Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Tov01]

Could you elaborate on what your plans for dual-wielding are? And will it be modeled after dual-wielding in real life (i.e. not all that effective in most circumstances), or the more stereotypically "gamey" dual-wielding.

[WillowLuman]

I just hope "pulping" won't be an actual verb ingame, as "strike the swordsman in the left lower arm with your +iron mace+, pulping it!" sounds... bad. Hopefully he just means it as a technical term.

Skin doesn't make much sense as an undead, and neither does having every single product of the creature reanimate. Skin has no structure whatsoever, unlike bone or muscle, and really doesn't have any way of hurting people even if it did flap around. Right now, the skin is treated as having the mass of the entire creature and so breaks bones by "pushing." Also, what's to stop necromancers from just making people's leather clothes kill them if skin reanimates? What's really that different between tanned leather and leathery mummy skin?

Bone also doesn't have much structure. You need tendons and muscles to keep it up, otherwise the skeleton just crumbles. What keeps it together in DF is the necromancer magic, so skeletons raise and attack you. The same thing can be done with muscle, hair and skin. A hollow man, made only of skin. You could argue that it can't hit hard but then again, it's using magic to keep things together, so it probably could. I would be okay with necromancers reanimating tissue, bonding them together to create hollow, hair or muscle only monsters. Of course, they would need to be destructible.

That's the thing though: bone is rigid, and so has structure, while muscle contracts/expands, giving it motion. Zombies have at least one or the other, so they have plausible structural support, with the aid of a little magic, but if the magic could just make anything structurally stable enough to animate, why would pulping work in the first place? If skin, which if separate means it was cut up to be removed, can animate, why not unrecognizably mangled limbs?

Currently, all butchery products except meat, fat, and nervous tissue will reanimate. Shouldn't the act of cutting up a creature into it's individual component tissues break it down enough for it to not work? You can't reanimate a leg, but you can reanimate a solitary leg bone if you butcher the leg? That's how it works in the current release.

I can understand individual animated bones, skulls, and mussel shells (though they shouldn't be lethal, much less equally lethal to a complete zombie), as they have rigid structure to them, but animal peelings?

[Keldane]

I thought things had to have a grasp or be a head (or equivalent thereof) in order to be reanimated in the current version? I've never been able to reanimate legs as a necromancer.

[LordBaal]

Actually that sounds like a more sensitive way to go, as long it has a head and at least an arm keep animated. If it lacks both head and arms its not going to help too much the necromancer in the first place, so maybe he simply stop wasting magic on it.

Today talked about that a bit, however I haven't been playing a lot lately, patiently waiting for the new release, so I wouldn't know exactly how it's working now.

I'm with HugoLuman in that "pulping" sounds... wrong, just wrong.

[Spish]

Currently, all butchery products except meat, fat, and nervous tissue will reanimate. Shouldn't the act of cutting up a creature into it's individual component tissues break it down enough for it to not work? You can't reanimate a leg, but you can reanimate a solitary leg bone if you butcher the leg? That's how it works in the current release.

Looks like someone hasn't played Fortress Mode in a long time. This was changed in the initial wave of bugfixes after DF2012 was released.

[WillowLuman]

I'm pretty sure butchery products till reanimate, including bones and shells.

[My Name is Immaterial]

Currently, all butchery products except meat, fat, and nervous tissue will reanimate. Shouldn't the act of cutting up a creature into it's individual component tissues break it down enough for it to not work? You can't reanimate a leg, but you can reanimate a solitary leg bone if you butcher the leg? That's how it works in the current release.

Looks like someone hasn't played Fortress Mode in a long time. This was changed in the initial wave of bugfixes after DF2012 was released.

I'm pretty sure butchery products till reanimate, including bones and shells.

The wiki says that HugoLuman is right: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Necromancer and http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Zombie.

[arkhometha]

I just hope "pulping" won't be an actual verb ingame, as "strike the swordsman in the left lower arm with your +iron mace+, pulping it!" sounds... bad. Hopefully he just means it as a technical term.

Skin doesn't make much sense as an undead, and neither does having every single product of the creature reanimate. Skin has no structure whatsoever, unlike bone or muscle, and really doesn't have any way of hurting people even if it did flap around. Right now, the skin is treated as having the mass of the entire creature and so breaks bones by "pushing." Also, what's to stop necromancers from just making people's leather clothes kill them if skin reanimates? What's really that different between tanned leather and leathery mummy skin?

Bone also doesn't have much structure. You need tendons and muscles to keep it up, otherwise the skeleton just crumbles. What keeps it together in DF is the necromancer magic, so skeletons raise and attack you. The same thing can be done with muscle, hair and skin. A hollow man, made only of skin. You could argue that it can't hit hard but then again, it's using magic to keep things together, so it probably could. I would be okay with necromancers reanimating tissue, bonding them together to create hollow, hair or muscle only monsters. Of course, they would need to be destructible.

That's the thing though: bone is rigid, and so has structure, while muscle contracts/expands, giving it motion. Zombies have at least one or the other, so they have plausible structural support, with the aid of a little magic, but if the magic could just make anything structurally stable enough to animate, why would pulping work in the first place? If skin, which if separate means it was cut up to be removed, can animate, why not unrecognizably mangled limbs?

Currently, all butchery products except meat, fat, and nervous tissue will reanimate. Shouldn't the act of cutting up a creature into it's individual component tissues break it down enough for it to not work? You can't reanimate a leg, but you can reanimate a solitary leg bone if you butcher the leg? That's how it works in the current release.

I can understand individual animated bones, skulls, and mussel shells (though they shouldn't be lethal, much less equally lethal to a complete zombie), as they have rigid structure to them, but animal peelings?

No, bones make as much sense as skin. Bone is rigid but it can't be keep together without magic. And skeleton-only undead exist. The same way, skin and other things are held together and animated by magic.
If skin can't be held by magic, why a skeleton could be? Bones are hard, but aren't connected to each other.

[WillowLuman]

Connecting bones together is a lot less work than making a skin stay up. A skeleton wired together has a lot more integrity than a skin stitched closed. Plus, if it's just the skin, that means its been peeled off the creature and isn't in an intact shape to begin with, while a whole skeleton is. Why should pulping work if a skin that's been cut into a big sheet with little semblance to it's original shape can still move? Pulping and reanimating peeled skin have to be mutually exclusive, or else it's not consistent.

And hair, hair should certainly not reanimate. Shaved wool from a butchered sheep coming alive is just... awful. Again, as with skin, if Necromancers can raise it, why can't they animate wool fabric? Why can't they make people's wool clothing kill them? Because that would be stupid. But by the logic of being able to reanimate things like hair, pulping should not work and necromancers should reanimate the very soil, since it contains decomposed particles from the dead.

With pulping, hair and rawhide must stay dead. It's simply inconsistent otherwise.

[Putnam]

It's not inconceivable, with the state that the game is in right now, that post-butchered skin is literally a full, intact piece of skin that, if it were to be animated, would appear to be the original creature standing upright.

[Lolfail0009]

There was a similar deal on some children's show about a guy who's scared of everything.

[Keldane]

There was a similar deal on some children's show about a guy who's scared of everything.

You may well be referring to the Soul Eater anime, in which an individual who was scared of everything eventually started to lash out at everything and, consequently, had Death himself remove his skin and use it as a sack in which to bind his now-helpless form. When he's eventually released, he's able to animate his own skin to appear as clothing and to attack, but technically his muscles, bones, and all internal organs were still intact. The skin was just hideously stretched whenever he wanted it to be.

For my part, I really like the idea of being able to reanimate skin separate from the rest of the body. It's creepy, especially with some of the images people made and the suggestions they had on how such a skin would attack when it was first revealed that it was possible. Perhaps 'hollow men' could be specifically reintroduced at a later date with a 'shredding' mechanic? Actually, now that I suggest it, isn't that basically what pulping would represent to a hollow man? The only real difference would be changing their attacks to include strangulation and possibly stretching around peoples' faces to suffocate them.

[Lolfail0009]

Asura is mad, not terrified. Actually scratch that, he totally is.

No, this was definitely not Soul Eater, and
HOW THE HELL COULD SOUL EATER BE CONSIDERED A CHILDREN'S SHOW?

[Cruxador]

Asura is mad, not terrified. Actually scratch that, he totally is.

No, this was definitely not Soul Eater, and
HOW THE HELL COULD SOUL EATER BE CONSIDERED A CHILDREN'S SHOW?

It's anime.

Plus the manga is published as shonen.

[Lolfail0009]

Point taken.