Forum:Homosexual Foocubi?

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Revision as of 03:51, 29 January 2020 by Lysdexia (talk | contribs)
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I'm a lesbian who isn't interested in incubi.

Some preliminary searches haven't turned up anything I feel I can call a lead. Anyone know of any mods or whathaveyou that would switch the interests of the foocubi?

In the SLASH'EM Extended variant, the first encounter with a foocubus has you decide whether your character is straight or homosexual. However, I don't think any other variant has that feature. --Bluescreenofdeath (talk) 11:20, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
I proposed a patch to add foocubi of varying orientations a while back, but I doubt anyone has implemented it. Aaron Rotenberg (talk) 12:15, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
That's a neat idea. I'd change the percentiles though to be roughly more 35% het, 30% bi, 30% homo and 5% ace. Word on the Wind (talk) 19:50, 5 March 2019 (UTC) Word on the Wind
I've considered implementing this in xNetHack, but all of the available/proposed ways of incorporating this seem like they have something problematic that make me hold off on it. The SLEX approach is weird because it means you get to decide, at the instant you have your first foocubus encounter, whether or not you want the encounter to proceed. Having orientation be a config-file option or a start-of-game option (like gender is) seems too weighty and important for this one smallish part of the game. The LGB patch linked above seems like it ignores the player's orientation entirely, which has unfortunate implications. Also, an implementation that makes some fixed small percentage of foocubi homosexual could land someone in hot water for perceived underrepresentation or arguments over inaccurate numbers (as seen on this page).
Also worth noting that SpliceHack has a nonbinary character option (and from what I can see in its code, that makes you totally immune to seduction attacks). --Phol ende wodan (talk) 21:47, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
"Having orientation be a config-file option or a start-of-game option (like gender is) seems too weighty and important for this one smallish part of the game."
I disagree. I would say it's of reasonable weight and importance. Foocubi interactions are a sufficiently significant part of the mechanics of the game what with permanently altering the state of your character, and yet over here on my end I -really- don't want to have relations with incubi. I'm not really okay with having to sacrifice personal comfort in order to get the most out of a game that I'm playing to enjoy. There's a reason why I spent an hour looking and when I couldn't find anything I made an account specifically so that I could ask my questions here.
I'm not a programmer or anything, but were it up to me I would have a compound option for Hetero/Homo/Bi/Ace. As such, I would encourage efforts proceeding in that direction. Word on the Wind (talk) 21:11, 5 March 2019 (UTC)
Fair enough. I was thinking that of the things I listed, a config option that determines which gender can seduce you is probably the cleanest all around. (This implies that all foocubi are bisexual, but that's not really a flavor problem IMO). Bisexual and asexual character options would have problematic gameplay balance implications: bisexual would mean that 100% instead of 50% of foocubi can be used for beneficial effects (making hetero and homo characters strictly worse in this regard), while asexual would mean that the player can choose to outright ignore the whole seduction system (making the game as a whole a little easier).
Another random point: given a male/male or female/female encounter, how should that interact with the current ring of adornment mechanics where a succubus will take one from you and an incubus will put one on you? --Phol ende wodan (talk) 21:47, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

"a config option that determines which gender can seduce you is probably the cleanest all around." I can agree with this notion.

Regarding bi players and Foocubi at the same time, my thought was to simply generate half of them canceled to prevent exactly that. Ace being able to ignore seduction I feel balances out with not being able to stat-dance, in my head it sounds more like an option that enforces a Conduct, "You were asexual." similar to how there's a permanently blind option for Zen Samurai.

Regarding the Ring of Adornment, I don't super feel a need to change anything? As it currently is, if female you get it put on you, if male it's taken from you. The other interaction can't happen. If mucking with the interaction -had- to happen, I'd say it should be a Int/Cha check similar to how they try to strip you. 50/50 chance for them to try to move the ring one way or another, if you succeed the check you'd get the prompt "Don't you think this ring would look great on me/you?" Word on the Wind (talk) 22:07, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Having a player-specific configuration affect how monsters are generated (or some other in-game mechanic, like how likely they are to get cancelled after an encounter) would be very odd. There's no apparent flavor reason for the character's bisexuality causing half of foocubi to spawn with severe headaches in this particular incarnation of the game. It creates other oddities like randomly spawned cancelled foocubi in bones files (that someone non-bisexual finds), or generating one via kicking a sink only to have it unusable. Not saying it can't be workable, but this is the sort of thing that I would probably hold off on implementing it.
Similarly, it's not necessarily an even tradeoff to mute both the good and bad effects of seduction - not all characters will actually try to leverage the good effects, so this option will just allow them to skip out on the bad (and being immune to having your armor pieces removed is certainly nothing to sneeze at; the speedrun/tournament crowd would definitely consider asexual an optimal character configuration that should always be turned on). Again, this isn't a problem that would stop every developer, but it's something I would at least wait on while looking at feedback from a plain homosexual option. --Phol ende wodan (talk) 14:22, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

I can see your reasoning. Personally I'd just do it and make adjustments afterwards but different strokes.

Regarding just a direct homosexual option, I take it you're considering things for your fork. Supposing that someone just wanted to have that in vanilla NetHack how complicated would you say it would be to make a patch for it? Word on the Wind (talk) 19:36, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Making and publishing the patch would be as easy in the vanilla development version as it would be in xNetHack (it is not a huge patch). Building a local copy of vanilla NetHack with the patch included would be about as easy as building vanilla normally, just requiring a little extra knowledge of Git. Getting the devteam to actually incorporate the patch into vanilla would probably be very difficult. (Getting a server owner to incorporate the patch into their vanilla version is probably a crapshoot and who knows whether or not they'd incorporate it.) --Phol ende wodan (talk) 19:57, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

I have no expectations of it being made a part of the core game in any short order. I'd be satisfied with just having a patch available to anyone who wanted it. If I knew anything about the code I'd do it myself. Edit: Foocubi popping out of kicked sinks slipped my mind. For consistency whatever would be an adequate seducer should emerge.Word on the Wind (talk) 20:14, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Riding the line of thought that it'd be simple to do, are there any resources I could be directed to in the goal of making such a patch? As said I'm not a programmer so unless I get some direction I'm not really going to be able to achieve much. With some direction however I'm fairly confident that I could figure it out. Word on the Wind (talk) 20:51, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

Doing it as a permanent change probably wouldn't be too difficult. Without looking too closely I think you'd want mhitu.c and try to find the "sex" code logic. Or maybe chat.c. Making it a configuration option would probably be a lot harder, but that would be the "proper" way to do it.
The first step, even if someone else writes the patch for you, is to make sure you can compile vanilla NetHack yourself. I'd suggest downloading the NetHack source code and visual studio express and make sure you can get it to run from that. -- Qazmlpok (talk) 00:01, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

Step 1: build your own nethack executable from source. A Google search for "how to build Nethack from source" will help with that. This will likely be easier on Linux than on Windows or MacOS. Step 2: find the sex-matching code. This is in function "could_seduce" in mhitu.c. Step 3: change the "if" statement that compares genagr and gendef. Right now it succeeds if the genders are different (more accurately, if their sum is 1). You want this test to succeed if genders are the same. Step 4: test your change in wizard mode. Lots of people have gotten their feet wet in computer programming by modifying computer games. Maybe this is the first and last bit of programming you will want to do. Maybe you will enjoy it and do more! Furey (talk) 02:15, 21 April 2019 (UTC)

barbarism -> Latin: homosexual -> idemsexual; asexual -> insexual. Lysdexia (talk) 01:08, 27 April 2019 (UTC)

Such a patch doesn't sound too hard, but there's another thing you need to be wary about: there are a few ways to accidentally change sex in NetHack, so if you're unlucky you may still have to deal with incubi. I myself ran into this problem in my last ascension, having changed sex after an especially unlucky polyself attempt. I had collected over a dozen of succubi and intended to raise my level with their help after a protection racket, but of course I triggered this 2% chance of feeling like a new woman and of course I didn't think to save a spare amulet of change and of course I didn't bother hoarding incubi -- I ended up burning a wish on the amulet and from now on I will always have one in my stash.

So, my point is, simply making your character homosexual does not preclude incubi if you're not resourceful enough. It's hypothetically possible to make an option to have your PC always prefer <specific sex> regardless of their own sex, but it's imbalancing in that it removes the main annoyance of the amulet of change, which I described before.

Oh, and while we're discussing foocubi, am I the only one who finds their current behavior a bit weird? Like, on one hand, they are trying to get paid for their services, but then they'll happily make love with a broke PC -- "it's on the house!" That's no way to run a business, they should ask for money upfront. And their hostile behavior is just ridiculous: they're trying to kill and doink the PC at the same time -- talk about tsundere! I'm not even breaching the topic of consent, it's inane enough already. Someday I'll write a patch to give hostile foocubi a drain life attack (like with seducing compiled out), and limiting intercourse only to pacified foocubi (with a bribe or charm monster) and only if you have enough money. Sure, battle stripping skills of foocubi have some gameplay importance, but that's something I'm willing to sacrifice for the sake of sanity. Tomsod (talk) 01:28, 27 April 2019 (UTC)

I just wanted to mention that as of the most recent version, SpliceHack allows the user to select their sexuality. Incubi and succubi respect the player's orientation, and only attempt to seduce players with compatible sexualities. It's not a perfect implementation, but it exists for the same reason cited by Word on the Wind, in that I'm a woman with no interest in incubi, and I would like the gameplay to reflect that part of me. More importantly, it's nice to provide options for other LGBTQ players. --Agulp (talk) 16:42, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

The user has no their: 1 != 2, the -> who, a -> one; and it's not nice < niais < nescius := not-skilled to provide options. Lysdexia (talk) 03:51, 29 January 2020 (UTC)