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[SirPenguin]

I'm growing somewhat concerned about the extent of feature-creep in this release.

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No, seriously, DF is literally one big feature creep. It's been that way for about 6 years now, and it seems the more Toady indulges his feature-creeper side, the better the game gets

[BradUffner]

Will the footprints be dynamic at all? For example, if the creature lost a toe, will that effect the footprint on screen?

[Auning]

Will there be groups searching for other historical figures and such? For example, a small army trying to hunt down a dragon that attacked a village of their kingdom. When artifacts are in play and the exploration mechanics are in, will there be armies/hired mercenaries searching for wherever they believe an artifact to be, and wandering bands of explorers searching uncharted lands? What about lone wanderers and the like?

(Forgive the silly fluff questions, I'm just so excited.)

[TheDJ17]

Will adventurers/roving bands/entire armies be able to hide their tracks or at the very least try to?
It would be fun if you could make special shoes that left the foot prints of different animals like a deer.

[DG]

Stopping fast travel to cross waterways could seem less tiresome if hunted quarry used them to try and shake you off the trail causing you to search up and down the banks.

[thvaz]

I feel that showing the tracks as exposed in the devlog is completely unnecessary, and would bring a series of problems. Each creature would need its own track, and there are many variations to each (a human could be using boots, or coud be using a crutch, and so on).

edit: to be honest, I didn't understand what Toady intends to do.

[CLA]

Will there be an element of in game learning required for the annotation of the track marks, or will the player be told what every track belongs to all the time?

As much as I'd love the game to give you no information whatsoever on that, it would be not a lot of fun unless that's your area of expertise and you like to keep notes outside of the game.

I guess having having the game track (no pun intended) which tracks your adventurer can possibly know would be nice.
If you see tracks, the tracks just say "unknown source". Your adventurer seeing an animal leaving tracks will add it to the list of known tracks. So next time you look at tracks, the game will tell you what the source is.
And you could also learn about tracks from experienced hunters. That reminds me, is something like people teaching your adventurer planned?


Will tracks have varying visibility/clarity (visually represented by added noise in the composite images for example)? Will it depend on your skill? On the underground the tracks are on?

Will we, then have a greater chance of not being tracked if we walk over ground that doesn't leave tracks, go through rivers to wash away scent, etc? Will the AI use that, too?

Will the track images be hardcoded?

[Askot Bokbondeler]

titan tracks? boogeymen?

[Jiri Petru]

I got pretty used to Toady's tendency to feature creep and add random cool things, but let me just say that this is the most useless thing I've ever seen added to Dwarf Fortress.

I don't see the point - it will require Toady (and modders) to add a footprint, which is basically graphics, to each single creature. Toady has stated on many occasions that adding graphics is exactly what he doesn't want to do, and the reason why he uses ASCII. Supposedly, whenever he adds something new to the game, ASCII allows him to just assign a tile instead of having to pixel paint a sprite. But these footprints basically = manually pixel painting a sprite for each creature. There's hundreds of creatures. Whenever a new one gets added, new footprint would have to be manually painted. What's the point?

[Manveru Taurënér]

I got pretty used to Toady's tendency to feature creep and add random cool things, but let me just say that this is the most useless thing I've ever seen added to Dwarf Fortress.

I don't see the point - it will require Toady (and modders) to add a footprint, which is basically graphics, to each single creature. Toady has stated on many occasions that adding graphics is exactly what he doesn't want to do, and the reason why he uses ASCII. Supposedly, whenever he adds something new to the game, ASCII allows him to just assign a tile instead of having to pixel paint a sprite. But these footprints basically = manually pixel painting a sprite for each creature. There's hundred of creatures. Whenever a new one gets added, new footprint would have to be manually painted. What's the point?

Not really. He can just make a few  generic prints for different animal groups and reuse them. Seriously, it's not like the world will end if a few days get spent adding a small but cool feature ^^

[Askot Bokbondeler]

i don't like it either
in classic rpgs, wich include roguelikes, there's a clear separation in what the player knows from what the character knows, what a player can do and what a character can do. with the latest additions, more hands on aproach to sneaking and tracking, this separation is getting blurred in a way i feel uncomfortable with. now a player has to be himself skilled in sneaking, meaning a supposedly legendary ambusher may behave like an amateur if he is controlled by a player who doesn't yet dominate the mechanics of sneaking, the opposite is true for a dabbling ambusher in the hands of a player that knows the system very well. this makes the character's stats less meaningful, which itself might not be a bad thing(i'm actually quite excited with the sneaking system, and looking forward to play arround with it), but is not coherent with the way rest of the game treats skills.
assigning a visual image to a creature's tracks brings up a similar problem, a character might be an incompetent tracker who can't recognise the tracks of a lot of animals, but a player who has memorized these or has access to a wiki can effectively nullify the need for such a skill at all
i feel these are features for an awesome, but different game, and do not fit df at all

[CLA]

But these footprints basically = manually pixel painting a sprite for each creature. There's hundred of creatures. Whenever a new one gets added, new footprint would have to be manually painted.

I doubt it's particularly hard to write a program that creates these images automatically from b&w images of animal footprints found online.
You still have to add it to every single new creature, but it's a matter of searching for or making a normal track image. It doesn't need to be pixel-per-pixel, just a regular, rough b&w image.
As with density values of materials, this could be something that the community can help with.

Anyway, while this does make it easier, your point obviously still stands. It doesn't add anything that couldn't be covered by a text saying "you see human footprints" or "you see tracks of a small animal". In fact, you could convey skill-related vagueness better with text.

But as it seems to be right now, it wouldn't use the adventurers skill, but the player's skill (Same for sneaking).

So it's mostly a gameplay design question.
Personally I really like the idea, because it would be a great feeling actually learn the real track appearance of creatures, just from playing Dwarf Fortress.
On the other hand I'm not sure if it really fits in with the rest of the game.

EDIT:
As Askot said, RPGs are either character skill based or player skill based. And inconsistencies between them tend to sully the gameplay experience when the game has deep mechanics. It might not be a problem with light casual games like Skyrim, but I think more complex games benefit from coherent and consistent gameplay design in that regard.

However, I think there can be a solution to incorporate both things in games generally:
Everything is basically player skill based, but character skills define how the character executes the player intention. In other words, the player is the brain, the character skills determine the "muscle memory" or sensory perception (and the attributes determine the physical properties of the character body).
So, for example, the player decides where to strike, and depending on the character skill your adventurer hits or misses. And depending how strong he is, he will make more damage. That's actually already in the game like that.

For sneaking this would mean, the player decides where to sneak, when to stop, etc, but sneaking/perception skill influence how much noise the character makes, how well and acute he can stop and, say, remain motionless, how accurate he can see where an enemy looks, who is alerted, etc.

For tracking, whatever perception/tracking ability he has, decides finding tracks in the first place, and possibly helping player memory with additional information like how old the track is, in which direction it goes, etc.


If indeed implemented like that, I don't think the concerns of Askot, that the skills become less meaningful are justified.
After all, it works for combat very well already.

[hermes]

I don't see the point - it will require Toady (and modders) to add a footprint, which is basically graphics, to each single creature. Toady has stated on many occasions that adding graphics is exactly what he doesn't want to do, and the reason why he uses ASCII. Supposedly, whenever he adds something new to the game, ASCII allows him to just assign a tile instead of having to pixel paint a sprite. But these footprints basically = manually pixel painting a sprite for each creature. There's hundreds of creatures. Whenever a new one gets added, new footprint would have to be manually painted. What's the point?

I kind of know what you mean, as in this was my first reaction to the tracks.  But as Manveru says, generic prints would be a fine placeholder, and with the appropriate reference book I can't imagine it taking more than a few days to paint them in.  Why not have the graphical representation?  Tracking is largely a visual skill and it would be nice to engage the player a little with sign to help immersion.

i don't like it either
in classic rpgs, wich include roguelikes, there's a clear separation in what the player knows from what the character knows, what a player can do and what a character can do. with the latest additions, more hands on aproach to sneaking and tracking, this separation is getting blurred in a way i feel uncomfortable with. now a player has to be himself skilled in sneaking, meaning a supposedly legendary ambusher may behave like an amateur if he is controlled by a player who doesn't yet dominate the mechanics of sneaking...

Toady hasn't explained the details of tracking yet, but I would bet a megaproject it will only be dependent on character skills.

As for sneaking, I really don't understand what you mean.  All RPGs revolve around choice, gameplay choice, and the manner in which you choose to sneak is one of those choices.  It seems pretty obvious that the player should be aware of the mechanics of the game to play it well, and rather baffling to say that the system isn't coherent when clearly the range of movement options are not an on/off toggle like other features. 

[Yoink]

Huh... I don't really like this either, myself.
Couldn't there just be, I don't know, a generic ASCII symbol which is used to denote some kindof track, (nothing big or glaring, just a '*' or something admist the ground tiles of the same colour) and then 'l'ooking at said track displays what kind of track it is, and which way it is going?

The sneaking mechanics sound interesting, but I don't like the idea of these new tiles at all.

[O11O1]

Huh... I don't really like this either, myself.
Couldn't there just be, I don't know, a generic ASCII symbol which is used to denote some kindof track, (nothing big or glaring, just a '*' or something admist the ground tiles of the same colour) and then 'l'ooking at said track displays what kind of track it is, and which way it is going?

The sneaking mechanics sound interesting, but I don't like the idea of these new tiles at all.

(those are larger images built from 219-223+254 that'll pop up with a description if we stick with that, not new tiles)

So it sounds like these are something that comes up when you actually examine these tracks, not something that shows up in local view.

Toady, what do tracks look like in local view? Are they title-invisible or something like a * as suggested earlier?