I had an idea for a mod that makes players anonymous to each other by randomizing their colors and names. I was able to randomly select a color without too much difficulty (although I am unsure if the colors are the same between players), but changing the names of players has been difficult.
I found a setting that hides player's names already built into FAF called options.options_show_player_names
. I used a mod to force it to 'off', but this breaks the chat. This seems to affect only PostprocessArmiesTable
in /lua/ui/override/ArmiesTable.lua
and PostprocessClients
in /lua/ui/override/SessionClients.lua
. However, when a chat message is sent, the engine has the sender as your original name, which causes GetArmyData
in /lua/ui/game/chat.lua
to be unable to find the correct army data and the chat message is ignored.
The ideal time to change the names of all the players would be just as the lobby is launched, but I am not sure that mods are loaded at this point. Alternately, if I can find a way to add some extra information to the army tables that can tie each player's original name back to them, that could also work.
If anyone has any ideas on how to get this to work, please let me know.