!!! Characters Shapes !!!

[Coyote]

characters shapes!
This is an interesting point. everyone is the same guy with some variations for the moment.
What can be done?
Do some generic types of hairs, eyes, noses, faces bodies parts...
Do a system of coloration for hairs, eyes, noses, skins. A slider with colours variances would be nice. a variable for each of those parts colour would be nice.
A couple of variables for example a guy who have black hairs but his age or level of global XP is really high, it adds some white hairs.
Doing a system of shapes for: bodies and each part of the body. some people are tall, some are big boned, and some are strong. Sliders to adjust global size, height, stoutness of the global body, and then of each part of the body: arms hands, head, legs, belly, nose...

Then limit the start and end limits for each slider depending of the race: a human for example will not have access to elves shaped ears, and dwarves will never be able to get slender bodies.

It will give one model with billions of different shapes.
Small ints for example 8bits will be perfect... it doesn\'t take a lot of time to load such a model I presume till it\'s on the client and it just have to adapt to the description.
Name
size

skin_colour
8bits
Colour of the skin

body_size
8bits
Size of the body (proportions)

body_height
8bits
The is the body more large or more tall

eyes_colour
8bits
The colour of eyes

[eyes_colour2]
8bits
The colour mixed with the first one or the colour of the white part of the eye.

haircut
4bits
Type of hairs.

hair_colour
8bits
Colour of the hairs

hair_length
4bits
How long the hairs are.

beard_style
4bits
Type of beard.

beard_colour
8bits
Colour of the beard

beard_length
4bits
How long the beard is.

nose_large
4bits
How large the nose is

nose_long
4bits
How long the nose is

nose_tall
4bits
How tall the nose is

nose_style
4bits
Type of the nose. Holes, sharp nose, piggy...
head_height

4bits
How long is the head

head_large
4bits
How large is the head

visage_position
8bits
X,y for the position on the head for the visage.
...
I think this would give more personality to characters. Just some work over the visage. The head... and the bandwidth load is of 104b for those options. Even if the characters model is 200b a 56k modem can download 280 of such descriptions in one second. In theory.
And the client can keep the descriptions of couple of thousands characters in memory.
This modelling way could also be useful for creatures or NPC generation.

[lynx_lupo]

I like your idea, but it brings a lot of work and some players wont want to spend 15mins just to make a char shape(there should then be some premade packages).

With a lot of work I didn\'t just mean to implement it. For every different race(and gender) there should then be different starting \"points\" and limits. Otherwise people would make extra-silly chars(like a dwarf with long legs, a long nose, pink eyes...)

[Axsyrus]

it\'s just a rumor, but i think they are already working on something like this ^_^

P.S. oooohhh a mug

[Coyote]

Originally posted by Axsyrus
it\'s just a rumor, but i think they are already working on something like this ^_^

Aah... a rumor!!!!

The think is that it\'s just a dy of work and a day of tests... to balance and prevent strange chars... And it would save a lot of work on new models...

[zinder]

Originally posted by Coyote

The think is that it\'s just a dy of work and a day of tests... to balance and prevent strange chars... And it would save a lot of work on new models...

the code to build chars from some predefined parts may be only some days of work. but you must create the predefined parts, too. and that will be lots of work for the modellers.

And for working without predefined parts, AFAIK just scaling the model in only 2 axis instaed of all 3 would interfere with the textures. I dont know how difficult it would be to solve that.

IMHO this is a lot of work, nice to have feature, but should be of low priority till the actual game is more complete.

[Coyote]

Originally posted by zinder
the code to build chars from some predefined parts may be only some days of work. but you must create the predefined parts, too. and that will be lots of work for the modellers.

Right... I didn\'t think about this small problem... I don\'t know any think about modeling, sorry. ^^ But anyway... i\'l continue to think it\'s a great idea cause there is no game wich offer such feature till now. Maybe cause it\'s a stupid feature? but i\'ll continue to deffend this idea.

Why not try to do a squeletton and face generator... I\'d love to try when i\'ll have free time.

[SkwirlDude]

This would be realy cool. But would it slow down the game to have ten-thousand diferent character posibilities?

squeletton

i\'m sorry, but whats a squeletton?

[Wedge]

It wouldn\'t slow down the game, the possibilites would be math-based modifications to the player model, depending on how many there are... well he did the math up there.