a couple games have tried this...

[Kixie]

customizable weapons have been tried in many games, maybe it should start the right way, here in planeshift? There should be custimizable weapons. And im not talking about enchanting the swords either! What if there was a way of custimizing the looks of a sword or weapon? If the develpper team could make a program in the game custimize your weapon easily and efficitiently then the whole game would be awesome! then people who have better looking swords could possibly sell them for more! It would add something to the economy being able to do this! In real life when swords were very common in medevil times swords were never exactly alike and people usually didnt have the same sword as anyone else! So blascksmiths or even players should be able to customize certain looks on a sword!  

[Zakynthos]

That\'s easily possible.  They could have the normal general weapon categories:

Dagger
Short Sword
Long Sword
Great Sword
Exotic Sword

Then from there blacksmith\'s can create a certain aspect and colour of the weapon.  Ie, curves, spikes, edges, barbs, reinforcing, etc.

So Mr. Blacksmith can make a standard dagger, add a curve on the blade, and two spikes on the hilt, and you have...

A curved dagger!  (With two spiikes) :p

There has to be limitations.  You can\'t make a long sword composed of 100 spikes.  The availible adornments should be organized into slots.

[Kixie]

I want to do soemthing even further!! Imagine this! Inside the game when your making the sword you are able to go into a simplified 3d max and design the sword! Of course you can only make the hilt and add ons so big because of your supply of iron (steel,etc) Of course there might be people who make dumb ones but the majority of people will want to take time and make a cool looking ones that sell very good or just for something they wanna keep! Wouldnt that be the koolest ever?  

[Axsyrus]

that would mean that every weapon there has been made has to be uploaded to the server or else all other people that are playing can\'t see it.. this would cause a lot of server stress = LAG

[Kixie]

well it maybe cause a bit of lag but if the devs would just patch up some of the lag problems then this idea would run just fine...

[Xandria]

whemy, I don\'t think you understand *how much* overhead that would take.  It would be bad enough if all it meant was downloading every person\'s weapon (model AND texture).  But you also have to load all these weapons into memory, and every time someone else came into your field of view, the game would have to download their weapon as well.  Then you\'re talking about the 3d engine having to render all these different types of weapons instead of the 50 or so that will probably be in PS.

Yes, it\'s a cool idea, but the same thing has been said about avatar textures (something I would much rather see than custom weapons, anyway).  It would be cool to have custom faces, and tattoos, and whatever, but it has to be done in such a way that makes it easy on both the devs and the lag.  Custom texturing of weapons might be reasonable (choosing different colors and patterns and such) because the engine can swap out texture maps fairly efficiently.  But custom 3d models of weapons is a bit over the top, I think.

if the devs would just patch up some of the lag problems then this idea would run just fine...

Don\'t give the devs a hard time about the lag; they know it\'s there, and they\'re working on a way to fix it.

[Kixie]

actually i thought of a way a custom texture and model could be implemented fairly easily and it wouldnt slow down the servers! A person could create thier custom weapon then send it to the server ingame! Then when the weekly update comes (im hoping when the game is almost done there will be litle weekly updates) the devs could upload the requested models into the game. that way instead of a person viewing the model from the user through the server to all the users in a 30 foot radius of him, all that would happen would the server would show the model just like any other model. Then people, if they liked a certain style they could use it for thier swords too! This would also allow the devs to accept certain models and reject others in case someone makes something dumb like a regular block for a handle. I think this would solve alot and still add a cool little thing into game play...  

[I3lack Templar]

Slotted Like in Diablo. Lets keep it like that because i Surly dont wanna wait 10 hours so that my computer can download and use all 1000+ People different types of weapons. I like the slotted idea but to Go further would create more headaches for the dev team and MAY cause delays in Future Versions of the game. THAT i cannot allow to happen. Mabey make a new Item Catagory like, Weapon Upgrade or something so that ull have to take said weapon and upgrade to Joe nameless Blacksmith to have it attached, and have each Upgrade Consistant, like for spikes, To add Spikes to anything would increase Oh lets say Block Rating. Regardless of the weapon, Spikes Increase Block Rating. Thats just an example and i know the Dev team can come up with better stuff. My point is, Dont make it too complicated.

[Kixie]

hehe wouldnt something like adding spikes to make a better block rating be more complicated?    Plus i would think spikes would help your attack more... Also i think some of you have the wrong idea on how high of a file a hilt model file would be! It would be a max of 5 or 6 kb. Not very much. Even if it had to transfer from player to player it would be unnoticable. Even in a sea of people the lag would be 6 seconds of lag then normal for the rest of the game and thats not even how i want to do it. If it was uploaded to the server and just server to player information then there would be no lag even in a huge crowd of people

[I3lack Templar]

You can catch a Blade in spikes, Like a Sword Breaker. But that is not the point. If it can be done, do it just make sure it dosent get too tedius or Over the Edge.

Caution Should BE observed when Implementing New ideas.

[Wedge]

A sort of piecing together from a base set of weapon parts is possible, but really I would rather see more totally unique weapon types and designs that just kind of avoid being generic enought to be built like that.

[Rageburst]

Appearance-wise, you can simply apply those attributes such as curved and spiked and whatnot and it will show up in the game as such. For example, that would mean everyone\'s sword have a picked attribute such as regular, spiked, OR something else. This appearance is already integrated in the game rather than processed and pop up dynamically in-game as I think some people had in mind.

The big problem is making the implementatin design, coding, artwork in the first place. I recommend this restriction -- I don\'t think the player should have rights to making the artwork. It should be restricted to only what the game has already so that everyone can have it without needing weekly patched..... OR if you want, only you can see your MODDED appearance, but not everyone else. This might give rise to problems such as incompatibility though.... and more coding.

And Whemy, I don\'t think you know what kind of work goes into make a simple patch.... allow me to inroduce to you the Unified Process... it\'s basically 4 phases: inception, elaboration, construction, transisition. These 4 phases are applied in iterations for independent subsets of the overall product. A patch probably has to go through many of these iterations, which entails things like lotsa of design, documentation, testing, and coding.

Of course, this is dependent on the level of work associated to the patch. If this is a small content patch that just adds just a bunch of easily scripted missions to the game, then you probably need only a tiny iteration.

Then again, you have the example with Blizzard, a company that worked on a diabloii patch for 3 years and still hasn\'t released it yet... it\'s hopefully going through its last testing phase.

[Jessyn]

whemy, you said 5 or 6 Kb, right? ok, say 5 Kb, 1000 people on the server.everyone makes one weapon.  1000*5Kb = 5 Mb, now, that\'s five megabytes of information that have to go the EACH of the 1000 players. 1000*5Mb = 5 Gb = a real pain in the ass, and a LOT of bandwidth, besides the fact that

A)  a bit bigger than 5 Kb
B) more than 1000 people
C) show me even ONE player who would only have one weapon

sorry to beat down you\'re ide, but it\'s just not practical, keep em comin tho  

Jessyn

[Harwen]

Goodness no, I would hate to see some idiots running around with huge penises as weapons. Don\'t say it\'s childish, because people would do it, really. Besides I would make a pop-tart sword cause I am a moron.    

It would be kidna pointless to make a sword that you could only see...if you could make your own sprites and that would satisfy you, sure, but everyone with your sword would have that sword.

I say this because that would mean loading custom sprites onto the server to hang in limbo until someone \'downloads\' the sprite and texture onto their computer, then whenever someone sees you they would have to download that same sprite and texture, imagine everyone seening your sword in teh middle of the plaza...the horror...

[Kixie]

omg.. i dont think anyone read my posts all the way through. I think that we should make 5kb files for a weapon model, send it to the devs. If the devs accept it as a model then they put it into the game as a patch. these patches could be weekly. I relize that making a weapon and making people download it the first time they see it would cause tremendous lag! Man sometimes i think you guys just look at responses of other people and reword them to make it look like you made a new post... X(