Is anyone aware of a mod for Xenonauts that diversifies the soldier sprites? The aliens and civilians get some variation, why do my 'Nauts have to all be represented by white dudes?
I know that your soldiers can be women and I don't think they're all white either but I might be misremembering that. But the sprites in combat are the same for men and women which is fair enough given I can't imagine you could tell much under all that body armour.
Something like 4/6 different outfits for your soldiers are pretty much full body covers. Of the remaining armour, one reveals the face, the other shows the face and hands. Since body armour is pretty androgynous, and they have full body covering, they could be male or female, I suppose.
It shows the portrait that shows their appearance anyway. It's a matter of a few pixels on the sprite. Now if all the portraits were white dudes, you could have a reason to complain. It might be a surprising amount of effort to diversify the sprites. Notice the sprites aren't modular - for a few pixel differences, you'd have to add sprite sheets for each possible combination of actions. For each weapon.
Xenonauts on my computer is 2908 MB, apparently. I don't know if mods count towards that total.
The size of the sprites for basic armour alone is 157 MB, or so I read. If you have 4 different skin hues, that balloons up to 628 MB. Jackal armour is 163 MB. 4 skin hues, 652 MB. Those two additions would increase the size of the game by 960 MB (not including 'standard' white sprites), so effective a third.
It's a large bloating of the game for something very superficial.