Edit: go to my
My Dwarf Fortress fan site to play as a Velociraptor now! This mod is in alpha/beta!
(C) H. Kyoht LutermanThe silly drawing above depicts correct positioning of the femur. With the body held at a 20 degree angle (as in walking or running) the femur should never go past vertical. The unfortunate raptor on the right has moved his femur past this point, and thus dislocated it. Dromaeosaurid leg bones disarticulate once extended past vertical. Keep your raptor femurs happy, never draw them over extended!
My Dwarf Fortress fan site has the body_default_classified.txt file.
*SPOILER*
Yes I know a creature update is coming that will remvamp this.
However, the way the common (non-randomized) creatures are set up will probably remain somewhat the same, or else we'd have to specify how many arms, legs, organs, etc. each common (TETRAPOD) creature had and that would get annoying.
Basicaly I am suggesting that non-randomized creatures (even plants!) follow the evolutionary classification system to most efficiently eliminate redundancies and handle variations with small sub-classes of pretty much only the body parts that changed
/*SPOILER*
So I am putting forth a suggestion for how to get TETRAPOD creatures in the game the usual way with a modular system including:
1. TETRAPOD:DIGITIGRADE ex: dog
2. TETRAPOD:PLANTIGRADE_HUMANOID ex: human
3. TETRAPOD:UNGULATE ex: horse
4. TETRAPOD:TAUREN ex: centaur but could be any quadruped lower body
5. all of the usual (non-mutant) finger/toe/hoof possibilities for those animals, however this time it also includes joints! And dewclaws (dewtalons) and thumb spikes!
TETRAPOD basically gives the creature a head, upper body, lower body, and 4 limbs. I didn't want to get into CHORDATA because that would only do one thing, give the animal a spine, so this isn't going to be a 100% everything evolutionary tree, just the parts that effect the body type in a major way (ex: tetrapod vs hexapod vs octopod, then choose reptile, mammal, bird, insect, or spider, then choose digitigrade, plantigrade, or insect_feet is what I'm thinking of for the future ... for Magma Men they just get TETRAPOD_SIMPLE and then the creature file adds the rest)
PLANTIGRADE, DIGITIGRADE, and whether or not they have _HUMANOID at the end gives the creature hands and/or feet (for DIGITIGRADE the feet ar called paws of course) and whether or not those are GRASP and/or STANCE. Also DIGITIGRADE have one more leg bone, the pastern.
UNGULATE had to be written because they have one extra leg bone ... the cannon bone ... so we can't just GENGLOSS DIGITIGRADE.
TAUREN was written because the front limbs had to have different ID than the humanoid arms to avoid confusion of GENGLOSSing the front legs to have horse-nomenclature.
I didn't actually distribute these improvements to the DF animals myself because I don't want to do that then find that the next version of DF breaks compatibility.
I changed lower arm to forearm and lower leg to shin because if the animal is digitigrade then the "pastern" part of the leg being below the "lower leg" ... that sounds awkward compared to below the "shin."
Whether Birds' bones are broken or not should effect how easily they get WINDED! Because the air sacs in the bones store fresh air for the lungs to use during exhallation!
Quadruped animal name limbs reference:
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/mammals/dog/label/anatomy/labelanswers.shtmlHorse limbs names were also used, only for Ungulates and Taurens, with the only change making the TAUREN quadruped forearm into foreleg since we don't want to confuse it with the human forearm!) and that info is easy to find. I used it because with so many limbs, keeping track of what does "front pastern" mean is that on the human body or one of the horse limbs? would be a problem. I don't use cannon for front pastern and shank for rear pastern as the non-TAUREN DIGITIGRADE "wrist-limb" names because they sound too much like a horse when describing say a dog or cat ... especially shank, and in fact pastern is used in real life for non-ungulate digitigrades (as the dog anatomy link I gave in the previous paragraph shows.