Thanks to Trif, Footkerchief, Putnam, VGray, MrWiggles, Knight Otu, HugoLuman, Dwarfu, Manveru Taurënér and anybody I missed for helping out this time. Please check just after your posted question if it doesn't appear below. It was probably answered there by one of the above forum-goers.
With the Goblins having "Troll shearing pits" in the towers, what would happen if you modded the game to put in a different race? Would we have empty pits, a lack of pits, pits filled with whatever shearable animals are available, or what?
I think it uses shearable creatures, though it could default to any "monster" pet if I forgot a check at any point. I think the presence of the pits depends on the world gen economic activities, as with the human towns.
Toady; when we're assigned to find targets in the sewers, will they leave trails from recent voyages to the surface that we can follow back to them?
The sewer dwellers don't have any voyages that they make right now. The city criminals and sewer animal people haven't really gotten any attention, and probably won't until we get around to the thief role. We have roving bandits and armies and night creatures and famous predators running about.
About how large are armies going to be, and are they segmented into squads or something?
That's why he came up with squads way back in the 0.31.01 devcycle in the first place.
Army size will probably be on the same level as the city populations.
It depends on the size of the civ that sent them out. I've seen more than a thousand, which is a bit unhealthy when they are clumped during travel. They don't trail out into longer lines depending on their size yet. Once they arrive at their destinations they break into smaller units or integrate into the town. It isn't fully integrated with the dwarf mode system yet, since there's not enough going on yet to take advantage of it.
Did you ever get around to finishing the cave and kobold sites, or is that going to be left out for this release?
Probably won't make it since everything else has taken so long.
Toady we will be able to tell our companions (permanent or insurrection ones) which weapons and items equip and use?
There's still a stray note for it in there but I can't guarantee anything. When companion orders are run through their last pass, I'll know. I'd like to do it but something unforeseen and slowing about it might have me pass on by.
In regards to all the additions that will be for the Adventure mod, what will become of the performance for the Adventure mode, will the game run much better due to some bugfixes and optimisations or should we expect roughly the same and possibly worse ?
I'd expect it to be roughly the same, barring any stupid new announcement/pathing etc. bug that causes lag which might come up and be fixed. I think the largest issue is still the 3D vision code, which is why you move faster indoors.
I guess with new non-lethal combat system, could you find a lake to repeatedly 'push' cohorts into until they stop floundering?
Toady, can we punch our companions in the face without them drawing a blade on us? Just what will they do when we punch them in the face?
Party members are not happy to be subjected to combat of any kind, but yeah, you can punch your buddies in the face without them drawing a blade on you. They'll fight back until somebody gives up. Currently, they don't cancel their arrangement with you, but that has a chance of changing before the release. The proper behavior should probably depend on the values/personalities as much as anything, and when I do my final pass on village-to-village stuff, we may get a small amount of this.
what features planned in DF2013 development log still hasn't been added yet?
I'm not doing any sort of countdown or public enumeration this time. It always turns out badly in the long run.
Will fish populations no longer become permanently extinct (as opposed to just locally extinct)? Sure, they can be overfished, but if you don't fish for a few years, will the vermin fish restock themselves?
Toady, when animal populations are being restocked, is there a specific cap to the maximum population for that species, such as capping it at the numbers you can find exported to a world_sites_and_pops file, or can the population grow beyond that to a point? For instance, if a region immediately after world generation had exactly 8 moose, and you killed 4 of them and then allowed them to repopulate, would the population raise back up to 8 and then remain there, or could the population continue on climbing?
If the population can rise above that listed immediately after worldgen, then what determines how large that population can grow? Do predator populations (including civilizations) in the region affect other species' population caps?
Also, do tags like LITTERSIZE and other reproduction-related tags that take effect in fortress mode affect how quickly region populations refresh themselves?
Toady did you respect the genetics of the remaining animals to seed the new generations? Will migrating animals seep in from other far out places? Say if a village kills the local wolf-population you get wolves from the outside?
Yeah, any wilderness population will replenish -- fish, larger roaming critters, other vermin... People had a discussion about critters not showing up at all, and that's a different issue which'll be in the giant stack as we start the bug fixing after the release.
Right now, it uses the cap of the original pop after world gen. There isn't any kind of food web or migration or evolution in wilderness populations at this time, so I didn't spend a lot of time trying to control rates. Until I have more information, it would be pointless. The exception is that any breeding that happens in play in the local area will be accounted for and can exceed the cap until deaths bring it back in line, just because of how the counting works when creatures are offloaded.
Keeping track of genetics for individual animals wouldn't be possible for technical reasons, and even doing it for each wilderness population would be trouble (the current breed system for entities is okay, but I think it would be a memory/speed problem if I extended it everywhere).
Will dwarves, goblins, and modded subterranean civilizations have the same day/night sleep schedule as humans in adventure mode?
Yeah, intelligent creatures still haven't gotten even the basic respect of activity tags that animals have, in most/all cases.
With the way excessive blood-loss and loss of critical bodyparts causing instantaneous death, will any proposed magic in far-future builds have the power to bring the dead back to life as they were? Is there going to be a stage of critical injury that is 'only mostly dead without magickal assistance' and 'completely dead, bar none, even with magic'?
It's hard to say what'll happen in the far-future. We're for generating magic systems that mimic common effects, and the injury system is already diverse enough that the kinds of healing effects available will imply the different stages you mentioned.
What are the current possibilities as far as interaction with retired forts in Adventurer mode goes? If our adventurer is from a civilization current at war with the fort in question, will (s)he get shot at and not considered a nice guest? Can we pick stuff up lying around without causing the entire fortress to turn on us?
You can chat with all of your old dwarves. Their military status at retire might determine if they can join you -- the way you can switch them on and off duty is different from the more dedicated roles of adventure mode, so it could be a little fuzzy how it ends up. Yeah, the general rules for stopping intruders apply to everybody, though your civilian dwarves won't do that. There aren't any new theft rules yet. If they even care about stealing from stores anymore, it'll matter when you steal stuff from the depot but not anywhere else.
Also, while I realize that the release is only months away, could we have some screenshots of the new dwarven sites? I know there were screenshots released of the goblin and (sortof for) elven sites, but not sure if screenshots were made for the dwarven sites. The hill dwarf sites sound like they would be a cross between hobbit burrows and hamlets.
Thought while typing: Will the problem of broken trans cavern-level passageways be fixed or at least minimized? They are at least common enough that you will eventually find one that does connect all the way through, but more often than not, they break somewhere, usually at the floor of the next cavern layer.
I don't have anything new I'm happy enough with yet for screenshots.
I'm not sure what the current state of the cavern-to-cavern ramps is, but with climbing now, you can often overcome breaks that involve open air somewhere, so there's that at least.
Say the only entrance to your fort is a trap lined hallway and you visit the retired fort and you are friendly with the forts civ (whether you are of that civ or not), will you not have to worry about the weapon traps or will you still be at risk of triggering them?
You don't have any extra knowledge of things. That system is an abstraction in fort mode, and we haven't added any sort of talking about traps in adventure mode. Adding traps to the entrance isn't inviting.
The gods' names in these two images are titles, rather than proper names. Is that something that we can force to happen/not to happen, or is it random for each entity?
Each different type of object has a different naming scheme, and it's mostly hard-coded now (you can do a small amount with symbols in the entity raws and with spheres in the creature raws if I remember). Like many language-based features, the lack of an overall basic grammar rewrite has stalled forward movement on content and moddability. It'd be nice to get to that, but the entire thing is sort of tangential to everything else.
AI pathfinding aside, how moddable will jumping be? How about vampires that gain the ability to leap over tall buildings in a single bound?
On a semi-related note, when and how will adventure mode syndrome timing be fixed? It's a problem when a short-term syndrome in fort mode (say, an interaction that stuns the target for 10 ticks) gets lengthened out to last an entire battle when a creature is affected by it in adventure mode - and it isn't possible to make short-term interactions in adventure mode, because the shortest unit of time is 72 ticks.
There isn't much in the way of jump modding at this point. I'm not sure how to do it reliably yet, and I want to take a stab at jumping AI before I mush it up any more.
I don't have a timeline for most things, and I'm not sure what the solution will be. There will always be a conflict between adv mode and dwarf mode timing with effects (because the dwarf mode combat moves are so unrealistically slow), and every effect will probably require an indicator about which way it is supposed to be treated (whether it is supposed to use day time or combat time). Once there is such an indicator, it should be pretty simple to dilate the durations by a factor depending on the mode, but there will no doubt be complications.
Are you going to work on world gen optimization after the current release arc?
My understanding of the current slowness is that it relates to all the economic stuff being pushed around, and that started with the aborted caravan release scheme. I was promising moving armies for longer, so I'm happy that's finally happening, but I'll have to loop back around to the tracking of objects in world gen at some point. I have no idea exactly when that'll be, though.
Is "reputation" planned to encompass other features apart from "good/bad"?
Yeah, even in the current release, your hero status is a separate variable from anything to do with being an enemy, and in the next release, there'll be a few more variables with more-or-less independent numbers. So your adventurer can simultaneously have a reputation as a hero for rescuing several abducted children and a reputation for being a violent jackass that beats people up all the time. It's not exactly complex character building, but we have started on the long road away from +/-. The reactions of people are simple as it stands, but different people filter known reputations differently based on their position and personality... the emphasis is on "simple" for now though, he he he.
So, will we be able to ask just where the catacombs are?
Another questionthought (yes, I just made that word up) on companions:
Will your adventurers companions be less likely to run off and attack the nearest wildlife, be it a rabbit or an elephant? That's a particular annoyance that I (and lots of other people I'm sure) have with adventure mode.
There's the matter of hearing about things in the first place. You can ask after certain kinds of trouble and then ask about locations and specific critters, and you'll get general directions for buildings in the same town. They don't know how to do road maps yet or directions that involve any kind of looping, but it is easier to get along to the sort of thing you want to get along to.
Yeah, with the massive rewrites of the conflict code, you'll be treated to an entirely new set of undiscovered targeting annoyances now. It should be fun.
question for the last twittering: Will snow cover the branches of trees in winter? Icicles when it rains?
No icicles yet, but we have snowy trees.
do evil NPCs like to associate with evil players, and vice versa? Does this reputation system create preferences?
We don't really have recognized evil interactions yet (you can't go off and be a goblin snatcher in this release, for example), though we're hoping to get some meat in along the village/bandit leader + ruffian/hero/fighting reputations spectrums before the release, and not all town/bandit leaders will have the same methods.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 3851044 times)