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Author Topic: Future of the Fortress  (Read 3826721 times)

Rose

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5925 on: April 05, 2013, 06:34:47 pm »


  • Which tiles will be used for the trees?
  • Have you given any more thought to allowing us to split the graphics off the curses_640x300.png so we can create proper tilesets?
  • Is the code already in place to do all that? We can already create tiles for all the animals and humanoids, since we can access their raw files.
  • Do you have a timeline to "rawify" all the things we don't have access to currently?

1.
2. You already can.
3. You already can.
4. No.

Also http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-11402-trees_slope
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eux0r

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5926 on: April 05, 2013, 09:47:17 pm »

i wonder if we will ever get something cool like the front view from the dfma in the main game. holds great potential, especially for adventurer-mode.
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WillowLuman

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5927 on: April 05, 2013, 10:05:51 pm »

Right now, trees seem fairly gigantic in comparison to most buildings and people. Each seems about 3-6 z levels high, while most human buildings are 1-3. The trunks are 2x2 but people are just 1 tile, making each tree like some kind of great big baobab or sequoia.
Your perception of scale is all kinds of messed up. Do you live in a city or something? There's very few trees that don't get to be twice the height of a single story house in just a few years, and double the width of a human can be as little as a few decades. Since these are presumably natural-growing trees (rather than planted by landscapers or loggers) many of them are likely hundreds of years old. The current size/shape seems to be modeled on oaks, and is appropriate to a lot of deciduous trees. It would be cool to see some trees that really do redwoods justice, but they would be a lot taller than anything in the game currently, besides geological features such as mountains. I believe they're not in because of the hardware issues implicit in calculating all those extra Z-levels, although a fort or elven encampment in a redwood forest would be incredibly awesome.

But the trees even surpass many human forts, which is obviously not so good for the fort. And if 2x2 is supposed to be the size of an average bedroom, then that's an enormous tree. An adult human can wrap his/her arms around or almost around most trees.

You are confusing sleeping quarters in a wealthy area of modern society with those of medieval peasants. And you are confusing trees that have been around for a relatively short period (read: almost all trees you're likely to have seen, unless you live in the right place) with trees that have stood for millennia (most of which near where most people live have long (and I really do mean long here) since been felled.

There are very few tree species with natural lifespans that long. And I'm not confusing wealthy modern bedrooms with medeival ones. A tree the girth of a room which can hold a bed, a chest, and a cabinet is a very fat tree indeed. Hell, even a tree with the girth of just a bed is huge. The trees I can think of which approach that size are redwoods, sugar-cone pines, sequoias, figs, baobabs, and certain tropical hardwoods. Oaks, spruces, elms, firs, willows, maples, larches, yews, fruit trees, and pretty anything else you'd find outside a rainforest doesn't approach that girth. I live in a suburb and often visit mountains and national forests, and I've seen giant sequoias up close.

As for Z-levels, I don't think 1 z-level equals 1 foot, more like 10. 20 z levels should be sufficient to represent a redwood or giant sequoia. Using that math, that makes mountains around 2,000-4,000 feet high, a realistic mountain size.
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mastahcheese

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5928 on: April 05, 2013, 10:41:41 pm »

Well, you have to realize that these are dwarven beds that you are comparing them to, after all.
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The Derail Thread

King Mir

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5929 on: April 06, 2013, 01:00:12 am »

Yeah the trees are fat, but they aren't particularly tall. Toady did talk about 30z or 20z tall trees being possible, but that was before he implemented them. 27z would be like the Grant Tree.

DG

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5930 on: April 06, 2013, 01:06:38 am »

Yeah the trees are fat, but they aren't particularly tall. Toady did talk about 30z or 20z tall trees being possible, but that was before he implemented them. 27z would be like the Grant Tree.

Which has a trunk diameter of about 5m, right? What're the dimensions of a tile meant to be again?

With pulping coming to prevent Necromancers and reanimation to be too strong, do you plan to ever add a limit to the number of corpses a necromancer is able to reanimate at a time ? With something like a necromancer skill to increase our corpse cap and/or our range. And making reanimating creature that are far stronger than us possibly go berserk because of its strong will being able to be partially free from our control over them, but not being strong enough to be sane.

From the wiki: "Necromancers who have a sufficient following may use their zombie slaves to build dark towers, a task that requires at least 50 followers" http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Necromancer
DF doesn't seem like the type of game that wants to allow the AI to do things that the player couldn't theoretically do so I assume you would be able to get at least that many followers and probably more. Of course there's a difference between directly controlling that many zombies as a fighting force and simply animating them like puppets. So there's merit in considering limits on how it would work and a sense of the "strength" of different necromancers that is not tied exclusively to how many zombies they curently have. But that's when questions start becoming suggestions. I'd guess that Toady hasn't thought about it much yet.
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King Mir

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5931 on: April 06, 2013, 03:11:21 am »

Yeah the trees are fat, but they aren't particularly tall. Toady did talk about 30z or 20z tall trees being possible, but that was before he implemented them. 27z would be like the Grant Tree.

Which has a trunk diameter of about 5m, right? What're the dimensions of a tile meant to be again?

2x2x3, in meters.

General Grant is 8.8 meters wide at the base, not counting the root spread. So that'd be near enough to 4 tiles wide.
« Last Edit: April 06, 2013, 03:22:58 am by King Mir »
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Wastedlabor

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5932 on: April 06, 2013, 03:59:58 am »

DF planet has 150% Earth's gravity. That's why you get so many dwarves and fat trees. :o
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Lolfail0009

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5933 on: April 06, 2013, 04:59:03 am »

And why the mantle lies not 200 metres below the surface.

smirk

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5934 on: April 06, 2013, 07:37:57 am »

The trees are getting their own raw files. Toady hasn't specified what exactly will be in them, but it's a reasonable bet you'll be able to specify things like height, trunk width, branch spread/density, growth rates, and so on. So there's likely to be at least one or two 'Realistic Trees' mods.

Relevant quote:
Quote from: CLA
When you say "it can all be changed in the raws" do you mean the graphical representation only or the growth parameters as well?
Quote from: smirk
How much control over plant growth will we have in the raws? Will it be fairly basic, as now, or will we have things like MAX_HEIGHT, CANOPY_SHAPE and LIMB_DENSITY?

The growth parameters are all in there.
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his moist amphibian skin
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Wastedlabor

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5935 on: April 06, 2013, 08:10:20 am »

So there's likely to be at least one or two 'Realistic Trees' mods.

Realistic trees, who wants that. I'm thinking already how to attach web spitting tentacles as tree limbs.
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I wonder, what would they do if someone killed their king.
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eux0r

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5936 on: April 06, 2013, 08:11:59 am »

Spoiler (click to show/hide)
also, i already asked toady about the relation of tree height to width seen on the pictures he posted and he answered the trees seen on the pictures were still subject to change. so he was at least made aware of the super-fat-tree-problem when he was working on trees
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Manveru Taurënér

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5937 on: April 06, 2013, 08:27:27 am »

While tree sizes could use some tweaking they aren't really that far off. It's also good to remember that tile sizes are all just approximations, a tree taking up 2x2 tiles doesn't mean that it's 4x4 meters, it meant that tree is somewhere between 2 and 4 meters in width. I agree things might be a bit over the top at the moment but not that far off (And we've yet to see what variation there'll be between different tree types as well)

Trees really can get much larger than what most people think though (even commonly considered "smaller" tree species). The really wide ones though are usually found outside of forests in more open and fertile areas. Trees adapt their growth pattern to their surroundings, growing wider but shorter if they have no competition for sunlight and lots of space, and taller but slimmer in denser forests where they have to compete for the available sunlight and growing taller than their neighbors gives an advantage. While this would be awesome to see simulated it would probably not be worth the effort though.

Regardless, I doubt Toady has put much effort into validating growth values for every single tree species in the game to correspond perfectly to reality (and he really shouldn't), as this is the perfect example of the type of thing we the community can help with and have done in the past. We just have to wait until the release and then we can check and cross-check the different growth values for each species and supply data and sources to Toady for any that might tweaking and he can quickly change the values for the next release ^^
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arkhometha

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5938 on: April 06, 2013, 10:25:27 am »

Regardless, I doubt Toady has put much effort into validating growth values for every single tree species in the game to correspond perfectly to reality (and he really shouldn't), as this is the perfect example of the type of thing we the community can help with and have done in the past. We just have to wait until the release and then we can check and cross-check the different growth values for each species and supply data and sources to Toady for any that might tweaking and he can quickly change the values for the next release ^^
Basically this. We can do some research and petition Toady so we have realistic trees done by a community effort.

Also, I'm fairly certain that some of these trees are meant to be elven retreat trees, that are magically larger because elves aren't apes and thus can't live in branches (without houses).
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King Mir

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5939 on: April 06, 2013, 11:38:44 am »

The community's ability to add realism is limited by what Toady foresees though. If an option isn't in the raws, it can't be tweaked.
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