Modding Discussion Avali 1.0 Reboot Discussion

I didn't specify earlier simply because I didn't think you'd care about such details, or be inquisitive enough to ask. That's kind of personal life stuff that I wouldn't be inclined to talk about in public, frankly; I'd say mind your own business, but I'm not really that type of person.

Besides, I was responding in accordance with the above statement. It seemed like you were sure that there was no way I wouldn't be able to use the app, so I simply elaborated. Don't act like I overreacted when I was simply correcting your earlier statement.

 

Well, not the part about your personal life, but simply that you're not allowed to use Discord would explain more than typing you don't have access to a computer on a computer, I think.
Also, how do I tell avali gender again? The feather patterns on the forehead are pretty obvious, but... some of them have started wearing hats.

 

Not to mention those in full armour. Maybe they should be colour coded. Or wear tags.

 

Look at the tails. Males have a dot, females have stripes.

In canon, they are color-coded--males have bright colors, females are drab. Starbound doesn't follow that convention because there's no way to code the mod so that certain colors only show up for one sex. Ryu had some ideas about how to fix it in the reboot, but, well... you know how that's going.

 

I wasn't talking about the plumage, I was talking about the armour, and not really serious about it. Too many of our options would be be beset by engine limitations. Now, one thing that could be done is to establish a clear naming system and rely on that.

 

Well, you can use natural feather colors and not end up with something drab, but yeah. Apparently people think that, because my character's an avian, you know, with full color feathers, black from head to tail, that I should obviously be able to tell avali feather patterns because "birb".
Anyways, yes, from what I know of color codes, it should be quite simple, actually. femalebody.png should use an entirely different palette than malebody.png, and then in the color options, simply specify what the hex color codes in malebody.png should turn into the bright colors while the colors used in the female body should use muted colors, in the same colorOption. Which means that, at any given time, only a half of the color options set are able to actually be used.

 

Unless I remember something incorrectly, most Avali are heavily into bodymodding. Given that, it seems highly unlikely that as minor a body mod as dying ones feathers is considered taboo, or even uncommon.

 

Nice idea. Went and tried it, but was foiled by the fact that while the body and head sprites are sex-specific, the arms and "hair" are not. Maybe there's a way to add sex-specific arm sprites, but it's beyond my very limited modding skill.

 

Okay, I don't know for the arms, but why are the female eyes different from the male ones using the same head sprite? Emotes? Those could be completely abused for this.

 

Feather dying is confirmed canon and can obviously "overwrite" natural feather patterns, effectively making it sometimes impossible to tell an avali's gender without getting a very close look at their anal cavity.

 

...or even asking them. Alternatively, get one of those things like in sci-fi movies that just pop up a holographic display with name, gender & occupation when you look at someone.

 

Asking is no fun. > w>

 

In light of the topic at the 1.0 lore discussion thread, I still don't understand the avali NPC dialogue towards humans. That's almost certainly not how Ryuu intended them, so why did he give them such dialogue? Was he purposefully overstylizing?

 

Perhaps a representation that most don't like the humans for some reason... why, I could not tell you. Might have been something added into the current playable avali mod by those who have kept it going. Or, if it was written and added by Ryuu, then it is somewhat cannon now. Too bad there's no way to tell which is true.

 

I'm pretty sure it was added by Ryuu himself, as Yellow started playing back in the beta days when Ryuu was still updating the mod and he (Yellow rather) came across such dialogue. Again, I find this very strange, as the wiki states "The Avali have a low-intensity racial grudge against Humans, who closely match the surviving descriptions of the Avali’s ancient “benefactors.” While this dislike has not spilled out into conflict, there is little love lost between the two races. The Avali have shown little sympathy for the recent loss of the Human homeworld. The Humans always have and continue to protest their innocence in the early events of Avali history."

Maybe the wiki description and the in-game depiction are more similar than I allow myself to realize (I could just be biased/offended because I'm one of the rare xenophilic avali), but it still seems like there's a large gap between "low-intensity racial grudge" and the fight-starting words that the majority of avali NPC's use towards humans. It just doesn't match up.

 

Context:

Those are very odd lines of dialogue indeed, not only because of the "low intensity" racial grudge but also the content of the lines themselves. Impervium gonads, bombarding fledgling races, civil war, a violin?!
Those make no sense, since the Illuminate 1. Doesn't use Impervium, that's way above their tech level. 2. They blame the human for enslaving them, right? 3. Earth was finally at peace before being destroyed by the Ruin, and 4. Why do they do know what a violin is?

 

Impervium is likely not referring to a real material but rather the idea of a fictional impervious material. That would still be a rather decidedly human thing to say.

A lot of these remarks seem like they would be said by humans; the way they're delivered and the casual human culture references definitely don't sound like things your average (at least canon) avali would say. Not to mention there are a lot of inconsistencies with at least current Starbound lore, yeah.

Maybe there is something to be said for Starbound avali being a practically different race than canon avali. To me that would only make things more confusing than they already are, though, so I don't think that would be in Ryuu's best interests. Maybe he realized this and just gave up with the avali in general.

 

Whoops.
I forgot they removed impervium from the game... twice. It did definitely exist when those lines were written, though.
https://starbounder.org/Impervium_Bar
https://starbounder.org/Impervium_Compound
Anyways, yeah, the now dubbed "executive" furniture set is made of Impervium. Or not, since they can no longer be crafted, but the sprites are still impervium black.

 

Thanks for revealing another arcane beta aspect to us, Scival.

 

And for point 1, avali reproductive organs are internal. I see no reason they'd find them worth mentioning. Point 2 makes sense for individual avali who realize that whatever happened between humans and avali during uplift, this human they're talking to wasn't involved and doesn't deserve their enmity. Point 3 was accurate when it was written, since human lore at the time stated that the humans were in the midst of civil war when the tentacle beast struck (except where it said they'd achieved peace long ago--the lore was schizophrenic). Point 4 always stuck out to me. I assumed the term reached them by cultural osmosis and they just latched onto it, but that's kind of a tenuous explanation.