Preview soldier sprites?

[Taberone]

Previewing soldier sprite
There should be some way to see the soldier sprite outside of going on a mission. It would be useful for avoiding things like female soldiers being given male names in cases where you can't tell if the name is male or female. This small feature would be nice.

[moriarty]

Basescape --> Equip Craft --> Equipment --> Inventory

you can also equip your soldiers before ever going out of the base.

if you have the soldiers in advanced armor (with helmets), there's some mods here for "helmets-off inventory sprites" so you can still see what the soldier looks like (usually the inventory sprite then carries the helmet in a hand).

[TurkishSwede]

That's all well and good, but it kinda requires you to have a craft at the base capable of carrying soldiers for the equipment screen to be available, and that's not always the case.

[yrizoud]

One way to subtly represent this information without reworking the entire screens could be to have a background image for soldier stats, which displays an open file on a desk, something like this:

The photo should be discreetly placed somewhere that's not covered in graph bars (at least initially) and be one of 8, depending on soldier looks (gender and skin color).

[moriarty]

I like the idea, but try that in 320*200.

One idea that was already discussed was that the soldier info screen could feature a "mugshot" of the soldier, auto-generated from the inventory sprite. However, that might cause problems for modded inventory images (where the head isn't where it's supposed to be). Still, I think that would be the most feasible solution.

[yrizoud]

The image only needs to have the right hair and skin color. The low resolution (and single-color gradient ) is rather a help, because the image will not be sharp enough to see unwanted differences with the inventory paperdoll, and it also help the illusion when you have multiple soldiers with the same looks.

edit: Something like this.
re-edit: better with an actual photograph - and more adapted for Veronika

[Qpoter]

There's a thread somewhere that suggested something like this, but I can't find it right now.

It suggested having a little square 'portrait' image of the soldier on their Stats screen, and the concepts looked pretty good. Maybe it's just me, but I don't think putting the soldier image in the background like that is really X-COM's style.

[clownagent]

The image only needs to have the right hair and skin color. The low resolution (and single-color gradient ) is rather a help, because the image will not be sharp enough to see unwanted differences with the inventory paperdoll, and it also help the illusion when you have multiple soldiers with the same looks.

edit: Something like this.
re-edit: better with an actual photograph - and more adapted for Veronika

Nice, Ilike these kind of background images!

[yrizoud]

Well, Qpoter is right. I'm glad I checked with a mockup, but even if somebody got an excellent design in the style of XCom's backgrounds, I'm sure it would be distracting when you pass from one character to the next.