Dragon Character Creator Feedback

Hello everyone, I'm Nocturnea! I've been messing around with the dragon character creator for a while now, and have some feedback I'd like to share. None of these are major, in fact they might be more nitpicks than anything else, but none the less I feel they could be improved:- First off, the body texture setting. I find the order in which the choices are presented is a little odd. I would think that due to there being three brightness settings and five scale types, it would be 1-5 normal, 6-10 brighter, and 11-15 brightest, but it's actually 13-2 normal, 3-7 brighter, and 8-12 brightest! It's not a major issue, but this seems like it could be ordered a bit more neatly.There's also the matter that scale color brightness and body texture are wrapped up in the same setting; while not inherently an issue, it might not be obvious to a new player that changing the body texture can also change the brightness unless they mess with the settings. I think it would be better to either separate them into two different settings, or just change the name to something like "Body Texture/Brightness" so that it's clear what it does.- Next, it seems unnecessary to have a Highlight on/off toggle separate from the color select. Since there is only one Highlight type, I think it makes more sense to fold it into the color select and have 1 be "off/none".- The chest plates have the same issues as body texture; the order is a little off (the first and last plates seem like they should be swapped) and brightness is lumped in with plate type. Not much else to say here.- Lastly, Decals have a similar issue to body texture and chest plates, they are very jumbled around and there's a fade effect mixed in. I find it the worst here as the decals are a lot more out of order, and the fact that there are so many makes it harder to find what you want. Reordering the list to either always go normal version-faded version or show all the normal versions then all the faded versions (assuming you don't make the fade effect it's own setting) would be good here.
Thank you for reading all that! Hope this helps and that you have a great day!

Hi Nocturnea, thank you for your feedback!

As part of the Visions update (a project in which we are gradually revamping character models), a new character creation menu is planned to be put into place where we're going to try to address some of these issues. In our current creator, I'll give some explanations as to why it is set up as it is currently.

When we add a new marking or texture, we need to add it to the end of the list as another entry. We can only add, delete, and edit - not order - in the database, so anything 'new' is placed onto the end of the list. This results in the issue with the markings where you have opaque, translucent, then opaque/translucent/opaque/translucent at the end of the list. The block of opaque and then translucent markings are the original ones available in the game, while the alternating ones afterwards are ones we added in later on.

It appears that for some reason, the original development team decided to add in the markings and scale textures in the order you see them - where it's all opaque then translucent for markings, and the odd groupings of dark/medium/light scale textures. Even more curious, the Chaos and Order character creation orders are different from our internal ones - I believe Order matches ours, but Chaos is out of order. (Fitting, no?)

I'm not aware of a way to order them currently, not with our tools and without randomizing the current characters in-game. It may be possible to adjust them directly in the raw data of the database, but I can't confirm and I've never questioned our tech guys if that's feasible. I'm also concerned it could break something if we messed with it.

The highlight is a little different - the way it works is the 'toggle' on/off either adds an overlay texture or removes it. Then the color changes the tint file used to color it. We cannot have one option choose both a tint and a texture, so it's done with a toggle instead. It opens the possibility for more highlight textures in the future, as well, so we've never looked into developing the tech to combine tints and textures.

In the future when we mess with the character creator, I want to make the options more clear when you choose them - such as 'choose a scale texture' and then you can adjust the light/dark/medium variations as a separate option and similar for markings.

I hope my answer gives you some insight and isn't too much of a disappointment! :)