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[Icefire2314]

PLANES: Once it's all established, you can make regions arbitrarily strange, and you make a lot of them. The real chore here is allowing multiple world maps to be active in one way or another and to allow game elements to move between them. It would be a headache to program, but it would add a lot to the game. Related to PowerGoal81.

How I see this:

In the year 231, the Ageless Continents were invaded by the Drunken Dwarves of the plane The Silent Crushings.
In the year 234, The Drunken Dwarves defeated The Oars of Shoving at The Plains of Blazing and destroyed Lithgomukt.
In the year 235, The Drunken Dwarves established Nelimatun at the Plains of Blazing.

So in short the Drunken Dwarves invaded from another plane and destroyed a site, and then rebuilt it, symbolizing a presence on the new plane.
I think this would be cool once you are able to use your armies to invade other places, and you could expand to other planes.

Thoughts?

[Evil One]

Personally I think planes should exclusively (barring player modding) encompass magical, otherworldly or elemental creatures IE the entrances to hell instead of just being stairways could become planar gates that may on occasions appear on the surface until their source of power is removed.

You could also have gates which access the plane of the dead, the plane of fire, ETC appear.

So no simple extra-planar dwarves (unless they'd previously invaded and conquered that plane or were unique in some way IE elemental dwarves), but you could see an invasion of fire elementals.

[Urist McVoyager]

Naw, I think it should be Multiversal, and something one could research in-game to use. I think there should be elemental planes, but I think one should also be able to invade other regular worlds as well. You just need to invade an elemental plane like Hell and conquer part of it in order to retrieve the research material for your own gate. Then it should be a buildable item you can use to initiate invasions.

[WoobMonkey]

And here I stand, disappointed.  I came looking for Urist McJetPilot.

[Urist McVoyager]

Tech level's already been locked in at Renaissance. You might get a flyer A La Da Vinci's notes, but modern-style jets won't be in there.

[Putnam]

Tech level's already been locked in at Renaissance. You might get a flyer A La Da Vinci's notes, but modern-style jets won't be in there.

Tech level's locked in to 250 years before renaissance.

[Falconbridge]

yeah, i also thought this would be about flying but whatever...

so 250 years before renaissance... didn't they allready have primitive form of hot-air-balloon at that time?
wouldn't a magma powered blimp be so dwarfy... bridge is the best thing we have yet to make our dwarves fly.

[whatever1works]

*Puts on cool movie voice*: From the producers of Cars......
comes..

PLANES

[Adrian]

Excuse me while i put this thread back on it tracks.

The easiest plane to build would be a Dreamlands kind of place.
The world could be built from the places your guy has visited and populated by his nightmares and accomplishments.

[Manveru Taurënér]

Massive DFtalk quote crits thread for over 9000

(last quarter ish regarding how it'd work is particularly interesting imo)

Capntastic:   Right now as it stands Dwarf Fortress is a fantasy world generator but currently it pretty much only generates kind of your Middle Earth kind of world, and I know a lot of people are looking forward to the future when you get these more bizarre alternate planes of fire and, you know, spirit realms and afterlives and just basically teleporting around through infinite layers of ... things.
Toady:   That's right ... Even Middle Earth had that stuff, right? So we have ... we have the general idea of what we want to do in terms of other states of being, other realms of existence ... or whatever you want to call them: planes, dimensions ... and the main one we're going to start with is the afterlife, because it would just be amusing to die and then the game's not over and you pop up somewhere and then something happens to you. So the basic idea was that you'd be playing around and then you'd be running around in a world where it's generated other kinds of worlds, it's traditional to have a place where critters can be judged and either horrible things can happen to them or they just be obliterated, or there's a place where the dead are simply stored and they hang out there, or there's a place where people are actually awarded ... it's pretty broad to have that kind of delineation, and the exact nature of it is up for the game to decide, but it kind of fits into what we were talking about where it was judging your intent; now the game would be put in the position to judge what sort of person you were. Then you'd probably just immediately pop up in your place, you'd either just be wandering around some kind of landscape right when the final strike hits you, or you'd be standing before something that starts chastising you like the little bearded guy from Fantasy Empires ... tell you how horribly you played the game or whatever and that there's room for improvement but now it's too late.

Then it's a matter of what happens to you. If you're in a place when you're not completely trammeled by chains and people poking you with sticks and stuff, then you'd be able to probably speak to other historical figures, ones that you've seen before, you'd be able to - if there is a deity associated with it - you'd probably be able to talk to them, and I don't know if there'd be some kind of legends mode interface where the deity would be like 'Ask me any question' or whatever and then you could be like 'Yes, tell me about this' or 'Tell me about that' and then you have this sort of interaction with them, and it might include the option to reincarnate ... You might just, if you're in one of those places where the dead are stored, like at the bottom of some waterfall at the end of the world, you're just hanging out, then you might just have to retire. It's kind of funny, it's the same sort of retirement option: 'So I can retire in the afterlife' and then you can wait for someone to come rescue you, or you could return for a bit or you could ... there could be some kind of war going on that you could briefly appear and help with if someone asks that you intercede on your behalf or something; there could be events like that that happen. It's kind of weird to see how the timescale would work there ... Or you could just be stuck as a ghost, and we have plenty of ghosts ... it seems like something that our poor dwarves are stuck doing almost all the time if they aren't properly looked after, and as a dwarven adventurer you wouldn't be properly looked after almost all the time - dying off in the wilderness somewhere - so perhaps you'd be a ghost quite often.

It kind of leads to the dwarves themselves, when your fortress dies: since every historical figure in a universe that has an afterlife or a series of afterlives ... your whole fortress would also ... every single person in there would end up somewhere if you got flooded by magma or something. I don't think you'd ... when your fort is abandoned I'm not sure if you'd get to glimpse that ... the place where they all went, or if you would just have to go visit it with one of your dwarven adventurers to meet them, I'm kind of of two minds on that question. But it could do something like actually make a physical copy of your fortress but make it out of adamantine and stick it up in the ... wherever it is, and then they could kind of hang out there. It's the same problem as retiring of your fortress, of course, the liquids would probably be removed, and they would be hanging out there and you could go chat with them and however it works, and if we ever let you control one of your dwarves as an adventurer, like switching modes, then I guess you could activate one of your dead dwarves in the afterlife and then come and reincarnate or something ...

There are all kinds of things that could happen. It's really up to what's interesting and what are the most fun options. Now if you're just being ... we had this in Zach's most recent story where one of the characters was sent to the underworld and thrown in a pit of black liquid ... it was either boiling or not I don't remember ... If that happens to you - which would happen if you're one of those people who causes trouble running around, not just killing bandits and stuff but like going into people's homes and causing trouble for them - then you might end up glued to a wall with all kinds of things poking in you and then you don't really have many options other than retiring and hoping someone bothers to come down and rescue you, which might be possible. There's different kinds of ... I don't know if it's a bodily rescue or if they just can turn you into a ghost or something, but that's sort of the starting point with the otherworldly stuff and that necessitates a lot of thinking about how you get to planes, what kind of travel ... does your body travel there, is it just a kind of ghostly soul type form of you that travels there, if your ghostly soul type form travels there does it get a body on the other side or does it just remain inconsequential or intangible ... and are there other planes that aren't just for housing the dead or for the gods to live, are there other things ...

The whole elemental planes, I think, was kind of a very Dungeons and Dragons thing, I don't know if there was an earlier source than that, but ... so if that's not some kind of massive copyright infringement then that's a thing that people would like to have hanging around for whatever reason, but in general it just allows you to have an exotic world where ... it might be limited now to the most savage, evil, regions - which can have strange things going on in them, especially now with the new interactions, you can do all kinds of strange things in the places - but mostly that should probably be reserved to places that are actually in another world, and then you can add thing like the fairy lands and the shadow worlds, and all that kind of stuff. They're definitely going to be randomly generated, because that would be a trip, to create five or six places and then just connect them with random lines and random connections and see what happens, so that's our intent. We've already moved a little bit on this because we wanted to have it around for night creature interactions, that kind of thing, we were thinking we might want to start having this stuff around ... I don't know if anybody remembers the conversation crash that happened some months ago in one of the releases but that was actually be revamping the entire region code for the game to support multiple worlds, and then when you talk to a guy he was like 'Where am I?' and then it crashed. So we've made some steps towards being able to have multiple places to hang out ... It's a big project but it looks like it's doable, and it's just a matter of when do we want to do it. So it should be cool, I don't know what ... there's all kinds of specifics we could go into but I don't know if we'll talk about that now or later.
Capntastic:   So with multiple worlds and stuff, that would be a great thing to eventually have ... like, as a curse, you just straight up get sent to a bad world ... you know, there's lots of rocks here and not much else. You make a mummy mad, and then that's what they do ...
Toady:   Yeah, yeah ...
Capntastic:   Maybe the mummy, even though the mummy's physical body is in a pyramid somewhere, his spirit and all that are in an afterlife world kind of zone and he's really powerful there, and then you make him mad and then he sends you there and then you have to deal with all that, you kind of have a Stargate thing going on ...
Toady:   Yeah, just kind of hide under the boulders and eventually get the undead peasants to rise up against him in his own world or something. Yeah, yeah ... It really opens up all kinds of crazy things like that that could happen and it's like, we've thought about some of them, but obviously there's a zillion possibilities here that we haven't even touched upon or thought of that exist in literature and elsewhere that's just ... it should be a really powerful tool to have to be able to have extra places and there's all kinds of technical concerns about memory and all that kind of thing, I mean in general the other places wouldn't be as complicated as the main world, because the main world's already kind of pushing the computer a little hard ...
Rainseeker:   Indeed, going through the wardrobe to find Narnia ..
Toady:   ... and Narnia would just be a smaller place, it would be a certain ... I mean, it doesn't have to be super small ... well, the one thing that's going to help it quite a bit is that most of these places probably won't be very deep, it's not like there's going to be three separate underground layers and then the lava underworld, all that kind of stuff. So you can do things like ... if you wanted to have a parallel universe in the sense that it has the same general topography to it then that could almost just be a variable on you or something, right? It's like 'I've entered this state of being' 'I've entered this state of being' but if you wanted to have different topographies so there could be ... maybe the landscape looks generally the same but in one parallel world that you can shift to there's a giant cliff and in one there isn't, then as long as those cliffs aren't too big you can actually store those worlds in the same memory just one sits above the other spatially but you can't get to them by getting up through the sky so they kind of just sit in the same place and it knows how they correspond to each other, because then you can have all kinds of stuff, like it could redo, say, how critters like the bogeymen work where they could be in the shadow dimension and then ... with the whole teleportation mechanic now that they've got could be them shifting in and out and you could also maybe learn to shift between them and they'd be stored in memory, so you could, if you wanted to hide something, you could shift to the shadow dimension and drop it and then shift back and just remember where you put it.

All kinds of things could happen with that kind of parallel mechanic and it's not something where you'd have to blow the memory out on your computer and there would just be ... doing an actual parallel world is kind of the same level of annoyance, perhaps, as adding the Z coordinate in terms of path finding and that kind of stuff, but it doesn't have to be as bad because there would be ... it's not an actual fourth coordinate so I don't have to change most of the code, I just have to have certain parts where they're thinking about it properly, so I don't think it's nearly as bad. Ones where it's just a portal or something, or that you can't normally travel to - like there's the one that you travel to when you die, there's the one you travel to when you sleep, that kind of stuff - that's easier to handle.
Rainseeker:   There's the one you travel to when you eat magic mushrooms.
Toady:   It's true, it's true. Maybe your soul travels there and your body is just sitting there unconscious, well not actually unconscious but just kind of rolling around in a stupor.
Capntastic:   Maybe your body goes there and your soul stays here.
Toady:   That's right, that's right ... That would be kind of annoying, that would be very annoying, wouldn't it? You eat it and then you're a ghost; your body is off laying against a beach somewhere, just kind of sitting there and you have to go find it.
Rainseeker:   Maybe when you're a werewolf or werebeast your body stays and your soul goes someplace else into this dream world and you come back and ... 'What happened here?'
Capntastic:   'Oh not again!'

[GreatWyrmGold]

Tech level's already been locked in at Renaissance. You might get a flyer A La Da Vinci's notes, but modern-style jets won't be in there.

Tech level's locked in to 250 years before renaissance.

Define "Renaissance". Both of you, if you wouldn't mind.

so 250 years before renaissance... didn't they allready have primitive form of hot-air-balloon at that time?

I believe so. Heck, the Nazca had the ability to make hot-air balloons--there's just no proof they ever did.

wouldn't a magma powered blimp be so dwarfy... bridge is the best thing we have yet to make our dwarves fly.

Yes, but magma is sufficiently dense to overcome any lift it could provide. Especially since it shouldn't infinitely generate heat.

The whole elemental planes, I think, was kind of a very Dungeons and Dragons thing, I don't know if there was an earlier source than that, but ... so if that's not some kind of massive copyright infringement then that's a thing that people would like to have hanging around for whatever reason...

Good news! There's no way that WotC can copyright the concept of an alternate reality full of fire! (Christians would really hate that.)
I like a lot of those ideas for planes.


A few things I'd like to consider.
1. The general form of the land should be pretty much the same over all (or most) planes. Mountains are around here, mountains are around there. Ocean here, ocean there. Cold here, cold there. The exact shapes may differ--this peak here, that peak a bit to the south, the coast shaped a bit differently--which could be, shall we say, interesting. Most plane-hopping things, or all but the strongest, or something like that should simply move you to the equivalent point on the other plane, or maybe a "safe" point nearby. Depending on the exact location, this could lead to hopping into a wall of solid rock (ow), falling a few z-levels, or something.
A couple of exceptions would exist. Some could have general, wide-sweeping changes, like a much higher sea level or lower levels of moisture overall. Artificial planes (e.g, Narnia-esque ones) could be a lot different, albeit much smaller. And, finally, some small fraction would be different.

2. Planes should not usually be absurdly different from the "real world"--herein referred to as the "material plane". At most, two or three quirks. Maybe the Ethereal Plane is always shrouded in mist, has few mountains or hills, and is devoid of life. Maybe the Dreamworld gives everyone in it limited magical powers and is mildly sentient. Stuff like that. The thing is, these aren't whole different worlds so much as different aspects of a greater thing. Think about the word--plane. Imagine old, 2DF. Now imagine a slightly different fortress above it--one where the Fortress Defense mod or something was applied. Above that is one where the dwarves live in an ehtereal-ish world, and past that is another normal-ish fort on a slightly different fort. And so on and so forth--you'll eventually build up a prism of worlds. The little slices, the worlds, are planes in the mathematical and magical sense...and no two next to each other are all that different. A bit of a simplification, but that's the idea.

3. Other worlds should mostly be inhabited. Not all the inhabitants will be familiar; maybe the Plane of Shadow just has darkness-adapted dwarves living alongside tower-cap-worshiping elves, but the Plane of Spirits would have much...stranger life.

4. As hinted at, no (or almost no) rules should be perfectly, always, perfectly, true. These are whole different universes, here. The concept of absolute laws is almost anathema to the entire concept!

4a. Each world's sentient modifications are pretty well separate from all this. Material Dwarves build a might Mountainhome in one mountain, but Shadow Dwarves might not build anything more than little outposts in that whole range. This helps when Shadow Dwarves (or whatever) start interacting with the Material Plane.

[Putnam]

...oh, now I understand.

Yeah, the timescale is locked in at the period right before the renaissance. No Da Vinci stuff. Maybe a bit of Thomas Wyatt stuff later on down the road, but that's it.

[Manveru Taurënér]

Just remembered about this part as well. There's obviously a lot of stuff like this in game that could be tinkered with for different planes, and we'll probably get even more in the future as further systems get fleshed out. Just imagine entering a realm where the increased gravity makes the weight of your armor too heavy to bear. Or realms with changed material constants, different time scales, a realm with increased hair growth rates etc

(there's a part in the middle I cut out since it refers to the implementation of parabolic missile arcs etc from before this was actually implemented)

Capntastic:   So with regards to gravity, will different worlds have different levels of gravity?
Toady:   Yeah ... The general question is the physical laws of the world being based on parameters, right? I haven't thought about that much and it's the kind of thing where it seems like you could just change the constants, assuming that they work like that. (snip) I think once you've got a model that has more refined numbers where it's keeping things at a few decimal places then doing things like messing with the physical laws is way easier because changing the gravitational constant doesn't suddenly knock you over ten tiles to screw everything up or just get ignored because it gets rounded off. That would be something that I think would be a low hanging fruit and that point so it would be fun to do. Does it come across in the game? Not quite so much as if you were playing a first person shooter or something that had really good graphics, where the gravity can come across; if you were playing on the moon you'd notice how things were. Since there's no actual frame of reference in Dwarf Fortress - like grid size is a question, how big is a grid, how far is it from here to here? - it becomes less obvious when the physical constants have changed. But at the same time if something falls and hits you on your head harder because you have more gravity that would probably come across, at least relative to your other play experiences. Then you could have some cases where there's just no gravity at all, which would be kind of fun, just things flying off and ...
Rainseeker:   You'd be losing dwarves left and right, into outer space ...
Toady:   Yeah, those silly combat things where someone flies and hits and tree and blow apart, the parts would just kind of fly off, fly off into space. It'd be fun, I think.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Yeah, the timescale is locked in at the period right before the renaissance. No Da Vinci stuff. Maybe a bit of Thomas Wyatt stuff later on down the road, but that's it.

Which one? None of them are from the 1400's, and none seem relevant to this discussion, so I'm going to assume I'm missing something.

[Putnam]

Yeah, the timescale is locked in at the period right before the renaissance. No Da Vinci stuff. Maybe a bit of Thomas Wyatt stuff later on down the road, but that's it.

Which one? None of them are from the 1400's, and none seem relevant to this discussion, so I'm going to assume I'm missing something.

The poet. You may notice he's straight from the early 1500's.

Because we need procedurally generated sonnets.