The Costume Creator is your pony, NCSoft!
By
Aggelakis,
Posted on: 2011-06-13 20:40 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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I have to admit it is a large part of what keeps me here too. Doing the same things while looking different is like doing it for the first time to me. In the end new powers are just a new way to kill things in a way that looks different. The aesthetics are the largest draw to this game for me.
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Originally Posted by rian_frostdrake
Well, i'll never say no to more costumes, its why im here, its why i stay.
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Types of Swords
My Portfolio
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Originally Posted by Jophiel
Golly no, not City of Smooth Barbie Dolls! What if America's youth was exposed to the same horrors you find in any five year old girl's toy box!?
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Yeah, that excuse/reason is just absurd.
Not saying people wouldn't race to make such costumes, but... So what?
I do not think it would take over the game nor cause any harm.
Things would continue to move along...
@Zethustra
"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
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Yup. Check my sig.
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Originally Posted by Chase_Arcanum
Cynicism is understandable and my first impression is the same as yours, but IIRC, the last few times this argument came up, several players provided a complete analysis of costume pieces made available issue-by-issue. The reality doesn't match that first impression. There has been no change in the rate that these are made available.
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PONIES IN I20.5?!?!?!?! YAAAAYYYYY
damn you forums and your anti-capslock...you are blocking my squee!
Paragon Wiki: http://www.paragonwiki.com
City Info Terminal: http://cit.cohtitan.com
Mids Hero Designer: http://www.cohplanner.com
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Originally Posted by Dispari
I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.
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So.. many.. things.. I could say! But I won't. I won't explode in a costume-themed tirade this time. Instead, I'll say this:
Look at your pony. Now look at me. Now back to your pony; now back to *me* - does your pony look happy? No, I didn't think so.
Brush your pony before she brings out the Magic.
Psh. The Costume Creator is only a one-trick pony!
Playstation 3 - XBox 360 - Wii - PSP
Remember kids, crack is whack!
Samuel_Tow: Your avatar is... I think I like it
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That looks like 'Super Naked Woman' from a brazilian comic, and I demand that she'll be genericized |
Originally Posted by AmazingMOO
Now if players can already make 'Nude' characters so easily, why bother to use that as an excuse to not change the color picker to allow more color options?
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(Yes, 'Super Naked Woman' actually exists...)
US: @Gearheader (EU: @Gearhead EU)
Thank you! thank you! thank you! Castle or Posi or BAB or whoever at Paragon Studios restored the abilities of pets to talk and emote!
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A few points:|
Originally Posted by DarkGob
Because you can make a male character in tighty-whities, or a female character in what amounts to little more than a string bikini, but god help us if they're fully nude (except not really because the game doesn't render naughty bits, so the models are all smooth right 'round the bend and look no different than the scantily-clad characters we can already make).
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1. It's already possible to match skin tone to costume colour for rather a few colour choices.
2. Skin doesn't only use unique colours, it's base texture is brown-tinted which means skin colours will never match costume colours even for the exact same colour selection.
3. There are no "naked" characters in this game any more so than a Ken doll is naked, because none of our character models have any primary sexual characteristics. None of the female chests have nipples and neither lower body has reproductive organs. The most you can do is a ken doll appearance that's more that of a genderless alien than a naked person.
4. It's very much possible to exclude a range of colour selection from costume items based on what skin colour the character has selected, though such would obviously require a tech solution to implement.
5. A broader colour selector with custom colour options would be a very good addition to both skin and costume colouring. The game already saves each costume piece with four 24-bit colours attached to it, yet out of those 2^24 colours, we only get to pick 110, and none of those are cream.
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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.
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Meh. Nothing out of the ordinary. I prefer Kekko Kamen.
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Originally Posted by Gearhead_NA
(Yes, 'Super Naked Woman' actually exists...)
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Father Xmas - Level 50 Ice/Ice Tanker - Victory
$725 and $1350 parts lists --- My guide to computer components
Tempus unum hominem manet
Speaking of naked characters, around the launch of City of Villains I made a character named The Naked Truth, who was an Ice/Ice Dominator.
Playstation 3 - XBox 360 - Wii - PSP
Remember kids, crack is whack!
Samuel_Tow: Your avatar is... I think I like it
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You misunderstand. |
Originally Posted by AmazingMOO
Not to bust on your explanation at all, CA, but this system was designed 7 or 8 years ago. The bottlenecks we experience now seem mostly related to sending buff data and positional data for NPCs on small instanced maps or in crowded outdoor areas. Player data doesn't seem to cause terribly a lot of slowdown compared to 300-odd Cimerorans in the mountain pass.
Despite being a risky thing to tinker with, CoH's network subsystems is apparently the focus of ongoing optimization changes as evidenced by the recent stress tests. Frankly, they direly need to be! During these changes, it sure wouldn't hurt to give us another byte or two to allow for more costume options. 2 bytes would theoretically allow for 64k or so of possible individual costume pieces. |
You are correct that adding a few more bits of data to the appearance definitions of characters will not add more weight to the traffic. I never said they did.
Most of the problem we have right now is associated with tracking the positional and action data of every element on the stage in potentially-visible range. That data's sent much more frequently than appearance data needs to be, and that's the data packet that's being managed and (hopefully) optimized (usually, that's more of a case of decreasing the interval of updates and increasing the client's ability to predict what will happen between updates, as you can't make them much more lean)
But ALL that data structure was defined early on-- and in an era where code practices that we see today weren't in place. In general, rather than having a function that needed X info call a function that would then extract that info from the data, programmers often accessed that data directly in various (unpredictable) places in the game. It knew that the data it needs was in the 65th bit. It went there and started reading.
As silly as this sounds today, this was rather common practice when defining the underlying code of the communication systems that powered this generation of games. The devs didn't anticipate the broad appeal of the costume creator, so when they defined the costume bits and left room for costume updates over time, they didn't necessarily leave the room for as many extra bits as players may assume.
So, add two bytes... then hope you can find every single place everywhere in the code that also might be using data piggybacked on that packet and make that change.
That's a time-consuming system that CAN be done, but it's money spent that, if you decide a BETTER tactic would be fewer but higher-detailed parts, isn't necessary.
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I knew I had your profile bookmarked for a reason.
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Originally Posted by Feycat
Yup. Check my sig.
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I had actually done a bunch of work on detailing all of the costume history to look into this myself (completely unsure about what the results would be, myself), but I think I saved it in Google and never finished/posted it...|
Originally Posted by Feycat
Yup. Check my sig.
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I do remember that my conclusion was a bit different than yours.
Perhaps I need to find that and post it and see what we all make of it...
@Zethustra
"Now at midnight all the agents and the superhuman crew come out
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
and round up everyone that knows more than they do"-Dylan
one thing that i think people discount unfairly is that costumes were more than just costumes now. weapon customization, power customization and animation customization are also part of the mix as well. technically they would be handled by different departments, but if my understanding of how game companies work, most of the art department has skill in a number of disciplines and can work between departments.
I suppose the reason i dislike these discussions is what has already been shown, they turn accusatory right away. the bottom line is we simply do not know what the internal stories are in paragon studios, but we make the most hostile accusations, that they are withholding costumes from us just so they can charge us for them later, largely out of ignorance. and that ignorance can lead to cynicism and eventually to people leaving with a bad taste in their mouth not because of anything that was actually done, but because of insinuation and bitterness.
Chiming in to agree (to a large extent) with the OP.
This game is - in majority - about the character generation / generator.
As the Costume Designer becomes increasingly unreliable / shows it's age, the (perceived) quality of the game changes.
My suggestion (personally; take it or leave it) is to increase all menus from "2 deep" (Torso - Tops With Skin) to "3 deep" (Torso - Tops with Skin - Patterns), so that you have 25-ish items on a list, instead of 50+ -ish items on the lists.
But any other solution that works is acceptable.
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I knew about that pic and wanted to bring it up, but I wasn't sure if you were the one who posted it last time. Based on that face, I should have known |
Originally Posted by bAss_ackwards
Speaking of naked characters, around the launch of City of Villains I made a character named The Naked Truth, who was an Ice/Ice Dominator.
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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.
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...anymore.
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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
None of the female chests have nipples
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This game has a whole ranch full of dead/dying ponies which are/were never cared for. PvP, AE, bases, gladiators (though nobody actually rode this one), inventions, power customization, the Shadow Shard, etc.
Unfortunately, only one pony can be taken care of at a time, and right now it's the pony wearing the Ascension Armor while galloping about in the Keyes Trial.
Anyone was able to make an animal toon (i.e. , full lion, cheetah etc.) and effectively use the steam punk pieces? I'd love to see it to get ideas. I want to use these pieces since I bought them. On my second toon (Paragon Crow) I'm using Valkyrie Armor, then Samurai Armor from the Ninja Pack. I don't want Feline Praetorian to have Armor at all. I just want her to be different colors as far as the costumes go.
My mech/tech toon is only going to be made when Time Manipulation comes out. That will allow me to use the cyborg pack finally (got this pack when I first started playing this game). My mech/tech toon will probably use the Bull/Minotaur head an body and be my only male toon. I'm just trying to make sure I use all the pieces for and on my brutes/tankers. Of course my Minotaur won't be a brute/tanker because that powerset is not for those ATs. I'll probably make him a defender.
Still want an idea for the Steam Punk Pack pieces. Would love to see screen shots of full on animals using these pieces.
THIS TOON IS NOW A HERO!
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Can somewhat agree with you here regarding PvP, AE, Bases and Shadow Shard... and it's truthes like these about CoH that concern me about it's ability to lure the F2Pers into becoming VIPs.|
Originally Posted by Vice_Virtuoso
This game has a whole ranch full of dead/dying ponies which are/were never cared for. PvP, AE, bases, gladiators (though nobody actually rode this one), inventions, power customization, the Shadow Shard, etc.
Unfortunately, only one pony can be taken care of at a time, and right now it's the pony wearing the Ascension Armor while galloping about in the Keyes Trial. |
Face it, the F2Pers are going to ask VIPs at some point about other aspects of the game... and I don't think we're going to lie.
And with that I think to myself why I left 2 other MMOs I won't mention... aside from flawed mechanics... there was this "forget the old, concentrate on the new" mindset and the game becomes more or less about one small, tiny aspect of the whole... and right now... I'm kinda seeing that developing with "Incarnates".
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No they aren't, they can't send tells. Just kidding, yes they probably will be. I know I won't lie when they ask me what an SG is good for. Sure I designed a base or two, even figured out the whole lame 'stacking' scape goat they did to make it more customizable, but I've yet to find an SG which actually does something together...|
Originally Posted by SupaFreak
Face it, the F2Pers are going to ask VIPs at some point about other aspects of the game... and I don't think we're going to lie.
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Well, there was SG-1 back when I used the Liberty server on my brothers account and Hami raids were worth it. But now if you want a big group of people to play with, hop into pocket D on you 50 who is only getting content through a round about, lengthy process.
I'm not opposed to buying costume bits I want, but if I wanted to spend hours and hours a day to get them in game I would play WoW. Not really, since I hate WoW. I mean, the acension stuff, okay only Incarnates can use it, so unlock it when you unlock your first incarnate slot. And the aura stuff, unlock that when you get +1 or something at the least. Maybe I just like the whole leveling up more than end game waste, because at 50- even with the incarnate stuff- I still feel like I'm going nowhere when I play that.
Yay, rant.
In agreement with the OP can I just say that I once took a look at a certain DC based game and laughed and pointed at it in mocking shame, when I realised you could have no more than 3 colours + skin in a costume! WTF!
Yes, the City of Heroes Character Costume Creator is a leading weapon against the opposition. Love it, nurture it, it's your baby.
This is a song about a super hero named Tony. Its called Tony's theme.
Jagged Reged: 23/01/04
Not to bust on your explanation at all, CA, but this system was designed 7 or 8 years ago. The bottlenecks we experience now seem mostly related to sending buff data and positional data for NPCs on small instanced maps or in crowded outdoor areas. Player data doesn't seem to cause terribly a lot of slowdown compared to 300-odd Cimerorans in the mountain pass.
Despite being a risky thing to tinker with, CoH's network subsystems is apparently the focus of ongoing optimization changes as evidenced by the recent stress tests. Frankly, they direly need to be! During these changes, it sure wouldn't hurt to give us another byte or two to allow for more costume options. 2 bytes would theoretically allow for 64k or so of possible individual costume pieces.
For a LONG time, people have been requesting things like simple sheer hosiery, knee socks, and ankle boots that could be addressed this way. I frankly don't know why longstanding requests like this HAVEN'T been added in yet.