Video game avatars for game forums

[St✩rlight]

Some online games have a forum which displays your avatar of your in game character. Steam should make it so you can display your avatar for each game forum you visit, while also keeping your regular steam PFP.

[BJWyler]

St✩rlight a écrit :

Some online games have a forum which displays your avatar of your in game character. Steam should make it so you can display your avatar for each game forum you visit, while also keeping your regular steam PFP.

And how would it do that for the 100 thousand games on the platform, 99% of which is not a Valve developed game?

[St✩rlight]

Quite easily. The developer just clicks on the avatar button to make avatars usable, and then has a PFP feature in the game that says this is your character and it can be used in the Steam forum if you click the option in the settings.

[Mad Scientist]

St✩rlight a écrit :

Quite easily. The developer just clicks on the avatar button to make avatars usable, and then has a PFP feature in the game that says this is your character and it can be used in the Steam forum if you click the option in the settings.

This code would come from where?
What benefit is there for Valve?

[Gwarsbane]

St✩rlight a écrit :

Some online games have a forum which displays your avatar of your in game character. Steam should make it so you can display your avatar for each game forum you visit, while also keeping your regular steam PFP.

First, that would be a developer thing to provide, because Valve wouldn't have code in the game to do that.

Second, many/most of the 50,000 to 100,000 games on Steam, no longer have developers because the development period is done for them and the publisher/IP owner of the game is more then likely not going to get a developer in to update their game with this kind of code...

Third, we don't need an avatar for each and every forum section we are in. That would also end up with many people having the exact same avatar because the avatar images in games are generally not unique to each person, some are, but most are not.

So just take a screenshot of the character you want in game, and make it your avatar.

[BJWyler]

St✩rlight a écrit :

Quite easily. The developer just clicks on the avatar button to make avatars usable, and then has a PFP feature in the game that says this is your character and it can be used in the Steam forum if you click the option in the settings.

And where is this avatar button? And how will differing code from 100,000 games be translated into something usable by Steam?

At the end of the day, to follow up with what Gwarsbane said, what's stopping you from making a screenshot of your character and creating a forum signature that you copy and paste into your posts, just like we did in the good old days. That actually sounds quite easier than attempting to code Steam to make intrusive inquiries into 100,000 different games and translate that into an entirely separate feature, a la the forums.

[metamec]

The most obvious way of implementing something like this is via an API call. Games can already pull the user's avatar. It could go both ways. User could click a button in game which submits whatever they have framed to become their Steam avatar. Making it global or limited to the game's own community could be an option. Implementing it would be optional for the developer too.

[St✩rlight]

I knew you would do this, God... you're such a bunch of negative nancies.

[St✩rlight]

metamec a écrit :

The most obvious way of implementing something like this is via an API call. Games can already pull the user's avatar. It could go both ways. User could click a button in game which submits whatever they have framed to become their Steam avatar. Making it global or limited to the game's own community could be an option. Implementing it would be optional for the developer too.

Exactly, thanks. Every acting like we're trying to invent cold fusion or something.

[metamec]

St✩rlight a écrit :

Exactly, thanks. Every acting like we're trying to invent cold fusion or something.

Ha! No worries. The tone in here reminds me of Monty Python's Argument Clinic sketch sometimes. Well, OK. Most of the time.

[Ben Lubar]

If you want to take a screenshot of a video game and crop it and use the cropped image as your avatar, nobody's trying to stop you.

[Satoru]

St✩rlight a écrit :

Quite easily. The developer just clicks on the avatar button to make avatars usable, and then has a PFP feature in the game that says this is your character and it can be used in the Steam forum if you click the option in the settings.

I wonder if people actually think there are magical buttons in Unity like "Enable MultiPlayer"