Guild Wars 2

i suggest for we to be able to dye back items too, arent much isnt a big pool so wont take that long work if its possible

why? because would be cool to have the back items colors to match with your current dye colors choosen for your equipment

They’ve posted before on dyeing backpacks. Here’s a quote then a follow up quote on the subject.

Tidgepot.3285:

Substance E.

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.

The system they setup from the start means we’ll never have dyes for weapons or back items. It’s not just a matter of adding functionality; it also requires retrofitting every existing back item (and possibly every weapon), which isn’t simply a matter of “just” adding a dye channel.

Snippets from jpetrie’s response to a similar question ages ago. The full text remains at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3394gf/backpacks_and_dyes_why_not/cqjqrbj

To address the specific topic of this thread (dying stuff)… what I recall (so I might be wrong) is that

1. The decision to dye armor but not weapons was a design one …made pretty early.
2. We wanted a much richer dye system for GW2 than we had in GW1.
3. This [requires] some changes to the way that the source art was authored, which increased the complexity (and thus time) of doing so.
4. That additional complexity pays off best for armor, which is more visible on-screen than weapons generally are,
5. [I]t was decided that we wouldn’t bother authoring dye support into the weapon art.
6. 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.)

(I added the numbered bullets to make it easier to see the thinking leading up to the situation in which we find ourselves today.)

My paraphrase: ANet decided that weapon colors didn’t stand out enough to make it worth creating the code infrastructure to support weapon dye channels. All future weapon designs depend on them not having dye channels. It’s possible to change this, but it would require creating the new mechanic and then (in effect) fixing every single weapon in the game. (Less than a complete redesign, more than just a simple copy/paste.)

So even just adding dye channels to future weapon sets would be a huge undertaking, i.e. they’d still have to build the infrastructure and still have to make adjustments in existing skins (even if they didn’t get a user-dyeable channel).

So the question is: how many new skins and other major potential features are we willing to give up in order to enable weapon dyeing? (My guesstimate: 20-70% of potential skins and 2-3 major QoL/cosmetic features, e.g. like a 2-year delay in implementing the wardrobe.)