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[CaptainMcClellan]

Hey to all the Dorfmasters out there, as awesome as both modes are, it's pretty clear that the Dwarf Fortress mode gets more improvements. I don't have any problem with that, but I'd like a few more things added to the Adventure mode. If you agree please reply with a thumbs up and more ideas you would think are cool. Many of these features are probably already in the works or available by mod, but I'd like to see them implemented sooner, so this post is basically a petition to ToadyOne to spend a month beefing up the potential for the Adventurers in the next major update.

Features I'd like to see implemented.
-A needle item and a sewing reaction to make clothes from cloth
-A patching reaction to reduce the wear on clothes by using a piece of cloth, some thread and a needle.
-Randomly generated Smithies in human towns, with anvils and forges.
-Randomly generated Tanneries in human towns, with the same premise as above.
-Options to interact with things such as the above to craft one's own gear.
-Shops in Dwarven and Elven societies so that we don't have to scavenge for armor.
-Adventure mode music ( This is nitpicking, but I'd still like it to happen. )
-Slightly improved conversations. ( This is not a priority so much, because I've programmed conversations in C++ and I know how extremely time-consuming that is, such that if he works on this feature, we might not get the others. )
- Option to play instruments, either via reaction or interaction. Just so that the Musicality isn't useless. ( Doesn't have to make sound, just show an announcement like so: "Urist McBard played a harp poorly. Animals flee Urist McBard and children cry." or "Urist McRockstar plays the lute beautifully. Women swoon and a warrior sheds a single tear."
- More advanced quests: Stuff like Fetch quests and Fiddle challenges with Demons.
- Option to write books. ( If Reader and Writer skills are high enough. )
- A compass item that points to the nearest entrance to a dungeon. ( This may be game-breaking/make it to easy/defeat the purpose of spelunking. But many people, including me, get frustrated getting lost underground. We need an easy button. )
- Final thing: The option to marry NPCs. Not just this, but also when one retires in the settlement where their spouse lives they can have children while the player plays other modes. This is because I am a big genealogy buff and I'd really like the option to play as the grandchild of my adventurer and because I like the idea of life moving on and your character becoming part of history like this. ( How this would be implemented... I don't know. It'd probably require improvements to the socialization system and the way the post world-gen simulation works. But if wars can still happen when you're playing a Dwarf Fortress, why not, right? )

(I also have a few ideas for Dwarf Fortress mode and a third new mode (Campaign mode), but I should only overload Toady One with one herculean task at a time. He probably already intends to do all these things, the point of this thread is to convince him that enough fans want these Adventure mode features to make it a priority. )

So! Let's get voting!

EDIT: I just found out that Toady is releasing something highly similar to my Campaign mode idea with the next release. Well, I'm looking forward to that! ( Still, if it's not in it's own mode, I don't think it will work well... )

[Nopenope]

Most of the features you suggest are either:

-already in (compass to the nearest entrance to a dungeon, it's on the top left of your window)
-planned in the very next release (improved conversations, advanced quests, dwarven/elven sites)
-easily moddable (dwarven/elven sites)
-already implemented in the form of plugins such as advfort (making crafts and the like)

I suggest you acquire and familiarize yourself with dfhack and its plugins if you haven't already, it's basically the main way the community adds features and fixes bugs Toady hasn't gotten around to work on yet.

[CaptainMcClellan]

Yeah. I saw that with DF Talk. Now I feel dumb for putting this up. >.<

I might take it down/replace it. With some discussion of a campaign mode. I know that he has a War arc with war stuff. I think that there should be a table-top war strategy mode that can fit in with the other two modes. From my current understanding of how he's current planning to implement things, which is likely wrong, seems to suggest that it's going to be put in with one of the existing modes. I don't think this is the best way to do it.

[Manveru Taurënér]

Well, since adventure mode and fortress mode are only going to get closer in the future having the first incarnation of it restricted to one of the two wouldn't be that big of a deal if it'd speed things up. There has been talk of seamlessly switching between the two, such as in a fortress deciding to pick one of your dwarves and have a quick adventure, or in adventure mode gather a band of followers and swap it into fortress mode directly.

Having the campaign map/features accessible only through one of them would be a non-issue at that point, you'd simply have to take control of your general for adventure mode play first. This would also help dealing with the time difference between the two modes. Something even more fluent might actually be needed, since you'd probably want army movements etc in the fortress mode timescale and the actual battles in the adventure mode one.

[CaptainMcClellan]

Yeah. Actually, I was thinking marches would be rather automated, with time based on distance and interrupted only by quickly brutalizing any kobolds idiots who were dumb enough to attack a legion of armed dwarves mid-march. Then the fights themselves would be pretty similar to Dwarf Fortress mode.

[CaptainMcClellan]

I still hope that Tarn adds in instrument playing. In the meantime, I guess we can always bludgeon people to death with harps or impale them on flutes.

[CaptainMcClellan]

In fact, I was thinking that combat might play out sorta similarly to Castles II except with much more control and attention to detail. Not to mention fantastical creatures and dwarves. I mean, I don't want it to be just a brawl between a bunch of dwarves and a bunch of goblins that you watch until one side wins or loses. Nor do I think that's what Toady One intends. I want a really nitty-gritty super-strategic military simulation. Of course, this is something that will be way in the future, most likely. Nonetheless, I still think that military campaigns should be given their own mode with it's own scale and scope. You're not building a settlement or controlling a motley crew, you're managing a whole civilization! ( It's military anyway. ) You have to incorporate factors like civ population, strategic location of mountain homes, loyalty, dwarven intelligence, trade, politics, macromanagement. That's what I envision, at any rate. Mind you, the idea isn't to be a king, it's to be a general. So perhaps there will be things like king-ordered duties that you are obligated to do instead of just rogue expansionism and general Spartan "kill 'em all" mentality.

[CaptainMcClellan]

I guess it would be like... sort of a melding of Adventurer and Fortress but with a more meta approach and it's own unique feel, goals, and responsibilities. Heh. I need to get some sketches made of how it would work before I go spewing my ideas like I know what I'm talking about and Dwarf Fortress has to go this way.

[Manveru Taurënér]

From what Toady has said so far this seems to be somewhat what he imagines battles on the world map would look like (just imagine it ASCII'ified):

I'm sure there's going to be a lot of things that people do to abuse the poor mechanics as they're added. Then with the larger wars and so on ... we always liked that Civil War documentary, the Ken Burns Civil War documentary, where you get to see all the little lines, the little blue and red lines and so on - or whatever colours they were, red and red or blue and blue, I don't remember anymore - but being able to go to those mid-level maps, the ones that you see when you're moving the rectangle around when you're embarking ... So your fortress is a portion of that, say it's a six by six in a sixteen by sixteen area, but since the map is all seamless now in most respects, like you can't slide your sight rectangle between two map squares, but you can keep it within one map square - now that's an artificial distinction we're going to get rid of at some time - but in general the entire map is seamless, so you could take those sixteen by sixteen maps, stitch them together and get a pretty large battlefield that's sort of a zoomed in world map, and then you can imagine those lines. In general that's going to require upping the numbers, which is something we're planning to do, there's kind of this conflict - and it ties back in to what Rainseeker was saying about populations being diminished too fast - we want more people, we want to be able to have thousands and thousands and thousands of people - not on the screen at one time, but actually having world populations that are more reasonable, because it'll make a lot of mechanics of the game more reasonable and easier to do. Because right now it's like those cannibal tribes that go and pick off one or another guy or so on, sending twenty people at a time; and that's not quite what we had in mind for a fantasy world with fantasy wars and stuff. So ostensibly you should be able to send out thousands of people and arrange them in lines and then siege a goblin tower with different approaches and so on. The main problem would be that you'd be restricted; if you ever zoom in you'd be restricted to having just a smaller number of people, while at the same time a fight could be raging on off-screen with further people. The main problem area this ties back to is fortress mode; what happens if twenty thousand goblins are knocking at your door, what exactly is going to happen there? And we've thought about that quite a bit in terms of ... we're talking about a fortress that's very old, that's had large numbers of things popping up around it, and you've got control of thousands of people outside the fortress and so on, and of course there's a million things that need to be considered that we don't really have time to talk about, just in terms of your industries and so on. But, say that these larger numbers came up; you'd first be able to contest them outside your fortress with larger numbers, with larger army battles; but if they did make it to your fortress and sieged the actual fortress where you've only got your hundred, hundred and fifty guys running around, then they'd have to keep their numbers lower too to keep things fair, or just to keep things running with the CPU. But they could send in two hundred guys or something and you could have your standard sieges, and now if they had twenty thousand people they could do that a hundred times, but we just have to artificially set things up so that that's not how it works, or if it does maybe supporting their supply lines would be what causes them to leave if you keep winning, or just being depressed would cause them to leave if you keep winning and so on. There are things to be figured out there, and things to watch out for when you inflate the numbers like that, so we're not 100% exactly what's going to happen, but we would like to have large battles with tactical and strategic elements, and so on.

Then you'd probably have various menu's and options included in a whole sort of world map interface that'd handle all those kind of things. There are a bit more detailed here and there throughout the DFtalks as well.

[CaptainMcClellan]

Awesome!  Can't wait.

[smjjames]

-Shops in Dwarven and Elven societies so that we don't have to scavenge for armor.

They'll have their own sites next version and they are supposed to have their own shops.

[CaptainMcClellan]

Right. I read the reports and such after making this thread and felt exquisitely dumb. Does anyone know of a tentative release date? Cos like, if I could get the new vers before my birthday, that'd be pretty awesome. ( It's probably not possible, unless he's releasing it this week. ) Even so, I'd like to play it before college starts and I have to focus on more pressing responsibilities like colleges and careers.

[smjjames]

There isn't really a tentative release date, but it feels like it's close, could be another month, maybe two.

[CaptainMcClellan]

That's good. Also, something that would be really cool, albeit impractical, is a music generator. Y'know something that generates simple 8-bit quips randomly based on certain parameters. It would be cool to eventually get emergent masterpieces after the many, many things that just sounded off and weird.

[10ebbor10]

There isn't really a tentative release date, but it feels like it's close, could be another month, maybe two.

Then again, it felt close last month as well, and half a year before that. You know.