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Can we please add dye channels to Warbringer?

Swagger.1459

By Swagger.1459
in World vs. World

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Illconceived Was Na.9781

Illconceived Was Na.9781

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Short story: they can't setup even one special backpack to have dye channels without changing the mechanics to make it possible. And if they do, that requires making changes to every backpack that exists right now... and means spending more time on any future packs. That's doable, of course, but it's a huge cost relative to the benefit. Especially since our appetite for new skins is never sated.

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.

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.

Ibid

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.

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Illconceived Was Na.9781

Illconceived Was Na.9781

Posted
Posted

And this about weapons, but the same points (mostly) apply to backpacks, too:

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

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intox.6347

intox.6347

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@Zephyra.4709 said:I don't think being able to dye backpacks is possible... it's 2018 and I really feel like the game should be able to by now. Anyway, as an alternative option they could always release different colors of the same skin regarding the cape bits (red, green, blue, yellow etc).

Ofc they can do it... its not big deal.... if somebody talk about it... they sound like its rocket science lol.But thing is that ... it will be free... so no time to spend on it.It must be like 2000 gems token to add dye channels to thing.... they should think about this version... to get some cash and also satisfy ppl.

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Svarty.8019

Svarty.8019

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@Swagger.1459 said:Can we please add dye channels to Warbringer?

Thank you for reading this great question! Have a great morning, afternoon or evening!

This has been requested before. I still concur that it'd be nice to be able to have different coloured banners, since there are three colours each matchup.

I'm surprised nobody thought of this during design... lol, ofc I'm not.

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xihorus.2804

xihorus.2804

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@Justine.6351 said:

@Crossaber.8934 said:Just make multi color versions of warbringer like the sprinal blade backpack and allow a cheap way to color change with forge.

Nah I wouldn't even bother with the forge recipes. Just have Warbringer unlock ~4 color skins in wardrobe when acquired.

Standard red,BlackWhiteBlue?

This is a pretty elegant and easy solution. I like it. Would only suggest that the colors should be red, green, and blue to tie in with the team colors in WvW.

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Illconceived Was Na.9781

Illconceived Was Na.9781

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@"Crossaber.8934" said:make multi color versions of ...

This is much more likely, because it doesn't require inventing a new mechanic. It's not "free" either; it would be resource-intensive (just not as bad as creating a new pack). And there would be an expectation that if ANet did it for Warbringer, they should do it for the PvP & Fractal backs, too.

I think it's interesting enough to be worth its own thread.

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  • 3 years later...

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