Print

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

[Orange Wizard]

It should be noted, in the real world, "latin" names (actually binomial names) are actually a hodgepodge of latin, greek, star wars references and stuff that doesn't actually correctly translate to anything because the person who named it wasn't very good at any of the above.

Don't forget Harry Potter and the Mangled Faux Latin.

[Dirst]

For 100% procedural generation plants, making/defining a small set of parameters to apply for the biome type, based on statistical distributions of realworld plant morphologies could work-- (EG, "70% of realworld desert plants are of X morphology, 10% of Y, 5% of Z, 5% of A, 2% of B, and 3% of C"-- then have the computer pick a classification for basic morphology type based on target biome, then based on this initial decision, pick some other features, again based on statistical spreads-- EG, Some percentage of type Y morphology has Q type flowers, which would define # of seeds produced, etc.)

Applying that to the "original plants" would make a good trial and testcase for the procedural generator's quality.

Total scrapping of those crops just seems kinda wasteful; they could be useful as testbeds for a procedural generator.

This can be taken a step further, where different characteristics are correlated with each other.  Producing correlated random numbers involves Cholesky decompositions and other arcane math tricks, but Toady actually speaks math so that's not the barrier.  The barrier would be coming up with a reasonable matrix (most likely a community effort like the materials properties mentioned above).

With procedurally generated creatures, having no idea what to expect is part of the fun.  But with procedurally generated plants (with which in-game civilizations have centuries or millennia of experience), will there be a way for the player to get an idea of what a plant is, its farming requirements, products, etc.?

It would be a shame for Urist McFarmer to spend a couple seasons tending Moonstone Bushes to feed the fortress, only to find out there are no edible parts.

Edit: grammar

[Footkerchief]

With procedurally generated creatures, having no idea what to expect is part of the fun.  But with procedurally generated plants (with which in-game civilizations have centuries or millennia of experience), will there be a way for the player to get an idea of what a plant is, its farming requirements, products, etc.?

That's the eventual plan, yes.  Toady has often mentioned the need to explain randomly generated creatures/plants/minerals/whatever:

Random minerals should be fun.  Even the current stock minerals can be a bit confusing, and random minerals might add to that further, so further exposition of what minerals can be used for and so on might be necessary there.

Threetoe:   Okay, this next question is from James, he asks 'Will you ever begin to include randomized main races, or will the player interactable races always be limited to token dwarves, elves, goblins and humans? And a smattering of chimera tribes' ... the animal people.
Toady:   Is that what he means by the smattering of ... I don't know how to say these words, is it chimera? Yeah, it must be the animal people. Unless you meant something else.
Threetoe:   Yeah, we could always just call the animal people something else, other than turtle man, we could make it some other name and still be a turtle man.
Toady:   I think it's always been in the plan to have randomized main races, it was up on the old dev pages, I don't remember if it made it anywhere on the new dev pages or not? I think it might actually be there. Maybe not. It would be the last one, because doing randomized civilizations is an extra step beyond randomized monsters. Because we've kind of been easing in, we have the forgotten beasts now, we've got the titans, those are randomized. We have some of the underworld creatures randomized and we wanted to ease in to having some of the regular kind of monsters in the woods and stuff, randomizing those with a few extra night creature entries at some point and then kind of ease in to having some randomized regular creatures and then finally adding in randomized civilization creatures. The problem with randomized civilization creatures is there needs to be a lot of exposition or you're just going to be completely confused about what's going on, but it would definitely be an option, I think there would be a slider or something for how strange you want your world to be because we definitely think having dwarves and elves and goblins is cool for a lot of people just to kind of understand what's going on without having to do a lot of extra reading.

[...]

Threetoe:   Alright, so the next one is from Eric, he asks, “Have you considered creating random materials in the game so civilizations and players could perform experiments on the materials to determine their properties? Given the structure of the raws it seems like it could be pretty easy to create random metals in world creation.”
Toady:   So there already are random materials in the game, just not the type Eric wanted. There's the rain, can be a random material ...
Threetoe:   Oh that's right, yeah.
Toady:   When it rains some kind of ... And mists, the mists are also defined as a random material.
Threetoe:   We just need a a solid now ...
Toady:   Yeah, we just need a solid ... there can be solids if it gets cold and the mist freezes I guess, or if it snows ... I don't remember if it can snow slime or not, but it might not be able to, but if it could then that would be a random material. The important point is that these random materials are raw files, they are generated just like raw files, then it just kind of puts them in with your other text files and pretends to load them, it actually goes through and processes the text file and everything. So it is just a matter of will and time and interface, etcetera; all of the game making pieces of it but not the technical framework for getting things like random metals in the game. And avoiding the kind of gray sludge problem where it's like does your world turn into mush if everyone is walking around with like akabarite shields or whatever. You're like, 'What is that?!'
Threetoe:   Yeah, it's the same problem as the randomized monsters, it's like when you see the name, and every time you play the game it's a new monster with a completely different thing you never get used to it.
Toady:   We just have to overcome exposition and then we'll be all over that.

[Dirst]

With procedurally generated creatures, having no idea what to expect is part of the fun.  But with procedurally generated plants (with which in-game civilizations have centuries or millennia of experience), will there be a way for the player to get an idea of what a plant is, its farming requirements, products, etc.?

That's the eventual plan, yes.  Toady has often mentioned the need to explain randomly generated creatures/plants/minerals/whatever:

Random minerals should be fun.  Even the current stock minerals can be a bit confusing, and random minerals might add to that further, so further exposition of what minerals can be used for and so on might be necessary there.

Threetoe:   Okay, this next question is from James, he asks 'Will you ever begin to include randomized main races, or will the player interactable races always be limited to token dwarves, elves, goblins and humans? And a smattering of chimera tribes' ... the animal people.
Toady:   Is that what he means by the smattering of ... I don't know how to say these words, is it chimera? Yeah, it must be the animal people. Unless you meant something else.
Threetoe:   Yeah, we could always just call the animal people something else, other than turtle man, we could make it some other name and still be a turtle man.
Toady:   I think it's always been in the plan to have randomized main races, it was up on the old dev pages, I don't remember if it made it anywhere on the new dev pages or not? I think it might actually be there. Maybe not. It would be the last one, because doing randomized civilizations is an extra step beyond randomized monsters. Because we've kind of been easing in, we have the forgotten beasts now, we've got the titans, those are randomized. We have some of the underworld creatures randomized and we wanted to ease in to having some of the regular kind of monsters in the woods and stuff, randomizing those with a few extra night creature entries at some point and then kind of ease in to having some randomized regular creatures and then finally adding in randomized civilization creatures. The problem with randomized civilization creatures is there needs to be a lot of exposition or you're just going to be completely confused about what's going on, but it would definitely be an option, I think there would be a slider or something for how strange you want your world to be because we definitely think having dwarves and elves and goblins is cool for a lot of people just to kind of understand what's going on without having to do a lot of extra reading.

[...]

Threetoe:   Alright, so the next one is from Eric, he asks, “Have you considered creating random materials in the game so civilizations and players could perform experiments on the materials to determine their properties? Given the structure of the raws it seems like it could be pretty easy to create random metals in world creation.”
Toady:   So there already are random materials in the game, just not the type Eric wanted. There's the rain, can be a random material ...
Threetoe:   Oh that's right, yeah.
Toady:   When it rains some kind of ... And mists, the mists are also defined as a random material.
Threetoe:   We just need a a solid now ...
Toady:   Yeah, we just need a solid ... there can be solids if it gets cold and the mist freezes I guess, or if it snows ... I don't remember if it can snow slime or not, but it might not be able to, but if it could then that would be a random material. The important point is that these random materials are raw files, they are generated just like raw files, then it just kind of puts them in with your other text files and pretends to load them, it actually goes through and processes the text file and everything. So it is just a matter of will and time and interface, etcetera; all of the game making pieces of it but not the technical framework for getting things like random metals in the game. And avoiding the kind of gray sludge problem where it's like does your world turn into mush if everyone is walking around with like akabarite shields or whatever. You're like, 'What is that?!'
Threetoe:   Yeah, it's the same problem as the randomized monsters, it's like when you see the name, and every time you play the game it's a new monster with a completely different thing you never get used to it.
Toady:   We just have to overcome exposition and then we'll be all over that.

Oh, excellent.  If the randomly generated stuff comes from pseudo-raw files, then the exposition can just be parsed from the raws (possibly with some context courtesy of the Legends).

[LordBaal]

I'm weary of random material/plants until something along the lines of knowledge/research is introduced. Awesome nevertheless.

[wierd]

If it werent for all the paywalls everywhere for anything even remotely scientifically significant, i would happily start looking into statistical spreads on botanical morphologies as they relate to biome types.

Sadly, Elsevier and pals make that basically impossible. (and people wonder why our culture is gravitating toward anti-science biases. hah.)

Strike that, looks like there is a very comprehensive list of plant species that can be freely browsed.
However, the data is NOT in a big-data processing friendly format. Will require significant effort to process.

Will also require outside datasets to determine biome coverage statistics (how commonly found are the plants listed, etc.)

[magmaholic]

Will there be a limited vision cone for players?

[Trif]

Will there be a limited vision cone for players?

No:

Toady:   [...] Then there's the whole thief mechanics, I haven't played a lot of those Thief games so I'm not up on the technology there ... a lot of it is about which way are they looking, like vision arcs, and that's something that I'm not comfortable with as a concept in general, I don't like it when you're walking around and you can only see half the screen, because that's not how it works, or at least if you were paranoid enough in a fantasy game you have to worry about getting attacked you'd be like 'step forward, look over my shoulder, step forward, look over my shoulder, step forward, look over my shoulder, step forward, look over my shoulder' so it should just show you everything. But when you're sneaking you shouldn't be able to ... when someone's sneaking at least if it's you or if the target of the sneaking is not the player, then there should be things like vision arcs so that you can have a guard walking down a hallway and then you can run down the hallway behind him ... There are going to be visions arcs then, but they just don't apply to you, I don't want to put them in for you ... Someone should be able to do that to you too theoretically, like you're walking down a hallway and then they can run up behind and either attack you or run down the hallway, but if we put in vision arcs strictly then you'll constantly have to stop and be paranoid about looking over your shoulder, and as realistic as that might be it would not be fun.
Capntastic:   Just have it tied to the perception ability or whatever ...
Toady:   Yeah, it'll just end up having to be something like that where its non directional for the adventurer only. For everybody else the guard might stop and look over his shoulder, but he's not going to be doing it all the time and you can sneak by, and then you'd be able to sneak into places, and it should be super entertaining. That's just another one of those weird little conflicts, the same way adventurers having emotions and stuff is one of those weird little flicks ... It should be pretty fun, and being hunted down should be fun.

[Snaake]

I'm weary of random material/plants until something along the lines of knowledge/research is introduced. Awesome nevertheless.

I'm sorry abut being such a grammar nazi, but I just can't bare errors like this. I would of stayed silent, but this was just too unseamly.

[LordBaal]

I'm weary of random material/plants until something along the lines of knowledge/research is introduced. Awesome nevertheless.

I'm sorry abut being such a grammar nazi, but I just can't bare errors like this. I would of stayed silent, but this was just too unseamly.

I'm sorry, did you mean unseemly?



Hehehe actually, don't mind it, I'm a fond grammar nazi in my own language too. Do you mind telling me the mistake I made? It's the weary when I should have used wary? I just realized that.

[TD1]

I think he was joking. He also said "Would of."

[smjjames]

If it werent for all the paywalls everywhere for anything even remotely scientifically significant, i would happily start looking into statistical spreads on botanical morphologies as they relate to biome types.

Sadly, Elsevier and pals make that basically impossible. (and people wonder why our culture is gravitating toward anti-science biases. hah.)

Strike that, looks like there is a very comprehensive list of plant species that can be freely browsed.
However, the data is NOT in a big-data processing friendly format. Will require significant effort to process.

Will also require outside datasets to determine biome coverage statistics (how commonly found are the plants listed, etc.)

http://eol.org/ Will also be of help, lots of information in there.

Edit: LOTS of data for Pineapple for example. http://eol.org/pages/1126520/data Including links to other databases.

Not suitable as a christmas tree product is included in there, lol....... However, it seems to be in agreement that it is not a viable wood producing plant.

Flower color green though?

[monk12]

I'm weary of random material/plants until something along the lines of knowledge/research is introduced. Awesome nevertheless.

I'm sorry abut being such a grammar nazi, but I just can't bare errors like this. I would of stayed silent, but this was just too unseamly.

I'm sorry, did you mean unseemly?



Hehehe actually, don't mind it, I'm a fond grammar nazi in my own language too. Do you mind telling me the mistake I made?

Honestly, I don't know what grammar mistake he was alluding to in your post. He was definitely doing so in a playful manner, as "bare" and "would of" are both (relatively) obvious mistakes in English.

FAKEEDIT: Oh hai ninjas

[Dwarf4Explosives]

Also, "abut".

[Putnam]

Wary is what was meant.

Anyway, that followed Muphry's Law like clockwork.