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[NW_Kohaku]

Speaking of re-wording a question... I actually have re-thought my previously rethought question once again, and want to ask it a different way (or rather, a two-part way).

Currently, in Adventure Mode, when I fire a crossbow, it basically means that I'm going to completely lose control of combat for a dozen or so turns.  Everything happens without me being able to even see what is going on, much less react.  (Which doesn't mean much now, but when we get into a mode where we can command our followers, having a commander out of combat for a dozen turns causes problems...) In some cases, I can fire a bolt only to get half a dozen pages of combat reports, and see one unit dead and three others critically wounded with no particular clue as to how things got that way aside from an overly-technical and not-particularly-helpful combat report.  (Which only gives information on actual wounds, not where everyone was, or which alligator was inflicting them.)  Sometimes, a character has fled from combat or fallen into a ravine, and I have no idea where they went.

How will "turns" take place when players can use abilities that take dozens of normal turns?  Will we be able to cancel out of actions or give orders to followers during long wind-ups?

Conversely, what about "held" actions, like a snake coiled and waiting to strike, a crocodile waiting at the water's edge for an ambush, or a thief waiting to pounce on a passerby from hiding, with some sort of wind-up already taken place, and an action primed to go? Will there be a way for "turns" to take place at a pace that makes sense for a player to watch the action and understand what's going on? (Or will held/readied actions not exist at all?)

[hermes]

On the world topology issue Toady has already talked about it in DF talk 5 (which has the best intro by Rain seeker and Captain)....

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Rainseeker:   I just thought it was a funny comment on that one. From Andrew K; 'On world generation you recently noted that the world in game isn't the whole world, i.e. it only has one pole. How permeable is the edge to new things coming in?'
Toady:   Nothing comes in right now, there used to be migrants that were generated on the edges and they would get these foreign culture entities, which would be much like the entities that are within the world except they just have different selections of items and things. And that's the idea right now because when we hit wards there are going to be potential depopulation problems and all kinds of other trouble, and one of the possible solutions of that is just to allow things to come in from the sides. Now I know some people are going to dislike that because if things come in from the sides then the effects that you're having on the world are very local and you might not feel that you have as much control as you want to have over the situation, so certainly an init thing or a world parameter thing most likely that you can just check and be like 'nah, my edges are not permeable'. Then in that case we could even do something like have them always be water, or have them drop off into space. Doing things like having the world be a torus, meaning that the left edge and right edge wrap, or have it be ... I'm not sure what happens if you go in through the top and come out through the top on another side, like if you're actually trying to create a sphere you're probably actually creating some weird projected space, just some mess. The left and right edges wrapping is more like one face of an annulus and then having the top wrapped to the bottom would be very weird, especially if it was from the pole to the desert, that would be a torus but that's ... you know. But any kind of option it just has to be supported by the pathfinding routine, which is easy enough, you just give it a few extra rules; I mean the world pathfinding routine not the dwarf mode pathfinding routine. Although, does that mean that you'd be able to settle a site half on one edge and half on the other, and then you'd have to be able to load those blocks correctly. There are certain annoyances that you get there, like when the adventurer walks through the edge it has to know how to load the blocks correctly. It's not a huge problem but it's a little issue. That's the obstacle there, so that's why we've just gone with this local region, those are the two reasons; first it's the easiest to implement, second it allows you to repopulate regions more easily. But we're open to helping people that want to have rounder more self contained worlds.
Rainseeker:   Very good.

[Trif]

Conversely, what about "held" actions, like a snake coiled and waiting to strike, a crocodile waiting at the water's edge for an ambush, or a thief waiting to pounce on a passerby from hiding, with some sort of wind-up already taken place, and an action primed to go? Will there be a way for "turns" to take place at a pace that makes sense for a player to watch the action and understand what's going on? (Or will held/readied actions not exist at all?)

Just a bit of speculation from my end:
Since there are now attack modifiers based on movement speed for charging and the likes, not moving at all (i.e. skipping a turn) could have an influence on combat as well. So if the player chooses to stand still, the game could interpret this as preparation for a more accurate attack.

[NW_Kohaku]

Just a bit of speculation from my end:
Since there are now attack modifiers based on movement speed for charging and the likes, not moving at all (i.e. skipping a turn) could have an influence on combat as well. So if the player chooses to stand still, the game could interpret this as preparation for a more accurate attack.

What about preparation for... well, just about anything else?

What about if you want to jump higher by crouching down low, and trying to measure the distance to the top of the cliff for a standing jump, rather than a running jump?  What about the difference between aiming a bow and preparing for a melee strike?  What if you're trying to give commands to allies, and are waiting for them to complete a certain task or to back them up if they fail at something.  (I spend time teaching my followers how to swim, for example, getting them into the water, then guiding them out if they start having trouble until they get to novice.) 

For that matter, if there's a difference between movement and other action speeds, when you skip a turn, which speed does the game use to determine when your turn comes up next? 

If we can sit there waiting on a frame-by-frame basis, and we have "reactions" that let us interrupt the actions of another unit, can we just sit there skipping frame-by-frame to interrupt all the actions of an enemy?

What this is doing is starting to merge the difference between the turn-based adventurer mode and the pseudo-real-time of Fortress Mode, and possibly also the real-time of other games.  There's a bit of a reason that most roguelikes don't do this sort of thing - it opens up an even greater complexity than either real-time or most roguelike games have.  (Not that I'm saying it's a bad thing to try doing - it's just that some of the ramifications are a little tricky to swallow.)

[hops]

Will Armok ever appear (read:exist) in the game world? What role would he have? Will he be the patron of the dwarves?

[Mesa]

Will Armok ever appear (read:exist) in the game world? What role would he have? Will he be the patron of the dwarves?

AFAIK, Armok is more like the representation of the player rather than an actual in-game deity to be worshipped.

[hops]

Will Armok ever appear (read:exist) in the game world? What role would he have? Will he be the patron of the dwarves?

AFAIK, Armok is more like the representation of the player rather than an actual in-game deity to be worshipped.

While I guess Three Toe's stories are not the gospel truth for the development plan, he wrote that Armok is a persistent entity that create things.

[LordBaal]

Oh almighty Toad, I have a question for you.

Is there some planing on a better undead system? I mean, it gets tiring to fight animated hair, hides and such, so what I'm really asking is that if you are thinking into a more "classical" representation of undead, where the pieces that fall don't stay alive and ultimately only smashing the head or decapitation would stop the zombies. And if not, do you see a system like that possible to mod?

Related to that, I wonder (and I'm sure this has been asked a thousand times) how much modable you want dwarf fortress to be. What things you will like/plan to left hardcoded in the game and what things you plan ultimately to left in raws?

[NW_Kohaku]

AFAIK, Armok is more like the representation of the player rather than an actual in-game deity to be worshipped.

That's just one of those persistent urban legends...

Our eventual goal is to have the player's role be the embodiment of positions of power within the fortress, performing actions in their official capacity, to the point that in an ideal world each command you give would be linked to some noble, official or commander.

The player is the Expedition Leader/Mayor/Militia Commander/other nobles.  (Unless they're an adventurer, in which case it's even less ambiguous.)

That's part of the point of bookkeepers (you don't have exact accounts of what's in your fort unless you have a bookkeeper tracking it for you) and murders going unnoticed until a dwarf actually sees and reports it.  You don't know something until the fortress command structure could reasonably know something (you're not supposed to be omniscient), and things are progressing further in that direction as time goes on.

Related to that, I wonder (and I'm sure this has been asked a thousand times) how much modable you want dwarf fortress to be. What things you will like/plan to left hardcoded in the game and what things you plan ultimately to left in raws?

It may have changed, but one of his old goals was to raw-ify everything.  It's just that many of the game's older features are hard-coded shortcuts and hacks that are too much trouble for Toady to get around to rewriting any time soon, but at the same time, for the past few years, almost everything but the procedurally-generated stuff is raw-modifiable. 

I'm not sure on how much he even wants to make some of the procedurally-generated creatures raw-modifiable.  (Including the zombies.)  Some things, like HFS, might always be hard-coded, for all I know. 

[LordBaal]

Yeah, that's exactly the kind of things I wonder about it. For example HFS right now can be deactivated by setting the amount of clowns to 0 (I always do). I'm curious of what things Toady could consider(if any) so important and core to the game that he left them hardcoded forever in order to prevent people modding those hypothetical features.

[Knight Otu]

Will Armok ever appear (read:exist) in the game world? What role would he have? Will he be the patron of the dwarves?

Here's a quote about that:

Will Armok ever make an appearance in DF? Like as a deity that all dwarves worship (in addition to their other, lesser gods)?

Right now, you can't for instance add a stock pantheon for a modded race (like one from real-world mythology).  I think when you are able to do that in the raws or an editor or whatever, Armok would probably be a top candidate for stock universe example raws.  Armok has kind of enjoyed the history of being in the original Dragslay, functioned as a joke about the player, served as an explanation for each save game, etc., and for the future, the stock entry is where I'd see it happening.

[LordBaal]

So in the process of making a game we could choose from procedural made deities like right now and pre-made, pantheon like ones? Cool.

[King Mir]

I don't think there's anything that toady considers too important to put in the raws. It's just that putting things in the raws takes dedicated effort, and it's not worth rewriting old code just to put stuff in the raws. When a subsystem gets reworked, then it'll go in the raws.

So for HFS, it's actually possible more details will be modable when Toady reworks how HFS interacts with the world when it is released, particularly if that invloves weakening it.

[EmeraldWind]

Will Armok ever appear (read:exist) in the game world? What role would he have? Will he be the patron of the dwarves?

AFAIK, Armok is more like the representation of the player rather than an actual in-game deity to be worshipped.

While I guess Three Toe's stories are not the gospel truth for the development plan, he wrote that Armok is a persistent entity that create things.

Will Armok ever make an appearance in DF? Like as a deity that all dwarves worship (in addition to their other, lesser gods)?

Right now, you can't for instance add a stock pantheon for a modded race (like one from real-world mythology).  I think when you are able to do that in the raws or an editor or whatever, Armok would probably be a top candidate for stock universe example raws.  Armok has kind of enjoyed the history of being in the original Dragslay, functioned as a joke about the player, served as an explanation for each save game, etc., and for the future, the stock entry is where I'd see it happening.

Here in Knight Otu's quote you see that Armok functions as all of the above. Yes, he will be a god in the game eventually, but he has also been recognized as the player.

And really, in a game where you can decide how your world works when telling your story... if you want to BE Armok then you are Armok. Simple as that. Me, on the other hand, imagine Armok as a sort of anti-zen state that my mind can get into. Armok is that little voice in your head that whispers "ALL BURN " every time an elf walks onto the borders of your fort. When you reach that moment where you give in and let the magma flow that is Armok.

[Scoops Novel]

Have you done anything with Kobold sites?