AKA "A way to add more colors without adding more colors."
As most of you know, expanding the color wheel is not only a massive undertaking (requiring something like 400 images made per color) but it will also break everyone's breeding pairs unless there is some kind of 'opt in' alternate wheel.
Or something new, a sort of complementary gene. A color morph/mutation.
The trait is simple to make: an overlay of a gene behaving like an accent and affecting the appearance of the color by being a different color/shade and transparent.
I am terrible at explaining, so here is an example.
This female leaf coatl is showing off '50% hypomelanism of her primary gene. Her secondary is unaffected. The images at the bottom show 0%, 25%, 50%, and 75% (100% would just be white and rather pointless to have.)
The artwork required to make the color morphs is extremely simple and existing artwork can be reused in all cases. Just needs to be set to some level of transparency and treated like a breedable accent.
Each gene in each breed/gender would need it's own overlay though, since a flat one just washes out the details. Some genes, like clown, would require two per gender since sometimes the light/darks flip depending on color.
The morphs, when applied, alter the gene they were used on. Inheritance would be separate from current genes, but behave similarly. Meaning a basic x freckle - melanistic could result in basic hatchlings, basic melanistic hatchlings, freckle hatchlings, and freckle melanistic hatchlings.
I don't care how they would be obtainable. That's up to the admins if they ever considered doing this (lol)
If this were added, it would be up to the staff if they wanted different percentages to be possible or just one flat change. Regardless, adding this and melanism (darkening of an animal) to FR, even in one opacity, would instantly triple the number of colors we could obtain, allowing for more customization, with a small fraction of the effort on the artists part.
For coding... that is trickier. I'd imagine they could reuse much existing code (the current inheritance code and accents-like code) but it would mean each gene would need the ability to carry a trait of it's own. Hopefully it isn't a nightmare to alter that code at this point, since in the long haul something like this or changing how genes are colored entirely is going to be easiest on the artist should they ever want to add more colors.
Another possibility is colored overlays. It's trickier to manage than just black/white and some of the results would be downright hideous, but here is a quick example of that.
Red morph lavender, blue morph emerald, and green morph tangerine guardians.
Additionally, and even more interesting to me personally, were this done it opens the door to more traits our dragons could carry. Things like piebald, for example, would be possible. They could look at other things in nature for inspiration and they could add mythical morphs too, flight themed things
These accent-like morphs would be very straight forward to add compared to new genes, and really only need 2 images per breed (since morphs are what you get, they don't really come in the shades of the color wheel. Piebald is always white, I suppose things like a merle effect could be done by doing a semi-transparent mix of black and white, but now I'm just brainstorming for something that is never going to happen.)
TL;DR:
-Add overlays that change the lightness/darkness of colors for more variety
-Them be breedable, obtainable and added to our dragons somehow
-Doesn't break existing pairs
Pros:
-Easier than adding new colors
-More dragon variety
Cons:
-Coding
-Make selective breeding more complicated
As most of you know, expanding the color wheel is not only a massive undertaking (requiring something like 400 images made per color) but it will also break everyone's breeding pairs unless there is some kind of 'opt in' alternate wheel.
Or something new, a sort of complementary gene. A color morph/mutation.
The trait is simple to make: an overlay of a gene behaving like an accent and affecting the appearance of the color by being a different color/shade and transparent.
I am terrible at explaining, so here is an example.
This female leaf coatl is showing off '50% hypomelanism of her primary gene. Her secondary is unaffected. The images at the bottom show 0%, 25%, 50%, and 75% (100% would just be white and rather pointless to have.)
The artwork required to make the color morphs is extremely simple and existing artwork can be reused in all cases. Just needs to be set to some level of transparency and treated like a breedable accent.
Each gene in each breed/gender would need it's own overlay though, since a flat one just washes out the details. Some genes, like clown, would require two per gender since sometimes the light/darks flip depending on color.
The morphs, when applied, alter the gene they were used on. Inheritance would be separate from current genes, but behave similarly. Meaning a basic x freckle - melanistic could result in basic hatchlings, basic melanistic hatchlings, freckle hatchlings, and freckle melanistic hatchlings.
I don't care how they would be obtainable. That's up to the admins if they ever considered doing this (lol)
If this were added, it would be up to the staff if they wanted different percentages to be possible or just one flat change. Regardless, adding this and melanism (darkening of an animal) to FR, even in one opacity, would instantly triple the number of colors we could obtain, allowing for more customization, with a small fraction of the effort on the artists part.
For coding... that is trickier. I'd imagine they could reuse much existing code (the current inheritance code and accents-like code) but it would mean each gene would need the ability to carry a trait of it's own. Hopefully it isn't a nightmare to alter that code at this point, since in the long haul something like this or changing how genes are colored entirely is going to be easiest on the artist should they ever want to add more colors.
Another possibility is colored overlays. It's trickier to manage than just black/white and some of the results would be downright hideous, but here is a quick example of that.
Red morph lavender, blue morph emerald, and green morph tangerine guardians.
Additionally, and even more interesting to me personally, were this done it opens the door to more traits our dragons could carry. Things like piebald, for example, would be possible. They could look at other things in nature for inspiration and they could add mythical morphs too, flight themed things
These accent-like morphs would be very straight forward to add compared to new genes, and really only need 2 images per breed (since morphs are what you get, they don't really come in the shades of the color wheel. Piebald is always white, I suppose things like a merle effect could be done by doing a semi-transparent mix of black and white, but now I'm just brainstorming for something that is never going to happen.)
TL;DR:
-Add overlays that change the lightness/darkness of colors for more variety
-Them be breedable, obtainable and added to our dragons somehow
-Doesn't break existing pairs
Pros:
-Easier than adding new colors
-More dragon variety
Cons:
-Coding
-Make selective breeding more complicated
