The Mana World Forums

m4ndr4g00n wrote:I like the UO aproach as I already said ^^

Who doesn't?

m4ndr4g00n wrote: 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?

That'll be hard to implement on 2D without excessive work.

Doesn't have to be...
Imagine this:
You could have a sword bitmap and draw the runes in as a variable colour and colourise them the same as the rest of the blade for non-magic weapons.
Another quick example:

The blade on the far left is the base bitmap. The colour of the straps on the handle are customisable by the player, the colour of the blade depends on the material and the colour of the runes depends on the kind of enchantment.

This thread hasn't been active, but I think it's a great idea. I was looking into using rgb shifts in SDL_PixelFormat to accomplish dynamic colouring. Who can I talk to about this?

#sdl @ irc.freenode.net ?

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

Oh Yeaaah!!

The dying and redying in games really ticks me off for the most part though. Yeah, it's realistic and that's nice but it's just too much of a pain in the butt. Graal Online had a system where you changed your colors as much as you felt like by a code you typed into the chat window. No 200 gil just because you feel like wearing blue instead of red. Just pure, easy customization. Anyway, my two cents for what they're worth.

And you are putting out some sweet stuff Modanung. Maybe writing code to let players change the colors of two pixels is a little excessive though? Especially because the sprite's hand should cover it anyway.

Question: would it be overly difficult to use variable colors to (eventually) impliment alternate skin tones for the character set, if I provided full palettes for them?

The only drawback with variable colours is that you can not have gradients to other colours or different saturations.
So yes, it would be possible and it has been suggested. The colourisable parts should be either greyscale or a pure colour. (All RGB values either 0 or X)

Um...well, look at the character sprites we've got. I use approximately seven or eight colors to do all the internal work; all the outlining is the same color. So you would want me to turn all the internal stuff different shades of grey?

If they don't have to be variable they can stay the same, as long as their saturation isn't 0 or max.
So basically you could desaturate all skin-toned pixels. The eyes (if not variable) should have a slight saturation.

This is really more of a time saver for the artists. Where they would have had to draw fifty different pics of the same shirt in 5 different colors

they only need to the draw the shirt once in ten different positions and it can be however many colors through coding. It saves space and time. Time the artists can be using to create frilly shirts or vests or other equipments.

Allowing the player to customize the color could be an option later down the road, but the fact is we need more equipment sets drawn faster first.

changing the colors of a equipment piece doesn't mean to redraw everything. modern image manipulation programs can do such things with a few mouse clicks.

I don't intend to use different colours to make different types of equipment.
The main reason I'd want such a system in TMW is not to have hair colour (and maybe skintone) restricted to a small number of colours.
I also like the idea guild, team, or kingdom members can be recognised by the colour of their outfit. Although I hate it when my entire armor is bright yellow, so it should only be small parts as I said before.
This might also be used for enchanted items, but not by colouring the entire item bright red. Maybe metal parts could be slightly more red, but I think it would be best to show enchantment mainly through rune-like decorations, so just a single strip of colour bits.

A short idea, but how about making ONE 'custumizable weapon' that you can change to your own image. It wont be very strong, but it would be for looking cool. And I agree with the idea as the the skill system is gonna be, people should be able to be unique.

this idea could even apply to the front end... every one loves themed front ends