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Blend

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Fallout1
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Blend

I know it may not seem like a real important color feature; however, I thought the blend option that transitioned one color to the second on a costume part was very effective. I had a character called Prism who was basically a rainbow starting red at the top and transitioning to purple at the boots. He had electrical powers a I made each power a different color of the spectrum. I also had a fire character Miss Match who started white at the mask and transitioned to yellow orange and finishing in red.

Lothic
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Actually I'd consider multi

Actually I'd consider multi-color blending on costume items and powers to be fairly important and I'd be amazed if that feature didn't get carried over to CoT.

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

Huckleberry
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I'm with you, Fallout1. This

I'm with you, Fallout1. This was one of my favorite features and can be a real stunning look if done well. I'd like a three-color blend or more, with a little slider that we can move to show where we want the blends between each color to occur.

Kind of like how they do it in Photoshop. This video at the 2:20 mark:


I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
Lothic
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Huckleberry wrote:
Huckleberry wrote:

I'm with you, Fallout1. This was one of my favorite features and can be a real stunning look if done well. I'd like a three-color blend or more, with a little slider that we can move to show where we want the blends between each color to occur.
Kind of like how they do it in Photoshop. This video at the 2:20 mark:

What you're talking about would be cool too, but that's a slightly different thing from what I (and I think Fallout1) were referring to. Back in CoH many/most costume items had two overlapping "regions" where the two possible color choices we had would be placed on the item. The two colors would then "blend" together by a function of how those two regions were predefined on the item.

What you're talking about sounds more like just coming up with new colors based on "blending" two or more colors together in abstract like how a painter blends paints together on a palette. Your idea is completely independent of any costume items being considered - nothing wrong with that other than it being another idea to consider.

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

Doctor Tyche
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Blending capability is built

Blending capability is built into the game engine, so we're fine there.

Technical Director

Read enough Facebook and you have to make Sanity Checks. I guess FB is the Great Old One of the interent these days... - Beamrider

Lothic
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Doctor Tyche wrote:
Doctor Tyche wrote:

Blending capability is built into the game engine, so we're fine there.

Is it going to be similar to how CoH handled it or something different? When you say "built into the game engine" does that mean the blending is automatic across a costume item without the artist having to predefine exactly where the colors appear?

For example in CoH most hair styles allowed for the two color options but where those colors appeared on the hair was effectively predefined so you could do the "main color" and then what could be called "highlights" blended together. If you reversed the colors it'd simply reverse the main/highlight colors respectively.

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Fallout1
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This is great news. I

This is great news. I seriously can't wait for this game. I bought COH within the first 2 weeks of introduction and played all the way until the final days. I am happy with everything I've seen so far.

Doctor Tyche
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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

Doctor Tyche wrote:
Blending capability is built into the game engine, so we're fine there.
Is it going to be similar to how CoH handled it or something different? When you say "built into the game engine" does that mean the blending is automatic across a costume item without the artist having to predefine exactly where the colors appear?
For example in CoH most hair styles allowed for the two color options but where those colors appeared on the hair was effectively predefined so you could do the "main color" and then what could be called "highlights" blended together. If you reversed the colors it'd simply reverse the main/highlight colors respectively.

Similar to how CoH handled it.

The artist gets to define the color patterns, which then can be overlayed on top of each other. That's the same approach CoH used.

Technical Director

Read enough Facebook and you have to make Sanity Checks. I guess FB is the Great Old One of the interent these days... - Beamrider

Lothic
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Doctor Tyche wrote:
Doctor Tyche wrote:

Similar to how CoH handled it.
The artist gets to define the color patterns, which then can be overlayed on top of each other. That's the same approach CoH used.

That's cool - thanks for the answer as always. :)

This does remind me to ask one other quick but related question: Would it be possible somewhere around the color selection GUI to have a "color toggle" button that quickly reverses the selected colors? Here's where that would be helpful: Again let's say you're choosing two colors for your hair and let's say those two colors are very close to each other (for the sake of argument let's say they are light and darker yellowish colors to make an overall blonde color). With the color toggle you could quickly switch those two colors back and forth with the push of one button to decide which scheme looks better. This would save having to reassign the color choices each time and cut down on several mouse moves/clicks while you're trying to "eyeball" which colors you want.

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

Huckleberry
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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

What you're talking about would be cool too, but that's a slightly different thing from what I (and I think Fallout1) were referring to. Back in CoH many/most costume items had two overlapping "regions" where the two possible color choices we had would be placed on the item. The two colors would then "blend" together by a function of how those two regions were predefined on the item.
What you're talking about sounds more like just coming up with new colors based on "blending" two or more colors together in abstract like how a painter blends paints together on a palette. Your idea is completely independent of any costume items being considered - nothing wrong with that other than it being another idea to consider.

You got the incorrect understanding from what I was trying to get across.

I am familiar with how CoH did it, and I thought that was clearly implied from my comment about how much I liked it.

However, what I was referring to is that in CoH you got to pick the two colors and the blend pattern was pre-chosen. What I was suggesting in my post above is that it would be nice if we could adjust the blend mix so that middle-color-point was further one way or the other. This is actually being done for hair color blending in at least one MMORPG that I know of, but for the life of me I can't remember which.

The other suggestion I made was the option of including a third color or more in between instead of just the two end colors that CoH used.

------

This leads me to another idea: Why stop at blends, why not include patterns, too? Yes, I know that there will be patterns; but stay with me for a bit while I get to the good part.

We know that we will have tattoos and we know that the tattoos will be scalable and adjustable such that we can move them all over the body . But a tattoo is a finite sticker. What if we were able to apply any 2D texture upon the costume item?

For example, what if we were able to pick a leopard print from the costume creator and pick the colors we want, then pick the zoom level so that the spots could be really small or really large, and then we can drag and rotate that pattern upon the costume item to get the effect and orientation we want. Going back to the original idea of a color blend, we could do the same thing with a color blend too. Let's say we want a color blend from white through pink to orange. And we want the blend to extend from the characters head to the character's feet, but we want the majority to be white, with just a hint of pink before it goes to orange. So the character creator has us set up our custom blend on a 2D canvas. Then we wrap that custom blend around each costume piece zooming in and out and rotating, as applicable, until we get the entire full body effect we want.

I don't see that as being really too different from what we intend to do with tattoos.


I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
Lin Chiao Feng
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Huckleberry wrote:
Huckleberry wrote:

However, what I was referring to is that in CoH you got to pick the two colors and the blend pattern was pre-chosen. What I was suggesting in my post above is that it would be nice if we could adjust the blend mix so that middle-color-point was further one way or the other.

Nonlinear blending. You're basically running the alpha channel of the original blend through a mapping function (0-255 in -> 0-255 out, where 0 = 100% base color and 255 = 100% overlay color) before blending.

Huckleberry wrote:

The other suggestion I made was the option of including a third color or more in between instead of just the two end colors that CoH used.

Piecewise linear blending. The problem is that there needs to be some kind of limit on number of colors or someone's going to try to make tie-dye out of hundreds of them, and each additional color adds to compositing time. Probably also eats lots of graphics RAM? (Every extra color adds a channel.)

No idea if either of these is feasible. It's a matter of adding all the controls to set these and how much does rendering this kind of blending slow the game down.

Huckleberry wrote:

This leads me to another idea: Why stop at blends, why not include patterns, too? Yes, I know that there will be patterns; but stay with me for a bit while I get to the good part.
We know that we will have tattoos and we know that the tattoos will be scalable and adjustable such that we can move them all over the body . But a tattoo is a finite sticker. What if we were able to apply any 2D texture upon the costume item?
For example, what if we were able to pick a leopard print from the costume creator and pick the colors we want, then pick the zoom level so that the spots could be really small or really large, and then we can drag and rotate that pattern upon the costume item to get the effect and orientation we want.

Pretty sure that was in a costume creator update. Except instead of leopard spots, it was a five-pointed star getting stretched, rotated, and dragged around the costume.

Huckleberry wrote:

Going back to the original idea of a color blend, we could do the same thing with a color blend too. Let's say we want a color blend from white through pink to orange. And we want the blend to extend from the characters head to the character's feet, but we want the majority to be white, with just a hint of pink before it goes to orange. So the character creator has us set up our custom blend on a 2D canvas. Then we wrap that custom blend around each costume piece zooming in and out and rotating, as applicable, until we get the entire full body effect we want.

Why do you need a separate 2d canvas? Why not just see what it does right on the costume as you drag sliders around? And anyway, this is more or less the blending you were mentioning above.

TL;DR: a classic case of feeping creaturism, but it would be cool.

Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...

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Lin Chiao Feng wrote:
Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

Pretty sure that was in a costume creator update. Except instead of leopard spots, it was a five-pointed star getting stretched, rotated, and dragged around the costume.

That's what I was referring to when I used the term tattoo. Perhaps it was a poor choice of words, but you definitely got the idea I was trying to get across.

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:
Huckleberry wrote:

Going back to the original idea of a color blend, we could do the same thing with a color blend too. Let's say we want a color blend from white through pink to orange. And we want the blend to extend from the characters head to the character's feet, but we want the majority to be white, with just a hint of pink before it goes to orange. So the character creator has us set up our custom blend on a 2D canvas. Then we wrap that custom blend around each costume piece zooming in and out and rotating, as applicable, until we get the entire full body effect we want.

Why do you need a separate 2d canvas? Why not just see what it does right on the costume as you drag sliders around? And anyway, this is more or less the blending you were mentioning above.

I was thinking of doing it on a 2D canvas for the same reason we see the star represented in 2D before we start placing it on the body. Just to give us a simpler rendition to see as we work the blending tool. Besides, setting up on the side as a 2D canvas allows us to paste the same canvas on multiple different costume parts where we can stretch it and rotate it instead of having to recreate it for each costume item. I'm sure any User Interface professionals working on the avatar builder would come up with the best solution regardless, should they even consider creeping featurism like this.

Lin Chiao Feng wrote:

TL;DR: a classic case of feeping creaturism


I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
Lothic
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Huckleberry wrote:I am
Huckleberry wrote:

I am familiar with how CoH did it, and I thought that was clearly implied from my comment about how much I liked it.

Right, and I understood that the things you were suggesting after that were nice but different and beyond the things OP was talking about. That ultimately didn't really answer the OP's original concerns.

Thankfully Doctor Tyche jumped in and he nailed down that the exact kind of thing we had in CoH (the two color blending based on the hardwired patterns directly on costume items) is apparently the same thing we're going to get in CoT. With that established we can go on to talk about your new ideas related to the helpful terms Lin Chiao Feng provided vis-a-vis nonlinear blending and piecewise linear blending.

Your idea for the 2D canvas is interesting. I'd settle for the means (as you point out) to easily recreate/transfer the same patterns from on character to another. If that fundamental capability is accomplishable (perhaps with the costume save files) -without- the 2D canvas then I'd go with that just for simplicity's sake.

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012

Huckleberry
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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

Right, and I understood that the things you were suggesting after that were nice but different and beyond the things OP was talking about. That ultimately didn't really answer the OP's original concerns.

and when have you ever seen me respond to a creative suggestion without then thinking how to turn it up to 11?


I like to take your ideas and supersize them. This isn't criticism, it is flattery. I come with nothing but good will and a spirit of team-building. If you take what I write any other way, that is probably just because I wasn't very clear.
Lothic
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Huckleberry wrote:
Huckleberry wrote:

Lothic wrote:
Right, and I understood that the things you were suggesting after that were nice but different and beyond the things OP was talking about. That ultimately didn't really answer the OP's original concerns.
and when have you ever seen me respond to a creative suggestion without then thinking how to turn it up to 11?

The "mind-blown pause" before he reflexively replies to the reasonably critical question with "these go to 11..." is priceless. :)

CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012