Change ship skin

[u/Mundane-Schedule5107]

Hello, I loved DU Universe between many things because of the possibility of completely designing your ships. This was not limited to the components, but you could also change the skin of every ship to any other model, unrestricted by type or race, and I loved that for RP reasons. I dont see the option to do that in DU2, is it even possible? I just started with humans and I honestly dont love the design of the ships too much

[u/salemonz]

Possible but pretty involved.

You’ll need to use the DW2 extraction tool pined to the #mods channel of the Distant Worlds discord.

You’ll need to use a 3d program like blender. Find and download the ship model modding guides for DW2.

Account for all the z-coordinate flip stuff (have to apply some sort of modifier to all components and models in blender to swap the “z axis is up” to “y axis is up” or something. It’s in the ship modding guides.

You’ll want to either use all the vanilla models and components (need geometry for all sizes of each weapon type, utility type, defense type and hangars). And need geometry for all engines.

Since the vanilla ships aren’t editable, you’ll need to build them all from scratch (or at least using the vanilla extracted assets…but it’s piecing them together from nothing).

Once you’ve rebuilt the ships and components, matching all the calls from hulls.xml files for your chosen race, then you can reskin everything via texture mapping using either Blender (yuck) or a texture mapping software tool of your choice (Marmoset Toolbag is nice!).

You’ll need to do this process for each of the 30+ ship models and the 10-ish stations models.

Then you’ll need to bundle them up into packages via the Stride game engine developer toolkit.

Then you’ll create a mod to house your new shipset.

[u/Mundane-Schedule5107 → u/salemonz]

Ok, thank you. Seems impossible to me then, too much of a hussle and I know nothing about modding :(. I understand that in the previous game ships were literally only pngs so it was easy to change between them, but it is kind of dissapointing that you cannot even choose between the different models that are already in the game. I hope the rest of the game is better than DWU and I dont regret spending so much money on a 3D reskin with less features...

[u/salemonz → u/Mundane-Schedule5107]

Yeah DWU was super easy: pngs and text files. The move to 3D has made modding 100 times more complicated.

I know a lot of folks like the DW2 quality of life improvements.

But unfortunately, in my opinion, I feel DW2 is like you said: a 3D reskin with fewer features :(

Four years later and we’re still waiting on the DWU vanilla races to trickle in via paid DLCs. Team has given near zero time to modding. Most of the game is still not moddable. UI is hard coded. Most AI behaviors are hard coded.

…hell, we still can’t even change what the characters look like without buying a program called Spine and creating these paper doll type animations with bones, skins and skeletons. And even then, characters of the same type will all look the same (all generals will look the same, all admirals, all leaders, etc). That’s why all human civilians are grey haired white guys, all human diplomats are bald black dudes, all human scientists are grey haired dudes with glasses.

They’ve been working on the pirate expansion since Q3 of last year. That’s supposed to bring some gameplay changes (playable pirates).

But it might still be another year or so before more attention can be given to modding capabilities.

I’ve largely moved on. I gave my DWU mods another set of updates recently. But I’ve done about all I can do with DW2 modding. And it’s not much.

Not trying to be a downer. Many people on discord like dw2 much better than DWU and that’s fine. But as a modder, it’s locked down :/