EVE General Discussion

Haha yes!! Its nice to see people who think like I do about this matter.

I love clothes that look like they came from a BDSM party

Since we have all these pretty CSM tags in this thread: it sounds like the whole avatar side of the game is struggling with an aging-to-non-existent toolset (no surprise, really: none of it's new anymore, it was rushed, and then it was neglected). As much as I enjoy having my clothing lovingly hand-stitched by a small team of the finest Icelandic tailors, it sounds like they need a toolset in much the same way that the PVE design team needs one.

This isn't "low hanging fruit," but the existing technology is old enough that CCP should be thinking about an upgrade, or at the very least a serious refresh. I take some hope from the fact that CCP karkur thought this was worth dropping in on.

CCP design choices and technical limitations (continued)

• Limit the number of factions to narrow design scope. Can't provide an option for every NPC corp and faction.

Discussion on specific apparel

• Rain: Some Sterling shirts are unavailable. Are they locked in some high tier FW store? No.
• corbexx: Rose colored glasses. CCP will look into it.
• Kate: Pirate faction dresses look like character is pregnant. CCP response: We don't think it looks that bad, and outerwear has to account for clothing underneath.
• Carmen: Collision for hair is inaccurate, we see clipping. CCP response: Can't make the collision boxes smaller due to performance reasons.
• Carmen: Clipping on Eternity jumpsuits for Gallente characters. CCP response: fixed!
• Carmen: Can we enable antialiasing in 3d view of character? Karkur: We may have had it disabled for performance reasons. We can look into it.
• Makoto: What about multi-color hair dyes, frosted tips, etc. No CCP comment on this. Personal comment: Some of this may not fit within EVE's style, too.
• Dersen: Can we fix smiles? CCP animation team was not on call to respond.
• Kate: Can we get clothing with less prominent logos? CCP response: We have logoless jackets, unreleased.
• Kate: Shoes without heels for women possible? CCP response: We have normal shoes on Gallente. We just didn't design these shoes. Will be considering them.
• Male shoes that are not boots? Attendees moved on and there was no response.
• Rain: Can we copy character looks, maybe through a NES certificate? CCP response: Not sure this is a high priority.
• Kate: Character was made earlier, but the skin tone is no longer available. CCP response: We had to get rid of some tones when all races were given skin tone variation. We tried to have a wide range of skin tones.

I love you too, Jade <3



As I am borrowing someone's internet to be here, I have to run!

Edit; Sibyyl beat me to it, and did a better job to boot. :x



One thing to note is that these scale. There are items that require very little additional work, items that require a bit of work, and on up it goes. Further, there are developer bandwidth issues, and bandwidth over short-term and long-term.

For instance, devs responded that new/interesting backgrounds were something that CCP could do very easily indeed-- but there's the wrinkle that they want backgrounds that better respond to lighting, which would require more development work. Depending on implementation and whether existing backgrounds are easily tweaked for a theoretical new lighting system, they may opt to not implement new backgrounds until they have a new lighting system. The low-hanging fruit may look good in the short-term, but long-term costs depend on implementation and conversion difficult.

I'm going to try to do this from a relatively short-term perspective, because that requires less consideration of variables.

Low-hanging fruit:
* Rotating as-yet-unreleased colors of existing clothes through NES. To avoid clutter, this would require rotation.
* New backgrounds
* Releasing backlog of old avatar assets that have in fact been developed. Will require QA work and some implementation depending on how old the asset is, but still relatively easy.

Not-as-low-hanging fruit:
* Covering additional minor factions with existing clothing items, such as factional variants of Sterling jackets, etc. While not as complicated as modelling new clothes, this runs into the clutter issue, and raises the question of the ideal level of granularity.
* Additional skin and hair-tones. CCP had trimmed back the options marginally to reduce clutter, but also dislikes options lost. It may be that CCP'll be expanding the options again to return lost options. vOv

High fruit:
* Hats. Hats are a clipping nightmare, and you'll notice that the newly-introduced headware uses a fixed hair model to avoid clipping issues. Implementation is difficult and requires a lot of jiggery-pokery to avoid a model that is either excessively frumpy, or not a clipping nightmare.
* Hair. CCP both knows that new hairstyles are much needed, but admits that hair modelling is one of the most difficult things to do. vOv
* Unlocking racial clothing to other races. This is seen as highly desirable, but there are questions about how to gate it so that players aren't inundated with options when they're first doing their character design, and so that racial styling doesn't go out the window.
* Accessories. Mention was made of gloves, watches, rings, etc; this would require a new implementation for models on the hand. CCP, via the Impact line, has demonstrated that reskinned hands for gloves can be done. This is, what's more, how we got sleeve tattoos and leggings. The issue is whether there's an easy way to implement models without excessive risk of clipping, allowing for accessories that require models.
* Shirt and jacket variations; sleeves rolled up, jackets unzipped, etc. Any significant modelling work is effectively as involved as modelling a second item. While I'm sure this is slightly an overstatement, it seems like its probably still a reasonable representation. Desirability was made clear, though, for making casual otherwise fairly formal outfits.

Forbidden fruit:
* Character cloning. While this would be nifty, implementation would require a lot of work, it seems. It might be that someone finds a way via 20% time to include it, though.

Complications:
* Clipping. This is the single biggest issue with authoring clothes; because of how clothes are mapped onto avatars, any new clothing item needs to be made preemptively frumpy to ensure that, for instance, pants don't clip through shirts or coats.
* Developer bandwidth. The NES/avatar team is understandably a small one. They do brilliant work, but their through-put will remain limited unless there's a major push. Given that WiS is naturally not a CCP priority for any conceivable time-frame, this is likely to remain the case.
* Clutter. CCP naturally dislikes having a cluttered market or character generator, as for most people an excessive number of options causes information overload and increased uncertainty. CCP currently plans to do some UI work to compress options into a color selector in the character creator UI, which may serve to free some needed UI space. Exact details on implementation weren't stated. ;)

Oh, also. When I commented on hair, it wasn't inquiring. Rather, I was trying to lay out hair-styles that are already past their prime. :x There's a danger with excessively bold styles that in four, five years, we'll look at them and laugh.

what about excessively bold cheekbones

Achura are born hawt. I'm surprised when I see someone get it wrong. I would question such a person's sense for aesthetics and fashion.

As always, corbexx's efforts are living up to his corporation's namesake.

My apologies if I took an overly-authoritative tone. It wasn't my intent. In all but one case where I crossed comms with another attendee, I gave way.

I still hold out a tiny sliver of hope that some day it will be for much more than just portraits.

awesome, I love new clothing options, I can get rid of this caldari coat then.