That brings an off-topic question to my mind, how do you determine the gender of a word in English? In other languages, i.e. Spanish, the last vowel of a word defines its gender, with only a few exceptions. In English would you say that a "ship" is a she or he? English is not my native language as you might realize so I'm curious :)

For some reason, a ship is a "she". It seems to be pretty random in English, but I'm not sure how many inanimate objects are called "he" in English.

In French (supposedly; I don't speak it myself), almost every object is either female or male.

In English, gender for inanimate objects are much less common.

"It" to refer to a person feels forced. A singular "They" feels less forced, but still clumsy.

Why is gender agnostic a desirable feature? It feels like it takes away options, rather than offering more.

I like ShaneC's idea of a introvert/extrovert setting. It should even be a bar with several notches for varying degrees.

Why is gender agnostic a desirable feature? It feels like it takes away options, rather than offering more.

Well it's not exactly about giving more or less options, but gender feels too human-centric, and I'm looking to build a character creator for species of any kind. In a galaxy, far, far away, evolution could allow the development of life forms that procreate in trios, instead of couples as in Earth. And why does an artificial life needs a genre at all, anyways. If gender is required by the human language, there could be male/female/neutral options, so the player doesn't feel "denaturalized".

This is rare but I can almost completely agree with both points of view. On the one hand, cronocr's approach seems like something I would want as a player and a step in the right direction. On the other, the lack of genders entirely involves a lot of simplication, seemingly too much so.

Ah, I didn't realize it was sci-fi. I was assuming fantasy 'species', where dwarves, elves, orcs, etc... usually also have male/female genders.

You could have "Male/Female/Entity" or "Male/Female/Unknown".

Or, you could just have 'species', and have "Human male" be a different "species" than "Human female". This is probably the more flexible option, because if you do decide to start defining a specific species' genders or lack thereof, your interface is already setup for three-gender or more species, by counting each gender (in the interface) as a separate species. You could then have, pre-defined for that "species", the proper way to address it in dialog.

Sounds good!

And one more clarification, this system is on a higher level of abstraction, and that's the reason I want it to be as general as possible. A designer will take this character creator system and define the constraints that suit a certain game. So the person in charge of taking the decision whether Gender equals 0, 1, 2, ... is an actual designer. I'm just the guy that created the generic template

Just throwing into this gender discussion, making using of "you" when addressing the player (considering they would be talking to the player) works for a genderless pronoun.

As for genders and inanimate objects, in my experience, the gender of the person applying a gender to the object comes in to play. A lot of guys refer to their cars as girls, and girls refer to their cars as guys. Not always the case, but a large portion of the time, this is what I run in to.

That brings an off-topic question to my mind, how do you determine the gender of a word in English? In other languages, i.e. Spanish, the last vowel of a word defines its gender, with only a few exceptions. In English would you say that a "ship" is a she or he? English is not my native language as you might realize so I'm curious

Unlike most other Indo-European languages, English doesn't actually have grammatical gender - i.e. words themselves don't actually have a gender. Many centuries ago, it had a system like the Germanic masculine/feminine/neuter distinction, but this has since disappeared with the exception of third-person singular pronouns - but even those have been greatly simplified. In modern English, pronoun usage is not a governed by grammatical rules, but by context and by stylistic concerns, which is to say that using the wrong pronoun may be offensive (or endearing), but it is not grammatically incorrect.

'He' can be used for male animals, people who are, appear to be, or want to be considered as male, and entities the speaker wants to refer to as being male.
'She' can be used for female animals, people who are, appear to be, or want to be considered as female, and entities the speaker wants to refer to as being female.
'It' can be used for anything - however referring to a human as 'it' is generally insulting.
Singular 'they' can be used for people of unspecified or indeterminate sex. Its usage is widely criticized, but also widespread.

Inanimate objects can be personified by referring to them as 'he' or 'she' instead of 'it'; conversely, people can be dehumanized by referring to them as 'it'.

Thanks for your help, I updated the list and implemented the features with highest priority, hope to code the rest in the future

What kind of character are you making?

What options do the characters have?

What kind of game is the character for?

It's sort of important to know this stuff before suggesting features.