So this is a weird one.
It started out as a short response in Future of the Fortress, it then it turned into a wall of text which expounded on an example for what a procedural magic system might look like. And well, now I'm here.
This post isn't intended to be a suggestion for Tarn, which is pretty odd, but rather for the community. The suggestion, so to speak, is to build a resource which helps expedite the transmission of certain ideas, which appear to have some difficulty in circulating.
Anyway, in the incredibly vain hope that the community can preempt future questions concerning what magical subsystems might look like, and to what shape and variety they might possess come Myth&Magic, I am starting this thread to compile whatever the best illustrations and forum posts made thus far concerning procedural magic that appear to assist newer players in calibrating their understanding of what they may be looking forward to. (Maybe this belongs in the terrible suggestions thread, now that I think about it.)
If and as people post suggestions, I can edit and append them to the OP.
Heres the original drafted post, broken up into three segments:
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2- About myth and magic arc, will we see different kinds of magical systems like maybe a world which only way to cast a magic spell is upgrade items and weapons with runes or other materials?
Yup, procedural magic systems of different kinds is one of the goals of the Myth&Magic arc. The development page should have the outline of planned features, but I also recommend checking out the DF Talks, and previous FotF answers.
The game currently has magic to upgrade weapons, and runes have been mentioned many times for being a type of magic often associated with dwarves. That doesn't mean dwarves will always get rune magic, that will depend on the world generation, but rather that rune magic is likely to make it in the first pass. Since there are lots and lots of imaginable magic systems, effects of magic, etc., not all of it can be added at once.
Seeing as how similar questions concerning the future of how procedural magic in DF will work continue to pop up without fail, on an almost monthly basis, perhaps Tarn's responses in interviews, dev logs, as well as the various community responses still haven't satisfied the meat of these questions?
Clearly then, it must be up to Dikbut.
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Chapter 1: The Preface
This is a chunky bit of text. I'm well aware. And I've been editing three four hour's worth of typing now, deleting, retyping, so heres hoping it preforms its function in elucidating something to somebody, anybody. If due to the length of this post, or its resemblance to a suggestion, feel free to comment, and I will gladly trim, scrap, and/or edit out whatever. But I believe this post accomplishes several hurdles in communicating the necessary ideas for visualizing procedural magic that we're likely to see in eventual release Myth&Magic (Understanding of course, that as of present, nothing has been decided yet, with the sole exception of whats already featured in game, with regards to magic.)
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Chapter 2: The Meat:
In this example, we have two generated worlds that feature their own respective definitions of "magical interactions" for "dowsing." And how desirable world-to-world variance in dowsing can be achieved. Both of the example dowsing interactions achieve the same end terminal result, which is to temporarily reveal a specific type of tile at any depth, but each interaction will possess different prerequisite reagents, so to speak, for triggering their respective interactions, which function much like how we would expect a ritual to work.
For starters, lets consider a definition of "dowsing" (for all of the uninitiated gold panners out there):
"Dowsing is a type of divination employed in attempts to locate ground water, buried metals or ores, gemstones, oil, claimed radiations (radiesthesia), gravesites, malign "earth vibrations" and many other objects and materials without the use of a scientific apparatus."
This seems to be an obvious sort of magical system that we might reasonably expect to see in the future, it may even be the best example.
Alright, dowsing seems especially pertinent to our present gameplay, so how then do we allow world-gen to spice things up and make things procedural? We do it by hitting one bird with two anvils.
As per Tarn's repeated statements about making the gods becoming increasingly relevant in game, we can satisfy this design goal, and at the same time, find the source for our world-gen's variance with magical sub-systems. For our magical dowsing interactions, the gods, and their respective spheres, will become relevant.
Thus, the requirements for each world's dousing system is pulled from a template, a template which corresponds to the spheres associated with the god who caused the magical form to spawn during world-gen. Hence a god of minerals might be eligible for spawning a dousing system during world-gen, and the rules for how dousing works would be determined by the other spheres that same god may be associated with.
An example of a similar magic system already featured in game are gods of death, and the peculiar slabs that they may create.
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Chapter 3: What magical variance even looks like.
Ho'kay - We present two example worlds, each featuring its own "dowsing" interaction effect. And how world-gen played out in terms of variance between the two.
- Ex World A: where there is a god of minerals and animals: dowsing requires a haruspicy reagent of some animal (which body part is required for these magic rituals would be randomly chosen during world gen, and could be intestines, livers, brains, or potentially shells even), in order to temporarily reveal map tiles for a specific ore, and/or water tiles. And each particular ore tile, or 7/7 water tile, would correspond to a particular animal specie's liver, or whatever.
- Ex World B: where there is a god of minerals and revelry: dowsing requires the player to analyze a doped up dancing dwarf, who has been huffing strange vapors in a cave. The player interprets the motions of the dance they preform, which if interpreted correctly, will point to the coordinates of a the nearest vein of some ore.
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Topic: Compile the best walls of text for visualizing Myth&Magic, and procedural magic. (Read 460 times)