Nearly a year ago, I launched this thread: https://cityoftitans.com/forum/costumeavatar-creator-ui-elements regarding features and functions of the Character Creator.
Recently, discussion of more such features has sprung up in a thread about Hair and I thought it would be good the resurrect the discussion, but not to necro the thread.
So, Emotes, Chat, save-files, what features would you like to see in the Character Creator?
Be Well!
Fireheart
[b]NOTE: This post is a cut-n-paste from the other thread Fireheart mentioned. I posted there before I realized this thread was being split off here.[/b]
As Grimfox mentioned the Devs of CoT have talked about having TWO different (but related) kinds of character creation save files. Unlike CoH's single "costume save file" which basically saved everything about a specific costume slot including body slider settings the CoT Devs have talked about having one type of file that -only- saves costume item related data and a separate type of file that would save all the body slider settings related to a character.
By breaking this kind of thing into two separate files you could for instance save off the specific body settings of a given character and then mix-n-match costume files separately to any other character. This would allow you to, for instance, send a "costume only" file to a new supergroup member so that they could start wearing the supergroup's uniform without having to worry about reworking any body sliders to match their character. This would also allow you to copy a given costume amongst your own alts without having to worry about individual body sliders. The "two file" concept for this is really quite clever and will make multiple things much easier.
But even if CoT wasn't going to do anything about saving costume/body files it'd still be useful to have a Test server for costume tinkering. I used it in CoH long before CoH offered any save feature - it was actually easy enough to [b]write down[/b] the options I wanted to use back on the live servers. ;)
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Power animation previews, save/recall, name check are musts for me. I was actually pretty happy with the CoH/V character creator. I'm not super boned up about sliders galore. I think I picked the standard Strong body-type and cranked the chest slider down to minimum and that was pretty much it.
You mentioned name checks. Do you want that just to see if anyone else selected the same character names as you want to use? Remember CoT will be working under a global naming system which means you'll be able to pick any character name you want [b]regardless[/b] if anyone else has used it or not. Even with the global system I suppose I might still be curious if name X is unique or if it's been used 100 times already but at best that would be a "nice to know" thing instead of a "need to know" thing for me at least.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
1: The biggest pain point for me in Champions Online was only being able to save an entire costume to file. There was no way to save face and/or body sliders independently. There was more than one occasion that I had to fix body proportions on a character. With no way to save sliders, and no visible slider values except for height, my only recourse was to count the number of arrow button clicks necessary to get from one of the slider's endpoints to the value I wanted. For every costume on the character. (Should I mention at this point how cheap and abundant costume slot unlocks are in CO? Especially if you have a gold or lifer Zen stipend? I had around 20 on my main, where I earned a few character-only unlocks, and at least 15 account unlocks on my alts.)
[i]1 tl;dr: Save/load sliders in their own file.[/i]
2: CoH and CO both had the same problem with their color palette UIs: Having to count off rows and columns to specify colors. I don't want to send the developers into the [url=https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/05/an-ai-invented-a-bunch-of-new-paint-colors-that-are-hilariously-wrong/]Hell of Naming Paint Colors.[/url] (Tag yourself. I'm "Snowbonk".) But even naming the rows Red, Orange, Gold, Yellow, etc., numbering the shades from dark to light, and providing tooltips would go a long way toward making colors easier to share with other players. RGB values would be helpful, too, even if it were an offline reference on the website. (This assumes the palettes will be fixed, of course. If you figure out how to prevent "nude costumes" with straight RGB values, it's a moot point. And a party for those of us who are anal-retentive about things like getting the exact shade of gold the Penguins use on their uniforms.)
[i]2 tl;dr: Give the color palette UI some identifiers.[/i]
Twitter: @SisterSilicon
My first post in this thread reminded everyone that the CoT Devs plan to do this. They talked about it several years ago.
I never had much trouble conveying colors to other players in CoH. How is referring to them by Row:Column that much harder than by RGB references? Having said that I'm sure whatever the CoT Devs come up with will be reasonably fine.
I actually haven't heard if they've decided to be "anal" about the "nude colors for costume items" thing yet or not. Sadly I'm assuming they will try to prevent it somehow given that one of the very first major nerfs to CoH (like literally a couple of weeks after its launch) was precisely changes in order to make "nude" color costume items harder to make.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
No need to, thanks to the material system. Even if you pick the same color, the material shader properties will still make clothing look clearly not skin.
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
I assume that's the case for overtly "3D clothing" (that's clearly -not- skin tight) but is the same true for something like a leotard? People who are going to try to "pretend" to be nude using this silly coloring trick are likely going to use the most skin-tight/skin-showing clothing possible just to look that much more convincingly nude.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
True for spandex/leotard, yes. We've done testing to verify, and it does meet ESRB standards.
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
That's interesting news - I'll have to see how it looks when I try out a flesh-colored bikini on one of my own characters. ;)
Does this mean that our color palette for clothing items will effectively be [b]any[/b] RGB color we want? Basically one of the main reasons we were restricted in CoH was because of the "nude clothing" issue - if that issue is gone then technically no color ought to be "off limits".
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
There are restrictions, but that's due to data size. But will be broader than CoH was.
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
More good news - thanks for jumping in. TBH, even CoH's restricted palette was good enough for me maybe 95% of the time. If CoT gives us like 2x or 3x the number of color choices that CoH did that ought to be good enough for practically everyone.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
Huh. That's kinda surprising. Then again, it's an "objectionable content" standards body. They can be arbitrary and political in the weirdest ways. I know Cryptic expanded the clothing palette in CO after launch, and there were a couple of near-skin tones that clever costumers put to good use and others used to make HURR DURR N00DZ costumes. I remember seeing them more often (which is to say I saw them at all) in the months before I left, and figured it was because nobody gave two ???? about the TOS anymore. (The forums were creeping into Carlin's Seven Words territory in a way that wasn't happening on STO or NW. And just when I was getting good at creative bowdlerization, too. Ratspit.)
Twitter: @SisterSilicon
My instantaneous guess is that there'll be at least a few people running around in CoT with some variation of "nude colored speedos" (or at least as "nude" as the game will allow for based on what Doctor Tyche just said). There will always be a few idiots who are willing to push any costuming system as far as it will go in that direction - kind of like when an 8 year old first discovers what a "dictionary" is and will use it to look up all the [I]bad[/I] words just because they can.
Hopefully it won't happen too often and I suppose people could always be reported to the GMs if any one case of it got annoying enough.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
I have to agree that standard RGB or Hexadecimal color values would be a boon. Everyone's Monitor is a little different about displaying color. Having numeric values would make this less a matter of guesswork.
I still think that being able to save just the face, or torso, or legs of a character model, or perhaps just having the save-file be readable in clear text, so one could adopt a costume and paste one's own, unique, character-face onto it, would be ideal.
Be Well!
Fireheart
I could see even if the color palette is set up like CoH (in Row:Column format) that maybe they could have scroll over "tool-tips" that would display each color's actual RGB value just in case you're interested or if it's actually easier for you to refer to them by that number than the Row:Column location.
Obviously having a separate "body slider only" save file is going to be a big improvement in CoT over what we had in CoH. I suppose having the ability to save off only subsets of body sliders (like face only) would be even more useful to some but you could get to the point where you might only be concerned with a small handful of specific sliders. At that point you could always just write the values down without the need of actual files.
As far as the file data being "human readable" my quick guess is that they will be at least to some degree. The CoH save files were more or less text based so I doubt CoT's files will be that different. It's not like the data involved here is huge enough that it'd need to be "compressed" via being binary-oriented.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]
*cough*JSON*cough*
<br /> {<br /> faceSliders: [<br /> "mouthWidth": 0.75,<br /> "nosePreset": "nose_04"<br /> ],<br /> bodySliders: [<br /> "height": 180, // centimeters<br /> "bicepSize": "Gun Show",<br /> "buttPreset": "1-900-Mix-A-Lot"<br /> ]<br /> }<br />Edit: OK, where do I file the bug report for visible break tags in BBCode code blocks? Ignore those, please.
Twitter: @SisterSilicon
I'll copy over my suggestion from the hair thread... please offer a way to see the character in motion while selecting costumes and hairstyles in the character creator / editor. Hope it can save us time when we want to try hair and clothes that may be heavily influenced by physics. Doesn't have to be ready at whatever date we may get the standalone CC, or even at launch.
This could be as simple as a few basic animation loops that can be toggled on while on the bodyslider and costume selection screens: walk, run, fly, jump.
If a few highly active emotes (e.g. dance, cheer, bow) can be added, that would be a nice bonus.
Chat window. for triggering e-motes and keeping in touch with people outside the CC.
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I second color identifiers, RGB-eqsue would be ideal I think. Also saving costume portions: face, everything but face.
Also, saving power customization: given how insane (-ly awesome) the power customization is, it'd be great to save combinations of customizations, almost like custom powersets.
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Having some "in game" backgrounds fixed pictures to look how our character is in game, with some viewing distance to see if at a big distance it looks like we want could be a good thing ^^
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I'm fairly confident we'll get what CoH had at a minimum for saving (2 text or XML files for body sliders + costume, and power customization). Also, we had very basic lighting controls and rotation, and a Power Customization screen, so I'm sure CoT will have that and enhance it to handle the full range of aesthetic decoupling.
Separating the body sliders and costume selections into 2 files would be a benefit to me too... yes please!
In the costume and body slider screens, I'd like the ability to zoom and rotate on at least three regions - head, upper body, and lower body - or if it's easier to provide a fully independent camera option, that would be excellent.
In the Power Customization screen, I hope we'll be able to see an example enemy so that the power "hit animation" and any ongoing status effect animations can be fully displayed, and with better camera controls. I recall that CoH's had trouble with showing these aspects of many powers, and often could not zoom/rotate enough to properly display pet summoning powers and targeted location AoEs.
I think we need Better lighting in the Character Creator. In CoH, some of my Tallest characters actually had their heads in shadows, because the lighting was single-source and came from an angle. Others had strange highlights, from standing right in the brightest part of the beam.
Be Well!
Fireheart
Yeah, an independent camera would be great, idk if I've ever seen a costume creator with a totally movable camera, with it's own lighting.
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[color=red]PR, Forum Moderator[/color]
[url=http://cityoftitans.com/forum/desvipers-creative-impulsivity]My Non-Canon Backstories[/url]
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You should download the [url=http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/benchmark/]FFXIV benchmark[/url]. It's pretty sick.
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I have it that emotes will be available for use in the costume creator. Seeing a bit of natural movement will help.
I have played with the nude character concept in COH. I gave up on flesh tones, and went for other colors. Blue was good. The skin was a slight shade different from the spandex, but a neck scarf was enough to hide the change.
orange/gold was a dead match...no seams could even be visible. Green worked like Blue.
I could even get stiletto heels to seamlessly blend in to the color scheme. Never played those toons much though, they were experiments mostly.
Just saying, where there is a will, there is a way.
Hmmm, better watch the modding community on this one.
[img]https://s15.postimg.cc/z9bk1znkb/Black_Falcon_Sig_in_Progess.jpg[/img]
Well CoH re-worked its color palette a few weeks after launch so that the only place human "fleshtones" existed were in the skin color selection GUI. The downside of this meant that we lacked any kind of beige/tan/brown type colors for costume items.
As you pointed out the only easy way to do nude characters after that was to pick non-human colors (like your blues, greens, reds, etc.) to match between the skin and whatever skintight clothing you were using. This is how comic books have been getting away with drawing nude characters for decades - it was "acceptable" as long as they didn't use "standard human" skin colors:
[img=100x100]http://www.thedailystar.net/sites/default/files/upload-2014/gallery/image/arts/jenifer_1.jpg[/img]
But now according to Dr. Tyche we'll be able to use human fleshtones in CoT. He claims that with the way clothing will work in CoT that'll always be obvious that you're wearing skin-colored clothing but as you imply there will be people who'll be "clever" enough to figure out ways to make it look reasonably convincing.
CoH player from April 25, 2004 to November 30, 2012
[IMG=400x225]https://i.imgur.com/NHUthWM.jpeg[/IMG]