As a vinyl creator it would be nice to share a set of vinyls for a car as opposed to creating a livery and sharing that, or sharing each individual vinyl.
It would mean I have less work to share, and players have less work to do to download and apply them.
I’m creating less files over-all and thus less drag on the game engine, disk reads, and storage requirements.
On of the reasons I personally became a vinyl creator was to allow players more freedom to choose their own car colors for their cars. As I do for my own. Car color is deeply personal in many cases, some people buy cars because of the color alone. In game I can change my car color with my mood or to support a certain look or feel. This is one reason I don’t really create “liveries” with my vinyl designs as I want the player to retain as much choice as they can in the matter.
Having learned how to read the vinyl download screen to see what thing is ‘most downloaded’ in my collection I can see clearly that many of the individual pieces in what is a multi piece set are not near one another. This means to me that players might never even see them or know they exist.
It might possibly also address some of the other QOL suggestions I see floating around this forum for the Vinyl editor. Even having tagging like photos do for liveries and vinyls would be huge.
Appreciate your vote, and please go vote for other QOL improvements to the various UI’s surrounding Vinyl sharing that you like.
You would still need to create the same number of files, and then you’d need to create additional “file group” files, with their own data (indicating which individual groups are “contained” within) and file overhead. If anything, this would take more storage space than storing vinyl groups individually.
The general idea has some merit, in regards to indicating which shared vinyl groups are related to each other, but it would not have any of the technical positive effects you listed. The negative impact should be negligible as far as storage space goes (up to ca. 4KB extra per each “file group”, depending on the file system used), the game engine would not be affected (it would still need to display all the same shapes in the same locations), but it may affect read speed. Currently, when you get close to 400 files in a category (500 is the max number you can have), you may encounter increased load times. This is because reading many small files takes more time than few large files of the same combined size. With your idea, the increased load times would be encountered at slightly smaller library sizes, since there would be additional tiny files to read.
Now, I do not know how many players actually have vinyl group collections that big, so I can’t say if it’s something one should be worried about, or not.
Ah, I see. I thought you meant that it would be a pack of vinyl groups that other players could disassemble and place each one on the car on their own.
But yeah, a livery that lets you paint the car body under it would definitely save a few bytes that are currently used for the body paint color(s).