Concepts

Eight rows

A face is eight rows of eight characters, one row per chat line. Each character is one pixel, drawn in its colour with face.glyph, a full block by default, which is as wide as a chat line is high, so the face comes out square. A line draws a row with <face:1> to <face:8> in this plugin's messages, and with %uxmheads_face_1% to %uxmheads_face_8% in any plugin that reads PlaceholderAPI. Words written after the row stand to its right.

Where a face comes from

flowchart TD
  P[Player's profile] -->|names a skin| H{Host in skins.hosts?}
  H -->|yes| D[Download, keep in skins/]
  H -->|no| F[face.fallback]
  P -->|names no skin| N{find-by-name on?}
  N -->|yes| A[Account service skin for the name]
  N -->|no| F
  D --> R[8 by 8 face, hat layer over it]
  A --> R

The address in a profile is set by the player's own client, so nothing is fetched from a host that is not listed, and nothing that is not http or https.

A player without a skin

A skin that cannot be read, and a player with no skin while find-by-name is off, wear face.fallback (Steve). With an empty fallback such a player has no face: a row draws nothing, and the words of that line move to the left edge.

Memory and disk

Faces are held in memory, skins.memory (1000) of them; the faces of the players on the server are always among them. Downloaded skins are files in skins/, read from disk next time. A file nobody wears for skins.keep-days (30) is deleted; each join resets its days.

Related: Faces and skins