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[thvaz]

Toady, In a devlog a while ago you mentioned that large creatures look ridiculous on a single tile compared to the new multi tile trees.  How do you intend to implement multi tile creatures, if ever, for example for a collosus will we have four Cs in a square or something like that?  or is this the kind of thing that is in the unimaginably distant future and hasn't been decided?

Yeah, that's almost definitely too far away for Toady to have decided already. He'd probably want to avoid the block of Cs, though, I imagine, to prevent people from thinking it's four creatures, but whether that's possible at the time is another question.

The fundamental reason this question may be never solved is because of the way pathfinding works within the game. I recall Toady saying that multitile creatures could need a complete rewriting of the pathfinding to work properly.

[Manveru Taurënér]

I think we can be fairly certain a complete pathfinding rewrite is coming at some point regardless. There are a lot more planned features than just multi-tile creatures that needs it.

[Footkerchief]

Toady, In a devlog a while ago you mentioned that large creatures look ridiculous on a single tile compared to the new multi tile trees.  How do you intend to implement multi tile creatures, if ever, for example for a collosus will we have four Cs in a square or something like that?  or is this the kind of thing that is in the unimaginably distant future and hasn't been decided?

It's not planned for anytime soon:

Rainseeker:   Right. Well, I have a technical question here; 'How exactly long, wide and tall is a tile in Dwarf Fortress? Are they cubes?'; this is from Lonewolf.
Toady:   What the traditional answer is [is] that they're not so big that a dwarf doesn't have to crawl under another dwarf to get through a corridor but at the same time they're big enough to hold a thousand dragons as long as nine hundred and ninety nine of them are lying down. On the other hand it's a serious question because so much would ride on giving an answer; that's why I haven't so far. Because the second that you give an answer the game becomes constricted and you need things to make more sense; suddenly everything needs to make sense. I'm not ready to do that; I think there's something to be said for it - something to be said for nailing that down - but it would really kind of invite things like multi-tile creatures and stuff that I'm just not ready to do. There are some good things about multi-tile creatures; I think they'd be kind of cool. But path finding would need to be changed heavily, and there'd be other issues with them. Would they be too easy to kill for example by hiding off somewhere that they can't get to and shooting at them or whatever; so they'd need to be smart enough to avoid situations like that which might be difficult. So that's kind of one of the main problems - the large creatures - why I haven't established a number yet.

[...]

Capntastic:   Will you be able to climb things in the future, like climb a dragon and punch its brain?
Toady:   There's the issue with ... It's a question of multi-tile creatures partially - which is a difficult problem - but just the fact that there's the wrestling, and even without multi-tile creatures you've got things like groundhogs that can currently jump up and bite your eyes. That's one of the problems I'm having when I was doing my groundhog tests: twenty versus a guy with a knife, who wins? If the groundhog problem is solved, which it needs to be solved - not for this release most likely but at some point - then that means that that same thing will happen to you when you're fighting a giant creature. I think it would be cool to jump up on things, beyond just Shadow of the Colossus it's a common thing in Ray Harryhausen stuff and so on. So with the large creatures I think it'd be really cool to jump up on them and climb them and swing from them and so on. It wouldn't be as dramatic visually of course as Shadow of the Colossus but it certainly would be a lot of fun.

An older quote:

Just having a chase routine isn't sufficient -- if the multi-tile creature chases something and manages to get around a corner, it'll then be stuck or have some very rudimentary routines to try to get out, which would be anticlimactic.  I prefer the large creatures to have brains (or at least potential brains) than extra tiles.  The main issue is path finding and how it currently handles it via connected component numberings, which really only work perfectly for creatures that move like dwarves now.  Other creatures currently work mostly okay with them, but multi-tile creatures wouldn't work at all.  I don't think it would be impossible to change this, but I don't have and have not seen any feasible ideas for handling the issue.

[monk12]

That devlog was amazing. I feel like I must have kicked a puppy in a past life or something, to earn the punishment of living in a world where I'm not already playing this game.

[neblime]

wow thanks for all the quick answers.. I feel obliged to ask another question then, perhaps an easier one though:
when sieges are made more "interesting" and enemies can tunnel in, etc, will previously invulnerable structures (like walls) be vulnerable and if so, will the material they're made of actually have an effect on what kind of punishment they can withstand and/or for how long?  (i.e. a wooden wall lasts less time than a steel one, or a wooden wall can be destroyed with a copper axe or a troll's fists, but not a steel one?)

[MrWiggles]

wow thanks for all the quick answers.. I feel obliged to ask another question then, perhaps an easier one though:
when sieges are made more "interesting" and enemies can tunnel in, etc, will previously invulnerable structures (like walls) be vulnerable and if so, will the material they're made of actually have an effect on what kind of punishment they can withstand and/or for how long?  (i.e. a wooden wall lasts less time than a steel one, or a wooden wall can be destroyed with a copper axe or a troll's fists, but not a steel one?)

Yea, that's totally planned in form or another. No time line of course, when it'll be implemented.

[Footkerchief]

wow thanks for all the quick answers.. I feel obliged to ask another question then, perhaps an easier one though:
when sieges are made more "interesting" and enemies can tunnel in, etc, will previously invulnerable structures (like walls) be vulnerable and if so, will the material they're made of actually have an effect on what kind of punishment they can withstand and/or for how long?  (i.e. a wooden wall lasts less time than a steel one, or a wooden wall can be destroyed with a copper axe or a troll's fists, but not a steel one?)

Threetoe:   Next question is from MrWillsauce: To what extent will invaders be able to dig? Will they only be able to dig through certain z-levels, or through certain types of stone, or will certain types of invaders be able to dig to different extents?
Toady:   Well, it's hard to say exactly what's gonna happen. They should be able to affect a siege upon you that can invade a fort that is, you know, where you've just shut your doors or something silly like that and that's supposed to save you from everybody.
Threetoe:   Or throw up a brick wall or something.
Toady:   Yeah. Just something like that. Just not very impressive. At the same time it'd be very silly if the invaders could come and just sort of dig out your whole map and dig down giant like, turn your whole fortress into a quarry or whatever. And I definitely think that different races would end up having different abilities. If you got invaded by dwarves I think expecting your fortress to have new tunnels would be a very fair thing to expect. And goblins too, for that matter. The way they're shaping up they have kind of a underground tunnely nature to them whereas humans should have some things they could try to do but wouldn't necessarily involve a lot of tunneling unless you've kind of restricted yourself to the soil layers. It is odd in the sense that the timeframe is so fast that you could have a siege that lasts a whole year and in that time there could be some digging done even in real life but it's...I mean, I'm mindful of people that don't want their fortresses utterly destroyed by digging, but yeah the whole brick wall thing is just silly so...Yeah, it's hard to say. I mean we're not going to have them like making a weird sort of swiss cheese pattern out of your fortress but, if they don't cheat, and they don't know where your fortress is, they are gonna have to do a kind of exploratory tunnels all around your entrance, or whatever. So yeah, we'll have to see how that turns out.

[Valtam]

wow thanks for all the quick answers.. I feel obliged to ask another question then, perhaps an easier one though:
when sieges are made more "interesting" and enemies can tunnel in, etc, will previously invulnerable structures (like walls) be vulnerable and if so, will the material they're made of actually have an effect on what kind of punishment they can withstand and/or for how long?  (i.e. a wooden wall lasts less time than a steel one, or a wooden wall can be destroyed with a copper axe or a troll's fists, but not a steel one?)

Actually, there are no quotes in any Fortress Talks regarding wall vulnerability, at least none I could find. Footkerchief's answering quote is more related to digging (which is already acknowledged in the question) than to material hardness. It would be expected to have material differences between kinds of walls, as we will have (in a kind of partial way) with climbers, what with climbing smooth walls vs. rough ones. That way, siege weapons for invading armies would make sense. Also:

Req529, CONSTRUCTION WEAR, (Future): Constructions don't wear down in the same way that regular smoothed walls do.
[...]
Req554, WALLS VERSUS MAGMA, (Future): Constructed and non-constructed walls should be subject to magma. It can't just melt stone though, or the whole map will be affected (since magma currently generates its own heat).

Also, Power Goals, because they're fun.

PowerGoal5, SIEGE POWER, (Future): Your armies totally obliterate and overcome the strength of a fortified position with the power of siegecraft.
[...]
PowerGoal173, THEY ARE SENSITIVE CREATURES, (Future): The goblin child taunts the troll child on account of the troll child's large and lardy appearance. The vicious jibes continue until the troll begins to cry, but the goblin child is still not satisfied and continues poking fun. The troll child is eventually driven to anger and hurls the goblin child against a wall, breaking both the wall and the goblin.

But still, nothing really clear related to material hardness and endurance against stuff thrown at it.

[neblime]

But still, nothing really clear related to material hardness and endurance against stuff thrown at it.

aha well maybe this one will get to toady.  I had listened to the most recent DF talk (and heard that part )  but that doesn't relate at all to different material strengths, just a vague mention that walls wont be completely invincible.

[Manveru Taurënér]

But still, nothing really clear related to material hardness and endurance against stuff thrown at it.

aha well maybe this one will get to toady.  I had listened to the most recent DF talk (and heard that part )  but that doesn't relate at all to different material strengths, just a vague mention that walls wont be completely invincible.

Far from everything planned is listed or talked about, doesn't mean it won't happen. Personally to think that this isn't set in stone to happen already is downright silly, considering the amount of detail going into everything else in the game

[LordBaal]

It's only logical to assume that once we get to that bridge materials will determinate the amount of damage a wall can take, or the amount of time it will hold against a ram or whatever. I expect something simple like the already implemented digging time required for soil and rock could probably do.

We'll have to wait for a few more years to see.

[Scoops Novel]

Has "time-travel", e.g playing during the times of world gen,  been ruled out?

[Jiharo]

Has "time-travel", e.g playing during the times of world gen,  been ruled out?

Strictly speaking, you (as opposed to player character) can "travel back in time" even in the current version, by generating the world using the same parameters and seed and stopping simulation earlier or picking lesser value of 'End Year'.

[Manveru Taurënér]

Has "time-travel", e.g playing during the times of world gen,  been ruled out?

Yes.

As far as timescale goes, it's hard to say again, mostly because things can work in Dwarf Fortress in a couple of ways. You either work at the timescale moving forward as slow as adventure mode and dwarf mode speed - it can go any speed as long as it's moving forward - or you can pause time. Going backward or anything like that is basically impossible without just scrapping and abstracting or whatever so, if you're talking about weird time-travel type stuff it's basically going to be impossible.

[Mesa]

I guess that we're down to 4 items now, right?
Late April-early May release looming over the horizon...Hopefully.