A fix to body morph parameters

[Skydancer]

Note: This is a continuation of an issue raised by Valoran here https://mortalonline2.com/forums/threads/characters-are-too-chunky-poll.1165/#post-15837

While checking out the new character creator I immediately noticed my character did not match its attributes in appearance.

This is what the body morph currently does:

• Strength influences your characters leanness
• Weight influences your overall body size

This should be done in reverse:

• Strength should dictate their musculature (minimum proportions)
• Weight should determine overall leanness at current strength level

I ran some tests at set intervals of strength and weight to compare these and confirm my thoughts which you can see in the spoiler tags.
You will notice currently that weight does nothing to your actual fat levels and instead only increases the size of your character while strength determines how defined or fatty a character looks.

Spoiler: Current System

• Characters leanness is proportional to Strength, not Weight (That's a mighty lean Fat Kallard!)
• Characters stay fat even while Skinny if Strength is low. One would expect a skinny person with very little strength to be skinny

Spoiler: Proposed System

Just by flipping the position of the same screenshots we already have something far more consistent.

• All skinny charcters are lean and all get larger muscles with more strength
• All fat characters are flabby, but still get larger muscles with strength hidden under their fat layers

I think this shows what was intended with the system and would go a long way to making more realistic characters. Having a lean elf who looks like got stung by bees and had an allergic reaction which swelled his whole body is just not cool.

I do believe some tweaks are needed after making this change to make weaker characters smaller so players at the very low end look emaciated. Perhaps even bring everything back a little to address the strongest characters also looking a little too muscular.



On a sidenote please make age affect appearance!

 

[Skydancer]

Bump. Latest patch partially addresses this but it seems like the system is too simple to handle the full spectrum of body types.

Right now weight works as a simple BMI - a pretty outdated system in and of itself - Overall weight regardless of muscle mass determines your BMI classification. This leads to athletes like powerlifters and strongmen being classified as Obese and Overweight when they are not, and on the opposite side, weaklings with very little muscle mass but ab unhealthy amount of fat being classified as skinny.

If you want to be able to represent every body type from lean beggar to obese warlord the system needs to be improved.
Tying everything to weight is a mistake and results in what you have now.

Please consider the following:

• Remove the character weight in favor of body fat %, with food solely modifying body fat % and str governing musculature, allowing for the full spectrum of body types available.
• Keep character weight(useful for mount conditions etc) and add body fat. Make bodyfat the key controller of body fat and body type classifications and modifiers (stout, lean, etc) and update the slider on creation to body fat

Here are the classifications I found on the MO1 forum:


These terms are all relative to someones fat free muscle index(FFMI) for which this simplistic version of weight is not sufficient.

I challenge you to create characters using these weight positions that the general population would correctly attribute to the classifications above in your character system.

Obese Kallard Max Str	Obese Kallard Min Str

To me Obese Max Str looks Stout, maybe Overweight - not Obese

Bony Kallard Max Str	Bony Kallard Min Str

Neither of these look bony to me. These are the very limits of weight and the only passable one is Obese Min Str with the rest not really representative of their classifications


Anyway there are bigger fish to fry, but for the sake of logical systems that give the maximum amount of options and are consistent with descriptions I implore you to think a little bit more about how things work before building systems. What are the parameters, what are the attributes, what should the edge cases look like. It usually helps to write things out in plain English, get reference images for the things you are trying to simulate and work from there.

 

[Necromantic]

The problem is that currently characters are too fat by default. When asked Henrik said it's known and they are supposedly fixing it. I'm just a bit confused by how these little things are not in all these character creation changes and fixed as those are really just Blendshape coefficients that need to be adjusted, basically a few numbers.

Also people underestimate how little fat in reality already constitutes an obesity definition.

 

[Skydancer]

It's not a gamebreaker by any means but hey this is what the forum is for. It does seem like tweaking morphs and parameters should be pretty easy though so we shall see.

I fully expect to see skinny malnourished NPCs in MK and Tindrem slums that look like they just escaped Auschwitz