Greetings Commanders.
I am sure you are aware of the current issue how in Odyssey completely different portraits show up for the carrier crew than you were used to. If you don't, it has been reported on the issue tracker °click° as well as on reddit °click° . Their names remain the same, just their faces change based on a limited pool of available customizations which are linked to the odyssey NPC creation, instead of the more varied creation options which fighter crew members receive.
This issue does NOT persist on the Horizons client though! Even after Update 11, they still look exactly the same as before. This is why it gives me hope how we can get our old crew back in the future. Let me explain with an image:
I have a strong indication how these portraits are not saved on an image server of Fdev but rather as a seed which is downloaded and the client creates the images from there (or the server does the creation and sends the image, but I'm much less inclined on that). For details on my educated guess, please refer to the spoiler:
Since they have to support the Horizons AND Odyssey client for now, it means there have to be some duplicated entries in our account data saved on the server side of Fdev in order to not cause problems when switching between the clients, portrait creation being one of them. Now, for the topic title:
1) How to SAVE your crew:
Do not touch them. At all. Do not try to reroll the staff in hopes to get a new face, else this would create a new entry in your account, deleting the seed which also carries the name. Because this is going to create a new entry for BOTH, Horizons AND Odyssey. Therefore making it impossible to salvage anything from the Horizons part of the database.
2) How FDev might RESTORE them:
We know how the same faces appear in concourses and settlements time and time again. I suspect this is to save on performance and database storage in order to load fixed presets. If you only have a singular double-digit entry to load for looks due to a preset which is then executed on the client, rather than a however-long-string seed, this causes TONS of saved space which adds up. You might think this being trivial, but a static database safe for more than one hundred thousand settlements each having 10 to 20 people walking around is quite noticeable if the difference is 2 digits or a (conjectured) 16 digits.
So for right now to fully reinstate our carrier crew to the original glory, we're likely out of luck. But for the (near?) future, Fdev might just as well open up character creation for carrier crew just like they do with fighter crew (which draws from a MUCH larger pool, although certain options for them are still not available compared to the full holo-me suite). Or they return to the original pool, which is likely drawing from the mission board members anyway. Considering how each of the Horizon carrier crew jobs wear a very different set of clothes to one another, clearly distinguishing them from one another. Not like the generic shared outfit that the current Odyssey crew mishap uses, with no difference whatsoever.
Options of what they CAN do for a quick fix is;
#) Separate non-visible services from visible services right now, and re-draw those portraits from the Horizon seed.
#) Have a temporary suspension of disbelief, returning the horizon seed but give us "random" concourse renders ingame. Just like the ship engineer portraits often do not quite resemble their ingame reflection.
#) Keep everything as is, bring out a PSA to not touch carrier crews if people want to keep their original portrait, so they can draw from the Horizon seed in the future once they got time to properly implement random NPC character generation.
With carrier interiors and the "attachment" to the crew members, based on the ability to quickly reroll / rehire staff crew with the outlook of actually seeing all them ingame with future updates, Fdev would rather want to have that sorted out sooner than later in order to not drive more people away who stay / want to stay for the more cosmetic part of the game. Given this quick research, the ability is well there and in their ability to remedy, based on the old crew seed still in the horizons database.
Let's hope for the best, and please spread the word. Thank you.
I am sure you are aware of the current issue how in Odyssey completely different portraits show up for the carrier crew than you were used to. If you don't, it has been reported on the issue tracker °click° as well as on reddit °click° . Their names remain the same, just their faces change based on a limited pool of available customizations which are linked to the odyssey NPC creation, instead of the more varied creation options which fighter crew members receive.
This issue does NOT persist on the Horizons client though! Even after Update 11, they still look exactly the same as before. This is why it gives me hope how we can get our old crew back in the future. Let me explain with an image:
I have a strong indication how these portraits are not saved on an image server of Fdev but rather as a seed which is downloaded and the client creates the images from there (or the server does the creation and sends the image, but I'm much less inclined on that). For details on my educated guess, please refer to the spoiler:
For one, the network traffic doesn't add up with what the file sizes of the images would be. For the other, if they were saved locally or in RAM for the session, there would be no need to reload them just like the portraits on mission givers and other commander portraits from comms/transactions window or the NPC crews in the related part of the UI. Saving bandwidth is crucial for any game developer running servers, and there are several hundreds of thousands of portraits which need to be saved just for minor factions alone ( 77,698 minor factions, each of them having one face per reputation rank, and there are 6 ranks) not to mention the commanders themselves, as well as carrier and fighter crew. Furthermore, they have two completely separate graphic clients as of now, which would double that storage requirement if it those portraits were saved to disk. Add extra space for all those Odyssey settlement staff portraits.
Additionally, every time you load up Fighter crew members in station and you are presented with new choices, network traffic doesn't spike as it should when loading two new portraits per member in the pool (one small, one larger) especially not when you keep hiring crew and terminating contract again. All this infers a very high probability that the portraits are saved as seed on the server but rendered locally instead of being transferred via image server from Fdev.
Additionally, every time you load up Fighter crew members in station and you are presented with new choices, network traffic doesn't spike as it should when loading two new portraits per member in the pool (one small, one larger) especially not when you keep hiring crew and terminating contract again. All this infers a very high probability that the portraits are saved as seed on the server but rendered locally instead of being transferred via image server from Fdev.
Since they have to support the Horizons AND Odyssey client for now, it means there have to be some duplicated entries in our account data saved on the server side of Fdev in order to not cause problems when switching between the clients, portrait creation being one of them. Now, for the topic title:
1) How to SAVE your crew:
Do not touch them. At all. Do not try to reroll the staff in hopes to get a new face, else this would create a new entry in your account, deleting the seed which also carries the name. Because this is going to create a new entry for BOTH, Horizons AND Odyssey. Therefore making it impossible to salvage anything from the Horizons part of the database.
2) How FDev might RESTORE them:
We know how the same faces appear in concourses and settlements time and time again. I suspect this is to save on performance and database storage in order to load fixed presets. If you only have a singular double-digit entry to load for looks due to a preset which is then executed on the client, rather than a however-long-string seed, this causes TONS of saved space which adds up. You might think this being trivial, but a static database safe for more than one hundred thousand settlements each having 10 to 20 people walking around is quite noticeable if the difference is 2 digits or a (conjectured) 16 digits.
So for right now to fully reinstate our carrier crew to the original glory, we're likely out of luck. But for the (near?) future, Fdev might just as well open up character creation for carrier crew just like they do with fighter crew (which draws from a MUCH larger pool, although certain options for them are still not available compared to the full holo-me suite). Or they return to the original pool, which is likely drawing from the mission board members anyway. Considering how each of the Horizon carrier crew jobs wear a very different set of clothes to one another, clearly distinguishing them from one another. Not like the generic shared outfit that the current Odyssey crew mishap uses, with no difference whatsoever.
Options of what they CAN do for a quick fix is;
#) Separate non-visible services from visible services right now, and re-draw those portraits from the Horizon seed.
#) Have a temporary suspension of disbelief, returning the horizon seed but give us "random" concourse renders ingame. Just like the ship engineer portraits often do not quite resemble their ingame reflection.
#) Keep everything as is, bring out a PSA to not touch carrier crews if people want to keep their original portrait, so they can draw from the Horizon seed in the future once they got time to properly implement random NPC character generation.
With carrier interiors and the "attachment" to the crew members, based on the ability to quickly reroll / rehire staff crew with the outlook of actually seeing all them ingame with future updates, Fdev would rather want to have that sorted out sooner than later in order to not drive more people away who stay / want to stay for the more cosmetic part of the game. Given this quick research, the ability is well there and in their ability to remedy, based on the old crew seed still in the horizons database.
Let's hope for the best, and please spread the word. Thank you.
