Games with player designing their gear?

Have you ever seen a (non-voxel) game where player could freely design their gear?
I'm mostly talking about clothes.

It looks like the idea is often to milk people for dlcs instead of allowing them to freely craft anything they'd want.

 

Could it be allowing players to design their own gear would give them some sort of advantage over others? Unless you mean changing only the looks of the gear.

 

I meant looks.

Designing gear for advantage could work as well - planet explorers derived gear stats from materials used. They did it in a very mysterious way, though, and result always was worse than prefabbed gear. Something similar was done in dwarf fortress, where material properties determined effectiveness of the weapon - based on density, weight, etc. (IIRC gold was a good hammer material, while adamantine was a good sword material. Or something like that).

But the main reason for asking was clothes. Basically, I saw quite a lot of games where developers release a metric ton of costume dlcs, and that always made me think that implementing a clothing designer instead of that would be cool.

I also wouldn't mind discussing possible implementation of that... (when I finish what I'm doing right now that is).

 

Do you mean like how it is hinted at with Mount & Blade - Bannerlord?

 

Unless it's just kit bashing, and messing with shaders it seems like a rather big challenge. Your not going to get tools in a game engine with anywhere near the amount of control a artist gets using stuff like Marvelous Designer, ZBrush and using s full high to low poly baked workflow.

I just see it kinda devolving into the mix and match from prefabs style clothing you would get in something like GTA, Saints Row or any RPG game.

 

Actually, I was thinking it might be possible to make a dumbed down version of marveouls designer. Meaning, position initial cloth, and bake it into skin, let the player cut it, and bake it into skin.

It wouldnt' be zbrush/designer level, but something cartoony/anime-ish should be very plausible.

The stuff demonstrated in bannerlord is "kit bashing", by the way. Then again, I've seen what kind of stuff people can do with kit bashing in Way of Samurai, which only lets player position/scale objects. (need to check if I have any screens anywhere).

 

I don't think it's just a monetisation issue. There are some significant design considerations too.

Basically you are trying to build a highly complex and expensive system, that on average it will make the game look worse. It's easy to see how this can be a difficult sell from a business perspective.

(That said I hope someone makes it, just so it exists.)

 

In APB I think it was, you could do that. At least I think that was the game.... maybe I'm thinking of some other game... but anyway the way it worked was you designed logo's, and could paste those logos onto clothes. This meant players could do different designs out of logo combinations, and make cool stuff, just out of t shirts or regular clothes available in the game by default.

Another thing that comes to mind is the Forza series, although not clothes, it allowed you to completely design the "texture" of the outside of your car (like vinyl pasted on a real car) and customize your vehicles that way.

Another example is GTA V, where you can paste your clan logo on your vehicles and clothing, although its pretty limited in that game (you can't position them, always one default place it can go).

Oh and that old tony hawk game - I think american wasteland? Had the ability to customize your board in a similar fashion - just doing edits to the texture with basic primitive shapes and colors.

I think those are cool mechanics and I think more games should allow that kind of stuff. Especially multiplayer games where lots of players end up looking very similar...

Of course these are all basically "texture splatting" sort of systems, and don't let you modify geometry... which can kind of be too much power for players, as they start exploiting it, or just making plain ridiculous stuff out of it.

 

Is it a bad thing, though?

 

A other approach would be the workshop system like TF2, which leaves lots of cases to get lots of high quality cosmetic content

 

Well, you could design "gear".... or you could make a giant cock and balls. Who needs bikini chainmail when the contest is to make the biggest wang?

 

Honestly it wouldn't be. You would just need to make sure your design accommodates for the crazy things players will do. But letting players go crazy isn't explicitly bad.

Thinking about it I vaugely recall second life having a large amount of customisation. Anyone know more on that one?

 

Brink - although not a great shooter from my experience, had a pretty robust texture and stencil/decal editor for the TON of clothing pieces available for the characters.
The clothes couldn't be 'created' in engine - they were just dynamic cloth meshes rigid pieces added to the character in the character customization dialogue, but I thought the amount of texture customization and the addition of stencils/decals on top of those textures was a pretty nice offering. Especially since I picked the game up several years after release for like seven bucks.

 

That's a matter of content moderation in online games, though. Sorta a very different thing.

Basically, if the idea was that "players will create horrible things with it", players will do that anyway by modding the game.

Ah, second life. I think second life had a built-in 3d modeler (a basic one), though I'm not sure about details. I think the built-in model was present around 2008, maybe, and was based around solids. At the moment it looks like most guides are focused on importing content from modeling software, though.

 

City of Heroes had a character creation system that is almost unparalleled even today.


Being able to make any super hero you wanted was a MASSIVE appeal to a lot of the fan base, myself included.

But it did allow for players to create Marvel characters which led them into a litigious nightmare.

 

WHAT?

No one would ever do that.

I mean, look at Spore. You could make whatever you want and they had no issues of people making obscene creatures in it what so ever.

 

How did it compare to the system used by Champions Online?

 

These days you could get around it by calling yourself a content hoster. Much the same way YouTube and the like do.

 

Champions felt watered down and more "safe" by comparison. They traded user control for making sure every costume looked stylish.

 

Define "freely."

I mean, technically, being able to change the color on something could be considered "designing" gear.

 

Custom materials, colors and geometry for the gear.

 

I think that custom gear beyond colors is mainly avoided just do to the difficulty of adding it with only a small marginal benefit. I would love add custom armor and clothing (other than coloring), but the complexity of such a tool makes it hard to justify. On a similar note though, in my game I am currently working adding custom swords and blades by allowing the user to draw the edges of the sword and procedurally converting the curves into a sword mesh. If anyone is interested in this, I have actually been considering packaging the sword creator up and putting it on the Asset Store.

 

The very, very obvious example is The Sims.

And they still have DLC, though they're typically adding new features rather than "skins" or so I understand.

 

Erm, nope.

Sims do not allow you to edit geometry of the objects in any of its installments. They had a very flexible material system in Sims 3 (which was scrapped in Sims 4), but editing geometry was never possible.

 

Oh okay, never mind. I thought you could since I recently saw an article on RPS about someone's Sims mods that had some unique looking clothing.

 

You can mod the sims, but you'll need to make clothes in external sofware and then export/import them.

The interesting thing about sims is that at some point someone found out that they can decompile the game. This resulted in quite a lot of mods changing core mechanics.

But that's not realy related to gear-designing.

 

I do. I wrote Primstar and the initial code to import their avatar into Blender that became Avastar. They are probably the two most popular 3rd party tools for Second Life. I'm not active there now since they discontinued support for their Linux viewer and I sold my code base to my partner, but I can probably still answer any questions you have.

One interesting thing they did was to have a graduated texture for skirts and trousers which I assume a shader used as a visibility threshold. So a single skirt and single trouser mesh could do long or short lengths by changing the threshold value on the shader.

The whole idea behind Second Life was a user created world, originally with primitives and the single morphable avatar mesh. Then came sculpted meshes (Primstar's speciality), a 32 x 32 face grid that had a displacement texture so vertex positions could be set in a 1 unit cube. Now they have full mesh import for objects and avatars.

 

Animal Crossing lets you paint your own clothing patterns ( a 32 x 32 texture!) if you want a simple example