Customizable Player... How?

[Ninaiso]

Gosh I hope I'm doing this right...

I've been tinkering around with a few things on a dating sim I'm working on (it's also a fangame *shields self*) and I've been wondering...

I would really love for the player to be able to customize the look of their character. Different hair, eyes, and clothes you know? I know this is possible, but how?
Also, is it possible to show their customized player on a CG Scene and not just their sprite?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

[leon]

It depends on how much customization you want. With a small number of customization options (for example - 3 options for eye, hair and clothes), you could simply prepare all combinations as images (3 options for 3 customizations would mean 3*3*3=27 images).

For more complexity, you will need to combine the images on the fly.

Menu example to store eye selection:

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menu:
    "Green hair.":
         $ hair = "green"
    "Blue hair.":
         $ hair = "blue"

Example of the fuction that displays the customized sprite:

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label show_sprite:
    show base_sprite
    # TODO: add if-sentences to display selected clothes
    show fancy_clothing
    # if-sentences to display selected hair:
    if hair == "blue":
        show hair blue
    if hair == "green":
        show hair green
    # TODO: add if-sentences to display selected eyes
    show green_eyes
    return

To display the customized sprite, you use:

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call show_sprite

This example is not the most elegant solution. It simply displays the images on top of each other. A better method would be to prepare the combined image first and display it once, but I'm not that experienced with Ren'Py yet...

To ensure the parts (eyes, hair, ...) are in the right locations, you can either position them in Ren'Py, but I think it's better if you save all the images from your photo editor so they fit (the hair, eyes, ... images should be the same size than the base sprite).

If a CG is a background + sprite(s), it shouldn't change anything. You just display the BG for the CG and the custom sprite on top of it (using the same code/function or a copy of it, with different images). But for more complex (action) CGs, this could mean a lot of extra resources...

[Ninaiso]

Thank you very much! That is a big help. ^^ I'll be sure to remember this.

[SusanTheCat]

I would think that playing with Composite might achieve what you are looking for:

im.Composite(size, *args, **properties)
http://www.renpy.org/doc/html/displayables.html
This image manipulator composites multiple images together to form a single image.

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    image girl clothed happy = im.Composite(
        (300, 600)
        (0, 0), "girl_body.png",
        (0, 0), "girl_clothes.png",
        (100, 100), "girl_happy.png"
        )

Susan