Visible language

[SCUBA]

I have posted about this before, but not an regular suggestion.

What I whant is that it in some way would be possible to differ characters by language. I dont whant his thred to be about signs of origin (town) or any other kind of thigs that could be placed on charcters when spawning. Language is what differ characters the most, and many players have not yet undertood that. If a character is spawned as Spanish, it only know spanish and if he/she meets english characters it doesnt know or understand english. It could learn, but this takes long time and much speaking and sorting words out. Not just 2 years of living in an english enviroment or something like that. PD and LD help me out here.

My main reason to make it possible to differ character is to be able to sort out problems like the one mentiond above. If you can't tell if a character has another language than most other in town, noone can tell if the player makes a big CRB letting the character speak a language it shoulden't know. More and more cross zone contacts are beeing made and this problem is growing bigger and bigger.

So how could it be done?

1 Just add language to character description: You see a swedish woman in her twenties.
2 Add it to description but not obvious what language it is: You see a green woman in her twenties. (all green characters speak swedish); You see a fat woman in her twenties. (all fat characters speak swedish.
3 Add it to the character description PAGE: He is in his twenties. He wears nothing worth mentioning. He speaks swedish.

Or another way I haven't thought of yet.

My suggestion is number 1!

[Rusalka]

And what if someone would learn another language? Besides that, you can't say that someone speaks swedish, french or elnglish unless he/she says something.

[Zanthos]

Personally, I feel the cure of the language problem is good rp.

players should be smart enough to know that their character wouldnt be able to understand a polish person talking when they first met, so players shouldnt go and translate what is said. They should accept the fact that there is a language barrier and should try to communicate through other means, like dropping resources and saying what they are in one's own language (Someone from polish zone did this a long time ago and actually had a translated dictionary of some common words, but then he died of a heart attack)

[tiddy ogg]

So we're back to this subject yet again... all this need of translation , whether by ig learning or mechaniclally, which slows things down phenomenally. That will put off new players, and without the ability to even point, without that action being necessarily understood, it's a complete loser. RReferring to the thread about the world being too large, as regards this language barrier, the islands should be far, far mor distaint. The playability under such Babel conditions may be a challenge, but how many people want such a pointless hindrance?

[Pieter de Groote]

And what if someone would learn another language? Besides that, you can't say that someone speaks swedish, french or elnglish unless he/she says something.

Just make it that someone is "looking Swedish", "German" or even "Esperanto". Independent of what language(s) a person actually speaks, people have visible characteristics that you associate with certain backgrounds.
I think it's a good idea to add that to Cantr as well.

[Sicofonte]

-thoughtful- But... it is not a good idea to announce that you can practice languages playing cantr and then to forbid the people (well, just the chars) to speak more than one language. Moreover when several languages groups are absolutly mixed (as dutch/french/german/spanish is), and a char there is always finding good situations to practice languages.
Besides that, the people that is not concerned to practice languages, has motivation to speak several languages too, since every city has three or more languages and it is not possible to rule or arrange anything if more than two thirds parts of the inhabitants doesn´t understand you, and half of the rest are sleeping. You NEED to understand that people.

In the real life, you have lots of time to gesture and try to find sense to the words of the foreigners. But in Cantr you can NOT see anything, and you have quite less time to waste on the simulation of the learning if you want to progress economically or socially in the game.

For example, the city of Snavirn has a population of 35 german, dutch and spanish people, and there is people of the three languages in the "government". Try to imagine these three people gesturing in order to write down a constition... No way.

Where I (the player) am living we have two official languages. I can swear that I was a fluent speaker of both languages before 10 years old. Nothing to say when I was 20.

Why a cantr char that newspawns in a place with two languages MUST know just one language?.

We can´t be strict with the CRB and the languages since it is only going to cause problem and to take off fun in the game.


PS: of course, if each language group would have been placed alone in each island, there wouldn´t be any reason to this, since every place would have just one native language.

[wichita]

I like the idea, but I would like to see this lumped in with visible spawning genetics. Funny looking guys speaking a funny looking language will make sense. It will not remove the CRB aspect from it, because the learning aspect will always be encouraged.


I started to set up the internationl emote translation page on the wiki, but I was trying to decide the best way to organize it. That should help speed the efforts with the learning process.


Personally, I don't think that the language barrier/learning process should be considered as slowing the game down. If the game mechanics are going to screw me out of being able to roleplay a guard/soldier/pirate because I don't have 24 unemployed hours a day to devote to the game, I think it is fair that the game mechanics provide a mechanical limitation to roleplaying a linguist. We all have our niche.

[SCUBA]

I like the idea, but I would like to see this lumped in with visible spawning genetics. Funny looking guys speaking a funny looking language will make sense. It will not remove the CRB aspect from it, because the learning aspect will always be encouraged.

This is just what i whant! But I whant the spawning genetict to be connected to spawning language and not anything else like spawning location exept the normal genetics of skills. So, still my suggestion is that it should ve visible in some way that charcter spawned with different languageess are different.

For example, the city of Snavirn has a population of 35 german, dutch and spanish people, and there is people of the three languages in the "government". Try to imagine these three people gesturing in order to write down a constition... No way.

I have a character here and dont like how rp is done in many ways. The people in this town speak german, spanish and dutch, but very often english is spoken. Very bad I think! So the "goverment" should ofcourse be done in som kind of mix of the three local languageses and also much gesturing. And all gesturing should ofcourse be described in english in such place, but most are not.[/b]

[wichita]

I like the idea, but I would like to see this lumped in with visible spawning genetics. Funny looking guys speaking a funny looking language will make sense. It will not remove the CRB aspect from it, because the learning aspect will always be encouraged.

This is just what i whant! But I whant the spawning genetict to be connected to spawning language and not anything else like spawning location exept the normal genetics of skills. So, still my suggestion is that it should ve visible in some way that charcter spawned with different languageess are different.

I would still rather see a location specific genetics introduced so people from different islands will appear different. The racial components to the society even within language groups could be interesting enough. I would like to see language as an added level, though. The German/Dutch/Spanish towns would have people with distinguishable features based on their language heritage, but the Spanish characters spawning in Kishnakotis could look different from the Spanish characters in Snavarin. All sorts of interesting layers of racism or culture could develop.

I have a character here and dont like how rp is done in many ways. The people in this town speak german, spanish and dutch, but very often english is spoken. Very bad I think! So the "goverment" should ofcourse be done in som kind of mix of the three local languageses and also much gesturing. And all gesturing should ofcourse be described in english in such place, but most are not.[/b]

I agree that the magical defaulting to English, while speeding up the game, is sidestepping the complication and is cheating that I refuse to participate in. I have actually emoted in English while my character is saying that he can't understand a word that they are saying, just to prove that I refuse to give in to it.

[SekoETC]

We have 15 languages now. If there were customised appearances then we could give a national trait to each language group. The problem is they'd likely be different from the ones we've gotten used to in real life. Like judging from the resources, Swedes would be likely to look like Asian people, while English might all end up with brown skin, and so forth.

Anyway, I don't think it would be impossible to come up with 15 unique features that still give room for variation.

[Pieter de Groote]

Just make it that someone is "looking Swedish", "German" or even "Esperanto".

Don't specify what characteristics make you notice someone's background. Just make the distinction.

[SCUBA]

Maybe we could have 15 distinguished traits for language, like haircolour or something. Then we could have to variables for where you spawn, based on latitude and longitude of the town spawned in. They could for exempel be fatness and length. So a character spwned in the upper right corner of the map would be fat and tall and one spawned in the lower left corner would be thin and short. Probably this should be based on more complicated algorithms so it wouldn't be easy to figure out and use for mapmaking. But why not?

[Sicofonte]

Ey... SCUBA, wichita... you convince me.

Let´s gesture! xD


And about the sugestion... it is not necesary that every trait was distinguished from the others. I mean, in real life, I tend to find italian people similar to people from Morocco, althoug they speak absolutly different languages (morocco´s arabic vs italian). And this is funny since Morocco is close to Spain more than to Italy, but I find the italian people more similar to Morocco´s people -shrugs-

Well, maybe just hair, eyes and skin color could be enough for 15 languages, But... in the same way as the real people (swedish white and blonde, oriental sallow and dark hair...), or just randomly for each language group (Cantrians are not Earth's humans)

[Nosajimiki]

I say heridity should be predefined via region, maybe break up all the contenents into a few zones, take everyone spawned in each zone and give them a set of traits randomly from a list of features that exist there and have about 5 or so traits (build, hieght, skin, hair, eyes?) So possible skin colors for example could be pale, light, yellow, light tan, dark tan,brown, black, ochre, and red? so someone from North West Treefeather might be able to be pale, light, or light tan and someone from South East Treefeather might be light, light tan, or dark tan. (simalar b/c on same island) but someone out on one of the other language continents might be in a ochre, brown, or black area. Once implemented heredity should take over and define what people look like where. Some genes could be dominate/resesive based and others, complex based.

resesvive method:eye color
**your trait = highest value of a double hylix
(0=green, 1=blue, 2=gray, 3=hazel, 4=brown)

EX: (1,3)= hazel

complex method:skin color
**your trait = result of multiple genes
*values are assigned by results of individual genes
0=(0,0) 1=(0,1)or(1,0) 2=(1,1)
*combanation of results determins trait.
[0,0]=pale, [1,0]=light, [2,0]=yellow [0,1]=light tan [1,1]=dark tan [2,1]=black, [0,2]=red, [1,2]= ochre [2,2]=brown)

EX:(1,1)(0,1)=[2,1]=black

As for adressing laugage groups once the regional stats are set, you could throw in some laguage modifiers, so let's say I have a swedish player assigned hazel eyes as shown in example above(1,3), I would get a (-2,-2) language modifier to eye color resulting in (0,1) leaving me with blue eyes. {note: modifiers would not make a value less or greater than able to be defined and would only take place at the intitial trait set.}

If for no other reason I think PD should consider this just becasue it'd be some fun algorithims to write. I started to work on a tribe based RTS that used basicly this type of system a few years back but it never got finnished because we realized the genetics code was the only really fun thing about making the game.

[fishfin]

what about in the character discription you see something like 'He speaks a different language than you.'