Today marks the launch of a long-awaited refresh to the Player Avatar! Discover a brand-new iconic face for the character you’ve always known and loved.
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Before we continue, let's clear up what is a "Player Avatar"? In short, the Player Avatar is you or, more accurately, your character in Gielinor. It's the character beneath the armour that you created when you first started your account.
[p align="start"]Those foundational customization choices such as gender, hairstyle, top, legs, shoes, and facial hair, along with the colour options available for each, are what make up your Avatar. These core appearance options are the focus of today's update.
Today's Release:
[p align="start"]The Player Avatar is a gargantuan project that touches a wide variety of systems. It isn’t just your character, it also affects NPCs throughout the world as well as armour sets, outfits and cosmetics, the wardrobe system, chat systems, and much more. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find an area of the game that isn’t impacted in some way.[p align="start"]Today's update lay's the foundations with a new base avatar, updated hairstyles and facial hair options. When you login today you should slip into your new shape with minimal friction as most outfits and armour have been updated to work with the new avatar! If you do encounter anything unexpected, please check out the known issues section below.New Base Avatar
Updated Hairstyles
[p align="start"]With a fresh face we definitely needed some fresh cuts and so we have updated 46 Female hairstyles & 37 Male hairstyles to fit this new head, including tons of your favourite styles!
Legacy Hairstyles
[p align="start"]You'll notice that some hairstyles are part of a new "Legacy hairstyles" category. Originally we had planned to remove some older and less used styles as part of this update, but after further investigation and insights from the beta we decided that keeping all available styles of hair is the better outcome. This did mean that we had to make a decision on which ones to focus on first.[p align="start"]The 31 Female & 26 Male "Legacy" hairstyles have been tweaked to fit the new player head, but they will get updated over time to the same standard as the updated hairstyles, so fret not - your favourite hairstyle is still available to you![p align="start"]And that's not all for hair!Beards
[p align="start"]Can't forget the face warmer: 22 Beards will be available to choose from with 4 of them being Legacy Beards. These Legacy beards will be updated in the future in the same way as the previously mentioned hairstyles.
List of Known Issues
[p align="start"]Our diligent artists and developers have been hard at work setting every hair in place and cleaning up clipping issues for weeks now but there are bound to be some issues with an update that covers such a wide swath of the game as this.[p align="start"]To that end we have compiled a general list below of several issues we are already in the process of resolving during the weeks following this launch.[p align="start"]While we have endeavoured to update every single piece of clothing in the game, as we mentioned in our initial introduction to the Player Avatar Refresh, ungrafting the skin from every item has been a complicated and lengthy process and there are still a small handful of remaining items that require updating.[p align="start"]Our approach has been to prioritize the most commonly worn and used items first, so the outstanding items are generally only worn by a handful of players each. These outstanding items constitute a very small percentage of worn outfits from the past month. While you may encounter such an item and it may not feel like it's working as intended with the new avatar, please rest assured that they will be iteratively updated over the next few weeks.[p align="start"]Beyond those items, there are a few outstanding bits noted below that you may encounter today, but we are already aware of them and are looking to address them as soon as possible:Some heads, torsos, legs, hands and feet items will still be displaying the old avatar skin and may look out of place (explained above).
Certain items may encounter clipping issues, especially with Tiaras or ‘legacy’ customisations (old style customisation but new avatar).
Clipping is a visual bug that occurs when two textures pass through each other in a way that is not realistically possible. An example of clipping would be a hair texture poking through the solid top of a hat.
The flip-side of clipping is when you can see gaps between joins so that items feel unconnected or floaty. You may encounter this on a certain number of items.
Heads in interfaces and speech may have bugs (chat heads).
Some clothes or limbs may appear stretched or at awkward angles.
Some NPCs may be missing parts of their heads.
The photobooth, which is used to reflect your in-game avatar's face onto our website, has been temporarily disabled, while we proceed with work to integrate the new avatar code into the website.
