Painting Issues to Fix in FM8

Forza Motorsport Forza Motorsport (2023) Discussion
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There are two glaring issues in Forza’s painting system:

The first and most significant is sharing.

Let me get this out of the way - greedy painters have ruined this game. The fact that so many who come here and purport to “love this game” focus so much on a fictional in-game currency and/or converting that into real cash on the side is appalling. This is not “love of the game”; love is inclusive, not divisive. The current model employed by Forza makes it nearly impossible for newcomers to quickly engross themselves in the game. New users cannot easily create the realism that is required to make this game something worth coming back to and not just another passing fad. They cannot easily create realistic-looking graphics, customize designs to include personal elements such as their name, or make other simple changes to make whatever car they are in THEIR car and not just something generic or someone else’s.

If you are serious about this game in anyway and partake in more than the arcade elements of it, then you know that you need to be able to share and freely distribute accurate logos and vinyl groups so that these issues can be addressed.

For example, placing a red logo on a red car is clearly going to cause an issue. Making this same logo white is almost always acceptable in the real world (i.e. with regards to trademarks), as the real world must also account for different color backgrounds and uses. This means that either the logo will be invisible (and provide no value to the creator), the logo will be left out (again, no value), or the creator will need to be contacted and asked to change the color. The creator MAY respond, and MAY change the color, but this is a long shot for most “painters”.

Additionally, for more advanced & accurate paints where the number of layers is very high, it is often desirable to remove details from vinyl groups that cannot be seen on the car in the game to save resources. Details and features that, when the vinyl group is prominently featured on the hood of the car, are simply not noticeable and/or needed when they are shrunk down and placed on a pillar, on the bumper, or in some other location where it is shrunk down. The demand on resources is the same regardless of the scale, however. This could mean that a desired/required vinyl is omitted or that some other aspect of the a design is removed; neither of which are good for the long-term success of this game. And without sharing, this sort of modification is simply not possible without SIGNIFICANT involvement from the creator, and again, that is a long shot - especially for a “noob” to the game.

Furthermore, sharing allows for collaboration. Explaining in detail why collaborations are a good thing should require no explanation, but since this is 2020 and people have lost their minds, I’ll do so. One painter may be great an recreating real-world decals, logos, and the like, but terrible at overall layout or design. Another may be a conceptual genius, able to create beautiful schemes and overall layouts, but unable to accurately recreate real-world decals. Together, these creators can create truly amazing designs and alone they simply cannot.

(I am reminded of a “blackout” race an old league I raced in ran. Every car for that week was requested to run a gray-scale livery. Because we were able to share vinyl groups & designs effectively, this was easily possible and the end result was great! Everyone was able to participate and feel like a part of the organization, and no one was overwhelmed by the task nor forced to run an “unsponsored” scheme.)

The second largest issue in the realm of painting are the inclusion (or rather the lack of inclusion of) fonts and/or a font editor. Why fonts cannot be created, downloaded, and used like they are in a standard word processor is beyond me. Most of the in-game fonts are almost comically useless and so much time is wasted trying to recreate even the most simple real-world fonts that in many cases designers/creators simply do not create an accurate representation of a design or logo in the game. This SIGNIFICANTLY detracts from numerous aspects of the game, frustrates users/players, and makes the game look less “complete” or “finished”. This is further compounded because of the above issue.

Together, these issues alienate the players who are the most important to the continued success of the Forza franchise; the sim racers. The sim racers invest the most in the game and are the most committed to it. They will consume everything related to it; DLC, media, hardware, new versions, etc. These racers NEED realism and engagement. They cannot have this is they cannot have personalization and ownership.

Finally, the hesitance to allow for the inclusion of an actual design creating and editing package within the game is ridiculous. iRacing, for instance, has a system that is far, far easier to use than Forza’s, far, far less restrictive, and yet there is still the desire and need for a painting community. There is even a side economy in which real money is exchanged! Those who claim that such a system in Forza would result in the destruction of this community are simply afraid of competition and not secure in their own abilities. These types have monopolized the system and do not want to see their monopolies destroyed. The issues above could ALL be addressed and rectified with the inclusion of such a design editor and the game would likely run much faster and smoother…

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In my opinion, it could well have been greed that motivated them to remove sharing content between players (gifting unlocked paints/ logos) but it wasn’t the greed of the painters.

It was the greed of the unlockers* that did for sharing.

Also if you have any evidence of painters converting their fictional currency in to real cash, you could share that info with support as that would be breaking the xbox live rules.

More fonts would be nice.

I’ve not played iRacing, pretty sure my PC wouldn’t be up to it - however you seem fine that there is a side economy on there, where players can make real money? Whether their design system is better than Forza’s - I have no idea as you don’t go in to detail about how theirs works or how it’s an improvement. If you want to suggest improvements for FM8 - may as well be specific.

*Unlockers a term I just made up to describe anyone who through nefarious means or without the consent of the original artist shared or sold their work (usually unlocked)

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The notion that that anyone would be upset that something they did for no gain got shared shouldn’t matter. Maybe Forza should just hide the painter’s information??? You’re kidding me about the “real-world money” issue right? All the monetized YouTube videos, streams, and “donations” for completing requested paints???

Here is a quick look at how iRacing does their painting: iRacing Paint Basics - YouTube

Note that iRacing has a very, very basic in-game editor also, but it’s limited to pre-made designs/layouts and a few included sponsors; colors can be changed pretty freely though, but finishes can’t. Firesuits and helmets can also be customized just like the cars.

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In a system where the painter is totally anonymous and everything is freely shared unlocked - what is the incentive for anyone to actually paint anything?

Something tells me you’re missing a lot of the history of the game, forza 2 was the wild west compared to what we have these days.

& Don’t get me wrong, I loved being able to share my paints with friends, it meant I could collaborate with much better painters than me, which made me look better than I am. It also meant, from time to time, I could do a one off to gift to a friend either as a present or sometimes a joke (or both depending on how it was received lol).

But on FM2, there was no storefront, so the only way to get paints out to people was to buy, paint & if associated with a tuning garage add all the parts and then the tune before meeting the recipient in the AH to arrange a buyout. If you weren’t selling to a specific individual, well you spent all that time, buying, building and painting the car, to list them on the AH - at a reasonable price - at which point, people would buy them out and relist them for more than you’d put them up for. As you could re-sell locked paints on FM2.

So painters often found themselves looking for sellers, or trusting friends to help them get cars out there. Unfortunately sometimes, these arrangements led to cars being sold or gifted unlocked, either from friends passing to other friends or just accidentally selling the car unlocked on the AH. When a car first turned up unlocked, this often led to friends suspecting friends and unnecessary conflict & suspicion in the community.

People went to extraordinary lengths to get paints unlocked, there was even basic identity theft happening, where someone created a similar gt to a well known artist and fooling one of their friends in to gifting their designs back to them - claiming their original GT had been locked out and that they’d forgotten the log on details.

As a painter in the 360 era, it was a daily thing to have a tonne of messages asking for unlocks of paints you’d done, if you declined however politely - you could expect to be bombarded with messages claiming they would just hack your game and steal them anyway - or just plain abusive. Funnily enough, that has stopped since you can’t trade unlocked.

Once something was unlocked, the genie was out of the bottle - as they would have shared it between their own multiple GT’s and friends in their circle - so it was whack a mole for the enforcement team - these days if something is unlocked through nefarious means, it’s much harder for them to share it - so easier to keep a lid on such occurrences.

I miss sharing, I don’t miss all the drama that came with it.

Do I think they have the correct balance with the current system, well no. But then I don’t know all the answers.

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I have several paints in Motorsport 7 that have taken 30 plus hours to make. Some i have been fortunate enough to have place in competitions and had featured, so when you buy the car you’ll see my paint as one of the first.

My most successful paint has 948 downloads, Thats 94,800 credits. If I’m lucky 1 in 10 will “like” it, and i’ll get maybe 1 in 3 uses. Including the 1 million credits i received from the competition that’s 1,205,500 credits made. How many millions upon millions would i of made if i had been racing for those 30 hours? If i was greedy and focused on a in game currency that would of been the route to take.

But i didn’t, i put in effort and time, created something and shared it. For other players to use without costing then a single credit. Maybe of those 948 players, 10 truly appreciated it and it helped make Forza fun to play. Pretty sure sharing is the opposite of greedy actions.

Now lets turn the mirror around.

You want to take someones creation, their time and effort, and change to however you see fit. Because you’re not content with them sharing it for everyone, you have to have a special personal paint. You want everyone to give you everything and let you do whatever you want with it to keep for yourself.
That’s pretty much the standard text book definition of greed.

You seem to suggest you that you have the skill set to alter someone else’s vinyls, but not create your own. That’s dubious, i think it’s more to do with being lazy. And because it’s 2020 and people (like you) have lost their patience, I’ll add entitled.

Now we have that sorted out, I’d like to point out that its the developers that create and change the game, not the painters. So painters can’t possibly ruin the system.

Also, if you download somebody’s vinyl you can change it to any single colour you like. Not a secret, it’s right there on the screen.

Fonts are property and cost money, but I’m sure you want the people that made them not be reimbursed too.

I make better credits on Horizon 4 because it’s a more popular game. Definitely not a “sim-racer”.

If players can download images to their cars and have them ready in 10 minutes, the all you will have is 10 minute liveries. There are enough of them already. When you take time and effort to make something, you’re more likely to be discriminating as to what you produce in your name. You should try it sometime.

YouTube creators get monetized by creating videos that are good to watch, not by painting in Forza. I watch a lot of YouTube, i have never been recommended a Forza painter, but always get “sim-racers” on my home page.

TL,DR? Your post is totally untruthful, lacking in any facts and just absurd. I’m expecting you to be yelling “fake news” any second now.
You seem to like iRacing. Please go there and don’t come back to Forza before your greed “ruins it”.

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It doesn’t seem particularly dubious to me. It’s easier to remove various elements you don’t like, recolour specific parts of a whole, reposition, resize, and other minor alterations than it is to successfully engage in the madness of creating a coherent image out of a hundred random shapes carefully arranged and layered.

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B.S. You’re not reading well enough, it seems. I don’t care if you shared your work (You can’t actually “share” it, you can just upload it and not put a price on it - it’s still locked and can’t be changed. You’re getting paid in “credit” & notarity. You admit and brag about as much above…); I don’t want YOUR work. I want my own for my own enjoyment. I want to be able to work on paints with my friends, to correct issues with colors, to change layouts from vertical to horizontal, to remove excess layers that don’t show up when highly-detailed vinyl is scaled down to fit behind the fender on a livery, to focus on the aspects I’m good at while allowing others to do the same, to truly share and collaborate, etc. Forza could remove all “ownership” from the vinyls, as far as I care. If they want to keep ownership, fine, but return to Forza 4’s sharing system. That one worked well enough. The editor is still junk though…

Allowing for a PC-based editor would eliminate so, so many problems…

Hell, we still don’t have a “cut” or “remove” tool, and there are still limitations on which colors and finishes can be applied to a vinyl vs. the car itself. And the scaling and mirroring “tools” are so clunky…

So, if you “create” a vinyl group with the logo of some brand in it, do YOU own that logo??? What about the font in that logo; do you own it? In Forza, you do… That’s much more of a slippery slope; you sure you want to start talking about ownership and greed in-game???

I can hold my own (Here’s one of my favorites; I had far more in FM4…):

But I’m here to race - I want to be able to spend my time improving my lap times, not “painting” a logo or design by twisting and contorting stupid shapes, especially not when “it’s 2020” and programs like GIMP are free and Google Image Search is very definitely a thing and you can very easily find SVGs for various brands/logos…

You’re being obtuse here. A 10-minute Forza paint scheme vs a 10-minute PC-graphics-editor paint scheme are not the same in any way. You can do FAR MORE in a 10-minute PC edit than you ever can in Forza’s editor. Furthermore, I’d wager most people would find a REAL WORLD paint scheme they like an import that, so the schemes wouldn’t look bad. Beyond that, I’d rather race with and see a bunch of poor-quality-but-customized paints than a whole bunch of solid-colored cars. If you want people to get involved in the series, you need to get them INVESTED; that only comes with personalization and ownership, and the current Paint Booth doesn’t allow for that.

Some fonts cost money, many, many, many more are free. That’s a lame excuse. Furthermore, how do you then justify recreating said fonts via indirect methods? You’re still using the fonts which “are property and cost money;” if you recreate a font or logo in the game without paying the trademark/copyright owner to the font or logo, are you a thief?

FH4 is a lazy-person’s game. Of course you’re going to make more there; far fewer people there want to invest in time in things like paints and race liveries…

Downloading a vinyl group with many layers and colors doesn’t allow the “change color” option to work, and most logos have at least 2 colors, if not 3 or more. That ONLY works with single-color graphics groups, so don’t act like that’s a real solution…

You have NOTHING sorted out.

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With regard to painting, I think they need to take a look at what competitors are doing. The current constructive geometry method of creating vinyls is cumbersome and imprecise. It appears Gran Turismo Sport allow the import of SVG graphics created in external tools. This would allow creation of much more accurate graphics using tools that are more accessible.

With regard to fonts, Windows (and presumably the variant of Windows that XBox runs) already supports TrueType and OpenType scalable outline fonts, which can be embedded in documents and artwork generated on the PC. I don’t see why using them in a game vinyl editor would be problematic.

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Ti Hsien,

& that’s as maybe, but good luck asking anyone to paint anything for you when you make statements such as;

‘Let me get this out of the way - greedy painters have ruined this game.’

& this was what the Op came back with about people unlocking paints through nefarious means;

‘The notion that that anyone would be upset that something they did for no gain got shared shouldn’t matter. Maybe Forza should just hide the painter’s information???’
Add to that, this was originally posted in the painting section, then moved to the FM section by a moderator - so going in to the stomping ground of the painters and calling them greedy, then telling them they shouldn’t care if their work is unlocked and shared - I’m a little surprised there wasn’t more posts to be honest.

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A lot of painters loved the attention and status that being good brought them, and the billions in credits as well. Many went out of their way to protect that status. It’s no coincidence that as locking down cars and paints dried up revenue, painters and tuners left.

The only real option left is to learn how to make logos yourself, most can be traced over and it’s a good way to start learning, steep learning curve but worth it.

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I agree with a lot of what you guys are saying. My number one request in Motorsport since the day FM5 came out is a storefront. Since FM4, the painting, tuning, and photography community has completely fallen apart to a disorganized mess. The sharing system is absolutely abysmal. As someone said, you can put hours upon hours into your design work for no one to find it, because you can’t view paints freely like we used to be able to in the storefront. This coupled with a dated paint booth that has not given us advancements like stroke settings and vector adjustments has made this series so much less desirable to paint in. The paint booth used to be the series’ strong suit.

If we can’t have imported stuff from programs on PC, then at least give us an editor with options as to how advanced we want the controls. When I’m painting, let me switch over to the “advanced” editing controls to let me change my stroke around selected shapes so we don’t have to spend tons of time and precious layers making outlines for our vinyls and designs. Let me use a pen tool to make my own shapes and a bezier curve tool to make my rounded edges instead of using a million flattened circles to do it.

Give us advanced controls (which are probably way more user friendly than the “simple” ones we have now) and give us a storefront again so we can actually DISCOVER painters and paint jobs that we never would have found otherwise. I used to buy cars in this game to put on a sick paint job I found while doddling around on the storefront. Those days and that community are long gone.

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For me the first thing they need to do is make sure that all the coordinates are centred. By this I mean that left and right sides should match but also that the front, top and back must start in exactly the middle of the the car on each side respectively.

Secondly, to avoid layers going through to other parts, the front and real wings, and possibly window banner areas should all be included in the wing area. I would add to this that wing end plates need to be put in separate coordinates on the sides so they don’t leech through either.

Finally, like others, I would like to be able to have the choice to gift layer groups or even full designs to other people. My suggestion on how to do this would be to need to click a button to send it unlocked. Say an option to send it fully locked, to send it semi locked in the same way you can save a design but not share it with downloaded vinyl groups while still being able to add to it, and finally to send it completely open. This would help people in leagues immensely.

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You are asking to have your cake and eat it too. If notoriety and rewards for effort are important then requiring that all paints be uploaded anonymously would eliminate the ability to do either of those things. All that really needs to happen is the livery editor to become more user friendly so that excellent painters can turn out their artwork faster and more amateur painters do not feel daunted to try to create a new paint job. I would not be against revisiting the Forza 4 style storefront but posting anonymously would eliminate almost all incentive to share anything.

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It is time to make a complete overhaul of the paintbooth in Forza games. The current system is cumbersome and a pain to work with. The resolution of liveries is very low when you take pictures of cars. Let the players import paints with UV wraps just like how it done in the gaming industry. This will solve all the issues I mentionned.

It is not an easier way to work, because you won’t be able to do good stuff if you can’t do 3D texture works to save your life.

As for NSFW vinyls, people that want to do unholy things does it with the current system already.

It will also make the quality of paints liveries and we won’t get as much of these popular one color schemes anymore.

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The issue of one colour paint schemes, isn’t really anything to do with the current painting system. It’s more to do with how the paints are shared/ highlighted to players.

The current system seems to reward the fastest person to upload a livery for a particular car over any kind of effort put in, with newer paints really not getting a look in at all - the only way a new paint can gain any traction against a ‘day one paint’ is for the painter to already have a massive following. If you were to suggest an overhaul of that system, I’d be all for it.

I play on the console, I can’t afford a gaming PC powerful enough to run the current titles let alone the next one. So introducing a painting system reliant on a high end PC would take me out of the game entirely. So it would become a less inclusive system rather than more.

Also whilst I admittedly initially skim read the sentence and thought, what’s so bad about need for speed liveries - now I’ve taken a moment, to grasp it - any system that could potentially allow the importation of images, rather than bit by bit creation - will increase the ‘not safe for work’ content’ by a massive amount. Clearly I can’t give you any stats on that as thankfully it hasn’t happened as yet but - if it does, expect the storefront /AH to be swamped within minutes.

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I can get behind that. In FH4 my Castrol ST185 livery hit the top and has remained number one since the first Forzathon event for the car. The font for “Castrol” isn’t even the correct font, but somehow it’s accumulated 13k downloads where as the next one down has (if I recall correctly) something like 6k downloads. My DHL livery for the Diablo GTR has also remained the number one design. I hardly ever see decent (purely subjective) new designs on FH4. Granted, I see a lot of bad replicas all the time, but that’s wherever the painter’s skill level was at the time of creating the design. Occasionally I’ll see a really good race replica, way more spot-on than the same livery by another player with less quality vinyls, with maybe 20 or 30 downloads. I try my upmost to drive cars around with those designs to help the creator get noticed but every single time I check their designs might get one or two downloads a week. Not to mention… might I say I don’t play a whole lot of the Motorsport series, but Horizon 3 and 4 have had some… interesting designs skyrocket to the top. Like… designs I consider trash. Again, purely subjective but I sometimes wonder exactly how many people like these designs enough to download them. I’ll spare you the details of exactly what designs I mean.

Additionally, I can afford a laptop capable of running today’s newest titles but I’m too cheap to buy one. That, and I already splurged on an X1X last year. It’s running fine for my needs. Yeah, I’ve thought about how much faster and more efficiently I could paint using a mouse. But I’ve already gone through this much trouble using a controller to paint that at this point it’s not worth buying a laptop just for the games. The system I have right now runs just fine for me.

The vinyl coloring thing to me is, meh. I have to make my own decals to make them a custom color. I kind of feel like the time I spent creating such decals makes them more valuable to me if to no one else. That, and being able to change the Flowtech color from red to green is nice, as well. I see the point in freeing up vinyl coloring options for collaboration projects, but maybe I’m not in a position to add in because I paint on my own and don’t have any particular crew to identify and cooperate with.

I guess my run down of the issues needing to be fixed is: put new designs at the front of the list when a player searches for designs. At the very least that by itself should increase the probability of new designs being noticed rather than the player downloading livery number one (being a sort of cliche, half-wayed replica such as my own, lol).

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