AlphaZen: What a pitty, just installed Arcanum yesterday, tried it for half an hour or so and now I'm looking for mods etc. to enhance the game a bit. More portraits would have been very welcome. Any chance that ewmarch or anybody else could upload the portraits again?
It's not too difficult to make your own portraits. You just need GIMP (freeware) or Photoshop and an image to work with. The instructions that tell you how to import custom portraits can be found in Arcanum/Documents/portrait.txt, and the portraits themselves must be stored in Arcanum/Data/Portrait (you may need to create the "Portrait" folder if it doesn't exist already).
For the portraits to be accepted, the following conditions must be met:
- the larger portrait must be 128x128 pixels
- the smaller portrait must be 64x64 pixels
- the portraits must be 256-color bitmaps (bit-depth: 8)
- the title of the portrait must begin with an appropriate prefix, such as HUM for human male, eg. "HUMcustom.bmp"
- the title of the larger portrait must end with the suffix "_b", eg. "HUMcustom_b.bmp"
- a message file (.mes) must be created in the "Portrait" folder which contains a list of user portraits. The following syntax must be used:
{1}{HUMcustom}
{2}{HUMcustom2}
{3}{HUMcustom3}
etc.
To create the message file, open a new text file and write your list, then save the file as "userport.mes" (making sure that "All Files" is selected in the drop-down menu instead of the default ".txt").
Again, I would recommend using GIMP or Photoshop to create the portraits. If you create 256-color bitmaps in MS Paint, the quality is severely degraded.
