Avatar Profile Images And Biographies

Since version 1.12 it is possible to add your own 'mugshot' images to personalise avatar profiles. These images appear in the avatar and profile selection windows, as well as in place of the Steam avatar in game - above your ball when putting and on the round summary screen. These images are totally optional, and are entirely local. They are not visible to other players in online games.

Since 1.13 it's possible to also add short biographies to each profile.

This guide explains how to add them to your player profiles.

Introduction

Since version 1.12 it is possible to add your own 'mugshot' images to personalise avatar profiles. These images appear in the avatar and profile selection windows, as well as in place of the Steam avatar in game - above your ball when putting and on the round summary screen. These images are totally optional, and are entirely local. They are not visible to other players in online games. This guide explains how to add them to your player profiles.

Preparing Your Image

Before you can add your image to your game you have to make sure to correctly prepare it. Images can, in theory, be any resolution as the game will automatically scale them when they are loaded. However, to ensure that they are displayed correctly, they need to follow some simple rules:

• The resolution needs to have a ratio of 2:1. That is, it should be twice as wide as it is high.
  
• The resolution should be *at least* 192x96 pixels in size. This is the resolution you should choose if you want to create "pixel art" images, to scale correctly with the UI
  
• The mugshot should have a front facing image on the left, and a side facing image on the right - this is not a strict requirement, however, but when shown in game the image will be split into left and right parts.
  
• The image on the left side should fit within a circle whose radius is one half of that of the vertical resolution. For example a 192x96 image should have a front facing portrait which fits in a circle with a radius of 48 pixels.

The first requirement is due to the fact that, in game, the image is split into two parts. The left hand part is then rendered within a circle when it is used by the game's UI. This is also the reason for the third and fourth requirements.



To help with creating your image there is a template (as seen above) available in the game's installation directory. Right click on the game in the Steam library, choose 'manage' and 'browse local files'. In the assets/workshop directory there are two files: profile_template.png and profile_template.aseprite.



These can be used as a starting point for your profile image. Note that although the template includes circular markings this is only intended as a guide, and is not necessary to mark on your own image.

When you save your image you should call it 'mug.png' as it will be a 'mugshot' of the avatar. The game will not recognise the image if it is named anything else.

Once you have completed your image and saved it to your computer, you are ready to add the image to the game.

Adding Your Image To The Game

To add the profile image you need to create a profile first. This is done by playing the game at least once, but you can create up to 64 player profiles by selecting Start Game or Join Game from the main menu, and then New Profile or Edit Profile (to modify an existing profile).


When profiles are created they are stored by Super Video Golf in your computer's user directory, which can be found at %appdata%/Trederia/golf/user/<steamid>/profiles. Each profile is stored in its own directory with a unique identifying number. The profile directory contains a file, also named with this number, with the file extension *.pfl

These files are just text files, and can be opened in any text editor, for example Notepad.exe. While it's not recommended to edit the *.pfl file directly (although it won't cause any damage if you do) it can be useful to view the contents in order to see the name of the player (as well as the ID of any balls or hair styles associated with the profile).

When you are in the profile directory of the profile to which you wish to add the image, paste the 'mug.png' which you saved in the previous step.



The next time the game loads it will search each profile directory for avatar images, and load them along side the profile if it is found.

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Installation Shortcut
Understandably navigating to the profile directory can be tedious, particularly when searching for a particular profile, so as a shortcut it is also possible to open the profile directory directly from Super Video Golf.

To do this, launch the game, navigate to the player menu, choose the profile you wish to edit, then select 'Edit Profile'. Once you are in the profile editor, make sure the game is running in windowed mode - the keyboard shortcut for this is Alt+Enter, although it can also be done from the console, which is opened by pressing F1.

When in windowed mode (and only in windowed mode) the following button becomes active on the UI:



Activating this button will open an explorer window directly to the current profile's user directory. You can now paste the 'mug.png' image in this directory. Simply close the window when you are done and return to the game. Profile images will then appear the next time the game is loaded.

Adding a Biography

Since 1.13 it's possible to add a custom biography to a player profile. Follow the steps above to open the player profile directory, where you will now find a text file named bio.txt. If the file does not yet exist, you can create it yourself. As the biography is a simple text file, you can edit the text in it with any text editor, then save it. Biographies are limited to 1024 characters of text.

That's it! 😄

[Mostly Hairless µC ⛳]

@AWood this seems to be a quirk with the Steam Cloud. The work around is to launch the game, edit your profile, then close the game so it saves the new profile text to the cloud.

If you don't launch the game first the next time you launch the game it will restore the old text from the cloud, and overwrite your new one.

I'll look into seeing if I can fix this.

[AWood]

This is so weird but every time I try to edit my bio, it keeps defaulting back to the original one set by the game. Any tips to stop that from happening at all?