• Would allow for some very neat plots/features for future Premium or community modules. For example:
  
  
  • A Shadow Twin of the player with dark skin & hair
    
  • Zombification of killed foes (seeing the corpses just get back up again without a "puff of smoke and new model" would be quite scary) or of the player.
    
  • Gradual poisoning/aging as skin turns colour
    
  • Special effects for spells (for example Iron Body that turns the skin a metalic colour)
    
  • Ritual tattoos on completing a right of passage
    
  • Relatives of the PC who have inherited their hair/skin colour, etc
    
  • More interesting multiple-form creatures such as were-henchmen, or an "incredible hulk", or something that changes immunities every so often and uses skin-tone to show this to the player.
    
  • Using a statue as a combination lock
  
  I think most writers could think of dozens of plots that include a change of skin or hair color for various purposes.
  
  
  
• At the moment there is no way to detect and restrict hair/skin colour. So for example, if a module builder or DM wants a strong Role-playing atmosphere but the player could be any skin tone at all, such as bright blue, which might not fit very well. At the moment, though DMs can visually spot this, without external tools the only way to change skintone is to make a new character. This could also be very useful given that custom models can now have custom *.plt files, so for example a kobold without a blue-grey skintone would look very odd.
  
  
  
• Greater interactivity with the player by having NPCs respond to the players appearance. For example, passing NPCs might say "*gasp*Look at that stranger!" if the player walks into town with blue skin, but they wouldn't say anything if the player has a more "conventional" skintone.
  
  
  
• Greater variety of NPCs by randomly varying their skintone in an OnSpawn script. Given the new SetName() function, large numbers of different NPCs can be spawned from a handful of blueprints to populate a town. It would be a shame if they all had the same skin/hair colours.
  
  
  
• Being able to make disguises. Without being able to change skin/hair colors, any disguise system that would apply to dynamic models is not really viable. This also applies to dopplegangers or other NPCs who wish to impersonate a PC.
  
  
  
• Being able to change colours for enviromental reasons. For example, developing a suntan, tattoos that form part of a puzzle, hair that changes colour depending on proximity of enemies, etc.
  
  
  
• We can already redesign clothing in-game to a different colours and/or style. Wouldnt it be nice to alter the character themselves along the same lines? Clothing dypots are very popular with crafter type players, and many people enjoy tailoring for their character; why not allow them hairdye and body-paint/makeup too?
  
  
  
• It might not be too difficult to do, at least based on the information Ive read in the specification documents at nwn.bioware.com/developers Colours are defined by a single field in the gff file and has only 64 possible values. Already 1.67 has wings, tails, and bodyparts which are similarly structured, so the code for changing those might be re-usable to apply to a different field. Other than the visuals, skin/hair/tattoo is not referenced anywhere else for strings/tokens etc, so updating those should not be a problem.
  
  
  
• This is a long shot theory, but here goes: If a custom phenotype was used, for example horse riding, then an underused colour like tattoo 2 could be used to recolour the horse part of the mounted model. Therefore multiple styles of steed could be created within one phenotype and you could avoid visual jarring artifacts where the horse is a different color when mounted compared to un-mounted.
  
  
  
• There are very few visual changes missing from creatures. Why not complete the set? SetGender would then be the only missing visual function that I can think of, and that is understandably more complex because of model names, token references, etc.
  

Edited By Lilac Soul on 06/02/06 08:28

Edited By Goddess of Time on 03/23/06 21:57