Thanks to Footkerchief, lethosor, MrWiggles, Putnam, Witty, smjjames, Knight Otu and anybody I missed for helping to answer questions. I removed some specific bug timing questions -- since they were either confirmed or crashes, there's not much more to say, anyway, and I should get to them eventually. There were a few questions about fruit harvesting that also should have answered themselves with the release.
Is the way that time passes in fortress mode ever going to change? Or did you already put a ring on it?
I don't have any plans to change it. People like to see their dwarves grow up and so on, and I think you'd have to run the equivalent of a 144 year fort to see a baby turn into a child if you were running at adventure mode speeds. It's also difficult to support variable speeds. Nothing's permanent though.
As for growing up emotionally, do you envision this being part of the caste-like life stages currently planned? Or are you more interested in researching how people really mature?
I'd be more interested in modeling it correctly, loosely speaking, and I'd like to try to avoid using castes for too many things, since they are bulky and difficult to transition temporary states (wounds etc.) between at the moment. I'm not sure how it'll end up. There could be transformations that operate on one section of the creature's body/mind or another, but then the individual unit drifts from its caste entry, which is also a problem that can get out of hand if overused.
Will goblin invaders be subject to the new personalities/thoughts when invading in Dwarf Mode or will they be more homogenous brain-wise?
It all uses the same stuff... which can be strange and buggy, as you can see with the tantrum-throwing crundles and so on.
With the new set of emotions, what will change about status icons?
I doubt it would be useful to see every emotion, but will some emotions get their own status icon? Will some not be displayed anymore? Are "melancholy", "madness", "terrified" "enraged", etc even emotions in the sense we're talking about, or are they special cases?
Any chance we might even be able to set them to other tiles ourselves?
I'm not sure if this is the right place for the following question, but here it probably gets most exposure to people that could know an answer.
As the list in graphics_example.txt hasn't been updated for a while, which entries in entity_default.txt are eligible for a custom creature graphic? I assume all POSITION and PERMITTED_JOB entries, but some others are possible, even without being listed as POSITION; namely things like QUEEN, or BARON_CONSORT. They are only referred to as SPOUSE_<gender>. Can we assume that all these are valid creature graphic tokens as well? Are there any others?
We have the new longer temporary states, which use new exclamation points -- every other temporary emotional state uses the dark blue exclamation point, but that's only for the ones that put a dwarf out of work. I think the downward red arrow has been claimed by the high stress states.
For graphics, it takes any unknown leftover string and just assumes you mean a position token.
Is widespread multi-item hauling within the scope of 0.40.xx?
Once the stepladder is done, can wheelbarrows and minecarts get the same carrying capacity/stockpile moving treatment?
By that I mean dwarves stack hauling tasks upon the container or tool used to carry said hauled item, instead of carrying them one at a time to the stockpile.
Whatever job priorities entails is going to be the main post-bug push for 0.40.xx. It's unclear what's going to get picked up there at this point. It's also unclear how potential bugs like "bring half-full bin to single haul item" are going to be handled. So regarding multi-item hauling, I can't really hazard a guess. The stepladder isn't really related to the hauling tasks, since the dwarf carries all the haul items kind of like a pack mule from the caravan does, then they just peel off individual storage jobs which happen to be in related locations because all of the hauled items are of similar types. I haven't had to address how the dwarves pick different initial haul items to chain together or how they choose multiple destinations, which are the tricky problems.
If ladders get implemented as a solution to the picking corundum, does that mean we have to build higher walls thanks to siegers carrying ladders on intent of scaling walls 1 or 2 z-levels high?
Are ladders also useful for engraving second floor's walls in that 3x3 radius?
I didn't do anything either of these. Engraving high up's not really important until we get multi-z room definitions, though I can see how it would be aesthetically useful and how it would make it easier to engrave those rooms without staggering dig jobs.
Will dwarves use backpacks to carry fruits, too?
It didn't come up, since they just carry them in their arms.
When do you decide it's time to work on the next major update? In a general way, I mean. At what point do you stop bugfixing and adding minor features and think "Yep, I think it's time to start working on DF20XX"?
I don't know that there's been a uniform way that works, except maybe the part where I say that I hope it doesn't happen that way each time before it happens. Ideally, there wouldn't be large releases, but it has also been the case often enough that we might find ourselves on a long road again before too many months have passed, all effort to the contrary.
When do you plan to separate the loading time for ranged attacks, as for example crossbows firing slower than bows, and lend us the values for modding, like for example a repeating crossbow and such? It's in the plans?
I don't have a timeline for it. It's definitely in the plans. There are a number of actions that need to be moved over to the new system, and I think the only hiccup with ranged weapons is adding some sort of "loaded/ready" state to it that is governed by a new action. That's not hard, but it's just annoying enough to see it bumped a few times.
What is the significance of the colors on the new thought screen? For example, arousal from talking to spouses, and fondness from talking to friends are cyan, while satisfaction from work and bliss from sleep are both green. What's similar about the cyan emotions? What's different between the green emotions and the cyan emotions?
Also is there any difference, in terms of dwarf happiness or behavior, between the many different positive emotions? Will dwarves who are aroused by there spouses behave differently from dwarves who are feeling fond of their friends? What about dwarves who are "interested" by fine furniture rather than feeling pleasure from it?
In a similar line of questions, what emotion is behind the 'stumbles around obliviously' (which happens to be a fast blinking light cyan exclaimation mark)? I thought maybe it was like the 'thousand mile stare' or something, but I'm probably wrong.
The cyan and green were just interpersonal vs. solitary good emotions, though really there'll be some circumstances that cause the lines to blur. The actual power of the emotion in terms of eustress or distress is based on the emotion and its numeric strength, where the emotion is determined by the personality+circumstance. Every circumstance has a base numeric strength, which can depend on things like how well you know somebody, but are mostly just numbers. The personality takes the emotion and can raise or decrease the numeric strength, so that a not-so-cheerful dwarf that should be feeling jovial-50 as a baseline might only feel jovial-20.
Overall, one dwarf might feel pleasure-50 at seeing a door, while another might feel interest-20, based on their personality facets and values. Interest is a level-one eustress emotion, so the dwarf gets a 20/8=2 eustress bonus each step, while pleasure is a level-two eustress emotion, so the dwarf gets a 20/4=5 eustress bonus each step (the levels one to four correspond to a divisor of 8, 4, 2 and 1). Things like anguish are level-four distress emotions, so anguish-75 would add 75/1=75 distress points each step. Several of the emotions are neutral, and don't effect the stress level. They only add their eustress/distress value while their sentence is bright in the paragraph -- the gray ones are just for informational purposes. The numeric portion of the emotion is invisible... it seemed clutterful to add intensifiers all over the paragraph. The eustress/distress levels of the emotions are pretty arbitary, but align more or less with the seriousness of the word.
I think I mentioned in a previous FotF that we'd be starting with this stress stuff, but the idea would be to have more secondary effects and behaviors from the emotions later. We have the temporary breakdowns, some running away and so on, but there's a lot more to be done.
The new temporary states like oblivious or depressed (and the old tantrums) are governed by relative anxiety, depression and anger propensities. The permanent states are governed in the same way (which has been the case).