We've all had moments like these - you have an old character sitting idly by and receiving no attention because you're just bored of him (we'll say "him"). Then one sunny day you get a good idea for how to make that character work, but you need to create a whole new character for it. And here you meet a stumbling block - how do you actually do that? There's no option to do that in-game, after all. So what now?
Well, I'm going to let you in on my way. It's very cumbersome, I'll admit, and probably more complicated than is necessary, but this method ensures that you copy ALL parameters of your character with as close to surgical accuracy as possibility allows. I'm aware there are easier methods, such as loading a character's costume into the tailor, or playing a character for a while and so forth, but try as I might, I never got those to work reliably. Even when I did, they didn't always carry everything over, changing colours, slider values, sometimes even costume details for no apparent reason. So I got down to it, and devised a method which is completely full-proof and very accurate. It's also, however, somewhat fat.
Since it would be a little... Dry, if I were to just sit down and talk about how to do it, I've decided to actually show you. We're going to recreate an obscure character I had lying around the servers. Meet Lemon Aid, a level 1 Science Defender. He's not a great looker, I will admit, but as we go about this, you'll grow to know his scaily features and petite physique. In this scenario, you are the proud owner of Lemon, and you just got an excellent new idea for him. You now want to remake the character, but keep the costume EXACTLY as it is now. So how do we do that? Well, there are three steps, which I will described based on order of difficulty.
Step 1: Write down the costume (easy)
Pick your preferred method for writing things down and prepare to write. This could be a plain text document in Note Pad, a big, elaborate Word document, or the time-honoured pen-on-paper method. After that, start writing down the costume options, their textures, their patterns and the colours they use. While you can make up your own set of rules on how to write things down, I have come up with my own that ensures everything is written down clearly and unambiguously.
Optional
Start with a name. Even if you title the file you're saving with your character's name, it's always handy to have it at the top just for clarity. Proceed with skin colour, describing the colour in round brackets. Then, break it down into sections. Start with a section name, then let each line represent a single category. Arrange it like this: Costume Item/Texture/Pattern: (Primary Colour)|(Secondary Colour). For items that don't exist, use [N/A] in brackets to avoid confusion with the slash separator. Record colours as a pair of numbers, with the first number denoting the line and the second number denoting the colour in that line, as viewed from the colours panel. This makes finding a colour fast and easy, as it describes colours by colour first, shade second. End Optional
Once you have everything else written down, recreating your costume pieces, textures and colours is as easy as following your list exactly as you wrote it down. This is a very simple, undemanding process, but it can get somewhat laborious, especially if you choose to use electronic means, as you'll be Alt-Tabbing a LOT.
Step 2: Record your sliders (intermediate)
Now that we can recreate the costume, the next step is to record your character's body and face slider positions. Unfortunately, the game doesn't give us any duplicable information on exactly where a particular slider is, so there's nothing to actually write down. Even if you were to take a screenshot of your sliders, there's still no direct way to reproduce that screenshot into the actual game. So this takes a little bit of ingenuity. It starts with taking a screenshot of your entire character editing screen with the sliders tab open.
On taking screenshots from the editor
Now, before I move on, it has been my experience that not everyone knows how to grab screenshots from the costume editor, as the game refuses to generate any screenshots from the editor when you try to make it. To obtain one, you need to do the following: Hit your Print Screen key. That will save an exact image of the picture of your screen in clipboard. Now, open pretty much any image-editing or viewing programme you may have installed (if you don't have any such, MS Paint will do just fine), then paste the picture in it. I can't speak for all interfaces, but this is generally done through Edit/Paste. Once that's done, save it. End note
Now, you have a screenshot of your character's sliders that looks something like this. Unfortunately, that screenshot doesn't contain any information that you can reproduce by hand, so it's going to take a little bit of creativity to actually use it, and a bit of software, at that. Obtain an image-viewing programme that can display pictures in full screen. Personally, I use IrfanView, as it's free, light, reliable and incredibly easy to use. You are free to pick your own programme, just as long as it can display images in full screen.
OK, provided you didn't alter the picture you took of your sliders in any way, it should match the resolution you are running your game in precisely. That's what we want. Start your game, go into your character editor and open the sliders tab. Now, Alt-Tab out of the game, open your sliders picture and set it to full screen. Now Alt-Tab between the game and the full-screen picture a few times. You'll notice that all elements of the picture as displayed match the corresponding elements from the game's menu, but the sliders on the pic and the slider in the menu are different.
Now this is the clever bit - look at the picture and move the sliders relatively close to where they look like they should be. Now Alt-Tab back to the picture and note how they change. You'll see you didn't get them quite right, and that they need to move a little to the left, or a little to the right. Adjust them, then check again. Repeat this as many times as necessary. Now, note that because the sliders are sensitive to the pixel, this may be a little bit tricky if your mouse hand isn't very steady. However, this also means that this method is precise to the pixel, provided you have the patience to see it through. Failing that, it's as precise as your patience allows.
A good tip when doing that is to go one slider at a time. It takes more time and causes more Alt-Tabbing, but it has much better accuracy and is, in the end, less irritating to do. Remember: your eyes are not exact to the pixel, so you cannot hope to remember the locations of the sliders. You need to try and retry until you match them. This isn't done by remembering them, but by comparing them, and the fewer the sliders you need to compare at a time, the easier it is and the less strain it puts on your nerves.
OK, so now you are able to recreate your costume exactly and replicate your sliders with perfect accuracy. Are we done yet? Well, no. You see, there's still one more slider to which we have so far never even had access to - the height slider. It's easy enough to check on a character you're making, but once you've made the character, you can't actually check height, so you don't know. What do you do, then? Well, we move on to:
Step 3: Discover your height (hard)
Discovering your exact height is IMPOSSIBLE, not unless a kind GM somehow pulls the records and tells you. And even then, what are they going to tell you? "Your height is something like 2/5 of the way up." Yeah, that helps! No, we need a more accurate method of recording height. Here's what you need to do:
Start making a brand new character. Archetype, Origin, Powersets and all that are irrelevant. All we care about is the costume. What you want, however, is to create an exact copy of the character you're trying to remake. HOW exact, in this case, is really up to you. The more exact, the better this will work, but even roughly the same is still accurate. Just NEVER forget to match the Leg slider. That one matters a LOT.
OK, now that you're done, go back to the Height slider. Boost that baby right up to the top, as high as it will go. We want a max-height character. Remember - the Height slider doesn't actually control height, it controls size. A character with greater height isn't just taller, he's actually upscaled in every respect. So a max-height version of the character you're trying to copy over should have the same proportions, but everything about them will be bigger. Now, enter that character into the game. Give it some corny name, anything that will get past the name check. You don't want to play that character. In fact, you can delete it as soon as the comparison is done. Slap that character in Outbreak or Breakout or whatever and log out back to the menu.
You should now have two similar characters - one big and one smaller. I've ended up with a Small Lemon and a Big Lemon. Look at them very closely, because the key to your height is right in front of your eyes. In this game, there's nothing to actually compare your character with in-game, because things vary too much. The ONLY thing that will give you an accurate assessment is a max-height copy of the same character. This gives you a constant, never-changing benchmark. This is what you compare against. Now HOW you compare is entirely up to you, though I'd advise against drawing on your screen.
I've done it many different ways, myself, from putting my finger on the screen where the head of one character is and switching (leaves a nice greasy spot), to stretching a sheet of paper at head level and comparing. For this example, I've put together a comparison picture. The white line here represents Small Lemon's head level, and if we trace it to the left, we can see just how tall Small Lemon is in comparison to Big Lemon. There are several areas on Big Lemon you can measure from, such as the belly or the left hand's lower arm, but I would suggest going for a place where the line intersects a detail on Big Lemon you can remember and recreate in Green. In this case, if you look at where the line intersects with Big Lemon's right arm, you'll note that that's slap-bang over the inside of his right elbow. That's what we'll use.
Additional notes
You may be tempted to measure against the background. After all, there is this nice, even building back there almost begging to be used as a ruler. But backgrounds change between all the character creation screens, so that measurement would be meaningless. Avoid falling for that unless you have specifically replaced all of your backgrounds to be the same one.
It is advisable that you never rotate your characters throughout this entire process. Accurate measurements can only be taken when comparing characters with the same orientation. You CANNOT match a character's orientation back to the default once it's been moved. Back out far enough for the orientation and reset before proceeding. End notes
So you have a relatively accurate measurement of how high your character should be. How do we transfer that into the game? We move on to the final step. Go into the character editor and make your character again. Make it as perfectly exact as you can, as that's going to be what you end up with in-game. Don't bother with any sliders on the Green Outline screen, just make the character in the costume editor.
When you're done, you will have gotten everything perfect, except the height. Now, back up to the Green Outline screen to finish this. Bump your character's height up to max and look at him. Now, remember the measurement we took before? Note the point up to where your character reaches against a max-height one, then drop the height down until the top of the character's head reaches that point. Again, you can measure however you please, but I put together this comparison pic. Remember what we found out? The top of Small Lemon's head reaches up to the inside of Bit Lemon's right elbow. That means that the height of Big Lemon's right shoulder is the height where the top Final Lemon's head should be like. In my pic, this is represented by the white line. The height at which Final Lemon matches the white line is the height given at the bottom of the picture. That's the height I used on the original character, and the height I'm going to want to use when recreating him.
I should not that this final step, in addition to being really hard and annoying, is also not perfectly accurate. It relies a LOT on getting your orientation right, catching the models at the same state of breathing (I prefer full breath in) and locating the "line" you want to match, itself. Barring any help from the development team, however, that's as close as we're ever going to get, and it's certainly a heck of a lot more precise than winging it from bad memory or trying to measure up against other people and obstacles. Plus, as laborious as it is to pull off, it still beats remaking 5 times over and still getting it wrong.
Final words
That's it. You're done. You have a copy of your character that's as close to the original as you're likely going to get. It took a long time to do, and it took even longer to write, so most of you that made it this far are probably wondering "Dude! Who cares?" Why, indeed, would it be so important to remake a character that one would have to go through THAT? Well, I have several reasons, see if one works for you:
1. It's a one-time process. You do it once, your character is transferred and you don't need to do it again.
2. It's precise. A lot more precise than any amount of winging it. To some people (myself included), their characters are perfect just the way they made them. Remaking them and risking getting them "wrong" is a very unpleasant prospect, enough to turn them off the character completely, or make them reroll and try again.
3. It's "right." Sometimes when we remake old stuff, we can't shake the feeling that we got something wrong. Even when everything is accurate, it still feels like we did something wrong and the character is somehow off, simply because it would have been so easy to make a mistake. This method alleviates that. It's precise and accurate. It doesn't LET you make any meaningful mistakes. The character is always "right."
That's all I have for now. With the new Powerset Proliferation feature, with the prospect of new Powersets in the future and with the general evolution of the game, I know there will be a lot of people who will want to reroll for one reason or another. If I've helped at least one of them, then this guide has done its job.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Arcanaville
Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.
We've all had moments like these - you have an old character sitting idly by and receiving no attention because you're just bored of him (we'll say "him"). Then one sunny day you get a good idea for how to make that character work, but you need to create a whole new character for it. And here you meet a stumbling block - how do you actually do that? There's no option to do that in-game, after all. So what now?
Well, I'm going to let you in on my way. It's very cumbersome, I'll admit, and probably more complicated than is necessary, but this method ensures that you copy ALL parameters of your character with as close to surgical accuracy as possibility allows. I'm aware there are easier methods, such as loading a character's costume into the tailor, or playing a character for a while and so forth, but try as I might, I never got those to work reliably. Even when I did, they didn't always carry everything over, changing colours, slider values, sometimes even costume details for no apparent reason. So I got down to it, and devised a method which is completely full-proof and very accurate. It's also, however, somewhat fat.
Since it would be a little... Dry, if I were to just sit down and talk about how to do it, I've decided to actually show you. We're going to recreate an obscure character I had lying around the servers. Meet Lemon Aid, a level 1 Science Defender. He's not a great looker, I will admit, but as we go about this, you'll grow to know his scaily features and petite physique. In this scenario, you are the proud owner of Lemon, and you just got an excellent new idea for him. You now want to remake the character, but keep the costume EXACTLY as it is now. So how do we do that? Well, there are three steps, which I will described based on order of difficulty.
Step 1: Write down the costume (easy)
Pick your preferred method for writing things down and prepare to write. This could be a plain text document in Note Pad, a big, elaborate Word document, or the time-honoured pen-on-paper method. After that, start writing down the costume options, their textures, their patterns and the colours they use. While you can make up your own set of rules on how to write things down, I have come up with my own that ensures everything is written down clearly and unambiguously.
Here is how I've written down Lemon's costume. If you want to use my technique, then follow these simple rules:
Optional
Start with a name. Even if you title the file you're saving with your character's name, it's always handy to have it at the top just for clarity. Proceed with skin colour, describing the colour in round brackets. Then, break it down into sections. Start with a section name, then let each line represent a single category. Arrange it like this: Costume Item/Texture/Pattern: (Primary Colour)|(Secondary Colour). For items that don't exist, use [N/A] in brackets to avoid confusion with the slash separator. Record colours as a pair of numbers, with the first number denoting the line and the second number denoting the colour in that line, as viewed from the colours panel. This makes finding a colour fast and easy, as it describes colours by colour first, shade second.
End Optional
Once you have everything else written down, recreating your costume pieces, textures and colours is as easy as following your list exactly as you wrote it down. This is a very simple, undemanding process, but it can get somewhat laborious, especially if you choose to use electronic means, as you'll be Alt-Tabbing a LOT.
Step 2: Record your sliders (intermediate)
Now that we can recreate the costume, the next step is to record your character's body and face slider positions. Unfortunately, the game doesn't give us any duplicable information on exactly where a particular slider is, so there's nothing to actually write down. Even if you were to take a screenshot of your sliders, there's still no direct way to reproduce that screenshot into the actual game. So this takes a little bit of ingenuity. It starts with taking a screenshot of your entire character editing screen with the sliders tab open.
On taking screenshots from the editor
Now, before I move on, it has been my experience that not everyone knows how to grab screenshots from the costume editor, as the game refuses to generate any screenshots from the editor when you try to make it. To obtain one, you need to do the following: Hit your Print Screen key. That will save an exact image of the picture of your screen in clipboard. Now, open pretty much any image-editing or viewing programme you may have installed (if you don't have any such, MS Paint will do just fine), then paste the picture in it. I can't speak for all interfaces, but this is generally done through Edit/Paste. Once that's done, save it.
End note
Now, you have a screenshot of your character's sliders that looks something like this. Unfortunately, that screenshot doesn't contain any information that you can reproduce by hand, so it's going to take a little bit of creativity to actually use it, and a bit of software, at that. Obtain an image-viewing programme that can display pictures in full screen. Personally, I use IrfanView, as it's free, light, reliable and incredibly easy to use. You are free to pick your own programme, just as long as it can display images in full screen.
OK, provided you didn't alter the picture you took of your sliders in any way, it should match the resolution you are running your game in precisely. That's what we want. Start your game, go into your character editor and open the sliders tab. Now, Alt-Tab out of the game, open your sliders picture and set it to full screen. Now Alt-Tab between the game and the full-screen picture a few times. You'll notice that all elements of the picture as displayed match the corresponding elements from the game's menu, but the sliders on the pic and the slider in the menu are different.
Now this is the clever bit - look at the picture and move the sliders relatively close to where they look like they should be. Now Alt-Tab back to the picture and note how they change. You'll see you didn't get them quite right, and that they need to move a little to the left, or a little to the right. Adjust them, then check again. Repeat this as many times as necessary. Now, note that because the sliders are sensitive to the pixel, this may be a little bit tricky if your mouse hand isn't very steady. However, this also means that this method is precise to the pixel, provided you have the patience to see it through. Failing that, it's as precise as your patience allows.
A good tip when doing that is to go one slider at a time. It takes more time and causes more Alt-Tabbing, but it has much better accuracy and is, in the end, less irritating to do. Remember: your eyes are not exact to the pixel, so you cannot hope to remember the locations of the sliders. You need to try and retry until you match them. This isn't done by remembering them, but by comparing them, and the fewer the sliders you need to compare at a time, the easier it is and the less strain it puts on your nerves.
OK, so now you are able to recreate your costume exactly and replicate your sliders with perfect accuracy. Are we done yet? Well, no. You see, there's still one more slider to which we have so far never even had access to - the height slider. It's easy enough to check on a character you're making, but once you've made the character, you can't actually check height, so you don't know. What do you do, then? Well, we move on to:
Step 3: Discover your height (hard)
Discovering your exact height is IMPOSSIBLE, not unless a kind GM somehow pulls the records and tells you. And even then, what are they going to tell you? "Your height is something like 2/5 of the way up." Yeah, that helps! No, we need a more accurate method of recording height. Here's what you need to do:
Start making a brand new character. Archetype, Origin, Powersets and all that are irrelevant. All we care about is the costume. What you want, however, is to create an exact copy of the character you're trying to remake. HOW exact, in this case, is really up to you. The more exact, the better this will work, but even roughly the same is still accurate. Just NEVER forget to match the Leg slider. That one matters a LOT.
OK, now that you're done, go back to the Height slider. Boost that baby right up to the top, as high as it will go. We want a max-height character. Remember - the Height slider doesn't actually control height, it controls size. A character with greater height isn't just taller, he's actually upscaled in every respect. So a max-height version of the character you're trying to copy over should have the same proportions, but everything about them will be bigger. Now, enter that character into the game. Give it some corny name, anything that will get past the name check. You don't want to play that character. In fact, you can delete it as soon as the comparison is done. Slap that character in Outbreak or Breakout or whatever and log out back to the menu.
You should now have two similar characters - one big and one smaller. I've ended up with a Small Lemon and a Big Lemon. Look at them very closely, because the key to your height is right in front of your eyes. In this game, there's nothing to actually compare your character with in-game, because things vary too much. The ONLY thing that will give you an accurate assessment is a max-height copy of the same character. This gives you a constant, never-changing benchmark. This is what you compare against. Now HOW you compare is entirely up to you, though I'd advise against drawing on your screen.
I've done it many different ways, myself, from putting my finger on the screen where the head of one character is and switching (leaves a nice greasy spot), to stretching a sheet of paper at head level and comparing. For this example, I've put together a comparison picture. The white line here represents Small Lemon's head level, and if we trace it to the left, we can see just how tall Small Lemon is in comparison to Big Lemon. There are several areas on Big Lemon you can measure from, such as the belly or the left hand's lower arm, but I would suggest going for a place where the line intersects a detail on Big Lemon you can remember and recreate in Green. In this case, if you look at where the line intersects with Big Lemon's right arm, you'll note that that's slap-bang over the inside of his right elbow. That's what we'll use.
Additional notes
You may be tempted to measure against the background. After all, there is this nice, even building back there almost begging to be used as a ruler. But backgrounds change between all the character creation screens, so that measurement would be meaningless. Avoid falling for that unless you have specifically replaced all of your backgrounds to be the same one.
It is advisable that you never rotate your characters throughout this entire process. Accurate measurements can only be taken when comparing characters with the same orientation. You CANNOT match a character's orientation back to the default once it's been moved. Back out far enough for the orientation and reset before proceeding.
End notes
So you have a relatively accurate measurement of how high your character should be. How do we transfer that into the game? We move on to the final step. Go into the character editor and make your character again. Make it as perfectly exact as you can, as that's going to be what you end up with in-game. Don't bother with any sliders on the Green Outline screen, just make the character in the costume editor.
When you're done, you will have gotten everything perfect, except the height. Now, back up to the Green Outline screen to finish this. Bump your character's height up to max and look at him. Now, remember the measurement we took before? Note the point up to where your character reaches against a max-height one, then drop the height down until the top of the character's head reaches that point. Again, you can measure however you please, but I put together this comparison pic. Remember what we found out? The top of Small Lemon's head reaches up to the inside of Bit Lemon's right elbow. That means that the height of Big Lemon's right shoulder is the height where the top Final Lemon's head should be like. In my pic, this is represented by the white line. The height at which Final Lemon matches the white line is the height given at the bottom of the picture. That's the height I used on the original character, and the height I'm going to want to use when recreating him.
I should not that this final step, in addition to being really hard and annoying, is also not perfectly accurate. It relies a LOT on getting your orientation right, catching the models at the same state of breathing (I prefer full breath in) and locating the "line" you want to match, itself. Barring any help from the development team, however, that's as close as we're ever going to get, and it's certainly a heck of a lot more precise than winging it from bad memory or trying to measure up against other people and obstacles. Plus, as laborious as it is to pull off, it still beats remaking 5 times over and still getting it wrong.
Final words
That's it. You're done. You have a copy of your character that's as close to the original as you're likely going to get. It took a long time to do, and it took even longer to write, so most of you that made it this far are probably wondering "Dude! Who cares?" Why, indeed, would it be so important to remake a character that one would have to go through THAT? Well, I have several reasons, see if one works for you:
1. It's a one-time process. You do it once, your character is transferred and you don't need to do it again.
2. It's precise. A lot more precise than any amount of winging it. To some people (myself included), their characters are perfect just the way they made them. Remaking them and risking getting them "wrong" is a very unpleasant prospect, enough to turn them off the character completely, or make them reroll and try again.
3. It's "right." Sometimes when we remake old stuff, we can't shake the feeling that we got something wrong. Even when everything is accurate, it still feels like we did something wrong and the character is somehow off, simply because it would have been so easy to make a mistake. This method alleviates that. It's precise and accurate. It doesn't LET you make any meaningful mistakes. The character is always "right."
That's all I have for now. With the new Powerset Proliferation feature, with the prospect of new Powersets in the future and with the general evolution of the game, I know there will be a lot of people who will want to reroll for one reason or another. If I've helped at least one of them, then this guide has done its job.