[CLOSED PR] Wig glue trait that allows mutantraces to wear hats and hair

[github_bot]

PULL REQUEST DETAILS




[TRAITS][MUTANTRACES][EXPERIMENTAL][INPUT-WANTED]
About the PR
Adds the Superglue Enthusiast trait that costs 3 points, replaces the player trinket with a crumpled up pouch of glue, and enables hair_override for the player. This allows mutantraces to have hats and hair concurrently, at the cost of quite a few trait points and a trinket of actual use.

The most glaring issue, however, is the character preview not showing the selected hair styles. I would make this a feature, but I'm simply not skilled enough to make that happen. (help with that would be appreciated!)



(I also find the trinket names coupled with a crumpled pouch of glue to be funny.)

Why's this needed?
The community is fairly divided on whether or not to allow mutantraces to have hats and hair, but most times I've mentioned this on the discord I've gotten positive feedback. I believe that mutantraces need more customization options, and while we wait on the mutantrace rework, I think this is a good first step. The way in which this trait is implemented would not at all impact the upcoming mutantrace rework, and could be very easily removed if needed.


Changelog

Code:

changelog
(u)Klushy225
(*)Adds a Wig Adhesive trait, which allows mutantraces to have 'real' hair at the cost of 2 points.

PULL REQUEST DETAILS

[Finnalin]

3 seems like quite a bit much, especially with mutas already needing 1-4

[Lord_earthfire]

Wigs on mutantraces are a low-priority problem, but a problem nonetheless.

Hair is a human-specific caracteristic. Because of this the direction to take is to remove roundstart wigs from mutantraces and give them other customisation choices.

In my opinion, the current situation of wigs for mutantraces is a bandaid for the pending mutantrace rework.

[Lefinch]

I will never use this but have an opinion here: Yeah that's fine by me. I don't mind adjusting the point values lower (or higher if there's some kind of reasoning, though I'm not sure what) Here's my logic.

Hair is useful to me, entirely as a pragmatic tool, for spotting who is who. Yes, I am not looking into your soul and loving you for your personality in game I am so sorry, it's all about your hair. I don't really think this should be a key argument for or against the PR but it's one reason I like it.
People really seem to like hair. They're suckers but this also works for the true baldies amongst us for being more distinct. That's good too you'll be cooler for eschewing the follicular folly and keep your own style. Show off those scales.
Keeping it as a trait (of any point value) prevents it being a default option, so it'll hopefully keep a bit of variety going.

But bear in mind, I'm not hugely invested in this. If I ever play a Lizard they're not wearing hair. Be bald, be proud.

[Sockssq]

This pr would be a great way to allow mutantraces to have more customization while we wait for the mutantrace. As a person who has many mutantraces I personally believe that this would be a good step in giving mutantraces more customization while the mutantrace rework is in works.

A bald mutantrace is nice, but hair is one of the only things you may remember them by, since the mutantrace rework isn't here yet.

[Spyritdragon]

I love the customisation options added to mutantraces through wigs, and I dont feel tradeoffs for mutantraces should come in the form of limiting their creative and style options.

It's always been a bit sad to me that someone both has to give up style benefits (hats) and mechanical benefits (helmets, handling the wig when putting on space helmets) to be able to play their character the way they picture and love them, not to mention the jarring experience of being bald post-cloning that Ive seen many people experience and at times cryo over, getting in the way of otherwise fun and interesting RP.

Ultimately I think wigs have made for many interesting looking and unique mutantrace characters that I love seeing around, and one or two of my own I love playing, so definitely in support of this - the trait point limit makes for a pretty decent tradeoff too.

[Kotlol]

I do not DISLIKE mutant races getting more options, but only for certain races.

For example... Bovines and monkeys and pugs should be able to grow hair period. They have fur and they grow hair too. (or atleast a barber can use hair grownium on them)

Skeletons, Lizardfolk and Roach folk (as well as squid and toad) should have to wear wigs since they cannot grow hair naturally.


But this idea is okay.. but this is slowly becoming the "clown should wear an oxygen mask" kinda thing or "Monkeys should have translators to be used with oxygen masks" But on a waaaaaaaaaay lower level.

I do not the understand the neat for every race to have hair and hats and such. You chose a race that cannot have hair and has to wear a wig, but wigs don't play nice with caps. But eh... as for the PR. I won't give it much fuzz (heh).

You can add it but in my opinion? This is one of those moments where I go: "You can litterly customize your skin color on most races"
Only bovines and skeletons look very alike. Bovines only have different horns and feet where as Skeletons... well... got nothing.

[junori]

Mutantrace rework has been talked about for years at this point with no word on when it’ll be done. Saying to wait for it is ridiculous, and I think more “bandaid” fixes isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

This is space station 13. Funny farty space game. It’s really not that deep. Let lizards wear hair and hats if they want. Being a lizard with a wig in a gang is misery if they choose a hat item for the gang outfit. HoS lizards (and other mutraces) should get to wear their hair and the beret. At some point it just feels like shutting down mutantraces in general in preference of humans. :/

Also yeah reduce the points I guess because 4 is a lot 😔

[klushy225]

To be clear, even though pictured is a saurian, this works for any mutantrace with the exception of pugs. And yes, I do agree with the bovine and monkey hair comment, however, that is outside the scope of this pr. I think policing who gets to wear what based on the body type selected is a slippery slope, and there is no rational reasoning behind the barring of hats from mutrantraces other than "but it's the human thing!"

And yes, the point cost is 3, not 4. Still a lot, but do-able.

[JOELED]

This topic (mutantrace hair) is one that I've spent a lot of time thinking about, and I feel strongly about. Whether or not this PR gets merged, I'm thankful that it was made because it's got more people talking about and thinking about this again. I was responsible for mutantrace hair being added to a downstream, and witnessed firsthand the effects it had on gameplay. This solidified my belief that the lack of mutantrace hair is a dated construct that is doing more harm to the game than good at this point.

IRT "mutantrace rework"/future customization options:
I strongly believe two things in regards to this. Firstly, the concept is nebulous and lacks any concrete evidence that it will be happening any time this year, next year, or in the next decade. That's completely fine; Goon dev work is volunteer work, and no one is obligated to pick up and finish a project. However, it means that the game is going to continue to be played day in and day out in its current state, and I believe that making positive changes like this that are already coded and PRed should be considered strongly on the merit of them being something tangible. Secondly, I believe that a mutantrace rework that adds in extra fields of customization does not necessarily need to be mutually exclusive with the addition of mutantrace hair. Extra appendages like horns, fins, ears, etc can be worn alongside hair; cow horns already layer overtop of wigs, which creates a visual that's unique to them and (IMO) looks funky + cool. Customization of the body itself, like markings, also isn't really affected by the concept of hair on the head. Plenty of people already play mutantrace characters without wigs, and many more will likely join their ranks to reap the rewards of cool + unique visual markings. If the perceived problem is that the three colour fields will be taken up by hair, that's already how it is with 2 of the races (lizards + cows) whose fields affect both their wig hair and their visual appearance, which IMO makes their designs a lot cooler and more concise rather than being a problem.

IRT mutantrace visual identity vs humans:
Haven't seen this one brought up much on here yet, but its come up every other time so I thought I'd throw my thoughts in here anyways. Our mutantraces are specifically designed to have several different visual and audio cues that differentiate them from each other and from humans, not just a bald head. Even with mutantrace characters that take the wig trait currently and purposefully choose the best options to purposefully obsfucate as much of their head and face as possible, it's still really difficult to mistake mutantraces for humans/for each other. With the exception of skeleton. It's really easy to disguise being a skeleton until you say something (I find that funny though).

If your opinion is just that mutant humans shouldn't have hair, and that the correct answer will never be to allow players to play a lizard that has hair, that's fair enough. There's nothing I can do to change your mind. I've spoken personally to a lot of players who chose to move away from Goonstation to other SS13 branches because their implementation of mutant races was more of a customization choice and lot less give-and-take. Different people have different feelings on it.

Regardless, here's the meat of why I loved it when it was implemented elsewhere, and I got to watch firsthand how it felt before-vs-after:
Hats are a very important part of departmental identity. Sprites on the main body are a great due to having more real estate, but they're more frequently muddied by the amount of shared real estate going on (jumpsuit + suit + backpack + belt + in-hand) vs the hat which sits atop the sprite with not much else going on up there. There was a palpable difference in at-a-glance recognizeability on the codebase I witnessed this on, and they didn't even have the current level of out of uniform dressup game shenanigans that Goonstation does. HoS berets, secoff helmets, chief engineer/engineer hard hats, captain, chef, mail courier, and detective all have distinctive hats off the top of my head, and even if a handful of them will still eschew the hat for some other kind of drip from the clothing booth, having even one more secoff with a helmet would do wonders for visual readability.
As a bonus, it would be a positive for gang rounds in the same way IMO. From my experiences, many people who take the wig trait currently will not wear their gang hat unless they're actually in a fight, since it's one or the other and the bonuses don't really come into play until you're doing something that actually needs them.

[444explorer]

Let's do it. Joel covers most of the points and I agree with them. I don't see much reason to not have cool hair on heads of lizards or skeletons. Bovines and Skeletons rock the shit out of hair so I'd say fuck it and give them it. Optional trait so there's bound to be just as many bald mutantrace characters.

[Torchwick]

I don’t have anything to add to this, as it’s all been said; so I’ll just say I’m all for this change. Even just to try it out. What’s the harm in adding it just to see if it meshes well with the way people play the game, y’know? I’m not passionate one way or the other, but I definitely give a +1 to at least trying it merged to see how it goes.

[nova2053]

I'm entirely in favor of this PR and have actually been wanting something like this for a while (wig stapling).
I can't really see any reason not to add this in some way.

From a gameplay point of view, this doesn't really raise any concerns. Mutantraces can already wear protective gear by just swapping the wig out; Giving them the ability to wear the wig and headgear at the same time wouldn't make the gameplay any more unbalanced in their favor, since the "real" hair offered by this implementation won't give thermal resistance.
While this could mean spy thieves have one less trinket objective to go after, since this wouldn't spawn you with a wig trinket, the pawn star trait already does this.

From a lore point of view, most mutantraces are technically just humans. It makes perfect sense for them to want to wear hair.

From a realism point of view, it should be noted SS13, especially Goonstation, isn't meant to mirror real life entirely. While I do believe some respect for realism is important for a game like SS13, especially in roleplay, it's not a top priority in most cases.
Also, you can staple butts to your head. If you can do that, it stands to reason you can glue wigs to your head. Furthermore, you can wear hats over wigs in real life.

From a roleplay point of view, this is a benefit for mutantrace players. More customization options are great for making characters, and it doesn't negatively effect roleplay in any way.

Some other points:

While hair is the "human thing," I don't see this as a reason to bar it from mutantraces. Hair for regular humans and hair for mutantraces aren't mutually exclusive, so why throw one out in favor of the other?

Lizards on Paradise and Monkestation already have real hair, and while I'm not advocating that codebases should all be brought into parity with each other, these changes have seemingly caused little to no trouble there; People still play humans frequently, even with hair being avaliable for other species.

Also, sorry if this is poorly written. This is my first actual post on the Goonstation forums, not counting that one time I got the profile picture thing.

[klushy225]

Not poorly written at all. it's concise, to the point, and helpful. Also- regarding the spy thieves thing- stealing hair anyway is not fun for anyone. It just puts people in a bad mood. Altering people's appearances forcefully never is fun, so I don't mind if it leads to less hair being stolen.

[Glamurio]

The mutantrace rework is something I'm eagerly awaiting, I've spoken with Tarmunora about and have since helped to do some preliminary work (which I still need to finish). It is a gargantuan task not just strictly from an effort perspective, but also keeping in mind the many things that need to happen in terms of code clean up and conversion of existing characters into a new framework. Once I have time and motivation I'll definitely be putting more time into it and help out where possible, but the assessment is true that there really isn't a chance it will come out this year or even the next, the prospects are nebulous.

All that being said, it's why I genuinely believe adding this is a good change. Not even a permanent change, but a band-aid fix. What I mean by that is, I think this is something that can very easily be removed in a year or however long it takes for the full rework to come out. But as stated, we don't need to starve ourselves of fun or cosmetics just because we're waiting on something proper. I say merge it with the prospect of removing it later again, because it will likely become deprecated with the new framework, and since it's a trait we can easily axe it later.