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[RustKnight]

LINK to tutorial - http://www.ja-galaxy-forum.com/board/ubbthreads.php/topics/314786/Random_generated_Portraits_TUT.html#Post314786
It was written by me on another site, next to the same article as this one.


Ok, maybe there's a little more to go, than half way.
But what i want to promote today is this generator, take a look and read lower:


 

These are the animations - there is some quality loss due to the video conversion (sorry, my fault) as you can see in contrast with the actual pictures.Also, didn't handle the frame sequence and looping too well, so some animations may seem screwy.

 




   





These upper portraits were created by me (through the generator) as trying to show some of the features: male, female, ape generator plus hats and torture marks. Two portrait was personally created while others were selected from a list of randomly generated portraits.



Here i want to show the color ability of the program, you can manipulate every color component, even more you have a random color button which changes colors randomly from a given set of list. In my perspective, just by playing with the random color button on a character changes the way it is expressed, and can also reflect age to a certain degree.



   

     


These sets of portraits were generated through preferences settings ( you can tell the generator what "pieces of facial characteristics, and clothes to use) making this tool pretty easy to handle.

Here i tried to create a biker stereotype (i included lots of facial hair, excluded some "soft" facial characteristics, and added hats) so that every time you create a random character, a biker stereotype is created. I didn't work too much on it, but enough to understand for a demonstration of what you can do:


   


You name them

   



And these are some prisoners/slaves portraits




These other portraits (the two links under) were generated randomly and posted as they are here.


 


   


Here is a link to the portrait generator itself, for those interested in using it or seeing what it does. You'll find it quite flexible in editing, just explore the functions - further instructions on how to use i will gladly share, only ask.

http://www.mediafire.com/?thhvg6rjhhz4wk6

(There are some features that need explaining, but the most important heads up is, if you load female pack you can't save in a gallery of male portraits. If you load a gallery of male, and you have female selected, you will get an error. I guess i wasn't too clear on it, but you'll understand.)


TO note - Quality is a bit dimmer since i am not so good at manipulating screen shots and such.
        - Also, looking back, i can see not all the hair types manage to get in for the girls, total hair types being 20 in number.

 
A list of features from the generator:

a) A lot of variations on portraits
b) THEY. ARE. HAND-DRAWN. - this is the most important feature of all, since 3d rand-gen portraits are abundant, this one is unique
c) ANIMATED - lips, eyebrows, eyes.
d) Male, female and ape generator.
e) Features like tortured face marks, glasses, hats.

Another option the generator has is an ethnic criteria, being able to choose between arab, american or russian facial characteristics, thou don't expect for changes too radical. (Biggest contrast is between americans and russians, there are differences in beards, eyes and so forth; also arabs looks pretty much like US soldiers because they are mixed mercenaries, some white some with darker skin color)

So what i'm thinking is - how hard would it be, and I bet it is - to actually implement this in game? for people you recruit meet or fight?
Seeing also that a lot of color and background is adjustable we can tune the portraits down to look grimmer so it could try and fit the the ASCII graphics.
As an ending, i just threw this over here, only if anyone is interested in coding it, also to take a look at the program itself since it's loads of fun to work with.
I am not expecting anything but your opinions at this point.
Cheers!


NOTE: The generator itself i talked about as for the artwork are NOT part of my work. The generator is created by STUCUK (forum administrator and patcher of Original War) as for the art itself being part of a game, Original War.

[Miko19]

Heeey, I never thought someone would use the OW portrait editor for something actually useful, besides making fancy avatars for themselves

[Jboy2000000]

What program would you suggest using?

[Jonathan S. Fox]

It's quite striking, but the there isn't any straightforward way to support graphics in LCS. LCS runs in a console window. At least on Windows, Win32 console windows don't support graphics rendering. It's possible to get around this by creating a secondary invisible window over the top of the game, and drawing on that, but that's not something I personally want to take on as a project. If the game were completely rewritten, it'd be more possible; Dwarf Fortress is a graphical game that pretends to be text-based, and could have quite fancy graphics overlaid if it wanted to. Anything built on the libtcod library is also graphical, and can step outside libtcod to draw on the window directly. But LCS really is text-based. Images? What are those?

[RustKnight]

Ah! I undertand Fox!
Yeah, i wanted to hear your voice on this one.
Well, that's that, nothing more to add...

It's just that it would have been SO nice. This program can be easily tamed to make more per say, as an example, hideous faces for punks and low cast socialists - or faces for agents or policemen it's just a beauty!

And yeah, i guess making an external support window isn't really all that nice. An integration in game would have been better.

Thou if i think about it now; i understand that we are talking about ASCII (non)graphics here, but is it not possible to add a window that represents those pictures somewhere IN the game window?
[Well actually this is a pointless question, you said it pretty clear the first time =(( ]


(Hmh, or just another idea hit me; how hard would it be to make a program that translates real graphics into ASCII graphics? that would be something! although it's only theory here...)

[RustKnight]

Didn't bother to proper resize it, but you get the "picture".

I used a freeware program to ascii the portrait, but then again this involves too many operations
(add generator behavior to generate specific characteristics; port the outputfiles in the game, integrate them somewhere - translate them into ASCII ---> which i think is useless anyway, since if you can add a window with that sort of ascii you might as well can add a window with the actual portraits...)

All in all the ASCII converter does posses a lot of flexibility. Still i don't want to raise hopes for anyone (less initiated in game modding), i've just thrown this here so i can see why it wouldn't work - since i pretty much had an idea that it wouldn't. And if it would - it would have meant a lot of effort.

[SealyStar]

If only LCS was graphical...

[RustKnight]

Oh well, as soon as Fox check's that last post i made i'll drop it.

[Sirus]

Even if this can't be used in LCS, I can think of a few other places where a generator like this may come in handy

[SealyStar]

Is there a chance you could put the file in a .zip file rather than a .rar? It's just a request, and I'm not sure if you can or not.

[Jboy2000000]

Is there a chance you could put the file in a .zip file rather than a .rar? It's just a request, and I'm not sure if you can or not.

Yeah, when I try to use it, it says I need to do things, and be the idiot I am all I can do is "... What?" at it.

[RustKnight]

You mean, put the files of the generator in a zip file? rather than rar?
If you have win rar you just right click the archive and then presss "extract to random generator portraits" or whatever  the tittle is.

But Sirus, what do you have in mind? Do tell.

[Sirus]

Using the faces for RPGs and the like, mostly. I'd have to fiddle around with it for a while to get some specific ideas.

[RustKnight]

Srius, check messages.
Yes, my point exactly, it can be used in many games as mod, since it's superb at what it does.
I recall now that cool roguelike, Rogue Survivor.
It would have been so cool for it to make biker portraits, soldiers, civilians the works.
This generator is just asking for roguelike usage.

Come to think of it, i might bother to copy this to a roguelike forum, maybe someone would pick it up.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

Oh well, as soon as Fox check's that last post i made i'll drop it.

I saw it, but it's as you said, there are practical problems with it. All else aside, LCS is 16 color and has a 80x25 character resolution; the portraits are simply unrecognizable under those constraints. You'd have to be able to display normal graphics to use the ASCII processed version of the portraits, and at that point you might as well just display the originals.