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[Lolfail0009]

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.

Holy shit that sounds awesome

[Footkerchief]

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?

Massive mountains are fair game, but multi-tile creatures may never make it in:

Rainseeker:   Right. Well, I have a technical question here; 'How exactly long, wide and tall is a tile in Dwarf Fortress? Are they cubes?'; this is from Lonewolf.
Toady:   What the traditional answer is [is] that they're not so big that a dwarf doesn't have to crawl under another dwarf to get through a corridor but at the same time they're big enough to hold a thousand dragons as long as nine hundred and ninety nine of them are lying down. On the other hand it's a serious question because so much would ride on giving an answer; that's why I haven't so far. Because the second that you give an answer the game becomes constricted and you need things to make more sense; suddenly everything needs to make sense. I'm not ready to do that; I think there's something to be said for it - something to be said for nailing that down - but it would really kind of invite things like multi-tile creatures and stuff that I'm just not ready to do. There are some good things about multi-tile creatures; I think they'd be kind of cool. But path finding would need to be changed heavily, and there'd be other issues with them. Would they be too easy to kill for example by hiding off somewhere that they can't get to and shooting at them or whatever; so they'd need to be smart enough to avoid situations like that which might be difficult. So that's kind of one of the main problems - the large creatures - why I haven't established a number yet.

[...]

Capntastic:   Will you be able to climb things in the future, like climb a dragon and punch its brain?
Toady:   There's the issue with ... It's a question of multi-tile creatures partially - which is a difficult problem - but just the fact that there's the wrestling, and even without multi-tile creatures you've got things like groundhogs that can currently jump up and bite your eyes. That's one of the problems I'm having when I was doing my groundhog tests: twenty versus a guy with a knife, who wins? If the groundhog problem is solved, which it needs to be solved - not for this release most likely but at some point - then that means that that same thing will happen to you when you're fighting a giant creature. I think it would be cool to jump up on things, beyond just Shadow of the Colossus it's a common thing in Ray Harryhausen stuff and so on. So with the large creatures I think it'd be really cool to jump up on them and climb them and swing from them and so on. It wouldn't be as dramatic visually of course as Shadow of the Colossus but it certainly would be a lot of fun.

[Ribs]

Massive mountains are fair game, but multi-tile creatures may never make it in

Well, not with that attitude 

But seriously, from the quotes you gave us it seems there's still a lot of hope. Granted, it won't happen anytime soon... maybe if Toady get's around doing a complete pathfinding overhaul. I am willing to bet Toady is crazy enough to muscle a feature like that in the game, even if it takes years and makes him half mad in the process. Remember Z levels? Was it not a major change similar in scope?

[Zavvnao]

What version number is the upcoming release likely to be? THe current is 0.34.11, is the next like 35 or 36?

[Gremdavel]

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

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.

Thanks!  Have tried to listen to as many past DF Talks as possible since I started playing at the beginning of February (started listening at the most recent one and have gone backwards from there), but haven't gotten that far back yet.

[Mesa]

What version number is the upcoming release likely to be? THe current is 0.34.11, is the next like 35 or 36?

Prolly going to be 38.
Or so they say.

[Zavvnao]

Prolly going to be 38.
Or so they say.

Thank you :3

[Zavvnao]

Sorry for so many post, but in the future with random civ factors, can there be more than a few non-eurocentric features such as sachems or other things?

[Caldfir]

On the subject of multi-tile creatures, there is quite a bit of variability in how bad the pathfinding becomes depending upon how general you would like "multi-tile" and "paths" to be.  If your multi-tile creatures are all cubes, then it isn't so bad.  These problems and more all come up with boats and seige-engines and moving fortress components, which we know are planned features, so the idea that those concepts might be applied to creatures isn't so far-fetched. 

The AI issue is somewhat less certain, though there are already situations now where no path exists between two creatures and the AI doesn't know what to do about it, so perhaps it isn't as large an issue as it seems. 

Regardless, it is all a very very long way off. 

[Valtam]

Sorry for so many post, but in the future with random civ factors, can there be more than a few non-eurocentric features such as sachems or other things?

You can already mod your raws so that the human leaders are called this way, because I haven't found anything else that jumps to my mind when thinking about sachems. Not to diss native cultures of any kind, but remember that Dwarf Fortress is, at its still developing heart, a generic fantasy generator. I think that, as soon as spheres for biomes, civilizations and magic (to a lesser extent) get some flesh on their layout, then we might see some random stuff as feathered snakes soaring above jungle canopies, magic carpets or people that eat their dead relatives as a cultural custom and a way of burial, none of that being quite euro.

Toady has said in a few FotF regarding this release that non-humans will steadily get further away from their stereotyped cultural trappings, shaping some of their own. Some day, as the example was laid, we'll have something akin to mongol raiders, in the form of human raiders, so that could be an answer of sorts.

[Eric Blank]

It was my understanding that while the fantasy races (dwarves, elves, goblins etc...) will become more alien compared to human cultures, they would also tend to have less variability and humans will become the entity that has clear distinctions and high variability between civilizations.
e.i; three dwarf civilizations will more than likely all be nearly identical except some variations in law and tradition and religious practices, but three human civilizations might share little in common with one-another besides being designed to suit human physiology and needs.

These variable civilization concepts won't be showing up any time soon I'd wager. Toady will want to make sure the basics for all possibilities for civilizations are covered before giving the RNG the go-ahead to toss them in a blender.

And yeah we'll also be seeing the same with magic and sphere-related biomes at some point, but again Toady can't flesh them out until they're functioning and have the potential for high degrees of variation on a basic level, and there are tons of other neat things to look forward to that might come before them. I can't freaking wait for them, though. Interactions are already so much fun to play with.

[Knight Otu]

What version number is the upcoming release likely to be? THe current is 0.34.11, is the next like 35 or 36?

We could also try to guesstimate it based on which parts of the dev page Toady could green/purple out after the release. Likely to be horribly inexact, of course.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

From Adventurer Role: Hero//Villains:
Tracking information from hunting needs to apply to following these groups: I guess that could be greened out. (1)
Changing populations, food use and other world gen stuff moved to actual play: Purple. It's started, but no way complete. (1.5)
Succession and succession struggles: Purple. (2)
Villain groups can include degenerates harassing people in towns: We've got those. Green (3)
Better opening explanation of the surrounding situation in your home town: In. Presumably can be greened (4)
Megabeast reproduction can be greened as well, I should note - it's already in the game. Maybe purpled if there's more to be done.

From Adventurer Role: Hero//Your followers:
Being able to take along aggrieved people for a time if you are seeking justice for them: Purpled, I guess. We'll get to incite rebellions, I think that counts. (4.5)
Expansion of personality system to support more value-judgment-based properties such as bravery vs. cowardice/apathy/recklessness: Purple, maybe. Depends on how far Toady got with the personality rewrite so far. (5)
Better morale failures: Green I guess? (6)

From Adventurer Role: Hero//Capturing people alive and interrogations:
Non-lethal fights, AI understanding the difference and the possible escalation to actual combat: Green, certainly. (7)
Sneaking mechanics: In, with its two sub-points (9)

From Adventurer Role: Hero//Combat flow:
Reaction moments and controllable counter-strikes/movement chances: Green. (10)

From Adventurer Role: Hero//Mounts:
Combat move/speed split: Green (11)
Movement speeds, turning and inertia: Green (12)

From Adventurer Role: Thief//Bounties and being hunted:
You should leave tracking information and it should keep track of the last many people you have talked to: Purple. You can be tracked (12.5)
Entity warriors and other adventurers should follow your tracking information: Purple as above (13)

From Adventurer Role: Treasure Hunter//Adventure sites:
Existing town-style sites should be updated as possible (dwarf fortresses, etc.): Green, definitely (14)

From Adventurer Role: Treasure Hunter//Movement:
Ability to climb in adv mode: Green (15)
Ability to jump in adv mode: Green (16)

From Basic Adventure Mode Skills//Hunting/tracking animals:
Everybody leaving trails of information that can be tracked with the appropriate skill: That one's green. The rest of the stuff I'm not so sure. (17)

From Basic Adventure Mode Skills//Growing crops:
Ability to harvest plants: Green, I'm pretty sure. (18)

While we're here, I guess "Eggs, chickens and associated objects" should be green as well, since we've got those things.

What can we make of that? I we assume that each bullet point is worth 1/4 for the version number (remember, it's no longer the static one core, +1 to version number), we're landing at 38 1/2 or thereabouts.

[Hamsmagoo]

Apparently this is the place to post questions I'm curious about. 

I did a little searching and noticed that some plans for the future are to have NPCs that give detailed directions and to have animals that leave tracks, for the purposes of hunting.  This is GREAT and I believe that it definitely adds realism but I was wondering just how far I could expect these features to go.  Specifically, I was wondering if there are plans to ever get rid of that quest compass in the upper left corner completely.  So, paraphrased, I guess here's my question:

Do you intend, at some point, to completely phase out that upper-left quest pointer and replace it with more realistic ways to find quest targets, as in signposts, discernible landmarks, NPCs that give detailed directions, NPCs that leave tracks, and a compass as an inventory item?

[Mesa]

Apparently this is the place to post questions I'm curious about. 

I did a little searching and noticed that some plans for the future are to have NPCs that give detailed directions and to have animals that leave tracks, for the purposes of hunting.  This is GREAT and I believe that it definitely adds realism but I was wondering just how far I could expect these features to go.  Specifically, I was wondering if there are plans to ever get rid of that quest compass in the upper left corner completely.  So, paraphrased, I guess here's my question:

Do you intend, at some point, to completely phase out that upper-left quest pointer and replace it with more realistic ways to find quest targets, as in signposts, discernible landmarks, NPCs that give detailed directions, NPCs that leave tracks, and a compass as an inventory item?

One of THE things coming in this update is that NPCs no longer know exact positions of lairs, so there's that.

[Hamsmagoo]

Apparently this is the place to post questions I'm curious about. 

I did a little searching and noticed that some plans for the future are to have NPCs that give detailed directions and to have animals that leave tracks, for the purposes of hunting.  This is GREAT and I believe that it definitely adds realism but I was wondering just how far I could expect these features to go.  Specifically, I was wondering if there are plans to ever get rid of that quest compass in the upper left corner completely.  So, paraphrased, I guess here's my question:

Do you intend, at some point, to completely phase out that upper-left quest pointer and replace it with more realistic ways to find quest targets, as in signposts, discernible landmarks, NPCs that give detailed directions, NPCs that leave tracks, and a compass as an inventory item?

One of THE things coming in this update is that NPCs no longer know exact positions of lairs, so there's that.

  Exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about.  Sorry I missed it.