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[xaritscin]

this may be a really foolish question but,

taking in account that practically most of the species with an intelligent or can learn tag will be coming to the fortress. would be feasible to expect stuff like night creatures, evil biome sentients or even released demons to be able to visit and maybe settle in the fortress?

[Dirst]

this may be a really foolish question but,

taking in account that practically most of the species with an intelligent or can learn tag will be coming to the fortress. would be feasible to expect stuff like night creatures, evil biome sentients or even released demons to be able to visit and maybe settle in the fortress?

"Okay kids, it's time again for the Annual Wear Costumes And Go Begging Around The Neighborhood holiday.  I'd recommend steering clear of the ol' man Darktangle the Girdle of Boats' place.  He means well, giving our really nice cat brain roasts, but remember that he gives off deadly dust constantly."

My guess is that unique creatures would be constitutionally incapable of living in a normal society, but a semimegabeast like a Minotaur could make for a very interesting immigrant-wave-of-one.  They might have demands before joining... such as being exempt from certain labors, leading a squad, etc.

[Button]

this may be a really foolish question but,

taking in account that practically most of the species with an intelligent or can learn tag will be coming to the fortress. would be feasible to expect stuff like night creatures, evil biome sentients or even released demons to be able to visit and maybe settle in the fortress?

Toady said that there's a boolean (on/off) tag which will determine whether a wild critter can come visit your fortress, and that the tag would, in vanilla, only be on animal people and gorlaks. Making tag combinations which are not present in vanilla work together has not historically been a high priority in DF development. Expect weird behavior if you mod the tag onto semimegabeasts.

[Cruxador]

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 game notice the difference? I realize the answer is probably no for the upcoming release, since it's a very peripheral feature and not a normal use case anyway. But this relates to the idea of the world perceiving player intentions, which is, unless I'm mistaken, the biggest purpose of fortress start scenarios. Will those likely have the possibility to change during play? This also seems like it could related to army arc stuff once your active fort is treated more like a normal site for the purposes of wars and you (presumably, if I understand intended future design intentions correctly) can use nobles for politicking.

And not related to that, but also a start-scenario thing: Do you have any plans yet about adding social strata beyond noble/common, such as slaves? I got to thinking of that in connection with visitors and the "Explicit standing of different citizens vs. civilization authorities" note, but it seems like it would be pretty necessary for the prison colonies in general, and could be useful depending on how fulfilling of an implementation you want with religious sites, which would arguably have hierarchy based in faith and might have relevant religious precepts, and the mining companies and military citadels which would probably be differently organized compared to the relatively anarchic situation we've got now.

[Knight Otu]

And not related to that, but also a start-scenario thing: Do you have any plans yet about adding social strata beyond noble/common, such as slaves? I got to thinking of that in connection with visitors and the "Explicit standing of different citizens vs. civilization authorities" note, but it seems like it would be pretty necessary for the prison colonies in general, and could be useful depending on how fulfilling of an implementation you want with religious sites, which would arguably have hierarchy based in faith and might have relevant religious precepts, and the mining companies and military citadels which would probably be differently organized compared to the relatively anarchic situation we've got now.

Status is specifically mentioned on the dev page for the starting scenario framework, along with "Explicit standing of different citizens vs. civilization authorities." Also, from the last DF Talk:

The migrants that come - I mean there might not be migrants that come - they might have a certain type of character to them. To really understand that, we're gonna need to add a framework to the game that lets you understand exactly what it is that the citizen's standing is in the civilisation. I mean, are these sort of serfs that are bound to your fortress, are they kind of frontier dwarves, are they almost employees of your mining operation, you know.. So there's a lot of different ways to think about it, and so we'd like to set up a framework of law, customs, rights, property, and status, so that we can understand these things and we can make these scenarios very explicit.

[Rezznov]

Currently in the game, animal men from underground, such as Cave Swallow Men and Olm Men, can form bands of outcasts in the civilizations screen on legends. I have read you also plan on making animal men playable in adventure mode. My question is: Will it be possible to play as an animal man member of these crude animal man civilizations? Or, will we be restricted to animal men living in Dwarven, Human, Elven, and Goblin civilizations? Thanks!

^{First post by the way!}

[rocer31]

I remember seeing in the planned features about ships, so Will there be anything involving ships added soon?  Also, since there will be ships, and in another reply it was mentioned advanced crime was planned, will that lead to piracy as well?

[xaritscin]

I remember seeing in the planned features about ships, so Will there be anything involving ships added soon?  Also, since there will be ships, and in another reply it was mentioned advanced crime was planned, will that lead to piracy as well?

from what can be gathered of the development page, ships should serve as transport between cities which have access to ports...kinda like a teleport...

[Putnam]

Boats of some kind might go in early to make different regions more accessible, but you won't be able to be a pirate or an undersea civ for quite a while.

Rainseeker:   I have another question here from Van, and he says, curiously enough, that you should cover vehicles in one of the upcoming DF Talks, and he wants to talk about siege vehicles, mounts, and boats.
Toady:   I remember I made that post. Someone wrote a thing about boats, and then I posted a giant thing about boats, and the siege vehicles were going to run into the ideas about boats. I don't remember if we've actually had that on at the DF Talk or not, talking about ...
Rainseeker:   Boats I'm not sure.
Toady:   The siege vehicles, like multi-tile things that can move around and so on.
Rainseeker:   Maybe talk a little bit about multi-tile stuff.
Toady:   A large issue there is turning; should you only be able to point in four directions, because it's kind of mathematically impossible to have more without breaking the grid system or breaking the relationships between grids and, or changing the number of grids, and you can't do any of those things really safely. Now even if the thing turns four directions it can still more in many more directions by doing kind of an up-up-over, up-up-over, up-up-over thing. So it's not like they'll be completely dissatisfying, it's just if you're trying to navigate a narrow thing that you'd normally be able to navigate, like a narrow channel that you'd normally be able to navigate a boat through but suddenly you have to corner and it's like, turn ninety degrees or whatever, then you might run into issues, or you make all the boats squares or something, I think that'd be pretty ugly though. But as far as covering it on a DF Talk we can always put it up for vote. Next month is taken by adventure mode, but after that it's up to ...

Toady:   Yeah. The other problem that I was going to mention ... well one of the sub-problems I was going to mention for liquids was boats; boats are important once you get to fluids. Then you've almost got like a cave-in problem; does this multi-tile thing that you've built, perhaps tile by tile, and in whatever shape; does it float? And if so how deep does the boat float and how much of it shows above the surface of the water. It could do that, once it understands the boat as a multi-tile object that's not so hard to calculate, because you have the total mass of the boat and how many air tiles dip down at each level, those kind of things are pretty easily calculated, it would just be a known quantity for that boat and then you could stick it in the water. If you have some giant galleon or something you'd have a couple of tiles below the surface of the water and a couple of tiles above the surface of the water, and you can just walk around on it and stuff; it'd be really cool. The other fluid problem was multiple liquids. It doesn't seem so bad at first if I want to add a couple more liquid types like oil and I mentioned sand before. Sand, you want to be able to build on it or walk on it or whatever has its own problems, but even if you just consider other liquids like actual liquids, like oil and ... I'm not sure what else people have suggested, blood ... and giant alcohol silos.

Threetoe:   Ok, the next question's from Akos: Will you ever implement ports that make sieges and trading possible on isolated islands, how much do you plan to make oceans part of the gameplay, will you have navies or pirate ships that can fire on fortresses?
Toady:   So we love this stuff, right? We have, we played Pirates! and Ancient Art of War at Sea and stuff, and...
Threetoe:   And multiple submarine simulators.
Toady:   Right now I'm reading the whole kind of history of one of the big greek wars and there's triremes ramming everyone and doing all kinds of things and so on. So yeah, we love boats. We've talked in the past about how boats might work so we don't need to go into kind of the technical details, those'll be in the transcripts of the old talks. But it's definitely one of the things that we're planning to do. And kind of incorporate it fully into gameplay everywhere.

[Jairl]

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.

You really wouldn't see much SSE usage with compiler optimizations... actually you wouldn't see much "optimization" with compiler optimizations either. Compiler optimizations mostly are "stop producing horrible assembly code" more than "make my code faster."

SSE is a "form" of parallel processing within a single processor environment, in that the same instruction is executed on multiple pieces of data in a single cycle. You REALLY need to set it up right to be using it, just like you need to actually thread your code to get multi-threading.

Vectorized math isn't really that hard and I'm surprised you're not explicitly using it.

[Rose]

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.

Yeah, you have to register it to your microsoft account to keep using it, which costs nothing.

[Robsoie]

In current version while megabeast/undead can still come, when playing Fortress mode goblin sieges (extremely) rarely happen and sometime not at all in dozen of years of fortress running. Will this be improved in the upcoming version ? or will all those multi-species mixing in fort will make goblin siege even less likely ?

[Mel_Vixen]

The Human/Elven Library sounds interesting, i bet they are all about Eugenics culling the week to get fiercer war animals while at the same time not needing to monitor them all the time - at least for the elves. In the humans it would mean a good forecast for food availability which makes hunting and stuff more productive.

Toady you mentioned that the Books deal with migration paterns, do herdanimals/birds and such actually migrate ingame?

[Knight Otu]

Toady you mentioned that the Books deal with migration paterns, do herdanimals/birds and such actually migrate ingame?

No, that's just a generated research topic.

[Dirst]

Toady you mentioned that the Books deal with migration paterns, do herdanimals/birds and such actually migrate ingame?

No, that's just a generated research topic.

The specific volume compared the airspeeds of various types of swallows when migrating with coconuts.