Open Discussion: Equalizing Male and Female model heights

[Maiyannah]

I am actually somewhat of the opinion that this is non-controversial to do, but rather than run roughshod over our admittedly-small community I'd rather solicit your actual opinions.

This came up elsewhere but I'm not planning on re-arbitrating that whole mess. Just to be clear and have full disclosure.

Right now, even with height scaling that I'm presently beta testing, an equal scale male is taller than an equal scale female, because the core dynamic model for females is generally (not always) shorter. This means that even if I allow things to be as max scale as they can be without breaking things (collission etc), women are going to be shorter then men.

Means exist to algorithmically do this, so it isn't too tedious. The larger consideration is that it means we will not be able to directly use things from the vault, each and every item would have to be modified again with the same algorithm. It's prone to things being forgotten.

My thought is to look at doing this once we feel the collection of items/gear/vfx we have is fairly mature and unlikely to see large additions. But I welcome your own.

[wilkins1952]

I think that it should be a thing, However is not urgent so far as we need it immediatly. But it should be done sooner rather than later. As for the concern that things from the vault might be prone to being forgotten to be modified, Ultimatly I don't see that as too much of an issue. If something new is added and missed I feel it will be a minor inconveniance at worst until it is fixed.

[Maiyannah]

I suppose my biggest concern in that regard is I'm still adding a fair few things here and there on a regular basis from the vault; once that's settled down, it's easiest to do this in one "batch" process.

[Ouroboros]

Assuming height scaling works as I've seen it on other NWN servers where you input a desired height and your character model is upscaled to roughly match that height, I'm not aware of what impacts this actually has RE; using vault content. Are all the assets used not scaled up accordingly with the character model?

[Maiyannah]

Assuming height scaling works as I've seen it on other NWN servers where you input a desired height and your character model is upscaled to roughly match that height, I'm not aware of what impacts this actually has RE; using vault content. Are all the assets used not scaled up accordingly with the character model?

The attachment points will need manipulated.
It is NOT a big deal, but it does put additional work on top of importing anything into the game thats clothing/armour/models.

[wilkins1952]

Waiting a little until the bulk of the heavy lifting with importing Vault content and such. Then sitting down to focus on this I feel is a good way to go about it. It might mean that a few people need to adjust their PCs heights afterwards to better represent them but this I feel is a minor and short term issue.

[Maiyannah]

Yeah batch processing it makes things easy in this regard.

I'm all for doing this, it's just a lot more technically feasible if we do this once we are happy with having most of the customisation options we want to have in. I prefer the players to have direct control over their height, not have to fuss around trying to work around the model, so normalizing the dynamic model sizes is best here I think (also makes height calculations a lot easier in the backend)

[Maiyannah]

I think a means to do this would be to equalize the phenotypes.
I don't know enough about the rigging to be able to do this myself, but it is something I may look into when I get the chance.