Guild Wars 2 Developer Diaries
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Always endeavoring to bring back the pretty to dye colors, we wanted to better describe the materials being dyed. Since cloth is very flexible and easily changed to a huge spectrum of natural-looking tones, we made that material capable of the highest saturation. Leathers also have a broad selection, but they will not be quite as saturated in order to preserve their nature. Metals are more desaturated still. However, just because there's a tendency towards desaturation, doesn't mean it's absolute. Copper metal, for example, can present very naturally saturated and there are some gold tanned hides that look quite realistic as well. I made sure to create material-specific hues that work very naturally to help players find just the right shade. You want tungsten? Got it. How about pewter? Yup. Calfskin? Rawhide? Jalapeno? You betcha! Plus, now all the colors have names, too. There are no forgettable numbers to memorize. Named colors allow for a more casual color discussion.
Even though there are a multitude of colors, those are not the only hues you will see. For each color, I had to craft three versions to meet the materials' standards. This shift in hue will happen automagically, depending on the section you want to dye. While some colors will look best with some materials (i.e., copper was really made for metal), their alternate material equivalents will still look great and will feel like that particular color. For example, in the image to your right, the cloth, leather and metal materials are all the same color, but they are shifted to read properly with their intended material.
And then we learn more about creating the game's cinematics from audio and cinematics programmer James Boer:
In Guild Wars, our cinematics artists used a code-based macro language to take direct control of player characters and other models on the game server, moving them around in the actual game environment. While this system had some advantages it utilized the character control and animation system, for example it also had a number of drawbacks. To start, the process of creating cinematics was both time-consuming and technically difficult. The cinematic system itself was not amenable to tool-based automation. It was also easy to completely ruin a carefully planned cinematic shot with any subsequent edits to the environment.
For Guild Wars 2, we went in an entirely different direction, performing a from-the-ground-up redesign. All cinematics are controlled completely on the client, your local PC, with no server interaction at all. Any required information is transmitted to the client before the cinematic starts, but from there, it's all locally controlled and rendered. This means we have much more control over exactly what is drawn, where it appears, and how it behaves. We've taken advantage of this in order to bring you a very different cinematic experience than you've seen in any Guild Wars game before. I think it really helps us create compelling stories for your character, all in a unique cinematic style that compliments the aesthetics of our game.
