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[Williham]

As it stands, all dwarves wear all manner of clothing; irrespective of type, based solely on things like cover, permit and size.

Of course, no clothes are strictly and historically speaking purely feminine or purely masculine, a good historical example being the tunic: Once considered the height of male fashion, now a decidedly feminine garment, so adding support for a [MASCULINE]/[FEMININE] tag in the item_armor.txt files etc. is clearly not a good option.

Rather, I propose that the GLOVES:; SHOES:; etc. tags in the entity file be amended to optionally support two new final parameters; like so:

[{ARMOR_TYPE}:{ITEM}:{RARITY}:{MASCULINE_CHANCE}:{FEMININE_CHANCE}]

e.g.


[ARMOR:ITEM_ARMOR_DRESS:COMMON:20:90] 90% of civilizations generated will consider dresses feminine, 20% will consider it masculine
[ARMOR:ITEM_ARMOR_ROBE:COMMON:70:80] 70% will consider it masculine, 80% will consider it feminine



If a civilization considers a type of clothing either both masculine AND feminine or NEITHER masculine NOR feminine, they instead consider it to be a unisex type of clothing.

(optionally, the two last parameters could have the option to be replaced by e.g. STRICTLY_MASCULINE, STRICTLY_FEMININE, UNISEX; meaning 100:0, 0:100, and 100:100, respectively, if only in order to clarify intent in the raws, as necessary.)

Default preference is 100:100, or UNISEX.


Dwarves when generated and gathering equipment should prefer gender-appropriate clothes, and depending on their traits should either completely reject, get bad thoughts from, be neutral towards, be fine with, or actively seek out wrong-gendered clothing:

e.g. Urist McSelfconscious, Admirer of Tradtion would reject wrong-gendered clothes in favor of rags, but rather wear a dress than go naked, yet get bad thoughts for doing so, while another dwarf with low self consciousness and middling to high liberalism might actively seek out wrong-gendered clothes, and gain good thoughts for wearing them.

As a possible extension of the same mechanism, people you meet in towns of different civs might alternately applaud you for being brave (if they are liberal) or harangue you for being a "girly-man" (if they are conservative) if you are wearing what they consider to be "wrong" clothes.


Alternative, simpler mechanism:

[REDACTED]

[Rose]

The hell are you on?

Pants are for girls.

The only truly masculine clothing is kilts.

[Williham]

The hell are you on?

Pants are for girls.

The only truly masculine clothing is kilts.

Post updated as a response to fair comments.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I like that you mentioned the possibility of worldgen changing it right at the start; it's one less thing for us to point out. Cross-dressing dwarves? Um...maybe.

[Williham]

Part of the idea is to add a bit more cultural differentiation to civilizations, wrt. clothes, and to necessitate a clothes industry that's more than just


make cloth shirt A R
make cloth thong   R
make cloth sock    R

[Footkerchief]

Yours is probably the most specific take on this topic so far, so don't take this as an indictment of the thread, but for reference:

This has been suggested several times:

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=71639.0
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=53135.0
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=25424.0
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=3555.0

Spoiler: tags (click to show/hide)

gender sex caste male female men women clothes clothing specific differ differing different difference differences differentiate differentiation differentiating

[NW_Kohaku]

I've been saying this in a few other places, but it isn't really specified in a suggestion thread...

What we really need are CASTE-specific clothing types.

As in, we define at the creature level what clothes each body part is capable of equipping.

The problem we have is that if we had a race of, say, intelligent crab people with four arms, one pair of which are giant pincers, the other pair of which are smaller, weaker grasping hands, then, just by the nature of being "arms", you could wear gauntlets or gloves on all those arms.

Even if you completely disallow arm-based clothing in the entity raws, if those crab people become bandits that live near human villages, they will start wearing gloves on their claws as though they were humans. 

The same goes for if I mod in my serpent-like naga race - elven bandits in my naga towns will wear "tail warmers" (whose size would take up half the body of an elf) on their feet, and nagas in other towns will start wearing pants, which just shouldn't make any sense.  The same goes for, say, centaurs which might have horse shoes... those same horse shoes would be hammered into the feet of any humans who started living there.

What we need is the ability to define at a caste-level (preferably importable through templates, so that when we use the humanoid body type, it also imports the ability to wear gloves on hands, for example) what clothing is appropriate for what body parts, so that there isn't a problem with snakes wearing pants or humans wandering into a centaur town wearing barding into battle. 

Beyond that, there could be the more culturally-based clothing choices - as in, turbans, hoods, masks, etc. could all be various forms of "humanoid head clothing" in some general Reaction Class type of token that is fitted to different body parts at the caste level, as well as fitted to the clothing at the item definition raws, and then you could select what out of each class type is appropriate to each culture. 

These Reaction Classes could also be placed in such a way that they designate gender. For example, having a Reaction Class for "unisex humanoid head clothing", a "female humanoid head clothing", and a "male humanoid head clothing", and assigning the unisex and female in the female caste definitions, and the unisex and male in the male caste definitions, for example, so that you could then say that "this type of clothing is enabled as per a unisex clothing option in this culture", whereas it might be "enabled as a male clothing option in this culture" in another civ. 

[Williham]

The ability for creatures to define what armor types they can wear is of course useful, perhaps something like [EQUIPS:HELM:GLOVES:SHOES:ARMOR:PANTS] at the caste level, together with allowing for armor slots to be defined in the raws; so one might have [EQUIPS:HELM:GLOVES:ARMOR:HORSE_SHOES].

However: Specific clothing types for a creature to use does not belong at the creature level, but at the civilization level. Bringing reaction classes into it is unnecessary, and attributing clothing choices to eusocial castes makes little sense in the general case, except as for to define what body parts are actually present to wear things on, and I do believe Toady has already made some inroads on that front.

[NW_Kohaku]

The ability for creatures to define what armor types they can wear is of course useful, perhaps something like [EQUIPS:HELM:GLOVES:SHOES:ARMOR:PANTS] at the caste level, together with allowing for armor slots to be defined in the raws; so one might have [EQUIPS:HELM:GLOVES:ARMOR:HORSE_SHOES].

However: Specific clothing types for a creature to use does not belong at the creature level, but at the civilization level. Bringing reaction classes into it is unnecessary, and attributing clothing choices to eusocial castes makes little sense in the general case, except as for to define what body parts are actually present to wear things on, and I do believe Toady has already made some inroads on that front.

No, Toady hasn't made any changes on that front, and snake people still wear shoes and pants, and they are eusocial. 

You need to have something that tells the game what types of equipment that creatures can wear, and then the civ portion can tell the game what equipment styles that the game can wear, and the Venn Diagram of where those two categories overlap is what clothing those creatures will try to wear. 

That's why using categories is the obvious solution - it makes organization easier while still being simple to mod.

[Williham]

That's all well and good, but is an entirely different issue. Yes, naga shouldn't wear socks, and crab people shouldn't wear gloves, but this isn't really about naga or crab people. This is about getting male naga to prefer turbans, and female naga to prefer face veils. Internal and external differentiation between types of clothing don't need to go in at the same time, or even be achieved through the same system, in fact, it's probably better that they don't.

Of course, for wildly sexually dimorphic species, the two systems may overlap, but most animal people are as far as I can see roughly similar between sexes in DF, and a system that allows for different creatures to use different clothing categories (e.g. ITEM_ARMOR_HORSE_SHOES for centaurs) will deal with any physical differences within a single civilization, assuming it's on caste level.

Again, it's about baby steps: The system as proposed in the initial post is relatively simple, and provides a good amount of depth for the common case of civilizations consisting of more or less similar creatures, and there is nothing in it that prevents extensions along the lines that you are proposing at a later point, and as necessary.

[Telgin]

Toady prefers sprinting to baby steps.

I think doing this is an important part of the game's flavor, and would like to see it sooner than later.  I'd like to see the caste based stuff go in at the same time though.  It's more generic, covers more ground and still covers the female and male distinction.

[Williham]

Except that the caste based stuff doesn't actually cover it, at all. Because the whole point is that there is no male and female distinction between clothing; there is only what is socially considered to be masculine or feminine clothes.

In species with extreme sexual dimorphism, sure, but those are, in DF, few and far between, and even fewer civilized ones.

And even then, it doesn't affect what kind of clothes they wear, it only affects what clothes they are physically capable of wearing, which is an entirely different issue.

[NW_Kohaku]

There was a reason I included categorical tokens in that example for males and females and unisex clothing - it's because that is exactly what allows you to do gender-based selection from categories.

In case you didn't understand, I'm saying that each piece of clothing can have more than one token.  The same turban might be male-only clothing in one civ, and unisex in another, female-only in another, and not worn in another, all while preventing types of civ creatures that have improperly shaped heads for that sort of clothing from wearing that clothing.

In short, it's a solution that solves all the problems, and is not terribly complex more more difficult to accomplish than what you are proposing.  It's a giant leap for the cost of the baby steps you are proposing.

When you are trying to approach a problem with a suggestion, you really should try to take more holistic approaches to the problems, rather than narrow, temporary solutions, as well as strive to understand the greater context in which the problem appears to understand how the changes that are coming down the road will require more flexible systems. 

[Williham]

Holism and context are all well and good, but there are two different issues being discussed here:

1) Differently shaped creatures wearing appropriate clothing.

2) Societal variations in clothing.

The two things have absolutely nothing to do with one another.

For the first issue, you propose categories; which is all well and good, and those categories already exist (GLOVES, PANTS, etc.).

There needs to be a template-importable caste-level definition of what categories go on what body parts, and preferably a system for defining new categories (TAIL_WARMER, HORSE_SHOES, etc.)

For the second issue, more information needs to be attached to the entities, as this is something that has nothing to do with the clothes, or the creatures, or in fact anything of the sort. It's a completely abstract issue dealing in completely abstract matters, relating to, and only to, the entities and their culture.

In other words: The two things are not actually related.

[NW_Kohaku]

Except you can solve two problems for the same amount of work.  You are trying to force a division where division leads to a less effective solution to both problems.