When are you going to update all the models

So you're saying that this is like conversing with a repetitive and annoying chatbot? I agree completely. You can find my own thoughts in the matter at my website http://...

----- Union's finest underachiever -----
Farewell CITY of HEROES
The First, the Last, the One.
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Plus every glove texture in the game. This topic comes up from time to time, and we'd certainly love to do it. But I think it's going to take some kind of tech wizardry to make an undertaking like this feasible. If attempted right now, this one task would cost thousands of man-hours and nullify all other animation and character projects for months. Given the dozens and dozens of other cool things we could make for you instead during the same amount of time, you can see why it's not the best investment.

Then again, Ultramode happened, so it wouldn't be the first time we did a large-scale cosmetic upgrade. Never say never, I suppose.

Hey David!
I dont count with fingers because the work would be HUGE for little in return, but...
What about higher resolution for the body? Right now the costume pieces we been getting are so awesome, but when we get to see some skin, with the body painting effect, looks dated. Compare one of the skin patterns with the witch top... I wish we can have that texture for the chest with different designs.
Also, higher number of polygons to have our character shapes more rounded is out of chance too?
Anyway, cant way to see that will be in the Paragon store. I hope we get some new faces and hairstyles.

The problem is slowly becoming that with Ultra-Mode, we have 2011 environments with 2004 models.

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

I'm impressed that you focused on how much work this would be to do but didn't try to say how little it would matter. Thank you, David. I appreciate it.

I have to kind of agree with the others here, though - the better the game's graphics become, the more some of the uglier legacy pieces stand out. Even something as relatively low-detail as the Medieval pieces still manages to go well enough with the newer pieces, but the mittens REALLY stand out. Just imagine the impression a new player would get when coming from pretty much any other contemporary MMO or game in general and seeing mitten hands circa 1998.

I realise this would be a massive, massive undertaking that would be very hard to justify, but please - keep an eye out for an easier or partial soltion. For instance, why not make all new gloves with fingers and fix a couple of sets per Issue, like you said you'd be doing with adding shininess to metallic textures. Sure, it might take a long time and sure, it might leave some gloves looking much older than others, but it won't be such a huge amount of work all at once.

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In other news, what about bare feet? These are just one costume piece per model. Do you think you can give us less blocky bare feet some time soon? That would help quite a bit.

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.

This, QFT and emphasis

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.

In the long run, it may even be necessary. Those same textures are 7+ years old and in many cases so lowres that you can see the individual pixels of the UV map (not to mention that they're often flat and lack bump- or normalmap).

Ultra mode is fine and all, but shadows, reflections and ambient occlusion can only do so much to 7+ years old models and textures. Sooner or later, the game has to have a major art overhaul to stay competitive.

But I do have a nagging feeling that the art overhaul will also be known as City of Heroes 2.

A fair point. The initial post was also born of the frustration of seeing all of the constant graphics updates side by side with the exact same models since the game launched. People have been asking for model updates for years now.

Totally agree with you. Would certainly love to see that feature at some point. But like I said, the challenge is in figuring out how to do it without spending all our collective resources for months. We'll keep looking into it.

Well I certainly appreciate all of the content updates and all the cool stuff you guys have been working on. However I have to disagree about the effect this would have. It will make a Huge impact on the game to see our character models updated. Enough that it would make the effort worthwhile.

As people mentioned seeing your old toon next to shiny new building really tends to remove from the game. And again I'm not saying we have to have fingers, that's simply the most recognizable example of this issue. All I'm really expecting here is another level of details on the models with more polys and higher res textures. No need to rebuild the skeletons and animations. I realize that in itself is not going to be particularly easy, but the fact is the game really needs it now. Having to play such a low res model in a high res environment is a big turn off to playing the game.

If new character models needs to be justified, ask the powers-that-be to datamine just how much time people spend in each zone on average vs how much time they spend stationary not doing anything but chat and play with emotes vs how much time players spend at the tailor.

While we appreciate zone revamps, the truth is most of us don't visit every zone every day. I do understand that it makes for brilliant screenshots to market the game; but individual character utility/appearance by far gets the most use per-player.

Fingers, more variation in costumes (and I don't mean sheer count, I mean things like more shorter and taller boots, shoes, more textures, more loose shirts), higher-res faces, eye color tinting, and more poses and emotes are things players will use and show off *every day* for several hours. If players like how their characters look, they'll spend money (points/infl) to adorn them. So if you want something that gives the greatest return for the hours put in, this is it.

P.S. Non-rednames please don't reply with how much work this will be; I know. I also know this will require a revamp of all costumes, emotes, and power animations, and multiple issue releases might go by before this dream is realized. But I think of all of that as an opportunity instead of a problem; there's a lot of junk built up in the character/costume system over the years (pieces that are very low-rez and look awful, or clip with everything and nobody really uses anymore) it's about time to clean it out, and the power animation system, well...it really needs some cleaning out.

*cough*outsource*cough*



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I have a lot of conflicting feelings on this subject.

As much as I want fingers, I would not want them to put a bunch of work in at this point just to have fingers. There are many aspects of the player models that are outdated, and as much as they could stand to be updated at this point, I question the wisdom in doing so.

You can spend resources re-doing a bunch of already existing assets, or you can make new assets.

I see this as a fundamentally different argument than 'updating' a zone versus making new zones. Zones that have been 'updated' like Faultline and the RWZ still come with content that wasn't there before. Remastering costume parts is purely aesthetic.

We're already in a situation where zones and costume parts are mismatched with older and newer levels of quality. It's really a problem that doesn't go away until EVERYTHING has been updated, but that's like chasing a rainbow; you'll never catch it.

I make no secret my desire for CoH 2. Something like that is where I expect and want improvements in graphics and character creation to be made. If you look at where the state of the art is, it would be something like the APB character creator. In many ways it puts ours to shame. I want CoH's creator to be that good; it's always been one of this game's strong points and we deserve the best.

But you can't have characters that look that good in this game at this point because it's just not feasible and the rest of this game doesn't look that good. If you can't aim for that, I don't see the point in investing heavily in revamping aging character models and assets.

What it all comes back to is that this game is aging and rather than slapping yet another new paint job on a rusting jalopy, the devs should focus on keeping it running, putting enough bobble-heads on the dashboard to distract from the seats starting to crack until they're ready to get a new car.

Until the devs are ready to roll on CoH 2 (which likely may never happen), I'd rather they focus on the practical. No matter how much sparkle you put on Atlas Park, you're not fooling anyone that this isn't a 7+ year old title.

Having said that, I makes me sad to see the great work the art team puts in because it'll just never be enough to catch that rainbow.


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Thank you.
Y'know the thought occurs to me that if you compare the game at launch with Praetoria and what's been shown of Issue 21 that City of Heroes has very nearly become City of Heroes 2 just through the additions and upgrades to the game's engine. If you can get the resources to do an upgrade to the character and NPC models similar to the environments we will have pretty much arrived at City of Heroes 2.

How about, instead of defined wiggly fingers, you instead applied the same Face Tech you got to play with in the Steampunk Pack to our Bare Hands such that there would be better definition of the fingers through texture mapping techniques. No change to the underlying polygons or skeletal animations ... just an update using the new Face Shading Technical Trickery ported over to Bare Hands. Would THAT be something doable with limited resources?

It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for ...

What about faking fingers with trasmaps?

David, I have only one thing to day: You need to post more! I don't know about anyone else, but your posts always make me optimistic about the game's future

And again, I appreciate it's a serious amount of work. Believe me, I do. These are the things I call "luxuries" - the changes and additions that take a massive amount of work yet don't add much in the way of "content," as it were. I'd class weapon customization, power customization and the extra character model sliders as the same thing. I'd class paper missions and tip missions as the same, as well. And all of the above, I will class as "completely awesome." Sometimes, some things seem like too much work for too little benefit, but some of these are just worth doing anyway. Like power customization, probably the best thing to happen to the game in quite a while, possibly comparable to the comic ability to start any AT on either side

If you can ever find the time, or think of a way to spread the workload, I promise I will be first in line swear by our new fingers.

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.