Custom Colors for Ships....

1. You create them via xml. The color pallete that comes with the game is very limited, has only a selection of colors for each faction plus a bunch for relics/asteroids and the like. Aiden made a new color pallete that hase 256 colors to choose from, I use this for my 50 new ship colors added with GST. This is an example of one of them colors:

    <GC3Appearance>
        <InternalName>ST_Krenim_R_Appearance</InternalName>
        <DisplayName>Ship_Color_ST_Krenim_R</DisplayName>
        <!-- Needs to be created with paint.net or the likes if you do not the game will use a plain white swatch and looks ugly-->
        <DisplayIcon>Krenim_R_Appearance_Icon.png</DisplayIcon>
        <!-- Ship Colours. Taken from GradientMap.png (Numbers 0-255, 0 been the top, 255 the bottom)-->
        <DiffuseGradientRow1>60</DiffuseGradientRow1>
        <DiffuseGradientRow2>0</DiffuseGradientRow2>
        <!-- Main Lights Taken from GradientMapLights.png (Numbers 0-255, 0 been the top, 255 the bottom)-->
        <LightGradientRow1>65</LightGradientRow1>
        <!-- Cockpit & Secondary lights Taken from GradientMapLights.png (Numbers 0-255, 0 been the top, 255 the bottom)-->
        <LightGradientRow2>69</LightGradientRow2>
        <!--Engine Taken from GradientMapLights.png (Numbers 0-255, 0 been the top, 255 the bottom)-->
        <LightGradientRow3>65</LightGradientRow3>
        <!-- Materials (These control how much of the materials set in FactionDefs.xml get displayed on the hull of ships) -->
        <SurfaceScale1>10.0</SurfaceScale1>
        <SurfaceWeight1>1.0</SurfaceWeight1>
        <SurfaceScale2>20.0</SurfaceScale2>
        <SurfaceWeight2>1.0</SurfaceWeight2>
        <!-- Engine Colour in RGB -->
        <EngineColor>
            <Red>50</Red>
            <Green>50</Green>
            <Blue>250</Blue>
            <Alpha>255</Alpha>
        </EngineColor>
    </GC3Appearance>

You can choose to overwrite the default pallete with a new one, or simply add a new pallete and point the game to it from GraphicAssets.xml and Crusade_GraphicAssets.xml. Either way addign a new pallete without the default colors in it (there is a combined pallete on the Nexus of default + aidens) will result in you changing all the default colors. Takes a bit of time to go through and set them right.

2. Do not think the UI is built for this. It requires set themes that are in the xml tables, like the example above. To do them on the fly within the game it would have to create xmls and art, just do not think the game is built for that atm.

Link to the Colors from GST (I just ripped the xmls and art out, not tested it but it should work fine)

Thanks!

I still think it would be nice to have a in game drop down menu to select more colors or what not.      I find the lack of selection really flustering at times.

New colors need new Swatches (Icon png files) I cant see the game making them on the fly atm. Without them the UI can get ugly (Civ Builder/Race edit).

Stardock should just pop all 256 into the base game then. The work is already done.

There is? I can't find it...

 I just looked and couldnt find it either

He made a post her eon the forums about it a while back, how I came accross it, cant find that now either.

Well it's not very hard to make my own lol, was just curious. You either only add a few of the most important vanilla color lines, i.e. the ones that are MOST different from any of the Aidan lines, into the small open (red) space available near the bottom; OR you willingly give up the third Aidan block (the second repeat) entirely, which opens up more than enough space for ALL the vanilla color lines.

I'm probably going to do the latter myself before too much longer actually, because I've already tried to avoid the third Aidan block in all my XML so far anyway, because they're the most faded/pale of all the color lines, and whenever I DID try using them I always ended up switching to a stronger version of the same color (-80 or -160) soon after lol.

I guess I was mostly just curious if the palette files have to stay at 256x256, or if the game will accept 512x512 ones for example. Easy enough to test I suppose, but I probably won't need to bother.

I find it a bit of a pity that the easy-to-use color sliders from GC II Ultimate were abandoned. Wondering if there's a chance some similar thing would still get implemented ...

If you do this, you would be better off using the base game map and adding adiens in the red space of this, it would save you having to redo all the colors in GC3AppearanceDefs.xml (which i did for GST, so they are all slightly different to the base game but as close a match as I could find) since they would keep thier numbers.

I already did this when making my mod 4 months ago, using most of your values (thanks a ton btw!) and doing a whole bunch more of my own (35+). Then over the weekend I did a quick conversion of the 21 new Crusade appearance sets as well. That was right BEFORE I discovered you can no longer use mods in MULTIPLAYER, since you can't edit the game's installed XML in Crusade, thus rendering Crusade completely and permanently USELESS to us, ARGH!!! So freaking pissed about this...

Anyway, I'm just doing a bunch of work now to update my mod for the base game with Crusade uninstalled, and then we'll just start a new game on the same old GC3 2.0 we were using before, sigh. But it doesn't take THAT long to go through the entire GC3AppearanceDefs.xml file, and I actually like the vanilla sets better AFTER they've been Aidanized in most cases, so this is not a high priority for me lol, was just thinking out loud is all.

The sole reason I chose not to include the vanilla pallete in GST. I found them to be overly colourful and prefered them dumbed down a bit by replacing them with Aiden colors. Asteroids was the only color I changed completely, to Grey over light yellow.