Xbox: user refuses to change gamerpic of the era 360, Microsoft fixes the image
Xbox
A particular story has emerged in these days and it all took place through Twitter, starting from a user who publicly complained that his profile gamerpic is now badly seen, being taken from the Xbox 360 era, and ended with an official Xbox Engineer who took the matter to heart and tweaked the image to work in the new interface.By itself it has little public relevance, but the way the matter has developed is undoubtedly nice and involved the community until they saw the solution. User Gabriel Roland, moreover with a past in the world of videogame development, started the matter with the tweet reported below: "As each generation passes, Xbox tries to humiliate my Pac-Man ghost avatar by reducing it in size. more and more. I don't give up. I bought this gamerpic for 80 Xbox Points in 2006 and I'm damned if it doesn't stay the best dollar I've ever spent until the oceans boil, "the message reads.
The problem is that, with the progressive increase of the resolution, the old images imported as gamerpics for the user profiles on Xbox Live become smaller and smaller and invisible, if they are not officially updated and optimized for higher resolutions.
What's even more comical, however, is the fact that Xbox Engineer Eden Marie has taken the matter to heart and started a particularly painstaking work to try to adapt the image to the new interface standards. Marie also illustrated on Twitter practically all the steps taken to solve the problem, starting with the purchase of the same package of images to be able to experience firsthand, however, noting how now it costs 2.38 dollars.
At the end of a long and complex process, which also led to the discovery that PNG images used as gamerpic can maintain transparency effects, as well as historical digressions on some background in the development of the interface, such as the fact that "a long time ago, someone decided that no matter how big you wanted a gamerpic, this one on Xbox 360 could not exceed the size of 72x72 pixels, with the surrounding space filled with a shaded version of the same image.
Eventually the problem was solved, much to the delight of Roland who also complimented him because he never saw such speed in solving the problem, with Marie replying that "It helped a lot that the your initial report made me laugh. "
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Xbox engineer fixes user’s profile picture, makes the world a better place
At times, Twitter can be a bad place, amplifying some of the worst opinions and people on the internet. But on some days, the platform can remind us there are still decent humans doing good work to make the world a better, less shitty place.
Long ago, an Xbox user who goes by Noukon on Twitter purchased a Pac-Man ghost avatar for a dollar. Over the years, as the Xbox user interface underwent changes and iterations, Noukon’s avatar got smaller and smaller until it was little more than a tiny blue square lost in the endless gray sea of the Xbox avatar display. Dismayed yet defiant, Noukon shared his problem on Twitter but expressed resolve to keep the cherished avatar.
“I bought this gamerpic for 80 Xbox Points in 2006,” Noukon tweeted. “And I’ll be fucked if it won’t remain the best dollar I’ve ever spent.”
As luck would have it, Eden Marie, an Xbox engineer, saw Noukon’s lament and pledged to help.
“Listen, I can’t promise anything, but I’m going to make it my personal mission to fix this,” Eden responded.
To start, Eden purchased the Pac-Man avatar, now $2.38 instead of a dollar, which, interestingly, is a dollar over the standard inflation rate. (Hey, Xbox gotta get its cut, too, right?) After that, Eden chronicled her process of trying to restore this ancient relic of a gamer avatar from 15 years ago.
“Listen, I can’t promise anything, but I’m going to make it my personal mission to fix this.”Eden first fixed an inconsistency between how an avatar looks when you’re viewing your own profile versus what it looks like viewing someone else’s. On your own profile, Xbox 360 gamerpics look like huge gray circles with the teeny little avatar in the center. On others’ profiles, that same avatar looks much better. It’s still very small, but its background becomes a blown-up version of the small avatar, which creates a cleaner look.
After fixing that problem, Eden’s next task was to figure out how to make the avatar look better on the Xbox profile sign-in screen. Apparently, there are a lot of ways Xbox displays your avatar, making Eden’s project a little cumbersome.
“If I were to ask you how many ways we display gamerpics on the console and your answer wasn’t something like ‘all of them,’ then you’d be off the mark,” she tweeted.
After some trial and error, Eden seemed to hit upon a solution. She took advantage of the Xbox UI’s affinity for transparent images.
“Did you know that if you upload a PNG with transparency as a custom gamerpic, the Dashboard and Guide will respect that transparency in most places?” Eden wrote. “Some of the built in gamerpics have transparency built in. Maybe we can take advantage of that here.”
To get around Xbox cutting off the edges of a square gamerpic, Eden decided to place the square pic inside of a circle and make the circle transparent. It worked, and it looks great now.
Eden credited her ability to update Noukon’s avatar to Xbox’s policy of allowing its engineers free time to tinker with whatever they like within the platform.
“I love that we do it, and this week I absolutely chose to use it to rescue ghosts,” she said.
A noble cause indeed.
