Thanks to Talvieno, Darkweave, Footkerchief, Knight Otu, Putnam, Witty, therahedwig, Mopsy, thvaz, Untelligent, Dirst, CLA and anybody I missed for helping out with the questions this time. I removed a few specific suggestion/timing and specific bug reports -- it's difficult to say at this point exactly when we are going to get to which bugs, but we'll keep working on them, and it is best to keep suggestions in their threads. Timing questions almost always don't have a satisfactory answer.
How did you decide upon CP-437 as the encoding of choice for the game? And do you still think it's a decent choice?
It is the one we grew up with on our DOS computers. We already had a bunch of the codes memorized and knew how they looked so it was easy to work with. Working without graphics has been good for us since things have been quick to add, relatively speaking (compared to Armok 1, say), but there's certainly the problem with too many characters overlapping now.
How do you plan to rework the tree-cap diplomacy of the elves? Singling out one particular tree and not telling you would be pretty !!FUN!!ny (and a little faeish, which I've always pictured elves as being), but would go into luck-based mission territory imo. Or is it the whole civ and the culture, that are changing?
I don't have more to add to the original question and answer. I'd assume the elves would tell you the name of the tree and exactly where it is and kind of rub your nose in it.
Is it a bug that kobolds steal from vaults, or are they really that badass?
It wouldn't be a bug if the baubles were really there... I'm not sure if they are being generated or if the vault guards are working during their wg idle time. I suspect it's just approximating what it thinks it should find though.
will a race (like goblins for example) be utterly terrified of you if you were to kill hundreds/thousands of them? and would they be scared of a weapon used to kill many of there kind?
That doesn't happen specifically along racial lines, but it probably should. It can effectively happen sometimes based on entity rep (which can be somewhat racial), though the effect occurs more in terms of having people pass on ambushing or harassing you than general terror. Lots left to do!
Would embarking in, say, the same joyous forest that an elven civ has settled in, eventually be considered a breach of territorial claims and trigger hostility, and therefore a Very Bad Idea? What if the settlement is fairly far from the nearest forest retreat, hamlet etc.? How would territories and boundaries of civs in general work, while balancing out the gameplay?
When civilizations get recognizable borders, how will we recognize them? Will we be prevented from embarking in anyone else's territory, or at least anyone we're not at war with?
It's still hard to say how it's going to turn out, or if it should always be clear-cut in terms of territory. As far as I can tell, the historical precedents are all over the place. I don't think it'll be too difficult to be clear about territorial claims on embark and that kind of thing, when it matters, but I don't have specific plans for how it'll be. We still don't have a well-defined notion of property/ownership/etc. at all, for anything.
Are refuse stockpiles supposed to terrify certain dwarves?
Are they being terrified by dead dwarf bodies? That's supposed to be scary, but there was that thing I mentioned back when I was talking about quests, where things like teeth would scare them under certain circumstances. I think there's probably a little too much flipping out as opposed to just negative thoughts, and that'll change when I do that thought rewrite I need to finish before job priorities.
Are those slade fortresses with upright sword in them still in game? I can't find them with stock menu, building menu or even lever trick.. So umm, are they still in game or are they just really rarer? Or is every method of finding them fixed?
Are demonic fortresses supposed to exist anymore?
It appears to be commented out. I don't remember why. The future of them is unclear while I try to recall.
In one of older version there were those unnamed whatever underground animal men civilizations, what is the plan for those? Is every type of animal men going to have their own tribal civilization or were those 7 underground "civilizations" placeholders for something else?
The underground ones were always a bit more civilized equipment-wise, but I don't know that the aboveground ones are going to remain in their animal population state. We'll probably be in better shape once we have things like better-defined nomadic human pops.
Are we going to see plant genetics and cultivar breeding in future?
I tried to take them all out from the list we have, so there'd be room for that to go its own way if we ever get there.
Does demon binding fall into the current interaction framework? If not, is it intended to be soon? If so, what are the tags for modding the demon binding
I haven't done it yet. The UNIQUE_DEMON tag is still a catch-all GENERATED tag, but there's not much of a reason that it needs to be. "Soon" is not a DF word, though.
Can you be at war with a civilization from one race and still get merchants from a different civilization of that race now?
I'm remembering that I didn't fiddle with the "nearby" tag yet? If I remember, the concern was that you couldn't build a relationship with a trader (i.e. have year-to-year agreements work at all) if it sent different ones every time. We'll probably need the economy/caravan rewrite before it would be good to change it.
STAY_ALIVE, MAINTAIN_ENTITY_STATUS, START_A_FAMILY, RULE_THE_WORLD, CREATE_A_GREAT_WORK_OF_ART, CRAFT_A_MASTERWORK, BRING_PEACE_TO_THE_WORLD, BECOME_A_LEGENDARY_WARRIOR, MASTER_A_SKILL, FALL_IN_LOVE, SEE_THE_GREAT_NATURAL_SITES.
Were these tokens only added to go with the new personality update or do they also indicate near term plans for expansion to secret motivations?
What's the difference between "STAY_ALIVE" and "IMMORTALITY"?
I wanted to make sure the systems were under the same umbrella moving forward, but I don't have specific near-term goals for them. STAY_ALIVE was just a way to get people to eat, when I tried to have motivations for each choosable action... I'm not sure if I want to stick what that system or not. Theoretically, I want to be able to attack core motivations so that certain action trees can naturally collapse so stuff is more reactive without having to respect individual causes, but overall it's also clumsy. It'll probably see more use/decisions when I handle the dwarf thoughts before job priorities, since that'll lead us to longer-term moods and different emotions.
Are there major differences between the historical resolution that happens in world-gen and the historical resolution that happens in the calendar between games? If so, what are the biggest differences?
There are many, many differences. The calendar doesn't have army battles, new necro towers with grave-robbing from battlefields, megabeast attacks, production, trade, thieves, snatching etc. etc. etc. It's just not done yet.
Version 0.40 added GET_ITEM_DATA and ITEM_REACTION_PRODUCT so reactions can create different types of items depending on what material they're given. In previous versions, you could use GET_MATERIAL_FROM_REAGENT:reagent:NONE to directly copy the material from a reagent (instead of specifying a MATERIAL_REACTION_PRODUCT), but using GET_ITEM_DATA:reagent:NONE appears to simply not produce an item - is this something that's supposed to work, or something that you weren't expecting anybody to do?
To copy an item? I didn't implement that, due to corpsey concerns or just an oversight (don't recall). I can throw something in if people aren't expecting corpses/body components... I'm not sure how that would/should work, especially given the diversity of the inputs. I don't remember if copy even works on corpses (in terms of moving wounds and all the other data). A corpse cloning reaction might be beyond me for now.
Do the AI-controlled climbing creatures consider the wall/cliff/whatever height for their increased climbing cost?
Nope. Any non-adjacent or persistent-from-move-to-move considerations are more expensive or difficult to set up, and I haven't done anything with that yet.
The new stealth mechanics are integrated in some way in fortress mode?
Everything except the actual vision arcs (so no facing, but all those things you see when you press 'S' in adv mode are in). It is the reason critters sneaking into the fort are generally much easier to spot... I'm not sure if the kobolds and snatchers are ever successful now. Hopefully sometimes. They need to be taught to crawl and move across open areas quickly, since that helps a lot.
are these plants a priority to be fixed as part of the tree/plant improvements that are part of this version, and should we expect them to be fully implemented as part of the current wave of bugfixing? Could we players effectively "fix" them ourselves with functions already extant in the game? Or are they unfinished because you want to add additional tags/mechanisms that will use these placeholder plants?
The harvesting stuff I haven't done should make them more reasonable. The dwarves aren't meant to just tear up grape vines and so on. They should pick fruit in season, and I'm hoping to get there in this cycle.
What does it really mean when they say "It was inevitable"?
It means pretty much that I haven't gotten around to giving them something better to say, even if there was a reputation change etc., due to time constraints as much as anything. Certain conversation replies default to boring things, and it was inevitable is the bottom of the bucket.
What determines whether a civ will use words from other languages to name their gods? It doesn't seem to be random chance - apparently, dwarves will do so more readily than other civs.
Just looking at the code, it seems to be feeding in the entity's language index, so there shouldn't be other languages. Probably just a bug, unless I'm misunderstanding. The choice of words is determined by the spheres, and that can go away from the preferred entity words, but they should all be in the dwarf language.
What is the deal with underground animal men turning into vampires? There a lot of them running around, killing people at towns, and it looks like they don't mind to hide their identities as a vampire. In legends I saw one that got cursed by a god by profaning a temple, this is intended?
Knight Otu mentioned the outcast groups -- and that's where they are coming from. Occasionally the underground people move into sewers and so on, and their historical leader is subject to the bad decision-making that plagues other historical city dwellers (like profaning temples). Their new rampaging behavior is all buggy though. The underground is stuffed with people that don't like each other, and they probably are buggy within their own groups as well, and it leads to an eruption of critters I think.
What kind of and in what format do you find suggestions most helpful?
I.e. of the following elements which is more useful: A quick idea, a detailed summary, hypothetical tags and RAWs for an idea, detailed implementations, back and forth discussion over a contentious idea, research about historical background, free-form brainstorming, etc.
I think I've gotten something out of suggestions in any of those formats. I prefer suggestions with less fighting, but that's a forum guidelines thing (and I'll generally skip posts in which somebody is being rude). There's usually not much of a point in going into code implementations or coding time estimates, though there will be exceptions to that as with anything.
Now that the population cap has been fixed, does this mean we will still get migrants when the units list gets exceptionally large? In at least 0.34.11, when the units list totalled over 1,000 units (dead or alive, not just citizens) the number of migrants started to drop significantly.
As Quietust brought up, that's an unrelated old intentional thing I haven't dealt with yet. It's sometimes difficult to just cull dead units, since so many little bits and references can depend on them, but just shutting down the unit list is silly as well.
How extensive will be the changes required to fix invasions at the moment, which appear to be broken? It appears to have something to do with neighbours not pathing correctly, though there may well be other reasons. Has the "army will camp forever" message something to do with goblin armies not moving?
I've posted a bug report about this; I'm not sure, if the visibly bugged neighbours list in the embark screen is connected to this (neighbours can literally disappear at the moment of embark seemingly) but invasions are definitely missing from my experience and many others.
This is the first time I've heard about it, and I have no idea why it is happening. I've seen plenty of invasions, but long-term forts aren't a common thing for me to test for time reasons. I don't think the camp message has anything to do with it, since that seems very common, and it wouldn't change or be changed by the neighbor status. I'll just have to check out saves and see what is going on. Losing neighbor status would be trouble for various reasons, assuming they aren't being conquered etc.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1885085 times)