Weekly Discussion #16 - What kinds of rewards would you like to see?

We already have tournament rewards in the form of avatars and cold, hard cash, but I've been exploring ideas for other types of events, like a TMM Blitz to boost TMM numbers, or for the various ladder leagues.

Stuff I've considered so far:

Money: Covered by tournaments
Avatars: Not particularly "special" since we already have these in the hundreds
In game cosmetics like ACU skins or hats: Would be awesome to have down the line but requires a lot of dev time to implement
Colored (or with effects) usernames in client: Would have to override or completely remove the ability to do so by individual users

Fame/recognition - e.g. news post recognising the winner; part of the client that highlights recent winners of tournaments; etc.

There used to be a ground decal mod, where some custom decal would appear at your spawn location. I think it might be this one https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=12450 but not sure. Anyways, spawn decals would be a cool reward.

A seat in the faf association

acu skins

New models or hats for ACUS would be best, but something easier to implement would be custom ACU (or even unit) textures. Imagine if all Cybran units had their black metal replaced with white metal. Would look dramatically different while keeping the same mechanical detail and flavor

News highlights of recent winners

The day the great FAF-team manages to steal StarCraft's idea with having different color-shemes is the day I'm actually willing to pay for smth.

@Sladow-Noob do you have an example of that?

@Jip I assume he's referring to the unit skins: https://youtu.be/fMA185owd-w

@Blodir @Poop_Dynamics @Zeldafanboy I like these ideas, but they all require a similar amount of dev time.

From talking to @Jip (perhaps he can clarify) the primary issue with any in-game cosmetics is getting the holy trinity of game-server-client to agree who has what cosmetics. Making a hat or new textures is pretty simple comparatively.

Also @Zeldafanboy faction-wide skins like that are fairly unlikely. For reference unit textures combined are about 324 MB. Assuming about 20% of that is for each faction (accounting for random campaign stuff and the like) that gives us 81 MB per faction reskin, which each and every user would need to download. We'd be over doubling the entire FAF repo (which is around 200 MB) to give each faction one other skin. I agree white-metal Cybran would be awesome, but I don't think it'd be feasible to distribute.

I'd like to see TMM rank icons appearing in more places (eg your highest one appears where an avatar usually does if you don't have one selected)
Should also (hopefully) increase TMM participation

@deribus

Hm, well is it possible to just reskin the ACU and Experimentals, then? That would be a much smaller filesize comparatively

@jip @archsimkat
Actually I was thinking more about just changing the color-shemes and not directly skins. Smth like this:

As a comparison for the non-StarCrafters, this is how it normally looks.

It'd add a bit variety and is basically like an icon... But in cooler since you actively see it ingame. However I have absolutely no idea if that can actually be implemented or not xD
However it'd take a lot of effort, but at the same time it's a nice way to gain some money.

Aside from the client+server+game issue pointed out by @Jip we would also need an artist with lots of spare time, highly specific skillsets and possibly some graphics shader development to boot. Creating new textures isn't just 2d work if you want to do something more interesting; it requires creating an all-new hi-poly mesh that matches the game model, texturing it, and then projecting this highly detailed geometry onto the game meshes used to render that unit (lod0 + lod1 times however many independently-animated parts a unit has) to create the new textures. Even an otherwise experienced artist will be pulling their hair out before finishing a t1 scout reskin if their ambitions are to do more than just paint over the existing textures.

What about just doing the acu?

@veteranashe I'll do an acu for you if you pay me for a few week's worth of work haha

@phong

Even just recoloring the base materials of each faction would be a good start. Starcraft 2 has remodels and changes the glossiness and materials of units, making units shinier or matte etc. Obviously that's far more ambitious than just turning UEF base metal from a shade of off-blue to olive green... but I think even that would look really nice.

If unit skins are too much work how about custom weapon or shield colors for a few select units? Imagine monkeylord with black maser or Seraphim pink shields.

@phong said in Weekly Discussion #16 - What kinds of rewards would you like to see?:

Aside from the client+server+game issue pointed out by @Jip we would also need an artist with lots of spare time, highly specific skillsets and possibly some graphics shader development to boot. Creating new textures isn't just 2d work if you want to do something more interesting; it requires creating an all-new hi-poly mesh that matches the game model, texturing it, and then projecting this highly detailed geometry onto the game meshes used to render that unit (lod0 + lod1 times however many independently-animated parts a unit has) to create the new textures. Even an otherwise experienced artist will be pulling their hair out before finishing a t1 scout reskin if their ambitions are to do more than just paint over the existing textures.

Can we mod shaders? If you know how to then hit me up. I'd be curious to play around with them a bit. I've written a few shaders for my 3d renderer project, but idk what I'm doing really.