Feature Suggestion: Choose your portraits.

TSIA. This little feature would take about five minutes to program (including time spent taking a phone call from Mom), would not affect balance or interact with any other part of the game (and thus has low potential for creating unintended consequences), and would probably be welcomed by a measurable subset of the customer base, especially those who want to use their own portraits in place of the ones provided. An expanded version would also allow for picking nationality and writing your own character bio, but that would probably take seven minutes, and you're busy people.

I think that the (small) increase in player satisfaction outweighs the (trivial) cost in programmer resources. Thoughts?

-- Mal

Yes, redesigning the entire soldier selection GUI shouldn't take more than 2-3 minutes tops.

I'd be dumbfounded if it required more than a simple pointer change.

-- Mal

Yeah, I don't see this happening. Also, I'm pretty sure Imperialus was being sarcastic. If you think redesigning an entire GUI can be done over the time period of a phone call you're hopelessly naive about programming.

If you REALLY want to see this feature in game, take it up with one of the community coders. Chris is not working on any new features for Xenonauts aside from bugfixes.

If the game randomizes a face I dont like, I swap the images.

Well, my bachelor's degree is 30 years out of date. I can't see how this should involve an "entire redesign of the GUI." There is already a provision to change names by clicking the name, changing the portrait by clicking the portrait should be trivial, or somebody in design needs to be shot. But as it would doubtless involve modifying the core, does it fall within the purview of the community coders?

Perhaps, however, my intent is unclear. I am suggesting choosing a portrait within the extant database, not modifying the database. The latter is a non-trivial exercise, and does interact with other game systems.

@ViniJones: there's a thought.

-- Mal

Yes it does. Talk to them if you want something like that implemented.

Admittedly I was over-exaggerating, but my point is that Chris won't be working on new features for Xenonauts, no matter how trivial.

malthaussen, you could ask about this feature the team behind Community Edition of Xenonauts. It is very unlikely Goldhawk Interactive will add new features to Xenonauts. I assume they are more focused on fixing bugs and future project(s). Chris did mention a V1.1 patch that could add new content to the game, but it's not an 100% promise and even if, probably it won't be released very soon.

Well, my bachelor's degree is 30 years out of date. I can't see how this should involve an "entire redesign of the GUI." There is already a provision to change names by clicking the name, changing the portrait by clicking the portrait should be trivial, or somebody in design needs to be shot. But as it would doubtless involve modifying the core, does it fall within the purview of the community coders?

Perhaps, however, my intent is unclear. I am suggesting choosing a portrait within the extant database, not modifying the database. The latter is a non-trivial exercise, and does interact with other game systems.

@ViniJones: there's a thought.

-- Mal

Modern language GUIs are a bitch. They really are. Considering the pain I had to go through to create a small menu GUI to run a program I wrote in one of my classes, I shudder to imagine messing with something of the complexity of one of the xenonaut menus, let alone do a full redesign.

Definitely not just a pointer change, and definitely not doable in a few minutes.

I would personally love to see the option to change portraits. It bugs me to end having 2 soldiers with same face on site since I've learned to recognize them by face more than by name. Sorry if the feature it's there somewhere but I just don't see it. I tried to look at the save files but I don't see any portrait-related variables that I could alter. Any tips regarding this other than "get used to it"?

EDIT: in the end I managed to swap the portraits in hex editor but for paranoid ppl like me this is not the best solution since until the end-game credits kick in I will be wondering what I messed up by doing so.

I would personally love to see the option to change portraits. It bugs me to end having 2 soldiers with same face on site since I've learned to recognize them by face more than by name. Sorry if the feature it's there somewhere but I just don't see it. I tried to look at the save files but I don't see any portrait-related variables that I could alter. Any tips regarding this other than "get used to it"?

EDIT: in the end I managed to swap the portraits in hex editor but for paranoid ppl like me this is not the best solution since until the end-game credits kick in I will be wondering what I messed up by doing so.

Rofl. There is absolutely no reason to have to hex edit to do that. Just go into assets/soldierimages/faces (or soldierfemaleimages) and swap the faces around. You also have to do this for all of the faces in the armor.X files so they match, but it's so much easier than having to hex edit stuff lol.

Rofl. There is absolutely no reason to have to hex edit to do that. Just go into assets/soldierimages/faces (or soldierfemaleimages) and swap the faces around. You also have to do this for all of the faces in the armor.X files so they match, but it's so much easier than having to hex edit stuff lol.

I may not be the most computer savvies person but wouldn't changing that change the face for all of the soldiers that come with that particular face? What I needed was to change 1 face that was already used by existing soldier while keeping the other soldier's face unchanged and things like that are usually embedded in saves not game files. Anyways, changing that 1 variable in hexeditor took under a minute when I learned what to change.

I may not be the most computer savvies person but wouldn't changing that change the face for all of the soldiers that come with that particular face? What I needed was to change 1 face that was already used by existing soldier while keeping the other soldier's face unchanged and things like that are usually embedded in saves not game files. Anyways, changing that 1 variable in hexeditor took under a minute when I learned what to change.

Yeah, I can understand that point. I just don't care if I have clones :-P

Another reason why this wouldn't happen I'm pretty sure the people who backed this, at the right level, expect their face, with their name.

This is a feature I would sincerely be happy about, so even though I understand the technical difficulties having it under consideration as one of the X:CE future goals would be incredible.