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MU transmogrification idea.

Junior Spellweaver
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There is a lot of custom features on multitude of private servers and I wonder why there is no transmogrification system in MU.

Transmogrification system is a system in World of Warcraft that allows you to "skin" any item you wear to have a different look than the item normally has. So you can wear for example ABA set, while having the looks of Grand Soul set.

It is an extremely potent idea for MU:
  • You bring a new life to a multitude of greatly modelled armor sets in the game. Reusing a lot of content.
  • You can create a completely free jewels sink to the game economy by tying the "skin" unlocks to jewels which I will describe further.
  • You can offer server admins an additional income stream by letting them sell an easier way to unlock a skin (easier than the above option). More on that further.

I'd like to describe, how I imagine this feature working in MU rather clunky client. I'm doing this to open up a discussion to players about what do they think about it so maybe it would inspire an experienced MU server developer to work on something similar.

I am a software engineer by profession but i'm not familiar with reverse engineering of MU and I'm not running any MU private servers. I'm only a player. I'll try to describe the idea in a way that at least to my knowledge should be the path of least effort to make such feature work while maintaining its relative ease of use to players.

===

Transmog panel
There should be a new NPC in the game using any model and any name that would allow the player to work on his character skinning.

After clicking the NPC, the standard shop and inventory interface would open up. There would be a difference tho:

Shop panel:
Shop would include items that we have unlocked skins for, for example - if we had unlocked Dark Soul Gloves then it would contain Dark Soul Gloves +0, +3, +5, +7, +9, +11, +13, +15 (normal, excellent and ancient versions if applicable). One shop would contain only skins for one item part.

Their price could be configurable to include an additional zen sink (a cost of applying a skin).

Inventory panel:
The inventory (what character wears) would be a copy of the standard inventory panel but it would have a different info in the database (item skins applied). What skins are attached would be displayed then. To use the least effort, item tooltips would look like normal items even tho they would provide nothing.

A usual inventory space would just be a temporary space to purchase the item skin from the NPC and put it into the inventory slots or remove an item from the skin inventory. Anything that is there, after closing this shop panel will dissapear (it is just a workable area during skinning).

How would it work - user perspective

Switching between skinnable sets:
To keep it simple (no GUI modifications). There should be a command in game - /skin Dark Soul Gloves. That would change which unlocked item skins are displayed in the shop panel after clicking the transmogrification NPC.

Any armor skin parts that player did not unlock would not appear in the shop inventory. So if a player has nothing unlocked for Dark Soul Gloves he would see an empty shop. If only an excellent variant of an item, he would see only an excellent version of the item (+0, +3, +5, +7, +9, +11, +13, +15).

The usual use case is as follow:
Player comes to the NPC. He wants to change his appearance to Grand Soul Set armor. He enters /skin Grand Soul Gloves (a system might show a reponse like - chosen skin panel changed). He clicks the NPC and sees a shop with various unlocked Grand Soul Gloves that he can apply to his skin inventory. Whatever he applies or takes off, will be reflected on the character model and visible to other players. After he skins the gloves, he can close the panel and again enter /skin Grand Soul Pants to skin the pants and so on.

To avoid issues with models, skins should have the same rules of application as normal items when it comes to character class - e.g. MG should not be able to wear SM items etc.

To avoid to big of a craziness - players should be able to skin: armor parts, shields and weapons. IMO: wings allow for easier character identification during PvP so they should look as what the player wears.

Unlocking skins
I came with the following idea for skin unlocks.

To unlock a skin, a player has to obtain the item he wants to get a skin of and make it +15. Then he can go to Chaos Machine and burn it to obtain an item skin of it. If modifying the Chaos Machine mixes is difficult to make right - it could simply be a command /skinitem Dark Soul Gloves - which will seek the player inventory for Dark Soul Gloves +15 and delete them, unlocking the item skin at the same time.

Normal item effects, excellent item effects and ancient item effects (visual) should depend on which item we have turned to a skin (if excellent, then we have excellent variant available etc.)

The effect of such skin unlock is that it opens up a huge jewels sink to the game economy by allowing players to burn a huge amount of jewels to unlock additional skins.

Also, I propose adding an additional item called "Skin Token". It could be offered by server admins in WCoin shop. It would allow players to change an item to item skin without making it +15 first. The usage could be as simple as using the command /skinitem ST Dark Soul Gloves. Which would look for the first Dark Soul Gloves in the inventory to burn and change it to the skin (burning the token because we specified ST parameter).

This would grant an additional revenue stream for server admins.

Unknowns
There are two additional things needed to figure out:

Database structure to keep the information about which skins are unlocked for the player and which skins he has applied.

The modification to in-game packets so other players could see the player skinned items instead of the ones in the "real" inventory.

===

I hope that you guys like the idea. I'll gladly hear what do you think could be improved. Maybe with enough interest, someone from leading private server files team could deem the idea interesting and implement it.
 
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What are you trying to suggest is not really skinning.. It is just an emulation of some existing sets that probably will mislead other players.
The real skinning is already there in the game like: glow effect, ancient effect etc.
From my point of view the skinning is when you could color your items, put some images over it, change the glow color and so on and so forth.

1) Would be good at least to have in game glow color editor
2) Load multiple OZJ files per model and of course all required changes in the main.exe to be able see different skins on the players.

In this case even players could participate in designing new skins for models and upload those somewhere for future client updates.
 
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Junior Spellweaver
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2) Load multiple OZJ files per model and of course all required changes in the main.exe to be able see different skins on the players.

In this case even players could participate in designing new skins for models and upload those somewhere for future client updates.

something like this was done on multiple private servers back in the good old days around 10 years ago (s3ep2 and s4) . first it was a very cool feature, but it got to a point where servers started doing custom sets, wings and weapons, which had stats way better than anything else on the market and became instantly the thing everyone was getting.

it essentially broke the game balance within each class, as even same class players with better set options would lose if the opposing player had the op weapon, not to mention how it broke the traditional game balance between classes.

so, for a good reason servers stopped doing it as it was essentially turning into a dickfight about who had the most op set and simultaneously breaking their server balancing.


as for skin editing and glow editing being available for players, I think it would only serve to kill player's interest in the server even faster as one of the main charms of muonline is compiling your set with correct options etc. if you had the ability to skin them, you could easily just take any parts with correct options and skin them.

only upside I can think of is that you could have FO leather set and FO hand axe on BK/DL, which would have the glow turned off. that way you could look like a noob and go stealth while still being able to kick some serious butt.
 
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