Remove Weapon Rack from Strife Vest

[Kanemano]

Is this easy or is it not? From a game developer's perspective (ie; me)

If the rest of the body has an ambient occlusion pass baked in to indicate the shadows from the holsters, then it could be an issue, otherwise, if they just remove the sheathes, it shouldn't be a problem visually; there just wouldn't be polys that show that part of the map.

The other question is if the sheath verts are tied in to the main rigging (which is likely the case), and therefore, the verts are weighted to the animation. It can be problematic with blend weights (ie; broken animations/rigging) when vertices that are expected to be there suddenly aren't. Although, game engines nowadays are able to take existing animations and apply them to newer models, so this point may be moot.

One thing they COULD do though, potentially, is make a new texture file that has the sheaths textured as an alpha. Then they wouldn't render, but the verts would still be there. This shouldn't take too much effort, as professional texture map files are made so that all the bits and pieces are easily identifiable and seperated by layers/folders in the photoshop doc. This would be an easy (but kinda hacky) fix. The new item would just need a new item ID to be put into the game database (non-issue).

It would still need to be bug-tested before released, they probably have their own in-house determination scale on how much bug-testing new equipment requires, potentially it could be less because it's simply a modification to an already existing game asset.

Edit: Actually, a lot of the armor sets get re-used by utilizing the alpha method already. The skirt-type for example, I assume all use the same "skirt" mesh (this technique was used constantly in XI, as well as XIV). The behavior for all skirt animations are already in there, it's just a matter of baking down all the information from the newly designed armor (normal maps/texture/ambient/etc), which then dictates where the alpha "pokes" holes through the skirt (like instead of the front of a skirt, one asset might have it open with belts going across).

This is not an uncommon way to be efficient on asset use, and normal maps help indicate form where it should be flat, versus having actual polygon geometry.

Is it easy? It sure seems like it to me. But time taken to do this takes away time doing something else, and as hard pressed as SE's crew is on time trying to please everyone and create all this content, it's more stuff on top of the pile at the end of the day.