Cover Feedback and New Upcoming Changes

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Itikar
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Re: Cover Feedback and New Upcoming Changes

Post by Itikar » Tue Nov 24, 2020 3:15 pm

A small question: what happens to the character portrait during cover?

A nice feature of polymorph and disguise is that they temporarily replace the portrait with a generic one.

When my character is covered, however, her portrait is still visible and that, well, gives away the race very easily. :P

I wonder if maybe disguise_race can work around that and provide a portrait concealment?

I made a few tests with it in game but did not manage to find out whether disguise_race worked for that. My main on live has still not yet 20 hard ranks in perform and on PGCC I did not manage to get cover to work.

Anachorn
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Re: Cover Feedback and New Upcoming Changes

Post by Anachorn » Tue Nov 24, 2020 4:21 pm

Itikar wrote:
Tue Nov 24, 2020 3:15 pm
A small question: what happens to the character portrait during cover?

A nice feature of polymorph and disguise is that they temporarily replace the portrait with a generic one.

When my character is covered, however, her portrait is still visible and that, well, gives away the race very easily. :P

I wonder if maybe disguise_race can work around that and provide a portrait concealment?

I made a few tests with it in game but did not manage to find out whether disguise_race worked for that. My main on live has still not yet 20 hard ranks in perform and on PGCC I did not manage to get cover to work.
Well, disguise automatically hides the portrait so if you use cover + disguise your cover won't be seen, disguise race requires disguise so its the same thing.

About hiding your portrait when covered without disguised... that's a bit tricky because cover is automatic now so people who cover up won't always want their portrait hidden.

So, question is how common is it that someone tries to hide their subrace with cover and is unwilling to use disguise while doing so, if that's a common scenario than we can think of ideas to allow portrait hiding for those who wish it (suggestions are welcome!) but it won't happen automatically for everyone because that would harm those who like their portrait as it is even while covered.

Itikar
Posts: 487
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Re: Cover Feedback and New Upcoming Changes

Post by Itikar » Tue Nov 24, 2020 6:54 pm

My main character right now is covered 90% of her time, and I would prefer to have the option to hide the portrait at least sometimes.

If disguise_race allows to hide the portrait, and if I can disguise as the parent race (i.e. Elf, Dwarf, Halfling, etc.), I think that should be fine already.

If not having another option to hide the portrait would be nice.

good man of god
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Re: Cover Feedback and New Upcoming Changes

Post by good man of god » Thu Nov 26, 2020 8:10 pm

To quote my bug report, it seems Cover is a bit broken at the moment:
good man of god wrote:
Thu Nov 26, 2020 8:08 pm
Hi there,

When my character is fully covered, people cannot read their description, and I can't see it when examining myself.

I know that there was a change to where people can still see descriptions when fully covered.

My character is also disguised, but this never stopped anyone seeing their description before.

If I take the disguise off, the description still cannot be seen.

As soon as my character is not fully covered again, the description becomes visible, until I am fully covered again.

I should note, that I was stood next to ANOTHER fully covered character, and I COULD see their description.

Any idea why this is broken?

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mash
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Re: Cover Feedback and New Upcoming Changes

Post by mash » Fri Nov 27, 2020 10:11 am

I would like to request that the hidden description will be reverted. At the very least, the 500 character limit should be lifted.

My character has currently a description of about 600 characters, of which only 100 concern the actual facial features. The rest is clothing, armor, speech habits and the like. If I made the description any longer, it would definitely more about the sword and other visible equipment. As it stands now, the cover description is severely limited and cannot accommodate for that although I only use a miniscule fraction of my description for anything that would be affected by cover. It is quite painful to keep two descriptions in parallel, even more so when one of them is limited.

Now that the change has been live for some time, I have seen maybe one person who actually set a cover description. The rest just wore a helmet and had no description anymore at all, which I suspect was not intentional for the most part. Not one rped not recognizing someone they knew because the description was missing. If the reason was to reduce cover metagaming, the name/disguise tag is a much stronger indicator compelling someone to check a covered person than a hidden description is.

The "just hide your neck piece" argument does not convince me. It is an arcane and counterintuitive solution, breaks WYSIWYG, and if it is acceptable to do this it would be better to have the cover description opt-in in the first place.

All in all, I believe the cover description should be strictly opt-in to avoid confusion and to accurately reflect the intuition and intent of players writing a description.

good man of god
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Re: Cover Feedback and New Upcoming Changes

Post by good man of god » Sat Nov 28, 2020 6:08 pm

mash wrote:
Fri Nov 27, 2020 10:11 am
I would like to request that the hidden description will be reverted. At the very least, the 500 character limit should be lifted.

My character has currently a description of about 600 characters, of which only 100 concern the actual facial features. The rest is clothing, armor, speech habits and the like. If I made the description any longer, it would definitely more about the sword and other visible equipment. As it stands now, the cover description is severely limited and cannot accommodate for that although I only use a miniscule fraction of my description for anything that would be affected by cover. It is quite painful to keep two descriptions in parallel, even more so when one of them is limited.

Now that the change has been live for some time, I have seen maybe one person who actually set a cover description. The rest just wore a helmet and had no description anymore at all, which I suspect was not intentional for the most part. Not one rped not recognizing someone they knew because the description was missing. If the reason was to reduce cover metagaming, the name/disguise tag is a much stronger indicator compelling someone to check a covered person than a hidden description is.

The "just hide your neck piece" argument does not convince me. It is an arcane and counterintuitive solution, breaks WYSIWYG, and if it is acceptable to do this it would be better to have the cover description opt-in in the first place.

All in all, I believe the cover description should be strictly opt-in to avoid confusion and to accurately reflect the intuition and intent of players writing a description.
+1

Previous:
Tornius Daressin
Matthew Daressin-Gravelle
Asvusha (Blake Lynk)
Sebastian Webster

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Itikar
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Re: Cover Feedback and New Upcoming Changes

Post by Itikar » Sun Nov 29, 2020 8:13 pm

I finally got to 20 hard ranks in perform on live and tried to use disguise_race, but it still show my character's portrait which is, well, very drow.

IMHO, disguise_race without hiding portraits is a bit defeated in its purpose.

Anachorn
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Re: Cover Feedback and New Upcoming Changes

Post by Anachorn » Mon Nov 30, 2020 2:19 pm

mash wrote:
Fri Nov 27, 2020 10:11 am
I would like to request that the hidden description will be reverted. At the very least, the 500 character limit should be lifted.

My character has currently a description of about 600 characters, of which only 100 concern the actual facial features. The rest is clothing, armor, speech habits and the like. If I made the description any longer, it would definitely more about the sword and other visible equipment. As it stands now, the cover description is severely limited and cannot accommodate for that although I only use a miniscule fraction of my description for anything that would be affected by cover. It is quite painful to keep two descriptions in parallel, even more so when one of them is limited.

Now that the change has been live for some time, I have seen maybe one person who actually set a cover description. The rest just wore a helmet and had no description anymore at all, which I suspect was not intentional for the most part. Not one rped not recognizing someone they knew because the description was missing. If the reason was to reduce cover metagaming, the name/disguise tag is a much stronger indicator compelling someone to check a covered person than a hidden description is.

The "just hide your neck piece" argument does not convince me. It is an arcane and counterintuitive solution, breaks WYSIWYG, and if it is acceptable to do this it would be better to have the cover description opt-in in the first place.

All in all, I believe the cover description should be strictly opt-in to avoid confusion and to accurately reflect the intuition and intent of players writing a description.
There will be another feedback thread in a few weeks to see what everyone thinks regarding the cover description length, but I don't expect cover will stop being automatic. I will however try to add a warning or prompt when someone doesn't have a cover description and becomes fully covered alerting them to the fact they won't have any description shown, perhaps people don't know that the cover description must be set and this will increase its usage.

Regarding keeping the neckpiece, or glove, or shoe uncovered - when you do that part of the skin is visibly seen if you look at the character closely and the description therefore doesn't tell you the PC is fully covered. The neckpiece is indeed the smallest change to appearance you can make to remain non-covered but it still visibly reveals the skin which is in-sync with WYSIWYG.
Itikar wrote:
Sun Nov 29, 2020 8:13 pm
I finally got to 20 hard ranks in perform on live and tried to use disguise_race, but it still show my character's portrait which is, well, very drow.

IMHO, disguise_race without hiding portraits is a bit defeated in its purpose.
disguise_race works only when in disguise, and disguise hides the portrait, so you shouldn't have been able to see your portrait, how did you test this? (the issue with portraits is only when covered and not disguised, we should probably hide the description in this state but its technically difficult to code and there is the workaround of using disguise while covered so I'm leaving it alone for now)

Itikar
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Re: Cover Feedback and New Upcoming Changes

Post by Itikar » Mon Nov 30, 2020 4:15 pm

Anachorn wrote:
Mon Nov 30, 2020 2:19 pm
disguise_race works only when in disguise, and disguise hides the portrait, so you shouldn't have been able to see your portrait, how did you test this? (the issue with portraits is only when covered and not disguised, we should probably hide the description in this state but its technically difficult to code and there is the workaround of using disguise while covered so I'm leaving it alone for now)
I tested it as covered but not disguised yes.

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Baron Saturday
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Re: Cover Feedback and New Upcoming Changes

Post by Baron Saturday » Mon Dec 07, 2020 6:52 pm

Found a minor inconsistency in body part appearances: Hands #6 and #8 (the fingerless gloves) make you uncovered, but forearm #63 (the wristband) counts as covered.
Rolled: Helene d'Arque, Sara Lyonall
Shelved: Kels Vetian, Cin ys'Andalis, Saul Haidt
Playing: Oshe Jordain

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