SWTOR

Bit of a derail. Just read this AAA game no longer has toll free customer service as of today. Probably tired of all the calls their getting from cartel armor not matching up with the ads for them. We can make more money now! EA truly has no shame.

Flipmode_sl said:

I didnt claim SWTOR had 12-20 character models.

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And I never said you did.

Flipmode_sl said:

1. Make all your characters have a similar paperdoll frame that allows you to create one piece of gear for any character or height. Games that do this are Rift, VG, TSW, and I suspect WoW and SWTOR.

or

2. Make the same piece of armor individually for every race/class/height combo in the game. This way is long and tedious. The only game I know that does it this way for sure is EQ2. That's why they don't get any truly unique armor very often. It's usually just retinting of the same armors.

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I already provided one example of that not being the case. It doesn't have to be everyone has the same paperdoll frame or everyone has a unique frame. There is a middle ground. There is also the fact that, even among the MMOs you've listed, others have taken a more simple approach to designing races without making them look all almost nearly identical. Vanguard, for instance, has a lot of diversity when you compare dwarves, orcs, goblins, elves, and vulmane.

But, personally speaking, I'd rather have retinted armor than retinted species.

It may be an engine limitation that prevents them from easily making non human models. Anyway given the lack of resources on the game now we're definitely never going to see any new character models.

I can not beleave this game is still going ....

if I look back at forum posts from before launch it makes me sad what a piece of shit this game ended up being

Flipmode_sl said:

And they probably have papedoll designs that allow the artists to only design 1 set of armor that scale to anybody size...just like I said. That is the way it has to be done in order to put out gear at a decent pace. But even still, all wow models are humanoid. They dont have any models in the shapes of some of the aliens in star wars.

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Yeah, they're all humanoid but they're alldistinct. They're not, for example, the same skeleton with different skins and heads - a male troll, a female dwarf, a male worgen and a female draenei all have completely different animations, body proportions and so on (hell, the draenei and worgen have weird knee-ankle things) but they all get to wear the same armour. Yes, it's more work for the art team but if you spend ~$200,000,000.00 on a game you'd have thought you could come up with more than one PC model.

And the fact that the gear looks different depending on which side of the faction divide you're on annoys me. You can't get certain looks just because of what you rolled.

Most, if not all looks are simply dictated by the BOP nature of the vast majority of gear. Believe me, I've seen my fair share of Operatives who look like Jedi and Jedi who look like Bounty Hunters due to the nature of the Adaptive Armor system, which is something they've heavily pushed with the Cartel Market in general. And no, you don't need to spend actual money to get any of this stuff. I've completely geared out my Assassin in Destroyer Armor (with new mods, of course), which is only available in the Cartel Market, simply by paying attention to the GTN and picking up pieces as they reach a nice spot in price. If you're talking about Tier items then you might have a point, except anyone with half an eye for look moves away from those travesties. Every piece of Tier gear is horrendous and the art designers need to be taken out back and shot for coming up with something so ridiculous.

I always hated the Assassin Columni/Rakata armor...looked like Rita Repulsa from Power Rangers.

WoW uses a mesh morphing system that "morphs" parts of a character's body without fudging up the topology. Preserving topology is the issue Flipmode is refering to. It can get expensive if every artist redoes the character mesh with a different topology (since a new UV has to be done, skin weighting etc).

With the exception of robes, in WoW the same Troll you had at level 1 is the same troll at level 65 or what ever, the mesh never changes it simply gets morphed. The vertex weights (the bone/skin assignments for animations) never change and don't have to since changing armor won't change the anatomy. The only parts of a WoW model that are not part of the topology are the shoulder pads, helmet, hair, eyes, assesories (jewelry, tusks, beards). When you wear a robe the whole model is switched (same model but robe as a body). Artists only need to do weight assignments for Troll naked, and Troll robe.

In order to change the textures of different parts of the model without fudging up the smoothing groups, they are either using multiple UV channels, or some other method (like a broken mesh but with the same smoothing group assignment). The engine just swaps out textures as needed depending on what armor is put on.

Sometimes that system gets messed up. A while back, ridding the griffon and then getting off of it in Ironforge would on occasion fudge up your character. If you changed armors immediately the "morphing" system would still be stuck on the previous morph. You'd see things like pants texture when you should be wearing a robe, or robe textures on pants and boots.

I believe, and I'm not sure, that all old world models have the exact same topology. Just that they were scaled differently to fit the different anatomies. BC and any newer models added do not use the same topology as old world models and were pretty much rebuilt from scratch. The most expensive part I would say was doing all those custom animations for each race/gender since they all have varying bone lengths.

I believe this is where EQ2, Vanguard, and other devs without the funds, have issues. It's very expensive to have an animator sit there and do the animations for one anatomy (like the bone structure of a Satyr),and then humans, and then gnomes. That's why EQ2 and such pretty much used the same anatomy for pretty much all of their models. Which means same bone lengths (particularly the thigh-bone, biceps, pelvis-root position controller) using a central animation set. You end up with the goofy "man in a furry suit" that Vanguard and even EQ2 has.

I am having fun playing the game.

Thinking about giving this game another shot.

I still have a buddy who plays, albeit it's quite seldom. He's enjoying himself when he logs on, but, eh, I just can't bring myself to play again.

I'm playing it daily. Having a great time on my new Sith Juggernaut, doing Warzones a fair amount and completing the character and planet storylines. I ignore most of the side quests.

when I said 1st tier oranges I didnt mean tier of pvp / raid loot progression. I meant first available oranges lvl 10-20 world loot sets. Also WTF is up with Dark Side force users not allowed to pants???, rly? Had to grind umpteenth space mission for a fucking pair of black pants. So little Black and Red gear in game. Dark Side = pastels??? folks who did the itemization for game never watched a single SW movie, and should be shot for failing Art 101. pretty much everyone who dev'd this game sucked at their respective job. No anti-cheat software? rly? half finished SWG was a better SW MMO..

Merkins4Brazil_sl said:

when I said 1st tier oranges I didnt mean tier of pvp / raid loot progression. I meant first available oranges lvl 10-20 world loot sets. Also WTF is up with Dark Side force users not allowed to pants???, rly? Had to grind umpteenth space mission for a fucking pair of black pants. So little Black and Red gear in game. Dark Side = pastels??? folks who did the itemization for game never watched a single SW movie, and should be shot for failing Art 101.

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Hmm, pretty much every piece of armor I got on my Juggernaut was black, red, or black and red. Sometimes silver and black and silver and red. And it all looked like proto-Vader armor...for Juggernauts, at least, I thought it all looked pretty good. Jedi Knights, the same, I mean shit, you had robes, and armored robes, in some variation of brown - pretty much what you would expect. This game sucked at a lot of things, and I am bitterly disappointed about it, but the armor for every class except Sith Sorcerors looked alright in my opinion. Why there are no pants for them, I will never know.

Because the "idea" behind them and their story is basically Palpatine (never mind the story is the worst in the game, narrowly edging out Consular by a cunt hair). In essence, his iconic look as Emperor was that of the dark hooded robe. In fact, one of the first pieces of custom gear you can get is off Black Talon and it's a dark hooded robe. I ran with that until I was like 40.

Faltigoth_sl said:

Hmm, pretty much every piece of armor I got on my Juggernaut was black, red, or black and red. Sometimes silver and black and silver and red. And it all looked like proto-Vader armor...for Juggernauts, at least, I thought it all looked pretty good. Jedi Knights, the same, I mean shit, you had robes, and armored robes, in some variation of brown - pretty much what you would expect. This game sucked at a lot of things, and I am bitterly disappointed about it, but the armor for every class except Sith Sorcerors looked alright in my opinion. Why there are no pants for them, I will never know.

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Yup Juggs didnt have that problem. Assassins - ton of pastels, Bounty Hunter - ton of pastels, Imperial Agent ton of pastels. There were a very few sets / pieces that were iconic looking and matched the lore, you really had to hunt them down. Imo it should have been hard to find Dark Side gear that wasn't Black Red or Gray, but it was quite the opposite. I didnt get that far up the light side, Smugglers looked good until the fucking Cowboy Hats? (rly cowboy hats? wtf!), but the LS force users had a lotta pinks and tans. I wasnt the only one to feel this way, there were tons of threads begging devs to make the gear more Star-Warsy.

Well, that's certainly one way of putting it:

?Star Wars? game segregates gay characters on gay planet

Does this officially make ToR "gay4pay"?

Cantatus_sl said:

Well, that's certainly one way of putting it:

'Star Wars' game segregates gay characters on gay planet

Does this officially make ToR "gay4pay"?

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Oh cool EA / BW keep finding new ways to shit on their title, INB4 expac has a boss fight mo-capped from GL's MMA dyke daughter as a marketing point.