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Author Topic: Portrait Generalism  (Read 963 times)

xenoargh

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Portrait Generalism
« on: May 01, 2018, 05:36:11 AM »

Just a quick idea here.  I just noticed how the Portraits are tied to particular Factions. 

While this is great for Factions that need very specific Portraits, it doesn't help with mods added in; you can't just drop some portrait pictures in a file folder and voila, new Portraits.

So... maybe have three Portrait locations that are specifically designed for drop-in and let all Factions use them if they want.  Something like: graphics/portraits/human_male  graphics/portraits/human_female  graphics/portraits/ai

Then all artist-types have to do is build the images and dump them in the right folders, and voila, they're available to any Faction, modded or not. 

How?

These could be read by the game and, for each portrait-sized image found, create a new portrait that was randomly available across Factions, depending on two Faction tags:  randomPortraits:"TRUE"  randomPortraitTypes:"HUMAN_MALE,HUMAN_FEMALE,AI"  If randomPortraits is FALSE, then the general-pool stuff doesn't effect them at all.  If randomPortraitTypes doesn't include the Portrait type the game requires, then it would also not work.

Yes, this means less specificity, if that's the only system in place, and I do think that the specific stuff (i.e., "just draw from this pool of specific images") should remain, to give certain Factions a custom look if desired.  This would just add a random pool to draw on that would be quite generic but would allow modders to add a lot of variety without touching Faction files.
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