Alternate mood icons.

[Bobble]

Way back a long time ago, I made a set of alternate mood icons for OOTP. The board has since swallowed them up so it's been requested that I dig them up and repost them.

Moodthumbs is a thumbs up/thumbs down kind of set. A zip file of the set is attached here along with a couple of examples. It was made for OOTP13 or something like that but I think the method to get them into the game is still the similar. Here's the readme:

How to install: (taken from a post by Deja Bru)

This is what you do, and I'm talking Windows. If you're on a Mac, you will have to edit this to fit your setup.

Go to where your game is INSTALLED (not where your saved games folder is located; my saved games folder is in My Documents, the default). On my machine, the game is installed here: C:\Program Files (x86)\Out of the Park Developments\OOTP Baseball 13.

In that folder, there is a folder called data and in that one there is a folder called skins. So the complete address is C:\Program Files (x86)\Out of the Park Developments\OOTP Baseball 13\data\skins.

In the skins folder are three more folders corresponding to the three skins available in this game. Drill down into each of those to the folder called images. Now the complete address is C:\Program Files (x86)\Out of the Park Developments\OOTP Baseball 13\data\skins\ootp 13\images, where "ootp 13" in that address could also be "ootp 13 classic" or ootp 13 dark."

In each of those image folders, you will see the original player_mood and player_status icons that come with the game. You should copy over the contents of the zip files here over these files. Don't change any file names! Do the same for all three skins.

Now the important part. Nothing is going to happen unless you rename or delete the skin.bin file in each skins folder (that is, each skin that you intend to use with the new icons). Go one level back up to locate this file; for example, C:\Program Files (x86)\Out of the Park Developments\OOTP Baseball 13\data\skins\ootp 13. Either rename it, say, "skin_old.bin," or delete it if you feel lucky.

Skin.bin is the file in which the game imports all of those images and combines them into the skin that you use in your graphical interface. By deleting it, or renaming it, you force the game to rebuild the file the next time you start the game, using that skin (NOTE - it may take a while). The game takes a snapshot of the new mood and status icons and includes them in the skin interface. So, you no longer see happy/frowny faces for player moods; you see cool thumbs instead (I show four of the six below)

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[Déjà Bru]

Many thanks, Bobble. As I said in my PM, I used these for years but managed to lose them during a laptop upgrade. I have missed them since!

Those default happy faces. Dozens and dozens, hundreds of happy faces staring at me . . . they drive me mad I tell you!

I racked Microsoft Copilot's brains to find a reference to your mood icons in this forum. Interestingly, it found your forum name and thread but could not link to it.

I said:

A long time ago, a forum member posted a set of player mood icons for Out of the Park Baseball. They were a series of hand gestures with thumbs up or down. If you scrubbed the mods forum, would you be able to find this mod?

It said:

Yes—there’s a promising lead. A 2008 thread on the OOTP Developments Mods forum discusses a set of mood icons created by a user named Bobble, which included hand gestures like thumbs up and down. These were intended to replace the default happy face icons in the game, and several users shared troubleshooting tips for installing them correctly.

To locate the actual files, I recommend visiting the OOTP Mods - Logos, Graphics, and HTML subforum and searching for “Bobble’s Mood Icons” or “thumbs up mood icons.”

I searched, but apparently the forum does not retain threads going that far back. So I looked up your profile and saw that you were still active, thank goodness, hence my PM to you and your gracious response.

Many thanks, again. I will lock these mood icons up in a virtual vault this time!

[Bobble]

Lol. Honestly, I thought these files were gone. I know I tried to save the original beard images that I did that eventually got incorporated into the game but I wasn't sure about the mood icons. I'm glad I could find them and that someone uses them.

[Déjà Bru]

In the meantime, pending your response and as an experiment, I asked Copilot to create similar images. This was its first try:



All right, not too bad for a first try despite having left out "Great" mood in favor of whatever that is in the middle.

So I instructed it to make one image at a time and it gave me this:



Okay, I could work with that. Not great (no pun intended) but serviceable, just in case. I would edit it in paint.net to remove the background, including the label, and resize it accordingly.

Then I asked for "Very Good". I said, "Next, the Very Good mood, somewhat less green, thumb at 60 degrees". This is what it came up with:



That's right, the same image with just the label changed. I tried again and again with the same results. It seemed to be stuck in a logic loop; it thought it was doing the right job; it would say something like this each time:

Here’s the “Very Good” mood icon—thumb angled at 60°, with a slightly lighter green than “Great,” all set against the black background. Let me know when you're ready to move on to “Good”—we’ll tilt the thumb to 30° and soften the green even further.

But the image never changed. It was stuck, so I aborted. I venture to say that AI is not ready to replace human ingenuity and artistry just yet!