A Final Plea to Frontier for Longer Hairstyles
- Thread starter Momoka Azuka
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It's a video game where realism is trumped by gameplay/reasons. Ergo: anything is possible if the devs allow it.
Bottom line - from FD - ED says it's a technical reason. (Most likely to do with them wanting to ensure ED still runs on the potatoes they support
)
The answer isn't going to change unfortunately. That was written with the help of Mr Brookes himself! I don't just pluck this information from thin air!
Edit - I see you're talking from a lore perspective specifically. I understand... but the technical limitations have the final say here, not the lore reasoning behind it.
However, The empire is written completely to the contrary, I agree if it was specifically about the federation, however it can't be denied that the empire is written as far more pompous.
EDIT - while i see your edit coming in and stating it as if it was lore and from your edit, it clearly appears that it is technical which i had expected.
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My post was more of inquisitive than criticism. I really don't care much about changing hairdos or small details there and here
I am curious how persistence of player *character* ties into all this with on look forwards.As far as I understand FD was curious to give unlimited freedom in tweaking our avatars. I understand that. It goes a bit against consistency, but it is not that painful price to pay to give people what they want. Just wanted to hear is that it and this will be how things will be on also for walking around.
Is... is this really what gaming has devolved into in the intervening decades between me playing Frontier: Elite II back in those Halcyon days, me not playing games much if at all since then, and me now suddenly getting back into Elite-as-an-online-game?
People are actually and seriously being concerned with whether their virtual avatar has long virtual hair or not AND getting distressed about it AND some others bringing in identity politics to the discussion?
I feel like I've been in some weird slumber for 3 decades and woken up in the Idiocracy.
Some people need to undertake a serious bit of introspection and ponder their existence on this planet, and whether or not, on the whole, getting this seriously and deeply embroiled in a virtual world arcade game is a healthy thing or not. Whether, on the face of it, it is worth expending your life's precious time and energy on actually getting upset about virtual hair in a virtual arcade game!
People are actually and seriously being concerned with whether their virtual avatar has long virtual hair or not AND getting distressed about it AND some others bringing in identity politics to the discussion?
I feel like I've been in some weird slumber for 3 decades and woken up in the Idiocracy.
Some people need to undertake a serious bit of introspection and ponder their existence on this planet, and whether or not, on the whole, getting this seriously and deeply embroiled in a virtual world arcade game is a healthy thing or not. Whether, on the face of it, it is worth expending your life's precious time and energy on actually getting upset about virtual hair in a virtual arcade game!
No, it's got to be this:
[video=youtube;4Lk2KHajp4Y]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Lk2KHajp4Y[/video]
Indeed, what about all those metal dudes?
I so wanted to headbang frantically on my pilot chair while carrying scrap inbound for Hutton Orbital...
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My problem with this Is their entire argument for this option to be added. Its funny how Momoka the OP of this thread started to realize that and logged off for the night but others couldnt grasp that and urged the OP to press on.
My post was more of inquisitive than criticism. I really don't care much about changing hairdos or small details there and here
As far as I understand FD was curious to give unlimited freedom in tweaking our avatars. I understand that. It goes a bit against consistency, but it is not that painful price to pay to give people what they want. Just wanted to hear is that it and this will be how things will be on also for walking around.
As long as we have something to distinguish hollow-me and real-me characters.
Have to agree.
It would be nice having females in the game which actually look somewhat feminine and not army commandos. Damn even the purple suit dude from the stream was prettier than the actual females they shown.
However people are reading way too much into this. Its got nothing to do with gender discrimination or identity things at all, its just for technical practicality. Nothing to get riled up.
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I thought I had seen it all with the Flat Earthers; the "we didn't go to the moon"; and the "9/11 was a hoax" but this is a new one for me.
Thanks for the laugh and have some rep mate.
To the OP, I'd imagine this could be more the result of technical restrictions with respect to the game's performance than any lore or design reason why long hair isn't available.
Other games with characters creators tend to do long hair rendering pretty badly in games. Either it's a blocky chunk of solid geometry, or layers of flattened geometric chunks, textured with a combination of hair textures and alpha textures for transparency.
The problems are that the high frequency detail looks bad from a distance, high poly geometry hair layers look will look crap if not animated, and animating them imposes an un-necessary performance load on the game, when the game is already doing so much with the character, cockpit and ship rendering of multiple ships within the same instance at once.
To actually render long hair really well you need to use sophisticated methods, which incidentally also impose an even greater performance load that in a game like ED they may not be able to afford. There mere fact that we're already going to have fully detailed in game avatars, fully-rendered in-engine alongside our ships and all the other loveliness going on is a real testament to the programming genius of the guys at FDev. The characters alone represent a boatload of vertex, texture and lighting data that will eat up a reasonable chunk of RAM. LOD systems can't offset this, as player's have full control over camera features that will allow them to view their avatars at any time, meaning that this information will need to be stored in RAM for the duration of play, as the nature of PC hardware is such that you would never be able to stream the data to RAM fast enough for a camera-based LOD system to load the pilot data on the fly.
I would add, however, that I'm not a games developer. So take all this with a grain of salt as I may of course be completely wrong, and long hair rendering is something FDev can trivially implement with little performance impact
Other games with characters creators tend to do long hair rendering pretty badly in games. Either it's a blocky chunk of solid geometry, or layers of flattened geometric chunks, textured with a combination of hair textures and alpha textures for transparency.
The problems are that the high frequency detail looks bad from a distance, high poly geometry hair layers look will look crap if not animated, and animating them imposes an un-necessary performance load on the game, when the game is already doing so much with the character, cockpit and ship rendering of multiple ships within the same instance at once.
To actually render long hair really well you need to use sophisticated methods, which incidentally also impose an even greater performance load that in a game like ED they may not be able to afford. There mere fact that we're already going to have fully detailed in game avatars, fully-rendered in-engine alongside our ships and all the other loveliness going on is a real testament to the programming genius of the guys at FDev. The characters alone represent a boatload of vertex, texture and lighting data that will eat up a reasonable chunk of RAM. LOD systems can't offset this, as player's have full control over camera features that will allow them to view their avatars at any time, meaning that this information will need to be stored in RAM for the duration of play, as the nature of PC hardware is such that you would never be able to stream the data to RAM fast enough for a camera-based LOD system to load the pilot data on the fly.
I would add, however, that I'm not a games developer. So take all this with a grain of salt as I may of course be completely wrong, and long hair rendering is something FDev can trivially implement with little performance impact
To the OP, I'd imagine this could be more the result of technical restrictions with respect to the game's performance than any lore or design reason why long hair isn't available.
Other games with characters creators tend to do long hair rendering pretty badly in games. Either it's a blocky chunk of solid geometry, or layers of flattened geometric chunks, textured with a combination of hair textures and alpha textures for transparency.
The problems are that the high frequency detail looks bad from a distance, high poly geometry hair layers look will look crap if not animated, and animating them imposes an un-necessary performance load on the game, when the game is already doing so much with the character, cockpit and ship rendering of multiple ships within the same instance at once.
To actually render long hair really well you need to use sophisticated methods, which incidentally also impose an even greater performance load that in a game like ED they may not be able to afford. There mere fact that we're already going to have fully detailed in game avatars, fully-rendered in-engine alongside our ships and all the other loveliness going on is a real testament to the programming genius of the guys at FDev. The characters alone represent a boatload of vertex, texture and lighting data that will eat up a reasonable chunk of RAM. LOD systems can't offset this, as player's have full control over camera features that will allow them to view their avatars at any time, meaning that this information will need to be stored in RAM for the duration of play, as the nature of PC hardware is such that you would never be able to stream the data to RAM fast enough for a camera-based LOD system to load the pilot data on the fly.
I would add, however, that I'm not a games developer. So take all this with a grain of salt as I may of course be completely wrong, and long hair rendering is something FDev can trivially implement with little performance impact
FD already commented and said it was a tech restriction
Not really. Even looked at from the simple point of view of supporting Frontier to push ED on through 'already awesome' land .. and into 'utterly epic' territory? I don't see this as a complaint thread .. it's a please. A plea.
We all know Frontier will deny all knoweldge but 'might' listen and I vote (as you know) for seeing a racer suit in the store soon as possible if it helps push the development ever forward.
Plus why not? My avatar will have tied up hair (plus outrageous moustache of course!!), maybe for shore leave it can hang down? Doesn't hurt anyone imo, to encourage the small team that developed HoloMe, not to disband right way but, if possible, to ... keep going!?
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I have a paunch ... I saw no mechanism for adding my paunch
Disclaimer: I've not read every page, so my opinion may be void.
This is a Holo-Me depiction of your character. Zero-G is irrelevant. Helmets are irrelevant. Therefore any argument made about hair in helmets is null and void.
Can we have the real, technical reason why we can't have long hair now please?
This is a Holo-Me depiction of your character. Zero-G is irrelevant. Helmets are irrelevant. Therefore any argument made about hair in helmets is null and void.
Can we have the real, technical reason why we can't have long hair now please?
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