Officially Unofficial Weekly Discussion #17: Fashion Faux Paws (Costume Creation)

[Starhawk32]

I don't know if this has been mentioned but years ago fashon tight boots would turn out sort of ice blue when you set both colors to white.  one day it was fixed again.  Recently this came back

[Greycat]

On 2/22/2023 at 1:32 PM, SeraphimKensai said:

What do you think about the Costume Creator? What are some strengths or weaknesses of it? What changes to it would you potentially like to see if any? How long do you spend on average per costume? What's the longest amount of time you've spent on a costume? Do you participate as a contestant or host of in-game costume contests? If so what's your experience been with them? Lastly, feel free to share a couple screenshots of your favorite costumes.

 

 

Generally, love the costume creator. Granted, experience with newer games make me wish we had more flexibility in creating our actual *characters* - yes,  y ou have a variety of faces to pick from and can fiddle with the sliders a little, but you're still using Face12 or Young Face 6 or what have you, for instance- but even with the limitations imposed by an engine as old as ours (I want my fingers!) I can only think of *one* time I've run across someone with the "same" (or close enough) costume as me... and that was back in the single-digit issues on Live. (I'm ignoring "let's use this costume together" or "there's a SG uniform" instances.)

 

Strengths are just ... variety.

 

Weaknesses? The way patterns and such are handled (as I recall,) they're mirrored across the character, which doesn't allow for assymetric patterns. They're also at kind of a lowish resolution (again, as I recall.) Probably the biggest *annoyance* I have with it have been when new pieces were introduced... and suddenly, because of how the tailor works, my costumes are "invalid," so if I want to tweak *a* color, suddenly I have to go back and (for instance) try to remember which pants and pattern I had, or they change, despite only wanting to (say) change that character's hair.  (That and having some pieces removed, but that was during live - I had one character who had the old ... I want to say "elf ears" and the *real* Malaise pattern - as in that used by the character Malaise - which were both removed and replaced. The current "malaise" pattern just is nowhere near the same.)

 

 

I don't really deal with CCs. I might look the participants over, but most of the time they're either too large, not moved somewhere like Echo (so a REALLY NICE group of costumes gets screwed by night lighting - even made a base and offered it to host CCs, pre Echo) or there are times they just feel rigged, with 3rd and 2nd being great and 1 just being "I can wear tights!" (or "close to nothing.") The last is, fortunately, rare. 

[ZekeStenzland]

On the whole, the costume creator is amazing. Not as good as CO, but still good. I still have fond memories of first time running the game, had friends online in game waiting for me… and I lost 1.5 hours in the costume screen. 
 

Things I would like to see better…

• Skin Patterns as a separate thing rather than as part of some costume pieces. Mostly affects legs, but chest and gloves too
• Better alignment of belts with pants. Can be tough trying to get them to line up
• Better alignment of chest details with chest pieces. Not all symbols will fit on a tank top and will bleed onto skin

Seems like there’s more, but drawing a blank right now. 

[mechahamham]

Whenever I communicated about costumes to the OG Cryptic/NCSoft/Paragon devs, I always made a point of saying something like 'The Costume Creator is your pony. You have to feed it, brush it, and exercise it every day or it will wither away.' It's what originally hooked me into the game, and maybe not now, but for a long time, I think it was what hooked others.

 

Others have mentioned most of the strengths I care about, so I'm going to mention areas where I think it can be improved. This is going to sound harsh. It's not intended to be. I love the costume creator and I want it to be the best thing ever.

 

- Textures are wildly inconsistent in their resolution and quality. Some faces have sharp and crisp lines while others are more blurry and have visible compression artifacts. <Insert 'NEEDS MOAR JPEG' meme here.> If HC is in possession of the original data for the faces (or if there someone out there who is), a lossless, higher resolution 're-master' of all the faces is well overdue. No changes to the art is necessary. This may not be possible. Those files may simply be lost forever.

 

- Additionally, some of the pattern textures are wildly inconsistent as well, particularly those that apply over the face. For example, the makeup textures will often blur over into the white of the eyes. Some tweaks to the color adjustment method (using multiplicative colors rather than overlay colors) might also help fix some of this.

 

- I would love to see parts of costumes and textures broken out into sub-groups. Imagine that when you were working on a face, you could lock in the lips and nose, but pick the eyes separately. (Imagine the children's paper 'sliding face' matching game, but with our characters' faces). This would require at least some heavy lifting in the code and texture editing, but would not require any new artwork. The obvious upshot to this is DRAMATICALLY more character variety with only a minor increase to the size of data structures.

 

- The old glasses models are pretty sad when compared to the newer items like 'Sweetheart' and 'Sporty'. The textures are miserably opaque and have no specular reflection. The low-poly rims are unforgivingly thin. The round glasses are tiny, and the ovoid glasses (Sunglasses, et al...) are huge. Additionally, glasses suck up a detail slot. You cannot have a horned demon who wears glasses. Even if there are no new glasses models, break ALL glasses out into their own detail category, as done with ears, please.

 

- Animal heads are WOEFULLY immune to customization. It's very difficult or completely impossible to change their size. They don't have any 'animation bones'. The faces are always snarling with bared teeth. They're never 'relaxed' as most animal faces would be, most the time. (This also applies to most of the animal models, tbh.)

 

- If you use Bestial legs with anything, you are locked out of using skirts or kilts. Why? (And why would the NCSoft devs have done this to begin with when there would be minimal clipping issues?)

 

- A lot of the hair meshes would look fine on all three bodies, yet are very firmly divided into 'male' and 'female'. In fact, players can and have experimented with this by doing demo editing. We live in a non-binary world now. If there aren't any clipping issues with the hair meshes, propagate them.

 

- For a little bit when NCSoft was floating the experimental costume file format that became our saved costume files, I reported a bug that one could hand-edit values into it with a text editor to get custom colors outside the palette made available by the game's UI. When I reported the bug, I made a point of saying 'I'm going to hate myself for ever mentioning this'. I DEEPLY REGRET reporting it. I wish I'd never done so. I wish I'd kept it to my little greedy self so I could have the perfect colors on all my costume pieces.

 

What I'm getting at is that it's BEEN far, far past time to have the option to use custom colors on all costume pieces for more than a decade, in game, or total. In fact, there are private servers who already do. This can be in the form of sliders, number entry, or even just remove the damned validation step that forbids custom colors in the save file. (NCSoft didn't validate any OTHER effing thing...) Comment that bastard out of the costume load code. <Palpatine> DO IT! </Palpatine>

 

The most immediate benefit from this is matching colors on pieces that just don't match, even though they should. The most obvious example are the classic 'with skin' patterns and the bridal textures. There are many, many more.

 

The ONLY downside to this is that players can fake 'nude' costumes. The people who want that can (and do) use modded textures anyway. We can /report anyone who makes a point of 'flashing' others or sexually harassing others in the game, because we do so already.

 

Long and short, it's not 2004. NOBODY is playing CoH over a POTS modem connection. Maybe some of us are still stuck on the potatoes  we were using to play CoH in 2004, but I highly doubt that. We can afford to use more memory. We can afford to use more network bandwidth. Let's add in some of the more popular modded textures, and accept at least some community submissions for textures and meshes. I, myself, submitted some textures to the devs in 2020 or 2021, I think, but was met with *crickets*.

 

If I may be so bold, from looking at the volunteer thread, we have all the human power we need to do ALL of these things.

[Ukase]

The biggest strength of the costume creator is the random creator feature. It does a better job than I would do, for sure. My routine is to hit it maybe a dozen times until I see something that might capture the image of what I think a character with the name it has might look like. I might change the color, and the head and hair. And the auras. Never did see the appeal of most of those. 

And the random creation tool has an affinity for non-human heads. Not sure why that is, but it does result in some interesting looks. 

Another big strength is the scale feature. I only just learned that was a thing about 2 years ago when I made Thong Kong, and got help with the gorilla look. 

The biggest weakness is there's no horse head. I'm on a character now called Neigh-Sayer. A horse head would have been a lot more fitting than a floating brain. 

[DougGraves]

Since I don't have a question thought of for this week and this thread got revived, I'm going to officially call this the Officially Unofficial Weekly Discussion for this week.