New Clothing for Avatars, Why see the same things over and over? Options

[hunter piazza]

Why don't they make like police avaters suit avaters and stuff like that? Nobody just wants the same things they want somthing new to put on like of they need to go to work or somthing.

[Amya]

I've seen this sort of suggestion a few times before and I believe the reason they said they haven't done anything like that before was because of the amount of work and extra programming it would take. I could seriously be wrong on that, though.

[Pferddie]

Besides, Furcadia is (at its heart) a text based MUD/MUSH/MOO.  There's only a pretty GUI shell on top of the text base background, therefore making Furc a "GUIMUD" (pronounce "gooey mud").  

In a text MUD, you are required to use your imagination skills to draw what is being described.  In Furc, it's no different, really.  If extra avatars, clothing, etc was added it, It wouldn't be Furc any more...it'd be ... Ultima Online with furres ... and a bunch of 12 year olds running around shouting "OMG, I pwnt j00!!!one11!!1"

Blow the dust off your brain cells and use your creativity!  You'll find that you have a more rewarding experience.

[Sib]

Yikes, that was a little harsh.  I understand where you're coming from in saying Furc's purpose in exploring one's imagination within a simple environment with others...but I wouldn't mind a little 'help' and some customization would add to that, I'd think.  I'm not digging the whole 'police' scene but, yeah, I hunger for new content.

[Tristus]

Umm.. er, I believe they'll make it so you can change cloths, have hats, and other stuff like that, when beta furc comes out.. which will be a really long time from now. Since they, from what I understand, all but stopped beta to update this version a lot.

[Ridere]

Clothing would have good and bad effects. It'd be neat to further customize your persona, yes, but the increase in graphics in order to do that would be substantial.

Let's say that you have four pieces of clothing. Pretty basic, but enough to work with. That's shoes, pants, shirt and a hat. Let's take it one step further and say that you only have one choice in that matter, and tha is that you will have to wear all four pieces, and there is only one type of option for each piece of clothing.

So each species in Furcadia has 20 different state animations (Laying, sitting, walking in all four directions). Now you need to have four pieces of clothing for each of those 20 positions, since it's not like you can use the same "shirt" graphic on all states of a speices, let alone all species together.

So you need 80 clothing graphics per species, and there are 8 species. (I'm not taking wings into consideration, or the eagle avatar). So basically... If Furcadia were to have clothing options (And I use the word "options" liberally, as you don't really have an option, because you were forced to wear only the 4 basic pieces of clothing), you'd be looking at an increase of 640 graphics.

Say later you wanted to add a second hat to the list, so that players could actually choose between two types of hats that they wore. Well, that's another 160 graphics, just for that hat in order to make it work on 20 different states for 8 different species.

So you could quickly see how Furcadia would go from providing quite a lot of functionality and customization with a download under 10mb to something quite a bit...  larger. But let's say we all said, "Who cares, let's do it!" Well, hurray for us, we now have clothes in Furcadia. But wait a second... What happened to all of our custom player patches?

They're all outdated now, because we now have clothes that we are drawing on top of of the actual avatars. (Goodbye ferals, goodbye pregnant winged cat things.) You could maybe avoid this by having special programming that allowed dream uploaders to specificy if they want to use the old player.fsh files, or if they want to allow clothes, but that would only be dream-specific and not furcadia-wide, should some of you like to patch your actual default folder.

The biggest problem in adding clothes that I see is new content. If you've ever made a patch, you would know how tedious it can be to try and add a special type of new wings to all of your furacadia species. Well, think if you had to create 160 individual graphics for each piece of clothing you wanted to add. Last time I checked, Talzhemir didn't have 40 arms, nor did Talz have a throng of starving artists locked up in her basement. It'd take a crack-tream of very very bored graphic artists be able to come up with the amount of clothes graphics it'd take to even begin working on such a huge task.

And since there is that classic idea of stealing from paul to give to peter, you have to ask yourself if you want DEP to devote such resources to a project like that, because it'd require them to focus less on other new content.

I'm not saying the idea is a horrible one, as there are lots of MMORPGs out there with customizable clothes (Most of which involving an install CD and not a small, < 10mb download.). I'm merely saying that I don't think Furcadia is currently in a stage to think about such ideas just yet. Especially not with the other neat ideas they're scounging together right now, like PhoenixSpeak and assorted other things talked about during the town hall meeting thingy.

[Sib]

It would take a lot of effort and data...but it isn't beyond us...

[Xenif Kardor]

In a text MUD, you are required to use your imagination skills to draw what is being described.  In Furc, it's no different, really.  If extra avatars, clothing, etc was added it, It wouldn't be Furc any more...it'd be ... Ultima Online with furres ...

Ultima online with furres... *imagines it*
*Your roleplaying skill has gone up by 0.1. It is now -20.6*

[hunter piazza]

Clothing would have good and bad effects. It'd be neat to further customize your persona, yes, but the increase in graphics in order to do that would be substantial.

Let's say that you have four pieces of clothing. Pretty basic, but enough to work with. That's shoes, pants, shirt and a hat. Let's take it one step further and say that you only have one choice in that matter, and tha is that you will have to wear all four pieces, and there is only one type of option for each piece of clothing.

So each species in Furcadia has 20 different state animations (Laying, sitting, walking in all four directions). Now you need to have four pieces of clothing for each of those 20 positions, since it's not like you can use the same "shirt" graphic on all states of a speices, let alone all species together.

So you need 80 clothing graphics per species, and there are 8 species. (I'm not taking wings into consideration, or the eagle avatar). So basically... If Furcadia were to have clothing options (And I use the word "options" liberally, as you don't really have an option, because you were forced to wear only the 4 basic pieces of clothing), you'd be looking at an increase of 640 graphics.

Say later you wanted to add a second hat to the list, so that players could actually choose between two types of hats that they wore. Well, that's another 160 graphics, just for that hat in order to make it work on 20 different states for 8 different species.

So you could quickly see how Furcadia would go from providing quite a lot of functionality and customization with a download under 10mb to something quite a bit...  larger. But let's say we all said, "Who cares, let's do it!" Well, hurray for us, we now have clothes in Furcadia. But wait a second... What happened to all of our custom player patches?

They're all outdated now, because we now have clothes that we are drawing on top of of the actual avatars. (Goodbye ferals, goodbye pregnant winged cat things.) You could maybe avoid this by having special programming that allowed dream uploaders to specificy if they want to use the old player.fsh files, or if they want to allow clothes, but that would only be dream-specific and not furcadia-wide, should some of you like to patch your actual default folder.

The biggest problem in adding clothes that I see is new content. If you've ever made a patch, you would know how tedious it can be to try and add a special type of new wings to all of your furacadia species. Well, think if you had to create 160 individual graphics for each piece of clothing you wanted to add. Last time I checked, Talzhemir didn't have 40 arms, nor did Talz have a throng of starving artists locked up in her basement. It'd take a crack-tream of very very bored graphic artists be able to come up with the amount of clothes graphics it'd take to even begin working on such a huge task.

And since there is that classic idea of stealing from paul to give to peter, you have to ask yourself if you want DEP to devote such resources to a project like that, because it'd require them to focus less on other new content.

I'm not saying the idea is a horrible one, as there are lots of MMORPGs out there with customizable clothes (Most of which involving an install CD and not a small, < 10mb download.). I'm merely saying that I don't think Furcadia is currently in a stage to think about such ideas just yet. Especially not with the other neat ideas they're scounging together right now, like PhoenixSpeak and assorted other things talked about during the town hall meeting thingy.

Sorry I didn't read all of yours to long but im sure your with and against me so thanks for the comment I might have some time to read another time

[Maranatha]

hahahahah.
classic hunter piazza.

[Ridere]

haha. I don't blame you, Hunter

[Amya]

Ultima online with furres... *imagines it*
*Your roleplaying skill has gone up by 0.1. It is now -20.6*

 What a place that would be! I don't know about anyone else..but I found that rather funny.  Hope you don't mind, but I'm adding that to my sig. :-)

[Carrie O'Kaye]

Actually, Ridere...  It is very possible.

Personally, it would take me, as an amateur, roughly 6 hours to create a rough Walkabout with all the fancy colour-coding and such (via computer modelling).  Two days -- if I wanted an exceptionally good model.  Assuming a two days rate, I would assume that Talzhemir, who also does computer modelling professionally, can create many Walkabouts in one year.  Of course, there's also the time consuming "getting approval" phase where the Walkabout gets criticized and shredded to pieces.  So I do not think that time is a factor.  What would be a major factor, however, is the download size.  DEP has always aimed at minimizing download size.

Anyways, I'm digressing.  For those who are not aware of it, DEP is planning to eventually create 3D models for Furres.  Everything else, i.e. objects, floors and walls, would remain 2D.  Only Furres will be in 3D with predefined motions.  Morevoer, these models will be "skinnable" (in the sense that you could change the surface graphics [i.e. Mip-maps] but not the coordinates of the models).  When?  When?  WAY, WAY, WAY pass Beta Furcadia which will be released in less than 20 (twenty)  years!



This post has been edited by Carrie O\'Kaye: Aug 25 2005, 10:26 PM

[Xenif Kardor]

Ultima online with furres... *imagines it*
*Your roleplaying skill has gone up by 0.1. It is now -20.6*

 What a place that would be! I don't know about anyone else..but I found that rather funny.  Hope you don't mind, but I'm adding that to my sig. :-)

Hey, no problem. .

Feel free to add it to your sig.

[Simseth]

Actually, Ridere...  It is very possible.

Personally, it would take me, as an amateur, roughly 6 hours to create a rough Walkabout with all the fancy colour-coding and such (via computer modelling).  Two days -- if I wanted an exceptionally good model.  Assuming a two days rate, I would assume that Talzhemir, who also does computer modelling professionally, can create many Walkabouts in one year.  Of course, there's also the time consuming "getting approval" phase where the Walkabout gets criticized and shredded to pieces.  So I do not think that time is a factor.  What would be a major factor, however, is the download size.  DEP has always aimed at minimizing download size.

Anyways, I'm digressing.  For those who are not aware of it, DEP is planning to eventually create 3D models for Furres.  Everything else, i.e. objects, floors and walls, would remain 2D.  Only Furres will be in 3D with predefined motions.  Morevoer, these models will be "skinnable" (in the sense that you could change the surface graphics [i.e. Mip-maps] but not the coordinates of the models).  When?  When?  WAY, WAY, WAY pass Beta Furcadia which will be released in less than 20 (twenty)  years!

LESS THEN 20 YEARS?!??!!??!?!?! OH MY GOD!!! 20 YEARS?!?!!??!?!?

*Waits*
*waits longer*
*Waits even longer*
*Waits even more longer*
How long has it been?
*looks at the clock*
34 seconds D=
Hurry and patch! Years and years go by!! That's a long wait...years and years, deaths and deaths, birthdays and birthdays, nightmares and nightmares, injuries and injuries, memories lost and new memories, moments gone by, anger strikes at a point...which may cause horror to some people...it may cause ban, they never got to see the amazing version!
It's hard to survive through furcadia, not getting banned, unless of course if your a guardian, creater, ect.

What shall we do throughout these years? Watch things grow, watch things disapear, even watch things that start disasters...what if a world disruption happens, what if the world hits the sun, what if the sun explodes, what if the world is gone....

Always get things done.
Before...it's over.

Friends gone...new friends here....favorite dreams gone....new favorite dreams here....something ruins your whole furcadia expirence....maybe your e-mail crashes and you get hacked or banned...no way to contact furcadia...
You just have to hang in there while seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years go by....
But at one point, it's here.

But at another point..it's gone..

What if new technolagie comes out...and there's so much to it that it's 50x better then furcadia, habbo hotel, gaia online, neopets, runescape, world of warcraft, ps2, xbox, ect.

What if it takes over all the expirence we have now. What if it's greater then ever that we never even got to expirence the Beta Version...what if....

[Irriel]

Personally, it would take me, as an amateur, roughly 6 hours to create a rough Walkabout with all the fancy colour-coding and such

I've only ever seen ONE custom avatar that was done properlly, and that was Ami'no Miko's Bat patch, and it was simply an alteration of the rodent avatar. No offense here, but I really doubt you're the one person in all of Furcadia who can make custom avatars that actually fit in with the rest of the artwork.

Unless of course you have links to your artwork to back this claim up. And even if you did, that doesn't change the fact that you'd be exponetially multiplying the size of the Furcadia download for every "outfit" added.

[Carrie O'Kaye]

As I have stated...
I am an amateur.  I only do this for fun.  Samples of my work can be found at the Roamheart Archives (http://archive.roamheart.com) under
"Bear, Deer, Dragon, Drake, Kangaroo";
"Sexy Female Furres";
and "Squirrel, Bat, Samurai Cat, Unwinged Wyrmme, Winged Wyrmme".

And as I have also stated ... DEP would probably want to keep the download size small.

[Ridere]

Carrie is actually quite talented, and her resume is quite large, if you've seen some of the patches and dreams she's made over the years. That being said, I'm not saying she's better than talzhemir, or anything, but I do know that I have asked her for multiple smaller avatars for my guild, and I've been pleased with all of them.

My main concern with the idea is the download size. I mentioned the time factor as simply another thing to consider. I've not dealt with 3D graphics much at all, so I'm not going to pretend to know how that would affect the amount of work it'd take to draw all the different avatars waving, bowing, clapping, or whatnot with different hats/jackets/pants on and whatnot. But I'd be inclined to believe that it'd still take a substantial amount of time. Even for some quite talented.

If they can pull it off, great. I'd love to see clothing. I'm sure I'd even download a substantially larger download if forced. I absolutely love the whole 640x480 window, though. I hope we're not ever forced to use anything larger than that.

[hunter piazza]

Actually, Ridere...  It is very possible.

Personally, it would take me, as an amateur, roughly 6 hours to create a rough Walkabout with all the fancy colour-coding and such (via computer modelling).  Two days -- if I wanted an exceptionally good model.  Assuming a two days rate, I would assume that Talzhemir, who also does computer modelling professionally, can create many Walkabouts in one year.  Of course, there's also the time consuming "getting approval" phase where the Walkabout gets criticized and shredded to pieces.  So I do not think that time is a factor.  What would be a major factor, however, is the download size.  DEP has always aimed at minimizing download size.

Anyways, I'm digressing.  For those who are not aware of it, DEP is planning to eventually create 3D models for Furres.  Everything else, i.e. objects, floors and walls, would remain 2D.  Only Furres will be in 3D with predefined motions.  Morevoer, these models will be "skinnable" (in the sense that you could change the surface graphics [i.e. Mip-maps] but not the coordinates of the models).  When?  When?  WAY, WAY, WAY pass Beta Furcadia which will be released in less than 20 (twenty)  years!

LESS THEN 20 YEARS?!??!!??!?!?! OH MY GOD!!! 20 YEARS?!?!!??!?!?

*Waits*
*waits longer*
*Waits even longer*
*Waits even more longer*
How long has it been?
*looks at the clock*
34 seconds D=
Hurry and patch! Years and years go by!! That's a long wait...years and years, deaths and deaths, birthdays and birthdays, nightmares and nightmares, injuries and injuries, memories lost and new memories, moments gone by, anger strikes at a point...which may cause horror to some people...it may cause ban, they never got to see the amazing version!
It's hard to survive through furcadia, not getting banned, unless of course if your a guardian, creater, ect.

What shall we do throughout these years? Watch things grow, watch things disapear, even watch things that start disasters...what if a world disruption happens, what if the world hits the sun, what if the sun explodes, what if the world is gone....

Always get things done.
Before...it's over.

Friends gone...new friends here....favorite dreams gone....new favorite dreams here....something ruins your whole furcadia expirence....maybe your e-mail crashes and you get hacked or banned...no way to contact furcadia...
You just have to hang in there while seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years go by....
But at one point, it's here.

But at another point..it's gone..

What if new technolagie comes out...and there's so much to it that it's 50x better then furcadia, habbo hotel, gaia online, neopets, runescape, world of warcraft, ps2, xbox, ect.

What if it takes over all the expirence we have now. What if it's greater then ever that we never even got to expirence the Beta Version...what if....

Ok Simseth I have instuctions for you: #1. This is actually a thank you. #2. You do have a point. #3.CLAM DOWN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!






You don't realize how much you like somthing until it is gone.

[Nif]

It would be nice it just might add more lagg and more proublems to the server (like we already need that x-x)