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Uniform Colors
etg518
Member Posts: 3 Arc User
Here's something that's been getting to me. Has anyone else noticed that when choosing uniform colors that you don't get the same color pallet for all your crew. Why try to have your crew with all the same uniform, if the system doesn't give you all the same color choices. WTH.
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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Yup...Klingon outfits suffer the most, only a few drab colors, not even green options when green is a reoccurring color all over
(Don't talk to me about "canon" when I can fly a Tholian ship with Elachi beams, wear Iconian or Terran costume pieces, and use weapons from every faction and even the Kelvin timeline. Canon ship sailed away many years ago.)
Space Barbie is the real endgame so let us dress our captain and crew with any costume pieces in the game, and with (256,256,256) RGB color choices for each piece.
The problem with the pallets is probably that the masks modify the color in sometimes weird ways so the same numbers plugged in would not necessarily match from piece to piece. A good example is the Romulan civilian skirt, you can find and put the same color on it and on a top and they will look completely different color-wise. I ran into that kind of thing a lot in Second Life making outfits for my store, more than enough to recognize the effect.
That makes sense, but if we had the full RGB to work with we could try tweaking the different pieces to either minimize differences or at least find better compromises.
Having more options (especially for older uniforms like the MACO and Dyson rep outfit) is also an improvement I'd like to see.
True, the only nonstandard one you can do that with that I know of is Kobali, but while uniforms are not a problem with them, getting a Kobali ship is nearly impossible. Only one exists, the Samsar, and it is locked away behind the worst odds in the entire game.
and it's not that great a ship either. the trait use to be good but there are better ones for my playstyle.
Removing the shading would make it flat and cartoonish looking (or worse), the meshes and lighting cannot do it alone in an older engine (the only one that even comes close is Unreal 5, and that is the newest one out).
The masters for the final textures/materials that go into better quality digital clothing have many layers (it was not unusual for mine to have twenty or more depending on how detailed the piece was and what kind of variations it had), or at least the oldschool methods that were common at the time STO was put together did, but I have not had a store in Second Life for a while and so haven't made anything like that since about 2013 so I don't know if it has changed much.
Some of those layers are opaque, some are partially or completely transparent, and some are masks that modify the view of the layers below them but really have no color or texture of their own (though they are often represented by shades of gray (or stark black and white), so you have something to see when working with that particular layer) and interact by multiplying/dividing/etc. the other values. The last ones are the tricky ones since they can cause some unexpected things to happen if they are moved, changed, or have something else added to the stack, and can react oddly with colors, especially if someone else made that master texture stack or if you forget exactly how you made it.
Those phantom layers with the indirect relationship to the rest are crucial to make it look like there is actually a person inside the clothing and also to make it look like it is draping right instead of spraypainted on. It often does cause a slight graying of white or other side effects depending on which interaction method you select.
Ironically, the textures on the TOS tunics are a good representation of the damage done to the velour by washing. The fabric that Theiss used was never meant to be washed or dry cleaned, it was a heavier version of the velour that some dolls are made of that was meant for use in things like theater curtains and drapes and whatnot, so it shrunk and the knap curled up a little worse every time it was washed.
Those TOS tunics are at about the second season level of damage where the knap was completely destroyed and snarled into little mats on the surface of the fabric. The tunics were supposed to all have the velvet shimmer but were damaged during filming of The Cage so by the time TOS got them they mostly just sparkled a little in the first season and went completely dull like an old wool sweater in the second.
The only one that survived the first pilot intact was the short-sleeved medical one because they had Bryce in the coverall version rather than the tunic and pants in the shipboard scenes and in the long-sleeved excursion version on the ground so the 'surgical scrubs' version was not used by the end of the first pilot, and by that time wardrobe knew about the washing issue. Despite the powder and brushing it got instead of washing, that tunic was probably getting rather wiffy by the end of the series, and it would probably have been much, much worse for the other tunics that got more strenuous use if they had tried it with them.
It seems they use the same stack for all colors and just alter the base color which is why light colors are the ones that don't look right as the stack meant to make the darker colors look like fabric is too much for the lighter colors. Now a solution would be to lighten the texture stack based on the base color but I dunno how easy that would be to implement.
To be honest, I always get frustrated when looking at other players' uniforms. They always seem to look much better on them than on my own characters.
Best example of this: the Undine reputation armour.
Fine. Let me decide for myself if a given match is good enough. The Alliance uniform, for instance, is designed to be white over most of its torso - but due to various factors, it comes out almost ash-gray. So I've adapted it - black works great, for instance. (Tovan Khev looks quite striking in his black Alliance uniform with green trim.)
Exactly. Giving us full RGB wouldn't fix everything but it would fix some things and get others closer to fixed.
This case full RGB wouldn't really fix anything as the issue is how the shading functions not with the base color and RGB would effect only said base color. That's why I can set a DSC medical uniform to the proper white color and have it still come out as gray (or grey if you prefer that)
As it's been brought up here, I am also fairly active in Second Life, and I have seen such things happen there, where something that is supposed to be white is more of a grey on the texture. This is especially apparent when you can apply an RGB tint to a texture there, with colours on a texture being either muddied or washed out. That said, I've also seen it happen with "fabrics" here.
Also true. And I have also done this in the aforementioned Second Life, so were I to have a similar option here, I imagine I'd be able to improvise as such.
And knowing is half the battle!
21 'til I die!
I have that Iconian outfit which has belts can be used but most of them seem to have some sort of blue tint to them which really messes things up in the outfit builder. Throw on top of that a KDF color selection and it's getting to me that getting outfits in STO is really not worth the effort even when you dive in to things like the sphere builder stuff which require the lobi crystals to purchase out of lock boxes.
The real kicker is seeing other people use options you can't access even though you have all the parts and pieces. No amount of category selection seems to get me where I want to be wither it's on duty or off duty. Frustrating.
Yes, seeing costumes improved with glitches and hacks is frustrating because it proves Cryptic could offer us those tailor options, they just choose not to.
The fact that they allow us to buy and use the outfits at all (in way too limited ways) proves it isn't a "canon" issue.
I've been saying they need to do a major overhaul of the character creator for a while now, but if there are more and more problems popping up in the tailor or with costumes, i could only hope they would actually put some effort into improving and fixing the system.
I agree with this. I first created Pa'u Zotoh Zhaan as a BOFF for my KDF and 1st Romulan captain (fanon as his "wife"), and then went on to create Zhaan again, but as my 1st Fed captain. Zhaan had clothing that best suited her (or at the least came close to what she wore in the show) as a KDF BOFF, but she sadly is missing those clothing options as a Federation officer (the uniform options in question are the TOS Klingon female uniform, TOS Klingon chain-mail sleeves, the KDF collar, and a cloth belt with tassels).
I'd love for these options to be available for Federation officers.
Same here, I have tried a few themes like that and been blocked the same way.
While I can see why the devs (and CBS) might not want the full uniforms themselves to be usable across factions, civilian clothing (like the Ferengi clothes) and some of the more generic accessories to the uniforms really should be available across factions. And especially, the boffs should be able to wear whatever the captain can wear, with the same restrictions as the captain, (or at least the stuff that is wearable in areas where the boffs can go, most (though not all) of the Risa stuff would be useless since it is restricted to Risa and the Fleet Colony, where boffs cannot go).