Veteran reward system revamp

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fingers
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Re: Veteran reward system revamp

Post by fingers »

First, thanks for the revamp of the vet reward system. This is great work +Colibri, +Nyx and +Arden. As a very old (and sometime grumpy, haha!) vet, I am usually not easily impressed. Well, for this one, I am in awe!

Regarding all this new handsomness, I do have three questions:

1. Are the ethy mounts for older vets (gaman and higher) supposed to be of etheral color (like the ones i claimed) or colored (like the ones in the display room)?

2. If not, will it be possible to get them colored that way (I know some have a single color, so possible to use unitub like i did on my undead steed, but some have many colors (centaur and sphinx for an example).

3. Can footsteps be switched from one to an other and on and off easily?

Thanks
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Melkor
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Re: Veteran reward system revamp

Post by Melkor »

fingers wrote:
1. Are the ethy mounts for older vets (gaman and higher) supposed to be of etheral color (like the ones i claimed) or colored (like the ones in the display room)?

2. If not, will it be possible to get them colored that way (I know some have a single color, so possible to use unitub like i did on my undead steed, but some have many colors (centaur and sphinx for an example).
I'm curious about this too. When I saw them in the display room I wondered if they got changed after the first restart so I purchased a second Sphynx to see if it would come out coloured but it was ethereal like the first one.
fingers wrote:
3. Can footsteps be switched from one to an other and on and off easily?

I can answer this one. There is a little item in your pack that turns the steps on and off.
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+Nyx
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Re: Veteran reward system revamp

Post by +Nyx »

For the mounts:

All mounts can be hued with a uni tub, the color variation of the base mob itself has no bearing on that.

We are waiting on +C to see if the change to the chargers (being defaulted to ethereal-transparent) is intentional, I have a list of bugs/questions for him and if he doesn't beat me to it, I will reply here once I hear back about that.
When I was making the display, I was confused about the charger too, so I actually purchased one from the menu to check and it is indeed defaulted to transparent/ethy. Whether this is intentional or not, I don't know, so I will wait till I hear from the boss :)

As for the higher-level mounts, I made a sign explaining them yesterday but must've forgotten to lock it down, it was gone when I looked today. So, there's a new sign :)
The jist of the patch-mounts: when you purchase these mounts they are ethy/transparent. However, most of these mobs are not in-world, meaning you can't go to a dungeon and look at it to see what it would look like without the transparency applied. I've displayed them as non-transparent so that when +C adds the transparency-toggle deeds, you'll know what your fancy mount would look like non-ethy and non-hued. Since all the old-school mounts are mobs found easily in-world, there was no need to do the same for them.
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fingers
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Re: Veteran reward system revamp

Post by fingers »

Well, most likely I have misunderstood the information about hue 0. Yesterday, I bought a unitub and dyed my new ethy undead horse in a color that was...ok, but not as sharp as the original obviously... So to make sure that Iunderstand well the thing about hue 0, i go to the hue room and apply hue 0 on my horsy... that indeed makes him look good like the one in the disply room. I elect to use my last real unitub, set it at 0... and it turns etheral :/

I guess I need to use a third unitub to put it like it wasyeserday, haha! Ho well, no biggie. When all that this mistake costs me is the need to PLAY an hour or so to buy unitubs on [exex, I can't complain!
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Re: Veteran reward system revamp

Post by Deorum »

If there is someone that is able to pull the hue numbers for the new vet dye tubs available Id appreciate it. Would love to test out what Bloody Sunset looks like on some items before I just use charges. Thanks!
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Re: Veteran reward system revamp

Post by +Nyx »

The ethy stuff seems to be confusing a lot of folks, but let me try to explain it using examples.

Say you have an ethy gaman. Upon purchasing it from the menu, it is ethereal (transparent).
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You decide to use a uni tub to make it purple. Your mount is now entirely purple.
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Later you want to remove the hue, so you use a uni tub hued '0' on the mount. This causes it to go back to the default it was before you applied a hue. Because your mount was originally ethereal/transparent, is now again ethereal/transparent.
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Now, if you wanted the mount to look 'natural', like the in-game gaman mobs do, you would need to apply a deed that turns its ethereal/transparency off. This is not currently in-game, but it will be available for purchase soon. Were you to use such a deed on your gaman, it would now have the normal flesh-color.
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With transparency toggled off, you could then dye your mount purple again:
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And then later un-hue it, using hue '0' on a uni tub, and your mount would go back to its non-transparent, flesh color:
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If you wanted it to go back to being ethereal/transparent again, you would then use another transparency toggle deed on it. This is presuming that the transparency toggle deed +C/+A makes is one-time use. It is possible they will opt to make it so that you apply to deed to a statuette and then can toggle the transparency any time you want from then on, but I think this is less likely.
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Re: Veteran reward system revamp

Post by +Nyx »

Deorum wrote:If there is someone that is able to pull the hue numbers for the new vet dye tubs available Id appreciate it. Would love to test out what Bloody Sunset looks like on some items before I just use charges. Thanks!
You can't actually test these hues, as they've been removed from the uni menu. I added some NPCs next to the tubs that display plate and cloth clothing pieces in each hue as well as a charger mount.
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fingers
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Re: Veteran reward system revamp

Post by fingers »

Thanks for taking the time to explain all this, +Nyx. I think that it is more clear for me now! And as I said, no biggie, my mount is now in a awsome color! The only thing that I don't fully understand is why my mount went full original color when I used the Hue Room dyetub set at 0 hue and etheral on my universal dyetub set at 0 hue.
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Re: Veteran reward system revamp

Post by Deorum »

I just made the same mistake and wasted a universal tub doing the same thing. Hue room tubs on 0 turn my gaman to natural color, but the uni tub 0 used it up and kept it as ethereal. (frowny face).
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Re: Veteran reward system revamp

Post by Rahr »

I also noticed the "new" mounts were exact copies of World Of Warcraft's racial/class specific mounts. Not sure how I feel about that lol. Dreadsteeds, Kodos, Gryphons, Raptors etc...even the Druid's Bear form has the iconic WoW Druid marking on its arm.
Out of curiosity, who's idea was it to use WoW skins?


*Edit: oops wrong thread?
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Yoda
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Re: Veteran reward system revamp

Post by Yoda »

yes because free shards typically employ animation departments, concept artists, storyboardists etc that would be involved in making animated mount sprites.

regardless its also not as if anything in wow is remotely original..

*COUGH*
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Re: Veteran reward system revamp

Post by Rahr »

Not complaining. Simply ignorant to the process and curious.
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Yoda
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Re: Veteran reward system revamp

Post by Yoda »

ah ok then.. regardless the process is complicated

you are using a set of tools mostly made for other things, and a few bits of tooling of varying quality made by hobbiest software houses, certainly is a trick to get that much into the packed graphics files of this uo game.

thing is before you said wow skins, thats a bit inacurate, without going into the 2 games to heavily they couldn't be more different at an object code level, the "wow skins" as you put them are 2d bitmaps, lots of them to make the animation, however wow is a 3d engine, it is wrapping textures onto geometry, so although they have little wow details (+n if you hate that drop me a ding) but they are essentially wow re-creations vs. skins, as these graphics wouldn't work in wow in 100,000 years even if you taugh 1000 monkeys c++
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Re: Veteran reward system revamp

Post by +Nyx »

Okay first, don't necro bump threads. It's been months since the last post, you could easily have sent a page.

Secondly, to answer your question, I make all the patches so I added the new items and mobs.

Why are some of them WoW mobs? Because that's what was available. There are not that many people still making new content for UO, even on free shards. Other free shards mostly just recycle all the old graphics to make "new" dungeons and the like, it isn't that common to find genuinely new graphics and animations. However, there are a few folks who did/do, and I pored over all the available things posted on runuo/servuo, various blogs/sites, and forums in all sorts of foreign languages I didn't speak to find everything I could. I spent a lot of time poring over obscure areas of the internet just trying to find more new stuff for UO. Then I sifted through all the new stuff I found and added what was most interesting.

In the end, lot of what I needed just didn't exist, so then I learned how to make my own graphics. A lot of the things in the art file I made myself. However, mobs are a whole other kettle of fish. Each mob (and in-world animation of armor/weapons) is a collection of well over a thousand tiny images. Think of them like highly complex .gif files - every time a mob walks, that is animating a series of frames of each step. This happens for every type of animation a mob makes (idling, death, walking, running, being hit, giving hits, and so on and so forth), and in every direction that the mob could possibly face. It's time consuming beyond your ken to make a mob from scratch. I made the Dalek mobs myself, by hand, from scratch. Those took me days of work, and most of their animations include only 2-3 frames of the same type of image (the average mob has 5-12 frames per type of animation, per direction). Since they don't have legs or arms that need to move when they walk, they don't fall over in a dramatic fashion when they die, etc, then these were exceptionally simple to make compared to any other type of mob. And those took me days of dedicated work to make and get working. Multiply that by ~100 and you have a vague idea of the work involved in making a regular, simple, mob such as the cats or birds already in the game. Larger, more detailed mobs (like the WoW-style mobs) are even more complicated than that.

Needless to say that beyond the Daleks, there was no way I would ever have the time or inclination to make a hundred+ new mobs myself. Sure, I could've thought up more interesting, creative or unique things myself. I would've preferred that option even. But one has to have some sort of balance to how they spend their time and in this case it was either we get no new mobs, or all these new mobs that someone else had made and posted for others to use.

If the fact that somebody went and made WoW style mobs for UO, and I gratefully snagged them and plugged them into UOEX bugs you, well nobody is forcing you to own them or attend events that use them or go to the facets that will have them. You'd probably want to also avoid fel wrong, as +M sometimes updates it to temporarily use some of the new mobs. Beyond that, and having to occasionally see another player riding one, it shouldn't really affect your gameplay any.
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Re: Veteran reward system revamp

Post by Rahr »

Nope doesn't bug me that bad. Though, I'd simply be lying if I said I was fond of seeing World of Warcraft in UO. Thank you for the clarification and I sincerely appreciate all of the work you devote to the shard. I apologize if it struck a nerve.
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