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[Footkerchief]

11/12/2013 Toady One More list, more stuff, more continuing along with. I cleaned up various starting paragraph and character background paragraph stuff, added some more conversation text, moved monster quests over to the new information system, moved bartering over to the new converstation system (in part, you still get to do the transaction itself automatically), that kind of thing. Yet another indexing error has been causing demons to get murdered in world gen way too often for quite some time, and that has been corrected.

I think the information system, especially the transfer of information between people, is one of the cooler overarching features in the upcoming version.  I pulled together some quotes on the topic for anyone else who's interested:

Spoiler: long (click to show/hide)

02/10/2013 Toady One Rare moment of restraint! The information and mechanics I need for the initial stages of the insurrection against occupying armies is more or less the same as the information and mechanics I need for the criminal role for later adventure mode. The existing dwarf mode crime stuff is enough to get me through, so I won't be adding the entire thief role to adventure mode now, he he he. In any case, your efforts against the goblins are going to be entirely dependent on who sees you and whom you talk to, and whom they get a chance to tell about it, so you'll be rewarded not only for stealth, but at times for discretion.

Capntastic:   So if you scare someone away for instance, will they go for help at this point?
Toady:   Oh no no, that's.. that's.. so that's basically beyond the scope of what we've done. However if you start a conflict with somebody, now this gets back to the other thing that we were working on, which is improving the goblin insurrections and the conversations and stuff.. when you get a, when you start a fight with, say, a goblin in a town now, that gets saved as an event. So not only can you talk about that now then other people, but the goblin also knows that this happened, and if the goblin manages to get away from you and get offloaded, then everybody in town will, there's a timer on it, so it kinda propagates information more slowly, then it becomes a foregone conclusion then that the goblins are gonna know about that. And so the goblins will know then that you just tried to start a fight with a goblin, or that you killed a goblin if someone else saw it, and then gets away. So you can eliminate witnesses and so on, but if someone does get away, then that information will propagate.

Now that doesn't mean that the goblin is running back to that location to bring help immediately at least at this point. There's still kind of talk about, in the notes here, the notes talking back at me that I wrote months ago that there would be organised groups coming to hunt you down, which is something we put in the tracking information for. And right now patrols can hunt you down, when you're walking around you leave tracking information and they can pin it, and snoop up the trail and follow you during wilderness travel, but it doesn't happen in the context of the insurrection and in the town guards and it may, but it may not and so it's not something I want to promise at this point, when we're kind of chopping things out [...]

Will we eventually be able to learn or teach skills or secrets to/from NPCs via talking to them? Such as learning a secret orally from someone who knows it, and then passing it on to a student?

I suspect, yeah, though the current plan is for skill training to be a longer term process in general (whether or not that has you do something with a different character during the time is an open question).  You can currently pass along rumor/incident information, which can spread around, so we have it in baby form now.

If you aim an attack at a friendly target, do they realize you are attacking them and are no longer friendly immediately, or after the attack lands, or does it depend on their observer skill? What about witnesses? What if by some fluke the target dies before the hit lands, would a witness still consider that assault?

When attacking with a ranged attack, what counts for witnessing the attack? Does the bystander need to see the you, your target, both, or either?

Yeah, right now they get that information.  Eventually we'll have cause to be more picky about it, but we're more worried about people standing idiotically while you attack them.  I don't recall if the event is generated on the initiation or the strike.  That'll also determine how ranged attacks work.  It's probably on the strike.  This would give them extra information about the shooter since the incident doesn't yet have missing knowledge, but we'll get to fixing that at some point.

When an alert is given, the offended entity doesn't yet know of the offence, right? In other words, is it possible to kill a guard before he alerts others and not become enemy of a civ?

The cascading nature of alert information is still a work in progress, but yeah, there are going to be different levels of information passed along to the entity depending on when you kill the guard.  Even after the alert is raised, until the guard gives a report, I don't think your information will be passed along -- ideally, even after the report, they'd just have your appearance, but it's still tricky to store that as a properly abstracted chunk of information.

Also, I found a more direct answer for this:

You know, with the new history continuing along after worldgen, will we recieve reports of events from merchants or even migrants? I'm just wondering since new events will happen outside of the fort while in fort mode. So, basically, will we be able to get news or rumors speaking of events in the mountainhomes or in foriegn lands, both in fortress and adventure mode?

It would be cool if we could and it'd add to the immersion.

Also, I suppose eventually the Dwarves (or someone) would have to invent the postal system or something.

Yes:

Rainseeker:   Is the goal to have news get to you, so you can be aware that this might happen to you in the next year or two, that there's been a dragon that's being laying waste to the countryside and it might come by?
Toady:   It has to update you somehow, and it's got to mesh in with what we're hoping to do with your own armies eventually, which means showing you some kind of world map or of the surroundings or whatever that you're going to be able to use to order your armies. We haven't thought about it too much but if it's going to give you, like, a snapshot of the world as you currently understand it and then the next time a merchant comes you get to update your snapshot or whatever ... then it can give you the same paragraph or a related paragraph that it gives you at the beginning of adventure mode, so that it would tell you about what's going on a little bit.

For a limited legends screen, will it be something you need to talk to caravans for,with each caravan providing different info, thereby also promoting trade or will there be something else? i think it might be cool to see my dwarves talking to caravan guards and learning that say, a king has a new lover or something. you know, gossip.

With history progressing even during Fortress Mode, would we see a diplomat coming to tell us that all of the immediate royal family were killed during the "Siege of Pointy Sticks", and the only living heir is a potash maker in the fort? That would be interesting.

Will there be any kind of conduit of information from the rest of the world to your fort regarding succession and army activities? Asking caravans or diplomats for news etc.

If so, will that information be useful? Being able to predict imminent goblin attacks because a nearby village was recently razed, for instance.

If so will it be through the liason? replacing one of the "you've carved a fine place for yourself" dialogues with some news of what is going on in the world?

I've always liked the idea of learning actually information from the visitors to your fortress, but I've never been able to move on it because nothing happened in the world post world-gen.  Now that some things actually happen in the world, we can move toward this, but it might not happen for this time.

[Rinin_Rus]

Did you consider escape-pathfinding improvements? I mean Dwarf running away from entrance into an impregnable fortress, because another tile is few centimeters farther from forgotten beast, doesn't prove his "great analytical abilities"

[King Mir]

Will dwarves, goblins, and modded subterranean civilizations have the same day/night sleep schedule as humans in adventure mode?

[Footkerchief]

Did you consider escape-pathfinding improvements? I mean Dwarf running away from entrance into an impregnable fortress, because another tile is few centimeters farther from forgotten beast, doesn't prove his "great analytical abilities"

This is unchanged in the upcoming version.  As for the future, Toady knows it's a feature people want:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=111607.0
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=58921.0
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=70163.0
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=85588.0

[PigtailLlama]

So it occurred to me...
Is it possible yet to create custom slabs and signs, instead of only having the option to engrave the names and achievements of the deceased?

[Footkerchief]

So it occurred to me...
Is it possible yet to create custom slabs and signs, instead of only having the option to engrave the names and achievements of the deceased?

Unless there's any indication Toady has worked on this, it's safe to assume the answer is no.

[Scoops Novel]

Just to take advantage of your omniscience Footkerchief, what's the current plan when it comes to inherited names?

[smjjames]

Lol scoops.

I don't think Toady has mentioned anything about that, however, if he does do inherited names (not talking about royal titles or nobility here), I hope he varies it by having some dwarven civ cultures do it matrilineally or patrilineally.

[Putnam]

Just to take advantage of your omniscience Footkerchief, what's the current plan when it comes to inherited names?

Threetoe:   Ok, so, we have a couple of questions from Ironbad and Isaacflashman, asks about inheriting surnames, so 'Will the children inherit the last names of their parents?'
Toady:   So this is a pretty popular thing, I think probably because of fort mode where you can't tell who's related to who and that kind of thing. I don't remember what the reason we hadn't done it is, if we just haven't setup the raws for it, or we wanted to support different systems, or we wanted to wait for the names to support different systems, or whatever. Technically speaking, we're all for having that kind of thing, being able to tell what families people are from, and so on. It's not necessarily the case that there'll always be family names and surnames, that's not present in all cultures, especially the further back in time you go. A lot of people just didn't have family names, they were just like 'I'm John from this city' and that was what they called themselves, they didn't really have a surname. But, just keeping our options open and having that kind of thing at some point maybe more in fort mode, or more for dwarves, just because it seems to ...
Threetoe:   It's just cool ...
Toady:   Yeah, I think for dwarves it would be more fun to see the families join each other and ... I don't know if dwarves have clans or whatever, I mean people think of them in different ways and we haven't really thought about it too deeply, but yeah, I think it would be cool to put a system in for dwarf mode and just raw-ify it and people can turn it off if they don't like it or whatever. I think we will do that. Both of them asked if it's coming in with the new succession stuff and it's not coming in at this point.

[Footkerchief]

^^^ That pretty much covers it, the only other thing I found was an older quote from DF Talk 6:

Capntastic:   Will there be traditions for naming children, will they be named ... all dwarves that are female have specifically female names, will they be named after historical figures that are not adventurers, will they be named after popular kings and queens and suchlike? Will they be named after the favoured food of a country? All that fun stuff, have a bunch of dwarves named Rummy McGin.
Toady:   Yeah, or Plump Helmet McWhiskey.
Capntastic:   Someone's going to register on the forum with that name.
Toady:   Yeah. So I know you mentioned the adventure mode one because that's the one we kind of harp on about right, it's like 'people will be able to name their children after you later', but the general thing is that we wouldn't implement it that way because it would be kind of weird for them to specifically single out adventurers. So once that goes in they'd use historical figures and so on. There's been a lot of discussion about passing down family names and so on, people are kind of upset sometimes when they have a fortress for a while and the dwarves have babies and the babies just have completely unrelated names, that's just something that hasn't gotten in, but it'll go in as soon as we figure out what dwarves like to do, or what procedural stuff needs to be generated there. As for male versus female names, I don't have - kind of like the passing down of names - I don't have systems there but it's certainly something that I think should be supported and people are interested in having that kind of separation as well. I'm not sure what dwarves would think about that, we know humans often do it and when it's done it's not always a strict split, there are just ones that are rarely used for certain genders; would you want specific name lists if you want to set them up yourself, or just have the game choose them, for no reason it puts half here and half here, or should it put names that are of a certain symbol type - there's the symbols like flowery, violent, ones that have to do with agriculture or whatever - it might, based on the symbol , put names in certain categories. So there's a lot of different ways to do it, and we're thinking of doing stuff with that, but I'm not sure when. I think it's something that would reflect the world a bit more, I don't know if anyone's ever offended by this stuff either, if there are things like that put in. Right now we have no sexual dimorphism for instance with dwarves or even humans, people tend to prefer that kind of thing and it's an extra step to put it in anyway so I'm just lazy about it but yeah in general we're going to do more with that, and it should turn out well.

[monk12]

As it turns out, there is no community member with the handle Plump Helmet McWhiskey.

Yet.

[Scoops Novel]

Thanks everyone, i knew you'd find something Footkerchief.

[Ribs]

Will low lethal fighting be easy to abuse as a way to gain skills quickly in adventure mode? I could see how easy it would be to safely gain legendary combat skills just roughhousing with random peasants for a short period of time, if you haven't set up anything to avoid rapid skill growth in those situations. 

[WillowLuman]

Naturally someone would get better at combat from practice. You don't have to be going for a kill to get better. It balances itself out when you get arrested for going around starting fights, and then probably escalates if you resist the authorities.

[Ribs]

Naturally someone would get better at combat from practice. You don't have to be going for a kill to get better. It balances itself out when you get arrested for going around starting fights, and then probably escalates if you resist the authorities.

The thing is, if low lethal fighthing works the same way is it does in dwarf mode, it would be way too safe for you to reach absurdly high skill levels just by "lightly tapping" your adversaries a few hundred times in adventure mode. I know there are ways to abuse combat right now, by harassing weak creatures with training weapons, etc. But "practice combat" in adventure mode could possibly add a whole new level to how easy it is to min/max your charachter from the get go.