personal heraldry

[leander 127]

      In this thread I would like to talk about the posibility of Personal Heraldry. I should start by defining what I mean by Heraldry: it is the practice of devising, granting, displaying, describing, and recording coats of arm and heraldic badges, if you were to simply type it into the Google search bar.  It is to be used on deed banners as well as other personal items such as tabards, wagons, horse covers, and flags, or other such display items.  In this way a person could display his/her own individuality or allegiance to one's village, or just simply personalize the look of one's wagon, ship, deed area, ect..  Now I'm sure this topic has come up before, but I couldn't find it when I looked, and be sure, I did look. 

        Before I started playing Wurm I was an avid W.o.W. (World of Warcraft) player for more than 10 years, until I honestly got bored with it, and on that they had a tabard system for guilds, one that a guild leader could modify with moderate customization, and a similar function already exists in Wurm with the shop signs.  Has this ever been considered, or thought of? I guess is what I'm asking.  If I were to create it, I would make it a window that a player could choose between 6 simple shield shapes, 8 backgrounds with various color combinations, and 10 or 20 heraldic images that could be positioned, sized, and colored on the shield to create the personal heraldry. 

         I have fallen in love with this game and look forward to a long relationship with it  as my gaming history would show. I will not be leaving for a while because Wurm has so much that I find appealing.  I just wanted to say that, but as far as this idea of mine for personal heraldry, I do look forward to having feed back, maybe getting this idea to a game creator, or even seeing it actually in game.  I've thought about this for a while and have a few other ideas for it, but I will hold those back for the right time.    

     

[Toecutter 331]

This has been suggested  many times  but i am  all for it

[NeoAnderson 242]

Concept has come up before, but certainly would be fantastic!

[Firestarter 1,210]

Moved to Suggestions & Ideas.

[leander 127]

   Firstly I would like to thank firestarter for helping me correct where my post should be and apologize for my foolish post placement.

   With that out of the way I continue, if it has been thought of, why may I ask has it never been implemented?  Perhaps if I may speculate, could it be that the proverbial  "math" is too outrageous, or even that the programing would be a logistical nightmare.  that would be what I would guess however if the game Dev. team is working on it for a patch in the future then I do look forward to hearing about it at the right time.  It should be noted that I do not seek to get an inside scoop, nor do I want the Dev. team to reveal any secrets that they have planned, I only wish to stimulate conversation on this subject.

[Slickshot 1,195]

27 minutes ago, leander said:

   Firstly I would like to thank firestarter for helping me correct where my post should be and apologize for my foolish post placement.

   With that out of the way I continue, if it has been thought of, why may I ask has it never been implemented?  Perhaps if I may speculate, could it be that the proverbial  "math" is too outrageous, or even that the programing would be a logistical nightmare.  that would be what I would guess however if the game Dev. team is working on it for a patch in the future then I do look forward to hearing about it at the right time.  It should be noted that I do not seek to get an inside scoop, nor do I want the Dev. team to reveal any secrets that they have planned, I only wish to stimulate conversation on this subject.

Well the most simple answer to your question would be that the development team has a list of other suggestions and possible updates to consider and work on.  That doesn't count the bigger content that takes them quite a while to implement or bug fixes for current mechanics and features.

 

So while many suggestions may be good, it doesn't mean they are urgent or more important than what is being worked on right now.  Some suggestions are used, and many are not, but we can't decide the time frames of such things.  Perhaps your suggestion will eventually be used.. Who knows?

[Alkhadias 548]

I like the idea however I'd suggest to add this option only to people with Knight titles.

[leander 127]

Thank you Slickshot, I do understand that there a literal boat load of suggestions the Dev. team gets, and I also understand that all good thing in good time, so I do look forward to future updates and content.  perhaps this will be one. 

On ‎3‎/‎27‎/‎2016 at 6:10 PM, Alkhadias said:

I like the idea however I'd suggest to add this option only to people with Knight titles.

Thank you Alkhadias for your comment, personally I would have to say that, limiting heraldry in this manner would be unfair, however it would be limited by premium status of a player account, and perhaps for knights they could get a embossment on the outside of the coat of arms like the helm and rampant animals on either side to indicate rank.  I say it this way because I am a premium player but I don't know if I will ever gain the knight title, and I'm happy with that, however if a person want to become a knight then they will have access to an additional customization option.  This could even give certain titles images that could be used in the making of the heraldry, and insure that a player doesn't flip flop and remake their heraldry a hundred times the player would have to pay an increasing amount of silver every time after the first creation to modify or remake it. to ensure that there are not duplicates that would work like player names, as in if a player creates a coat of arms it would be unique to that player account, and saved with other account information.    

[Fawkes 1,567]

On 03/27/2016 at 0:05 AM, leander said:

   With that out of the way I continue, if it has been thought of, why may I ask has it never been implemented?

It used to be that wooden objects had their own textures depending on wood type, but this was scrapped because supposedly it was too resource-intensive. I didn't notice a difference in performance, but the staff insists that it has a large effect and they aren't budging until they figure out some hacky workaround involving shaders. So if half a dozen wood textures are too much strain on the game, thousands of unique heraldry textures probably would be too.

[leander 127]

8 minutes ago, Fawkes said:

So if half a dozen wood textures are too much strain on the game, thousands of unique heraldry textures probably would be too.

 

On ‎3‎/‎27‎/‎2016 at 0:05 AM, leander said:

Perhaps if I may speculate, could it be that the proverbial  "math" is too outrageous, or even that the programing would be a logistical nightmare.  that would be what I would guess

Thank you fawkes, that was part of the reason of why I speculated what I did.  I am no computer programmer, I am just a person with an idea I wanted to have a conversation about.

[Etherdrifter 2,512]

Going to bump this and add a note discussed on another thread:

The idea of locking certain devices and symbols behind a material wall (so 150 QL90 bird cages to unlock a phoenix, or 100,000 QL of saplings to unlock a different trees, or 100,000 QL of shafts to get a cross pattern, etc).  Each different pattern or symbol displays genuine achievement by the alliance, rather than just being something to pay for.

Plug an initial fee in front (2g-ish), and I think everyone can agree this would work well.

[Thalius 246]

For the Freedom kingdom side of this, rather than having a huge list of random items to spam out in bulk simply to give some obstacle to overcome to prove something about alliance/deed activity in the game and thereby unlock certain heraldry related options:

I'd very much rather see a system whereby a deed or alliance could work to "gain favor with the king" that would award them ranking within the kingdom and eventually give the deed owners and certain other highly contributing citizens within the deed/alliance the right to lordship and knight-ship (and possibly other appropriate titles that could be earned).  At that point, once lordship of some kind has been granted to a settlement owner/alliance deed owners, the deed/alliance could submit a request to have personalized heraldry granted to the deed or alliance "by the king", (with an appropriate gift in gold to the king's coffers offered at that point, of course). 

 

[leander 127]

i agree to locking certain devices and things behind some achievement barriers like connecting to crafting or journal entries or other achievements very much like titles perhaps even in conjunction with them. i still believe that heraldry for a village should be allowed after the village has been in existence for a amount of time, or even perhaps when the deed gets a trader that will unlock the heraldry application, this we agree on that there needs to be a time that heraldry is disallowed to prevent noob spam. i still think that it should be easily attainable however. A person's individual heraldry is a part of the journal and can only be put on a tabard for the player to wear or a banner to be displayed the image can evolve and be altered by the player as they reaches certain journal milestones and achievement.  It would have very basic beginnings, very limited  i am not saying that doing one way is the way it should be done and every idea helps to evolve it as a whole. in the end i'm agreeing with the ideas and adding my thoughts. 

[wipeout 1,355]

On 3/29/2016 at 11:32 PM, Fawkes said:

It used to be that wooden objects had their own textures depending on wood type, but this was scrapped because supposedly it was too resource-intensive. I didn't notice a difference in performance, but the staff insists that it has a large effect and they aren't budging until they figure out some hacky workaround involving shaders. So if half a dozen wood textures are too much strain on the game, thousands of unique heraldry textures probably would be too.

It stems from the fact that wurm kinda loads almost everything into memory and the following is by no means bashing staff, The game runs it works but there is a lot and i mean a lot of pure straight up client optimization that can and should be done same goes server side and slowly bit by bit it gets done but with the nature of what wurm is and how old wurm is and how it was developed from early on there is a lot still left of old ways of doing things that in todays age would not pass at all and slowly they get worked on

If you have restrictions in place that stem from "we must support older machines" then ya having 18 different textures all of the same item times every wooden item in the game(of which there are many) it adds up real quick
Lets take large table as an example currently the texture file for that is 350kb having 1 is fine sure but times that by 18 and we sit at 6.3mb now we grab other items and start adding them up by the time you sit at 100 items(just to keep it simple lets say average file size is 300kb) you would be sitting at 540mb worth of just dds files for wood textures alone making up 62.5% of the current graphics.jar file

Now lets take the fact that handles for every tool would easily add in over 100+ unique items ontop of that you reach a point where you have to make a decision do you go for players having to download a 10gb game or a 1gb game and next to that wurm loves loading almost everything into memory so do you want wurm to load all that too?
In a modern engine having 190gb of textures is not an issue with selective loading based on content around you in an area and preloading content outside of your visual range with modern gpu's it becomes even easier but wurm is wurm it starts to struggle and struggle a lot when you start to introduce a lot of texture data, i made a mod for wu where was just importing pictures to display on paintings (new item that you could select a picture from a list and it would display it) and you could tell it started to have issues when you have a few thousand wallpapers that it can load and is loading in a small area but it was a fun experiment and something i hope wurm might have themselves some day

Either way with the nature of what wurm is going the shader route for colors of wood types was the better way which again was a huge undertaking as the game wasnt designed for that

Now to the topic at hand having a customizable tabard system would be nice id honestly love it if it extended beyond just tabards but instead of creating textures for every possible type wurm would need to be able to paint specific surfaces with specific colors based on data instead which well we can now with armor and ships and such and if you look at some wu mods its not really that hard to extend kingdom textures onto boats dynamically so wurm does have some of the tech for it laying around
So we might see this in the future honestly after the combat changes after the ui after jackal 2 after steam after what is currently planned once the big things they are working on now are done we might start seeing more customization pop up here and there and at such a time i hope we get more clothing choices and the ability to make them more unique

[leander 127]

in the other post i go deper into the idea and explain it a bit further as u see below

 

personalized deed heraldry purchasable from a trader starting with a scroll using a similar mechanic as shop signs only a bit more complex starting with the frame

Spoiler

 

 

then the back ground would have a few options along with the field show below the color of the field could be chosen here

Spoiler

 

 

then a few options for the main image depending on the field chosen you have a few placement options upon the field, or to keep it simple the image could just be the only one you can choose would still give plenty of options and variations. color would be one of the options for the image too. 

Spoiler

 

to prevent the creation of a black horse on a black field a very simple heraldic rule would be in place "no metal on metal no color on color" any part of the image can not share a color with another part of the image in other words if u have a white(silver), and a yellow(gold) party per bend field you can not have a yellow(gold) wolf bust, it would say you need to change the color values to complete.  the alliance heraldry could be a bit more complex but i have thought about this idea for a very long time and even posted a thread about it myself long ago here.

 

thinking on it a bit the village heraldry would be separate from the personal heraldry (the one on your journal) and the personal would only be able to be applied to tabard and regular banner, the village heraldry could go on tall banners, standard banners, flags, tents, pavilions, wagons, and boats with sails.  

[leander 127]

ok so here are some ideas that i worked on from super simple to slightly complex i used a photo editor i have on my pc to make these and only used the images i provided from the earlier post to give some idea of what the heraldry could look like 

Spoiler

the bas shield and field design just a few options i chose for this example but could be more

 

second i took some of the images all very simple 

Spoiler

the image could have color and meaning to the maker 

the one below wold be one that is a bit more complex

below is very simple way to have an image on that field

this would be a very complex image 

i could go at this for hours and have hundreds of examples but u get the idea.. tbh i just wanted to create one of these as an example since i started this post