Guild Wars 2

A lot of backpieces in this game usually take up too much of the screen (makes it hard to see animations etc) or they don’t fit with the general theme of your character.

I don’t understand why Arenanet haven’t added a color palette for backpieces yet, i’ts been so long.
And clearly they can make exceptions for things they want to be 1 color like the glowing eyes for example.

Am I alone in thinking this is a good feature for the game? Or are the devs just lazy when it comes to theese things?

No, not lazy. There’s a fundamental technical restriction on dyeing backpacks, as they are not considered armor. More like weapons.

You can use Google to find the long, technical explanation from the Devs, if you so desire.

Good luck.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

No, not lazy. There’s a fundamental technical restriction on dyeing backpacks, as they are not considered armor. More like weapons.

You can use Google to find the long, technical explanation from the Devs, if you so desire.

Good luck.

This. Much like weapons, the decision was made early on not to have the dye channels due to significant workload. They have said it is possible, but the work involved is far more than most realise since it involves changes deep in the core of the code and risks breaking a great deal of things.

Here’s what one of Anet’s artists said in another topic about this issue:

“It’s extremely hard to alter the engine so backpacks are dyeable. As far as the engine is considered, backpacks are considered items (like weapons) and gliders are considered effects. The engine needs to be fundamentally altered from the ground up to allow for item dye channels. It’s not impossible, but not easy. To add to this, the Shining Blade glider was designed on its own and after it was modeled one of the artists saw that it could be turned into a backpack for the players to enjoy. I think lazy is an inappropriate term for this situation when someone went the extra mile. However, I do understand your frustration with not knowing it couldn’t be dyed. That should be more clear.”

“Whether or not the equipment takes damage or not has no bearing on how the engine separates items. The engine sees armor as what is called a composite, it sees things attached to your characters like weapons and backpieces as items, and it sees gliders as a sort of middleground item/effect. Our file structure separates gliders as items, but because of how they pop into view, layer, and more easily allow for dyes it makes sense to basically treat them as effects. Now I’m not positive on this, but I’m going to hazard a guess that if we decided to make gliders as items, we’d have to retroactively alter the system in a way that would allow for weapons/backpieces to be dyed.

On its face doing this sounds like a great idea, since this is what fans want. As a fellow player I’d like this as well, but unfortunately our systems were not designed with this in mind. Not only would we have to go back and code each item so it can have dye channels/sufficient UI and prepare for the veritable bugfest that would ensue from altering a system that has years of work built on top of it, but we’d also have to retexture these items. Why? Our dye system is balanced around a red base color which has an impact on how every other color will appear when a channel shifts to it. Anyone who has played with dodging/burning in photoshop will know that red has some strange properties when it comes to shifts in values. Many dyes would have blown out/dull/oddly saturated textures as a result.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s SO much more to the process that I don’t have a firm grasp on."

“This sounds like a it could be good idea, but it doesn’t sidestep the issue of categorization and what certain types of assets can do. The older assets would still be affected. We’d still encounter a ton of programing challenges and bugs from altering a core mechanic of the game and the years of code built on top of it. Every player and many npcs use items, so the wrong bug slipping through can have a major impact on everyone in the game. Not to mention finding that bug could be like searching for a needle in a haystack because of how fundamental this part of our system is. We’d still probably end up having to re-author and retexture all old items (which would take a ton of resources) and even if we did do that, more players may end up upset by the minor texture changes to their current gear than those who can’t dye backpacks.

Maybe(?) a workaround could be a new asset type, but our engine is old and finicky— it would certainly take a lot resources to teach it to parse through something so fundamental."

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Dye-backpacks-Shining-Blade-back-issue/first

(Note: the first two posts are under the name Tidgepot and don’t have the red Anet banner, as apparently Devs have to request it.)