Thanks to MrWiggles, EmeraldWind, Trif, Knight Otu, Putnam, Valtam, Ribs, Caldfir, Talvieno, Kogan Loloklam, zwei and anybody I missed for answering questions this time.
Other than adding the ability for figures not attached to a fortress to form relationships while the game is running do you plan on making any other changes to the current relationship system before the nest release?
It's the same as ever.
With climbing coming in, will we have use for ropes in adventure mode, like say tying an end to a rock or something and using it to climb down a smooth surface?
Or, with non-lethal combat coming in, will we be able to hog-tie someone or otherwise restrain them?
I was hoping to do something with ropes and climbing, but it hasn't happened yet. Tying up people is part of the hero role (oddly enough), but we haven't gotten to that part of it.
Goblins don't eat, but players may mod in races which both need to eat and use dark fortresses. How will their worldgen and non-player-controlled farming work in that case?
I haven't changed anything about how that works.
You've mentioned that we'll now have a visual indication for the direction a creature is facing. What will it look like? My only reference to this type of mechanic in a game like Dwarf Fortress is in Unreal World, where you have a little arrow on the corner of every character's sprite to indicate direction. But since DF is a little more graphically impaired I wonder how will you do it instead.
It shows a cone with vision and peripheral vision when you are sneaking around. Otherwise it doesn't bother telling you.
I'm assuming you mean people moving to a different location when married. How are you planning to do it? Are we going to see different patrilineal, matrilineal, bileneal, and manyotherlineal descents between cultures? Or is it going to be one system for everyone? That could also potentially lead to doing extended families, so are extended families in your plans for near future?
I'm not setting up those systems right now. One of the people is just going to move.
When you meet travelers on the road, will they tell you why they are there? It's one thing to bump into random people in the woods, it's another for them to be all "I'm journeying to Bedscaled to be with my lover!" Especially as development goes on, and people travel between sites for more than two reasons.
This is the intention. I'm going to deal with it when I get the refugees in (which shouldn't be too long now that I'm back to goblin invasions).
If you place your fortress on a busy road. Will the travellers pass through your site in play? If so, could you play as a "bandit camp" waylaying them?
With people moving from site to site, and actually have them travelling, does this mean that if we embark our fort on a road, we might see people from one city travelling to another city, and possibly stop them?
Will this be similar to how adventurers appear when taverns are introduced?
I still have to do the tile interactions with armies, but I suspect they might want to bypass your site if there's nothing to do there, because it's a horrible time sink to them. When we have adventurers, they'll be deciding to stop at your tavern, so the time sink will be part of their calculation. I guess they need a really long drink.
Will travelers detour along roads and through sites in order to avoid wilderness? Will they try to stay the night in sites, or will they camp in the woods and get eaten by bogeymen?
I know inns are certainly out for this release, but I'm wondering if people traveling for peaceful purposes on the map will plan their journeys differently than armies/bandits/dragons plan theirs.
Everybody's col' stupid right now, but they don't have to worry about the same things either. Once they are subject to the horrors of nature and the night, they'll have to be more prudent. I'm not sure when that's going to happen. Probably with inns, like you say. They are good for that sort of thing.
I always wondered if you ever thought of implementing a "research system", where some things became available as certain dates or entities invent/discover/develop them?
I don't think anything will happen with certain dates. I don't have a specific objection to people discovering things, but it requires some kind of starting point, which I haven't really thought about.
Does this mean that loyalty to a civilization or other faction will be tracked like belief in a diety?
I'm just starting this now, but yeah, there's going to be additional information. There was always a "strength" variable for the entity links in historical figures, but it wasn't really used for anything. Now it'll have to be a little more nuanced.
Wil you be able to embark underground? As in, not like in the middle of nothing, but maybe creating a Dwarvern settlment in trading tunnels between Dwarf sites, the same way we can embark on roads in the current build?
Another question, will we see caravans activly traveling on roads/tunnels, so we can trade and raid them? And will caravans actuly take your items back to the mountainhomes? Because in the current version, the items in caravans just vanish when they leave the map.
And another question that I just came up with, will you be able to play as Hill/Deep/Whateverthehyell Dwarves and as them embark in caverns or some other area underground?
You can't embark underground for this release, though we may see that when I get to the start scenarios. Moving groups avoid your fortress right now to avoid the time sink that'll ruin all their plans. I'm not tracking items yet (though traded items are stuffed away for safekeeping already, and have been for quite a while if I remember).
Are the tunnels between settlements going to be completely enclosed or can they be open to the caverns?
Is this upcoming release going to feature any walls as world constructions?
I'm not sure quite how tunnels are going to end up -- right now they are connected through the layers. Walls aren't used yet, though the class has been sitting around forever.
So if there are multiple people vying for power, will each one have an influence with parts of their population? Will the religious sects or other groups eventually start trying to take power? It'd be cool to see a Theocracy or something sprout up.
Yeah, that's the stuff I'm working on now, at least with the basic claim and occupation opinions/factions. We'll get to the religious stuff later. Helgoland mentioned the vampire cultists, and I'm not sure when they'll be activated. It'll be scary when that part from world gen is actually up and running in play.
With the upcoming update, say three Barons/Counts/Dudes are vying for power, and in adventure mode I Butcher two "Convince them to revoke their claims" via my axe, will the 3rd account for this and take power? Or will the dead leaders' sons/daughters/Wives/demon-spawn take over the claims and carry them on?
So if a Dwarven Count has a claim on an open King position, and dies before that claim is resolved, will his heir (or whoever takes over the Count position) pursue that claim on the King position, or will they abandon it if there are other claimants already vying for it?
Will titles be handed down if they are hereditary, such as kings with a line of succession handed down via relatives and bloodlines, do you think the game will account for this I mean? I don't mean the positions and titles themselves, but the claims to those positions? For example a Duke is killed and a Count lays claim to his *Empty* position, will the son of the now dead Duke also have a claim? Or will the son just automatically be made Duke regardless of the claim by the Count? I Guess what I'm asking is could a character have a claim to a position that isn't vacant? And if so will a dispute such as that stop the position being filled once the current holder dies?
The claims are made by historical figures, so the child will re-evaluate and make up their mind. That doesn't involve much now, but they do get to decide. They don't think about how their parent was involved for instance, even if that should be one of the factors. If there's just a single claim for a while, that remaining person will get the spot (though I imagine that'll be subject to some extra testing later). If the position is hereditary and their is an heir, the heir gets the spot before anybody else even has their claim AI kick in, but I imagine that's not going to stop historical figures later on from continuing to fuss.
From this it would seem the the claim system is not complete, so resolution of several claimings is not determined just yet. I guess it could be at random (I would start with that at first if I where programing the game), but maybe we will end up with some fancy mechanic to determinate it, like competitions, assassination attempts (great quests for an adventurer I guess) and even civil war?
Yeah, the whole point of putting in competing claims was to get the succession struggles mentioned on the dev page, for story and gaming purposes. It should be really cool once we get some more actions in for them to take.
Toady how did you get the voice work for Beyond Quality?
I said beyond quality in several silly voices and overlapped them, if I remember. I might have digitally changed the pitch on some of them, but I don't remember if that came up.
Will there be only one aristocratic hirarchy, or will different civs have different noble positions?
will there be people who are related to the nobility, but act like regular citizens unless they have a claim to maneuver? For example, the duke's cousin might not be important enough to warrent his own title or any noble perks, but he might have a tenuous claim on succession to the duchy.
The hierarchy is set up in the raws. Civs like humans and goblins can also generate their own (though it's not very interesting). Hopefully claims will get more interesting over time, but it's pretty basic right now in terms of who is going for what. Extended families have always been a little iffy in DF, and hopefully I can improve that. I haven't done it yet.
Will we be seeing factions develop around opposed claimants to a title? If so will the player see or participate in feuds between rival factions take place in game?
With all the inheritence stuff done now, will the players be able to directly affect the political world by doing quests for historical figures that want to inherit their titles a little sooner, throught means of assasination and/or intrigue? Also, will an adventurer be able to become a king, or obtain any of the positions, and actually influence the world that way?
Yeah, the basic opinion/factions/politics surrounding these things is the current project. I'm not sure what actions you'll be able to take (aside from randomly killing people) -- those'll be added in piecemeal like everything else.
What about wider political consequences? A faction has the king assassinated, that leads to a declaration of war on the nation that was backing that faction, etc. Think Archduke Ferdinand and the First European Unpleasantness.
In a similar vein: How fleshed out will diplomacy be?
There's nothing interesting now, as usual, aside from the basic mechanics, but I'm putting them in to make stuff like that possible.
Will we ever get half elves?
We have them in our stories, and we don't really have objections to it. Sorting out the raw creature definitions is a mess.
Will there ever be a way to specify what the subject of a statue/engraving ought to be?
Probably, yeah. I vaguely remember when it came up before thinking that some dwarves might be happier working on their own stuff, but that they wouldn't really mind working on a more official fortress project sometimes either. I don't have a stylistic objection to it. You can already make very specific mosaics and so on, so being able to carve specific artwork is legitimate as well. I wouldn't want to remove the dwarves' ability to make their own things as well, of course.
For example, would it be possible for the player to become a king as an adventurer, start a war with a civilisation, retire, make a fort to build an army to aid it's civilisation in said war, AND have the adventurer Monarch migrate to your fort?
It's a little early for the player to become a monarch, but we are on the slow march there. Once you get to that point, yeah, having your adventurer monarch migrate to your fort would be automatic.
Will we see some religions have schisms where something like some believing in the divinity of the Demon Glob the Snotball while others claim they are a bunch of heratics, possibly lasting past the destruction of the imitation demon sect leader, maybe creating a dual-religion thing?
Eventually -- that was part of the old Core 63 and as such has migrated over to my new notes, but I don't have a schedule for it.
With the succession in the game, does that mean dwarves will re-marry and so on for the upcoming release? If so, have you or are you going to make any other improvements to the system before the release?
That hasn't changed yet.
Since you are working on Goblin occupations, will you also be doing occupations by other races in this release?
We're starting with goblins, and we're hoping that the succession conflict and other such nonsense will lead to other critters being bad, but they don't send out forces over those concerns yet. It'll either take that or a realization of existing world gen relationships.
Will goblins treat occupations any differently than other races? I could see where goblins are much more brutal than everybody else, and it would be neat if everyone had their own little conquest quirks.
I expect it's not going to be a desired experience, even in this release, whereas changing human/dwarven/etc. leadership might not matter at all sometimes.
With the 1400 technology cutoff are there plans for platinum, aluminium, bismuth, and nickel silver what with them being on the other side of it?
I think people talked about this a bit in the thread, but if I remember aluminum is the only one that's been really controversial. There are native deposits, but I don't know if they are specks or what. I'm not attached to it, if that's all there are.
Toady, how does pairing people up in worldgen work? Does it just randomly pair up different-sex friends, if friend relationships are even tracked in worldgen? And how does it decide who can be friends with whom, if that's how that works?
It doesn't even track friendships right now, and there aren't anything like alliances, so it doesn't try to match people politically. It just pairs them off.
With goblins occupying towns, does that mean they will occupy deep dwarf settlements if the fortresses connected to them fall?
Yeah, they fall more or less under the hamlet category as the human settlements go. Of course, I'm not simulating battles at this time, and having my paltry goblin armies defeat any of the dwarven fortresses is a little cheap. They should have to try harder.
You've mentioned that once this release and the bugfix releases following it are out, you've got several directions to choose from in terms of where to go development-wise. What are some of those directions you're looking at?
Inns and taverns (both modes), dwarf mode start scenarios and hill/deep dwarves (these'll be necessary before we do any dwarf mode army stuff), criminal justice system stuff... but I'm really not sure. And during the bugfix releases, there might be more focused additions as well.
With story generation being one of the main aims I figure romance will be important. I know sex is a difficult topic but will some kind of abstracted lust be present? I ask because it has been an interesting driving force in many stories.
I really don't know at this point. Right now, in the fort, there's the instant where relationships change from "friend" to "lover", and there's some missing stuff there, and the missing stuff can involve all kinds of interesting story stuff like triangles and all that without getting into the sex aspect at all.
When a leader is killed in an attack, will their successor instantly be in power? Or will there be no leader until after the attack has been repelled, if it is repelled?
Also, how does the town defend its self? Is it everyone for themselves? Or are there organized defenses?
Can invaders destroy buildings even if the defenders succeed in repelling them? Do the defenders repair buildings?
It isn't really a question of repelling people at this point, since we haven't gotten to the proper army arc stuff yet. If there's any fighting, it'll be up to you. I haven't set up battles yet.
People will make claims on positions reasonably quickly (not instantly). If the trouble continues for more than a day, you might have a claim made during the trouble.
Will invasions wake up nearby... residents?
Like underground residents? I didn't particularly think about that one. Nothing bugs anybody right now outside of the specific things that you bring about in dwarf mode.
There isn't yet the ability to time-skip, but it's a planned feature. Right now the best you can do is start/abandon a fortress a bunch of times- each new start will cycle the year forward to the next spring. Though actually, with worldgen activities continuing into play, that might change, or be a more involved process. Do world activities advance after an abandon? Will the game simulate world activities before the next fortress is founded?
Dealing with the abandonment/post-adventure time-skip is one of the clean-up things on the menu. It'll have to advance the events, but as you can imagine, that's a reasonably messy process.
do sites expand in worldgen as of the current release, or not besides the general upscaling from town to city?
In world gen the houses/shops expand on a percentage scale, it tracks what sort of work the town has specialized in, and certain specific buildings are tracked (like temples). Population is tracked, as are most of the items numerically. There's quite a bit of information. It just doesn't have a specific map layout, which is why it is easy to get away with anything there.
Will NPC sentients have any chance of becoming necromancers/night creatures after world gen is over?
Not right now, but we'll get there eventually. Every process from world generation will ideally be continued... just not yet.
(regarding debug map viewer)
What potential applications were you thinking of? Divination spells? Scouting reports for generals and the like? "Kingdom Mode?" Something else entirely?
Yeah, that sort of thing. Anything where you'd move a map around in some detail.
When goblins attempt to capture a village, are they hostile to the entire population of the site as to get control of it? Or will they keep their relationships with neutral and even friendly entities already living there?
I'm not sure what you had in mind... the bandits and other criminals? They don't really like anybody.
With the comments on goblins finding food for citizens having to eat, will this include hunting for carnivore races or will those guys still be out of luck and destined to starve in a few years?
The comment was about post world gen, and you sound like you're talking about world gen, since people still don't eat at all after world gen (outside of your fort). So two issues might be being conflated here. Whatever bugs from world gen exist are still bugs.
Can you make Legends Mode accessible from within Dwarf Mode or Adventure Mode, so you don't have to abandon fort to see it?
It's probably legitimate to have some kind of restricted mode, but being able to see everything would spoil stuff, including outside threats to your fortress, vampires and whatever else.
Now that the world is really operating during play, how have you found size of world (or other outside variables) to affect FPS, especially during Dwarf Mode? Is there much of a difference between large and pocket regions, or worlds with more or less history?
It isn't time to really get into that yet, so I'm not sure. I don't think there'll be any issues that I can't make disappear with this stuff.
Since dwarves could now, theoretically, become necromancers during play, do they require any reading skill to get a tome from a god? Or is the skill just granted for them upon recieving their powers? And would it target fort mode dwarves or adventurer dwarves differently than normal?
I haven't continued everything from world gen yet. That'll take more time, and we've already taken way too much of it. Each of the interactions has tags saying whether it is teachable and how, so it'll depend on how the knowledge is given. If the god sets it down on a tablet, and it isn't some kind of magical tablet, the critter will have to read.
Toady, do historical figures post-worldgen gain skills yet? Currently, historical figures spend parts of their lives working as various professions, and they have some matching skills to show for it. Will someone born post-worldgen do the same, or does the world slowly drift toward skillessness? (I mean for the upcoming release, since it is fairly obvious this ought to happen at some point)
Nah, but they don't actually work either, so it's okay for now. Once they start producing things again, hopefully I'll remember to make them better at their jobs. In world gen, they (often) actually work and produce goods, and that's when they get skill.
When goblins raid towns and hunt for leaders, can those leaders and citizens escape? If so, what do they do?
That's the plan. They'll probably just camp out or go to the nearest city and complain to you for now.
Will the military UI be improved next update, or is it for later updates?
I haven't changed anything with it.
Now that all civilized sites will be actively running "forts", does it mean they get properly furnished? I'm tired of seeing those empty houses and keeps.
It isn't that far along yet. Specific furnishings in all the various places, like human keeps, isn't in yet. I'm not sure I even touched those.
To what extent will the move attack speed split be modifiable? Would we be able to give each attack different speeds, ease of being reacted to and so on, or will it be a more basic 'This creature moves at this speed and attacks at this speed'?
Also while on the subject any chance of us seeing some attack examples to see the new tags?
Putnam mentioned the pre/post attack speed settings, and those affect every attack.
I still have one more pass to do before I can put up the raws, since I have to do some more thinking about reaction moments. Hopefully it won't be too long now.
does this mean that some goods produced by the conquered civilisations will appear on the trading list of their overlords now?
And by extension, can we lose access to some goods if the suppliers are conquered?
Basically, how are trade routes affected by site contests?
I haven't done any of this yet. There isn't much of a point working with this until we get production back up -- in that case the actual items we already track will be moving around and I can hopefully scrap a lot of the placeholder information, instead of having to massage it based on conquests and all that.
For the next release, If we, as adventurers, liberate a conquered town, will the game recognize its new status?
Is it even possible to liberate a town, or will the guards respawn when we leave the site, like they do now?
Also, can we enlist the citizens to rebel?
Toady, with the succession and population information going in this release, will it once again be possible to track populations properly in this manner, and permit a town's population to increase or decrease according to population growth rates and player actions? This release or sometime in the near future?
Yeah, we're definitely going to take it to that point. Of all the interesting things that have opened up, that's one of the easier ones to do, and it's one of the ones we're going to use to keep a sense of having something to do in adventure mode, with all the new stuff happening (as hard as it might be to survive right now -- at least using the Toady-approved method of repeated assaults by berserk new adventurers will work).
Enough of the respawning issues will hopefully be solved for the next release. Historical figures have always died, but entity populations act weirdly, and that should be fixed before I release it.
Now that there will be other forts running in real-time, (and also armies), will we be able to see migrant waves in Adventurer mode arriving at other sites, such as fortresses? Or will the sites not increase in population?
They can increase in population through breeding and by marriage (which can also make people leave). I haven't formalized the dwarf mode migrations as army movements yet -- once that's in, I imagine things'll get pretty crazy. I'll probably want the start scenario hill dwarf stuff further along to understand how to best integrate those things into dwarf mode.
With sites, can I start as a human slave in a golbin civ, or a dwarf living under Elven occupation?
I don't think it'll let you start in a goblin civ, regardless of the race you pick. I don't remember if elves occupy anybody in world gen. I haven't set them to attack other sites yet in play. I'm not against either of these scenarios, but in the first case, I haven't written enough conversation etc. stuff up for it to make sense to change it from the way it is now, and the second one just might not happen yet.
To go along with my earlier question on necromancers, will we see recognizable dwarves being entombed, such as a nicknamed general, and go find them again in their afterlife? Also, will adventurers be mummified? And if so, would they be re-playable?
They don't handle the dead yet, as they do in world gen. Every process needs to be done manually, and my world activation has just touched upon some basic important things. Not that handling dead bodies isn't important. The only thing that isn't an eventual yes there is the last one... I haven't really thought about how it would handle your adventurer rising from the dead as an intelligent being after a long break. It might be fun to play them, but I'm not sure when you'd get to shift perspective. It would be funny to see the mummy in the list of available adventurers when you start your next game (assuming they weren't put down already).
Author
Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 3841101 times)