Let us be able to customize our back packs like gliders.

[TheUnknown.5204]

Please anet! I really want this to happen uwu

[NanoEliteSixSixSix.8935]

Something something backpieces not made that way back when they made the game something something spaghetti code (can we have pizza code instead?) something something something sadness for everybody.

For real, though, it will forever bug me that my jetpack doesn't match it's glider variant.

[TheUnknown.5204]

@NanoEliteSixSixSix.8935 said:Something something backpieces not made that way back when they made the game something something spaghetti code (can we have pizza code instead?) something something something sadness for everybody.

For real, though, it will forever bug me that my jetpack doesn't match it's glider variant.

I have the branded relic backpack and it bugs me that I can't change it to orange instead of it being purple so I made my character look purple, He looks cool but it would be great if we can make it match. :PYep, It's very annoying seeing that we can color our glider but not pack backs so they can look totally different when you use your glider.Come on anet, Plz make this happen. :(

[The Greyhawk.9107]

I'd like being able to dye...most backpacks about as much as anyone, but if it actually is something in the coding there might not be much they can do about it.

[Excursion.9752]

May as well put this idea in the QoL thread here: https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/53097/suggestions-qol-quality-of-life-ideas/p1 if its not already there.

This has been a complaint from most of us for a while now. Maybe one day they will rework all their old systems. The excuse is somewhat getting old now and is falling on mostly deaf ears. While I understand it will take work to fix old code it does not mean it shouldn't be done.

[Just a flesh wound.3589]

Here is what one dev said about dyeing backpacks (in a response to a previous discussion)

Tidgepot.3285

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.

.

Ashe Lewis.9815

I rarely post on the forums so I just had my account upgraded to a developer one. So Tidgepot is indeed a dev because I'm Tidgepot! My posts earlier in this thread still stand. I'm sorry about the confusion :P

Like I said before, I’m just an artist so I’ll elaborate on what I understand as best as I can, but I’m no engineer.

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.

Maybe(?) a workaround could be a new asset type, but our engine is old and finicky— it would certainly take a lot resources to teach it to parse through something so fundamental.

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

And that was years ago, so there is even more code built on top to go through.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

@NanoEliteSixSixSix.8935 said:For real, though, it will forever bug me that my jetpack doesn't match it's glider variant.

If you want, they can make the gliders undyeable too.

[NanoEliteSixSixSix.8935]

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:

@NanoEliteSixSixSix.8935 said:For real, though, it will forever bug me that my jetpack doesn't match it's glider variant.

If you want, they can make the gliders undyeable too.

While that would technically solve the color mismatch issue, that would be a decidedly less-than-ideal way to go about doing it that would leave us all worse off than when we started. Like burning your house down to kill a spider.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

@NanoEliteSixSixSix.8935 said:

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:

@NanoEliteSixSixSix.8935 said:For real, though, it will forever bug me that my jetpack doesn't match it's glider variant.

If you want, they can make the gliders undyeable too.

While that would technically solve the color mismatch issue, that would be a decidedly less-than-ideal way to go about doing it that would leave us all worse off than when we started. Like burning your house down to kill a spider.

Which is why ANet made gliders dyeable in the first place: better to have one of the two options than neither.

[Batel.9206]

@NanoEliteSixSixSix.8935 said:Like burning your house down to kill a spider.I see nothing wrong with this....where I live, we have hobo spiders, wolf spiders, brown recluses, and black widows (among many others). Have one of those crawl just out of sight along the wall, and tell me you wouldn't break out the flamethrowers. :tongue:

Ahem, to be somewhat on topic: it'd be nice if we could customize backpacks, but I understand why it isn't possible, due to coding issues way back when. Something similar happened in SWTOR; due to hilariously awkward coding issues, the most innocuous updates would end up breaking the most random things ever. Like that one time every elderly NPC had their eye texture replaced with their face texture...or when everyone in the galaxy spontaneously armed themselves with a sword...or when eye colors got broken so severely that they've never been fully fixed... I'm not sure I'd want to risk something like that happening to GW2.Still...one can dream of a glitch-free dyable backpack, right? :blush: 'Tis impossible, but fun to think about.

[Just a flesh wound.3589]

Here is a couple more dev posts on a related issue with the same underlying problems, dyeing weapons

jpetrieI can't give you specifics or anything (they'd be very tedious to compute even if I still had access to the code), but GW2's codebase is very much an evolution of the codebase used for GW1. We did not start over, or anything crazy, but nor did we use the GW1 code unchanged.

Huge chunks of gameplay code were added, removed, or refactored so heavily as to be effectively-new (even things you might think would be the same, like inventory). The core rendering and networking capabilities had some significant reworking to support new features, but a lot of the fundamentals remained the same. The very low-level stuff, such as the classes we use to manage collections of data, do math, sort things... those didn't change much and some files might even be identical to the ones in GW1, except maybe for some copyright or header date changes.

Essentially if you view the code as a vertical stack of functionality, with very-game-specific gameplay code at the top and generic data structure/algorithm stuff at the bottom, the closer something is to the top the more likely it experienced significant tweaking at some point during GW2's development.

To address the specific topic of this thread (dying stuff)... what I recall (so I might be wrong) is that 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.(Please keep in mind that all of this is from memory from a long time ago, so I may be forgetting/misremembering/et cetera some things.).LinseyMurdockIt'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.......(Snip) 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......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.

[NanoEliteSixSixSix.8935]

@Batel.9206 said:

@NanoEliteSixSixSix.8935 said:Like burning your house down to kill a spider.I see nothing wrong with this....where I live, we have hobo spiders, wolf spiders, brown recluses, and black widows (among many others). Have one of those crawl just out of sight along the wall, and tell me you

wouldn't

break out the flamethrowers. :tongue:

I dunno, you're still down one house in that instance. I mean, that's where you keep all your stuff!

Now, if we're talking about giant monster spiders, then all this talk of burning houses starts to sound a lot more sensible.