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[Eric Blank]

With the addition of jumping, will invaders now be able to leap over a 1 z-level walls? Can they climb on rough walls?

Not in the next version; Toady hasn't and won't be doing the climbing pathing for AI. It'll probably come up in the future.

Right now, combat physics don't seem to account for some things. For example, it doesn't seem that the skull round shape mitigates the effects of impacts it suffers as it happens IRL. As a consequence, we have strange things like dwarfs breaking each other skulls with punchs and a lot of skull breaking in general. The same thing can somewhat be applied to arrows vs armor, they don't seem to account the armor shape in impact. Since we had a combat overhaul, does this theorized unintended deficiency (bug? I don't know a better word for it) stills stands, it's somewhat better or it's completely removed? If it's not and I'm right about this, do you plan to do something about it in the future?


Simple example, not mine, of someone breaking a skull after being thrown by the thumb.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

He's acknowledged this problem before and said he'll deal with it in the future, but he hasn't stated that he's reworked how impacts affect tissues, made shape of a body part or impacting object affect that or anything of the sort for this release, so it's probably going to have to wait until he actually decides to go into the combat arc directly.

[arkhometha]

With the addition of jumping, will invaders now be able to leap over a 1 z-level walls? Can they climb on rough walls?

Not in the next version; Toady hasn't and won't be doing the climbing pathing for AI. It'll probably come up in the future.

Right now, combat physics don't seem to account for some things. For example, it doesn't seem that the skull round shape mitigates the effects of impacts it suffers as it happens IRL. As a consequence, we have strange things like dwarfs breaking each other skulls with punchs and a lot of skull breaking in general. The same thing can somewhat be applied to arrows vs armor, they don't seem to account the armor shape in impact. Since we had a combat overhaul, does this theorized unintended deficiency (bug? I don't know a better word for it) stills stands, it's somewhat better or it's completely removed? If it's not and I'm right about this, do you plan to do something about it in the future?


Simple example, not mine, of someone breaking a skull after being thrown by the thumb.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

He's acknowledged this problem before and said he'll deal with it in the future, but he hasn't stated that he's reworked how impacts affect tissues, made shape of a body part or impacting object affect that or anything of the sort for this release, so it's probably going to have to wait until he actually decides to go into the combat arc directly.

Thanks for the info, Eric Blank!

[Caldfir]

There seem to be a number of things sitting around waiting for a pathfinding rewrite.  Most notably flyer/swimmer pathfinding being sort of crazy, but with the upcoming new release there is climbing and jumping, and on the horizon there is potential digging and construction.  Gonna be one hell of a rewrite once it comes, which by the sounds of things will most likely be along with "improved sieges", since that's the one item that simply doesn't work at all until the pathfinding is working (at least not as it's been described). 

Though when that might be is completely unknown

It's going to be interesting to see how all that eventually works it's way to fort mode.  I can imagine strange bugs with dwarves scaling cavern walls and swimming through underground lakes to fetch wads of silk on the cave floor and all kinds of craziness.  What's going to be hard is representing these abilities without having them used all the time.  Maybe someone would scramble over a wall if faced with an imminent threat, but it's much less likely for anyone but some kind of parkour gymnastics ninja to do so while carrying a baby and a load of lumber.  There are many strange cases that need considering.  Stuff to look forward to though. 

[DG]

Right now, combat physics don't seem to account for some things. For example, it doesn't seem that the skull round shape mitigates the effects of impacts it suffers as it happens IRL. As a consequence, we have strange things like dwarfs breaking each other skulls with punchs and a lot of skull breaking in general. The same thing can somewhat be applied to arrows vs armor, they don't seem to account the armor shape in impact. Since we had a combat overhaul, does this theorized unintended deficiency (bug? I don't know a better word for it) stills stands, it's somewhat better or it's completely removed? If it's not and I'm right about this, do you plan to do something about it in the future?


Simple example, not mine, of someone breaking a skull after being thrown by the thumb.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

From the most recent DF Talk (21):

[01:25:51] Z: "Are you planning to make skulls and brains a little more tough? Every fight seems to end with the skull being jammed through the brain."

T: "Well, hopefully this is already fixed for the next release. I didn't add...I didn't go quite the direction, I guess I wanted to end up going there, by adding more geometric information to the parts and stuff to kind of explain what the part looks like. There just wasn't enough time but I made them larger. I mean, I don't remember, they were kind of a ridiculous size. So the largeness for now I think helps enough.
 And if we wanna get them back to a, I don't know, appropriate size and geometry and hardness, and all that, it might get tweaked later on. But I've been pretty happy with the results of sitting there and sort of boxing someone in the head over and over and not just having their skull collapse after a few hits. It takes quite a bit more in the next release."

[arkhometha]

From the most recent DF Talk (21):

[01:25:51] Z: "Are you planning to make skulls and brains a little more tough? Every fight seems to end with the skull being jammed through the brain."

T: "Well, hopefully this is already fixed for the next release. I didn't add...I didn't go quite the direction, I guess I wanted to end up going there, by adding more geometric information to the parts and stuff to kind of explain what the part looks like. There just wasn't enough time but I made them larger. I mean, I don't remember, they were kind of a ridiculous size. So the largeness for now I think helps enough.
 And if we wanna get them back to a, I don't know, appropriate size and geometry and hardness, and all that, it might get tweaked later on. But I've been pretty happy with the results of sitting there and sort of boxing someone in the head over and over and not just having their skull collapse after a few hits. It takes quite a bit more in the next release."

Oh, I didn't hear the latest DF Talk, so that makes my question redundant. Sorry. Thanks a lot for the quote, DG!

[Muffindog]

From the most recent DF Talk (21):

[01:25:51] Z: "Are you planning to make skulls and brains a little more tough? Every fight seems to end with the skull being jammed through the brain."

T: "Well, hopefully this is already fixed for the next release. I didn't add...I didn't go quite the direction, I guess I wanted to end up going there, by adding more geometric information to the parts and stuff to kind of explain what the part looks like. There just wasn't enough time but I made them larger. I mean, I don't remember, they were kind of a ridiculous size. So the largeness for now I think helps enough.
 And if we wanna get them back to a, I don't know, appropriate size and geometry and hardness, and all that, it might get tweaked later on. But I've been pretty happy with the results of sitting there and sort of boxing someone in the head over and over and not just having their skull collapse after a few hits. It takes quite a bit more in the next release."

Oh, I didn't hear the latest DF Talk, so that makes my question redundant. Sorry. Thanks a lot for the quote, DG!

Do check it out when you can. A lot of interesting topics get covered and a lot is said about the new combat overhaul.

[arkhometha]

Toady, you mentioned a long time ago:

I'm not opposed to setting cage traps in trees although I think most anything to do with trees is premature until I handle multi-tile trees.  Elves might be the first to set traps up there.

Now that you handled multi-tile trees, can we place traps up in trees and do elfs do it?

[PigtailLlama]

About the skull thing, has densities been implemented into the game? Sounds like a dwarf's head doesn't need to be bigger, but more denser (both figuratively and literally). Not dense enough that a falling boulder would bounce some poor dwarf's head without leaving a dent, of course...

[Putnam]

About the skull thing, has densities been implemented into the game? Sounds like a dwarf's head doesn't need to be bigger, but more denser (both figuratively and literally). Not dense enough that a falling boulder would bounce some poor dwarf's head without leaving a dent, of course...

Density has been around for a long time. I think you're referring to thickness, though, or bulk/young's modulus, all of which are pretty much in the game. Lead is hella dense, but if your skull were made of it, it could be crushed pretty easily.

[DG]

Toady, you mentioned a long time ago:

I'm not opposed to setting cage traps in trees although I think most anything to do with trees is premature until I handle multi-tile trees.  Elves might be the first to set traps up there.

Now that you handled multi-tile trees, can we place traps up in trees and do elfs do it?

The following quotes in the spoiler from the latest  talk don't address your question specifically but they give the impression that nothing new has been done with traps and that any changes are likely to wait for a more specific mechanics release.  When that goes in traps as they are now will probably be replaced with more component pieces that require something more from the player, whether that be more thought and planning or resources or time and space, I don't know.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

"Do you have any future plans for liquid pressure? Will more powerful pumps ever make pump stacks obsolete and will volcanoes ever erupt?""

T: "Don't have specific plans for liquid pressure. I mean we're always open to people's ideas about that. We're not sort of engineering or mechanically minded people so as much as anything we rely on the community to come up with ideas that kind of fit within our sort of fourteen hundredths plus dwarfiness time frame. And you know if there's ways besides the Archimedean screw or whatever that people have for pump ideas, and we can kind of think of how to make that work CPU wise with the liquid model, we're all for whatever is feasible there.
 For a volcano...I mean, it would be sad to have volcanoes and not to have them erupt." *laughs*

"Are conveyer belt buildings anywhere in the plans?""

T: "I don't specifically recall. We already have those mine cart rollers, so that's practically a conveyer belt already. And just anything that's feasible. We have a list of machines and devices and parts of devices that people have come up with that they think fits within the time frame. There's a big arc for that actually. Working on that stuff. So if people come up with different feasible ideas for conveyer belts we don't have anything against it. I mean, it's not gonna be like modern or anything, but whatever fits we're willing to put it in. It's dwarfy enough."

"Are magmatic pistons ever going to be implemented? It would be fun to move z-levels around once you get enough resources.""

T: "Well...So we did promise moving fortress pieces. We don't really know what that's going to involve. If that involves taking a rope and hauling things around a shaft like an elevator. If that involves, you know, magma driven mechanized mech fortresses with particle projection cannons or whatever that shoot magma at people. Who knows what people will come up with once we put in the mechanics,
 Fluid, messing with fluids is always annoying. Because fluids take so much processing time and so on. So I'm not sure what exactly's going to come out of it. As I said earlier with mechanisms and machines, we don't really have a feel for that stuff so people just come up with their specs and ideas and when we get to the moving fortresses, if people have stuff for us to look at, we're gonna consider everything and there's gonna be a whole lot of stuff going in at that time. All kinds of bits and pieces.
 We're gonna try and think about making things as, sort of, into their little constituent elements as much as possible so that people can realize all kinds of different machines and not just go by some script that we wrote for them. So yeah, just keep throwing ideas at us on that stuff and when we get to it we're going to do some interesting things hopefully."

And this quote relates to things like caltrops now being lower hanging fruit from a development point of view because they can be adapted from the spatter system.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

(C = Capntastic, R = Rainseeker, T = Toady)

C: "So...Is there eventually going to be like, in the near future, like throwing caltrops down or making little traps or tying wire across a room and tripping people or making people step on things like broken glass or whatever. Is that gonna be, it seems like all that stuff could be kind of feasible at this point."

T: "It is. It is more feasible now. We have, ever since we added the trees having all...I don't even remember what they're called in the raws now. They're called like "plant growths" or something like that. But the trees have leaves and I used all the different kind of samaras or whatever the flying keys are called or whatever, I don't remember anymore. There's the kind of thing that I had some retention of the names and words when I was just copying down lists of plant parts and so on.
 But there're lots of new things in the game. Flowers and leaves and so on and fruit and that kind of thing. Finally can have a fruit fight in Dwarf Fortress. Although I imagine that thrown things are still a little more lethal than they should be. *laughs*"

R: "Urist McDwarf killed by apple."

[31:01] T: "Yes. Our apples definitely will be a killer. So what that led to though, especially during fall, when all of the leaves fall off the trees, is that it led to these...Couple things it led to. Item clouds which are kind of like, they are stored like a breath attack or a mist. But they're cloud of small items and then, when they land on the ground, they turn into an item spatter. So we can start thinking about...At least it's another way to think about a lot of small objects like broken glass or lots of little caltrops or coins for that matter. But also lots of other stuff.
 And there's information lost as usual which isn't necessarily a bad thing when it comes to not wanting to track the specific information of every little object when it comes down to that level. And yeah, stuff like that becomes more feasible because the feet interact with spatter of all kinds and so you could definitely see some of that stuff happening. Of course I have no idea when, but it's all on the table now. With the new storage system makes interesting things possible.
 I think you can already mod in item cloud breath or whatever, if you want to breath...If you want to make a modded creature breath little daggers at people, you could add a little dagger like the carving knives or whatever, from the tool raws you can have them breath forks at people or something."

[Kyphis]

With the new climbing being implimented, what are the odds of seeing/constructing fences that block most animals, but only cost extra movement (take longer) for things with climbing or sentience? It would be interesting to see Adventure mode towns be able to have livestock pens and fences around their crops.

[tfaal]

You said in the Bay12 report that bandits won't be hanging out around wells this release. Should this be taken to mean that the previously mentioned feature of bandits harassing townsfolk and getting in fistfights with the player is out for this release? If so, is there any way for the player to get into a nonlethal fistfight without angering the town's populace?

[Knight Otu]

You said in the Bay12 report that bandits won't be hanging out around wells this release. Should this be taken to mean that the previously mentioned feature of bandits harassing townsfolk and getting in fistfights with the player is out for this release? If so, is there any way for the player to get into a nonlethal fistfight without angering the town's populace?

That's not how I'm reading the report - he said they're on hold (presumably in fixing or expanding), not that they're gone.

[Mopsy]

That's not how I'm reading the report - he said they're on hold (presumably in fixing or expanding), not that they're gone.

My impression of the report for June was that bandits harassing townspeople are on hold because: A - they are using up valuable dev time and B - there's nothing your adventurer can do with them (e.g. interrogate them, drag them to the sheriff) once they yield. Adding more ways to deal with yielding ruffians seems to have been ruled out for the coming release.

interrogations and temporary prisoners (features I'm not willing to add for the release at this late juncture)

Whether bandits will still show up in towns in some way in the release is apparently an open issue.

We'll see how that turns out.

[hermes]

I dunno, think you're reading too much into that, possibly?  Toady just said loitering at the well was out for the moment, nothing more.  Bandits showing up and harassing people has been on the table for a long time.  I got the impression this feature trimming (how wonderfully rare it is!) just applied to post-ultra violence behavior.    ...