Forget just Detective Baby Legs, I can envision an entire precinct of Baby Legs!

Edit:
[Img]https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/rickandmorty/images/c/cd/Baby_Legs.png/revision/latest?cb=20160603213353[/img]

Woo hoo -- earlier than expected! Definitely worth it! I like the look of that mesh-y material on his shoulders.

With all that range in so many sliders, doesn't that cause you folks clipping nightmares with various costume pieces, or does everything scale the same as we see stuff scaling in this video?

I see wee lock symbols by various sliders. Am I right in thinking that once we get one setting right we can lock it down as we continue to experiment with the rest?

And just to confirm what's been said before: there will be a selection of pre-sets to rely on when our sliders just get way out of hand or to use as a starting point, correct?

Last question: any chance we could get a Random button by every individual slider and costume piece selector for those times when we don't want an entirely random character, but are stuck for ideas on only one element?

Thanks for the very specific comments on this video and upcoming ones. That's good communication.

I can actually think of some uses for some of those body types in the second video. :-)

This is some really, really good stuff MWM. Thanks for all the hard work!

EDIT: P.S. Nice, professional intro/transition animations between sections of the video also.

[B]Worth noting:[/b]

Someone on the YouTube page asked about posture, and a dev replied that their goal is to have various "idle animations" for things like that, and aim to add more as time goes on.

Cinnder wrote:

Woo hoo -- earlier than expected! Definitely worth it! I like the look of that mesh-y material on his shoulders.

With all that range in so many sliders, doesn't that cause you folks clipping nightmares with various costume pieces, or does everything scale the same as we see stuff scaling in this video?

I see wee lock symbols by various sliders. Am I right in thinking that once we get one setting right we can lock it down as we continue to experiment with the rest?

And just to confirm what's been said before: there will be a selection of pre-sets to rely on when our sliders just get way out of hand or to use as a starting point, correct?

Last question: any chance we could get a Random button by every individual slider and costume piece selector for those times when we don't want an entirely random character, but are stuck for ideas on only one element?

Thanks for the very specific comments on this video and upcoming ones. That's good communication.

I can actually think of some uses for some of those body types in the second video. :-)

This is some really, really good stuff MWM. Thanks for all the hard work!

EDIT: P.S. Nice, professional intro/transition animations between sections of the video also.

As the guy who actually coded (not the actual data or the wiring to the character - that was "Geeks") and did the planning on the sliders I can answer your questions (and I'll probably answering them again in the Twitch stream Wednesday - it will be live with little time for me to prepare as much as I'd like).

We have had some clipping in the past but I think we have that licked. Some animations we've find have amusing results though. And idle has the character's hand going into his throat slightly. Not sure if that has a ready solution yet but we'll keep trying.

The "wee lock symbol" is my artwork and code - as is the reset symbol beside it (in fact most of the slider system is based on my code). You guessed correctly on their function. Even the reset button won't work when the slider is locked. The reset option returns the slider to its default value.

There will be a selection of presets. We've even provided several already in the video. I expect this to be improved over time.

We do want to provide for randomization. I can add a per-slider randomization option if the rest of the team approves. It's just artwork and a smidgen of code for me to add to the slider widget. Maybe an hour's work for me at most.

Hero_Zero wrote:

So we get our hands on it when?

"THE TITANS ARE COMING! THE TITANS ARE COMING!"

The game (beta) release is scheduled for this fall. We [i]might[/i] have the character tool out earlier as part of an alpha release by the middle of this year. We have some legal issues that prohibit us from doing certain things until the game is released as part of our engine licensing agreement. We'll get there.

I note the note of the pre-alpha UI, however, I also see only 9 colors. Now, I have no problems with a 9-color working palette when choosing what colors go where. That seems handy. I just hope that there will be a way for us to choose what colors go on that palette from a Much larger pool?

I don't insist on 16-million shades, but 256, or 1024, or a few more would be handy. Just so we don't all end up the same color, right?

Be Well!
Fireheart

Fireheart wrote:

I note the note of the pre-alpha UI, however, I also see only 9 colors. Now, I have no problems with a 9-color working palette when choosing what colors go where. That seems handy. I just hope that there will be a way for us to choose what colors go on that palette from a Much larger pool?

I don't insist on 16-million shades, but 256, or 1024, or a few more would be handy. Just so we don't all end up the same color, right?

Be Well!
Fireheart

Because of bandwidth issues we have had to make a trade-off. I had hoped to have a palette in the million-color range but we are going for 256. The picker you see will still have a low number of favorites with the ability to expand it to a larger palette as needed. At least that's what we've been discussing the past few days. I might still use the color slider tool that we showed off at one point just to make things easier to manage (a grid of 16x16 is pretty large!). But three colors per costume piece is within our limits.

Thanks for the answers, avel. It all sounds excellent to me.

avelworldcreator wrote:

We do want to provide for randomization. I can add a per-slider randomization option if the rest of the team approves. It's just artwork and a smidgen of code for me to add to the slider widget. Maybe an hour's work for me at most.

That would be a sweet QoL thing if it can be done. In the old game when I wanted a random piece, I had to count all the entries in a drop-down and figure out what sort of die roll would fit that. Come to think of it, you could use an icon of a die for the random feature.

avelworldcreator wrote:

The picker you see will still have a low number of favorites with the ability to expand it to a larger palette as needed. At least that's what we've been discussing the past few days.

This is the sort of thing (along with the comments about pre-sets) that convinces me that MWM is making sure that the large scope of options won't overwhelm folks. Sounds like this game will cater to the full range of players, making it easy to create something quick for those who want that, but also providing tons of extra options for people who want ultimate tweaking. Outstanding!

Thank you. That's literally our goal. And, yes, a pair of 6-siders is actually what I had in mind for the graphic (or something similar). If I did a d% or similar I'm sure I'd be just confusing. :p

ThunderCAP wrote:

It's great but I want to stress something. I'll summarize like this:

Freedom to create gnomes --> It's OK
The player creates a gnome by mistake --> It's NOT ok

There is a great need to put a meter (always visible), a measure, a shadow showing the normal height for the majority of npc, or the average value or some "named height sections" or whatever could clearly tell the player if your character will be considered "giant" or "tall" or "average" or "short" in game. Your decision how to do that.

I don't fear the quantity of players willing to create giants or gnomes, I'm sure they won't surpass the 50% of the population which is fine (imho) since the game will be full of npcs too.
The issue comes if the majority of players creates monsters on mistakes and not because they want to, because I'm pretty sure the majority of players are lazy and won't correct the mistakes, they won't restart the game and the character by re-creating it because they wanted a Superman and got a Puck (Alpha flight, shorter than Wolverine) or Giant-man and they just discover that by talking with the first 10 npcs.

Also I don't want to create the character 10 times because I need to play the game first, to get an idea of the correct height to reproduce based on the npcs I will meet at begin.

- Easy to correct (you just need to put some shadows or lines or named sections of the height).
- Great impact on immersion and credibility of the players mob and of your character compared to npcs.

You might have missed it but we have a control that that puts up a scale. Some people don't want it "always visible" apparently so we made a toggle. It's there though, and it works. We haven't messed much with a per-user settings system but it should be on our list.

Kassandros wrote:

That looks incredible. Very nice. The range of options looks pretty astounding. Not up to date on current AAA games but this is very promising.

Hoping there will be some good non-human options eventually. I think it's been said after release but I'd love to play with all sorts of body types and critters.

The mention of tails and wings sounds super fantastic. One of the best things about CoX was the ability for a low level character to fly and have nice wing animations to go with it so you could just fly around the beautiful islands and chat.

Great work! Congrats on all the progress so far.

I miss my wings and tail too. We haven't forgotten.

Looking good! Can't wait to get my hands on it!

Looks great! I too think the scale or police height lines or whatever should be on by default, but I'll settle for the toggle being easily visible.

Can't wait to get my manipulative members on this game!

OH S#$!@*%T! THINGS IS GETTIN SHINEY UP IN HERE!

Great job! And y'all can expect more positive buzz now that you're at a point where you can begin to crank out the visuals that are all most people really want to see anyway.

To me, what is really exciting about these great visuals is knowing the lore and mechanics that they will overlay.

This game is going to be freaking awesome.

The Nightmare is appeased. The only thing I would add is that on top of the dropdown menu for costume pieces, there also be the classic left and right buttons like in the old game. Also "prebuilt" costumes from sets. I actually used that feature for brainstorming alt looks.

Congrats on a stable chargen backend and a decent video. Add me to the number looking forward to a hands on experience. Can I hold you to the "...years to get here but a lot less than that to finish." remark? I think for my own personal sanity and for avoiding the danger being less than a positive force to this effort, I am going to walk away from following the daily activities on this forum and on Twitch for at least six months; or maybe even until later in the fall. That isn't much time in comparison to Kickstarter until now. You can thank me for making this move later ;) . This way I will be able to marvel at the rapid progress you have made to reach beta and become a business enterprise rather than throw rocks. Tick tock guys, tick tock.

avelworldcreator wrote:

ThunderCAP wrote:

avelworldcreator wrote:

Ah! I see you posted almost as soon as I did. Some of the values you suggest might be highly subjective so we have confined ourselves to a simple numeric scale.

Is the middle of each bar the default value?
That would work too, the player won't take long to notice the default value is always set at the middle of each bar and that would be easy to re-default something when needed.

Depends entirely on each slider but if you read the earlier posts I point out that each slider has a "reset" and "lock" buttons that help you undo or protect you from such mistakes.

Okay, but the numeric values in each slider do not necessarily translate well, in terms of 'size'. Proportion and 'size' are subjective, as you say, however, having some objective Scale, such as 'height-lines' helps inform that subjective sense. That way, I will have a way of knowing/measuring/judging how well my subjective size-changes translate into the results that I desire.

Be Well!
Fireheart

Fireheart wrote:

avelworldcreator wrote:

ThunderCAP wrote:

avelworldcreator wrote:

Ah! I see you posted almost as soon as I did. Some of the values you suggest might be highly subjective so we have confined ourselves to a simple numeric scale.

Is the middle of each bar the default value?
That would work too, the player won't take long to notice the default value is always set at the middle of each bar and that would be easy to re-default something when needed.

Depends entirely on each slider but if you read the earlier posts I point out that each slider has a "reset" and "lock" buttons that help you undo or protect you from such mistakes.

Okay, but the numeric values in each slider do not necessarily translate well, in terms of 'size'. Proportion and 'size' are subjective, as you say, however, having some objective Scale, such as 'height-lines' helps inform that subjective sense. That way, I will have a way of knowing/measuring/judging how well my subjective size-changes translate into the results that I desire.

Be Well!
Fireheart

We are stuck with numbers for space reasons on the sliders. How we [i]label[/i] specific values, what meaning we give them, is what is personal and subjective; numbers related to proportion and size are absolutely objective. It can even vary with the same person depending on their mood and such. "Oh, it's only a mile away." "Dang! That's a mile away!". No, we are absolutely not going to put a ruler next to every part.

Thank you for this. It's rather exciting because it makes it feel like "Wow! This is really happening!" I would say "I can't wait," but clearly I can. I'm just glad that the wait seems to be drawing to a close, and what we have been waiting for is going to be so worth it! :)

Shadow Elusive wrote:

No, we have a height scale you can toggle in and out of sight, and may possibly include a few props on a similar toggle for context.

As long as NPCs aren't all 7 feet tall like in City of Heroes, this will be perfect. :P

[img]https://media.giphy.com/media/mXnO9IiWWarkI/giphy.gif[/img]

Doctor Tyche wrote:

McNum wrote:

Shadow Elusive wrote:

No, we have a height scale you can toggle in and out of sight, and may possibly include a few props on a similar toggle for context.

What units will that use? Could we have a setting for both Metric and Imperial? I can't really what's super tall or not in feet, but I know centimeters pretty well.

That would be nice for the whole game, actually, now that I think about.

The engine itself is in metric.

Yay Metric! I'm not really all that familiar with yards or miles, so games that use them may as well tell me it's 40 thurbims away.

Shadow Elusive wrote:

No, we have a height scale you can toggle in and out of sight, and may possibly include a few props on a similar toggle for context.

And why not like in FF14 which allow you to put your character in a specific landscape context ?
That could be a really great thing !
I wanna try it in a street, in a room (or the orbit room :D), in a forest... just let me choose between some (maybe 3 or 4) pre-loaded backgrounds through a selector :)

OathboundOne wrote:

TitansCity wrote:

Shadow Elusive wrote:

No, we have a height scale you can toggle in and out of sight, and may possibly include a few props on a similar toggle for context.

And why not like in FF14 which allow you to put your character in a specific landscape context ?
That could be a really great thing !
I wanna try it in a street, in a room (or the orbit room :D), in a forest... just let me choose between some (maybe 3 or 4) pre-loaded backgrounds through a selector :)

My guess is that it has to do with them wanting to offer a stand-alone character creator. It's one thing to have the Character Creator access the character files, it's another thing entirely to have it support an "in-game" style location to test your costumes out in (even a very small one).

Maybe not an In Game location but at least some preset environnements to load ? even if they have not extreme details in it but just few elements to consider the size of the character in some environnements like in front of a building door, next to a tree in a lansdcape.
They probably could integer the character in a basic landscape :)

Now I don't feel so bad about being bummed last week, because this update was perfect! AHHHHHHH!@!$!%!

dvirbl wrote:

would we also have a master randomize button so we can randomize everything at once and not go item by item?

Oh yeah, I was just foolishly assuming we would have a master Random button when I asked for individual buttons, so I'm glad you have asked.

McJigg wrote:

As long as NPCs aren't all 7 feet tall like in City of Heroes, this will be perfect. :P

Yes, please let us avoid repeating that.

If only there were some sort of device, say a 'computing' device, that could convert from one unit to another. And if only there were many, many free software applications, let's call them 'apps', that one could download onto a handheld device, which also make these sorts of conversions... :-)

Why is it that the person who said they didn't understand Imperial didn't generate such a snide asinine response? One which assumed a smartphone that downloads apps? One that says "If you don't do things like I do, YOU need to adjust"? Particularly given that I was not in any way saying it needed to be done MY way, simply that I would have more difficulty using it than people who understand metric. And people say AMERICANS are snooty! LOL

Yep. It beats acceptance all to hell. If someone doesn't do things exactly like you, to hell with them.

I mean to be fair, CoH used meters for certain measurements (like distance to mission instance). If I ever needed to see how tall to make X character, it's not that hard to just do a quick google search.

I mostly lurk on the forums, but I have to say I am impressed. A lot of the fun in CoH was just making characters. I don't know how many I made but then never played much. Too many to count. This looks like it takes CoH to the next level (and well it should, right?). Can't wait to get my hands on it.

McJigg wrote:

Shadow Elusive wrote:

No, we have a height scale you can toggle in and out of sight, and may possibly include a few props on a similar toggle for context.

As long as NPCs aren't all 7 feet tall like in City of Heroes, this will be perfect. :P

When I complained to the CO devs (back when they existed) about Sapphire being Zdeno Chara-sized in the Anniversary event, they explained that they made NPCs oversized so they’d be visible and clickable in a crowd. Maybe if there was an interaction zone around the NPC with a “press F to talk” prompt, you could mitigate that.

SisterSilicon wrote:

McJigg wrote:

Shadow Elusive wrote:

No, we have a height scale you can toggle in and out of sight, and may possibly include a few props on a similar toggle for context.

As long as NPCs aren't all 7 feet tall like in City of Heroes, this will be perfect. :P

When I complained to the CO devs (back when they existed) about Sapphire being Zdeno Chara-sized in the Anniversary event, they explained that they made NPCs oversized so they’d be visible and clickable in a crowd. Maybe if there was an interaction zone around the NPC with a “press F to talk” prompt, you could mitigate that.

There is in CO which makes the choice to have oversized NPCs even more confusing.

I personally like the old "right click, double click, or target and click in a dropdown menu to interact" that is so prevalent in early MMOs and cRPGs.

At least height/distance conversions are pretty simple. Weight, on the other hand... "He only weighs 30 Kilos." Sounds like Greek to me. If it's important, I'll look it up, but mostly I just ignore it and gather what I need to know of the weight from context.

Totally worth it! I like the range in the sliders. I sometimes like making really odd toons. Maybe somebody wants to make a tank named Slappy McSlappyHands or something.It looks like it could be done. Brilliant! I'm so itchy to play! Keep up the good work.

And all these odd-shaped toons should make for great roleplay.

Mordheim13 wrote:

Interestingly, I like the "fat" option that was demonstrated. This is because in CoH one of my toons went through a pregnancy, and it took a bit of playing with the generator to make her look pregnant. This will have the provision right away, it seems.

Cabbit insisted we have it. Took a *lot* of work for it to look right.

Doctor Tyche wrote:

Mordheim13 wrote:

Interestingly, I like the "fat" option that was demonstrated. This is because in CoH one of my toons went through a pregnancy, and it took a bit of playing with the generator to make her look pregnant. This will have the provision right away, it seems.

Cabbit insisted we have it. Took a *lot* of work for it to look right.

All hail Warcabbit, and you for agreeing. I can't possibly be the only one with that RP idea, plus some might like to play a less well-sculpted Hero or Heroine. Something like "Uncle Marvel" of the old Marvel Family. LOL

Peter from Family Guy as a hero-- or, more appropriately, Villain.