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[Kagus]

Howdy.  I'm interested in doing a little modding here and there, and wondered how many things can be assigned to a specific gender of the same race.

So far, I've only seen gender-specific names in the raws.  Cows and bulls, for instance.  

Is there any way to specify the tile, color, and/or body parts of a gender?

Okay, so I'm modding in genitals.  Don't tell Toady what his game is being used for.

[Fenrir]

I don't think this is currently possible. To be honest, I'm glad that your strange modding experiments cannot continue.

[LSTAR]

It might be possible if you made Males and females two different species with different body templates.
Ironically, adding in genitalia that way way would make procreation kinda impossible  

[penguinofhonor]

Just make a "Genitals" part and you win.

[Kagus]

Meh.  That's no fun, you don't get combat messages about the drunk biting you in the left testicle (eep).

And yeah, I tried making the seperate race bodyparts.  However, I didn't feel like making two new races, so I made just one.  And used a combination of the two bodytypes.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I added a he-she to our beloved Dwarf Fortress.  Somebody stone me. Please.

Also, I found out that only (and all) creatures with the [INTELLIGENT] tag show up in the demon pit engravings.  I also found out that tentacle demon pit engravings were far too well-suited to the foul creation.

(For those of you who haven't seen them, it goes something like this:  "Engraved yadda-yadda an X and a Y.  The X is committing a depraved act on the Y")

[Cosmonot]

quote:Originally posted by Fenrir:
<STRONG>I don't think this is currently possible. To be honest, I'm glad that your strange modding experiments cannot continue.</STRONG>

What did he do?

[Fenrir]

quote:Originally posted by Cosmonot:
<STRONG>What did he do?</STRONG>

Have you been reading this topic?

[Cosmonot]

quote:Originally posted by Fenrir:
<STRONG>
Have you been reading this topic?</STRONG>

It's not inconceivable that someone might want to create a creature with significant differences between males and females; you could make a type of farm animal which has horns if it's male, and does more damage with it's headbutt attack as a result.

[Kagus]

Yes!  Yes!  That's exactly what I was doing!  No strange, abhorrent experiments for me, oh no.  Just innocent attack modifiers...  Really.

[Red Jackard]

The female giant cave spiders you see, they are more vicious and persistent than the males.

[Kagus]

And, most likely, the big ones.  If common spider male-to-female size ratios are to be considered, little Mr. mini cave spider would be just about the right size for the males, whereas the females would be those big bruisers we all know so well.

So, just add the [FEMALE] tag to giant cave spiders, and you're set!

[Sean Mirrsen]

I think I suggested this a while back (or did I?).
Basically, I've found out from Toady that a lot of the entity code right now depends on there being ONE creature definition for ONE entity. Then I thought about the thing I've been trying to promote - referencing - and concluded that indeed, one creature per entity is very convenient, and at the same time it is possible to have a creature that consists of several different creatures - it will change its parameters and setup when it transitions between age categories, or depending on whether it is male of female, all using existing tags. Though the tags themselves would have to do a lot more.

Basically, instead of saying [MALE] so that the creature is recognized as male, you say [MALE:CREATURENAME_MALE], referencing a creature with the [CREATURENAME_MALE] ID for all male instances.
Furthermore, the male and female creature variants will have age categories - [CHILD:CREATURENAME_MALE_CHILD:12], for example. This will allow a child to actually be of smaller size than the parent (currently, it seems the "child" or "baby" refers mostly to the mental state of the subject, rather than the physical state), or posess intrinsics that would make it vastly different - as in the case with eggs. The number in the back means the same that it does now - the age at which the creature converts into the next phase. The details of the transition have also been discussed elsewhere, but at least pertaining to wounds and such, the method is "same tag - same state", any part on the old body with a token matching the new body's part will retain the damage and state on transition, missing parts will be lost, new parts will be unharmed.

[Kagus]

Not quite sure I follow you...  You seem to go off on a slight tangent, but I may just not be reading it right.

[Hague]

He wants tokens that reference other creature data so you can make different critters with different properties that fall under a larger category of creatures. For example, you could create a raw for some kind of insect larva and make that larva the spawn of another variety under a child tag. Since the larva itself won't have a child tag it cannot spawn but it will grow into the adult variety referenced somewhere else. Basically you could make it so certain life-stages have certain properites like size, bone mass, meat quality that sort of thing.

For example, if you make a child-type of cow called a calf, the calf meat could be more valuable since it is considered veal but you are guaranteed to get less of it, because the COW_CALF data says its [SIZE] is lower than that of a cow and so on...

You could technically expand this by making multiple sub-species of a particular variety. In fact, perhaps there could be a "phylum" file that groups other creatures together and allows them to interbreed and defines what creatures are children and so on. You could adapt a breeding token that determines what happens when two species breed together. Imagine, a series of dragon-types that can breed into a hidden super-dragon type. The same could go for cats, dogs, and other livestock.

[ February 04, 2008: Message edited by: Hague ]

[Sean Mirrsen]

That's correct. It's called referencing, I got used to it while modding Supreme Commander. Well, SupCom is LUA, so it's a lot more different there - like the way you can define a reference class, then just modify any variables in the class within parentheses. Here, a simple method of direct referencing should work just as well.

To clarify a bit on how it works, the definition of the creature in question will hold any data that is common to all its variants, and then it will have references to the creature's variants. So a human may just as well be defined by three lines: the human ID tag, and two tags referencing human_male and human_female creatures. The engine will still understand them as one creature, because of the common ID, but all the other data of the creatures will be read according to the only other tag present - the reference to the male or female variant of the creature.
The male and female creatures themselves could either have a tag that would not allow them to spawn individually (marking them as a subcreature), or as a simpler way, they would not contain spawn information, which would instead be read from the original definition.