New directions for the costume creator?

The impossible today becomes the possible tomorrow

The female stances really weren't that good

I don't completely agree with you about the CO costume creator. Yeah, the sliders on the face are hurt quite a bit by having one face that looks like Mr. Incredible, but the sliders options on the body, while not completely intuitive, are pretty wicked, and allow so many more options that we just can't duplicate here.

One of my first toons in CO was a stereotypical grey alien with tiny body, incredibly long skinny arms and legs (with two-toed feet and two-fingered hands), and a huge head with huge eyes. The fact I can make the arms long and skinny and the head so much move oversized really shape that toon into the alien he was meant to be more so than any attempt I make at him over here. (It also helps he has a hover sled!)

My very first toon in CO was a huge muppet-like beast, with a large maned head, huge upper body with long, beefy forearms, but with a teeny-tiny corseted waist and short skinny beast legs. When he gallops around with his beast run stance, it looks awesome.

Once I'd seen a game with the ability to scale individual body parts, it made this game's costume creator feel every bit the 6 years old that it is.

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IIRC, there was one slider for physique. The other sliders, like Hips, legs, chest, and the head sliders all came later.

Personally, I'd like to see a wider variation on the sliders, at least in that you could make very very thin, almost skeletal characters, or really really fat characters.

Also, get rid of the sexism for costume parts. If I want to make a woman with a cigar, or a dude in fishnets, let me.

Well, that still means that they've added sliders at some point - so it's possible they could add more.

There'd have to be a /e timewarp emote then

It's just JUMP + LEFT.




...although now I want an /e pelvicthrust that also works as a Taunt.

I 100% agree on this part, I'd like to see some costume-piece prolifation around here. Can you believe females get Sandals, since when are sandals girls-only wear?

Or you could make some textures yourself. I've been damn tempted to make some, but I have no idea if we can post them on the forums or not.

Not fond of all of those but...even so, some cool ideas in there, that could work given the right CoX touch and magic.

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

I'm not against the notion of having sliders or even having more sliders. I'm against the *** backwards way they're implemented in Champions Online. You have sometimes three to four levels deep of redundant sliders that all affect the same thing. You have general body mass, then you have arm thickness which affects the upper arm, lower arm and hand, you have upper arm thickness that does the same thing, lower arm thickness that does the same thing, and a few hand sliders that do the same thing as the above, as well as the same thing as each other. I'm not an idiot. I tried to figure them out, but the way they interact with each other is NOT intuitive, and I don't have the patience to figure out stupid design in a bad game.

City of Heroes is superior in terms of user-friendly design, for the simple fact that each slider only affects a single thing, with the exception of the general bodymass slider, which acts as a multiplier for a few things. If you want to give us more control, then just split the general bodymass slider into separate bodypart mass sliders and give us the ability to link them together and slide them around at the same time, rather than adding redundant sliders. Because the way Champions Online does it is like adding a fifth wheel to a wheelbarrow.

Their whole system is like that. It's designed in complete chaos. You have a section for heads, a section for torso... And a section for just hands alone? Huh? Base textures (where they even exist) are hidden in a sub-menu that I had to comb the options three times to even FIND, and they're mixed in with bump maps... Sometimes. You have texture, pattern, bump map, shader and not always in the same order and not always the same things. At the same times, you have jackets, but no control over their sleeves. And the "benefit" of clicking on your model to pick specific costume items directly is just a pain, because I keep mis-selecting random junk that takes me away from what I was doing. And the inability to tab through costume pieces without using the dropdown is a PAIN IN THE ***!!!

And it's not like I looked at it and gave up. I spent a full God damn weekend trying to make sense of this thing and I continually failed and continually furstrated myself with not being able to find things I knew were there or mis-selecting things or just fiddling with crappy dropdown menus. And I STILL didn't manage to end up with any even halfway decent design, because the whole game has digital vibrance crammed up to over 9000 on top of a mild cel shader, so bright colours blend into a flat soup like I need glasses and half the costume pieces are just intentionally stupid, added in more for the kicks than for any use they may have.

Like I said, I came into Champions Online with a lot of expectations, and found that the game really, really had potential to be something great. But it's just... Clunky. And not in one or two isolated issues, it's all over the place. Every aspect of it is just cumbersome, tiresome, irritating and just plain and simply badly designed. And, yeah, I know City of Heroes wasn't exactly the pinnacle of good design back in 2004, but Jack touted this as the next step in evolution, a better game. He can't afford to compete with City of Heroes as it was back in 2004. He needs to compete with City of Heroes as it is in 2010, and his game just can't. It offers its own host of unique elements, and I want to take nothing away from them, but the overall quality of design is just... BAD.

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.

That's kind of what broke my resolve, really. You can alter left and right arm independently, but you can't alter your jacket sleeves. You can put details everywhere, but the only tops with skin you can have are a very skimpy bra or a full tank top. You have all those face sliders, but you only have one face to work with. It's just... It's great, and yet it isn't. It's one more example why aiming too high and not delivering on it isn't as good as aiming lower but being able to deliver fully. A solid project will always trump one with more potential but less actual execution.

Speaking of faces, I have to bring up Aion again. I don't know why, but all faces I've tried to make in Champions Online end up just the same. I did a little work on Aion, and the face editor there beat Champions clear out of the water. Sliders generally did more, and while there may or may not have been as many, the sliders that were there made more of a difference. For instance, in Aion you have a slider to select the angle of your eyebrows. This can produce anything from scowling scorn to grim determination to neutral indifference to gentle kindheartedness to genuine confusion, just from the shape of the eyebrows. You could also make the mouth be anything from pouting to smiling and it just goes on from there. What Champions does with its preset expressions, Aion allows you to do by hand.

The problem with giving players too much freedom, though, is that they don't know what to do with it. If you're a graphic artist, a psychologist or just a people person, you may have a very good idea, but most people, myself included, will just keep remaking the one face we enjoy. City of Heroes presets do help with that a LOT, since they give us faces to choose from, and it's a lot easier to see what you like when it's presented for you, rather than CREATE what you like with no prior reference. I'm not a visual person in the slightest, so when I make up characters, I don't know what I want them to look. City of Heroes basically shows me character and constantly asks "Is it like this? No? How about like this?" It's effectively someone else drawing my character to my specifications. Too much freedom puts the burden of drawing on me, and I just can't do that.

The problem with faces in particular is that you can hit the uncanny valley VERY easily. Take the example of something I did in Aion. Tabbing through the sliders, I found one which could make my girl's mouth smile. It should have looked nice, but it just looked creepy, and for a simple reason - people don't smile with the mouth. In fact, you can have a smile that has almost no mouth involvement at all. People smile from the cheeks and from the eyes, it's how our faces work. That's why it's so easy to spot a fake smile done by someone who doesn't know what a smile actually is. That's why TV ad photoshoot models look so disturbing when they "smile." A graphic artist will know this, and so give you a face that's properly smiling. A player will not, so either he will make a face that ought to be smiling but just looks creepy, or he will be unable to find a face that doesn't look creepy to him.

I tend to think of myself as a people person, and a person of strong taste, so I appreciated Aion's ability to give me EXACTLY the face I wanted, despite the fact that my friend who was showing it to me constantly kept telling me my choices looked bad. Just off the top of my head, I made a girl with a lower mouth and a longer nose, which he felt wasn't pretty, but I overruled him because that's what looked good to me, which, again, I appreciate. But I haven't tried making a second female face, so I'm not sure if I'd be able to make it truly unique.

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.

Then it's just a JUMP + RIGHT.

Angel Red
"We're heroes. Fighting injustice is the thing we do." ~Rebel Scum

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

The amount of items wasn't daunting it was the haphazard semi random nature of some of the item listings.

You can tell a lot of people put a lot of work into CO I just wish they had compared notes more often.

I've spoken with Positron at Comic-Con about this, and there are some things that could be done without major work on the costume code; things that would just be database additions. For example, one of the things that's been a niggling annoyance (the 'wish I could do this' kind) is with the Tech Sleek set (click on image for a bigger version):


If you use the 'Tech Sleek' pattern, you get the outfit colors divided neatly, with the armor plates being one color and the flexible mesh the other. But for other patterns, the pattern covers the entire costume piece. What I wanted was to have the flexible mesh a fixed dark color, with the armor plates having the pattern on them. For example, getting urban camo by specifying the 'Camouflage' texture with white and black as the colors, but have the camouflage pattern only on the armor plates, not the flexible mesh.

And apparently there is a mechanism in the costume code for this -- part of a costume piece can be designated 'uncolorable', which means that it will always be the color 'baked in' to the piece, like the buckles on some pieces, and any patterns would be applied to the remainder of the piece. So some types of retexturing are just a matter of the devs a) having the art department not busy with other things, and b) deciding that additions like this is a good thing to do. Unfortunately, we don't know enough about what's going on behind the screen to tell whether the art staff have the time to make additions like this.

What can be colored or not is literally as simple as an alpha channel in the texture file in Photoshop, if I remember right from when I changed one of the male heads to have a snake bite piercing on it's lower lip. Maybe duplicated Tech Sleek pieces, too.. I haven't really seen if you can just have two channels like that or what. *shrug* But yeah, it's really easy.