Character model revamp?

It turns out that the Devs rarely if ever completely "delete" costume items from the source code. Yes they have made many items "unavailable" in the game, but the code behind these things linger to this day because it's usually safer to just leave them abandoned in place maintenance-wise.

As to why the Devs often chose to "replace" items instead of just adding new versions of old items I think they get stuck into the mindset that "players want new things" without realizing that we mostly just want "more" things, not just new things. Sometimes it might just be easier from an implementation point of view to replace stuff instead of adding new stuff. For whatever reason it can be very annoying.

[Science]
The notion of taking a grainy, low resolution photo and generating an enhanced version of that which has more detail is, for the most part, science fiction. However, the notion of taking a grainy, low resolution video and generating an enhanced version of it which appears to contain far more detail than the video appeared to take is actually not impossible in at least some cases. The concept existed twenty years ago and I studied it myself in college at one point (specifically, jitter induced subpixel detail). However, the technology to do it hasn't really existed until relatively recently. Today, the set of techniques are usually referred to as super resolution technology.
[/Science]

My last full time job was building and repairing computer systems for a company that offered forensic video analysis software. The kind of stuff that is actually possible is pretty impressive, as long as you don't expect "magic green lines" to do the work for you.

(Also: Hollywood really loves their keyboard interfaces, lulz.)

Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

You're quite welcome, Dink I try to pitch in with stuff I know whenever I can, but don't worry about correcting me when I say something terribly wrong.

It's not just about what looks better, but what a costume piece actually "is." For instance, the old-old Gladiator shoulder was quite low-res, leading to some people using it to represent metal, others leather and still others carapace. When it was up-rezzed and made to look like beaten iron, most of those "other" designs no longer worked. That's what I mean when I say you have to invent information where none exists.

Low-res textures are a bit like a Rorschach ink blot test, in that they often look like splotches and each person who looks at them sees something different. My "uprezzing" them, you ARE making better textures, but you're also making much more specific textures at the same time. The more detail you add to an item, the more specific and particular and unique it becomes and the more uses it can no longer fill because it's obviously not what the low-res version might have looked like.

Uprezzing old textures is a lot of work, since an artist would basically have to make brand new ones with the added burden of having to keep to a very strict look. It's like tracing over 320x240 graphics in Flash (which I've done), in the sense that sooner or later, you HAVE to start making your own details because the resolution is so poor small details turn into blotches. It's a lot of work, and at the end of the day, you're creating something that has a very high chance of not really being what people thought it should be. Again - look at the Medieval shoulders and tell me what pattern that is on the sides. I'm told it's a Celtic weave, but what kind? And is it really? Because it doesn't look like one to me.

That's why David made the decision he did - keep the old pieces, update whenever possible and leave both pieces in. He even wanted to work on a toggle button to hide "old" costume items in the editor, and tech for that already exists with the button which hides all items that aren't owned. That is, to me, the safer approach. Add "better" versions of old items, but don't remove the originals. Just hide them.

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.

Pure guesswork here, but this wouldn't actually surprise me. Real-life video captured into a digital format and interpolated between pixels should hold a lot of information from that interpolation between the various frames, because the more detailed real world can flow between those more seamlessly.

Unfortunately for this thread, that doesn't really work on computer-generated animation that's pixellated at creation. Maybe if an original scan existed somewhere and that were rescanned in higher detail, then that could work, but as the character model textures stand right now, to make them more detailed we'd have to create that detail from whole cloth.

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.

You mean normal mapping, methinks. Bump maps have been in the game for... well... forever.

And I agree... the newest faces look down right bizarre in all their plasticiness.

That's why I was glad that, in at least one episode of Star Trek:TNG they made it relatively clear that this "enhancing" was being done by extrapolation, i.e. "computer, take your best guess at the missing data".

As far as character models go, I'm in the "perfectly happy" camp. I came to CoH after 3+ years of staring at WoW's oddly-proportioned character models with their oversized hands and potato butts (seriously, take a female night elf and put her in leather pants, and her butt looks like a potato). Not to mention things like WoW's plate armor being mapped directly to the models' "skin" so that it "jiggles" in a way that plate armor simply should not do.

Exactly, and I'm reminded of the first upgrade I had in my video after I started playing. I think it was going from an Nvidia GS6600 to a 7600 but it could have been a 5600 to 6600. Anyway. ... I was shocked at the changes in how some of my characters looked. Just with that one upgrade.

And that was just improving my video card not actually changing any of the underlying graphics in the game.

Exactly. With video each frame contains slightly different data so one can use a computer to fill in a frame with data from other frames. It would be a big pain in the neck resource wise. Which is why it needs modern computers and software and isn't a common tool anyone can use.