A novel way to use portrait?

[Ghertu]

So, Warcraft III UI is big and unit portrait is one of the biggest parts, it takes a really good portion of the screen space. It's very useful in melee games since it helps to get which unit type is currently selected while you microing an army. But in some map genres e.g. RPG or AoS you have one unit selected through whole game session. And there is same freaking face in the freaking portrait frame through the whole freaking game. It made me think: maybe that big chunk of the screen can be used some another way? Like providing some useful situational information for the player? Or at least some purely cosmetic use that can be alternative to just showing the same picture? So I call upon the Hivemind. As far as I know, means to manipulate portraits are quite scarce but maybe we'll manage to come up with something useful, it worth to try.

This case may come outdated with arriving of Reforged customizable UI, but we can't know for sure and Reforged is far from being shipped yet.

 

[Daffa]

This, as far as I'm aware, needs model tampering to display information

 

[anufis]

You can already change portrait midgame without any "model tampering".

native SetCinematicScene takes integer portraitUnitId, playercolor color, string speakerTitle, string text, real sceneDuration, real voiceoverDuration returns nothing
native EndCinematicScene takes nothing returns nothing

 

[Daffa]

Interesting, that's something. Nice share @anufis.

 

[cleavinghammer]

Maybe if you have several portraits of the same hero unit, you can switch between them to reflect status ailments or story events (i.e. getting a big scar after a fight, covered in hideous boils from a plague, missing an eye, etc.).

The only real use I've ever seen of a portrait model was in a long-distance communication cutscene to make a hologram of the unit on the other end (à la Emperor Palpatine) instead of its entire body (à la every other hologram in Star Wars).

 

[Trill]

Theoretically, you could use portrait to indicate the "active" spell - you'd need to attach a camera to SFX for that.