Thanks to thvaz, Knight Otu, Footkerchief, Talvieno, King Mir, Untelligent, Eric Blank, Trif, Inarius, Rockphed and anybody I missed for helping to answer questions. If your question does not appear below, it was most likely addressed by one of the people listed above shortly after you asked, so please check!
Do you have an idea as to how much you still need to implement before being able to tackle various fort mode start scenarios?
As in, being able to do a hermit fort scenario without having to kill off six of the starting seven? Or some sort of last dwarves/generational scenario without having to re-roll fifty thousand times (exaggerated, yes, but the point stands) to get six of the starting seven to be age matches? And so on.
Note that I'm not asking "when", I'm asking "what still needs to be done before."
Something like a hermit scenario doesn't take much of anything. Others take more stuff, like having hill dwarves or more mechanics involving religions. The specific ones you brought up don't require additional features, just an interface that interacts with the breadth of current variables.
Looking into interaction details revealed two new breath attack types: TRAILING_ITEM_FLOW and UNDIRECTED_ITEM_CLOUD. How exactly are they used? Do they work with both CDI and IT_MATERIAL?
(I'm guessing "no" for IT_MATERIAL, since it's only used with weather effects, and there's no WEATHER_CREEPING_ITEM or WEATHER_FALLING_ITEM, as amusing as it would be to have it rain fish or have a cloud of locusts drift by)
Knight Otu put up a CDI example, and I think that's how they work, since they operate through creatures. The regional reactions are reasonably malnourished in terms of the attention they've received.
With the current model of morale, do diffrent creatures exude diffrent levels of horror? IE is a dragon more horrifying to a militia dwarf than say an alligator or a gazelle?
Are "secret" critters like FBs and demons scarier than other more mundane creatures?
They mostly judge by size and special attacks, in terms of morale during a fight. They don't have a pure horror reaction to the big monsters though.
I don't think they understand anything like that.
Toady, in past versions, adding [GRASSTRAMPLE:50] to a creature would cause it to trample grass flat almost immediately, but in the current version (40.08) it appears to do nothing. Was this removed intentionally? If so, I'm curious as to why, and if it is coming back in the future.
I don't recall changing anything intentionally, and the combination of adding trees and the attack/move split stuff could very well have messed it up, if it's a new problem for this set of releases.
(Made invaders not come back as ghosts)
Are there plans to bring this back and make it functional? Haunted battlefields seem like a missed opportunity.
We have some notes regarding both old battlefields and various hauntings/ghosty stuff, so it's quite possible it'll happen on the long journey. I'm not sure I'd call it a missed opportunity, since there's a lot of work to do to make it worthwhile.
(Items disappear after getting pushed by flowing water, burning in magma, or encased in ice)
Just out of curiosity (and to actually make a question for the green text), what was causing that bug to happen?
The items were removed from the ground when pushed, and then there was a section that had the item sometimes be redirected 45 degrees off so that the pushing of piles wouldn't be 100% orderly. Finally, the item was placed back on the ground at its new location. The problem was that if the redirection failed because an obstacle was detected, it bailed early and never replaced the item properly on the ground. That's why tight hallways made it happen more often. A lot of the item's information was retained overall, hence its appearance on certain lists and so on.
do the new map layout options imply some kind of edge-wrapping behavior?
Nope. That's a time-consuming change that isn't likely to make it in any time soon... probably almost as annoying to add as whole other planes of existence in the end.
I really would like to know how projectile firing speeds became broken due to fixing wagons.
There was an old flag from before the attack/move split that stopped people from moving too often, and it was messing up wagon speed. But projectile firing delays were also being governed by that flag (as that was one of the actions that didn't get updated to the new system). So there was still a delay, but it ticked off many times faster than it was supposed to.
(Made attacker always look at target upon initiating attack)
Well, actually, in all seriousness, if you don't mind my asking: How did this make a difference? I thought vision mostly mattered for sneaking, and you can't attack someone you don't already see, so I'm having a hard time guessing what the impact of that bug was.
I was having a problem where, after doing a sneak attack, the target would correctly initiate an attack on me (since they now know where you are briefly), but their vision cone would remain pointing the wrong way for a long while. It looked weird. So just a technical change more or less.
How much data about historical figures is stored after that figure dies? Is, for example, the hair color of that person retained after they're killed?
Yeah, it maintains the unit definition where that is stored on disk without cleaning it out and can load it from there as necessary (for a body, for example). There are a few pieces that are deleted for historical figures that die in world generation, and a lot of information is never generated for them. There's a spot for the historical troll lair victims for instance where it creates the physical description on the spot for the first time so it can make the bodies correctly, if I remember. Same thing for historical zombies and mummies.