Armor weight restriction removal? Thoughts?

[fatihso.7258]

Yes, they should lift the weight type limitation of skins. Since they are not adding specific skins people request for x weight of armor and for years.. This will be a fair solution at minimum and add variety to mix&match.

[b k.1648]

4 hours ago, Marikus.1875 said:

Plenty of assumptions made but: 

1) We don't know what Anet's budget is and unless you're part of the organization and working directly in finance, neither do you.

2) Hiring a team of five dedicated personnel with total comp (both sides) at ~150k/yr would still come in under a million dollar investment not "several millions". 

3) I am okay with them making this change, you're right. 

Having this restriction in place just goes against the spirit of freedom that this game exemplifies. It's rooted in old and outdated design and seeing as they're showing they are more than willing to take a second look at things in the backend such as how WvW is going to play and even infrastructure changes like DX11... I'm okay with them taking a second look at this too.

 

Just five? For hundreds of pieces of armour to rebind on ten character models? That sounds extremely optimistic even if it's outsourced to India, and that's not even counting the art adjustments that will be needed to match the seams for the waist etc. on the destination rig. I might not know exactly how much they'd be willing to sink into a vanity project, but I do know this would be way beyond any reasonable scope. Redoing art takes a lot more manpower than updating the renderer.

 

  

4 hours ago, ChronoPinoyX.7923 said:

If they could rig these things three times without issue, that means the same rig could be incorporated into other weights. That's copy pastaing a rig to different weight skeletons, which are all exactly the same just coded separately, and it works from what we can see. If they can copy pasta rigs between different professions (like Reaper GS to Rev GS), then this shouldn't be an issue at all. 

 

It's not without issue. It's cheaper than doing three different designs, but it's still three times the rigging work compared to one piece for one armour weight. You can't just copy-paste a mesh onto a different rig unless all the bone locations and weights are identical. If I recall correctly, the anchor points for the armour pieces are different between different weight classes, so a "copy paste" solution is likely to have polygons floating, flying off into infinity, and all that good stuff. Weapons, on the other hand, most likely are identical.

 

I suppose you could display all three rigs in the client simultaneously, and hide certain mesh segments for each one. Eek. Might technically work, but it would be on a fan mod level of bad practice.

 

  

1 hour ago, ChronoPinoyX.7923 said:

People are making it sound more laborious than it needs to be. Believe it or not, all three weights share the exact same rigs between all the races, they're merely separated by the game's programming which restricts the mixture of each weight pieces.

I don't believe it, because they've specifically said they're not the same in past. I'll see if I can dig up the source on that.

Edited September 15, 2021 by Ben K.6238

[Batel.9206]

I'd love it if we could get an armor weight "swap" system - sure, you can wear armor outside your normal weight, but it has to be all of one weight. You can't have a mix: it has to be all light, all medium, or all heavy. You can mix and match freely inside those weights, but trying to rig different weights to work together all at once would be a bit much. So, for example, if a heavy armor class wanted to wear light or medium armor, they could do so, but it'd have to be all light *or* all medium. No heavy boots, light shirt, medium pants, etc.

And so it doesn't break anything, this would be restricted to cosmetic use only. You wouldn't actually be equipping the different armor weights, just the skins in the wardrobe.

...I hope that made sense.

Edited September 15, 2021 by Batel.9206
Okay, really now, what's with the giant spaces between paragraphs? That's annoying.

[Loules.8601]

41 minutes ago, Batel.9206 said:

I'd love it if we could get an armor weight "swap" system - sure, you can wear armor outside your normal weight, but it has to be all of one weight. You can't have a mix: it has to be all light, all medium, or all heavy. You can mix and match freely inside those weights, but trying to rig different weights to work together all at once would be a bit much. So, for example, if a heavy armor class wanted to wear light or medium armor, they could do so, but it'd have to be all light *or* all medium. No heavy boots, light shirt, medium pants, etc.

And so it doesn't break anything, this would be restricted to cosmetic use only. You wouldn't actually be equipping the different armor weights, just the skins in the wardrobe.

...I hope that made sense.

I think that one of the problems - different class animations with much more collision problems (because of different “material” too - you can’t do some things with plate-armour or it would be very weird)

And I don’t count outfits here, because it is… just outfits? Much more “fun thing” unlike armour. 
Also - not so good with visual diversity. As example - I don’t think that many light armour looks good on male characters and heavy - on female. So we’ll see tons of male scholars with only plate-armour and female - with medium (but most light). 
Even if I like freedom in things like this, I don’t like it with armour types - it will lead to much more similar looks for all and completely transform us in army of male knights and female assassins/“dancers”

[ChronoPinoyX.7923]

18 minutes ago, Ben K.6238 said:

It's not without issue. It's cheaper than doing three different designs, but it's still three times the rigging work compared to one piece for one armour weight. You can't just copy-paste a mesh onto a different rig unless all the bone locations and weights are identical. If I recall correctly, the anchor points for the armour pieces are different between different weight classes, so a "copy paste" solution is likely to have polygons floating, flying off into infinity, and all that good stuff. Weapons, on the other hand, most likely are identical.

The bone structure where the rigs are anchored onto are not based on the weight of the armour, they're based on the skeletal structure of the races. That's how they've been doing it for a while, which is why certain armour sets are absolutely awkward on certain races, Charr being the biggest offender of weird clipping and anchoring issues. 

21 minutes ago, Ben K.6238 said:

I suppose you could display all three rigs in the client simultaneously, and hide certain mesh segments for each one. Eek. Might technically work, but it would be on a fan mod level of bad practice.

Fan mods are literally how certain game devs are able to identify issues on their games from a design perspective, calling them bad practice is pretty ignorant, especially since this game has a mod that has some serious QoL changes that the game doesn't offer. 

24 minutes ago, Ben K.6238 said:

I don't believe it, because they've specifically said they're not the same in past. I'll see if I can dig up the source on that.

You're welcome to look, but as far as I'm aware, even in the old forums, ANet never made such a claim that rigging is different between each weight, that was all statements made by players. That said, I know for a fact that ANet can easily copy paste rigging between different assets, even if people think it's impossible, because Crystal Reid literally made this statement before she departed from ANet

It’s helpful to reuse existing rigs for raid bosses because they have several available animations, and this means more animations overall than if they all had to be built from scratch for a new rig. -Animations in Guild Wars 2: A Summary

[b k.1648]

9 minutes ago, ChronoPinoyX.7923 said:

The bone structure where the rigs are anchored onto are not based on the weight of the armour, they're based on the skeletal structure of the races. That's how they've been doing it for a while, which is why certain armour sets are absolutely awkward on certain races, Charr being the biggest offender of weird clipping and anchoring issues. 

Fan mods are literally how certain game devs are able to identify issues on their games from a design perspective, calling them bad practice is pretty ignorant, especially since this game has a mod that has some serious QoL changes that the game doesn't offer. 

You're welcome to look, but as far as I'm aware, even in the old forums, ANet never made such a claim that rigging is different between each weight, that was all statements made by players. That said, I know for a fact that ANet can easily copy paste rigging between different assets, even if people think it's impossible, because Crystal Reid literally made this statement before she departed from ANet

It’s helpful to reuse existing rigs for raid bosses because they have several available animations, and this means more animations overall than if they all had to be built from scratch for a new rig. -Animations in Guild Wars 2: A Summary

Armour and character model permutations are multiplicative. If you've got heavy pieces that all need to work together, how they join up is going to be different from all the light and medium meshes, and weird things can happen if it's done differently. So far, I've seen a lot of player claims that the rigs are different, but I'm not sure where that originally came from. Still digging through dev posts for any information on how these are done, might take a while.

 

I've been involved in fan mods for enough projects to keep my own counsel on that one. You can get away with a lot of things in those because they technically work in that specific situation, but are horribly fragile and would be every shade of nope in a professional context. Not to say there aren't some very high-quality fan mods out there, there's just a lot more latitude for cowboy implementations.

I've seen that article on monsters. They don't have to wear armour though, so that makes re-using the rig a bit less of a nightmare. If you've just got to redo joint weights for one mesh, it's way better to have a complete set of animations ready to go.

[ChronoPinoyX.7923]

5 minutes ago, Ben K.6238 said:

Armour and character model permutations are multiplicative. If you've got heavy pieces that all need to work together, how they join up is going to be different from all the light and medium meshes, and weird things can happen if it's done differently. So far, I've seen a lot of player claims that the rigs are different, but I'm not sure where that originally came from. Still digging through dev posts for any information on how these are done, might take a while.

And that's exactly the reason why I don't believe the weight classes of each equipment set has a separate rigging structure to one another, because if that were the actual case, we'd be seeing those issues arise with the sets of equipment that's duplicated across all three weights. So far, there's been next to no issues with those equipment pieces aside from looking a bit awkward on races like the Charr, but overall their interactions with each weight seems to hold no issues. 

11 minutes ago, Ben K.6238 said:

I've been involved in fan mods for enough projects to keep my own counsel on that one. You can get away with a lot of things in those because they technically work in that specific situation, but are horribly fragile and would be every shade of nope in a professional context. Not to say there aren't some very high-quality fan mods out there, there's just a lot more latitude for cowboy implementations.

I don't disagree that there's a number of mods that aren't exactly up to spec if it was implemented in a professional setting, but that's also the reason why it's fan-based to begin with. I've always had a positive stance on mods, even if they're not exactly "professional" quality if they improve upon elements of the games I play. 

17 minutes ago, Ben K.6238 said:

I've seen that article on monsters. They don't have to wear armour though, so that makes re-using the rig a bit less of a nightmare. If you've just got to redo joint weights for one mesh, it's way better to have a complete set of animations ready to go.

Different body structures are as detrimental as different armour designs and weight classes, if they can do both with creatures and pieces of armour, it shouldn't be hard for them to do it with full armour sets. I can definitely see it as a tedious task, but not one that would take a huge amount of effort with the skills that ANet's team has. 

Overall I personally think ANet can do it, it's mostly a question of priority over can or can't do. 

[b k.1648]

34 minutes ago, ChronoPinoyX.7923 said:

And that's exactly the reason why I don't believe the weight classes of each equipment set has a separate rigging structure to one another, because if that were the actual case, we'd be seeing those issues arise with the sets of equipment that's duplicated across all three weights. So far, there's been next to no issues with those equipment pieces aside from looking a bit awkward on races like the Charr, but overall their interactions with each weight seems to hold no issues. 

 

You may be right on the armour sets being identical rigs; I haven't been able to find anything that meaningfully describes how they're set up. Just these two comments are relevant.

From Curtis Johnson, in 2014: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Feedback-Questions-Town-clothes-Costumes-Combat/page/18#post3823361

Quote

When we started looking at bringing more of the clothing back into armor with mix and match styles there are some fundamental incompatible things between weight classes. (part of how we set up every armor to allow many dye channels and styles per piece).. There really is no way at this point over six years since we started development to make absolutely everything work together. So we needed something new to continue to grow in the future.

So the weight classes are "fundamentally incompatible", but it doesn't mention anything about rigging.

 

And Mike O'Brien a few days later: https://old.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/48zlyd/im_mike_obrien_here_with_gw2_dev_team_ama/d0o34v3/?context=8&depth=9
just agrees with a player who said "However, in order to make an Outfit an armor set they'd have to shoehorn it into an armor classification and chop it up so it's cut at the proper vertices and attributing item IDs to call each piece correctly."
Notably, he's mainly agreeing that it's a lot of work to make armour, but doesn't say this player was mistaken in his reply.

So, probably more of an armour mesh thing than anything to do with the rig.

Edited September 15, 2021 by Ben K.6238

[ChronoPinoyX.7923]

13 minutes ago, Ben K.6238 said:

 

You may be right on the armour sets being identical rigs; I haven't been able to find anything that meaningfully describes how they're set up. Just these two comments are relevant.

From Curtis Johnson, in 2014: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Feedback-Questions-Town-clothes-Costumes-Combat/page/18#post3823361

So the weight classes are "fundamentally incompatible", but it doesn't mention anything about rigging.

 

And Mike O'Brien a few days later: https://old.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/48zlyd/im_mike_obrien_here_with_gw2_dev_team_ama/d0o34v3/?context=8&depth=9
just agrees with a player who said "However, in order to make an Outfit an armor set they'd have to shoehorn it into an armor classification and chop it up so it's cut at the proper vertices and attributing item IDs to call each piece correctly."
Notably, he's mainly agreeing that it's a lot of work to make armour, but doesn't say this player was mistaken in his reply.

So, probably more of an armour mesh thing than anything to do with the rig.

It's more a mixture of outdated design philosophy that ANet chose at the time of developing the base game along with the programming side of things from what I understood when reading these. For existing armour designs, the part about different weight classes was only an issue because ANet chose that design philosophy that a certain design had to be fundamentally tied to a certain weight class, which is why Curtis mentioned the following:

Additionally, every time we added something to town-clothes, it didn’t really help someone building their light, medium, or heavy look. And there was no way to add combat gear fairly without creating 3 versions on the back end (light, medium, and heavy). As a customization platform and sustainable expansion design it left a lot to be desired.

I doubt ANet would consider moving away from this design Philosophy given that EOD showcases different armour weight classes once again, but I'd like to think that aside from the programming side of things, ANet can actually amalgamate every design they've made into each weight class without issue. That said though, I also get the whole programming side of things and how that would be a massive can of worms for ANet to open up since they had issues with legacy (spaghetti) coding in the game before. 

[Just a flesh wound.3589]

Here’s a long ago post touching on mixing different armor weights

 

Curtis Johnson ANet staff

… there are some fundamental incompatible things between weight classes. (part of how we set up every armor to allow many dye channels and styles per piece). There really is no way at this point over six years since we started development to make absolutely everything work together… 

[Dawdler.8521]

2 hours ago, Loules.8601 said:

I think that one of the problems - different class animations with much more collision problems (because of different “material” too - you can’t do some things with plate-armour or it would be very weird)

And I don’t count outfits here, because it is… just outfits? Much more “fun thing” unlike armour. 
Also - not so good with visual diversity. As example - I don’t think that many light armour looks good on male characters and heavy - on female. So we’ll see tons of male scholars with only plate-armour and female - with medium (but most light). 
Even if I like freedom in things like this, I don’t like it with armour types - it will lead to much more similar looks for all and completely transform us in army of male knights and female assassins/“dancers”

Pretty moot point since you can run around as an ele in extremely bulky plate armor or run around as a warrior in a literal wedding dress.

Not to mention many animations are shared between classes.

Once upon a time the weight restrictions made sense but with everything Anet has done since, it doesnt anymore.

Edited September 15, 2021 by Dawdler.8521

[Hector.9035]

I have studied 3D modeling and rigging for games at university (i dont work doing that atm, but I understand how it works) and I'd like to know why you guys are saying different weights of armor wouldnt work on every character. 

Why wouldnt an asuran heavy amor work in a ele or necro asura? An asuran warrior's body has the exact same model and rigg that an asuran mesmer's body, so their armor should work fine, regardless on the different animations. 

Please correct me on this if I am mistaken and you are a rigger with experience. 

 

Would it clip? Probably. But a lot of clipping is actually happening in the game at the moment, even if we use same weight armours. They clip, and its fine, it doesnt break the game or anything. 

 

Personally, I would LOVE to be able to use some heavy pauldrons and leggins in my weaver. Feels weird to go kill things with a sword and a dagger dressing with long robes. 

[Gehenna.3625]

13 hours ago, Marikus.1875 said:

 

Leave those how they are??

It's interesting you haven't considered this, but removing the weight class from classes will make 2 out of 3 sets redundant of the legendary armor sets. Especially now with the legendary armory. 

 

That's why I asked the question. People will not respond kindly to this if it makes a lot of their efforts in vain all of a sudden. Just leaving them as they are doesn't help them.

Edit: if it's just skins then I'm fine with it, but I didn't get that from the original post.

Edited September 15, 2021 by Gehenna.3625

[HowlKamui.5120]

Yes.

Please let me mix and match my fashion. There are literally no down-sides, and I would probably get more armor skins from the gem store if this was implemented

[kharmin.7683]

13 hours ago, Marikus.1875 said:

However long it takes, I'm okay with them dedicating the resources to it.

So, no more expansions.  No more strike missions.  No more LS chapters.  No more raids or fractals.  No further work on WvW or PvP.

[Vilin.8056]

3 hours ago, Hector.9035 said:

I have studied 3D modeling and rigging for games at university (i dont work doing that atm, but I understand how it works) and I'd like to know why you guys are saying different weights of armor wouldnt work on every character. 

Why wouldnt an asuran heavy amor work in a ele or necro asura? An asuran warrior's body has the exact same model and rigg that an asuran mesmer's body, so their armor should work fine, regardless on the different animations. 

Please correct me on this if I am mistaken and you are a rigger with experience. 

 

Would it clip? Probably. But a lot of clipping is actually happening in the game at the moment, even if we use same weight armours. They clip, and its fine, it doesnt break the game or anything. 

 

Personally, I would LOVE to be able to use some heavy pauldrons and leggins in my weaver. Feels weird to go kill things with a sword and a dagger dressing with long robes. 

And how would you correctly attach a heavy pauldron onto a light cloth when that pauldron was specifically positioned to adapt to the thickness and height of an heavy armor, and vice versa?

[Dawdler.8521]

3 minutes ago, Vilin.8056 said:

And how would you correctly attach a heavy pauldron onto a light cloth when that pauldron was specifically positioned to adapt to the thickness and height of an heavy armor, and vice versa?

Hotsnot.

[Dante.1763]

21 minutes ago, Vilin.8056 said:

And how would you correctly attach a heavy pauldron onto a light cloth when that pauldron was specifically positioned to adapt to the thickness and height of an heavy armor, and vice versa?

Ive had some experience rigging and my own experience lines up with what i said earlier, and its also why the models phsyically break when they are equipped with heavier or lighter clothing in modeling programs.

Shoot, ive got a ship i made that has 3 different variations and a majority of the points dont line up with the kther variations. They share some common ones, but specific points are all different.

[ChronoPinoyX.7923]

16 minutes ago, Vilin.8056 said:

And how would you correctly attach a heavy pauldron onto a light cloth when that pauldron was specifically positioned to adapt to the thickness and height of an heavy armor, and vice versa?

The same way they did Etherbound pieces, Hologram Pieces, Jackal Pieces, Foefire pieces etc.

By literally keeping the rigs the same. That's exactly how those pieces worked on every weight class. Again, ANet's design philosophy was not about each weight class not working on a technical level, it was simply from an aesthetic design level. They felt that cloth focused armour (light) wouldn't feel right working with metallic focused armour (heavy), that was Curtis' point. Hence his statement

5 hours ago, ChronoPinoyX.7923 said:

Additionally, every time we added something to town-clothes, it didn’t really help someone building their light, medium, or heavy look. And there was no way to add combat gear fairly without creating 3 versions on the back end (light, medium, and heavy). As a customization platform and sustainable expansion design it left a lot to be desired.

And people translated that to not working with rigs which isn't true otherwise Outfits would have needed separate weight classes a long time ago.

[Fuchslein.8639]

If I have understood this correctly.

I would love to skin my char's, especially my leather classes with light or heavy armor uu.

And by the way, about the clipping ... do you people even play fashion wars? There's so much clipping in the game because most armor sets are just cut into pieces. Not to speak of Charr or Asuras ... What kind of excuse is that all the time?

[Dante.1763]

22 minutes ago, Fuchslein.8639 said:

If I have understood this correctly.

I would love to skin my char's, especially my leather classes with light or heavy armor uu.

And by the way, about the clipping ... do you people even play fashion wars? There's so much clipping in the game because most armor sets are just cut into pieces. Not to speak of Charr or Asuras ... What kind of excuse is that all the time?

"Its already bad, it doesnt need to be worse" i believe is the thought behind those responses.

[Fuchslein.8639]

28 minutes ago, Dante.1763 said:

"Its already bad, it doesnt need to be worse" i believe is the thought behind those responses.

Can it get any worse than characters who impale themselves with their tops and shoulders as soon as they move?

Just kidding.
But the thing is, does Anet really care when you look at all the new armor? Or is that ultimately just an excuse(from anet himself and an overprotective community), not only on this topic?

If Anet really would have become better in it, I would sign this immediately, but so ... let me decide for myself if I want to wear something what chilled or not.

[Dante.1763]

Just now, Fuchslein.8639 said:

Can it get any worse than characters who impale themselves with their tops and shoulders as soon as they move?

Just kidding.
But the thing is, does Anet really care when you look at all the new armor? Or is that ultimately just an excuse(from anet himself and an overprotective community), not only on this topic?

If Anet really would have become better in it, I would sign this immediately, but so ... let me decide for myself if I want to wear something what chilled or not.

I have no foot in either race ^^

It would be cool if it happened but i understand the amount of work it would be.

[HowlKamui.5120]

5 hours ago, Vilin.8056 said:

And how would you correctly attach a heavy pauldron onto a light cloth when that pauldron was specifically positioned to adapt to the thickness and height of an heavy armor, and vice versa?

Are you really bringing up physics logic on a topic about dressing video game characters up, on a game that already has unrealistic/out-of-this-world fashion skins?

Edited September 15, 2021 by HowlKamui.5120

[Sigmoid.7082]

11 minutes ago, HowlKamui.5120 said:

Are you really bringing up physics logic on a topic about dressing video game characters up, on a game that already has unrealistic/out-of-this-world fashion skins?

I think they were on about rendering, anchor points, 3d modelling and potential clipping / mismatch with this ... which very much pertain to the conversation at hand

Edited September 15, 2021 by Sigmoid.7082