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[Eric Blank]

A simple hybridization scheme could be to make the child the mothers' race, inheriting some of the features of the father like skin/hair/eye color and facial features. Dunno, maybe it would be easy to give/take from an individual some of the special tags a race has, like the trances tag, or change their size, say a hybrid of a dwarf and a human might be predominantly dwarf (uses the dwarf creature definition) from the mother, but human-sized and doesn't experience martial trances/lacks the enhanced night vision of dwarves.

A simple control mechanism to decide which species can interbreed: creature class tokens. Can_hybridize_with:(class) on females of the species. If their husband is a different species and not that class, no children will result.

[Vattic]

Anyway, with multiracial forts coming into play for the next release, will it be possible to define multiracial entities as well?

With the possibility of multiracial entities being added in the near future,will it be possible to have interracial marriages between 2 different races and maybe some sort of hybridization as well?(half-elves and half-goblins?)

I would be surprised if we got hybrids. They were mentioned in a recent DFTalk. Seems they will need a lot of groundwork first.

Threetoe:
Okay, so the last question: 'I was reading the suggestion thread on interspecies breeding the other day, and I was hoping that you could discuss the notion of extending the breeding system to include such things as hybrids to a greater extent, primarily half-breeds among the sapient beings like elves, humans, dwarves, etc., and all the possible fun that arises from that, aside from stuff like discrimination, ethnic cleansing and increased interracial tensions, a more diverse and less static set of races populating the world would no doubt contribute to the richness of the game.'
Toady:
Yeah, I mean we're for it. The snatcher story, for instance, had an elf-goblin hybrid which didn't even have a human component to it.
Threetoe:   Yeah, I've written a few stories about this. We definitely want to entertain these possibilities.
Toady:
Basically, we would have done it already, it's just a matter of overcoming some technical challenges. Do you just create new raws for all of the half forms? Then what happens if there are quarter forms and so on, or if you have one part elf, human, dwarf and goblin? Does it try and average the raws or come up with a one-to-one correspondence between the different body parts? It's kind of like the polymorph problem where you turn into another humanoid and right now your equipment just drops on the ground, even though the werewolf could theoretically hold things and wear things that were stretchy enough, or something, or just stayed on, like a little hat. It doesn't know how to do that, or transfer wounds, for that matter. Once we understand how that works, which is an easier problem than coming up with a mixture of creatures, then there's also the centaur problem, of taking pieces of creatures and gluing them onto each other; taking the top half of a person and gluing them onto most of a horse, except for the head. These are all easier problems than trying to procedurally just come up with the child of two creatures, but it's still an intriguing problem. So I'm not sure I'd just jump in and be, like, here's the half and two-halves breeding can just do a Mendelian genetics type thing, and sometimes they're a whole, sometimes it's one race or another, sometimes it produces another half, like half-elf/half-goblin. It could work that way, but it would be interesting to be able to get something more smeared, but it's difficult. That's part of the reason it hasn't happened yet; it's an intriguing and difficult problem.

[LordBaal]

As for marriages, something sort of like that sort of happens already, the night trolls making spouses of other races members. I guess simple interspecies marriage would be something kind of easy to make, but they would yield no offspring for the time being.

[Urist Tilaturist]

Night creatures kidnapping other creatures is different, since they do not produce any offspring.

Cross breeds between species (calling them "races" is somewhat inappropriate, since races have no problem breeding with each other) exist on Earth as well (mules are an obvious example, and cross breeding would allow mules to be born in DF). However, they are infertile.

[Vattic]

Night creatures kidnapping other creatures is different, since they do not produce any offspring.

Cross breeds between species (calling them "races" is somewhat inappropriate, since races have no problem breeding with each other) exist on Earth as well (mules are an obvious example, and cross breeding would allow mules to be born in DF). However, they are infertile.

They do mate and produce offspring. Sometimes you find quite large families of them.

Maybe all the sapient creatures do come from one species, but became more diverse for in-universe reasons.

[Putnam]

It's still different, since they convert the kidnapped into their own species before mating.

[Urist Tilaturist]

It's still different, since they convert the kidnapped into their own species before mating.

I was completely wrong about night creatures. I have actually never seen one in game, having only seen werebeasts, vampires and the undead attacking my forts out of the supernatural creatures.

[reality.auditor]

How are things looking regarding save compatibility? I'm guessing it's at least tricky to inject the new stuff into existing saves.

Major releases of DF never are save-compatibile. And making it so would be horrible waste of time. In this case "it is alpha!" excuse actually works.

[lethosor]

How are things looking regarding save compatibility? I'm guessing it's at least tricky to inject the new stuff into existing saves.

Major releases of DF never are save-compatibile. And making it so would be horrible waste of time. In this case "it is alpha!" excuse actually works.

0.21, 0.22, and 0.23 were save-compatible, as were 0.27 and 0.28.

[reality.auditor]

How are things looking regarding save compatibility? I'm guessing it's at least tricky to inject the new stuff into existing saves.

Major releases of DF never are save-compatibile. And making it so would be horrible waste of time. In this case "it is alpha!" excuse actually works.

0.21, 0.22, and 0.23 were save-compatible, as were 0.27 and 0.28.

Interesting, didn't knew that (I get to knew DF from 40d). Anyway I somehow doubt it will repeat ever, especially with change in versioning number system.

[Urist Tilaturist]

Since 40d, big DF releases have been infrequent, changed a lot, and been incompatible as a result.

[Fieari]

You stated that the language RAWs don't have enough information yet to actually construct poetry at this time, like for stressed feet and whatnot.  Any plans for putting in new RAW tags for this, even if you don't fill them in yourself?  I'd bet the community would love to help with data-entry work like that.  (that or someone might be able to write a program to generate the information based on rules)

Another major lack of information in the languages are words for local creatures-- it's weird that there can be no Dwarven words for creatures they encounter every day.  That said, I understand that there might be... technical issues, given that modders can add new creatures (or take them away).  Do you have any thoughts regarding how you might fix this in the future?  For example, would the creature names go in the language file or the creature file?

[Putnam]

Oh god.

I mean, it's not insurmountable, but just imagining the amount of tokens makes me wanna barf a little.

Like, here's an excerpt from the first language file I found on my computer:

Code: [Select]

    [T_WORD:DATE_VERB:rusama]
Now, let's try it out with some stuff to facilitate poetry and other language.

First of all, obviously we need conjugation rules to preserve our sanity:

Code: [Select]

[TRANSLATION:TROLL]
    [VERB_PRESENT:o:i:u:u:a:n] first person singular, first person plural, second singular, second plural, third singular, third plural
    [VERB_PAST:o:i:u:u:a:n] troll words all have exactly 6 letters. I figure this is a good example mostly to show the difficulty, heh.
    [VERB_FUTURE:o:i:u:u:a:n] Same for all tenses because I'm lazy and, again, six letters.
    [VERB_PARTICIPLE:e:t] past participle, present participle; but then, the game already has this.
Second, we need our verb.

Code: [Select]

    [T_WORD:DATE_VERB:rusam:REGULAR] what kind of language would this be without irregular verbs? Some sort of conlang?... wait a minute
        [SYLLABLES_PRESENT:roo-sah-moh:roo-sah-mee:roo-sah-moo:roo-sah-moo:roo-sah-mah:roo-sah-min] I guess it'll just assume that identical syllables will rhyme in this system.
        [SYLLABLES_PAST:roo-sah-moh:roo-sah-mee:roo-sah-moo:roo-sah-moo:roo-sah-mah:roo-sah-min] I mean, this is obviously a dumb way to go about it, but whatever, silly example.
        [SYLLABLES_FUTURE:roo-sah-moh:roo-sah-mee:roo-sah-moo:roo-sah-moo:roo-sah-mah:roo-sah-min]
        [SYLLABLES_PARTICIPLE:roo-sah-may:roo-sahmt]
       
And that's just off the top of my head, there's more that's important. The game already organizes words by theme in language_SYM.txt and each individual word is given certain parts of speech in the files, and this isn't going at all into other such things, such as number, gender (though that's probably not a problem for dwarven poetry, heh), tense, case, mood or voice.

The system could probably just include default behaviors for case/conjugation/tense etc. and you'll end up with elven esperanto or whatever, but in general it'd just be far harder for modders to make their own languages. The pronunciation I guess you can apply rules to as well, so that's nice, but in general it seems like something... again, not insurmountable, but horrifically tedious. I know some people enjoy that kind of thing (I know quite a few do!), but it'd be a bit odd to require a bunch of wikipedia time for a language.

On the other hand, materials are pretty ludicrous right now, so it fits right in.

[Urist Tilaturist]

The dwarven "language" isn't, having only a few random words, no grammar, and no words for things that dwarves encounter every day. A whole RAWS system for grammar and more words could be given by modders to Toady and implemented if he cannot be bothered to do it.

[Mel_Vixen]

I would like to have some random Music and dances next although a more complete peoetry generator would be awesome too. Would be interesting if you could marry both so that we get chorals and singing.

How far would the musical forms go?  Can i dare to hope that Dwarf fortress procedurally generates and plays "midi"-files with songs the various cultures have writen?