Hey 'Scapers!
Today we want to talk about the first launch of our player Avatar project.
This blog is a little different - rather than outright previewing work-in-progress (before it's ready for prime-time), we wanted to share a bit of under-the-hood insight about the Avatar Project - what it is and what's involved in relaunching it.
This is slated to launch later this year - future updates may either expand the selection on offer (e.g. more hairstyles) or will implement new updates that the previous iterations didn't yet address (e.g. update NPCs).
We also plan to revisit the Player Avatar as a Community Topic a number of times in the time ahead, so please consider today just the first step of many.
What exactly is the Player Avatar?
This is the most important question to begin with.
The Player Avatar is the character model and its foundational customizations (gender, hair style, top, legs, shoes and facial hair as well as the colour variations that are available to each of these aspects) that you chose when you first created your character. It's quite likely that you have changed a few aspects, such as your hair style or your base shirt and trousers since then.
The Player Avatar is what is beneath all that armour that you wear after you spent hours agonizing over its details. It is the chathead you see every time you speak to an NPC in game.
Relaunching the avatar is the focus of this project. Note that updating NPCs is not part of this project's first stage. Cosmetics are not considered to be part of the Player Avatar and will not be changed as part of this particular project.
For the purposes of today's blog we will be referring to the above, as "customization choices", though that term may today occasionally also refer to certain items that interacts with the player avatar (e.g. certain worn items or armours).
What will the Player Avatar relaunch include?
When we relaunch the Player Avatar we will offer:
- A full suite of starting game based outfits and refreshed versions of the most commonly selected base items from Thessalia's shop.
- All existing base hairstyles refreshed.
- All existing base beards refreshed.
- Replaced old avatar heads with new avatar heads.
- Replaced old avatar chatheads with new avatar chatheads.
- Replaced any instances of old avatar skin showing through on clothing with new avatar skin.
As work progresses through the year, further Player Avatar updates may include (amongst other things) additional hairstyles that have been refreshed along with potential updates to human NPCs.
A look at the project as a whole
What we are delivering with this update is our new core suite of styles and customization choices, which are listed above. Bearing that in mind, it is critically important to us that when the Player Avatar launches there are no old hair styles, base clothing or visible old avatar skin left in the game. The reason for this is the quality difference between the new and the old avatar and mixing them together would create significant issues for the visual integrity and identity of the game.
Our aim is to offer as much like-for-like comparison to existing styles or customization choices as possible. That being said, should your avatar currently have a customization selected that we are not directly recreating, you will automatically be given a closest option.
We are working hard to cover as many existing aspects of the old Player Avatar as possible and bring them up to the new standard we are setting. Given the amount of individual customization options that need to be updated, however, we will not be able to address them all.
Our options for each choice are to either upgrade or to remove individual avatar choices from the game. For many of the lesser used choices we may be able to include them in a follow-up update to the Player Avatar project, but this will not be possible for everything. Importantly, no worn items (e.g. armours) will be affected by removals, though they do play a part here.
Generally speaking, however, it is our intent that players should notice a sensible transition from their old avatar onto the new one when we launch this first update. Relaunched model aspects should either be the same (if upgraded models exists) or roughly similar (if a choice has been removed and a suitable alternative can be identified).
The Details
Here's the rub - there are two aspects of the Player Avatar project that greatly complicate what might otherwise sound like a relatively straight-forward project:
These issues relate to "Head Ungrafting" and "Skin". Let's have a look at how these affect the entire project.
Head Ungrafting:
- Fun fact for the current avatar system:
- Currently, when you equip something (a Bronze Medium Helmet for example), it places a model of your head wearing that item +(a Bronze Medium Helmet) onto your body. It does not actually place the Bronze Medium Helmet onto your head. Think of these wearable items as being grafted onto a multitude of duplicate heads, and the results of those are what the current avatar currently displays.
- We currently count over 4000 head models in the game, all of which require us to separate hair or helmet from head in order to upgrade the respective models to the new Player Avatar standard.
Skin:
- We face a similar issue to the grafted head models when it comes to the rest of the player avatar. When you currently wear a piece of clothing (such as the examples shown below), you are not just wearing the clothing textures. You are in fact wearing the clothing textures along with textures that display arms, a chest and generally any piece of skin between the neck and wrists if considering tops.
The same applies to legs and other slots. Put differently, you are not equipping a top slot clothing piece onto your avatar - you are equipping everything (including skin) between neck, waist, forearms and wrist onto your avatar (yes, it's creepy - we know). - Addressing this poses a huge amount of work. It means that for every single one of the over 2000+ items that are affected by this in the game, we have to tackle them by (largely) manually removing the skin textures and extracting the clothing textures.
- Important note: Updating the items themselves is not part of this project. This is purely about the Player Avatar that is intended to be shown beneath the worn items.
The reasons for the above two issues are both varied and mostly lost to the annals of time, but we plan to rectify them as part of the Player Avatar project. With the new Player Avatar, you should be wearing just the clothing on top of your avatar, nothing else. Doing so will greatly improve both the cohesiveness of the new Player Avatar and it will improve our own processes too, making us better able to create more awesome designs for you in the future.
To round off this blog we did want to share a work-in-progress sneak-peek comparison of the new avatar's body compared to the old one.. The head isn't quite ready for prime-time today, but we're looking forward to sharing that with you in a future news update.
That's it for now - Head on over to the official threads on Discord and Reddit if you want to discuss this topic!