Costume Editor - Save/load Character Scales Separate From Costume

[McSpazz]

Let me give you a scenario:

Your character started out as a weakling. After some hard work, heaps of eggs, and way too much time in the gym, and now they're an absolute hunk.

You'd want to change your character scales, of course! However, you might not want to change all ten of your outfits into something new. Making the scales all match throughout your costumes can be a pain to do, though. Currently, the best option is to save all of your costumes, open up a text editor like notepad++, open the new costume file, copy the scales, open each of the old costume files, copy the scales to the old costume files, hop back in game, then hop between each costume and load each newly modified costume file.

I suggest we cut out a few of those steps by allowing you to directly save body scales not unlike how you can save power customizations of your primary/secondary individually or everything in one go.

 

From a UI perspective, you'd have something like this...

I obviously don't know the madness that is the CoH codebase, but here's how I'm imagining this play out from an overview perspective:

When you save the scales, it creates a .scales file only contains scales data (Everything from CostumeFilePrefix to but not including the skin color). When you load, it will only apply the scales data. It defaults to showing .costume files with a button that can toggle it to instead show .scales files.

The end result is that, if you want to transfer the scales from one costume to another, you never have to leave the game or guesstimate. There might be more elegant solutions, but that's just what I thought of.

[Naomi]

A checkbox option on the load costume screen that only parses the scales from .costume files onto your current costume might eliminate having to have scale files.

[McSpazz]

11 hours ago, Naomi said:

A checkbox option on the load costume screen that only parses the scales from .costume files onto your current costume might eliminate having to have scale files.

Yeah, I actually realized that last night when I was lying in bed. Would basically change the original suggestion from requiring two interface changes and a new file type to a single interface and a minor backend change in how the file is read.

[lemming]

Not a difficult thing to program a script to modify the costume files, but I like Naomi's suggestion

 

Looks like Scale for height

For the body scales:
BoneScale, ChestScale, HipScale, LegScale, ShoulderScale, WaistScale

Head scales:
BrowScales, CheekScales, ChinScales, CraniumScales, HeadScales, JawScales, NoseScales

[Captain Fabulous]

It's been a long time since I've tried it, but can't the costume files be edited manually? I can't seem to remember if that actually works. I know they're plain text, but I seem to remember something about how there's some kind of checksum. Or was that Champions Online?

Edited October 24, 2023 by Captain Fabulous

[McSpazz]

29 minutes ago, Captain Fabulous said:

It's been a long time since I've tried it, but can't the costume files be edited manually? I can't seem to remember if that actually works. I know they're plain text, but I seem to remember something about how there's some kind of checksum. Or was that Champions Online?

As I said in my OP, you can directly modify costume files via something like notepad++ as the costume file is basically a JSON array. The issue is that it's a lot of extra steps for something that should probably be just a few steps in game.