More Costume Slots?

[Latex]

I know so many of us love the customization in City of Heroes, being able to play a character close to the concept you have is part of what makes this game fantastic.

 

It seems like a simple implementation for my non-programmer mind to add more costume slots so that we can have a single character with 12 or 16 costume slots instead of 8? In my case I'd love more because I have alternative looks of a single appearance; For example mask off, cape off or on, aura on and off variants.

[ImpousVileTerror]

More costume slots is a popular suggestion, and for good reason.  It's kind of half the whole point of the game.  I definitely support any and all improvements to costuming; whether it be content or quality of life/user experience.

 

But another suggestion to help facilitate more costume options would be to allow a summonable Tailor/Wardrobe, like the Invention Workbench.   That would be absolutely stellar!

 

And, as a major quality of life improvement, it would be wonderful if the Save/Load Costume interface could recognize subfolder structures.   I'd really like to organize my costumes better.  After about 300, it becomes a real pain to track them down.

[EmmySky]

Not having looked at the game code but knowing how programming works in general I can tell you that the current code only accepts a single digit modifier for costume slots.  It uses 0 through 9 and if you try 10 or any other multiple digit entry it does nothing.  I have no clue how difficult it would be to change this or if it can even be changed.

 

I have found the 10 slots to be enough, even more than enough, for most of my toons but I do have a couple who could use a few (dozen) extra for, as you say, variations on a theme.

Edited June 11, 2020 by EmmySky

[Greycat]

1 hour ago, Latex said:

It seems like a simple implementation ....

Oh, now you've doomed yourself 😄 There are horror stories from those who have tried to untangle the spaghetti mountain of COH code. From the sounds of it, changing things to get more slots would probably... I don't know... make all Controller powers suddenly taunt every enemy on the map and drop team damage into the negatives or something. When they added the server slot (for things like the Lambda trial temp powers, etc?) In beta it completely broke Dominators and Kheldian forms.

 

That said, yes, I'd love more slots. And more flexibility with existing slots, like not having to take two slots for a helmet/hat on and off option, for instance.

[General Idiot]

10 hours ago, EmmySky said:

Not having looked at the game code but knowing how programming works in general I can tell you that the current code only accepts a single digit modifier for costume slots.  It uses 0 through 9 and if you try 10 or any other multiple digit entry it does nothing.  I have no clue how difficult it would be to change this or if it can even be changed.

 

I have found the 10 slots to be enough, even more than enough, for most of my toons but I do have a couple who could use a few (dozen) extra for, as you say, variations on a theme.

It does nothing only because slot 10 or above don't exist. For a while back on live it was possible for Arachnos Soldiers and Widows to get an 11th costume slot if they did all the regular missions plus their unique one, and you could swap to it just fine as slot 10. You could just never edit it once earned because the UI doesn't give you the option. From that I can fairly reasonably assume the limitation is not a technical one, it's more that the UI would need to be changed to display more slots for editing and swapping purposes and then possibly concerns over storage space on the server - if every character suddenly has twice as many costume slots, that potentially inflates the size of the character database by a not insignificant amount.

[Haijinx]

I usually only use 1 costume slot per character.

[Greycat]

27 minutes ago, General Idiot said:

 that potentially inflates the size of the character database by a not insignificant amount.

I... honestly kind of doubt that. The files (plain text and editable) that we can see, per costume, aren't that large, and if they're stuck in a database I'd be fairly sure they're more compressed than what's exported for us to see. Going through costume files, old and new, the largest I see is 10 kb. Most are 7-8. Power customization files are larger - I'm seeing from 4 - 64kb. So even if we're assuming the largest there, uncompressed, at 74 kb (not Mb, not Gb) that's 740 kb currently for ten slots. 1480 if we doubled it to twenty - just over 1 Mb, uncompressed as plain text. And that's assuming every slot and all the powers are customized to that extent. How many people customize powers on all characters on every costume? Most, I'd wager, are using the default (so, no real "power customization" entry needed, just look to the default" or are using a minimal FX for a few, or have one customization they use across them all (which, most likely, referenced separately, because why copy that over repeatedly?)

 

Yes, the database would get bigger. No, I don't honestly believe it would be any size to cause any real concerns.

 

Edited June 12, 2020 by Greycat

[General Idiot]

Take that 1 Mb and multiply it by the 1,207,409 characters that existed as of the last time they posted statistics though and that's over a terabyte of storage space for costumes alone.

 

Now obviously not all characters will use every one of those slots, but even if you don't use them explicitly merely having them unlocked puts a costume in them and that gets stored even if the player never touches it. That could be solved by making them take missions to unlock much like the original four extra slots did and still do. And sure there might be some compression in places, but even if you assume a probably entirely unrealistic 90% compression that's still over a hundred gigabytes. I don't remember offhand  what the specs are on the servers Homecoming uses but I doubt they have so much free space that they can just add an extra hundred gigabytes or likely more to the database without any concern.

 

That's my point. It's not impossible, but concerns like that are probably more of an issue than a technical limitation in the code that may not even exist.

 

And then of course there's the question of where to stop. If they added ten more slots it'd be about five minutes at most once the servers came back up before there'd be a thread on these forums asking for ten more past that. Personally I don't think I'd have much use for more than 20 on one character but I knew someone over in Champions at one point that had over two hundred costumes on one character.

[Greycat]

That *still* doesn't strike me as problematic. Plus, don't forget, I was taking the *largest* files I could find, including power customization (which is actually larger, and I doubt looks anything like what we see when it's actually in the database, even *before* considering compressing anything.) I mean, looking at the file, I see"

 

PowerCustomization
{
    PowerName Incarnate.Hybrid.Support_Genome_4
    Power 3207861323776
    Color1  97,  97,  49,  255
    Color2  76,  255,  253,  255
}

 

... for over 3600 lines. Plus space - which with all that takes room, yeah. I really doubt the database has all that spelled out for every character (we're exporting it, after all, so *we* can read it.)  The same would go with costume files - a lot of things getting exported into a file we can read that I rather doubt the game cares about or stores in the same way.

 

Then again, you don't have to look hard to run into COH code horror stories. I fully acknowledge I could be way off and *these* are stored in an Excel 97 spreadsheet 🙂

 

Even so. Storage isn't exactly dear these days. Not at the sizes either of us are talking about. And yes, I know, "it'll affect performance if it's larger." True. But did we notice when we went up to 10 costumes per character? Was there a performance hit when we went from 8 characters per server to 12, to 36? Or the 1000 we have now? People do use them. Or when we added power customization?

 

I'm just not sold on the idea it would have any real size or performance impact to worry about. Technical difficulties in adding to the UI? Sure. I'd almost expect that. But that's about it.

[General Idiot]

Honestly, given some of the horror stories I've heard about this game's code I would not be at all surprised if all of that power customisation info is there in the database for every single costume slot. Nor would I be surprised to learn the way it's stored in the database is somehow even more verbose than that and takes up vastly more space than either of us would expect.

 

That said, having gone and actually looked at the specs posted in the June donations thread for the servers Homecoming uses, they have three physical machines each with 1920 Gb of storage. So depending on what else is stored on said machines - all the server software, the existing database at however large it already is, plus forums and such as well - an extra couple hundred Gb for extra costume slots may indeed not be an issue. What's more likely, but still not really hugely likely, to affect performance in any meaningful way, is each of those servers having 256 Gb of memory available. I don't think they're pushing the limits of that as is or at least I would hope they're not given this is the new setup they're just switching to, but every bit used for loading costume data into memory to be served to clients is that much less available to run mission scripts and mapserver instances. But that's ultimately a discussion for the dev team to have amongst themselves, whether whatever tradeoff may or may not exist there is worth it or not.

Really you're probably right that the UI work is the bigger hurdle.

[ImpousVileTerror]

I know that I would be willing to have additional costume slots without any GUI changes, and simply typing the command.

But in the spirit of accessibility, that's not a great solution for everyone.

 

So, mayhaps this is an opportunity to also fix an issue which has bothered me for some time.  Ever since they made the number of slots 10 back on Legacy, the Costume Change window doubled in height, and takes up a rather large amount of screen real estate.  Perhaps if it were possible to shrink that window back down to 5 costumes, but add a dropdown with "Page #" which would load the costume preview images in sets of 5.

 

Something to consider, at least.

[EmmySky]

Or a scrolly bar instead of drop down menu.

[Greycat]

I think the "Costume UI" change I'd like most is a "Propagate power change to all costumes" button. Just so you don't *have* to go to each costume to, say, set a travel power to minimal FX.

[littlegems]

so there are 10 costume slots. i have unlocked 9 of them. i am lvl 50+35 veteran, and i have 2 more free tailor sessions, but no more unlocked slots, how do i unlock that last (10th) slot? i have done the tailor missions for the first 3 tailors, the only ones i know of. i don't understand how any of the other ones have unlocked quite honestly.  i just want to be able to use my free tailor session on the 10th slot but i don't know how to open it. can anyone tell me? thanks

and sorry if this is not the way to ask this question, but again i don't know how this works.

[biostem]

I can't speak for others, but I frequently have different color variations of the same costume on many of my characters;  I wonder if an implementation like that would be possible, as a kind of shortcut or middle-ground.  I'm not saying I wouldn't love more costume slots, but perhaps some sort of "palette swap" option would be an alternative, if more slots isn't an option...

[EmmySky]

3 hours ago, littlegems said:

so there are 10 costume slots. i have unlocked 9 of them. i am lvl 50+35 veteran, and i have 2 more free tailor sessions, but no more unlocked slots, how do i unlock that last (10th) slot? i have done the tailor missions for the first 3 tailors, the only ones i know of. i don't understand how any of the other ones have unlocked quite honestly.  i just want to be able to use my free tailor session on the 10th slot but i don't know how to open it. can anyone tell me? thanks

and sorry if this is not the way to ask this question, but again i don't know how this works.

Either use Halloween salvage (one of each) and turn it into Annah in Croatia for the last costume slot or switch sides (red to blue or blue to red) and run a tailor mission there.

 

Good luck!

[ZacKing]

On ‎6‎/‎12‎/‎2020 at 10:03 AM, Greycat said:

I think the "Costume UI" change I'd like most is a "Propagate power change to all costumes" button. Just so you don't *have* to go to each costume to, say, set a travel power to minimal FX.

Yes this please!  I wanna say that I remember dev posts from back then that adding more costume slots was a lot of work for some reason.  Something about the UI being a real pain to update or change.

[Greycat]

13 hours ago, littlegems said:

so there are 10 costume slots. i have unlocked 9 of them. i am lvl 50+35 veteran, and i have 2 more free tailor sessions, but no more unlocked slots, how do i unlock that last (10th) slot? i have done the tailor missions for the first 3 tailors, the only ones i know of. i don't understand how any of the other ones have unlocked quite honestly.  i just want to be able to use my free tailor session on the 10th slot but i don't know how to open it. can anyone tell me? thanks

and sorry if this is not the way to ask this question, but again i don't know how this works.

You have six by default - top row and one on the bottom. Those are the ones you're seeing.

You have three missions (20, 30, 40.)

And you have one slot you can unlock by halloween salvage.

[littlegems]

thanks, i understand now. i didn't remember about the annah in croatia thing from 500 years ago when i played.  i knew y'all would have the answer.