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[BradUffner]

still no report... armok forbid but, is toady DEAD?

I'm always pleasantly surprised when we get one on a weekend.  Weekends are usually reserved for making ASCII art and crayon drawings.

[MrWiggles]

Will we be able to launch minecarts via the bridge-a-pult?

The only known changes to bridges is that they magically act like mine cart rails. There 'tossing' ability, probably hasn't changed at all.

Also:

Is there any plan to let a player establish a fort, and then take a new starting squad and start another fort after getting the first one up and running, thereby extending the holdings/exportable goods/import needs of the players civilization?

Yep.

That is probably one of the major goals of the Army Arc. It also cross over with the Starting Scenarios for forts too, and the tangential goal of just managing a Civilization.   

[Cobaldunderpants]

Will we be able to launch minecarts via the bridge-a-pult?

The only known changes to bridges is that they magically act like mine cart rails. They're 'tossing' ability, probably hasn't changed at all.

Also:

Is there any plan to let a player establish a fort, and then take a new starting squad and start another fort after getting the first one up and running, thereby extending the holdings/exportable goods/import needs of the players civilization?

Yep.

That is probably one of the major goals of the Army Arc. It also cross over with the Starting Scenarios for forts too, and the tangential goal of just managing a Civilization.

I so want this. I really wanna be able to explore and get into the history of the worlds I create. I just don't want my established forts to turn into dusty dark tombs in order for me to do it.

[Lac]

His 'tossing' ability, probably hasn't changed at all.

[MrWiggles]

His 'tossing' ability, probably hasn't changed at all.

?

[Lac]

Sorry; I saw the mis-corrected grammar and couldn't resist.  I did actually feel guilty enough for posting it that I've turned my computer back on to edit in something more constructive.  So, err... Right-angle track turns seem at odds with a realistic physics model.  Either Toady is making the rails extremely grippy, or he's got quite a wide arc going on the tile; I wonder which he has modeled.

[Deon]

I wonder what will make us to build rails at all? Why not to build bridges, a few tiles from 1 stone, everywhere instead? It's faster and cheaper.

[orius]

Possibly you don't need an architect to design a rail system like a bridge.

[MrWiggles]

I wonder what will make us to build rails at all? Why not to build bridges, a few tiles from 1 stone, everywhere instead? It's faster and cheaper.

Bridges can't have stops, or accelerators. And bridges might not be able to let Carts turn.

Though this would probably ultimetly look silly, and might just be exploitive of a feature in its infancy.

[Gilihad]

still no report... armok forbid but, is toady DEAD?

It's been less than two days...

[Elone]

This is a suggestion, do not view it

One of the things I remember suggesting a while ago in the big Improved Mechanics/Traps Wishlist thread was a "black box" that could fit into one tile, but be designed in a manner of "pop-up window" that let you designate inputs, outputs, and jam it full of gears, so that you could make a compact form of any sort of gear assembly you could physically manage to make work. 

It would let players retain the ability to design complex gear logic systems manually, thus meaning that actually understanding gear logic was rewarded in play, while making a much simpler and smaller object for the game to track and save FPS (because the whole assembly could be considered one object for temperature and pathfinding and all those other FPS hogging reasons). 

People didn't like the idea of a pop-up menu, however.

I very much want this. It's a great idea. And it failed because people could not agree on the final interface? Sad world.

I literally dreamed, last night, (among other stuff) how I was managing some machinery in a very small room. I set the final palm sized gear inside (made of metal, and pressed, not cut), then got the machine started. I do not remember what happened next, but it tasted like success, strawberries, and rainbow, all at the same time.

And omfg, you looked =O Bad syringe psycho, bad!

Spoiler: Dejavu (click to show/hide)

still no report... armok forbid but, is toady DEAD?

It's been less than two days...

Sounds like just about the right time to start the panic. Mourning starts the day after tomorrow.

That said, I'm having a feeling of dejavu now! I can see some consistency starting to build up on this topic. He is SO hardcore, just like every single creature in his creation, that he refuses to wear his plot armour for any reason.

[TempAcc]

This is a suggestion, do not view it

One of the things I remember suggesting a while ago in the big Improved Mechanics/Traps Wishlist thread was a "black box" that could fit into one tile, but be designed in a manner of "pop-up window" that let you designate inputs, outputs, and jam it full of gears, so that you could make a compact form of any sort of gear assembly you could physically manage to make work. 

It would let players retain the ability to design complex gear logic systems manually, thus meaning that actually understanding gear logic was rewarded in play, while making a much simpler and smaller object for the game to track and save FPS (because the whole assembly could be considered one object for temperature and pathfinding and all those other FPS hogging reasons). 

People didn't like the idea of a pop-up menu, however.

Oh my, this would be truly beautiful, altough its usefulness would be somewhat limited right now since we don't have much use for complex mechanics (IE stuff that requires more then just linking a lever to a door/bridge/floodgate/hatch). It would still be pretty fun to mess around with though, specialy with huge megaprojects using many pumps and fluid logic and maybe carts/rails, in the future.

[Footkerchief]

Is there any plan to let a player establish a fort, and then take a new starting squad and start another fort after getting the first one up and running, thereby extending the holdings/exportable goods/import needs of the players civilization?

Fortress retirement has been touched upon frequently:

Spoiler: quotes (click to show/hide)

I'd rather handle this properly when I get to it instead of spending time on a half measure that won't necessarily be related to the completed feature.  The adventure mode dwarf fortresses aren't completed and retired player fortresses should work with the same mechanics as these, so I have to do adv mode dwarf fortresses first.  Since I'm going to do those using the mechanics in place from dwarf mode, it might be easier to see the path forward to reversing these procedures when that's done.

DF Talk 16, Sep 2011:

Toady:   That's right. So, yeah ... we can definitely improve on that. I guess that leads into ... The dwarf mode legacy is quite similar, because you're creating a new site and that's being left behind, and you're also creating a bunch of dwarves, and when you abandon a site all of those dwarves move somewhere, and they're all being left on site. You're trading goods around the world ... and creating artifacts; those especially are one of the main legacies that a dwarf fortress leaves behind. And then the analogue to ... I mean we've talked about it kind of a lot, but the analogue to retirement in adventure mode would be retiring your fortress, and I think we've gone over that a few times so we can skip it, but it is a very important thing, especially because you'd be able to be, say, the new capital of the whole dwarven kingdom ... when the monarch arrives, if you retired then that would be a huge geopolitical shift there, right, where whatever the old mountainhome was is now some little hamlet or something, or some ghost town, or just a large city without a king that used to have one, and you've got a new one ... So there's that ...
Rainseeker:   Right, so we're thinking that we can retire fortresses and still have them be entities and still have them be technically active, the game considers them not ghost towns anymore?
Toady:   Yeah, the part that we've probably spent the most time discussing is why there are technical hurdles to this, or whatever, so that's the part we'll bypass. But yeah, you'd be able to leave that active mark on your world and you can kind of spread out and cause migration or spread of the dwarven civilization over a few games and then it would actually stick, it wouldn't just be a litter of abandoned fortresses with a few monsters living in them or new places for goblins to live. But I guess that could be part of your legacy; when we get to the army arc decisions of, you know, why did the goblins attack your town? Right now it's because they triggered some kind of 'attack the town' event and then they don't stay there, but if they were attacking your town for a reason, moving over the map and then arriving at your town, then they presumably had some reason to attack your town and it might include staying there, and then you'd have caused that kind of political change to the landscape, where the goblins now have a new fortress that's quite powerful. So hopefully ... I mean some of these changes are coming in the shorter term, and some of them are farther off, but hopefully we'll start seeing some of this stuff ... like I was saying the kind of successiony thing will be the first non-negative changing we see in either of the modes, and that's not too far off now. Yeah, so I guess ... were there any other things about the legacy you guys wanted to talk about?

Dec 2011:

With these new upgrades to the city systems, how close are we to having a 'Retire' option, where instead of abandoning the fort, you give it to the gameworld to control, allowing you to, say, start a new fort and trade with the old one?

Probably not until after we have actual dwarf towns being generated, and then some.

Yeah, since the new city system moves us closer to re-enabling dwarf towns, we are at least descending in our orbit around this one.

[Tenebrais]

I wonder what will make us to build rails at all? Why not to build bridges, a few tiles from 1 stone, everywhere instead? It's faster and cheaper.

Which brings the question.

If tracks will need to be laid out in lines, will constructed rails function tilewise like walls and floors, or will they work more like axles and bridges?

[Rose]

he mentioned that they can be built just like constructions.