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Point is, it will never be enough, and it will continue to snowball into more and more work, one step at a time, eating up more time and resources that could have been used on new content you could have cooked up twice the amount of when you were making sure your green laser eyes were green when they hit AND fired.
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QFT.
New enemies, mission maps and zones > orange icy effects for the Fruit Fletcher's Juice Concentrate Arrow.
I am one of the very opinionated about this subject. I must say this is by and far the best open dev post EVER made on the subject. BAB you should be the Full time PR guy for CoX (if it pays more), and baring that, well just keep doing the great job you do.
I understood it, and hate that I did. It is very frustrating to want a feature as bad as I and others I know want this, and see where it is not practical at all. I still hope it is being considered a little at a time addition. I would understand if it is not though.
What I would suggest is to move ALL of the powers you can to the WC model. The one that comes to mind is EM's pink pompoms of death (I believe that was one of the ones you said could be easily moved, or I could have misread that as I was up all night with the new baby.) Move what you can now, get to the rest if you ever can.
As I said, it just sucks to realize you may never get something you want in the game you love the most. I think PC could make this game huge, but I think no new content could kill it completely, and PC is not worth that.
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Saving link to this thread so I can refer to it in all the future "Power customization shouldn't be that hard," "If we have weapons customization then we should also have power customization" and "Champions Online will destroy CoH if we don't get power customization too!" threads.
When it comes to customization I wuld prefer it be put towerds things like on the pets. I feel the power colers the way they are are fine. Yes blue fire and purpel lighting wuld look cool, but your right there are things that desereve the to be worked on more. It makes no sense to work for ever jsut to a minor cosmetic work and not put out any real content for a realy long time. Still wuld love to see customeized pets I'll admet.
I just think that there are one or two powers that you could change the color of and a lot of people would be happy.
For example...the Prestige Power Slide.
PINK?
Why in the world did you guys go with pink? Why not just use something that would go with every concept toon, such as bright white or silver?
Thanks BaB, this was very informative.
Global name: @k26dp
*speed reads the whole thing*
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A: Technically, yes...they could. Still, I think we'd prefer to hold off on these particular powers until we can deal with being able to customize the whole powerset. Otherwise we could paint ourselves into a corner by making the elemental weapons customizeable and then not being able to make the rest of the power FX customizeable because of that.
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Hey that sounds very nearly like a promise that you will get around to giving us power customization some day. WOOT!
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Very nice post, BAB. But, I hope nobody minds if I mention a few other problems that would have to be sorted out?
First, there are a couple of power sets that have a power that doesn't match the color of the rest of the set. /Thermal for corruptors is one, as is the fire defensive set. Both of these have a shield power that is more blueish-white than the normal color of the flames, to make it stand out. If PC went in, these powers would either have to start to match the colors of the set or they would require a second choice for colors.
The second problem comes when you start to stack powers. Let's look at Force Field for an example: You're on a team with three FF users. One has red bubbles, one has yellow, and one's still at classic blue. Now, how do you handle it when they start to put shields on their allies? Will a red shield and a yellow shield make an orange shield? What if Yellow has both personal shields, but Red only has one? Yellow-Orange shields? And then blue starts adding shields in, and... yuck. There's also the eyesore you'd get when they all fire up their big AoE shields and start moving around each other. It might look neat from a distance, but I'm sure anyone caught in such a mess would quickly discover it to be as headache inducing as the old Sonic effects.
Finally, there are powers that create other power effects. MM Robots cast their own Force Fields. The /Traps FF Generator does the same. MM Robots shoot red lasers, and MM Zombies hurl green "stuff". /Devices Trip Mines and Time Bombs create explosions of orange flame. And Trick Arrow is full of secondary effects after the arrow hits, including (Castle's favorate power) Oil Slick. And who's power customization would determine what color Oil Slick burns, anyway? When you have a team up of The Purple Archer and The Green Flame, having it burn orange just doesn't seem like an option...
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I think that goes back to what BAB said about the powers could inherit from the player costume, but how they interacted with enemies (and I assume allies) could not be changed. And the bubbles that are on players are one of those continuing effects that he mentioned I think. So, even if you could change the color of your Force Field attacks, the two bubbles you put on an ally will always be the way they are.
That's where I'm thinking if you make blue fire attacks, when it hits the enemy and burns, it's still going to be some of those red flames burning on them.
And that gets back to why it really shouldn't be done.
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There's just no way to intercept hit or continuing effects, so every powerset would have some sort of disjointed half customized, half standard look. That's just not acceptable for us
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And it wouldn't be acceptable to all of the people clamoring for PC. They would be the first ones back in here complaining about how half-arsed a job the devs did on PC and how they were leaving for Champions, yadda yadda. *rolleyes smiley*
Spend the code and animation time on more new powersets, some villain SFs, and whatever else you guys have up your sleeve for the rest of the year. 
Thanks for the info Brawler. Great post.
There are three flowers in a vase, the third flower is green.
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I just think that there are one or two powers that you could change the color of and a lot of people would be happy.
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*This* seems like it would be worth the time. The Prestige Power Slide mentioned being the big one. At least give everyone with the power slide a second, white power slide. (I don't even have the slide and I cannot for the life of me figure out why they chose this color.)
Doing something to make Hasten less visually distracting, since like 50% of all characters have it, would also be helpful.
I know weapon customization was a big reason me and my friends came back to CoH after several years off. Just conceptually it was a very strong draw for us. This is the case even though most of us are playing with characters that don't even take advantage of it. Still, it was a trigger.
I'm not sure if it's the most requested feature of not, but the great thing about it is that it's an update you can capture in a screenshot and people can look at it and say, "Yeah, that does look fun".
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Someone needs to build a data maintenance tool for Castle to use so duplicate powers don't turn into a maintenance issue.
It seems like it'd be pretty straightforward, flag differences other than color/sound/animation in supposedly 'identical' powers for his attention.
I would keep asking for exceptions, but it's probably useless, so - at this point, I suppose, "don't bother with power customization, it'd have been nice but obviously REALLY isn't worth it anymore" is the best attitude to take.
After all the game is very enjoyable as it is now. And we will all benefit from new game activities more than simply a visual flavor addition.
OK so I get why PC is hard to do, but I don't quite understand whether you are going to try it or not. I read the F.A.Q. but it seems like you said no it's not gonna happen, then you said we are trying to figure out how to do it then you said no again. Please clarify: is it ever going to happen or no?
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I think the answer is:
With the current setup, and what they know, they can't do it the same way they did weapon customization. The only way they can think of to do it and do it right involves a massive amount of time and effort with the only return on investment being that Block of Ice now comes in lime green. In other words, not much visible return for the effort expended. Compare that with other areas that they get more bang for the buck, and power customization keeps getting set aside in favor of other things.
However, they're going to keep trying to figure out a way to do it. If they figure out a way that they can do it without basically writing City of Heroes 2, they'll jump on it.
In other words: Power Customization will be added just as soon as it's feasible. Right now, it's very much not feasible. But just as soon as it is, they'll add it.
Well if I understand this correctly, MM pets must be pulled from a bank of available costumes. Is there a way to redirect the call script from a pre-built database of costumes to a player created one? So instead of Summon Soldier > goto pet database > summon random soldier it would go Summon Soldier > goto player pets > summon Custom Soldier. Using the costume editor a player could created all 3 costumes for a pet for each upgrade.
Thanks for making this F.A.Q. BaB.
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OK so I get why PC is hard to do, but I don't quite understand whether you are going to try it or not. I read the F.A.Q. but it seems like you said no it's not gonna happen, then you said we are trying to figure out how to do it then you said no again. Please clarify: is it ever going to happen or no?
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Here's what BaB said in an earlier thread in the Suggestions forum:
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Actually, the time required to implement it stays exactly the same. There's will eventually be more people available to actually do that work but that still doesn't mean it's the best investment of resources. Where as it was completely impossible before, and may be possible now, it's still not a given that it's the best thing for the game.
I'd also have to refute the claims that this is the most often requested feature. It's not. It's high up there, but there are still a half dozen things that are suggested quite a bit more and would actually have more of an impact on the game.
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Its an easy interpretation from all the explanations the developers have given time after time that while they would like to do power customization, its both an enormous amount of work, and not the top request of the playerbase.
They aren't likely to say "no we'll never ever do it", but its pretty clear this is a "maybe sometime in the distant future when we have more resources to work with".
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[ QUOTE ]
Stage 2 is a massive overhaul of every single effects script used by player powers that we're going to customize. Right now, the colors for the various effects are softcoded into the particle emitter scripts. Most of our particle emitters use grayscale textures that are tinted to an RGB value through the particle script. In order for a particle to inherit the tint from an outside source (currently only from a costume node it's attached to), it has to be set to red. So 255,0,0 as an RGB value means that particle is going to inherit 100% of the costume nodes RGB color. The more white a particle's RGB value is the less color it inherits. Most basic example of this would be the effects for Energy Blast powers. Those are all tinted various colors, from blue to white. All of those particle scripts would have to have their RGB values shifted to red instead...So there would be a pretty big chunk of work required to 1) tracking down, collating, and duplicating all of the FX and particles scripts currently used by powers 2) change all of the RGB values used by all of the particle scripts so that they can inherit the color from an outside source.
On top of that, we also have some particle scripts that use pre-colored particle textures. Dark Miasma is a good example of that. We also use geometry in some of our FX scripts, and most of them use some sort of pre-colored texture So things like the bubble for Force Fields, that teal blue-green is the color of the texture that's on that sphere. Those particles and FX geometry would have to have new grayscale textures made for them and then they would need to duped and set up to use color tinting.
Stage 2 isn't difficult work, it's just a ton of it. There are tens of thousands of FX and particle scripts that would need to be tracked down, duplicated, and modified.
Stage 3 is hooking all this up into some sort of system or UI to allow you guys as players to change your fireballs from red-orange to green. Most logical place for that is the costume editor, probably something similar to how you currently deal with auras or custom weapons. Other ideas involve special color enhancements that you can slot into powers, console commands that you could type in, options set in the graphics menu, etc. Those are all implementation ideas...probably the easiest step of the whole process.
Can it be done? Sure. Given enough time almost anything can be done. But is it more important to do than all of the various other things that can also be done in the same amount of time? That's the step where power customization as a feature has repeatedly fallen off the list and pushed back to the next issue. We still continue to discuss it, trying to figure out some way to do it in a way that won't require as much new code, or won't require so much time from an FX artist to make it happen.
[/ QUOTE ]Instead of overwhelming yourselves by trying to do it all at once, split up the time necessary to complete it between now and Issue 13. Do maybe half until I12 and the rest after.
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I like power customization, I like the idea that you have stated the problem and also a thesis saying it can be done but with alot of work.
You stated before that Power Customization was up there with one of the top requests. You fulfilled supposedly our top 2, able to go back and redo content and new powersets which you still haven't fulfilled. Either I12 is going to have a huge bunch of unique powersets, or power customization.
Then i13 will have power customization, because you have had enough time to implement systems to satisfy the other "top" requests which I think are just inevitable setbacks to distract us from what we really want. You have the time and a possible solution, now it is TIME TO GET TO WORK. Because power customization will be the only thing that will keep me to COH.
(On note, do not say power customization is not the top most requested thing, why you say? Well gee look at all the explanations, the discussions, and time put into just stating the problem. I can only think of one thing and that is bugs, and crashes fixable with proper software and the handful of missions that should of been fixed or find a work around. It is time that we stop putting off the goal and start working on it.)
This is a great thread. It shows that BaB has really thought this through and know exactly what needs to be done to do it. And while I'm not a programmer, I can see that while it's possible to do Power Customization, it's a big task. Well, I'm one of those who'd like to see PC, but I can wait. If it suddenly becomes the next best thing to do for the game, I'll cheer for it. If not? Eh... It's not anything that get my blood boiling. We've gone this far without it.
For implementation, I say costume creator. It's where we go to color everything else about our characters, so it should be where we should go to color our powers.
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Issue 12 MIGHT have a new powerset in it, I doubt it.
But nether it nor Issue 13 will have power customization.
They have said that it is a full year of man hours to make it work. Maybe more, maybe less.
They have only had a tiny team for so long that the fact they managed to pull the issues we have seen is nothing short of magic. There hasn't been time to add this in, between all the other things their team has been doing. Not enough people.
Well, now they have more people, but there's still a years worth of work. If they did it a little at a time... we might see it in I20 or 21. If they dropped everything and worked on ONLY it. They might have it by 16-17.
But that means no new power/art content. Even the former means restricted content, because some of their time is devoted to digging through the mounds of power FXs.
Nothing short of Jesus coming down and coding it himself will make it come out anywhere close to this year.
The good thing is, Champions Online is still 2+ years from coming out, I'd say. So they have time to mess around before it comes ot picking between the two.
The only thing I could see them doing is to replace each Power set for each AT, one at a time over about 20 issues. This is the reason NOT to do it imo, cause once you start making somebody's Primary / Secndary Customizable, then everybody else will [censored] and moan about when their (insert favorite power here) is coming up on the schedule. The amount of PM's alone that would cause isn't worth it. Do I want Power Customization? Sure I'd guess it would be cool to have, but it really doesn't affect how I play the game wether my blasts are Purply Blue, or straight orange.
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I like power customization, I like the idea that you have stated the problem and also a thesis saying it can be done but with alot of work.
You stated before that Power Customization was up there with one of the top requests.
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Not quite. As I posted above, he's mentioned that there are least half a dozen other features requested more often. So, yeah, its in the top-10 probably, but its around number seven on the list of most requested things.
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Thank you BaB. Keep putting out all the fun stuff and stop worrying about PC. Keep experimenting and if you find an easier way to do it, then implement it. Otherwise, new powersets and content FTW!
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tl;dr
So, when are we getting Power Customization?
*runs and hides*