After thoroughly exploring a village and talking to four guys who all remarkably were quadruplets since they all looked the same, I thought to myself "it'd be really nice if I didn't have to ask these people's names each time to tell the diff between who they are."

So I figured maybe we, the community, could provide new images of ourselves and our friends (or anything that isn't copy protected) for Sami to possibly include in newer versions for more variety? While it's more of a "fluff" thing, I do think the images do help in situations where you cannot discern the differences between different NPCs due to the same sprite being used.

Also it'd be nice if after learning an NPC's name if the game remembered and instead of when you look at a person and it say "A Villager", it might say "Dan, A Villager"

Unless there's been a change in the game recently, you will indeed get the name of the person when you look at them after you've learned their name.

I do think it would be a good idea to include more images, but I don't think the majority of us here have access to the style of clothing or environments that would mesh well with the setting of the game.

As for sprites, IIRC, there was atleast one 'alternate set' somewhere, (probably on Thoth's site,) and there's even been atleast one user submission on the forums in recent times. Expanding the program to allow more sprites is probably one of those longer-term goals.

The persons name is added in the description when you look at him/her after getting to know the game. So this feature already is there.

And about the images; everyone is free to send me any pictures that could fit in the game. When it comes to face portraits, they should fit in the style of the game and the present pictures. And it has been our intention take and add some more face portraits at some point.

I've played RPGs before where you can add your own custom character portrait to the game if you weren't happy with the defaults, basically just a simple matter of dropping an image of the right type and size into a certain folder. It'd be nice if something like that were possible with URW, but I have no idea how hard it'd be to actually program in...

You currently can add your own images to the game, but only to replace the ones already there. If you resize a picture to the dimensions of a character portrait and save it in paint to the appropriate format, then place it in the appropriate folder, rename the old image, then rename the image you wish to use to the old image's name, you can use it in-game.

I tested it once before in the 3.00 version, and it worked fine, so I'd imagine there'd be no trouble getting it to work now, considering the portrait interface is still the same.

I do miss the old log, though. Having a page for each day allowed you to edit log.txt in notepad to add things you needed to take care of in the future, like pulling nets and retrieving skins left to tan, and even add little summarizations of your days for yourself if you felt like it.

Yes, if the same size images are added to replace the current ones this can be done.

And about the logfile, at some point I'm most likely to add an option to write a log entries by yourself to keep a better journal.

Sami, would it be possible to format NPC portraits so that it chooses randomly from a directory, using a specific name format?

For example, everyone's favorite, the Sage.

You could have a portraits directory, and the first time you talk to a particular sage, it could pick a random file of the appropriate name, and tag it to that particular NPC, so to speak.

Example:

Inside c:\games\urw\portraits, you could have....

Sage00.png
Sage01.png
Sage02.png

If someone wanted to add more pictures to be assigned to a sage, they could either overwrite the current pictures, or add Sage03.png, Sage04.png.....

I'm guessing NPCs already have a picture flag somewhere that assigns them a portrait when first spoken to or generated?, and if so, this may not be hard to switch over to.

Error-handling could be designed so any NPC that does not have a valid portrait , it simply picks a new one from the available files. This would occur when either the portrait is set wrong, or the portrait file is deleted.

It is 4 am, and I have been up for 36 hours again, so if this does not make sense, I will be happy ot explain more. :P