There might be more info during the Q&A portion. Listening now, they seem pleased with SWTOR's performance.

If you sold part of it then that part was never bound to you so it's not in your collection.

Yep, the little known fact is SWG really had hundreds of thousands of players when it was shut down, they were all just hiding in their houses, that's why you never saw them!

http://www.metacritic.com/feature/game-publisher-rankings-for-2012-releases

EA doesn't make good games? Huh?

I hope they expand this system to stuff other than Cartel market items but it's welcome nonetheless!

This seems like a cool feature.

Actually what they think to themselves is "This is a vanity feature so it goes in the market, this other stuff is PVE/PVP content so it'll be included in a free patch". They have made this clear numerous times, not sure why people aren't understanding that. Actually I take that back, I am sure, it's because people can't remember past 3 weeks ago and all they can remember is spending $10 for an expansion and therefore all content must cost $10 in the future. It's incorrect thinking but I can only assume that some people just have extremely short attention spans. Sure, if you want to ignore the larger picture.

Actually, my argument is not null and void since 95% of the cartel market items CAN be purchased on the GTN that means you don't have to spend you monthly allotment of coins on anything else which should mean that you'll have enough every month to do appearance changes. Let's wait to see what the prices are for subs because we start flipping out. You second point is invalid, the game costs nothing now, what you spent on it previously is irrelevant.

http://www.swtor.com/patchnotes

I bought multiple copies of SWG, all the expansions and had multiple accounts for years and now the game is shut down. Such is the way of life. Neither SOE or BW owe us anything more for the money we've spent than what is presented to us when we spend the money. The business model has changed, as is their right to do by EULA, pining for money the money you spent 16 months ago isn't going to change that. If you don't think having a sub is a value to you then quit. It's really not hard to comprehend. Life is too short for me to get all indignant about a company wanting to charge me for things. If I'm not happy about it I don't give them more money. I've never felt nickeled and dimed by Bioware, I'm getting value for the $15 I spend every month. More than I get from spending $15 to eat fast food for lunch or going to see a movie.

GW2 doesn't have a sub but it's not free to play, it's $60 or the equivalent of 4 months sub for SWTOR.

Thanks for the links. I guess Wefi was talking about this: http://hewiki.heroengine.com/wiki/Dynamic_Texture_Tintable_Tutorial The problem is I've seen some ripped models from SWTOR and the textures are not greyscale, at least for the ones I've seen. Anyway, I still don't buy the argument that they did it so they could sell combo dyes. It makes no sense when you'd sell way more single dyes if people could mix and match.

I've never dealt with a palettemap when making game textures but it seems like you're describing an RGB colour map which is only being used to tint flat areas like a logo. The SWTOR textures in general are more complicated than that. I don't see how what you're describing can produce the subtle variations in colour we see in the example dyed armour they showed. http://www.swtor.com/sites/all/files/en/gameupdates/GU2.1/GU_21_Screen_bg_05b.jpg Again, we're dealing with different situations where the base texture might have to be radically recoloured in order to get the end tone you want. How is a palettemap going to make my black duster white?

Cool. How are they set up? I'm curious to know.

No no no. That's not going to produce good results at ALL. Look at the example they gave: http://www.swtor.com/sites/all/files/en/gameupdates/GU2.1/GU_21_Screen_bg_05b.jpg Look at the yellow areas on the right picture. How many colours do you see? I see yellow, bits of orange, some green, pink, metallic blue. Doing a basic colour overlay on top of greyscale is going to give you flat ugly colours. SWTOR has a very distinct hand-painted look. They need to maintain that while still giving us the customization options we want. Of course not, I'm not sure where you're getting that last part from. It would mean taking 2 maps that artists create and use parts of one and parts of another. Maybe I just take for granted that people understand how these things work since I use photoshop every day. The alpha is like a green screen in movies. You know how those work? They shoot the actors in front of a screen, later they use the colour of the screen to mask out anything that isn't the actors. Then artists create the stuff that exists behind the actors and they use mask that they got from the green screen to superimpose the two images together.

No, lol. The swatch was just to give the artists something to match to. Each texture is an individual picture, nothing is driving the colour in that picture, it's painted by the artists. The artists are likely given a set of swatches, like the paint samples you get at the hardware store that you pick from, and are told to create textures where the primary colours of the texture match those. Then they output each individual texture file from Photoshop separately. The game itself isn't doing anything except layering that complete colour texture onto the game geometry. Here is an example I did for someone else. Pretend the armour in that picture was a flat texture like I showed previously. I went in to Photoshop, masked out the areas that weren't orange, then tinted the orange to pink. That's now a new texture, call it Texture_001. http://abload.de/img/swtortint1iouhd.jpg Now I'll do one where the orange part is red, then yellow, then baby blue. Those are Texture_002, Texture_003 and Texture_004. The I produce 4 more except I leave the orange the same and change the white to pink, red, yellow and baby blue. Those are saved out individually as Texture_005, Texture_006, Texture_007 and Texture_008. Then I'll make one where I make the orange pink and the white blue, I save that as Texture_009. When someone drops a primary yellow into the dye slot the game displays Texture_003, when they drop a pink secondary dye into the slot the game displays Texture_005 and if they have a pink/white combo dye the game displays Texture_009. Make sense now?

Not already incorporated no, but pre-defined, yes. The key thing to remember is that each item can only have ONE colour texture. So lets look at the history: When the game launched that colour texture was whatever the artist had painted. When match to chest was introduced chest pieces were unchanged, since everything was matched to them, while every other piece of gear had multiple texture produced and the artists would decide which texture worked best with any given chest piece. Daniel specifically talked about this because people were worried that if you put on red jacket everything would turn red and you'd look like a power ranger. So then they work on a dye system. They already have a bunch of recolours for each piece of gear except chests. Now the artists are given a set of swatches with the dye colours and they proceed to go in a produce 2 maps for each dye, one where they alter the primary colour to match the dye and one where they alter the secondary colour to match the dye. They ALSO produce a bunch of versions where they change BOTH primary and secondary based on special combo dyes. So let's say there are 40 individual colours and 8 combos. That means each piece has 88 possible textures. When you drop a dye in the game displays ONE of these possible textures. What people are asking for is a way to display PARTS of one texture and PARTS of another at the same time. This is much more complicated because the game engine needs to be able to mix them somehow. I'm not saying it's impossible but this was the quickest way to get it implemented into the game. This system as it is was already a crapton of work for the artists.

No. Daniel Erickson specifically talked about that. What they did with match to chest is exactly what they did here. The artists produced a bunch of recoloured versions of each non-chest piece and when you click match to chest it displays the predetermined alternate texture that the artists decided fit best with that chest. Have you never noticed that the colours are sometimes not what you'd expect? So this is an evolution of that, they've already created a bunch of alternate versions, now they're filling in gaps in the textures they already possess with the rest of the colours they need to match the dyes. In other words, match to chest is technically the same thing they're doing here, only they're expanding the system. That doesn't relate at all to being able to mix and match 2 arbitrary colours on the same item. Again, you have to look at the quality of what you're talking about. We're at orders of magnitude better, higher resolution, more detailed and more complex textures and shaders than those games had.

No, maybe you guys don't understand. Take a look at this picture: http://www.ydouwant2know.com/images/Draco_03.jpg What you have from left to right is: 1 diffuse map - this provides the colour information 1 normal map - this is a way of making low polygon game geometry look more detailed by having light react to the surface as if those details were modelled in, basically it provides surface bump detail in the simplest terms 1 specular map - this tells the game which areas of your gear are shiny and how shiny they are All we're concerned with here is the first map, the diffuse, this is painted by the texture artist. So let's say we have 5 dyes: Red Green Blue Black Black/Red combo The artist will is now going to create 9 new diffuse maps: Red primary Red secondary Green primary Green secondary Blue primary Blue secondary Black primary Black secondary One with black and red So when you apply a red dye to the primary is switches to that map, if you change it to a green secondary it switches to that map. Each map is a separate texture! So now the player wants to create his own combination. How do you do this? They way you do it is by creating an alpha channel between the two maps. It's a black and white map where white shows through and black doesn't. So you have Diffuse1 > Alpha map > Diffuse2. Then the 2 layers have to be blended into a new single diffuse map. Now you've made their shader almost twice as complicated. Instead of Diffuse > Normal > Specular you have Diffuse1 > Alpha > Diffuse2 > Normal > Specular. There are other ways to do it but that combo map showing parts of Diffuse1 and Diffuse2 has to be generated SOMEWHERE. So while there is nothing to say that can't do this in the future this seems like it was the easiest way to get it into the game without rewriting a part of their graphics engine. Does that make more sense?

Well of course they'll be releasing more colour, but I was taking issue with the fact you were implying it was simply so that they could make more money. Obviously they want to make more money but I don't think the limitations of this dye system were put into place ONLY to make more money from selling combo dyes.

How? Where does this new texture map come from? Are you aware of what a set of game textures look like?

It's not a very good business strategy as you describe it though. Making combo dyes only so they can make more money from people wanting that specific combo? Doesn't make sense. If you wanted white/blue but that specific combination doesn't exist because they can't make every possible combination are you going to buy white/purple instead? Why not just charge more for individual dyes instead of hoping the combos you make are worth more than paying for 2 separate dyes?

The truth of the matter is it's much more likely that they simply don't have a shader network in place to blend 2 textures together to create a new diffuse map that combines areas of PrimaryColour1 with areas of SecondaryColour13 within their engine. I don't think your conspiracy theory is very likely.

That's kind of a ridiculous bit of FUD right there. If you wanted blue and white you'd have to buy 2 dyes, whereas if they release a blue/white one then you only have to buy one. If BW is only doing this because they are greedy bastages then they didn't think that through.