Huckleberry wrote:

Nice informative patch. Thank you.

I'm assuming that the pink tint is just to grandfather in any existing characters and will eventually be phased out? Also I support making all neutral skins and materials to be as light (close to pure white?) as possible to allow the most color options.

The pink tint versions might be removed from the menus at some point, though I don't know if we'll actually delete the underlying texture; it doesn't take up that much space. Basically it would stay in the dresser tables, but would get flagged not to show in the menus. As long as you didn't try to change the skin base and re-save the character, it would continue to work. But you wouldn't be able to use it in new designs. But that probably won't happen for a while.

Another thing to keep in mind is that some of the old skin colors were designed to be used with the pink tinted base, so some of them don't work very well with the neutral base. I moved those to the end of the skin palette, to make it less likely people would use them by accident with the new base and be annoyed by the results. Those have a fair chance to be removed from the palette in the future, especially if they're very close to one of the other colors. Again, there's a good chance they'd continue to work for older characters employing them, they just wouldn't be usable on new characters.

There are also still questions about whether we've got quite the right combination of the new base and new skin colors in the palette. The lightest colors don't always look good, and they're very sensitive to lighting conditions, so it's tricky to get them right. I wound up lightening the neutral base just before the release, which improved things a bit, but I'm still not entirely happy with the results. I'm not an artist, and my color sense is sometimes questionable. We've got some better people than I looking at the light tones, so you can look forward to improvements there.

My general principle on things like this is to try to design things so as not to invalidate older characters unless there's a compelling reason. But some deprecated choices might not be usable on future characters. All items used on characters now use a unique internal ID, so it's possible to "replace" an item and still leave the old one working by giving the new version a different ID.

However, some of the new skin tints might actually change a bit, since there are a lot of them and keeping two sets would make a mess of the palette.

Turns out that the shift key movement modifier isn't a key bind, but actually wired into the player character. I added in the right shift key to do the same thing, at least for the time being. Should show up in the next release. Longer term, this probably isn't the right way to do it; it really should be a bindable key action.

There's a bunch of stuff going on in the UI area right now, trying to move to the "real" version of the UI infrastructure, and all the game option setting stuff is part of that. That includes all the typical keybinding options.

Right now, the options package I'm trying to work with only allows one key binding, plus a gamepad binding, for each action. The underlying binding stuff in Unreal allows multiple keys to bind to an action, so I'm hoping I can fix that at some point. Most of the games I play allow two key binds per action, and I often find that useful, so I'm looking at that as our goal.

Amusingly, Unreal actually only has forward and rightward movements; back and left are actually forward/right with a negative speed. Since each key bind can have a different speed value, most likely any fast movement will be done that way at some point, rather than as a hack on the character movement function using the shift modifier. I'd like us to have an auto-run action, too. Right now, the character actions are pretty much default things from the basic Unreal character behavior, and we'll have to build on that for travel powers.

So all the movement stuff is all pretty temporary, though I expect the typical WASD and maybe the arrow default bindings we have will be part of the final movement setup. I don't know what the eventual base set of movements will be, since different movement speeds generally need different animations. Obviously super-runspeed will need to be in there, though, for those with that power.

Yes, I remember using that system in CoX. However, there are two things being conflated there: the binding of keys to actions, and the fact that actions can be sequences of a scripting language used in the chat system. I suspect that all the key binding in CoX was done via that scripting language, much like it was back in the days of EQ. And WoW’s entire UI is written in a scripting language, Lua.

However, Unreal binding actions don’t go through a scripting intermediary stage, they couple directly into events in the code, similar to all the other things that happen in the game world, like a target being hit, colliding with an object, or clicking the mouse on something

So incorporating something like other games key-to-chatstring bindings would require the creation of a scripting language we don’t currently have. That isn’t to say it’s not feasible, or not desirable. But it’s a whole additional set of features that would have to be added. The good news is that it wouldn’t disrupt the current more-direct key-to-event model, since it’s perfectly possible that chat commands and/or a scripting language can also trigger events in the code, and that could be done in parallel with the existing Unreal key-binding mechanism we get for free. That does mean the key-binding option editor would need to be extended to include command strings as a possible action, or it would have to be done via the command line like the /bind command, which requires the chat system to support a command language

Right now, I’d be happy to just have basic key binding to basic in-game actions and powers, and basic chat working. Once we get that, then we can get more elaborate for power users. And I don’t think architecturally that we’re painting ourselves into a corner where that would be more difficult to add later.

I think the tricky design issue with keybinds to command strings or scripts is the problem WoW ran into with people trying to automate their characters too much. Basically I think that boils down to limiting a single key press to a single *significant* action that affects the game world. Of course, you also need to prevent the spammers from automating too much in chat channels. So this has to be thought out a bit. None of those issues come up with basic keybinds to basic actions, fortunately.