I've been thinking about this for awhile. Outside of some rare roleplay situations with custom aliens (ie. playing a chameloid), the ability to set slider values for costumes seems problematic at best.
When you're in a social hub, all of your costumes get loaded, which seems like a system hog feature that reduces the viable size of instance caps by a factor of three to five times. They have to be loaded because you can change your costume anywhere.
Beyond that, a tweak to one costume means going through all of your costumes to match, which can multiply the cost of costume changes considerably the more slots you have.
I tend to think that the first two screens of character creation should be "inherited" by all additional costumes rather than stored separately. This should drastically reduce some of the strain on servers and cost of changing your look while enforcing a consistency of character appearance that makes it so that we aren't all shapeshifters, capable of drastic body changes between costumes.
Maybe as a concession, move hairstyle and headgear to the uniform slot area so that those can reasonably be changed between costumes.
But otherwise, I tend to feel like custom body types for each costume are probably limiting our options more than it's actually giving most of us options, particularly since I question how many of us are exercising the option to begin with.
Inheriting slider values from the default costume strikes me as something that would improve performance, allow social maps to be safely more social, reinforce each character as having a coherent look, and maybe free up resources enough so that we could have a bridge officer join us on social maps.
It would be great if there was the option to copy the body settings from one costume to anther. When you are viewing a costume, there could be a button that would bring a up a dialog. From that dialog, you could either copy the body of your current costume to the other costumes you select, or you could copy the body of a different costume to your current costume.
Leviathan99 and ThetaNine have good points. If it is not tedious and bothersome, sometimes it is just too difficult to match.
It would be great if there was the option to copy the body settings from one costume to anther. When you are viewing a costume, there could be a button that would bring a up a dialog. From that dialog, you could either copy the body of your current costume to the other costumes you select, or you could copy the body of a different costume to your current costume.
Leviathan99 and ThetaNine have good points. If it is not tedious and bothersome, sometimes it is just too difficult to match.
Outside of hair and clothing changes, the only advantages I can see to multiple costumes are if you want to play a Borg at multiple stages of Borg-ification or a shapeshifter. I think it's almost got to be a considerable resource investment both clientside and, when you think about maybe 300k+ characters, database side for very little practical effect.
Not to mention that in trek 99.99% of all people don't change their entire body on the fly, lanky human, boff, fat human, boff short fat human .. all they while running down the hallway.
I'd like the ability to update body structure changes across all my costume slots, but I don't think that forcing that will actually help much.
Client-side, loading the different textures for the different uniforms would be the biggest hit, which would still be there.
I still think changing on the fly can be kinda goofy and would prefer to see that reserved for an actual instanced tailor room on each base and ship interiors. Right now, the info for alternate costumes all get preloaded on every ground map.
Unique Slider Values for Costumes: Good or Bad?
I don't think that it is about good or bad, unique sliders just don't make sense because it is still the same character.
It would make more sense if all body /face sliders would adapt when you change them.
While there may be some advantages to separating body size and type options from clothing tailors, I seriously doubt that performance improvements are among them.
Comments
It is so aggro to me, I wish I could just delete those extra slots I bought.
Leviathan99 and ThetaNine have good points. If it is not tedious and bothersome, sometimes it is just too difficult to match.
Outside of hair and clothing changes, the only advantages I can see to multiple costumes are if you want to play a Borg at multiple stages of Borg-ification or a shapeshifter. I think it's almost got to be a considerable resource investment both clientside and, when you think about maybe 300k+ characters, database side for very little practical effect.
Client-side, loading the different textures for the different uniforms would be the biggest hit, which would still be there.
I still think changing on the fly can be kinda goofy and would prefer to see that reserved for an actual instanced tailor room on each base and ship interiors. Right now, the info for alternate costumes all get preloaded on every ground map.
Unique Slider Values for Costumes: Good or Bad?
I don't think that it is about good or bad, unique sliders just don't make sense because it is still the same character.
It would make more sense if all body /face sliders would adapt when you change them.
Thank you for reading.