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Discuss: Developer's Workshop - Hair Movement

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Grimfox
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kidrad: There are some key

kidrad: There are some key details that are being left out of this discussion, which have been brought up else where. It's important to do some of this research now. Later it gets a lot harder to implement. If the character model needs to have additional "animation bone attachment points" they need to be added to the model NOW not LATER because changing the character model later could result in a lot of costume save files being obsoleted and unusable. So they need to look into this now and figure out how and what to do to enable that for the future. Once the research is complete and they decide on a course of action which may be "we need to make substantial changes to the character model to support this" then they can do those things and table the rest of the development post launch knowing that they gave themselves the option to pursue it in the future.

Kid Rad
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Grimfox wrote:
Grimfox wrote:

kidrad: There are some key details that are being left out of this discussion, which have been brought up else where. It's important to do some of this research now. Later it gets a lot harder to implement. If the character model needs to have additional "animation bone attachment points" they need to be added to the model NOW not LATER because changing the character model later could result in a lot of costume save files being obsoleted and unusable. So they need to look into this now and figure out how and what to do to enable that for the future. Once the research is complete and they decide on a course of action which may be "we need to make substantial changes to the character model to support this" then they can do those things and table the rest of the development post launch knowing that they gave themselves the option to pursue it in the future.

That doesn't really make sense to me. Why couldn't they just add in the animated version of the more basic hairstyles later, without affecting the save file? It really shouldn't alter the bone structure at all, just basically be a new fancier hat.

I guess I just don't understand enough about animation to speak intelligently on the subject, but this is just not something I care about in a game, so when I see it as an update my reaction is "is this really necessary in the short term?". Not to diminish the work that is being put into this, it is a cool effect, but definitely not crucial to me to have a good initial release.

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Kid Rad wrote:
Kid Rad wrote:

This should be at the absolute bottom of the list of your development priorities. This is something that could be added in in mid to late beta. No wonder this game is taking so long, you're focusing on this kind of pointless minutia.

No offense, it's a nice touch, but seriously, at this stage, why are you working on it?

The time invested in this was not large and the tech involved applies to may other aspects of costuming, it's actually the simplest form of getting any kind of motion out of our costume elements. Do you want capes, long coats, things like that? It's the same tech. Also as you can see from some of the other replies in this thread, not everyone agrees with your particular priorities ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Kid Rad wrote:

That doesn't really make sense to me. Why couldn't they just add in the animated version of the more basic hairstyles later, without affecting the save file? It really shouldn't alter the bone structure at all, just basically be a new fancier hat.

Nobody knows whether that is even POSSIBLE until we actually try it. There are some surprising (tbh, shocking) limitations even in the latest version of UE and we can't really take this sort of thing for granted, build tons of content expecting that support for a feature we haven't worked with will be there.

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Flesh Forge][quote=Project
Flesh Forge][quote=Project_Hero wrote:
Atama wrote:

Stretchy attacks like Mr. Fantastic or Elastic Man.

This is a really fun concept, but be aware it would need a radically different character skeleton from what we are working with. It's one thing to extend the skeleton with something like hair or clothing, but to allow the character's arms and legs to get stretchy is vastly more complex and would need a ton of animation support.

would there be a way to visually 'cheat' the stretchiness without having to veer too far from what you're doing now? Like how squash and stretch is used a lot in animation to create stretchier/more fluid movements and some games like Overwatch to use it to make characters bouncier. Would it be possible to mimic that effect with the current skeleton but make the 'stretching' parts a lot more noticeable on the model, while keeping the skeleton in tact? or maybe I'm just misunderstanding and I'm asking for oranges instead of apples? :D;

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I don't see how stretching

I don't see how stretching would work. Even if they could find a way to make it appear as if its stretching or if they successfully find a way to animate it, how would they then tackle attacks around object or other players? If an arm stretches out and punches a character, but there is another character or a lamp post in the way, do they now have to find away to make it go around that object? Or do they make it clip right through. I think its just too much trouble.

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ElegantHope wrote:
ElegantHope wrote:

maybe I'm just misunderstanding and I'm asking for oranges instead of apples? :D;

The short answer is yes, this is apples to oranges. The elbow will still bend like an elbow, even if the forearm and upper arm are made very long, it won't appear stretchy at all.

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Flesh Forge wrote:
Flesh Forge wrote:
ElegantHope wrote:

maybe I'm just misunderstanding and I'm asking for oranges instead of apples? :D;

The short answer is yes, this is apples to oranges. The elbow will still bend like an elbow, even if the forearm and upper arm are made very long, it won't appear stretchy at all.

This is absolutely true. Stretchy supers turn their limbs into noodles, that’s kind of the trope. If you just made the limbs longer but kept them looking like they had the same bones/joints it wouldn’t look right at all.

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Wolfgang8565 wrote:
Wolfgang8565 wrote:

I don't see how stretching would work. Even if they could find a way to make it appear as if its stretching or if they successfully find a way to animate it, how would they then tackle attacks around object or other players? If an arm stretches out and punches a character, but there is another character or a lamp post in the way, do they now have to find away to make it go around that object? Or do they make it clip right through. I think its just too much trouble.

What happens with any attack when something gets in the way? It just goes through it. The same thing would apply here.

I mean if my character hucks a fireball and some player runs in front of it I don't expect it to impact on the player, I expect it to travel to its target unhindered.

The better question would be what happens when you use stretchy attacks while moving? That'd probably make some buggy looking movements.

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If the skeleton supported

If the skeleton supported that kind of thing - and it does not, let me make that clear - it actually wouldn't be that big a deal to move the endpoints to a target and have an Inverse Kinematics (look it up) chain solve where to put all the intervening joints. Don't expect this though, what you're talking about would require a radically different character skeleton from what we have now.

e: actually two, male and female

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When it comes to hair

When it comes to hair selection and customization in the character generator, what is the plan for how we'll do it and how detailed we can get? I realize that plan may be subject to change as you discover UE4/other limitations...

Select hairstyle, apply one color.
(CoH, LOTRO method, lots of other games)

Select hairstyle, apply color(s) to two or three predefined regions of hair, possibly with some color blending options between the regions.

Select hairstyle, adjust length and tilt angle of predefined bone-like segments, apply main color, apply "roots" color, apply "tips" color, and control color blending with sliders?
(BDO method)

Something else?

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It'd be cool if we could set

It'd be cool if we could set like patterns for hairs. Like, halfs, checked, gradient, tips, tips front only, etc.

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avelworldcreator wrote:
avelworldcreator wrote:

@Cinnder,
Well, the idea I've been tossing around is have multiple palettes on the client already existing. Key each palette to the either the body section (there are 22), the material used, or both. We are limited to only 3, 8-bit, values per part for transmission, but this could give us a potential number colors of 256*22*number of materials.

No alpha channel?

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Huckleberry wrote:
Huckleberry wrote:
avelworldcreator wrote:

We are transmitting 8-bit color indexes. Each maps to an fRGB value. That's floating point values, not integers. At least 12 bytes per color. After that those colors are manipulated into gradients and the like by the materials used so the total number of colors resulting can be quite large. Consider what you've seen with the recent costume videos with only 9 colors! I was shocked when I first heard this too but my later experience led me to think otherwise. Would I like a larger range? Yes. But it's an issue of bandwidth. The equipment on the client end can handle it but our modern data pipes are still too narrow yet. The environment has as much of a range as we like.
What we are doing is storing our colors on the client in advance and just transmitting a reference to them so we don't have to send all of that data every time.

That makes sense. I hadn't thought about the effect materials have. So our client knows the 8-bit color as "blue #256" but that same exact "blue #256" can appear as hundreds of different shades more, generated by the Unreal Engine on our client depending on the lighting effects and the material selection, right?

Right. In fact this aids in color correction and other effects, so it's actually a good thing; just takes a bit to digest.

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velvetsanity wrote:
velvetsanity wrote:
avelworldcreator wrote:

@Cinnder,
Well, the idea I've been tossing around is have multiple palettes on the client already existing. Key each palette to the either the body section (there are 22), the material used, or both. We are limited to only 3, 8-bit, values per part for transmission, but this could give us a potential number colors of 256*22*number of materials.

No alpha channel?

Technically yes, but not needed in most cases and often computationally more expensive. Unreal uses fARGB actually but for our materials its usage is implied.

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Kid Rad wrote:
Kid Rad wrote:

This should be at the absolute bottom of the list of your development priorities. This is something that could be added in in mid to late beta. No wonder this game is taking so long, you're focusing on this kind of pointless minutia.

No offense, it's a nice touch, but seriously, at this stage, why are you working on it?

I'll bet if you asked every regular poster on this forum to come up with a list of say the top 20 features they think are absolutely vital for this game to have before launch that many of the "top ten" items would be similar. But by the time you compared everyone's "11 through 20" choices I'd bet practically everyone's list would be radically different.

So what's the point of what I just mentioned? It means that while most of us can probably agree on the most vital elements needed for this game once you get past those critical top features the overall priority for virtually everything else becomes completely subjective and ultimately not as individually critical as any given player thinks.

So does this mean that "hair animation" is a top ten item or something that would be pegged lower on the list? Well even I would easily place it in the second, less critical grouping.

But here's the key point that I think people like you are missing with all this: CoT is not going to launch with ONLY the top ten features. In fact it's likely going to launch with the equivalent of the top 30 or 40 features many of which only the Devs are keeping track of at the moment. So sure I don't think anyone would claim that CoT MUST have hair animation or it cannot be launched - frankly that would be silly. But if we can assume that the Devs have decided that some version of hair animation is in fact important enough (as Flesh Forge even mentioned) to be in the game at launch (even if it's like only the 39th most important feature in the game) then that's what's going to be in the game for launch regardless.

There are going to be a ton of features in CoT even by launch time and there's no rule/law that says everyone must like everything it provides. Conversely everyone's going to have their own "pet features" that they wish were in the game -instead- of some other thing that they don't care about. These things will happen. Just because you don't like X and would prefer to have Y doesn't mean there's not another person out there who believes the exact opposite. The only thing ANY game can ever do is provide as many features as MOST people want.

Besides if games like this didn't push the envelope of what's possible we'd all still be playing Pacman on 80's era arcade machines. Frankly I'm willing to wait for the innovation.

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

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Scott Jackson wrote:
Scott Jackson wrote:

When it comes to hair selection and customization in the character generator, what is the plan for how we'll do it and how detailed we can get? I realize that plan may be subject to change as you discover UE4/other limitations...

Select hairstyle, apply one color.
(CoH, LOTRO method, lots of other games)

Select hairstyle, apply color(s) to two or three predefined regions of hair, possibly with some color blending options between the regions.

Select hairstyle, adjust length and tilt angle of predefined bone-like segments, apply main color, apply "roots" color, apply "tips" color, and control color blending with sliders?
(BDO method)

Something else?

I seriously doubt we'll get more "color areas" for hair than what we get for other costume pieces, and that is 3 at the moment.

As for blending options I'm not sure but I think they already have a system in place that separates pattern and costume item. If so then it wouldn't surprise me if they also used it for hair. The advantage of having a pattern-based blending instead of just a slider would that you can many more options than just a gradient from root to middle to tip.

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avelworldcreator wrote:
avelworldcreator wrote:
velvetsanity wrote:
avelworldcreator wrote:

@Cinnder,
Well, the idea I've been tossing around is have multiple palettes on the client already existing. Key each palette to the either the body section (there are 22), the material used, or both. We are limited to only 3, 8-bit, values per part for transmission, but this could give us a potential number colors of 256*22*number of materials.

No alpha channel?

Technically yes, but not needed in most cases and often computationally more expensive. Unreal uses fARGB actually but for our materials its usage is implied.

I’m guessing that means it’s built into the textures rather than color palettes?

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velvetsanity wrote:
velvetsanity wrote:
avelworldcreator wrote:
velvetsanity wrote:
avelworldcreator wrote:

@Cinnder,
Well, the idea I've been tossing around is have multiple palettes on the client already existing. Key each palette to the either the body section (there are 22), the material used, or both. We are limited to only 3, 8-bit, values per part for transmission, but this could give us a potential number colors of 256*22*number of materials.

No alpha channel?

Technically yes, but not needed in most cases and often computationally more expensive. Unreal uses fARGB actually but for our materials its usage is implied.

I’m guessing that means it’s built into the textures rather than color palettes?

You know normally I'm the type of player who stands for the idea that we should have as many X, Y or Z options as possible, which would include getting as many costume color choices as possible. But while I certainly want to have more choices than CoH offered I don't really think having hundreds of thousands and/or millions of color choices would be -that- useful all things considered.

Remember that CoH only offered 160 costume color choices (and 70 skin color choices). I think if CoT even offered several hundred or several thousand combined choices we would enjoy a massive improvement over CoH without the game having to go crazy trying to support every barely imperceptible variation imaginable.

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

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In fact "as many options as

In fact "as many options as possible" is not always the best route, everything needs a purpose to be effective or it's just chaos. It's the same as sending to your players all the info you can via email, that's useless spam even if somebody would say "the more info the better". "Spam" and "chaos" are negative results.

Filling the mind of the player with "all possible options" is the lazy route for devs who don't want to balance everything and take decisions that need some thought put into it. Everything needs balance.

About the colours in particular, I already got friends that when informed about the "256 colours limit" they replied "that's too much already" (for me it's the perfect number, but I understand them).
I never had troubles with City of Heroes limited selection (the only troubles were related to the forced "materials") and I always felt I got an useless loss of time in DCUO char creator (infinite palettes that I need to write down somewhere to remember the exact ones I selected for that hero or the other, so I could reuse them in future and not lose the same time again) when I just want a dark blue or an electric blue or a water blue etc. I'm sure in 256 colours there are all of these blues already and I won't lose useless hours to find the slight best one.

More colours would be better? Maybe, I'm not sure of that but I'm sure you can go to resolve another problem and leave this one behind for now since 256 is enough imho (where "enough" means that it won't limit anyone's imagination). Use that free band & ram to give us other things (like the hairs movement or similar :D ).

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ThunderCAP wrote:
ThunderCAP wrote:

In fact "as many options as possible" is not always the best route, everything needs a purpose to be effective or it's just chaos. It's the same as sending to your players all the info you can via email, that's useless spam even if somebody would say "the more info the better". "Spam" and "chaos" are negative results.

Filling the mind of the player with "all possible options" is the lazy route for devs who don't want to balance everything and take decisions that need some thought put into it. Everything needs balance.

Where in the world did you get the idea that I wouldn't want the Devs to balance this game properly? You're basically of taking what I said to some kind of blanket argumentum ad absurdum that I never intended or even came close to implying. OBVIOUSLY if the Devs of a game literally tried to give their players everything then they would fail due to being unable to focus on anything. Stop being silly with this.

All I intended with my statement was that the Devs could work towards optimizing "targeted aspects" of the game (i.e. let's try to have as many costume options as possible or as many emanation points for powers as possible). I really do find it disheartening that I seem to have to constantly explain myself about things like this to people who ought to know better. *sigh*

ThunderCAP wrote:

About the colours in particular, I already got friends that when informed about the "256 colours limit" they replied "that's too much already" (for me it's the perfect number, but I understand them).

I never had troubles with City of Heroes limited selection (the only troubles were related to the forced "materials") and I always felt I got an useless loss of time in DCUO char creator (infinite palettes that I need to write down somewhere to remember the exact ones I selected for that hero or the other, so I could reuse them in future and not lose the same time again) when I just want a dark blue or an electric blue or a water blue etc. I'm sure in 256 colours there are all of these blues already and I won't lose useless hours to find the slight best one.

More colours would be better? Maybe, I'm not sure of that but I'm sure you can go to resolve another problem and leave this one behind for now since 256 is enough imho (where "enough" means that it won't limit anyone's imagination). Use that free band & ram to give us other things (like the hairs movement or similar :D ).

Back to the topic at hand. In the case of color options I think we're basically in agreement despite your unfortunate assumption I enjoy chaos in game design. As I said there are cases where having AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE is actually a bad thing, including having millions of unique color choices. Clearly people can (and will) still debate the numbers (Is X colors too much? Is Y colors not enough?) but what's important is that we will likely get -more- options than CoH provided for.

A lot of it would be based on how the color palette GUIs are designed. If they are designed in a reasonably intelligent way it would be possible to support a huge number of color options without it getting unwieldy. Obviously time will tell exactly how the folks at MWM choose to tackle this issue.

Personally I would say anything beyond 512 colors would likely be excessive. By that point the game could offer so many similar shades of color that getting much more detailed than that would likely be considered "overkill" by even the most picky artsy people. But even if the number ends up being more like 256 at least that's a big improvement over CoH.

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

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

Personally I would say anything beyond 512 colors would likely be excessive. By that point the game could offer so many similar shades of color that getting much more detailed than that would likely be considered "overkill" by even the most picky artsy people. But even if the number ends up being more like 256 at least that's a big improvement over CoH.

Best general-purpose compromise I've seen is to have a base "palette" that covers 5-8 levels of the most popular/relevant 8-12 shades (so somewhere between 40 and 96, which, with any reasonable UI, is not nearly as many as it sounds like... even 256 is pretty straightforward, as demonstrated by a certain other Cryptic game's UI). Then allow the folks who want to use "advanced" mode to use a standard color-picker to select between the umpteen million colors that are actually possible (which, if things are done in any sane way, have *exactly the same* computational and network cost as the base shades). For the folks who want it, phenomenal cosmic color... and for the folks who don't, itty bitty color space.


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DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
Lothic wrote:

Personally I would say anything beyond 512 colors would likely be excessive. By that point the game could offer so many similar shades of color that getting much more detailed than that would likely be considered "overkill" by even the most picky artsy people. But even if the number ends up being more like 256 at least that's a big improvement over CoH.

Best general-purpose compromise I've seen is to have a base "palette" that covers 5-8 levels of the most popular/relevant 8-12 shades (so somewhere between 40 and 96, which, with any reasonable UI, is not nearly as many as it sounds like... even 256 is pretty straightforward, as demonstrated by a certain other Cryptic game's UI). Then allow the folks who want to use "advanced" mode to use a standard color-picker to select between the umpteen million colors that are actually possible (which, if things are done in any sane way, have *exactly the same* computational and network cost as the base shades). For the folks who want it, phenomenal cosmic color... and for the folks who don't, itty bitty color space.

Sure offering a two-stage "simple palette" and "advanced palette" is definitely one way to implement it and if CoT offered that scheme I probably wouldn't be overly upset with it.

Still I suspect the "advanced palette" in that scenario would be of dubious value, especially if the simple one managed something like 256-512 choices. From my personal experience I liked to duplicate and share my costumes as much as create them and I can just imagine it would be relatively difficult to pick and then "re-pick" identical shades of color from one of those "infinite color picker" GUIs.

Essentially having "umpteen million colors" choices is one of those things that sounds cool when you say it fast but once you actually think about it and try to utilize it it's not that ultimately useful/helpful in a practical sense. Sometimes having "too many" choices is simply almost as bad as not having enough.

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

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

Still I suspect the "advanced palette" in that scenario would be of dubious value, especially if the simple one managed something like 256-512 choices. From my personal experience I liked to duplicate and share my costumes as much as create them and I can just imagine it would be relatively difficult to pick and then "re-pick" identical shades of color from one of those "infinite color picker" GUIs.

Essentially having "umpteen million colors" choices is one of those things that sounds cool when you say it fast but once you actually think about it and try to utilize it it's not that ultimately useful/helpful in a practical sense. Sometimes having "too many" choices is simply almost as bad as not having enough.

Any sane "umpteen million" color picker lets you get at the underlying representation of the color in some fashion (typically either 3 or 4 0-255 values, 3 or 4 0-1 range values, or the hexadecimal representation of the bits involved), specifically so that it is trivially easy to replicate later. And again, "advanced". As originally pitched there's a *lot* of stuff that may fall under "advanced" (for example, non-standard power animations). The whole idea being that non-advanced should only expose what the average person should need, while in an ideal world advanced lets you have as much control as it is practical to provide.


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DeathSheepFromHell][quote
DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
Lothic wrote:

Still I suspect the "advanced palette" in that scenario would be of dubious value, especially if the simple one managed something like 256-512 choices. From my personal experience I liked to duplicate and share my costumes as much as create them and I can just imagine it would be relatively difficult to pick and then "re-pick" identical shades of color from one of those "infinite color picker" GUIs.

Essentially having "umpteen million colors" choices is one of those things that sounds cool when you say it fast but once you actually think about it and try to utilize it it's not that ultimately useful/helpful in a practical sense. Sometimes having "too many" choices is simply almost as bad as not having enough.

Any sane "umpteen million" color picker lets you get at the underlying representation of the color in some fashion (typically either 3 or 4 0-255 values, 3 or 4 0-1 range values, or the hexadecimal representation of the bits involved), specifically so that it is trivially easy to replicate later.

Of course you're making an assumption about this no matter how "reasonable" it might be. Remember CoH did not provide for the concept of color labeling so there's no implicit guarantee CoT would either.

DeathSheepFromHell wrote:

And again, "advanced". As originally pitched there's a *lot* of stuff that may fall under "advanced" (for example, non-standard power animations). The whole idea being that non-advanced should only expose what the average person should need, while in an ideal world advanced lets you have as much control as it is practical to provide.

And again I would simply wonder how often it would be used if the simple palette had a workably large number to begin with. I created hundreds of costumes for dozens of characters in CoH and while I did want more choices than the 160 colors CoH provided I probably could have happily done 99% of my "costume color tinkering" if I had had 256 or 512 colors to work with.

Again if CoT provides for something like an advanced color palette as you're suggesting I wouldn't be mad about it. But I would wonder how much I'd ever use it. *shrugs*

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

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If a color just had a hex

If a color just had a hex code you could save for later (maybe even a place in the creator interface to list those codes you’d applied?) then it won’t be hard to find that color again to apply it to a different part of the character.

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

Of course you're making an assumption about this no matter how "reasonable" it might be. Remember CoH did not provide for the concept of color labeling so there's no implicit guarantee CoT would either.

No assumption involved. I spoke of the original pitch, which I can speak to authoritatively because I made it.

What CoT will actually do? Long ago ceased to have much to do with what I pitched, although it hasn't changed anything about the fundamentals of UE4.

I do, in fact, have some in-depth knowledge of what it is possible to make practical, having done it. I just can't tell you what CoT will bother to build a UI for.


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DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
DeathSheepFromHell wrote:

I do, in fact, have some in-depth knowledge of what it is possible to make practical, having done it. I just can't tell you what CoT will bother to build a UI for.

And again I'll simply point out that just because things -can- be done doesn't necessarily mean they -should- be done. For what it's worth I find those "infinite color GUIs" such as the following very annoying/cumbersome to use and I would personally consider something like it "overkill" for the likes of CoT:

To me it'd be analogous to having 200 slider controls for eyebrows like they tend to have in Korean MMOs. Simply too many options for its own good.

If CoT could provide us with 256 or 512 colors in a simple, well-organized palette I strongly suspect that would satisfy an overwhelming majority of players without needing to resort to an "advanced" version of anything.

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

To me it'd be analogous to having 200 slider controls for eyebrows like they tend to have in Korean MMOs. Simply too many options for its own good.

So... don't use advanced color mode, then?

I'm not saying it should be a priority to support it, but it is one of those things where "any reasonably good design does not prohibit it", and there are a wide number of good UI controls available for it, which means that the cost to implement it is damn near negligible. As in "a couple of hours, tops". So it isn't like it would be delaying something else meaningfully.


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DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
Lothic wrote:

To me it'd be analogous to having 200 slider controls for eyebrows like they tend to have in Korean MMOs. Simply too many options for its own good.

So... don't use advanced color mode, then?

I'm not saying it should be a priority to support it, but it is one of those things where "any reasonably good design does not prohibit it", and there are a wide number of good UI controls available for it, which means that the cost to implement it is damn near negligible. As in "a couple of hours, tops". So it isn't like it would be delaying something else meaningfully.

Well fine then... Why don't we have CoT give me extra things I don't even want... ;)

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:
DeathSheepFromHell wrote:

I do, in fact, have some in-depth knowledge of what it is possible to make practical, having done it. I just can't tell you what CoT will bother to build a UI for.

And again I'll simply point out that just because things -can- be done doesn't necessarily mean they -should- be done. For what it's worth I find those "infinite color GUIs" such as the following very annoying/cumbersome to use and I would personally consider something like it "overkill" for the likes of CoT:

To me it'd be analogous to having 200 slider controls for eyebrows like they tend to have in Korean MMOs. Simply too many options for its own good.

If CoT could provide us with 256 or 512 colors in a simple, well-organized palette I strongly suspect that would satisfy an overwhelming majority of players without needing to resort to an "advanced" version of anything.

While you find full RGB color picker UIs ‘annoying/cumbersome’, I find *not* having them available to use to be frustratingly limiting. To each their own. Having basic/advanced modes for choosing palette colors seems like the ideal compromise to me.

They could also do the same with sliders for body shapes as well.

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velvetsanity wrote:
velvetsanity wrote:

While you find full RGB color picker UIs ‘annoying/cumbersome’, I find not having them available to use to be frustratingly limiting. To each their own. Having basic/advanced modes for choosing palette colors seems like the ideal compromise to me.

Well for your sake let's hope MWM bothers to "waste the time" on it. For what it's worth a color picker for MMO costume items is simply not the same thing as having a color picker for say something like a photoshop program. I love having that much color control for general artwork; for something like a MMO it's semi-pointless. Apples and Oranges.

velvetsanity wrote:

They could also do the same with sliders for body shapes as well.

Organizing body sliders into "lockable trees" would simply be a means to rationally/logically organize hundreds of sliders. That still doesn't make the concept of having 200 sliders for eyebows any less absurd. ;)

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A two layer system, offering

A two layer system, offering color palettes and an advanced color picker for those who wanted it, was the original plan, before the bandwidth limits killed it.

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Shadow Elusive wrote:
Shadow Elusive wrote:

A two layer system, offering color palettes and an advanced color picker for those who wanted it, was the original plan, before the bandwidth limits killed it.

So can you please be clear about what we're getting as a compromise (even if it's been covered elsewhere) so that we can finish this line of discussion in this thread. Thanks.

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I remember asking for digital

I remember asking for digital color controls, so I could input a string of numbers and get the exact color I wanted. Some people argued that was too much...

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Fireheart wrote:
Fireheart wrote:

I remember asking for digital color controls, so I could input a string of numbers and get the exact color I wanted. Some people argued that was too much...

Some people will argue about anything. ;)

But on this point if the game was going to provide for some kind of "infinite RGB GUI" I would at the very least want it to have the ability to accept values directly and report chosen values back for any selection. Remember (once again) that's not a guaranteed feature considering CoH didn't bother to provide for that.

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:
DeathSheepFromHell wrote:

I do, in fact, have some in-depth knowledge of what it is possible to make practical, having done it. I just can't tell you what CoT will bother to build a UI for.

And again I'll simply point out that just because things -can- be done doesn't necessarily mean they -should- be done. For what it's worth I find those "infinite color GUIs" such as the following very annoying/cumbersome to use and I would personally consider something like it "overkill" for the likes of CoT:

To me it'd be analogous to having 200 slider controls for eyebrows like they tend to have in Korean MMOs. Simply too many options for its own good.

If CoT could provide us with 256 or 512 colors in a simple, well-organized palette I strongly suspect that would satisfy an overwhelming majority of players without needing to resort to an "advanced" version of anything.

As a graphic designer this unlimited amount of color is necessary!

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CoH (and Icon and Paragon

CoH (and Icon and Paragon Chat) had inconsistent textures, that could leave you with hands that don't match your skin or gloves that don't match your tights. Unless you teased the heck out of the color-palette. I'm hoping we can avoid that issue in CoT.

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Shadow Elusive wrote:
Shadow Elusive wrote:

A two layer system, offering color palettes and an advanced color picker for those who wanted it, was the original plan, before the bandwidth limits killed it.

I will admit, this statement worries me. A great deal. If this is taking up anything even *remotely noticeable* as bandwidth, compared to, say, position information that changes every fraction of a second, then something is seriously and profoundly wrong.


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DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
Shadow Elusive wrote:

A two layer system, offering color palettes and an advanced color picker for those who wanted it, was the original plan, before the bandwidth limits killed it.

I will admit, this statement worries me. A great deal. If this is taking up anything even *remotely noticeable* as bandwidth, compared to, say, position information that changes every fraction of a second, then something is seriously and profoundly wrong.

I’d think it’d only take up enough bandwidth to be noticeable when loggin in or loading into a new zone (load screens), where it has to load a whole bunch of player characters all at once, but I’m no expert.

One possible option to reduce bandwidth on character settings is caching: cache the data when you encounter a character for the first time, and on subsequent encounters check the date/timestamp on the cached data against the one for the character’s most recent costume alteration? And then maybe only resend the data that’s changed?

Anyway, we’re just a bit off topic now :)

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avelworldcreator wrote:
avelworldcreator wrote:

@Cinnder,
Well, the idea I've been tossing around is have multiple palettes on the client already existing. Key each palette to the either the body section (there are 22), the material used, or both. We are limited to only 3, 8-bit, values per part for transmission, but this could give us a potential number colors of 256*22*number of materials.

Cool. Thanks!

Spurn all ye kindle.

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DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
Shadow Elusive wrote:

A two layer system, offering color palettes and an advanced color picker for those who wanted it, was the original plan, before the bandwidth limits killed it.

I will admit, this statement worries me. A great deal. If this is taking up anything even *remotely noticeable* as bandwidth, compared to, say, position information that changes every fraction of a second, then something is seriously and profoundly wrong.

TBH, even though I've been arguing against the idea of CoT allowing for too many costume item colors (based purely on the practical/philosophical basis that we don't really -need- that many) I'll have to admit that it does seem somewhat odd to hear that the whole "infinite RGB GUI" thing might not happen based more on some kind of system bandwidth issue.

In simplistic terms the amount of "data" needed to transmit the info about one costume color from one player to another ought to be identical (format-wise) regardless if the game supports 10 colors or a million unless they are seriously nickle-n-diming every last bit and in this case it would truly only be a matter of a handful of bits in some kind of mapped message format.

So again while I don't think we need millions of colors for practical reasons I would rather that be an arbitrary design decision rather than one made because the system was already physically limited from a data processing point of view. This is why I asked Shadow Elusive for clarification - I guess we'll see if we get any.

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Fireheart wrote:
Fireheart wrote:

CoH (and Icon and Paragon Chat) had inconsistent textures, that could leave you with hands that don't match your skin or gloves that don't match your tights. Unless you teased the heck out of the color-palette. I'm hoping we can avoid that issue in CoT.

The sad problem CoH had was that it often didn't provide entire costume sets worth of clothing in every texture they offered. For example COH had a "shiny" version of the basic spandex costume items but it only offered the shiny texture on the main full top and bottom parts - it didn't offer that same texture on the spandex gloves, boots or bikini bottoms. This meant it was impossible to create a head-to-toe spandex outfit in the shiny texture (or for instance a complete shiny leotard) and have it all match color-wise.

As I understand it CoT is going to be much more complete about offering multiple textures for virtually every costume item. Long story short we hopefully won't be stuck with not being able to have the right texture on any given costume item.

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:
ThunderCAP wrote:

In fact "as many options as possible" is not always the best route /.../

Where in the world did you get the idea that I wouldn't want the Devs to balance this game properly?
/.../
In the case of color options I think we're basically in agreement despite your unfortunate assumption I enjoy chaos in game design.

When a person begins a sentence with "in fact" means that he is in agreement with you and it's just continuing what you started (but in a slight different direction in this case).
I understood perfectly that your first post started with the "the more options the better" but end up in agreement with my personal opinion. I knew we were in agreement, which is why I used "in fact" to start my post.

I just used the beginning of your first post (which was not representative of your whole opinion, I know) to put out something that imho was needed to be heard at least once in this forum, since I did read many times here "the more options the better" and "please no limits" tantrums, which are basically always wrong. Limits are needed, spam is never good. Experts on whatever fields would know that "balance" wins against the blind "the more the better" (which is a concept for peoples who won't put some serious thoughts into it) and I already got the impression that you learned that already, but apparently others in this forum may have not, since these sentences come out so often during the various "suggestions" threads.

Lothic wrote:

Still I suspect the "advanced palette" in that scenario would be of dubious value, especially if the simple one managed something like 256-512 choices.

Lothic wrote:

For what it's worth I find those "infinite color GUIs" such as the following very annoying/cumbersome to use and I would personally consider something like it "overkill" for the likes of CoT.

And again I totally agree with Lothic here and I vote against the "infinite color GUIs".

DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
Lothic wrote:

To me it'd be analogous to having 200 slider controls for eyebrows like they tend to have in Korean MMOs. Simply too many options for its own good.

So... don't use advanced color mode, then?

I'm not saying it should be a priority to support it, but it is one of those things where "any reasonably good design does not prohibit it", and there are a wide number of good UI controls available for it, which means that the cost to implement it is damn near negligible. As in "a couple of hours, tops". So it isn't like it would be delaying something else meaningfully.

Even an optional "advanced mode" is bad, for one reason: 256-512 won't limit anyone's imagination and working to add more colours when you have so much more to do is just a bad choice imho. There are even trivial things that will get best results in attracting peoples to the game (like the hairs movement or better animations etc.) than adding an useless unlimited colours number option nobody will use.

Why I'm so certain that pretty much nobody would use it?
Because I'm an artist in my spare time and one of the players that spent more time in the character creator than actually playing the game (I got only ONE char really maxed out in all aspects and played City of Heroes from the first 3days-open-beta till the last day). Therefore if even someone like me (excessively creative and colours lover) think that infinite colours are useless or even counter-productive (proved by DCUO) it really means CoT devs could spend that time somewhere else. That's my opinion at least.

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The following pic shows the

The following pic shows the 160 colors provided by CoH for costume colors:

To be perfectly honest the only thing I ever found significantly wrong/limiting about this particular collection of colors was that it generally lacked various tan/brownish colors which was likely just a holdover from the game's attempt to prevent "skintone" colors from being used for costume items. Beyond the lack of browns all this collection needed were a few more "in-between" shades of the rest of the colors.

Basically everything I just mentioned could be solved by getting 256 (or perhaps 512) color choices. Seriously folks, once you have say 40 or 60 truly unique shades of "blue" do you really need thousands more after that? Who would even notice the distinction between one shade and another if we were really given a proverbial "million colors" to choose from?

Again I understand the basic gut reaction is to say "I need access to every shade/hue imaginable". But in reality we don't, and if people who are saying we need that really thought about it they'd realize that having 50,000 shades of color X is roughly 49,950 too many to have to deal with in a MMO.

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I just hated the fact it was

I just hated the fact it was almost impossible to make a decent looking PURPLE in City of Heroes.


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Redlynne wrote:
Redlynne wrote:

I just hated the fact it was almost impossible to make a decent looking PURPLE in City of Heroes.

I've also heard arguments that the colors on (according to the provided pic) Rows B and C, Rows N and O, and all the colors compared between Columns 1 and 2 were collectively so close to each other that CoH effectively only provided roughly 120-ish unique colors instead of 160. Yet somehow we all carried on surprisingly well with that.

Presumably even if we only got 256 unique colors in CoT we would gain many more shades of ALL the colors in question including browns and purples and anything else that was lacking in CoH. Then imagine jumping that up to say 512. It's really hard to see needing more than that in practice.

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The problem is that we're

The problem is that we're allowing three unique colors per costume PIECE, not per costume total. There's a lot of different pieces. So we're looking at, potentially, something like 75 unique colors per costume, whereas in most games you wouldn't have more than maybe five or six total (DCUO gives you infinite range of colors but your costume can only have three different ones in it). So if there are twenty players in range when you log in, you're suddenly processing one THOUSAND five hundred unique colors. It's only at load time, but is twenty really the realistic limit? At fifty people we'd be talking 3750 of them. In DCUO that same number of people could only add up to 150.

At the moment, we expect a color palette of 256 colors. You'll be able to adjust the shade of the color so there's a lot more variety in there than it might sound. Naturally we'll keep looking for ways to optimize and expand options, but frankly, as far as at launch features go, our time is better spent elsewhere. Long term...it's an MMO. We never have to stop getting better. One of my favorite things about this.

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Shadow Elusive wrote:
Shadow Elusive wrote:

The problem is that we're allowing three unique colors per costume PIECE, not per costume total. There's a lot of different pieces. So we're looking at, potentially, something like 75 unique colors per costume, whereas in most games you wouldn't have more than maybe five or six total (DCUO gives you infinite range of colors but your costume can only have three different ones in it). So if there are twenty players in range when you log in, you're suddenly processing one THOUSAND five hundred unique colors. It's only at load time, but is twenty really the realistic limit? At fifty people we'd be talking 3750 of them. In DCUO that same number of people could only add up to 150.

At the moment, we expect a color palette of 256 colors. You'll be able to adjust the shade of the color so there's a lot more variety in there than it might sound. Naturally we'll keep looking for ways to optimize and expand options, but frankly, as far as at launch features go, our time is better spent elsewhere. Long term...it's an MMO. We never have to stop getting better. One of my favorite things about this.

Thanks for the info. I think you've done a great job in telling us what you're expecting to provide for in CoT (i.e. 75 unique colors per costume as opposed to DCUO's 3 per costume). I also think your "256 colors with adjustable shades" is a reasonable/practical compromise between CoH's 160 hardwired colors and the "millions of colors" RGB alternatives.

Perhaps if people really continue to clamor for the "infinite RGB color selector" GUI idea then maybe it could be added as some kind of paid-for upgrade in the in-game store some time after launch.

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

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So each piece has its own

So each piece has its own separate palette...gotcha. Yeah, that’s a lot of RGB data adding up quickly. I can deal with a 256 color limitation for a while (never said I couldn’t, just said it’d be frustrating for me ;) ).

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velvetsanity wrote:
velvetsanity wrote:

So each piece has its own separate palette...gotcha. Yeah, that’s a lot of RGB data adding up quickly. I can deal with a 256 color limitation for a while (never said I couldn’t, just said it’d be frustrating for me ;) ).

Remember that Shadow Elusive just pointed out that we'll be able to "adjust the shade" of each color (presumably with a shade slider). In practice that would likely give us a very large number of "alternative colors" depending on how many increments of shading will be provided for. For example even if we're only given 10 shades per color (a likely very low estimate) that means we're effectively getting at least 2,560 unique colors in CoT. Frankly I suspect you (and everyone else) will be "able to deal" with that for a very, very long time. ;)

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:
velvetsanity wrote:

So each piece has its own separate palette...gotcha. Yeah, that’s a lot of RGB data adding up quickly. I can deal with a 256 color limitation for a while (never said I couldn’t, just said it’d be frustrating for me ;) ).

Remember that Shadow Elusive just pointed out that we'll be able to "adjust the shade" of each color (presumably with a shade slider). In practice that would likely give us a very large number of "alternative colors" depending on how many increments of shading will be provided for. For example even if we're only given 10 shades per color (a likely very low estimate) that means we're effectively getting at least 2,560 unique colors in CoT. Frankly I suspect you (and everyone else) will be "able to deal" with that for a very, very long time. ;)

Ooh, yeah, definitely. I somehow missed that part, but it sounds like a rather effective low (bandwidth) cost workaround to get us close to the full RGB color wheel :)

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Shadow Elusive wrote:
Shadow Elusive wrote:

The problem is that we're allowing three unique colors per costume PIECE, not per costume total. There's a lot of different pieces. So we're looking at, potentially, something like 75 unique colors per costume, whereas in most games you wouldn't have more than maybe five or six total (DCUO gives you infinite range of colors but your costume can only have three different ones in it). So if there are twenty players in range when you log in, you're suddenly processing one THOUSAND five hundred unique colors. It's only at load time, but is twenty really the realistic limit? At fifty people we'd be talking 3750 of them. In DCUO that same number of people could only add up to 150.

At the moment, we expect a color palette of 256 colors. You'll be able to adjust the shade of the color so there's a lot more variety in there than it might sound. Naturally we'll keep looking for ways to optimize and expand options, but frankly, as far as at launch features go, our time is better spent elsewhere. Long term...it's an MMO. We never have to stop getting better. One of my favorite things about this.

I'm a bit rusty in this area, but for those that are wondering, a lot of this caution is necessary because the issues of transmitting realtime data updates can extend well past the initial load.

From what I read, most Unreal Engine traffic defaults to UDP. Unlike TCP, which checks for delivery and re-sends a packet if it's dropped, UDP's rather "fire and forget." (If the data doesn't arrive, don't bother re-sending). UDP's useful for realtime data like video or constant streams of updates, like positional data in games, so it's pretty much the core of data transfer. When you need something reliably sent and realtime doesn't matter, then TCP is better, but if "a second too late is as good as never delivered" then UDP does best. Most multiplayer data really works best with UDP

I encountered an older game back that sent character appearance data in UDP. It had some quirky side effects where a gear change would not make it to all users-- or the gear change came through, but not the color palette, or even an initial appearance packet would be lost and the character would use some coded default values.. They tried to mitigate this by but adding periodic updates over UDP where all user data was re-sent. On a busy instance, people on limited bandwidth would have all sorts of warping during those intervals as so many packets of all kinds were just being dropped, but it eventually cleared up or just people bumped offline. The more data needed to define appearance, the greater the impact. Imagine a rikti-mothership-type raid with hundreds of players, all synchronizing a costume change mid-battle, causing half the players to go line dead. Ultimately, they moved to sending appearance data by the more reliable (but somewhat slower and bulkier) TCP, but divorcing that messaging data after initial design wasn't the easiest path to take.

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chase wrote:
chase wrote:
Shadow Elusive wrote:

The problem is that we're allowing three unique colors per costume PIECE, not per costume total. There's a lot of different pieces. So we're looking at, potentially, something like 75 unique colors per costume, whereas in most games you wouldn't have more than maybe five or six total (DCUO gives you infinite range of colors but your costume can only have three different ones in it). So if there are twenty players in range when you log in, you're suddenly processing one THOUSAND five hundred unique colors. It's only at load time, but is twenty really the realistic limit? At fifty people we'd be talking 3750 of them. In DCUO that same number of people could only add up to 150.

At the moment, we expect a color palette of 256 colors. You'll be able to adjust the shade of the color so there's a lot more variety in there than it might sound. Naturally we'll keep looking for ways to optimize and expand options, but frankly, as far as at launch features go, our time is better spent elsewhere. Long term...it's an MMO. We never have to stop getting better. One of my favorite things about this.

I'm a bit rusty in this area, but for those that are wondering, a lot of this caution is necessary because the issues of transmitting realtime data updates can extend well past the initial load.

From what I read, most Unreal Engine traffic defaults to UDP. Unlike TCP, which checks for delivery and re-sends a packet if it's dropped, UDP's rather "fire and forget." (If the data doesn't arrive, don't bother re-sending). UDP's useful for realtime data like video or constant streams of updates, like positional data in games, so it's pretty much the core of data transfer. When you need something reliably sent and realtime doesn't matter, then TCP is better, but if "a second too late is as good as never delivered" then UDP does best. Most multiplayer data really works best with UDP

I encountered an older game back that sent character appearance data in UDP. It had some quirky side effects where a gear change would not make it to all users-- or the gear change came through, but not the color palette, or even an initial appearance packet would be lost and the character would use some coded default values.. They tried to mitigate this by but adding periodic updates over UDP where all user data was re-sent. On a busy instance, people on limited bandwidth would have all sorts of warping during those intervals as so many packets of all kinds were just being dropped, but it eventually cleared up or just people bumped offline. The more data needed to define appearance, the greater the impact. Imagine a rikti-mothership-type raid with hundreds of players, all synchronizing a costume change mid-battle, causing half the players to go line dead. Ultimately, they moved to sending appearance data by the more reliable (but somewhat slower and bulkier) TCP, but divorcing that messaging data after initial design wasn't the easiest path to take.

And the lesson here is clearly that you should use TCP for character appearance data as well as finding ways to minimize the bandwidth needed to transmit it, and UDP for character position/movement/combat data :) (Just have characters fade into view when their position data is received)

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Shadow Elusive wrote:
Shadow Elusive wrote:

The problem is that we're allowing three unique colors per costume PIECE, not per costume total. There's a lot of different pieces. So we're looking at, potentially, something like 75 unique colors per costume, whereas in most games you wouldn't have more than maybe five or six total (DCUO gives you infinite range of colors but your costume can only have three different ones in it). So if there are twenty players in range when you log in, you're suddenly processing one THOUSAND five hundred unique colors. It's only at load time, but is twenty really the realistic limit? At fifty people we'd be talking 3750 of them. In DCUO that same number of people could only add up to 150.

At the moment, we expect a color palette of 256 colors. You'll be able to adjust the shade of the color so there's a lot more variety in there than it might sound. Naturally we'll keep looking for ways to optimize and expand options, but frankly, as far as at launch features go, our time is better spent elsewhere. Long term...it's an MMO. We never have to stop getting better. One of my favorite things about this.

Champions Online let’s you have between 3-5 colors per piece (depending on the particular piece) so you’re pretty close there. I’m pretty sure that they have fewer than 256 colors on their palette though, probably about half that. So overall you’ll be about the same.

That’s a very good thing. One of the strengths of CO is how colorful you can make a character, and giving us a similar range is pretty great. For me that’s fantastic news. :)

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Shadow Elusive wrote:
Shadow Elusive wrote:

The problem is that we're allowing three unique colors per costume PIECE, not per costume total. There's a lot of different pieces. So we're looking at, potentially, something like 75 unique colors per costume, whereas in most games you wouldn't have more than maybe five or six total (DCUO gives you infinite range of colors but your costume can only have three different ones in it). So if there are twenty players in range when you log in, you're suddenly processing one THOUSAND five hundred unique colors. It's only at load time, but is twenty really the realistic limit? At fifty people we'd be talking 3750 of them. In DCUO that same number of people could only add up to 150.

At the moment, we expect a color palette of 256 colors. You'll be able to adjust the shade of the color so there's a lot more variety in there than it might sound. Naturally we'll keep looking for ways to optimize and expand options, but frankly, as far as at launch features go, our time is better spent elsewhere. Long term...it's an MMO. We never have to stop getting better. One of my favorite things about this.

So as far as I can tell, y'all are being freaked out by something that is, fundamentally, not actually an issue.

Let's do some math real quick. I'll be using *worst case* scenarios here, with no attempt at reuse or compression, just the most trivial possible implementations.

75 costume pieces * 4 colors per (because I'm going to assume that y'all eventually decide to support alpha channels, mostly because your competitors have had it for years) = 300 colors per costume.

300 colors * 4 bytes (there's no need to *transmit* fRBG, it is only really useful to go to the full accuracy of floating-point on the client side during rendering or to provide HDR effects, for the network and color picker the 16 million colors of 24-bit+8bit alpha is ample) = 1200 bytes. So even a horribly complex costume color spec will fit within a single packet (packets are normally capped at 1500 bytes, or a bit less).

At 56K (dialup speed), that packet will take less than 1/5th of a second to transfer. So yes, for a full costume contest, that could take up about 20 seconds before you had all of it across the wire.

But here's the thing: if you run the math another way, you can say that every costume piece needs 4 bytes * 4 colors = 16 bytes of color data. The identifier for the costume piece, assuming you're using FGuids (and if you aren't, uhm, good luck because you're going to need it to ever release anything at all, given how built-in that is) takes... 16 bytes per piece.

In short, the color data in the *worst possible case* (which is actually fairly easy to avoid) for full color is... exactly the same size as just the *identifiers* to tell the system what costume piece is involved.

----

Now, as a way of pointing out something hopefully productive toward mitigating that impact: there are two relatively simple ways to reduce the amount of color data (one of which can also be applied to most "out in the world" situations with combat, where timely reactions are far more critical):

First, the vast majority of people aren't going to want 300 different colors on their costume. If you want to do indexing, do a costume-bound palette with 16 or 32 colors total, and let each of those colors be arbitrary (limit the UI, but don't bother trying to collapse down to special cases for those 256-or-however-many colors). Being able to "lock down" colors so that you can get the same set across a costume is actually a major *feature*, and a per-costume palette gives you both a highly predictable bundle of data that you can "burst" more easily, and a straightforward and intuitive way for folks to know that they're getting the same shade of purple (whichever one they picked) across different pieces. If you do 16, you can fit two index values per byte, although frankly that's probably more technical cost than would be worth the benefit unless you are seriously fetishizing "absolutely minimal" data transmission (at a cost in CPU, although that cost is equally trivial). In practice, I can only think of once or twice I've ever wanted more than the eight-ish that CO provides, so even 16 is likely to be overkill for all but the most picky of players, as long as they get to pick what those 16 shades are.

Second, in most situations outside a costume contest (where sub-second timing is much less critical), 1/3 to 1/2 of your on-screen assets (those of the team) are going to be pre-loaded the moment they step into the instance, and rarely if ever change. Even a worst-case scenario above would load the whole team's color data in less than two seconds. You spend five times that staring at the loading screen, for a lot of games. And the other 1/2 to 2/3 are likely to be composed of only a handful of costume pieces and colors that get repeated heavily, because that's what people expect to see from "enemy groups", psychologically, and you probably don't want to violate that for non-technical reasons. But it means that you can transfer the data once, by using templating properly, rather than four or five times. UE4 has some very strong support for this already, and you want to be using it for graphics efficiency *anyway*, because it will be noticeable even to high-end folks if you don't.


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Atama wrote:
Atama wrote:

Champions Online let’s you have between 3-5 colors per piece (depending on the particular piece) so you’re pretty close there. I’m pretty sure that they have fewer than 256 colors on their palette though, probably about half that. So overall you’ll be about the same.

That’s a very good thing. One of the strengths of CO is how colorful you can make a character, and giving us a similar range is pretty great. For me that’s fantastic news. :)

Nope, they have 256. I checked last night. :)


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chase wrote:
chase wrote:
Shadow Elusive wrote:

The problem is that we're allowing three unique colors per costume PIECE, not per costume total. There's a lot of different pieces. So we're looking at, potentially, something like 75 unique colors per costume, whereas in most games you wouldn't have more than maybe five or six total (DCUO gives you infinite range of colors but your costume can only have three different ones in it). So if there are twenty players in range when you log in, you're suddenly processing one THOUSAND five hundred unique colors. It's only at load time, but is twenty really the realistic limit? At fifty people we'd be talking 3750 of them. In DCUO that same number of people could only add up to 150.

At the moment, we expect a color palette of 256 colors. You'll be able to adjust the shade of the color so there's a lot more variety in there than it might sound. Naturally we'll keep looking for ways to optimize and expand options, but frankly, as far as at launch features go, our time is better spent elsewhere. Long term...it's an MMO. We never have to stop getting better. One of my favorite things about this.

I'm a bit rusty in this area, but for those that are wondering, a lot of this caution is necessary because the issues of transmitting realtime data updates can extend well past the initial load.

From what I read, most Unreal Engine traffic defaults to UDP. Unlike TCP, which checks for delivery and re-sends a packet if it's dropped, UDP's rather "fire and forget." (If the data doesn't arrive, don't bother re-sending). UDP's useful for realtime data like video or constant streams of updates, like positional data in games, so it's pretty much the core of data transfer. When you need something reliably sent and realtime doesn't matter, then TCP is better, but if "a second too late is as good as never delivered" then UDP does best. Most multiplayer data really works best with UDP

I encountered an older game back that sent character appearance data in UDP. It had some quirky side effects where a gear change would not make it to all users-- or the gear change came through, but not the color palette, or even an initial appearance packet would be lost and the character would use some coded default values.. They tried to mitigate this by but adding periodic updates over UDP where all user data was re-sent. On a busy instance, people on limited bandwidth would have all sorts of warping during those intervals as so many packets of all kinds were just being dropped, but it eventually cleared up or just people bumped offline. The more data needed to define appearance, the greater the impact. Imagine a rikti-mothership-type raid with hundreds of players, all synchronizing a costume change mid-battle, causing half the players to go line dead. Ultimately, they moved to sending appearance data by the more reliable (but somewhat slower and bulkier) TCP, but divorcing that messaging data after initial design wasn't the easiest path to take.

UE4 uses a mix of both, with a variety of techniques, depending on what you've told it about propagating the data (whether to prioritize size over speed of transmission, whether you need speed, reliability, or minimal data transfer, etc). It is actually somewhat non-trivial, and you do have to be careful about telling it the right thing for both data replication and remote function calls, but if you tell it what you care about accurately, it does a pretty darn good job of arranging for things to get where they need to go in the appropriate way (or ways, some configurations hybridize the two paths). About the only thing I think it doesn't really have built-in is support for using something like SCTP to send data over multiple routes redundantly.


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DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
Atama wrote:

Champions Online let’s you have between 3-5 colors per piece (depending on the particular piece) so you’re pretty close there. I’m pretty sure that they have fewer than 256 colors on their palette though, probably about half that. So overall you’ll be about the same.

That’s a very good thing. One of the strengths of CO is how colorful you can make a character, and giving us a similar range is pretty great. For me that’s fantastic news. :)

Nope, they have 256. I checked last night. :)

Huh, I could swear they had less. But again, if you have a similar amount of colors that’s pretty good.

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DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
DeathSheepFromHell wrote:

First, the vast majority of people aren't going to want 300 different colors on their costume. If you want to do indexing, do a costume-bound palette with 16 or 32 colors total, and let each of those colors be arbitrary (limit the UI, but don't bother trying to collapse down to special cases for those 256-or-however-many colors). Being able to "lock down" colors so that you can get the same set across a costume is actually a major *feature*, and a per-costume palette gives you both a highly predictable bundle of data that you can "burst" more easily, and a straightforward and intuitive way for folks to know that they're getting the same shade of purple (whichever one they picked) across different pieces. If you do 16, you can fit two index values per byte, although frankly that's probably more technical cost than would be worth the benefit unless you are seriously fetishizing "absolutely minimal" data transmission (at a cost in CPU, although that cost is equally trivial). In practice, I can only think of once or twice I've ever wanted more than the eight-ish that CO provides, so even 16 is likely to be overkill for all but the most picky of players, as long as they get to pick what those 16 shades are.

You've provided some interesting information here but it does raise a related question that I think I know the practical answer to but wouldn't mind your input on to better clarify what you're alluding to here.

I agree that it's probably unlikely that most people would want/need to have "300 unique colors on their costume" so I accept your premise that it'd be a good compromise to have a costume-based palette of colors with perhaps a hard limit of say 16 or 32 unique colors. The exact value of that limit is not important to me at this moment (I assume the best value for that could be determined as part of the design process/testing). For the sake of hypothetical argument let's say they set that limit to 16 colors. What I'm more interested in is whether you're envisioning a field of information presented to the player somewhere on the costume creator GUI that would be labeled something along the lines of TOTAL COLORS USED: X out of 16 that would help indicate how many colors the player has left to work with. It would seem that if the system is going to impose a hard limit on the total number of unique colors allowed on a costume that presenting that information (dynamically updated as it changes) to the player while the costume in question is being created would be a very useful nugget of info to have on the GUI.

Is something like that part of your "vision" for how this would work?

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

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I’ll be honest, I doubt I’ve

I’ll be honest, I doubt I’ve used more than 16 colors on a character before, ever. Usually I have 4-5 colors that I put throughout the costume. Not counting things like skin color, eye color, or hair color of course. And then I use different shades of that color.

Most superheroes are similar in comics as well. I don’t see a 16 color limit as being that big of a hindrance.

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Atama wrote:
Atama wrote:

I’ll be honest, I doubt I’ve used more than 16 colors on a character before, ever. Usually I have 4-5 colors that I put throughout the costume. Not counting things like skin color, eye color, or hair color of course. And then I use different shades of that color.

Most superheroes are similar in comics as well. I don’t see a 16 color limit as being that big of a hindrance.

Well I posted my last post with the exact intention of making sure this "color limit per costume" concept that DeathSheepFromHell is talking about doesn't end up producing a result that would actually be WORSE than CoH was in this particular regard. Like you I generally used similar colors for most of my "clothing" costume items followed by other unique colors for skin, eye, lips, hair, etc. I simply don't want an arbitrary color limit (like say 16) to impede our collective ability to make reasonably colored costumes.

Frankly based on this overall discussion and having some time to think about it I would (ideally) like to see the limit be 32 colors. I'm concerned that 16 would not leave us enough "room to maneuver" so to speak for future growth and I would hate to literally be bumping up against a hard limit like that in a statistically significant number of cases.

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:
DeathSheepFromHell wrote:

First, the vast majority of people aren't going to want 300 different colors on their costume. If you want to do indexing, do a costume-bound palette with 16 or 32 colors total, and let each of those colors be arbitrary (limit the UI, but don't bother trying to collapse down to special cases for those 256-or-however-many colors). Being able to "lock down" colors so that you can get the same set across a costume is actually a major *feature*, and a per-costume palette gives you both a highly predictable bundle of data that you can "burst" more easily, and a straightforward and intuitive way for folks to know that they're getting the same shade of purple (whichever one they picked) across different pieces. If you do 16, you can fit two index values per byte, although frankly that's probably more technical cost than would be worth the benefit unless you are seriously fetishizing "absolutely minimal" data transmission (at a cost in CPU, although that cost is equally trivial). In practice, I can only think of once or twice I've ever wanted more than the eight-ish that CO provides, so even 16 is likely to be overkill for all but the most picky of players, as long as they get to pick what those 16 shades are.

You've provided some interesting information here but it does raise a related question that I think I know the practical answer to but wouldn't mind your input on to better clarify what you're alluding to here.

I agree that it's probably unlikely that most people would want/need to have "300 unique colors on their costume" so I accept your premise that it'd be a good compromise to have a costume-based palette of colors with perhaps a hard limit of say 16 or 32 unique colors. The exact value of that limit is not important to me at this moment (I assume the best value for that could be determined as part of the design process/testing). For the sake of hypothetical argument let's say they set that limit to 16 colors. What I'm more interested in is whether you're envisioning a field of information presented to the player somewhere on the costume creator GUI that would be labeled something along the lines of TOTAL COLORS USED: X out of 16 that would help indicate how many colors the player has left to work with. It would seem that if the system is going to impose a hard limit on the total number of unique colors allowed on a costume that presenting that information (dynamically updated as it changes) to the player while the costume in question is being created would be a very useful nugget of info to have on the GUI.

Is something like that part of your "vision" for how this would work?

Actually, my generic-and-not-too-particular vision was more like having 16 slots to pick from when setting a color, or to... I'd say "right-click" but that's not a great UI for touch screens, let's just go with "alternate activation"... activate to set the actual value on it. Using either something like CO's 16x16 grid, for folks who prefer the simple picker, or a full color picker for those who want advanced. That way they don't have to worry about remembering which "slot number" was which, and they can easily see how many they have used up at any given time (as well as what shades they have available) because that would be the main thing showing for most of the costume edit.

For "seriously, please do this" bonus points: allow power colors to be linked to the same palette (I'm not sure if "require" is good here, but at the very least making it simple to say "yes I want this" so that folks don't have to double-enter it to get their costume and powers color-coordinated).

For bonus points, maybe let folks save off palettes separate from costumes so they could load it back easily on another costume/toon, or use it to do a quick "palette swap" on an existing costume.

For *really* bonus points, allow a console command to update the value in a color slot directly (think the 'powerhue' command in CO, only actually, well, working usefully). Once there is any sort of scripting / command support, anyway. Because it would be so freaking awesome to be able to have a power pick from one of a random subset of colors each time it fires, and the cost of changing a color like that is literally "the couple of bytes it takes to send over the wire to update just that one thing" (color blending already has to happen on a per-frame basis in the GPU anyway, as part of processing a material, so switching a color this way is basically free -- or at least so cheap that it is not readily distinguishable from "zero" unless you're using microbenchmarks).

The exact details would be subject to UI work, obviously, but the general notion is that you would have your "selected palette" directly "at hand" when picking costume colors, in a fairly direct analogue to how a painter has their palette in one hand and brush in the other... but spends a bit of time "setting up" the palette before using it. Simple mode would be "grab some of the pre-labelled tubes of paint", advanced would be blending your own shades. Or something in that metaphor.


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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

Frankly based on this overall discussion and having some time to think about it I would (ideally) like to see the limit be 32 colors. I'm concerned that 16 would not leave us enough "room to maneuver" so to speak for future growth and I would hate to literally be bumping up against a hard limit like that in a statistically significant number of cases.

8 is an absolute minimum, 16 is maximally efficient if there truly is a bona-fide need for bit-packing things into the tightest possible space, 32 is probably a good upper bound in the sense that "going past that is likely to have extremely rapid diminishing returns and increasing risks of confusion or overwhelming the user".

As an interesting point of data: when I created "Patches", the body demo from the KS update that first showed how a character might be divided up by color-coding the body parts, it was difficult to come up with enough clearly-distinct colors to properly code all 22-or-so (I forget the exact count, but pretty sure it was above 20 and below 25), and that was using a tool specifically designed to pick colors with a maximized "perceptual distance" between them. I had to be careful which parts got which color because otherwise it wasn't sufficiently obvious that they were different, in a few cases. Which is part of why I'm reasonable certain that more than 32 isn't really productive; even 32 probably requires having at least a few that have non-generic alpha channel picks to be usefully distinctive.

That said, it worked because I could pick *any* 20-some-odd colors; if I were limited to, say, the "web safe 216" or even the basic 256 used as standard 8-bit color, it would have been a lot harder.

I do think alpha channels are going to be bigger than some folks expect; while a fourth color on a single costume piece might not usually make sense, CO has used it to *very* good effect to allow the normal 3 plus one extra "glow" color, or 2 normal + 2 glow. We may not have tons of it at launch, but it would be a shame to lose a quarter of the flexibility built into the engine (or to paint into a corner where it takes a lot of effort to retrofit things to use it, which this would definitely qualify as).


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DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
Lothic wrote:

Frankly based on this overall discussion and having some time to think about it I would (ideally) like to see the limit be 32 colors. I'm concerned that 16 would not leave us enough "room to maneuver" so to speak for future growth and I would hate to literally be bumping up against a hard limit like that in a statistically significant number of cases.

8 is an absolute minimum, 16 is maximally efficient if there truly is a bona-fide need for bit-packing things into the tightest possible space, 32 is probably a good upper bound in the sense that "going past that is likely to have extremely rapid diminishing returns and increasing risks of confusion or overwhelming the user".

As an interesting point of data: when I created "Patches", the body demo from the KS update that first showed how a character might be divided up by color-coding the body parts, it was difficult to come up with enough clearly-distinct colors to properly code all 22-or-so (I forget the exact count, but pretty sure it was above 20 and below 25), and that was using a tool specifically designed to pick colors with a maximized "perceptual distance" between them. I had to be careful which parts got which color because otherwise it wasn't sufficiently obvious that they were different, in a few cases. Which is part of why I'm reasonable certain that more than 32 isn't really productive; even 32 probably requires having at least a few that have non-generic alpha channel picks to be usefully distinctive.

That said, it worked because I could pick *any* 20-some-odd colors; if I were limited to, say, the "web safe 216" or even the basic 256 used as standard 8-bit color, it would have been a lot harder.

I do think alpha channels are going to be bigger than some folks expect; while a fourth color on a single costume piece might not usually make sense, CO has used it to *very* good effect to allow the normal 3 plus one extra "glow" color, or 2 normal + 2 glow. We may not have tons of it at launch, but it would be a shame to lose a quarter of the flexibility built into the engine (or to paint into a corner where it takes a lot of effort to retrofit things to use it, which this would definitely qualify as).

You're discussing multiplying the data needs by a factor of 12 here. That is just not practical.

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Doctor Tyche wrote:
Doctor Tyche wrote:

You're discussing multiplying the data needs by a factor of 12 here. That is just not practical.

Math needed, because I'm just not seeing it. Not unless you're doing something in a profoundly broken way, which I would obviously hope would not be the case.


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DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
Doctor Tyche wrote:

You're discussing multiplying the data needs by a factor of 12 here. That is just not practical.

Math needed, because I'm just not seeing it. Not unless you're doing something in a profoundly broken way, which I would obviously hope would not be the case.

You're unfamiliar with the design, or what's been done with it. We could, of course, throw out many features to keep the data size down, but they're features I feel are more important than offering 16k shades of red.

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Doctor Tyche wrote:
Doctor Tyche wrote:
DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
Doctor Tyche wrote:

You're discussing multiplying the data needs by a factor of 12 here. That is just not practical.

Math needed, because I'm just not seeing it. Not unless you're doing something in a profoundly broken way, which I would obviously hope would not be the case.

You're unfamiliar with the design, or what's been done with it. We could, of course, throw out many features to keep the data size down, but they're features I feel are more important than offering 16k shades of red.

And this would be the point where it is time for me to leave for another year or two, because I have no response I can give to this that is even remotely polite. You're either all brilliant beyond my comprehension, or your have found a way to profoundly complicate something that is, by and large, fairly simple. In a few years we'll see which one is the case.


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DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
DeathSheepFromHell wrote:

...the general notion is that you would have your "selected palette" directly "at hand" when picking costume colors, in a fairly direct analogue to how a painter has their palette in one hand and brush in the other... but spends a bit of time "setting up" the palette before using it. Simple mode would be "grab some of the pre-labelled tubes of paint", advanced would be blending your own shades. Or something in that metaphor.

This is the only part of your response that was even remotely close to the question I asked - I could care less about the rest of your general costume creator GUI suggestions.

I get the "real world painter" metaphor and I could see some of the practicality of establishing a costume palette somewhat separately from the actual "paper doll" part of clicking directly on your character. At the very least you could directly keep track of how many colors your used. I'm just not sure the average "MMO gamer" would actually appreciate that level of abstraction.

People are going to want the CoT costume creator to work more like it does in pretty much every other game. Pick a costume part and pick the colors all right at the same time. Most people aren't going to know exactly which X number of colors they are going to use -before- they actually tinker around with adding part-by-part to their paper dolls on the screen.

This is why I suggested simply adding one field on the GUI with an updating total number of colors used value. Players are going to want to organically add bits to a costume AND they are going to want to know whether they've used "too many colors" or not. Any more info or abstraction beyond that would likely only add convolution to the process.

Remember that we've already been told we are getting the ability to save off costume data in dedicated save files which would presumably contain all the colors used for that costume as well. I doubt there'd be much value in saving off ONLY the list of colors used for a random costume palette separately as you implied.

DeathSheepFromHell wrote:

8 is an absolute minimum, 16 is maximally efficient if there truly is a bona-fide need for bit-packing things into the tightest possible space, 32 is probably a good upper bound in the sense that "going past that is likely to have extremely rapid diminishing returns and increasing risks of confusion or overwhelming the user".

At least we seem to agree on the limit of 32 colors. Ideally I'd want that "limit" to be effectively invisible and/or non-significant to 99.999% of the costumes that ever get made. In fact it would almost be nice if the average player didn't even realize there was a hard limit like that in the game. Case in point I assume there was actually such a limit back in CoH but I honestly never recalled a situation where the game ever told me "costume invalid due to having too many colors". I basically would like it so that the average CoT player never encounters that situation either.

DeathSheepFromHell wrote:

And this would be the point where it is time for me to leave for another year or two, because I have no response I can give to this that is even remotely polite. You're either all brilliant beyond my comprehension, or your have found a way to profoundly complicate something that is, by and large, fairly simple. In a few years we'll see which one is the case.

Wow... and here I thought I could be the occasional asshat to the current crop of Rednames at MWM. It's kind of sad that you're effectively hoping for CoT's failure just to prove your point here.

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

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DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
DeathSheepFromHell wrote:

And this would be the point where it is time for me to leave for another year or two, because I have no response I can give to this that is even remotely polite. You're either all brilliant beyond my comprehension, or your have found a way to profoundly complicate something that is, by and large, fairly simple. In a few years we'll see which one is the case.

OR... or, could it be that brilliance or incompetence aren't the only two possibilities, and that one contributing factor might be that you don't know everything about an ongoing project that you left over a year ago?

And that maybe you were feeling a little cranky when you wrote that?

FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)

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At this stage, we have to

At this stage, we have to assume worst case scenarios - that the actual potential limit will be hit in all cases. Once we have real data over, say, a six month period to go on, we can say things like 'this is what actually happens so our design overhead will be x percent of that number'. I'm sure this will happen in a lot of areas.

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DeathSheepFromHell wrote:
DeathSheepFromHell wrote:

You're either all brilliant beyond my comprehension, or your have found a way to profoundly complicate something that is, by and large, fairly simple. In a few years we'll see which one is the case.

Careful, only a Sith deals in absolutes.

All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.

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Just got a bit more explained

Just got a bit more explained to me by tech. We are basically 'cheating' by using the alpha channel to provide the other 8 bits of color variation. Conveniently, we can simply turn off the alpha channel under heavy loads (or at a distance) to improve performance. We are probably looking at 50 shades of a color to start. So each of the 256 colors can have fifty variations...or a total of over 12 thousand actual different colors possible.

I think we will survive the backlash.

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Shadow Elusive wrote:
Shadow Elusive wrote:

Just got a bit more explained to me by tech. We are basically 'cheating' by using the alpha channel to provide the other 8 bits of color variation. Conveniently, we can simply turn off the alpha channel under heavy loads (or at a distance) to improve performance. We are probably looking at 50 shades of a color to start. So each of the 256 colors can have fifty variations...or a total of over 12 thousand actual different colors possible.

I think we will survive the backlash.

What if we didn't want a color. Could we still have 50 shades of Grey?

yeah, I went there.


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.
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Huckleberry wrote:
Huckleberry wrote:
Shadow Elusive wrote:

Just got a bit more explained to me by tech. We are basically 'cheating' by using the alpha channel to provide the other 8 bits of color variation. Conveniently, we can simply turn off the alpha channel under heavy loads (or at a distance) to improve performance. We are probably looking at 50 shades of a color to start. So each of the 256 colors can have fifty variations...or a total of over 12 thousand actual different colors possible.

I think we will survive the backlash.

What if we didn't want a color. Could we still have 50 shades of Grey?

yeah, I went there.

No, only fifty shades of blue. But I may be biased. May.

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I just want a whiter shade of

I just want a whiter shade of pale.

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Well I’m sure black and white

Well I’m sure black and white will be available so 50 shades of grey for your leather and pvc outfits should be possible. Might want to accentuate with a red ball gag n whip tho.????

"A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space." ~ Thomas Carlyle

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OK. We have 22 costume pieces

OK. We have 22 costume pieces (this includes things like hair). Each of those pieces has up to three colors. I'm not sure where a quoted number of "76" came from but I think that was someone misremembering something I said. That comes to 66 colors.

We have a LOT to transmit when we load a map from the server. Every bit of fat we can trim in that transmission is a good thing for the players. For a number of practical reasons we chose to trim colors. Instead of 48 bytes (full fARGB) per costume piece we went with 3 bytes. In the "early" days of the internet there was a limit of 256 (1 byte) "web safe colors". Modern connections are a whole lot better for most people (there are still some people on dial up) and so the number of colors allowed expanded to a full 256 values per channel of alpha, red, green, and blue. Sadly, we may be having to cater to those dial up players. Assume we have a map of 1000 players and the support NPCs. If we did a full color range that would mean 1,056,000 bytes just for color - that's more than a megabyte (1,048,576 bytes)! Instead we are doing only 66,000 bytes. That's 1/16th the original number. And a kicker here is your high-end video card probably only supports 65,536 colors at any given moment. Are we really limited to what we can actually transmit? No. But if you condition that question on how well or how fast, the the answer changes to "yes".

What I can do is use tables. In fact using tables helps TONS. This allows us to better optimize lighting effects among other things or allow people with disabilities adjust things to their needs more effectively. What I also can do is select a specific table each byte maps to based on context (body region, material, costume piece, or some combination of the three). An example would be skin color, hair, or eye colors. The trick here is all the palettes live on the clients computer and don't need to be transmitted.

But I'm going to share the original color picker/material editor design (fully expanded) that I and one of our art leads came up with. This is showing the use of advanced modes. There was going to be multiple standard palettes and user custom palettes (personal colors, supergroup colors, or custom categories). Some of this may still be available into the future but we had to ditch much because of the now limited color range.

-----------

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“Load a map from the server”?

“Load a map from the server”? Am I to understand that the maps themselves won’t already be on our hard drives, and that we’ll have to retrieve them from the server every time we go to a location? :P

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velvetsanity wrote:
velvetsanity wrote:

“Load a map from the server”? Am I to understand that the maps themselves won’t already be on our hard drives, and that we’ll have to retrieve them from the server every time we go to a location? :P

They need to cater to people without hard drives. :P

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DSFH was being a bit

DSFH was being a bit hyperbolic there. And while I don't think that his idea of using a limited per character palette to trim data transmission was a bad idea, inherently. I think 16 color restriction would certainly have been limiting. I could easily see a costume where you would draw from more than 16 colors because your brown leather jacket with white fur lining and blonde hair with highlights and a colored streak consumes 6 of your 16 colors before you get to the core of your costume. Then if you want to add in things like battle damage and cybernetics and skin tones and makeup all pulling from a separate necessary palette could quickly exceed the 16 colors proposed. Even if you were to try to pick a single color for all 22 items to be "that guy" you'd be short with 16 colors per character. 32 it probably a better choice.

With that in mind having 256 colors with 10 (16 shades is a better quantity for "reasons") shades each seems like a better option at the end of the day. Although. Given the 2560(4096) color selections having a "used in costume" palette in the color picker window would be a good idea. selecting the color should warp to the color in the color picker, rather than operating as a eye dropper, to make it easier to tweak the color.

Finally, having full access to 16.7million colors is only really useful if you have a color calibrated monitor. Just because you see a particular shade of purple doesn't mean that it's the color of purple that everyone else is seeing. With a more limited palette you'll be less likely to run into issues like that. A more limited palette still being 2.5k (4k)

Finally^2 It has been stated multiple times that along with colors you'll have a texture to apply it too that will tweak the colors again. We no longer live in the age of plastic spandex. We'll have glossy spandex, matte spandex, shiny spandex (yes it's different from glossy) leather, shiny leather, suede, ...the list goes on...probably.

I know return this topic to it's regularly scheduled topic. Hair.

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Cobalt Azurean wrote:
Cobalt Azurean wrote:

No, only fifty shades of blue. But I may be biased. May.

*high fives* You and me both, buddy. XD

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velvetsanity wrote:
velvetsanity wrote:

“Load a map from the server”? Am I to understand that the maps themselves won’t already be on our hard drives, and that we’ll have to retrieve them from the server every time we go to a location? :P

I meant load map content from the game server. Remember when you could walk around the map sometimes in CoX when the server was down? No people, no cars. Just buildings and other fixed city props.

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Huckleberry wrote:
Huckleberry wrote:
Shadow Elusive wrote:

Just got a bit more explained to me by tech. We are basically 'cheating' by using the alpha channel to provide the other 8 bits of color variation. Conveniently, we can simply turn off the alpha channel under heavy loads (or at a distance) to improve performance. We are probably looking at 50 shades of a color to start. So each of the 256 colors can have fifty variations...or a total of over 12 thousand actual different colors possible.

I think we will survive the backlash.

What if we didn't want a color. Could we still have 50 shades of Grey?

yeah, I went there.

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

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Atama wrote:
Atama wrote:

I just want a whiter shade of pale.

It's actually kind of funny you made this reference because all joking aside one of the more often talked about problems with CoH was that the "whitest white" we had available to use for costumes had trouble appearing "solid white" on many costume items. What I mean by that was that in various cases the textures of the items in question didn't allow the whitest white to be a bright, blinding solid white but instead left it with a kind of semi-transparent, washed-out greyish tinge to it.

Hopefully this issue will be resolved in CoT so that using the "whitest white" will provide what I think most people would want from using that color on something.

P.S. And no this wasn't an issue with just a single monitor. Many people talked about this over the years and I personally saw the issue on several different monitors during my time playing.

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

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Doctor Tyche wrote:
Doctor Tyche wrote:

they're features I feel are more important than offering 16k shades of red.

I'm so happy there are reasoning devs in City of Titans. I'm totally with you Doc.

It's useless to select one of thousands shades of reds when your character is made of 3 colors in total, it will always seem a person "covered in red" and nothing else (for example the mono-color characters of DC Universe Online, in fact several players end up with characters made of TWO colors in total there). Instead City of Titans solution to have unique pieces with 3 colors each, with a "limit" of 256 colors will permit us to create characters that are made of so many colors that you will never be able to go back to DC Universe Online and similar ever.

I'd like to add that what really broke the characters colors in City of Heroes were the forced "materials" that created different shades of colors the player didn't want (dark metal pants and shiny leather shirts etc.). That was the only time you could feel the need to get more colors so you could "cancel" the material's "dark/glowing" effect. But in City of Titans they already resolved this problem since we will freely select the material of each piece.

Atama wrote:
velvetsanity wrote:

“Load a map from the server”? Am I to understand that the maps themselves won’t already be on our hard drives, and that we’ll have to retrieve them from the server every time we go to a location? :P

They need to cater to people without hard drives. :P

LOL, great joke :p.

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If the color selection

If the color selection discussion is winding down, by any chance could my (now somewhat buried) questions regarding hair customization please get a little help? I hope these will help a lot of us to understand the range of possible character designs.

Generally, I was wondering what plans / goals / ideas the team has for how much customization of hair shape and color will be available...either at launch, or as part of some future expansion pack.

Will we choose a hairstyle, then apply up to [n] colors to predefined regions of the hair, almost as if it was a costume piece?
(e.g. I choose "medium ponytail with straight bangs", then select colors for the predefined regions "root" "main" and "tip". Tip region for this hairstyle might be predefined to include a large part of the ponytail but very little of the bangs, for instance.)

Will the color regions for a given hairstyle be adjustable in any way, such as with a slider to make the "tip" region smaller?
(an example of this feature can be seen in Black Desert Online)

Will we be able to apply some "mask" or pattern of our choice to the base hairstyle, to which the colors can then be applied?
(e.g. I choose "medium ponytail with straight bangs", then pattern="Star R Roots", which adds a star region to the right side of the head which will match the color of the roots, then choose colors for roots, main, and tips as in prior example)

Are you hoping to offer some limited adjustability of certain "bone segments" in the hairstyle?
(e.g. I could stretch the length of the ponytail, or have its neutral position arc away from the back as it decends further down the back. An example of this feature can also be found in BDO.)

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Scott Jackson wrote:
Scott Jackson wrote:

Generally, I was wondering what plans / goals / ideas the team has for how much customization of hair shape and color will be available...either at launch, or as part of some future expansion pack.

Honestly, all this is being evaluated and I don't think it's a good idea to commit to features we aren't sure we can reasonably deliver. Customizing bone lengths is a nice goal but we need to find out whether it breaks the movement being driven by those bones (and this itself is still being evaluated). We can't really promise to duplicate all of Black Desert's features, because a) they have a gigantic, unbelievably huge budget and a massive staff of artists, and b) they literally wrote their own engine that does whatever they want, while we are limited to whatever we can get Unreal Engine can do within our technical constraints.

We've talked about allowing players to have mixed colors within a hairstyle controlled by masks, and I think that's reasonable, but we'll need to see how practical that is to implement and what's needed to give a player control of that in the UI.

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avelworldcreator wrote:
avelworldcreator wrote:

OK. We have 22 costume pieces (this includes things like hair). Each of those pieces has up to three colors. I'm not sure where a quoted number of "76" came from but I think that was someone misremembering something I said. That comes to 66 colors.

We have a LOT to transmit when we load a map from the server. Every bit of fat we can trim in that transmission is a good thing for the players. For a number of practical reasons we chose to trim colors. Instead of 48 bytes (full fARGB) per costume piece we went with 3 bytes. In the "early" days of the internet there was a limit of 256 (1 byte) "web safe colors". Modern connections are a whole lot better for most people (there are still some people on dial up) and so the number of colors allowed expanded to a full 256 values per channel of alpha, red, green, and blue. Sadly, we may be having to cater to those dial up players. Assume we have a map of 1000 players and the support NPCs. If we did a full color range that would mean 1,056,000 bytes just for color - that's more than a megabyte (1,048,576 bytes)! Instead we are doing only 66,000 bytes. That's 1/16th the original number. And a kicker here is your high-end video card probably only supports 65,536 colors at any given moment. Are we really limited to what we can actually transmit? No. But if you condition that question on how well or how fast, the the answer changes to "yes".

What I can do is use tables. In fact using tables helps TONS. This allows us to better optimize lighting effects among other things or allow people with disabilities adjust things to their needs more effectively. What I also can do is select a specific table each byte maps to based on context (body region, material, costume piece, or some combination of the three). An example would be skin color, hair, or eye colors. The trick here is all the palettes live on the clients computer and don't need to be transmitted.

So yes, it hasn't been a year. I checked back to see some PM stuff and saw Avel's post.

Did nobody actually _read_ what I posted in terms of the math?

  1. Transmitting fRGBA would be silly, it is really only useful for things like HDR; sRGBA over the wire and fRGBA when working in the rendering pipeline should be ample (it also simplifies your color picker). This means it would use up the same 4 bytes per color.
  2. You never need to send all 1000 players over the wire "at once"; the engine manages visibility for you already.
  3. Actually, have you checked how many players you can even fit on a single instance? The default implementation caps at 64, and while you can get around that easily enough the highest I can find anyone claiming to have working (admittedly not an exhaustive search, but this is the sort of thing folks would brag about) is in the 150 range.
  4. Even if you did manage to cram 1000 together there would be problems trying to shove that much data over the graphics bus, long before you ran into the network being a limiting factor.
  5. What I was talking about was in fact an alternative approach to using indexed lookups -- or rather, an alternative approach to the indexing.
  6. For 66 color "slots" (22*3), using a 16-slot "palette", the total size of a costume's color data would be (66*0.5)+(16*4)=97 bytes per costume. Or (66*1)+(32*4)=194 if you want a palette 32 wide and don't want to fuss with non-trivial bitshifting for your slot selector.
  7. Completely independent of what you do for any other color handling (for lights, buildings, or whatever).
  8. If you aren't *also* building an index table for assets, you're going to be using up 16 bytes per costume slot just to identify what asset goes in it; alternatively, if you are, you could get it down to 4 bytes (trying to go to 2 bytes is unwise, you could very easily go through 64k unique asset IDs over the lifetime of a game that runs for 10+ years).
  9. 56K = 7000 bytes/sec (although there is overhead). Let's assume 194 bytes goes up to 250 effective, counting overhead. That will take 250/7000=0.0357s to transfer. Or to make it easier to read, 100 costumes worth of color data would take 3.57 seconds... at dialup speeds.
  10. If you assume that human psychology means folks will tend to follow the easy path (a pretty safe bet, as a rule), then you can crunch it down further by hybridizing the two approaches, having one table that represents the 256 "non-custom" colors, or however many you go with, and selecting between whether you look at the central table or a custom table. With a little bit-banging, you could in fact use the 3 leftover bits from a 32-slot palette and select any of up to 8 tables. Granted, you'd need more than one of those to hold the global table, but it is straightforward to support 224 global colors and a 32 color "variable" block. Only slightly more complicated, and it gives you the best of both worlds, pretty much.

I'm not sure how you're working your math such that 10 shades are available for all three colors out of eight bits, because -- check my math here -- that would require 10^3=1000 possible values, and 2^8 is only 256. I might be missing something, but... I'm pretty sure I'm not. Also, that's assuming that you do weird overlay logic that realistically would need to then be undone again *outside* the material pipeline, because that particular bit of math is going to cost way more than would be worth it inside there. Binary-coded decimal is fun, right? :) So... doable, certainly, but nowhere near as simple as an index lookup into a preloaded table.


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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:
DeathSheepFromHell wrote:

And this would be the point where it is time for me to leave for another year or two, because I have no response I can give to this that is even remotely polite. You're either all brilliant beyond my comprehension, or your have found a way to profoundly complicate something that is, by and large, fairly simple. In a few years we'll see which one is the case.

Wow... and here I thought I could be the occasional asshat to the current crop of Rednames at MWM. It's kind of sad that you're effectively hoping for CoT's failure just to prove your point here.

I have never denied that I can get cranky when I see folks doing things that cripple opportunity for years to come because they're optimizing for non-existent cases, or rather, they're missing an alternative optimization that gets them a completely different scale of power and flexibility for a cost of only shrinking the data by a factor of 6 to 10 (or, with a bit more effort, a factor of 12) rather than a factor of 12.. on something where their given argument is about a situation that is an order of magnitude above what can reasonably be expected of the engine for the next several years.

I've spent somewhere between two and three decades learning (often the hard way) both why one should not do that, and how to spot it. It is also one of the very first rules that gets taught to new developers: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil". Not transmitting fRGBA is not a premature optimization; trying to pick a global color palette is using a hammer to pound in a nail with an inclined plane wrapped around it. At which point, if someone offers you a screwdriver, it might be worth at least looking at whether it makes sense to use.

However, at no point did I say, or even imply, that I was hoping for CoT's failure. While I certainly *believe* that I am right, I was not being sarcastic about the possibilities. There is *always* the possibility of having missed something. But one of the other lessons I've learned in my career is that quite simply, programmers can argue until the cows come home... and get a good night's sleep, then go out again in the morning, and not settle something. If you want to get anything done, at some point you stop arguing about whether it is possible to do it, and just go *do* it, or fail trying.

I do not know, and I do not pretend to know, the details of the current approach (other than what Avel posted). That does not change certain fundamental aspects of "what is possible" -- the only question is whether certain things are *practical*. I see ways that they can be made so, ways that aren't even particularly complex to code, and I posted sufficient details about those that anyone with the skill to actually do the work should be able to evaluate whether I'm right, or just off my rocker. It is up to MWM to evaluate that and do whatever they see fit with the knowledge. While I certainly *hope* that they make use of it, I gave up any potential for control that I might have had over when I retired. But even if you account it as purely selfish reasoning, I'd much prefer that they not cripple the potential of the game when it brings a benefit that may well be *zero* literally 98% of the time (if folks are to be believed about how often they would use custom colors).


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Flesh Forge wrote:
Flesh Forge wrote:
Scott Jackson wrote:

Generally, I was wondering what plans / goals / ideas the team has for how much customization of hair shape and color will be available...either at launch, or as part of some future expansion pack.

Honestly, all this is being evaluated and I don't think it's a good idea to commit to features we aren't sure we can reasonably deliver. Customizing bone lengths is a nice goal but we need to find out whether it breaks the movement being driven by those bones (and this itself is still being evaluated). We can't really promise to duplicate all of Black Desert's features, because a) they have a gigantic, unbelievably huge budget and a massive staff of artists, and b) they literally wrote their own engine that does whatever they want, while we are limited to whatever we can get Unreal Engine can do within our technical constraints.

We've talked about allowing players to have mixed colors within a hairstyle controlled by masks, and I think that's reasonable, but we'll need to see how practical that is to implement and what's needed to give a player control of that in the UI.

Thanks - The mixed colors & masks seem like a good upper-middle tier of customization and would certainly provide me with enough; it helps to know the current target even if that target is clearly tentative based on the research & testing under way. I definitely wouldn't call anything beyond CoH-tier hair customization a commitment until the team has attempted to integrate it and decides that any issues are fixable. I hope my BDO references didn't imply that I desired a particular feature... I merely wanted to be clear what I meant since those features are rare and the designs for their UI elements are tough to describe in text to someone who hasn't seen it in action.

[edited 1st sentence for clarity]

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