Recently I read some forum entries by our players that inspired me to revisit some of the female avatar clothing and pieces. In the forums they were discussing some of their frustrations and, frankly, their points were quite valid so we’re planning to address many of their concerns. Some of the issues will be a lot of work and will take us a while to process. Others, however, appeared to be low-hanging fruit and could be dealt with right away. I’ve done some work on these in 1.14.

The most immediately-addressable-concern was an issue of color in the clothing colorization process. Players find that colorizing an article of clothing does not always yield the expected result. For instance, in some cases a red would appear less saturated and/or darker on the model than the red they picked from the palette options.

This de-saturation and darkening that users have been seeing is the result of two different aspects of the user colorization process. In this devlog I’ll attempt to explain how each of these processes work and what was done to improve them in this patch. Easiest to explain is the darkness issue, so I’ll begin there:

In order to give a model a complex appearance, a lot of the work is done in its base texture. This texture work adds additional detail that isn’t actually in the model itself, but can create a convincing illusion that it is. This is a trick that game developers have been doing from the beginning of 3D games. We put wrinkles, seams, shading, etc, into, say, a coat’s texture to make up for otherwise absent detail. Essentially, this means that some lighting information is “baked” into the texture, which allows us to keep the coat’s polygon count down while it still appears complex.

In the case of player colorized clothing, the base textures are always as white as possible because when color is applied, we multiply a colored layer over them. Multiplying a colored layer is like turning that layer into a sheet of stained glass, tinting anything on the layer beneath it. This means that if the base layer is anything but white, the multiply layer’s color is going to get darker. So, the whiter a base layer is, the truer the custom color will be. However, if the base layer is completely white, all the extra detail that makes the model appear more complex will be lost. The trick is to find the right balance of painted texture detail and pure white texture real estate to yield a solution that gives both the illusion of detail and the correct player color choice.

This milestone, I went through all the worst offender base textures and increased their overall brightness to ensure that the items will be closer in value to the players’ chosen color. Unfortunately, this couldn’t be an automated process because each texture required an artist’s eye to make judgments and alterations. Ultimately, I think players will be happy with the results. Below you can see how a white coat (a coat without any color multiplied over it, basically) looks more like a white coat in the new scenario than it did in the old—consequently any color multiplied over it will be more accurate:

Besides color darkening, players were also frustrated because the color choices they made for some items would be duller once applied—an intense red, for example, would look a little washed out or pinkish when applied to the model. The reason for this is a bit trickier to explain than the darkness problem. It involves the “mask” layer, which is a layer that is invisible to the players. Masks are the technique we use to divide up texture real estate into two customizable colors (also allowing us to assign which areas will get no colorization). I’d try to explain this, but I dont think I’ll do a very good job, so suffice it to say that I’ve corrected the problem and colors will be truer to the palette choices from now on. Below you can see an example of a red palette choice that appeared less intense on the shirt in the old scheme:

While the difference may appear very subtle here, it is far from subtle when you are actually constructing your character and trying to get exactly what you want.

While I was working on the female coats and shirts, etc, I would save them in Photoshop and then toggle over to the game to check them in context. It was during this process, in the character creation area, that I was reminded of a few unrelated issues that I’d been meaning to tend to for some time. The Asian female did not look quite right and a number of the other female faces were, well, broken in various ways. So I revisited them, softening some of the features on and generally improving them

(Also, at the suggestion of our fashion design intern, I added some tassels to the short skirt texture—which looks like the bottom of the shirt in this picture.)

Additionally, we know players like to change their clothing options frequently. Currently there are fewer options for female clothing, so players end up cycling through the same combinations every time. This is something we started working on some months ago, when we hired a fashion design intern. Our designer made many sketches of female outfit designs that our avatar team is going to implement over time. We feel good about these upcoming avatar pieces because they were designed by someone with a formal education and experience in apparel design—something that most character artists in the game industry tend not to have.

Incidentally, if you have original clothing designs that you’d like to see in the game, please post your drawings on the forum discussion for this devlog. We love the idea of implementing things that will make our players happy.