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[LordBaal]

As in chaos dwarves? I'm taking that for granted! Eventually we should have pretty different civilizations on the same species. Well, that's the plan if I read Toady good.

[Andreus]

I mean, I realise it's already easy enough to mod in an entity that's precisely the same race as another entity but has different cultural values. I'm just wondering if, in the future, we'll see human, dwarven or elven civilizations that are noticably different from each other (architecture, customs, culture, etc.) without resorting to that. Right now human civilizations almost never go to war with each other, and we know that's (unfortunately) not particularly reflective of reality.

[LordBaal]

Oh you mean, something like X race/civilization spawn, naturally on world creation or something like that two different civilizations. It would be interesting.

[Knight Otu]

On a related note, will there eventually be societies within the same species which hold differing values? Perhaps the stereotypcial "dark elves" or cannibalistic slaver dwarves.

Yes, that should happen eventually. Technically, it is even supported by the game already (since 2008), it just isn't happening yet.

No matter how it turns out, we'll still have the new position raws, but I thought I'd mess around with this a bit. I'll also be lifting ethics up into an entity instance rather than entity raw definition set of variables, so that they can vary between civs and change during play. Not sure how much I'll actually do with that now though. I'm planning to get the necessary dwarf mode changes in after I handle the raw loading to avoid getting bogged down in world gen again.

It's also something that Toady has talked about, notably when he said that he wouldn't make his goblins to be a Mongol equivalent, because humans should be able to be that equivalent one day.

I know a few people were dismissive of our decision and called it a cop out, but we thought about these situations (including the Mongols) and rejected them.  Goblins that herd meat animals are insufficiently scary to us.  Goblins that die exclusively violent deaths in great numbers in a potentially vegetationless wasteland are better, and we want to explore a wider variety of possibilities than humans allow -- humans can be Mongols, because the Mongols were human, and we hope to support some human variety eventually./quote]

[Thursday Postal]

I saw a two-headed lizard on TV. It was a gila monster, I think. Apparently the two heads are separate and mostly control different sides of the body, so it is difficult to move.

They named the two heads "Zack" and "Wheezy". I thought I had that show out of my head, too...

That's true! I forgot all about conjoined twin reptiles, which seem to be fairly common as far as conjoined twins go. There's a lot of examples of turtles, snakes, lizards, etc like that.

Maybe a hydra's brain develops where all the necks meet, and the heads just have simplistic brain-stem type brains for reflexes and stuff. I feel like the "bureaucratic organ" could be there, seeing as it'd be the largest mass of neurons, bigger than any of the individual brains.

Of course it's hard describing a creature in evolutionary terms when the creator gods of a DF world could create whatever they like in whatever way they please.

[Neonivek]

Remember that unlike a two headed snake a Hydra was born/created to have multiple heads.

It is quite possible that Hydras possess a hive mind so to speak that exchange information with each other while still retaining a unique personality.

[LordBaal]

I think that it would be interesting if at early age the heads had this fight over control, where the stronger would impose over the others regarding the control of the legs and tail, the rest of the heads controlling only it's own necks.

Or maybe this is default to the center head, and in the case of losing that head the next most strong take it's place as the body coordinator.

Other instance would be something like Neonivek says, I see it like different personalities in each head of the same entity that is the hydra, and all or any of the heads control the locomotion and parasympathetic functions, that's it, the hydra has a several case of central nerve system redundancy.

[WillowLuman]

Maybe they're all identical, redundant copies of the same mind, which is why losing a head doesn't disable it.

[Noble Digger]

I've sent Toady the following question a couple times, but haven't received an answer.

Are there plans to improve the interface\system for placement of buildings (furniture, constructions, etc) in a near-future release?

Primarily I’m interested in information about anything that reduces the number of repetitive actions one must take in building a structure using a large number of constructions or when placing sets of furniture in 100+ bedrooms. It’d be awesome to be able to ‘paint’ with a chosen type (Selected: Larch Tables, quality = any, distance = any, quantity available = 30) instead of going b, t, selecting a location, selecting a specific object, over and over. This can get time-consuming (on the order of hours of work) when doing tasks like making a large block wall or placing floors in a room with a complicated, non-square shape.

I don't know if the man is too busy improving the game to answer, or has chosen not to reply because he disliked the question or the way I asked it, but I'm really only concerned with finding an answer; has anyone seen such an answer in this thread or another thread or devblog in recent memory?

I put a lot of time into playing and promoting DF so I'm disappointed at how conspicuously he's avoided discussing this matter after I've politely asked several times over the past 6 months.

[ChuckWeiss]

I put a lot of time into playing and promoting DF so I'm disappointed at how conspicuously he's avoided discussing this matter after I've politely asked several times over the past 6 months.

He hasn't been working on anything that even remotely changes how building works, and this release arc doesn't have any plans to touch upon those things. Go read the questions he answered this time around really closely. Did he answer any questions that weren't related to the content of the upcoming release? No. He didn't.

[Noble Digger]

I put a lot of time into playing and promoting DF so I'm disappointed at how conspicuously he's avoided discussing this matter after I've politely asked several times over the past 6 months.

He hasn't been working on anything that even remotely changes how building works, and this release arc doesn't have any plans to touch upon those things. Go read the questions he answered this time around really closely. Did he answer any questions that weren't related to the content of the upcoming release? No. He didn't.

I can ask a question, even if it doesn't seem to relate to other questions that have been answered in recent memory. Do you disagree? Or are you being snide and impolite because that's just how you roll?

[Trif]

I put a lot of time into playing and promoting DF so I'm disappointed at how conspicuously he's avoided discussing this matter after I've politely asked several times over the past 6 months.

He hasn't been working on anything that even remotely changes how building works, and this release arc doesn't have any plans to touch upon those things. Go read the questions he answered this time around really closely. Did he answer any questions that weren't related to the content of the upcoming release? No. He didn't.

I can ask a question, even if it doesn't seem to relate to other questions that have been answered in recent memory. Do you disagree? Or are you being snide and impolite because that's just how you roll?

No accusations please. This thread is about the current development of DF, and the plan for now is to move world-gen features into actual play. UI improvements weren't mentioned in the devlog (or past questions), so your suggestion definitely won't be in a near-future release.

[LordBaal]

UI improvements, for the time being are not a priority, that will come out latter if at all. UI changes are subject more to gameplay changes than anything.

[Noble Digger]

UI improvements, for the time being are not a priority, that will come out latter if at all. UI changes are subject more to gameplay changes than anything.

Fair enough, thanks for giving a more polite response. I know Toady works in large blocks and doesn't like to get side-tracked from finishing an important milestone, and feature creep can destroy a sprint really easily. I'm certainly not impatient, so even if the change takes another year or two, that's just fine, I've played this game for quite a few years already. I just got worried that the man wouldn't even acknowledge the question for a long period of time despite answering plenty of other questions of varying relevance, and I don't know him personally so it's anyone's guess what the silence could mean. I simply keep repeating the question until I get an answer, which is my right, and nothing that justifies random crumbs showing up to give me shit for it.

I've made 20-30 mature fortresses and nowadays I find that my enjoyment tapers off when I get to the point of wanting to build a large structure of some kind; the menu is really inefficient for placing constructions and it's been difficult for me to stick with a fort long-term as a result. That makes me sad because I feel like I'm losing a battle with my own willpower to play what is definitely my favorite game. I'm looking forward to some small UI efficiency improvements for that reason. Not to say that the other things being worked on aren't important--understand that my question has just gone unanswered for ages and that fact was making me feel disengaged from the development process.

[LordBaal]

As for not answering your question, most probably it got bogged down in the hundreds of mails he gets every week. Here's a more direct way of asking him questions, on this thread. Make a question and put it in color green, wait a few days/weeks and he eventually answer it if it's not obvious or he has answered the same question before, in which case people here will put quotes about that. You can read a few pages back from this one to see how it works.