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[Acanthus117]

Can castes utilize the [BP_APPEARANCE_MODIFIER] tag? like all females of X species have huge noses, while males have fat?

[Untelligent]

I'm fairly certain. Try using it inside a caste and see if you get an error message.

[Lofn]

Yes, appearance modifiers are caste-level.  I have a race with one caste that has horns, and it took me a while to work out that the error I was getting was because I was attempting to apply the appearance tokens to bodyparts that didn't exist for half of the creatures. >_<

[Warlord255]

I thought RELSIZE was the parameter for changing a part's size. What does Appearance Modifier do?

[Deon]

Modify appearance parameters you set .

[Lofn]

Appearance mods are responsible for the appearance descriptions in the individual personality page - nose depth, eyebrow thickness, etc.

[Untelligent]

RELSIZE changes the relative size of a specific part. Appearance modifier sets the ranges of appearance descriptors. Relsize affects the actual size, appearance modifiers seem to only affect descriptions.

[Midna]

Actually, I have some questions about this, too.
Just what can we do with castes exactly? The most important question I have is,
how different can we make each creature using castes? For example, with antmen, we have the definition for the queen:

Code: [Select]

[CASTE:QUEEN]
[FEMALE]
[CASTE_NAME:queen ant woman:queen ant women:queen ant woman]
[POP_RATIO:1]


Okay, so there's only one queen out of however many ant(wo)men. Even though that's not terribly specific, I'm wondering if we could, say, take this web code from a giant cave spider:

Code: [Select]

[THICKWEB][WEBIMMUNE]
[USE_MATERIAL_TEMPLATE:SILK:SILK_TEMPLATE]
[WEBBER:LOCAL_CREATURE_MAT:SILK]
...and stick it under a [SELECT_CASTE:QUEEN] tag.


Secondly, and possibly more importantly, how can we set up positions (in the entity raws) so that they are caste-specific? For example, if I made antmen into a civ (as is often done), how could I ensure that the position of MONARCH was always held by a queen? Do we know this yet?

[JoRo]

Elves have a few gender restricted positions and use [GENDER:FEMALE] in the position definition, and the ant queen is the only one with the [FEMALE] tag, so you might be able to use that.  The issue is slightly muddied by the fact that the female caste for humanoids is just called [CASTE:FEMALE], so maybe [GENDER:QUEEN] or [GENDER:DRONE] could be used.

EDIT:  Attempting to test, and I don't know about position restriction but I do know that with the pop ratios/max ages the way they are the civ is initially seeded with a bunch of workers and maybe one soldier, and then they all die of old age.

[Lofn]

Castes are -glorious-.  Absolutely glorious.  There's very little you can't do, short of equipment or job restrictions - you can restructure body, limit attacks, change colouration, change mental and physical attributes, make them milkable, make them a totally different animal... it's very, very flexible, and very powerful.  As an example, this is an alien mod I've been working on that makes extensive use of castes.  http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=1998

[Midna]

That could work. I hope there's another way to do it, for the sake of flexibility (and I'm still wondering why non-queen females are considered genderless instead of sterile), but hopefully that'll work.

Also, yeah, I've noticed some of this. Right after asking the webbing question I realized that it probably would work. If [INTELLIGENT] can be caste-dependent, why wouldn't being a webber be so as well? That'd be ridiculous.

[Knight Otu]

Castes are -glorious-.  Absolutely glorious.  There's very little you can't do, short of equipment or job restrictions - you can restructure body, limit attacks, change colouration, change mental and physical attributes, make them milkable, make them a totally different animal... it's very, very flexible, and very powerful.  As an example, this is an alien mod I've been working on that makes extensive use of castes.  http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=1998

Specifically, here's a quote on what kinds of tags are creature level rather than caste level.

The number of tokens that are creature rather than caste specific is very small.  Creatures handle the overall name, biome, whether the creature is considered fanciful/doesn't exist (for art), vermin information (so, no, Fault, sorry!... too much depends on that right now), whether groups hang together closely, whether it is mundane (from real Earth for age name purposes), population information including good/evil/savage, if it is equipment, sphere information (not sure how long that'll last, but there were annoyances), and that looks like it (they also have some general categories that have caste overrides, like child names and speeches for adv mode).  Everything else, including body information, is held in the castes.

The one way I found to restrict entity positions beyond the [GENDER] tag is by adding a creature class to the caste(s) in question and in the entity position, use the [ALLOWED_CLASS] tag(s), which I had to use since gender only seems to take male and female, rather than castes (There is also an [ALLOWED_CREATURE] tag, but I haven't worked out yet how it works. There are also [REJECTED_...] equivalents for those two tags). For antmen, however, the gender tag should suffice, as the queen is the only true female in the species.

[Midna]

What do you mean by 'creature class'?

[Knight Otu]

Sorry, I should have specified - I mean the [CREATURE_CLASS:...] tag, such as [CREATURE_CLASS:GENERAL_POISON] that most living creatures have. It's a simple identifier that can take any string.

[Midna]

Ah. Can that be added multiple times, so the effects of poisons in general aren't lost for that creature? For that matter, is it caste-specific?