Hello guys, I am currently writing a little disseration and I had an idea to use Guild Wars as an example. It's hard to explain what is it about so I will just post a part of it and I am asking you to tell me if my way of thinking is correct. There is a little about technology there so I'd be amused if someone from ANet could appear and leave a comment on this
And yes I know I made an insane amount of grammar mistakes ;d
Quote:
Outfit style...
... and how does it affect the entire character creation process in MMORPG games where the customizable art asset pipeline is the main issue during production.
Everyone knows and most don’t even bother to think about so obvious things. What am I writing about? I am writing about ‘/dance’, ‘/flex’, ‘/ponder’ and many more emote commands used in (not only) MMOs. Still not following? Imagine that you create, then rig and weight a character and then because it is customizable, you change its armour. The same rig, the same weighing, completely different geometry. Result – mess...
And that is where advanced parenting and weighting scripts come with help. But the code has to be optimized and there is no place for different scripts for every single armour set so here is the thing, outfit styles.
Take a look at two first characters from the left, then the other two. It is clear that the way they keep their pose differs. In the same time the hands of the 3rd character and the shoulders and hands of the 4th character are different from the basic form. This is how the character classes are distinguished in basic pose no matter what kind of armour they wear (or not). They have a different way of moving, attacking and casting spells as well.
This is very basic, but still customization [(...)means ‘anything made or modified to personal taste’ and it is similar to: personalisation, (...), individualize]. Each of these characters is individual in its own kind of way. The artists task is to create as few rigs and weighting sets as possible to keep the best timing, to keep the project complexity and the game code optimized as everything costs money.
How does it regard outfit styles? Please take another look at the above characters. Outfit styles create an illusion that the following characters have their origin in one particular world, they belong to it. They (outfit styles, and characters) keep the game world integrate, so a player can see it as a whole. That is one thing.
The second bottom is technology. Would it be possible to take one of the above characters, dress it in a thick,’ waving on a wind’ fur coat long enough to reach the ground, and use the very same rig to make it work? It could be hard to achieve. Maybe it would be necessary to create another rig and another weighting set? Or maybe there should be one, very complex rig able to take care of everything? The problem is that kind of rig would be time consuming and ‘buggy’, as well as higher computer power dependent.
Few more examples. Can you see the pattern in the above outfits? Clothes are getting wider below the waist level in a specific, cone-like manner. It is the optimized way to reduce, generally speaking the computing power needed to run the game as well as (and mainly) it is the specific style of the game.
So when a group of artists want to create an efficient customizable art asset pipeline they have to spend a lot of time planning in advance, all the aspects of the technology they are going to use and consequences of their choice.
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