Dwarf as starting race

[saintchuck]

The use of dwarf as the starting race makes it difficult to judge the ability rolls. Would it be possible to start with human?

[bort]

But we need for it to show something that changes. Like one day when you log in,
it shows dwarf b4 you pick the actual race. Next day, dragon. and so on and so fourth. Then you would get some diversity

Bort

[Casper]

I must agree with saintchuck, human would be a saner choice.

[bort]

some player (looks around) dont consider themselves "human"......

[Aaron]

You consider yourself a dwarf?

really, i think they should be displayed in order by popularity, or in a logical order, like humans/elves, small humans, large humans, reptoids, and wraiths/spirirts

[Salathar]

I tend to agree with the general spirit of this thread that there is a need for some kind of a logical order in which the races appear.

At first it seemed that the races appear in alphabetical order but doing some experimentation showed this to only be partially true. All the races can be found on the crossfire website under the heading 'Race Stat Modifiers'.

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Dwarf
Elf
Fire Hatchling*
Fireborn
Gnome
Half-Orc^
Halfling
Human
Northman
Quetzalcoatl
Serpentman
Troll
Wraith

The order in which these races actually appear at the character creation process is somewhat close to that but not quite:

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Dwarf
Elf
Fireborn
Gnome
Halfling
Human
Northman
Fire Hatchling*
Half-Orc^
Quetzalcoatl
Serpentman
Troll
Wraith

So we have Fire Hatchling and Half-Orc changing places while the rest of the order is preserved. Fire Hatchling here is aka Dragon race.

This made me wonder what on earth could be causing such a bizarre order of appearance. After some code poking it turns out that this is exactly the order in which player arches appear in archetypes.

Why arches appear in this order? Simply because this is the alphabetica order of the filenames of files which contain player information in /arch/player/race:

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dwarf_p.arc
elf.arc
fireborn.arc
gnome_p.arc
halfling.arc
human.arc
northman.arc
pl_dragon.arc
pl_half_orc.arc
quetzalcoatl.arc
serpentman.arc
troll_player.arc
wraithp.arc

Now, to the best of my knowledge these filenames are only used in collecting all arches into archetypes file. And simply renaming these files to match some logical order would do the trick of changing the order in which races appear at character creation stage.

This might not look like a proper way of doing it, but it probably is one of the 'easier' ones.

Another way would be to add new field 'order_of_appearance' to all player arches and have it be 1,2,3..etc. This will require some code changes and is more flexible if new races are ever introduced.

Three questions remain open :
1 Should the order of character appearance be changed?
2 What should be the new order?
3 How the change should be implemented?

[Casper]

Three questions remain open :
1 Should the order of character appearance be changed?

Yes

2 What should be the new order?

Humans first, since then stats are easier to read (as suggested by first post in the thread). The rest makes little difference to me.

3 How the change should be implemented?

Your approach (rearranging filename order in file) seems as good approach as any as long as you add a comment expaining the strange order.

Side note: is the order ALWAYS that, or can certain compiler otimisations change it?

[woo]

(Fire Hatchling used to be Dragon, hence it's order in the group)
(Half-Orc is listed under O for Orc)

Although personally I think putting human first the most logical as well.

[Rednaxela]

Although personally I think putting human first the most logical as well.

I agree, and perhaps ordering the ones after by how many points off (either direction) in total it is from "human" stats.

[cavesomething]

what about having new characters spawn in as blobs of energy (souls?) and changing the hall of selection instead to have a 'choose race' room like the class ones?

Don't know whether this is doable or not, (still don't understand quite how faces work), but it would avoid the whole ordering of races issue.