JT on gender--
I think it's very funny, but more than that, I think it's very realistic. As I mentioned before, it's not a magical sex change option, it's a matter of a different paradigm on gender and identity. This may not line up with yours, but it's one that's held by many people in the real world, and it's one the LCS would support.
It is actually an important but often overlooked part of the gay rights movement that many people are transsexual and identify as a different gender than the anatomy they were born with. They do, for the most part, have their decisions respected by those around them, but it has been a difficult part of the gay rights movement to even get legislation protecting the right of these people to equal employment opportunity in anti-discrimination laws, and gay rights groups have pulled out of support for otherwise highly favorable legislation because they perceive it as pulling the latter up behind them, and they support GLBT rights, not just GLB and throw the last group under the bus.
The Liberal Crime Squad pushes for these Liberal ideals, the absolute Elite Liberal Agenda, not a more moderate half-way that some would prefer, but the far left wing. That means they have full support of the gay rights movement, including support for the recognition, respect, and equality for transsexuality and transsexual people. It is not simply a matter of humor and a joke, but that this is a fact of life for some people and recognition of people having the right to make decisions about their own gender identity and have others respect that is part of the ideological stance of the LCS.
I have personally known former men who now identify as women, former women who now identify as men, even people who don't identify as either gender, but something different or neither, and have new and different pronouns for their identification which they specifically request others to use in reference to them. Like it or not, changing gender and even defying it completely is a canon part of the LCS's stated ideology and worldview, and I'm not going to take that out because it seems unrealistic to some. The idea that it's just a joke to enable people to make a choice like that and is unrealistic is in fact one of the Conservative ideas that the LCS fights to end. In another time people would have said the same thing about implementing gender realistically to the suggestion of letting people flip a switch in their profile setting sexual orientation.
The fact is, not everyone in this world agrees on everything. You're not going to agree with everything that the LCS believes, and you're not expected to. But for many people this sort of thing is an aspect of life for them, and the LCS fights to represent those people. When I say that I would be okay with adding gender if you could change it in your profile, and that there might be a secret variable tracking your original gender and Conservatives might refuse to acknowledge your new one while Liberals would, I am proposing a more realistic system for gender, and one that adheres more closely to the world as it is seen by the sort of people you play as in this game. You may personally perceive it to be unrealistic that people would have the right to choose their gender identity, but that doesn't mean it's unrealistic for the sort of people you are playing as.
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Representing M/F--
This may seem stodgy and Conservative, but I don't want to get into putting non-printing characters in text in hopes that they will be printed and not treated as control characters, when that is completely out of my hands as a programmer to enforce. Dwarf Fortress has the luxury of displaying using its own defined character set in OpenGL, but LCS is totally at the mercy of the console it lives in. The Linux and Mac ports don't use the same library and don't use the same console, and as a result, both butcher a lot of the ASCII LCS already uses. They rely on horribly ugly hacks to do things like represent the US Flag as a bunch of tildes and underscores, and that's just so you can understand what you're looking at. When I put a M or an F on the screen I know that it's going to be an M or an F no matter what console, library, and operating system is being used. Given that LCS already suffers from portability issues in its display, I like the security of knowing that what I'm programming is both standard and consistently implemented.
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Wheelchair--
The game already implements wheelchairs in a pretty reasonable fashion. It's not exciting to get one, that's just a one-line thing that is a real snoozer (you activate->find a wheelchair (replaces steal cars for legless/lower body paralyzed liberals), and the game tells you if they succeeded), but once you have one the game handles it pretty gracefully. How it's implemented now:
1) Wheelchair is currently neither weapon nor armor. It's a special item with its own slot and it's only used if you need it. You need one if you can't walk, but once you have one you can travel in site actions and move around and fight as normal with a squad. Of course, if you don't have command of your arms either, you'll just sit there and look on with authority as others battle far you, but that's another matter.
2) Wheelchair doesn't affect combat, but you'll be sitting on a permanent and juice-immune 1 agility if you are fully body paralyzed. If you can move your upper body but can't move your lower body, or you have no legs, your agility will not be nuked completely, but it'll still be quartered (including juice bonuses), making them easy targets to hit, and attacks will do much more damage as they'll get nice, clean shots in on your wheelchair-bound Liberal to boot.
[ May 21, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]
[ May 21, 2008: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]
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Topic: Future of the Crime Squad (Read 22995 times)