Theseus' Ship: If an old ship is brought back to shore, and every last part of it replaced with new timber, sails, and rigging, is it still the same ship?

I like this question because, in my opinion, it's not about the physical world at all but about the way we as humans perceive and categorize things.  (Also, I just took a few benodryl a while back so forgive me if I don't make any sense.)

The universe doesn't care what is a "ship."  The idea of "ship" is something humans came up with as a shortcut for any number of configurations of wood, nails, sails, etc.  What is "wood"?  It's a broad term for some specific configurations of elements, each of which is just a name for a specific arrangement of protons, neturons, and electrons.  Etc.

So in this case, I think the answer really is "there is no answer."  I would say, yes it is the same ship because when I consider what makes a "ship" I am thinking of the configuration of the pieces, not the pieces themselves.  But that is just a matter of perspective on my part.  If you asked "if you take an important sword and replace the hilt, and then later replace the blade, is it still the same sword?" then I would say no, because in this case I feel that it is the blade which makes the sword.  But that's just the way it's organized in my brain.

You can apply this to humans too.  If I lose a kidney or break a hip and doctors replace it with a new one, I feel that the replacement is part of who I am and the old dead one is not any more.  You can do this with all body parts except the brain.  If you replace my brain, the body is no longer me.  The brain is the "essence" of the person just like the blade is of the sword.

Final note: http://xkcd.com/659/

You are not the first to think about making robe variations tman, and you won't be the last. The last word I got on the topic was the desired way to do this was with post processing. The same way that hair colour starts with one base image and 'shaders' change the colour based on character settings. My understanding is this would be less resources intensive than having potentially 100s of more individual textures/meshes loaded by the game each time you log in.

I see what you're saying about the efficiency, but these 6 textures combined, when zipped, only take up 976 KB.  So, if colors were added for all currently available robes, it would add roughly 7 MB to the download, which is already around 1 GB.  That's an increase of less than 1 percent, and it would more than double the body customizations available to the player (right now we only have normal, LA, MA, HA, and one robe).

And of course, if there ever comes a time when PS can change the colors of clothing arbitrarily (which sounds like a long way off), they can always be deleted.

Uhh... what?

Are you suggesting we ICly make friends with inactive players/guilds?  I think the "inactive" part might make that kinda difficult...

Thanks for the tip.  I was going off the color of the glyphs in game (look white with a blueish tint, and a dark blue outline) because I've never really seen azure outside of PS.

I've always thought that a lot could be done in terms of character customization just be reusing and editing existing artwork.  So, I decided to to try my hand at making custom colored robes for each Way.  Here's what I ended up with.

Azure:


Dark:


Red:


Blue:


Brown:


Crystal:


If people like these, I can do more for the other races.  I can also send people the .dds files if they want.

I'm not against the idea as a whole, but I really don't like the name.  It's just too obviously ever so slightly different than pizza but still means pizza.  "Flat pie" or something would work better in my opinion.

So, from what I understand, the game currently has a whole bunch of locked chests but no way to unlock them.  So, if lockpicking is a long way off, it would be cool if there was some other way for people to open their chests.

I know GMs sometimes show up as merchants to sell or auction items that can't normally be purchased by players.  What about an outlaw GM hiding out in the sewers or in Oja or something, who will unlock a player's locked chests for a fee?  There could be a limit of one chest per person, or require each player to perform some task per chest, or something along those lines, to prevent a huge line or overcrowding.