Phantasy Star Online 2

[MachEnergy]

Great, another 6 hours spent making an ugly character. God, I hate video games :\

[Wraith]

Did anyone have audio working in the demo? I saw options for trying different dialog or character voices, but didn't hear anything. And no music either.

[Wraith]

[Wraith]

[KamaItachi]

I gotta give the CC a whirl tonight. Some of those look awesome.

[MachEnergy]

I have to say, I'm quite impressed with those screen caps Wraith. How much of this is your ability vs how good the tool is?

[Cyndair]

Nice pics, Wraith!

I also didn't hear any audio when selecting what seemed to be the voice option. However, my music/menu sounds worked fine throughout. I think it may be that you are selecting your character's dialogue animation and not necessarily their voice.

[J Arcane]

It seems pretty cool, but trying to fumble through the Japanese is frustrating. I got mad when my awesome looking blade-wielding chick suddenly got reset to random shit, and then quit the thing.

It's a fun toy though, and makes me more intrigued for the game.

[Cyndair]

Originally Posted by J Arcane

It seems pretty cool, but trying to fumble through the Japanese is frustrating. I got mad when my awesome looking blade-wielding chick suddenly got reset to random shit, and then quit the thing.

It's a fun toy though, and makes me more intrigued for the game.

Ugh, yeah, I did the same thing, then later realized that there is an undo button in the bottom right corner of the screen (circle arrow icon). Just an FYI if you fire it up again in the future.

[Wraith]

Originally Posted by MachEnergy

I have to say, I'm quite impressed with those screen caps Wraith. How much of this is your ability vs how good the tool is?

I think the tool is very good, as character creators go. It doesn't have the breadth of options that City of Heroes/Villains does, but it's better than a lot of other character creators, including previous PSOs. The only thing required to make a decent looking character is enough time to fiddle with all the different settings. (And in this case, figuring out what settings do what; I understand there's an unofficial English translation patch out there, but haven't tried it.) And making a quick character isn't hard either - randomize a few times, change a few settings/colors and you're good to go. In detail:

You start out by picking your race/gender. Then choose class (out of 3), then predefined character template you want to start from (out of 10). After that, you're in the editor, and probably can't go back and change your race/gender/class. The randomize button can be helpful, if you don't care for the predefined character templates. And undo/redo buttons are on the bottom right of the screen. CTRL+Z also works for undo, I'd guess CTRL+Y for redo. Character creators without undo/redo are a pain to work with.

For head/face and body proportions, you get both an axis-based control that lets you combine various styles (see the blog link for details), and you get individual sizing sliders - and these are more adjustable than simple min/max sliders. Hard to explain, but you'll see when you play with them. For example, on Newman ears, you can adjust whether they're thin/wide, long/short, and angle up/down, from a single tool. And while you can go crazy with the adjustments and get something ugly/goofy looking, I never got the feeling that hitting the extremes of a slider made something that looked totally inhuman/unusable, as you sometimes get tweaking the sliders in the Sims games. Seems like a pretty good balance between giving you options, and keeping them within usable ranges. (Though character heads look a bit too big on super-short bodies; and going for the most morbidly obese setting possible is pretty weird, too.)

You can also have 4 different settings on screen at once. As you open new settings, the 4 most recent remain on screen until closed. So you don't have to go back to the menu as much, if you're tweaking several things in combination.

You get color palettes for hair, skin color, and armor. Humans and Newmans have normal skin tones available, while Casts have a much wider palette (you can still get some skin tones). Armor has three different color components. Cast armor has 3 different color components, while Human and Newman armor has one changeable color. The color palettes are widely variable, and have a contrast slider. It isn't hard to find the color you're looking for.

You get up to 2 facial decorations (scars, makeup, bandages, facial hair, Cast seams, etc.), and 3 head accessories (hats, glasses, headphones, cat ears, etc.). Humans and Newmans have six armor options, and Casts have 3 options each for body, arms, and legs; these are different between male and female characters. Some hair/accessory combos do clip into each other, like hair or ears pointing out of hats, but you can usually find other options that look good without clipping.

Camera: I use the mouse, don't know if you can use keyboard or not. Click and hold to move camera; up/down for up/down, left/right to rotate, mouse wheel to zoom in/out. Zoom all the way out, and the camera angles down slightly. Zoom all the way in and keep zooming, and the camera will reach a flat angle; zoom all the way out again to get the downward angle back.

The voice thing I still haven't been able to use. You see the character talking, but I get no audio. A post on PSO World said to update DirectX; I'll have to see if there's an update I don't have yet. But the setting can still be used to get different facial expressions for screenshots.

[MachEnergy]

Originally Posted by Wraith

* I copy pasted this on my phone, sorry if the formatting is screwed up. *

My eyes are bleeding. Other than that, everything is fine. They're supposed to do that, right?

[Wraith]

Originally Posted by MachEnergy

My eyes are bleeding. Other than that, everything is fine. They're supposed to do that, right?

Yikes. Okay, it's fixed now. (Really nice how Blackberry takes out line breaks when copying from an e-mail...)


Also forgot to mention, if you create a character then run the benchmark, your most recent character shows up instead of the HUmar that's usually there. (They don't show up if you create a character, exit out, then launch and run the benchmark.)

Screenshots taken go into a folder under Documents\SEGA\.

[KamaItachi]

Bah, the benchmark was in single digits for me... I figured I'd have to hold off on this until it's out on the Vita, but I had a good time with making as many female characters that looked like whores as I could last night.

[Troggles]

Originally Posted by KamaItachi

Bah, the benchmark was in single digits for me... I figured I'd have to hold off on this until it's out on the Vita, but I had a good time with making as many female characters that looked like whores as I could last night.

Single digits? Are you running it on a TI-83? I got something like 12k when I ran it.

[Wraith]

I had 1200-something on the benchmark. Max graphics setting, 1600x1200. Framerate was going between 30 and 55-ish.

[KamaItachi]

Originally Posted by Troggles

Single digits? Are you running it on a TI-83? I got something like 12k when I ran it.

It's an older Desktop.. probably pushing 5 years, but it wasn't even that good then. I was hoping to update some time this year, but I don't think that's gonna happen any more.

I'll have another tinker with the settings tonight.

[Wraith]

I did the DirectX update (here), and now music/sound effects work. Still no voices - must not be included in the demo.

[Wraith]

[Cyndair]

Originally Posted by Wraith

Also forgot to mention, if you create a character then run the benchmark, your most recent character shows up instead of the HUmar that's usually there. (They don't show up if you create a character, exit out, then launch and run the benchmark.)

I couldn't get this to work. I created a character, saved it, then backed out to the main menu and ran the benchmark. I only see the default characters. I didn't exit the program at all after character creation.

EDIT: Nevermind, I figured it out. I had to save my character again with a different name for some reason.

[Wraith]

I've been saving both with the button as described on that blog, and with the button at the very bottom of the editor menu (which brings you back to the main menu after).