Dye Weapons/Backpacks

Simple request. I would like the options to do it. In the current state with all the cool armors and dyes. the weps/Backpacks are getting no love. Please make weps/Backpacks Dyable . Thank You.

I AGREE ^^

It almost certainly won't happen. The game was designed on the assumption that weapons would never be dyed. And backpacks are handled differently.

From Tidgepot.3285, regarding someone asking why the Shining Blade Glider can be dyed, but not the backpack, even though each were created relatively recently.https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Dye-backpacks-Shining-Blade-back-issue/6257985

It’s extremely hard to alter the engine so backpacks are dyeable. As far as the engine is considered, backpacks are considered items (like weapons) and gliders are considered effects. The engine needs to be fundamentally altered from the ground up to allow for item dye channels. It’s not impossible, but not easy. To add to this, the Shining Blade glider was designed on its own and after it was modeled one of the artists saw that it could be turned into a backpack for the players to enjoy. I think lazy is an inappropriate term for this situation when someone went the extra mile. However, I do understand your frustration with not knowing it couldn’t be dyed. That should be more clear.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Dye-backpacks-Shining-Blade-back-issue/6260425

If you need citation, then look no further. I’m the dev who concepted this glider! Granted, I’m an artist so I couldn’t give you the full technical rundown like Josh Petrie, but I do handle our engine daily.

Whether or not the equipment takes damage or not has no bearing on how the engine separates items. The engine sees armor as what is called a composite, it sees things attached to your characters like weapons and backpieces as items, and it sees gliders as a sort of middleground item/effect. Our file structure separates gliders as items, but because of how they pop into view, layer, and more easily allow for dyes it makes sense to basically treat them as effects. Now I’m not positive on this, but I’m going to hazard a guess that if we decided to make gliders as items, we’d have to retroactively alter the system in a way that would allow for weapons/backpieces to be dyed.

On its face doing this sounds like a great idea, since this is what fans want. As a fellow player I’d like this as well, but unfortunately our systems were not designed with this in mind. Not only would we have to go back and code each item so it can have dye channels/sufficient UI and prepare for the veritable bugfest that would ensue from altering a system that has years of work built on top of it, but we’d also have to retexture these items. Why? Our dye system is balanced around a red base color which has an impact on how every other color will appear when a channel shifts to it. Anyone who has played with dodging/burning in photoshop will know that red has some strange properties when it comes to shifts in values. Many dyes would have blown out/dull/oddly saturated textures as a result.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s SO much more to the process that I don’t have a firm grasp on.

The devs here are gamers and we love what we do. We want fans to get excited about what we make because we’re fans, too. However, we have players clamoring for every fix/feature under the sun so we have to do a ton of prioritizing. Game development is never plain and simple.

Here's a current dev explaining in September 2018 why we won't get dyeable weaponsLinsey Murdock wrote:There are trade offs we had to make in order to have a trading post and in order to further our technology on weapons themselves (like crazy animating stuff). We made that choice years before GW2 shipped. Along with cutting variable stats and GW1 style customization. Dyeable weapons is not even a topic of conversation, let alone being on the table. Yes, we can create technology to allow us to do things we could not have previously done but I don't see this being one of those things. In fact, we have probably even crossed the line of it being possible with all the crazy stuff we have done on weapons since ship. That is not even assessing the gross amount of work that would be required to update the hundreds of existing weapon skins, and that alone would probably make such a project out of scope.

[Q] I don't even want that all existing weapons are getting updated - More like just some new weapons, but it seems even that won't be really possible then I guess.

A

It's really not about the existing weapons, it's about the tech to do the dye system on weapons itself being incompatible with the tech we built the game on in order to have a trading post, animating weapons, etc.

And

A fundamental decision made nearly a decade ago, not a decision that is being continuously made and we just keep choosing no dye on weapons. It's the kind of decision you make at such a fundamental level that you don't get to change your mind a decade later and undo it. That's why it isn't even a topic of conversation here.

And finally

All those ascended weapons in different colors also have geometry differences. We have never done simple color shifts. The team that works on weapons has a rule against it.

Here's a former dev explaining why we can't dye weapons and aren't likely to ever be able to

...the decision to dye armor but not weapons was a design one (in the sense we chose to do it, not that there were insurmountable technical issues), and made pretty early.

• We wanted a much richer dye system for GW2 than we had in GW1.
• This would require some changes to the way that the source art was authored, which increased the complexity (and thus time) of doing so.
• That additional complexity pays off best for armor, which is more visible on-screen than weapons generally are,
• and so (I think) it was decided that we wouldn't bother authoring dye support into the weapon art.
• Eventually this decision would have led to code changes or optimization relying on that assumption, and we arrive at where we are today.

As with all things, it could be made possible to dye weapons with sufficient code and art resources sunk into it. But

it would be a nontrivial undertaking

(and probably a non-trivial patch download!) to

re-author all the existing source art with appropriate metadata for dye channels.

(text is verbatim; emphasis and bullet points are mine)

tl;dr It's only "possible" in a theoretical sense

• They decided long before launch that there wasn't enough bang for the buck (effort|time) to dye weapons.
• The existing game depends on that decision, so changing it would mean re-rendering every single weapon in the game (whether dyeable or not), plus additional QA to make sure weapons work properly with extra 'metadata'.

For what it's worth, a few of the past requests from the old forums

! https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Weapon-Dye/4662447! https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Weapon-dyes/3344528! https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Dye-able-Weapons/5768082! https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Let-us-dye-weapons/4547784! https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/Weapon-dye-Application/4818242! https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/Weapons-back-Dye/5090753! https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Dyes-for-weapons/5836961! https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Suggestion-Dye-Channels-on-Legendaries/6521161

And some from the new forums:

• https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/50952/one-reason-to-dye-weapons

I'd love for this to happen too, but as shown above it's actually a pretty major change, so it's unlikely to happen.

i hope dyeing my weapon and backpack allows for a better combat!

I am building a character that uses the toxic mantle and gloves skins together with the nightmare thornblade skin, the nightmare nettleguard skin and the glowing green mask. It is just such a same the green colours used on those skins dont match as it seems to me those pieces were meant to be used together. Guess all I can do is hope Anet someday reworks them to match.

I don't much care for dye, but I would like the banners on my Warbringer to change each week to match my server color instead of just staying red

At the very least backpieces need to be dyeable. Especially the ones that are gliders that can be dyed. Obviously it's in the system for those pieces to be dyed. They just need to set up the interface to do it. Need this NAOW, especially since the dragon wings came out.

@radiantbliss.6875 said:At the very least backpieces need to be dyeable. Especially the ones that are gliders that can be dyed. Obviously it's in the system for those pieces to be dyed. They just need to set up the interface to do it. Need this NAOW, especially since the dragon wings came out.

It's obviously not in the system for back-pieces to be dyed, as the Devs have explicitly stated this.

@radiantbliss.6875 said:At the very least backpieces need to be dyeable. Especially the ones that are gliders that can be dyed. Obviously it's in the system for those pieces to be dyed. They just need to set up the interface to do it. Need this NAOW, especially since the dragon wings came out.

Somehow I feel like you didn't read any of the posts above yours... It was explained in detail why it's not possible/won't be possible.

Devs have said a million times it'll never happen

@Memoranda.9386 said:

Somehow I feel like you didn't read any of the posts above yours... It was explained in detail why it's not possible/won't be possible.

Oh I read it. I'm still fully allowed to express my opinion on it. If enough people continue to express their desire for it perhaps one day it will be brought onto the table of possibilities. Once upon a time expansions weren't being considered as they favored living story as the only way to get extra content. Look at us now with two expansions. WvW overhauls were NEVER talked about, but now we're being talked to about an Alliance system. This game changes and adapts. If you never express your desired changes, even if it's not possible now then it's even less likely to be a possibility. There is no harm, except minor inconvenience, in expressing a desired change. Because you don't know when or if that never will change. Because never does sometimes change just like sometimes things they do say they are bring don't happen. But you keep on asking anyway. Because that's all we can do anyway. But somehow, I don't think you actually care either way.

(copy pasta from other thread)Pretty disappoint with the scaled dragon wings base colour for the back piece. "Night shade" really A-net? couldn't have at gone abyss? glossy black? Or at the very least just base black? You just HAD to go with the weird blue tinted version that is going to find some way to clash with virtually any set that is lacking a blue hue?

Jeez, make it so we can dye back items, or make it more neutral already and you wont have people coming asking for this every time you release a new back item.--Actually you probably will until back items are dye-able, but the rate at which you release new ones, and the way you choose the the base colour of the back item you will have a much larger people shouting about this.

@radiantbliss.6875 said:If enough people continue to express their desire for it perhaps one day it will be brought onto the table of possibilities.In this case, it's not a question of desire; it's a question of scope.

To be able dye even a single weapon (and for this discussion, the game doesn't distinguish backpacks from weapons) means both creating the infrastructure to make it possible to dye any and redoing the artwork for every single weapon in the game. Even if 99.999% of the weapons won't get dyed, they still have to be re-rendered in order to work with the new system before that new system can be implemented in the live game.

It's probably reasonable to assume that re-inking is less overall effort than starting from scratch, but the bulk of work remains in the post-design artistry. So while it won't be as bad as making up an entire wardrobe of new skins, it might be as bad as designing enough new artwork to match what we had at launch.

That would almost certainly require something close to all-hands-on-deck for the art team for a year, maybe two (or more?), while postponing any new artwork.

tl;dr it's not that folks at ANet (or fans) don't want dyeable weapons & backpacks. It's that there's simply too much existing artwork to make that feasible, except when starting a new game.

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:To be able dye even a single weapon (and for this discussion, the game doesn't distinguish backpacks from weapons) means both creating the infrastructure to make it possible to dye any and redoing the artwork for every single weapon in the game. Even if 99.999% of the weapons won't get dyed, they still have to be re-rendered in order to work with the new system before that new system can be implemented in the live game.

I completely get them not doing weapons. Especially considering several weapons share the same skin with different colors. It wouldn't make any logical sense for weapons (no matter how dreamy some might be using silver instead of gold). My point was more towards backpieces. Since they share the same skin as gliders and would likely, share the same dye channels. The item itself isn't changing because it already exists in design (which is why I pointed out it does actually exist). Codes would have to be changed, yes. It would mean recoding backpieces to not be read as weapons but as something separate. Lots of work, no dispute, but more in the realm of possibilities.

@radiantbliss.6875 said:

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:To be able dye even a single weapon (and for this discussion, the game doesn't distinguish backpacks from weapons) means both creating the infrastructure to make it possible to dye any

and

redoing the artwork for every single weapon in the game. Even if 99.999% of the weapons won't get dyed, they still have to be re-rendered in order to work with the new system

before

that new system can be implemented in the live game.

While backpacks and gliders look similar to us they don’t look the same to the computer and therefore you can’t argue they share the same skins.

The engine sees armor as what is called a composite, it sees things attached to your characters like weapons and backpieces as items, and it sees gliders as a sort of middleground item/effect. Our file structure separates gliders as items, but because of how they pop into view, layer, and more easily allow for dyes it makes sense to basically treat them as effects.

Another problem is bugs and resources to do this

On its face doing this sounds like a great idea, since this is what fans want. As a fellow player I'd like this as well, but unfortunately our systems were not designed with this in mind. Not only would we have to go back and code each item so it can have dye channels/sufficient UI and prepare for the veritable bugfest that would ensue from altering a system that has years of work built on top of it, but we'd also have to retexture these items. Why? Our dye system is balanced around a red base color which has an impact on how every other color will appear when a channel shifts to it. Anyone who has played with dodging/burning in photoshop will know that red has some strange properties when it comes to shifts in values. Many dyes would have blown out/dull/oddly saturated textures as a result.

That's just the tip of the iceberg. There's SO much more to the process that I don't have a firm grasp on.

The devs here are gamers and we love what we do. We want fans to get excited about what we make because we're fans, too. However, we have players clamoring for every fix/feature under the sun so we have to do a ton of prioritizing. Game development is never plain and simple.....

This sounds like a it could be good idea, but it doesn’t sidestep the issue of categorization and what certain types of assets can do. The older assets would still be affected. We’d still encounter a ton of programing challenges and bugs from altering a core mechanic of the game and the years of code built on top of it. Every player and many npcs use items, so the wrong bug slipping through can have a major impact on everyone in the game. Not to mention finding that bug could be like searching for a needle in a haystack because of how fundamental this part of our system is. We’d still probably end up having to re-author and retexture all old items (which would take a ton of resources) and even if we did do that, more players may end up upset by the minor texture changes to their current gear than those who can’t dye backpacks.

There is a high risk of gamebreaking bugs slipping through when you mess with codes at the bottom of the spaghetti coding. Bugs that will effect both players and NPCs and may be impossible to locate in any sort of timely manner.

You can express it all you want. But unless your offering to pay for the scope of work needed, ANet has ruled out this happening in the near- and long-term, if ever, due to the amount of work required to do so, including possibly modifying the clients base procedures for item look-up, parsing and so on.

Several employees have stated this, relevant posts linked, etc., especially concerning back pieces which was also covered in the above posts.

tl;dr ANet employees might want to, but it's not going to happen.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to be able to dye back pieces, but it's not happening. Weapons? Couldn't care less.

I was going to make a post about weapon dyeage but here it is...#iwantthis

I still hope Anet will, sometime in the future, go the extra lap around the planet to atleast make backpacks with matching gliders dyable.Looks so weird to run around with black wings, then glide away with white ones.

Weps no but backpiece yes

I would buy the dragon scale backpack if I could dye it to match my character better.

It would be nice to be able to dye weapons and backpacks. I really miss being able to dye weapons from GW1. I suspect it's too big of a task for Anet to do, considering how many weapons and backpacks there are though.

I'd prefer being able to dye weapons and backpacks over an expansion though (if I could only choose one option).

If that's so then is it possible to remove all back items we have now and add them later on when they have been reworked or rebuilt from scratch(if possible)? Instead of having to sieve through and alter old code that could cause bugs. Instead back items could be added as an "effect" rather than items attached to characters. Not really a programmer so I wouldn't know how it works, just offering ideas. :)

By back Items I am mainly talking about dyeable gliders with back piece sets.

I can understand why weapons are not set up to be dyed, but the decision process in development that lead to back pieces having no dye channels was short sighted at best. It's as if back pieces were an afterthought to armor.