Welcome!

I have good news for you, for this game embraces what is known as "Aesthetic Decoupling". A mouthful, but here's what you need to know.

When you look at the power sets, it is ONLY talking about it's MECHANICS. NOTHING about it's visuals.

If you look at Force Blast under the Ranged Sets, it's the set mechanically all about knocking things away and/or down. It's visuals? Completely up to you. You can make that fire, wind, a bow with blunt arrows, a tech gun, lightning. Better yet is how these themes are chosen!

So you get your two power sets, let's say Force Blast and Strategy. Cool, now pick 2 themes such as fire & lightning, you will also get a 'default' theme meant to represent powerless. Now take these 3 themes (fire, lightning and default) and mix them through your powers. That's right, Force Blast doesn't need to ALL be fire, you can set each power to a different theme.

Better yet, each power can be colored separately. So attack 1 can be blue fire, attack 2 green lightning and attack 3 purple fire.

EVEN BETTER YET, this is based on your costume. So, just because you can, you could have your powers swap to look like Ice & Darkness on your other costume.

Power sets are only mechanics, visuals are separate and part of City of Titan's "Make Anyone" mentality. It can take a while to wrap your head around, I know my thought process first needed to adjust to the idea.

Welcome to the forums, hope this helps!

just be aware, there is a limit if you are using props.
Currently the limit is 2. This also limits the related animations based on the props selected.

That's a shame but I understand.

Sword and shield, knife and gun, book and staff. Any more is getting silly.

Tannim222 wrote:

just be aware, there is a limit if you are using props.
Currently the limit is 2. This also limits the related animations based on the props selected.

Speaking of that, why the power aestetics are not in the AB ? Is that due to a tech issue or just a functionnal choice ? Since, i think, we'll have at least 2 powers at the beginning. Unless those powers will be the "common" powers like punch and kick ?

TitansCity wrote:

Tannim222 wrote:

just be aware, there is a limit if you are using props.
Currently the limit is 2. This also limits the related animations based on the props selected.

Speaking of that, why the power aestetics are not in the AB ? Is that due to a tech issue or just a functionnal choice ? Since, i think, we'll have at least 2 powers at the beginning. Unless those powers will be the "common" powers like punch and kick ?

The power fx is a separate system from the AB. That team is still working on that project and which also involves animations which is a lot of work. Even with animation packs on the store, we have to evaluate them to see if they can be used in our same (some for example are made for more fighter games with missing frames and suxh), and then they have to be tweaked to our model. It is quite time intensive.

Thanks for that answer :) i didn't think it was to hard to make this kind of things and i understand i can take a lot of time to developp it, even with some elements from the market.

I took Tannim's comment about "props limits it to 2" to mean "if one of your themes is a prop, the prop effectively occupies two of your three slots and leaves room for only one other theme. So you can either have three non-prop themes or a prop and one other theme, but not 2 props."

So, the question is, which of these interpretations is right?

1. Three themes allowed, at most 2 of which can be props

2. Three themes allowed, but a single prop counts as two of your themes, which means that when you do the math, you can only have at most one prop plus one non-prop theme.

2 props, 3 aesthetics themes regardless of if you choose to use props or not, and they are chosen separate from each other.

Main reason is that having to choose prop and aesthetic theme as a single unit would make it unworkable since the list of every combination of prop type and aesthetic theme would easily become too long. This would also lead to that a prop would be "locked" into a single aesthetic theme (unless you choose the same prop for both aesthetic themes) which would be a big blow against customization. But also that just because I want to use a staff or spell book for my wizard, or assault rifle for my military guy, I shouldn't have as many thematic varieties usable to me?

Ones chosen props may enable suitable animations for that prop that are not suitable otherwise in the aesthetic themes chosen so that you can mix and match. Having to choose between using a prop or another aesthetic theme just doesn't make sense to me.

Kuraikari wrote:

I really am looking forward to seeing the avatar builder. It might be the thing I will use the most. And the longest of course. Oh god, I know I'm going to spend days creating one character...

I think the most important thing (besides a working builder in general) would be the possibility to save my characters locally so I can finish them later, if I'd need to log off. I wouldn't like to spend again 10 hours to just get to that point again, just to log off again and never get my character finished...

They are working on being able to save costumes and has said that costume and body sliders can be separate "saves", I'm hoping that power aesthetics will be a third one.

Kuraikari wrote:

@MWM where can I throw my money at you?

Until Second Chance goes live, there is this option: [url=https://www.patreon.com/HiJinx]The HiJinx Comic Patreon[/url]
ref:
[url=https://cityoftitans.com/forum/discuss-introducing-hijinx-mwm-publishing-and-faq]Introducing Hijinx! MWM Publishing! And a FAQ![/url]
[url=https://cityoftitans.com/forum/hijinx-webcomic-discussion-thread]Hijinx Webcomic Discussion Thread[/url]

Sorry, the term of “theme” causes confusion internally too. Always clarifying that one.

When it comes to aesthetics, “theme” can be the set of animations; martial arts-karate can be an animation theme. We began using the term animation suite for these.

There can also be visual effects themes; fire particles can be an example. We use FX Suite for these.

Props may dictate a which animation themes you have access to. Picking a sword will give you access to the suites do sword animations. But you won’t have animations that don’t go with a sword while having the sword prop equipped.

Two pistons would be two props. I don’t have word on dual-weild animations as of yet. It may be something that doesn’t come in at launch depending on factors.

Would one have access to sword use animations, if one isn't using a sword (or staff in place of sword)?

I don't see why going propless would give you access to it.

desviper wrote:

But without props, you have infinite access to FX suites, right?

It seems props only affect animation suites, not FX suites, so not sure what you are asking. And only in such a way that makes the animations available to makes sense with the prop "equipted".

Right, but you made it sound like you thought that choosing/"equipping" a prop would reduce the number of FX suites you could use, which was the point I was trying to clarify.

FX suites does not seem to have anything directly limiting our access to them, but it also may be that that is what they have referred to in other posts as having to choose two visual themes. Seems to be in addition to the unarmed one making it effectively three total. It may also be thata that is referring to animation suite, or maybe both combined. Jeez, we really need an official post (front page news update) on how we will be choosing the aesthetics for our powers.

Ok, my revised understanding of how power aesthetics will be "built":
Choose if using a prop, and if so which of your two chosen ones.
Choose an animation from a character animation suite, adjusted to suit prop.
Apply a "trail" effect from FX suite. For melee ones it's any residual effects from the swing, and for ranged ones it's the projectile and its trail.
Apply "hit" effect/animation.