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.

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 .

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

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.

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.

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