I believe the king (your in-game avatar) should be customizable, for instance, I don't want my king to have a beard the size of that of a dwarf, I don't want him to carry a stupidly oversized sword or his mount have spikes on the head like a god damn unicorn.

That sounds like a cool idea. i hope they put it in the game.

Not if it means cutting out precious time to more important things.

Mike

So what? A week longer release date? Not really a huge problem in my opinion.

No offence, but its obvious you don't know the first thing of game design. You also have huge expectations if you honestly think its takes aonly 1 week to create from scratch an entire character custimization system.

Mike

Yeah then I guess it's better not to implement it, such a huge feature could take years to be made possible in our current technological dark age... [/sarcasm]

But Orange has a point. Having a little programming experience of my own, even the simplest of features take a lot of time and code to bring to reality. Time is money. It won't take just a week to do make a customization system, it would take in my estimate at least a month with several employees working on it. Remember, it's not just the framework, but also the customization items, the art, the balancing, gameplay considerations, all that stuff. Then it has to be debugged, which if my experience is any indication, is a terribly stressful task, especially with thousands of lines of code to check for bugs.

I definitely agree with Orange here. I too have some coding experience, and the things that you'd logically think would be simple are usually the exact opposite. You have to consider things you'd never have imagined until you try it, such as how do I give each face texture a different blend of skin color without making 30 seperate textures of it, how will the UI for customizing the character be designed, how will the specific configuration of character features be transferred to everyone in an MP game, things like that.

Funny how everyone's claiming this a bad idea, only after a mod posts. Want to get in good graces or something? In every other strategy game in-development ideas forum I posted this, everyone said that it is a must-have feature, thus I bet if the mod hadn't posted, there would be a lot more people who would express their admiration of the idea.

No.

He was just the first one who bothered to say what everyone else was thinking.

Everyone? You might want to double-check. Funny as it's always like this - anyone before the mods agree, after the mods post, everyone suddenly hates the idea.

You see, Orange actually knows about the process and the costs involved. A great idea means nothing if it's too costly to implement. And king customization, despite being a cool idea, would take far too much time to implement, especially since GPG has already gone into production for the game (meaning it is mostly feature-complete).

You haters need to read posts more carefully.

I never said it was a bad idea or that I hated it. Just that it shouldn't take precedence over things that actually affect the game experience, things like balancing or QA.

As far as people trying to get into my good graces, 3 things;

A) they only seem to be doing such because I happened to be the 3rd poster in this thread, due to my being around a lot due to me being a Mod, had I not posted right away it would just look like I was agreeing with someone else, this whole situation is just coincidence, nothing more.

B) it could also be because I'm a mystical GPG Prophet, along with BulletMagnet, and as such I'm always right![\sarcasm]

C) If you really want to get in my good graces.........I only take cash! ;p

Mike

King Customization could be a good idea. it would add a lot of personal feel to our king avatars. however, making such a system takes time and money, and if it means cutting corners in other aspects of the game in favor of an "ok" system then forget.

if given the choice between funding and time between creating a mod support system or a King Customization system, i'd take the mod system(note im just using this as an example, probably not a good one but whatever)

Worked like a charm, already have a post that liked the idea.

Um wat?

No one every said it was a Bad idea, northwestcore said good, I said the time for such a feature should be higher-priority items first, then you got butt-hurt and claimed such a feature would onyl take a week, then myself, X-cubed and Destroyer commented on why it would be a larger project than you anticipated. Then you got more butt-hurt and tried to make me out to be some kind of bad guy.

As I said, its not a bad idea, being able to custimize your king would be cool, but you have to consider that allowing custimization of ONE unit in a game dealing with Hundreds of units, should come before balancing or QA.

Mike

There is nothing wrong with king customization (except if it is completely botched). It can add a lot of replayability and individuality to the game. In games where I can customize a character, I like to play through the game multiple times with different customizations each time. It's not a bad idea.

But how much will it cost? How long will it take? Creating such a system is expensive, time-consuming, and complicated. KnC is already in the production phase. The main brainstorming part where new features are incorporated is already over. I do know that KnC will include an item shop of sorts as well as items dropped from in-game creeps. So I think there will be an aspect of customization.

I think that you should expand your original idea a bit. Are you talking purely aesthetic changes? Or do you mean gameplay affecting changes, for example less armour horse is weaker but faster etc, like an RPG style customisation. You seem to be given you mention beard, sword type and horse armour type, which would suggest the former.

Bear in mind we already know that equipment and items can be given to the monarch, though I don't know if this will change the physical appearance or not. I don't think it will though, simply too much work. Furthermore we're at "maybe" for swappable mounts, such as changing to a dragon from the horse once you reach high enough tech level, if you want them to have a lot of different armour types as well, then that's just more work.

If after this (or before it) you want facial hair customisation you get yet more work to do.

Having said that I think that it would be nice, as someone has invariably already suggested (probably me if I got ever round to posting it, can't remember), to have an "armoury" where you can switch out different armour/weapon sets for purely aesthetic purposes, and to give the community tools to make their own armour/weapon meshes, then make the best ones of each month into the official patch, if the mesh was truly exceptional it could be added as an ingame item and not just an alternative mesh.

Well ya that goes with out saying. I could do with out some the extra stuff if they put that time in to making the gameplay the best it can be.

By Michael's logic the game should be nothing more than 2d chess. As anything beyond that is just fluff.

Thats just gross oversimplification. But I do believe that a purely Visual Feature, especially when it only afects 1 unit in a game about hundreds of units fighting shoudl take a back seat to things that actually effect gameplay, such as balancing or QA. It would be niuce to have, but not if itmeas the game is fuller of Bugs and has Poor Balancing.

Wouldn't you agree?

Mike

It's just like how using spell check should take a backseat to getting your post on the forums!

/Serious time

It comes down to how big an effect the system will have on the game versus how much time it would take to implement. As Orange said, it will be one, possibly two units that are affected, and in a purely visual way. The simple fact that this game will be an RTS means your single altered character will be one of hundreds of others, and only the most obvious of detail changes will even be noticed by many players in such a mob.

This one sentence tells me all I need to know about you. A week longer you say

We need some kind of IQ test before registration on this forum to stop idiots like this ever getting through.

Key words here people:
All we've seen is of Pre-production stuff.

Quote: "Almost everything you see here currently is going to change in production."

Though this is mostly in response to the person who doesn't like the "current" king.

Perhaps there can be different king/queen models for each faction?