Thanks to Willfor, MrWiggles, Putnam, Cruxador, Japa, and Knight Otu for answering some of the questions I didn't include below.
Could you please give a little definition for 'entity claims to sites'
Toady, you said you were "replacing [the current site ownership system] with a system of claims of varying purpose and effectiveness" ; what do you mean by "effectiveness" ?
Also, how much ground will be covered by what's planned for next time ? Religious claims, business claims, battles over the line of succession ?
Who will be entitled with a right to consult these claims ? You already mentioned important historical people, but do you plan on establishing some sort of statistical representation of the overall population's state of mind, as that would be needed for things such as revolutions ?
When an entity is doing something with a site, or decides that it wants to, it makes a claim on the site. A part of it is an expansion of the old site link system -- there are number of overlapping purposes (residency, capital, monument for the dead, banditry, trade partner, etc.), and it now also tracks the location, any special buildings involved, the time of day, and entity position involvement. Once I'm further along in this release, it'll also track the effectiveness/seriousness of the claim to allow other entities to respond and to allow the critters living in the town that only have a generic affiliation to the area to take sides reasonably and so on. It'll also let people in the town talk to you about the overall situation (in a way inflected by their own feelings on the matter).
Only the entity leadership knows about the claim until it becomes public through the first action the entity takes, then it's common knowledge. Before the first action it's just an AI helper. If you have multiple effective claims, the idea is to split up the entity populations all sorts of ways so that each individual person you meet will fall in along a spectrum of taking sides or not in each thing there is to care about. It can only track it with a certain degree of precision for the non-historical people, but once you talk to somebody (and thereby make them historical), it has everything it needs consistently for the life of that person, so it should work out more or less. We should have this in before we do the part where you can bring people along with you motivated for vengeance and when you are trying to hide from vengeful posses.
Does this mean we're going to have worldgen progress in actual play?
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Is the new release going to have the current worldgen stuff (population change, successions, settlements, wars) actively run during gameplay?
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With these new features, are we actually going to have more interactions between civilisations? For instance, if we embark next to a gigantic city, or on a road, we might end up in conflict with the humans?
Will the moving bandit groups raid fortresses or is that not on the menu at this point?
What will this arc give to fortress mode ?
So with the new complex faction interactions, will it be possible during Fort mode play for, say, some humans (for example) to show up on your map, without your being sure of what their intentions are; ie, you wouldn't know at first whether they were peaceful traders or bandits come to attack you?
Pieces of it, and eventually all of it. The next release won't have everything.
As entities start thinking about things to do in play, the location of your fortress will become more and more relevant. Since I'm pretty close to having a goblin army marching over to wipe out a village, having the armies that attack your fort go about it in that way is a much lower hanging fruit now. Having the bandit thug harassers come is a little more involved, since there'd be a non-lethal component to that which needs to be thought out in relation to the fort, and I haven't done that yet. When we do dwarf mode taverns and inns, you'll suddenly have a mess of critters hanging out and supported, and it'll probably be easier to work some neat stuff in then.
The real prizes of having you send out dwarven armies and having more interesting trade agreements and so on are intimately related to what's going on (since the world will be active) but aren't impending features in the same way. We still need to do hill dwarves and more trade stuff for that.
What happened to the personality rewrite? I was under the impression it was a precursor to all this stuff about entities interacting with each-other.
Parts of it have already happened, but I'm not doing it as an independent large push in the way I thought, so I haven't particularly noted it -- there are lots of other things wrapped up with the personality changes that we're still going to do later.
For the tile counts in designating good/evil regions, for a given map size, what exactly is a small, medium or large region?
It looks like small is 1-24, medium is 25-99, and large is 100+, for any map size.
Do you ever look at the forums and think to yourself "What the hell is my playerbase on?"
I try not to generalize when I see something particularly messed up, he he he.
Will we be able to increase the danger level in confrontations? For example, if a guy starts punching me, and I draw my sword and stab him once, will he start spilling the beans quicker than he would in fist-fight?
The beans from his stomach? If the combat jumps up to lethal and he's not willing to go there and can't run, you'll get your yield faster, yeah. You don't even need to stab him.
Is there going to be any kind of "desensitization" to the fear of fighting that slowly builds up? I can see hardened troops who have made it through dozens of battles being less likely to run away than the fresh from the fields farmer.
I'm not sure everyone that has been through a bunch of battles will respond the same way, and I'm not sure if the current simple PTSD/hardness variable we have will survive at all, but we are hoping to have various changes occur and to have various mitigators to combat terror before the release. Having a previous experience with terror seems like a fair mitigator, I think, though anecdotes are all over the place -- from people becoming more effective to totally breaking down later on if they didn't the first time. We certainly aim to keep the game in a playable area with respect to companions and dwarves.
Is there going to be combat realism with this release, meaning if you say, murder a entire kingdom and go to another, they will run in fear. And if yes, what of soldiers? If you slaughter a army alone, would hardened elites you fight later on flight or fight?
These are specific things related to reputation, and though we'll be expanding reputation stuff as we go, up to the point that people will know who you are and help you or hunt you down, I'm not sure exactly where the line will be drawn this release.
Will these kinds of reactions be added to Dwarf Fortress mode? For example, nervous dwarves would be more likely to run away from those starting first fights, whilst others might decide to actively participate.
Will the new lethality aversion effect the behavior of military dwarves? What about your civilian dwarves? Right now military dwarves are always totally cool with risking their necks and civilian dwarves always turn tail at the first sight of trouble, but only adventure mode stuff has been mentioned in the devlog.
I haven't gutted the dwarven brain yet to incorporate these things, but it should all come up. There'll have to be some control to keep the game usable, but that can probably be afforded by the general dutifulness of being in the dwarven military with orders, so that most dwarves act roughly as expected, with the deviations being most often caution or overreacting.
Would fighting animals, that can't wield weapons be considered as non-lethal fighting? Would it go as far as saying that fighting a Hydra be non-lethal as it has no weapons?
Can we, as an adventurer, choose to initiate unarmed combat with wildlife?
I don't think there'll be a non-lethal state for them at first at all, though I imagine we can think of a few reasons to have one later.
are there any plans to be able to restrain our enemies after we subdue them? Either in terms of affixing them to actual restraints that we have in fortmode (like chains etc.), hogtying them, or tying them up but being able to walk?
Yeah, it's up on the dev page. Gagging people and tying them up was originally envisioned as a way to deal with certain guards when you infiltrate a villain's site, and it might also come up when you force people to lead you somewhere. That led to various stuff you might do in dwarf mode with relation to mine carts and all that. When we allow you to tie people up, I'd expect it to probably all be done at once.
i see a problem with weapon recognition: what about other things not really considered a weapon? i thinks its documented history of this game to kill things with something else than a weapon.
Right now it errs on the side of judging things lethal. Once we get to actual barfights, there'll have to be more wiggle room.
If I hit someone with the flat of my blade, does that count as a lethal or non-lethal attack according to the game?
It's a lethal attack right now. That seems like a reasonable thing to think unless the attacker tells you what's going on and you trust it, or you've been hit by the flat several times and realize what happened. Aside from just wanting to knock somebody out, there's a weird place that kind of attack is supposed to occupy where you beat the enemy into submission I guess, but the lethality state doesn't matter there as long as the defender thinks they have an option to yield and they don't get killed.
How particularized are the different sorts of fear going to be to individual thoughts, personalities, and histories?
In other words, obviously some people might be willing to engage in fistfights but not lethal combat. However, would that extend to different sorts of lethal combat, so that a person might be willing to fight another human to the death, but not a dragon/demon? Or might be unwilling to fight a sort of animal that that dwarf "likes"? Also, would someone who is generally unwilling to enter lethal combat be willing if their opponent were an "enemy" subject to special and particular enmity (e.g. a troll that abducted the person's spouse)?
As an extension to this question, will the concepts of "natural enemy" found in D&D and phobias get in the personnality rewrite ? I'm thinking, for example, about a certain knight very keen on slaughter leaving a fight because he fears fire after being severely burnt as a child.
None of that stuff is going to come up at first, but the more details we have to differentiate people the better off we'll be over all, and we've toyed around with various of those ideas in the dev pages. Dunno when though.
Will the exact weapon you're carrying make any difference beyond simple material/quality/type? For example, will there be cases where a well-used sword that has killed many goblins is more intimidating to a goblin than a human?
any chance we get the option to boast a kill or two as our enemies do (which I *think* you mentionned somewhere), in this next round of psychological warfare ? Will the boasting of an enemy have an effect on our followers, distinct from the effect of getting rounded by 6 people in the wilderness ?
There was a lengthy discussion in response to the first question and I don't think I have much to add to it. We've got items that gain names and everything has its stats tracked, and if you can somehow convey this information to the critters or if they can recognize the weapon, it'd be a fair and funny thing to do.
There's going to be quite a bit more talking to critters in this version, but I switched to my current site claim stuff right before I started that (partially so there conversations would be more intelligible and have better options). So I'm not quite sure how it'll manifest. If your boasting bothers enemies, enemy boasting will bother your friends in the same way, assuming we get them put in the same framework. The current enemy boasting appears to be more public than it actually is (it's actually a conversation with you), and some work needs to be done to pull conversations out of their own space to get them to occur more like market chatter, but that's a little messy.
Is combat going to be revamped with this as well? Say elf E and goblin G are in a fight, and elf E pulls a dagger out. Will goblin G disarm the elf, and will the elf attempt to pickup said dagger again?
Some things have changed, which I've posted in the log, and adding more is part of the hero role. The loss of equipment by your companions is particularly annoying, but I'm not sure exactly what's going to happen.
Seeing that non-lethal combat is being implemented, will we be seeing non-lethal weapons at all?
i.e.: blackjacks, brass knuckles, etc.
If so, what kind of response would drawing one in a fight get?
I haven't thought about it much yet. Bar fights will probably be our first round of worrying about some of the item possibilities, but I'm not sure.
Is there any plans to improve upon the effectiveness of punishing a vampire? Punishing them for murdering just about always ends up giving them a few bruises and that's about it.
It's silly how it works now, but I don't have a timeline.
Will the player's character be affected by fear etc. and subject to forced actions, or will it be left to roleplaying?
As people brought up, there's been a lot of discussion about this over the years -- the current position is that there will be very little if any forced actions from the player's emotional state. It relies on the computer getting things correct, and a single screwup blasts immersion.
(log)Failure to master emotional states leads to forced actions...(/log)
what other emotions and actions than does this include?
I haven't gone through and done much with it at this point.
Does the [SKILL:SWORD] tag on the weapon raws determine which weapons can be found upright made out of spoilermetal in the unique spoiler entrance to the spoilers?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's how it works.
Would the next update deal with "when creatures should flee"? For example, dwarves behind fortifications, dwarves dealing with untamed creatures like rabbits.
I'm not specifically handling every broken situation right now.
Now that you have entities and groups setting goals and acting on them in adventurermode, will you soon add these features also to groups in the Fortress mode?
So that groups such as familiy, inactive squads ect will coordinate their goals and actions more. Also intergroup; feuds, alliances etc. influencing an individuals' thoughts,likes etc. animals could claim territories and defend them.
How will these new thought-systems interface with the upcoming groups system?
Toady, will dwarves ever try to assasinate people(outside of tantrums)? Will we find fighting factions within our forts?
Having factions/religions/guilds in the fortress is something we're holding in mind as we work with the thought/personality/emotion rewrite and the entity claims. The new systems are basically the framework of the personality rewrite we've been going on about forever and the dwarf mode interface there with groups is all of the sort of decision making we've been talking about. However, I still need to gut the dwarven brain in the same way I've gutted the adventure mode critter brain to get them to be able to use the new stuff, and the old dwarven brain is large and messy.
The upside of that was also being able to support things like custom job prioritization and better for decision making, but I haven't embarked on this yet, so I'd hesitate to say I've truly begun the personality rewrite. The adventure mode dabbling should make the dwarf mode rewrite a lot easier when it happens, since I've gotten a chance to prepare an AI function more like what I'm imagining the dwarf will have now. Once a dwarf is allowed to weigh actions and can take a free action a little easier, they'll be able to think about doing something for their various allegiances, whether it's killing another dwarf or something a lot less extreme. It's important that the game isn't constantly disrupted to the point of unplayability, but there should be room for stuff.
Toady, how have you been approaching the implementation and design of personality stuff as this bit of the project moves forward? Have you been consulting with anybody who specializes in psychology, or is this basically the result of wiki-diving and/or astute induction?
Zach and I have mostly just been talking situations out as we come to them. Some reading online back when we were hashing some of the new categories out, but nothing in particular.
Now that multiple attacks can be used at the same time, does that mean weapon traps will attack with all their weapons at the same time now? Are we going to get riders and riding in the new release given that you've mentioned that on the devblog, or is this still just regarding fortress mode invasions?
Do the weapon traps not work like that now? There's simultaneity in terms of attacking on the same phase, and then simultaneity in terms of actually rewriting the strike code to somehow make two items hit a creature at one time. The latter isn't going in in any way, since it's messy and unimportant. We have multiple attacks now in the sense that you can have two attacks started that resolve a few phases later on the same phase, but in that one phase they are still resolved in a sequence. Riders are just being supported -- they are slated for the hero role but I'm not sure when they are coming in.
Do the changes to how entities claim sites mean that sites and lairs and the like are going to work in a more unified fashion?
I mean, right now you've got towns, fortresses, camps, caves, sewers, towers, tombs, etc, and they all work differently. But is there any reason why a successful bandit group couldn't use a fortress as its base instead of a camp, or a civilization couldn't live in towers and shrines instead of hamlets? Or heck, why night creatures couldn't lair in towns?
The site claims don't impact the map structures, which are more unified in towns, sewers, towers and tombs than is apparent. Caves are really old, and camps, fortresses and lairs haven't been updated. I'm not sure when it'll change, but ideally they'll get treated the same at some point.
since multiple attacks will be implemented, will heroes, sufficiently skilled, be able to dual wield and attack twice at the same time?
Yeah.
How will movement and attack speed be determined for different types of creatures? To clarify - will the game recognize that a hydra has many heads to bite with and automatically give it a faster attack speed, or will creatures like that need to have an equivalent of the current SPEED token? I suppose they could be tied to different attributes, too.
Each head will be able to engage in a separate attack with the same speed as, say, a dragon's single bite attack. The attacks begin, strike, and finish concurrently (with the strike damage all happening in rapid succesion during the same tick, a few ticks after the attacks are initiated), and it won't be able to attack any faster than a normal biting creature (unless we decide it deserves a bonus for whatever cobra-strikey reason). You won't need to calculate to find a proper timing.
Toady, how does the movement/combat split affect creature, weapon, etc. raws?
Are weapon attack speeds entirely based on raw constants, calculated based on a mix of raw constants and internal code, or entirely generated from internal code?
Does weapon quality affect attack speed?
Will movement speed for dwarves be affected primarily by the existing Agility attribute, or will there be a split so that dwarves have differing attributes that control how fast they move and how efficiently they accomplish actions?
I have yet to muck around with the raws, but it'll come up very soon once I go back to that stuff once I'm done messing with entity claims. I imagine attack raws will need basic speeds, perhaps broken into the pre/post strike periods, and that these'll be subject to attribute/skill improvements in many cases.
There are also two notions of attack speed -- the finer tuned velocity with which the strike damage, and the basic tick numbers, which by their nature have very little resolution to mess with (though it is possible to add resolution there in limited ways). So if one sword swing hits at 100 and another hits at 120, they might both take 2 ticks to resolve, but the 120 will hit harder. More importantly, when "heavy" and "fast" strikes are distinguished, the heavy strike will have a longer tick pre-strike period, but will actually be harder (higher velocity) when it hits, where the "fast" strike will have a short pre-strike period but hit with a lower damaging velocity. These are distinctions which will certainly be in by combat styles, perhaps before.
I think weapon quality effects the strike velocity. I'm not sure if there's enough resolution in the ticks to mess with the pre-strike period much.
In the currently released version, movement speed is affected by strength and agility equally, though strength also bulks muscled parts which decreases speed so agility is better overall. I don't have a plan to change that. When it comes to jobs, everything is up in the air now that movement is an action -- doing jobs is now utterly independent of the movement action, but I think it still feeds them the movement delay. That'll definitely be changed for this release, and like you suggest, it'll likely be replaced either by a constant or something more appropriate for the job.
Toady, will the next changes include a nerfing of crossbows, both overpowered in Fortress mode and on enemies and VERY inconvenient as a beginner adventurer due to the fact you automatically reload right after firing (instead of doing something more useful, like fleeing or dropping your crossbow and pulling out a sword) ?
I haven't changed them yet, but the special firing delay variable is up for the chopping block now that they can be merged with the other actions. And yeah, that'll give us some more freedom, since we couldn't make the post-fire delay very slow in the old system.
By the end of this update arc, will DF be able to handle all the births and age-related deaths behind the scenes? In other words, if we have a world we spend a lot of time with (like, say, 300 years), will we still have to worry about all the humans dying out from old age after a certain point?
Yeah, we're hoping to get that part done for this release if we can.
Now that we're moving into dealing with heroes and villains, are we going to have some "generic" content added? For example, certain heroes may have radically different fighting styles, some villains may live behind a vast array of traps and minions, and heroes may have their own varying moral codes.
We'd like to add differences between critters, but we're trying to stick with the basic moving around and so on at first. Somewhere in here we're going to flesh out villains a bit, to some basic minimum, but I'm not sure what we'll get to yet.
With the additions to AI starting in the next update, will we eventually have things like Forgotten Beasts with more specific goals than just killing everything?
There's a dev item in the hero role for giving some of the megabeasts intelligent behavior, but it's unclear how it'll manifest. When we first activate megabeasts out on the world map, it'll likely be to get them to do things they do at random currently (like appearing at your fort).
Will things like evil weather be tracked when off screen/cross-region? As it is, it seems that it only queues up the evil weather to run it's course when you enter the area it's designated for. I thought this might go hand-in-hand with continuing history since weather events may play a part in this, at some point. The end result would be something like: If you embark in an area that rains a repulsive sludge, the ground will already be covered with it if it has been raining it there for some time. As opposed to: You embark in the area, and it is completely clean of sludge, but it quickly becomes covered with it when it rains. It doesn't make sense for time to freeze in terms of this kind of weather in some areas until you get there.
The actual husking cloud events are tracked more closely, and it knows how deep the snow is in advance, but, yeah, residual rain products aren't handled at all. I'm not sure when I'll get to it.
Toady, you talked about penalties when attempting to attack with two weapons, or two targets simultaneously. Does that mean the entrance of some "ambidextry" or "multitasking" skills ?
I think that's reasonable, though I don't have a particular plan at this point.
how exactly will the penalties for multi-strikes be handled? do we have to expect the same penalty for kicking with both legs at the same time as for poking someones eyes with the index and the middle finger simultaneously? is there a difference in penalty for attacking 2 different people with 1 attack each or 1 person with 2 attacks?
I'm not sure how it'll work yet. I think it's reasonable to decrease the penalty for having only 1 target, but part of the penalty should always apply, since you'll almost always be spreading your power around and trying to be accurate in more than one way when doing multiple attacks.
So does this release make much progress to us being able to start cracking some 'eads together? (From multiple grappled creatures I mean, rather than like an ettin or hydra.)
Can we have a choice in where to throw an opponent when wrestling?
The situation at this point remains unchanged.
Toady will you be combining movement and attacks into one for specific attacks like charges, tackles, and moving stabs in this release? Will that actually be a thing?
Yeah, this will be a thing. The old charges have been gutted, and everything's going under the new action framework.
Will the non-lethal system shouting wake nearby sleeping creatures?
When we do infiltrating the compound etc. as we progress with villains, I think the silliest things will be managed, and it'll slowly be improved like the rest of everything. There's a specific dev item for raising the alarm.
Will it be possible for your fortress to become a goblin slave camp while you play?
Ideally we'll be able to do that. There's a lot of specific interface etc. associated to being in that position though. It's similar to bandits messing with your site beyond murder and stealing (which we have), but even more complicated.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 3852808 times)