The Mana World Forums

I've mentioned this some times earlier, but never got a clear answer. I think it'll be nice for the artists to get one.
I was thinking about variable colours, greyscale or other systematic colours that can me colourised in-game. I don't know if it takes a lot of programming or if it would slow down the game a lot (mostly in software probably), but I think it would be a nice feature.
Mostly with skintoning and haircolouring this will spare some work as well as amount of data, and allow more freedom to the players.
I was thinking about hue-, saturation- and brightnesssliders. This will make it easier then RGB-sliders to prevent too saturated or too dark/bright colours.
Maybe we could also have every player choose 2 or 3 colours at the beginning of the game which will be the colours parts of their appareil will have during the game. They did this in Baldur's Gate and I thought it was a nice feature, eventhough I didn't really like the rest of the game.
In every bitmap you could have mulitple variable colours with not only using greyscale (RGB = X,X,X) colours, but you could vary in this system with pure red, green and blue (X,0,0 ... 0,X,0 and 0,0,X) and yellow, pink and cyan (X,X,0 ... X,0,X and 0,X,X).

So in one total composed player sprite you could have for instance:

Hair colour = X,X,X
Skin colour = X,0,0
Custom colour 1 = X,X,0
Custom colour 2 = X,0,X
Custom colour 3 = 0,X,X

So... my question is: Will we have a system like this or are we going to stick to colourising every hairstyle, playersprite and armour variaty after every minor edit and leave the player with only 10 colours to choose from? (including bald?)

This must be my longest quoteless message on this forum yet.

/EDIT: Whoops, maybe this should be moved to suggestion/feedback.

Strange, i was thinking about this last night, i think it wouldent be to complex
to code (maybe im wrong, im no programmer ).

Anyways its a great idea.

Well I'm a programmer so I'll try to think on it. I sincerely agree more personalization of the character could be cool regarding hair color and skintones (even though I don't really like green or blue or purple skintones, maybe they should be limited some way?)
I don't agree about items color, it will bring lower quality, and I think some colors could be used for special items: just think of a red dragon armor...what if everyone could have a red armor?

Anyway I was investigating how to do it when we were using Allegro it wasn't so hard and I guess it won't in SDL as well. In packets that show a new player in visible range we will have 2 more unsigned char (not that much, but something that should be considered in guild wars for example)

Using an 8-bit SDL_Surface for elements with changeable colors shouldn't be too hard (perhaps the palette would add complications for artists). The problem is, perhaps, slowdowns due to color conversions to screen. But that could be solved by pre-converting it, at the cost of more memory.

No ideas with respect to the protocol changes, though.

Elven Programmer wrote:(even though I don't really like green or blue or purple skintones, maybe they should be limited some way?)

That's what I said (sort of), with a hue slider it could be easily limited to colours between yellow and red.

Elven Programmer wrote:I don't agree about items color, it will bring lower quality, and I think some colors could be used for special items: just think of a red dragon armor...what if everyone could have a red armor?

I don't see why the quality would be reduced. (EDIT: Ok, maybe I do)
I agree on the last point, but not the whole armor should be colourisable. I meant things like a sash, cloth, shoulderpads, maybe just the edges or some painted pattern.

Made a quick example of how a piece of armor could look with 2 variable colours.

Ok this make sense

Ultima Online anyone?
I really think we should look at UO at times because it just has the best things in certain areas.

Changing the hue of hairs/items is awesome and really really helps in personalizing your character with clothing etc.

Allowing personalization to the max is a personal agenda for me.

I agree we should also have multiple faces to choose from.
But creating your own item bitmaps doesn't sound like a great option if you meant that by "...to the max...".

I strongly disagree with users changing the colors of their items at will. If any of you played Diablo 2, you get to look cool if you have fancy equipment. It's like a status thing; when you get a really rare item, you get to show it off.

It would be very cool if the client could install client-side different character themes that would replace the current set of character bitmaps. For example, if the server sends a message to the client saying player BobJoe has spikey hair, then the client would use the spikeyhair bitmap that it loaded from a theme folder at startup. Therefore, the character themes would only show up on the client's computer.

I hope I did any okay job explaining =P

meltingwax wrote:I strongly disagree with users changing the colors of their items at will. If any of you played Diablo 2, you get to look cool if you have fancy equipment. It's like a status thing; when you get a really rare item, you get to show it off.

Sometimes it looked really weird, all those singlecoloured items.
But I'm not talking about the complete items (as can be seen in my example). You could still have special items, that are special with their colour or small additions to the bitmap.

The Diablo II-ish approach is similar to what I have in mind.

Of course they shouldn't be able to change the color of everything!
Just stuff like cloth, shirts, hats and whatnot. Stuff you can put in a dyetub.

I say as the last one. Like Ultima Online would be great: Cloth can be re-dyed, armor with small clothparts could have just those parts re-dyed for customization and also only the cloth so the normal armour doesn't overshine the rare ones.

Maybe a system for making special "dyes" for weapons, like customising a weapon with some magic would make a mark apear like runes or something?

I like the UO aproach as I already said ^^