It's been a while since Custom Vehicle Support (CVS) has been released. It is a very robust mod with plenty of potential. However, there are some areas which the mod could be improved, so here are my ideas.
1. Doing away with the /command
One of my major gripe with the current state of the mod is that it utilises a slash command. To me, slash commands always felt cheap. So instead of that I propose an impact wrench item for bringing up the GUI. I also understand some may have got used to the current slash command, so for those the usage of the command could perhaps be made available through an RTB preference.
2. Improved colour palette
The current colour palette is a very basic one. While it gets the job done, unfortunately it can become inconvenient to use, as you can't save colours, so in the long run it will always boil down to tinkering for too long to get the desired colour. Instead of the current colour picker, a palette similar to the avatar customiser could be introduced. It should use the colour palette of the paintset you are using while also giving you the ability to create and save new colours just for your vehicle.
3. Saving preferences
If you ever spent more than a minute thinking about how you wanted to make your car, or you simply wanted to have duplicates, then I am sure you felt the need for saving preferences. Perhaps it could be expanded upon by making presets saved into a file which could be traded between players.
4. Revising categories
Perhaps this would introduce the biggest change, that is why I left it for the last. The current system seems adequate at the first glance, but upon further inspection you could find a few problems. The biggest problem lies with categorising parts and accessories. The current system can needlessly bloat the number of part categories for your vehicle; for example if you wanted to add antennae and mud flaps to your vehicle as an accessory you would need two separate categories with two items in each. One for showing and one for hiding that particular accessory. I believe it would be more efficient if there was a way to enable multiple accessories at once. So for example, the antennae and the mud flaps could be in the same category and they would become something you could toggle on and off. It could be done by adding another argument in the .txt file. This might necessitate the use of some kind of a dependency system, so that you could set up conflicting accessories should not be enabled at the same time.
These ideas may require reworking some other aspects of the mod, but I thought I would share them anyway. Just for clarification, I am well aware the development of the mod was halted because MARBLE MAN got banned.
As for the impact wrench, I am willing to supply a model if someone ever takes interest in further development.
