The reason you don’t see much in the way of color changes is because the dye system isn’t a true dye system. It uses what many video games do with this sort of thing and applies a tint layer to the piece of armor or location on armor.
Conan Exiles has a pretty indepth system where we have up to four channels. Historically in previous games the tint would be applied to the whole piece of armor as one channel and while you could get some decent results with that. It was limiting in variety and expression.
But due to the system just being a tinting system not all colors are going to be equal. Not even the same color. For example, if you have some straps that you want to dye a different color. Say… a shade of Red. And you use Red dye. It comes out the way you want and you’re like, alright, now lets do this other strap the same shade of Red.
There’s when the issue might show up. Unless the two straps are the same base color and shade, using the same red dye won’t give the same results. The only way for it to do so would be to change the base color and texture of the straps to be similar.
When you have a color picker, it is much easier to match shades and colors of different pieces made of both different textures and material (like leather and metal). Its always possible, but its easier.
Because of different material types and textures, these items will look different depending on location and lighting as well. Its just a basic limitation of the system as well a limitation of the logistics. Ideally if you wanted everything to be consistent, they wouldn’t simply change the tint but change the texture for each dye. But this would increase the filesize of the game by the size the armors take up already times the number of dyes. That’s a pretty big number.
Instead we have one texture for each piece of armor (well two, one for male and one for female), and then a pretty heinous amount of dye options (options as in options for dyes, not the actual number of available dyes). In the devkit when assigning a color to a dye, there’s three color channels, one each for Red, Green, and Blue and you can get an exponentially great number of colors from that. Its why some mods can bypass the dyes entirely. They can tie into that system and simply bring those sliders from the devkit to the players in game and they can choose whatever color they want.
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