I've been messing around with fertility today and have a few questions.
Are there any plans for raw-ing gestation/incubation/child spacing intervals?[/color] At the moment if I understand correctly - given the presence of an appropriate male - civilized females can give birth again as soon as their children grow from Baby to Child; domestic viviparous animals have a litter every year; and domestic oviparous animals have bugs with un-fertilizable clutches such that I don't even know what the intent is there. I want elephants to give birth less often than dogs, and I want to be able to breed giant insects without significantly lengthening their lifespans.
Will we ever be able to designate which CASTEs can pair up with each other in monogamous species? What about the ability to designate which castes in which combinations produce other castes?[/color] E.g., let's say I have castes named after colors; will there ever be a way I can designate that a Red can only mate with a Blue or a Yellow, and that the Red&Blue combination will produce a Purple, and the Red&Yellow combination will produce an Orange?
What about defining castes as life phases, a la insect and amphibian life cycles, with creatures moving through very different physical stages as they mature?[/color]
Are there any plans for allowing the adoption of orphaned infants?[/color]
It's worth noting that this thread is for questions about current development- namely, things that are going to be in the next release. That said, these are the kinds of question that would be appropriate for
DF talk (
forum thread,) and much more likely to be answered there.
Also, I don't have a quote but I'm pretty sure the last one is "yes, no timeline." And you can fake life cycles using interactions (though that has the downside of completely healing the target.)
@Noble Digger, UI improvements are one of those things that lots of people ask for, and Toady
knows lots of people want, but he's extremely reluctant to spend time on it since the time spent improving the UI is time spent not adding content, and there's a significant probability that he'd just have to do it over again when a new content release renders it obsolete.
Or, to more directly address your specific question, no, there are not any near-future plans for an interface overhaul, whether in general or in regards to building/constructions. As LordBaal mentioned, it probably won't change until the next time he changes the way that aspect of the game works, or if he makes changes to another part of the game that would transfer over (for example, off the top of my head the earliest he might touch this would be Adventure Mode constructions, which were on the old list of near-term goals, though that list is itself obsolete.)