Thoughts On The Livery Designer

Sorry for the long post but I just want to leave some general thoughts I have on the livery designer for the devs. For what it’s worth, I’m playing on Xbox One with a controller:

So it’s pretty obvious that you’ve taken some inspiration from the Forza design editor. That’s not a bad thing, the one in Forza is one of the best designers I can think of in any game, so when you showed this off on the streams it looked fairly promising. Now that I’ve had a play with it though there are some pretty big issues with it:

1) The button mapping is awful. Pressing up on the dpad to go from the different colours to how light you want the colour. Having to use RB to move the camera. Using LB to switch between LS Move and RS Scale to RS Scale X/Y. It’s too complicated honestly. If yous can do something to improve that it would go a long way.

2) The sensitivities on the controls are bit too much too. “I just want to make a small adjustment to this red line I just made... Oh no, now the whole train is red”. Just needs turning down a bit.

3) Give me coordinates for where my shapes are and what orientation they are. If I put a square on the side of the train and I just hit one of the triggers by mistake (which you do because of what I said in point 2), I don’t know how much I’ve offset that shape by to undo the mistake and get it back to being straight. It’s impossible to get it back to being straight manually and there’s no undo.

4) Text. Like my point above, I need some coordinates to get my text appearing all on the same line and to make sure they are all the same size. At the minute, it is near impossible to make a word with letters that are the same size and all on the same line. Also, give us more fonts. Yes we could make our own fonts with shapes but... (see next point)

5) Give us more layers. 300 per carriage is not enough. Forza uses 3000 per car. If I wanted to make a logo of a company and I had to make my own font for it, I won’t have many (if any) layers left for the actual livery.

6) There is no clear boundary of where the shapes stop. For example, if I’m painting the 72 Stock and I’m on the head on view looking at the train and I want to make the front of the train red, unless I get the dimensions exactly right (which I can’t without coordinates) then the red first bleeds onto the doors down the side of the train and then down the first half of the carriage. If your going to have set camera views, put some boundaries on where they shapes can go. Another problem with that is you can spend an hour doing a great design on the front of the train, be really proud of it, then look down the side of the train and find it’s a mess of shapes that have bled over from the front. And on the ICE, the boundaries are completely different from the left side to the right side. The left side fills more of the roof than the right.

7) Camera controls, can I invert my right stick (orbit)? It is flipped from what I have set in the main game. I’d also like to be able to zoom out further and see at least a whole carriage in the editor. When painting the ICE I can only see 4 windows on the side when fully zoomed out.

8) Mirroring, I think this is something you mentioned would be coming in the next update but that’s a pretty big this that is missing at the minute.

in summary it’s a start. Do I wish you saved the effort and put the focus more onto making an actual editor for PC? Yes, and that’s coming from an Xbox player. I don’t feel a livery editor or scenario planner would be needed if the editor was there. It just feels like we’re getting two half baked features instead of one big useful one. But if this is the path you’re set to go down it’s a start. Please consider the points I’ve made above and hopefully others can chip in to see if they agree or not.

Edit: I hope this is the right place on the forum to put this. I know it’s not a bug per se, but it’s still of a technical nature.

Edit 2: And just as I finished writing this, the Livery Editor crashed and the livery I was making wasn’t saved. Think it’s safe to say I won’t be touching this feature for quite a while. An auto save feature wouldn’t go amiss....