Let's talk about skin

I've been thinking about the character creator

I am blatantly comparing it to another life that I have a second character in, and for a game that prides itself on its character creation, the skin aspect jars increasingly with my senses.

Skin, in this game, is poor putting it mildly.

Let's put this into context. I'll give you some numbers. If I chose a Hat option for my characters, I can chose 44 different hats. I can choose 160 primary colours and 160 secondary colours. That's just for hats

That comes out at 1,124,400 different colours and combos for hats

I have 70 different skin tones. That's it

70

When I choose my skin, I get to choose my colour. I don't get to choose the skin. That's a layer above. My skin is pre-chosen and it's left for me to choose a colour.

So there are some layers that may pass as skin and they are ok. Metallic, and robotic and others are ok but they fail in the skin layer because they clash or may be subtracted.

Oh, my detractors may say "You can choose a chest later as a Robe and then choose Chitin as a skin layer" but that fails. How can I make my face chitin? How can I make my character wear an open jacket and a low cut singlet and still have a quartz skin? It's not possible as the game stands.And frankly what I propose is probably quite a bit of back end engineering.

But then so was power customisation, and so is animated hair.

I want a character with a liquid metal skin, kinda like Terminator but maybe not so shiny. I want a rose quartz skin. I want a stone tank who really IS stone who has a skin of polished granite that reflects the environment like the windows of Praetoria. Why should a stone tank only ever look like stone when in armour?

Why can I not have a character made from terracotta? If it's good enough for an Emperor's army why can it not be good enough for me?

Instead all I get is a choice of 70 (mostly insipid) colours that don't actually reflect what my character is about. Sure, if I want to play a natural human - and I admit they enable diverse ethnic backgrounds - then cool. I can do that. But that's to miss a point.

I can have a shiny or a matte top. Why can I not apply that to my skin? I cannot get an aura that will fix that becuase it's an additonal layer. It doesn't make my skin any better.
Sure I can be an African or a European or an Arab with the skins colours - and the faces mostly accomodate that. But why not an Echoriate who reflects your life in their presence?

Matt Miller (Positron) said once that we literally had billions of costume options. We only have 70 for skin. That's limiting

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

I can get behind this. I wanted to make a stone-skinned character the other day and gave up when I couldn't get a look I liked.

I can also get behind this, given one of the pains of trying to make my ocelot girl is that I can't match skintone to chest tone.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow City of Heroes is a game about freedom of expression and variety of experiences far more so than it is about representing any one theme, topic or genre.

MEH!!!!! your argument is null and void.....terracotta indeed, that's just ridiculous!

but i'm 100% behind everything else

More options are always good.

Would love to see more skin options like a translucent gem/crystal, smooth/polished metal (no lines), dirt/sand texture, and also something similar to an energy being, like power surge from the electric armor set

I'm all over this. Two of my characters have blue skin, and there are only about two different colors of blue available.

And lets not forget the glove and shoe options that completely override a skin texture you may have had going.

We used to have more skin colors available. But that was changed because of players making their skin and tights colors identical thus creating "nude" characters. Pretty childish on the part of the players (many of whom are children thus excused) and Cryptic for overreacting.

Hmmmm... Maybe now that it's NCsoft we can get the full color spectrum back.

It puts the lotion on its skin
or else it gets the hose again

I would love to have both more color and texture options for skin. I'm with you on this one Scarlet.

Yes, please. I'm tired of having any female characters in tights have dark muscle lines all over their backs. It looks bad. None of them are body builders.

I'd just be happy to have the animal fur texture apply to a toon's lower legs. My poor minotaur can't go barefoot without looking like he's bleached his calves. o_0

David has already commented on this topic several times, in regards to a more muscular female texture. Apparently, they have met with as-of-yet undefined technical difficulties in implementing that, from which I asserted that they're looking into tech for blending or overlaying textures. That alone - that is to say, the ability to apply a pattern past with one texture (not single-colour tint patter, an actual texture) over another complete texture - should allow us to have non-human skins with human clothes.

One should note that the reason we only have human skins with tights and such isn't so much that it's HUMAN skin so much so as that it's SMOOTH skin. Most Tights with Skin pieces are nothing more than colour mask patterns not in the slightest different from, say, Isles or Flames or Fat Stripe, which are overlaid over a smooth, nippleless, genitalless model of a human body. What you are seeing is not tights over skin, it is literally colour tint over skin. This is only ever usable with human skin, because human skin is smooth and putting patterns over it makes us think we're seeing fabric, instead of what we're actually seeing. Putting such patterns over, say, reptile scales or rock skin, would be far too obvious that it's paint and not fabric, as the texture's details would be visible through said "fabric." The only reason human skin works is that it doesn't HAVE detail of any kind. Not even a navel, if you look closely, as that would otherwise show through Tights with Skin.

I should note an apparent problem - the developers have almost never used texture overlays for anything in the costume editor, despite the fact that a great many things would benefit from that. The easiest example is pictorial chest details like the Heart or the Fist or the Greek letters. You may or may not notice it, but those are not actually painted on your chest. They hover a slight distance above your chest, painted onto completely separate geometry, an invisible double of your chest offset by a bit. This, I believe, is what's known as a decal in 3D graphics, and it represents a completely separate surface drawn with a pattern mask over another surface. It's what makes bomb charring in a lot of earlier FPS games.

The apparent solution to this is texture blending. While we have almost no precedent for this, that's still ALMOST no precedent. A small handful of pieces exist that I'm pretty sure use texture blending already, and those are the Science Pack goggles. Have you noticed how most of those have canvas straps that clip at the back of the head? Well, I've looked as close as I could, and those don't appear to be decals. In fact, they fit so tightly under even short hair that I'm pretty sure they're not. I am, instead, almost positive those are texture overlays drawn on the head's 3D model OVER the head's own texture, something which the game "shouldn't" be able to do, because if it were able to do so, we should have seen it used a LOT more.

I'm not sure whether this has anything to do with the tech for "splats" or not, but it might. "Splats," as defined by BABs back in the day, are those power effects that paint themselves on the ground and appear to follow the contour of terrain, snaking over street curbs, parked cars, tables ladders and chairs and so on. Originally, these didn't exist in the game, and powers with such ground effects like Quicksand or Tar Patch instead played a horizontal animated decal, which would oftentimes sink half-way into the ground when placed over a slanted surface or into a recess on the ground. Now they seem to instead be animated textures mapped over the existing ground texture straight top-down, to some... Amusing effects from time to time, but to very pretty effects for the most part.

It is for these reasons, and more, that I feel the game is capable of this, and why I take David's promises that they're working on this seriously.

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.