Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Saram-61-97-kon]

I think it would be a nice idea to add things like genetics, correct internal organ function and failure, magnetism and chemicals to DF.
Hair-, eye- and skincolor and even attributes like strength and intelligence should be heritable, so that you can create super animals and even dwarves, if you control who gets children.
Internal organ function and failure should be correct, so that hurting the pancreas can result in autolysis of the organ and hurting the liver results in intolerance of alcohol and jaundice.
Iron and steel should be magnetic, and if a magnet is implemented you can build traps against iron and steel wearing soldiers.
All materials should be seperable in its elements when a certain temperature is reached and you should be able to crate new chemicals out of the elements, so that the hole crafting system gets more flexibility. The location for the reactions could be a new workshop, or the smelter. As a result of this you could create new traps with toxic or explosiv chemicals like mercury, which can be extracted of cinnabar, or sodium, which reacts with water in a hot reaction and can be extracted out of rocksalt.

This features are not very likely, but I think its a nice mind game.
And sorry for my bad English.

[Manveru Taurënér]

Those are mostly already planned, to various extent ^^

Also, some genetics are already in the game, and will surely be refined at some point as well (see the first quote).

Can't find any detailed quotes for future physiological improvements, but there's some note of it in the development documents, so I'm sure it'll all get improved at some point (see quote 2).

Magnetism was a bit uncertain at least last time I know it to have been discussed (which was years ago), since Toady wasn't quite sure how to code it (see quote 3)

Chemistry is handled in the fourth quote.

Enjoy the wall of text! 

Rainseeker:   Alright here's one from LASD; 'How much natural selection is going on in Dwarf Fortress and how much is planned? Are there already some inheritable traits that make creature likely to die younger?'
Toady:   There is natural selection on the genetics locally right now. It doesn't have larger population tracking, especially for wilderness creatures and stuff, but there is selection in the sense that critters die and there's some variation and so on, and some of the things would be positive as far as reproduction goes so you'd actually get evolution as well. For selection all you need is death for a reason, and that would include things like size right now; if you're a smaller creature you're pretty much more likely to die when you're fighting and so on; and that's selection against the small size because it gets passed on to the children and so on. The thing that's weird right now is that there's no downside to getting bigger and stronger and smarter and it's easier to do; having attribute variability to make a dwarf smarter, it's not like the evolutionary process has to work really hard to figure out how to make something smarter, it's just like 'Oh you're smarter. You rolled the die and you're a little smarter, you know'. So it doesn't take a long time, if you had this you could breed dogs that can write dissertations and open doors and walk around on their two legs in like two seconds, and it would be a very strange society that we'd be living in right now; because the dogs would be involved. So there's going to need to be some kind of change there, but it's in the game now although not for personalities actually, which was one of the things under question; those are all kind of random right now, but it is there for attributes, and appearance modifiers which govern size and anything else like the skin colour and hair.

The absence of a spleen can increase the chance of septicemia.
...
The kidneys, spleen, liver, stomach and pancreas should have functions that are reduced by damage.

Capntastic:   So 'Is magnetite armour going to be picking up stuff?'
Toady:   Yeah I don't know ... It's one of those things where it's basically like magic, right? You've got a material that can attract certain classes of other materials. It's one of those things where you wonder how you're ever going to code stuff like that, even with magic, because you have to check all the time whether or not something like this is happening and then you have to throw in specific shortcuts and flags and things to make sure it isn't actually checking all the time. So the more general and vague a system is - and we're going to make magic very general and vague - the more you have to scratch your head and wonder how you're ever going to get it to work. I think there's quite a bit of hope for it but I haven't thought about the specifics that well yet so I can't promise you that you're going to have magnetite that does weird things when you walk into a room and all the silverware sticks to you and stuff.

Rainseeker:   So let's address chemistry. This kind of overlaps I guess, I'm just going to jump into something I was wondering about; will we ever find oil in the mountains or in the plains?
Toady:   Or under the deserts, and wherever else you find it!
Capntastic:   Under the sea.
Toady:   Yeah. (singing) Under the sea. (end singing) With the mermaids ... because there are already industries based around mermaids, so why not oil?
Rainseeker:   Floating fortresses over oil patches.
Toady:   Yeah, frozen methane under the ocean floor, all that kind of thing. I think it would be really cool ... we talked about liquid types before and the problems, but now let's talk about some fun things and just assume that you can overcome some of the issues there. It would be cool to have whole ... you know how you have the raw files with the different types of stone ... it would be cool if you could just be like 'well this one's actually a liquid' or whatever, and so there'd be an oil layer, like a big oil sea ... I don't know that much about it but I assume there's quite a lot of oil down there if you're pumping a hundred and fifty million barrels or whatever, and so you should actually be able to go down there and occasionally bump into whole seas of oil.
Rainseeker:   That'd be a problem.
Capntastic:   Pressurised.
Toady:   Yeah, you'd have your dwarf shoot up on a geyser, it'd be really cool; like shoot up in the air and then catch them on fire or whatever. But then actually using ... historically I imagine that petroleum or oil or whatever isn't just a modern thing; people at least poured it on people and set it on fire of course, so you'd be able to do things like that assuming there was a way to say that any liquid you've got - right now we've got water and magma, but say you'd get one of these mineral liquids that you'd define as a mineral layer or whatever - to be able to set up an activity zone or a workshop at that location and then put it into barrels or something. Then once you have barrels of it whatever custom reactions you've got designed for it in the workshop, whether that's in vanilla or modded Dwarf Fortress, you can do things with it and if there is something that sets on fire and you can pour on people you'd need a way to be able to do that. And whatever else you can use oil for would all be fair game at that point. I think it would be really cool. You have to jump over the largest hurdle there which is just getting a liquid on the map that isn't water, that can act like water. It opens up other things too, like there's tar, above ground, having tar pits ...
Rainseeker:   That'd be awesome.
Today:   Yeah, tar pits are a lot of fun. Even a more liquid version of mud that you can kind of sink and fall into ... but we're going back to the physics discussion instead of forward into the chemistry discussion, so ...
Rainseeker:   We also have acids of course; what are you plans for acids?
Toady:   I'm of two minds on this. I've got my Arab/Persian chemistry from around the year 800 or something like that, the kind of stuff I've been looking at when people were isolating sulphuric acid and making aqua regia and all these kind of ... chemistry ... glass flasks, spun and turned around for distilling things that you see in crazy mad scientist movies and stuff. All that stuff existed long before my arbitrary 1400's cut off and it would be really cool to be able to do all kinds of things with that. Of course those acids are not like fantasy acids; if you used aqua regia to etch gold instead of making someone melt into a little puddle then that would be cool, just to use it for things that it might actually have been used for. And there's things like acetic acid and citric acid and so on; there were all kinds of things that were isolated and had myriad uses, and I think it would be just great to have all that stuff go in. At the same time you can't have fantasy world generators without fantasy acid. Fantasy acid is like some kind of monster - a dragon or whatever - spits some crap on you and you just go away. However the game models that, if it's just 'yeah this does really bad things to people', if it's like a poison that way like how I've got them currently set up, or whether it just says 'this has the melting acid effect' on all kinds of stuff ... however it works it would be way more powerful than anything that you'd be able to make with your chemists shop, but then you can start working things like dragon scales and things in there and it starts to blur the lines between chemistry, alchemy and flat out witches cauldron style stuff.
Capntastic:   That's how it should be though.
Toady:   Yeah, I'm not saying that's bad at all; those are the things I want, it's just a matter of getting that stuff started. For real chemistry I think having all of that out in the raws, trying to hardcode nothing, just list out as many chemical reactions as you can think to do ... There's a few problems here and there; like if you define zillions of chemical reactions that give you all kinds of different chemicals and they have different uses and you just slowly add to that list more and more, you don't want to get to the point where any time you drop an item on the ground it has to chug away, checking to make sure ... it's like 'well these two things just touched each other; the sword blade just touched the ground, and now we have to check a list of twenty thousand reactions to see if in fact the ground is going to explode'. There are just things that you have to be conscious of when you start defining those things; one of the reasons we have contact poisons not quite on hold, but they only work through splatters and contaminants now is because there are all kinds of things touching each other all the time and you don't want to bog yourself down, like when a dwarf is walking on the ground do you have to take the boots he's wearing versus the type of the soil and make sure that there isn't some explosive catastrophic reaction or that the boots don't turn into gold or something, because of some reaction; and is the reaction exothermic and his feet catch on fire, or do they freeze ... It's the kind of thing where you could find it getting out of control. However, those problems are all surmountable, just looking things up a little more intelligently than doing it by brute force, and then you can have a very lively world where things can get splattered on you and splattered on other things and mixed together and so on, and turn into other things. We have temperatures for all the objects so if you did have a reaction that just heated things up, you pour one liquid into another liquid and it turns into other stuff but it's also very very hot, you could do that, and you could do that to do harmful things to your goblin friends and stuff. It really does have a lot of potential and just having those things in the raws ... There's a reason that the jobs in the raws are called reactions; it was originally going to be for the alchemy system for the alchemists workshop that doesn't even do anything - except for soap or whatever it does now - it's because I want to have reactions where it understands what materials ... I'll have to change the format of them a little bit, but it understands how materials react with each other and what the outcome of that process is. There's a lot that won't be done just because the real world is so rich with this kind of stuff, but we can do a lot, and we can do it eventually to the point where some people are satisfied.