Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.
March 28, 2024, 01:48:44 AM

Login with username, password and session length

Search:     Advanced search
we're back, baby
*
Home Help Search Login Register
f13.net  |  f13.net General Forums  |  The Gaming Graveyard  |  Game Design/Development  |  Topic: Custom equipment colors 0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
Pages: [1] Go Down Print
Author Topic: Custom equipment colors  (Read 9785 times)
Margalis
Terracotta Army
Posts: 12335


on: June 27, 2008, 07:02:00 AM

Does any modern game allow you to do this? (One based on 3D graphics and textures)

I've been thinking a bit about it. It seems like to make it work you would have to define a texture as a set of base colors plus a set of offsets. (HSV?) For example if you have an emblem which is 3 shades of red it would be defined as red, darker, and extra darker. Then the user could change "red" to "green" and "darker" and "extra darker" would look ok. (With some range correction applied)

Gets tricker if you have an emblem that goes from red to orange along a smoothe curve, in that case the texture would have to be defined as "red" and the offsets would be hue offsets, so if the user chose "green" as the base then it would go from green to yellow or whatever.

I'm assuming here that textures have too many colors to be represented by a user-edited palette where every color in the texture can simply be re-assigned without too much trouble. However in the old days shading data might have been baked into the model to fake per-pixel lighting, but these days that isn't common and typical textures might actually have fewer distinct shades than before.

Either way it needs careful texture design and maybe some extra tooling, but is there some reason that no game I am aware of does this? Or are there examples of games that do?

vampirehipi23: I would enjoy a book written by a monkey and turned into a movie rather than this.
Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23611


Reply #1 on: June 27, 2008, 07:07:00 AM

CoH/CoV has this. I think LotRO does as well. There are others too.

Edit: TR and AA have/had that.
« Last Edit: June 27, 2008, 07:10:20 AM by Trippy »
Margalis
Terracotta Army
Posts: 12335


Reply #2 on: June 27, 2008, 08:00:45 AM

LOTRO looks like it has dyes but they appear to be prefab textures.

COH looks like it might have it for real. Maybe I'll download...

vampirehipi23: I would enjoy a book written by a monkey and turned into a movie rather than this.
Lantyssa
Terracotta Army
Posts: 20848


Reply #3 on: June 27, 2008, 06:56:01 PM

Guild Wars to some extent.  Color mixing, too.

Hahahaha!  I'm really good at this!
eldaec
Terracotta Army
Posts: 11838


Reply #4 on: June 29, 2008, 02:45:04 AM

Daoc does it, does that count as modern?

CoX and GW as mentioned.

Also Hellgate.

And I think Tabula Rasa?


ATitD has a hugely complex paint system though I don't think it applies to gear (because there isn't any gear), just other random junk.
« Last Edit: June 29, 2008, 12:31:18 PM by Trippy »

"People will not assume that what they read on the internet is trustworthy or that it carries any particular ­assurance or accuracy" - Lord Leveson
"Hyperbole is a cancer" - Lakov Sanite
Lantyssa
Terracotta Army
Posts: 20848


Reply #5 on: June 29, 2008, 09:50:23 AM

Having seen the original, I pity Trippy and the recursive loop we're about to enter.

Hahahaha!  I'm really good at this!
Trippy
Administrator
Posts: 23611


Reply #6 on: June 29, 2008, 12:27:21 PM

Indeed.
Kail
Terracotta Army
Posts: 2858


Reply #7 on: June 29, 2008, 04:39:03 PM


A lot of MMOs seem to do this with character textures (like, your skin/hair tone) but not with gear (I assume so they can try to generate some mild interest in the idea of grinding for a month to get the same shoulder pads, only in in a fuschia/neon green pattern).

It's not an MMO, but TES Oblivion has a lot of this on their characters (but not their gear).  A million little bars to fiddle with to change the opacity and hue of various texture maps for the character's face.  I think the original Neverwinter Nights had custom colors for gear and characters, and you could do some weird things with it as I recall (like give your character metallic tattoos).

Another non-MMO would be WH40k Dawn of War, where you can "paint" your armies in custom colors.  You set HSV for something like four or five colours (pirmary, secondary, trim, weapon color, and I think there's one I'm forgetting) and it paints all your units (and some buildings, depending on your army) in those colors.
Margalis
Terracotta Army
Posts: 12335


Reply #8 on: June 29, 2008, 05:55:29 PM

I tried the trial of CoX. It only allows you to choose two colors per piece but it does work well overall.

vampirehipi23: I would enjoy a book written by a monkey and turned into a movie rather than this.
Lantyssa
Terracotta Army
Posts: 20848


Reply #9 on: June 30, 2008, 09:00:15 AM

You can change them any time though, and the number of pieces easily equals or exceeds those of other games.

Hahahaha!  I'm really good at this!
Mrbloodworth
Terracotta Army
Posts: 15148


Reply #10 on: June 30, 2008, 10:30:49 AM

There are many diffrent ways to do this, so its hard to say all games should ETC.. A lot of the techniques have sever drawbacks. Such as using the alpha channel to perform the color blending on an object. This basically removes the ability to have see though parts (its taken up by the color that will now be blended with the colors bellow it), so you would have to design accordingly is this is your chosen method. (See LOTRO)

Another is swapping the textures completely, but this creates limitations on texture footprint (more so than reusing the same image for the above alpha technique), so again, you would have to design accordingly, it also ups the number of textures (beyond diffrent looks) required for each mesh (tack on some more net traffic here X number os players newly encountered, or changed since the last time viewed or in update range).Compression type and limited/shared palates reduce the footprint. (See Wow)

For instance, on some jobs i have created one "Shirt" mesh. That mesh has 3 diffrent "Pattens", now i need 3 diffrent colors, for each pattern, you can see how this can inflate quite quickly, such as updates, if i want to add a new pattern, i now also need 3 colors of that pattern. But i have an alpha channel still.  Oh ho ho ho. Reallllly?

Then there are shaders, performance hit, and possibility of lack of support depending on hardware ETC... (See oblivion)

Or generated textures (ones that are parts of three textures, re-renderd on the fly, and reapplied to the models). COX uses this i do beleave, when you leave the creation area, your textures are compiled, rendered into one... and streamed to who ever needs it (at least, the ID's of what was used, and the other users client creates it). This was also used in some of the later Smackdown and RAW titles. (See COH/CIV, and EVE avatar creation, very simulator technique)

It 100% depends on design, and give and take.


Gets tricker if you have an emblem that goes from red to orange along a smoothe curve, in that case the texture would have to be defined as "red" and the offsets would be hue offsets, so if the user chose "green" as the base then it would go from green to yellow or whatever.

I'm assuming here that textures have too many colors to be represented by a user-edited palette where every color in the texture can simply be re-assigned without too much trouble. However in the old days shading data might have been baked into the model to fake per-pixel lighting, but these days that isn't common and typical textures might actually have fewer distinct shades than before.

Either way it needs careful texture design and maybe some extra tooling, but is there some reason that no game I am aware of does this? Or are there examples of games that do?

Sounds like you are talking pixel by pixel, and adjoint color (hex, RGB) replacement. It would be at least one part texture generation, and yeah, would take A LOT of really careful texture creation, depending on what you are using to find the area in question. Akin to photo shops magic wand + Paint bucket. Pixel art would be the most simple to apply this to, anything more complicated...art wise...would be very hard to acheave. Or you can just let it ride across the entire base texture, and just blend , OR use the alpha channel (again) to mark out, or mask only the areas you want the base + Color blended.

 Thats why such things are normally designed and mapped out before hand (such as patches or areas with 100% pure colors, no blends), instead of dedicating processor and render time to such activity's. Especially for something most people would be happy with a more analog method, and would not know the difference.

Then again, this can be coupled with the texture generation, it is essentially the same.

I am sure there are tons of more programer solutions i am not aware of.
« Last Edit: July 01, 2008, 07:15:24 AM by Mrbloodworth »

Today's How-To: Scrambling a Thread to the Point of Incoherence in Only One Post with MrBloodworth . - schild
www.mrbloodworthproductions.com  www.amuletsbymerlin.com
Jerrith
Developers
Posts: 145

Trion


WWW
Reply #11 on: June 30, 2008, 11:46:02 PM

Either way it needs careful texture design and maybe some extra tooling, but is there some reason that no game I am aware of does this? Or are there examples of games that do?

While I don't know of anywhere it was ever used, I believe Vanguard has the capability of doing it.  Basically, for tinting, you had the base texture (generally white / grey) and then two additional textures:  One indicated which areas should be tinted, and by which of tint color, by having red or blue drawn there.  Then the second was a tint lookup, on a 64 x 64.  So, at least in theory, you could have a mix of red and blue to indicate a mix of the two tint colors, and get the sort of effect you were talking about.   All the tint maps I ever saw were just pure red and/or blue though, never a mix of the two.

It's been a few years since I looked, but Guild Wars and it's guild cape emblems might have actually done this.  I don't recall for sure.

Mrbloodworth
Terracotta Army
Posts: 15148


Reply #12 on: July 01, 2008, 07:13:28 AM

Either way it needs careful texture design and maybe some extra tooling, but is there some reason that no game I am aware of does this? Or are there examples of games that do?

While I don't know of anywhere it was ever used, I believe Vanguard has the capability of doing it.  Basically, for tinting, you had the base texture (generally white / grey) and then two additional textures:  One indicated which areas should be tinted, and by which of tint color, by having red or blue drawn there.  Then the second was a tint lookup, on a 64 x 64.  So, at least in theory, you could have a mix of red and blue to indicate a mix of the two tint colors, and get the sort of effect you were talking about.   All the tint maps I ever saw were just pure red and/or blue though, never a mix of the two.

It's been a few years since I looked, but Guild Wars and it's guild cape emblems might have actually done this.  I don't recall for sure.



This sounds neat, and docs on this type of implementation? I have heard of using grew/white or neutral color bases, and using another texture to essentially mask of the tintable regions, but this color "look up" thing has me intrigued, i am guessing its small 1 x 1 blocks of 64 possible colors? ....

anyway, got a write up?

Today's How-To: Scrambling a Thread to the Point of Incoherence in Only One Post with MrBloodworth . - schild
www.mrbloodworthproductions.com  www.amuletsbymerlin.com
Jerrith
Developers
Posts: 145

Trion


WWW
Reply #13 on: July 01, 2008, 08:49:30 PM

This sounds neat, and docs on this type of implementation? I have heard of using grew/white or neutral color bases, and using another texture to essentially mask of the tintable regions, but this color "look up" thing has me intrigued, i am guessing its small 1 x 1 blocks of 64 possible colors? ....

anyway, got a write up?

Sorry, no write up...  Thinking about it some more, it may have actually been a 16x16 of the small 1x1 blocks.  256 tints to choose from sounds right, the more I think about it.  I ended up picking out all the tint colors for horses and barding on Vanguard which is where most of my experience with it came from.  One tint texture for the horse "skin" (which actually only had about 5-10 different colors, I believe) and a different one for the barding & armor.  The plate barding used one tint color for the base color, and then a second for the highlights (so you ended up with some nice combinations of two slightly different shades of a single color, or a color + gold highlights, etc.) 
Margalis
Terracotta Army
Posts: 12335


Reply #14 on: July 01, 2008, 09:48:56 PM

I'm still a bit confused, can I restate to see if I'm getting it?

The model has a grayscale texture along with two other textures, one red and one blue. The "red" and "blue" textures map to two *other* textures that are essentially palettes. So the 256 different shades of red correspond to 256 colors in the palette. These palettes tend to be variations on the same color.

So if you want to swap in new colors you swap in new palettes. Is that about right?

This sort of stuff seems more feasible these days. Back in the old days people might use color to draw on detail that today is handled by shading, normal maps, etc.

vampirehipi23: I would enjoy a book written by a monkey and turned into a movie rather than this.
Mrbloodworth
Terracotta Army
Posts: 15148


Reply #15 on: July 02, 2008, 07:21:19 AM

This sounds neat, and docs on this type of implementation? I have heard of using grew/white or neutral color bases, and using another texture to essentially mask of the tintable regions, but this color "look up" thing has me intrigued, i am guessing its small 1 x 1 blocks of 64 possible colors? ....

anyway, got a write up?

Sorry, no write up...  Thinking about it some more, it may have actually been a 16x16 of the small 1x1 blocks.  256 tints to choose from sounds right, the more I think about it.  I ended up picking out all the tint colors for horses and barding on Vanguard which is where most of my experience with it came from.  One tint texture for the horse "skin" (which actually only had about 5-10 different colors, I believe) and a different one for the barding & armor.  The plate barding used one tint color for the base color, and then a second for the highlights (so you ended up with some nice combinations of two slightly different shades of a single color, or a color + gold highlights, etc.) 

Just to continue with this, (IMO) blending is hard, and can sometimes come out really bad, but mostly always very ..bleak. Especially if you are starting off with white/Grey base colors...

I am talking fidelity here..crispness of color if you will. Thats why i tend not to go the route of blends, additive/subtractive blending as a method of coloration.. its always muddied to a point.

Thanks for expanding on it for me, i appreciate it. Sad there is no write-up.

Today's How-To: Scrambling a Thread to the Point of Incoherence in Only One Post with MrBloodworth . - schild
www.mrbloodworthproductions.com  www.amuletsbymerlin.com
Jerrith
Developers
Posts: 145

Trion


WWW
Reply #16 on: July 02, 2008, 07:29:51 AM

Not quite it.

The model has a texture (that is greyscale anywhere you want to tint) and two other textures.  The first of these (tint map) has a mix of red and blue on it, indicating where tint color 1 (red) and tint color 2 (blue) should be applied.   The actual possible tints (tint palette?) come from the 3rd texture, a 16x16 (256 choices) where each pixel represents a different tint.  When rendering the model, you have two index values that represent which pixels to look up on the tint palette.  0 = first pixel, first row, 16 = first pixel, second row, etc.  So 0 might represent white, and 16 might be yellow / gold, and selecting those two on a piece of armor would give you white with gold trim armor.

There are generally only a few tint palettes.  One with skin colors, one with hair colors, one lots of different colors (to be used on armor & such), that are reused throughout the art.

I hope that clears things up. :)
Margalis
Terracotta Army
Posts: 12335


Reply #17 on: July 02, 2008, 04:09:42 PM

I see I see. Sounds similar to CoX, where you had a maximum of two colors per item and the items all used the same palette for the most part.

vampirehipi23: I would enjoy a book written by a monkey and turned into a movie rather than this.
Stephen Zepp
Developers
Posts: 1635

InstantAction


WWW
Reply #18 on: July 06, 2008, 09:51:46 PM

I'm guessing that you're looking at this within Torque, so I thought you might be interested in this theory .plan posted by Pat Wilson: Multi-threaded Mesh Skinning.

He didn't mention it specifically, but this code is specifically for skinning meshes dynamically for allowing user selected jerseys (colors and styles) that can be modified in game. It's a theory post, and proprietary code for Rokkitball, but it may make it's way into TGEA sometime in the near or far future (no info on that, but I know the Tech and Tools team liked the technique, so they may wind up pullling it in to an update).

Rumors of War
MahrinSkel
Terracotta Army
Posts: 10857

When she crossed over, she was just a ship. But when she came back... she was bullshit!


Reply #19 on: July 10, 2008, 09:07:33 PM

In Wish, we were going to have a "split channel alpha mask", each wearable item would have an 8-bit texture that would be used for applying tints (the tints would have been basically any RGB value).  The tricky part of it was that they would support *two* tints, values above 128 would indicate the saturation of tint A, and values below the saturation of tint B (so 128 exactly would indicate an area that could not be tinted at all).  So where an item's texture colors would not play nicely with tinting, it wouldn't be tinted, and it could be tinted to differing degrees in different places, and in two different colors.

It's always a struggle, artists tend to get a little pissy when you suggest that the players should be allowed to change the colors of their work.

--Dave

--Signature Unclear
schild
Administrator
Posts: 60345


WWW
Reply #20 on: July 10, 2008, 09:41:03 PM

Quote
It's always a struggle, artists tend to get a little pissy when you suggest that the players should be allowed to change the colors of their work.

There's a place for elitist MY ART IS MY ART wankery, and it's definitely not in games where persistent avatars is one of the prime reasons people are playing. That avatar is a reflection of the player, not the artist. But then, they wouldn't be artists without the wankery I suppose.
Mrbloodworth
Terracotta Army
Posts: 15148


Reply #21 on: July 11, 2008, 06:26:21 AM

Quote
It's always a struggle, artists tend to get a little pissy when you suggest that the players should be allowed to change the colors of their work.

There's a place for elitist MY ART IS MY ART wankery, and it's definitely not in games where persistent avatars is one of the prime reasons people are playing. That avatar is a reflection of the player, not the artist. But then, they wouldn't be artists without the wankery I suppose.

I don't think its about that. Its more about..."Thats going to look like ass" and a dash of pride about the work done. Figuring out all possible tints in a given system, and killing the ones that look like ass is an undertaking.

Especially if it is a retrofit. Also, it really depends on the art style.
« Last Edit: July 11, 2008, 06:30:02 AM by Mrbloodworth »

Today's How-To: Scrambling a Thread to the Point of Incoherence in Only One Post with MrBloodworth . - schild
www.mrbloodworthproductions.com  www.amuletsbymerlin.com
Fordel
Terracotta Army
Posts: 8306


Reply #22 on: July 12, 2008, 05:07:22 AM

Looking like ass is half the point of having custom colours!


The other half is wearing all black so you can be dark and mysterious/badass.  awesome, for real

and the gate is like I TOO AM CAPABLE OF SPEECH
eldaec
Terracotta Army
Posts: 11838


Reply #23 on: July 12, 2008, 05:57:24 AM

Some people manage to look like ass in all the games that have this.

That's their business, I'd rather other people looklike ass, than have a situation like WoW, EQ2, SWG etc where I look the same as everyone else.

"People will not assume that what they read on the internet is trustworthy or that it carries any particular ­assurance or accuracy" - Lord Leveson
"Hyperbole is a cancer" - Lakov Sanite
MahrinSkel
Terracotta Army
Posts: 10857

When she crossed over, she was just a ship. But when she came back... she was bullshit!


Reply #24 on: July 12, 2008, 03:32:27 PM

That was always my attitude about it, if someone wants to look like a fashion disaster, let them.  You can't give people the ability to look unique, without giving the ability to look awful.  But it's *always* been a struggle to get the artists to get out of the way on that, if Brad McQuaid hadn't insisted on being able to wear red armor (Rubicite), EQ1 would never have had even the capability to tint worn items (if the artists had given in and made him a unique texture, it probably wouldn't have happened).

--Dave

--Signature Unclear
Margalis
Terracotta Army
Posts: 12335


Reply #25 on: July 13, 2008, 09:03:10 AM

Artists tend to be more possessive. This is a consant cause of friction among open source 'tards who complain that sine code is open source art should be as well.

vampirehipi23: I would enjoy a book written by a monkey and turned into a movie rather than this.
Pages: [1] Go Up Print 
f13.net  |  f13.net General Forums  |  The Gaming Graveyard  |  Game Design/Development  |  Topic: Custom equipment colors  
Jump to:  

Powered by SMF 1.1.10 | SMF © 2006-2009, Simple Machines LLC