Thanks to Putnam, Dirst, Button, Knight Otu, xaritscin, Vattic, Max^TM, Nahere, NW_Kohaku, Cruxador, Alfrodo, burned, lethosor and everybody else that helped to answer questions this time. If you don't see your question below, please check back where you asked it and you might see an answer!
If a visitor signs in and becomes a full member of the civilization, will he make engraving or artefact in relation to his former or his current civilisation ? I suppose he will do the same as a Dwarf would do (migrants also writes on walls about things they saw in their former locations, don't they ?), but I'm not sure.
Through all the places it decides on artwork, it's an unwholesome mixture of the creature's mind and the current site you are playing. That's not necessarily "wrong", but it could afford to be more systematized.
So... does that mean [visitors]'ll go crazy if they're stuck on the map too long?
Are visitors cool with leaving through the caverns?
You'll have some room beyond what normally happened with stranded visitors, and it'll let you know you are messing with somebody.
If I remember, there hasn't been any functioning army travel through the caverns once play begins and people have been stranded in the deep sites if they don't live in a fortress. I don't recall exactly what the issue is, but it'll need to be sorted out.
With the new visitors, how does the justice system interact with them? If they get upset and knock something over, do they get dragged into your jail for a bit? If one of them kills another, do your dwarves punish the murderer or is that left to an external justice tracker to handle?
Right now, all of the crimes that happen on the site are handled by dwarven justice.
[regarding fort becoming dwarfless] 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.
Yeah, the idea of embark scenarios is not to limit the game, but to make it more interesting by better understanding the situation that caused your dwarves to embark in the first place. Although some aspects of a given scenario might take a while to change or require specific mechanics that we won't get to in the initial release, it's all going to be built out of the same sorts of bits and pieces that bump against each other in the rest of the game, so it shouldn't be static.
Knight Otu mentioned that setting up an idea of status was a specific goal of that release. We haven't established a specific set of goal statuses or anything yet (and I'm not sure it'll even be set up like that), but the noble/common distinction isn't even the main target (and it already exists more than any other distinction in the game by virtue of the position/land holder mechanics). We have the criminal stuff and the economy and religions and guilds and all that we're looking forward to, and we don't yet have a fitting backbone for any of it. There are already slaves in the game (with the gobs and some humans), but they don't do anything and aren't thought about in any particular way. I imagine that'll just be something we'll have to figure out with the rest of it.
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!
Not at this point -- the animal people that become historical adventurer types are separated from their abstract-not-at-all-realized societies. We still need to do the underground civs, and the aboveground animal people in their natural habitats, however they live.
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 ?
There was one pathing error that has been fixed for the next version that should improve the frequencies in some cases (some mountain embarks). We'll have to see where it goes from there. The species mixing doesn't change anything.
With all these poets and philosophers in the world will there be fewer soldiers, hunters, beast tamers and other violent historic figures? Are worlds going to be a more peaceful and cultured places?
If I remember, I raised the numbers, though there might be a few fewer of the older professions. The human values determine the available scholars, but not the proportions of which professions are taken. Ideally, that would come up, but we haven't used the values in enough places.
Will the scholars be able to study necromancer books? And even gain their power?
The trick is to get the books on site, which might require adventurer intervention until we get books moved out of towers in other ways. Once the book is there, then everything triggers as usual.
With the scenarios/law/property update, might we possibly see the return of the economy?
It won't be specifically in that release, but one of the central points of that release is to make it possible to implement an economy robustly. Then we'll have to decide whether it is time. There are a few other things we might want beforehand. Specifically, understanding the various industries and their processes and sites a bit better, and water transport, both of which might blow up any economic work if we don't have a handle on them first. Hard to say, though -- we need to think about which option is best, in whatever terms (the game, the code, etc). It might go the other way (real resources, production and caravans/trade first), or a completely different direction. The embark scenario framework is going to be somewhat disruptive, and we might not know until partway through that update which way it'll go... we'll have lot to choose from.
Will there be different burrow options for visitors/citizens/non-dwarves? What about alerts? How much control will we have over our visitors? Can I keep my visitors from running out into a goblin siege?
You'll at least be able to make certain meeting places off-limits to visitors and non-citizens, so they won't mill around there. I'm not sure what we'll need with the rest of the controls. You haven't been able to order merchants around, and I'm not sure I want you to be able to do that... perhaps giving them helpful hints to enchance or preserve their lives wouldn't be bad though.
Will the dabbling-to-legendary scaling of professions ever change? Specially now that the master-apprentice mechanic is a thing in world gen.
The changes don't impact anything immediately. I don't know what's going to happen in the future -- it could get very strange when we figure out how labors interact with innovations and adventure mode and all that.
Your last post implies there are different research subjects from people like naturalists. How many more research fields are we going to see and are they going to be of any use? Are we going to see people like chemists, geologists, material scientists, and physicists making books too? An earlier post also implied stories can be told. Will books be a medium for storytelling?
What is your plan regarding the rest of the literature? Will we ever see novels, epics and other "entertaining" books?
As we've mentioned before, the innovations have not actually been tied into the game's industries yet, so that won't come up. We have naturalists, mathematicians, engineers, astronomers, historians, philosophers, doctors, chemists, and... I always forget one... it's nine, right? Dum de dum... maybe it's eight... [intervening walk to store] geographers!
Poetry books count as entertaining books I imagine. There are autobiographical adventures and alternate histories once these are innovated by historians, though I wouldn't count on those being entertaining to read as the player. Everything is pretty bare-bones right now. I anticipate other in-the-1400-cut-off forms of literature will receive similar treatment, whether they are derived from historians, poets, the festival angle, or something else entirely. We were originally going to have the necromancers write plays along with all their other writing way back when, but just ran out of time. I'm not sure where playwrights will fit into the overall scheme of things now, especially now that performances would be more or less required at the same time.
Today's update suggests that excessive alcohol will effect characters, including Dwarves, adversely. If lack of alcohol continues to effect Dwarves badly, and too much alcohol also effects them badly, how does one achieve the right balance in fortress mode?
We don't have rationing systems or other economic stuff, so it's really up to the dwarves now. Generally, some bad behavior and crimes and so forth should be anticipated from now on even with "perfect" play on your end. You might get the aforementioned controls later, as we get various frameworks up, but those will probably just bring new societal problems.
When the tavern games update happens will there specifically be drinking games or will there just be games that happen in the same space as drinking? How about drinking contests?
and
Can vampires get drunk by drinking booze? Can vampires pick up the drunkenness syndrome from feeding on drunks?
I'd love to be able to have my vampire drink a bunch of hearty dwarves under the table in a contest, goad them into a fight, and then get pleasantly drunk from the losers afterwards.
I'm really not sure how it is going to shake out.
Alcohol is treated like a regular poison. I think vampires still get hit with those but are immune to most of the effects. So they don't get dizzy or nauseated, but they might still get a buzz, start a fight and pass out? I don't recall that bloodsuckers get blood syndromes from sucking people.
Apart from dwarfs regarding booze will addiction be based on the material/syndrome? Will there be possible withdrawal effects now that you go into recreational stuff and effects?
I haven't done anything like that.
How will the effects of drinking take into account the unrealistically rare occurrence of drinking in fort mode? I half expect a similar issue to the were-creature one where it seems to last little time at all.
Are we likely to see some dwarves become the fort drunk?
On the topic of immoderation might we see abstinent dwarves at some point and if so is the slowing effect here to stay?
Are we likely to see creatures stagger about and move involuntarily?
Will booze stealing creatures get drunk?
There's a tag that lets effects be stretched out by a factor in fort mode (beyond the normal stretching). It gives us a bit of room to fit a full-fledged bender into the immoderate dwarf's rhythm of life.
Yeah, dwarves are different and some are more likely to run into trouble.
I'm not entirely certain how the most extreme abstinent dwarves are going to be handled in the long run. Either the slowing effect will go, or there just won't be dwarves that are that abstinent (at least personality-wise -- there could be room for philosophically abstinent dwarves).
The dizziness effect has never impacted pathing due to the nightmare that might bring to jobs and other activities. Hopefully there will be room for it in the future, but it seems like a can of worms right now.
Booze guzzlers are affected like other creatures.
Now that you are integrating inns, will there be an innkeeper job?
If yes, will the innkeeper at some point also serve dwarfs in meeting halls?
We have the tavern keeper, and they serve drinks in the areas designated as part of the tavern, whether they are meeting halls or dining rooms.
will this mean that some dwarves will use alcohol in extremis to deal with grief? will there be booze suicide spirals now?
They don't understand cause and effect with respect to syndrome emotions, so they don't know how to self-medicate.
Toady, a couple of years ago, a very heated discussion took place about the possibility of an interface API, in which you joined in and explained why this was potentially harmful to your workflow. However, a long time has passed since then and the ingeniosity and skills of many prominent bay12 members has shown that such an interface is about to become a reality, what with third party tools like DFHack. In fact, the gap between the 2014 DF release and its dfhack equivalent has shown how much the ever growing userbase has become accustomed to these third party utilities making one's life easier, and this is likely to get worse as DF complexity rises and third party tools expand in scope. So my question is, will further development of third party tools eventually make you feel the dreaded pressure you mentioned back then? Would that prompt you to revise your current noncommital view towards such tools (causing you for instance to close the utilities forum) or affect your dev cycle priorities in any way?
In terms of people complaining to me, it hasn't become any worse. As the tools have developed, people have become dedicated to keeping things up to date (to the point of receiving financial support), and it seems to work. I'm not sure exactly how it works or what the delays are like, but it hasn't become an issue where people have tried to put any additional weight on me.
Toady, I am interested in how you generate the local maps in dwarf fortress, such as the maps that your adventurer and dwarfs run around in. How do you make the edges of each local map match up? How do you make sure that the elevation of a local map corresponds with the elevation of the world tile that it is within?
Also, what would you say was the most difficult and or interesting piece of creating the world generator for DF. Excluding legends and history. Is there anything else that you would like to eventually add or change with the world generation?
It generates 1-dimensional fractals for the edges, and it keeps edge data at different levels to sew things together. You could also use a more global method like perlin noise, etc. There are trade-offs. If I had a better handle on local modifications I might have switched over to a function that works globally, but as things stand I can stitch things well enough while maintaining complete control of the local shapes. Right now I track 48x48 blocks, 16x16 midlevel maps of each tile, and the world map. There's data for how rivers and underground caverns pass through edges and so forth -- it always has it up at the world map level, then when it pulls up a midlevel map, it generates all the crossing points etc. for use in generating local maps.
I'm no good with favorites/superlative type questions... the erosion and river-pathing stuff was interesting. It was cool to see the first division of the world into watersheds with the streams on every tile. We still have a lot of work to do on world gen, so... everything for the last question.
Did I imagine this or were there ever plans to allow world gen to be restarted/the length between retire/abandon to be tweaked so you could do the normal couple of weeks or set it to like a year, ten, a hundred?
There are issues with putting the cat back in the bag, so world gen can't be practically restarted. The easiest thing would just be letting the calendar run longer, though that becomes impractical at some point. There'd need to be a new world gen written more or less to get up into the hundred year range, so that's way on the back burner. I'm not sure whether putting the cat back in the bag (ie, deleting/ignoring all expanded information) is easier than rewriting abstract world gen mechanics to respect the expanded information, but it's all hard.
concerning inebriation becoming a syndrome, will this be related to body size ?
will a tall, broad, muscle-and-lard-bound dwarf never be drunk? and if an already small dwarf has a few combat amputations, will they die as soon as they touch a drop?
actually, better examples: will gnomes (being the smallest guzzlers) now run into booze stockpiles and just die. and will polar bears or other large drinkers be getting drunk at all?
having size based effects seems logical but gnomes will make things hard. while having drunkenness be size independent could lead to people (me) deliberately leaving a barrel of booze out to get and giants or ettins drunk before sending in the military.
that said, I was reading the raws and I noticed that dwarves have a liver that is 50% larger than a humans, so...
do you plan on making drunkenness (and/or any other syndromes) strength/duration be related to liver size?
(and then maybe make gnomes livers take up most of their chest cavities?)
It's related to body size, but the effect isn't so drastic that different dwarves are either dead or not drunk. I do fear for gnomes somewhat. Perhaps that's just the course of their lives.
The dwarven liver size was there for a reason, yeah, though I haven't decided how to take that one up. There'd need to be a whole new mechanic for relative bp sizes vs. syndromes, and I'm not sure I want to go there. It could just be a factor or shake itself out through the disease resistance att or whatever.
Toady, since we now have both retiring forts and you are adding in more free-wheeling caravans, traders, wanderers and hill-dwarves, plus there are going to be starting scenarios, I'm curious about how you want retired player forts to interact with active player forts in the long run. Are you going to try to get towards a retirement system where forts have saved import needs/export capacities or other pushes/pulls upon new player forts?
(I.E. build a new fort to support the next fort or sustain your last fort. "The mountainhomes need steel, set up a mine, and export iron or steel." "The mountainhomes is rich in steel, now we need you to build a watchpost at this location and train these steel-clad but rookie soldiers into stalwart defenders of the realm.")
Do you consider potential goals like potential "mock-simultaneous" play or taking steps to encourage succession multiplayer across multiple forts (sharing world saves after abandoning/retiring) as a means of encouraging play in a shared history worthwhile? For that matter, how much is this notion of compounding historic depth still a driver of your focus as a developer after all this time?
Yeah, we'd like to have retired forts continue on in every way possible, although some are clearly harder than others. It already works that way with migrants and baronies (to the extent they matter). Hill dwarves will be easy in this respect since they'll be separated from your fort to begin with. Production and trade are the hard ones (assuming we ignore impossible ones like forts having computers in them). We have pretty specific resource stockpiles stored for all of the non-player sites already, and getting retired forts into that system would be ideal -- then the issue would be deciding what the map/items look like when you load the fort's map again after a period of trade. It seems doable, with some fudging perhaps. Complex production chains are hard, but those are also hard on the non-player sites, especially when they involve custom reactions.
I think the succession stuff people have done has been among the most striking things that have happened with the game, and I'm not even sure I really need to encourage it specifically, but just keep adding in mechanics that make the experience more interesting. Respecting retired forts is in line with that, and respecting retired forts makes my life easier anyway -- having special exceptions makes coding more difficult (their saved maps/items/stockpiles/etc. are one of those issues, along with the time difference and the rest).
Having multiple games played in the same world is still the main goal we're aiming for. The forces of change have been slow in coming though, so we still haven't made the churning mess we want, and we spend time on other things that don't advance this goal. The embark scenario framework release is certainly a step in the direction of societal/economic change. The intervening artifact release on the other hand is more looking for other sorts of churn in a plotish direction. Aspects of it are pure fantasy/generation that aren't geared toward change immediately, though artifact powers and curses and that sort of thing will interact with resource use/production directly once we get there (allowing us famine etc., which counts as churn).
Will barfights inspire troubles later on or is it forgive and forget type stuff for non-serious brawling?
If nobody dies, they'll be fine for now, I think. Death incidents are counted in relationship calculations, though ultimately their relationships are still kinda half-assed.
Will forgotten beasts be able to infect syndromes like they can that are already linked? Paticularly Alcohol?
I'm not talking about alcohol breath. I'm talking about contact poisoning or other contamination issue that increases the alcohol consumption flag. Or other already present syndromes.
I haven't generated any of them like that. A creature in your raws could use the alcohol syndrome though. I might be misunderstanding though.
Hey Toady, can syndrome concentrations be reduced, or can syndromes be otherwise directly 'cured' rather than simply counter-acted (removing the syndrome, such that the afflicted isn't now afflicted with a syndrome with opposite effects, but is no longer affected by the original syndrome) now?
We haven't done anything like that yet.
How do the taverns work for Elves or Goblins? Dwarves and humans seem like they'd be pretty standard 'put walls around a tap and some chairs' affair. Do Elves and Goblins have taverns? Do they even have a cultural equivalent, or are you thinking that Elves/Goblins do something radically different as a passtime?
It might shift as we have more time to do more things, but we're not doing anything ambitious for this time. I don't recall if goblins even make the building. Don't think so. Elf taverns are a touch abnormal but not too tree-y, like the market, so it accepts visitors so you don't need to climb.
Visitors are drawn from historical figures rather than randomly generated, right? Is it possible to follow around mercenaries, dance troupes and such in adventure mode and see them visit and settle in fortresses? Or to be a visitor yourself and petition for citizenship in one of your own retired forts?
Yeah, they are historical. You can follow them around, but there's no visible AI petition process in place outside of fortress mode. I'm not sure what we'll get for player adventurers, but we should know soon as we complete the performance stuff.
Will I be able to recreate the Casablanca moment where the goblin occupation forces sing their songs in the Inn, and as I start to sing the anthem of oppressed folk other join me outvoicing the hated goblins?
He he he, it's probably more likely that people will just think you are rude for interrupting an ongoing activity. We will hope for slow improvement.
Are coral FBs are a hint that sea FBs (AKA Krakens hype hype hype) will someday be added in the game?
Someday is always an odd thing with this game, but when we get to boats and multi-tile creatures, nature will take its course. One of the iconic things a multi-tile creature should do is use a giant tentacle to tear down a mast.
Later, will it be possible to get Dwarves to hunt properly (as in, bringing the kill back to the fortress.) with melee weapons such as spears?
I don't have any specific plans for dwarf mode hunting, if I remember. Like most things, it might end up being expanded incidentally.
Will there be quests involving books or libraries?
I expect we'll see this more when we get to all the artifact quests in the next push after this one. Quests and all sorts of antics involving original books will happen on their own (with all the other artifacts) unless we explicitly rule them out.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1880877 times)