First, I’m aware that the code for the character creator is different, so not all of these ideas are doable, but, I think some of these ideas might be workable and might improve the game experience enough to work toward them. I’m trying to keep it simple, but I’m still expecting for someone to tell me such and such is impossible.
the hat/tshirt/flightsuit give aways are getting old we need new stuff, especially if we’re doing login rewards more frequently. I recommend new outer pieces that allow people to show off what they have. I’m thinking vests and asymmetrical pieces that let people show off their tattos, shirts, scars (?), and augmentations. Engineers’s tool vest is something I think you could get some mileage out of releasing different colors of. it would be practical, and RPers would like it because it appeals to the aesthetic of some characters.
let races unlock race specific clothing at LP stores. If an amarrian really wants the base red gallente shirt, they should be able to unlock it for that character by getting enough LP. I hope this keeps the clothing special enough to signify race, keeps it out of the market, and also allows more character customization options.
we need more model positions to see hands in portraits. I mean, I spent isk on those arm augmentations. Let’s see them. For women, I’m thinking the position should be one arm under the chest, it’s hand supporting the other arm at the elbow. And the supported hand is up in either a “yes, and?” Position or a “relaxed position” where the hand is relaxed back,.palm up, fingers in a relaxed curled position. you can find a fair number of models doing a position like this if you know what to look for.
for women: more hairstyles to go with hats. I imagine you’ll have to split hats from “hair and headwear” but if I could have 3 styles to choose from (shaved, pony tail, braids) it would be enough. (Not really expecting this one, but there it is)
a little more flexibility in positioning. Basically I want to zoom out more, be able to move the character a higher up in the portrait in some positions, and to have a little more ability to rotate the character.
simple custom gradient background. Basically, just a simple two color gradient that players can choose the color(s) and rotate the direction.
CCP could generate more revenue selling new stuff via NES for PLEX rather than for LP (more PLEX sinks = healthier economy). More money for CCP = they actually have money to dedicate to graphic design for this stuff. Race specific clothing, though, kind of sucks, not going to lie. There’s already race-specific tattoos, hairstyles, etc that I’m sure players would like to see available on other races, so if anything they might be willing to pay PLEX to have those options UNLOCKED for their race (eg. use Caldari tattoos on an Amarr character, etc).
This is a tough call: portraits should show heads (if not faces like some people manage to get away with), so hands just… literally don’t fit in the picture. I’ve seen some graphic artists take their full-body avatar and do neat things with them, though. Same situation with boots, etc.
Hair + Hats is an extremely complicated issue because there are two main approaches, and both approaches are extremely time consuming and simply don’t provide a return on investment in terms of CCP spending money and CCP making money or players having an enhanced experienced as a result of these efforts. One approach is to try to tackle this through some kind of adaptive programming, and it’s pretty difficult to pull off without several pairings looking wonky and unnatural, and the other is to have some special parameters for every pairing of hats and hairstyles to make it look right, which again is a lot of time and effort for so little return on investment (and whenever new hairstyles or hats are introduced, new pairings have to be calibrated). One thing CCP could maybe do is provide a limited selection of hairstyles for a given hat in the same way that you can select different tuckings for boots, bottoms, or tops. So you wouldn’t select a separate hat + hairstyle, but rather the hat hair would be a “variant” of the hat in the same way that a tucking is a variant of a shirt.
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Gradients of a wide variety are not difficult to generate (linear, bilinear, radial, etc), so it would not be unreasonable for CCP to have a “generate gradient” option given the existence of backgrounds that are fairly bland and detacted from lore or space or scifi
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