just had an idea. Any chance of doing a playable female main character, and making it so her images show with the rest of the characters? Don’t know how complicated this will be
~scratches head in thought~ This is Eldricus' turf so I hesitate to presume, but my thought would be that your idea as framed might be too involved. Each model is rendered and placed in a specific scene, so to try and place a player model would require a composite that fits into every scene. So, although your player composite might look fine in the void and on the beach, it might be overlaying the furniture in the lounge or bedroom, and the more locations there are, the worse the issue becomes. However, the player file is quite adaptable, as I've discovered, and you could certainly replace the male images with female images. Of course, they would still not be bigger than the current male images. As a halfway house, I wonder if it might be possible to move the player window from the bottom left position to the top right of the screen and expand it in a vertical strip that wouldn't interfere with the main view screen so as to support larger, full body images that players could customize to their heart's content?
As swipe pointed out, the main character player1 is coded in as a regular opponent folder, so swapping out those images would be pretty trivial. It wouldn't change much, but giving non-white-males an avatar they can identify with is good. You can even put pictures of yourself in there if you're feeling bold. I could see adding a few different player opponents. Those are small, quick renders, and coding a selector to pick an avatar would be low-mid-effort. Side note: It can also be a way to adjust the difficulty by having more or fewer clothes.
There's checks in the code to specifically never show images of your player, but those could be removed, or maybe just the ones around composite shots. It's already a bit of an art-form squeezing 4 ladies around that table though, so a fifth would be tricky. Then we'd need a set of composite images for each place for each player. So probably not something I'd want to tackle any time soon, but if someone wants to go do a bunch of renders for me, I guess it's doable?
There's a third option that's more straightforward and requires 0 rendering: Allow picking one of the existing ladies as your player. As long as they have an outfit in that location and aren't bumping into any other players in the composite images, it would work. The only catch there is personally I'd feel weird playing as one of those characters that I normally think of as an opponent, and there are already 4 gorgeous ladies to look at on screen, so a fifth isn't going to be a huge plus. It wouldn't really boost immersion, either, in that case.
Some of that also opens up the possibility of finales that involve the player, which is probably something Swag really would like.
Technically, _all_ these things could be done together, but then the work really adds up, and there are a lot of other things on the roadmap as-is, but if there's a lot of enthusiasm for it an/or some help being volunteered, we could go there.
Thoughts?
I already posted my thoughts on having the player window perhaps in the top right to facilitate larger player images. I've been thinking on it a little more and came to the conclusion that you did, some diversity in the player files would be a good thing in our current age of progressive awareness. What if Swag or I were females who are gay or bi? Only playing as a male might not be attractive. Ok, it's unlikely to be a deal breaker, I know, but the point of inclusivity is certainly valid, and if you're going that far, then adding discernable images would be a better option to help players identify with their player. I wouldn't suggest anything fancy for the defaults, just basic but larger images. Enthusiastic players could add their own images easily enough, either of themselves or avatars, whatever works. I'm with you in that adding the player images into the scenes might be stretching things somewhat. I would perhaps add that to the list of things that might be nice to work on once everything else is done., but diverse player files could be run up in hours, and I wouldn't imagine it would stretch you to far just to add a start menu option to select player type? I have a lot of faith in your abilities.