Yeah, thank you, that's how I'm leaning too. Was aiming for #2 at first, didn't consider #1 as an option but it was a necessary step in the production, and working with the Hive as a template, I thought "Oh, Yang would love this - the uniformity!" - so I went and rendered it to see how it looked. And after seeing #2 I went, ok, let's shift a random half of these by 1s in either direction.
The *.flc files with the photo galleries can't be easily read with today's software, by the way. Other flc's (short animations - body scans, planet buster explosion, escape pods landing etc.) can be read just fine, sometimes with minor discrepancies, but in this case present-day video players & editors scream error and skip a bunch of frames. So the only reliable renderer I have for them is the game. Luckily it shows the slides every 2s like clockwork, so I could screen-rip at 1 frame per second with no glitches.
Depending on the faction, the entire cycle lasts between 48 and 56 seconds (24 to 28 images, 30 for aliens but theirs are not real photo galleries
), and it repeats in the same order. The second time around, though, the first image in the set is usually omitted. Not sure why or what it depends on. My guess is that they didn't want the repetition to be too glaringly obvious, and since the player is likely to remember the first slide the best (just how the brain works, and on top of it the opener is typically a childhood portrait that obviously resembles the character), they wanted us to not immediately catch on that we were seeing repeats. Whatever the reason is, some thought went into it.
