Tunnel Rat

That’s not a bad idea, RavenSoul, but as you mentioned later in your post, it’s not very user-friendly, and therefore it’s logical to assume that few people will use it. If the FX department invests a significant chunk of time into a new feature, I want to make sure that feature is easily accessible to a lot of our players.



Thanks for the suggestion, Vanden. To use this technique for an aura, or any persistent effect, would require a consistent screen of nonadditive particles. For aesthetic reasons, I didn’t want to have a lot of thick smoke spawn indefinitely around the character, so I made the tradeoff of having slightly transparent lava sprites.



Thank you, SilverAgeFan, but all the credit for the lava textures goes to Chris Gregory, one of our awesome environment artists. In his own words, “ It's a combination of a photo of a worn crosswalk (for the dark fractured islands of lava) and roof tar (for the hot liquid lava underneath).”

Chris did a presentation for the Paragon artists awhile back about his technique, and he is an unbelievably creative guy. One of the ground textures in the Underground was actually based on an egg he burned. That’s right; where we see a botched meal, Chris Gregory sees opportunity.

As for getting those textures for characters, all I can say is that I’ve seen our character team do increasingly amazing things.



Thanks for letting me know, Goblin Queen! I’m so glad those eye auras worked out for you!

You can have this RITE NAO! With I21's launch, Boils has a Head and Head and Arms option. (The Feathers aura should also have a light version.) I omitted it initially because I couldn't imagine anyone wanting boils on just their heads. Then I saw your awesome character concept and I was enlightened. Sorry about the wait on this one. Unfortunately I checked it in too late to make the I20.5 patches.


I can understand your request for a Slime head aura, but unfortunately with the very vertical shape and movement of the sprites involved, they would either be obscured by or clip noticeably with the head.


Great idea, SilverAgeFan! I'll keep this in mind.



I wouldn't call it new tech, though maybe a new technique. I believe the solution would be similar to what we did for Path Auras, which activate with an indicated animation state. If each weapon has its own animation state, the need to add an unwieldy number of options in the menu may be eliminated.


I agree with BaBs that having to implement all those menu options would be a deal-breaker. I'll spend some time on this and see what's possible.



Unfortunately, I don't think an opacity slider is going to help you with this. The reason many fully saturated hues are transparent is that they are mid or low value colors. This basically means that if you were to convert them to grayscale, they would appear to be gray or dark gray. With additive particles (particles that add light to the scene), the only truly opaque value is white. Anything less bright than white will have some degree of transparency. So an additive blue, for example, cannot be opaque, and will always be influenced by colors in the background.


There are ways around this, such as setting additive particles in front of nonadditive particles. Pyronic does this, which makes the colors brighter and less influenced by the background. However, most of the older effects use purely additive colors. If I get the opportunity to make alternate effects for some of these additive sets, I'll take an approach closer to what we did with Pyronic.


On the more broad subject of the possibility of an opacity slider, if the time involved is anywhere near the time we needed for color customization, I'm afraid the answer will be no. I don't feel it adds enough to the game to justify that scale of time commitment, especially with the growing possibility of implementing a way to suppress other players' effects. If you're having trouble changing the opacity of your powers with the current system, I'll leave you with a good rule of thumb. For bright sets, choose colors from the left side of the palette for increased transparency, and for dark sets, choose whitish colors.



Something like the Synapse aura is simple enough to implement for players. It can't be custom-tailored to the pattern of your costume like Synapse's is, but it can certainly be color customizable with one color as an aura, or with two colors as a theoretical alternative to Speed pool power effects.

Feycat - Just saw your post before I posted. The dark, opaque afterimages in the Dual Pistols attacks and Dimension Shift emote are the result of a bug. This will be fixed and reverted to the original look in an upcoming patch.

In other news, I expressed on the last Ustream marathon that I believed Granite Armor could be made customizable. I'll be devoting some of my free time to exploring this possibility. The trade-off would be that the Devouring Earth model is done away with, and replaced with a more generic-looking model that is placed over the character's body, similar to the rest of the Stone Armor powers.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on this trade-off. Thanks to those who have already posted their opinions!

Italics represent my clarification, Zyphoid. Hope you don't mind. I’m seeing a lot of requests that would tie into Pools Customization, so let me elaborate a little on what’s involved here.

Most importantly, this isn’t a task that requires only FX time. To implement these options into the powers customization screen, we need UI and code time. It’s true that we’ve already added an additional heading to this screen for Incarnate powers, but that was just one heading. We will need to add several headings to the powers customization screen to implement pool powers customization. And by several, I mean more than the screen can currently support. We also need code to help us address the question of whether all of the possible ancillary, patron and regular pools are visible in the screen at character creation, or whether they are added later in the game as you choose your powers. The first option will require code time, and the second option will require more code time. Then we'll need a UI artist to revise the powers screen and make sure it's as readable and attractive as possible.

I know some of you are really dying for an update on the state of pool powers customization. Being one of many people necessary for this feature, I'm not the best person to share this information. When and if there is solid information, we'll make an announcement.


Not a bad idea! I can get on board with Weapon Auras, and elemental variations of weapons. I'll look into this.

A tech version of the Victorian Decor aura does seem like a no-brainer. I can't promise a date or anything, but we're definitely looking into more variations for form-fitting/holographic auras.

Power customization in the AE isn't really up to me. I vaguely remember some folks talking about it, but I think there was concern about how much it would increase the file size of player-written story arcs.

As for an FX suppression slider, are you talking about changing the opacity of your powers? Or something that suppresses other players' effects beyond what the Max Particle Count graphics option can do?

As far as opacity goes, you can actually achieve more transparent effects by selecting darker colors. (This works best with Bright palettes.) I've seen suggestions for an opacity slider for powers before, but I think choosing darker tones addresses this request fairly well.

If you're talking about the suppression of other players' or unnecessary effects, then this is something we're looking into.

That is indeed possible. I think the ring of stars may look a little odd when the character is running around, but we can vary the motion paths of the stars a bit to make them look more natural.

Sure, there's no good reason why they should be excluded. Can't promise you a date, but I'll definitely mention this when we get some time to do more emotes.


Finally, I see there may be some confusion between character art and effects requests. Effects mainly cover things like powers, auras, costume changes, and the like. They do not include things like the bioluminescent glows introduced in the Mutant Pack, shaders or animated costume pieces. This is also not the best place to propose themes for booster packs or suggest character animations. These requests are outside my field and I'm not the best person to provide information on them. Please post these suggestions in the appropriate "All Things Art" threads so the right people can see them!

Anyway, it's great to see that this thread still lives. Thanks again for all your thoughts and ideas. I'll do my best to drop by more frequently!

The introduction of trail auras has generated some issues that I’d really like to resolve. We realize you guys want to use them with your regular auras, and that you’d like for your regular travel effects not to obscure them. I can’t give specifics on our progress on these issues, but it’s something we’re actively looking into.

Many of the existing path auras already have flight effects. Are you asking specifically for contrails that are more dramatic than the ones on the current Flight power?

I hear ya. I’m not sure if there’s a way to customize Domination, but I’ll look into it.

Hahaha! You can get pretty close to a rainbow theme with some sets when you choose colors red and green (bright palette). They’ll make yellow when they overlap, which gives you enough of the spectrum to suggest a rainbow effect.

While a dual aura system is currently unscheduled, it is something we have explored while attempting to break off path auras from regular ones. I’ve shared concerns about performance with you guys before, and the FX team is currently tossing around ideas about how a dual aura system can avoid the pitfalls that some defense auras currently demonstrate. On the subject of defense set FX, yes, some are… showing their age. And lag issues with powersets are always a concern. I’ve seen a lot of player interest in alternate FX for various sets, especially some of the older, uglier ones. It’s a project I’m interested in myself, and I’ll pass along the idea to the folks who schedule my tasks. And the FX team will definitely remember that players don’t like having their costumes obscured.

Also, thanks, Zamuel and Srmalloy, for highlighting that magma bug – that’s quite a stinker! I’ll investigate.

Great question, Nieromaru! We typically release our auras and other FX goodies with new issues, or half issues like 20.5, and booster packs. There are lots of reasons for this, but one of the more important ones is that it makes the QA and publishing schedules much more manageable. New auras have to be viewed, evaluated and tested by these departments, and it's much more orderly to do this when a lot of other new stuff is going into the game, rather than trying to schedule according to the whims of a rogue FX artist.

Another factor is that FX time is shared by a lot of other tasks besides auras. We are constantly working on effects for new powers, villain groups, zones, cutscenes, storyarcs, etc. An issue full of new powers and content, like I20, doesn't always leave a lot of time to devote to auras. Still, we realize how important character customization is to our players, and we do schedule time for that. We just can't focus all our time on auras and nothing else!

The Ascension Armor and Victorian Decor auras are the first auras to demonstrate some very exciting tech - FX geo that scales with physique to avoid clipping issues. We can do a lot with this new tech, and a decent energy armor aura is definitely on our wishlist.

Have you tried tinting one of the existing eye glows to black, or another dark color? Since the particles for most of the auras are additive, darker colors actually increase their transparency.

On the subject of eye auras, Goblin Queen (sorry, I can't find your post, but I've read it) has asked for eye glows that don't clip with hats. This can be a little tricky, since the tech that would usually push the glows in front of a hat's brim also pushes them behind the back of the head, when the character is viewed from the back.

Creating a very small eye aura may be the answer to both of your dilemmas, however. I'll keep it in mind for future auras.

Hahaha, no bribes necessary. I'd be curious to hear your feedback on the new Bubbles path aura, and whether this gets the job done.

For that matter, I'd love to hear everyone's feedback on the 20.5 auras, especially the path auras. It's the first time we've released a big batch of these, so I'd like to know your reaction to them.