The Costume Creator is Stagnating

Separate designing the body from the costume.

Screen 1: same as now with various sliders for adjusting the character's sex, height, and proportions hopefully with slightly more control over some aspects. I don't want something so complicated I can't easily make a normal looking person but would like a little more control. This same screen sets the face, hair, skin color and skin texture as well. Expand the choice of skin colors.

Screen 2: Costume - which fits over the existing body. Most helmets and all hats would fit over the selected hair, tops would fit over the existing arms, legs, and chests. I understand that some body choices would preclude some costume options. Use the extra space gained from removing body parts for adding a neck slot, separating left and right shoulders/arms/legs, and leg details. Clean up the options adding sub-menus as needed to make it easier to navigate. Expand the choice of colors. If afraid of creating the City of Nudes, dim out the selected skin color from the costume color palette (and possibly any "near" colors around it as well).

Screen 3: Power customization

And for the love of all that's holy, make sure all colors for clothing are not transparent i.e. the horrible white tights we have now.

Other than all that more options are always nice. I didn't realize just how many costumes I take for granted are not part of the standard. It's a very steep hill for new players. I think after a set has been on the market a few years and the cost to make it depreciated fully, it should be made part of the game... much like COV became part of COH and vice versa back the month I joined.

I would just be happy if they finished Power Customization. It makes me very sad-panda that Pool, Epic and Patron powers (along with PB and Warshade powers-) STILL can't be recolored or FX-supressed...

I can actually understand why they haven't tackled pool and, to a lesser extent, epic powers. You can respec out of them and you can have up to ... what? 4 pool powers? Sounds like a programming nightmare to me. It would also probably require a 4th page to accomodate.

More options for both clothing and animations are a given. The topic seemed to be more about how to redesign the CC in particular. For more options see Jay's costume request thread or the various Art threads but if there was one option I'd like to see ... Let us put wings on the bolero again. Man I miss that. Oh I know, to make it on-topic, I'd vastly improve backend flexibility to disable specific costume pieces when others are selected... so Back wouldn't go away just because you selected Bolero but the cape-system options would be unselectable.

Many of these items would be great, but most of them would really be as much work that they're more likely part of a CoH2.0 than something for the existing game.

Take Tertiary colors:
1) The system would have to be re-encoded to support sending a third color in the datapackets that we currently have. Right now, they're very lean, so adding another value to transmit means modifying the parsers that make sense of that data, too... To give you an example of how tricky this is, pretty much everything we've gotten to date (including powerset customization) has used existing bits in the packet. (Somewhere, sometime back, BaB even alluded that there were only a few unused values left, too)

2) All/most of the art asset textures would have to be configured to apply a tertiary color to them, or all this is just a waste of resources for a few art assets. They also have to be able to appear similar to the original one for reverse compatibility, lest we lose some of our favorite designs.

If you're going through THAT level of effort this late in the game's life, you start to wonder about just saving it for wholly new art assets for a newer Directx11 next-gen 2.0 version of the game, if there was to be one.


... Or take "more flexible body structure options"
Roughly speaking, the more extreme the bodytype customization, the less likely the animations will look right. Make longer arms and the animations that show arms crossed will look even worse than now. Hands that clasp together will instead cross over one another. Hands on hips clips more than they do now with the various costume pieces. Art direction tries to balance flexibility with quality here, and adding more flexibility WILL result in quality loss when it comes to how these work in the world. Again, designing from scratch for a certain level of tolerance is more effective than retroactively applying them.


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Me, I want

1)more variation of existing pieces.

- Take the samurai armor and give me an ultra-mode shiny texture for the high-tech silver samurai clones (unlikely, since its a vet power, but its the idea).
- Take pieces that have particular textures to them and give us a more neutral versions that can better mix-n-match existing pieces (again, ultra-mode pieces that look crappy against non-ultra pieces come to mind).
- Take something as simple as the biker jacket and say "how many other pattern variations would work with this?"

- STANDARDIZE a few things. I take a leather top and matching leather pants, and they appear consistent. I MIGHT find one leather-ish set of boots that appear the same color when the same color is applied.... and then I try to add the leather skirt (to make the top appear more tunic-like) and again, the colors don't match.

2) Back details.

3) Asymmetrical costumes, even if that means that we'll be adding to the list of pieces that only look good when part of a set.

I don't think it's the costume creator, I think it's the models themselves. A few more polies wouldn't hurt.

I read the thread title as "The Costume Creator is Staggering"

There are some things that just Should Not Be

It would be pretty awesome if there were little checkboxes on the power customization screen that would leave a toggle on, so you can see how the toggles look together.

I've noticed that nobody's top three changes seem to include "keep all the current costumes same as they are" or "make sure I can fully recreate any of my existing costumes, even if I'm using very old grandfathered pieces that aren't in the game anymore". Is this because everyone's assuming *of course* they could retain the same costumes, we don't even have to ask for that, or because they are okay with losing some of the old unique looks if it means getting a complete revamp of the CC?

I'd just like the ability to stack more than one pattern on a costume.

Example: I'd like to be able to have a red and black checkerboard pattern over a blue costume. I could do that with Checkers combined with Stripe 2, but I can't stack them.

Example 2: I'd like to have a pattern like Electricity combined with a space for an emblem. Can't do that now because they are two separate patterns.

Hair that fits under hats is not workable, even with a revamp of the costume creator. On normal people, a hat placed over the head compresses the hair under it, so designing hairstyles that naturally fit under hair would be missing the point of having hairstyles to begin with.

Hair found under hats needs to be designed for the specific hats in question.

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.

Certainly agreeing with many of the suggestions above. Especially the separation of body design from clothing design.

What I'd like in particular though, and this would solve many of the matching and transparency issues mentioned by others, is to have proper control over the materials in each clothing item. Currently we can select: zero to two colours from a palette, which allows one low-saturation option per colour value; and a model, which includes a fixed texture, which incorporates glossiness, bump map, some uncustomizable colours, and I think also some coloured textures which are blended with the customizable colour bits.

Suppose instead we could, for each model texture, select not only the full gamut of colours for each incorporated material (up to and including transparency), but also define the other material qualities. For example, one could then match the martial arts shorts with one of the tops; there would be no need for a special glossy tights option, and so on.

For interface, I imagine that one, as now, would first select the clothing item. But then instead of selecting primary and secondary colours, one would select primary and secondary (and ideally, ternary etc.) colours and materials. The materials could simply be a fixed list of the currently extant combinations of material texture, glossiness, and so forth. Full customization might be nice, but this fixed list option alone would allow a huge number of new possibilities, and allow us to mix and match components so much more successfully.

Give me invisible Hasten, and I'll be happy.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Iggy_Kamakaze Nice build