Loading custom portraits from user's folder

[kujeger]

Currently the only way to add portraits is to drop them directly into the game's data folder, which is not a great way of doing it -- it requires that the user be able to modify the game files, which is not necessarily the case.

This should be done by reading additional portraits from the user's data folder used by the game, like e.g. savegames.

 

On linux at least this path could be something like $XDG_DATA_HOME/PillarsOfEternity/portraits

(saves are at $XDG_DATA_HOME/PillarsOfEternity/SavedGames/)

 

 

I realize PoE is not the biggest focus with PoE2 in full production, but it would be a nice fix to have. Certainly it should be done for PoE2 at least.

[Boeroer]

What do you mean? You don't have to edit any game files. You just drop pictures of the right size into the portrait folder and that's it. Pretty simple.

 

Where did you get that wrong information?

 

Or do you mean that one may not have writing access to the game folders? In that case, your question makes sense. It would be convenient to have a dedicated portrait folder in the user space.

Although on Linux the game will be installed into the user's space so that's no problem. I have no idea how the game gets installed on Windows...

 

Edit: typo

Edited August 9, 2017 by Boeroer

[kujeger]

Yeah, I am talking about the latter case.

 

Most commonly you will be able to write to the game's data directory since you either installed PoE somewhere in $HOME or you have sudo-rights, but that's just an assumption that happens to usually be true. It did bite me in the ass, leaving me to set up some symlinks to work around it.

 

The right way to do it is to read/write any user-specific or user-provided content from $XDG_DATA_HOME or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME, like is already done with savegames and config files. Should be done for both Windows and macOS as well.

[Boeroer]

Yeah, you are right.

 

Would even be better if there was a GUI that lets you pick a custom portrait from anywhere via dialogue. It's easily done with Unity. Maybe even has the ability to crop and shrink the picture to the correct size - like profile picture uploads on several websites do it.