Guild Wars 2

Hi everyone!

I’ve been thinking, since we can dye our gears, it wouldn’t be a far concept to be able to dye our weapons too :/ There are good weapon skins in the game that I can’t use cuz their color doesn’t really match the color of my outfit. I just think it’d be really cool we were allowed to do dye weapons. #GW2Fashion lol

While it would be nice it’s unfortunately not likely to happen. Here’s the time it was discussed by an ANet dev so you can see what they had to say about it.

jpetrie
I can’t give you specifics or anything (they’d be very tedious to compute even if I still had access to the code), but GW2’s codebase is very much an evolution of the codebase used for GW1. We did not start over, or anything crazy, but nor did we use the GW1 code unchanged.

Huge chunks of gameplay code were added, removed, or refactored so heavily as to be effectively-new (even things you might think would be the same, like inventory). The core rendering and networking capabilities had some significant reworking to support new features, but a lot of the fundamentals remained the same. The very low-level stuff, such as the classes we use to manage collections of data, do math, sort things… those didn’t change much and some files might even be identical to the ones in GW1, except maybe for some copyright or header date changes.

Essentially if you view the code as a vertical stack of functionality, with very-game-specific gameplay code at the top and generic data structure/algorithm stuff at the bottom, the closer something is to the top the more likely it experienced significant tweaking at some point during GW2’s development.

To address the specific topic of this thread (dying stuff)… what I recall (so I might be wrong) is that the decision to dye armor but not weapons was a design one (in the sense we chose to do it, not that there were insurmountable technical issues), and made pretty early. We wanted a much richer dye system for GW2 than we had in GW1. This would require some changes to the way that the source art was authored, which increased the complexity (and thus time) of doing so. That additional complexity pays off best for armor, which is more visible on-screen than weapons generally are, and so (I think) it was decided that we wouldn’t bother authoring dye support into the weapon art. Eventually this decision would have led to code changes or optimization relying on that assumption, and we arrive at where we are today.

As with all things, it could be made possible to dye weapons with sufficient code and art resources sunk into it. But it would be a nontrivial undertaking (and probably a non-trivial patch download!) to re-author all the existing source art with appropriate metadata for dye channels.

(Please keep in mind that all of this is from memory from a long time ago, so I may be forgetting/misremembering/et cetera some things.)

Oh I see, nonetheless GW2 still the best!!! I’ll just have to wait for some new weapon skins to be released and hope they got colors I want.