Character customization! :D

So we all know that there's character customization, right? But we what we don't know, is how it'll work. I'd like it to be; Pick what race you wanna be, pick how big you are and stuff, and than draw directly onto your guy. How do you want it to work?

 

Um... Yeah, mine's just about the same. Don't forget genders for the females out there.
Kinda like minecraft, in the sense that you can make your person look like just about anything.
But maybe a little more... restricted.

 

Oh yeah, forgot about the women of the internet. And yeah we don't this:

 

Exactly.

 

Why not? The possibilities should be endless.

 

Becuase it looks absolutely terrible, and completely will ruin the starbound game experience!

 

The way somebody else looks will ruin your experience? That's just too bad. I'm gonna make myself a giant walking penis and follow you everywhere you go.

 

It looks too obnoxious and doesn't fit at all.

 

Not sure to laugh.. Or be creeped out..

 

It doesn't have to. If you don't like it you'll just have to deal with it.

 

Wow if we can draw on our characters I sure do hope they can be animated.
I want my character to be like an animated gif plucked from the darkest depths of Geocities. That would be cool.

 

BUT I DON'T WANNA DEAL WITH IT! That's why it should limited.

 

They're not going to limit something that has no need for a limit just because you don't like it. Not to mention it would be an incredibly hard thing to monitor without having character customization feel like a Nazi screening program.

 

There is the possibility that players would make characters that look like creatures in game, which definitely has an effect on gameplay. There is also a little thing called having an art style, and keeping a consistent aesthetic for a video game is important. So no, it isn't like a "Nazi screening program", it's thinking like an intelligent game developer and having some artistic integrity.

Of course, I highly doubt that the character customization is going to allow for custom sprites. The cons outweigh the pros.

 

i think it should be a cross between the terraria customiser and the minecraft one, with the separate default sections of the former (with many choices of shape etc, like hair in terraria) but the pixel by pixel colour picker of minecraft

 

There would likely be some way to distinguish player from creature, in MineCraft you can use a zombie skin but you have a name over your head, I assume Starbound will have the same. I'm going to go ahead and assume that the devs have a sense of humor, and that fun outweighs "artistic integrity". And yes, in order to screen every players skin would require a very fascist-esque screening system.

 

I'm going to place my bet that you're going to notice the monster before you notice the name, and judging by the screenshots we've seen, names do not appear over other player's heads. I'm guessing that it is more akin to Terraria in that you have to mouse over the player first. Not to mention that in your example, the player model and the zombie's model are still distinguishable if you look at their arms. With 2D sprites this boundary is not there.

Does a sense of humor really translate into allowing a player to walk around as a giant dick or big floating letters that spell "niggerfaggot"? It's a system that can be easily abused, and if it isn't possible for the devs to combat this, then it should not be in the game at all.

Edit: Another potential issue with such a system is that a player could be entirely invisible, which wouldn't fare well in PvP.

 

Whether or not a name will be visible is all speculation, it doesn't work in favor of either argument. If the zombie example doesn't work for you, think pigman. Just because a few people will misuse an option doesn't mean scrap it completely. The invisibility issue is easily combated, you can't make yourself invisible in MineCraft, it would probably work the same way.

Edit: It's probably also worth mentioning that being a walking dick is on a different level than not following artistic integrity, one is crude and offensive, the other is imposing on a players total freedom.

 

You don't know how many people are going to abuse the system. You can't just ignore a problem because only 5% of the population may make an issue out of it. It's still a problem, no matter how likely it is that you personally will run into it. Your response to the potential invisibility issue has me doubting your general knowledge on the subject. It isn't possible in Minecraft because it doesn't support transparency, but in a 2D game using sprites you're forced to. If it were to work like Minecraft, then making a character that did not perfectly overlap with the original human character would result in a white silhouette where it doesn't match up, and at that point, the freedom of the system is gone. But this is all irrelevant because that isn't how sprites work. You can't say "It'll be fine!" because Minecraft does it.

 

I was saying that there would likely be some sort of template in which you draw over, so that there would be no transparency on the main outline of the character. Let's not make percentages out of speculation. I wasn't saying that because MineCraft did it Starbound can do it, but if one game gets it right it only makes sense another game would learn from this, even if the way in which it's gone about doing is completely different.