In Star Trek Online we see certain NPCs in EV suits that have transparent visors that you can see their faces through. One of the Romulans on Viranat and D'tan are two examples. However, all EV suits work by players and BOFFs have opaque visors/helmets. I've always been curious about this. Does anyone know if this is just a choice on the part of the developers or some kind of a technical limitation involving the fact that player avatars and BOFFs are customizable?
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Join Date: Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Do we know if it's possible to make it an option for player EV suits?
Join Date: Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
Linked to this, could we please get EV Suits added as costumes in the tailor so we can customise them? All other outfits and clothing has some degree of customisation but not EV Suits, just seems a bit of a shame.
That's actually a good point. With the various ranges of heads and body sizes characters can have it makes sense the environmental suits for characters are forced costumes.
But Kal Dano didn't feature in a cut scene so it wasn't really important to see who we were talking to in that one episode and yet he had a transparent helmet. Or at least, it wouldn't be more important than seeing and being able to recognise the faces of my own bridge officers.
So I don't think that was the main reason they made some different helmets. It's more likely to be what @feiqa said.
Basically they're like modern NASA Space Suits. There is no neck to the suit.
normal text = me speaking as fellow formite
colored text = mod mode
Personally, I'd rather take the option to turn off the suit visuals completely.
You used to be able to back when you could just disable armor visuals.
I would like to turn our unlocked armour visuals into our suit visuals for the few times we need them. Honor guard or Maco walking the hull of DS9 anyone?
Originally Posted by pwlaughingtrendy
Network engineers are not ship designers.
Nor should they be. Their ships would look weird.
normal text = me speaking as fellow formite
colored text = mod mode
Same here. Love the look of the Solanase suits.
Essentially this.
When you "put on" an EV suit, we basically just swap your whole costume out with that of the EV suit. If a player's EV suit had a transparent visor, you'd see it was empty inside! (G-G-G-GHOSTS!)
So, the EV suit's Helmet IS your head.
Having both your head AND the EV suit helmet causes a lot of problems with clipping (as others in the thread have already deduced). You can scale your head a bunch of ways, add horns, flesh-beards, dreadlocks, etc. None of that stuff has it's own collision, so, unlike a real helmet, there's no way to keep it all inside. As such, it all just spills out wherever the helmet isn't big enough. Add to that animations, and you have a severely complicated problem that is basically just not worth dealing with.
The reason we can do it with NPCs is that we have control over them. We can make sure that their hair/fleshy bits don't stick out too far. And if need be, we can make a custom head/helmet to work for THAT NPC.
That's not something we can reasonably do for players. It would be much easier if we just knew everyone was human, and thus we could just remove your hair, or something. But we can't go around lopping off the antennae of Andorians, or the beards of Tellarites just so they fit in their helmets.
Out of interest can we not add the suits to the tailor so that at the very least people can choose what they looks like? I mean stuff like the MACO costume is practically an EV suit anyway. Be nice to be able to customise them somewhat.
Then have the game auto-select the outfit for the EV suit whenever you equip it in game. Sort of like a customisable version of what already happens.
could you just put a skull in there? Im not saying its a Dr Who reference or anything, but...you could make it flaming, so it will go faster
Hey! Who turned out the lights?
I don't think it's as easy as all that.
I'm reasonably sure that the EV Suit is a full swap for your entire normal costume. We just change it over to a pre-built costume. It'd be the same as me changing into Admiral Quinn, or B'Vat or whatever. There's no customization of those, because they're single units.
I'll paint some stripes on the sides too.
I would TOTALLY love that to be possible with such costumes, especially the Omega Force one.