If all current and past year is too complex to fix in this regard why hasn’t blizz started creating gear with this in mind?
It works be a shame for old gear but I do think it’s a greater shame that it hasn’t been added and puzzlingly enough doesn’t seem to be a priority.
When Dance stuido releases, we’ll get dyes.
and have to work on congruent colors for each piece of armor?
Don’t you have a heart you don’t know how much it costs blizz to do all that?
They are only a small INDIE company.
Sarcasm apart I have not lied at all do not want to make recolors because they do not “like” as the armor with tones in automatic mode.
I love the Diablo dyes, but I think they use re-colors so much to determine the level of an armor set that offering a re-coloring service would mess up their system.
We’ve all been asking for this for some time now. They explained they physically can’t because of how armor is made (painted) so until they actually make a new engine, we’re stuck with… this.
So it’s truly the engine and not just how they make gear?
Like I think we would all be fine with wow patch 10.0 armor dyes but none of the previous armor is capable of dyes…
Also keep in mind they did say “we can’t possibly change the backpack size!” For years. And then even at last blizzcon they said we can’t do that to a dev and the dev said “well yeah you can. It’s easy. “ and they did it.
I haven’t seen a single game where armor dyes don’t make the gear look completely awful in 99/100 colors anyway. It isn’t like how it was back in classic, where gear sets had 1-2 color schemes and that’s it. These days we get 4+ for nearly any piece of equipment.
Because their armor model system works off old school skinning, and not a layered system like say ffxiv. It would mean remaking every armor piece and their method of attachment, laying and display to do so. I don’t even think the engine is capable of doing it. Probably never going to happen.
As someone that works in the business, just so you all know, it would take an employee about 1 - 3 mins per item. They will open it (the Targa file) in Photoshop, select the current colored area, make it an alpha channel, and done.
The programmers will have to program something that says <<if $dye=red then "alphachannelred"Targafile>>
That’s about it. Why that’s so hard, has always been strange to me as a game dev, myself, but there’s not much to it. If you’d like a Blizzard reference for how it’s done, look at original Warcraft 3, that’s exactly what they do for team colors. Just an alpha channel and select color, so they actually already have the code needed and have for almost 20 years.
My theory? They’ve held onto it for a long time to make it a “feature” or an expansion, like how they are only now… finally… giving us more option to character creation. Yet another thing that is really not that hard, even if people that don’t work in the gaming industry will claim it that is lol
TLDR - Blizz makes an alpha channel and color selection same as Warcraft 3 has in it from almost two decades ago.
You should look at gw2 then
Very interesting. Thank you for the thoughtful response!
Unless they went back and altered each and every armor model to be an actual model and not just a texture painted on the body of a character, they say there’s no way they can do it with this system. Meaning we need WoW 2.
Please read Zulzambas response.
That armor was designed around being able to recolor it. And even then, only parts of the armor were recolored.
This is basically how Warcraft 3 handled team colors:
Since most WoW armor isn’t designed around being able to recolor it, they’d have to go in to each armor file and cut away the parts that would be recolorable so the alpha channel could do anything.
Alright now I’m confused.
This is the answer to the thread.
It is not being worked on because they are able to make gear seem more appealing based on coloration attached to specific difficulties.
How would you justify making 4 different colors of the same gear be from the same boss on 4 different difficulties if you could just get the Normal version and make it look like the Mythic one?
I’d be interested in seeing a single set each expansion feature this, but certainly no way can it be every single item.
How do you justify a level 12 warrior wearing a Helmet of Wrath? Because transmog was said to cause this exact same confusion when it was being introduced, that ‘gear couldn’t be checked’ or some such rot.
Wut?
I think you misunderstood what I am saying lol.
And just to take this notion a step further, accomplishing a dye system through the alpha channel would leave all “recolorable” sections of armor as flat colors with no texture to them. This is why as others have said armor dye tends to look bad.
Any method used to accomplish this effect would have to go beyond a quick and dirty process to actually look decent.