Dyeable weapons

[Larissa Ketan.1460]

Any of you also have quite often like : cool skin but the colors just dont fit the outfit/armor style ye got? like for example i do love the branded skins but i got atm a black and red revenant. i wish we could dye purple to red :/ now i can understand its lots of work for anet but what if they use the alrdy build in color per material system?

like for example if we pick bolt. bolt has gold metal with those fancy lightning effects. if you look closely the lightning effects are split up in 2 to 3 colors and it gradients between those through the particles.

Would be great if we can dye based on such things. like a silver bolt with green particles for example (or just a silver/black/idk what metal color bolt with lightning) ^^

[kharmin.7683]

A simple search of the forums using the exact words of your thread title would find many other threads on this exact topic.

[Larissa Ketan.1460]

old topics yet still unanswered by anet.... it wont hurt posting one with ideas for them, if it does bother you just scroll further

[AgentMoore.9453]

I think the answer has come in the form of the weapon reskins we've been getting over the years. Festivals especially are perfect examples of this. Rimed Verdant weapons, Shining Aureate, Holographic, Demon Haunted.

I'm sure you get the point. Couple that with the multiple versions of the Tengu and Dragon Slayer sets in their latest update, and you realize ArenaNet is using those as 'carrots' to keep people doing content, festival or otherwise. Allowing dyeing would remove that option, which I don't think they're eager to do.

So, a nice thought. Unlikely to be gotten through.

[aspirine.6852]

Dyable skill effects.. Imagine the visuals during big fights :D Guess it only works for PoE because its mostly single player..

[medivh.4725]

I think they will sell

[Solanum.6983]

While I like the idea, I think retroactively updating every past skin would be too much work. Maybe have it exclusive to legendary skins?

[Randulf.7614]

A popular request for sure, but a dev answered the request before. The reddit quote has vanished, but I've copied this from a forum poster who saved the text. Whilst it never rules it out, it explains why it is unlikely unless something radically changhes with their ability to sort out the significant coding challenges

That isn't to say you shouldn't feedback you want it, just to keep hopes in check that it looks unlikely to ever happen

@Just a flesh wound.3589 said:The reasoning was explained in a long ago post

I 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.)

[Astralporing.1957]

@Larissa Ketan.1460 said:old topics yet still unanswered by anet....They actually have answered it, more than once. Weapons not being dyeable is a consequence of a certain decision result made in the early stages of game design, that is unfortunately not easy to reverse now. Adding colours requires not only changes in the game code. They'd need to redo all the already existing weapon models to the new system. No, apparently it's not possible to just leave all existing weapons as they are, and only add colour channels to new ones - the system would be reapplied retroactively to all old weapons as well, even if their colour channels were to remain locked to original selection.

They did it for backpacks, that's true, but there's far less backpacks than there are weapons. And it still took them years for this.

[Linken.6345]

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@Larissa Ketan.1460 said:old topics yet still unanswered by anet....They actually

have

answered it, more than once. Weapons not being dyeable is a consequence of a certain decision result made in the early stages of game design, that is unfortunately not easy to reverse now. Adding colours requires not only changes in the game code. They'd need to redo all the already existing weapon models to the new system. No, apparently it's not possible to just leave all existing weapons as they are, and only add colour channels to new ones - the system would be reapplied retroactively to all old weapons as well, even if their colour channels were to remain locked to original selection.

They did it for backpacks, that's true, but there's far less backpacks than there are weapons. And it still took them years for this.

Ofcourse it wont just reapplied to the old ones as well just look at backpacks they made a break through can now dye new but that dident affect old backpacks at all.

Im more inclined to the idea that its easier to recolour weapon and add them as rewards then create new rewards as an explanation.

[wilykcat.5864]

I would make my shimmering aurora dagger hot pink if I could.

[Astralporing.1957]

@Linken.6345 said:

@Astralporing.1957 said:They did it for backpacks, that's true, but there's far less backpacks than there are weapons. And it still took them years for this.

Ofcourse it wont just reapplied to the old ones as well just look at backpacks they made a break through can now dye new but that dident affect old backpacks at all.Actually, from what i understand, it

did

affect old backpacks. Adding the colour channels is one step, and this one they did only for new backpacks, that's true. At the same time however adding just mere

capability

of posessing colour channels is also a step that had to be done, and required a rework. Basically, all the old backpacks also had to be reworked into the new model even if they weren't to be making full use of it.

Think of it like migrating from one proprietary file format to another, that offers more options. Even if old files would not be enhanced with those new options, they would still need to be converted to the new format. Except in the case of data files we usually can automate the process.

[Linken.6345]

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@Linken.6345 said:

@Astralporing.1957 said:They did it for backpacks, that's true, but there's far less backpacks than there are weapons. And it still took them years for this.

Ofcourse it wont just reapplied to the old ones as well just look at backpacks they made a break through can now dye new but that dident affect old backpacks at all.Actually, from what i understand, it

did

affect old backpacks. Adding the colour channels is one step, and this one they did only for new backpacks, that's true. At the same time however adding just mere

capability

of posessing colour channels is also a step that had to be done, and required a rework. Basically, all the old backpacks also had to be reworked into the new model even if they weren't to be making full use of it.

Think of it like migrating from one proprietary file format to another, that offers more options. Even if old files would not be enhanced with those new options, they would still need to be converted to the new format. Except in the case of data files we usually can automate the process.

So your saying here is anet can have all backpacks with color channels they just refuse to do so?Instead of having old backpacks gen 1 new backpacks gen 2 like i understand it and the two cant mix?

Maybe we should start demanding them flip the switch then since they are already in the system and can be dyed by your statement.

[Astralporing.1957]

@Linken.6345 said:

@"Astralporing.1957" said:Actually, from what i understand, it

did

affect old backpacks. Adding the colour channels is one step, and this one they did only for new backpacks, that's true. At the same time however adding just mere

capability

of posessing colour channels is also a step that had to be done, and required a rework. Basically, all the old backpacks also had to be reworked into the new model even if they weren't to be making full use of it.

Think of it like migrating from one proprietary file format to another, that offers more options.

Even if old files would not be enhanced with those new options

, they would still need to be converted to the new format.

Except in the case of data files we usually can automate the process.

So your saying here is anet can have all backpacks with color channels they just refuse to do so?Instead of having old backpacks gen 1 new backpacks gen 2 like i understand it and the two cant mix?

Maybe we should start demanding them flip the switch then since they are already in the system and can be dyed by your statement.That's not how it works.

Again, i'll give you an example, since you seem to have not understood the previous one (i marked it in the quote for better visibility).

Think about some old digital image file format, that does not support colour - all the data that is there is just whether the pixel is "lit" (black), or not (white). At some point you decide to start using images with colour. That requires moving to a new format, which supports this, so, you go and convert the old pictures to the new format.That does not mean those pictures will suddenly stop being black and white though - for that you would need someone to add that colour to them first.

Old backpacks were converted to the new format, but they did not have the colour channels added. First step required a lot of work, but the second step would require even more - which is why they skipped on it. Now, it probably means if they ever felt the need to add colour channels to a specific old backpack, they could do so, but doing that to all of them is quite unlikely.

And, as i pointed out, there are way, way more weapons than there are backpacks.

[Linken.6345]

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@Linken.6345 said:

@Astralporing.1957 said:Actually, from what i understand, it

did

affect old backpacks. Adding the colour channels is one step, and this one they did only for new backpacks, that's true. At the same time however adding just mere

capability

of posessing colour channels is also a step that had to be done, and required a rework. Basically, all the old backpacks also had to be reworked into the new model even if they weren't to be making full use of it.

Think of it like migrating from one proprietary file format to another, that offers more options.

Even if old files would not be enhanced with those new options

, they would still need to be converted to the new format.

Except in the case of data files we usually can automate the process.

So your saying here is anet can have all backpacks with color channels they just refuse to do so?Instead of having old backpacks gen 1 new backpacks gen 2 like i understand it and the two cant mix?

Maybe we should start demanding them flip the switch then since they are already in the system and can be dyed by your statement.That's not how it works.

Again, i'll give you an example, since you seem to have not understood the previous one (i marked it in the quote for better visibility).

Think about some old digital image file format, that does not support colour - all the data that is there is just whether the pixel is "lit" (black), or not (white). At some point you decide to start using images with colour. That requires moving to a new format, which supports this, so, you go and

convert the old pictures to the new format

.That does

not

mean those pictures will suddenly stop being black and white though - for that you would need someone to add that colour to them first.

Old backpacks were

converted

to the new format, but they did not have the colour channels added. First step required a lot of work, but the second step would require even more - which is why they skipped on it. Now, it probably means if they ever felt the need to add colour channels to a specific old backpack, they

could

do so, but doing that to all of them is quite unlikely.

And, as i pointed out, there are way, way more weapons than there are backpacks.

Or they have 2 formats new and old we dont know.

[Astralporing.1957]

@"Linken.6345" said:Or they have 2 formats new and old we dont know.That would be an extremely dumb decision from a software point of view. That is the difference between GW2 and the example i gave - multiformat support is generally a staple in image viewing software, and they are build from ground up to support it, so adding a support for one more format is generally not a big deal. Doing it in a game that up, until that point worked with only one format would be a completely different issue however. It would add a whole new level of complication (said "multiformat support" intermediary) to something that was up until that point much simpler, which would be basically asking for something to break.