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[Silverionmox]

Completely agree. But at least we could work a bit on name pools etc.

[hostergaard]

Yes, a lot of people want this.

I really would like to see a more variety in cultures. Of course, there would be certain tendencies in the different species.

Like I would like to see things like high elves that live in fantastic cities made up of incredibly slim but high towers (made by an allied dwarfen nation perhaps?)  who focus on high magic and other "high arts".

And wood elves who are something like our current elves, except they may live in treetop cities made of giant trees grown trough their nature magic. They would be more in tune with nature and plants than the high elves, their magic based on that of druids and elder trees.

Or wild elves whit little to no centralized government or settlements. They live alone or in small family units, have little weapons or clothing aside from what can be made easily without tools. They are completely in tune with nature, perhaps moreso with animals. They might have animal companions, perhaps specific animals that are their preferred/spirit animal (either nationally or personally).

Not to mention dark elves, the standard drow fanfare, elves who can settle in evil regions.

So procedural but perhaps with tendencies according to species. Not hard definitions but rather a modifier to the procedural generation so, say, elves are much more likely to be nature focused and good aligned. One could then make evil or corrupted versions where one core ethic or cultural part have been reversed, like good in case of drow, perhaps trough some event.

I would like to leave as much up to procedural generation, but perhaps one could be given a little control over what one want procedural generated, perhaps on a per civ basis. This way one could share defined cultures (like world seeds) and if one wish to have high elves in the game one could tell the game for one elven civ to use a specific seed instead of procedural generation. Of course its not an definite thing, one could define a limited number of things in a civ and let the rest be procedural.

[Aachen]

So procedural but perhaps with tendencies according to species. Not hard definitions but rather a modifier to the procedural generation so, say, elves are much more likely to be nature focused and good aligned. One could then make evil or corrupted versions where one core ethic or cultural part have been reversed, like good in case of drow, perhaps trough some event.

I would like to leave as much up to procedural generation, but perhaps one could be given a little control over what one want procedural generated, perhaps on a per civ basis. This way one could share defined cultures (like world seeds) and if one wish to have high elves in the game one could tell the game for one elven civ to use a specific seed instead of procedural generation. Of course its not an definite thing, one could define a limited number of things in a civ and let the rest be procedural.

A lot of that, in the general sense, is possible using entities presently. I have to say I agree with NW_Kohaku, though, that it's going to be quite a while before any of it becomes more meaningful in anything but the most abstract sense. It'll be tough to avoid a lot of spaghetti soup, and I don't know if it'll add a lot of depth to the world.

Wait for the elves allowed steel-and-no-other-metals, wearing toga-dress-facemask, wielding the only permissible weapon (mauls), who live in caves, spawn in the badlands and are allowed carpentry, but not woodcutting. O, and killing civ members is acceptable, but foreigners? PUNISH CAPITAL!

But at least we could work a bit on name pools etc.

Seems like a matter of expanding the symbol sets (and, for the ambitious, the language files generally) to give more flexibility relating to names when defining entities.


As an aside: My god, what use is a monkey-pig-dishwasher?! Is it .... alive?

[Iapetus]

A slight aside on it, Toady himself just called (maybe still calls) these things "random", and I remember reading an old (2008 or so) quote from him on the subject. 

Procedural is sort of a buzzword among programmers for things most people would call random (to distinguish it as "random with a chart of possible structured outcomes" from "any crazy thing, like coming up with monkey-pig-dishwasher").

According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_generation), procedurally generated means it was created using algorithms, as opposed to manually.  So randomly generated stuff is procedurally generated, but not all procedurally generated stuff is random.

(Which is slightly different from what I had thought it meant, namely stuff like the original Elite where the content was "randomly" generated using the same seed every time, so you didn't have to store the data on disc or even necessarily in RAM).

[Urist McDagger]

Anybody else get the feeling that today's update will lay the foundation for this?

[ayoriceball]

Anybody else get the feeling that today's update will lay the foundation for this?

Dwarves with giant spiders as guard dogs?

[Inarius]

I agree with this. Civilizations could have some "preferences", such as size of cities (rural or urban), place of living (sea, moutains, forests, tundras or whatever), but also their legends, including what type of creatures they loath or love (why not a preference for Leopard in "The Glad empire", with a link to a leopard god, or statue of leopard everywhere ?). They could also be "reknown for their leathercraft", etc.

I think this could add some background to the history of the world...

[GreatWyrmGold]

Boundaries and filters would be needed though to prevent "stupid" behaviours - things like conflicting ethics tags, or cultures devoted to fishing in the desert.

So do a ton of work to implement procedurally generated cultures, and then another ton of work to filter out the ones that don't make any sense, so that we can have basically the cultures we already have. The stock, hardcoded DF Elves are already more interesting than whatever this algorithm would vomit up, but they're not proceeeedural!

(They're also the same for everyone, which means we can talk about them and have a common reference point. I think the value of this is badly underestimated.)

Okay, first off, why would" not morbidly stupid" equate to "exactly what's in DF right now"? Personally, I like the idea of differences between worlds or between nations of the same world. If nothing else, wars would be more frequent. And I really don't get the idea of "generic tree-hugging cannibals are more interesting than one of a wide variety of dictatorships, fishing cultures, nations where pride is based on the number of chickens and cavies you own, etc."

[Corai]

Why just for humans? Every race should have subcultures. Woodelves, cityelves, mountainelves... Dwarves who live in freezing mountains have different culture than ones in temperate mountains.

Mostly just because they're currently the only race with real settlements, but that'd be great to see once the other races' places go back in properly. Surely at least a few other people wouldn't mind being able to explore the frozen ruins of the regenade arctic dwarf nation of Necrobeers along with the above-ground cities of the plains dwarves?

Oh, and we should let elves burn down trees too? Dwarves are underground people, culture is one thing, completely uprooting a species is another. Its one thing being born into a above-ground culture, but a dwarven civilization? Me no likes.

[Urist McDagger]

Why just for humans? Every race should have subcultures. Woodelves, cityelves, mountainelves... Dwarves who live in freezing mountains have different culture than ones in temperate mountains.

Mostly just because they're currently the only race with real settlements, but that'd be great to see once the other races' places go back in properly. Surely at least a few other people wouldn't mind being able to explore the frozen ruins of the regenade arctic dwarf nation of Necrobeers along with the above-ground cities of the plains dwarves?

Oh, and we should let elves burn down trees too? Dwarves are underground people, culture is one thing, completely uprooting a species is another. Its one thing being born into a above-ground culture, but a dwarven civilization? Me no likes.

Potentially. It's not impossible for a dwarf to live above ground. Maybe the humans started a war with the mountain homes and brought some POWs back. Five or six generations go by. The dwarven underclass rebels and drives the humans out. Would they start caving in their homes and shops to make a fortress under the town or would they continue to live there? Say they branched off and became a civilization of their own. Would the humanized "plains culture" dwarves be sending settling expeditions out to the mountains to learn a new way of life from scratch, or would they be settling new towns?

[GreatWyrmGold]

Precisely. While dwarven civs shouldn't start out above-ground, nor elven ones as tree-haters, enough time and they would diverge. Maybe the dwarves living aboveground were outcasts from dwarven society and decided they wanted nothing to do with it. Maybe the elves rejected their old culture after their gods failed to intervene while those of the goblin race burnt their forest to the ground, leaving the elves trying to appease a god they knew only by his actions against the elves (as well as more traditional and/or level-headed ones still being around, until the rebels or goblins killed them all).

[Jeoshua]

For those saying that Elves shouldn't live underground, I have one word for you:

Drow.

It is possible to justify just about any alteration to a culture within the confines of the reality of a fictional world.  Different cultures can be extremely divergent from the originals, as the Droven example illustrates.  Does anyone here think that Drow are really so strange, when compared to other such goodies as Cavy Spirits which have shells and spikes and acid spit which populate hell, or "regular" elves that eat those which they slay?

Basically everything could be variable, even the subterranean factor, and not "break the reality of the world"

[Williham]

The obvious solution is adding range to the ETHIC token:

[ETHIC:LYING:SHUN:5:ACCEPTABLE:5:APPALLING:1]

As of right now; it appears to be one of the most important entity tokens, and the one that most sternly influences behavior.

On a more long-term basis, most entity tokens should have range capabilities; but adding range to ethics alone would easily add a lot of variations to worlds, and probably a lot of human v. human wars, or dwarf v. dwarf, for that matter.

[Jeoshua]

I like that, but it's just not enough to really create diverse cultures.  It might lead to wars between two different entities who are otherwise similar in creature and what-not... but it wouldn't create anything as diverse as Elf vs Drow or Dwarf vs Dreugar, Riverfolk vs Desertmen, or anything really "interesting" like that.

It's a good start, tho.

[irmo]

(ill-considered and not very constructive remark deleted)