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[Eric Blank]

Somehow I don't think goblin civilizations would be very affected by the death of their leader. Didn't one of Zach's stories depict them as killing their leaders to usurp the throne? I can't really remember... That could get messy, but woldn't have a great effect on their morale.

[DrKillPatient]

I'm also impressed by the current work on in-game invasions and deaths of important historical figures, and recovering from them. I have yet to see any game successfully pull off mid-game changes like that, but DF is nearly halfway there.

Yeah, I can't tell you how upset I get that killing the head of goblin civilization has no effect beyond bragging rights, and no mounts. I'd like to see collapse of goblin civilization, or at least a fundamental weakening.

Perhaps this means that in the future we'll be able to tantrum-spiral an entire dwarf civilization into oblivion by killing one of their leaders.

[MrWiggles]

Well, tantrum spirals of old are suppose to be going away, with these personality changes.

[Telgin]

They will probably be replaced by something just as entertaining and fort breaking though. 

[misko27]

Somehow I don't think goblin civilizations would be very affected by the death of their leader. Didn't one of Zach's stories depict them as killing their leaders to usurp the throne? I can't really remember... That could get messy, but woldn't have a great effect on their morale.

What I MEAN is, Its so odd that I continually take out the head of their government, and theres just nothing. No response, no anger, no replacement, What do these guys Do? Same with dwarf civs, I Just find it so odd that the king is dead and no one cares. That messed me up so much I turned the mayor into president and declared a god-damned republic. I don't know, it just rankles me. And of course the thing could check up on your actions and the world every, say, season, and then just go from there.

[MrWiggles]

Its definatly a sore thumb, buts a pretty none trivial task to solve though.

[Urist_McArathos]

If I were a multi-millionaire, I'd probably hand Toady several hundred thousand dollars and say "I'll give you all this money, but in return you're going to buy yourself a team of crack programmers and get this motherfucker multithreaded in a couple of months. Deal?"

This has already happened.  A company offered to finance the game, but the catch was that Toady had to work with them and their team of programmers to finish it.

He'd probably just hand it back and say, "No, thanks, I'll just continue on as is." This is his baby, after all.

This is what he said.  For better or for worse, he's doing it alone.  Best if we just accept it for what it is, and move on.  It's not changing, after all.

If he doesn't find some sort of default way to get new numbers from old ones that works 90% of the time and let us report the other 10%, that is going to be an issue, yes.

This sort of thing should be best handled crowdsourced. We have the arena to test, the will to get a good result and lots of modders with the knowledge to properly tweak the raws.
If I had any say in all this, I'd tell Toady to let us do the boring part and focus on making dragons attack villages and properly grill the petty goblin raiders who happened to be there too.

My guess is this is how this will work as well.  With materials Toady just shoved some placeholder numbers and guesstimates in to get the game running, and when the community worked to totally overhaul the data on materials he just shrugged and said "Hey, that works" and plugged them into the game as part of an update.  Same when Quietust found a host of easily resolved issues; they just got folded into a proper release.  I see no reason the same chain of events won't happen here too.

[Dae]

If he doesn't find some sort of default way to get new numbers from old ones that works 90% of the time and let us report the other 10%, that is going to be an issue, yes.

This sort of thing should be best handled crowdsourced. We have the arena to test, the will to get a good result and lots of modders with the knowledge to properly tweak the raws.
If I had any say in all this, I'd tell Toady to let us do the boring part and focus on making dragons attack villages and properly grill the petty goblin raiders who happened to be there too.

My guess is this is how this will work as well.  With materials Toady just shoved some placeholder numbers and guesstimates in to get the game running, and when the community worked to totally overhaul the data on materials he just shrugged and said "Hey, that works" and plugged them into the game as part of an update.  Same when Quietust found a host of easily resolved issues; they just got folded into a proper release.  I see no reason the same chain of events won't happen here too.

The thing is that it'd be great if Toady spent minimal time on setting these placeholder numbers and said "ok, while i go on about the game, please put better numbers" instead of spending a significant amount of time setting almost perfect numbers and letting us work the details.

Also, Quietust found the source of a bug through memory hacking which is in my opinion quite an impressive achievement. I'd like to see Toady trust us a little bit more, even with the boring little things.

[MaximumZero]

Unfortunately, with things like Goblin Camp, he really doesn't have a reason to trust us with a damned thing, and I can't say that I don't blame him.

[reality.auditor]

Unfortunately, with things like Goblin Camp, he really doesn't have a reason to trust us with a damned thing, and I can't say that I don't blame him.

Uhhh... what Goblin Camp have to do with it?

[MrWiggles]

If he doesn't find some sort of default way to get new numbers from old ones that works 90% of the time and let us report the other 10%, that is going to be an issue, yes.

This sort of thing should be best handled crowdsourced. We have the arena to test, the will to get a good result and lots of modders with the knowledge to properly tweak the raws.
If I had any say in all this, I'd tell Toady to let us do the boring part and focus on making dragons attack villages and properly grill the petty goblin raiders who happened to be there too.

My guess is this is how this will work as well.  With materials Toady just shoved some placeholder numbers and guesstimates in to get the game running, and when the community worked to totally overhaul the data on materials he just shrugged and said "Hey, that works" and plugged them into the game as part of an update.  Same when Quietust found a host of easily resolved issues; they just got folded into a proper release.  I see no reason the same chain of events won't happen here too.

The thing is that it'd be great if Toady spent minimal time on setting these placeholder numbers and said "ok, while i go on about the game, please put better numbers" instead of spending a significant amount of time setting almost perfect numbers and letting us work the details.

Also, Quietust found the source of a bug through memory hacking which is in my opinion quite an impressive achievement. I'd like to see Toady trust us a little bit more, even with the boring little things.

While the Quietust bug patch is kinda of cool, it also didnt violate the whole 'doesnt like working with other folks'.
The issue with the us debating 'proper' values for raws, is that it does force ToadyOne to work with someone else.

While ToadyOne could create mechanics move on with place holders in place... the place holders probably wouldnt save any actual time.

Lets say that we as a community does actually decide on what the proper values are for whatever group of raws we're currently working on. And we give those raws ToadyOne, and from these numbers it turns out that his mechanics are inherently flawed.

So what time does that actually save ToadyOne? Dwarf Fortress is a fairly interwoven game. ToadyOne now realizes a certain subsystem is actually wrong and has to be replaced, this means that all other interconnected systems must also be adjusted. And at a worse case scenario, that these mechanics is the frame work for another system, then replacing the mechanics might even reverse progress with other features being removed for an indeterminate amount of time. 

This is assuming that that the community somehow does decide on raw values. Which, I'm not sure if we can. (There been quite a few debates on metal effectiveness for armor and weapons. In particular of iron vs copper.) There also the infrastructure how these community driven raws are derived. What do you do with competing entries with different, but overall similarly functional inputs? And what do you do if some raws never receive community derived data?

This doesnt really lesson the workload from ToadyOne, it just redirects what hes working on.

And while organization and infrastructure questions can be solved, they probably cant function without ToadyOne or ThreeToes involvement at some level.

[MaximumZero]

Unfortunately, with things like Goblin Camp, he really doesn't have a reason to trust us with a damned thing, and I can't say that I don't blame him.

Uhhh... what Goblin Camp have to do with it?

Upon introspection, I seem to be referring to the Khazad project, not Goblin Camp. Anyway, that one time that some jackass tried to reverse engineer the game and was a jackass about it.

[Urist_McArathos]

Unfortunately, with things like Goblin Camp, he really doesn't have a reason to trust us with a damned thing, and I can't say that I don't blame him.

Uhhh... what Goblin Camp have to do with it?

Upon introspection, I seem to be referring to the Khazad project, not Goblin Camp. Anyway, that one time that some jackass tried to reverse engineer the game and was a jackass about it.

This will always be a hurdle to community input; true, most of us wouldn't dream of trying to ruin or steal Toady's hard work.  All it takes is one person to decide they will to undo all the integrity and trust we've established, and (understandably) that's too great a risk for Toady.

[hermes]

This will always be a hurdle to community input; true, most of us wouldn't dream of trying to ruin or steal Toady's hard work.  All it takes is one person to decide they will to undo all the integrity and trust we've established, and (understandably) that's too great a risk for Toady.

I reckon it's probably a bit of that, but also like how you mightn't give the keys to your new car to your best friend - not because you don't trust them but because if they had an accident you could be putting your friendship on the line.  The DF community is pretty awesome, and I think it's for our own good we're on the outside looking in.

Anyway, kinda back on topic, the "release 5" stuff is coming along pretty quickly.  You know some days I just want to curse DF because the next release always kills my enjoyment of whatever  other RPG I'm playing at the time.  Right now I'm thinking Dragons Dogma would be so much better if goblins harassed towns and camps at random... sigh!

[hops]

Well, I see "active world" as a brief randomized change afflicted to the civs around you at every end of the year like those history generation. So every time the year ends you get a preloader calculating what would happen. This of course would be funny when a goblin civ collapse while they're sieging you, and the  gobbos go apeshit and retreat away.

Also my life would be easier if that "damned" tower get massacred by a vampiric hero or something.

Also I foresee Toady making Dark Fortresses more defensive and retreats an actual fort. That'll take care of people trying to genocide something.