Would you use an external character creator?

[Taliriah]

Just say the devs can never untangle the spaghetti code and the character customisation will never improve significantly... would you use an external OFFICIAL character customisation app that you can import into the game? (Imagine something like the benchmark but just for making your character.)
I've heard people have copied dat files to/from the benchmark to see truer representations of their characters, and it got me thinking about how that could potentially sidestep the in-game code.

Thoughts?

Assuming they are not updating character creation due to "spaghetti code" is quite the assumption. And anyway, your proposal would work only if the limitation was "the ingame character customization UI", which is frankly an absurd theory. With your proposal the hard part of the work, ie adding bones and additional mesh/texture variations to the character, would need to be done anyway.

I think the biggest limitation is bandwidth. The game have to send out character descriptions to every other player in range. This uses upstream bandwidth from the server, and this can balloon very quickly when a lot of players are clumped together (think limsa): every player character description have to be sent to every other player in view range, so it increases quadratically. And upstream bandwidth is expensive.

So they are probably counting bytes when it comes to character descriptions. That is why they rarely expand it (you see the same thing happening in WoW btw), and when they do, its parsimonious. This is why for instance there's a preset set of dyes rather than RGB sliders. Currently they can use just one byte per dye, because there's less than 255 of them.

After all these years all they're willing to give us is a secondary dye slot, that is, just 6 more bytes (assuming weapons also get a secondary dye slot, otherwise it would be just 5). That should give you an idea of how much they want to keep the size of character descriptions down.

[Iscah]

After all these years all they're willing to give us is a secondary dye slot, that is, just 6 more bytes (assuming weapons also get a secondary dye slot, otherwise it would be just 5). That should give you an idea of how much they want to keep the size of character descriptions down.

I've seen people theorising that they might not even be assigning "six more bytes" but repurposing some less important data that is currently being transmitted.

Likewise, the new glasses slot is probably repurposing the old belt slot with some new way of recording what is equipped there.

I also recall someone saying in the Hrothgar megathread that adding their hairstyle customisation option was done via weird stuff in the back end with a multitude of copies of each head type and a hairstyle attached, rather than one head with a hair model applied.