Droid Engineer Archive

I bet they fear a method of grief with the Ticket Collector...imagine 4 silver 3POs all named Tlcket Coliector standing next to it...

They should get rid of the ticket collector and place a terminal there...

Okay, now that I've sucked you all into this thread, here's the deal...

For what seems like eons, we've all questioned, moaned, groaned, bitched, and generally griped about why every single droid in this game is able to have its paint job customized except for the 3P0 Protocol Droid. You can target the poor hapless droid, and even choose "Frame" from theDroid Customization Kit'smenu. But when you get to the customization screen,there are absolutely nocolor options available,and the "Accept" button is greyed-out. No real answer has been forthcoming on this subject from the devs, Community Reps, or otherwise...unless thecolor issuehas been lumped into the "naming-talking-droids" comment that Thunderheart mentioned in his DE answer list. It went something to the effect of:

/quote We want to add this sort of thing, but it would be way down the list…there are lots of other important things we need to tackle first./unquote

Well, I've noticed something strange about protocol droids in general that MAY have something to do with them not being customizable. Since the Droid Customization Kit (DCK) was added and untamed droids were finally classified as "Droid Deeds"in a previous patch, the protocol droid is the only one that still lists as a "Generic Item". I've even noticed that a protocol droid's experimentation is much higher than, say, an ADV R2 unit's. It strangely seems to be recognized along the same lines as a Control Unit or Fireworks in terms of experimentation.

Now, there may not be any corellation between droid customization and my Droid/Generic Item theory...but there must be SOMETHING screwed up in the game's code that won't allow this particular droid to be as varied and colorful as all its other mechanized bretheren.

Forgot to add:

It's not like alternative protocol colors aren't available in-game. There are protocol droids sporting silver, white and red paint jobs.

How could they greif with that? It would be quite apparent which one takes your ticket - it's the one with the Use menu option, or when double clicked gives you a dialog box or a time readout.

However, there's one reason why we're probably not likely to get any other choice than gold, and maybe silver - it has to do with graphics rendering. If you look very closely at the protocol droids (and also at the head of an R2 or R3) you'll see that there is dynamic reflections being rendered. This is a technique called cubic environment mapping, and sucks a lot of CPU/GPU time to do properly (ie for dynamic updates in response to the environment). As a consequence of this, surfaces that use cube maps always end up being shiny. Adding extra layers to get both the reflections and some other colour is quite a pain to do, and do it with decent graphics performance. In fact, silver is the easiest colour to do, not gold. Thus, one of the principle motivators behind not allowing colour choice there (and the same for R2/R3) is that it is very complex to do so and that it would severly impact the game's rendering performance. Because we already have issues with that right now, we really don't need any more. There is a way to do this using pixel shaders, but that means it would be restricted to those cards that support them already. Since not every card does that this game can be played on, they don't want to create something that cannot be seen to be the same by everyone.