Vierra hats?

[Iscah]

I mean they could just make holes to them for ears, I know it's a hard work but it's kinda expected of them honestly, you can't just have 2 races that can't see hats they are using because it's too much work. They should make space for that work and eventually have it happen.

My impression is that it's not about it being "too much work" but that there's something about the character designs that inherently stops them from working well with the programming for equipping hats.

From memory, when they were talking about them at the Fanfest reveal they said they made the decision that it wasn't necessary for them to be able to wear hats. Combined with their unusual design (moreso for Hrothgar) it sounds more like a design choice than a "corner-cutting" exercise.

This mostly makes sense with Hrothgar - I see it as being a flow-on effect from the same unusual use of character settings that puts fur patterns in the 'hairstyle' setting slot.

This is all guesswork and observation but...

1. Assume that the normal process for equipping a hat is that the [character element in the hairstyle slot] is in two halves. To equip a hat, the top half of the [hairstyle] is turned off and the hat is added, giving the illusion that the hair is under the hat. It does not affect any other parts of the model.

2. To give Hrothgar customisable fur patterns that respond to the hair colour and highlights settings, the pattern choice had to be placed in the [hairstyle] selection category.

3. Because of this, they had to make Hrothgar manes built into the [face] setting instead of a separate piece added later.

4. Now... add a hat. It's programmed to change something in the [hairstyle] setting but won't do anything to the [face] setting.

Probable outcome: the mane doesn't go "under the hat" but clips straight through it.

Thus - once people objected to the prospect that headgear wouldn't be visible at all - they added the items that don't require that "turning off" of part of the hair but just sit over it or don't touch it.



Viera are... harder to make sense of, although some of their unique hairstyles are quite "fluffy" and might not fit well under a hat - though that's possibly an effect of knowing they didn't have to design the hair with hats in mind.

Perhaps it's some odd side-effect of being treated as "one race" alongside Hrothgar in the programming, which means options have to be turned off for the race as a whole even if it should be fine for Viera alone.



It would be nice if they went into a deeper technical discussion of their design choices and why the races have these limits, instead of leaving people thinking they're just temporary measures or "didn't do the work".