"4. Will armor have one or two dye module slots to accommodate primary and secondary dye modules? How exactly do primary and secondary dye modules work?

 

Armor will have one Dye Module slot.

 

Dye Modules come in three types:

 

· Dye Modules containing both a primary and a secondary color

 

· Dye Modules containing only a primary color

 

· Dye Modules containing only a secondary color

 

Dye Modules that contain only a primary or secondary color will affect only the primary or secondary color of the armor, while leaving its counterpart unaffected. It is not possible to combine a primary-only Dye Module with a secondary-only Dye Module.

 

For example, take a piece of armor such as the Havoc Squad armor worn by Aric Jorgan. It is white in its primary areas and orange in the secondary areas. If a Dye Module containing only the primary color dark blue is applied, the armor will now be dark blue in its primary areas and orange in its secondary areas. Similarly, if a Dye Module containing only the secondary color light purple is applied, the armor will now be white in its primary areas and light purple in its secondary areas. Applying a Dye Module to an armor that already contains one will replace and destroy the existing Dye Module." - Dulfy.net

 

So Bioware has once again half assed the already half assed system. So first you limit the colors we can use to the selection of dye modules instead of just giving us a color wheel like every other game. Ex: SWG, EQ 1 and 2. Then you make it where more then half of the colors we can get we have to buy using real cash, something that has never been done in a MMO, F2P or other wise. Now I can't even put multiple color modules in the armor I want? Why are we doing such a half *** system? Why in the world would you not let us put say a black in the primary module slot and not let us put another color in the secondary slot? Allow me to tell you why that is a really dumb idea.

 

1) You are once again limiting customization. If one thing that is ALWAYS true in any video game, the more customization the better. 2) Half assing a system that people have been begging for since beta only makes more people upset and leave. 3) If none of the common sense reasons why this is a bad idea will convince BW or those who seem to always forgive BW of their short comings, allow me to try to appeal to their wallets. So in the current system you are going to make people buy colors they want. But now that you have limited them to 1 color only for what ever armor piece they wanted to customize they will not be able to put that 2nd color they wanted to put in their armor. Thus you have cut your possible profit from these armor dyes in half. Bioware, please change this. I promise you there will not be a SINGLE person who can come up with a logical reason why we should limited to just 1 color dye per armor peice.

Edited May 13, 2013 by Silko

BW wanted to have dyes available from CM, CE vendor, security vendor and crafted. Would anyone have expected poor artifice to be relevant? And every MMO wants to be able to introduce new items. if they only sold one full-spectrum color-wheel dye, then they could not spread the sources around. And in particular make a crafting option.

 

And the BW system is limited only if they don't get the pairs out. E.g., if in a year, instead of shipping 12 colors and a main and secondary slot, they shipped 168 dyes (12 primary, 12 sec, and 12*12 pri/sec) then you can accomplish the exact same thing.

If you want a game with full customization, you should check this one out: http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

 

Anything less than that does not have full customization.

I agree, the system is completely retarded. I'm fine with Primary color dye and Secondary color dye. I actually think that's a GREAT system. As an EQ1 vet, I always hated dying robes and it just turns the whole thing one new color. You lose a LOT of the accenting and details.

 

However, the system being used here is absolutely terrible. Here's why: Let's say I want to have mauve armor with a chartreuse trim.

 

Currently: I'm screwed unless I can find a moddable armor shell with that color scheme AND a gear model I like.

2.1: I'm screwed unless EAWare actually puts out (and I can find/obtain) a Pri/Sec dye of Mauve/Chartreuse. I MIGHT be able to find a Mauve dye. I MIGHT be able to find a chartreuse dye. But I can't even use the two together.

 

Better idea: Sell access to primary color dying in the Cartel Market. Then sell access to secondary color dying in the Cartel Market. Have Artificers(or whomever) craft Primary Dye and Secondary Dye. When applied to an item, the dye opens a color wheel that allows you to choose what color is applied to that dye slot.

 

Now EAWare, the crafters, and the color-concerned player have all won.

These are the people who have been asked since beta to allow shift-click of items into the GTN search field... and they still can't do it. And you expect them to come up with something as imaginative and advanced as you are suggesting? Either the people working on this game left their skillz in their other pants, or else there are some serious limitations placed on what is possible by game engine. In either case, things aren't going to get any better until there is either an overhaul of the engine or the staff... and probably both.

I was more then fine with a pri/sec system. In fact I prefer a system like that. I was even willing to deal with being limited to the colors that they are going to give us instead of just giving out a color wheel. Am I happy that we have to spend real money for it? No, but once again I am willing to deal with it. How ever now on top of all this you are going to limit us to just 1 slot? When I first learned of the Pri/Sec slot it was my understanding that a armor piece will have both not just 1 and you are limited to choose which one you wish to change. That is the straw that broke the camel's back. You make a poor system to begin with and then you limit the system. Edited May 13, 2013 by Silko

Why do things simple when you can do them complicated? That's their philosophy.

First of all, you're missing a few letters in your thread title....."customization". Next, when did they ever say they were giving us or trying to give us "full" customization? People have been calling for armor dyes since before launch. And now they are giving us armor dyes and you're complaining because they aren't giving them to us in exactly the way you wanted? How about we all see how the system plays out for a day or two before people start freaking out and jumping off bridges?

Then you make it where more then half of the colors we can get we have to buy using real cash, something that has never been done in a MMO,

You have no idea how much these things cost. They should be easily affordable with the monthly sub grant of coins per prior dev comments. People will be selling them all over the GTN if you want to use credits. They are adding them into packs too, so it won't be long until the GTN is flooded with the Cartel ones. How many colors do you need anyway? You do actually have a use for all 25 colors from the Cartel Market? You don't even know what colors will be on there.

Then you make it where more then half of the colors we can get we have to buy using real cash, something that has never been done in a MMO, F2P or other wise.

 

You obviously never played Aion, they've been charging real cash for Dyes for several years now. So has Guild Wars....

So Bioware has once again half assed the already half assed system. So first you limit the colors we can use to the selection of dye modules instead of just giving us a color wheel like every other game. Ex: SWG, EQ 1 and 2.

I had no idea there were only 3 other MMOs ever produced.

Why do things simple when you can do them complicated? That's their philosophy.

 

Exactly. Let's take the tiniest most trivial feature and figure out how to make our paying subscribers jump through hoops of fire and buy more and more and more STUPID Cartel Packs.

 

This isn't a expansion folks. It's not a new play style or class or whathaveyou. Put a color picker in the kiosk... which should be free to subscribers... and be done with it.

 

90 days from now they'll be in their war room over at EA all yelling and pointing fingers at each other trying to figure out why nobody plays this garbage anymore.

So Bioware has once again half assed the already half assed system.

 

Here's your TL;DR version.

 

and yes, they did.

I could care less about whether the dyes are from CM or crafted. What bothers me is their system. Make 2 slots: primary and secondary. None of this - dyes with a primary and secondary color. That's just terrible.

 

That way, if I like the black as primary and get bored of the red as secondary, I can just switch the secondary without having to look for a whole new duo-coloring dye that was black as primary and the color I want as secondary.

 

Much like the enchanting system (aka the augmentation system), it's another terrible design.

Not sure where the OP ever got the idea we would have "full customization". I'd like to see the link to the statement that supports that conflated perception.

 

Sounds like OP is just mad about the way dyes are being implemented, even though OP is absent some facts and is using assumption as foundation for complaint. As far as I can tell, no real $$ will be required to aquire dyes with one exception: dyes that are CE vendor only.. you must purchase the CE.

 

Before tomorrow.. we have no ability to dye armor. After tomorrow, we have the ability to dye armor. Over time.. we will have more dye colors and I am sure more ability to dye armor.

 

I really don't see the issue. I see the QQ, but I don't see the issue. All I see is.. "wah!! they did not design it to my specifications!! wah!!" Seriously.. are you actually that self-entitled OP?

Edited May 13, 2013 by Andryah

Whats hilarious is how badly they ruined the customisation in this game which was at its best pre launch, they took out everything being modable for no good reason and removed colour match to chest just so they could hold onto it to "give back". They lift the bad things from other game and try to reinvent the good into an unusable mess.

 

I take it back its not hilarious, its just sad....

Then you make it where more then half of the colors we can get we have to buy using real cash,

 

If you subscribe, you don't have to pay cash. You can buy them with your monthly CC grant.

 

Now I can't even put multiple color modules in the armor I want? Why are we doing such a half *** system? Why in the world would you not let us put say a black in the primary module slot and not let us put another color in the secondary slot?

 

Math.

 

Imagine I have a piece of armor. Now, lets add one color slot to it. Now... let's add a paltry 8 possible colors for it. Now, to properly texture that armor, I need to produce 8 textures which incorporate those 8 colors. But wait, we want multiple colors, so lets add another slot with the same 8 colors. Now I need to produce 64 textures to cover all of the possible combinations. And I need to produce them for every base equipment model in the game. Let's say there are 30 base equipment sets, with 7 pieces each.... that's 210 base models. Let's drop that to an even 200. Most of the bracers are the same, anyway.

 

So now, we need to produce 200 x 64 textures to cover all the possible armor with all the possible combinations. That's a daunting 12,800 textures. A rough job, but you only do it once, so...

 

But wait: People want more colors. They really love mauve, so we're going to add it. Unfortunately, that means we have to add all the combinations. So that's 200 [base models] x ( 8 [primary combos] + 8 [secondary combos] + 1 [mauve-mauve combo]). That's just... 3,400 new textures to make. Well... they really want mauve.

 

Now they want chartreuse. Okay, let's add another 3,400 textures. Wait. No, we need to have the mauve-chartreuse versions too, so its 210 x ( 9 + 9 + 1), meaning we have to create 3800 textures now.

 

And so it goes. Each time you add a color, the amount of work you do increases... exponentially. Meanwhile, your texture repository is ballooning and it will get harder and harder to optimize texture loading in areas where a lot of those textures are needed.

 

Taking the approach used by Bioware: You add one color slot. For each color option you add, you need to create just one set of model textures (ie: just 200 more textures). Sure, the users don't have as many combination options, but you have the ability to add a larger number of the most popular/desired colors. It lets you focus on just the most popular combinations, such as "black", "black-grey", "black-brown", "grey-blue" without having to waste design-time and run-time resources on hopefully unpopular combinations like "green-red", "brown-pink" or "green-orange". Even better: you can adapt to customer requests without having to pay an exponential cost every time a new color is added.

 

Of course, procedural textures (textures created on the fly, such as by color-replacement ie: color wheel selection) may give you more customization and avoid the ballooning-texture problem, however, the textures are going to be lower quality (due to blending/shading issues) and have lower graphical performance.

 

1) You are once again limiting customization. If one thing that is ALWAYS true in any video game, the more customization the better.

 

False.

 

More customization at the cost of acceptable performance is not better.

 

3) If none of the common sense reasons why this is a bad idea will convince BW or those who seem to always forgive BW of their short comings, allow me to try to appeal to their wallets. So in the current system you are going to make people buy colors they want. But now that you have limited them to 1 color only for what ever armor piece they wanted to customize they will not be able to put that 2nd color they wanted to put in their armor. Thus you have cut your possible profit from these armor dyes in half.

 

You did your math wrong. In your proposal, you forgot the cost of actually creating the textures. The cost of doing it their way is drastically cheaper than your method, and continues to be increasingly cheaper the more colors they add in the future. Doing it their way is actually better for their wallets than following your desires.

 

Bioware, please change this. I promise you there will not be a SINGLE person who can come up with a logical reason why we should limited to just 1 color dye per armor peice.

 

#1 : Performance. Pre-cooked textures are easier on CPUs than dynamic textures.

#2 : Quality. Pre-cooked textures will have better anti-aliasing, better shading, and better textural details than a palette-swapped texture.

#3 : Increased room for crafting. By forcing all dyes into a single slot, the number of dye modules can be much higher. Instead of having just 8 colors creating 64 combinations, they can have 20 or 30 or 50 modules. Yes, I know only 20 are craftable now, but it is easier to grow that number with a single dye module design.

#4 : Reduced development cost. The cost of adding new modules is drastically lower and doesn't require exponential growth in texture counts.

#5 : Limited color selection. Color combinations can remain mostly-realistic. There is a reduced worry of users producing hideous armor combinations.

Edited May 13, 2013 by Malastare

snip

They already can do colorings on every piece of armor (minus chestpiece) with the "match to chespiece" schema. So it's basically there. I don't see how complicated this can be when we already see it happening in game.

"Applying a Dye Module to an armor that already contains one will replace and destroy the existing Dye Module"

 

Any reason why they can't stack the armor dyes? I know nothing in terms of video game design and the issue this might cause... but if you have a piece of armor that is White (primary) and Blue (secondary)... and you add a Red (primary) and an [empty] (secondary)... turning the armor Red and Blue.

 

Can they not make it then that if you now add to this 'dyed armor' an [empty] (primary) and yellow(secondary)... that the armor becomes Red and Yellow?

 

Then they wouldn't have to worry about creating a whole bunch of dye combinations and only release (primary) and (secondary) dyes, and the only time that a color dye is destroyed/replaced is if you add a (primary) dye to a (primary) dyed armor...

 

..Yes, no? Maybe so?

They already can do colorings on every piece of armor (minus chestpiece) with the "match to chespiece" schema. So it's basically there. I don't see how complicated this can be when we already see it happening in game.

 

Because they don't do dynamic matching or guarantee colors. Essentially, they search through the catalog for a best fit. No matter how many color module slots they add, the result will be the same: The color modules will do the same best-fit search. I have no doubt that the code to find/match the colors already existed in the engine and what they added was a UI element that let us force the selection parameters. The issue isn't how the texture is found, but in how many textures need to be available.

 

This is the critical part: Even with the number of existing textures, the math still holds true: If you have 8 colors with primary and secondary options, you have a minimum of 64 textures that must exist, in addition to the default appearance. You want 10 colors? Then its 100 textures at a minimum. 15 colors? Now its 225 textures at a minimum.

 

The difference then, in case it wasn't obvious, is that the current 'match-to-chest' is not guaranteed to find an ideal match. The catalog is still restricted, and in many cases, no close match exists. For the solution they're using, this is manageable, because their required color sets are easily enumerated, and grow linearly with the number of modules. For the 8x8-combo version, the sets might be easily defined, but each new color requires you to create texture combinations for every other color in existence, making the number of textures grow exponentially with each additional color. This matters because you can't fudge on the colors like 'match-to-chest' does. A "close-enough" match isn't good enough. If I pay CC for "lime green" I want the armor to look different than it does with the "just green" dye. If I use primary-black and secondary-red dye modules, I don't want the armor looking black and pink.

OK LISTEN, SIMPLE POINT TO MAKE HERE.

 

THEY CAN EXPAND on the system once it is in place, do you want to wait 3-4 more patches until they can FULLY implement it OR get some modifications now and more later??

 

People WHINED SO MUCH about the bugs in "Unify Color to Chest" in beta that they REMOVED it from the game for MONTHS after launch. I would rather they left it in and deal with some armor pieces just not acting right (some still don't) than have them remove it.

 

I mean seriously, I think BIOWARE could've given you a primary, secondary color set, 500 new hair styles, 17 new races, scalable body types, massive height modifiers and you people would complain about them not adding the ability to scale your feet, hands separately. WOW you people amaze me every freaking day at how much you DEMAND.

Edited May 13, 2013 by Planar

Any reason why they can't stack the armor dyes?

 

Yes, for the same reasons I've tried to explain in my (admittedly very long) responses.

 

The textures in the game are not dynamically created. They are created by artists and packed into the game. The more combinations they allow, the more textures need to be created. In order to allow you to create any combination you like, they would need to create a new texture (or ensure one exists) for every possible combination any player might possibly come up with.

OK LISTEN, SIMPLE POINT TO MAKE HERE.

 

THEY CAN EXPAND on the system once it is in place, do you want to wait 3-4 more patches until they can FULLY implement it OR get some modifications now and more later??

 

People WHINED SO MUCH about the bugs in "Unify Color to Chest" in beta that they REMOVED it from the game for MONTHS after launch. I would rather they left it in and deal with some armor pieces just not acting right (some still don't) than have them remove it.

 

I mean seriously, I think BIOWARE could've given you a primary, secondary color set, 500 new hair styles, 17 new races, scalable body types, massive height modifiers and you people would complain about them not adding the ability to scale your feet, hands separately. WOW you people amaze me every freaking day at how much you DEMAND.

 

/Agree with Planar.

The textures in the game are not dynamically created. They are created by artists and packed into the game.

 

I find that seriously hard to believe.

Why would they do something as clumsy and unoptimized, when there is evidence the hero engine can do texture tints, and they could already do it in DAO, in Mass Effect, and even as far back as Neverwinter Nights ???

I find that seriously hard to believe.

 

Do you have evidence for that? The match-to-chest behavior suggests that pre-cooked textures are being used: Note the number of items that match imperfectly to some hues, or those which customize to some color groups, but not others.

 

Why would they do something as clumsy and unoptimized, when there is evidence the hero engine can do texture tints, and they could already do it in DAO, in Mass Effect, and even as far back as Neverwinter Nights ???

 

Yes, the technique has been around for a long time. And many older games used it. Often its done via a process similar to (or perhaps exactly like) palette swapping. The problem with palette swapping (actually, something closer to tinting) is that the appearance of certain textures is not solely controlled through manipulating dark-light, saturated-white, so its very difficult to have palette swaps produce high quality textures. For example, in light, fabric like green velvet won't be a solid color. It will have varying levels of darkness, less saturated areas, and areas where the green color shifts hue to yellow or maybe something more bluish. Trying to simply replace the green component with blue won't work. The shades might look fine, but the saturation differences might be too much and the hue shifting might not work at all.

 

Usually, palette-swapped (or hue-tinted) textures tend to look more fake than more custom textures. Most games with high-definition textures do not use tinting to produce alternate colors. Neverwinter Nights is actually a decent example. From what I can tell, it probably did use palette-swapping/tinting, and the results looked good... for the time it was created.

 

And for the record, I'm strongly suspect that the "tints" you saw in Mass Effect were actually a collection of pre-cooked textures.

 

Of course, if someone can find some information that shows the textures in SWTOR are dynamically tinted, I'll happy concede the argument. However, "They did it in Neverwinter Nights" is not evidence.

I find that seriously hard to believe.

Why would they do something as clumsy and unoptimized, when there is evidence the hero engine can do texture tints, and they could already do it in DAO, in Mass Effect, and even as far back as Neverwinter Nights ???

 

LOL. Why, indeed. This was yet another example of poor planning by this team. And all the people going "at least they are giving us something..." are the same ones that have been making excuses for shortcomings, from the start. Something is NOT always better than nothing.