ID:153871
 Nov 19 2002, 4:36 pm
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I have been working on a system so each player has a skill for speaking, hearing, reading, and writing each of the in-game languages. Each value is a percentage. If someone's speaking value for Language A is 50, and someone's hearing value for that language is 50, then they will hear approx. 1/4 of that spoken language. Is this a worthwhile thing to add to a game? I have no specific game I am making this for, I was just bored and started tinkering around. I would have to eliminate the OOC verb, so all dialog would have to be in one of the game's languages. Would this just become a hassle in the game, or would it be super duper neato, or soemwhere inbetween?
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Nov 19 2002, 4:40 pm
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Canar
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sounds neat, but with a large user base there would probably be alot of confusion between characters. With a large user base it would help to unify characters who speak the same language, which is a good thing. I like the idea. Canar
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If there's a use for it, then it's a good idea... If it's just there as something to complicate things, then it's a bad idea...
At least, that's my philosophy on game creating... Everything included in the game should serve some purpose... Complexity for the sake of complexity is a bad thing... | |
It doesn't have a purpose yet, because it doesn't have a game to be put into. Right now you pick a town, thus picking your native language. It could be neat if there was a war (in-game =P) and you could tell if someone was on your side by how well (or how badly) they speak the language. Of course there are the people that can't type well, so they would always appear to be a bad speaker of that language. I am only wondering if this could eba useful feature. Because if it would only be annoying, then I'd stop working on it.
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OneFishDown wrote:
[snip] I am only wondering if this could be a useful feature. It definitely could be a useful feature... But that all depends on the rest of the game... | |
Well if the 1/4 or so that is heard is random I could see people saying things about 10 times so someone could understand them... May be bad but somewhat realistic
Think of Joe Dirt with the guy Joe "You like to see homos naked?" | |
I know it's not exactly what you're trying to do, but I made a library for a very similar function. Check it out if you like, maybe grab some ideas.
Sapphire_Languages It's percentage based, but it takes the average of the two percents, and finds the difference between the average and 100%. That's the percentage of the message that's "flubbed" Anyhoo, just thought I'd throw that out there (and for a shameless plug. Sorry about that =P ) -<font color = #0000FF>Sapphiremagus</font> | |
I think it depends on what type of audience you expect in your game. If it is a high-roleplaying game, people will go along with it and let the languages enhance the roleplaying. If it is mostly just powerleveling (and if your game allows powerleveling, it will be) then players will do as someone suggested earlier and just repeat things until enough of the message through the language filter. They'll also not appreciate it, and would do nothing but complain about it.
That said, I like the idea and I hope you work something out! :-) -AbyssDragpm | |
Well, 1/4 of the message would be heard if the speaker has a 50 speaking value and the listener has a 50 hearing value. The other 3/4 of the message would be random letters. A value of 50 is not very good.
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At one time, I programmed FoomerMUD (now JungleMUD) with 7 different languages, all totally alien sounding when spoken and all sounding different. But after quite a bit of experience with making them, I've finally decided that it's not worth the trouble and doesn't really add much to the game.
(And as you mentioned, people can cheat with things like emote verbs and that spoils it.) Of course, the acception would be if your game is about, say, two or three waring tribes and it would be important for each tribe to be able to only communicate with fellow tribe members. | |
I started working on mine, then I remembered that you made a system for this. My system filters the message twice, once when said (or written) and once when heard (or read). Both of those filters are based on percentages, because some people are cpable of understand a language when its spoken to them, but they cannot speak it themselves. There could be some ways around the system, like "leet speak", because my filters only check letters so that puncuation is unaffected.
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Foomer wrote:
(And as you mentioned, people can cheat with things like emote verbs and that spoils it.) A "warring tribes" scenario was sort of like one of the uses I had in mind. You could tell which side a person is on by how well they speak, but there could be spies that learned to speak the language. If I wanted to add languages to add to the realism, I thought maybe I could just use a say verb (and get rid of emote, wsay, ooc, etc.). In a game set in 60 AD, you most likely wouldn't be able to instantly send a message to everyone in the world, so being limited to talking to people within view, or at the same location, would be a reasonable restriction. I think as long as the game this is used for has a good reason to use multiple languages, then it would be a gooda ddition to the game. But if I throw this in a game "just because", then it would be more annoying than beneficial. | |
Hmm, a good idea. I was debating making it that way, but as my attention span seems to deplete VERY quickly on my projects (I have half a dozen, all good, all not being worked on, lol) I decided to get out what I had. My plans for a future update will include the option to fub letters or words.
Ex: with 90% flubbing (10% heard): Letters - be9fh rtblz (was Hello Hello). Words - Blah Hello. This would allow for game designers to pick whether they wanted the players to feel like they're hearing and understanding certain syllables, but failing others, or have them get the "I understood exactly one word out of that whole mess!" feeling. The first option allows them to better simulate the brains 'auto complete' function. The second would for the less hardcore RPGers out there who don't want to sort through jumbled letters, just know what they did and did not understand. I'll probably make it easier to implement reading and writing too. *Looks at his mile-long to-do list*. While I'm at it, I'll see about playing around with double-filter. Actually, I'll probably make two lists, one for the speaking percentages and one for the hearing/understanding percentages. That would make it easier for people trying to do D20 based games to simulate the "Can learn many, but only speak one" found in them. Most notably, wookies in SW D20. Anyway, enough rambling and shameless plugging =P Good luck on your system. I'd love to see how it works when it's done, sounds pretty good. | |
I have only done speaking/hearing, but I would imagine that reading/writing would be almost exactly the same. The differences would be that talking is to all people in view. The player's message is filtered, and sent to all players in view and filtered again by the listener's hearing value. Reading would work the same, except a player would write something, and player's could read it. They could read it over and over, and piece it together. Flubbing whole words also makes sense, but so does partially flubbing a word. You might not know the particular word for what you are trying to say, so you would flub the whole word, but you might just mis-pronounce is, therefore flubbing a letter or two or three. Maybe if in the filter you checked word by word, and determined either a complete flub, mis-pronunciation, or its correct. Maybe you could have two vars for the language, one for your vocabulary in that language (which would be used to determine complete flubs) and a var for how well you pronounce words.
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If I am ever going to build a language system, it will work like so:
Let's say you speak about half of a language (50%). Here's what that means: You can use words that are five letters (your skill/10, rounded to the nearest 1) long or shorter perfectly 75% (your skill * 1.5) of the time. You can use words 6 - 10 (skill+1 through 2*skill) letters 50% (your skill) of the time. You can use words above 10 (2*skill) 25% of the time (skill/2). You have to speak language at at least 20% to be able to say any words at all except for a basic set of words, probably, including a greeting, a sign of peace or hostility, and a farewell. Now, when you fail in speaking a word, it dosn't just go blank... if you can make a save versus your intelligence times your skill proficiency, you still get a percentage of that word equal to your skill proficency. So, let's say I have a skill of 50% and I say to you, "Good morning!". Good passes as a 4-letter word, which is fairly easy for me to spell. Morning, however, fails, but I have high intelligence and I happen to make my save. So, what I see on my screen is "Good morning!" and what you see is "Good m*rn**g!", as I got approx. 50% of the word out. Pretty much the same goes for hearing, so two creatures speaking in a language that neither of them know well would be fairly disasterous, but if one creature knew the language very well then even if the other person didn't speak well you could still make out what they said. This system is based on my pet-peeves about most language systems... if you fail your speaking check of if they fail their hearing check, nothing comes out at all. How stupid is that? -Lord of Water | |
But what if i wanted to say the word "intelligence", and I have a 50% knowledge of the language. "intelligence" is 12 letters, so it would have a 25% chance of success. Couldn't I just say "in telli gence" and have a 75% chance at saying each part correctly?
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Certianly you could. Would it seem like you didn't really know what you're talking about? Yes. You could even say I N T E L L I G E N C E to make sure the word is heard, but if you did everything that way your speech would be mostly unreadable. You wouldn't sound like a native speaker at all, you see. If you only knew half of the language, you would be safer to say that you have good smarts (4 letter word and 6 letter word) then to say you have superior intelligence (8 letter word, 12 letter word).
-Lord of Water | |
Considering the (horrible) spelling and grammar of many people on BYOND, their words could come out exactly as they typed and still not sound like a native speaker =P
My idea was so that you could communicate with someone if you don't know the language well. You wouldn't sound like a native speaker, but you could comunicate. | |
In Haven's case, repeating it does absolutely nothing -- the words are run through a hashing mechanism which makes the same word come out the same way no matter where or when it is said.
(Presumably, people could cheat and make little translation guides ("Oh, so 'refbu' is 'hello'!"), but it'd be pretty ridiculous to have to look up each word in a sentence -- my hashing mechanism is complex enough that it'd be pretty difficult to figure out the formula for hashing words. And each language hashes differently.) | |