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PersonalizingYourAvatar

For any online game, having a personalized avatar is pretty important.

Some experimets I made concerning easy animated sprite creation for the game. Turns out we only need 3 base images, at least for this scale.

Discussion

(The conversation has been moved from GameItems, for the first few only keeping the relevant paragraphs)

The other class are the “artifacts”, items used for customizing your character. Most of them have only decorative purpose – your clothes, additional accessorys like glasses, hats, masks, maybe even wings or tails. They need to be persistent in order to keep your avatar looking the way you want. There could be probably a way to “convert” normal items into artifacts, stripping them from their scripts. – RadomirDopieralski?

It doesn’t need to be managed by GameItems, the way it is in SecondLife?. Maybe each player could have a personalized sprite, and maybe also a “portrait” for the sidebar. Or, his appearance could be determined by a set of flags (hair colour and style, clothes colour an style, skin colour, etc.) used to generate the sprite. In any case, it doesn’t need to be managed through items. – EmileKroeger

Very important part of every MMORPG game I have played is customizing your avatar. Not just picking the starting looks and tweaking several sliders – you need elements that are hard to get, that are expensive to buy, that are tricky to make – so that you can show off them.
As for drawing your own avatar – I don’t think it’s possible for a normal player, especially if they are going to be animated. And if you want the overall looks stay meaningful in any way. Presented with an option to draw their avatar, players that want to get into the game will just make several random strokes, or upload a random image. Even if they do try to stay in theme, most of them will just be unable to draw what they want.
Garments provide a very nice way of customizing your avatar easily (they are just image overlays over a ready character), and make very good wares – to be exchanged or traded. The separation of them from the rest of the avatar makes it easier for the players to add small modifications. Possibility of wearing multiple garments increases the varitey exponentially. Of course, you still need to be able to set your species, gender, skin and hair color, hair style, etc. (hair could be handled by wigs).
I can provide some initial graphics for that – enough to have the players started, and give them a base to build on further. Technically, it’s just a question of taking those layers and merging them to create the avatar frames. Then you can send them around and store as single images.
Of course this is in fact a low-priority feature, but I think it’s an important one. – RadomirDopieralski?

I agree that asking the players to draw their own avatars would suck.

We can try to approach the problem differently: where and how is avatar information stored? 1) The avatar is stored as a sprite or set of sprites on the player’s machine, and those sprites are broadcast to whoever sees the player. 2) The avatar is represented by a set of “text” attributes (hair colour and style, glasses, etc.) stored on the player’s machine, and the server uses those attributes to build the sprites that will be sent to those who see the player. 3) The avatar is equal to a collection of items (clothes, wigs, glasses, swords) stored with their graphics on the player’s machine, and these objects are broadcast to all who can see them. 4) The avatar is equal to a collection of items stored with their graphics on the player’s machine, and these objects are sent to the server only; the server then builds some sprites out of those images, and sends them to whoever can see the player.

So. All of these allow the player to personalize their avatar, though 1) makes it a bit difficult - it can be done with “dollmakers” (like some internet forums have) entirely seperated from the actual game (though it can be possible to make a dollmaker on a server, where the players can build there character in-game).

Solution 1) Doesn’t allow exchanging or trading. But the problem is, the open source and MultiServer nature of the game makes it very hard to implement any kind of trade of GameItems between players :P

Hmm. I’ll drift a bit off topic here, but please tell me what you think of the various technical solutions up there. I tend to like 1), but 3) is nice too (it has the advantage that it still allows the look of your character to change when you pick up items, etc.

Anyway; drifting off-topic to general philosophy: one thing I’d like (and I’m not sure I talked about it elsewhere on this wiki, I probably did) is that if Joe is the administrator of one domain / kingdom / FloatingIsland /Dungeon, he can’t use that to give an unfair advantage to his player outside of the zone he’s administrating: he can’t give his character a +20 sword of exterminating and a huge stack of gold. Or he can, but won’t be able to use them outside his home. I believe that is important, because it means we can allow anyone to administer his server, to administer his little corner of the world, without worrying that they’re cheats.

But this also means that it’s pretty hard to have any kind of reliable economy. You can have all the trade, gold, etc. inside one server, but if you start having items / money that has value accross the servers, then what prevents a player from creating a domain, giving himself plenty of neat stuff?

Another constraint is decentralization: it shouldn’t be necessary to store any information in any centralized place. Some servers may decide to store some player info, but the game should work fine if they don’t. Having a central repository of “who owns what item” would enable trade, but I think the cost is not worth the benefit.

So, back to avatar personalization: if we don’t have trade, it’s hard to make the aspect of your avatar part of the reward system; because anybody can make a copy of any graphic (though for solutions 2) and 4) above, he’d have to have his own server to do that).

I believe that even with those constraints, it’s possible to make a fun game.

In fact, some “dollmakers” could be quite difficult to reach; for example there could be a “dragon armor” dollmaker for members of the Dragon Slayer Guild; while any player could make a copy of sprites created with that dollmaker and use them for his avatar, he couldn’t fake membership of the Dragon Slayer Guild (which could be proved only with a cookie digitally signed by the Guildmeister). Other players (or administrators, I mean, DreamLords) seeing him parade around with a dragon armor but without being a member of the guild might take appropriate action. So winning a DragonArmor? would be a reward in itself, even though technically nothing prevents you from “stealing” one. – EmileKroeger

Hmm, I think my big rant was a bit superfluous; the key point would just be that “permanent items can’t be lost” (and therefore, can’t be exchanged). This is why it’s impossible to have global health, money, or tradeable items. Or, it would be possible, but I believe it’s possible (and considerably easier) to make a good enough game without them. – EmileKroeger

Personally I’d choose yet another approach: 5) The avatar is represented by a set of items in the player’s client (and in his inventory), with all their graphics and scripts and whatnot. Then, the avatar’s graphics is created by the client from those items, and sent to the server to be broadcasted to everyone. If you are paranoid, you could even use some WaterMark? techniques when assembling the avatar, so even when I make a screenshot and cut out the interesting parts, the result is not the same.
On the other hand, I don’t really think that you need to have copyrights enforced to permit trading. In the real world, for example, we can trade even when copying has become so simple. It’s a matter of user agreement. Another aspect – even if you can freely copy the elements of other avatars, you still need to find the avatars that have them. So a rare item is still hard to get.
As for real trading, I think the DreamLord-s could maybe set up trading posts, that would use the information recorded on their server to keep track of item ownership. Of course, those items would become worthless outside their FloatingIsland.
Avatars constructed from parts have one huge advantage – it’s easier to mix-and-match large number of small elements, and eventually modify them slightly, than to create a whole new avatar from scratch. Especially if it’s supposed to be animated. – RadomirDopieralski?

Solution 5) seems pretty good too, I wonder why I haden’t thought of it :) So basically, the game only cares about sprites, and clients can have DollMakers? to build their character’s sprite.

I like the “loose compling” this implies - the way elements fit together doesn’t matter to the core game engine, so the game can work without anybody implementing a DollMaker? or agreeing to what parts constitute a character (body+head? Torso+legs+arms+head? etc.). Plus, it’s still possible to add doll makers on the servers too. – EmileKroeger