Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[smjjames]

I seem to recall Today speaking of a place where the occupation force gathers after taking over the site. Isn't this? Or it was some sort of town hall?

Generally they'll displace the current leadership and take over whatever castle or mead hall structure is around.

This? I guess whatever structure the current (or former, in the case of occupied sites) local leadership is using, whether it's the castle keep, mead hall or the town hall.

[Knight Otu]

This:

Back on the dwarf peninsula, I reintroduced the manor houseish mead hally hybrid places for the petty lords to reside in, and I'm now finishing up conversation and reputation issues surrounding companion agreements to get your role as a participant in the village-village bickering established properly.

[Footkerchief]

I'm looking forward to seeing the new conversation system in action.  People yelling "Yield!" during fights and stuff.

[dmatter]

Toady, thank you for your reply. Happy to see that it got a reply, though I don't really feel like my question was answered.

What my original question boils down to is: Do you plan on, way down the road, implementing things like cultural marriage preferences/requirements where, for instance, a dwarf has to marry another dwarf that doesn't even speak the same language, potentially from another city/fort?

Speaking of which, another question came to mind: Once you get to the hill dwarves do you plan on having cultural variation within civs?  * Since dwarven society (and most of the df societies in general) seem to be feudal systems I imagine there might be a significant amount of cultural and linguistic variance between forts/settlements/cities within a civ.

*Both of my questions might be looking too far ahead. If so, no worries.

[Putnam]

Most questions that ask "do you plan on" can be answered with this page. The exact specific types of "things" each bullet point is and their effect on the version number may be out-of-date, but most of the stuff on there is still planned.

[Footkerchief]

Toady, thank you for your reply. Happy to see that it got a reply, though I don't really feel like my question was answered.

What my original question boils down to is: Do you plan on, way down the road, implementing things like cultural marriage preferences/requirements where, for instance, a dwarf has to marry another dwarf that doesn't even speak the same language, potentially from another city/fort?

For everyone's reference, here's the previous conversation (emphasis mine):

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.

With highly specific features like these, Toady seldom has much to say about if or when they'll be implemented.  It would be speculation at best, and, unless he did some serious reading and thinking on the subject, probably uninformed speculation, which does nobody much good.

Speaking of which, another question came to mind: Once you get to the hill dwarves do you plan on having cultural variation within civs?  * Since dwarven society (and most of the df societies in general) seem to be feudal systems I imagine there might be a significant amount of cultural and linguistic variance between forts/settlements/cities within a civ.

*Both of my questions might be looking too far ahead. If so, no worries.

Yes, cultural variation, divergence, etc. is planned:

Rainseeker:   Is it going to be possible for us to get civilizations like goblin civilizations that go in unexpected directions like maybe they get a leader somehow from an elven civilization who enforces their beliefs on the goblins or something?
Toady:   I only put in little teeny baby steps in that direction back when I set up those ethics; looking in that direction I made it so that the ethics sit inside the civilization so that they're mutable; it doesn't just look at the definition that you put in the raw files, but within each civilization they're mutable; but they don't actually change yet. But that kind of thing is what will allow certain individuals and even sub movements ... this is the kind of thing where say in dwarf mode if you have a philosophical movement spring up and enough of your dwarves adhere to it it should start changing the actual fortress civilization in terms of how it thinks, and whether that's happening because the actual fortress ethics are changing or just because a majority of the people follow the ethics of this movement ... it's kind of one leads to the other, or it should anyway. So we're thinking about those things, we're definitely not ignoring that kind of stuff, but it's just a matter of getting it done and that always takes a long time.

Toady:   Okay, so the original vision for the ... It's always evolving really. Originally we had in our earlier games these fantasy settlements and so on, with humans and a few other types of critters like dwarves and so on, and we added a few more but it wasn't in the raws or anything like that. Then we moved them out to the raws so you can put your own races in and those hard coded ethics that are in there now and a few things about what items they can use and what jobs you're going to find; people milling around the cities eating food out of magic barrels [and] having jobs that they don't do. The vision there has been changing over time, so when you say originally, back say three or four years ago, it wasn't a crucial part of the game having cultures that evolved but once you get started and have a world that is just sitting there and it's got civilizations that are sitting there and are all very similar then the need for variability arose pretty quickly, so the first thing we did was just vary their clothing and so on. But then you need ... instead of variation in space you also want to start thinking about variation over time and that's when these notions started coming up and maybe the past couple of years thinking about what kind of variations we'd like to have happen to cultures over time.

Toady:   Yeah, it'd just be bizarre. They'd put you in a little cage, and haul you off and put flowers in your hair and start worshiping you or something. Who knows, right? It's one of those things that the game doesn't respect right now. As for how to handle that, should that be an ethics thing? The ethics lists in the raws are a list of a premade culture for a group that's going to be created during world generation and then suddenly have that culture. This is so that you can have the flavour in the universe that you want to have, especially when you're modding where you have some notions of how they should behave and so on, like an elf or a dwarf when you want those to behave in certain ways in general, so you create these preconceived cultures for them. Now that doesn't respect how a culture might emerge, there's no notion of an emergent culture right now that's built up through racial traits and geography and history and so on. Those kinds of things should come up at least after the fact, like you've got these civilizations but they should be able to change a little bit once play begins at least, right? It's not really hard to give a really crappy simulation for an evolved culture, you plop the ten guys down, they have no ethics and then you just examine how crazy are the monsters in that area and what sort of resources are there and then bring up some silly model for how that would determine the ethics in some way, and then put a giant random element on it, and slap them down, and you've got a procedural starting point. But that's not necessarily compelling, it's interesting to have the variation, that certainly should be in there, but the main thing is how variation can occur through the history that occurs once the history starts. That's a step by step process, just putting in different influences and changes and what happens if you have several goblins somehow get assimilated into an elven society, and then all the elves get killed and then the goblins found a little thing up in the mountain somehow when they get chased out of the forest, then what are they? What do these goblins think? Does that lead to a whole goblin movement coming down from the mountains to reclaim the forests or something?
Rainseeker:   (as goblins)We are the true elves!
Toady:   Yeah it's all very weird, that kind of thing. Right now it's kind of strange ... Normally you'd think the hard part is getting the changes to occur, but right now there are too many changes in a way, like kidnapped dwarves and humans and elves and so on assimilate immediately and societies that are conquered by the dwarves and then get a dwarven overlord put over them, they're assimilated immediately and then they go on to spread that culture entirely without maintaining their previous one. It's kind of the opposite problem of implementing cultural diffusion and assimilation, and the interest comes when you do it half way, because the main thing that's missing from the game in terms of world generation and everything about making that interesting is the notion of conflict, not like a war but an internal conflict within one person, that drives their decision making. Having multiple cultural backgrounds for a single person is a great way to do that, and that's really the foundation of a lot of literature and so on, having those conflicting backgrounds and so on. It's one of those things that would start to be realised when you have the leaders moving around during play, which is not too far away, just getting more personal decision making in for the leaders, then there would be more of an impetus to draw on that kind of information. At least there's some challenges, because if you've got a hundred thousand people you can't keep track of every little thing about what they think and all that kind of stuff. The important decision makers are the ones that are going to be done first. It has all their background saved, it has all the historical things that led up to their present time and all of their previous entity affiliations and so on, so it can have a pretty good background but what it really needs is a snapshot sitting in their head of what their current ethical belief and value system is. Then it'll be easy to filter decisions through that and just have that vary over time as they move from place to place and various things happen to them that move them from culture to culture as they are exposed to other cultures. One of the main things we're missing is an exchange between two cultures that doesn't involve them just killing each other, there's not a notion of trade or alliance during world generation that can build up that sort of thing. Then when you get into regular play it's all just the same thing over again, when your adventurer's running around you are an agent of cultural diffusion as you go from place to place; that should have some kind of effect. It'd be cool for them not to just judge you based on the clothing that you're wearing but also to look at your clothing and then if you do something heroic for the town, there's some dev goals about them like naming their kids after you and all that kind of thing, but what if they started dressing like you but they're also dressing in the clothing of the southern culture as opposed to their own one ... whatever direction we're using this time in the example. Then it'd be cool if that started to lead to some kind of tension, we've already got the personality facet for traditionalism; traditional versus people that like to branch out and experiment, and that'd be very interesting, to have someone's kid dress up like you and then their parent would be like 'What are you doing? You've got to wear your robe'. It really all hinges on the personal goals and the personal decision making upgrades that are coming before the sieges. That's part of the excitement of the game is seeing what kind of things it comes up with that you didn't come up with yourself; when people start doing all kinds of crazy things we'll just have to revel in the horror.

[MeTekillot]

If I'm not mistaken, with the new way you're changing entities and awareness or something, discreetly killing/stealing from a member of a civ won't have the entire civ turn hostile unless the act is witnessed by someone who is able to off-load themselves to "spread the rumour". Am I correct in this assumption?

[Footkerchief]

If I'm not mistaken, with the new way you're changing entities and awareness or something, discreetly killing/stealing from a member of a civ won't have the entire civ turn hostile unless the act is witnessed by someone who is able to off-load themselves to "spread the rumour". Am I correct in this assumption?

That's been implemented for killing:

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.

06/10/2012 Toady One Now that bandits can sometimes just be hanging out on the street waiting to mess with people, I've shut off immediate enemy recognition so that people don't start fighting to the death in the streets. I'm next going to use the dwarf mode training activity framework to allow them to coordinate their harassment a bit, and we'll probably move to the recognition of fights and non-lethal combat from there.

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.

However, it hasn't been implemented yet for stealing.  That will come later:

Adventurer Role: Thief
    Bounties and being hunted
        No automatic recognition that you have stolen an item
        People should notice when items are missing and raise an alert
        Strangers found around town when crime is suspected should be stopped and searched
        Your identity/appearance should be remembered for a time if you are seen in an area
        If your identity/appearance is associated to an alert over a crime, somebody responsible in the entity should put a bounty on you if appropriate for the entity
        You should leave tracking information and it should keep track of the last many people you have talked to
        Entity warriors and other adventurers should follow your tracking information
        Villains/raiders/etc. from the Hero role should also receive bounties that you can fulfill

[MrWiggles]

So does your fluid modeling have the Venturi Effect?

[Putnam]

It certainly looks that way, doesn't it?

[smjjames]

If we are talking about pressure resetting through diagonals, yeah it certainly looks like it does.

Outside of the thing with diagonals, I don't think anybody has tested with a straight pipe.

[King Mir]

The behavior of fluid is pretty well understood. It acts a cellular automaton, using only adjacent tiles to determine where it goes, when not under pressure, and when it is under pressure, water instantly teleports from high to the lowest non-full square it can reach.

Trickier to describe is the behavior of creatures and items pushed around by flowing fluids, but this is probably because of the random nature of cellular automata motion.

[Putnam]

It's not altogether too random; you can see the exact motion of updating liquids through simple observation, for example.

[IndigoFenix]

AI pathfinding aside, how moddable will jumping be?  Can we make a creature capable of jumping up multiple z-levels and attacking enemies by stomping on their heads??  How about vampires that gain the ability to leap over tall buildings in a single bound?

On a semi-related note, when and how will adventure mode syndrome timing be fixed?  It's a problem when a short-term syndrome in fort mode (say, an interaction that stuns the target for 10 ticks) gets lengthened out to last an entire battle when a creature is affected by it in adventure mode - and it isn't possible to make short-term interactions in adventure mode, because the shortest unit of time is 72 ticks.

[Mr S]

I'm not so sure that this is a bug, per se, as a difference in expectations.  By one way of thought, seeing someone to be knocked completely unconscious, it's not unreasonable to expect that they'd miss the whole party.

It seems that what you're referring to is something more akin to being stunned.  With the advent of less than lethal combat, there are some hints that the stunning effect would make an appearance finally, possibly in this release, but I can't find a quote to confirm.  I say that since there has been mention of saps and blackjacks.  Knocking someone unconscious, binding them with ropes and carting them away as part of the combat AI has specifically been mentioned as something that is tabled until further development of the thief role by WoT.  That means ON PURPOSE.  The underlying mechanics have not been specifically stated to be non-present, so may be an emergent behavior soon.

Now, syndromes have an interesting way of getting directly into the data structure of bodies and/or souls.  That's how transformations work, for instance.  I'm not aware of any entity flag that isn't transparent to syndromes.  If not in vanilla reactions, there should, soon we hope, be a way to make a modded syndrome, i.e. and adventure mode reaction, that sets the stun flag/timer.  That would probably be closer to what you're looking for.