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Responsive costumes -- On the fly costume changes.

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DesViper
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Responsive costumes -- On the fly costume changes.

A few threads are suggesting uses for the Momentum mechanic, which responds to how heated a battle gets. A great use for momentum could be having the costume change as momentum, health, endurance, or aggro even go up or down.

Examples:
A hulk character that gets larger as momentum increases.

A robot that has LEDs that change from blue to red as health decreases.

A fire toon whose flame aura gets more intense as momentum increases.

A ghostly toon who becomes more transparent as health decreases.

I don't know how hard the technicalities would be for such a thing. Dunning-Kruger tells me that it'd be easy to link momentum to size, or transparency to health.


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This suggestion is related to

This suggestion is related to the classic "battle damage" idea that people talked about way back on the CoH forums. The basic idea there was that as you got reduced to certain HP percentages your costume could become more ripped/stained to reflect that you were getting the stuffing beaten out of you.

One semi-easy way something like this could be accomplished is if the Devs gave us a number of extra "battle change" costume slots. Then we could design our own versions of "modified" costume change appearances that would be triggered by reaching certain battle thresholds (like reaching 50% HP or when Momentum reached a certain value). The Devs would have to provide not only the extra battle-oriented costume slots but a reasonably large selection of "damaged" costume items or aura-like effects that would pair up with their corresponding non-damaged counterparts. Obviously this would not be impossible to do but clearly it'd require a dedicated effort on the Dev's part to support.

As with most things this might make for an interesting optional update sometime after the game's launch.

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A lot of "conditions" the

A lot of "conditions" the game might put on toons would come into play here, like burning, bleeding, poisoned, frozen, etc. Not to mention the "tweety birds and stars orbiting your head because you've been knocked silly for a second" type stuff from the cartoons. I would guess that this would be a property of the costume itself or the NPC body in question. Like when you fly, your jetpack, if you have one, will be rendered with the turbines rotating and smoke coming out of the exhaust, etc.

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I suppose the easy way, like

I suppose the easy way, like Mal said, would be to just give a few more slots, with a scripted condition for costume change. But I was thinking something more gradual and deep.


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desviper wrote:
desviper wrote:

I suppose the easy way, like Mal said, would be to just give a few more slots, with a scripted condition for costume change. But I was thinking something more gradual and deep.

I wouldn't be against something like this being "more gradual and deep" but you just have to think how this would have to work in the actual game. Would you want the game to apply these kinds of effects on you by hardwired default or would you want some kind of control over how it works? Maybe you'd want to have some characters display certain kinds of "cosmetic combat" changes but not others. Maybe you'd want to have no changes until you're like at 10% health or maybe you'd want something to change gradually (like an aura that slowly gets brighter) at every 5% damage increment. There are literally millions of ways these kinds of things could be implemented based on character concept alone.

To be honest I would probably find it very annoying if I didn't have full control over how these changes (if any) worked and off-hand I can't really see how the game could allow for that in a practical way without dedicated "combat costume change" slots like I suggested. Maybe the game could allow for such a specialized costume slot for each of the triggering thresholds you'd want to establish so some characters might only need one or two extra slots whereas others could use like 10-12 slots - that might allow for some of the "deepness" you were talking about.

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I think if anything, I think

I think if anything, I think this should/could be a cash shop add-on that you buy and then have to set in your graphics options settings to accommodate it. For starters, you're going to need the graphic settings set to enough detail that it would do the added rendering, etc You could then sell separate costume and aura options off the rack that go into your avatar editor options, possibly as a whole new tab, with various dynamic functionality like reacting to Momentum, damage, etc with more flashy graphics. So instead of the normal Glowing Body aura, you'd apply your newly-purchased "Momentum Modulated Glow Aura" which gets brighter as your Momentum increases, etc.

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Radiac wrote:
Radiac wrote:

I think if anything, I think this should/could be a cash shop add-on that you buy and then have to set in your graphics options settings to accommodate it. For starters, you're going to need the graphic settings set to enough detail that it would do the added rendering, etc You could then sell separate costume and aura options off the rack that go into your avatar editor options, possibly as a whole new tab, with various dynamic functionality like reacting to Momentum, damage, etc with more flashy graphics. So instead of the normal Glowing Body aura, you'd apply your newly-purchased "Momentum Modulated Glow Aura" which gets brighter as your Momentum increases, etc.

Sure no matter how they implement it (either via dedicated costume slots that would be triggerable for user definable "battle damaged" costumes and/or threshold dependent auras usable in normal costume slots) it could all be provided as cash shop items. If they allowed for cosmetic items that were linked to specific combat-based variables the store could literally offer thousands of variations (i.e. you could choose from having the standard aura X, the momentum-based aura X, the health-based aura X and so on). They could sell things like that individually or in sets so if you really liked aura ABC you could unlock every combat variation of ABC with a single grouped purchase.

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One thing that'd be easier to

One thing that'd be easier to implement is costume pieces that are only generated when using a certain power, or one costume piece that changes when using that power. For instance, a cape that transforms into a pair of wings when the user wants to fly. A giant insect or spider that rides around on you like a backpack, but when you summon it like a minion it hops off. or transformation powers that cause you to develop new costume pieces, like a short-lived transformation into a werewolf

Just some ideas.

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Halae wrote:
Halae wrote:

One thing that'd be easier to implement is costume pieces that are only generated when using a certain power, or one costume piece that changes when using that power. For instance, a cape that transforms into a pair of wings when the user wants to fly. A giant insect or spider that rides around on you like a backpack, but when you summon it like a minion it hops off. or transformation powers that cause you to develop new costume pieces, like a short-lived transformation into a werewolf
Just some ideas.

This is an interesting idea at least in theory. We already know that we're going to be able have different animations assignable to different powers (basically the way "Power Customization" worked in CoH) but the idea that a power could be represented/expressed as a costume item might be cool if handled properly.

The hard part would be whether such a thing could be designed to be definable by the player or would we have to accept certain specific powers hardwired directly to specific costume items. If it was NOT possible to have this kind of thing be player-customizable then we might be stuck with having to accept specific costume items if we wanted to have specific powers. For instance using your "spider backpack" example if they made it so that you could only have a "wearable spider" as a costume item then you would be forced to use a spider as a pet even though there might be a pet monkey power you prefer that does NOT let you wear it as a backpack. Basically the danger of having hardwired power/costume combinations is that depending on how many of those combinations they offered the whole thing could actually become a limitation on creativity (i.e. if the only wearable pet is the spider then you'd be forced to use a spider if you wanted a wearable pet).

The key to this working well is for it to either be very flexible in terms of player customization (as in being able to assign almost any kind of power to any kind of costume item) or they need to offer so many hardwired options (like having all pet powers in the game have a matching "backpack version") that it won't matter that they aren't customizable.

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It would be cool if the game

It would be cool if the game (either automatically or as an upgrade) made your standard idle emote motions look like your current state of health, endo, etc. Like if you're low on endo, you act all winded and put your hands up behind your head and breathe heavy, etc.

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Great idea here, but I'd also

Great idea here, but I'd also LOVE to see a responsive suit like a Carnage symbiote type or anything like a symbiote organic like responsive suit.

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I have mentioned this in

I have mentioned this in another thread that was discussing battle damage:
While not planned for launch, we have built hooks within our power design which can be used to display certain hit effects on targets.

Now of course this won't result in say a thug's jeans getting completely ripped to tatters or burned completely away, but showing say tears or singe marks will be possible.

As to animated costume pieces, well that isn't out of the realm of possibility.


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I could see texture effects,

I could see texture effects, almost like how photoshop has an effects studio.

In character creation there is a damage slider on the screen and several damage effects choices to choose from. As you slide the damage slider across you see the texture effect on that costume item. Once you are happy withthe damage effect choice, you move on to the next costume item, and so forth.

Some damage effects will look like tears, some will look like craters, some will look like light escaping, some will like they are getting darker, etc., etc. An option to not show damage textures should be available, too.

Since they are texture effects, it would not require changes to the 3d mesh.


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Huckleberry wrote:
Huckleberry wrote:

Since they are texture effects, it would not require changes to the 3d mesh.

The idea of using textures and a slider to select how damage might appear on given costume items are good ideas. But would such a slider exist for each costume item or be a single general slider that affects the entire outfit? Also your slider suggestion more or less implies there would only be two states a character could exist in, either A) undamaged or B) damaged. This would seem to not allow for the MULTIPLE stages of damage that I've seen many people hope we'd get from this.

Sure it might be impractical to account for dozens of realistic damage states but it might be reasonable to have more than one - maybe you'd have a switch at 50% health, 25% health and 10% health. This is where my idea for dedicated "damaged" costume slots comes in - you could have a slot for 50%, 25% and 10% and predesign how badly each of those threshold stages look. No reason why the Devs couldn't incorporate your texture slider idea for each of those costume slots.

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After reading over the

After reading over the comments here, I'd have to say that 3D changes would be impractical unless if you were swapping out one costume piece for another. For example, In CoX's character creator, you had the option of giving your character a robe. The robe could be customized to be intact, tattered, or shredded, which characters could use if they were anywhere from 100% HP to 0% HP. We needn't provide damaged variants for every costume piece, though- for example, shoulderpads could just completely break off when a certain HP threshold is met. Just have an animation play where the piece detaches and falls to the ground, then fades away; barring that, you could have the item create an explosion effect and quickly fade out. (or something to that effect) In either case, your toon will appear with different costume pieces after the old costume falls away and the models that didn't match what your new costume is fade into oblivion. (as opposed to getting their meshes edited or anything overly-complex) Scaling models also shouldn't be too difficult, but I know firsthand how much effort it can take to transform vertices, so perhaps our toons could change their overall size even though changing the actual shape of their costume's pieces may be too impractical.

And then there's 2D effects. I believe that changing colors, textures, opacity, and other values that don't affect the 3D design of the toon's armor would logically be a synch to implement. All you do is mark what condition you want for the values to change at, assign the values, and watch the magic happen. We can create and delete marks as needed for our toons, but I honestly think that there should be an upper limit- if you make the scripts too heavy, then obviously you'll notice a drop in performance when you take "Super Transform-Once-Every-Point-Of-Momentum Man" into a big fight. I believe Lothic mentioned the possibility of us customizing these marks at 5% increments, but that would leave us with 21 (including 0%) different marks for each stat we're setting transformations for! This means we could have 21 different marks for HP, momentum, endurance/energy/stamina/whatever, rage, and who knows what else if we're not careful. In the event we get to choose how our toon looks across multiple different stats, then might I recommend narrowing these marks down to 10% increments? (or 20% if we're doing it for EVERY stat) Alternatively, could we choose a graphical setting that lets our computers only choose to see the transformations in different-percentage increments? If Player A has a Macbook and Player B has a proper gaming desktop, Player A could set his graphics to only render what the toons look like at 20% increments, whereas Player B could set his graphics to only render what the toons look like at 2% increments.

One last note: Halae and Lothic mentioned that using costume models that could double as deployable minions presents a number of obstacles, such as how limited it would be if only minions that had a costume pet slot could be used in this way. (or, vice-versa, only costume pets that look like minions could be used in this way) Would it be possible to just use the exact same minion models on the character, scaled up/down to fit onto the player's shoulder/back/head/arm/wherever until deployed? And furthermore, how possible would it be to make costume pets that can "stand in" for typical minions, perhaps using a simple set of animations for their abilities OR using the same skeleton so they could use the exact same power animations as the usual minions they're now replacing. Think about that shoulder dragon we got last Christmas- if he had the same skeleton as a four-legged minion in a Beast Mastery-themed powerset, could he hop off your character's shoulder, grow to the size of a wolf on the way to the ground, and then use the same animations? (maybe with the extra appendages like wings and such using a separate skeleton and rudimentary animations) Theoretically, using the same animation skeleton as a template for rigging/skinning/modeling costume pets AND minions could allow them to become interchangeable for either role. This tactic has been used by countless modders over on Nexusmods.com in order to create brand-new creatures that don't require days or weeks of creating new animations and skeletons; perhaps it could work for CoT before they get too far into development with minions and pets.

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

The idea of using textures and a slider to select how damage might appear on given costume items are good ideas. But would such a slider exist for each costume item or be a single general slider that affects the entire outfit? Also your slider suggestion more or less implies there would only be two states a character could exist in, either A) undamaged or B) damaged. This would seem to not allow for the MULTIPLE stages of damage that I've seen many people hope we'd get from this.

I wouldn't want the same damage texture on my flowing silk sleeves and cape as I would on my hardened composite breastplate.

Lothic wrote:

Also your slider suggestion more or less implies there would only be two states a character could exist in, either A) undamaged or B) damaged. This would seem to not allow for the MULTIPLE stages of damage that I've seen many people hope we'd get from this.

I used the word slider on purpose. I did not use the word toggle. When I think slider I think an analog mechanism that graduates proportionately from one state at one extreme to another state at the other extreme.

The way I imagine the slider, picture a block of swiss cheese. The holes in the block of swis cheese are so small at one side as to be imperceptible. As one takes slices off the top of this block of swiss cheese, the holes get bigger and bigger, so that the very bottom of the block of swiss cheese is almost all hole and very little actual cheese in your slice. Now, imagine that each step along the slider is a progresseviely deeper slice of that cheese. That's what I was thinking when I was thinking about a damage slider, with the characteristics of swiss cheese being but one of the damage texture choices you have to choose from.


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Huckleberry wrote:
Huckleberry wrote:

I wouldn't want the same damage texture on my flowing silk sleeves and cape as I would on my hardened composite breastplate.

So I guess the answer to my question is that every individual costume item would have its own damage slider. I agree that would be more ideal but clearly that would also be that much more difficult to implement.

Huckleberry wrote:

When I think slider I think an analog mechanism that graduates proportionately from one state at one extreme to another state at the other extreme.

Right, I realized that your slider idea would allow for multiple damage appearance choices while creating your character. But once you've manaully chosen your ONE choice the game would only have that one choice to work with. That's what I meant when I said your idea implies that while actually playing the game there would only be two possibilities for your appearance - either no damage or one damage state based on whatever ONE choice you selected.

This is why I still favor having a handful of "damaged costume slots" that can be pre-designed by the player and be ready to go when you hit certain damage thresholds (again my suggestions for 50%, 25% and 10%) This way the game could automatically switch between those slots as needed an provide for a more gradual appearance "evolution" instead of just either A) Undamaged and B) Damaged. Again for each of those damaged costume slots the game could use your slider idea to select which kind of damage you want to have appear at that specific damage threshold. So for example let's say the 50% slot might have a cape that's simply a bit dirty or has a rip or two, at 25% the cape could look more ripped/shredded and at 10% could be be made to look completely tattered and barely there. Or maybe you don't care about seeing your cape damaged so instead for your 50%/25%/10% slots you decide that you want to see your aura fade away (like it's part of your life essence so it fades as you get closer to death) so you set three different settings for your aura with your costume slots. The damaged costume slots concept gives the player more control over HOW they want their battle damage progression to appear.as they go between 100% health and death.

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

Right, I realized that your slider idea would allow for multiple damage appearance choices while creating your character. But once you've manaully chosen your ONE choice the game would only have that one choice to work with. That's what I meant when I said your idea implies that while actually playing the game there would only be two possibilities for your appearance - either no damage or one damage state based on whatever ONE choice you selected.

Huckleberry wrote:

In character creation there is a damage slider on the screen and several damage effects choices to choose from. As you slide the damage slider across you see the texture effect on that costume item.

As I read the original suggestion, I got the impression that the slider is not to select a damaged state, but to observe the choose you made before saving your costume.

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Foradain wrote:
Foradain wrote:

Lothic wrote:
Right, I realized that your slider idea would allow for multiple damage appearance choices while creating your character. But once you've manaully chosen your ONE choice the game would only have that one choice to work with. That's what I meant when I said your idea implies that while actually playing the game there would only be two possibilities for your appearance - either no damage or one damage state based on whatever ONE choice you selected.
Huckleberry wrote:
In character creation there is a damage slider on the screen and several damage effects choices to choose from. As you slide the damage slider across you see the texture effect on that costume item.
As I read the original suggestion, I got the impression that the slider is not to select a damaged state, but to observe the choose you made before saving your costume.

When you say "observe the [choice] you made" are you saying it would be used to preview what your costume would look like in-game as you progress from 100% health to 0% health? That'd be nice I guess but what would you use to actually "choose" what kind of damage effect you'd want to see? Would you want a burned effect, a bashed effect, an increasing/decreasing glowing effect and/or just scuff marks? There's more to it than just getting a in-game preview - there has to be a way to manually select the basic effects in the first place.

This is why the whole idea of having "battle damage" (or even more generally the idea of costume changes via combat effects) seems simple enough at first but quickly becomes a less-than-trivial effort once you start wrapping your head around it. There's really no wonder why the CoH Devs never got around to it.

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Huckleberry wrote:
Huckleberry wrote:

In character creation there is a damage slider on the screen and several damage effects choices to choose from. As you slide the damage slider across you see the texture effect on that costume item.

I was picturing a group of radio buttons for that part.

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Foradain wrote:
Foradain wrote:

Huckleberry wrote:
In character creation there is a damage slider on the screen and several damage effects choices to choose from. As you slide the damage slider across you see the texture effect on that costume item.
I was picturing a group of radio buttons for that part.

Yeah unfortunately the part of the sentence you highlighted was a little vague. The slider itself could easily be used to "choose" which damage effects you want. As a slider the Devs could add new effects without having to change the GUI in the future. If they dedicated physical radio buttons to specific damage effects (one for one) then they'd have to change the GUI every time they added (or removed) damage effect options which would frankly be shortsighted at the very least.

For what it's worth I'd rather have dozens of damage effects to choose from regardless of how the GUI is designed. The ability to see how it looks in-game might be a nice extra feature but is not the priority. The priority is giving us as many choices as possible in the first place. If the Devs attempt to provide a system for this with only a few types of "combat triggered costume change effects" it'd almost be worse than not having it at all because everyone would suddenly start looking the same. Imagine what it would be like if the game only provided say two types of boots - it'd start to look dumb to see everyone running around in boots that had a solid chance of looking just like everyone else's.

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Foradain wrote:
Foradain wrote:

As I read the original suggestion, I got the impression that the slider is not to select a damaged state, but to observe the choose you made before saving your costume.

That was exactly what I had in mind. I'm glad my explanation wasn't totally inept! The idea being that as you take damage your texture would progress along the entire scale.

But whetever I may have intended, a good discussion is always the best outcome.

Perhaps it would be simpler to have only a few states for each texture: 50%, 75% and 95%.


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Huckleberry wrote:
Huckleberry wrote:

Foradain wrote:
As I read the original suggestion, I got the impression that the slider is not to select a damaged state, but to observe the choose you made before saving your costume.
That was exactly what I had in mind. I'm glad my explanation wasn't totally inept! The idea being that as you take damage your texture would progress along the entire scale.
But whetever I may have intended, a good discussion is always the best outcome.
Perhaps it would be simpler to have only a few states for each texture: 50%, 75% and 95%.

While I would agree a smooth, continuous costume change scheme might be cool/desirable I'm doubtful that could really be handled effectively by the game without a lot of extra processing. Even your "smooth" progression would likely be broken down into small increments (say at each 1% health mark) and tiny changes would be made based on those 1% increments. There comes a point where even if your costume subtly becomes more damaged between say being 46% damaged to 48% damaged how likely is it going to be that you'd be able to notice that tiny amount of difference in the heat of battle?

Again this is why I'm suggesting a compromise of having just a few specific damage change thresholds. The exact percentages are not hyper-important but I'll again suggest having them at 50%, 25% and 10% health for the purposes of discussion. Between those three (several?) points you could have "relatively" subtle changes that might not be as good as some kind of smooth progression but it would be far simpler in terms of the logistics of the game having to switch between these handful of states. Remember the CoH Devs claimed they had to impose their 30 second timeout on ANY costume changes because if people tried to do a bunch of quick changes in short order it would overwhelm the network traffic of everyone in the immediate area. There might still be limitations with CoT being able to update all of these "combat costume changes" for everyone in the middle of a close combat situation. The network traffic would be extra heavy if you had to get the updated damage state of every one of the individual costume items of everyone in the immediate area in anything approaching real-time.

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Lothic wrote:
Lothic wrote:

Foradain wrote:
Huckleberry wrote:
In character creation there is a damage slider on the screen and several damage effects choices to choose from. As you slide the damage slider across you see the texture effect on that costume item.
I was picturing a group of radio buttons for that part.
Yeah unfortunately the part of the sentence you highlighted was a little vague. The slider itself could easily be used to "choose" which damage effects you want. As a slider the Devs could add new effects without having to change the GUI in the future. If they dedicated physical radio buttons to specific damage effects (one for one) then they'd have to change the GUI every time they added (or removed) damage effect options which would frankly be shortsighted at the very least.

What about a simple dropdown-box, or how they did them in CoX?
No need to redesign the UI every time those options are added to or removed from since, as with the slider, the changes are only in the data "feeding" it. A dropdown would scale better in the long run than a slider since sliders have an effective max before the "stepper buttons" become effectively the only way to navigate it.

Quote:

Again this is why I'm suggesting a compromise of having just a few specific damage change thresholds. The exact percentages are not hyper-important but I'll again suggest having them at 50%, 25% and 10% health for the purposes of discussion. Between those three (several?) points you could have "relatively" subtle changes that might not be as good as some kind of smooth progression but it would be far simpler in terms of the logistics of the game having to switch between these handful of states. Remember the CoH Devs claimed they had to impose their 30 second timeout on ANY costume changes because if people tried to do a bunch of quick changes in short order it would overwhelm the network traffic of everyone in the immediate area. There might still be limitations with CoT being able to update all of these "combat costume changes" for everyone in the middle of a close combat situation. The network traffic would be extra heavy if you had to get the updated damage state of every one of the individual costume items of everyone in the immediate area in anything approaching real-time.

The big advantage with your approach is that the "damage effects" can be effectively anything that is allowed within the CC. This means that one could simulate a "spare body" approach that switches to a completely different look at the 10% mark, though the health bar wouldn't reflect it.

Radiac
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I'm a little worried that an

I'm a little worried that an abrupt change from one 3d body to another at a specified point would cause twitchyness. Say you're at 10% health. You can intermittently take damage and get healed such that you're going above and below that threshold a lot in a short period of time. This would cause your whole toon to get re-rendered many many times, using graphic resources, and using them in order to fuel an effect that's not good to look at.

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Two different limits? By that

Two different limits? By that I mean that it could be done so that it doesn't switch back until you are 5%-points (or something like that) above the limit that first initiated the switch. So 10%/25%/50% for switching to it and 15%/30%/55% for switching back.

Or you could put a CD on it, something like 3-5 secs, and every time you dip below the threshold while it's on CD that timer is reset.

The thing is that if we get a system where you change to another costume at set health levels then that possibility will exist. Building a system that makes it only a "tasteful" change will in the end essentially boil down to just using auras and/or overlay effects.

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You can have a slider, and

You can have a slider, and use layers to stack the textures, and use a 3rd texture as a mask which is grayscale.. so you can ramp up or down the light value of how much to show at a certain percent. (0.0 to 1.0) Similar to terrain tools, laying down a dirt road on a grassy field.

But as you might have already guessed, having allot of this on the shader side will quickly pile on the GPU cycles, and depending on the graphics card and free memory on the card, could reduce frame rates. :/

If this option can be disabled in the Graphics Settings, i'm for it. ;)

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Izzy wrote:
Izzy wrote:

If this option can be disabled in the Graphics Settings, i'm for it. ;)

I would almost guarantee that any game mechanic that involved "costume changing" on any level would have to be 100% OPTIONAL regardless if there was any potential graphics processing issue or not. The idea that the game would be allowed to automatically change how our characters looked would likely be UNTHINKABLE to many of those people who spend hundreds of hours designing their various costumes in the costume creator. ;)

On a more serious note I could realistically see where based on my character concepts I'd want some of my characters to display "combat damage" and others to NOT display it so I would very much want to be able to specifically control exactly which of my characters displayed it and which didn't at the very least.

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

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Not sure how much of this

Not sure how much of this would actually be visible/worthwhile. At least insofar as the damaged costume is concerned. Think about how quickly a character can lose and regain HP not just in COH but almost any game. Most games will quickly heal you up to full health once you're out of combat for a few seconds. So is it worth the complexity to have a damaged costume appear for the 1.7 seconds where you exist below a 25% health threshold in the middle of a fight where you are likely surrounded by particle effects or more focused on A) your power bar/reserves bar to recover that health B)focused on your enemies beating them before they beat you.

I suppose there could be the rare instance where a player would finish a fight without energy to recover and with very little health where they would be below the threshold where the damage could be seen and perhaps add a bit of weight to just how close the fight had been. But then you would take a knee recover health and be right back into it.

I don't feel that sort of costume morphing would be worth the effort, my opinion. I wouldn't mind being able to change my costume when dead though. For instance my Plant rad was a green/green plant monster type character and it would be fun to RP the costume turning brown/black when dead. Or being able to switch to a brighter aura before laying down the total control and lock down she was capable of dishing out. For that it might be nice to be able to create a "smart macro" that would change the costume in response to those broad states. But while it would be kind of neat for my Plant/Rad. I don't think I would get a whole lot of use out of it for the majority of my characters.

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Grimfox wrote:
Grimfox wrote:

Not sure how much of this would actually be visible/worthwhile. At least insofar as the damaged costume is concerned.

Yeah I think the point was already mentioned that the costume change thresholds (going up or down) might prompt switches that would happen so quickly that either A) they might not be worth it and/or B) might not even be doable in terms of network bandwidth. Again we must remember that CoH imposed an arbitrary 30 second costume change cooldown timer simply to prevent people from spamming changes and slamming the network for people around them. If left uncontrolled this feature could allow multiple nearby people to switch through multiple changes all at once.

As blacke4dawn suggested probably the only way this could work on a practical level is to make sure every auto costume switch had a cooldown period (say 5 or 10 seconds) so that any switches would "lag behind" reality long enough that no matter how many thresholds you jump through you'd still only costume switch at most say once every 10 seconds. This compromise would save stress on the system at the expense of having your costume lag behind your exact status at any given moment. *shrugs*

I do like your alternative idea of allowing for just one costume switch upon being defeated. For example I might have a character who only has a flaming aura when she's consciously using her powers. As soon as she's unconscious (or dead) her aura would turn off automatically.

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

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As an example of a costume

As an example of a costume shift mechanic without a cooldown, I refer you to the Kodan Tonic in Guild Wars 2, attached to an activation macro.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIq0jrgMhdU

This would, quite simply, make low-end computers melt. Costume changes should always have a cooldown on them, just for the sake of keeping people from impacting the network badly. Particle effects I can see being turned off on being defeated, but combat damage mid-fight is a whole other beast.

An infinite number of tries doesn't mean that any one of those tries will succeed. I could flip an infinite number of pennies an infinite number of times and, barring genuine randomness, they will never come up "Waffles".

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Halae wrote:
Halae wrote:

As an example of a costume shift mechanic without a cooldown, I refer you to the Kodan Tonic in Guild Wars 2, attached to an activation macro.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIq0jrgMhdU
This would, quite simply, make low-end computers melt. Costume changes should always have a cooldown on them, just for the sake of keeping people from impacting the network badly. Particle effects I can see being turned off on being defeated, but combat damage mid-fight is a whole other beast.

I might agree that multiple costume changes that could happen within a second or two would likely NEVER be reasonable/legitimate no matter what would allow it. But like I said back in CoH we actually suffered (and I literally mean suffered) from a hyper-conservative 30 second costume change cooldown timer which was generally far more annoying than helpful. It was always super irksome (on characters I had with multiple costumes) to accidentally switch to the wrong costume then have to wait a useless 25-30 seconds just to switch one more time to the right one. I wasn't trying to fry anyone's GPU - I just wanted to quickly switch back over to the costume I wanted.

Given the average capabilities of today's computers I would say that an arbitrary costume change cooldown timer for CoT of say about 5 seconds would be more than enough to provide an adequate safeguard against costume changes from happening TOO FREQUENTLY and from being TOO RESTRICTIVE against legitimate costume changes.

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

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Five seconds or ten seconds

Five seconds or ten seconds seems ideal to me. These are timeframes that don't allow you to rapidly just swap between things willy nilly, but are still short enough that you don't get the misclick horror.

An infinite number of tries doesn't mean that any one of those tries will succeed. I could flip an infinite number of pennies an infinite number of times and, barring genuine randomness, they will never come up "Waffles".

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5 seconds for costume change.

5 seconds for costume change.
10 seconds for logout delay.


Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.
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I think making the delay

I think making the delay timer a constant 10 sec for everything (logging and costuming) makes sense too.

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