I don't much care for the picture sets.  The one that has the best Vasari image has by far the worst Advent one (in my opinion).  They are pretty much all like this, one or two good race images, one really bad.  Why not just have discreet images without confining them to sets?  Packing them into sets just seems like an odd design decision to begin with.

Don't know why I think of JCD when I look at this demotivational...

No, not pwned. Just cause you post some internet banner doesnt mean anything. Again, tell me how either of the posted banners have anything to do with my actions on this thread.

With all due respect, insulting the game developers by insinuating that they do not have two brain cells is likely not the best way to convince them to listen to your game design requests (regardless of whether they are right or wrong). Just saying.

Really guys? I mean seriously? are you all looking back on what you are posting here? Tobiwan, and Myfist0 are about the only ones making any kind of sense here. The OP posted a legit gripe.. It all went to hell in a hand basket from there. Damn. Legit as this may be, much could have been worded better. I thought I was a stress case. All of you go to starbucks, and get a mocha!

The "Real" answer for the current picture set issue is that the developers thought the current setup would use less ram, and resourses in a very resource intensive game. Sins being 32 bit has a 2 gig hardcode limit. So i can see to a point why the Dev's did it the way they did. Any other way from the developer's point of view may have crashed the game left, and right. Which is EXACTLY what happened in Entrenchment! Because Entrenchment had too many assets added to it, and it made the game go over the 2 gig hardcoded ram limit. IC fixed that issue with the recent Diplomacy patches (but they did not fix Entrenchment, or Original Sins).

Modders have found a way to work around the issue, and add to the picture sets without crashing the game, but that is the MOD community's work. Not Ironclads work. It is true if IC were to adapt a single picture per faction they would have to do a lot of re-building of the UI to make it happen. Some of it is simple to do, but some of it is not that easy (sorry Myfist0, but some of us still haven't figured out the UI yet). We (Developers, and Modders both) still have to be careful not to make the game hit the 2 gig brick wall when we add to, and change stuff around in the game.

I wont say this is a "non-issue", because this is a legit question. The current picture sets don't bother me, but as a modder i did question why it was done this way, and found a way to change it without breaking the game. As others did.

Guys you need to relax a bit.

You must be spying on me because that's exactly where I am. Awesome!

At first some said it wasn't worth bothering and people like Stant tried to say it would be a pain. But then we have had other rough dealings with JCD, so our wick is pretty short to start.

Thanks for the detailed analysis of the actual issue, Major.

I don't think that, aside from someone making it a mod, I would support the multicolor thing. It can be done, but we currently have .dds and .tga files to work with. I don't know what the limit is with .dds files, but I know that .tga files are limited to a single alpha channel. I also find it easier to stick with .tga files as they are about the same size as .dds files and you can be fairly sure nothing is messed up during a conversion process. If they want to use more than one alpha, the way I would expect one to create a multicolored image, then they would have to choose a new file type and that means going back to fix a lot of things previous done and, I'm willing to bet, more data pushing us up toward the 2 gig limit, especially given that the game loads everything prior to the start of a game, whether or not it actually utilizes it.

Just my two cents on that.

Yes, I know.

I was just establishing the file types the game is designed to read before anyone tries to throw out any ideas involving something incompatible.

Yes, but when you choose a color, it places the color within the selection and makes it more or less transparent based on the alpha. You could, in theory, use two alphas with differing priorities so that one designates a primary color and the other a secondary. I figured someone might think that, so I established that, as nice as the thought is, we only have one alpha to work with.

I don't know about playing with animations, but I know that there are multicolored factions (mostly militia) available. The problem is that they are set colors. If someone's going to be picky about having to toggle character images, I can't imagine how pissed they would be to discover that they can't change their team colors. I'm thinking more along the lines of people wanting to choose their multiple colors, which I assume is what people would desire given what they are already accustomed to.

One of the custom images I used for DS started with a clip from an Asian porn.

It couldnt have had anything to do with all of you guy's stubbornness could it?

Also, there was only ONE comment of mine that flamed anyone, and that was in retaliation (for my being called retarded)

@Stant

Yes I heard about the issue of "starting over" mods, but you guys are gonna have to start over anyways when Rebellion comes around. Tis the life of a modder.

If its really gonna make updating your mods so hard to redo, then whatever. You guys never said so in the first place though.

EDIT: I guess Stant tried to say something about it, but I just assumed MyFist0 told him off.