100 Custom Commanders

With the incoming release, Uber will release the 100 Custom Commanders for the higher tiers of Backers. Supporters who booked a custom commander skin for their exclusive use.

Which sounds like a pretty cool thing.

On the other hand, those variations will be on the hard drive of everyone. And only the legit “proprietary” will be allowed to utilize one of them publicly.

I am wondering if others players could make use of those resources. After all those are assets that will occupy some space on each of our disks. I have no idea about the precise amount of space required. It may be a minimal thing individually, but if you multiply for all the installations, number may sum up pretty quickly.

So, will we be able to see those Commanders in some sort of Armory? Or we will be able to see a particular skin only in game if the legit user will join the actual game? Which likely means that unfortunately we will never see the very most of them.

Or, will we be able to mod and hack the skin of the installed Commanders so that we could pretend to play with a Commander which does not belong to us? In which case, if I understood correctly, those “illicit” skins will be visible only to us, since on the other side others will see the legit skin of our pick as it is registered server-wise.

Or all this aspect of the game works in a very different way, and I did not get it at all? And if so, and if you know any better, would you mind to explain how does it work?

Having a dig around in my PA files suggests that each commander takes at most 2.86MB of disk space. Are you really that bothered about less than 3MB?

Well, 100 commanders at that file size is 300MB, which definitely would be a lot to expect us to store on our computers and never use. I would expect instead that they will need a way to send us the commander art automatically the first time you play against someone that uses a custom commander.

Well Considering those people made this game possible in a pretty mayor way. I'd say we owe em at least that disk space. (assuming it isn't more than some 300-500MB).

Edit: Although it would be great if we didn't have to

I think that's what will happen, plus the file could be downloaded to temp so it automatically disappears when you no longer need it.

300mb isnt exactly a lot, to be fair - wasn't it said recently that Titanfall contained something like 35 gigabytes of audio? hard drive space is cheap, don't begrudge the developers too much for taking their time to reward the largest contributors - instead we should be applauding their commitment in this. Plus it was a stated goal all along if I remember, you bought the game knowing full well that your megabytes would be used in this way!

And yeah as you say there will more than likely be opportunity to "mod" access to restricted commanders in some way or another, and there is more than likely going to be an armoury of sorts to preview commanders too. I wouldnt really consider it wasted space.


in saying that, it always bugged me in Starcraft 2 that you had to install all the single player assests and HD video even if you only ever intended to play online... that's a separate issue though.

I bet Uber will find a smart way to handle this aspect of the game and space management.

But that's not my main question. I'm actually even more curious to know if we can do anything at all with those assets. At least in the privacy of our computer. After all for what we can imagine at the present, we're may gonna have those files on it.

Some of those Commanders will be pretty nifty for sure. For once, I would like to be able to take vision of them in a sort of Gallery, if not within the Armory itself.

In a time where multiplayer only games with 9 maps need 45 gb of disk space I am really not that concerned about having to store 400 mb of data to honor the people that made a game possible that has a single player and tens of thousands of maps while probably not taking up more than 10gb of disk space.

Edit: Since the files are on your disk, I am 100 % sure that there will be mods utilizing them at the very least.

Ok, if I have to express my personal opinion on this, I do not think it is very fair to have 100 people buy 300 Mb of space on my hard drive. That wasn't state anywhere on Kickstarter, neither on Steam, and I doubt it would be legal in any way. If we want to be democratic, 100 people didn't make such a big difference as 50.000 of all the other backers. We're speaking about ~100.000 USD vs ~3 millions USD.

Anyway, I really do not want this thread to degenerate in polemic.

I'm really curious to know if we can do anything at all with those future assets that will surely be interesting. So could you please address the original questions, if you can?

Once modding is enabled, there's really nothing stopping you from taking the custom commander assets and using them to make your own units, or swapping the assets of a commander you can't use with one you can (but then all commanders of that type will look like that, and only for you).

Yeah 500 mb of space, wasted on commanders we can't use, we should sue Uber for this...

It's already enabled and I guess you can swap commanders and play as Delta if you don't own it.

Right, I meant in regard to making new units that use custom commander skins. It's already possible to swap commander assets around on the client-side.

You would be able to mod those files into your game, sure. But distributing them to other people is probably a copyright violation and against the EULA.

I'm really a lot more interested in what the modders can cook up as far as custom commander art anyway. How many of you would buy a nice looking commander for a couple dollars on the mod marketplace? I bet a lot of people will be doing that sort of thing.

Ovbviously somewhat frowned upon.

I'm not really into the microtransaction stuff, but I can say that I'd be much more likely to buy a cool looking commander for a buck or two than I would be to buy the ridiculous $25 mounts that WoW is trying to sell.

I still can't believe people pay 1/2 the price of a game for a single item within the game... anyways... off-topic.

innocent until proven guilty

Actually even if I like the Delta very much, I bet that in the lot of the new 100 Custom Commanders there will be something even more appealing.

After all, the available commanders to all players will be around 5, which is 20 times less than 100.

Those 100 Custom Commanders could start a sort of gold rush, finding ways to hack a treasure chest, hidden somewhere in the core files.

Don't you see it coming?

I'd bet that what @cptconundrum said is the most likely option..

The custom commanders would be hosted on ubers servers and only downloaded to the person who owns it.
Everybody else will only get a temporary copy of a custom commander if they join or host a game with someone using one.

There is completely no reason to hide them for Uber and no reason to hack them for community.
You can do anything you like with game client or assets as long it remain on your PC.

For server and other player you'll use commanders you own.