I'm kind of disappointed by the African portraits DLC

[DominusNovus]

[img snip]

This is going to sound weird, but they were so cute I had to force myself to marry them off. They ended up killing everyone I loved and giving my Kingdom to the Byzantine Emperor and splitting a province to Aragon (Eventually I had a Miaphysite Castillian Aragon OPM in Ethiopia O.O), though

The men look like regular Semitic characters, so that's part of the reason why I favor female rulers in this play-through.

I like how the female mixed portraits look; a very good blend. Hopefully, they can manage to do something so that the male portraits are also a nice blend.

Of course, I'm glad that the blend exists in the first place; its a good enough approximation of how mixed race people look, for game purposes. If we start getting too much in the weeds about how everyone should look, then it'll discourage other ethnic portrait sets from being released. Now, if we could get a 'steppe portrait' DLC beyond the mongols, for the Cumans and Bulgars and those guys, it'll be great, and it could even be the template for what a Mongol/European mixed character would look like.

 

[LarryLeica]

This is how I ended up with a long line of brown kings of Scotland.

But that happened in real life too!

As for the DLC... the guys are pretty cool, just playing as an Othodox Countess in Mali courtesy of the Beard Designer, but the woman all look identical, and pretty ugly too. In fact they just look like young boys. It's pretty difficult to distinguish between them and male characters apart from the lack of beards, of course, CK2 lacks breasts or any kind of other distinguishing female characteristic so it makes it trickier again. This isn't a plea for (more) boobies, just an observation...

 

[TheGreatSnoop]

Going by ZechsMerquise73's in-game pictures, I can settle for the look of Arab-esque offspring, I can just suspend my disbelief regarding the fact they won't have any African features, I can live with that.

 

[CrackdToothGrin]

...Now, if we could get a 'steppe portrait' DLC beyond the mongols, for the Cumans and Bulgars and those guys, it'll be great, and it could even be the template for what a Mongol/European mixed character would look like.

Like this?

Spoiler

 

[DominusNovus]

Like this?

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Trust me, I like your stuff. I just am enjoying P'dox's design philosophy for this game so much that I want to give the more money for official content.

 

[Mad King James]

The African faces mod is probably more appropriate for West Africa than East Africa, in East Africa people braided their hair and the only decoration was a design either carved or tattooed on their forehead or face (for Christians, a cross, for pagans, various clan scar patterns, for Muslims nothing).

 

[Yakdast]

I actually feel almost like I shouldn't have bought the African faces DLC...

The reason being, I like my characters to look realistic, and I don't want to see the off chance that an African king somehow marries a Swedish princess and they get a child who looks perfectly European or perfectly African in appearance, because that's just going to look stupid, especially since European features seem to more or less get cancelled out in real life when a child is half-European and half-African.

That said, I do have a little hope, seeing as I've seen games where the Golden Horde (with the Mongol faces DLC being used) makes their way, sometimes as far west as Denmark, and created half Mongol, half Northern European heirs, and the heirs do actually come out looking like they should, with kind of Mongol/European features, sort of like Cumans I guess

I don't know if you noticed, but there has never been mixed-race characters in some RPG games. For example, no mixed in The Elder Scrolls games; only half-elfs and half-orcs in D&D universe RPGs. The only game that was more liberal on race mixing was Arcanum - they had half-elves, half-orcs AND half-ogres.

Also, Cumans weren't that mixed really. Some were later, but most were pretty European-looking, judging from the contemporary accounts. This, nevertheless, didn't prevent them from being very scary and kinda ugly at times, due to a harsh way of life.

 

[Bloodmerchant]

East African gfx should be a combination of the Arab and African faces.

 

[Yakdast]

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Sorry for being off topic.

These look great, especially the girls. But I'm wondering why all of them have dark complexion? Khan Gizak of Cumans was so pale, he was a redhead with a strongly red skin tan. I have been to Kazakhstan and seen native Kazakhs (who are are, arguably, a remnant of Cumans in Central Asia) with light brown hair and green eyes. It's not something that exotic really.
The percentage of such cases goes even higher when you visit nomadic Kazakhs in Mongolia or China.

 

[TheGreatSnoop]

The African faces mod is probably more appropriate for West Africa than East Africa, in East Africa people braided their hair and the only decoration was a design either carved or tattooed on their forehead or face (for Christians, a cross, for pagans, various clan scar patterns, for Muslims nothing).

Yes, but, and I'm being a hypocrite because I'd get annoyed if English characters were made to look like Greeks, but I'm inclined to, since the African Portraits DLC has already been released, take the stance many took with the movie Black Hawk Down, which was criticised for not having extras who looked like Somalians, and just suspend my disbelief.

That actually sounds like a really badass form of decoration, not keen to get my face carved up though! :ninja:

I don't know if you noticed, but there has never been mixed-race characters in some RPG games. For example, no mixed in The Elder Scrolls games

Although my first point will contradict the second point, Bretons are a mix of Mer and Man, although I was under the impression that in TES lore a mixed race person was born purely of the mother's race, so an Orc father and a Dunmer mother would produce a pure Dunmer.

 

[CrackdToothGrin]

Sorry for being off topic.

These look great, especially the girls. But I'm wondering why all of them have dark complexion? Khan Gizak of Cumans was so pale, he was a redhead with a strongly red skin tan. I have been to Kazakhstan and seen native Kazakhs (who are are, arguably, a remnant of Cumans in Central Asia) with light brown hair and green eyes. It's not something that exotic really.
The percentage of such cases goes even higher when you visit nomadic Kazakhs in Mongolia or China.

Well, to pick a single solid 'color' for a confederation of peoples who stretched from Eastern Asia to Eastern Europe presents itself with some challenges. The eyes are capable of being blue and green, and the hair is also capable of being blonde (I wrote an equal chance of it in the .gfx files).

Those compilation shots show the hair and eyes in their base grayscale coloration, because I wasn't going to be buggered enough to physically recolor them since I had to compile and reorganize the source files to even get this. The coloring is done by a line of code for values in RGB for three tonal ranges of the hair. In-game, they are represented correctly.

As for the skin, the skin is pale (in comparison to the darker arabic color), but also windswept and suntanned, which is to be expected of a mostly nomadic people. I actually based the colors and the aging visibly off of 'Turanic' photos and the wind-blown look they got as they aged. The same goes for the wrinkles, which are exaggerated for the men who would be exposed and squinting over sunny, windy plains.

I could show you in-game examples, but my mod is being reworked to compatibility issues and is at home.

 

[macphineas]

I'm actually hoping for a separate Ethiopia DLC (or even mod) that makes Ethiopians look distinct from the Malians. If crackedtooothgrin has already done work on them, it might make sense to keep at it...

 

[CrackdToothGrin]

I'm actually hoping for a separate Ethiopia DLC (or even mod) that makes Ethiopians look distinct from the Malians. If crackedtooothgrin has already done work on them, it might make sense to keep at it...

That was what I was actually working on. I suppose I could just repurpose the hair/beards/clothing for use over the existing faces? Or just finish and release the whole thing independently since they are a little lighter in skin color. I wasn't going to do the West Africans until I could sink my teeth into the whole 'Berber' thing with a giant Reconquista-themed graphic pack.

 

[Theddude]

You know, if they do a Pagan DLC, they might very well do a Steppe Portraits pack, given that the Cumans and Pechenegs are pagans.

 

[DominusNovus]

I'm actually hoping for a separate Ethiopia DLC (or even mod) that makes Ethiopians look distinct from the Malians. If crackedtooothgrin has already done work on them, it might make sense to keep at it...

hmmm...

Can we call it the Lost Ark DLC? It'd mesh well with bringing Relics into the game, like they originally wanted to.

 

[Crater122]

I think the same thing that happens when you marry white and arab. You have a chance of either ending up with either a black kid or a white kid. This is how I ended up with a long line of brown kings of Scotland.

Same for me, but Sweden. Makes even less sense.

 

[Jia Xu]

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I've always been a fan of the great work that went into the Steppe portrait mod. I just wish they didn't look so plastic in the game and fit in better with the game's regular portraits.