Izzy wrote:

Another concern i have is once we get the Avatar Builder, people will use it, and use it, and ... and in a month's time, ask... "is the game ready yet, i wanna walk around in the world now!?"
If MWM could also include their own version of Pocket D, that might help a little. :s

Well I guess they could have a "no powers" Pocket D-like place you could log into. But even that kind stripped-down meeting room would require things like the login system, the chat system and maybe some emotes to make even that "limited" room worth visiting. From there it'd be hard to draw the line between having "something limited they could give us before the main game is done" and "it being easier to wait for the rest of the game to be finished instead of giving us half-created pieces-parts.

Having a clear demarcation between the Avatar Builder (that only deals with character models and costume items) and the rest of the game is likely workable enough because the Avatar Builder is a much more "standalone" concept. But trying to give us some other fractional part between "more than the Avatar Builder" but "less than the full game" could be problematic depending on how much all those other parts rely on each other to work correctly.

Personally, I have no idea how long it takes to build, make, acquire costume and other assets. For that reason alone I don't expect an Avatar Builder worth a darn until they tell me it's ready.

Radiac wrote:

Personally, I have no idea how long it takes to build, make, acquire costume and other assets. For that reason alone I don't expect an Avatar Builder worth a darn until they tell me it's ready.

Well the Devs made it clear they were going to release the Avatar Builder as a "standalone app" before the game itself is launched. That's just about the only "confirmable solid fact" we actually have at this point. Now whether it's going to take another 6 months (or gods-forbid 6 years) before we see a beta testable version of it is anybody's guess at this point. Obviously I will continue to hope for the lesser of my two estimates here.

But even in the absence of any other information from the Devs one can apply bit of common sense about how this might all turn out. Costume items are going to be one of those things that the Devs will be continuously adding to the game. Simple history reflects the fact that CoH started out with far fewer items than it ended up with so it makes little sense to think that the Devs have to try to be "finished" with "all" the costume items before we get to see the initial Avatar Builder in action. What will be most important for the launch of the Avatar Builder is to make sure the fundamentals are sound; things such as whether the sliders all work as expected and the costumes save/load correctly. That critical testing can be (and technically ought to be) done with only a small handful of individual costume items available for testing. Fewer items would ensure fewer variables to worry about.

Sure as time progresses I'm hoping our Devs end up producing literally thousands of costume items for the Avatar Builder. But that part of the "job" will never really be finished, either before or after the game itself launches. The Avatar Builder will be "worth a darn" regardless of how many items it offers. The exact total number of items it ever offers isn't important. I'd rather help test (in the near term) a beta version of the Avatar Builder with a few dozen generic items to make sure the foundation is sound than to have the Devs spend an extra year or two holding off that essential public testing just to generate several thousand items that all end up resting on a crappy app that could have been reviewed and fixed early on. Get the foundation established and tested correctly first - the Devs will then have as many years as they want to create as many items as they can. We don't need the Devs focusing on a huge number of individual costume items before we know the app works in the first place.

In my opinion, character creators work best with both a slider and a mesh drag mechanic - Black Desert does it, and it can let you fine tune on both sides of the coin, which is a large part of the reason the game's character creator is lauded as being so great.

Gorgon wrote:

Then I figured out if you clicked on part of the body, it grabbed a suddenly-appearing mesh, which you could then drag bigger and smaller. It wasn't unlimited distortion, and there were only finite grab points (like chin, end of nose, bridge of nose, etc.) and you only had limited drag change (very comparable to a slider's range) but it was an interesting variation to a proper slider.

Halae wrote:

In my opinion, character creators work best with both a slider and a mesh drag mechanic - Black Desert does it, and it can let you fine tune on both sides of the coin, which is a large part of the reason the game's character creator is lauded as being so great.

Even Fallout 4's character creator allowed for this kind of "mesh drag" mechanic for the faces. It was fairly workable given that "character creation" is clearly not an absolute priority for that game the way it would be say for CoT.

I've got mixed feelings about this for CoT - on one hand it seems like a feature that would be "nice to have" but as long as the game has plenty of standard sliders I could probably live without the face mesh thing especially if implementing it would take a significantly large amount of additional effort that might be better spent in having better standard sliders or more costume items. As always adding "mesh drag" technology could be something they could throw into the game after launch as an upgrade.

WarBird wrote:

I neither need nor expect extensive facial adjustments. Give me a couple dozen stock facial 'skins' and a handful of proportion sliders and I'm good. Heck, I spent enough time with the limited capabilities of CoH. I certainly won't kick if we get the crazy abilities that are out there now, but remember, many of the games that give you that much adjustment (Like Fallout 4) are single player and only need to store and render YOUR face for you. Honestly, If I was given that amount of detail for every character I expect to create in CoT I might be paralyzed! :)

Actually relative to games like Black Desert (a modern MMO) the character creator of Fallout 4 (a modern single-player game) is somewhat limited. And besides FO4 uses the same graphics tech to render ALL the NPC faces in the game, not just the player character's. It's still far beyond what CoH provided for back in 2004 in terms or body slider tech but as good as FO4 is it's almost at the "low end" of what might be considered acceptable for a game created in the 2016-17 timeframe.

Obviously while I hope for the best to come from CoT's Avatar Builder I will certainly understand (due to MWM's limited budget) if I doesn't turn out to be the most cutting-edge character creator ever created for any game. But by the same token I do expect it to noticeably surpass the limitations that existed in software tech from 12+ years ago.