While in the process of making my own ship, I got to the conclusion, that we are severely lacking one type of textures. The metallic looking ones. Unfortunately all the "armor" textures looks more like painted plastic and it bothers me. So I browsed steam workshop for better textures pack (like you can do in SE), just to find out there isn't any. Is there a reason for it?
Is there a particular, technical reason why we are limited that way? It's not the first time Empyrion players hit a brick wall on things that are normal in other games. I'm starting to see a pattern here and it's neither a good nor a promissing one.
Modding is not yet really implemented as it is in space engineers Best we can do right now is fiddle with the settings files, no changes can be done to the core game
Not only can players not add their own textures, last we heard the texture atlas for blocks was full and they couldn't add any more. Unless that changed and they didn't mention it (or I missed it).
"We" did? I heard something to this effect quite some time ago. But there ARE some metallic textures, that are available for Metallic blocks...as well as a number of textures available for Carbon blocks are are less suited to Carbon. It seems a bit of redesign might be in order where this is concerned, but at the current stage, it's not really important enough to worry about.
Absolutely. They could definitely prune out the least used ones to make room for better ones, but who is to say that other players don't enjoy those ones that would get removed? It's been a while, but yes, the devs have told us a few times that the block texture atlas was full. Is it still full, or did they change it and never tell us? Only the devs could answer that. They publicly stated it on these forums...... somewhere. So yes, "we" because it was public and not a private message.
Remove some of the existing textures and you'll potentially have to go through the poi's and opvs to see which ones are effected. Ya....no thanks
Pretty sure I saw one if the devs mention it again recently (within the past 6 months to a year), either on here, Steam, or discord. So since they have not stated anything to the contrary, there is absolutely zero reason to suspect it has changed at all.... Like has been said, we can't just remove "unused" textures either, because they aren't unused and it will mess lots of blueprints and prefabs up. Even reorganizing the textures affects blueprints and prefabs. The last time they moved a couple textures around it affected a large portion of blueprints and prefabs. That takes a lot of volunteer time to fix..... Nothing is stopping you from asking one of the devs directly though. They might even answer. Pretty sure we would know if this changed at all though, because that change would have been accompanied by new textures most likely..... and we haven't gotten any new ones.
I've began digging into the Unity forums, and I've not yet found any definitive "this is the maximum number of textures you can use" information yet. I've found a lot of maximum texture size, and some talk about texture atlases, plural. I will confess, I've never worked with the Unity Engine before, so there may well be some hard-coded upper limit to the number of textures that can be used, but I'm not finding it. https://docs.unity.cn/Manual/Textures.html I would certainly welcome some high-level feedback here from the dev team. Is this really an engine limitation, or is this limitation based on hardware-targeting? I do know the minimum system specs were upped some time ago, which generated some discontent, but at the same time, one cannot really product a AAA-grade title targeting D+ hardware.
To the best of my recollection and knowledge, the problem Eleon encountered at some point was that there were "no more ID available" for game objects - that is : any object, be it texture, model, script, etc. The only "limits" I know of in Unity regarding this is the number of tags that can be used in the editor when working on a project (10 001 max). - other than that is the 65k vertices limit for 1 object, but that's geometry related. So no more tags = no way to reference the objects, so they had to find a workaround to allow more content to be added. That was around the time they allowed us to use 2500 "new blocks/ items" free slots in the BlocksConfig.ecf, provided that we only use the { BlockName: MyNewBlock } convention instead of the original { Block ID: 123, BlockName: SomeOldBlock }. This way the game can read the new objects at runtime and is not bound by the editor's limit, with the caveat that blocks names (identifiers) lists are created at each new game start, and blocks may be ordered differently from one session to another. Eleon warned us that this could cause some problems in some cases where a name would be referenced but the object it links to has changed. The game assigns its own identifiers to all objects at runtime (as can be seen when pointing at any construct in game with the Debug Info menu enabled) so this "tag limit" is clearly only an editor problem, as the game can instantiate as many objects as the machine can support.
There's a difference between textures for pre built assets, and those that need to be dynamically applied while in game by players. It's likely that whatever system that are using for texture management on blocks has a limited number of texture slots and that increasing that limit isn't their priority. Of course we're unlikely to get any explanation beyond "the texture atlas is full" and they seem to not be focused on adding any new building components or shapes. So in the end if you want more things you'll have to add them yourself through scenarios, though what we can do is still limited.
Well, I'm not the one asking for more things added, I'm just curious about the mechanics here - the real in-depth, technical aspects of how and why. You could be correct with dynamic texturing, or wildly off the mark - don't really have any way to know. Can't really find much in the Unity manual about how this is accomplished, and I'm not really up for a venture in hunting through code bases for examples. I skimmed through about 30 pages, but none were particularly helpful. Plenty about how to create textures, import them, create shaders and import them, and few about combining them into Materials, but that's about it.
Yes adding textures is easy and there isn't really any limit to that, beyond file size, etc. I do this right now with custom block models. But we have no way of making custom blocks that can be textured in-game by the player, and certainly no way of making a new texture atlas for the texture tool. And you're right it's just guessing based on what they told us.
