This is for the authors and CoG themselves. Would it be possible to add an option where we can add our own custom portraits for our MCs and other characters in-game using AI generated images that we make? This does include if the game already have images in-game but some players either prefer their own images or just doesn’t like it for some reason.
To my knowledge, CoG does not officially support mods of any nature.
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Still would be nice to add though. It was just a thought anyway.
…what? Why? How? Choicescript has no graphic-upload feature, and it would be a completely useless function in a text-based game. In what possible situation would any player benefit from that?
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Players like me who might have weak imagination to imagine a clear image of a character or for people who just prefers to look at pictures often or likes looking at portraits of characters.
But like, why would you want to upload that picture anywhere? Even if Choicescript allowed that, and even if the game always displayed that picture on the stat page, it would just be a more high-effort version of having that image opened in another tab. You’d need the exact same number of clicks to look at it, and a whole lot more clicks to upload it in the first place. It’s literally just extra steps.
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I don’t mind the extra steps as long as I can look at how nice or awesome my character looks and be reminded of “how” they look whenever I come back to that character after some time away from the game but I forget how they look sometime cause some IF games doesn’t list your MC’s appearance in the Stats tab when the game does have character customization involving hair styles, hair colors, skin tones, eye colors, etc. You have to be reminded based on what other characters say if you are trying to pay attention to that sort of thing. Otherwise, you’ll just skim through it without noticing.
I’ll say it like this. If I was able to post a character that looks like this based on what options are available in-game or not.
Or this
OR this
Believe me. I would not mind the extra steps if I can keep seeing these kind of portraits.
Theoretically, yes. It is possible. That said it would almost certainly not be cost effective for an author. Perhaps for those who have donation platforms set up and wanted to offer it as a reward for reaching a milestone, otherwise I wouldn’t expect it to happen anytime soon.
I’m not sure it’s possible from the author side to enable that to be done by a player, unless the player had a set of images they really liked and the author compiled their own custom copy of the game for them. But that’s quite a lot of effort and I could imagine most authors would prioritise other things over it. It would be easiest to just make your own Pinterest board or Canva, or print out the pictures or something.
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That’s why I also made this question for the people that manages the CoG site in case there was a way to make it a option in the Setting category that enables us to add our own portraits/images if we wanted to without the authors themselves having to put in extra work in making their game being able to add custom portraits in them. It’s still mostly a question on whether it was possible or not.
I don’t think it’s really feasible with the way choicescript works, unfortunately.
Even if it was put on the settings page so authors didn’t have to add in code, there isn’t really a file upload feature built into choicescript–and I imagine adding one that would also allow the uploaded images to be embedded into the game itself somehow (on the stats page?) would probably still require the author of each game to do a little work.
Entering your name and stuff works because authors use the *input_text command, for example, which stores the name as a variable that can be output later using a ${variable} command. That’s also how the descriptions are output to the stats page (when they are)–with output code the author has added.
I guess theoeretically choicescript itself could be modified to include a “portrait upload” and a “portrait output” function that automatically puts it somewhere on the stats page if it’s present… but that would be a lot of work for the dev to implement and it would be difficult to get it to consistently display without messing up other bits of the stats page.
I think what @HarrisPS suggests–generating the images and putting them somewhere outside the game–is probably the closest you could get.
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Asides from the no scripts thing in HG, COG has stated they will not allow AI generated art in their published games due to the potential legal iffyness of them. You can as others have pointed out use the link command to link to a webpage but it will cause the player to leave the game. Whether COG would allow linking to AI sites is another matter given their stance. It’d be something you’d have to ask them.
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