Destiny’s first expansion, The Dark Below, is due in December, but Bungie is hard at work preparing the game for its arrival, and several very interesting new items seem to have have turned up in the game’s code.
The first is a material called shader data. This item is described as “code tweaks and mods for more complex armor shaders”. This may mean a new tier of patterned or otherwise more differentiated shaders, or it may mean the ability to set the colours of individual pieces of armor. Maybe Bungie will give us the ability customize our own shaders for a change.
The next two interesting additions are also materials: the ship shader template (“a reverse engineered shell that allows a Shader to interface with ship hull coatings”) and “vehicle shader template (“a layer of translation code that allows a shader to interface with vehicle coatings”). This will presumably allow you to change the color of your ships and ground vehicles, which is good news for those stuck with one of the many, many Legendary brown ships, but less delightful for those of us carefully hoarding our Common but somehow elusive bright red vehicles.
This information seems to have been pulled from DestinyDB, which uses data mining among other tools to harvest information on the shared-worlds shooter, but was collated by Planet Destiny. Head there to see thumbnails for the 30 or so ships expected in the new expansion, along with screenshots of some new models.