Emblems/Badges/Banners customization?

Some RTS games have started to include this customization option. Where units wear a 'badge' or an emblem which is a customized image of a small size (small enough to where it can be easily transferred to other players, large enough to be seen on units without stretching occurring). Which can be used to mark buildings, important units, or just general strategic locations and objects (Like the commander, in addition to having the player's name over it, a small emblem would appear next to that player's name. Such as in this Poorly Photoshopped Example).

Emblems and Badges are uploaded from the player's computer, assuming that they match the right file type and file size as well as image dimensions.

The idea of the Emblem is to make it easier to identify who the units belong to (besides just "Green, Red, Orange") at a glance. Also adding personalization to the armies instead of having "Red Robot Army" and "Orange Robot Army". As well as identify extremely important units or groups that may be referred to often.

The beauty of it is that the emblem can be placed anywhere and on any unit or UI widget that has a flat surface. On buildings, units, over strategic locations like bases, over enemy bases, on scoreboards, even in the game lobby and in chat. Entire teams could even share a single emblem.

True, this also opens up an avenue for abuse (I don't particularly want to fight an army that fights under a phallic-shaped flag for the entire match). Which is also why it would be extremely important to give the option to disable custom emblems, badges, and banners.

What is your opinion on this idea?

I would actually love to have an Army Painter similar to that of Dawn of War 1.

+1

I like this, would give more variety to those you fight.

This is a cool idea, especially like the idea of the army painter. I am for the idea but I have two concerns.

The first is the aformentioned abuse issue; as I too have no desire to fight against a phallic army. This seems easily countered with the inclusion of an option to disable floating banners and unit decals, but I wouldnt want to disable all of them for the sake of the abusing individuals.

The second is less easily defined, the army painter would be great, the issue I would like to see considered with decals/badges/banners is the potential to break up the clean aesthetic that Uber are aiming for. This could be a non issue if done correctly but I would like to see the game not become too visually cluttered. I guess so long as the area you can apply the decal to on units was planned for (ie not stretching the decal over the unit in haphazard ways) it would go a long way to mitigating this.

How about a Halo Reach style to banner creating? This removes the options for abuse, but unfortunately it really does restrict the creative ability.

I'd like to think that people who play this game would be mature enough not to abuse the feature. But who am I kidding? It's the internet.

Hahaha never underestimate the internet. I am not familiar with Halo Reach...ill have to look it up and then tell you what I think of it

With the numbers of players mentioned possible, it would be nice to have a selection of emblems and 2 or 3 colors to pick for each player. Like a primary color and 1 or 2 secondary colors.

I remember reading somewhere on the forums that the primary/secondary colour selection was happening. It would certainly be nessesary for easy identification of unit ownership in games over a certain number of participants.

It would certainly be nicer than a single colour system.

Actually I think they started doing it in halo 3. Before anyone says anything.

In fact, I did some looking on youtube for some vids:

Halo 3

Halo Reach

They are essentially the same. Just a different GUI. While we're on the subject, I'm not suggesting that a creator needs to be exactly like this or as simple. But considering what it is and how simple it is to implement, IMO it's pretty good.

I like the look of that. All the options were unified under a design that didnt look out of place when applied to the character. Also the primary and secondary colour options for the armour.

What I would want to avoid in an emblem system for PA is what you typically see in sprays in FPS games. A situation where a scaled down image of some kind was slapped onto the side of a players units, looking out of place in terms of the games overall visual design.

Connecting to server...
Synchronizing...
Dowloading custom map...
Downloading badges...
Downloading: goatse.jpg
Downloading: windmill.gif
Downloading: 2girls1cup.gif
Downloading: BronyWankFodder.jpg
Downloading: xxxKiLlOr_KlOwNzxxx.jpg
Joining lobby....

No no no no no! I do not want to relive the "spray tags" scum pile that is Counter Strike 1.6

All this will do is subject you to the poor taste and questionable artistic talent of anyone who can make a 96x96 animated gif.

Yes do this instead.

That gave me a good laugh. Pretty much what I wanted to get across, just funnier :lol:

While I agree that the the potential for abuse is certainly there. I don't think locking players into a set of a dozen or so badges would be the answer (I may change my mind on this if we got dozens and dozens of badges to choose from, but that's asking a lot) Part of the reason Dawn of War's army painter was so great was how you could make your own badges to match any kind of crazy color scheme you wanted.

Maybe allow disabling of badges on a per-user basis like microphone muting? Certainly more people are going to use it legitimately than otherwise.

Or how about this: Force all badges to be monochrome. Extremely detailed pictures of goatse would be barely recognizable while an emblem that's made of a few colors would still come out and not be bright and colorful enough to distract from the art style.

Played DoW. The system really isn't that dissimilar to that of Halo.

Except.. you could use any badge and banner combo you wanted, even ones that you made yourself. Plus the painter allowed painting of almost every facet of a unit model (almost to the point of confusion). That is where it shined, the sheer amount of customization that could be applied to every unit in an army.

That kind of goes against PA's design principle, but the general idea of having a primary color, secondary color, badge, isn't too far from the mark.

The videos that Wolfdogg posted seemed to suggest a rather large number of options from which to create an emblem (certainly more than a few dozen), along with colours and the like. I agree that if implemented there should be more than a dozen pre-set emblems, but there seemed to be sufficient scope for customisation.

That would be better than a blanket on off option, but it would still be an annoyance the game could do without if it could be avoided.

Yeah, having it restricted to between 2 and maybe 3 colours that didn't include gradients I think would be a must. An emblem if implemented would need to be readable at a glance.

Yeah I agree with the second paragraph of this, it would need to be simple so as not to interfere with the visual design of the game and become too visually busy.
DoW focused on small numbers of units in squad based combat and the source material lends itself to giving players quite extensive customisation. PA by contrast is set to have massive armies of mass produced machines. I am all for keeping it as simple as possible.

I don't really care if Uber implements this or not or how they decide to handle it, as I don't see it as being important for this particular game. I'm just posting here to state that I can't stand the wet blankets in this very thread who like to complain at the sight of anything that's above PG rated and want to control human spontaniety for everyone.

The two games I used to play featuring user uploaded images were Dawn of War and Team Fortress 2. I never made any NSFW type images myself(All of my images were in the style of faction flags.), but when I did come across them I thought they were hilarious and part of the usual online banter. I remember two instances of swastika bearing space marines and thinking it was mildly ammusing. It was all just good for a laugh. If I really didn't want to see any of this stuff, I'd just turn it off, because it's not like they were anything but added bells and whistles features. In truth though, real occurences of NSFW imagery were rare. I was also dissapointed at Dawn of War 2's neutured army painter and felt it was a move towards Xbox Live's style of nanny controlled online environment.

I'm not a little boy and I can handle my own online. I doubt most of you are little either. I don't need others deciding for me what I should and shouldn't be exposed to. If you're over twenty and you can't handle the spontaniety of the internet without getting uncomfortable then my estimation of you as a person shoots way down.

Agreed with ayceeem. Though I would like to see customization, it really gives you the feeling that your units belong to you.
NSFW images aren't reall a problem are they? Like ayceeem said, it's part of the usual online banter, it just happens. We don't need handholding. If you don't like an enemies banner, that just gives you another reason to kill him first. And besides, he has to stare at goatse or 2 girls 1 cup as well, so he's not doing himself a favor either.

I'm just awaiting the first religious war or signs which are prohibited by law in some countries.

Even if insulting pictures might not mean much to the troll, they actually might hurt the feelings of others. There is a good reason, why most games won't allow you to upload your own insignias or at least not without moderation. Not because it would be difficult, but because people are going to abuse it.

On the other hand... There also might be insulting ASCII-art in the ingame chat.