Guild Wars 2

Hi there, i would like to sugget to Anet to make some backpacks (like moth wings) share color when you use it as a bag.

I mean, you have a “green” moth wings when flying but a “red” one when land, that is weird :S

So please Anet ¿can you make SOME backpacks share colors?

Or even simpler, in case of the latest destroyer wings, release like a few base models, like red and green

YES! I don’t see the point in being able to color just the wing set because it looks wrong when you go back and forth. Would love to be able to customize as a back as well

They might release more versions at X gems each but they’ve already said that dyeing backpacks (and weapons) won’t be an option because of the work involved and the number of bugs that would come up with changing something so basic in the coding.

The code doesn’t exist in the game to dye weapons or dye backpacks, so it’s not possible to set the back + wings to match, whether dynamically or otherwise.

They could rewrite the code from scratch, to enable dyeing backs, but that would also require retrofitting the existing designs even for the packs that aren’t going to be dyeable.

Why did the developers decide to make this so hard on themselves? They thought about it a lot before the game launched and decided that they’d prefer to release more weapon skins more often, by leaving the base designs simpler.

And that’s worked out in practice: we have 37 BL weapon skin sets plus several in HoT plus some for raids plus some for LS3.

tl;dr developers made a design decision before launch that simplified design of backs & weapons by not including the capability to dye them. Changing that would require a massive retrofitting of code, even to change just one back or weapon.

I know that is extra work for devs, i,m just saying that i really like moth wings but i don,t like that change of color, so i don,t buy it :S.
¿May be instead of code for backpacks, just copy de model of your wings?
Don,t know just saying.

Alvaro.5270:

I know that is extra work for devs, i,m just saying that i really like moth wings but i don,t like that change of color, so i don,t buy it :S.
¿*May be instead of code for backpacks, just copy de model of your wings*?
Don,t know just saying.

Not possible, according to the Devs. The game sees wings and backpacks as different, gliders as effects and backpacks as items, so they can’t be substituted.

Here are the quotes where they discuss dyeing backpacks (and the related issue of dyeing weapons where many of the issues described also relate to backpacks).

(Backpacks)

Substance E.

Substance E.

[Citation Needed]
Back items also take damage like armor and thus are not the same thing as accessories or weapons. They never got dye channels likely for the same reason that we only had the guild backpack at launch, it was never finished.
Backpacks will remain un-dyable so Anet can sell black and white wing sets. Plain and simple.

If you need citation, then look no further. I’m the dev who concepted this glider! Granted, I’m an artist so I couldn’t give you the full technical rundown like Josh Petrie, but I do handle our engine daily.

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.

The devs here are gamers and we love what we do. We want fans to get excited about what we make because we’re fans, too. However, we have players clamoring for every fix/feature under the sun so we have to do a ton of prioritizing. Game development is never plain and simple.

Edit: Thanks Aikawa! I designed it but Chelsea M. modeled it. She’s a rockstar!

Ashe Lewis.9815:

I rarely post on the forums so I just had my account upgraded to a developer one. So Tidgepot is indeed a dev because I’m Tidgepot! My posts earlier in this thread still stand. I’m sorry about the confusion :P

Like I said before, I’m just an artist so I’ll elaborate on what I understand as best as I can, but I’m no engineer.

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.

jpetrie (dyeing weapons)

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.)

So, like 0% chance i guess, thats sad.

Alvaro.5270:

So, like 0% chance i guess, thats sad.

Yeah, it’s one of those decisions made early that are so baked in it’s close to impossible to change them later on. Sometimes that ends up being regrettable, but done is done…