The Boobie Factor

First of all, I won’t talk about the pros and cons having a female toon or about the pros and cons having some of these to play with or whatever. That’s something up to you to decide. If you expected some of these, well, don’t trust headlines, okay? Since Incarna went live I’ve seen several people complaining about the cleavage of their toons, yes, not all players set that particular slider to the max in all games and some will even complain if they’re forced to do so. Well, EVE hasn’t gotten any visible sliders, but I guess you’ll get the idea. There are some voices stating the exact opposite, too, but you’re able to simplify everything down to something like “hey, these are not the boobies *I* was looking for”. *Jedi hand trick*

While testing some of the NeX store items on Singularity, I noticed something that might be the cause for most of the confusion and obviously secretly done cosmetic surgery: Clothing! Like pretty much everyone knows, clothes can make you appear fat or slim, athletic or sloppy, etc., EVE reaches some new dimensions. Some clothes work like a corset, others like a balloon or cushion. Well, the issue seems to apply to all characters, male and female, but especially female characters got an area where the difference can be rather obvious. Sounds odd? You expect a character with more clothing, like one of the vests, appear thicker? Look at the following screenshots I’ve taken on Singularity, all from the same session with the same camera position and orientation as well as the exact same zoom level. All I did was messing with the clothing options.

Too hard to spot the difference? Don’t know what exactly is odd, other than the braids “disappearing”? Here’s an alternating version making the difference more obvious.

So, what happens here? To be honest, I’m not really sure. I’m not working at CCP and I can’t see the source code of the game, but I assume the following: Naturally, you’d expect clothing being added on top of a character, e.g. first you draw the body, then you add the clothing on top of it so it fits the body. Talking about different layers you’d most likely have something like this with the player’s set constraints (body dimensions set during character creation) being applied to the body/skin:

Body/skin (fixed size) ► Inner layer of clothing ► Intermediate layer of clothing ► Outer layer of clothing

While this sounds logical, it’s most likely not the way CCP draws the characters. Instead I assume they do it this way:

Outer layer of clothing (fixed size) ► Intermediate layer of clothing ► Inner layer of clothing ► Body/skin

Is the result the same? No, not at all! If your body size is fixed, your character will always be the same size, which also applies to all parts of his body. However, if the outermost layer of clothing is fixed, you’re getting different results depending on the effective amount of layers of clothing applied. So, what does this mean? If you think your avatar is too fat or you think his cleavage is too excessive, get him something to wear! The more clothing is applied, the smaller/flatter the different parts of his body become. This sounds odd, but just try it! It’s especially easy to notice with one of the navy shirts combined with any vest as seen above. I could understand the shirt alone sitting a bit loose, but it still feels a tad bit too excessive.

I really hope CCP rethinks this strategy (or simply rechecks/fixes it) to allow people more versatility when picking an outfit for their characters, without ignoring the constraints they picked during character creation. After all this influences the attractiveness of the NeX store items as well. Who wants to wear clothing that changes the look of someone’s toon after carefully setting it up before? And by look I’m not referring to the general appearance, of course.