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[monk12]

Well I think weresheep would look a lot more like beastmen from warhammer than a cute cotton animal.

Yeah, weres in DF aren't "now you're a sheep," they're "now you're a half man half sheep monstrosity." Even the goofier ones are probably pretty horrifying to behold considering they're normally innocuous or cute critters twisted into a bloodthirsty mockery of humanity.

[Footkerchief]

Will it be possible for the player to direct the manufacture of special-material weapons based on known vulnerabilities?  For example, if weredonkeys are vulnerable to zinc, are there any plans to insert zinc into the possibilities for weapon/bolt forging?  An adventurer might even discover the zinc secret by asking a shopkeeper why in Armok's name does he have zinc bolts for sale.

If weaknesses to odd materials start coming into play (weremeerkats weak to silver, evil regions populated by blistered giant rabbits weak to gold, demons weak to nothing but other demon bones, etc.), then would that open the possibility of broader material selection in fortress mode? Obviously right now there's no sense to making gold swords and hammers, but if you've got the possibility of things like an outbreak of lycanthropy where they're actually necessary due to material weakness, it starts making more sense to be able to do that.

Yeah, if it came up that we started tormenting people with esoteric stuff, we'd need to start having reasonable ways to get at counter measures.

An interesting related discussion:

Toady, where do you see the ability of players to affect AI behavior?  Will we see something that goes more towards having the ability to directly script dwarven AI to use certain items or take certain actions using some logic operations or a rudimentary scripting ability?  Or do you see this as being more a matter of dwarves having to somehow learn how and when to properly perform actions or use items from the properties they have in the raws alone?  While I'm obviously interested in the effects this can have, I'm also interested in what sort of game design philosophy you have about what level of control you want players to be exerting over their dwarves.

At the extreme end of the potion/material discussion, out beyond what maybe anybody was asking for, I'm absolutely against having to master some sort of scripting language just to get dwarves to poison their weapons.  At the same time, it'll be difficult to get dwarves to use certain exotic syndrome-causing materials in a reasonable way that satisfies a player, especially one using potion mods.  Maybe it'll end up being usage hints in the raws and classifications in-play for use in the military etc. with some sensible defaults.  Ideally they'd be able to handle it like food, water and alcohol (to the extent those aren't broken), and perhaps those would be brought into the same system.  For more exotic actions and random weirdness, maybe there are cases in the mods where you'd really want to write some kind of script down, especially for a non-dwarven mod race that does something or other, but that level of support is pretty hard to prioritize when I don't really need or want it for dwarves.

On the other hand, writing from the perspective that every command the player gives will be credited to fortress position holders, if an appropriate official were to order that a liquid, with usage hints/whatever in the raws, will now be used for something entirely outside those bounds (like coating a weapon with syrup), that action might be anything from brilliant to quirky to wasteful to tyrannical to suicidal, depending on the situation.  The dwarves aren't currently capable of judging their officials and it's a very difficult problem most of the time.  If a randomly-generated creature has a weakness to syrup, maybe coating the weapons with syrup is simply a practical strategy, and in that case syrup wouldn't have the "weapon coating" usage hint in the raws.  That coating action is entirely up to player ingenuity, much like ordering the creation of a complicated machine, and it's a reasonable thing to allow.

Manually ordering a dwarf to perform a specific series of actions that can't be presaged in the raws/code might be the only way to save your fort and might be a reasonably orderable action made by some official, but that kind of power can degrade the atmosphere we want to build.  It's going to depend on the specific cases, but for the sake of guiding discussion on a wide range of future topics, I think it's best that the player feels that a dwarf's autonomy is being respected.  The thing that makes dwarf mode not strictly a hands-off simulation is that you are allowed to compromise dwarves' autonomy if they hold fortress positions, to the extent that you are selecting actions that fall within their position's purview.  If an order typically makes it feel like the dwarves are being controlled like marionettes, forced to do things against their will, etc., the order should probably be altered or removed.  Presently, there are a ton of things that dwarves don't care about that they should care about, but this is the overall idea.

Also:

Workshop Material Use and Specific Object Construction
    Ability to specify material used in jobs

[Dirst]

Will it be possible for the player to direct the manufacture of special-material weapons based on known vulnerabilities?  For example, if weredonkeys are vulnerable to zinc, are there any plans to insert zinc into the possibilities for weapon/bolt forging?  An adventurer might even discover the zinc secret by asking a shopkeeper why in Armok's name does he have zinc bolts for sale.

In adventure mode? I seriously doubt it. In fort mode, you can either manipulate a mood to use that material (and hope you at least get an edged weapon) or edit the raws so that you can make weapons out of metals that are normally unuseable for weapons.

Of course though, each individual werebeast is vulnerable to a different metal, I don't think the same metal vulnerability applies for the whole werebeast species in DF.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at, a bit unclearly.  Once the fortress discovers that weredonkeys are vulnerable to zinc, the overseer browbeats the weaponsmith into making something out of an "inappropriate" material.  And it's no help against weretigers that need, say, golden weapons.

Note that these weapons would be absolutely crappy in general combat, meaning keeping a watchful eye over squad equipment.  And Urist McImpractical who has a preference for zinc...

Looks like Footkerchief has a really good answer to my original question.

[SmileyMan]

I always mod in lead as an ammo material, because I seem to be cursed to embark on massive galena deposits. Due to the hardness, in DF lead crossbow bolts have an effect like a sort of long range mace, causing bruises and blunt trauma rather than cuts and stuck-ins, and are a bit useless against armour, but are perfect for hunters.

[LordBaal]

I always mod in lead as an ammo material, because I seem to be cursed to embark on massive galena deposits. Due to the hardness, in DF lead crossbow bolts have an effect like a sort of long range mace, causing bruises and blunt trauma rather than cuts and stuck-ins, and are a bit useless against armour, but are perfect for hunters.

Until everyone goes mad for led poisoning from the meat.

[Mesa]

Am I the only one here that feels like the next devlog is going to be about how Toady finished the remaining 4 items and that now he's going to be doing the cleanup? I mean, unless there have been some RL issues in the way (or said items being really f*cking tough to deal with) at this point he's gotta be done...
Maybe I'm just going insane stark raving mad from all this waiting, but lately I've been getting dreams of the new version actually coming out (twice or thrice now, so that's not just a random one-off thing).

Or I'm just an impatient little brat who'd kill to get this release out right now and you should stop paying attention to me.

[catenate]

Or I'm just an impatient little brat who'd kill to get this release out right now and you should stop paying attention to me.

As a rule with only a few exceptions, everyone would like to play every playable release as soon as is possible, and everyone wants there to be more of them.  I would imagine Toady wants there to be more releases.  But, the features he adds are major, and he gives himself scope to do the big ones right.  So, we could have more, and more trivial releases, or deal with the waiting for big ones.  Now, even though I'm not an adventure-mode player, I appreciate the scale of what he's putting in adventure mode, and do hope that it will eventually greatly change the world around the fortress, to give the fortress a wider role than merely trade and suffering semi-random, semi-provoked invasions.

[CaptainArchmage]

Am I the only one here that feels like the next devlog is going to be about how Toady finished the remaining 4 items and that now he's going to be doing the cleanup? I mean, unless there have been some RL issues in the way (or said items being really f*cking tough to deal with) at this point he's gotta be done...
Maybe I'm just going insane stark raving mad from all this waiting, but lately I've been getting dreams of the new version actually coming out (twice or thrice now, so that's not just a random one-off thing).

Or I'm just an impatient little brat who'd kill to get this release out right now and you should stop paying attention to me.

To be honest if the game crashes five minutes in, I'm fine with that. There will be a bugfix update out and I will be able to enjoy five minutes of seeing the game as it has become.

Based on the devlogs there weren't really crashes going on; it would be hard to get around the map otherwise.

[Footkerchief]

As a rule with only a few exceptions, everyone would like to play every playable release as soon as is possible, and everyone wants there to be more of them.  I would imagine Toady wants there to be more releases.  But, the features he adds are major, and he gives himself scope to do the big ones right.  So, we could have more, and more trivial releases, or deal with the waiting for big ones.  Now, even though I'm not an adventure-mode player, I appreciate the scale of what he's putting in adventure mode, and do hope that it will eventually greatly change the world around the fortress, to give the fortress a wider role than merely trade and suffering semi-random, semi-provoked invasions.

Big features don't necessitate year-plus release cycles, unless you try to add a half-dozen big features in one go.  In hindsight, the release was overambitious from its inception, and other features kept creeping in (non-human sites, multi-tile trees, camps, stealth, etc).

[magmaholic]

Does the rising hunger for more processing power make you look towards multi-core/GPU support yet?
Or will it require more drastic FPS jumps towards heck?

[Putnam]

As a rule with only a few exceptions, everyone would like to play every playable release as soon as is possible, and everyone wants there to be more of them.  I would imagine Toady wants there to be more releases.  But, the features he adds are major, and he gives himself scope to do the big ones right.  So, we could have more, and more trivial releases, or deal with the waiting for big ones.  Now, even though I'm not an adventure-mode player, I appreciate the scale of what he's putting in adventure mode, and do hope that it will eventually greatly change the world around the fortress, to give the fortress a wider role than merely trade and suffering semi-random, semi-provoked invasions.

Big features don't necessitate year-plus release cycles, unless you try to add a half-dozen big features in one go.  In hindsight, the release was overambitious from its inception, and other features kept creeping in (non-human sites, multi-tile trees, camps, stealth, etc).

I think a reminder should be made that this release is not indicative of Toady's usual development cycles and is, in fact, exceptionally long by a wide margin.

Does the rising hunger for more processing power make you look towards multi-core/GPU support yet?
Or will it require more drastic FPS jumps towards heck?

I can run the game at 10000 FPS early-game on this computer and at a consistent 100-500 (that doesn't seem consistent, but we're talking orders of magnitude here, where that's the same as the difference between 5 and 1) for a few years of fort on my less powerful, 5-year-old computer. It's not that big a deal yet and next version makes it almost moot, since you can retire a fort and leave it to its own devices when the FPS gets too unbearable (and then invade it as a dragon or something and see how you fare... oh man that's a really good idea).

Not to mention that multithreading will give you an approximately 0 gain in FPS.

[Dirst]

An interesting related discussion:

Toady, where do you see the ability of players to affect AI behavior?  Will we see something that goes more towards having the ability to directly script dwarven AI to use certain items or take certain actions using some logic operations or a rudimentary scripting ability?  Or do you see this as being more a matter of dwarves having to somehow learn how and when to properly perform actions or use items from the properties they have in the raws alone?  While I'm obviously interested in the effects this can have, I'm also interested in what sort of game design philosophy you have about what level of control you want players to be exerting over their dwarves.

At the extreme end of the potion/material discussion, out beyond what maybe anybody was asking for, I'm absolutely against having to master some sort of scripting language just to get dwarves to poison their weapons.  At the same time, it'll be difficult to get dwarves to use certain exotic syndrome-causing materials in a reasonable way that satisfies a player, especially one using potion mods.  Maybe it'll end up being usage hints in the raws and classifications in-play for use in the military etc. with some sensible defaults.  Ideally they'd be able to handle it like food, water and alcohol (to the extent those aren't broken), and perhaps those would be brought into the same system.  For more exotic actions and random weirdness, maybe there are cases in the mods where you'd really want to write some kind of script down, especially for a non-dwarven mod race that does something or other, but that level of support is pretty hard to prioritize when I don't really need or want it for dwarves.

On the other hand, writing from the perspective that every command the player gives will be credited to fortress position holders, if an appropriate official were to order that a liquid, with usage hints/whatever in the raws, will now be used for something entirely outside those bounds (like coating a weapon with syrup), that action might be anything from brilliant to quirky to wasteful to tyrannical to suicidal, depending on the situation.  The dwarves aren't currently capable of judging their officials and it's a very difficult problem most of the time.  If a randomly-generated creature has a weakness to syrup, maybe coating the weapons with syrup is simply a practical strategy, and in that case syrup wouldn't have the "weapon coating" usage hint in the raws.  That coating action is entirely up to player ingenuity, much like ordering the creation of a complicated machine, and it's a reasonable thing to allow.

Manually ordering a dwarf to perform a specific series of actions that can't be presaged in the raws/code might be the only way to save your fort and might be a reasonably orderable action made by some official, but that kind of power can degrade the atmosphere we want to build.  It's going to depend on the specific cases, but for the sake of guiding discussion on a wide range of future topics, I think it's best that the player feels that a dwarf's autonomy is being respected.  The thing that makes dwarf mode not strictly a hands-off simulation is that you are allowed to compromise dwarves' autonomy if they hold fortress positions, to the extent that you are selecting actions that fall within their position's purview.  If an order typically makes it feel like the dwarves are being controlled like marionettes, forced to do things against their will, etc., the order should probably be altered or removed.  Presently, there are a ton of things that dwarves don't care about that they should care about, but this is the overall idea.

When this mechanic appears in the game, the baroness is going to mandate silver maces dipped in golden salve.  Because she can.

[Footkerchief]

I think a reminder should be made that this release is not indicative of Toady's usual development cycles and is, in fact, exceptionally long by a wide margin.

It's exceptional with regard to number of releases, but it's the norm with regard to time spent.  Since DF's first release, 66% of the time has been spent in just four abnormally long release cycles:

Code: (ruby) [Select]

long_release_days = [
  Date.new(2007, 1, 18) ... Date.new(2007, 10, 29), # 0.27.169.32a
  Date.new(2008, 9, 8) ... Date.new(2010, 4, 1),    # 0.31.01
  Date.new(2011, 3, 28) ... Date.new(2012, 2, 14),  # 0.34.01
  Date.new(2012, 6, 4) .. Date.today,               # upcoming
].map{|r| r.to_a.size}.sum
total_days = (Date.new(2006, 8, 6) .. Date.today).to_a.size
long_release_days.to_f / total_days                 # 0.6607270135424091


[Putnam]

And 36% of that time has been waiting for this release, which is still a pretty wide margin. Yes, it's not unusual to be waiting for the big releases, but this one is still the longest (no pressure, no sarcasm).

[thvaz]

Toady, at this level of development if you don't post a devlog saying at least "nothing to report, still going on" our expectations raise to unmanageable levels.