Proper clothing adaptations for non-humans

[Fren256]

I think moth, felinid and lizard players could agree on that it looks weird when their tails, wings, snouts and facial features "disappear" when putting on spacesuits/modsuits and other apparel that covers their entire bodies and/or heads. Perhaps it would be a good idea to redesign these clothing sprites to give the notion that they actually cover those extra limbs and appendages, instead of just hiding them.
Alternatively, those features could simply be shown when wearing spacesuits, which would look goofy tbh.

[oranges]

it's annoying to have extra sprites for them so no

[Fren256]

Why is it annoying?

[Farquaar]

Why is it annoying?

Even if you personally volunteered to make three new variations for every head/mask sprite in the game, it would still quadruple the work necessary for everyone else who wants to add or resprite a head/mask item in the future.

[EOBGames]

Why is it annoying?

Edit: just noticed that you're referring mostly to suits/modsuits- while the overall number is therefore a bit lower, this reasoning is still applicable, especially since suits make up a large portion of our clothing sprites.

For the sake of illustration, let's look at one of the jumpsuit sprite files (specifically civilian.dmi, the one that has the outfits for the service department):



This file has 55 sprites in it, multiplied by 4 directions = 220 sprites.

This is only one of our jumpsuit sprite files, of which we have several more:



And that's not even all the clothing sprites:



Basically: at our current count, we have several thousand clothing sprites. Even if we're charitable and say only half of those need adjustments for different species (which really is charitable- the majority of our clothing sprites are jumpsuits and oversuits, both of which would require extensive modification for this purpose) that's still equating to another several thousand sprites needing made, by hand. It should be fairly obvious that that's a colossal workload, and while the end result is probably going to be nice, it's not worth that amount of effort being put in.

There's other miscellaneous reasons that something like that's not a great idea- one is the RSC load, which as I understand it is that all assets the game uses need to be sent to the user when they connect. Serving the RSC as it currently stands is already a major part of our server data usage, and quadrupling the clothing section is only going to exacerbate that issue. Another is as farquaar mentioned above- anyone who wants to contribute something new is also now requiring to overcome that hurdle, and what that invariably means is less people contributing to the repo.

[TheFinalPotato]

If you do this you will provide excuses for removing them, because they would require extra work to add any new spacesuit or apparel that block these features.
Also this would prevent them from hiding defining features, so cringe.

[Fren256]

Why is it annoying?

Edit: just noticed that you're referring mostly to suits/modsuits- while the overall number is therefore a bit lower, this reasoning is still applicable, especially since suits make up a large portion of our clothing sprites.

I think this could be overcome by making a generic sprite for the tails and wings that covers almost, if not all, bodywear. This could help in not overwhelming the RSC load, as you mention. Even if that's not possible, I'd like to refer to the second option:

Alternatively, those features could simply be shown when wearing spacesuits, which would look goofy tbh.