A thread because I’m stuck at the car mechanics

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

So I’m getting the brake pads changed on my Maserati (and if you believe that I have some shares of AOL to sell you), and I’ve got nothing to occupy myself but my iPad. Let’s fix everything wrong with Atlas in a single post! Okay that’s a bit ambitious, how about a single modest suggestion?

Fix the paint texturing on ship planks.

This might not seem like much, or a thing that needs high priority, but hear me out. Atlas is (or should be) about ships to a large degree. People want the things they build to look good. Especially when they’re cruising for mermaid tail in them (Hey Baby! Do those scales go all the way up?). Atlas’s paints are fine, I know because when I dye my clothes with them it looks good. But the wood structures textures mostly make the paints look like @#$&.

I spent over 2 hours of real world time meticulously painting our new galleon yesterday. It looks as good as it possibly could, but Red and I had to forgo our first choice of base color because it fell into that “I’m making this face because that looks the way chitlins smell when they’re cooking” category. I understand that the goal was to give a realistic appearance to wood that sits in water all the time, but this is one of those things where I think aesthetics ought to trump realism.

The problem isn’t just ships. On pve builders often feel compelled to spend points they could use elsewhere to get esotery of building so they can build out of stone not because they need its greater structural toughness, but because they hate the way paint looks on wooden walls. If the developers change the way these textures look painted to make paint jobs more even coated and richly vibrant, I suspect a lot of players would make more of an effort to paint and feel more invested in their structures. This is low hanging fruit when it comes to game enjoyment.

As always, this is just my two doubloons and your mileage may vary.

[Winter Thorne 696]

I don't mind wood having a weathered appearance.  In fact, that's much better than everything looking all new and shiny and plastic-y.  But the problem is the colors don't show up.  Of all the different colors you can use, maybe 3 or 4 of them even give a little bit of a tint to it, and those are the brightest most garish ones.  Sky blue and white don't do anything at all.  On stone walls it's a little bit better but not much.  The wood walls themselves look like adobe or stucco anyway.  It's impossible to get the effect of a wood sided painted house. ) Or even a wood building for that matter)

The interesting thing is that if you paint a wood roof, the colors show much better on the underside than they do on the top.  That's a good thing, because for some weird reason the undersides are all sort of blue to begin with.

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

Yeah you phrased it better than I did. It’s not the weathered look that is inherently the problem, it’s the way the particular texture doesn’t show most colors well at all.