Wow, this really makes me want hair under my hood! Or at least the illusion of swept back hair. Something!

Hair under hoods was available in the game... a long (long) time ago in a Galaxy far, far away. If memory serves, it was one of the closed beta servers that went up for pre-release testing.

It looked awful, because of the clipping between the hair and the hood, and for all practical purposes, unless your character had a crew cut, the hood occasionally poked out from the hair in odd places. BW decided it was not fixable in the time available, and just suppressed the hair visuals for any "hood up" chest piece.

The limitation is, iirc, the model collision mapping on the Hero engine that swtor uses, and at the time nobody had the time to try and fix it. Now, I am 99.9% sure that the issue is nobody on the team knows the ins and outs of the Hero engine well enough to be able to investigate the problem.

It sucks, but it is one of a list of areas where BW's dev team seem to have lost the expertise to extend and maintain elements of the game (the UI designer being the other glaringly obvious one).

Maybe a way to make it work would be to create "hair head gear", that would be an head gear that would look like hair, and could be dyed to look like our character's actual hair (would have the added benefit of being able to temporary change our characters' hairstyle without changing the actual hair, to fit with a particular outfit for instance).

Some could be similar to some of Padmé's more elaborate head gears (like some of her queen or senate ones) and make the hood disappear, while other could simulate hair hunder a hood, they'd work the same way as some masks / helmet do and fit under a hood, just to hide the baldness included with most of the more recent hoods.

They'd have to make it so that these particular "hair head gear" don't disappear during cutscenes though.

Hair under hoods was available in the game... a long (long) time ago in a Galaxy far, far away. If memory serves, it was one of the closed beta servers that went up for pre-release testing.

It looked awful, because of the clipping between the hair and the hood, and for all practical purposes, unless your character had a crew cut, the hood occasionally poked out from the hair in odd places. BW decided it was not fixable in the time available, and just suppressed the hair visuals for any "hood up" chest piece.

The limitation is, iirc, the model collision mapping on the Hero engine that swtor uses, and at the time nobody had the time to try and fix it. Now, I am 99.9% sure that the issue is nobody on the team knows the ins and outs of the Hero engine well enough to be able to investigate the problem.

It sucks, but it is one of a list of areas where BW's dev team seem to have lost the expertise to extend and maintain elements of the game (the UI designer being the other glaringly obvious one).

So that's it? We will never have hair under hats and hoods because of a lack of foresight on Bioware's part to make sure more than one person knew certain important aspects of the engine to make changes and fixes?! Why didn't they just fix it after launch? Bald heads under hoods and those eyesore headwraps under hats are such a blatant copout.

While this is great for the employee (you're irreplaceable) it's bad from a management standpoint and this is why: You either lose time retraining someone in that position in order to get back to operating at 100% losing that functionality of your business or product until you do, or you lose it forever. I have never heard of a scenario where a company chose the latter.

The incompetence astounds me. This is basic contingency planning, most displeased.

Great work, EA! You just had to push Bioware for a release during the Christmas season, instead of holding back until the game was truly ready for launch.

Wow, this really makes me want hair under my hood! Or at least the illusion of swept back hair. Something!

 

LOL, I saw this on reddit too and I was so close to making a thread to link it here.

This really is something that should have been implemented or fixed 5 years ago. But I doubt they can fix it or they would have by now.

The reason I doubt they can fix it is because hair clips through gear outfit models. ie. if you have long flowing hair or a plait, it will go through collars or jackets or back packs. It will even go through some hoods and helmets sometimes.

I want it fixed as much as everyone else. But I’ve set my expectations so low as to suggest this will never be done because it’s either too hard, impossible or too expensive to do vs times and resources to make new content and just keep the game going without breaking it.

I've read numerous threads where people asked for at least a faux head of hair in the right color.

Meaning, not their normal hair, nothing d****** around the neck, just a visible hairline at the front of the hood.

So, instead of turning the hair off, they could just switch for "hood hair".

I think they would sell considerably more armor in the Cartel Market if they added that.

The hooded sets would do much better.

Oh, and devs, that D-work up there is NOT profanity. Your filter needs some tinkering...

The reason I doubt they can fix it is because hair clips through gear outfit models. ie. if you have long flowing hair or a plait, it will go through collars or jackets or back packs. It will even go through some hoods and helmets sometimes.

I forgot about that - the hair style poking through does look awful and prevents me from using some really nice armours because of it. Conversely, I don't use any hooded armours unless I'm using a face-mask with them because plain hoods no hair look awful imo. Did Vaylin with hair & hood (kofte) only work because she was a non-player character do you think?

When you consider all the different hair styles, I can envisage many clipping, etc, problems with hair under a hood. It may be simple enough with some hair styles, such a the ones shown in that Reddit post, but just imagine trying to have a hood over those large pigtails or a 'mohawk', for example. (Trying to determine how much can still be seen, etc.)

Still, it would be nice. But I doubt it would ever happen in this version of SWTOR.

I forgot about that - the hair style poking through does look awful and prevents me from using some really nice armours because of it. Conversely, I don't use any hooded armours unless I'm using a face-mask with them because plain hoods no hair look awful imo. Did Vaylin with hair & hood (kofte) only work because she was a non-player character do you think?

Yes, she has hair because she uses a special model. It's the same reason Nico Okarr's hat doesn't have those godawful headwraps around his head. Supposedly, as it works currently, they would have to create a model for every hairstyle for every hat and hood. Considering the amount of pieces that would be, that's no small task. They painted themselves into a corner. This is also why the conical hat for Freelance Hunter includes a mask.

I still would like it done though. Hoods, especially shallow hoods (such what's on Hoth Defender) look especially awful, and I'll never get to wear a space cowboy hat that doesn't have those stupid headwraps.