Thanks to smjjames, Cobbler89, lethosor, Manveru Taurënér, Footkerchief, Knight Otu, Trif, Putnam, King Mir, Ribs, PeridexisErrant, Valtam, Parisbre56 and anybody I missed for helping to answer questions for this final posting in the 0.34 thread! I left out some questions that people might like to answer for themselves now that we've got 0.40, but feel free to re-ask them in the new thread.
Toady, what are you envisioning for the job priorities redo? What will it entail, and how will it work?
We're still just kicking around ideas and reading relevant threads. It was from the vote system, so we'd more or less like to solve some of the problems people had there, but there are a few big things at the root of many woes, like v-p-l being a crappy way to edit a row on a spreadsheet that you don't want to have to deal with at all in the first place... at the same time allowing enough control for people that want control, and better decision making for people that want to let their migrants do whatever, but still have skilled workers do jobs designated as important (or whatever), and so on. Guilds are on the table as an AI-organizer starting point, but we're still considering how that interacts with the specific intent of the player and what sort of non-crap twiddling works for management if v-p-l is ditched. Aside from standard labors, there are also specific things like levers and broker jobs that might require a different approach.
Do you plan to try and keep up with the suggestions board now you've cleared the backlog?
Yeah, it would be a shame to fall back again. It's on my daily checklist, anyway.
Are the dwarven hill and deep sites tied with the CAVE_DETAILED tag, or will they have their own, separate tags?
We were hoping to make it separate, but everything was done quickly. At least all the basic sites are in now, so blurring the boundaries is a little more imaginable anyway.
I was specifically wondering which particular development items will require "major structural changes" to game code that will require updating many parts of the game, if you can say at present. ... I guess, to be clear, I'm less interested in knowing how many long release cycles there will be as I am interested in knowing how many major structural changes remain before the fundamental framework of DF is in place.
There are still lots of things to do -- even the upcoming job priority rewrite still needs some underlying work (fortunately we got some of that out of the way). Inarius mentioned the economy and planes, and those are certainly major. It's not a clear-cut distinction between major structural changes and not... sort of hard to answer this one.
Will this ability to generate new object types mid-game allow us to potentially add new modded objects mid-game as well?
Knight Otu mentioned some of the difficulties -- it would basically need to figure out what's new and try to get them in, and changing existing items is much harder than adding new ones. In addition, new items added mid-game would not exist anywhere unless you tell them to, so it's tricky all around. In the most basic way, it would work now, but it wouldn't mean much.
What determines if a dwarf notices furniture? Does it happen every time they walk past a statue?
I think there's a random chance, but yeah, that's about it.
Toady, is it possible to bring a dead body (say, from the wilderness) inside a fortress and memorialize it? Or does it need to be part of the fortress history to do so?
So like, bringing a dead body from faraway, dropping it in a fort, retiring, and then assuming control of the fort with the body there? Hmmm... I have no idea. I don't remember what comes along for the ride to maintain the identity of the body, and if that's the same stuff used in the memorial list (or if the memorial list relies on the unit-in-play list).
Can we expect to see more variation between the layouts of towns and villages in the future? IE: One village has a keep and a bread mill, but the one a couple miles over has a palisade and a general store.
Towns get variations in shops based on the goods produced in world generation, and I suspect that sort of distinction will continue. Ideally the different cultures would have major variations as well.
Say the goblin civ that is in contact with you only has a few members remaining (perhaps the demon is the only one left) and only one site left, where do siege and ambush participants get pulled from?
And if all members of a civ manage to get themselves wiped out in one final siege on your fort, what happens next? Does that civ go extinct and another civ take it's place?
If they aren't numerous, they don't get pulled from anywhere -- they won't be sent until the numbers replenish, if they do. Assuming it works. If a civ goes extinct, you don't necessarily have one take its place, especially if there isn't one. I think I still have to work on some stuff before I can scrap the artifical neighbor tag completely, so within a single fort you might run out if you wipe some but not all civs out.
What role do castles and their lords/ladys play in human nations in the next version in regard to the new same-nation site conflict?
I've removed them for the time being -- as they stood, they relied on a civ-level infrastructure (which is practically gone for humans now). We've got the nobility framework used for dwarves, but we still don't have strong enough notions of territorial control or any sort of strategic thinking at all, so it might be a bit before we see them again.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 3844905 times)