Okay so, this is currently beyond my current coding knowledge, mostly because the only coding I know is from a couple tutorials and whatnot, but this idea has been gnawing at my brain, so I'm going to share my ideas here.
So I know people don't like the language system that goob has because it makes people group together and I want to come up with a system that fixes that. Firstly, throw all extra languages from traits out the window for now. Secondly, remove the trait that makes it so you don't understand galactic common at all. Why would NanoTrasen hire you if you don't even understand the main language?
So that would leave us with the following:
species specific language
critter language
trait that lets you understand but not speak galactic common
Now, I'm going to work out of order from that list.
Starting with...
Trait that lets you understand but not speak galactic common.
This is simple. We have AAC tablets so they could still communicate if needed if not poorly. Plus they could communicate in species language if that's what we want to go for. Now, you may know that goob's system has translators. Translators are bad. They basically make the trait... useless? Like what's the point if it's not going to affect you at all. So I would say leave out the translator.
Next...
Species languages!
This is simple, each species would have their species language. This could allow for some interesting roleplay opportunities. Such as a thaven mood where you prefer to speak in thaven language. Maybe traveling ships could only speak their species language to give them more flavor? Would make them a lot more interesting. As for humans... I don't know how they would do a language? Maybe some kind of galactic uncommon? That would need to be worked out. There is another thing that this could be used for so let me get into...
Critter languages.
As we know, there are a lot of animals. There could either be a general animal and critter language... or! We could make them speak species languages? Mothroach could speak moth language, mice rodentia language, carp and dragon could speak thaven language. And so on. I know this may sound a bit lrp... BUT rodentia squeak, moth people chitter, and... well thaven don't make noises but they could. What is to say that that's now how their languages work? Through speaks and chitters. Oh, and I forget... arachnids could talk to spiders. But that could lead to some problems, but I will get into that later. They could argue with antagonistic vent spiders though which is a positive roleplay! This still needs a lot of building... but yeah. I'm adding this later, but I just remembered kobolds and reptilians could communicate and other monkies could talk to PunPun which would add onto those roles. I don't really know that this all would mean for cognizine though as all this would change the use of that.
Now... onto...
Potential issues...
Firstly, I know people are worried about grouping and cliques, which is why I don't really want trait languages because that is mostly what can lead to that I think.
Another issue I can think of is Shiva... I know people already say that Shiva already looks for antags or have said that in the past, so I feel like Shiva being able to communicate with arachnids could reinforce that idea more... which we don't want. We could fix this with separating animal and species languages into separate things, but I'm not sure. This could be handled with good roleplay though by just like... roleplaying Shiva well. But this is just an issue that I can't think of anything for now.
As I mentioned earlier, this would change how cognizine works. We could leave it how it works now, and just make it so it gives the receiver of cognizine the abilitiy to speak galactic common. This could work for the trait of not being able to speak galactic common maybe? Especially since I think cognizine has other uses so you'd have to use it wisely. Or just make it so it doesn't remove that trait. I personally like traits to not be fixable, so maybe it could not work on humanoids. We could also make it so it could give animals the ability to be sentient, but that would also be a lot to consider. For example, would a chicken speak a harpy language if it were smart? Or a vox language since they are also birds. This is a lot to consider.
These are all the issues I can think of. Feedback in the replies are very much wanted. Again, this is beyond my experience, so I cannot make this happen myself... But, if you read all this, thank you.
