At instances, Twitter could be a unhealthy place, amplifying a few of the worst opinions and folks on the web. But on some days, the platform can remind us there are nonetheless first rate people doing good work to make the world a greater, much less shitty place.

Long in the past, an Xbox consumer who goes by Noukon on Twitter bought a Pac-Man ghost avatar for a greenback. Over the years, because the Xbox consumer interface underwent adjustments and iterations, Noukon’s avatar bought smaller and smaller till it was little greater than a tiny blue sq. misplaced within the countless grey sea of the Xbox avatar show. Dismayed but defiant, Noukon shared his downside on Twitter however expressed resolve to maintain 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, noticed 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 begin, Eden bought the Pac-Man avatar, now $2.38 as an alternative of a greenback, which, apparently, is a greenback over the usual inflation fee. (Hey, Xbox gotta get its reduce, too, proper?) After that, Eden chronicled her means of attempting to revive this historic relic of a gamer avatar from 15 years in the past.

Eden first fixed an inconsistency between how an avatar appears once you’re viewing your personal profile versus what it appears like viewing another person’s. On your personal profile, Xbox 360 gamerpics appear to be enormous grey circles with the teeny little avatar within the heart. On others’ profiles, that very same avatar appears a lot better. It’s nonetheless very small, however its background turns into a blown-up model of the small avatar, which creates a cleaner look.

After fixing that downside, Eden’s subsequent activity was to determine how you can make the avatar look higher on the Xbox profile sign-in display. Apparently, there are a whole lot of methods Xbox shows your avatar, making Eden’s mission a little bit 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 appeared to stumble on an answer. She took benefit 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 round Xbox reducing off the sides of a sq. gamerpic, Eden determined to put the sq. pic inside a circle and make the circle clear. It labored, and it appears nice now.

Eden credited her capacity to replace Noukon’s avatar to Xbox’s coverage of permitting its engineers free time to tinker with no matter they like throughout the platform.

“I love that we do it, and this week I absolutely chose to use it to rescue ghosts,” she stated.

A noble trigger certainly.