Visually differentiating characters - cheaply

The reason range is restricted is so that tunneling in darkness and stuff (while trying to be ninja like) is viable (although this is somewhat defeated by the mini map). Anyways, it lets people completely in the dark use it to their advantage against someone they can see. Not a big deal either way though since day/night cycle isn't used all that often.

Guards and Admins have the ability to view names regardless of darkness or not so that they can deal with griefers, hackers and the such(very useful for spectator and stuff).

 

I do have to admit that this is a small problem. I keep thinking that the person standing next to me is someone that they aren't. Maybe being able to change skin tone would change that. Changing the hair color would be nice as well. Not too many choices though, maybe blonde, brown, black, auburn (lol), and gray (no crazy colors like blue, pink, and green). Not everyone has brown hair.

 

Nope, I've checked with my no gold, no admin, alt account and the range for viewing team names is much smaller when compared to when I did have guard/admin

 

I believe that this problem could be solved twofold:
1)Skin tones (8 tones including zombie in the tone file)
2)Changing realistic colors (Different armor tones? Bronze, Steel, gold?) (3 types)

That along with the heads (and possibly just adding extra heads as well) should be more than enough.

As a base for now we have
Male heads + female heads (62 + 62) = 124 different types
If we add in skin tones
124*8 = 992

Add in anything else like some armor types or tones
992*3=2976

 

@BlueLuigi fwiw the whole 2976 combinations thing is precisely why we haven't gone down this road of things as of yet - as it stands each different combination of colours needs to be loaded into graphics memory separately. For just the knight spritesheet that's 512*512 pixels * 4bytesARGB = 1MB graphics memory per sheet -> 8MB for 8 team colours. This would be fairly trivial, but even so we only load each "team" image as needed to help save on RAM - the only issue is that because freeing and reloading and re-processing images can lead to lag, we tend to never free images after they're loaded, and pre-cache a lot of commonly used images. This means that if we allow loading 100s or 1000s of variations of images, we're likely to start running into issues with graphics memory - remember we'd need to load all sorts of extra image variations, male and female sprites for all three classes, head spritesheet variations. We haven't implemented the skin colour stuff yet because we need to see how even adding that extra level affects memory consumption, and that's just one more level of "stuff".

It would be possible to do this recolour in hardware with shaders, but then we're excluding a large portion of our market, those with "shithouse computers". We've opted to avoid doing that with KAG.

 

Unfortunately 6 new sprites is many more work hours than just changing some of the colours, unless we just manually change some of the colours. New armour types would have to be designed, then animated for all the different frames.

I'll nag MM about adding the skin colour change and we'll see how it goes.