Guild Wars 2

Is it possible to create a vanishing dye whereby it would effectively remove a particular subset of armor from character based instead of coloring it? Many armor sets would look a lot nicer if I could customize it.

maybe they should just add the checkboxes to all pieces – similar to the helm, shoulder pads and back piece.

I like the all checkbox idea, but I can see the want for an ‘invisible’ dye. It would add another realm of customization to have pieces of an armor be non-existant

There are two distinct problems with this idea,

1) Certain parts of the armor should never be transparent, we all know what I’m referring to… Enough said

2) Polygon objects are assigned color zones whereby certain polygons of said object are differentiated from the others. Each new color adds to the file size of the object. Anet’s use of these and allowing the current customization options is brilliant. Each dye box in the Hero tab represents one of those zones with the little details added onto whatever color you choose by the use of a bump map. In order to insure that problem #1 is not a problem, all armors would have to be reprogrammed to assign the naughty bits to a special non-transparent zone and then each customization detail to its own zone. Then the transparent dye would also have to turn off the bump map so that the newly transparent areas don’t accidentally look like scales/thread/feathers/etc. when the light hits them just right. And for reflective materials, that property would have to be turned off as well. Now consider that your computer would need to calculate all of this for each avatar that comes into view. Just because that set of polys is transparent, doesn’t mean they aren’t there. So the render engine (the piece of programming that displays the polygon info as and image on your screen) still has to run calculations for those transparent zones and recalculate shadows for each and so on.

As I hope you can see, it’s not just a matter of turning off the horns or whatever other piece of the armor you wish weren’t there. It’s a nice idea but not one that can be overcome without LOTS of man hours dedicated to reissuing all of the old armor.