No, the colors for a lot of particles are ‘baked in’ to the particle’s texture. The FX scripts themselves are completely separate from animations. In fact there’s a lot of animations that are shared between different powers with entirely different FX.
Power customization has some pretty big hurdles to overcome.
1) Powers currently point to one animation and one set of FX scripts. There’s no way in the our engine at this time to have them reference a different animation or different FX without just changing it in the power definition (which changes it for everyone). This isn’t a small or insignificant change and without it we literally can’t even begin to do costumized FX or animation.
2) Colors in FX are often baked into the particle textures. Most of the time they’re not, they use a greyscale texture and tint the color with an RGB value, but there’s enough that do use a colored texture that it would require quite a bit of work to overhaul and set everything up for customization. We did test a more global system that could just shift the hue of the entire FX script around the color wheel, but it’s not a complete solution to the problem. Namely that FX aren’t normalized to a common color, there’s no way to dynamically change this ‘shift’ value, and there’s still issues with blend modes.
3) Particle FX most often use an additive blend mode. Additive means that the closer a color is to white (in RBG values), the more opaque it becomes. Secondaries like yellow (255, 255, 0) are more opaque than primaries like red (255, 0, 0). Black (0, 0 ,0) ends up being completely transparent. So to take the Energy Melee FX for example and make a black version or even a dark purple (64, 0, 64) or dark blue (0, 0, 64), we’d have to do more than just shift the RGB values around.
4) Even if the system could accept more than one animation or more than one FX script for a power, we don’t have an in game system for allowing the player to choose this themselves. We could make one (probably based off of the costume editor in some way) but it’s still another chunk of time to devote to this.
Those are the major issues that I can think of right now, there’s other minor little issues here and there but it all adds up to a tremendous amount of dedicated work from multiple departments to pull it off.
As opposed to, say, the Invention System.
Which do you think people would appreciate and use more?
How about c) None of the above?
Granted, I’m actually using a partial set on my Domi’s Seeds power, but if IOs had never happened I’d be 100% okay. Customized colors for my powers, though? Faugh. This is a bad, bad idea, and all I have to do to prove that is to direct you to the garish monstrosities that people come up with in the costuming system. Do you really want those bozos to have the power (no pun intended) to fill your screen with garish FX as well?
Would I like to be able to customize FX colors for my powers? Sure, but not at the cost of real content. Do I want that obnoxious twit in the eye-searing costume to be able to customize his FX colors? Hell no.
I think it would be at least as valuable as the Invention system. 🙂 And, yes, there would be some garish monstrosities — but there would also be some nice variations, too, to all X being green, or white, or whatever.
Ah, well.
On one hand, I would have loved being able to customize the color of my blasters (especially my energy blasters) power effects. If nothing else it would have been nice to tell which of the two or three energy blasters we sometimes had in a team at once were the ones pulling all the aggro and adds in.
On the other hand, I remember way way too many ‘i wan blak fire’ or ‘i wan evil jedi lightning’ posts. I would really dread going to Atlas Park (or Mercy Island) after a patch like that went live and hearing all of the ‘BuRn N mY BlAk FyRe Of Hel!’ spam.
As easily ignored as the garish costumes some folks (not me! 🙂 ) folks come up with.
If they did take the time to implement this, I imagine they would add something to the Option menu that would allow users to suppress power customization. If I recall correctly, they already have options like this that make the game easier on the processor/video card.
I was just thinking about this earlier today. Something else I want is voices. I don’t like how everyone sounds the same or how my scrapper sounds like a troll every time I use Integration.
That’s one I’ve thought of, esp. having seen other MMORPGs that do that.