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[Pickerel]

I know this isn't too important or anything, but it's a modding dynamics thing:

The ability to have variants of a creature without messing with the number of a type of creature.  Common example of variant creature: dragons.  In most games, there's dragons of different 'colors' that denotes abilities and difficulties.  Currently to get 5 color dragons I need 5 entries in the raws.  That leaves, when chosing megabeasts, dragons in general at a 5/9 chance of being picked.  But I LIKE the other megabeasts.  To get the ratio back up, I can change frequency values, or add more entries of the other megabeasts.  But megabeasts don't have frequency values (in fact, sasquatch has frequency of 1, so megabeasts would need fractions anyway if they worked under that system.) Now there's all sorts of megabeasts.  Are they now, overall, more likely to be chosen in worldgen?

The remedy: in the raws, the ability to have variants.  Instead of 3 entries of dragon, it could have:

Creature:Dragon
    ect.
    Variant1: Black dragon
        name:black dragon:black dragons: black dragonian
        ect.
        Variant frequency 10
    Variant2: Mauve dragon
        ect.
        Variant frequency 5

And when a world is generated, it will only look at this =after placement=...  Thus it will place based on only a single creature:dragon entry, and only after things are placed, apply variants, and then play out the history, as it does, with this particular individual dragon.

While I use megabeasts, an extreme example, this applies to many things, from the ability to have 'a large buck' vs 'a mid-sized doe', or a stone golem vs a metal golem vs a mud golem without having three entries in the raws, or to more quickly and easily add variants like platonic elemental variants to magical creatures.

[i2amroy]

It would be cool though if the variant not only applied to names, but could use any of the tags, that would allow you to create things like elementals that share much of their tags, but not all of them.

[Pickerel]

Perhaps I should have specified, but that was what I meant.  Hence why I mention stone vs metal vs mud golems.  To do that they would need to have different raceglosses (and some other things modded as well).

[Neonivek]

No offense but I hope Dwarf Fortress never EVER goes into color co-ordinated dragons...

It has gotten to the point of pure stupidity to be honest...

[Derakon]

You got something against beige dragons?

[Neonivek]

Well... When I go outside and see someone with black hair... I do not expect them to be able to spit acid because of their hair color.

The first Monster Hunter had plenty of dragons of many color... but they were named differently... (The second however... Did have "Colored" versions that were dramatically different...)

[Granite26]

Just remember: Vanilla DF vs. Mod functionallity.

[Draco18s]

No offense but I hope Dwarf Fortress never EVER goes into color co-ordinated dragons...

It has gotten to the point of pure stupidity to be honest...

Our Dragons Are Different.

[Granite26]

nice one Draco18s...

[Neoskel]

Toady is gonna put in appearance raws so you can have dragons with different scale colors but no other differences, along with different hair and beard colors on dwarves, etc.

[Granite26]

        name:black dragon:black dragons: black dragonian
 

isn't it draconic?

Anywho, talking in some of the other threads, it really feels like some of this could and should be done in an external mod/raw managing tool.