Thanks to Knight Otu, Putnam, MrWiggles, LordBaal, Button, lethosor, Japa, Shonai_Dweller, Cruxador, Dwarfu, BlackFlyme, Heph, King Mir, Lac and everybody else that helped to answer questions -- if your question doesn't appear below, please check back around where you asked it! I might have also removed a suggestion or two. Those should go in the suggestion forum to keep this thread uncluttered.
1. I was reading about how you wrote that poetry and songs used terminology that is "commonly used". I mentioned this in passing to a friend who's a big dance fan and gaming fan, and she brought up that there is terminology. Have you thought about opening this matter up to the community for input?
2. With what you just said about Earthquakes, have social stigmas affecting the fort's business been considered? (a la what happened during chinese feudalism if a large enough natural disaster occurred)
1. I found some dance terminology, and I've posted my first pass of the paragraphs. If there's more universal terminology, it would work in suggestions.
2. I haven't planned out much of anything along those lines.
With enough luck and "accidents", will it be possible to make a fortress, where the only citizens are , well ... batmen?
(or any other non-dwarf immigrants, like humans, animal-men etc.)
Yeah, once you get your first permanent sign-up who isn't just visiting, you can end the dwarfiness if you like.
Will the distant update require new worlds for the changes to occur?
Most of them will, yeah. There was no easy way to update the existing saves with randomly generated instruments that'll be respected everywhere, or the new raw jobs. A few bits here and there will work.
An active projectile has several flags which were critical in getting my dorfs hopping up into trees (and goblin towers) like PARABOLIC and NO_COLLIDE plus NO_IMPACT_DESTROY, but for the life of me I can't determine what HIGH_FLYING does, would you happen to recall if it is an outdated tag or just for something else entirely? Oh, and do any of the numerical flags there have an effect on the way a projectile lands? When you jump you can land on your feet, using the launch.lua script right now you basically have to keep a hand free and grab on to a wall or tree to stop yourself, or just skid to a stop and hope your armor/toughness can take it.
I'm not sure what any of these things are. Are they names from a script or DF hack headers? I'm not sure what you mean by numerical flag. I can't figure out which one HIGH_FLYING could refer to, since there isn't anything along those lines. There is a bit (like #13?) that does controlled jumps so you land on your feet. The first bit also controls how items land, but shouldn't relate to unit landings.
So, what part of the visitors will visitors play in our fortresses? Are any of them capable of betraying us during a siege, and say, opening a drawbridge?
Nothing interesting like that.
The question about writing being used in engravings made me wonder, will we also see graffiti on walls of towns and ruins, like the drawings found on walls in Pompeii? If so, might it also be possible for adventurers to make their own graffiti?
I'm not sure when we'll get to things like that. Writing things in blood on random walls seems popular. It resides somewhere between the current engraving and spatter systems, probably.
As animal people are playable now can gnomes become playable assuming they've joined the civ?
Gnomes are not treated like animal people or gorlaks. Currently considered too drawn by booze stockpiles to be useful contributors.
Currently a civilisation inherit all its ethics values from the entity that spawned it, ethic/values will then never change through the course of that civilisation existence.
But in real world, things change, you have ethics that evolve with the people in power, with the influence of culture/religion or simply with the time etc.
With the philosophers and philosophy going to appear in DF, will we see changes in ethics/value within a civilisation with the moving of time, or the rise in prominence from a specific philosopher (or religious leader) , possibly then leading it to break from its entity and even change the war/peace dynamics with other civilsations that had previously exact same ethics/values (due to spawning from same entity) and so made wars possibly happening between those civilisations while it was previously unlikely
We've been aware of the possibility, and the civilizations are all set up to allow them to change away from the definitions. It just needs to have a mechanic. For philosophers, something about how their influence is felt, either through talking or writing or an influential intermediary, etc. We wanted to get to something small this time, but it might not happen now.
If we see several animal men of the same species settle in a human civ, could the population take off, where that species could become a significant portion of the population, or even 1-2% in a handful of sites? Or will these be relegated exclusively to historical figures and their special roles?
They don't get treated as abstract site populations at this point. We were mulling that over when the heroes went in, and thought it would be a reasonably straightforward addition to just move a segment over, preferably with some historical explanation, but we haven't done it yet. It would help them to make little enclaves -- the heroes will hardly ever make families, since you don't often get the same type in the same place.
Will naturalized non-dwarves be possible in migrant waves? In the starting 7?
LordBaal mentioned starting scenarios as being a time that this might start to happen, and I'd certainly want to wait at least until we have some more explanatory text. Starting Dwarf Fortress and having nothing but humans come in your first wave would be odd, and we'd want to lay out something about what happened to the hillocks and so forth so that the player understands what's going on (the current position holders are odd enough). I'm not sure how much the first embark scenario release will cover (since there's a lot of potential ground to cover now), but the main goal is to engage the fort more with the world as it exists.
Do you use any SIMD instructions (e.g. SSE), or do you know if your compiler(s) use them? Why or why not?
I haven't done anything explicitly that I'm aware of, though compiler optimizations squeeze another 10% out with every version and I'm not sure what is going on down there.
how come it's mechanically possible to hold (admittedly one-sided) conversations with babies, but not creatures with the [UTTERANCES] tag? (ie kobolds and modded species)
The babies belong to a creature type that can speak intelligibly, which is what it checks to start, I think.
Would the ability to base animal men civ's off their bestial counterpart be in the raws anytime soon?
I'm not sure what that entails. The bestial counterpart has no civ. Any traits would need to be inferred somehow, and there isn't much relevant data now.
Will fort visitors 'learn' what kind of behavior they can get away with while at the fort (sheriff present or not, hammerer equipped with platinum warhammer or featherwood crossbow, etc).
They'll understand what's up, hopefully, though I'm not sure there'll be room for a learning process.
Is it possible that your sheriff enacting justice on visitors who commit crimes could result in retaliation (such as a siege) from the visitors' civilizations?
It wouldn't work that way without a rumor to pass the information, and I don't think one gets created during executions... hmmm... although I think it might pick up on the slayer identification in the historical event, which might be enough for certain personal considerations. The civ members don't generally have time to check all those though.
Are there any plans to make regular dwarfs write diaries?
Having diaries was one of the original plans way back when we conceived of the game (as part of the adventure mode high score procedure in the ruined fort), but now it's a way lower priority. There are getting to be more kinds of writing though, so rather than being fundamental, I expect it'll be one of the things that happens as we have more dwarves writing.
Have you considered pre-patching the game with large address aware as a temporary hold until 64-bit becomes a reality?
Besides allowing far more RAM allocation, do you know if any of the newer 64-bit instruction sets and registers could help Dwarf Fortress in certain computational tasks? Such as pathing and procedural generation?
LAA came up but I wasn't sure if it would introduce new bugs at random so I never tried it.
I don't know anything about 64 bit ramifications outside of numbers being larger.
The current state on that overall is that the base code is incompatible with 64 bits (the window creation, message pump etc.), and then the supposedly free MSVC stopped working with some kind of expiration window.
How much is lag an issue when you're testing features/debugging? Do you have methods or debug tools that circumvent it?
It doesn't really come up. Most of the time, I have very few units and items on the map, or I'm doing a ton of logging which gums up the works all on its own.
Since wild animal men are now eligible for immigration, will it also be possible to mod feral creatures like, for instance, gnomes and trolls to be able to join civilizations?
And to rephrase my previous question, are kobolds getting their own combat/fort mode dialogue anytime soon? Those guys seem awfully quiet compared to everyone else.
It'll be possible to mod it, though only gorlaks have the setting in vanilla. The game doesn't recognize animal people in any special way -- I've just put a new creature tag in their creature variation (and the gorlak def).
You mean screaming kobold utterances at random? No near-term plans.
You mentioned we'll be in control of whether or not visitors can stay. Will this control be expanded to migrants?
A complete overhaul of the migrant system comes with embark scenarios (every one relates you to your parent civ and neighbors in a different way), but not this time.
Is the "cause trouble for [insert group]" quest/assignment broken? If not is there a certain less obvious trigger for completion? I've heard and tried fistfights, I've tried maiming various members of said group in sight of other members, I've tried exterminating entire cities save a couple of survivors who I regaled with the tales of my murderspree, and numerous other permutations of this to no avail, I return to the guard captain/lord/lady/etc and give an update, they give a canned response, and it never shows as completed in the log.
It should flag as complete if you've had any conflict at all with the relevant group, and you should give a report of a specific incident that it counts when you report it (or say there will be no rest for the enemy if it can't find one). I can look at a bugged save on the tracker if one's available.
Are there separate population caps for visitors and citizens?
Why do visitors come? (At the moment. I know it will radically change with start scenarios)
Why do visitors leave? Do they depart on a timer, when their needs are satisfied, random chance, etc?
Just how "citizeny" are visitors? Do they follow traffic designations? Do they trigger traps? Can we assign them labor? Can the military kill them? etc.
Visitors have their own cap.
Visitors come because you have a relevant location designated, with some reputation effects.
Visitors leave once they check off their itinerary items, which usually involves a certain amount of drinking/research/praying, waiting for a residency petition to be heard, etc.
Visitors are like merchants until they become residents, then they are like dwarves.
Now that we have foreign people asking for shelter in the fortress:
What about refugees from wars and such?
They would seem like the most logical example for something like that but are not mentioned in the recent dev log.
I haven't done anything additional with them, and the scale there is much larger than single visitors. That's more along the lines of the additional of hill dwarves later, where the numbers will be beyond what can reasonably be loaded.
will you be able to use a kind of kill orders thing to make use of monster hunters to clean out pesky troublemaking critters?
If so...
In the next release or two can we set adventurers out after offsite creatures that annoyed us? And will we be able to track rumors we heard about it via a quest management screen or something?"
Right now you can use them how you like. They might end up a bit more autonomous, but it's easier just to let you order them around once they sign up.
The offsite stuff is all for later.
With non-dwarf visitors being able to join the fort as citizens will we be able to make clothes & armour of the correct size? ie. large items for humans and XXL for hippomen?
That's the big thing that still needs to be done with them... it would best if you didn't have to fiddle, but it might end up that way. It'll be difficult as the size becomes more diverse, and there has always been the open question of child-sized clothing and so on which is a similar nightmare we'd rather not get into... ever...
Travellers going to other places wouldn't be another fit category of visitors?
And what about traders? As the caravans bring an entourage of soldiers and merchants, won't they be another kind of visitors (renting rooms and going to parties at the inn)?
Like just passing through? The time difference is a problem there. It's best to go around if you actually want to get somewhere and the game expects you to arrive. The meandering drunk adventurers that show up are kind of on a long journey to nowhere.
But yeah, there are lots of opportunities for different kinds of visitors, and we just need to get to it all. It's to the point where the merchants and their escorts could go party in the tavern as it stands. They'd just need to leave somebody behind at the depot. They could do two-week or month-long shifts, I guess, if they stay a few months.
Do you envision spies or other such traitors coming to the fortress later on?
Yeah. We're into that stuff and will slowly inflict it on everybody once we're ready. I don't expect to get there for some time, though.
What happens if your civ goes to war while your inn is full of visitors from your new enemy's civ? Are there any mechanics to let you know, or will the visitors just turn hostile one day without notice? Would going to war effect the reactions of short-term and long-term visitors in the same way? How will friends of visitors react?
It's possible that it'll start to fall apart quickly, yeah, since we don't have any information restriction mechanisms on that kind of information yet. They cache their reactions to people for a while to save the processor, but it probably won't take long for them to reevaluate, especially if the walk to a new part of the fort or a dwarf they haven't seen comes to where they are standing. I don't think long-term visitors will be as impacted -- their new status should provide a buffer in the calculations.
Are we likely to see art forms and intellectual concepts die off? More than the library of alexandria analogy that was proposed, will we see concepts die off the way that Latin as a language died off? (only practiced in scholastic sense and such)
Since the knowledge doesn't have practical uses yet, it's either simply known or not. Once a branch can be explored by a civ, the same potential is there, so something can just be rediscovered after it is lost without really changing character. I guess some difference exist when branches work together and a civ only has one -- as with the elves and some randomized humans. Art forms can be lost as practiced forms, and then reintroduced through books by people that just know them but don't use them, but they can just start using them, so it's not that impressive. Nothing fundamentally shifts in how it is used.
How are the visitors (adventurers, artists, scholars) going to arrive? Accompanying caravans, accompanying migrant waves, on their own? Will there be special announcements to draw attention to their arrival?
Right now they come on their own and get their own announcement. They are listed with the merchants in the unit screen until they sign up (if they want to sign up), at which point they move to the dwarfy list.
With musical instruments being used now, are we going to see other non musical related use of "musical" instruments? Like invaders sounding horns to attack or bells being used to wake up the militia soldiers that are sleeping? Or is this behavior part of the army arc?
Nothing like that for this time. But yeah, it's good to have bells and horns now, with hope for the future.
Since visitors will be visiting local "establishments", will minting currency have a greater purpose than just to be used as an export item?
I'm not exactly sure what the exchange rate would be, like 1 golden coin for 10k elven bark currency notes? If this is even how it's going to work.
I can just see a possible expansion of the use of currency in this next update as a likely next step. Money for furniture/weapons/food/beer/bounties and whatnot.
Until we get back to the economy in earnest, it's best not to mess around with it too deeply. There should end up being some kind of exchange with the visitors, ideally, since they want your booze, but we still haven't done anything yet. For this reason "Set prices/activities" is not purple with the rest of the tavern stuff on dev.
If the monster hunters are successful in their endeavors during their stay in your fortress, will they make their own trinkets from their kills as they do offsite?
I haven't gotten into anything like that. We'd like to have everything be consistent between play and world gen, but most things are way easier to implement in world gen.
You mentioned inns will attract visitors due to their reputations sometime back. Would the caverns also attract adventurers due to reputation (monsters found, previous adventurers killed, wealth uncovered, or something?).
Yeah, they come for the caverns and stay for the monsters. Right now, it's just a simple trigger, though a bit more might be done before the end.
Will visitors decide to never put a foot anymore into a tavern when the death toll start to increase ?
He he he, yes, right now the death trap information is considered public.
Will there be any 'compatability' problems for multispecies forts other than culture?
Will elves and humans get vitamin D deficiency from being underground too long? Will carnivorous animal people get sick from eating only plump helmets?
We haven't added anything new like that.
Will visitors be able to pursue romantic relationships with other visitors and the permanent residents of your fortress?
Yeah, they can form regular relationships as well. There are still creature-type restrictions.
So, scholars and scribes. How does it all fit together on a worldwide scale? Is there a system for passing knowledge around from one fort to another or between friendly civilizations?
Once play begins, the relevant parts are getting the game to recognize which copies are in your library (artifacts are pre-done), and where books go when you trade them away. Handling the trader part is less likely, since they still don't actually exist. Individual scholars move around after world generation, though I'm not sure I'm going to be able to do all the same site/item work from world gen until I get a better handle on items (it's all pretty much the same problem).
What's the the mechanic of tree growing?
There are various timers and then it decides to grow out that sort of tile, such as a brank or trunk extension etc. (or change from a sapling to a multi-tile tree), according to the parameters set in the raws. The raws also determine which growths are active and whether they are falling, and so on. I'm not sure if you wanted to know something specific.
Would adventurers be able to fill their mugs with drinks from barrels?
Or better yet, the blood of their enemies?
Yeah.
Will citizens who secretly murdered other citizens attempt to hide the corpses? And how would that affect the investigation?
How much love will Adventure Mode be getting in the coming updates?
Incidentally, is there any intention to expand the adventure mode medical system?
There's nothing like that. We aren't doing any complicated crime stuff until we get to the complicated crime part of the game.
We're going to try to keep going as we are going with this release -- there's the basic part, the world gen part, the fort part, and the adventure part. As far as I can tell looking ahead, the releases will have room for that kind of growth without being overlong (unless this already counts as overlong).
Adventure mode medical stuff is up on the old dev pages, and that's still the idea -- that we'd somehow get to each dwarf mode job. Clearly healthcare is more important than doing adv versions of some of the more obscure dwarf jobs, but it's unclear when it'll be slated. All we've decided are that the artifact/myth stuff is next, then the embark scenario/law/property stuff.
Toady, what are your personal feelings towards the "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream" situation that currently exists with regards to adventure mode personality? By which I mean, you are possessing an individual who has their own personality (even if we now get to choose what that may be) and can only watch as you use their body to do whatever, leaving them the freedom only to weep uncontrollably at the death and murder you cause.
Do you feel like this is a bug, to be removed in the future if possible, or is it a feature (that could maybe be communicated to the player better, like being able to talk to the person you are possessing)?
He he he, I'm not sure everything is a bug or a feature. This is more like... a situation that arose, one which is very difficult to get right. I'm adding in needs for this version, adding more rather than less personality, but I think the crying part is somewhat extreme. If it judges correctly, it can be cool, but if it is completely wrong about what happened, it's goofy, and there's no really reliably way of making the correct choice. It doesn't bother me much as long as it doesn't take control out of your hands, and it might work out fine when you are taking control of historical figures later. I'm not sure what I think about various expansions to this way of thinking -- the needs part works out well enough, I think, but a more explicit separation of you from your character I'm less comfortable with. I guess it already happened with the "No. That's disgusting." refusal of eat commands earlier on, and I'm sort of against that now, since the game just checks if you are hungry but you might have some other compelling reason to eat... whatever it was. Like becoming a vampire, and so on. The more your character is marked as explicitly squeamish though, the more okay it is, but it still can't judge the degree of your necessity.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1883305 times)