Character portraits on soldier stat screens, or gender field

[moriarty]

base palette




tactical palette


differences I notice:

fourth block: green is darker in tactical
fifth block: base greyish, tactical green
eighth block: base brownish, tactical blue
thirteenth block: purple is much lighter in tactical
fourteenth to sixteenth block: completely different

question is: are those blue tones from the eighth (tactical) block used for the personal armor? if yes, that's a problem.
skin colors are probably in 2, 6, 9 and 10, those are identical.
power armor / flying armor colors are probably in 6, that's identical.
I'll just assume that the greens in tactical 5 are plant leaves, grass and the like, while the greyish tones in base 5 are concrete and paint for the top-down base view.

[Hythlodaeus]

Why would you want to use personal armor paperdolls in this case either way? What really matters is to identify the soldier, not to show him wearing a suit of armor (although it would be cool to have something like that too). For that a simple cutout of the coveralls paperdolls serves perfectly. Unless you're already thinking armor customization features and mods, which isn't really the point here, anyway.

[Warboy1982]

look at 9 again, tactical is MUCH darker.

[54x]

That's a very interesting mockup 54x, but personally, I still think the soldier's face should be displayed in the character profile, because it allows for quicker identification, and helps the player to familiarize with the character, even when he/she is behind a heavy suit of armor. Perhaps we can make it so that the profile shows a helmet-less version of the armored suits, kinda like they did in TFTD. It's a character chart after all. Why wouldn't it include the soldier's face by default?

I'm working on customisation sprites right now. One of the later phases of that is power and flying armour with visors that lets you see the entire face- this would include on the paperdoll. So you'd still have facial recognition once I can convince someone to code for those sprites, or failing that, once I transfer over my programming skills to C++.

ah, so your only problem was not being able to see the face. now I understand.

there is one more thing that might become a problem: with the full soldier displayed, the rest is squashed together, which works in english, but the descriptions might be longer in other languages. that would be one real reason for limiting the image to the soldier's head in this view

That's a very good point, however we can always squash the graph up a bit again, and there's additional horizontal room to squash the paperdoll. I can do another mockup if the palette problems aren't an issue- I'm looking into that now, I just have to rebuild the basescape palette in an actual .PAL file first so I can load it over the paperdoll images.

[Hythlodaeus]

That's a very good point, however we can always squash the graph up a bit again, and there's additional horizontal room to squash the paperdoll. I can do another mockup if the palette problems aren't an issue- I'm looking into that now, I just have to rebuild the basescape palette in an actual .PAL file first so I can load it over the paperdoll images.

Due to this I kinda switched opinions again, though, so might still be preferable to get the full body paperdoll on the separate customize screen after all. Having lots of readily available information in the same screen is good, but keeping squashing things for the sake of superfluous and purely aesthetic content without measuring the consequences shouldn't really be the way, methinks. A character screen should be concise. The reason why I first suggested this portrait thingy is because it would allow the player to identify individual soldiers easily while keeping most of the original looks intact.

Besides there also this thread, which proposes the creation of a stat-accessible equip/customize screen, which would likely work better with what you're trying to do here.

[54x]

Yeah, I kinda think you're right. We should probably just have a seperate customise screen and go with the headshot.

I'd still really like to see a readout of the base stats versus the improved stats in numbers on that graph, and just display the base stats for psi power. (That way it will be obvious to people that it doesn't improve)

The advantage of that is that we might also have room for additional stats on the character sheet, for instance number of aliens mind controlled and number paniced for psi soldiers?

[Hythlodaeus]

I'd still really like to see a readout of the base stats versus the improved stats in numbers on that graph, and just display the base stats for psi power. (That way it will be obvious to people that it doesn't improve)

Yeah, I sort of agree with that too. I really liked the way you improved the stats bars.

[54x]

Seeing I think headshots will probably be the way to go and we can save the full paperdoll until we do a customise screen, I've moved the scroll button to either side of the paperdoll, and the edit name button is back next to the close button, leaving us plenty of room for long soldier names up to about 22-23 characters or so. The longest names in the world tend to max out at about 25-30 characters (the longest fullname I know of takes 24 characters including spaces) so I'd say 23 characters should be an acceptable character limit.

I'm still working on that palette to see if it makes sense to load in the armour state of the character in the headshot. (Unfortunately, PSP 15 doesn't have an easy solution for reordering palettes, so I have to copy each colour to the relevant position) If we go with a headshot design I'll also provide a 32x32 headshot for all haircuts with the customisation images I'm doing, so until it's coded don't worry about the headshot images- as long as we can load in a png for them, that will be fine.

I can see two options for doing the character screen this way- either we go back to the original format, and remove twenty pixels from the graph to make a base vs now comparison to the left, or we extend the name area by twenty pixels or so and just move the information to the graph like I did in my paperdoll mockup. Here's graphics for both of them. I personally favour the second one.

(As a bonus, that headshot is for Moriarty's short male haircut)

[54x]

OK, I've cut everything up so that it should be ready for coding. I seem to recall OpenXcom uses a bitmap font that functions off UTF8 for lettering? In which case the symbols below will need to be added. I've attached the bitmaps, and here are their unicode offsets:

U+2640 ♀
U+2642 ♂

I don't know if the small fonts I used for numbers on the bars are included in this text scheme at the moment, as I filched them from the screen background, and they may simply have been part of the image. If they aren't, I've attached a png that can be sliced into the numbers as appropriate, which should be recoloured as necessary from indexes 1 and 3. I used the brightest colour of each colour range for the right-hand numbers, and the fifth-brightest for the left-hand numbers.

Other than the repositioning, attached are the sliced graphics for the two new buttons I've added. As they don't use text they may need to be coded slightly differently, as from what I recall the original engine only allowed buttons of set widths with text attached.

Note that the palette I've used for the background and the small digits file is incomplete- more than half the colours are still jumbled around onto the wrong indexes, and a few valid colours are missing entirely. I still have to finish sorting it out so I can load all the basescape images properly, however the indexes for these two images will play nice with the correct palette.

edit: I still haven't determined if personal armour will look correct in the basescape palette, as it uses group 17, just after three of the smaller groups, and not groups 8 or 9 as we suspected, but that probably means we're okay.

I should also mention that I've included the outlines of the buttons to aid positioning them, and I think the text should be straightforward to position- the main block starts on pixel 3x, 34y, assuming the first pixel is numbered 0. The armourtype starts on 100x, 50y, and the psi training text starts on 100x, 61y.

[hsbckb]

Simple design is the best. I vote for the second one.

[54x]

Yeah, the basescape palette does not work with personal armour, so unless we're able to use multiple palettes on the same screen, then we should just use the unarmoured headshots.

[moriarty]

hmm, nice, special forces x-com "nightstalker" armor...

[Volutar]

I think "Male" and "Female" are more common and less confusing than signs. Also numbers over bars are not very contrast and thus less preferrable than 1st .

[moriarty]

problem with "male" and "female" is that they need to be translated... or are they already?

about the numbers on the bars: I actually prefer those because they are unobtrusive and low-contrast. you don't strictly need those numbers, because the bars already contain all the information, they are just there to provide actual numbers. if you really want them, they are visible enough, in my opinion.

[54x]

problem with "male" and "female" is that they need to be translated... or are they already?

about the numbers on the bars: I actually prefer those because they are unobtrusive and low-contrast. you don't strictly need those numbers, because the bars already contain all the information, they are just there to provide actual numbers. if you really want them, they are visible enough, in my opinion.

Right. Also, my thinking was that as the base numbers only give you context for the soldier's improvement, (which you can already see well with the bars) they should be low-contrast numbers on the bars themselves, given we don't have any other space available. The actual ability scores will have high contrast against the background as they are placed two pixels to the right of the bars, but will be somewhat smaller text in option 2. This hopefully shouldn't be an issue with how upscaled each pixel is however, so the numbers should be perfectly visible.

If people really want high-contrast numbers, we can always just have the base values in black, too.

Plus, with option 2 we actually have more room for translated text than before, which is pretty cool.