Modding Discussion Mod Concept: Refurbishing

I imagine enough of us have played enough Animal Crossing: New Leaf to see where I'm going with this, but for those who don't, here's a quick rundown: the series contains a ridiculous amount of furniture to decorate a player's virtual house with. In New Leaf, however, they upped the ante a little by introducing refurbishing.

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A vast majority of the in-game furniture was overhauled so that players could recolor or otherwise alter them. The feature was simple but effective. New and furniture alike could be improved in some players eyes by almost literally just slapping a new coat of paint on them. As well player creations could use different variations of the same object.

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So what if we could bring such a mechanic to Starbound with a station featuring a user interface to change furniture colors? And I don't mean simply stopping at reviving the furniture dying mechanic back from the early access days (user @mastercookie has already beaten me to the punch for that) - What I mean is adding new options for tons of furniture in the game and a simple means for other mod creators to do the same and add their own objects!

for example...
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Now normally I'd probably take a shot at this myself, but unfortunately my .lua skills (which I imagine are key to pulling this off) are severely lacking. So I'm very open to either putting this idea in the hands of someone up to the task or collaborating with anybody willing. Thoughts? Questions?

 

That would be great!

 

I do know that furniture was intended to be painted. Browsing certain objects lets you see different coloured versions. I was so let down when I learned that you cannot do that atm.

 

@rare_candy_bracelet. Animal Crossing I love that game. I often wondered why the Starbound developers had never implemented the ability to recolor furniture. Giving a piece of furniture a splash of color to better match the rest of your room would be excellent.

 

they did though! that's the weird thing! furniture used to be dyeable like clothes - the sprites for it are still even in the assets!

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hell, since Pixel Goods Store came out around the time when it was still a feature, even some of their furniture was dyeable! I can't imagine why they'd cut support for it.

 

A continuation of this post with some more concept ideas, since I really like this idea and don't wanna let it go. Please let me know if you might know of a way to code in this feature!

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This seems like an amazing idea I hope you or somebody else will be able to make it I wish you goodluck

 

Hey, saw your update to Prop pack and the link to this thread. I'm pretty ok at Lua, so I'd like to help when I can. I think I have a fairly ok idea of how to do this, after working with the Paint Gun mod. I do have to finish with my server's modpack before I can work on it, and I'd like to finish my RP tech too, but if you want to get started on things I can guide you in the right direction till I can work on it myself.

 

that's fantastic! if and when you get settled with those projects, I'd love to have your help!

 

While I'm still busy for now, we can still talk about abstractly how you'd like this to work. What would be the most ideal? You could have something like the Paint Gun, use a crafting station of some kind, or probably even use tech. Basically what we'll do to get this running is have a custom lua and animation; the lua script will interact with our method of change (the item, station or tech), and then choose an animation state based off of that. I believe animation files can use multiple png files for different animation states, but if they can't we'll have to shove all the variants of a given object into one file, which does make it a bit more of a hassle to also include color changing alongside it.

 

Okay, so I'm partial to doing it kind of like how nostalgic greenery does it, but being able to set it from inside the crafting station (like enhanced storage does for changing the amount of slots on an object). Like before crafting the item, I'd like for there to be some sort of toggleable buttons that would let you choose the color of the object. Although I have little to know knowledge on how .lua script works so I have no idea how realistic that would be to implement.

 

I'm 100% sure it's possible. I don't know if a crafting station is the best way to go, though, I mostly suggested it in case you can think of a reason to use it over the other options. Maybe previews? I feel like there should be a way to implement those into an activeItem or tech.

The paint gun's main benefit is that you literally just paint the object another color; You don't have to bother with the in-between man of a crafting table. The fact that it enables colors that are hard to get in vanilla (but that already exist in it) is the main feature, but technically that could be done by just making an object for each color. The bigger benefit of the Paint Gun, to the user at least, is that it can recolor furniture instantly, just like the vanilla paint tool. That instant feedback and higher portability (no need to place/remove anything) is pretty valuable to the end user, about as valuable as the fact that this process reduces the amount of files a developer needs to make significantly (despite each file's increase in size).

 

i know it's been a while, but the best way to go about it for the time being short of wrestling with lua scripts is to pull out the old two-slot furnace and modify it. or use the pixel refinery as a base, for example:

you make a "color cycler" station out of a pixel refinery, put the furnishing in the first slot, click the button and it comes out a different color in the next slot, repeat the process to go through various colors

normal > red

red > blue

blue > green

green > yellow

yellow > normal

you can modify the UI to have a big fancy graphic explaining the process when they open up the machine.... though in theory it may be possible to add in an extra slot to the existing furnace/refinery interface, because it uses otherwise normal recipes to handle the conversions. you can then add "customization kits" like animal crossing new horizons has to produce a more specific output

this is the most practical way to get the content OUT and working, until you manage to get something more elegant running, rather than having all these design variations in stasis