Tailor Archive

Hello all,

I eagerly anticipated the 55 colors with baited breath and found that when I finally got them (I was a master tailor before they were added) I was still lacking a lot of good colors. A fewin particular... Black, Aqua, Teal, Turquiose, and Yellow. Some of these colors are available on the limited color items (go figure), but in a world where I can carry enough ore to start building a PA hall in a tiny little crate inside my backpack, how come I can't figure out how to make teal and I can't dye any long coat blue.

My solution is not that innovative. Just requires SOE to look at a past game. Everquest. EQ uses a dying system that uses a RGB scale. Essentially, if I want to make something a lil redder than it was, I turn down the amount of green and blue in it. So why can't tailors use such a scale (at master) to create rich yellows, bright teals and aquas, and the darkest black in the game. Image Desginers get a NICE black lip color, so we know the engine can pull it off. I guess the Devs are afraid that if EVERYONE (and they will) wants something in black, that it will negate any texturing on the item. Well if that is the case, thanks for the vote of confidence. Tailors are exactly that because most of us have a good eye for color. Wewill figure that out.

As for the issue of color matching... Allow tailors to examine an item and it give the RGB values. People have to trust a smuggler to hand their items over to get them sliced, and most hand you a weapon or armor without hesitation. So why can't we say "If you want that color blue, you will have to hand me the item so I can get an exact color match for you."?

And color limitation on certain items would be fine, IF IT WAS BASED ON A CONSISTENT FACTOR. An Exotic leotard uses the same components as a grand ball gown, but it can't use the same colors. So, I also propose we remove all of the color restrictions, because my MOST requested item that is actually in the game are bright red and navy blue dusters. It's annoying to have to tell people that it can't be done. SOE should just change our titles to "Not Quite A Master Tailor" until they figure this out, because a MASTER tailor should be able to make anything. If acustomer comes up with an ingame outfit in specific colors, I should not have to make excuses and suggest something different to fill the holes in it. I should be able to say "Easy Enough." and make exactly what they asked for in the colors they asked for them in.

This all makes perfect sense to me and it's asolution that can probably be readily created (slider bars are in the game and so are color scales). So, if I can get some support, maybe we can get some more love since our changes don't affect game balance anyways.

Thanks,

First off, I want to say I really like this post. I bitch at least twice a day about not having the colors available that I want. I see very little reason for the limited palettes, other than perhaps the "Metal" palette. Even then, with the textures inherent in the clothes, it's not a great reason. As for be able to read colors from clothes, that's a wonderful idea with the RGB slider and numbers. To prevent scamming, these numbers could be available in the trade window, so it wouldn't even have to be traded for the Tailor to see them. Whether the ability to read these values is a Tailor-only skill, or something anyone can do, I'm still undecided on. While it's always nice to have profession-specific skills, it would also be nice if someone could say "I need black pants with a ee5522 stripe on the side to match my jacket."

In general I like the idea, though it may be difficult to implement 16.7 million colors for the clothing textures (I don't know that for sure, but it occurs to me it might be).

I do think that some clothing should still have a limited palette. Not as limited as it is, and certainly we should get more colors as we go up the tailoring tree... I don't see why my leather palettes have the same number of colors at Tailoring II that I see in Master Tailor screen shots. Perhaps the colors shouldn't get as bright as cloth, but at least get a full color range with some leathery blue for the smallest palette and something more reddish on the middle one.

But, finally... you can dye things in EQ now? since when? I stopped playing over a year ago (just before Legend of Ykesha came out). At that point your armor was whatever color it came as. All lower-level bards were Lambent blue, po' bards without big guilds were Planar gold or Singing Steel green, and so on. What did they bring in as far as colors go?

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Xelene wrote:
In general I like the idea, though it may be difficult to implement 16.7 million colors for the clothing textures (I don't know that for sure, but it occurs to me it might be).

I do think that some clothing should still have a limited palette. Not as limited as it is, and certainly we should get more colors as we go up the tailoring tree... I don't see why my leather palettes have the same number of colors at Tailoring II that I see in Master Tailor screen shots. Perhaps the colors shouldn't get as bright as cloth, but at least get a full color range with some leathery blue for the smallest palette and something more reddish on the middle one.

But, finally... you can dye things in EQ now? since when? I stopped playing over a year ago (just before Legend of Ykesha came out). At that point your armor was whatever color it came as. All lower-level bards were Lambent blue, po' bards without big guilds were Planar gold or Singing Steel green, and so on. What did they bring in as far as colors go?

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A bunch of stuff, not many people use. It was in game, at least a year before you quit. And you could only change the color on crafted armors. probably didn't see it because anyone who was trying to craft stuff got fed up with it long ago on your server, and stopped doing it.

Currently in EQ, there is an actual armor dying system which consumes a Dye vial for each section you want to dye. It can be constructed by pretty much anyone. It allows you to change the color of your armor by using a RGB scale (one red, one blue, and one green with slider bars and numercial entry fields.) Essentially, you could set your red color value at 40, green at 0, and blue at 115 and make a purple/violet. It gives you pretty free reign over the color choices. In EQ, however, the dye was set to the slot. So if you dyed your blue breast plate red, then when you sold it, it would be blue again, and whatever you replaced it with would be red.

It was implemented when LoY came out. I think the system could be easily implemented in SWG. And it would quiet any complaints anyone has about the 255, yet still limited colors.

As for the number of colors, I can't think of anyone who is running SWG at a lower color depth than 16 bit (probably can't). In addition, the colors are IN there... we just can't use them. How unique/vivid would the world of SWG be if it was made up of the 255 colors we have? I think we just need to get support for this idea and maybe the devs can bring it to fruition.

Thanks,

So how would you handle the increase of colors available with progession through the Tailoring branch? I suppose if it were just a slider, and you couldn't type in numbers, you could make the sliders skip numbers. Novice Tailor could be every 32, then 16, 8, 4, 2, 1 going up the branch. Not sure how well this would work.

"As for the number of colors, I can't think of anyone who is running SWG at a lower color depth than 16 bit (probably can't). In addition, the colors are IN there... we just can't use them. How unique/vivid would the world of SWG be if it was made up of the 255 colors we have? I think we just need to get support for this idea and maybe the devs can bring it to fruition."

I don't think it's that simple. You have to code the graphics engine to display particular textures in particular colors. I get the general idea that for each texture, or at least texture type, you may have to manually outline in the code all the colors it can be. Then you have to include that data in the client so that it can display the right colors. Also, since there's four more bits of data required to save the color information, that's going to triple the data storage needs of the server and the traffic required to tell the client what the guy standing in front of him looks like. (Currently, it can handle any color possible for any piece of clothing with a two-digit hex number; to make it full-color, it would require a six-digit number, and that adds up over several thousand pieces of clothing, many with more than one color.)

The code may actually be much more simple than I'm making it out to be, but the data issues would be real. And during early beta one thing they kept going on about was how data-intensive this whole game is, so this is not a trivial concern to the devs.

Don't forget the bandwidth issue of the extra color data.. It may not seem like much for one piece of clothing, but think of a room full of people, each in 4 pieces of clothing, each with 2 different colors on it. Or an inventory full of clothes, or a shop full of sample clothes.. Right now there are 255 colors, which strangely enough is exactly one byte of computer storage.