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[Flaede]

New addition to the danger room: a model train set!

Danger room?  Dining hall.

Urist McDiner has eaten a masterful train recently.

Oooh. Like those restaurants with the little train bringing the plates around and around and around for people?

[blake77]

Are minecarts capable of derailing?

[Putnam]

Are minecarts capable of derailing?

Yes.

[Kogut]

Are minecarts capable of derailing?

Yes.

[citation needed]

[Tenebrais]

Under what circumstances do you envision minecarts behaving according to minecart physics?

I.e., are they going to break free from time to time?  What would cause that?  How often are they going to go careening off out of control?

If they hit a corner too fast or hit a bad junction or track end or hit another cart really fast...  lots of opportunities for trouble.

How are junctions going to work, if at all?

Will it be abstracted, allowing carts to switch direction freely at any point where more than one rail intersect? Or only at 'stop' tiles? In either case, how will runaway carts coming up to the head of a 'T-junction' from the tail be handled? Will they just derail at that point, or will they be diverted?  In the case of the latter, will the direction be random or constant?

Or will there be splits like on IRL rail lines, where carts coming from one direction are sent in only one of two (or three!) possible directions?  If so, what would happen to carts coming up a secondary rail when its not the one presently being diverted to?

The carts do not switch freely at junctions.  You can prepare a multitile junction as described above, and there might be switches later as mentioned above.  At stop tiles, where a dwarf sets it on its way, you get a full fourway ability to send it on its way.  Runaway carts hitting a T-junction will not pick a side -- they will continue on in violence.

[dree12]

And, devlog:

I went ahead and just debug-put a cart on a track and debug-pushed it. They gain speed going down ramps, get slower going up, lose a little speed on the rest of the track, a bit more on corners, and they fly in little parabolas and crash into the ground when you set them free, either straight off a cliff or launched from a short upward ramp. I've put off updating the rest of the projectiles to have parabolic paths because I don't want to lose time dealing with adv mode targeting etc., but you may well see parabolic unit paths when creatures are unfortunate enough to take flight without wings.

[eux0r]

apart from the fact, that this is totally a suggestion and not a question which is not meant to be greened... using green instead of limegreen makes my eyes bleed!

Seconded, thirded, and fourthed. I've wanted to say this every time I saw the darker green text, and I did not because I felt that it's not in my place and that I'd be just a lone voice. I had to select the text to be able to read it.

Actually, thanks for pointing that out -- I hadn't noticed limegreen in the color list (or if I had, my brain probably ignored it because in most media lighter shades are the hard to read ones -- but then, that's usually not on a dark background, all of which didn't even consciously occur to me). Future reference, or should I go back and edit my questions for ease of reading?

light backgrounds are painful. light writing on dark backgrounds is just so much better in general. but whatever.

As for suggestion vs. question... I'm a little unclear how half the things that get asked on this thread aren't borderline suggestion, although I guess a specific solution to a known problem could be taken to be more suggestive than most things; I guess I'll have to dig around the thread and learn better.

(the following should by no means be a form of trying to drive someone away, he simply asked for the differentiation, as far as i understood at least)

Could a solution to the elven stupidity be to add a raw tag that 1) changes the description to suggest an object was grown rather than carved/cut, 2) allows the elves to recognise their own work and trade it back, and perhaps 3) adds a surrounding symbol -- say, "~" -- to the name to let us distinguish a +<<*larch bow*>>+ and an elven +<<*~larch bow~*>>+?

until this part its a just a very suggestiony question, which i have absolutely no problems with: its incredibly hard, if not outright impossible, to ask many things without also suggesting something.

It seems to me that given the system already tracks material, quality, encrusting/decoration etc. of individual items it shouldn't in principle be difficult to add elven-ness in this manner (though maybe it's more complicated to change any such things than I realize)? I for one would like to get a *~larch bow~* from the elves, decorate it so it's a +<<*~larch bow~*>>+ and sell it back to them at increased value, whereas currently there is (to my knowledge) no point in larch bows being in Dwarf Mode at all.

here one can recognize the suggestion/demand by the following: "...it shouldn't..." and "...I for one would like...".
also most sentences not ending in a question mark usually dont need to be greened(exceptions may include, but may not only be limited to, necessary explanations of greened questions). this improves readability a lot. a good exaple:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=100851.msg3215006#msg3215006


edit: gosh, this turned out quite long, sry everyone!

[Sunday]

Actually, it's pretty easy to ask non-suggestion questions. Just ask non-leading/open-ended questions.

e.g. (something I'm very curious about, given the most recent DF talk): What exactly is the 'personality rewrite'? How are personalities going to change, and what sort of personality features are you looking to implement?

Notice I'm not 'suggesting' any particular features.

A beneficial side effect of asking such questions is that—since they generally are not 'yes/no' questions—if Toady chooses to answer them you'll get more complete and complicated answers. Leading questions are excellent in certain circumstances (e.g. adversarial journalism, trial cross-examination), but are less good for getting general information about a subject.

[Cobbler89]

light backgrounds are painful. light writing on dark backgrounds is just so much better in general. but whatever.

Actually, you and I are in agreement -- but everyone else I know tells me we're also in the minority. *sadface*

As to the rest, thanks for the pointers (you too, Sunday).

[Footkerchief]

e.g. (something I'm very curious about, given the most recent DF talk): What exactly is the 'personality rewrite'? How are personalities going to change, and what sort of personality features are you looking to implement?

I think the personality rewrite was first conceptualized under the old dev system:

NEMESIS ARC: The civilization leaders should be fleshed out in many ways. Related to Core11, Core15, Core40, Req161, Req277, Bloat48, Bloat68, Bloat176, PowerGoal98, PowerGoal101, PowerGoal102 and PowerGoal122.

Core15, PRESENTATION OF ENEMY LEADERS AND OTHER IMPORTANT FIGURES, (Future): Enemy leader play an important part in creating a story around otherwise by-the-numbers conflicts that can occur, so the leaders can afford to be presented in such a way that you as the player can learn something about their background, motivations and appearance without digging around in the legends screen. There can be a variety of mechanisms for this. Diplomats and others that visit your fortress could afford the same treatment, as well as the people you talk to and about in adventure mode conversations, etc.

Since then it's been discussed in DF Talk:

Spoiler: long (click to show/hide)

Rainseeker:   The adventurer growing up, of course, you have a back story. So you could create these ... he's always scared of goblins because his brother was kidnapped by a goblin, so your character has a negative two to some kind of check; maybe you freeze in fear, or something terrible like that.
Toady:   As long as it's in a controlled environment where you can expect it, like if you knew it happened when you saw goblins that'd be cool. It's the kind of thing, like general terror ... that kind of bugs me, it's like you're not allowed to act because the game says you're afraid. You spent all this time going to find the dragon and then it's like 'No, you're just scared. Sorry.' But you spent two years trying to find it, you'd have worked up a little nerve ... So that kind of gets to an additional part of the overall personality rewrite which would be an emotion system. In adventure mode emotions are a tricky thing because you really don't want to get too far ahead of yourself there, getting into the players head, whereas if it's just doing some helpful bookkeeping for you with your favourite hobbies and stuff, that's actually a really good thing, but if it's actually trying to force you one way or another based on what it thinks you should be feeling, that's quite strange. But once you get to the other guys then emotions are a great thing. Right now we just have this slow descent into unhappiness and despair and psychotic breaks for the poor dwarves, and that sucks. They should be able to just snap, throw a tantrum, come back and be the happiest little dwarf that they could be, having worked out their issues, but it's kind of strange now how it's only long term despair and so on being tracked, rather than short term events. This is some distance in the future so we haven't really settled on a system there, we've just been writing up lists of emotions and so on, trying to think about when they might come up or how it might affect how the dwarves work and how we can just get rid of the happiness variable overall.

[...]

Toady:   Yeah, I guess if he's through with it. But then if you want to interrogate them further than that, or if they have some resistance rather, to that, then it can take the location of the bandit's thing ... If you're asking for a thing like 'Where is the store?' 'Where is the bandit's hideout? 'Where is one of these things?', you basically just need to go in and say how do people lie about things; they need to come up with a plausible alternate locations, and plausible alternate locations are basically going to be the bread and butter of bandits moving around to begin with, so it should all tie in very naturally, and the dude could just lie to you and send you to a cave. Now in addition to this you can start getting sinister about it and have him send you to a cave where something dangerous is that he would know about. When you talk about AI there's this thing where you're like, 'Well, don't you want him to just be able to come up with all of this on his own, "Well it's good to send the adventurer into danger so I'll do this" and you can get into this thing where there thing's all going to happen because you've written some sort of revolutionary value-weighting judgement and the guy can just make judgements like that on his own', and I don't think that's how those features on that list are going to work, I'm not going to make some kind of miracle happen. But I'm going to try my best to keep things general and to allow as much crossover as I can so that occasionally you'll get surprised by what they're able to do, that's all I hope for. So if the guy does send you off to a dragon cave, that's fine even if it's totally hard-coded, and if I can slip away from that so that the guy's evaluating danger, the guy's evaluating the goals that he has then that's icing on the cake ... well, it becomes the cake and then the result becomes the icing afterward ... you know what I mean, maybe, or maybe I'm just not making any sense at all. But that's not to say that there's not a basic AI change that's going to happen. With the personality rewrite we're going to be shifting over to a lot more goal-oriented building up of how people conceptualise each action that they take when they're doing things in their day instead of just following a script. So there should be some satisfying things that come out of that; we've written some test software that make people run around a city and do little goals that wasn't impressive at all but it was based on the new system, so I think it'll all work out, I'm pretty happy with it. Hopefully that'll work, but I'm not going to make any big promises because those things always frustrate me when other people do it, when they offer you up the world with artificial intelligence or whatever and give you crap. So this is ... Each feature that I put up there is going to be accomplished in some way, but it's not necessarily going to be done by a miracle. As for ... I don't know if we'll go into the other example as well of people trying to capture you alive. That really feeds into this idea of the personality with goals and so on, because it's more like a military objective, if someone wants to capture you alive there's two starting points there: how did they come up with that idea in the first place, and how are they actually going to carry it out? How they actually carry it out, that's the kind of thing where I don't think it's going to be based on some sort of magic AI, but it's just going to be something that they learn how to do, how to effectively trap you, box you in, and get you ... either use some kind of trap, or surround you and drag you down, whatever they might try.
Capntastic:   There could be the option to surrender of course.
Toady:   It's true, they could just yell at you and scare you and stuff. The new capybara sounds should really lead into a glorious future of people yelling at each other and stuff, that'd be great ... But anyway, the tactics there are probably not going to be interesting. When I get to the combat arc I'm hoping to open that up a little bit, but it's not very interesting now and I'm not sure how interesting it's going to get. But when it comes to the actual goal of 'We want to capture this person this alive for a reason', that's where we're hoping that the personality rewrite, which is basic to the army arc of them coming up with 'What do I want to do with my life?' - and that's not just for military goals, it's more general - but for military goals when they decide 'I want to capture this guy alive, why would I do it?' they'd need to have a reason for that, and that would be one of their goals that pops up, like 'I want to extract information from the adventurer', 'I want to hold the adventurer for ransom', 'I want to do this', 'I want to do that'; that would come up. Hopefully that all just fits into the overall system.

[...]

Toady:   [...] the personality rewrite involves not just coming up with facets of the personality that are more interesting than the current ones, that allow you to tell better stories, but also new categories entirely of things, like what are the dreams of this dwarf, what are the dwarf's lifelong goals and that kind of thing. Then in adventure mode you don't quite have the same thing because you're playing, whereas your dwarves will have those things independent of your existence

[eux0r]

Actually, it's pretty easy to ask non-suggestion questions. Just ask non-leading/open-ended questions.
-snip-
A beneficial side effect of asking such questions is that—since they generally are not 'yes/no' questions—if Toady chooses to answer them you'll get more complete and complicated answers. Leading questions are excellent in certain circumstances (e.g. adversarial journalism, trial cross-examination), but are less good for getting general information about a subject.

well, in general i have to agree with you there, but when you have something specific you want to know, broad questions wont always work that well. recent examples, where i cant think of a broad question whose answer would necessarily contain the answer to what the people want to know, are:
-elones question to whether we will be able to set how nearby "nearby" is in terms of gathering stuff into a container a dwarf is holding in his hands.
-flaborts question to whether animals can be used to pull carts or not.
those are completely fine questions(independent of the way the askers actually formulated them) but can also always be understood as suggestions.

[Sunday]

Very true. The more specific/pointed your question, the harder it is to make it sound like not a suggestion.

[Caldfir]

Spoiler: on suggestions (click to show/hide)

I think the key here is that some legitimate questions can sound like suggestions.  For example I got called out on "suggestions" in the previous thread when I asked about the large increase in mineral frequencies the releases at that time had undergone.  Granted the tone of my question might have conveyed my opinion, but it's hard not to do that: in truth it was simply a change that had occurred to the game which was never mentioned on the devlog, list of changes, or in this thread, so it wasn't clear if it had been an intentional change or what.  Pointed questions are sometimes required.

In general:

• try not to ask "questions" you yourself know are really thinly veiled suggestions
• if someone asks something that could be interpreted as either a suggestion or a question, give them the benefit of the doubt - don't call people out unless you're certain, and even then always be polite

Its hard because suggestions are very tempting to make, but I don't think a similar thread to this one, but "suggestion-based" (on the appropriate forum) could work very well.  While questions can get answered by Toady, frequently without drama, people are very often invested in their suggestions, and it's harder to hear someone shoot down your suggestion than tell you a negative answer to a question.  Forums work best when there is debate, but worst when people feel personally attacked.  Toady himself has frequently mentioned that when he isn't sure about how to go about something, he checks to suggestions forum to see if there's anything helpful there, but at the end of the day there's no way things could be added at the speed people think of them, so it's understandable that people can feel frustrated putting suggestions there, and never knowing if it made a difference.  I guess the point is that sometimes good ideas will get ignored, but that happens everywhere in politics/business/social life, and is certainly not unique to these forums. 

back on topic:

I'm very happy to hear that non-human sites and animal people frequency are going to get looked at sooner rather than later.  The latest DF talk alludes to some pretty neat things that might happen in those sites.  Multitile vegetation is something I've looked forward to for a long time.  I hope the surface animal people get at least the treatment that the underground ones have, with camps and whatnot.  I always enjoy venturing into the underground to bring ant-people with me on adventures (when I can at least).  And who doesn't want capybara-man necromancer raids?  Lots of cool stuff on the horizon. 

[thvaz]

Toady is on a live broadcast right now talking about DF:

http://aigamedev.com/broadcasts/dwarf-fortress/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=promote

edit: I got it at the end. It's over now.

[MrWiggles]

Damn it. Its concluded. I hope it was recorded.