Prompted by some discussion in the Thinky Games discord about how "
the main characters [are] extremely offputting"
and "
it's a big thing which is always in the corner of the screen"
, it occurs to me, yeah, Beethro is really ugly, and we've all kind of collectively agreed to ignore that. However, if people want to be able to load a graphics mod to put a paper bag over Beethro's head, they should have that power.
Knowing that it's possible to replace tiles of either GeneralTiles or any particular style through additional config lines in drod.ini, and an appropriate graphics file + .tim file, I checked if similar functionality was available for the Faces file, and unfortunately it looks like it isn't.
I propose a similar "
tile replacement"
scheme for Faces, where the user can add two files to the Bitmaps folder. (e.g. BeethroPaperBag.png and BeethroPaperBag.tim), then add a line to drod.ini (e.g. Faces=Faces;BeethroPaperBag)
The .png file would contain one or more portraits, of standard portrait size 130x164 pixels (i.e. no red border padding). The .tim file would work analogously to a GeneralTiles etc. .tim, where the numbers in the first line of the .tim would indicate a position/range for the first row of the .png to replace, the second line of the .tim would indicate which position/range for the second row of the .png to replace, etc.
Presumably for the pupil + eyeball masks slots, for simplicity the portrait tile in BeethroPaperBag.png would contain everything in that tile, at the same offsets, with the same size as the originals. The eyeball masks and pupil would then be drawn at the same position on the Beethro portrait as usual. This could be more extensible in the future, but keeping everything with the same hardcoded positions would certainly be fine for a first implementation.
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