Custom suit/official color?

[mudcrabs]

Will we be able to set a color for our organization so we can potentially set up base in the USSR and wear red, etc? If not we should.

[anotherdevil]

that would require thousands of new sprite layers to be coloured and rendered, so not really possible at this stage

[mudcrabs]

They don't have the ability to set a custom colour colour in their palettes?

[anotherdevil]

it's not about changing the model colour, it's about then having to rerender every frame of animation. Throughout the game there are hundreds of thousands of frames, and they take time and cost a lot of money to render

[mudcrabs]

Well, I mean the frames could have a special colour gradient inherited from the model that allows the user to define the color of the suit.

[mudcrabs]

This is like old, old RTS level technology. Basically parts of the sprites would be on a purple gradient and the game renders the purple as some other color that the user defines. They could potentially use purple for the suit and lime green for the skin areas, so that different suit + skin colors could be used.

[lyosha]

Skin is even simpler: if the skin parts are drawn on a separate layer, they can simply have rotated/tweaked hue+lightness parameters, if the engine supports it.

[Jean-Luc]

FAQ:

2) WHY ARE THERE NO FEMALE SOLDIERS IN THE GAME?

This isn’t sexism, it’s a question of technical limitations. The game uses spritesheets to render each animation, and we need a different spritesheet for a human soldier performing every animation in the game from all 8 isometric directions for every weapon / armour combination. There will be literally thousands of spritesheets in the final game, which take a lot of time to render and process, and fill lots of memory. If we changed the underlying model so it could be a man as well as a woman, that would double the amount of spritesheets required. This is also why there is no black / asian soldier sprites in the game – although there are black / asian soldier portaits and black / asian / female civilians in the game.

The same reason applies to this.

[lyosha]

Why, palette roll is a nice solution for color variety, we do it all the time with j2me and mobile device constraints.

[RotGtIE]

This is like old, old RTS level technology. Basically parts of the sprites would be on a purple gradient and the game renders the purple as some other color that the user defines. They could potentially use purple for the suit and lime green for the skin areas, so that different suit + skin colors could be used.

While it's true that things could have been done like that, the problem is that the work has already been done on what we have now and to do what you're suggesting would require recoloring all the sprites to the variable gradient anyway. What you see now has already been quite labor intensive and every bit of that costs.

[Gauddlike]

It is not just redoing existing animations and sprite sheets.

The current game engine simply does not support that kind of on the fly recolouring.

To add it in would require changing the game to a new engine.

[mudcrabs]

Really? Hmm...

As much as I like the work that's being done on the game there's plenty that should have been accounted for in hindsight.

[Gauddlike]

It is easy to say that now.

If Chris had known in advance how many people would pre order and how much cash would be available for animators etc then we would probably be looking at a very different game.

Not many indie devs can add every feature they would like to while still having enough cash for the little things like mortgages and food.

[Jean-Luc]

That's ok, the Soviets didn't wear red uniforms anyway.

[anotherdevil]

That's ok, the Soviets didn't wear red uniforms anyway.

Plus even if they did, this isn't the Soviet Army, it's the Xenonauts Mother F*&KERS! =p

[Straker]

Xenonaut colors should be uniform and non-national. The geoscape allies could be national forces though.

[Chris]

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Xenonauts would be in 3D if I had magical future vision, for a start. But basically, this isn't possible in the engine and even if it was it wouldn't be that high on my list of priorities - more interested in getting a fun, complete game first really.

There's also the argument that letting people colour their units in any lurid colour they want might spoil the atmosphere of the game a bit too (as well as leading to inconsistency with the Geoscape art).