Print

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

[red_29A]

The Elf: About Poetic Serpents into Velvety Tightness

fixed that one

Also, In Soviet Russia euphemism implies you!

[isitanos]

Actually, I saw someone make a request on the mod forum about a graphical tileset that actually was something like that... For example, instead of having a tileset where you have a picture of a goblin, you have a "g" with pointy green ears on it.  An "s" that represented a snake has a forked tongue coming out of one end, and an "s" that is a snail looks something like the top half of the "s" is a shell sitting on top of the bottom half. 

Apparently, there are tilesets like that for NetHack.

well, this is certainly interesting, since it avoids the problem all picture-tilesets have: they are inevitably incredibly ugly(for me, they all lie in the uncanny valley, among other inevitable problems). but as long as there is no real font for something like that there will always remain the problem of reverting back to the old problems when playing in text-mode.

edit, before someone can answer: also defining something like "use this font for reptiles and this one for amphibians and..." in the init-file would be way more flexible and would require less work to keep up to date than having to add little details all the time a letter is used again: just by combining different fonts with the basic colours one gets such a large amount of differentiation-options...

I've been hoping for a long time that an artist picks up this idea... it's doable right now in the same way that graphics tilesets are done, and I really don't like much the picture-tilesets.

For reference the Nethack tileset in question is the Abigaba/Chozo one: http://www.multifoliate.com/nh/, and here's the modding forum thread I created about this whole idea (You can check out the tileset over there, I found a version hosted on google code that I embedded).

[Jackledead]

Hey Toady,
I was watching TV over my shoulder just now, and while watching a scene from Jeepers Creepers, I noticed tall grass.
Do you have any plans on implementing tall stocks of plant matter used to block visibility, but allow safe passage. Or even not safe passage, like with thorns?

[hermes]

Oh, while we're asking about grass, I'm not going to green this because I'm sure it's been brought up before but I can't find in a forum search...  I love that there are so many grass types but it seems strange to me that each tile sports a totally different type of grass when grasses have a mat-like root structure I'd expect the same variety to cover a large area.  Is there any word on whether this might change in the future?

[Naryar]

Hoping next release fixes the military equipment problems. I've become a bit tired of seeing dwarves not being able to equip armor correctly.

[MrWiggles]

Oh, while we're asking about grass, I'm not going to green this because I'm sure it's been brought up before but I can't find in a forum search...  I love that there are so many grass types but it seems strange to me that each tile sports a totally different type of grass when grasses have a mat-like root structure I'd expect the same variety to cover a large area.  Is there any word on whether this might change in the future?

Toady hasnt really spoken about changing above ground features. But there are few pending things that will probably change it.

Pasturing animals is a known half working system (from what I recall its just from poor values for the animals mostly) and farming will eventually get overhauled, probably.

When either one of those these gets looked at again, we'll probably see grass get adjusted as well.

[hermes]

Cool, thanks, sounds good.  Oh, and I rather like Jackledead's question, I love it when rather "simple" things like that result in significant and cool changes to gameplay.  Things like lighting, line of sight, or topographical knowledge would be awesome if they could be implemented in some detail, but there certainly would be a major pathfinding rewrite required.  e.g. If a creature walks into a tall-grass field, how do they path out of it?  What does it mean to get lost?  etc... The answer could well be along the lines of what MrWiggles said, or something further off.

[Footkerchief]

Hey Toady,
I was watching TV over my shoulder just now, and while watching a scene from Jeepers Creepers, I noticed tall grass.
Do you have any plans on implementing tall stocks of plant matter used to block visibility, but allow safe passage. Or even not safe passage, like with thorns?

This is on the dev page:

Basic Adventure Mode Skills

    * Wood use
          o Ground debris/sticks/underbrush

Toady expanded on that item in DF Talk:

Capntastic:   I've got to say I'm really excited about the ... things you would think to be excited about, like the ground debris, sticks and underbrush ... you're like 'oh man, you find a rats nest under a tree and then kick it and rats come out'.
Toady:   The main thing there is up here in a lot of the parts of the Pacific north west where there's been logging recently and the trees ... there's not a whole lot of old growth forest left where I'm at, so there's a bunch of small trees, and when there are small trees there's a crapload of underbrush, and it's hard to go places; a lot of places you have to go around giant bushes and all kind of blackberries and that kind of stuff, you just walk through ... I don't want that to be super annoying, but right now in adventure mode there's a few scattered trees in the forest and they're little teeny trees but they somehow prevented everything but a few strawberry bushes from growing. And there are certain points where you should be walking through this brush and getting scratches all over your body, and mosquitoes ...

It was also touched upon in a FotF thread:

Now that trade routes depend on availability of roads (do they?), will fast-traveling over roads in Adventurer Mode confer reasonable bonuses to traveling speed (or penalties for moving off the road)? For both adventurers and merchants, it would make sense for walking on road to be easier, faster, and safer than hacking through wilderness.

Related: Will dwarven roads over mountains squares be accessible through fast-traveling in Adventurer Mode?

Fast travel speeds aren't going to be different from local travel speeds, for consistency, as close as I can make them anyway.  So if traveling on roads should be faster, it has to be for a local reason.  Right now, traveling on any terrain is the same speed.  When we get to underbrush in the dev page, the movement speeds should be properly impacted.  I'm not sure that we'll get to any of that this time, though the grass density information helps set us up for it.

The visibility part was covered here:

Are you planning on making certain 'wilderness' areas a bit more defined? Currently there is hardly any difference between a hill and a forest. Having, for example, denser bushes that, maybe, obscure vision, or multi-tile trees would make the denser forests much more foresty.

Yeah, we've got three things up there that should help a bit with that:

Skills:Wood Use:Ground debris/sticks/underbrush

For some basic variety -- there's nothing like the woods around here where you can hardly walk and end up getting all scratched up.  Now it's more like the older growth forests with the cleaner floors, but with really small trees and inexplicably no underbrush.  Not sure about vision there -- thick underbrush should definitely obscure it, but we might wait for the lighting part to get that all under one umbrella.
[...]

[Mr S]

^^^ THIS!!

Very excited to see how this plays out in gameplay.  Many people can attest that there is a huge difference between concealment and cover.  I can be concealed behind a sheet, but you could shoot right through it.  I could take cover behind bullet proof glass, but you could still see me.  I can definately see it coming into a lighting re-write.  I can easily see LOS being affected by it, as well.

Also, it would be easy to see how underbrush would affect movement speed.  Of course, so should wet sand, sand dunes, muddy tiles, deep snow, etc.  I suppose it's all coming... someday.

[Elone]

Dont get too far ahead of yourself. For one, I am seeing a bigger problem with existing LOS limitations.

When you're in a foggy area, or when it's just plain night, you do not see very far at all. You'd think that it would be easier to sneak up on creatures, but their LOS is unaffected, so even in complete fog you cannot attempt SNEAK because "somebody can see you". It was a big bummer when it happened in tundra, because I could see animal tracks in the snow!! but couldnt enter the sneak mode to follow them... It would have been very hunterlike. How about changing all creatures' LOS to such as adventurer but adding a nightvision tag? Then add that tag to (some) monsters in a priority order? Bogeymen would come first, I bet.

Oh yeah. Allow force sneaking of some sort! Just because one carp can see me, it apparently means that I am not allowed to sneak up on bandits in their camp =(

[nenjin]

We've heard you say you knew were-creatures were in an unsatisfactory state when you decided to update, and that they'll require at least another pass to bring them up to where you want. Have you given any real thought to what that'll require, other than some of the lower hanging stuff like "sometimes give them weapons when they're not in were-form"? Changing their transformation rules? Making were-curses grant better attributes out of were-form? Were-creature awesomeness isn't high on my list of desires, but they do make up a large chunk of vanilla content at the moment.

Additionally, do you have plans to make time for Vengeful Ghosts sometime within the Caravan arc releases, or have Night Creatures gotten all the work they're going to for a while?

[EmeraldWind]

Cool, thanks, sounds good.  Oh, and I rather like Jackledead's question, I love it when rather "simple" things like that result in significant and cool changes to gameplay.  Things like lighting, line of sight, or topographical knowledge would be awesome if they could be implemented in some detail, but there certainly would be a major pathfinding rewrite required.  e.g. If a creature walks into a tall-grass field, how do they path out of it?  What does it mean to get lost?  etc... The answer could well be along the lines of what MrWiggles said, or something further off.

I'm not sure where (possibly a DF Talk) Toady mentioned something about rotating the screen in order to disorient the player to emulate loss of direction. I think he mentioned the functionality for it was in the code already (or used to be), but was never used for anything. He also alluded to the hunting/tracking/survival features being a good time to possibly implement it.

[trees]

I'm not sure where (possibly a DF Talk) Toady mentioned something about rotating the screen in order to disorient the player to emulate loss of direction.

Yep, DF Talk 16.

Now we have that little map, the little town/city map so you can walk right on the roads, you can't just ... you bonk into the buildings and you have to pass around them. If you want to cut through whatever alleys or whatever might exist ... or cut through the sewers, then you have to zoom in, it's really just for going from store to store in a faster way, and to see the city layout as you understand it, because you can get lost very easily. It might be kind of realistic to get lost in the city but you don't have ... it's not like you're looking out of your eyes; you can't see ahead and you can't see large landmarks, and you can't see cross streets way ahead of you as you could in real life, so it's more fair to give you this travel map than to not give it to you, I think, in terms of realism, although you do lose just a bit, the getting lost in the city, but we can always give that back to you by restricting your view on the travel map and then wiping it if you get hopelessly lost, then rotating by ninety degrees in a random direction or something.

[dei]

Totally expecting Footie to catch this one, 'cuz it's far from a new feature, but what, exactly, does the champion do? Is there any particular benefit to having the champion be a skilled fighter as opposed to some random Urist McSchmoe (in 40d, a "champion" was any dwarf who reached legendary in a fighting skill (...right? It's been a while...), so I'm assuming high skill would help)?

From entity_default:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Code: [Select]

[POSITION:CHAMPION]
[NAME:champion:champions]
[SITE]
[NUMBER:1]
[RESPONSIBILITY:BUILD_MORALE]
[APPOINTED_BY:DUKE]
[APPOINTED_BY:COUNT]
[APPOINTED_BY:BARON]
[PRECEDENCE:65]
[MENIAL_WORK_EXEMPTION]
[PUNISHMENT_EXEMPTION]
[DO_NOT_CULL]
[COLOR:7:0:1]
[ACCOUNT_EXEMPT]
[DUTY_BOUND]
[DEMAND_MAX:1]

It looks like they have an effect in the morale of your dwarves. Maybe they fight better besides a champion.

If that is the case I'm dressing up my champion in a ☼pig tail tunic☼ and ☼rope reed short skirt☼. Because that sounds like the champion is just a glorified cheerleader.

[HiEv]

If that is the case I'm dressing up my champion in a ☼pig tail tunic☼ and ☼rope reed short skirt☼. Because that sounds like the champion is just a glorified cheerleader.

Think more William Wallace (inspirational war leader type) and less cheerleader.