Now everyone's a villainface :(

As far as I can tell the RECENT face changes are just because they merged Masks With Hair and Standard head types. When I went to the costume creator with each character, I had to search and re-find each character's face (I've got 20+ characters and they all use different faces except a pair of twins) - but all their faces were still there.

I DID lose 2 faces in the CoH/CoV face merger, including a character using Glowing Eyes that now uses Supernatural Face 13 and Alpha Aura on her eyes, but I haven't lost any this time, male or female.

Male "Face 1" had a determined look, rather than smiling or friendly, so the CoV devs just upped the contrast on him to give him darker lines and shading. The result is male "Villain Face 7". If you have a dark skin color you can see just a little difference on his lips, under his eyebrows, etc. If your skin is pale, however, the contrast hack fails; his lips and eyelids look much too dark, and it looks like he has dirt, scars, or Star Trek prosthetics on his cheeks.

Found a screenshot of "Face 1" on this post:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showt...69#post3395369
Notice the lack of dark lines on the lips, and lighter shading over the eyes and cheeks. Unlike Villain Face 7, this face looked okay on pale skin tones.

The male smiling, friendly hero faces got the heaviest handed changes. Obviously, the CoV devs had to do more work to make the corresponding villain faces look sinister. "Villain Face 3" is probably the best (worst?) example; at the top of his nose, you can see the angry eyebrow lines are more prominent than the original.

I call them villain faces for clarity, because that's their original name. They were labeled "Villain Face #" when they were added in CoV, alongside the original hero "Face #"s. When I say "Villain Face 1", that's Mr. Smirk. The original "Face 1" is someone else entirely. "Villain Face 7" would be the darkified "Face 1", while "Face 7" was said to resemble Val Kilmer.

The costume creator now refers to "Villain Face #" as simply "Face #". At the time of that change, many players, and presumably some Cryptic devs, were unaware of the faces' history. As I recall, most of the CoV team jumped ship almost immediately after launch, and were not very good at commenting or documenting their work.

Despite the rename, the current first dozen or so "Face #" textures (really "Villain Face #") are only the CoV-side ones. The CoH-side ones are gone.

My face is still the same - it just got renumbered in I21 revamp, so I had to use one of my billions of costume tokens to fix it

I should have taken a screenshot in beta; they had put the old faces back in briefly when they combined masks with hair and standard. The screenshots wouldn't actually show much difference because it's hard to catch what's (probably) going on in a still.

Now, there's not actually as much of a difference between them as some people think. What the difference is: The original faces were made as one side of the face so that they could be symmetried to make a whole face. They found that this caused issues with some of the masks/patterns introduced with CoV. Some of you may recall a brief period of time when some face were showing up on the side of the head and face patterns were acting funky.

The thing is, game engines are finicky with symmetry. The most common issue is shading issues. If you've got a keen/trained eye, you can see the difference in shading on symmetrical pieces that are in the game now. Some chest pieces are the worst offenders; go in to the tailor or creator and slowly rotate the character. If you watch for it you might be able to see the symmetry line and notice that the shading is slightly different on either side.

I have a feeling that what was happening with the old faces, with their symmetry, was that they were being "lit" from both sides. I don't know for certain, but I've seen similar things happen in other engines. This would cause the issues that some people are mentioning (that the "villain" faces are shaded more). The "villain" face textures aren't actually any different when you look at the texture I bet; which is why the devs say that there is no change (no, I don't have confirmation of this, but I remember it being said when it was brought up a long time ago). What can't be seen when looking at the texture is how it reacts to the in-game lighting.

So what's likely going on is that what is being seen is the details of the faces that were originally intended to be there but were washed out by the lighting; which means the "hero" faces could look smoother and brighter, while now the "villain" faces look darker and have more lines. It's not a huge difference, but it exists and if you are one to look closely at your characters face, you might have noticed it.

Here are Faces 1-13 as they existed shortly after CoV was released (included are Hostile 1-5 and Scarred 1-6).

Those faces are still there with the addition of other neutral stance faces. The ones currently in the creator, if they are more shade-y can probably be chalked up to high resolution ultra mode.

Still, it could be worse. At least everyone isn't duckface.

More non aggressive faces are desperately needed. Faces are the top tailor problem IMO.

The tailor has like 20 determined faces, 20 angry faces, and 2 goofy faces that are over the top.

Thanks for the screenshots! But it's still hard to describe how they differ from the original faces without a side-by-side comparison.

Re: Static textures or dynamic lighting?

The textures were changed, it's not just a trick of the lighting. This can be confirmed if you know how to look at the 2D texture images. The darkened lines on villain face 7's cheeks, for instance, are photoshopped directly into the 2D texture.

Should I post the textures or would that get me modslapped?

Whew, it's a little late for me to be hex editing and converting file formats and stuff, but here you go. This is just one example. All original CoH face textures were similarly edited to create villainous versions.

face_skin_head_10.texture


v_face_skin_head_10.texture


In this case, the villainous version's face is shorter, the smile isn't as wide, there's less of a sparkle in his eyes, and there are dark lines added on the eyelids.

As I stated before, only the villainous versions of the hero faces are accessible in the current game version.

Very interesting!
Even if the changes are subtle, I can understand how some would not have liked it (and still don't).

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zombie Man Here are Faces 1-13 as they existed shortly after CoV was released (included are Hostile 1-5 and Scarred 1-6). Those faces are still there with the addition of other neutral stance faces. The ones currently in the creator, if they are more shade-y can probably be chalked up to high resolution ultra mode. ...

Are those images from before or after the renaming/merging/replacing that has been mentioned?

The original faces showed up for a brief period during I21 Beta. Something about the editor was borked, and EVERYTHING was suddenly available - the old faces, the old Pointy Ears head, the old jackets, everything. They patched that up in, like, a week, at least since I saw it.

The old faces aren't sufficiently different enough from the new ones to constitute brand new faces, I don't think, though the one old old man face was a bit distinct from the three new old man faces. I don't necessarily want to argue against adding them back to the game, but to my eyes, they looked like the same faces with slightly different graphical settings, as the bump maps on the old ones were kind of garbage.

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.

I remember years ago that my main female hero's face changed to the worse, but haven't noticed anything recently. I did recently have to change a face on one of my heroes when I went to the tailor, but I think I found one that looked the same.

I've played games with faces I liked less, but I agree with ChaosExMachina that more choice of sympathetic faces would be good.

Remember, the only time you see a villainface is when you're slowly going mad...
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WARNING: I bold names.