Ha ha ha. Still keeping up the pretence.
You are well aware. Of course you aren’t actually looking for the answer.
So idk if this is true but the programmer / designer in my head fears that it might be due to sheer incompetence.
Here’s my theory:
Previous halo armor models work as follows: the armor texture base is white. This then has colour applied over it, no real authored texture per say, is kinda just like a filter over it that colours it. This had the benefit that you only need 1 texture per armor, and after that you can just apply any rgb colour you want over it. Nice and simple, low effort, totally sensible.
My fear is, with building the game from scratch & implementing coatings they went away from this system and made each coating a unique texture file. Why is this a problem? Well… now each armor piece you add increases the number of textures by the amount of coatings you have. As the game ages, both of these numbers go up. In the previous system, 10x the amount of armors is just 10x the textures, for a total of 10N textures (where N is the initial number of armor pieces). With individual textures per shader, you initially have N x M textures (where M is the initial number of shaders), and when there’s 10x as much of each option you have 100xNxM textures. That’s 10M times the texture files, and 10M times the work. It scales badly, no sane designer would do this.
So, the solution is to cut those numbers by only having one texture for some pieces (effectively reducing N by taking those pieces out of the equation), make coatings not cross core compatible so not every armor piece needs a texture for every coating, and make coatings less work to produce in general by e.g. making some coatings just desaturated versions of others.
We see all of these things in infinite, which worries me because they’re only sane solutions if the system is badly designed when one of the goals is to maximise customisation options / creative expression.
Don’t trust anything I just said though. There are a dozen other reasons the customisation could be botched for other reasons varying from sensible to completely scummy. They do look bad though and I wish they had proper coloured textures like previous games. MK.VII could be a beautiful core, but right now with these chests it just isn’t.
Which is why ever since the first flighting, and heck, even in the flight preview trailers, people already cried out and told 343 that Coatings was gonna be a REALLY BAD IDEA.
And they promptly ignored us.
Well, If this is indeed the issue the trouble is they’d botched it at the planning phase long before we got to the flights. But it doesn’t take a genius to work this out so it tells me there’s clearly not been a dialogue between the system designers / whoever was in charge of putting the customization system together & the engineers that actually implemented it.
But again I don’t actually know how the system works and this may not be the case. Trouble is the alternative is that these limitations are imposed willingly and unnecessarily which I’d say is worse, because that just means the actual system is totally fine but it’s been stunted for the sake of monetisation. That doesn’t explain the steel grey armor pieces though.
Of course I am looking for an answer. If people are buying these things they must do something. If they were useless they would simply be ignored by even remotely-intelligent players. This game is free, right? What advantage would a player get by spending money on it?
There you go. Don’t forget to tag the author and thank them for answering your question
Contribute to forums instead of talking rubbish for once.
Your comments add no substance, ironic considering the ‘point’ you always try to make.