Races and their languages

Discussion in 'Mechanics' started by reversePsychologist, Apr 22, 2013.

  1. PlanutExplorer

    PlanutExplorer Void-Bound Voyager

    :iswydt: me like this idea..:up:
     
  2. Alternal

    Alternal Existential Complex

    The emersion is already looking pretty sweet in this game, add something like this and you now have it 10x over.
    Good ideas for the Glitch and Novakids too, those would be difficult to come up with.

    For the Apex I was thinking maybe something more along the lines of random looking equations or even grunts and other ape sounds mixed into the speech.
     
  3. Witness

    Witness Giant Laser Beams

    The idea is nice but I am not sure it really should be worked on. The problem is, that - great minority of RPers aside - most players on most servers will seek and concentrate on easy communication in some sort of global chat, turning whole racial language feature into merely an amusing gadget, seldom ever seriously used and one that may not excuse amount of work put into it in the first place.
     
    reversePsychologist likes this.
  4. Double S

    Double S Pangalactic Porcupine

    Personally, I'm a big fan of a language barrier. The thing that gets me in games is that somehow, even though they could live on opposite sides of the planet, everyone knows the same language. Of course I understand that using multiple languages will hinder the player, takes extra time, and trying to make a language is pretty hard in itself... I've tried.
     
  5. Raiden Firewing

    Raiden Firewing Void-Bound Voyager

    *Facepalm* I meant Florans, sorry. And it was just an idea crossing my mind, because I found a font that would really fit them in my eyes, and it was titled "Old Gothic". But you already said you didn't wanted an "encrypted" language, so this is obselete after all ;)

    Well, there would be a way around that too. Let's say you have the letters for each language. When someone is now saying a word in a language you dont understand it will take the number of letters in each word and substitute them each with a random letter from their alphabet. So there is no way it can be decoded using "traditional" means. But then again you have your translator. And I thought, when you have, say 68% in Avian language, each word has a 68% chance to be displayed correctly. Like you can speak parts of the language, but not all of it. If you're lucky you may understand a sentence, but if not, you just hear gibberish. You'd still have a unique language with unique letters, but no way to tell what they said.
    Increasing this % could be done by reading books belonging to the race, or just plainly speaking to them. There is no better way to lear a language but to speak with the natives. So let's say, whenever you talk the first time to a specific NPC you'll get 0,5% in their language. (Just a random number, I don't know how balanced this would be)

    A funny addition might be that you can still accept quests from them... but you have no idea what they actually want (because the description is just the nonsensetext I explained above) until you can speak their language. Would be quite interesting I think ^^
     
  6. reversePsychologist

    reversePsychologist Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    Indeed, as you can see that point is already in the "Why Not" section of the post. As for "merely an amusing gadget", that would be exactly the point of this thing save for that little further "immersion". I was a bit hesitant to talk about the specific ideas for languages because they would be a bit hard to code since they wouldn't use regular fonts, and I wanted it to be a minor side-thing/don't want it to sound pretentious by being a side-feature that requires way more work than it should, however on the other hand perhaps it should need work and be big because a thing such as languages for every race doesn't sound minor...? The devs will deem it appropriate or not.

    Still, the part about the specific language ideas might as well be ignored, it's just me brainstorming ideas: the main point of my suggestion, again, is the mechanic of languages itself. I'd be ok with it being a side feature and languages to be coded simply, I would like it more with the other stuff I proposed.

    Now that would be hilarious!
     
  7. Akaiji

    Akaiji Subatomic Cosmonaut

    What possible reason (gameplay-wise) would it have to break down? o_O

    Uhm... That might be interesting if you used actual languages for each race, but I, for one, would not want to learn a dozen fictional languages just to play the game. :p

    I like the idea, but why not make it a quest? Something like "Hey, I know you want to learn our language so tell you what: You do me a solid and I´ll give you the data you need."

    An alternative mechanism would be that we define Common as derived from a merchant language, meaning every in-game vendor speaks it, so you just have to track the bugger down and continuously throw moolah at him until he surrenders the data to you. :proper:
     
    Dorsidwarf likes this.
  8. Renzenkin

    Renzenkin Aquatic Astronaut

    Yeah after sleeping on it i can see most people are to lazy or find it to difficult or simply don't have the time to do it my way (I'm not even sure i would want to learn like 5 new languages just to understand every one). So i thought that it could follow the difficulty settings (if there is difficulty settings) and my idea of course most likely following the hardest settings. But after thinking it over i am more up for the others idea of learing a language with you actually reading the book and your character learning the language instead of you, because if we go my way that would mean any character you make would after learning a language would be able to speak the language when they heard it for the first time. And the part about the translator breaking, i ment in like a gun fight or when you were fighting a tribe on a planet, they would have a chance of hitting your translator and it breaking form the physical force hitting it and not it being used to much and just randomly burning out.
     
  9. Heartstrings

    Heartstrings Giant Laser Beams

    I suggest when you 'learn' languages, books and signs turn from their language into the reader's. If you haven't fully learned it, then only simple words like 'and', 'the', 'eat', and others are shown in a real world language.
     
  10. reversePsychologist

    reversePsychologist Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    As for books, of course, if books in another language get to be a thing, that would be a natural consequence.

    As for signs I'd rather avoid that, it might imply the ability (of players too) to write in different languages on signs and I wanted to keep the feature as simple as possible. I'm not even sure there are NPC signs and if there will be they will probably be a minor detail, so I'm not sure.

    As for simple words, that would also imply something hard/obnoxiously long to code, which is filtering all the "simple words", unless you just tell the game to show the words that are composed of 3 or less characters. But still, the idea of % of learned language = % of understanding is, again, an overcomplication of this side feature anyway. I think it's best to just start understanding everything at 100% of the language learned. Otherwise, if the devs turn out to know how to make these things and it's not too hard and they are willing to spend time doing them for such a minor feature, then yes, books, players writing things in a different language, % of language learned makes you understand some words, all my ideas in the OP for each race's language etc., but until then I'd like to keep it simple (and maybe I even have a personal preference for it).

    Another problem with being able to write in a language combined with beign able to understand simple words would be the silly yet possible exploit of writing eve ryt hin g lik e thi s and the y wou ld sti ll be abl e to rea d it. Although I guess there's little to no point in that and might even be considered a circumstantially useful shenanigan?
     
    Dorsidwarf likes this.
  11. Heartstrings

    Heartstrings Giant Laser Beams

    Now how about you learn letters? Instead of words learn letters, which fixes both problems.
     
  12. reversePsychologist

    reversePsychologist Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    Read all previous posts about that :D
     
  13. Swirly

    Swirly Subatomic Cosmonaut

    It might be possible to pull a pig-latin in regards to alien languages. Change the normal symbols into ones appropriate for each race, and then apply very specific rules to each word in a block of text. You could simulate % learned of a language by phasing out steps in the "translation" from Galactic Basic to whatever the alien language is. So, if you have a 0% understanding of the language, then it does all the steps. But if you have 50%, then it only does half of the steps.

    So, the phrase: "Hello world!"
    might be translated in a series of phases into the Glitch language by following these steps.
    1.) Replace each alphabetical character with a glitch-language symbol. (For the glitch, maybe add a space between each letter, otherwise it would be very difficult to tell where one letter ends and another begins.
    2.) Shift all Vowels 2 spaces to the right. If a vowel hits the end of the word and needs to shift again, it moves to the front.
    3.) Swap the 2nd and 2nd to last character in each word. If a word has <=2 symbols, then nothing happens.

    Assuming you replace each alphabetical character with the roman numeral representing its place in the alphabet, and following the above steps you get:
    1.) "VIII V XII XII XV XXIII XV XVIII XII IV"
    2.) "VIII XV XII XII V XXIII XVIII XII XV IV"
    3.) "VIII XII XII XV V XXIII XV XII XVIII IV"

    And there you go, now all you robots can boot up and proudly proclaim "VIII XII XII XV V XXIII XV XII XVIII IV!"

    For our brains this sort of thing is pretty tedious and difficult, but for for a computer, it isn't very hard at all.
     
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  14. darkrhodes

    darkrhodes Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    Nice idea, language always adds to immersion and would just be fun.
     
  15. Lumberjack_Liam

    Lumberjack_Liam Existential Complex

    this is a good idea, but what about all the other humanoid NPCs and their villages? will they also have unique languages? and if so would we need a universal translator ? and then would we need to build it?
     
    harmonic_dissonance likes this.
  16. enigmatic fluff

    enigmatic fluff Big Damn Hero

    I think languages are an awesome idea!
     
  17. Akaiji

    Akaiji Subatomic Cosmonaut

    That is what we´re discussing in this thread (the translator was, in fact, discussed quite a bit on the first and beginning of this page). ;)
     
  18. The Thing

    The Thing Existential Complex

    The same idea was used in the game Sword of the Stars were all race have to research the other one language in order to communicate and do diplomacy. This really had a dept to the game and it's alway nice to broadcast funny insults at the start of a game when no one will understand :p. I support race specific languages.
     
  19. General Chaos

    General Chaos Pangalactic Porcupine

    I like the idea of the languages because it adds a lot of depth to the game itself.It can go far further than just with player to player and npc to player text. It can go into the background of the items in the game itself. Books,writings/drawings in caves, signs for towns,media formats a alien race uses, instructions on how to open,close,etc things in buildings/ruins/pyramids/temples/etc. Also I would make the feature optional since not everyone will want the immersion citing it being a chore more than anything else.Trust me I posted it in the irc chat and first thing that came out was it sounds annoying,etc these opinions by people that do not understand how much immersion would be added to the game.
     
  20. Akaiji

    Akaiji Subatomic Cosmonaut

    Well, considering the ideas in this thread it wouldn´t become tedious... You mostly don´t NEED to go hunt for languages (every spacefaring race is, by default, fluent in Common so you can communicate from the get-go and you can buy minor languages where they are spoken).
     

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