With the removal of the citizen and the transition into humans happening platform-wide I am excited to see what improvements can be made to the models and their customization. With s&box going free to play and it's economy eventually becoming reliant on cosmetic sales, having a robust avatar editor i think will go a long way to incentivizing people to make purchases.

I made an issue yesterday regarding being unable to edit your avatar while in-game (it initially started off as an issue for Sandbox but was split into a feature request and separate issue when I was informed that it was intended that we should not be able to edit our avatars while in-game)

Having platform-level avatar customization while in-game I think is both important for games like Sandbox, but also extends to every other game on the platform that want to use the system. There is already a large percentage of games benefiting from the Play Fund that don't engage with the cosmetic system that is (supposed) to be funding them. While that is another problem, I think having a system that offers quick and easy customization will at least incentivize developers to leverage the system instead of building their own if it suits the art of the game. Having to quit a game to make a change to my avatar is not ideal and I don't think developers would want to invest in a system that requires players to leave their game which would only increase the chance of them not coming back.

As the list of cosmetic combinations grow each week, I think it would be great to offer the ability for players to create outfit presets they can quickly choose from and swap between. Currently, along with having to leave a game entirely, I find that a lot of my time is spent digging through categories, looking for what I want. Being able to make presets ahead of time and swapping to them in a few clicks would make it much faster to get back into the game, while still letting me browse the assets and customize my character when I have some downtime.

The avatar editor, like a lot of things on s&box, feels cluttered and hard to navigate. You have various settings on the left hand side that persist throughout your editing session even though most of them are only relevant at a single stage, and a section on the right specifically for cosmetic items which is a bulk of where users spend their time.

Things like eye color could be moved into the eye category when a player selects it, hair color could be moved into the hair category and shown if a player selects one that can be changed. The various skins and heads could really be their own category.

Regarding the right hand side, the segregation of customization options at the present makes it hard to navigate, with too many subcategories, some of which are entirely empty.

One of the best avatar editors I have come across so far is from The Finals. They offer a huge array of choices, while keeping everything easy to navigate using a single column. Cosmetic name and flavor text is then listed on the right, which would also be an ideal place to add any cosmetic-specific customization (like hair color).

This offers both a cleaner and more readable character editor, while also refining the categories into easy to navigate sections. It hides what I do not need to see when browsing that category and makes the best use of space to show me all the items in that category. If I am browsing hair types, I don't need to see a slider for height, or eye color.

While I'm glazing The Finals, one thing I would love to see standardized across cosmetics is the hiding of hair groups between headwear. I know this is something that has been mentioned by a few people in the past and I think is something that would be a huge bonus, as the way s&box currently handles hair and hats is, well, non-existent.

The Finals I believe gets away with two hair groups - the group above the 'hatline' and the one below. When a hat is worn, the group on the top of the head gets hidden.

At this point in time, the body of the player is determined entirely by the type of head chosen by the player. Separating body types from face types would add a bunch of new combinations for players.

I think a current missed opportunity is adding animations to the platform. While I hate the idea of going full Fortnite dances personally, there are many games that have various taunts and emotes that players can choose from such as TF2. From things like clapping, pointing, laughing, etc. - I think there's a goldmine of fun content there that could be explored that players could then use in an emote wheel in say, the Sandbox game.

Emotes could also serve as a less intrusive way of integrating cosmetics into custom games - if a developer doesn't want to include full blown cosmetics into their game for whatever reason, emotes might serve as a way to still include platform content and encourage players to engage with the economy in a smaller, less impactful way.

Not to mention there are some pretty skilled animators out there that would love to be able to create animation based cosmetics.

I know character customisation is a huge technical thing to get right in games so I know a lot of this stuff can be a pretty big ask, but I hope that while the Citizen is being retired the player avatars can get some love. While they are going through all these massive changes, getting this kind of framework set up would be really nice for the future as prior to this it felt like the way cosmetics were handled was a bit rushed, with no technical requirements when it came to things like hair and hats, etc.