Re-skining of ships

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[Tugboats007]

Hello all, I was wondering if there is a way to re-skin the ships and boats in SS08 as you can in MSFS09 or MSTS. Also I for some reason cannot find where the ships and boats are stored in SS08. Can somone help?

Thank you, MJD

[mvsmith]

The ships are not accessible for modification in any way; not for re-skinning nor for modification of their characteristics such as max speed.  There are no separate, easily identifiable files for individual ships.
VSTEP’s present business model is to keep tight control of all add-ons. There has been talk of a “Subscription plan” for acquiring ships. Whether it will be like a Cheese of the Month Club offering a choice between a few offerings, or like the diamond trade where you are offered a set of ships and must take all or none, I don’t know.
When a sim becomes as popular as this is becoming, it is inevitable that third parties will offer add-ons, whether blessed or not. I understand elves are at work as we speak.

[Tugboats007]

Hi MVSmith, thank you for writing back. Like MSFS I think that SS will be big and hope that VStep will see that and the real added benifit to allowing others to have accesses to there ships for re-skinning. If not and we have to wait on VStep to do releases or repaints I think alot of customers are just going to give up. By allowing others to repaint and add more ships and models it make the Sim take on a whole life of its own. Just my thoughts anyway.

Later, Tugboats007

[greyhill]

its a shame that you are not allowed to "tweak", thats how flight sim got so popular and so good, people began tweaking the product to meet there requirements, if a plane didnt handle like it should it was tweaked until it did. Freeware scenery, planes , you name it were released by the average person and over the years the game developed into something great. Never quite understood why vstep would not allow it, but it would appear that it has emerged that vstep will control the release of addons which you have to pay extra for, or take out a subscription plan??. As it has already been seen on the forums, they use us to improve and develop their game, we find the bugs, suggest improvements and give some good ideas. I personally think that if the public was given more flexability this game would go onto greater things, and alot quicker than present. Thats my 2 cents anyhow

[mvsmith]

Since VSTEP needs permission from ship owners, who are presumably concerned with their image, re-skinning might violate their agreement with VSTEP.
On the subject of tweaking, while I think that making performance values available in an editable text file, as Trainz does, would be handy, I see one drawback from VSTEP’s and mission designers’ perspectives:
Many missions depend upon the vessels having certain performance, such as max speed.
For instance, a mission that depends upon one ship overtaking another within a set time might fail for players that have tweaked their vessels.

[[RWP]DJM]

Some very good points there mvsmith

Regards.

DJM.

[greyhill]

On the subject of tweaking, while I think that making performance values available in an editable text file, as Trainz does, would be handy, I see one drawback from VSTEP’s and mission designers’ perspectives:
Many missions depend upon the vessels having certain performance, such as max speed.
For instance, a mission that depends upon one ship overtaking another within a set time might fail for players that have tweaked their vessels.

i understand where your coming from about the mission times, but i personally do not like the fact the game appears to be a race all the time, you only get rewarded for being the fastest. to me thats not really a sim and its not accurate to what really happens at sea. I think that tweaking has the advantage of, say someone has experience of super tankers, they try tweaking and over time they can get the sims super tanker to match a real one perfectly, they learn to tweak the tanker so that they can perfectly match her in ballast, different combinations of ballast and cargo or empty. over time they get more experience of the way the program is written and works and they develop a ballast or cargo system where the ship can react to loading/discharging cargo or ballast during the game and you will see the ship either rise out of the water as she discharges or sink as the loads. The ability to do this is not a fantasy, the flight sim community have developed some truly amazing tweaks and programs over the years, most of the best were developed by joe blogs who was not happy with the default game.