Thanks to Footkerchief, Matoro, MrWiggles, InsanityIncarnate, smjjames, Eric Blank, thvaz, HugoLuman, DG, TastyMints, Quietust, Manveru Taurënér, Putnam, Urist Da Vinci, Knight Otu, Trif, Rockphed, DVNO, DarkDXZ and anybody I missed for helping to answer questions. There were many, many answered questions this time, so please check back around where you posted if your question doesn't appear below!
If I raided the human caravan, and their civ starts sending sieges, will they besiege the closet site of my civ, my fort, or potentially both?
This one is a little odd, because the caravans still don't have an actual presence -- generally, humans fight site-to-site if they initiate things, but the caravan isn't associated with any single human site. The game likes to keep things symmetrical now, for the time being at least, so it opens up a broader war. It currently has your fort on the menu regardless of distance, but it won't be the only place. I'm not sure how or when that'll change. The situation will be strange until caravans have more substance.
Now that wars can start (and stop I assume) out of worldgen, can player adventurers directly cause them? can you become affiliated with an entity to an extent where your actions could be considered a reason for war with that entity? (say i'm good friends of a dwarf civilization and I go kill some elves in another civ, is there any circumstance in which this will cause anger with the dwarf civ?)
It understands certain actions on behalf of your own entity or affiliated entity as hostile (like site takeovers), and your strong entity affiliations (by strong I mean position holder or squad member) are stored in all the incident records. That filters back around to all the diplomatic calculations. Assuming you get a rumor/witness report started in the offended entity (meaning people see the killing and aren't themselves dispatched, and they belong to the offended entity), that'll impact all of the decisions down the line. And that can start a war the next time the leader of the offended entity sits down to plan their next action, though if they don't have available forces or deem your entity too powerful or whatever, they might not do anything. If they operate on the civ level, they might also attack a different site than the one you are affiliated with as well (from the same civ), since they don't really understand site-civ or civ-site interactions yet (except by mistake). That whole distinction probably needs some revisiting later.
Are we going to be able to order rough gems from caravans in the next release? Any changes to the caravan mechanics (i.e. more than four items of each kind can be brought).
I haven't changed anything, aside from basic stuff like allowing them to bring plant growths and that sort of thing.
If I abandon my fort then you mentioned that my military dwarves may become bandits if the leader is a jerk. How does the game decide who will become the leader? Is it the squad leader or does the leader skill or personality matter in the selection process?
It's reasonably random for abstract power struggles at this point, since we don't really have a model for what is going on and there's not enough information yet.
So, we'll get an announcement whenever we smell something funny and/or new? And it's going to be labeled with whatever thing is emanating the odor like "you smell a zombie" or do we get more vague hints like "you smell rotten meat" which could be whatever between just bad food up to a zombie titan.
It keeps you informed with an on-screen label if you have tracking information on, and it'll tell you when you press a button. Whether you get a vague hint depends on if you have a raw string for the creature (otherwise you get the exact name), but the undead always smell like death.
Is there something about the strength of the odor ? Okay, the smell can be good or bad, but is there a raw for the force of the smell (the distance from where it can be smelt with a normal nose ?)
There's the level from 0 to 100, but I don't have any calculations about how that works with distance, time or anything else. It only uses the wind and the trigger value now.
Is the [odor] detection going to be randomized in any way besides the wind?
Not at this point. I'm not sure where it'll go over time, and I don't really know anything about how scent trails are tracked or decay over time.
The smell system allow for detection of corpses and carrion? I'm asking not with undead in mind, but with normal corpses and miasma.
I haven't done anything with items yet, or even the flows/miasma, sadly enough.
Are there any plans to sort these new crops into some kind of cultural groups or similar, and will these in that case be constructed randomly or based on the real world? (possibly also inluding livestock at some point)
I don't plan to adhere to real-world cultural groupings, though it might get slightly closer to that when we take soil into account later on.
None of these have GROWDUR tokens. And every single one has [SPRING][SUMMER][AUTUMN][WINTER]. Assuming these are finalized raws, the seasonal crops mod will need some serious updating. Are these finalized raws, or still subject to revision?
They are always still subject to revision. As far as farming time goes, I'm not really sure how that is going to play out. World gen has always used a different (annual) system from the fort, there are no actually-harvested crops outside of your fort during play, and the growdur stuff is focused on underground mushrooms as they stood several years ago. The default growdur is the same as it is for plump helmets, and I don't have enough infrastructure to think much beyond that yet.
Will we see eventually plants (exotic forms?) growing in the level under lava, and will the demons and FB have any odor and smell ?
I'm not quite sure what the plan is for the underworld -- the way it is described, it'll probably enter into the same mess the rest of the multiplanar stuff falls into, and become more procedural when we do that. It has smell information for demons and FBs, though you'd have to get them out in the wind for it to matter at this point.
On trees, will the smelly hippies get angry if you try to trade them fruits from trees now or if you harvest too much fruit from trees?
I don't think it upsets them. They have orchards for fruit as well.
I guess every crop/gardenplant is still single tile?
Yeah, that's right. There should probably be some larger bushes and so on, but it's not properly supported now.
What about the bug with trees growing while submerged in 7/7 water? This bug specifically: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=457 With multi-tile trees, this bug will become even more annoying.
The situation has changed, but I'm not really sure about the particulars since I haven't observed a lot of underground growth over long periods of time. I know the initial tree trunks have no mud and no water, and the functions are all the same so hopefully it is somewhat better.
You mention vampire guards in the April report. How are they different from the vampire cultists in the current version? Do they likewise go on killing sprees when their master is unmasked? Do the killing sprees on master unmasking still happen, or do the cultists only become hostile to the player at that point?
These are just the guards in the regular civ sense, but the civ has gone wrong, so everybody takes the situation into account, conversation-wise. That's all I meant by a nod. There are still cults. I don't have enough information about what exactly the harsh laws are to go any further. Presumably it involves farming people in some way, when the vampire is that brazen. It'll be an enriching day when we finally establish legal systems.
Will soldiers / town guard wear uniforms and stuff, which involve using specific weapons or armor? If so, will adventurers working for a town have to wear it, and will be able to identify soldiers from other towns?
It doesn't work with full uniforms of weapons and armor -- the uniforms have always just been little symbols or whatever. They also don't have them available in stacks to hand out, so that whole old system is sort of on the backburner until I figure that part out. It reminds me of those game quests where you have to go a few different places to get your new outfit. It could turn out that way for all I know.
Are there any significant changes to the Legends mode in this release? What's going to be tracked in there now for us lore people to look forward to?
There are the site disputes, and the new demon stuff, but it wasn't really the focus, since we were trying to get the existing stuff out into play.
Shouldn't the pineapple 'tree' be more like 'shrub' since the plant isn't actually tree sized? Unless you don't have a category set for smaller plants or something.
Yeah, there were some vague descriptions and pictures that made me think the wild varieties could crack 3 meters, and I still don't really have any idea how the wild pineapples are/were or how much they varied. I'll probably lean back to shrubs.
I noticed the new drinks seem to be “beer” or “wine”, which are just fermented. Does that mean we’re going to be facing a distilling process to get whisky, vodka, brandy, and so on sooner than later?
I don't have a timeline for it, but we'd like to have the alcoholic beverages come about through vaguely proper processes at some point, rather than the crap we have now. I defaulted to beer or wine when presented with many options, since I had to pick something, and most things probably have many options and will have that in the game when we get around to separating the methods.
Are you planning on specifying more specific biome sets for all fruit trees? Most fruit trees don't do well in swamplands/marshlands/wetlands (inundating their roots with that much water eventually kills them), and I'm not entirely sure if you took that into account. Desert lime would be the most immediately obvious to exclude wetter biomes for, I suppose, but some of the other tree types have difficulty with it too.
I didn't have information immediately available for most things, especially as it regards our chosen set of biomes, so I just pushed on through. I can use any sourced information for improvements, though I'm not quite sure what the future holds in terms of soil information for farming and all that.
To what extent will odors respect obstacles? Can you smell a creature that has a wall between you and it, provided there is open air above? And conversely, will it be possible to smell a creature on the other side of a solid wall with no gap for the odor to flow through? (I ask because dwarves panicking due to smelling creatures on the other side of a solid seal seems like a Day 1 bug waiting to happen.)
It's not a bug so much as an incomplete feature, but if the critters in question are "outside", then it doesn't check for more than that. I'm not really sure how it'll be handled, since anything to do with connectivity or flows is a nightmare.
I'm pretty sure that the most potentially-problematic part is that DF can be redistributed if none of the accompanying files are modified, and the pack has different init settings and Phoebus graphics installed by default. An argument can be made that this is not unusual or in the latter case replacing instead of changing the files... but it's potentially dodgy.
Is this kind of change a problem?
I don't have a problem with pack distributions in general, and tweaks to the init files etc. are part of that and it's usually fine. I don't want things attributed to us that aren't ours (graphics/mods etc.), so it's best when people are clear about what they are doing.
How fast is world generation right now? Is it slower or faster than in 0.31.11? Talking about “time to generate 1000 years of history on a medium map”.
Has the dictionary been updated at all for the coming release?
Tunnels: So according to the devlogs they are back in (AW YEAH). If we embark over a tunnel will the tunnel be open or sealed at the map edges?
World generation seems about the same speed (and there isn't all that much new going on in world gen if I remember), but I haven't really tried to stress it out.
I don't recall any dictionary changes.
I haven't gotten too far into tunnel particulars for forts (since you don't have attached deep sites and only get tunnels when reclaiming certain wg sites). They are open but it doesn't mean much. Unless it does... I haven't reclaimed such a fort and tested it for long. I'm not really sure what'll happen in the case of underground invaders. Probably something wrong.
When converting from a color token to the nearest display color, does the game use the default RGB values for the comparison, or does it check the ones defined in colors.txt?
It takes the colors.txt data into consideration, but there's some preprocessing that skews calculations for non-standard values. For instance, it assumes that the gray/white/black colors have RGB values that are roughly the same (it doesn't test them for matches with the rest). It also zeroes out small values for RGB in the color raw object if there are high values, since that was screwing up matches.
The big trees should look cool, at least. Can you "mine" them, and make tree houses? Can you chop them down and cut them up for hundreds of logs? Do they grow an inordinate number of fruits, out on their long high branches?
What level of control do you foresee the player having over multi-tile trees? Can the branches be trimmed topiary-style? Can multi-tile plants be guided to grow in certain directions? Can anything be built in or on them, like a little platform for a marksdwarf?
You don't get hundreds of logs, but you get more than one most of the time. You can't currently mine them or otherwise trim them tile-by-tile. There are lots of fruit, as well as catkins and leaves and samaras and flowers and various stuff. I imagine there'll be a more to do tile-by-tile later on, though I don't have specific plans. Forcing elves to walk though tunnels in a trunk seems stylish. I think constructions attach to them as it pertains to cave-ins and so on, but I haven't actually tried to do it.
Will we (or invaders) be able to climb up the side of furniture items that act as "walls" like Statues, Windows, Floodgates or Wall Grates? Subquestion: will building destroyers (trolls) be able to climb a wall and bust through an adjacent Window/Wall Grate or other blocking structure, thus making their way into the fortress proper?
I haven't changed anything about furniture. As with various other invasion blockers (walls, traps, fluids, or whatever else), there'll need to be changes when we get around to that.
If you rescue an orphan, or if by some chance the parents that request your help die while you're at the goblin tower, is that child going to be embraced in someone's family, or at least going to be accepted in the community?
Orphans have never had it easy in dwarf fortress, and this isn't an exception. The adventure mode children don't need to be fed, so that's a positive, anyway. People in general still don't understand a lot of things. I was kind of hoping to give you some place to settle a family-less child you rescued instead of having a permanent adventure companion. At least the parents aren't currently required -- any relative works, and most people have lots of relatives.
Will people able to notice when your doing something like necromancy? I find it a bit odd when I raise dozens of corpses and no one nearby knowing.
I don't have a reaction for observing interactions in general, or sort of ethics classes for them or whatever it'll end up being. Certainly something is needed there.
Will retired adventurers be treated the same as normal histfigs? Will they be able to set off into the wilds, become necromancers, marry, ascend to positions etc?
I'm mostly wondering if I'll be waylaid by a past adventurer who has become a bandit or if he might lead an attack on my fort or something hehe
Yeah, once they retire, they are the same and can do the things that the others do -- they don't have parents, but they can start families and be assigned to entity positions etc. You can still unretire them if they are alive... I'm not quite sure what that will imply sometimes, since they might be on the road doing something or other.
In adventure mode, can you grab things that arent equipped on you like branches in mid-jump? This is essential for something I want to try when the new release comes out.
Climbable tiles can be grabbed mid-jump. It's not always successful (I think it looks at the regular climb difficulty for the tile and increases it). Since you mentioned equipment, I'm not sure if you were talking about tiles though -- branches are a tile to me, but if you were talking about items, it doesn't let you do that at the moment. Eventually you'll need to be able to do things like jump vertically and grab an item or even pull a lever or something, but we haven't entered that time yet.
With the new jumping/climbing AI will we see goblins/humans/hippies jumping down into our courtyards from now on, is it only horizontal jumping for now?
They can climb down if possible, but they don't think about jumping down.
Can item-clouds contain vermin? If so, is it possible for the vermin to be alive?
You can probably stick it in the file, but I have no idea what would happen. I don't think they would be alive, since that would require a special exception.
Since we're now getting growths for plants (fruits, flowers) are there any plans for growths on creatures? Say, egg sacks that burst open to spawn a creature, or chest-burster like monsters that grow in a hapless dwarf before exploding out of his/her body?
I don't have any particular plans, though certainly various roads might be embarked upon. Plants didn't really have much of a system at all analogous to the body part/tissue system from creatures, and growths were the remedy for that -- now that they have growths rather than what the creatures have, I'm not sure what sort of unification efforts should be made.
would a fruit growth made of sentient meat count as meat or fruit for eating purposes?
I'm not sure what you are asking because you put the sentient part in there -- are you talking about diet (like the game's carnivores) or the ethics of butchery? I don't think the ethics come up anywhere, since the only place it checks is for corpses being processed (as far as I remember). I think for carnivores, the current functions don't check the material flags, but I'll probably change that for moddings' sake now.
Is there a typo in the growth prints for the leaves in the new plant files? They all seem to have tile 7 for their picked tile, rather than tile 6 that you've posted for mango and maple leaves. Or was that a deliberate change?
Yeah, I assume I forgot to leave that as the to-be-decided mark when I copied it over. I've made a note to check.
a side effect of this was that the "material reaction product" stuff you might be familiar with from modding now also has a similar tag to send over an item type with the material, so a single reaction can produce different item types depending on the incoming reagent's material. I'm not sure how useful that is overall, but it could cut down on some clutter.
Is the syntax for that final enough to release it (the syntax, that is)? And if so... can you?
There's [ITEM_REACTION_PRODUCT:<class name>:<item type>:<item subtype>:<2-3 mat tokens as usual>]. It's all stored with the MATERIAL_REACTION_PRODUCT stuff, so HAS_MATERIAL_REACTION_PRODUCT and HAS_ITEM_REACTION_PRODUCT actually just check the same token and not how it got there (so be sure to use unique class names all around). For the product itself, there's [PRODUCT:<chance>:<number>:GET_ITEM_DATA_FROM_REAGENT:<reagent token>:<class name>] -- so it works like GET_MATERIAL_FROM_REAGENT, but it also gets the item type and item subtype.
Now that you're (technically) finished with the release (as of this post, at any rate), what's the new version number going to be? 0.38? 0.40?
Yeah, it has settled on something now.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 3836507 times)