More variation per unit: Male (Black/White), Female (B/W)

[Creative Mechanism]

Hello,
I've been tinkering around with some images and unit WML and I'm very impressed with and appreciative of what I've seen. I've created 4 variations on a unit: Black and White men and women. Is there any way to randomly choose skin color along with sex?

Thank you for your time,
Matt

[Creative Mechanism]

I'm specifically asking if it would be possible to do this with the current version of Wesnoth. If it isn't, I'd like to suggest that skin color variation be considered as a feature.

Is it possible to add more values to the gender options through a cfg file?

[Kestenvarn]

Hmm... if something like this could work, I wonder if it would be possible to get variations in things like hair color.

[scott]

You can use the current gender system to simulate non-gender variations, but the max variations is 2. The female version doesn't actually need to be female, since the female image can be set to anything. Although limited, it's really simple.

There is also a variation system but I don't know it off the top of my head. Try looking up http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki/UnitWML
It doesn't tell you how to use it, but you can look in HTTT for examples.

[Creative Mechanism]

Thanks for the replies. I'm currently using the gender tag to choose between skin color, but that's not really satisfying. This means that the user has to choose between male/female OR Black/White and have the other gender chosen randomly. If the units are otherwise identical, if doesn't make much sense to make one of these a choice and the other one random.

What I am looking for is a way to make units a little more representative of its players. I am worried that forcing racial or sexual preference choices on the player will make their choice too much of an issue.

I've checked the [variation] tag, and I'm not sure how it would apply to this problem. The only examples I could find were on changing from a living archer (for example) to an undead one.

Please let me know if you have any other ideas.

[zookeeper]

I think something like skin colour variations for units is just unnecessary complexity. It would make, for example, units less recognizable by glancing. And why would any Wesnothian races even have a variety of skin colours? This is of course completely off-topic, and please note that I only wouldn't want to see things like this in mainline, but I can't see a problem with it in user campaigns, factions etc.

[scott]

Konrad and Li'sar have graphical variations for when they receive the sceptre of fire. There is a WML [effect] that invokes the variation inside an event:

Code: Select all

					[effect]
					apply_to=variation
					name=scepter
					[/effect]

In Konrad's unit config file there's a section that defines the scepter varaition.

[Creative Mechanism]

Scott:
Thanks again for your quick response. I'll work with the variation tags and see if I can get them to work for me.

Zookeeper:
As to whether or not this feature would be needlessly complex: you might well be right, but I've got a couple of questions before I'll be convinced.

1) would it be more work than simply changing the gender to a non-Boolean variable? (Of course, I might not know anything about how this actually works in the game).

2) If sex in the game isn't that distracting (with different head shapes due to hair, etc), why would skin color be? Since the units are symbols, they are probably read at a glance like other symbols (like words, emoticons, etc). Although I hate to cite it, Microsoft has a good page on how symbols are recognized. Especially look at the parallel letter recognition section.
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ctf ... on.aspx#m1
I can't imagine that changing the few pixels constituting skin tone would present much of a problem to unit recognition.

3) I admit that I don't know anything about the actual racial/skin-color makeup of Wesnoth's races. I'm only reacting to the overwhelming Whiteness of Westnoth's humans. I think that this is one of the best and most interesting games I've played, and it feels odd that none of the humans would have dark skin. Is Wesnoth a White world, or is there room for some random racial variation?[/url]

[Ranger M]

I think that entire races are being made specific colours instead of specific units, eg the new desert human faction (forgotten the actual name) will probably have black skin.

[Viliam]

I feel like we are going again to the type of discussion that led to adding genders in game. It does not improve gameplay; the only advantage is that hopefully no one will be offended. More pictures can be nice, but it also means more work for painters; and pictures must be done carefully so that player can differentiate one gender from another, but still the two genders of one unit type are more similar than units of other types, including the advanced levels of the same type.

It was enough to make two genders (so far no transgender or intersexual people complained), but for realism we need more than two colors. The real people have many shades of skin color between pink, yellow, brown, gray, and black. That would be many images to draw. (For each human unit there are attack pictures, defend pictures, death pictures; for both genders.) So we have to implement it differently. The solution could be to modify some pixels of unit images by algorithm - some pixels would be marked as skin color pixels (face, hands), they would change randomly when the unit is recruited, and the color would be remembered. (While doing it, we could also generate random hair color; it is the same method.) The set of selectable colors could be race-specific (race = humans, elves, drakes). I am not sure how significantly would this influence the speed of game or memory requirements (more different images will take more memory when cached, and more CPU time when calculated repeatedly).

PROS:
- not offending anyone
- units will gain a bit more "personality", no two will look really same

CONS:
- lot of work to implement
- may increase hardware requirements

[scott]

Race in Wesnoth is geographically homogeneous, since geography causes racial variation in the first place. The world is patterned after medieval Europe, so this also means race is culturally homogeneous for technological or societal reasons. It also means that you're going to get a lot of white people. I think these are natural side effects of writing what you know and building upon other people who have done the same.

I also understand the very valid question of where do other races fit in (or, "Where does my race fit in?"). I think the answer is anywhere, consistent with the basic principle stated above. There are semitic and African-type units and factions being developed (enthusiasically, in some cases). The Lavinian faction has a line of black horsemen.

As the world grows it will be (hopefully) natural for non-white races to pop up. However, these must serve the game's sense of internal consistency. I don't think that this can happen by being multicultural for its own sake, since we're saying cultures are unicultural. This does NOT mean factions are necessarily uniracial or unicultural (see the Lavinians), but I don't think a Loyalist spearman has an equal chance of being any skin color. Thus (to summarize) units of all races are welcome, but there are good reasons to say that a particular unit is of only one race.

I'm not speaking for the dev team here, just laying things out as I understand them.


P.S. I think an automated algorithm for changing skin or hair could be marginally nice but more of a hassle than it's worth.

[Creative Mechanism]

On skin color:
I think that automatically changing the skin tones would be interesting, but probably require much more work. I'm not advocating making changed skin tones mandatory, only expanding the unit variability. If the gender tag could be changed to allow any number of variations then creators could decide at the time of creation whether or not to include other skin colors.

I'm not interested in allowing different skin colors to avoid (1) potentially offending people or (2) recreating reality. I'm interested in allowing different skin colors to make the units more inclusive at the creator's option.

Feasibility for Artists:
With a program like Gimp or Photoshop, changing skin color is actually a very easy and fast process (just use Match Color, Curves or Replace Color), though applying the simple process can be time consuming unless the artist automates the process to apply to all the different image files for a particular unit. I honestly don't know how you'd do that with GIMP, but I'm sure it wouldn't be any harder than it is in Photoshop.

On unit image variability:
Beyond skin color, allowing more unit variability would generally expand what is possible in the Wesnoth Universe. Who knows what creative variations people might come up with. That is what's exciting for me about open source.

Wesnoth's Homogeneous Culture
I understand and appreciate why Wesnoth could be and is a primarily White society. At the same time I believe that Wesnoth will continue to grow, and just like the real world, there will come a time when a mixed culture (Medieval Egypt) might play a role. It would be great if this was part of Wesnoth's possible future. (Also: Were Medieval Spain + Portugal racially homogeneous?)

Questions:
1. Would it in fact be easy to allow the expansion of possible variations on the gender tag?
2. Are there any technical problems in allowing this variability
3. Are there any plot problems in allowing creators the option of creating a heterogeneous culture?

[Yogibear]

There is one more aspect that has not been mentioned yet: download bandwidth.

Wesnoth has 35-55 MB at the moment and the biggest part of that is graphics. Not everybody has a DSL connection to download. In fact there have been activities to produce "light" versions of wesnoth for modem and isdn users. With the next release wesnoth is growing further and we should only add more graphics if there is a substantial need or improvement.

I understood this feature is mainly for campaign authors. Since i do not create campaigns, i am not going to judge the need for this (although i am having an opinion on it). So what do campaign authors think about it?

[scott]

I am all for expanding the gender system to handle more than 2 variations, even if it is an undocumented feature.

I understand the bandwidth issue... I thought of suggesting a packaging option that excludes all animations. Bare bones rather than light.

I think heterogeneous cultures are fine as long as their existence makes sense "in-role."

[Darth Fool]

There will in the future be a way to specify in a unit definition color changes similar to team colors, but with the ability to define the end color range instead of just using the unit's team color. This will enable artists and unit designers to have random hair/skin color for units if they wish to do the work necessary. It should not have any more impact on CPU performance then the team colors has had. It will not require new graphics, so it shouldn't increase download problems for low-bandwidth player. It will not provide the variation in graphics that gender does, but that is ok.

I am also planning on adding a feature that allows the unit/scenario designer to specify that when the unit is recruited it takes on a random variation from a list. This would essentially allow everything that you want, but also have a lot of other possibilities as well, but would increase download bandwidth and require much more artistic work for any given unit. Most core units in wesnoth will not use this feature because of the bandwidth and work issues. A few special core units might use it, but mostly I imagine it would be used by era and campaign designers.