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Introducing the official Champion Palette swap (discussion)

LORD777FROSTY··15 votes·1,487 views

So with all the "discussion" flying around about the LE skins being re-released it made me remember and idea I had a long time ago when I first started playing.

Back then a lot of the skins available were really simple palette swaps (i.e. Golden Alistair, Mercenary Katarina, Toxic Mundo). And I wondered for a long while why Riot didn't try to take advantage of a Palette swap feature.

If anyone played Soul Caliber 3 you remember each character had a default skin, a secondary skin, and then a recolor for each. Not only that, but you could actually customize the colors for those recolors! It wasn't anything terribly precise, but it was always fun playing with a lime green nightmare for example.

I'm not sure how complex the coding or tech for this would be, but I feel like Riot is missing a cool opportunity here.

Again it wouldn't have to be anything terribly complex. Changing a champions hair color, or the color of his armor and weapon. Most base skins revolve around 3 or 4 colors anyway. You could even save a custom name that would appear in the loading screen like a regular skin.

So for example, lets take my favorite champion, Rengar.

You purchase the Palette swap like you would any other skin, except now on your profile there's a new drop out menu under champions titled : Palette Swap :

You click the champion you bought the Palette swap for and it takes you to a model viewer

Kinda like this --> http://www.lolking.net/models

There would be 3 or 4 sliders you could use to change colors. Make his fur light orange, his armor bright blue, and his weapon a sleek and shiney silver.

When you're done you can save it as "Liono Rengar" and bam you have a brand new custom colored Rengar skin.

Think of the possibilities! Fans could post screen shots and slider positions for the ideas they come up with. We all know how much people loved the fan made ideas that got turned into skins. Well now Riot could have hundreds of new ideas to draw inspiration from. On top of just the fun of running around with a bright pink Tryndamere, or a Demonic black, and red Teemo.

Now the pricing. 1350 sounds like a pretty good deal on both sides. Yes, they are just recolors, but they are infinite recolors. You get bored of Ashe with blonde hair and gold robes, make a ginger Ashe with bright red robes. Maybe even do a buy two get one free deal if you purchase the "palatte swap" for multiple champions.

The price allows it so people who just want the original skin (say Mercenary Katarina)can now buy it for a cheaper price as well as getting a snazzy splash art. While others can pay little more to customize their favorite champs!

Again I am not certain how much crazy coding this would require, but I believe it would be very well received by the community at large.

@Riot nerf master suck town parrot nerf Irelia pulsefire Ezreal wherE

10 Comments

TheVoiceofExile6 votes

I like this idea quite a lot actually. It sounds so basic but it would be really cool to change the color of champions. I don't think it should be applied to each skin individually though, I think it should be applied to a champion over all. People that own a bunch of skins (like myself) wouldn't want to purchase the recolor option (saying we don't get it since we already have the skin) for each of the skins. So make it champion wide and apply to each of the skins for that champion and I think this would be a pretty cool feature.

kodiak1112 votes

This is actually an awesome sounding idea. Please riot, just do it.

Cypherous2 votes

Its a nice idea but from a technical standpoint its something that could never happen, imagine the number of textures required to make this seem worth buying, its an interesting idea i will give you that but realistically i dont think its something they can add without potentially breaking so much in the process

Zielmann2 votes

Not only that, but the exact recolored model that gets created would have to exist on everybody's client.

Take custom skins as a good example. Because this is basically just an officially-supported custom skin generator. The player creates it and applies it on their end, just like with custom skins. But with customs, you only see that skin on your end. That's because the other people in the game don't have the model on their end.

So basically if you allowed this, at the start of every game, the game would essentially have to patch itself with any custom palette being used in that game in order for all players to see the custom skin. Oh, and don't forget about the load screen graphic, too. I don't even know if it's possible to have things like that 'patched' into the game just during the loading screen. But I don't want my game to take extra long to load just because a couple people have made these skins and they need transferred to my machine. What's more, the game would have to revert itself back to the base skin after the game is over.

BedderDanu2 votes

One of the ways to pull this off is to store the colors as greyscale, and then color over the grey with the value from the slider. This means there is only one texture, and the color gets algorithmically generated.

I believe this is how minecraft does it, for a simple implementation.

Zielmann2 votes

It would be an entirely new tech in how they handle skins and game models. They don't dynamically generate each skin for every instance of the game. There's a set model that gets used.

Bottom line: the complexity to do something like this is far bigger than many of you seem to think.

BedderDanu2 votes

I'm fairly certain they use textures in addition to the models. This is how the texture replacement programs work.

I do know it would be new tech. However, I think there is a way to do this so that you only need one copy of the model and texture, so the only thing that gets downloaded are the 4 colors the summoner has chosen.

the end result after all of this hard work would be the game loading the "Jax - Red, Yellow, Pink, Mauve" and coloring the texture on load.

Note: I'm simply saying it could be done without greatly effecting client load times. Not that it would be easy to develop.

ModCaptainMårvelous2 votes

I think what would be nice is a Borderland's style. For example, pay a small amount of IP/RP and you can edit 3 colors on a champion. For example, on Katarina, you edit the color of her hair, the color of her outfit and the color of her daggers. Very simple and easy to implement (I believe) and allows for customization for those on a budget.

TaintedTaint2 votes

This needs to happen. My rent money demands to be spent on this.

EDIT: However I think it should be per champion, not per skin. I would EASILY pay a legendary price for this ability

Fawlty1 votes

This idea I think opens up a lot of cool possibilities. Whatever Rioters are related to these departments need to read this.

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