Tailor Archive

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I think it would really help tailors differentiate themselves from each other.

Let us use experimentation as a way to customize our clothes more. Let me give an example.

Let's say at master tailor you get these additional components added.

Titanium Zipper
Green Diamond Crystalline Gem Setting
Nabooian Wooly Hide Cuffs
Thoranium Steel Rings

There should be lots of them (hell, at least 25), but there's some examples to start. Titanium Zipper might require:

50 units titanium aluminum
20 units copper
10 units steel
10 units amorphous gemstone

This is how it would work. You'd make a titanium zipper.. this is a required component of NO clothes. You make, say, an infiltration suit. You get to experimentation stage and click 'Clothing Accessories'

You can now experiment to add additional slots to drop accessories into. A failure at this stage makes you lose the clothing. You can add up to 3 additional slots to clothing this way. I suceed once and add one slot - the risk factor to get 2 slots is now 60% so I stop. I now go to an additional screen which gives me a slot to drop an accessory into. I drop in the titanium zipper and click 'Create Prototype'.

I now have a jet black infiltration suit with a zipper from the crotch to the neck.

To continue, this time I make the steel rings, the wooly cuffs and the gem setting. I now make a luxurious dress and am lucky enough to get three slots without failing. I add the steel rings, wooly cuffs and gem setting. When the dress is finished, it now has wooly cuffs on the ends of the gloves, two heavy steel rings hanging off the end of the scarf, and gems inlaid down the center of the body.

By adding something like this, it would add LOTS of customization options for tailors. Piling on the upgrades should look ugly if you have no sense of style.. but could look AWESOME if you do. It also makes rare resources VERY important to master tailors - who wants a generic metal bikini, when you can have one that NOBODY else is wearing??

This can be greatly expanded on obviously, just the start of an idea.

I agree this would be great and really enhance the profession. It does sound difficult though.

One thing that I think would be great is customisation of clothing like is seen in wrestling games, if anyone here knows of what I speak (doubtful). Anyway, in these games, quite often you can specify things like sleeve and pant lengths with a slider. This allows the same pair of jeans to be used for both full-length pants, to skater-boy style knee length shorts, to Daisy Duke shorts. Pursuant to that, there could be a number of trims or cuffs for the pants/sleeves. And, while we're at it, different pantleg/sleeve shapes.

Frankly, instead of the model that they have in-game, they should've provided us with basics that we could mix and match, and just upped the number of them as we went along. Start with regular, undecorated pants. Learn piping, pleats, or patters as you gain in skill. You want infinite customisability? Putclothing design in our hands and you don't need to be creative.

It's another pie-in-the-sky idea, and would completely destroy the clothes already in the game("Can I get a short skirt?" "Not until Casual III"),but it would keep us busy.

Also, I'd like to be able to layer clothes better. Why can't a woman wear tight pants underneath her floor-length gown? How come my administrator's robe requires me to nekkid underneath. And for that matter, why can't I take off my stupid undershirt? (Heck, I'm waiting for a game that's not afraid of nudity, but I guess I'm progressively minded. And probably naive.)

Back to the topic at hand: pant/skirt/sleeve lengths could be altered to greater degrees as we progressed up the tailor tech branch. Let us make up to"floods" at tailor 1, knee shorts at tailor 2, regular shorts at tailor 3 and short shorts at tailor 4. Throw in bathing suits or thongs or something at Master tailor.

To be honest, I find SWG a little disappointing in the fashion department. I assume it'll get better as time goes on, but as of now, most things look very similar, with the ocassional outlandish item thrown in. Anarchy Online had a great selection of clothes (especially for the women).

Come on devs, get on it!

I would love for it to happen.

Will it happen? Doubt it.

Don't see why not. They have to do something. I can't see many people still playing tailors in six months if they're still churning out the same junk every day.

At 'end game' you need something for everybody, and I'm *assuming* that SOE knows this and has ideas up their sleeves, or at least is willing to implement some.

There has to be something for us to do at master tailor come October, November, December that is still somewhat challenging and/or interesting.

I think the issue will be the horde of new texture combinations there will need to be to pull this off. If they do like it, I doubt we'll see it anytime soon.. maybe in a couple of expansions.

The problem with layering is that each layer is another strain on the rendering enging, client side. So if suddenly you have several hundred peeps in a city all wearing 5-6 layered objects on them, there will be an evenworse load.

Nah not really. You'd just make separate textures. The infiltration suit would just have a texture with a zipper on the front rather than nothing.. it wouldn't be any more strain at all, as the texture file would still be 256x256 or whatever size they're using.

It would be a lot of work to make all the new textures but hell, that's what the art team is for.

I could see new clothes being added. Just the customizing like that sounds like it would be a pain to try and code/create the art for. For every custom piece you add youwould have to have art to coincide with it and then you would have different art to go with all the different items mixed together.

To make it easier on lower level stuff, you might not even have to add things - maybe the spec-ops duster for example could get additional options through experimentation, like different camouflage patterns, or you could make it closed at the waist instead of open.

There are so many ways you could add things like this, and I can't see tailors sticking around for months/years/whatever without some way of having fun six months after making master.

"I could see new clothes being added. Just the customizing like that sounds like it would be a pain to try and code/create the art for. For every custom piece you add youwould have to have art to coincide with it and then you would have different art to go with all the different items mixed together."

Yeah, it would be a pain. Not really to code for, just to make all the art. Coding it would be relatively simple.

The harder things to do are normally the cooler things - the music system in AC2 for example, I think overall is a lot cooler than Star Wars - the star wars music doesn't seem to work right, it doesn't flow a lot of the time and has erratic jumps in it between the obvious loops. I'm sure the AC2 system wasn't that easy to make (hell the SWG one probably wasn't all that easy either) but I know I played with it for a LONG time just because it was so cool.

Adding these kinds of tailor customization options might take a couple of artists 2-3 months of fulltime work to do. But come on, we know SOE has the staff.. and 2-3 months is about the time I'm sure I'll be getting VERY tired of making endless identical metal bikinis. Dunno about you guys..

Yep I agree... even that much would be something. With a bit more customization and a way for a tailor to really personalize his clothes, this game would have the best tailoring crafting system... ever. Right now I think it's just going to be a 'meh' oddity in a few months. Once there are 20 master tailors per server and as many metal bikinis as you want, we're going to need something to keep peoples attention. More bioengineer buffs would be a start, more customization options would be a second.