Dev log: Improving the character editor

Hi everyone! For the past week I've been working on getting the character editor updated with new capabilities.

I started with the intent of switching from using predefined sets of colors (limited, no preview available) to allowing the player to pick any color they want, everywhere. I did have a problem when it came to the eyes, since their color was basically defined by their texture. I ended up fixing this too, and the result is that now the game supports various eye designs as well as arbitrarily picked colors. Whereas before the eye slider was picking between various colors, now the slider is used to select between the available designs (currently two - the original one, and another one with a larger pupil). There is a limitation when it comes to design - the iris cannot get any bigger than it currently is. Well, maybe a bit.

Colors are chosen using a color picker (it's available out of the box with Godot, so it helped cut down on development time) - you can see it in some of the screenshots above.

Then, since I was already deep in character editor code, I decided it might be a good moment to do another thing that I kept putting off for quite a while now. I wanted to improve wearables a bit, since frankly they were quite boring (I'm very much aware of that - I'm a programmer, not an artist). What I wanted to do was to define various surfaces on the wearables, and allow the player to customize all of them, both in terms of color, but also in terms of material properties (e.g. roughness, clearcoat, clearcoat roughness). Long story short, what you see in the attached screenshots is exactly that. You will probably notice that I also expanded the customization possibilities to the head and back accessories (e.g. horns, wings, etc.).

There is a downside to the whole thing though. The colors you have picked for all clothes? They'll be gone. The clothes you selected will be kept, but the colors will revert to the default ones. Keeping backwards compatibility is painful in this instance, and while everything else will be carried forward normally (character look, skin color, eye color, wardrobe, etc.), the color of the clothing is the sacrifice I need to make.

EDIT: I just thought of something that might allow me to keep the old colors. Will have to try it, so there is some hope there :)

EDIT 2: Disregard the above, I found an elegant way to keep backwards compatibility without sacrificing anything :)

Finally, I moved the physics sliders to the bottom of the second controls column (I didn't feel they needed to be so center-stage after all), and removed the third one. Makes for a cleaner / less cluttered UI (well, adding all those customization options made the UI quite cluttered anyway). The added space makes for a slightly better Android experience too. Unfortunately I haven't found a way (yet) to make the color picker bigger on mobile, so for the moment it will be pretty awkward to use some QOL options (such as defining swatches / saving a palette).

The new editor will come with the next release, which is probably going to happen towards the weekend.

The next step for improving the character editor will be to review the character parts selection process. Right now everything is on sliders. Except for the morphs and anything else that is basically a number, the current way to select things might not be the best one. I need to think on it (so any change here won't happen very soon).

Well, that's about it for now. As usual, thoughts and feedback are welcome.