Redlynne wrote:

There's also Cinderella's Glass Sword (or Knife if you're a Warehouse 13 fan) to consider as well, where transparency (of less than 100%) would be appropriate for weaponry of this type.

I agree it's a cool enough idea. I'm just guessing that for CoT it would have to be considered its own unique weapon "item" (with a hardwired percentage of transparency) instead of being able to have any standard weapon be adjustable by a player to possess any specific percentage of opacity they wanted.

Zombie Man wrote:

I can't see where transparent weapons will take us.

I thought it was 'clear' where this idea might lead...

Zombie Man wrote:

I can't see where transparent weapons will take us.

Transparent ITEM ... non-transparent Visual FX "on" the Item ... {pauses significantly}

If you need to "see" what you're "not seeing" ... try [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCbOaE-p49E]Saber's Sword[/url] in a very great deal of Fate Stay Night (not all of it, granted, but usually).

Lothic wrote:

It's a question of giving the players a direct way to do something the Devs probably wouldn't want us to be able to do in the first place.

Um ... not to put too fine a point on things, but ... that's a rather weak and dubious prospect to hang your hat on, let alone to use as the foundation for your entire argument.

Why do I say that? Because "invisible weapons" will not confer ANY meaningful advantages as far as combat is concerned.
Invisible weapons won't animate use of Powers any faster.
Invisible weapons won't in and of themselves have any sort of "range" advantage over the visible variety.
Invisible weapons will cost the same Endurance to use.
Invisible weapons will deal the same amount of "damage" as the visible variety.
... and so on and so forth.

I mean, I can tell you straight up, right now, that the animation set for Dual Blades in City of Heroes would have made a rather "nifty" sort of potential "psychic melee" powerset, simply by virtue of making the Costume Blades invisible "so they'd just be "mental" with nothing to "see" per se, and just animating all of the attacks AS NORMAL minus the (dual) blades. Swap the sound FX for the Dual Blades animations to sound more "mental" than "metal" and you're all set after changing the Damage Type on all the attacks to Psychic, with maybe some Smash/Lethal thrown in for flavoring. Yeah, it would be a cheap-[b]{censored}[/b] way of doing it ... but it would have been FUNCTIONAL ... and I can tell you right this instant that I can imagine being able to make it work simply by virtue of "rockin' the moves" without needing the visual FX (or at most, a cut down set of them).

So when you say the Devs [b]--> PROBABLY <--[/b] wouldn't want us to be able to do this, I honestly think you're selling both the Developers for City of Titans *AND* the ingenuity of our community short, in terms of what potentials an idea like this could have.

Lothic wrote:

I know it may sound odd but I suspect the idea of players being able to equip themselves with "invisible weapons" is something that would be considered a borderline exploit or at least akin to a graphics glitch to be avoided (like clipping). At the very least it would look relatively silly if a bunch of players could choose to flail around swinging fully transparent weapons without any glowing FX "surrounding" the weapon.

If "looking silly" were a disqualifier, then the majority of Fashion Disasters that I saw roaming the streets of Paragon City wouldn't be allowed to exist, let alone play. Heck, the Random function in the City of Heroes costume editor was perfectly capable of creating Fashion Disasters with a single mouse click. It's not the responsibility of the Developers to prevent us, the Players, from looking silly [i]if we insist on looking silly[/i] using the costume editor.

The other thing I think you're overlooking here is something that ironically turned up in Tabula Rasa when PvP got introduced. Tabula Rasa had an armor equip system that altered your appearance depending on what you equipped into your 5 armor slots (feet, legs, hands, torso, head), and putting on a helmet pretty much decided what your head looked like. So if you wanted to see your character's face, you simply dispensed with the helmet and got on with the PvE, because none of the Foe NPCs could (or would) go out of their way to target your head.

Enter PvP, with Players who WOULD aim for "BOOM! HEAD SHOT!" to score a quick kill, and suddenly, being without a helmet on made you an instant PvP target, because you were "weak" to a particular type of attack mode. So helmet-less Players were "easy marks" for the PvP gankers and their preferred prey (since they weren't interested in "fair fights" to begin with). Then Destination Games "ruined PvP" for them by making the appearance of a Helmet Head entirely optional ... meaning that you couldn't tell at a glance anymore if your designated victim was ACTUALLY wearing a helmet (and all the armor and modifiers that conferred) or if they weren't. So the PKers wailed and moaned mightily (and lo verrily, a ship laden with treasure did set sail on the river of their tears!) because now they couldn't tell the easy marks from the hard targets ... and had to just assume that everyone was wearing full armor all the time, even when it [i]looked like[/i] they weren't.

Purely a cosmetic change. It was literally a checkbox in the costume editor to determine if you used a helmet or a head for your avatar ... and you would not believe the moaning and grief and STINK the PvP community raised over the issue! Made no difference whatsoever to how the game PLAYED in terms of game mechanics, and made all the difference in the world in terms of figuring out who was an easy PvP kill and who wasn't.

I fail to see how a transparent [b][i]costume part[/i][/b] that has no game mechanical relevance to how combat ACTIONS get resolved might be considered an exploit in a game that is intended to function in ways broadly similar to City of Heroes. It's not like we're going to have a TERA-esqe sort of Active Combat System in which the "reach" of your weapons is somehow determined by the weapon skin you choose to equip yourself with. It's not as if the Foe NPCs are going to "care" what your weapons *look like* when you're using them. Indeed, the only people who might (or ought) to care about what your weapons LOOK LIKE would be ... Players ... either yourself or the other people you interact with while playing the game. Other Players can feel like your use of Invisible Weapons is {insert derogatory comment here} all they want, but it doesn't change the fact that what they LOOK LIKE has no bearing on HOW THEY WORK as far as the game mechanics and "rules" of combat are concerned, since all of that stuff is determined by Powers, not by Costuming. So I'm really hard pressed to figure out a way that this could be used as an "exploit" of any kind. At best, you'd be able to use it as a sort of decoy/misdirection as part of a Player to Player psychological attack ... of the "[url=http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IAmNotLeftHanded]I ought to tell you I'm not left handed[/url]" variety that involved deceiving your opponent into *assuming* you're something you're not (which, again, only "works" against Players who go by cursory appearances) ... which of course is why I related the story about PvPers getting hacked off about invisible helmets in Tabula Rasa.

Redlynne wrote:

Lothic wrote:
It's a question of giving the players a direct way to do something the Devs probably wouldn't want us to be able to do in the first place.
Um ... not to put too fine a point on things, but ... that's a rather weak and dubious prospect to hang your hat on, let alone to use as the foundation for your entire argument.
Why do I say that? Because "invisible weapons" will not confer ANY meaningful advantages as far as combat is concerned.
Invisible weapons won't animate use of Powers any faster.
Invisible weapons won't in and of themselves have any sort of "range" advantage over the visible variety.
Invisible weapons will cost the same Endurance to use.
Invisible weapons will deal the same amount of "damage" as the visible variety.
... and so on and so forth.
I mean, I can tell you straight up, right now, that the animation set for Dual Blades in City of Heroes would have made a rather "nifty" sort of potential "psychic melee" powerset, simply by virtue of making the Costume Blades invisible "so they'd just be "mental" with nothing to "see" per se, and just animating all of the attacks AS NORMAL minus the (dual) blades. Swap the sound FX for the Dual Blades animations to sound more "mental" than "metal" and you're all set after changing the Damage Type on all the attacks to Psychic, with maybe some Smash/Lethal thrown in for flavoring. Yeah, it would be a cheap-{censored} way of doing it ... but it would have been FUNCTIONAL ... and I can tell you right this instant that I can imagine being able to make it work simply by virtue of "rockin' the moves" without needing the visual FX (or at most, a cut down set of them).
So when you say the Devs --> PROBABLY <-- wouldn't want us to be able to do this, I honestly think you're selling both the Developers for City of Titans *AND* the ingenuity of our community short, in terms of what potentials an idea like this could have.
Lothic wrote:
I know it may sound odd but I suspect the idea of players being able to equip themselves with "invisible weapons" is something that would be considered a borderline exploit or at least akin to a graphics glitch to be avoided (like clipping). At the very least it would look relatively silly if a bunch of players could choose to flail around swinging fully transparent weapons without any glowing FX "surrounding" the weapon.
If "looking silly" were a disqualifier, then the majority of Fashion Disasters that I saw roaming the streets of Paragon City wouldn't be allowed to exist, let alone play. Heck, the Random function in the City of Heroes costume editor was perfectly capable of creating Fashion Disasters with a single mouse click. It's not the responsibility of the Developers to prevent us, the Players, from looking silly if we insist on looking silly using the costume editor.
The other thing I think you're overlooking here is something that ironically turned up in Tabula Rasa when PvP got introduced. Tabula Rasa had an armor equip system that altered your appearance depending on what you equipped into your 5 armor slots (feet, legs, hands, torso, head), and putting on a helmet pretty much decided what your head looked like. So if you wanted to see your character's face, you simply dispensed with the helmet and got on with the PvE, because none of the Foe NPCs could (or would) go out of their way to target your head.
Enter PvP, with Players who WOULD aim for "BOOM! HEAD SHOT!" to score a quick kill, and suddenly, being without a helmet on made you an instant PvP target, because you were "weak" to a particular type of attack mode. So helmet-less Players were "easy marks" for the PvP gankers and their preferred prey (since they weren't interested in "fair fights" to begin with). Then Destination Games "ruined PvP" for them by making the appearance of a Helmet Head entirely optional ... meaning that you couldn't tell at a glance anymore if your designated victim was ACTUALLY wearing a helmet (and all the armor and modifiers that conferred) or if they weren't. So the PKers wailed and moaned mightily (and lo verrily, a ship laden with treasure did set sail on the river of their tears!) because now they couldn't tell the easy marks from the hard targets ... and had to just assume that everyone was wearing full armor all the time, even when it looked like they weren't.
Purely a cosmetic change. It was literally a checkbox in the costume editor to determine if you used a helmet or a head for your avatar ... and you would not believe the moaning and grief and STINK the PvP community raised over the issue! Made no difference whatsoever to how the game PLAYED in terms of game mechanics, and made all the difference in the world in terms of figuring out who was an easy PvP kill and who wasn't.
I fail to see how a transparent costume part that has no game mechanical relevance to how combat ACTIONS get resolved might be considered an exploit in a game that is intended to function in ways broadly similar to City of Heroes. It's not like we're going to have a TERA-esqe sort of Active Combat System in which the "reach" of your weapons is somehow determined by the weapon skin you choose to equip yourself with. It's not as if the Foe NPCs are going to "care" what your weapons *look like* when you're using them. Indeed, the only people who might (or ought) to care about what your weapons LOOK LIKE would be ... Players ... either yourself or the other people you interact with while playing the game. Other Players can feel like your use of Invisible Weapons is {insert derogatory comment here} all they want, but it doesn't change the fact that what they LOOK LIKE has no bearing on HOW THEY WORK as far as the game mechanics and "rules" of combat are concerned, since all of that stuff is determined by Powers, not by Costuming. So I'm really hard pressed to figure out a way that this could be used as an "exploit" of any kind. At best, you'd be able to use it as a sort of decoy/misdirection as part of a Player to Player psychological attack ... of the "I ought to tell you I'm not left handed" variety that involved deceiving your opponent into *assuming* you're something you're not (which, again, only "works" against Players who go by cursory appearances) ... which of course is why I related the story about PvPers getting hacked off about invisible helmets in Tabula Rasa.

Once again you've jumped all over a relatively insignificant aspect of one of my posts and ran with it making yourself look at the very least trollish about this whole civil back-n-forth discussion thing we're trying to have here.

I actually said earlier that I have ABSOUTELY NO PROBLEM with semi-transparent weapons in the game. I simply do not believe the Devs will either A) allow us to have 100% invisible weapons (a point that Gangrel and others have agreed with me on) or B) give us any MANUAL CONTROL over setting any weapon to have any level of transparency we want. I believe if semi-transparent waepons end up existing in CoT at all they will be handled as separately unique weapon items with specific levels of transparency and/or FX hardwired into them.

Please stop trying to hyper-complicate these issues with wall-of-text tangents that aren't really germane to the topic at hand. If you don't think that characters running around "air guitar-ing" with weapons that don't appear to exist because they're 100% transparent and lack any FX wouldn't look really dumb really fast then there's nothing I can you do to help you with that.

Lothic wrote:

You do realize that sometimes Devs make arbitrary decisions about things in their games that have nothing to do with their technical feasibility right?

So now we're supposed to believe that you can accurately predict with a high degree of certainty that the Developers will make arbitrary decisions that have nothing to do with technical feasibility [i]on this specific issue[/i]? And even better yet, you know in what direction they'll arbitrarily decide to go?

Right now I'm trying to figure out if you're playing a [url=http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BatmanGambit]Batman Gambit[/url] or a [url=http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/KansasCityShuffle]Kansas City Shuffle[/url] on this one.

I'll remind our engineers that if they can make everything to be completely opaque and completely transparent with every degree of transparency in between, then they should. Ghosting, being out of phase, disappearing, crystallized, X-ray vision, made out of glass/energy, etc... all call for some degree of transparency.

The Animated Swords in the Apex TF were just invisible foes wielding visible swords. The Dark Servant was just an invisible NPC with a visible aura.

And it would be helpful for both the engineers and players to have access to alpha channel sliders (when appropriate).

As always: mileage may vary, these are intentions rather than commitments, I'm not the person in charge of prioritizing costume feature handling, yadda, yadda.

The Unreal engine has a slightly better way of handling most stuff where something is truly and completely transparent and not *actually* there at all (e.g. the sword-wielders): you can simply not assign a body mesh to the "character" at all, and nothing will be drawn, or even collided with by physics. But the sword would still be present, real, and animated as if it were held by something. Quite handy at times, even if it also leads to some rather baffling "where the heck?" moments if you're messing about with geometry and try to tell the engine to do the impossible (by default it disables rendering that mesh, though we will probably change that at some point to give a visible indication that something is badly wrong but the character is still *there*, as a better fall-back approach.

Transparency (partial or full) does in fact have several of the issues mentioned, when working with body parts that are modeled one-inside-another; we may or may not end up supporting 'head' as a *costume* level transparency thing (much like there will be enforcement of non-transparency over certain areas to maintain a T rating), but things like "ghosting" or hologram-styling of a toon would be applied across the body as a whole, and thus would be applied across the entire mesh as a sort of "after-effect".

There are potentially other things that can be done as well, they just get into significantly trickier coding that isn't really worthwhile unless and until the simpler methods show themselves insufficient; while stuff is starting to move forward somewhat more regarding character bodies in particular, we're still *well* out in "highly experimental / prototyping" land as far as practical results — what was done in the KS video involved a few significant bits of "sleight of hand" to make sure they came off right, which is fine for a demo but not so good for the real thing where you have to worry about stuff such as what Redlynne brought up.

Regarding ascetics complaints: they are valid, up to a point, but *only* up to a point. The general guiding principle we're designing based on for most of this stuff is "make it look acceptable if the user does a next-next-next-next chargen, make all of the stuff that is available by default look pretty good when a user invests some time and effort into picking combinations… and allow a mode where users who ask to stand in front of the fire-hose are allowed to do literally any and every combination the engine and code can actually support *at all*, but they get to keep both pieces if it breaks (or just looks truly awful)". Mostly because it just isn't possible to enable some of the "oh wow" results without granting access to stuff that means "uhm… wow…" results are also possible.

I just want to see something be glowly energy based, like energy claws, that look like Baraka's.