[v1.3.0+] Golem Gender

[Zizzo]

On a whim, my most recent Alchemist character named her golem Suzie Q (memories of old JoJo episodes… ). It was a bit disconcerting after that, though, to get log messages like "Suzie Q (servant of <player-name>) uses his Bill's Tree Trunk." A bit of source diving revealed that the engine's pronoun handling assumes an actor is male unless it's specifically flagged as female or neuter, and with a bit of deep wizardry, I figured out where to sneak in and set the appropriate flag when the golem is created.

Now, I wasn't going to release this addon originally, since I felt that if I was making the golem female, I should make her look female, and I assumed that that would require hand-drawing a whole bunch of new tile modifications for various armor types, which is far beyond my skill level. It turns out, though, that the upper-body mods used for the golem are almost (if not exactly) identical to those for male dwarf characters, and that Actor:updateModdableTile() has a convenient hook where I can slip in and craftily swap in the corresponding mods for female dwarf characters as needed.

Thus my new Golem Gender addon. Purely cosmetic, but hey, if we can have an addon that makes Ogres look like Shaloren, then why not? The actual configuration of your golem's gender is done in the "Customize" subdialog from the character creation dialog (internally, this is implemented as a cosmetic unlock, but I unlock them for you for free ).

For reference, the drolem's appearance is not modified by this addon; I briefly considered adding a pink hairbow for female drolems, but when I looked more closely, I realized I'd been completely mistaken about where the drolem's actual head is, and that said head is far too small for a bow to be noticeable. I'm sure you're disappointed. Similarly, if you've changed your golem's appearance via the Mirror of Reflection, that overrides any appearance changes from this addon.

[Technical notes:]

Code: Select all

Hooks:
  ToME:load [to add customizations to Alchemist descriptor and modify Refit Golem to use them]
  Actor:updateModdableTile:middle [to modify tile appearance for female golems]

[Zizzo]

v1a is a compatibility update for the 1.6 release and its newly more elaborate cosmetic options dialog; our "Golem is female" and "Golem is neuter" options live in the Golem subtree alongside "Golem becomes a Drolem". In other under-the-hood changes, the alchemist golem in v1.6 is now created with (at least the semblance of) a few birth descriptors, including one specifying sex='Male', which we adjust accordingly while we're making our other changes. (There is no 'Neuter' descriptor definition for sex, but AFAICT nothing actually tries to reach down into the definition of that descriptor, so we should be safe. I hope. If it turns out to be a problem, I can easily add a suitable descriptor in a later update.)