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[Poll]Should Back Pieces Be Dye-able?

MixC.6083

By MixC.6083
in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

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Illconceived Was Na.9781

Illconceived Was Na.9781

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The tl;dr is that the original design compromised "no dye" in exchange for simplifying the design process, which partly explains how ANet is able to release far more weapon sets than armor sets. To enable colorization, they'd have to (a) create the new system and (b) retrofit every existing (applicable) item to it, even if they never turned on dye channels for it.

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.

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Illconceived Was Na.9781

Illconceived Was Na.9781

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Posted

The following is more about weapons than backpacks, but the tech (and the issues) are comparable.

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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Dahkeus.8243

Dahkeus.8243

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Doesn't matter if they should be or not. They won't be. Two main reasons for this:1) It would be a lot of work for devs to recode the UI as well as all of the skins already released2) There are skins that look the exact same except for their coloring, such as the Super Adventure and the Spinal Blade skins

The SAB, in particular, would cause outrage if it was made dye-able since the color of the skin is associated with the achievement across various difficulty settings.

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starhunter.6015

starhunter.6015

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@Dahkeus.8243 said:Doesn't matter if they should be or not. They won't be. Two main reasons for this:1) It would be a lot of work for devs to recode the UI as well as all of the skins already released2) There are skins that look the exact same except for their coloring, such as the Super Adventure and the Spinal Blade skins

The SAB, in particular, would cause outrage if it was made dye-able since the color of the skin is associated with the achievement across various difficulty settings.

Agreed and a solution would be that certain back pieces would not be dyeable much like the Radiant or Hellfire gloves.

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Illconceived Was Na.9781

Illconceived Was Na.9781

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@Dahkeus.8243 said:

@MixC.6083 said:Should Back Pieces Be Dye-able?

Only if weapons became dyeable as well.

Yea, that's probably one of the reasons the devs would never want to make back pieces dye-able. Players would be really worked up for dye-able weapons. Kind of a shame that this wasn't implemented at launch though.

According to the devs, if they had, we'd have many, many fewer weapon and back skins. I like it better this way.

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