Thanks to MrWiggles, Footkerchief, HugoLuman, mastahcheese, Putnam, Valtam, Knight Otu, Trif, lethosor, and anybody I missed for helping out this time. If you don't see your question below, it was likely addressed by one of these fine people right after you asked it.
Will we see dreams going for a specific skill? One that is hopefully useful.
Also, will the dreams have some kind of effect on gameplay or are they just personality flavor right now?
That's the plan, though I'm not sure if that'll happen now or a little bit later. I had wanted to do it, since it interacts pretty directly with dwarf mode. I think I had an answer to the second question last time, that we're just aiming for happiness-type effects now when they are accomplished, but nothing entirely special. Dwarves don't have a lot of choice in their work, so the chase for the dream isn't really under their control. I'm not sure how that'll change in the future. It would probably involve a wholesale gutting of the labor list choice thing, and some care would have to be taken there, since people still need to have a game to play. As the "official will of the fortress", it would be neat to have economies that are controlled and ones that are free-wheeling, with different effects, but the more stuff the more work.
If a dwarf has a fear or a dislike for something, say they really hate being outdoors... will they freak out if they go outdoors? If this is the case, if you were to get a migrant dwarf that was scared of the outdoors, would they not freak out right away and unable to move? Not sure how fears or dislikes will alter the behavior of a dwarf.
We don't have specific phobias yet other than the old vermin ones. If you're referring to typical dwarves now finding "nature disturbing", the new values are pretty simple now -- it's a positive/negative scale, but the sentences have to say something, so a negative sometimes sounds like it might imply a specific phobia/whatever. It's still something that needs to be fleshed out. It'll be one of the big challenges of the philosophy/religion section, having the ability to address issues with more variety, and I imagine it overlaps with psychological quirks. Then it's just the work of having that matter at those places where dwarves have the freedom to make decisions. We're still embryonic at the moment, and while the values will be used in places that'll cause difference in dwarven behavior, I don't think there'll be dwarves broken down in front of trees quite yet.
Thinking of trees, is there any chance of something like this happening? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bialbero_de_Casorzo]
In a similar line of thought, will we be seeing epiphytes in DF? If not now, eventually? Also I'm referring to things like bromeliads and some orchids. Although having moss and lichen growing on trees would be neat and would just be a description and perhaps a tile change rather than a full blown plant with complete raws. So, moss and lichen on trees would be doable in a shorter timeframe.
Having a tree like that is technically possible and would be supported by the current code -- the difficulty is hollowing out the center of the lower tree to open up a tile for the upper tree to grow from, and I don't think there are currently ways for that to happen... maybe a fire that you control with water in some elaborate way.
MrWiggles brought up moss being in the game in a specific case, and vines are clearly necessary for a credible general fantasy game. The existing moss is just a tile flag, but it would probably work better in conjunction with a fully realized raw definition and then we could just use the existing framework for grass, so memory wouldn't be much affected (and at the same time, you could then pick some/harvest some and have it work right). I'm not sure when I'll get to vines... at some point there'll have to be giant dwarf-eating flowers and stuff too.
If one were to make a tree farm underground, would the "cave in" mechanics break through and fall to lower z levels provided the level below is empty?
Like if the tree catches on fire? I'm trying to remember when it still uses cave-ins for trees. If you chop down a tree underground, it turns into projectile items, and those'll be floor-safe. But yeah, if you get a cave-in on a tree, it falls as powerfully as anything. I don't think there are different cave-in mechanics for any material, and there should be all sorts of things.
Will goblins be automatically hostile to an adventurer? Is there any way to go to a goblin site to trade or get quests?
The main issue is that we don't have the justice system, which involves code for moving and incarcerating the player, so goblins patrolling their own sites aren't left with many options. So for now, they will probably err on the side of murdering you (just as elves/dwarves err on the side of letting you in without issue), to keep their leaders protected and their prisoners secure. They might engage in the generic stop routines we've got for a bit of show first, from bandit harassmnet, but they can't do much with it. If I remember, we had a power goal involving trade with goblins, and we're still all for that, but not for this time.
Are there any plans to include things like multilingual exogamy (I know it isn't a priority right now)? I just think it would be a neat feature down the road, which could lead to all sorts of interesting situations with different civ interactions.
Example of multilingual exogamy can be found here: http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/300
There aren't many specific plans, though we had some dev notes about difference in language being respected. Right now, fort mode trade and adv mode reading/speaking don't respect language at all, so we have to start from a very basic place and move forward.
Toady, will adventurers have dreams/values now because of the new personalities? And what are the primary values of the other races? (i.e for elves, "Like others in his culture, he wants to preserve all plantlife."
We haven't done anything with adventurer personalities yet. There are various previous discussions and the pros and cons and pitfalls there. We've found in some tests that it can be fun and role-play-ey to have some personality stuff to monitor, and it wasn't too annoying or stifling, but we'll have to see how it plays out.
I still have to fill out the numbers for the other races, but yeah, they'd read like that. The sentences are done. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to be able to let any values float yet -- humans should have pretty random value sets, but I might not do that yet since it takes more text to support the conversations and it might shut down the few mechanics we have to work with (if there are no fights between villages, we need replacement stuff to do, which doesn't exist so much yet).
You used humans for your example, which have WALK, CLIMB, SWIM, and CRAWL gaits. Will flying creatures have various FLY gaits that operate the same way? Will creatures like snakes and fish lack WALK gaits, and be unable to stand up?
Is 'build up time' simply the number of ticks spent getting up to full speed, or the number of actions by the creature, or what? What are the units for 'turning max'? Does a creature have to attain 'start speed' to begin a gait, or can they enter any gait at start speed from a stop?
Does energy use cause over-exertion, hunger, or both? How does it affect creatures with NOEXERT/NO_EAT?
Yeah, there is FLY as well. The issue with crawling animals hasn't yet been resolved to my satisfaction. It has been a long-standing problem with them vs. the "grounded" flag. It's a large refactor, and I haven't dealt with it. The most annoying part is the issue of unit occupancy, since you'd want to have multiple snakes in a square while suffering only certain grounded penalties, and still have them use their crawling gait. So it just needs to be redone.
Build up time is the number of actions. A creature sets its desired gait and builds up to it, but it doesn't go verbally through other gaits on the way. Turning max is the number of build up steps that are retained if you move in a direction sort of but not exactly in the direction you previously moved, you can run in a circle to build up speed, but only up to the level of turning max, and if you start curving when you are at full speed, your amount of build up credit will drop down to turning max. If your turning max is zero and there is a build up time, you don't build up any speed at all if you move in a circle. If there is no build up time, you always move at max speed. It's sort of convoluted compared to just tracking the physical speed/acceleration of the critter and doing some physicsy stuff about handling turning effects, but if I remember I had some issues trying to define it differently so I just moved on. I'm not happy with the current system, but that's normal.
Energy is over-exertion. There isn't yet a strong energy/hunger connection, aside from fat layers maybe. NOEXERT would turn off energy use from gaits.
I'm assuming that personalities will eventually effect pretty much everything in the game. Such as whether or not dwarves will steal from communal stockpiles or other dwarves once the crime arc is in.
If that's the case my question is how much will events affect or even completely change a dwarves personality. Say during a famine an honourable dwarf may not steal more than his or her ration, but if the dwarf has children will that same honourable dwarf feel that it is more dishounourable to let his or her children starve than stealing food from the community
Can dreams be lost or modified, due to stressors? I'm thinking about, let's say two dwarves lose their family to goblins, one gets depressed, the other swears to kill the culprits.
The examples here don't necessarily represent a change in personality/value/dreams as we've tabulated them. It's the numbers responding to different inputs with different outputs, or the same input going through different numbers and giving a different output. There are gray areas among jobs, dreams, long-term goals, quests and all that, but yeah, I think dreams can change, certainly. I think there'll eventually be large personality changes in play -- the greatest just being dwarves going from children to adults. Childhood personality extremes should change as part of normal development and childhood dreams should change quite often. Right now they start out completely formed, but it shouldn't be that way. There's plenty of room for tragedies and epiphanies to change personalities as well. Nothing happens now, of course.
Do trees have their own vermin? (woodpeckers, parasites, that sort of stuff)
There's nothing like that at this point. Trees should be homes to critters, but it's not the case now. It'll be fun to have holes in the trunks with small beasties.
More generally, do you want/need/appreciate proofreading help? I don't have any in-game examples in mind, but I've been re-reading Threetoe's epic stories recently and noticed a number of typos that I'd be happy to catalogue and submit, if it would be of any use.
Yeah, I always like to cleanup typos we've posted. PM'ing me a list would probably be easiest. Thanks for your help!
Just out of curiosity, are there any new creatures in the next update?
As far as I remember, there aren't any. There'll be a large number of new fruit trees and veggie plants, which'll sort of put them on the same footing as the real-world animals and real-world grasses and real-world minerals.
Will cities be repaired and rebuilt after siege damage in the upcoming release?
It's still in the release notes to have cities reclaimed by the AI during the game. Right now, cities don't generally survive damaging attacks since there are no army fights. There are occupations, which'll be reversible by your character, but those don't cause damage (though they are currently slated to cause site modifications). I'm not sure for this time if towns will refill trenches and so on when normalcy returns.
Will stolen/traded artifacts be tracked now there's somewhere to take them too?
I haven't specifically changed anything here. There's also the matter of kobold sites being the one place that haven't been done.
Can you run into other adventurers? Can they recruit you? On a possibly related note, can you conscript followers? Given our new-found vulnerability to numberless hordes, will world gen adventurers have companions or royal guards etc?
Now that there are plans to slow skill growth, will long-lived and otherwise extraordinary creatures use different metrics entirely? A 300 year old elf's sword-fighting prowess matched against a 130 year old mercenary vampire's axeman-ship couldn't be reached by a human legend, not to mention the difficulties in comparing the two combatants.
Will we have abstract control over hill dwarf settlements layout? If we do get some kind of united expansive fortress, will we be able to change which part we directly control? Sounds similar to next door retirements and reclaims as you offered in the DF talk, theoretically.
There's more than last time, but it's not entirely interesting. Guides and mercenaries will be able to come along with you, with agreements, but you can't be hired in the same way yet. You can get lots of people with you for a short time when you are leading an insurrection, or when you are raiding between villages.
I don't recall what the skill growth slowing is in reference to. In any case, the issue of the skills of immortals is a defining issue in pretty much any setting where they occur. We've whiffed it with world gen caps so far. My problem with removing the caps at this stage is total game ruination. We haven't felt pressed to address it at this point, and I'm not sure what's going to happen.
We haven't decided on the particulars for your hill and deep dwarf settlements. Yeah, how much you are able to "move the camera" depends on how successful retirement and unretirement turns out. I'm hesitant to say we'll be able to do much on the fly. There's a lot of data and moving parts floating around.
Will there be more social effects of having artifacts being successfully completed by a dwarf? For instance, they might become more prominent and well-liked members of society after having made one, or become feared and disliked after making one with a fell or macabre mood.
I haven't done anything with that. The dwarves' attitude toward fell mood dwarves in particular has been something we have in mind at times, but there aren't reputation-based effects right now at all, really. Hopefully some of the adv mode changes are going to be preparing a sensible framework for that, though I'm not sure when it'll come up development-wise over in the fort. There are lots of potential avenues, but those'll also involve basic development and might not get to the higher-up stuff (guilds, religions, fairs, succession, etc.).
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 3837260 times)