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[Valtam]

With tributes running the town while you're away, will messengers ever find you to alert you to problems in that town, e.g. the guy you left it charge was killed and someone new controls the town? Or will you intrinsically know when your rule is affected?

Tributes and such are likely going to be kept abstract, but Toady hasn't mentioned anything about a prompt telling "you have lost a settlement" or something like that. So maybe you're going to be kept up in the news thanks to rumours and improved dialog system. I might be wrong.

[Zavvnao]

And remember, there will probably be secrets that we are supposed to find for ourelves also.

[smjjames]

And remember, there will probably be secrets that we are supposed to find for ourelves also.

Like the mysterious demon sites. Though I know you mean secrets that haven't been revealed.

[Scoops Novel]

Given that the process of creating or controlling existing adventurers has been discussed, i 'd like to ask how do you intend to handle players who want to create custom "heroes" from scratch? You mentioned writing characters into world gen after the fact, but i was wondering how this would be affected by creating characters with more impact on the world then mcpeasant. On a related note, could a player's backstory be affected by his actions in play? Could some traits, like social skills, be similarly affected? This does depend on a lack of life-changing/important events before play if you wish to make sweeping changes, which might be rare for many adventurers, but perhaps how a freshly created peasant with little personality interacts with his acquaintances in his village could let the game make some fair judgements. A adventurer who nicks pies could be reasonably accused of never growing up, for example. As for the skills, this again requires unimportant, bored characters, and even then could raise eyebrows if the difference between how they acted in "world gen" and play is dramatic enough. This ties into a broader question of handling differences between the player's game-play style and the internal consistency of their character. You've previously mentioned that the current inability of the game to simulate the duties, relationship and general "role" of historical figures, or notice/handle people "breaking character" is the reason we can't assume control of them, but how important is acting like a historical figure as opposed to playing like a historical figure? Obvious examples include combat, but even simple things like a player controlling a unobservant character looking at everything, or a new player controlling a experienced tomb raider triggering every single trap, would be relevant. Would players in this position be able to use abstraction, or be able to use (limited) hints?

The world is becoming more and more lively, and this should make it much less predictable, but nevertheless i was wondering what plans do you have to handle players who know the ins and out of a favorite world, particularly those with a roleplaying bent who do not want to reenact past discoveries and struggle to resist "spoiling" new characters? How much of the worlds fundamentals (theme, magic, critters, geography) could change after world gen has stopped and play has started?

[wdiksolan]

I was reading through some old devlogs about tracking and combined with giving companions orders this question popped up:

When being tracked, can you tell a companion to wait and then ambush the hunters while you escape?
Or better yet, will you be able to give your companion your shoes and then tell him to head in another direction to confuse them and if so, will they follow him?

[Broken]

So, Now that the duplicating populations are being fixed, does this mean that bringing the age of death is posible, like in the old days?

[PDF urist master]

friendly fire is nice though. will a loyalty cascade happen if i order a marksdwarf to shoot another dwarf?

[Greiger]

you can choose to shoot non-hostiles now

Woo! I can properly go bow hunting giraffes now!  Do you know how hard those things were to melee?

[smjjames]

On the population duplication, if you, say, clean out a kobold cave, leave the site, come back, and now it won't be populated by things in massive lag inducing numbers of hundreds (and about a thousand ravens in one case)? Currently you have to make the site a lair via DFhack in order to keep that from happening. Kobold caves seem especially prone to the population duplication.

[Footkerchief]

On the population duplication, if you, say, clean out a kobold cave, leave the site, come back, and now it won't be populated by things in massive lag inducing numbers of hundreds (and about a thousand ravens in one case)? Currently you have to make the site a lair via DFhack in order to keep that from happening. Kobold caves seem especially prone to the population duplication.

That would fall under site population duplication, which is what Toady worked on, yeah.  Was there something you wanted clarified beyond that?

What happens if you start mistreating the citizens of your new entity? Will they kick you out of the entity, or will they leave it, or will they just be like "well the King can do what he wants, I guess." Are they more tolerant of stealing in the name of the new site leader (considering it tribute or something?)

The only rebellions we've heard about are insurrections against occupiers, so I think this would depend on whether the adventurer is considered an occupier.  That might be based on whether you're from the same civilization?

I also updated the player targeting code for shooting and throwing to respect the new conflict system -- nothing special like aiming or anything, but as a side effect you can choose to shoot non-hostiles now (there is still no friendly fire if it isn't intended, but you have the option to select them).

friendly fire is nice though. will a loyalty cascade happen if i order a marksdwarf to shoot another dwarf?

The devlog is talking about the player's ability to target other creatures in Adv. Mode.  I don't think it affects Fortress Mode attack orders.

Given that the process of creating or controlling existing adventurers has been discussed, i 'd like to ask how do you intend to handle players who want to create custom "heroes" from scratch? You mentioned writing characters into world gen after the fact, but i was wondering how this would be affected by creating characters with more impact on the world then mcpeasant. On a related note, could a player's backstory be affected by his actions in play? This does depend on a lack of life-changing events, which might be rare for many adventurers, but perhaps how a freshly created peasant with little personality interacts with his acquaintances in his village could let the game make some fair judgements. A adventurer who nicks pies could be reasonably accused of never growing up, for example.

Toady has discussed this at length.  Basically, retconning is hard.

Spoiler: long (click to show/hide)

Toady:   There are dozens of issues standing in the way, but a lot of them are things we've discussed like graphics and tutorials and instructions and all that kind of thing. So putting those important things aside, just to get at adventure mode specific matters - rather than just problems with Dwarf Fortress in general - you really start out in adventure mode - you create a character - and you start out in the middle of a building or something and there's really no clue about what's going on. The keybindings aren't really harder to learn that any roguelike, you just pop up the screen and they're there, so the problems with accessibility are more in the line of a direction for your character; right now there's not a lot to do and you have no direction at all, for a new player especially. If you've played before you at least know what the deal is and you might just wander off to your old fortress or you might just wander around and set a goal to kill some monster or something, but without that, if you press adventurer mode before even playing fortress mode then you'd really just have no idea what to do, and when you talk to people you might find your way eventually to the people that will give you quests, but their quests are all kind of cynical, it's just like 'Oh you, you want to do something for me? Alright, go kill the dragon.' It's not really appropriate for your character, so I think the thing to do here - and we'll get to the future of adventure mode, which is the topic - a huge part of that is character generation. So there's the idea of how can you improve character generation, just in general, and also how than to make the game entirely take care of all of the accessibility problems that don't have anything to do with graphics and the general interface, that kind of thing, but just the game itself. So the idea is to have some additional options and the main one would be ... you've got a character who - currently you just create them and they're this outsider who doesn't really belong to the world at all, they might belong to the overall civilization that you've selected for them, but they don't meaningfully tie into that, they don't have a parent in that civilization, they don't have any friends in that civilization, they don't know anybody in that civilization - so one of the ideas for a mode of character generation would be a scenario-driven thing. There are downsides to that sort of stuff, like if you have a Q and A process like the Ultima games or even our own Liberal Crime Squad, the main downside to that I think is that it's a cumbersome way to create a character when you know the questions are just building stats and giving you items, so it just gets really annoying and you have to game the system just to get where you want to get, and it's the same every time. The key difference here is that it really can't be the same every time in Dwarf Fortress because the worlds are all different; it can picks two parent for you and say 'you were born to these two people and you're living in this kind of situation' and then it can have things arise based on just running world generation, just continue world gen from whatever point the game's at. So if goblins were attacking that village that would be the scenario event it throws at you, how do you deal with this? Depending on how old you are you might just be forced to run away, but there might be choices to make in any case. So it can give you a past in this way, and it will let you interact with it. Ideally you'd be presented with a situation and you'd either have some options for resolving that and then continuing to the next situation, or a little more difficult would be allowing you to jump into any situation that you wanted to, so if you were nineteen years old in some village as a farmer in the beginning and the goblins attacked, maybe you'd want to just jump in right there, and that's where you start playing. And at that point you certainly wouldn't have an accessibility problem in the sense of not knowing what to do, or at least having a situation that you'd be confronted with because there'd be something going on, and you'd also have your parents and friends and things; that's the main point, you'd have relationships to begin with, and you should be able to punch up a screen that says what's going on there, and if during the early scenarios you had a situation where your parents were killed by somebody or something then you'd have a Conan relationship screen or something, where it's like 'Thulsa Doom killed your mom' or whatever, and that can be something that drives your life if you want. That's the scenario situation, running through that, being able to break out when you want, or just finishing a number of them, and that would start from wherever your last game ended. The downside here is that if you're starting from that year and it takes a certain time to grow up, then whatever was going on in the world is going to be spent by twelve, thirteen, sixteen, twenty more years by the time you jump in. It's more difficult to retcon you into the world and start you where you want to start off but using past events. We've talked about that a bit before with the fake populations and saving their historical events and how you can use that to retcon things in, including your own character. So it's possible, but ...
Rainseeker:   Well presumably you could choose from two different options.
Toady:   Aside from the scenario stuff and the retconning and that kind of thing, there would also be, especially for people that kind of know what they're doing, but for anyone else as well - when we were talking about accessibility the scenario driven way would give you direction - but another way to do it would be a role playing mode where you can create your character on the spot as an outsider, or just say 'I'm this guy's kid' just picking off the legends screen, that would be fine too. Then you could set everything about yourself, absolutely everything about yourself, and just start playing at the year that everything left off, as if you'd just popped into existence, or had a past, or whatever you want to set up, just to get you in with minimal difficulty without worrying about the retconning problems, get you in there at the right year, if you wanted to continue right where you left off. Another way to do that would be to just say 'I want to play an existing person in the world' and you just go down the legends list and pick someone. That would require something like a world generation parameter I think, because that's one of those things where you'd be tempted to deal with certain problems ... there are people who complain about being tempted to spoil their games. So if the goblins have been attacking you, you could be 'Well I'll be the goblin king and I'll jump into that volcano!' So that would be one of those world gen options most likely, like 'only allow you to jump into people that don't have entity positions/only allow you to jump into people of the good races/allow you to do anything/disallow you to do it at all'; I think that would resolve those issues, for any of the scenario or roleplaying type modes. There's also the notion - it goes to accessibility but difficulty more - so when you have skill points that you assign, or in the scenarios in terms of how much your character's learning or what kind of background they have, there's this notion of the different kinds of heroes that there are in myths and so on, since we're trying to generate and recreate those stories it's important to get at that. Three general options would be, firstly 'Well, I want my character to be a demigod' like Hercules, it could go into the human pantheons and you'd be like 'Zeus is my dad', and then that character would be exceptional, and you wouldn't have to worry as much about a wolf killing you or something, and you might have gods giving you gifts or cursing you; you'd have an epic life no matter what, you'd have no choice in the matter. Then there's also the middle option which would be a heroic character, which is similar to what we have now where you can start out as a really talented swordsman, someone who's like Batman who's exceptional but not supernatural necessarily, so you can really jam your numbers up or have an exceptional life in terms of your parents or whatever. Then there's the third mode which would be a normal mode, or an 'unlikely hero' mode instead of a hero mode, where you start off as a person who has skills per their scenario or if you're roleplaying you wouldn't add that much stuff to yourself, and that would be suited for the games where people just want to make their own way in the world, or create their little log cabin in the woods and hunt things, or become a bandit, any of those kind of games where they don't really care how survivable their character is if they ran into a goblin tower or something. It runs a bit against all the roleplaying games I've played since Legend of Zelda, where all the numbers and things increase, and the adversaries increase, and the areas that open up increase, and it's all matching larger and larger numbers against each other, and it's becoming less of an option in Dwarf Fortress just because of how the thing is set up, so you can't really run it that way. So it might be weird to start as a powerful character and stay a powerful character but it's really more about the story than the power levelling type of increase, although there are elements of that when your skills improve, and you occasionally find better equipment, although it's nothing the loot-driven systems. There are going to be issues here to tackle, repeatedly, we can't really see everything that's going to happen when you strike out on a new mode of thinking about how an RPG might work. I'm not saying this is the first time anything like this has been done, but I certainly don't know how to handle it myself. It should be interesting to see where this leads. I think when you've got that setup where your character starts and they have as much backstory as you want them to have, then you'll have more direction. You need a little bit of a push maybe and there's more that needs to be done with social interactions and so on when you talk to people, when you talk to like those meeting hall guys that tell you to go off and kill a goblin or kill a dragon should probably not cynically toss you away, especially if you look like you're worth anything, and they should probably just send you with a guy to prove yourself against some kobolds that are out on patrol rather than sending you on suicide missions and then when you get back, they're like 'Oh that was cool'; they don't really care.

The world is becoming more and more lively, and this should make it much less predictable, but nevertheless i was wondering what plans do you have to handle players who know the ins and out of a favorite world, particularly those with a roleplaying bent who do not want to reenact past discoveries? How much of the worlds fundamentals could change after world gen has stopped and play has started?

What sorts of fundamentals do you have in mind?  This may be relevant:

Rainseeker:   Yeah, that actually is interesting, to have the concept of, maybe, scenarios where that is stated, like, you know, 'In ten years, the end of the world is coming, prepare yourself.'
Capntastic:   That'd be fun.
Toady:   Yeah. We're definitely thinking, when we said ... there was this old Armok system where, I think it was the atmosphere, plot ... what was the other word, there were three words right? There was the atmosphere and the plot and the something else ... a genre. The genre, atmosphere, plot system of Armok I, which of course ... we didn't get anywhere with that game, but the genre, atmosphere, plot system ... the idea was you'd pick your overall genre that your game is in, if you want to do horror/fantasy or if you want to have My Little Mermaid or something like that, and then you'd have the overall plot: is it an apocalyptic My Little Mermaid game which means that someone's going to come and steal all your toys at the end of the world, or is it a cyclic game, or is it a game where everything kind of fades into mundanity or whatever. Then there's the atmosphere which is kind of everything else, the little things about the game and little tweaks that you can do to it. So, even if we're not using that same system, we have those world generation parameters right, in Dwarf Fortress, where you can set up various facts about the world and that would be where this apocalypse thing fits in, you could give an overall arc to your world each time.

[Putnam]

friendly fire is nice though. will a loyalty cascade happen if i order a marksdwarf to shoot another dwarf?

Loyalty cascades as we know them should be dead with the new reputation system. It's possible that a new, similar bug is in existence, but I'd rather wait and see.

[PigtailLlama]

I've been thinking about enemies, and I've got to ask: Where are we in terms of automata? Will bronze colossi and iron men still be lumps of living metal that take the form of a bipedal being, or will they soon be beings with metal flesh and mechanisms for bones and muscles?

[Footkerchief]

I've been thinking about enemies, and I've got to ask: Where are we in terms of automata? Will bronze colossi and iron men still be lumps of living metal that take the form of a bipedal being, or will they soon be beings with metal flesh and mechanisms for bones and muscles?

It's fair game for the future, but there are no immediate plans:

Rainseeker:   Speaking of the bronze colossuses; could it possibly be that you have it be connected together with a bunch of bolts or something that could fall off and that's the way you could kill it even if it's solid.
Toady:   I guess one of the things to consider is why is it there? Was it made by somebody?
Capntastic:   Some sort of supernatural intervention.
Toady:   I don't remember anymore, but was the one in Jason and the Argonauts made by Hephaestus or something? So created by a forge god type thing, right? Then there's the idea; could they have been made by old dwarves, then you have the problem of, well, can your dwarves make them? And then you get into the whole automaton segue into steampunk and so on. Then there's just them being ... or are they some kind of bronzey spirit of nature type thing, that's just kind of wondering around, causing trouble.
Ampersand:   I don't know if you've ever played Morrowind or anything, but in the lore of Morrowind or Daggerfall even, the dwarves did in fact make a gigantic mecha.
Toady:   Yeah, they had all kinds of steam automatons, right? I remember ... no I won that game, I think, if you're talking about the big statue at the end. So there's a notion of dwarves there, just ... there's something about steam [that] bothers me, I don't know why. Having all these steam powered ...
Ampersand:   I don't think their giant machine was steam powered, it was part of Lorkhan ...
Toady:   Oh yeah that's right, there's magic and stuff, and we don't have a whole lot of that, but we should, yeah. I don't remember what our thoughts on automatons were completely; I believe that having something like an intelligent automaton walking around would be an artifact type situation.

Bloat42, AUTOMATONS, (Future): Automatons could be created, but it's campy to overdo it, at least in the standard world model. An artifact creating dwarf could make special automatons.

PowerGoal45, MEET THE CYBERFIST, (Future): You use your iron geared prosthetic hand to crush a piece of stone in front of the cowering goblin, and it passes out.

[smjjames]

I've been thinking about enemies, and I've got to ask: Where are we in terms of automata? Will bronze colossi and iron men still be lumps of living metal that take the form of a bipedal being, or will they soon be beings with metal flesh and mechanisms for bones and muscles?

You could do something with the tissues and creative raw editing. I know the Masterwork mod has these golems and automaton things.

I see no reason why someone can't do it now. Though I guess the problem then becomes keeping them as formidable as they are now.

[Scoops Novel]

I've cleared up what i mean by "fundamentals" in the post Footkerchief, thanks for asking.