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[Neonivek]

As well the art style and first sections of Soul Eater are meant to invoke the style of a children's show with its more adult elements comming later. (and don't you DARE mention the fanservice. I've seen childrens anime with tons of fanservice. Heck Marchen Awakens Romance is for kids and it was one step away from being a hentai)

Which, may I add, is becoming extremely common now adays to the point where you REALLY cannot judge the tone of an anime even five episodes in because they often just set up a tone just to intentionally sabatage it later. One that used it that may not be considered bad is "When they Cry" which used the peaceful small town angle to contrast with the horror that was actually going on as well as heighten it further.

Mind you this is terribly terribly off topic.

[Lolfail0009]

True, but led me conclude the tangent with a mention of little miss nekkid cat-that's-not-a-witch.

[O11O1]

Hope you feel better soon, ToadyOne!

You've mentioned that we should be able to still just run into people and trigger our attacks that way. How does that work with ranged attacks? In more general sense, how does the new reaction system apply to ranged combat? Would we have chances to, say, catch the occasional arrow from the air (or just shield block it). Do we get attacks of opportunity on bowmen we've gotten into melee with?

[Putnam]

It doesn't work with ranged attacks; he's talking about the system where you walk into creatures to attack them.

[WillowLuman]

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.

Right now, the post-butchered skin is just an item with a few properties attatched to it. Butchery products, unlike severed body parts, have no defined shape. It's one of those things that isn't actually coded, just implied, like whether a limb is currently flexed or straightened. The reason they kill people is that butchery objects, when animated, are treated as having the mass of the entire, whole creature, so every push is as if some strong person hurled the whole body at you.

[Putnam]

I know. I'm saying that you're making assumptions about shape.

[WillowLuman]

Some things have to be assumed, unless otherwise stated. For instance, waste and sex are implied though not specifically coded. Unless Toady says dwarves actually use some magical process to remove the skin completely intact from the animal, we must assume that they use the real life process of actually cutting the skin and peeling it off.

[Toady One]

Many of the butchery products are just a "meat" item, but I believe the skin is tracked as a "corpse component", which has the potential to track a body's worth of data.  The bones are also stored this way.  I don't remember what else is like that -- the skull probably, but the skull isn't considered a head, and also things like nervous tissue.  So when the bones or skin are raised, it remembers which parts and tissues they are.  If the mass is incorrect, that's just a bug.

[mastahcheese]

Hope you feel better!

Also, on having your character know infoformation on how a battle is going,
Will the amount of information available in combat be based on our observer level or oter skill, or do we just know everything for now?

EDIT: Toady answered in recent devlog.

[Man In Zero G]

Some things have to be assumed, unless otherwise stated. For instance, waste and sex are implied though not specifically coded. Unless Toady says dwarves actually use some magical process to remove the skin completely intact from the animal, we must assume that they use the real life process of actually cutting the skin and peeling it off.

But... That's how skinning works in the real world. It's not like peeling a potato, they take the whole thing off in one big piece, usually with  like 1-3 incisions total:

Case skinning is a method where the skin is peeled from the animal like a sock. One would usually use this method if the animal is going to be stretched out or put in dry storage. Many smaller animals are case skinned, leaving the skin mostly undamaged in the shape of a tube.
Although the method of case skinning individual animals varies slightly, the general steps remain the same. To case skin an animal, it should be hung upside down by its feet. A cut should be made in one foot, and continued up the leg, around the anus and down the other leg. From there the skin can be pulled down the animal as though removing a sweater.
Open skinning is a method where the skin is removed from the animal like a jacket. This method is generally used if the skin is going to be tanned immediately or frozen for storage. A skin removed by the open method can be used for wall hangings or rugs. Larger animals are often skinned using the open method.
To open skin an animal, the body should be placed on a flat surface. A cut should be made from anus to lower lip, and up the legs of the animal. The skin can then be opened and removed from the animal.

So, yeah, when you're skinning an animal, you end up with one, big, animal shaped piece. Which, under "magic logic" means that a necromancer should be able to make a big hollow monstrosity out of it. I've always envisioned the animated skins killing dwarves by wrapping the dwarf up inside itself and constricting till he suffocates, sort of like reverse-wearing the dwarf.

[WillowLuman]

Many of the butchery products are just a "meat" item, but I believe the skin is tracked as a "corpse component", which has the potential to track a body's worth of data.  The bones are also stored this way.  I don't remember what else is like that -- the skull probably, but the skull isn't considered a head, and also things like nervous tissue.  So when the bones or skin are raised, it remembers which parts and tissues they are.  If the mass is incorrect, that's just a bug.

Oh, thanks for clearing that up. Still, doesn't getting skin requiring butchering the main part part of a corpse? (the UPPER_BODY bit)

I know how skinning works in real life, and I still don't think a removed outer layer counts as whole enough to start moving. That said, they don't kill by constriction, they kill by blunt force in the game. And if skin and hair reanimates, what's to stop necromancers from just animating people's clothes and constricting people to death? If a severed limb reanimates, and skin reanimates, then logically any piece of leather, fur, or hide clothing should too. In fact, what's to stop them from just having people's dandruff stand up and burrow into their skull?

For the record, no one's defending animated hair/wool, right?

[laularukyrumo]

I say keep it in because, one, it makes the game more FUN, and two, because zombie-aided wool farms are A-OK.

Plus, watching your ARMY OF REANIMATED HAIR-GOLEMS strangle entire cities to death? priceless.

[Eric Blank]

Animated fluff is kinda silly, and as far as combat goes, nearly completely harmless. Unless it's method of killing you is to shove itself down your throat; that could technically be fatal due to suffocation.

If hair/wool-based undead persist, I'd say we ought to make sure they can't push you to death or something, or that dwarves just kinda laugh and blow them away with a little slap. Perhaps their main purpose as an undead is to serve as a sort of creepy apparition to frighten dwarves like ghosts. But made of hair.

[WillowLuman]

I say keep it in because, one, it makes the game more FUN, and two, because zombie-aided wool farms are A-OK.

Plus, watching your ARMY OF REANIMATED HAIR-GOLEMS strangle entire cities to death? priceless.

Why stop there? Why not give necromancers control over every piece of matter that was ever part of any living creature? In fact, necromancers should just be omnipotent. That would save us a lot of trouble. It's not as if they're already overpowered, and extremely annoying when you're not controlling them. It's not as if Toady was introducing pulping to make them more balanced or have them make more sense or anything.

Toady wants consistency, as can be evidenced by removing the arbitrary hitpoint system. But in the case of reanimated wool, the distinction between free floating wool and clothes is also arbitrary. To be consistent, there must either be no hair zombies, or hair zombies and clothes zombies. Furthermore, hair was never even living tissue in the first place, so it can't be dead tissue. And this non-living excretion by living organisms can revive, but clumps of actual meat and nervous tissue don't?

They don't because porkchops and sirloins and extracted nerves are technically "pulped" because they're so chopped up. Clumps of non-living keratin are even more unsuitable. And really, push attacks need a rework, mass translates directly into damage (which is why giant sponges kill people).

[Bronze Dog]

I don't have too much trouble imagining animated skins doing a "hollow man" act or attacking like a blob. I don't see them as a brute force sort of horror, more a "ambush, envelop, and suffocate" thing, which would probably take some basic intelligence. If this were D&D, I wouldn't make it something necromancers regularly do, or something that'd regularly self-animate in evil places, more a specialty undead monster that requires extra attention in some way or another. But since this is Dwarf Fortress, I don't know how to restrict it to that. I'd probably favor removing the animation of skin over making it a generic undead thing.

And yeah, I'm against animated hair/wool. An additional technical excuse: As I see it, hair's not really "alive" when it's still attached to a living person and growing, so it can't really die.