Can we get a custom race with better selection?

nex8226

It would be nice if the "Alien" race had more customization options. I had thought about doing a human looking person with a tail, but realized that the options for what are essentially the custom race are very small.

wombat140

Been said many times before. I agree. Especially the "less humanlike" options such as tails. In the Star Trek TV shows most of the aliens weren't drastically different from humans because of budget constraints, but we don't have to stick with that in this game, where we can do what we like within the limits of the computer graphics.

I think they keep tails and fur out of the "Alien" options in order to keep the Caitians/Ferasans (which are only available if you pay) more desirable. They're probably thinking that if there were those options in the Alien generator, a lot of people who really just wanted an animal-like character rather than specifically a Caitian would settle for the Aliens, which are free, rather than paying extra for a Caitian.

But that doesn't apply to the Gorn, which are available for free anyway, at least on the KDF side. So scaly skin effects could be made available without undercutting the C-Store. I'd very much like that, and even a head shape with a long muzzle, too, if that could be readily transferred from the Gorn. It seems as if it might be; I mean, as it is, helmets are treated as a separate "head type" which is interchangeable with the character's actual "head", rather than something that goes over an existing set of head options. So it seems to me that, in the same way, you should be able to replace it with a Gorn-like head shape with the options that go with *that*, and make it so that you can put on it either a scaly skin texture or one of the existing textures for aliens. That would allow you to use it not only for lizards but also doglike or deer-like aliens (though it might not be possible to fit standard aliens' ears onto it, but never mind). I don't know whether the people who actually program the character editor would agree with me, though. I'd be interested to know.

Something else that occurred to me just today was that you could have beaks, done as a "Mouth Attach" option that covered the "actual" mouth. (Maybe you could get a muzzle or snout of sorts that way, too, if not as a separate head-type?)

If they needed to know that they would get money for doing this, maybe they could release a whole set of these "non-humanoid" options as a paid-for bundle. I think it would be popular.

One of the most "un-humanlike" things you can do with an Alien as it currently stands is to make it very big or very small. The available range is quite wide, and although it may seem like a rather simple change it really does give an effect of something that's different from the humans in a major way, rather than just in details. I've often walked past aliens of this kind and thought "That's different. How did they get that in the character generator, or is it an NPC?", before realising that actually the only different thing about it is just that it's very big or very small. Using one of the tall horns/coral options on a giant character helps get you a few extra inches, and using the "Creature" stance also makes it look more different from the basic human body shape, even though in fact it still is it.

horridperson

The limited diversity of species presented on screen was caused by budget limitations but this was reinforced in canon by creating species like the Preservers and "science" like Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planet Development.

wombat140

Fair point. All the same, there are plenty of exceptions among the canon races e.g. among the playables in STO we have the Caitians, Ferasans and the Gorn, and among the others there are the Tholians, Breen, Undine and probably others I've forgotten that are beyond what we currently have in the Alien generator. That's a reasonable percentage out of the maybe a few dozen commonly seen species. So it wouldn't be unreasonable "canon"-wise to have those.