Update: Baseball cards, player photos, and Hall of Fame plaques

[Admin]

There are several updates percolating on the development server, some graphical, some related to page display and mobile devices, and some in the game engine. Rather than wait for all of them to be ready at once, I am going to move individual features over as they are ready.

First up is a purely cosmetic enhancement: player photos and baseball cards have been improved, and Hall of Fame plaques are now available. The main goal was to have a special player image for Hall of Fame players, but that required numerous changes to how baseball cards and player photos are displayed. The changes are:

- Player foregrounds and backgrounds are now separated so there is more variety available in baseball cards.
- The number of baseball card formats has increased from 20 to 32.
- Cards now use TrueType fonts rather than bitmap fonts, for higher quality and more variety.
- 100 new player photos have been added, most with additions like facial hair, longer hair, glasses, more blonde or red-haired players, etc.
- A new Hall of Fame plaque is now available.

Examples:

[Vytron]

It's great to see changes like this being implemented. My dream is to one day see the possibility of seeing, if very rarely, generation of female players. Nothing has ever forbidden them from playing in the MLB, it was just that the best ones moved to playing softball instead. When enough interest finally built up they made a league of their own, and without adult women being represented in the MLB, little girls were never inspired to become like them. But Jackie Mitchell was able to struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, and Toni Stone hanged around in the minor leagues of the Negro American League in 1953.

The biggest problem for this is the pictures, but if 100 new ones could be produced for male players, perhaps the dream lives on.

[Admin]

There are female images, but only one league has ever enabled them. The game will not automatically create any female players but owners can select them.

There are only a little over 100 female images because the face generator I was using simply didn't create women as realistically as men; they took a lot longer to create per image; and some people who saw them complained that they didn't all look like hot fashion models.

And while generating samples I just discovered that the female images do not properly get backgrounds. (Fixed)



What could be done is to have a percentage for how many women are generated in each draft, so leagues could have no women auto-created but owners can create them, or have completely female-generated leagues (although there is currently no way to turn the male pictures off to keep them from being selected). I personally would like to see a few women popping up here and there. Setting the percentage to 0.5% would give you around one woman for every other amateur draft, or five-ish women for an initial draft.

Note that the selection of female players is purely cosmetic. No stats are different, and if there are any pronouns in the game they are still male. Again, only one league requested it; it was more a proof-of-concept than a full-blown feature. But maybe it would be worth it to create an Ila Borders League to add and test an "occasional women" feature; it should be a fairly easy add and it would give us another rare initial draft, and a lot of people missed out on the last one (it filled on word of mouth before I could even make an official announcement). Increasing the number of player images to support leagues with a large number of female players would consume a lot of time but I can do it the way I did football logos, just create a few additional ones each day when I need a break from other things.

Chris

[Vytron]

Admin wrote:
> Note that the selection of female players is purely cosmetic.

Yeah, but it's quite nice to see they exist, it'd indeed be a cool surprise to see one pop up randomly on a trial league.

[KennyEngland]

Love the updates thanks

[ballmark]

Loved these when they were debuted in the 24-Team Beta League, Chris ... though was unaware of the distaff side being available. They all look awesome! Great work, man!!

[Leonard]

There are no women in major league baseball.

[Michael1]

How does a Hall of Fame commish get Hall of fame plaques activated?

[Admin]

How does a Hall of Fame commish get Hall of fame plaques activated?

They are automatically activated. Here is a link to a Hall of Fame player:

http://www.simdynasty.com/player.jsp?id=19410

They also appear in the pop-up cards when you hover over a player.

Chris

[Glug]

Very nice update.