Allowing for more adaptative text (gender, etc)

Hello all, I'm talking to you as an interested translator.

At first, this topic was about gender friendly texts, but he who can the most...

Is it planned to make all textual info about the only character whose gender is not known before hand in game, the hero, variable according to his/her gender?

On the grammatical gender... :

In the same idea, the good/evil trend or alleged dumbness/education of the hero could also be accounted for.

As per vanilla game, the concerned textual info would be:

• scenarios' dialog, when the hero talks or is talked to (nis files)
  
• scenarios' introductions (act files)
  
• campaign's log entries (act files)
  
• quests' various lines, when the hero is talked to (quest.xml)
  

Vanilla game has already two name sets for each race (used for AI heroes, and allies). Scenarios' dialog may already test for races, alignment, and some classes. Also, as for the log entries, there is a structural difference in tone between the victory and the defeat entries (one is boisterous, the other is bad faith).That's all.

As far as I read, The Protectors have a whole range of tests for scenarios' dialog.

The basic idea is to import this test feature to any other textual generation process in game that involve the hero (hence possibly his/her gender, race, alignment, class, ...), that are, for what I know, the scenarios' introductions, the campaign's log entries, and the quests' lines.

An example:
To make an idea why the concern extends well over the gender and grammar thing, please consider the following example. In vanilla campaign, on the first Ssrathi ambush, the hero says something like: "Let's smoke these lizards out." I read this as deprecating/racist slang. Now, what if the hero is a Ssrathi himself? We could either make all the texts neutral, bland, and so interesting, or we could add a line where a Ssrathi character (even supporting the Empire) would merely talk about "dispersing those obstinate fools" (I did it in my personal version). This would not be possible if a quest or log entry.

How?
I think that there is basically two ways of achieving the goal, once the textual processes are upgraded, as said above:
[*]doubling all the concerned text lines, and only them.
[*]allowing for alternate versions of words, like PoEdit mark the way number and gender are handled.

The way to go should be the first because it's simple, there aren't many lines to work on, and we don't use PoEdit. The only question is just about whether adding another flag [gender=male/female], or devising a smarter system that doesn't request to write twice all the concerned lines.

Read if you need to see what I mean... :

That's a good point. Heroes don't have genders and the text can't change based on that, so it has to say 'they' instead of 'him' or 'her'.

More NIS functionality is planned too. We have Stat checks in 0.8.8! It's just going to be a little stretch to get race checks too (should be pretty easy, a lot of the code is already done since there are some race and class checks in vanilla).

Fine to hear this!

If you are going to develop NIS checks, don't forget the quite handy feature of being able to fast check for the hero's category (not class), such as fighter, adventurer, mage,... charismatic (?). They are a remnant from old WBC I believe, as we can see unused tracks of them in vanilla XCIstrings file, and a little check in first NIS file (Explore Sundered Island). Although they can all be replaced by thoroughly class checks (with chained .OR./.AND.), it would be easier if they are available.

I believe that all the races can be checked in vanilla game. True, I didn't played enough to test them all in game, but adding them in various NIS files didn't break the game either (indeed, I added many of such checks in most NIS files).