What we're missing (clean)

OK, I obviously messed up, so let's try this again, this time following the rules. Let me see if I remember how that went.

We all have our own pet peeves in the game when it comes to cosmetic appearance. For some it's the lack of jetpacks, for others it's the lack of skirts and for still others it's the fact that all characters we can make are invariably bipedal and humanoid. We all have things we dislike and things we would REALLY like to see, but most probably won't. Mine is, and has pretty much always been one thing above all others - muscular women, or rather, the lack thereof. Oh, sure, with the right choice of sliders and the proper slider values and costume pieces, you can get a girl that's pretty big, and I think I pretty much pushed the editor to its limits when I made Xanta, my big, super-strong Troll girl.

Generally, it has always been easy for me to ignore what we don't have here in CoH when I focus only on what we do, but every so often I'll find something, a good representation of a truly muscular or even beefy woman, and I'll be reminded of exactly what we're missing here in City of Heroes. Sometimes it's other games, sometimes it's movies, sometimes it's comic books and mangas, and hell, sometimes it's just real-life TV. While not very frequent, fiction has always had a special place for the muscular and tough of women, the ones who can fight hard and hit hard and, most importantly, look the part. I could cite She Hulk and Wonder Woman as the easy targets, but the fact remains that all we have access to here in City of Heroes is women who look like picture-perfect photo models.

Now, to recap a bit on what has already been lost, we've discussed many ways people envision that this could be improved upon. Many already talked about just adding muscular textures like the Icon dummies, but that's not all. Remember the old bug when Police Shirt Sleeves retained the Male veiny, muscled upper arm texture regardless of model? As soon as I tried that, and I tried it on a fairly skinny girl, she immediately looked many times stronger despite the fact that her model had not changed and her arms were still just as thin.

We talked about different muscle sliders for the different body parts, allowing us to, say, have beefier arms and legs without ending up with bigger buts and pot bellies or, worse, with a giant rack from the uni-muscle slider. We also spoke about replacing the arms ala Robotic Arms 3, only instead of replacing them with robotic cyber analogues, we would instead replace them with a different version of a human arm. This can already be seen on Foreshadow. Drop by the Hollows sometimes and have a look at his fake real arms. As some of the BIGGEST problems seem to be in the area of arms (too thin, not muscular enough) replacing them might be a just about possible.

We spoke about outright making a new upper body type called Muscular in the same vein as Armoured has a different upper body shape, as well as an extra lower body type. That seems at least somewhat feasible. We even spoke about adding a brand new player model. After all, we're looking at a new expansion some time soon, and who knows all the weird and wonderful things it might hold. Why not hope for this, as well?

Of course, there's also the matter of appeal. Not everyone likes muscular women, and that's coming from members of both sexes. I've seen as much many times over. There's also the question of how buff a buff woman should be, and there are many degrees of this. One thing that is not under question, however, that there are at least some people whose concepts simply require that a woman not appear to be so perfectly thin and to-model pettite, but rather be strong and tough-looking. It's certainly becoming more than a little unsettling how many times I've made warrior and fighter women, such written that they would be able to stand toe-to-toe with any man, take hits like a champ and punch like a train, only to end up making them into skinny little girls like some kind of strange anime tiny bruiser.

The whole point of this thread was, and still continues to be, that it always bugs me when I see a strong woman done right and remember that I cannot have that in city of heroes. The most I can hope for is a skinny woman with super powers and, if I push the sliders, a rather large butt. But one that LOOKS physically strong and imposing, we just cannot have. Hell, I'd pay full price for an expansion that had even just that - one new model or a retool kit for the existing female model, which allows me to have a real tough, strong, stout, muscular woman, a body type which would fit a LOT of my characters that currently just about make do.

If this thread sounds familiar, it probably is. I've done my best to keep it clean of rule violations, so let's please try to keep it this way because I really don't want to lose it again.

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The panty shot caused the thread to die? ;-;

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Seriously? City of Heroes can generate much MUCH worse shots than that.

It must have been comparing CoH to CO, which if that's the case they might want to hire a few dozen new mods soon.

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My personal opinion is that splitting the physique slider into multiple specialized sliders for each portion currently without a specialized slider (upper arm, forearm, upper leg, lower leg, neck) would solve the problem quite nicely. You can have a character with very beefy arms without having hugely muscled neck and legs. You could also go with scrawny arms but huge legs (MA Scrapper much?).

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My personal opinion is that splitting the physique slider into multiple specialized sliders for each portion currently without a specialized slider (upper arm, forearm, upper leg, lower leg, neck) would solve the problem quite nicely. You can have a character with very beefy arms without having hugely muscled neck and legs. You could also go with scrawny arms but huge legs (MA Scrapper much?).

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Ahh! What an excellent idea!

( See? I didn't ignore your good idea this time. )

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My personal opinion is that splitting the physique slider into multiple specialized sliders for each portion currently without a specialized slider (upper arm, forearm, upper leg, lower leg, neck) would solve the problem quite nicely. You can have a character with very beefy arms without having hugely muscled neck and legs. You could also go with scrawny arms but huge legs (MA Scrapper much?).

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To restate, that would be a very big boon. We have (again, I don't remember) something like 27-30 facial sliders, yet only 6 or 7 body sliders. I would settle for something even simpler - just body, arms and legs is enough for me. Though, ideally, I'd like to see a mirror of the facial sliders - one slider for each axis.

See, one of the big problems I had when making Xanta was that while I could make her rather wide both in the shoulders and in the waist, I couldn't really give her any breadth. So her waist was wide side-to-side, but still very narrow front-to-back, while her rib cage was always rather flat. I wanted to make her bigger, but the chest slider doesn't slide the right kind of "chest." What's more, the Shoulders slider doesn't really make the shoulders wider organically, it just moves the shoulder joints into or out of the rib cage. But a real person with broad shoulders doesn't simply have his shoulder joints yanked out of his body, his shoulders are broad because his chest is broad. Men can achieve that, because their chest slider enlarges their CHESTS. Women cannot, however, as their chest slider enlarges their... Breasts...

The other thing that worries me, though, is that the muscle slider on women doesn't actually control muscle in the slightest. It controls fat. Well, unless women's muscles are in their butts and breasts, but I'm not quite dense enough to believe that The muscle slider should, one would think, make the biceps and triceps bigger, the forearms bigger, the thighs more muscular and the calfs more pronounced. Instead, it makes the butt larger and the breasts more extended, ding proportionately very little to the actual MUSCLES.

Further still, it bothers me that women are locked into wearing tiny, tiny shoes and having small little hands. Sure, that's largely true in real life, though more often because women tend to be shorter than men than anything else, but not all women are like that, and especially note those who have, say, spent their lives fighting bloodthirsty monsters (which isn't very common in real life). For instance, I had a girl friend (as in a friend who is a girl) from school who's slightly taller than me and wears the same size shoes as I do.

All that is to say that I believe the female muscle slider could use some work at the very least, and can do with a total overhauls and expansion, most preferably.

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I think that expecting a slider system for musculature as complex as the slider system for the head is a bit much, especially since the head doesn't perform anywhere near the number of animations that the rest of the body does (and isn't even articulated to boot!).

However, one thing that I do wish was present for women (and only the women model) would be a separate slider for chest and breasts. I agree that it makes no sense to me that men can have a huge barrel chest but women can only have huge knockers (which are a B cup as the smallest, wtf?). I'd very much like to be able to actually create some beefy women than aren't oozing hormonal teenage versions of the female form.

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Count me in as another who would like to be able to add muscle to women. I don't care how, I just want.

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A (Golden Gate) Bridge Too Far- arc 299315
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Seriously - I have characters both male and female that fall on parts of the spectrum that simply cannot be adequately represented right now.

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You want pics that will close the thread?

Strong Woman 1

Strong Woman 2

Strong Woman 3

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Well, to add some real input to this, I DO think that Paragon Studios should work on the graphics a bit. It looks like Cell-Shading was a worthy sacrifice to get what they've got in terms of the graphics otherwise.

That said, you can't really blame CoX for not having this just yet. It was still the original Superhero MMO. It laid the groundwork for the genre/subgenre, and that's an important aspect.

Would more bodytypes be a good thing? Hell yeah, and I hope to see them in Going Rogue, but I think everyone expects it to be some sort of Miracle Expansion.

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I think that expecting a slider system for musculature as complex as the slider system for the head is a bit much, especially since the head doesn't perform anywhere near the number of animations that the rest of the body does (and isn't even articulated to boot!).

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Well, technically speaking, the only thing that should matter as far as sliders and animations interfering goes is anything which changes the bones of the model skeleton (such as the leg slider). The worst thing separate width sliders can do, if properly weighed, is cause a little more clipping around the joints, of which there is plenty already, especially the buff Huge variety. Women tend to get away with relatively less clipping and distortion (though they still get square elbows) mainly because their limbs are thin and there isn't much there to clip. I don't believe it's even FEASIBLE to buff them up so much that they enter the area of the Huge model, let alone be that big and actually look good.

It COULD, I will grant, interfere with shields in some parts, but by and large the biggest actual obstacle seems to be rigging the system to do that. I've no idea how characters are bound to their skeletons and what it would take to fiddle with existing sliders and/or add new ones, but I'm thinking the biggest thing would be making it in the first place. Working with it shouldn't pose any problems that we're not already seeing. I guess we could worry about certain items distorting based on new and unexpected slider values, but again, fixing those is a question of work, not a question of technology.

I still think that adding a new upper body and a new lower body of the Muscular variety might get around this problem in a very cheeky way. It comes with its own perks and drawbacks, of course. On the one hand, a purpose-built muscular upper and lower body combo would look a LOT better than anything sliders could do to the stock body AND have the benefit of sliders affecting it in a more natural way. On the down side, a separate such body will always be limited, like the Robotic Arms variants, to being used by itself, so no Shirts, Robes, Jackets, Boleros, Trenchcoats and so forth. Again, this is a work solution, not a technology solution, as it's essentially "more stuff" rather than "new stuff." I suppose asking that different body geometries be allowed under Shirts and Jackets and such, so that we can pick Robotic Arms or this one, but that is a technological solution as the editor doesn't seem to allow this currently. I could be wrong, however.

I suppose we COULD get away with just a muscular skin, but then that has the problem of Tights with Skin (really the only way females can show skin) only having one menu option, which is the pattern. Choosing the "skin" below the tights does not appear to be possible, so while that solution would be less work, it would be more technology. There's the added problem that Tights With Skin are actually just patterns over the basic skin texture. The current largely smooth and unshaded female texture works as well for skin as it does for tights. A ripped skin texture might look odd when "painted" with a skimpy tights top.

Though I seem to have rambled on...

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Would more bodytypes be a good thing? Hell yeah, and I hope to see them in Going Rogue, but I think everyone expects it to be some sort of Miracle Expansion.

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Well, "expect" would be too strong a word. Call it "wishful thinking" I intend to make myself fell better by pretending it will have all the stuff I always wanted up until about a month before it launched, when I'll give myself forty lashes and start expecting the worst. But still, you are correct that they really should be looking into giving City of Heroes SOME kind of facelift. We can have the best game in the world, but when its public face begins to look more and more dated, the game will not age well. Besides, there are enough technical limitations in the current engine (such as not being able to use more than two cores last I heard) to merit messing with it anyway. I'm not expecting the zones will suddenly gain a new level of detail or that characters will suddenly turn into UT3 models, because that's not just engine, that's someone sitting down and making NEW zones and costumes, which will not happen. However, the things that CAN be added as technological solutions without someone having to remake, say, all the costume pieces in the game, should very much be capitalised on, in my opinion. Messing with female models' sliders is a good example, and I believe I posted about shaders the game has but doesn't use at some point. Technological solutions that allow us to pick what our "skin" looks like are also something to look at, though how feasible that is is dubious.

In general, I really do believe this game will need a facelift to remain truly great, at some point and in some way.

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I've been asking for Female Huge since beta.

No love.

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I've been asking for Female Huge since beta.

No love.

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Mostly because it makes BaBs sad, and to a lesser extent (perhaps even a similar extent!) Sexy Jay.

BaBs would have to make sure that it plays properly with every animation in the game twice (Flying_NO and Flying_YES modes).

Jay would have to check every possible existing combination of costume parts for clipping, and to make sure that it all bound to the right places and in the right orientations (skirt bug reference there).

It's possible, but that's a lot of work for them (and any attached minions) to go through, and it may mean that they don't have as much time to put out other new things.

...personally, I'd love if they dedicated a minion and a coffee maker/doughnut dispenser to the project and made it his new jerb for a while to 'teach him the ropes'. Then all they'd have to do is quality assurance, before signing off on the result.

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Mostly because it makes BaBs sad, and to a lesser extent (perhaps even a similar extent!) Sexy Jay.
BaBs would have to make sure that it plays properly with every animation in the game twice (Flying_NO and Flying_YES modes).

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BABs once commented on a thread of this nature that adding a full new model would mean not just duplicating ALL applicable costume pieces to fit the new model and scale with it, but would also increase the overhead associated with adding new pieces in the future. I'm not sure if it was the same post that talked about how this might affect power animations, but I do recall BABs saying that while all three skeletons used technically different animations, adapting an animation that worked with one to work with another was not secifically difficult. That was, however, probably two years ago, if not more.

The biggest thing with a new model, I think, seems to be that if they will be adding a new one, they're likely to stick in something diametrically different, like the Monstrous rig that things like War Wolves and Kheldian Crabs use. I've heard that it is a reasonably functioning system that could be made to do different things, but lacks a WHOLE host of things that would be very much required for it to be playable, support for non-NPC-specific costume pieces and support for anything but a few very simplistic animations being the biggest things. We've already seen how things that "should" be simple are, in fact, quite difficult and troublesome, as evidenced by the many, many problems Huge Crab Spiders had with their backpacks on Test before Issue ?? went Live.

Then again, how different IS a Huge from a male, but in that the Huge muscle slider starts where the Male muscle slider ends? That isn't directly applicable to females, of course, as the problem with them isn't how high the muscle slider goes, but rather what it affects. I'd say just change it and reweigh the different muscle groups, but I just KNOW that many, many people are going to blow up if their characters are altered irreversably, and BABs has gone on the record as stoutly refusing to change established looks without a very good reason. "I want" just doesn't seem to be good enough.

That still leaves the various technological solutions, though, like additional upper and lower body types, fake arms and so forth, but again, that might still be too much work. In the end, I just choose to hope that we'll get something like that some day at all, because this will quite seriously DOUBLE the things I can do with the editor. In a sense, I'm afraid of it being a new model, because it would mean I'll have to remake several old characters

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