Answer to the Hair Question

Hair has always been an issue for some people in our community (i.e. "Why does my hair look like crap?") Well, OneEye finally answered one of these questions with a little story that goes back to the age before DemonSpire:

OneEye posted in Devs question-extra 105 and above skills:

I didn't say there wasn't a fix, it just isn't something that can be done quickly or easily.

The story basically is when the paperdolls were being changed over to the next system it was only completed to say 85% before TKO refocused the Austin team onto other projects and then eventually shut down the studio.

Then, those original paperdoll assets and source files (there are lots and lots and lots of different files that make up the paperdoll system) were not in the dump of assets IWG got when we purchased AE back.

So, the combination of a not fully complete data set to start with plus the lack of any source files makes updating specific animations almost impossible (a single hair piece for example has about 1,000 different frames that would need to be edited by hand).

The reason that some hair pieces don't work is the TKO art team (Denis, Todd, Brian and Matt) were tying some 'new' things like long hair as 2 pieces so for example a pony tail could swing independently of the top part of the hair. The studio was shut down before any of that really came on-line, so all 2 piece hair (ie long hair - mostly 'women' style) never had the tech programmed for it to actually make it work. Without the source max files it's pretty much impossible to reverse-engineer this tech.

A long term solution is to of course re-do the paperdolls completely. The process however is very time consuming and just hasn't hit the top of the queue of stuff we have to do yet. It is something that is still planned, there is just no firm timetable.

So the reason we have no hair? TKO jipped us on the art. I'm curious to know what hair would have looked like, though.