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Crew rosters — names and faces at the consoles

A console has always been able to carry a person's name: the picker asks for one, and the Director's lower thirds and the Gamemaster's message list read it back. Almost nobody fills it in, so almost every seat on air reads unmanned.

A crew roster is a named set of people who fill those seats without anyone typing. It is an .amd file, it can carry a face or a photograph per person, and it comes from whichever layer knows best — a mod for its own hulls, a mission for its own ships, an operator for tonight's game, or the player themselves.

The two kinds

A roster says which it is with By:, because the two real uses want opposite things.

By: What it is Who decides
console (the default) a cast — each member names a seat, so opening helm makes you whoever crews helm the roster, automatically
person a group — a list of real people, console irrelevant you, by picking yourself

A cast is what fills a Director bridge multiview with nobody touching anything. A group is the "us, with our actual photographs" case: you pick yourself once and your name and face follow you to whatever station you take, this session and the next.

Writing one

The section fence carries what everybody shares, and each entry says only what makes them them. That is the whole point of the shape — Data is three lines.

## [Enterprise-D](tng_d)
---
crew
Hull: tng_fed_galaxy
Ship: Enterprise, Enterprise-D
Race: terran
Portraits: media/crew/tng
---
The Galaxy-class flagship's senior staff.

### [Jean-Luc Picard](picard)
---
Rank: Captain
Console: mainscreen
Face: tng1 #fff 0 0;
---

### [Data](data)
---
Rank: Lt. Commander
Console: science
Portrait: data
---

The kind is a bare noun

crew on its own line, not Kind: crew. The label kind infers landmark, which types the whole roster wrong and takes every member with it.

The fields

On the section Means
By: console (a cast) or person (a group). Defaults to console.
Hull: shipData keys this roster crews by default — the tier a mod uses
Ship: ship names bound to this roster — the tier a mission uses
Race: face race for members with no Face: of their own
Portraits: the folder every Portrait: below is relative to
Sheet: / Cell: / Grid: one portrait sheet, cut exactly like an image atlas
On a member Means
Rank: display only — "Captain", "Lt. Commander"
Console: which seat. Leave it off for a floating officer who fills any spare station.
Face: a face string, or a race keyword like terran_male
Portrait: a photograph — an atlas key, or a path under Portraits:
At: this person's cell on the roster's Sheet:

A portrait beats a face, never both: a photograph is the stronger statement and stacking them has no rule to resolve it. A portrait draws wherever Cosmos draws our own GUIs — the picker, Director lower thirds, the Gamemaster panel, any text area. It does not reach the engine's comms face slot, which only accepts face strings, so give anybody who speaks over comms a Face: as well.

A group, with photographs

## [Thursday Night Crew](thursday)
---
crew
By: person
Sheet: media/crew/thursday/faces
Cell: 256
Grid: 4, 2
---
Pick yourself; you keep your face whichever console you take.

### [Doug](doug)
---
Rank: Captain
At: 0, 0
---

One 4×2 sheet, cut the same way an icon sheet is. Sheet: resolves through the shared-media search, so it works the same in a clone and in a fetched copy.

Loading one

A mission loads its own file:

crew_load_amd("crew/rosters.amd")

An add-on or a mod cannot use that — it resolves relative to the mission, and a mastlib is a zip. Read your own file out of your own add-on instead:

shared MY_CREW = crew_declare_amd(amd_document(media_read_relative_file("crew_rosters.amd"), data_parser=amd_crew_data))

Which roster staffs a console

Strongest first. Every step above the last is optional; the last one always answers, unless you turn it off.

  1. The player. What they typed at the picker, the face they built, or the person they picked out of a group. Nothing outranks somebody's own answer about themselves.
  2. The ship. A roster declaring Ship: Enterprise, or crew_bind_ship(). This is how one game runs several crews at once — the Enterprise flies with one, the Defiant with another.
  3. The game. The CREW_SELECT setting: the Crew dropdown on the server console, or Defaults: CREW_SELECT on a @map.
  4. The hull. A roster declaring Hull: tng_fed_galaxy, or crew_bind_hull(). A mod sets this and every Galaxy in every mission arrives crewed.
  5. An automatic name. A console nothing above reached gets one anyway — see below.
  6. Nobody, only if automatic naming is off.

Two people never get the same person: a seat is taken when somebody sits in it and freed when they leave, so a bridge with two science stations gets two different officers.

Automatic names

A console nobody named gets one regardless, and a different one from every other console in the run. Uniqueness is what makes a Director bridge wall readable — every panel is on screen at once.

This is on by default, and it is the one part of the crew system that changes what an existing mission shows: a lower third that used to read unmanned now reads a name. That is the point rather than a side effect — the crew name existed for years and almost nobody typed one.

CREW_AUTONAME: true     # false: a seat nobody claimed reads as empty, as it used to

The stock names live in the library, so they work for a mission that loads no add-ons at all. A base game or a total conversion replaces them by registering its own, which are consulted first:

crew_register_names("helm", ["Ensign Vega", "Lt. Sorm"])       # any console
crew_register_names("helm", ["K'tal"], race="klingon")         # or per race

A group roster (By: person) never hands out its people automatically — a seat nobody claimed gets an automatic name instead. Giving Doug's face to whoever opened helm first is exactly what a group roster exists to avoid.

Names are released by the mission reset, so "unique per run" is precisely that.

At the console picker

When a roster staffs the ship, the picker grows a crew dropdown and a portrait beside the name box. The dropdown is an override — a cast already assigns itself, so reaching for the list is reaching past the automatic answer.

Edit Face opens the avatar editor and brings you back. It appears only when the avatar_editor add-on is loaded, and it builds the six stock races; a mod's faces are whole drawn portraits with nothing to slide, so those are picked from a gallery instead.

Turn the whole affordance off and the picker is the plain name box it always was:

CREW_EDIT:
    enable: true
    allow_face: true
    allow_portrait: false

What reads it

The name lands on the client as CREW_NAME, which is where it has always lived — so everything that already read it keeps working with no change:

  • the Director's <<crew_name>> overlay token, and the new <<crew_rank>> beside it
  • the Gamemaster's "To …" message list
  • anything of your own doing get_inventory_value(client_id, "CREW_NAME")

The face, portrait, rank, roster and why this name was chosen arrive as CREW_FACE, CREW_PORTRAIT, CREW_RANK, CREW_ROSTER and CREW_SOURCE alongside it.

See also