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[Mr Crabman]

Creature attributes of both the physical and mental kind are displayed relatively; dwarves are less agile for instance than humans, but if a given level of agility would be considered "clumsy" for a human, for a dwarf it will be described as average (or rather, not mentioned); because of the way this works, no dwarves will ever display as "abysmally clumsy" because a value of 0 is too close to the dwarven average.

But it would be handy to be able to see it relative not to that species, but to another species (most likely the one being played as in adventure mode, or controlled in fort mode); so you could display how agile a given dwarf is, and how much "immoderation" they have, and so on, relative to a human, or you may see that compared to dwarves, even the weakest willed of dragons has "an unbreakable will".

A similar suggestion could be made for body part appearance modifiers (ie the stuff specifying how deep-set a creature's eyes are for example), though it would be slightly different because the current way that works isn't based off distance from the "average", but off specific hand-specified ranges, but the idea is the same. While right now elves ears are actually identical to humans and dwarves, you could imagine that if they were set to be longer, then while playing as an elf you could still have friends that have "average ears", but with that same elf, when playing as a dwarf, you would see that they have "very long ears".

[IndigoFenix]

For total size, I agree - telling the player how big the observed creature is relative to yourself is much more useful information than telling the player how big they are relative to the average for their species.

However, some players may still want to see more precise information. Perhaps there could be two strings, one describing the creature relative to their species, and the other relative to the player ("he is enormous, but small for an elephant").

For body parts, this could get tricky, because not all creatures have the same body parts and the game has no simple and accurate way of associating one creature's body part with another. Descriptors are also surprisingly arbitrary, you can assign any existing descriptor to any body part (I like adding curvature - from nose descriptions - to horns and beaks), and the game would have no idea what to do with these. So I think body part descriptions should be left as is; if players want to give elves long ears they simply have to change it in the raws.

[Mr Crabman]

For total size, I agree - telling the player how big the observed creature is relative to yourself is much more useful information than telling the player how big they are relative to the average for their species.

However, some players may still want to see more precise information. Perhaps there could be two strings, one describing the creature relative to their species, and the other relative to the player ("he is enormous, but small for an elephant").

That's one idea; my initial thought was just a toggle option in a menu somewhere that switches between "relative to the species" and "relative to the player", but showing both at once is an interesting idea, my only fear is this could get rather crowded given that there are a lot of attributes (19 or so?) and several may be displayed at once.

For body parts, this could get tricky, because not all creatures have the same body parts and the game has no simple and accurate way of associating one creature's body part with another.

Is this such a difficult issue? I'd have thought it could detect the use of say, `[SET_BP_GROUP:BY_CATEGORY:EYE]`, and the use of each modifier in that group, and be able to compare it with the same modifiers in the played creature's modifiers for that BP_GROUP (if they have one of course).

Descriptors are also surprisingly arbitrary, you can assign any existing descriptor to any body part (I like adding curvature - from nose descriptions - to horns and beaks), and the game would have no idea what to do with these.

The answer here I think would be to just fall back on species specific descriptions if the creature you're controlling lacks the right descriptor in the right BP_GROUP?