Suggested new action: "switch gender role"

[tjekan]

1 hour ago, LadyLyzar said:

In addition, it makes zero biological sense for two same sex dragons to be able to produce offspring.

 

Well, greater than zero. Many species of fish do it, including some common aquarium fish like clownfish. It's also a plot point in "Jurassic Park" ("Life found a way,") so it's likely that a lot of users have heard of it before. If it works for fictional dinosaurs, it's not that ridiculous that it might work for fictional dragons.

 

I think the game-mechanic problems with the idea are more significant than the "it might ruffle people's feathers" ideas. Everything up to and including the color of a Snow Angel's wings ruffles SOMEbody's feathers. That's not a good argument against anything. And considering the box office success of "Jurassic Park," I don't think this would be much of a crowd-killer.

[angelicdragonpuppy]

1 hour ago, tjekan said:

 

Well, greater than zero. Many species of fish do it, including some common aquarium fish like clownfish. It's also a plot point in "Jurassic Park" ("Life found a way,") so it's likely that a lot of users have heard of it before. If it works for fictional dinosaurs, it's not that ridiculous that it might work for fictional dragons.

 

I think the game-mechanic problems with the idea are more significant than the "it might ruffle people's feathers" ideas. Everything up to and including the color of a Snow Angel's wings ruffles SOMEbody's feathers. That's not a good argument against anything. And considering the box office success of "Jurassic Park," I don't think this would be much of a crowd-killer.

 

The idea with the dinos (and real animals) is that they truly change sex, though. This suggestion is suggesting you still call both female. Now the obvious answer around that is “just make it male,” but then you have to ask if you want to retcon every breed on DC to be capable of sex switching. I like my version (obviously I’m biased though, haha) because it skirts that entirely in favor of less drastic logic that accomplishes the same thing.

 

All that being said, this topic has been brought up multiple times before and generally the answer has been that some Spriters might not want their dragons retroactively made capable of it or even just saying some males look “feminine” or vice versa, which shuts down both ideas.

[tjekan]

How about a gender-fluid new breed of dragon, with notably dimorphic forms, who can switch their genders back and forth using a BSA. A nightmare for lineage-builders? Perhaps, but no more so than the aegises or siyats. It wouldn't mess with any old lineages, and people can use them in new ones carefully.

[random_dragon_collector]

On another site not to be named, you can switch the gender of dragons--ONLY if they have no offspring.  That's another possibility.

Edited September 9, 2018 by random_dragon_collector

[angelicdragonpuppy]

17 minutes ago, tjekan said:

How about a gender-fluid new breed of dragon, with notably dimorphic forms, who can switch their genders back and forth using a BSA. A nightmare for lineage-builders? Perhaps, but no more so than the aegises or siyats. It wouldn't mess with any old lineages, and people can use them in new ones carefully.

 

At one point there was an adorable slug dragon in the works that couldn’t switch after breeding, but to start with could breed with whatever. Unfortunately stuff happened and the spriter left DC though. ;__;

 

But while I think ideas like that are cool, it doesn’t solve the current thing of “dang, female Frills and female Harvests would look so good together!” 

[tjekan]

45 minutes ago, angelicdragonpuppy said:

But while I think ideas like that are cool, it doesn’t solve the current thing of “dang, female Frills and female Harvests would look so good together!” 

 

Well, there are lots of things that would look good together that we're not able to breed. I wish I could breed glaucus drakes with dozens of things that I can't. I was very disappointed to recently learn that I can't breed red-violet spinels true with mutamores, ever.

 

I think the bigger reason to implement some kind of parthenogenesis to the game is that it would be interesting. It's always good to shake things up a little to keep them from getting stale. Obviously you have to balance that against whether it's possible within the parameters of gameplay.

[Confused Cat]

4 hours ago, DarkEternity said:

Here's a clearer explanation of my suggestion:

We basically tell the site to display picture x but get represented as gender y. 

 

So male picture is recorded as a female by dragcave, and because it gets recorded early it always behaves like that.

 

If we instead went and changed dragons, say a dragon behaved like male in one lineage and you wanted to make it behave like female, the entire sort order of that dragon lineage chunk could be messed. Eg

from

       M

M    F

F

 

F

       M

F     F

One way of imagining how it works is M is compared to how big F is. M is less than F, so M is stuck on top and F on bottom. If F is compared to, for example F, or M is compared to M, you would get equal results and you would not know where to put the dragon. So switching might not be as easy as just changing how the dragon is represented on the inside, unless you set that F dragon as M or M as F in the first place then there's no chance of not knowing where to put it because you would never end up with two of the same.  Then you could probably tell it to display a different image. Since the M dragon with an F sprite behaves like an M always and is recorded as an M (although the user gets told it is F), the comparison would work. 

 

Another solution would be if you really wanted to change genders on the fly, you could make four genders. Say F, M, Z, W. But Z and W, for example, always display as F or M to the dragcave user because those are the genders assigned to any newly changed dragon. Then you'd be able to figure out the correct order when comparing. Or if something like gender was represented, as say, 0 being male and 1 being female maybe you could set the newly maled dragon as -1 and the newly femaled dragon as 2 

 

 

Until TJ says otherwise, I'm convinced that displaying the lineage page would not be a problem because it works like this:

Get info about the dragon whose lineage you want to display --> now you know what image is at the left side (highest generation).

Info about this dragon also contains the parents' codes, so you can work with them. Which code is the male parent? --> Now you know what image to display at the top of the previous (2nd highest) generation. Which code is the female parent? --> Now you know what image to display at the bottom of the previous (2nd highest) generation.

You do not somehow start with having all the images and then try to find out where to place them in relation to each other.

 

The tricky part is, how does a female dragon's code get into the "male parent" field of an egg's information. This has to happen when the egg is bred.

 

[Fuzzbucket]

9 hours ago, LadyLyzar said:

I'm not overly fond of this idea.  It adds a lot of complexity to something that is relatively simple.

 

In addition, it makes zero biological sense for two same sex dragons to be able to produce offspring.

 

8 hours ago, tjekan said:

 

Well, greater than zero. Many species of fish do it, including some common aquarium fish like clownfish. It's also a plot point in "Jurassic Park" ("Life found a way,") so it's likely that a lot of users have heard of it before. If it works for fictional dinosaurs, it's not that ridiculous that it might work for fictional dragons.

 

I think the game-mechanic problems with the idea are more significant than the "it might ruffle people's feathers" ideas. Everything up to and including the color of a Snow Angel's wings ruffles SOMEbody's feathers. That's not a good argument against anything. And considering the box office success of "Jurassic Park," I don't think this would be much of a crowd-killer.

 

And add to that a number of reptiles do reproduce  parthenogenetically.

 

3 hours ago, Confused Cat said:

 

The tricky part is, how does a female dragon's code get into the "male parent" field of an egg's information. This has to happen when the egg is bred.

 

 

THIS is exactly what bugs me, as a lineage breeder who would only use such eggs in a linage OF such eggs.

[Confused Cat]

1 minute ago, Fuzzbucket said:

 

THIS is exactly what bugs me, as a lineage breeder who would only use such eggs in a linage OF such eggs.

 

Wouldn't that be similar to existing features (or "anomalies") such as Alt Sweetlings, Snow Angel colors, and in the broadest sense even all kinds of Alts? (Or... all dragons, actually?)

 

You get an egg from the AP, you check its lineage, and its mother is a Snow Angel that is not your scroll's type. You can't continue the lineage in the way you would like to, so you toss it back.

You get an egg from the AP, and it's a checker of blue Gemshards and Tan Ridgewings. You decide it will be too annoying to try to continue it, so you toss it back.

You get an egg from the AP, and it's a checker of female Frills and female Harvests. If you don't want to continue it, you toss it back.

(Of course you could also keep the egg from the "lesbian" parents, influence it male and breed it to a messy-lineaged female Nebula if that was your playing style.   Apart from the fact that it has two female parents, it's an egg like any other.)

 

I love lineages and I would not support a feature that will break existing lineages, so if I still missed the actual problem, I would appreciate an example of what could go wrong.

[Fuzzbucket]

Sure, but it is the way they might display that would bug me. I do build lineages with Angels and with Sweetlings - indeed, I seek those OUT ! It's which way round the parents would display. As in what you said - getting the female dragon's code into the "male parent" field of an egg's information.

 

As long as I could be sure that the - say - "naturally gendered" parent would stay in its place... I don't want that ex-male harvest leaping on top of that naturally male red in my male red x female harvest checker line, if you get me. And it has to be available only for dragons that have no offspring - unless the image and positioning stays the same NO MATTER WHAT.

[olympe]

47 minutes ago, Fuzzbucket said:

Sure, but it is the way they might display that would bug me. I do build lineages with Angels and with Sweetlings - indeed, I seek those OUT ! It's which way round the parents would display. As in what you said - getting the female dragon's code into the "male parent" field of an egg's information.

 

As long as I could be sure that the - say - "naturally gendered" parent would stay in its place... I don't want that ex-male harvest leaping on top of that naturally male red in my male red x female harvest checker line, if you get me. And it has to be available only for dragons that have no offspring - unless the image and positioning stays the same NO MATTER WHAT.

Coding shouldn't be that much of an issue, unless TJ says so. He'd have to record for every bred egg who the "father" and "mother" are, instead of assigning these roles automatically due to their gender. So, a female dragon that was bred "as a male" in one instance would usually show as the mother, unless she was the assigned "father" of an egg, in which case she would be displayed as such.

 

This, of course, has several consequences: You could change the breeding role of a dragon more than once, or make the "natural" role the default unless this gender switch action is used. However, the gender switch action would only count for the next breeding (or until reversed, whichever). Parents would be displayed as either father or mother in accordance to what the parent was in that exact breeding. So, if I had a female frill, bred her to a male and got an egg, then switched her to male and bred her to a female harvest to get another egg, the frill parent would be named the mother of the first egg and as father of the second. It's not that complicated, is it?

 

Also, yay to all kinds of genderqueer and bisexual/pansexual dragons!

Edited September 9, 2018 by olympe

[DarkEternity]

4 hours ago, Confused Cat said:

Info about this dragon also contains the parents' codes, so you can work with them. Which code is the male parent? --> Now you know what image to display at the top of the previous (2nd highest) generation. Which code is the female parent? --> Now you know what image to display at the bottom of the previous (2nd highest) generation.

Hmm yes. Now that I think about it your statement does seem to be a good way of doing things. I looked up a lot of examples and no one seemed to make much of an attempt in making sure that male was male all the time and female was female all the time after the creation of the person. Except for one person who really wanted proper verification of what went in each field and overcomplicated it. 

[Fuzzbucket]

Who, me ? Well, I do want to be sure, OK ?

[Confused Cat]

I guess all our brains work differently, and we will understand the same words in different ways... it can be complicated to make sure we all have the same idea in the end (regardless of whether we agree on the quality of the idea). But at least I think we can say we all agree on "changing existing lineages on other people's scrolls is not cool". 

 

@Fuzzbucket so your example would be this?:

You find an egg on the AP, and it is a checker of male Reds and female Harvests. One of the CB pairs is on my scroll.

Suddenly I decide to use the "switch gender role" action on my CB female Harvest.

You are worried that in this situation, her position in the lineage of your egg will change because she is now marked as "goes into male position in lineages"?

 

This would indeed have to be prevented if (!) the action was available for dragons with existing offspring.

 

22 hours ago, Confused Cat said:

However, there is a potential problem regarding the technical implementation: in those previously existing lineages, the dragon in question would have to keep its "original" position. E.g. if the female Frill already had offspring with a male Gold before I used the action on her, she would have to be in the "female position" in the lineage with the Gold, and in the "male position" in the lineage with the Harvest. I don't know how complicated that would be.

 

(I think it would not be very complicated, because as I said before, the position a dragon has in a specific child's lineage view is determined at the exact moment the child is created. That's when the father's code is put into the "male parent" field, and the mother's code into the "female parent" field. That information just needs to be left alone forever, no matter what happens to the parents' gender roles.)

[Fuzzbucket]

25 minutes ago, Confused Cat said:

I guess all our brains work differently, and we will understand the same words in different ways... it can be complicated to make sure we all have the same idea in the end (regardless of whether we agree on the quality of the idea). But at least I think we can say we all agree on "changing existing lineages on other people's scrolls is not cool". 

 

@Fuzzbucket so your example would be this?:

You find an egg on the AP, and it is a checker of male Reds and female Harvests. One of the CB pairs is on my scroll.

Suddenly I decide to use the "switch gender role" action on my CB female Harvest.

You are worried that in this situation, her position in the lineage of your egg will change because she is now marked as "goes into male position in lineages"?

 

This would indeed have to be prevented if (!) the action was available for dragons with existing offspring.

 

(I think it would not be very complicated, because as I said before, the position a dragon has in a specific child's lineage view is determined at the exact moment the child is created. That's when the father's code is put into the "male parent" field, and the mother's code into the "female parent" field. That information just needs to be left alone forever, no matter what happens to the parents' gender roles.)

 

Exactly. ESPECIALLY if whoever makes for TWO trans dragons so you get a total sex-swap. So that harvest and that red switch places because the red is now a girl and the harvest a boy... (But are we talking SEX CHANGE, not gender change here. A male red becomes female enough to bear young sired by a male dragon - that won't work if there's no biological female component of any kind... Parthenogenesis requires no sexual interaction anyway.)

Edited September 9, 2018 by Fuzzbucket