Image Designer Archive

Well I personally think if the interface was all one window and functioned similar to the character creation window (like you said) it would be a big improvement. I would love to see a preview pane where you could zoom in on different parts of the body to see them better, and with proper lighting.

Another good idea would be to assign tool tip color names to the swatches (which I hope are going to be put in).

I would also like to see the height slider have the meters besides it - I'd like to know how tall 1.6 meters really is supposed to be in the game.

Another idea would be to not close the image design window every time you complete an ID change - basically you have the window go grey, or something similar when you have an ID change in process. That way you could easily hit the back button and make adjustments to things you needed. That's good for those jobs that take a while.

Also for us MIDs who don't need experience, I think it would be nice if we could suggest for each little change. That way when they hit 'accept' on the change it would automatically charge them (or their bank). It would help us from getting stiffed, kind of like a secure trade.

Those are all the ones I can think of off of the top of my head.

sheesh i feel bad hijacking this wonderful thread of wonderful creative pretty fluff bunny ideas but ....

couldn't the devs energies be better spent... oh i dont know, fixing broken $hit instead of allowing Mary Kay the image designer to moreeasilypaint someones lips (when you can't even see their lips anyways). call me crazy but i wouldn't spend 1 millisecond on sucha useless fluff buff to a profession when so many others are in FUBAR, SNAFU and TARFU modes.

hey i have an idea, how about fixing crafting and factories? its only the backbone of the entire game.

image designer U.I. sheesh, dont make me vomit...

I make most of my money from people who don’t know how to make their character look good. For instance, how many people here see 10 customers everyday with no chin! I give them a chin at my suggestion, and put most of the sliders to the middle. Then they are happy as can be, and they tip me big money. The customer had his chance at creation to make himself what he wanted to be and he couldn't do it, now I am here to fix him and make him happy.

If you give the person the ability to make the changes, then I the image designer, become a Crafting Station.

The fun in image designing is working with the player to achieve something better than what they had. I’m a patient Image Designer and I have dozens of repeat customers who pay me well. I have fun, and make money.

It would be nice if there was some sort of catalog in game that I could show the customer. But just for hair. And while you’re at it, can you add cool colors to hair?

Do not take the interaction out of Image Designing.

My idea is to give the slider bars a number. But let the players see what they are set at under CTRL C. So they can hit CTRL C and see that their nose is a size 10. And they can go to the Image Designer and ask to see what their nose would look like at size 12. Then I can show them.

Also make it so the Image Designer can see the character free of shadows and lighting. And let the Image Designer and player have the ability to zoom up on the face when image designing. I can’t change female characters eye shadow correctly because I can’t see it and when I think I get it right, the player has a hard time seeing it.

-Bossa Nova (Starsider)

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TwileksAreHot wrote:
Guess what, the guy who responded was from the art team. Hence INTERFACE. He isn't a combat or profession dev. Go whine somewhere else, troll.

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do you write your own material twileksarehot? cause that troll bit at the end was hilarious. jeez why dont you just call me a "noob" while you're at it? i can only assume by your "sentence name" that you are much too original and crafty to waste any GOOD insults on me.

annnnyyyyyways, i still find it funny that their "art team" is busy fluffing up the image designer interface while the rest of the Dev team is probably tearing their hair out and suffering from massive ulcer hemorage trying to fix the rest of the broken a$$ game. or maybe they're not, hah, who knows.

actually, a catalog interface for the client to select changes that they want to be made would be really really nice. they could come to you with a plan and everything. would make it like you went into a hair salon, picked up the "current styles" book, and picked what you wanted...they have those at large chain hair places in the real world.

the same type of thing, i think would be fantastic for tailors...you pick what item of clothing you want, then pick your colors from fabric samples (for custom made tailor items...not vendor ones)

that would make that process go fantastically smoother rather than me trying to tell a tailor what color purple i want from a pallete that has 2 sets of 5 purples...and so and so on.

just my two cents.

Greatjon, go away. This is a problem about the ID sliders and buttons. Our sliders and buttons are difficult to use, hard to see, and it makes all of our interactions with our clients impossibly hard. This developer is here to make the interface easier. We have bugs of our own that this process will likely not fix. There are different development teams. UI is one of those departments. Taking this developer's time away from this User Interface issue will not add one millisecond of time onto droid engineers, carabineers, chefs, factories, PvP, TEFs, flamethrowers, or baz nitches. The droid engineer slides and buttons work fine. The carabineer doesn't need them. None of the balance issues I can think of are based on a poor interface window. The broken things in Combat Medic are between the combat dev and the crafter devs. This is a UI issue. Get lost. Please.

Ahem.

I have been an ID client and I am now a master ID. I've seen this from both sides. The biggest problem with being a master ID is that we can't see what we're doing. The biggest problem with being a client is that we can't see what they're doing, either -- we wait in silence for something to happen, anything, while the IDer plays with stuff we can't see.

I have been thinking a lot about the ID interface, and there are a couple of fairly simple ways that the existing interface could be made easier on the ID and client without a full screen character-creation window. I prefer that we did not get a full-screen window! Please do not take away my email or my chat window in order to focus all of my attention on one person! A master ID gets dozens of tells asking for appointments and shutting me off into a full-screen client interface would be awful.

A Retract or Cancel button. When we click Commit, our box disappears and we have to wait for the client to accept or reject, or for the offer to time out. Our entire UI disappears! We have no way to cancel the offer we have extended. We sit like idiots for three minutesuntil we can do something productive again. So make that final box with the slider have a button called Cancel. We click Commit and Cancel lights up (or Commit changes to Cancel). We therefore have a way to back out when the client goes AFK or LD or is off jawing to his mom on the phone.

I do not want the client to have access to the buttons and sliders that I spent92 skill points on. I do not want to stand around like a moron while someone doodles up a new character, plays with all the buttons, tries to figure out how everything works, and then clicks on every hairstyle. "hey im fat lol lol omg omg!!!!!11! wait no let me try one more! hey i got a mowhak!!!@! lol lol wait wait wait let me sho my friend hey ins't this roflmao!!!! wait wait let me sho him teh fat, wait!! hey how do i get my nose biger, where's the nose buton?" I'm a Master ID and I know exactly what the buttons are because I've done this dozens of times a day. If the customer wants a certain look, I know exactly how to get it. You don't walk into Gene Juarez salon and ask to use their sinks and scissors. You don't take your car to a shop and use the mechanic's hydraulic lift. In the game, you don't get to use someone else's skillpoints.

That said, we need a clickbox to show the client live changes. A checkbox, optional, that can be on or off. When it's on, every time we nudge the slider, that goes straight to the client and they can see every nudge we make. When we have a Trandoshan who doesn't know what head ridges he wants, we can nudge by them one at a time until he says, "Stop, that's the one I want." When we have a human who doesn't know which of the 40 hairstyles he likes best, we canuse the button totrack live changes and show them one at a time without hitting commit or expending our mind pool. The same goes for Wookiee fur patterns, Zabrak tattoos, beards and mustaches, height, weight, nose size... anything. Sometimes the customer doesn't know what he wants, so we should be able to show him what we're doing as we're moving the slider. I can tell you right now, most of the time I wouldn't need to use it, because most of my clients know what they want. "I want to be as tall as possible. Can you make me fatter than the character creator? I want black hair. I want the hairstyle sort of like Jennifer Anison, with the hair in the face. Can you give me red eyes? I want max muscles, can you do that?" When the client knows what he wants, we know exactly how to get it to them. For the ones who don't, let us have a box to allow them to see what we're up to.

The various attributes should have names ornumbers. If someone had Nose Protrusion 14, and I switch to 80, I want to be able to write down what that person had and go back. This "appearance" information should appear somewhere for me to look at, and maybe somewhere the player can see, too. (Maybe something like the medic's /diagnosis so we can look at a player and pull up a full-body list of appearance stats.)

I'm not sure if this falls into UI, but I'll mention it anyway. The final checkbox should have another button in addition to Commit, and that button is Keep Styling. This would allow us to go back to the start and add on another change without having to click Commit (and wait like morons, see my first point). We could then change two things or more at once, if we have enough mind pool for it. Many, many times I have to explain to people, No, I can only change one thing at a time, you have click accept two separate times. When someone wants a height/weight change, we ought to be able to do them both at once if we have the mind for it. Ditto hairstyle-color.

So somewhere in the UI should be a Mind Pool remaining stat. This should tell us how much we'll get hit for if we go through with the change (or changes, see Keep Styling)we have in mind.

IDs need secure trade. This may or may not be a UI problem, but I'll mention it anyway. Once we have clicked on the changes we want and given them to the client, the client can (and often does) walk away. So in my dream world, after we click Commit and we show the client his two or three changes, we get a secure trade box that tells us how much the customer is paying. If you're an ID and you take take tips, like I do, don't use it. If you're an ID that has a fee schedule, you can use this. This might be tricky to code or it might be extremely simple. I wouldn't know.

Some other dream ID UI bells and whistles:

Reverse Markings. As a master ID, you can change Twi'lek lekku and skin colors; Wookiee fur and marking colors; and Mon Cal skin and marking colors. These two palettes are the same colors in the same sequence, as near as I can tell. At master, I want a button under "body fur" or "skin color"that says "reverse markings" in one fell swoop.

Match Beard To Hair. This would be very nice. (It would be nicer if the corresponding colors actually DID match, which they don't, but at least it gives us somewhere to start.)

Thank you for coming into the ID forums. Excuse the mess, we're still evidently under construction.

Escia

I agree with a lot of what has been said before. What I would like most would be a way for the client to see possible changes quicker without committing anything. If I work on myself, I can click through the slider and every time my skin color changes slightly or my ears shrink slightly... if the client could see these slight changes too it would make the process easier I think. Right now we depend heavily on communication. I don't like the idea of the client using me to make their own style, after all, what's the incentive to pay me if I don't have to work and what's the incentive to be an IDer if I have no interaction... I just see that interaction improved if they could actively be a part of choosing the style. Uh, not sure if I've been clear, but a UI that pops up and shows proposed changes to both sides would do it for me.

Thanks for showing interest Mr. Rodgers. Thanks for flagging him down Kwee, I think I'm going to have to make a character on Starsider to begin to thank you properly.