So now maths and engineering 
will we get differential gears and banana Spaces?
Generally speaking what are the highest ideas the dorfs or any other civ can come up with?
Differential gears are certainly one of the popular "did they or didn't they" technologies -- just in my quick run through, they were hypothesized in the Greek mechanism as well as the Chinese south-pointing chariot. I don't remember finding anything definitive online. I went ahead and made them a difficult tech (and added the pointing chariot and astrarium -- abstractly for now of course).
They can get divergence of the harmonic series and invent a symbol for addition, but no banach spaces. They can build a theory of rainbows using water-filled spheres and a camera obscura, and they can calculate the height of the atmosphere based on atmospheric refraction using the law of refraction (though it tries not to get into the actual shape of the world, since that might vary). They can make oil of vitriol and spirit of niter in theory, though I don't remember if we have any vitriols at all. Historians can start to understand how cultural differences and state bias affects source reliability and think a bit about social forces. They can come up with dedicated hospitals with specialized wards, staffing, medical labs and treatment for many illnesses. All sorts of other stuff -- as far as I can tell, none of this bumps up against the soft 1400 cut off, though there was disputed material here and there, in every field, and people are welcome to comment or advocate for inclusion/removal if they have information.
Given the realistic nature of DF technology/science, to what degree will chemistry, mathematical, and similar books be randomly generated?
The books are randomly generated in the process of history (and in materials), but the content placed in the books is based on the knowledge of the writer, which depends on the currently fixed set of innovations available. The set of innovations will begin to include some randomized fantasy stuff over time, and it might make reference to the raws in terms of chemistry perhaps later (and in ways related to the whole "does it affect the game?" set of concerns with reactions and all that). It isn't randomly generating math theorems or anything, though I can see something vaguely happening along those lines for certain magic forms (as with the Threetoe story involving magic).
The specific text of the books doesn't go deeply into the theorems or anything -- it would be better to have more, but we have a large list we're working with so we can't spare more than a sentence or two at this time.
Are there plans to integrate the animal training knowledge with rest of the knowledge system before the next major release? (The one after this one)
There aren't concrete plans to integrate the knowledge system with any practical side of play yet. It's a tricky and dangerous sort of change. We hope to work it into everything, but we don't have a time scale for that.
You mentioned dwarf, elf and human scholars but not goblins. Does that mean goblins won't have scholars (except poets!) or just that you haven't decided what they'll specialise in yet?
Their civilization doesn't value scholarship, so it doesn't happen there. Goblins that are so inclined can become scholars elsewhere. Some of the random human civs don't have scholars either. The way the goblin stuff generally works, there'd be goblins that make the personal decision to think about such things even in the goblin civ, but the system doesn't support local individual choices of that kind yet.
Does that mean there will be maps in Libraries, allowing to discover new locations?
Not yet, but we're working toward that. It has been on the dev pages in several forms forever, and now we have one more reason and avenue to get there.
Does this mean we are likely to see humans fighting amongst themselves now?
Are the values similar to spheres in that related ones are more likely to group together and vice versa?
I don't remember if values made their way to world generation war causes the same way as religious sphere opposition and ethics, since they were added later. Maybe not. Certain pairings should probably be included, though lots of them probably wouldn't bother people the same way as eating people.
Right now, the value randomization is all independent, and hopefully it can work that way. Some of the sphere relationships are meant to exclude things that don't make sense (especially as it concerns super/subsets), and the other are to build small groups of related spheres, but if it doesn't have to rule out certain value combinations, it would be best to keep them all. If something really doesn't make sense, we'll probably prevent it eventually.
Once values can change more during play, there might be some that move together depending on the source of the change (if the source is more general), so I'm not sure they'll remain completely independent. Some of the initial philosophically-inspired value changes that we get will probably be along a single value axis, since the written works refer to those directly.
A thriving civilization, scholars from around the world congregating and exchanging ideas, storing the collective knowledge of the world in a vast, Alexandria-like Library.
Then the dragon/goblin army led by their demonic Overlord/fire-breathing titan/adventure mode PC shows up, slaughters the scholars and burns the library, setting back the pace of learning by centuries. Awesome.
So - books do burn, right? Will this be a thing?
Right now all the covers are still made out of stone sometimes, and the pages don't have materials (or whatever it does for that item improvement). I'm still debating taking a further detour into better materials for books (and then doing scrolls or whatever instead of books oftentimes). It might be best to wait. Books might still be destroyed in world gen when bad things happen, and in regular play when really bad things happen.
How do you feel about the game producing actual music following the rules you generate? As in, simple one voice folk songs that you hear when you walk by a musician who's playing. I made a song following one of your formats by just picking random notes and rests within the chords generated for a form.
Would you consider making key parts of the randomly generated musical forms stored in such a way that they could be reasonably easily accessed by external programs that convert them into audible music?
I don't think I could make music following the rules I generate, especially because some of the descriptors use emotional words in a way that makes it a difficult and subjective problem.
I don't have a raw format for the forms at this point, and they aren't considered part of the xml either. It's a time-consuming conversion, so I probably won't do anything for this time. I'd consider doing something, but I'm not sure what the correct choice is at this point between raws and xml. Raws are more useful for more people, but I don't know if it has settled down yet or what's going to happen.
With the advent of library's, will bookcases become a thing, or will books be stored in existing furniture?
I haven't added anything like that -- I won't get to library maps until the adventure-mode tavern changes at the end of this release process, most likely, and we haven't decided to what extent libraries will be in fort mode yet.
How do you plan to display adventures approaching music?
Like the sound behind a wall? We have those exclamation points for speech and walking, and we can probably use the musical notes provided by the ASCII for music. Might use musical notes for visible people as well, but we'll see once I get to the dwarf mode musical activities (which aren't too far away now).
Will we get these scholars in the fortress? (like the old philosopher)
Do you have any plans to have them create books while in player fortresses? Will we be able to create libraries ourselves (like a hospital or temple zone or whatever) and attract scholars?
Quote from: devlog
The outlines are ready for [...] geographers [...]
Does this include cartography? And by extension, will that mean the world map you see in adventure mode will be influenced by your civs cartographic/geographic knowledge? Will we be able to find physical maps?
In general, will the book framework be used for anything else than actual books? I'm thinking of pamphlets, proclamations, wanted posters, and as mentioned, maps.
If we get the libraries into fort mode, which will probably happen to a small extent, we'll have fort mode scholars and books in a very basic capacity. And yeah, the idea was that they'd be analogous to taverns and temples as meta-multi-zone location thingies that can attract outsiders.
The geography innovations include several related to cartography, but as with everything else we aren't tying it into the actual game yet. But yeah, that's the idea. We have several dev items on maps and we'd have you interact with them once they go in.
The "written content" framework functions beyond books, and presumably we'll use it for everything. It now works for poems, music and choreographies now whether they are in a book or not, and any items that eventually spring up in a scroll sort of form should be able to use it.
Since necros are not the only ones making books now, will we see existing professions creating books to pass down knowledge? (Fisherdwarfs giving casting techniques or guides to what fish are best when, animal trainers cataloging things that they tamed, miners keeping diaries, craftsdwarves writing about the proper usage of tools, etc)
Although the reason I didn't see it might be because it's venturing into suggestion territory, we do know that the new artists are getting books, so it's more like who else will be getting book-writing functionality?
I haven't added other authors than the ones mentioned at this point.
How will our new visitors react to having the fortress closed and being unable to leave, especially during a siege? Will they freak out and eventually go crazy like merchants currently do, or will they react more reasonably (either by accepting that there's a good reason for being stuck there or perhaps even demanding to be let out if there's no good reason for the fortress' entrance to be blocked)?
The merchant code is archaic, so I doubt the new visitors'll have the same issues. I'm not sure what'll happen at this point, though, if anything. They don't really have decent recourse if they don't break things, but I suppose they could just annoy people if they are impatient.
Will there be partial and unfinished works?
Also now with books more commonplace will the Bookkeeper actualy keep book?
It isn't like that yet, though since we have that part of world gen working in weeks, it should be possible. Once people write after world gen, it'll be a more natural result (since it surely wouldn't be a fast job), though it would need to be added explicitly as with anything.
The bookkeeper does not yet keep a book.
Have you heard about weighted A* search which introduces a constant factor w (with w > 1) to A*'s admissible heuristic to improve execution time by trading off the optimality of the results to be no worse than w times the optimal solution ?
Edit for clarification: My intention is to get a quick yes/no-like answer before I'll attempt to write a potentially redundant, proper, lengthy and formal suggestion post about ?-admissible search algorithms that are based on weighted A*.
Yeah, I've heard about it. Initial complications are that (if I remember, been a while) we might blow out some variables if we multiple up beyond the traffic weights we're already using, and imperfect paths are kind of bad news for the appearance of reality, which leads to all sorts of trouble (false bug reports, etc).
Do you have plans for gorlaks, or other non civilised creatures making poems, songs, dances, and similar?
We're hoping to get our first animal person etc. "heroes" in for the visitor part this time. Once they exist as historical figures... various things can happen. I'm not going fully into entity definitions for the side races this time -- and regardless there's the interesting question of the arts for intelligent solitary/mega critters that won't have entities (except in weird circumstances). Not sure what'll happen and no specific plans.
Will dwarves read books while on break? And if they read books, will they be able to gain skill from them?
It's quite possible, assuming we get our dwarven libraries up to the point that they have books in them, which seems like a first step. We don't have skill books at this point, so the most they'd be able to do is learn the pythagorean theorem or something.
Toady- have you thought about tweaking with crossbows/ranged weapons having fixed ranges? i.e. the idea of firing a crossbow from a 3z high tower to get extra range?
Part of the problem is the visual range in general -- we just don't have a lot of room to work with, certainly not anything approaching the actual range of these weapons. I haven't come up with a solution or thought about it very hard though. It would be appropriate to do something, and the tower example would happen naturally if we get parabolas up for everything (which would get us to the range problem again though, so it doesn't actually work).
where will knowledge of adamantine working come from?
Where it'll stand after the myth generation and after the tech stuff gets worked into actual jobs is anybody's guess. In general, both supernaturally-inspired knowledge and a slow slog of experimentation are on the table. We're hoping to get some of our generated fantasy stuff innovation-tree'd up in a way that'll allow stuff like "mage colleges" (or whatever millions of other types can be concocted, not necessarily the typical "scholarly" ones) with some heft and consequences.
Will the new knowledge "tech forest" be accessible in the RAWs?
If I think up a new fantasy philosophy, can I have the philosophers in game discover it? Or when the history department at my local IRL university thinks up a new historiography method, do we have to wait for it to be hard coded in or can we just add it to the RAWs ourselves?
For that matter, what about ideas that aren't just ambiguously correct, but are clearly wrong? People wrote books and chased down clearly false ideas plenty of times in history. It's a part of science too, to propose an idea that might not work out.
Are the innovations moddable? E.g. Is it possible to add some more innovations or even entire innovation chains via modding or is everything hardcoded? With innovation chain I mean let's say for woodcutting first investigate single blade axe, than double blade axe, than double blade axe with extra sharp blades, etc.
When this is moddable and one day ingame-functionality is added, will we be able to add custom effects to those innovations? e.g. double blade axe => 10 per cent faster chopping than with standard axe, double blade axe with extra sharp blades => 20 % faster chopping than standard axe, etc.
Also when moddable, will we be able to add tech trees for completely random studies e.g. plump helmet science or tree hugging techniques for elves? Just for personal amusement and to be able to find books or engravings about this or that.
Nope, not yet. I'm still not sure how to interact with a few things -- certain things like "biography" are linked to the ability to write that kind of book, which is going to require a syntax like any of the job connections we do later, and trickier problems like how the ability of philosophers to write on individual happiness or government allows them to inject their values into specific books about the subject (with lots of associated text branching on values). It's also kind of like spheres -- there's a fundamentalness to a few of the innovations that resists rawification (since it basically amounts to the open-source question). We'll probably figure it out, one way or the other, anyway. Presumably the technological advances will matter in some way -- probably ties to whatever item raws eventually say about things like agricultural purpose/efficiency/etc., or how a non-item innovation itself merges with however farming output works. It'll be complicated and piecemeal, I imagine, since there's a great variety to be handled.
Doing incorrect information is hard when we don't even have "correct" information done. We'll get to specific cases eventually, but the myriad wrong paths people can take are harder to do. It'll be part of the myth stuff as each society looks at the generated story from its perspective, but maybe not much on the first pass.
So will people still write books about other people's books about other people's books about mugs?
I haven't changed anything about that, though the scholars have generally been writing about their research instead of commenting. The necromancers get bored.
Does that mean that, eventually, we will have hunters that have read books about specific critters and know how they usually act in a state of terror? I.e. that we will have hunters that do not run up next to an elephant before it has dealt a lethal blow?
If so; will this be expanded upon to enable hunters/players to aim for lethal points in sentient creatures/critters, if they've read a book about the biology of, say, humans?
It all depends on the direction things go. We have books about various behaviors of various animals, but since few of those behaviors are actually in the raws yet, it doesn't really matter until the game itself is more interesting, and then there'd be the additional step.
With the 1400 cut-off date, could we expect world-gen ruins that hint at more advanced things you can't be build by any of the civs?
Entire civilizations don't die off often enough for this to happen much yet, but it's theoretically possible to have a ruined town with a ruined library now that has books describing things well beyond what is known by anybody living. As the innovations get linked to actual in-game objects, the living and dead civs will differentiate more.
How will people discover new knowledge at the beginning of time? Will worldgen just create wisemen who then write books or pass on teachings through teacher/apprentice relationships? Or will gods n' demons grant the knowledge?
The initial scholars discover the simple innovations (those without prereqs) by spending time thinking during their turns. When the myth stuff goes in, all the prometheus gift/demon "gift"/etc.etc.etc. stuff will start to come in as well. As we expand the innovations over to the game's professions, scholars won't control the whole mundane process I expect, and we'll have technologies spring up in regular communities outside of the library setting, and spread in ways aside from books.
Will scribes make copies of important books to distribute them, possibly to other libraries across the world?
Yeah, the libraries currently obtain copies of books that reside in other libraries over time with some respect for distance, but we don't have scribes separated out as a person you can find yet.
Is some knowledge protected? Will dwarves prevent the spread of metalworking techniques outside of their civilization?
We don't have anything like that yet. It'll be more important when they matter and hopefully we'll remember at that time before the wrong book copy gets sent out to a human library.
Everyone will be capable of reading any book? I mean, different languages won't affect reading/speaking (just yet)?
We don't have different languages for the books yet. I'm not sure when I'll get into that. Attaching a translation token to the written content would be simple enough, but we'd also need the knowledge of languages inside the people, and it would still make playing quite annoying without various mitigation (especially if you can't read the various slabs/books that actually do stuff when you triumphantly obtain them). It is something we want to do though -- once you can take the slab etc. to a translator etc. it would be fun again (and open up more possibilities for how it all turns out).
That led me to wondering then if accidentally or by bug or by facetious adventurer bringing it, a necromancer book end into the fortress library, will that fort be filled by lots of new necromancers in no time?
It depends on how books are understood to belong to a library or which books are understood as being the ones to read -- the game won't see things that aren't properly transferred (although in the fort they might not care as long as the zone is right -- haven't gotten there yet, assuming we do much with libraries there this time). The way artifacts are stored on sites, it might recognize original books brought to a library, but it would have to work harder to understood copies you've pilfered from one library to another, since those don't have "artifact" status and the library tracks its copies separately by necessity.
Will the new system allow for things like training medical dwarves? Will it be possible to have reactions that look for a book of a particular topic/type?
Eventually, it'll all be linked up, but I haven't rawified innovations yet, not even with a sphere-style tag, until we're ready to risk blocking off chunks of dwarf mode to tech-starved dwarf civs, which would be frustrating until that's mitigated in many ways.
Will there be harder books that require greater reading skill than others?
I haven't sorted that out -- it isn't just the reading skill, but the scholarly/art skills/knowledge as well. It seems like some books should require not only prerequisite skills but also prerequisite knowledge to understand at all, whereas others might actually implicitly provide prerequisite knowledge as well as the topic knowledge while imparting some skill as well, depending on the subject, length of study, etc.
It's vaguely related to the overall adoption of an innovation -- at some point, losing books/scholars shouldn't matter if everybody in the civ picks up a concept from an early age or there are representative artifacts everywhere, but that only applies to some things that lend themselves to cultural absorption/reproduction (some of the more esoteric innovations never get that way, even after thousands of years, or they occupying a middle ground where they'd be more obvious but not without work).
In adv mode will the player be able to become a student of a scholar, and later become a teacher themselves? Will adv players be able to create books?
Can the game be modded so scholars genuinely "know" what they're supposed too and actually teach the player? i.e, rip from various ancient textbooks and treatises which the player can then be taught and tested on?
I'm not sure we'll be doing this one for this release -- the performance stuff is a little easier to make fun, where making the teacher-student process for scholars work seems like it would take a lot of writing and conversation and passage of time, and having any actual mechanics there would require a lot more resolution in the knowledge lists, perhaps. It's kind of like becoming the bookkeeper of a fortress -- it's possible to work out a game from there and make it fun, and it should be an option in the spirit of doing everything, but it doesn't feel like the path of least resistance, especially with what's on the table now. That said, playing things like wizard's apprentices is very standard fantasy, and the way things are going, that's all going to be part of the same system (in the more 'understandable' generated magics, anyway), so the circles might wrap around in weird ways.
How will the game actually differ between short and long world gen? What will the technological differences be?
Will research be conducted in our own fortresses? If that research is fruitful, will it spread out of the fort in some way, say travelling scholars visiting the library as well as the tavern?
As I mentioned in one of those logs, the technologies won't yet affect the playable aspects of the game, and I haven't broken down the hands-on labors into their innovations for the most part. Even where I have, it doesn't matter. So the practical differences are very small, and it doesn't affect dwarf buildings or jobs. As we figure out how to manage larger changes, there'll be differences, but it's hard to say how that's all going to interact with other changes, especially where the supernatural is involved. We'll probably have a few options as well, if the changes become intrusive.
Assuming we do libraries in fort mode this time, they'd get books as a first step very likely. At that point, the game would understand what's there, and any scholars moving around would be able to read and use them as the calendar advances, and presumably the copying procedure would also continue -- every w.g. process needs to be continued manually into post w.g., but I'm trying to keep that up to date between modes.
Just, for the big picture, is the innovation system currently implemented as major feature of the adventure mode only? Or is this also a major topic for fortress mode?
Calling it a major feature for either mode would be a stretch. This was just for wholesome and diverse libraries this time, and we'll go from there.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1884074 times)