In Your Face... AGAIN!
Permission graciously provided by Outrage Entertainment
Update sponsored by The Wildcards Empire Descent League and The Descent Network Team
By Jeff "ZappaFan" Guynn, Heiko Herrmann, Charles "Stormcrow" Featherer

Ppics.zip should contain the following: ppics.hog, ppics.txt (this file), and the FAQ for submission guidelines used during the promotion (IYF2FAQ12.txt) 

INSTALLATION

You might want to rename ppics.hog (i.e. ppics_original.hog) to keep it as a backup, just to be cautious. Then simply unzip the contents of ppics.zip into your Descent 3 directory, placing the new ppics.hog file in use. Select Pilots from the main D3 game menu, and then select your pilot. Then select "Choose Pilot Picture". If you spelled the file name of your pic the same as your pilot name, you should see a choice to select the applicable picture or two. Make sure you have Audio Taunts enabled on the same menu as the "Choose Pilot Picture". Also make sure you've mapped your audio taunt keys in Keyboard configuration, and in Ship Configuration you need to select which four audio files to set for your four audio taunts. Then you should be able to see your pic whenever you play an audio taunt in a multiplayer game.

BACKGROUND

The first time I (ZappaFan) saw mention of the wish for a "second chance" at the In Your Face Promotion originally held by Interplay was in a thread on the Descent Bulletin Board (http://www.descentbb.net) by Stormcrow. This was in one of those "We're probably not going to get another patch but if we did it sure would be nice if..." threads. I already knew that all of the pilot pictures were contained in the file ppics.hog, so I started to wonder if the that one file couldn't simply be updated to include more pictures. So I mailed Matt Toschlog at Outrage on April 3, 2000 asking if it would be possible to update the file, and if so I would be willing to lead the promotion, receive new pic submittals, host the new file, etc. I was under the naive impression that all I might need to do is import more pics into the hog and "viola!" new ugly mugs could be displayed. Matt responded to my mail, along with Jeff Slutter (Outrage Programmer), explaining that there was more to it than that. Besides all of the pics, there is also an index file that assigns a number to each pic. Our new hog would need to contain all of the old pics and old index numbers, and we would have to add new pics with incrementally higher index numbers above the original numbers. After a couple of e-mails, Matt decided to just give me the source code for the original IYF program that was given to Interplay to make the first hog. I could then use this code to make a modified version of the IYF program to create the new hog that would meet the parameters required to make it backwards compatible with the old file. If people elected not to update to the new hog, everybody still needed to be able to see all the old pics.

Of course, I immediately thought of my good friend Heiko Herrmann to make the modifcation to the program. Heiko agreed that it sounded like a cool thing to do and I sent him the source code. Then Real Life set in for both of us and the project sat basically idle for quite some time. Finally near the end of 2000 we both had enough free time to dive into the project. It didn't take very many builds for Heiko to create a modified version of the program that worked! The only problem was that I had completely forgotten that you have to actually "Choose Pilot Picture" or it doesn't show. So I wasted a couple of weeks fiddling with the program thinking that it wasn't showing my newly added pilot pic! DOH! Once the pilot error was taken care of the new test hog worked like a champ!

NEW FILE

The new file now has a total of 1904 pictures and logos. The original IYF promo by Interplay resulted in 681 pilot pics/logos. One major difference between the way we ran the promotion than the way Interplay ran it is we allowed multiple submissions per person, so that people could have a pic/logo for a number of different pilots. Over the course of about 5 weeks, we received over 1200 new pics & logos from nearly 300 people. To see all of the new pics, check out http://www.wildcards.org/zappafan/iyf2.html. For all the OLD pics, you can still visit Interplay's site at http://www.interplay.com/descent3/iyf.html.

THANKS!

Of course, many many thanks to Matt Toschlog of Outrage Entertainment for giving us the authorization to take on this project. It's been extremely gratifying to witness all the new excitement that has been sparked in anticipation of all the new pics & logos being added. With the number of people who missed the first promotion, and those that are by now flying under different pilot names, it has been very rare to actually ever see a pic in a game when an audio taunt is played. This new file should change that substantially.

Many thanks to Heiko Herrmann. This update to the ppics.hog file would not have been possible without the modified IYF program!

Many thanks to Stormcrow, for maintaining the FAQ, answering lots of questions, harrassing people in chat to get their pics submitted, and also for posting updates on the DBB and the alt.games.descent newsgroup!

Thanks also to the various Descent news sites and bulletin boards that helped promote this and make it successful.

And finally thanks to everybody that participated in this promotion by submitting a new pic/logo to be included in the update! You all are what makes this so much fun. :)