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[Putnam]

I think Toady's said he hasn't messed about with prepare/recover times for ranged attacks yet...

[LordBaal]

And of course, it' obvious he's releasing the next year. I think a late January is an optimistic (overly so) date for release. To tell the truth is most likely we have to wait the whole first third of the year.

Which is completely fine. I could (and will) wait years for this game.

[Uristsonsonson]

Do you mean just for the initial release or the bug fixes and minor tweaks before the three year Armies and Dimensions arc?

[MDFification]

Toady: Currently underground tunnels are capped at the map's edge in fortress mode to prevent invaders from using them. In future will this be different? Drums, drums in the deep!

[Golym]

If a site gets a rumor that a force of critters is coming to eat them or torture them for fun (checking the ethics of the invading civ)

How will the game behave in case of the player decides to remain in/go to the site to confront the invaders?

I doubt anything special will happen here. The invasion will happen, and people will get slaughtered. Do you think something should go on?

What I was trying to say is how it will behave when looking in the Legends mode? How it will be called?

[LordBaal]

Do you mean just for the initial release or the bug fixes and minor tweaks before the three year Armies and Dimensions arc?

I mean the initial release would be within the first third of the year. I'm lost on translation here. What I meant is that a year third is four months, so a year can be divided up to three thirds, the first one from January to April, the second one from May to August and a third one from September to December. I thus believe the release of the next version to be within January to April next year.

What do you mean by Armies and Dimensions arc? I believed Toady didn't know what to work following this.

[Footkerchief]

Toady: Currently underground tunnels are capped at the map's edge in fortress mode to prevent invaders from using them. In future will this be different? Drums, drums in the deep!

Do you mean worldgen tunnels, or tunnels that the player orders the dwarves to dig?  It's planned that attacking enemies will be able to attack through both of those, as well as dig their own tunnels to attack through:

Improved sieges

    Eliminate remaining edge-of-map exploits
    More highly trained attacking soldiers when approprate
    Many trap exploits are handled above by requiring more to produce a trap, things like cage traps should make more sense vs. large creatures etc. (respect strength/ability vs. material, large cages might be separate object)
    Coming up with a plan to overcome pathing obstacles to reach fortress innards
        Ability to dig (optionally, default on)
        Ability to build bridges/ramps
        Ability to use grappling hooks/ladders/climb

If a site gets a rumor that a force of critters is coming to eat them or torture them for fun (checking the ethics of the invading civ)

How will the game behave in case of the player decides to remain in/go to the site to confront the invaders?

I doubt anything special will happen here. The invasion will happen, and people will get slaughtered. Do you think something should go on?

What I was trying to say is how it will behave when looking in the Legends mode? How it will be called?

Do you mean how Legends will describe the player's participation in the conflict?  Legends currently has formalized battle descriptions, but those only apply to the special abstract battles that occur during world generation.  In the scenario you described, Legends would describe it like any other ordinary fight -- it won't recognize that you're taking part in a larger struggle.

[Scoops Novel]

When in-game languages are fleshed out, will it be possible to mod in real earth-native more-or-less accurately simulated languages? What if we pay you for it? I feel the Egyptians should have their due, for one.

[Mesa]

When in-game languages are fleshed out, will it be possible to mod in real earth-native more-or-less accurately simulated languages? What if we pay you for it? I feel the Egyptians should have their due, for one.

Mancipia ut Armok: Deus in sanguine: Caput II - Pumilio Præsidium

Omnia dicta fortiora, si dicta latina!

[LordBaal]

I just come up with an idea, if each of us from different regions and languages make dictionaries in our corresponding languages and ditch them to the game DF could force you to learn new languages, specially while playing as an adventurer. Of course when and if different languages are fleshed out en el juego.

[Footkerchief]

When in-game languages are fleshed out, will it be possible to mod in real earth-native more-or-less accurately simulated languages? What if we pay you for it? I feel the Egyptians should have their due, for one.

It'll probably be possible to mod in half-baked imitations of real languages, but since Toady hasn't begun work on it yet, no guarantees as usual.  I doubt there'll be a grammatical sponsorship drive or anything.

Spoiler: long (click to show/hide)

Rainseeker:   [...] I have one here from Elijah. He says: 'Could Tarn spend some time talking about the possibility of implementing different languages and written works. Is there any possibility of old languages, and what about books made of sheets, metal, paper, papyrus or even clay tablets.
Toady:   We're into that stuff and it reminds me of the Steles, the big pillars that the Syrian kings wrong all their conquests on and so on, and the translations of those were some of the inspirations for some of the world generation tortures after the towns were taken over, like stretching out skins and sticking them on walls and stuff. We like that kind of thing – not the tortures, personally, for ourselves, but the written languages – so we're all for it, especially when we get to the treasure hunter section where we've mentioned old books and things like that that we'd like to throw in there. It'd be cool to find one of those old libraries they had, I think they had an ancient library with these cuneiform tablets, they looked like little triangles pressed in different configurations on this clay tablet ... to find a library of one of those things would be really cool. The issues that come up – there's a couple of them – one is displaying the language written out. It would be cool to use different symbols for it, and it would be a time to go add some tiles. These are the kinds of tiles that we can actually draw without total failure, doing it ourselves, so it might be possible to extend some language tiles or ... I don't know if that would involve Unicode in any way since we have better font support now. It's not clear to me exactly how we'd go about doing it but we're definitely ... even if it's just adding some symbols like the graphics for creatures currently, you could just add some more symbols, then it would be cool to actually display the words that are written in the books or on the tablets or whatever, and see them there, and then be able to translate them. It might be difficult to ask the player to do that manually, but they could do it based on their characters skill, and translate pieces of the tablet and then reveal them as you translate them. The other issue is if you're having the game randomly generate a language, which is something that we've avoided up to this point, even though you can throw something together, especially with as little structure as our languages have now – we don't really have any grammar for them or anything, it's just here's a word, here's how you write it – the only reason we haven't done that is because we're afraid of getting too many words that are real life words. So for our dwarf language we didn't want the word for 'mine' to be randomly generated as 'pepsi', and have the word for 'dwarf' just be some swear word because of what it comes up with ... so if your name is 'Dwarf Mine' your name would be like 'Poop Pepsi' or something. it's just not what we imagined for the dwarf language.
Rainseeker:   That does become a problem unless you're using random characters.
Toady:   That's why there're a couple of solutions, there's using different characters for the languages, or, when the language isn't as central – it's not the dwarf language, but is just some language of some randomly generated three-armed squirrel people that live in the forest and fight with leaves, but they still use, for whatever reason, the same alphabet – then if they had something that was called pepsi, that doesn't really matter. I'm sure there'll be ... if you've got thousands of people playing, I'm sure someone out there is going to get a screenshot that's just horrifying, horrifying in the worst possible way and we'll just let it go at that point and hopefully the news doesn't pick it up. But that's basically the only obstacle. I kind of had a pet fascination with linguistics in college, I was fishing around for a double major for so long when I was doing math; I went from computer science to animal behaviour to chemistry to linguistics, and so I never actually ended up getting one. But I took like six or seven or eight classes and I got all the books from the advanced classes ...
Rainseeker:   Makes you a very interesting person, that's for sure.
Toady:   Well ... I don't know ... But I read them. I missed the coursework and I can read online ... so I don't really know where I'm at with that stuff, but it is one of my little fascinations. That's why it's always been up on the dev page even if I never get to it.
Rainseeker:   So how do you see that affecting adventure mode? You have your adventurer, he finds this 'leafen tablet' scrawled by the squirrel people that he just slaughtered and he's like 'hmm, what does this say?'
Toady:   It might be harder to learn the language now you've killed them all.
Rainseeker:   That's true, so you could maybe have an ability to talk and learn their language gradually?
Toady:   Yeah, that's what we're hoping for. The thing that's neat is in a rudimentary way – it would be impossible to pull this off, for me anyway, in a really satisfying way – but if you've got ... Right now the grammatical structure of all the languages is the same, well they can only say one phrase, like 'Johnny run/walk the dog of war', there's only one kind of phrase they have but they're all the same. So even now you could say 'you know thirty percent of the goblin vocabulary, these are the exact words you know' and then whenever you hear a phrase it could translate those words and not the others. But the thing that'll be neater, if we're storing the things that people will say in conversations ... this conflicts with other things, so I'm not really sure how this is going to work, it might just be the writing, it might not be with the conversations; I'm not quite sure ... but if you have the basic sentence trees syntax ... noun/phrase things or whatever, sitting behind the sentences then the grammatical rules can take those trees and turn them into all kinds of different stuff, shifting the word order, cramming certain things together, putting little helper words everywhere, all that kind of stuff ... and still have your knowledge of the language interpret parts of it, or let you pick out pieces of it, in a really straightforward fashion while still preserving all the diversity of the languages. It would be pretty easy to do overall, except for the part where you actually build the sentence trees for everything you want to say. So it's like, you want to say 'the sword is hidden in such-and-such a cave'; that sentence tree's not so hard to build, it involves two of those noun type phrases we already have, like the 'shiny sword' or whatever it's called and the 'cave of darkness' or whatever it would be called, those we can already do. Then you just need to say how the verb works, and once you can construct that you can translate that into all the different languages and they can apply their rules to how those things work. It's nowhere near as complicated as an actual language where you just need all these little rules that modify them, and people don't even have a complete theory; but the game can have a complete theory, because I know what sentences are allowed to be in the books. We control that information and it allows us to complete the picture, so it should be cool. I guess that's a 'yes' for that question, if it was a 'yes/no' question. Is there any possibility of old languages? Yes. It should come in with the treasure hunter stuff, that's where it's on the dev page, if I remember.

Capntastic:   EggFibre asks, 'How did you create the languages for all the civilizations? Did you base them off of something in real life or did they all come from your imagination? Also, how long did the process take?'
Toady:   We created all the languages. They were not based on anything in real life and the main reason for that is because we haven't added grammar yet. What we did is we had the list the words, which took a while to just type in all the words - the English versions of the words - and then we had a generator that just had certain rules about how consonants could be combine and what frequencies there were for the vowels, and that kind of thing. It had to generate a list of words and then we went through by hand and picked out words that were either existing words - especially words that are profanity, because it would generate plenty of those - and words that just sounded wrong; when you look at the word for candy or something and when you end up with some really harsh sounding word, and then you just roll the generator on that again until it gets something that matches. That's really all it was. With goblins we let more things go through regardless of their tone because we wanted the language to sound more alien, but it was pretty much just that. When we get to things like grammar it's going to be harder to completely ... we'll just put in different processes there, but I don't think it's going to be randomly generated because you either have a rule or you don't, or you have variants of a rule or whatever, but there's only four or five stock languages, so we're probably just going to pick and choose which rules we think are appropriate and place them in.

Then there's the larger question or what about a randomly generated language. The computer can spit one of those out really fast with random grammar and random words and all that, but then you will have the problem where some of the words are really not something you want to have. We haven't tried that yet, and it might not be that bad of a problem in retrospect so it could be that we do the random generation and then what we'd do it just ... depending on how we store our sentence trees, when we get to that kind of thing, because computers are good at that sort of thing, so you can just throw it in ... It's obviously going to be simplified from the giant thousands of pages of, you know, even entry-level textbooks you can get on this kind of thing, it's progressively more complicated theory that they've got floating around now, but we throw some simple stuff in there and I imagine it'll all work really nicely. The only thing I'm not sure about is when you get a lot of words that are recognizable or so on, if that breaks it too badly. I mean it would be interesting to have a conlang generator and just see how it turns out.

[Zavvnao]

gun powder does not have to be weapons though if that is the developers aversion, what about medicine or other things its ingredients where used for?

[PigtailLlama]

what about medicine or other things its ingredients where used for?

I'm pretty sure Dwarven medicine is more booze and water/lava falls to ease the pain, along with soap and water to clean cuts...

[WillowLuman]

And eventually, Herbalism.

[Zavvnao]

And eventually, Herbalism.

Is this the point people make funny elf jokes?