Vox-Pidgin Exclusivity

[Davnik]

It is always an immersion-breaker to have a player who speaks Vox-Pidgin. While it is supposed to be allowed for the rare organism who chooses to restructure his entire mouth-to-chest region into a freaking bird, it's fair to say nobody is going to bring in that harrowed snowflake, so we're better off preventing non-vox from speaking Vox-Pidgin.

Prevent non-vox from speaking Vox-Pidgin. Allow non-vox to specialize in Vox-Pidgin, but only allow them to understand it. Despite the unintelligibility of it all, it is just a coherent pattern of guttural birdsong. Make sure each of these characters knows the backstory implications of understanding Vox-Pidgin; it requires extensive time spent with a rare and obscure race, learning from their paranoid and xenophobic scholars, who would not want to share their difficult language with an outsider. This is the basic description of a whitelist, but we'll leave it on a blacklist the admins are expected to manage regularly.

[Jacquar]

Agreed. Alternative options - might we create a non antag mask slot item held by the hop and cmo that translates into a mechanically distorted version of the language? A rough mechanical one way babel fish?

[Davnik]

Or, babble fish, considering we're discussing vox.

[Davnik]

Meanwhile, this conversation has stirred. Apparently not even cunning linguists can make sense of Vox-Pidgin, so perhaps only Vox should be able to even understand it, much less speak it.

[Mewchild]

Direct wiki copy/paste: Vox-pidgin itself is bewilderingly complex and defies any concerted study by linguists. It would be impossible for a human (or humanoid) to speak Vox-pidgin without drastic and disfiguring throat and facial surgery.

[staticcharged]

Could we do it through the pAI? They can already do translate features, what about talking through them to speak Vox? This would assist in keeping the rarity of it being translated...

[Davnik]

In lieu of vox becoming an antag race, 100%, beyond any debate, vox-pidgin needs to be removed from the player race language list, and forced to only apply to Vox, like Rootspeak or Changeling Hivemind. I believe the tag is... "Restricted" rather than "Whitelisted", if that helps.

[killer99603]

I'll take it out. I'm leaving this issue open though because it has ideas that are not just removing the language entirely.

[killer99603]

Just as a note, thus far, there is nothing in the Vox-pidgin code that should allow it to be chosen. It's got the same flags as binary and rootspeak. I'll keep digging into other files to see where the problem is.