Unique Heroes Idea

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Slayer of Cliffracers
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Unique Heroes Idea

Unread postby Slayer of Cliffracers » 13 Mar 2007, 16:15

I've just though, in WoW and Gathering Storm, the main heroes, have a unique appearance on the battle map. This seems to be tied to their portrait.

I've just thought of something, why don't we make each and every hero, have a unique appearance, tied to their portait.

For the most part, it wouldn't be neccesery to do much more than paint different colors on to the hero, for hair and stuff. Non-Human heros, would be based upon the creatures.

Also, we could add special abilities depending on the race of the hero. Normal humans would be fast learners, gaining an experiance boost each level, so in effect they need less experiance to level up. Genies and Efreeti would be able to fly and so on. Elves would gain bonuses to their attack ability, their ranged ability and their spellpoints.

Human Barbarians, would be able to go beserk, meaning they cannot be controlled, they cannot shoot, they cannot cast spells, but they gain another strike, and a bonus to their damage.

The latter idea, would probably be harder than the former idea, since the latter idea has not been implemented by the designers of the game.
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Dalai
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Unread postby Dalai » 13 Mar 2007, 17:53

Set of graphic files for 1 creature or hero includes up to 1000 frames. Do you REALLY need each hero to have a unique appearance? Want to take part in recoloring heroes?

Special abilities are replaced by advanced classes' bonuses.
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Unread postby Slayer of Cliffracers » 13 Mar 2007, 21:21

Dalai wrote:Set of graphic files for 1 creature or hero includes up to 1000 frames. Do you REALLY need each hero to have a unique appearance? Want to take part in recoloring heroes?

Special abilities are replaced by advanced classes' bonuses.
Do I want to take part, well if I knew how to do it, then I wouldn't mind. It would be serious work though and I know almost nothing about programming.

1000 frames, would be pretty hard I guess, unless you got some kind of color replacer and could select for instance blond hair texture, and replace it with red hair texture, it could be done fairly quickly, as long as one didn't have to change anything else.

The simple bit would be to change the coloring of hair or skin of a single creature type, beacause you could just change the colors to suit each particular individual, on each frame, without changing anything else. Not the animations or anything else.

The biggest problem I guess would be making "new" creatures and animations. In only a few cases, you could convincingly borrow a creature animation. Effreets is the only one that comes to mind in this regard.

An effreet character, would just replace it's movement animations, with the red bubble, while remaining otherwhise the same, just with red skin.

Genies, would on their movement animations, have their legs removed, and would have the blue genie lower half. On their static animations, they would just look like blue skinned human wizards.

The other creatures, orcs, dwarves, elves and so on, are the biggest problem, beacause there you have to change the size and shape of the creature.
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Unread postby jeff » 13 Mar 2007, 22:45

How about changing it so the attributes aren't tied to the portrait but the starting profession. Example I used Alita which I customized to be a necromancer to match the story. I wanted the unique adventure icon on the map. Yet she received the Life alignment bonuses at temples and caused morale problems whenever she used her necromancy skill putting death aligned creatures into her army. Of course that could be an equally difficult problem.
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Unread postby Slayer of Cliffracers » 14 Mar 2007, 19:03

jeff wrote:How about changing it so the attributes aren't tied to the portrait but the starting profession. Example I used Alita which I customized to be a necromancer to match the story. I wanted the unique adventure icon on the map. Yet she received the Life alignment bonuses at temples and caused morale problems whenever she used her necromancy skill putting death aligned creatures into her army. Of course that could be an equally difficult problem.
Good idea too.
Working on tracking the locations of Heroes IV battles. Stage 6 of campaign map finished, all initial Heroes IV campaigns mapped.

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Unread postby Metathron » 14 Mar 2007, 19:25

Dalai wrote:Do you REALLY need each hero to have a unique appearance?
I've always wanted to have this feature, it would further personalize the existing heroes and make the game even more atmospheric. I've also suspected that a lot of effort would be needed to achieve this, and this has now been confirmed, so tough luck.
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Unread postby Dalai » 15 Mar 2007, 15:23

2 jeff
I didn't quite get the problem with Alita and thus your idea :|

2 Metathron
NWC most probably made a 3D objects for heroes and creatures, animated them and made the desired number of shots under certain angle with certain scale. It requires reasonable amount of efforts.

We have to either recreate these tools or do it all manually. Both ways require a lot of efforts. Unless some good 3D-modeler makes a miracle :). All we can do to help is give the detailed description of required result - angles, formats, scales, number of shots, etc.
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Unread postby jeff » 15 Mar 2007, 20:26

When I first started working on Dragon’s Fate I used the game’s Lamentia picture and icon. I later decided it would be nice to have some different adventure icons, so I used trick mentioned in the forum that allowed any picture to start with any skills you wanted. So I customized Alita so she would start off with the skills my Lamentia had. This meant she was a necromancer. Now the game’s Lamentia is a necromancer, when I customized Alita to my Lamentia I gave her the same starting skills as a necromancer. However, whenever the ‘Alita-Lamentia’ fought with any undead or traveled with them she suffered the same morale penalties that a priest would. When the game’s Lamentia games to a life temple she gets no morale boost, but the ‘Alita-Lamentia’ get the same boost as any life creature/hero would get.

Now I have tried customizing other heroes with the same result, it seems their alignment is tied to the base class and not the starting skill set. It maybe too much, but what I was asking was it possible to break that aligment tie with the class and associate it with the actual starting skills. Having explained it more clearly, I now realize this may way too much to take on.
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great

Unread postby Siegfried » 17 Apr 2007, 07:29

Unique heroes appearances would be great, but indeed extremely much work. How about this: If there is an unique animation frame, take this, if not, take the default one? This would allow to add them slowly over time.

There may be other personalisation ideas. How about a unique sound file for every town, depending on the name of the town? What if overriding that music with a governors music, if any?

Not really important, but would be nice.


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