ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I threatened to do it, and by golly, I did it. And while I was working on it, I had another inspiration. This was on a different character, a Doomelf, and while I was playing with customization, I looked at the dark gray Skin Color 8 and thought, "…this really needs a white bikini instead of pink." And since I was already knee-deep in fiddling with bikini cosmetics, I immediately thought, "Gentlemen, we can recolor this. We have the technology."

Which brings us to two new addons, Bikini Colors and Thorn Bikini. Thorn Bikini, as promised, is a companion piece to Cathbald's Bristlebarb addon; when you have the Body of the Thorn talent and are (of necessity) not wearing body armor, it modifies the character doll's cosmetics to draw you in a thorn bikini or mankini instead of the default boring undergarments. Bikini Colors is slightly more ambitious: it replaces the "Bikini/Mankini" option in the Customize dialog on the character creation screen with a list of several bikini/mankini colors to choose from, all of which should be functionally identical to the original article for achievement purposes.

Now, I claim no particular artistic skill here. The various bikinis and mankinis in Bikini Colors are clumsy palette swaps of the original pink bikini and green mankini, and the bikini/mankini graphics in Thorn Bikini are just the character doll images for Nature's Blessing cropped in the shape of a bikini or mankini. And I may have put slightly less effort into making the mankinis look good than for the bikinis. But such as it it, I humbly offer it up for your enjoyment.

[Implementation notes (Bikini Colors):] [Implementation notes (Thorn Bikini):]

Frequently Asked Questions:

Hey! My bikini isn't showing up right on the character sheet!

That's unavoidable, unfortunately. The characters vault on te4.org obviously doesn't know about our custom bikini/mankini images, and in their absence the character doll image on your online character sheet would probably end up naked. While we suppose that might appeal to some, we prevent it by modifying the character sheet for export to the server, replacing our custom bikini/mankini graphics with the corresponding default graphics. We Apologize for the Inconvenience.™

v1a adds something that I'm frankly ashamed didn't occur to me before: chainmail bikinis! For all your Red Sonja needs. These are in fact distinct items from regular bikinis/mankinis (though they confer the same achievement), counting as heavy armor and conferring the same armor and defense as iron mail armor (half the fatigue, though, for obvious reasons ).

[Disclaimer: As before, I have no artistic skills. The doll image for chainmail bikinis/mankinis is basically the upper and lower pieces for voratun mail armor cropped to the shape of a bikini/mankini, and I have no idea how a chainmail mankini would even work. For entertainment purposes only, basically.]

[Disclaimer²: I couldn't figure out a way to make this cosmetic only available to characters that start with a point in Heavy Armor Training, so yes, this does technically mean you can use chainmail bikinis with characters who shouldn't be able to wear one. I leave that to your conscience.]

I… guess no one has tried to use chainmail bikinis with an Ogre or Krog? See, the character images for upper- and lower-body chainmail pieces are different sizes for those taller races, and my Perl script for making bikini images out of them wasn't expecting that and handled it very badly, leaving bikini and mankini images that were… well, basically empty. Fortunately, my character sheet export juggling would have replaced our broken image with the regular bikini/mankini image by the time it got to the characters vault where anyone but the player could have seen it.

Needless to say, v1a.1 fixes the issue. We Apologize for the Gratuitous Nudity.™

Hey! theres a pretty major bug when you starts as a tinker class with bikinis (i tried the chainmail mankini) it just gives you normal starting clothes +a massively bugged UI

SealOverlord wrote: ↑Sun Dec 11, 2022 12:39 am Hey! theres a pretty major bug when you starts as a tinker class with bikinis (i tried the chainmail mankini) it just gives you normal starting clothes +a massively bugged UI

[sound F/X: testing] Not tinker-specific, as it turns out; congratulations on apparently being the first person to ever try a chainmail mankini, because that wasn't working for anyone. That's fixed in v1a.2, just pushed out.

And a few more tweaks, while we're in the neighborhood:

• The encumbrance of chainmail bikinis/mankinis is now half that of regular chainmail. Because obviously.
• Remember how I mentioned earlier that I tried and failed to restrict the chainmail bikini/mankini option to only characters that start with Heavy armor training? Well, it turns out that if you try without it, you'll just end up with the `kini in your inventory. Rather than attempt deep hackery to limit the cosmetic, I'll just be nice and remove the talent requirement for them. We Apologize for the Convenience.™

niceee i love chainmail mankinis

On a whim, I turned off the fancy full-spider sprite for my Weaver character, just to see her human form again. Of course, the Weaver's True Form evolution removes your body armor slot, so you're running in around in the boring default undergarments — which, recall, is why I wrote Thorn Bikini in the first place.

The obvious next step, then, was my new Spider Bikini addon, which works basically the same as Thorn Bikini except for Weavers instead of Bristlebarbs. The bikini/mankini graphics in this case are cropped from the character doll image for the Spider-Silk Robe of Spydrë, which seemed thematically appropriate.

[Implementation notes:]

*ahem* So, y'know how we're supposed to be modifying the outgoing character sheet so that it uses the regular bikini/mankini images instead of our custom images that the online vault doesn't have? Well, it turns out I wasn't doing that quite right in Spider Bikini, as I just found out now that Weaver characters can sucessfully upload their character sheets. Needless to say, that's been very hastily fixed in v1a. We Apologize for the Gratuitous Nudity.™

Pushing out v1a for Thorn Bikini and v1a.1 for Spider Bikini to accommodate in-game player gender change. So for instance, if you're playing a Lunar Bristlebarb and you have your Inferno-related game options set properly, your Body of the Thorn bikini/mankini tile image will automatically switch to a mankini/bikini when you activate Moonlit Dance, and will switch back when the effect expires.

And while we're here, Bikini Colors gets a different upgrade, bumping to v1b: at the point where I was modifying all the birth descriptors to add our bikini/mankini options, it turns out not all addon races have installed their descriptors yet — so Lunars, for instance, were stuck with boring pink bikinis. Fortunately I found another place to hook in, just before the character creation dialog goes live (and if your addon race descriptor isn't installed at that point, you're outta luck…).