I want to be fat

I like this idea. It was pretty dumb how even the sickly, dying old men and starving beggars were completely ripped underneath their rags. They don't necessarily need to incoporate weight into the game. Just not have muscle definition on every single person in the game, at the very least.

All they really need is three sets. Skinny, buff and fat. I think people wold be happy with that.

I really want to see fat barkeeps...

imo it will have to be a morph system to work without being a complete resource hog. Otherwise the other way would be having completely separate meshes for all body types, and the complete library of outfits having matching versions to accommodate them.

If it was just used to give different weight representations, you would only need to store a morph target at the highest possible weight, fat. then a value in the npc and character could be used to morph to any point 1-100% towards the morph target. giving the

further more there could be a system where you have texture blending in morphs too. so as the morph slider rolls up towards being fatter, the texture blends.

something like this is still resource hungry. even baring in mind that the body asset isn't all that is entailed a character on screen, it's still basically doubling the resources needed per body

It's down to how much they can pull in from other areas.

Instanced geometry and some culling features i imagine, if implemented, give them some more room. probably quite a bit seeing how much is usually going on on screen in a TES game.

I'm hopeful but not confidant.

Very good talk.

Yeah i'm starting to see where an idea like this can become a resource hog off the very instant. I'm not very mesh/model savy but I understand enough to see the common error: making sure everything fits!

Even with a small margin of editing weight to add a little flab would be good enough for me. But maybe with this new engine they have more room to move around in? I guess it all boils down to the ole' wait and see...unless the Dev's secretly implemented this at start of character production.

variety is good, yes...

...but ABSOLUTELY NOT to the being forced to stay in shape thing...

now, if you wanna play as a fat guy, scrawny guy, or muscle guy... you choose that body type in character creation... thats how it should be, THIS ISNT FABLE!

if you force people to work out, eat right, etc... thats gonna get in the way of how everyone wants to enjoy their own roleplaying experience, and i guarantee it will chase people away from the game.

they wanna roleplay, not feel as if they're in a health simulator...

i would certainly hate having to eat/sleep every now and again just to make sure my guy doesnt wobble around and die of starvation or lose his physique, whatever it is you were suggesting,

body types should be choosable in character creation, not made in-game by wasting time exercising and running around looking for a salad.

Sorry, I will not be available as a playable character...

Not necessarily TalkieToaster (Renowned modder) developed a system where NPC's are given different skeleton's (e.g. fat, severed limbs, mega-buff) and all clothing automatically refitted to match the body-type, I haven't been following it a lot, but the last I heard of it was that he could get any and all clothes to re-fit perfectly and had succeeded in applying the skeleton's, but I think there was some difficulty determining who got what body or something so it became random. Anyways my point is, we know it can be done, some of the top oblivion modders have shown proof-of-concept and this is verified to be something of plausible application.

For some odd reason, fallout 3 capped the weight value at 1.0000. I liked Oblivion's system of better choices.

Can't really see the use of having Fat Bastard in the ES series. He won't be able to steal anything, kill anything (unless he sits on it), hike, swim, endure prolonged physical exertion, that sort of thing. If I want to watch clumsy obese people flail about, I'd turn on the BIggest Loser.
(Which I hate, by the way. I wonder if any of those folks have a medical workup before the show. Judging by some of the high impact exerscises some were doing, I'd think not.)
All these people clamoring for realism need to realize that it will take longer to accomplish goals, at the expense of the player's health if the option is available to play an out of shape character.
Why waste gaming resources on that?

Only changing appearence
fat slim normal archetype for every race maybe
or maybe a slider

you start fat you end the game fat

Different body types would help SO much with the immersion, no more having old beggars look like body builders under their rags. I don't however agree all thsa tmuch with the athletics reflected in your bodyshape. Not only would this be frustrating for alot of players, it's also not very realistic. I for one am a nerd and honestly do do much in terms of workout ect. But my bodyshape is infact pretty decent despite this, so yes to body types, no to letting it be controlled by a skill.

I agree, ever since Morrowind, I've wanted more diverse body types.

Haha, right. It even worked in morrowind, when you changed the weight variable in the CS.

(Almost) fully customizable body shapes should be standard by now for RPGs.

Really fat characters would not be easy to do, as, in order to be believable, they would have to have their own unique animations. It would be a ton of extra work.

Not to mention, although the clothes already stretch and scale a bit in Oblivion, there is a limit to how much you can do that before the textures look out of place.

Basically, any changes to weight would have to be fairly subtle to avoid turning this into a hugely time-consuming operation.

Look:


http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/rr212/Qeros/nordf.jpg

An ordinary thin Nord woman standing next to an obese Nord man. They are wearing the same clothes item, all I did was increase the weight variable for Nord men. If we could have that variable apply to individuals, that shouldn't be too hard.

They should just rip-off APB's and EVE's character creators. APB has than neat feature of being able to create custom symbols in a relatively easy interface which you can then apply as tattoos, on clothing, cars etc. EVE body/face sculpting looked great, better than APB's IMO.

And before you say that clothing would have to be done for each shape: the clothing is automatically re-fitted to the new body in those games.

That looks frightening.

Only that guy doesn't look "obese", just super thick (and the textures do look stretched). It would have to be implemented more like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M77rXk09CA.

Oh, I know its far from perfect, but it does show that we won't have to build new meshes for every set of clothes.

We don't need huge, obese characters. Who wants them anyway? Just some body types from starved to a little thick so we can have variety.

I hate being fat in games... but it's nice to see other NPCs being it.

A fat landlord, a fat... bank-owner, a fat shop-owner! Those things would be awesome!!

Edit: not too fat, but some fat yes! Especially a fat face! Double chins ftw!

And fatness goes especially well with a big bushy beard.

More variation is always a good thing. I'd love to see more bodytypes for not only the player, but NPC's.