Are dresses/robes really that problematic?

In AE I've selected the sorceror from the Tsoo gang and went through all the emotes. The only emotes that doesn't look right is crouch, only because the sorceror's arm clip through his robe. Is having trouble with just one emote a reason not to add something quite a few player have been asking for?

Sorcerers also come in only one size and have only the one power set.

"Give it to us, I don't care how it looks" may be acceptable to you, but I'd get pretty grumpy if my characters' robes or dresses had to stretch and contort in ugly and unpleasant manners in order to accomodate their motions.

This was tried but it looked horrible with some powers, like the kicks from Martial Arts.

Short answer, yes. Long answer, send J_Love a PM.

Yes. Yes they are.

I'm trying to find the post, but I recall Sexy Jay once saying he'd made robes for player characters, only to discover that they clipped hideously with many, many power animations. Including Rest.

Remember, while players can get clever with Arcitect to make NPCs do emotes, the devs get to test using actual player skeletons and every animation in the game. They know what would happen.

Guessing here, but I heavily suspect I know roughtly how to implement this in game since the clothing mechanism in CoH bares fair similarity to the system in Neverwinter Nights.

On that basis, getting robes to work correctly with all animations would be verging on the impossible.

Comparing player models to things like the CoT mages is not going to get anyone anywhere except frustrated. They are totally different models. The mages are one, solid lump with a skeleton embedded in it. Player models are component parts clipped together and robes would need a structurally different mechanism bolting on to get them to work. (Which is what they did in NwN. A robe was actually a seperate, solid body form with its skeleton bound to the PC model beneath. At times, you could see the player body move before the robe did.)

Still be awesome to have them though - we'd need some elbow gloves too, for formal occasions, like in-game weddings

Without the skeleton, none of the animations are even possible. So, yeah. Not too likely even if that IS how they did it in another unrelated game engine.

robes and robesque clothing always look like trash mainly because you are trying to create something that doesn't take a lot of processing to do so devlopers crunch it down. So what you end up with is massive clipping or them being connected to the leg and not free to be processed with a physics engine.

CoH uses a physics/hand-animated combo for that stuff so things look better than other games but if you take it too far you get the clipping that looks ugly and its because the physics is based on anchor while the animations aren't set for robes. You can do 1 of 2 things... animate the robe so they look ugly, but more acceptable than they would be... OR change animations on every movement so that it works for robes.

Cost vs Reward... It costs more than it's worth imo... and apparently to the dev team so far.

If they added a tremendous amount of transparent "siding" to them... perhaps it wouldn't look SO bad, do you know what I mean?

If you look at some of the capes particularly you see it, and also the edge of the trenchcoats. The "gaps" in some areas are just transparent layering, the piece itself still is the same 'shape' as everything else of that sort. But... still, not good enough I think.

I'll live, though it'd be very nice to have front/back loincloth type things. buttcapes only on both the front and back, but I don't think they can do those because of the limited number of costume nodes available.

Everquest 2 tried a half decent job by combining baggy "pants" covering the legs along with motion-sensitive loincloth and back/sites Most of the time, the loose pieces "clip" into the same-textured leggins, helping give the illusion that this is one continuous robe seam. Jumping still broke it rather badly, as did strafing, but it STILL would look better than the damn thing stretching all over like other MMOs long robes.

I can live without robes for a couple more years, but I would like some loincloths, like Zekiran mentioned.

Something along the lines of this, this, or armored ones like this one.

Some of my characters

Waiting for someone to say CO has robes/long dresses, but I probably won't be the first to respond that they should go play CO then.

The reason CO has robes is because it uses the robes the CoX developers rejected as not being good enough to use...

*sniff*

but but... i wants my robes pl0x?
/ragequit

not really..

no robes? big deal. although you would think that at the start of production that would be one of the things address considering every other MMO before it practically had robes/dresses. also, with the huge character editing powers. they must have known SOMEBODY would want to recreate their.. i don't know.. umm.. Everquest character or DAoC character? (i dont know..). Odd, but its not a big deal to me.

please
plz
plx
pl0x