Recently, I remembered one of my favorite (mod) features in SLRR: custom color palettes. By default, you got the default set with standard and pretty boring shades – five generic reds, a few blues and teals, punchy yellows, and so on. With custom, user-provided palettes, you could expand this with a wide range of colors that fit your car much better, for example the standard RAL list. The same could be done in BeamNG. As of now, you get two palettes to chose from: the one that comes with the car (OEM colors) and the colors you make yourself. This gives you some options to choose from, but this is still pretty limited. So, imagine there was a drop-down menu in which you could choose your preferred color palette. Case 1: Colors from different cars. This is pretty self-explanatory. If you want to use the hot green from Vivace on a Bolide, you have to equip it on Vivace, save as user color, and then apply it on your Bolide. With a palette picker, you could just open the Vivace palette on Bolide and choose the color you want. Case 2: User-provided palettes. To a large extent, BeamNG's popularity relies on user-generated content. So, it goes without saying that allowing custom palettes is a no-brainer. For instance, you'd like to create a palette inspired by recent Porsche models, or maybe one inspired by 2000s tuner paints. I created a simple tutorial using the current system. It works, it is not that difficult, but it also requires a little more effort than most people would want to put in getting just some colors. I'd rather prefer to just add the same colors section to my upcoming mod pack. Q: Why not just use the color picker? A: Because a) the color picker is still pretty janky, and b) even if it wasn't it's difficult to get some color right, for example, accurate golds. Then, you may also want to fine-tune the other paint characteristics to make the color look best – for example, midnight purple looks pretty bad in glossy but great in metallic – and with proper palettes you'd have them already preset. On top of that, following the OEM colors, the custom colors from palettes could have their own unique names so you know what you're using.
