{"id":882,"date":"2007-05-14T16:20:14","date_gmt":"2007-05-14T22:20:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp\/2007\/05\/the-problem-with-customized-power-effects\/"},"modified":"2007-05-14T16:20:14","modified_gmt":"2007-05-14T22:20:14","slug":"the-problem-with-customized-power-effects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/2007\/05\/the-problem-with-customized-power-effects.html","title":{"rendered":"The problem with customized power effects …"},"content":{"rendered":"

Quoth Back-Alley Brawler<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

No, the colors<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

Power customization has some pretty big hurdles to overcome.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/i> make one (probably based off of the costume editor in some way) but it’s still another chunk of time to devote to this.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As opposed to, say, the Invention System.<\/p>\n

Which do you think people would appreciate and use more?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Quoth Back-Alley Brawler: 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 … Continue reading “The problem with customized power effects …”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":352,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-resources-rules"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/352"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/heroes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}