I was messing around with the character creator in CO the other day, and two things of note hit me that I would like to see improved upon for City of Titans.
The first, is the "default" option. I'm not sure how far MWM has gotten with this, but I would like two default options. Let me try and clarify. Every time I try to create another costume and use "default", I have to either readjust every slider I used when creating the original characters height / muscles / etc. Otherwise, I have to go through each individual item (20+ items on some characters) and restore them to a base mode so that I can create a new costume. Simply put, I would like either a "Full Default" or "Default Costume" option (which will save the body model, but restore it to a base costume).
The second issue I noticed concerns emblems. I have not seen anything specific on the subject, but I have noted that some character creators, such as CO, seem to tie the emblem directly to the body geometry. This tends to cause distortion of the emblems if the body is changed in any way from its default values. This is mostly of note with female characters when adjusting the chest size, but if I put an emblem of a star on my heroes chest, I don't want it to turn into a triangle if I mess with the chest / bust size.
Honestly, each section (body sliders, face sliders, head costume, upper body costume, lower body costume, etc.) just needs its own "reset" button that just resets its section. Bonus points if they can let us save the settings for each section in individual files, or when loading from a file, give us the option of only loading certain sections. This can make deploying SG uniforms easier.
The CoT system seems to be decoupling the clothing from the body geometry, so this should be less of a problem. Also, in one of the early updates, they show how emblems can be moved, rotated, and/or scaled to different areas on the costume. So, for example, the "star" emblem can be left in its default position center-chest, or slid over to a shoulder, or rotated to point at a one-shoulder cape clasp, or whatever. So even if it stretches a bit due to body sliders moving around, you can goto the sliders for the emblem and fix it.
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Simplest solution to the "default costume" option is actually an export/import to text file function allowing you to SAVE parameters. Run the system on a hash code and you're most of the way there. Personally, I'd want to do a Folder+Files method for this, allowing for an easy breakdown of component pieces into easy to manage chunks of related parts. Just name the folder the Character name when saved and do something like this for the .txt files:
Head + Neck file
Torso/Waist + Back
Arms + Shoulders
Legs + Footwear
Entire Costume (all in one)
That ought to facilitate the forum sharing of costume designs as well as the saving and editing and reverting to last save and so on functions.
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The idea of being able to save off different body areas of a costume is interesting. But given that CoH eventually provided for a basic "full costume" save and load feature I have to think that CoT will also provide a least that default capability as well.
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I would definitely hope so! If there wasn't a save option it would make me very sad! I think it would be beneficial to add a "code" feature that you can easily send a code that you paste in that immediately brings up a build/costume. This would work really well with the character creator app. Just message it to a friend and they can load it up and alter it and just get to share all their ideas.
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Emblems and anything non-geometrical that is applied to costume is typically done in in the form of 'decals' that are postitioned and then baked into the costume texture by the graphics card. This makes it subject to the same kind of distortion that the costume texture itself is.
It also is the reason why a good 3D graphics program has radically different textures and UV mappings for female models than they have for male, so that the decal system can take into account the deformation. This is generally well outside the realm of practicality for an MMO though, as it requires a lot of calculations to 'pre-distort' the decal bitmap so that it will appear as a projection rather as a stretched texture.
(note that the simplistic technique of UV mapping on a distorted (through various sliders) mesh geometry will also lead to distorted geometry if the sliders are pushed too far out of the average for which these textures were created. This could be seen in CoH also with some costumes paired to the more outrageous chest sizes. Either you need the sliders within fairly strict limits, or you need a series of revamped textures that are centered on different scale points along the slider. Again a difficult and costly operation. Most of the early CoH textures were carefully designed to make this stretching invisible or at least inobtrusive by making the areas on the texture uniformly coloured that were strongest affected by stretching to match the deformed mesh, and relegating the patterns and small details mostly to the areas that were difficult or impossible to affect by the sliders.
Are you taking into account the capabilities that ship with the Unreal Engine 4, though?
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