Print

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

[King Mir]

Near the end. 11:50 or something. It was the last question.

[LordBaal]

I think it would make more sense to have a civ where the vampires are the leadership, ala Sylvania from Warhammer lore.

[fractalman]

Actually, vampiric leaders are not unheard of.  They're more common in worlds with a longer world gen duration; vampires that grab a throne tend to keep it. 

[Spish]

Vampires are fine the way they are (apart from being attacked by their own troops upon being ousted, even if it was incredibly obvious). What I really want to see is werebeasts that blend in.

Speaking of vampires; what is up with Fortress Mode automatically (and irreversibly) labeling vampire blood-drinkers as vampires? Unintentional? Either way, it takes a lot of fun out of succession fortress vampire conspiracies when you can't covertly infect a select few members of the population without immediately giving them away.

[LordBaal]

But add a tad of political scheming and intrigue between themselves, in a no undead society that accept and know their leaders are vampires would be interesting.

[Scoops Novel]

Speaking of Vampires! When you retire in a location, if you make sure you are inaccessible to the fort will you remain so (in the same location) when you reclaim? Otherwise I'm imagining a a year and a half's worth of bloodletting in the time skip as the Adventure Mode Vampire Tax, not to say that couldn't be justified  .

[Knight Otu]

Speaking of Vampires! When you retire in a location, if you make sure you are inaccessible to the fort will you remain so (in the same location) when you reclaim? Otherwise I'm imagining a a year and a half's worth of bloodletting in the time skip as the Adventure Mode Vampire Tax, not to say that couldn't be justified  .

In all likelihood, vampire feeding will not be one of the things tracked during actual play for the next version (for that matter, I don't think food use has been mentioned for the next version).

[toboo123]

Now that trees are multi-tiled and have more of a sense of scale, will other things be getting a sense of scale as well? Massive mountains, or multi-tiled creatures, If so how would multi tiled creatures work? Would they all be square, or would certain creatures be rectangular or different shapes? would they all be flat or would they encompass multiple vertices tiles? How would a giant creature compensate for tiny fortress entrances?

[Putnam]

Yes, no timeline.

[Gremdavel]

Gravity already affects falling and throwing, and now with jumping it becomes even more important.  Will the size of a world ever affect the amount of planetary mass, and thereby the gravitational pull so that it may vary from our usual 9.8m/s²?  Could world composition also affect mass (i.e. Earth-like molten iron core vs. some other metal) and therefore gravity?

Will curvature of the planet ever be taken into account in calculations for things like throwing trajectory or line of sight for high altitudes?  Could this also be dependent on the world (planet) size?  Will worlds ever be non-flat (i.e. wrap around like Civilization), and if so, would it be theoretically possible (if the dwarves could survive the heat and the HFS) to dig a magma-safe tunnel into the center of the planet, and eventually come out the other side?  Will gravity ever lessen as you dig closer to the center?

[Zavvnao]

as a tiny sidenote, will backpacks be added to arena mode?

(thank you for the show that I put the wrong color at first)

[My Name is Immaterial]

as a tiny sidenote, will backpacks be added to arena mode?

Or quivers?

[DG]

Gravity already affects falling and throwing, and now with jumping it becomes even more important.  Will the size of a world ever affect the amount of planetary mass, and thereby the gravitational pull so that it may vary from our usual 9.8m/s²?  Could world composition also affect mass (i.e. Earth-like molten iron core vs. some other metal) and therefore gravity?

Will curvature of the planet ever be taken into account in calculations for things like throwing trajectory or line of sight for high altitudes?  Could this also be dependent on the world (planet) size?  Will worlds ever be non-flat (i.e. wrap around like Civilization), and if so, would it be theoretically possible (if the dwarves could survive the heat and the HFS) to dig a magma-safe tunnel into the center of the planet, and eventually come out the other side?  Will gravity ever lessen as you dig closer to the center?

  Has there ever been a game that has had questions like this asked of the developers?

To be somewhat helpful, Toady did chat about worlds with weird shapes other than spherical in a DF Talk (can't remember which one), and the most likely place you're going to see deviations from the norm is probably in different dimensions (if/when that's implemented) which he's also talked about before but not in much detail. It's basically "Sounds cool and would be interesting, but I haven't thought about it much and there's no time line for it."

[King Mir]

The world is currently generated to be about the size of a small country. It would not do to make gravity proportional to a planet that small.

It's also a fantasy world generator, so should allow for the world to be flat.

But being able to see long distances from mountains or on flat plains would be a nice feature.

[Trif]

Gravity already affects falling and throwing, and now with jumping it becomes even more important.  Will the size of a world ever affect the amount of planetary mass, and thereby the gravitational pull so that it may vary from our usual 9.8m/sē?  Could world composition also affect mass (i.e. Earth-like molten iron core vs. some other metal) and therefore gravity?

Will curvature of the planet ever be taken into account in calculations for things like throwing trajectory or line of sight for high altitudes?  Could this also be dependent on the world (planet) size?  Will worlds ever be non-flat (i.e. wrap around like Civilization), and if so, would it be theoretically possible (if the dwarves could survive the heat and the HFS) to dig a magma-safe tunnel into the center of the planet, and eventually come out the other side?  Will gravity ever lessen as you dig closer to the center?

There was a bit of discussion on the DF Talks #5 and #8.

Spoiler: quotes (click to show/hide)

Capntastic:   What is the cosmology of the dwarven world; is it heliocentric?
Toady:   So right now there is a sun that sets on one side and rises on the other side; I think it determines that at random, although those words depend on the sun and magnetism, so maybe that's meaningless, and there's also a moon. But we don't really have anything decided for those. What will probably end up happening further along is that you'll have the creation tale, there are several civilizations with different sets of gods, so I'm not really sure who's going to be right, or if's all going to be different sides of the same multi-sided coin, the same polyhedron or whatever, but it's probably going to be one of those things that's easily randomized and so it will be randomly decided what the deal is there. And that could also, with a little bit of work, have to do with the shape of the ... not just what is orbiting what, if anything's orbiting anything, rather than being dragged along in chariots and stuff, but also what the shape of the world is; how the edges work. Right now the edges just have this invisible barrier, but migrant groups and certain foreign materials can come in off the edges depending on the version you're playing; it's just not really well defined right now, what the world is. But it would be easy to make a torus or a cylinder, or to fudge a sphere with the proper edge behaviour, like something going off the top edge and then coming half way over on the other top edge. I don't remember if you actually get a sphere from that or some kind of weird projected space, but it's close enough. So we'll probably mess around with that later on ... the myth stuff might come sooner rather than later, just because I really want to mess around with that stuff, it's a lot of fun to do.

Capntastic:   So with regards to gravity, will different worlds have different levels of gravity?
Toady:   Yeah ... The general question is the physical laws of the world being based on parameters, right? I haven't thought about that much and it's the kind of thing where it seems like you could just change the constants, assuming that they work like that. Part of the problem with the projectiles is how you've got these quantized tiles and right now they think of it that way too, but if the projectiles actually stored their location in a much more refined fashion and were just displayed by tiles and hit things by tiles but actually had their own arcs that they were travelling along, then doing things like having a flight trajectory that is something like a parabola - like you'd want - wouldn't be so bad. You'd have trouble maybe in that there's a couple of issues then for AI and when you're in adventure mode how you target, because even if you've got a parabola and you can target any square that you can get a parabola to hit by theoretically raising the angle of your crossbow or whatever, that's not so bad, especially with my math background. I've solved this problem before, I remember doing it in Armok I, and you could actually accurately hit something shooting on a parabola. So you could hit things along parabolas in that game and it would come up with the parabola, and generally there were two solutions for each equation and it would choose the one with the lowest angle so that you'd shoot straight at the rabbit instead of shooting way up in the air and having it fly and then come down on the rabbit or whatever. So there are little issues like that but you just want to make sure that once you nail it to the tiles that you don't lose your solution and get all confused. But I think it's not that difficult a problem and that people and siege engines and everything else could be flying properly and it's really not that much of a processor problem either, just because projectiles aren't that frequent. If you do something weird like stick five thousand logs on a drawbridge and then lift it up to shoot your logs everywhere ... these are kind of player created problems, but I'm sure that might slow things down a little bit then. I think once you've got a model that has more refined numbers where it's keeping things at a few decimal places then doing things like messing with the physical laws is way easier because changing the gravitational constant doesn't suddenly knock you over ten tiles to screw everything up or just get ignored because it gets rounded off. That would be something that I think would be a low hanging fruit and that point so it would be fun to do. Does it come across in the game? Not quite so much as if you were playing a first person shooter or something that had really good graphics, where the gravity can come across; if you were playing on the moon you'd notice how things were. Since there's no actual frame of reference in Dwarf Fortress - like grid size is a question, how big is a grid, how far is it from here to here? - it becomes less obvious when the physical constants have changed. But at the same time if something falls and hits you on your head harder because you have more gravity that would probably come across, at least relative to your other play experiences. Then you could have some cases where there's just no gravity at all, which would be kind of fun, just things flying off and ...
Rainseeker:   You'd be losing dwarves left and right, into outer space ...
Toady:   Yeah, those silly combat things where someone flies and hits and tree and blow apart, the parts would just kind of fly off, fly off into space. It'd be fun, I think.
Rainseeker:   You'd be having people bashing their heads on the ceilings too when they jump over each other in narrow hallways.
Toady:   The nice thing about - just considering physics again in general - the nice thing about using actual equations, getting to that point ... having discrete tiles makes that hard sometimes ... but getting to the point where you're using realistic equations or semi-realistic equations like with the combat stuff with all the new parameters that are in there ... the nice thing about having it that way is being able to change the laws and you could even consider things like local changes of the laws, like a particular area of the fort because of some weird artifact you've got or something is zero gravity, and if you go in there then things start to fly and float around and stuff, and that could lead to some really cool sights in the world; places where things just don't behave quite like you'd expect. That would all be a lot of fun, and because we've been modelling things it's more accessible; it's something that can be done, which is cool.

I think they also talked about gravity altering artifacts at some point.

It seems like the general idea is to make laws of physics randomizable, probably moddable. That would most likely result in gravity changing as you dig deeper, as well as curvature being important on dwarf planets.