hmm
I get what you are saying. Although im not a modeler, I hustled in Black hood with mask, Black Lamellar Vest and Snowflakes into cRPG back in the day.. (With help from kind modelers I found on the warband forums)
It IS daunting to approach Shik!
Although from our communication, I learned some things about quality control I didn't know. I sent 5 or so versions of Black Lamellar before he approved. I was happy with the first one, but I must agree the approved one was the best. He rejected 5 out of 6 Masked Hoods. I think chadzius dealt with the snowflakes though.
The reasons for this resistance were clear enough and I do understand him. First of all this game is played on many different gfx settings on many different monitors. It has a certain palette, and objects have a shinyness within a certain range. It is important to keep all new gear inside the contrasts and saturation "limits" of the game, and polycount low for performance issues.
Many people make shiny new items that would stand out like crazy on the battlefield. It seems there's nothing in the gfx engine limiting the colours, they are all done in the palette of the items. I.ex, on my screen I think the new Turk hats have too white, white colour in them. They don't fit well with other white things we have like horses, and armors like the white lamellar or headcloths.
These kind of mistakes break the "visual mood" of the mod, and can throw you off.
Also, many items are just copies and retextures of old items, and perhaps not worthy of a place. IDK but I assume the more different models and textures you have on the battlefield, the memory and performance get's sucked out of your comp. As this mod requires a steady 60fps with 120 players on to be competitive, and many play on old laptos or old comps (i.e. chadzius) this is important.
New items should be unique in some way, and not be copies of each other or old items with small differences.
So to finish off, yes I think both Ujin and Shik may be right. For sure comms are not working properly.
Here's my suggestion:
- Perhaps we could ask Shik to post some guidelines for modelmakers and texturemakers? About limitations in colour, shinyness, historical accuracy, what they want to see, technicalities on LOD's etc? It's not unthinkable that some non-dev expert could work an in-between quality control before Shik. If such a person exists, raise your hand now.
- Do like the Ninjas, retexture old armours to fit our preferences, and spread our ninja-patch-hacks among ourselves. You may think we look silly in steppe armor, but for us we look uber-cool.
