Fireheart wrote:

Shakti-Maia wrote:
One of my favourite character looks is a very tall, extremely thin character with elongated, extra-thin limbs and oversized head
That was Willowy, right? Stick-figure with a giant sword, if I recall. I agree, she was a bit disturbing to look at, but you had such fun playing the waif!
Be Well!
Fireheart

Yep! Willowy and her sister Twiggy! :D Twin sisters that looked very alike, if you can recall? :D

Foradain wrote:

Shakti-Maia wrote:
I think it would be a shame to restrict the sliders much. Players should have full rein on their artistic expression!
One of my favourite character looks is a very tall, extremely thin character with elongated, extra-thin limbs and oversized head. The look is similar to a character you might find in 'Nightmare Before Christmas', like the pic of 'Jack Skellington' above. I was only able to make her in Aion because of the sliders that game has. I'd show you a picture of her, but stopped playing that game a long time ago and can't seem to find one on my computer. I didn't consider her grotesque, but I guess some people could find her appearance rather disturbing. Given the chance, I will be creating her again, and if anyone is offended enough not to play at my side... well it'll be their loss!
With regards to Mr. Skellington, I'd like to direct your attention to the shirt (maybe a sweater? hard to tell...) worn by then-President Quinn in her Thank You message. Not that I'm saying I'm sure that level of slimness will definitely be available, but I think it's a hopeful sign...

Wow! That is cool! I can hope to create my Willowy & Twiggy again! :D It was also cool listening to her address! I'm so glad the funding is there for not only creating the game but also possibly some stretch goals! You guys on the project have certainly earned the backing. Well done!

Lothic wrote:

Shakti-Maia wrote:
I think testing done to intentionally try to create something vulgar or Super Offensive (pun intended!) would be a good idea!
That's a good point I want to stress: It seems to me like some people around here somehow don't think ANY of this new game will be tested in any way and what little we saw in the video the other day is EXACTLY what we're going to get when all this goes live.
The reality of course is that we're going to be getting the first versions of the Avatar Builder to play with many, many months (maybe even a year or two) before the game itself actually launches. I'm quite sure the extreme limits of ALL the sliders will be experimented with by dozens if not hundreds of testers for hundreds if not thousands of hours long before anyone comes close to considering this thing ready to go.
What does this mean for the average player? Well first it means most of the people who are ever going to want to create silly/goofy freaks on-purpose just as a "joke" are going to get tired of that long before the game itself even starts. Second it means if there are actually any problems along the lines of being able to create "universally acceptably offensive" characters I'm fairly confident that'll be discovered and fixed in the first few weeks of open betas.
One more time there's always going to be a few people out there who'll make grotesque looking characters simply "because they can" and others will do it for the sole purpose to annoy/grief other players. This is a MMO so there's no way to prevent 100% of anything that would ever annoy you. But until it happens I simply cannot accept the notion that this game is somehow already locked into some kind of "death spiral of doom" of everybody making "non-serious freak" characters just because there's the mere POSSIBILITY that the Avatar Builder will be flexible enough to allow for it.

Well, you've definitely got your pick of people here who'd gladly be involved in testing things, that's for sure! In fact, I think most of us would consider it an honor to be included! Not to mention it could be seriously fun! :D I foresee a very busy testing forum! *Checks the tarot cards... Thinks: [i] Hmmm! That looks a lot like Jack Skellington! Why is he in my deck?[/i]

Grognard_87 wrote:

I'm curious about the scale as, looking at that vid, it looked like you could make characters the size of giants! I'm curious if that's actually possible or if there's no lockdown on the limit with the scale option.

As Foradain implied the range of the sliders we saw in the recent video does not fully represent the final limits we're likely going to have once the game is tested and released. What we saw was at best a "first draft" of things to come, not the final game.

That said CoH allowed characters to range from somewhere around maybe 4 feet tall to roughly 8+ feet tall - somewhere in that ballpark at any rate. I would be really surprised if CoT gave us a character height range that was much different than that.

Empyrean wrote:

I asked a question earlier on this thread that I think just got lost in the shuffle about how they would handle that max height in indoor environments and thresholds, or were they just going to limit it. I agree that likely the easiest solution, and the one they are most likely to use, is that they'll just limit the sizes to those that don't cause problems. I'd be perfectly cool with that.

I actually remember talking about this very subject back on the old CoH forums but I think my following thoughts here would still apply to CoT.

There's theoretically no reason why you couldn't have a 15 foot tall character graphics-wise. The problem is that the game would have to be "smart enough" to know when that character was going to have to duck through a doorway and/or hunch down in standard hallways. By being "smart enough" I mean it would have to be able to constantly compare your height to your surroundings and have a bunch of reaction animations ready to go to make your character move the right ways to squeeze into those tight places. Like I implied that COULD be done, but it would increase the amount of the (no pun intended) overhead processing and animations necessary to handle all of that by multiple times.

So in effect you sort of answered your own question about this: It would simply be far, far easier to make sure the max character height allowed would fit into the given game environment without having to account for any bending/hunching down.

Shakti-Maia wrote:

You seem to have a fairly thorough understanding of the process.. So, I wonder is it possible to add a 'smash' effect to map doorways? :D Ceilings can generally be set higher than doors... So... maybe a giant causes a 'smash' of the doorway? :D Then it would be only the map needs to react, rather than the toon and the map right?

Well to be honest I don't have a working knowledge of what UE4 will allow but a lot of this will still boil down to how the game handles [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_detection#Video_games]collision detection[/url].

You see in computer games our characters are usually internally represented by simple geometric shapes (like boxes or cylinders) to determine when our characters actually bump into other solid objects in the environment. The simple shapes help make the math involved easier/quicker to process. This is why you sometimes see your arms and legs temporarily "clip" through a wall because as far as the game is concerned your character only exists as a limbless geometric shape bouncing around.

So when it comes to giant characters that are scaled to be larger than the given typical environment the Devs have several options for how to handle it:

The easiest (and ugliest) solution is to "just not worry about it". For example as long as your relatively small internal geometric "box" can fit through a door it means your character can go through that door. But it also means that maybe half of your body will clip straight through the ceiling and surrounding walls all the time. This would be very bad all things considered.

The next best solution is to have your giant "hunch down" in tight spaces. The problem here is as I said before - the game would constantly have to compare your height with your surroundings (relative to your internal box) and employ a large number of "crouching" animations to make it look reasonable. That COULD be done but it would be very processing-intensive and require a large amount of extra Dev work to make it look good.

The final idea of being able to "smash through doorways/ceilings" without hunching over could also be done, but this would probably require even MORE processing and graphics/animation support because then you'd have to deal with the whole question of "destructible environments" and how they'd get reset and so on. A hypothetical game again COULD do this, but again in practice it would be very hard and time-consuming to do correctly.

So after all this I'll basically come back to my original conclusion: "It would simply be far, far easier to make sure the max character height allowed would fit into the given game environment without having to account for any bending/hunching down." As a compromise it might be relatively easy to allow for giant characters in outside spaces (via temp powers?) where there's no fear of bumping your virtual head on anything. But this might create weird transitions where the game "forces" you to shrink down if you go somewhere considered to be inside. If people could accept that limitation then that might be doable.

Rigel wrote:

I had no problem with the ceiling height in any of the CoX maps.

There were plenty of places in CoH that had "typical" (8 to 10 foot tall) ceilings/tunnels and I don't recall having too many problems with it. Obviously if you had several teammates/pets jammed into places like that it could get a little crowded camera-wise. At any rate I'd rather have that than have "all ceilings at least 30ft high" just because it's a little more realistic to have some tight places if nothing else.

As I mentioned I still think CoT could probably support some kind of "outdoor giant growth" temp power for players without too much trouble. There could be ways for "normal sized" NPC critters to potentially turn into giant monsters in special locations either inside or outside. There are ways like this to provide for some kinds of giant growth even if the Devs have to limit it in certain situations.

Grognard_87 wrote:

I remember someone mentioning on the Valiance Online forum that the City of Titan's Devs said that you won't be seeing characters at 20ft tall or similar heights as it would be impossible for them to get through doorways...that being said it was often funny going into a office building and seeing Devouring Earth, many far too tall to fit in the building, walking around fine :p

Those big NPC critters simply grew up super-fast once they walked into those buildings as baby bad guys. ;)

on a side note but definitely related to the topic at hand...want to say a big THANK YOU to Avelworldcreator for taking the time to respond to all the questions being hurled about. very much appreciated! :)

keep up the awesome work!

<---fan! :)