Thanks to Trif, Footkerchief, Putnam, Knight Otu, Matoro, Parisbre56, King Mir, smjjames, Eric Blank, Manveru Taurënér, BlackFlyme, metime00, MrWiggles, My Name is Immaterial, Talvieno, thvaz, Valtam and the various missed individuals for helping out with questions this time. A few were answered later on, after other questions were asked, so you might have to poke around, but I think pretty much everything was addressed in one way or another, so please check after your question if you don't see it below!
Now, when you mention the perceived strength of occupiers vs. your attempts to kill them, does it just take into account the number/equipment/skill level of the remaining soldiers or does it factor in player events such as how many people witness the fights, or your reputation? For example, if your world-famous dragonslayer comes into town and promptly starts killing goblins, will it affect the perceived strength differently than an equally skilled adventurer the town has never heard of?
The civilians don't take your reputation into consideration when making raw strength calculations, though it'll help with recruiting, assuming you have such a reputation with the culture in question.
Hm, what if the only way to get to a job site is by climbing (say, getting to the dining hall, unless thats not classed as a job)? will they path then?
To clarify, what I'm asking is, for example, if a dwarf wants to eat and the only way to get to the dininhg hall is to climb, will said dwarf climb?
I could only do non-path-component-number pathing in limited circumstances -- generally circumstances like combat where the distances can be reasonably controlled without degrading the outcome much. I still don't have a good angle on solving the general problem.
Do factions exist in any meaningful way in Fortress play?
I don't think so. There aren't insurrections or guilds or religions or anything there yet, though since it's all the same person-to-person reaction code between modes, it's possible something could happen between migrants from different sites with a history. I'm not really sure, though dwarves don't attack other dwarf sites of the same civ so the histories won't be too violent most of the time.
Will creatures be able to ride a creature that can climb? And would they keep use of both hands in that situation?
Yeah. Jumping mounts, maybe, too... though I'm not really sure what happens code-wise currently when a mount becomes a projectile (which is how jumping works). The rider may detach, which'll be funny until it is fixed.
Would the killer of someone be disturbed by the corpse of his victim? For example, someone gives you a quest to kill his brother and then you recruit the quest giver and have him kill his own brother. Would he break down and start crying over what he has done?
What if the discovered body was a night creature? Would that make it more or less disturbing?
Yeah, he'd experience all the same troubles. The game sort of needs adrenalin or something now. It does get reasonably strange sometimes, how immediately reflective people get in large combats.
I don't think the creature type/interaction status of a body makes a difference at this point.
Will neutral parties (like hunting trips, migrants to different forts, etc) pass through fortresses without any intent to make contact?
In the distant future, will there be sound to go with the game?
Nobody passes through at this point, and the time-dilation thing encourages them not to do so.
Technically speaking, there's a dev item for sound, though if you play WWI Medic, you'll find that you want the future to be as distant as possible.
Any word on [Power of Play video]?
Nope. I'm not sure what happened. I just sent another email and we'll see if there's more information, hopefully.
Toady, do you yet have a plan for how you're going to implement more complex subterranean features?
I'm not sure when I'm next going to work on it, and when I get there it'll likely unfold as usual. We have potential underground features sitting around in various text files, and there'll be some angle we're taking that directs what we work on (aboveground features, underground civs, underground animal people, treasure hunter, etc.). I guess it's the same as everything. Some basic stuff like underground rivers, stalacgtmites and so on count toward v1 numbering, anyway.
So, I guess now instead of bandit ambushes being a 'DIE!!' situation, it'll now be a SURRENDER OR DIE!!' situation. Telling your companions to surrender to the bandits is something else though...
Who knows, maybe the option to order your companions to surrender will be available, or maybe they'll surrender first or even ignore your orders.
Toady: is there already a mechanic similar to this in-play that we could invoke (affecting our party members) to avoid conflict?
Companions can surrender first, and your own surrender is an implicit order for them. You can also try to get a hostile opponent to stop fighting without surrendering, but they generally need a reason to accept that once a fight has begun (like things not going their way).
Do reanimated body parts invoke the same emotional responses in NPCs as inert ones? If so, is there additional terror associated with their undeath?
There is additional terror associated with undeath.
What was the existing thought... being attacked by undead? I don't remember if there's one for just seeing the undead. There are lots of steps in the process, and it's going to be inconsistent for a while, but yeah, we're trying to make distinctions.
Will ghost express feelings of horror upon seeing dead loved ones? Do they even still have loved ones? Do ghosts have feelings at all?
The ghosts remember all their loved ones -- certain kinds of ghosts have always focused on relations (or grudges). They still have their "soul", but they don't have their body. That said, I don't recall if they have an exception for emotions. Their lack of eyes should stop them from crying.
Do you/are you planning to make a meaningful distinction between a creature's "mind" and their "soul"?
The current soul is a heterogeneous mix of personality, skills, and mental attributes, so arguably the distinction already exists. Would "meaningful" mean like replacing a dwarf's personality while leaving their skills and mental attributes intact?
Dwarf Fortress is strictly dualistic, to facilitate stuff like going to the spirit realm or swapping consciousness with another creature. All mental type attributes are in the soul.
Yeah, the basic idea from here is just to mess with the system we have vs. interactions as well as generated metaphysics. Code-wise, hopefully the objects themselves don't need to be changed too much. We have a collection of souls in each critter (only one is used now), and the souls store all the mental/personality atts. The generated metaphysics on top of that could be one of those systems that classifies, say, certain personality facets or all of the skills etc. into one named part of the soul, and the others into another named part of the soul, and then the generated magic systems and death and all that could respect those distinctions (so that, for example, all skills could be lost on death, or parts of the personality could change). The next world would have a new system to explore. The difficult part is probably doing AI for it, and respecting it in the abstracted parts of the game like world gen. That's sort of the distant plan, anyway. I don't know if you had some other thing in mind.
What thoughts do you have on making vacant non-dwarf-fort sites reclaimable?
Manveru had a DF Talk quote where we mentioned reclaiming a ruined castle would be fine, and I'm still fine with that. The main difficulty is that some of the sites are very large (up to 17x17) or that they can cross world map square boundaries (which probably isn't an issue, I just haven't dealt with it yet). Dirst mentioned partial reclaims on a portion of a larger site, and there is already a "subordinate site" framework for that (which happens for instance when you embark over a cave, the cave becomes subordinate), but that framework doesn't handle everything yet, so I suspect there'll be some growing pains there. For instance, the humans might come to reclaim their ruined 17x17 town after you already have a site that occupies a small part of it... leading to who-knows-what, but not necessarily good-fun rather than crashy-not-fun.
When the Army Arc, Caravan Arc, etc. are complete, do you foresee the player's fort getting involved in fights between third parties? For example, armies crossing the area that are not aiming for your fort, but might end up causing problems anyway? Caravans from besieged cities not arriving unless you send them an escort party, etc.?
Yeah, certainly. You can already get collections of refugees lingering outside of your fortress, and if you had hill dwarves, they could already banditize and start harassing those communities. Depending on hill dwarves being attached to your fort, which seems like a nearer term thing given all that has been discussed, this shouldn't be too far away. Your fort itself is a strange space and a little more particular to work with, but it'll also be involved. And yeah, once caravans are moving on the map, they'll be subject to the full array of world troubles, and so on with everything else. Hopefully when we start to rewrite diplomacy we can really start to have some interesting interactions where you might be brokering agreements rather than just dealing one-to-one with everybody. At first it'll probably just be policing barfights in your tavern or something though.
On January 9th of this year the devblog post references a Necromancer who could not find any corpses because she was too busy camping out and teaching apprentices secrets of death. Will creatures and regions be capable of I_EFFECTs like ADD_SYNDROME, RESURRECT, and ANIMATE during world gen and off-loaded world progression? For example: Will corpses of historical figures who die in evil reanimation areas get back up and wander around, or out of, the region?
I haven't changed how that works, so I'm assuming it doesn't work if it doesn't work in the old version. Ideally it'd make sense, but since world gen is abstracted, everything needs to be re-coded there, so individual effects don't tend to get attention until I use them in vanilla.
Can we rob people too?
The bandits are going to harass the npcs too?
Do we as adventurers have the option to rob people?
I guess the specific question is: once an NPC yields, can we demand that they drop their belongings?
Yeah, though one works strictly as a conversation (yours) and one is a conversation plus activity (theirs), so there could be different issues that come up as people try it out.
If they do drop their belongings, and we don't grab all of them, will they pick them back up? Or is there some risk other NPCs will walk by and grab them? Also, how are cloths/armor handled in this case?
Relatedly, do Robbers ever demand that you give up your spiffy *<=Steel Chain Mail=>*?
Unfortunately, no, they still completely lack this sort of broad awareness. It'll happen at some point, and that'll be a healthy and game-making moment, though they'll screw it up for a long time, no doubt.
Robbers do not ask for clothes. When I have time I could have them check the layering, but it was a bit squicky having them ask for everything. I was still going to have them steal your shoes, but since the shoes have the same name on either foot, that was also confusing, since you might take off the wrong one and get beat up. It'd be better to have them ask for both (or oddly specifying the foot), but I just decided to cut my time losses for now.
Do robbers have a single, hard-coded way to surround a player and do things or is there some variation between their tactics (as in, how they arrange themselves, what they talk about, when they start demanding, etc.
Relatedly, do robbers take into account their own numbers when choosing targets and how to approach them? Can a player potentially unnerve them by being a famous monster slayer within the civ?
Can onlookers (I'm thinking mainly of guards and similarly skilled individuals) decide to stop the robbery even if the player yields?
The bandits are just hanging out loosely, generally, and the others will come up to some square around you while one of them is talking. It's one script, but since one bandit can be closer or farther away, and small talk is frequent and has varying forms, you might not catch it if you aren't careful. The fact that bandits are armed unit types is a big clue. Adventure mode really needs to scrap the unit type concept for something else, eventually, but it is tricky.
Numbers and rep matter. An issue with reputation is that it doesn't carry easily to bandits, though, since they don't live in town and they don't currently have a lot of vectors for information transfer other than losing a fight they shouldn't have picked.
The guards aren't quite interested in comprehensive justice yet. That'll be a thief role thing. They are just kind of town-to-town thugs for now.
If you know someone is a bandit, or you just make a guess when someone is acting fishy and you attack them, will outsiders recognize you or them as the "bad guy"? Will you be the one they register as a hostile to the civilization or the bandits?
Locals know who their neighbors are. Generally, conflicts between strangers aren't something the civilians find offensive (scary, yes), though you'll likely catch a general reputation from the witnessed event, and if you are fighting off bandits, that can be good, provoked or not. If you guess incorrectly and attack a civilian, that's a different matter. If you mean outsiders like other travelers that witness the event, they care just as little or even less if that's possible, unless they are related to the bandits or something.
Do all people have the potential to do smalltalk when they meet you or is this something reserved for important people or bandits?
Everybody can do it... even the wren men out in the woods seem to say hello and goodbye to each other.
Will a fortress be able to secede from its parent civilization? Would this be under player control, or need to result from a factional conflict?
You can sort of do that when you refuse to become a barony, but there still aren't repercussions. We won't get into that until start scenarios, outside settlements and your own map armies start coming into play.
What happens to stolen items once the bandits/you leave the map? Can they be tracked and reclaimed? Can the items end up outside the bandits' possession (in shops or camps, for example)?
Also, what qualifies as a "valuable" item for stealing?
Everything is tracked as far as inventory goes, so you can go get stuff back even if it is offloaded, but it starts to lose the thread after that. The economy/caravan stuff will help with that somewhat, but I imagine it'll be difficult to deal with all of the orphaned items, especially the less interesting ones. I'm trying to remember what they stole... certain item types above a certain numeric value threshold perhaps.
What speed will Fort mode dwarves default to?
They use "walk", which is the same as the normal speed, though they run and so on like everybody else when closing with foes, etc.
Will unfriendly locals (i.e. goblins) be able to oppress adventurers in a similar fashion?
It'll probably still just be hostility by the time we get to the release. When you are robbed, you can continue along, and locals at a gob site should stop you from intruding. If they understood their space a bit better, they could start smaller and amplify, but it doesn't do that now. They can't detain you either, which is the key thing. We'll have to wait for the thief role for that.
Is there going to be a DF meetup in the semi-near future?
There isn't anything scheduled. The ones in the past were organized by other people, and that has become more difficult now that attendance is a little too large for a restaurant's back area.
Are garden plant raws final enough to show us (with the implication I mean explicit meaning of plz show) and have there been any raws from the new version changed since October 2013?
Will there be tags to make creatures easier/harder/impossible to smell? (such as [STRONG_ODOR], [WEAK_ODOR], [NOT_SMELLABLE], for creatures such as dogs, lions, and the "amethyst man", respectively)
There's some smell stuff, yeah, and aside from some seed-within-growth stuff I may or may not do, the garden raws are ready. I'll post it all here once I confirm the initial test is happy. I still need to run them through their production chains in a fort to see how many stupid mistakes I made. I'll be able to post here Wednesday unless something goes wrong.
So the new devlog clearly means that the elite military dwarves who become refugees when we abandon our forts will become bandits and plague legend mode, right?
They'll plague more than legend mode. If their leader is a jerk, they might rob your adventurer. Or they could go off and reclaim a site, or just hang out by an existing site for a while. They should also be able to migrate into a new fort, at least after they get settled... though if they've converted to bandit status they might not become migrants. I haven't tried that out.
Bandits forced out of an invaded entity will be different in any way from other bandits? They will become more like of a freedom fighter group or will harass everyone like regular bandits?
It depends on the personality of the leader right now.
Given that there will be substantially more developed non-human sites in the next version, will the Sites and Roads Legends mode map export include them now?
I know the hill dwarves and elf sites show up, as do the surface gob parts. People mentioned that the other ones are too 3D, but it does do a sort of half-assed export for them when you export their site maps. I'm not sure how that'll be changed -- it just does a nested square thing now to give an idea about industrial vs. living zoning now that is not very helpful.
[will] new wars will be declared after world generation stops?
Yeah, it does that part in the same way as world gen, and hopefully they'll continue to make more sense together.
Also in relation to the tunnels, will there be soldiers stationed along the length, or enemies polluting it (Bandits, goblins, kobolds, etc.). Or will there simply be an uninhabited tunnel?
The soldiers stick to the entrances at this point. You can find critters, but no civilized presences, along the length. At some point we'll do the underground animal people more justice, but animal people in general are completely underdeveloped.
Will travelers use the tunnels to travel between the dwarven sites as they use the above ground roads?
Hmm, I don't think they do, but it's an easy change now. I don't remember if I had a note or not, but I'll double-check.
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?)
Material strength will eventually matter. There is some weird ancient thing about wooden vs. other doors that was already in, which had to do with building destroyer ranking, but I have no idea if that is still meaningful.
What possibilities will we have in Fort Mode to gather information about the outside world? Liaisons, merchants, immigrants, etc - who will tell us stuff?
Right now it's just the diplomat/liaison, since they had a handy pop-up screen available. I was going to do it for traders, but they'd have no additional information beyond what their diplomats bring and the trade screen was a little more annoying to work with, so I bailed to save time. Eventually there should be lots of options, including your own hill/deep communities and so on.
Right now, it's still to easy to flood your fortress with new arrivals relatively early on if you only let your original 7 be moderately productive. When will migrants start acknowledging that while your fort has beautiful smooth interior walls and decently big meeting hall, so does other (NPC) forts, i.e., when will more than a raw fortress wealth vs. death-per-year-count be taken into account when game decides to send migrants? And when do hill dwarfs come into play?
Note, I'm not asking you about some fixed timescale, just your opinion or rather vision on this thing. Thanks!
I'm not quite sure what's going to happen, since outside hill dwarf populations are going to completely change the dynamics of migration. There has to be some initial "freshness" to your site, since you'll never get enough people to build it up otherwise, so it can't just compare you to existing established sites. There are lots of reasons people go out to the frontier though, so that shouldn't be a problem to tune up. I can't really speculate, though, until the start scenario and hill dwarf stuff is in. It'll be quite disruptive.
On the next release what's going to happen if the dwarfs go the dinosaur way and get extinct and you try to embark on a fortress? Probably the same thing that happens in the current release (I don't really know what happens in the current release under that circumstances). But as now the world is starting to wake up, could it be possible for the dwarves from one last fort funded by you and then retired to repopulate the world with more dwarves while you go and play as an adventurer? Or no new places get colonized after world gen right now?
Yeah, I don't remember what happens either. But assuming you are allowed to make an initial fortress, and retire it, then yeah, it should go off and reclaim ruined sites and create new places (though that last part depends on site cap stuff). It would be a time-consuming process, since populations don't increase very quickly.
How many of the new plants will dwarves be able to brew?
Lots of them. Of course, one of the main outstanding issues is that in real life there are all sorts of drinks you can make with a single plant, depending on what you do, and the current system isn't built around that. It just has one per plant. So some of the drinks will be arbitrary, until we finally get to all the recipeish stuff. Possibly tavern arc-y, depending on how that turns out.
Now that there will be more millable grains available, will we be able to do more things with flours, like making real bread?
I haven't extended the existing mechanics there.
Now that we have real world fruits, etc, what will happen to the other ones (aside from the underground crops) which were basically analogs to real world crops? Like will bloated tubers become potatoes or something?
That's an open question. My thought was to scrap them, since the real-world ones are more interesting and I want to use that stronger diverse base of mechanics and potential mechanics as a place to generate random ones from eventually. Generated plants can have more intricate ties to generated mythology than the made-up plants without constraining the game, I think, and it allows for more possibilities (and our made-up plants are crappy enough that they could all have easily been generated without decreasing the quality at all...).
All the same, they could end up dying a slow lingering death instead, and some might survive indefinitely.
What kind of thought process went into choosing plants for inclusion? What about the names you chose to call them in DF?
There were various lists of plants that were commonly cultivated, and I went through a bunch of them. I tried to stay away from recent cultivars, and I'm not sure how that's going to evolve, concerning things like the various squashes, peppers, and all that. I was probably a little too strict or just misinformed in cutting out certain plants, and I don't have a well-defined cut-off year there. As far as tech trees go, maybe that'll be one of the things to go into world gen and beyond eventually (so you can make lemons and pumpkins and orange carrots). Hard to say whether we'd have the real-world hybrids or new ones or whatever, and then there'll be generated plants to figure into that. Just a mess, but hopefully it'll work out.
When they had multiple names, I often used the first name used on wikipedia (which I think accounts for the ones you mentioned -- carambola and bitter melon), though I also tried to stay away from Earth place names when possible. If I remember, and there's a lot of competition, long yam was the most made-up name I used, since it was down in a later paragraph as a suggested translation of the Japanese name. I went with that instead of nagaimo since I wanted it to be grouped with the other yams verbally. In any case, it's apparently from the thread that a lot of the various names are used depending on where people live, etc., so I'm just going to leave them unless something clear comes up.
This list adds 132 new plant species, making the number of varieties over 6 times greater. Given how complicated food/drink/textile/etc. production already is, how will players (especially novices) be able to figure out just what plant does what? What will prevent players from throwing a tantrum themselves due to the sheer scope of different flora?
I haven't exactly been useful in any of the many aspects of the game in that respect. If it seems to be even worse than the other stuff during testing (haven't loaded them up a fort to test production yet, though the raws are doneish), something basic may be done, but I'm not sure yet.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 3831690 times)