Axing the news robot

What "news robot"? The only announcing-type robot in GalCiv was for when you finished your research. Could it be, that you're thinking of Master of Orion per chance?

Still, I have to agree. Being able to see more of your own race would really help with immersion.

We need a News Hal 9000.

If the news announces must be of the race... what of custom ones that are not one of the default races? Let me guess: robot!!

Ah well if you search through the forums you would see I did a whole post on the topic of custom races .

To briefly sum up here my suggestion was that they have a race builder similar to the soverign builder / unit builder in the elemental games crossed with the spaceship designer in this game:

You would pick a basic form so the animation system knew where to start e.g.

Humanoid, Insectoid, Cephalopod, etc

Then be able to remove/attach/ scale, colour and texture parts.

Once you had done that the game can render and animate your race in game as elements on varoius UI screens, cheaply and easily.

While the system would have a considerable development cost to start with it would make adding racial advisors and announcers easy and create a great deal of visual variance in custom races. It's to late for such a system in the initial release but I'm hoping I could sell them on the idea for one of the expansions .

The robot would also advise you of your relative strength in various areas from time to time and some events too I believe.

Removed accidentally quoting myself

I wouldn't mind the robot coming back if it can be done correctly- maybe it could be thrown in the campaign or something.

Well the truth is I didn't hate the robot itself just wanted to feel more engagement with the species I chose to play.  The one thing I think moo2 did better on than galciv2.

Right now as far as I can tell all the animations of races are basically just Bink movie files. There currently 3 states (happy/neutral/mad) with a transisition animation. The same applies to the 'small' animated faces you see for each race on the race selection screen, its just a Bink movie file referenced in the XML

If you wanted to create a race specific announcer for each one, you'd have to render and create a movie for each one. That's not impossible, its just more work. And would generally mean that you'd get less possible animation types and more races, vs more animation types wtih a single announcer.

As a side note, why does Bradley's hair look like the 30th century version of Donald Trump's toupee. There's something 'wierd' about it in 1080p. LIke its a spray on wig or like he has a collander on his head something. It was a tad jarring to look at.

Yes I agree that's how it's currently done and yes more animated movies means more work producing assets, I think the problem is that it's not seem as bringing anything to the game in which case I can see why they wouldn't want to spend the money on it.

But to me it would be well worth it, as it stand the race I choose to play is the one I never get to see.

But of course this is a consequence of going the prerendered movie route for these animations, means the quality is good but flexibility and ease with which you can add more content is relativly poor.

I'll have to see how the rendering wroks in-game. Right now I'm probably one of the last few people on the planet that hates wide screen monitors so I' keep buying 4:3 monitors on ebay. I wonder if all the games movies will look 'squished' when they're rendered in game. Have to wait n see I guess.

The only benefit of using Bink movies is that if you make your own custom race, then it 'might' be easier for you to create these kinds of idle animations by just ripping video from somewhere else and plastering it in. Rather than having to do custom Blender work. Basically if I want to create my "Star Trek Race" pack, I could just pull from reference video from whatever show and use that.

Although if you publicly  posted your Star Trek mod particularly with the ripped video it would cause all sorts of copyright issues. I'm a bit of a Junky for the creative side of the game I spent hours in the GC2 ship designer and building units and soveigns in elemental, was really wishing they'd extend this for custom race creation in GC3.

Sadly they haven't and as I'm wary of reusing anyones copy righted material in the way you describe I'm going to have to go the blender route for my custom races I think. At least I'll be able to see them as opponents.

Also it will be a good project to help me improve my blender skills so far I've only done a little modling no rigging or animation though I have watched a few tutorials. If I start now I may be ready to render a movie by release time.

tbh i dont mind the graphics used. As long as they are as funny as some of the robots 'lines' im happy