Thanks to MrWiggles, Talvieno, Valtam, Eric Blank, Footkerchief, Knight Otu, BenLubar, lethosor, therahedwig, smjjames and anybody I missed for helping to answer questions. I cut out a few scheduling questions, since I don't really have a schedule. I also removed a few specific suggestions that didn't relate to anything going on now. The suggestion forum is the best place for those.
I was under the impression that we'd be able to interact with Hill Dwarves to some degree in Fortress mode in this release, but I haven't seen anything about it. What needs to be done before that comes available? I'm just talking about little things like being able to send people out to help them, nothing major like sending out campaign forces en-mass to attack others.
Do you have a formed idea how hill dwarf<>Fortress trade/transport will be formulated for the player-fort?
We're pretty much ready for hill dwarves, if I remember. We'd just need to get into some starting scenarios that involve them, and hill dwarf mechanics would be added one by one.
Aside from the timing/sync issues we've been over, there are some issues with equipment in general that are more or less related to your dwarves only needing to eat a few meals a year. If your fortress gets to a sort of county/duchy/kingdom level, it won't be possible to manage all of the equipment using fortress production. We also can't have more than a few hundred dwarves at the fort at a time. So your relationship with off-map dwarves will probably start reasonably intimate and then drop off to a more representative/liaison level with some incidental interactions. I'm not sure precisely how it'll all work though. It seems like the sort of thing that'll work itself out once we establish the market/fair setup for your depot and allow you to send out dwarves and have dwarves brought in.
the current tantrum and insanity systems are "placeholders" but do you have a broad-strokes idea of what needs to be done before this part of the AI (artificial insanity) engine is fleshed out? I would love to see someone actually appoint a yak to a noble position and mean it! This would be a legitimate loyalty cascade between loyalty to the noble and loyalty to the country.
I'm not really sure how it should work at this point. Once we get the new stress/stability system in, it'd probably just be the sort of thing that can be addressed directly. The easiest way would probably be to assign specific issues to people that have been having trouble for a while, but I have no idea if that's something that should happen.
I have been messing around with the new options for temperature map settings, and I'm getting a common map rejection called "Placed farming entity without orchard crops". What might have caused that to happen and why is it something that a map should not have?
As far as I can tell, it means it couldn't find local trees with edible growths for them to grow in their orchards, for civs with OUTDOOR_ORCHARDS/INDOOR_ORCHARDS. As with all the other mechanics, it could have unintended issues. So if there are edible growth-bearing trees in some forest that would normally get elves (or whatever elf-like race), then something didn't work out. There's also the larger issue of giving them some kind of "common_domestic" tree to compensate or something.
What are these two errors? Never seen these before.
Civ Zone Kitchen 5959: Null Unit Assignment (Id 28978)
Civ Zone Captive Room 5960: Null Unit Assignment (Id 28978)
Looks like a night troll lair where it couldn't load a prisoner or one of the trolls. Could have a variety of causes, but I'm not aware of a specific known culprit at this point.
Do worldgen population limits (MAX_POP_NUMBER, etc.) affect expansion post-worldgen, or can a civ theoretically expand to populate the entire world? If the hard cap is still in effect, what happens to player created units (starting 7 and adventurers) over the entity population cap?
It uses the TOTAL_CIV_POPULATION number to prevent births, across civs, but it doesn't look like it uses MAX_POP_NUMBER to control individual civs. The global cap is only used for births set up away from the fort, and doesn't affect the starting units.
While I recall that roads aren't built and megabeast attacks don't occur after world-gen (outside of fortress mode) as well, that doesn't seem to destabilize things nearly as much as the goblin blitzkrieg. If it's not something that will happen for a long, long time (not until the next major version), is there any possibility that a sort of stopgag might be put in so that post-worldgen invasions can have diverse outcomes, even if it's just a population based dice roll?
Knight Otu answered another question about this with a twitter quote where I said even coin flips would be difficult, and it is tricky to do -- the armies already break up into little squads and go to different parts of town and all that when you are in the mid-level zoom, and that sort of thing leads to a variety of hassles with determining the outcome. I'm not sure what the progression is going to be, but it won't be a quick fix situation.
Why does Dwarf Fortress stop CMV recording once the file size exceeds 5 million bytes? Was there originally some reason behind that limitation?
It would be a strong statement to say there was a reason for it, even if I could remember it now. I'm assuming the original ~2005 implemention was just in single buffer that got dumped after the movie was fully recorded, and I set aside 5 million bytes for it. I have no idea what twisted logic informed the retention of the limit, or if I just didn't think about it. As for now, I can't think of a reason to keep it. I'm not sure if the movie upload site is still in use or if it has a movie size limit of its own.
Will you go on a pub crawl to research the tavern arc? How do you generally research, come to that?
It depends on the subject. I have lots of books, and there's also the internet. I don't have a specific process. For taverns, I have a modest amount of personal experience, and there's lots of other stuff out there online and in a few books I have laying around to round it out.
With pulping, it seems like there are lots of injuries that are not easily sorted with a splint and some stitches - are there any plans to incorporate amputation of mangled limbs? Thanks for the great work!
I don't have a specific plan, but lots of amputations were bound to happen something or another.
How do you envision conversation?
There are lots of things to improve about the current system, but now that it has been pulled out of its own mode and put in with the rest of the actions it seems a little more like we want it to be. Lots of challenges -- managing the text of lots of people talking at once, giving people distinct "voices" based on culture/personality/mannerisms/etc., having your own voice/tone/registers/etc., managing more and more possible questions you'd want to ask without it being impossible to find the options, etc. I don't have clear solutions to all of those problems, just thoughts and ideas and so on.
What are the 119 emotions?
People have a guessing thread now, so we'll have to wait!
Will we get to peek in on the conversations of our dwarves in fort mode? You know, see Urist McFuturedad on his pregnant wife and future child, see the soldiers comment on the slaying of the FB or be concerned about injured comrades, see our dwarves pay thier respects to the dead, grumble about the shortage of copper, etc.
Edit: Oh, will the 119 emotions also be applied to the other races and be visible in adventure mode?
There's an issue with having many conversations at once and keeping FPS up (since it has to search the world and other such things when they discuss rumors and so on). So it'd have to generate them when you look at them, and that'd probably cause some temporal problems. They do have those emotional outbursts, since those aren't FPS heavy, and most other things can probably be brought over. We were toying around with the idea of having the new "thought paragraph" be a series of utterances, but we ended up going with a more standard format, at least for the time being.
The emotion system actually started in adventure mode and applies to everybody -- a lot of the new circumstances are restricted to dwarf mode for the time being though, just because more is going on there and the thoughts I converted were originally set up with dwarf mode in mind.
Do each of the emotions have a distinct in game effect, aside from just a note on the dwarf information screen?
Will grief mean more than appreciation of art now?
Will dwarves become acclimated to splendor, and no longer be brought to tears in awe at their masterwork dining room after eating there all their lives? On the flip side, if they lose said legendary diningroom and then have to deal with lesser quality, will they see it as a major loss, or still as an "okay" diningroom?
Does this mean there's no "positive excitement" (like joy of giving birth, which should be neither "stable" nor "stressed") status anymore?
Distinct is certainly a strong word at this early juncture, and there are a few that currently mark a passing up of a potential flip-out that probably shouldn't have a noticeable effect by design (other than something extreme not happening). There aren't really secondary effects either -- having grouch-prone people causing irritation in irritable people when they talk to them, but only while actually grouchy, would be the sort of thing that's now in reach. I'd expect these first-pass emotions to be a touch more interesting than the up/down of previous thoughts, meaning that there'll be some new quirks and melt-downs and a great deal more variety in who is experiencing general stress trouble and how much. They don't perform whole new interesting behaviors for each emotion or anything like that, and aside from the time it takes to add, that sort of thing is tricky since we want dwarves to simply labor a lot of the time. There's a lot to do just with the secondary dwarf-to-dwarf interactions though and other smaller changes that should be pretty interesting.
The personality change/shifting standards/acclimation question has been sitting on the table for a long while, but I haven't much with it yet -- we did do that thing with dwarves getting tired of specific food/drink types, and a few other individual counters, though having dwarves get tired of craftsdwarfship would be a sad, angsty thing. General changes in personality have to be approached more carefully, and I'm not sure when we'll try to actually shift a facet. It happens a lot in real life (just growing up mostly, though kids should start with way more out of whack facets), but facet changes need to occur through a clear process so it isn't mushy and confusing and character-killing, especially since we are using the emotions in part to more clearly establish the dwarves as distinct characters.
The old positive happiness status was just a sum of thought +/- values added to owned possessions, and it didn't do anything aside from indicating that your dwarf wasn't in danger of throwing a tantrum or worse. In that way, all of the new positive emotions indicate this sort of "positive state" with more clarity and with some diversity respecting the dwarf, and as secondary effects are added, it'll fully justify the change.
Is this going to work in Adventure mode too so we can finally get something else than "it was inevitable" in answer to incredible adventure feats ?
What I'm doing is only marginally related to that -- "it was inevitable" doesn't come from the emotion system, but rather a "rational" response to information/opinion/rumor you are passing along that they don't have a reply for. Some of the converted thoughts will probably show up in adventure mode (I'm not sure which ones), but I haven't yet broadened my scope beyond the dwarf thought update I've been doing.
How many of the emotions are ones that have long German names that have no equivalent in English?
He he he, I think they are all more or less regular English words. I was considering how I might handle that language/culture specific situation back when I was thinking about how language generation might work... it would be cool to have some kind of procedural emotion word creator when we get to languages, say. Then certain circumstances could make certain civ creatures feel something others wouldn't be able to conceptualize, or something. The "many words for snow" situation is related as well, and a sort of cliche that should be fully explored for our tacky fantasy generator. But that's all backburner speculation.
Whatever happened to these composite footprint images?
I assume they got scrapped because it would have been too much work to research and integrate footprints for every creature, but is that still planned to be added in the far future?
I'd say that's great opportunity for the community to collect some data and transform it in a meaningful format.
Yeah, it was partially the time, and partially that we weren't sure about them overall... for graphics, it's the sort of thing we'd like, since they are fun and educational and stuff, but it makes the bar for modding in creatures higher in a new and different way. I still have the little program that changes images into ASCII footprint thingies, but I'm not sure I'll be starting up on that any time soon.
how are living encampments and search posses going to be implemented in the current frame? Right now tents are just fancy backdrops for either unjustified murder or meaningless, one-sided interactions, what with their occupants being always asleep.
Haven't commited enough crimes in a single savefile to provoke manhunts against me, but I think they're non-existant by now. I might be wrong.
Yeah, it ended up poorly -- tents became trouble during development, and I'm still not sure how to have them packed up and so on while armies don't even have equipment. Many armies just don't stop and hang out during the day -- they only stop and instantly sleep, so it is a weird setup. There are guards in the camp that wander around at night, so it shouldn't be utterly one-sided. I'm not sure what's going to happen, but a lot more work needs to be done with army movements and intent and supplies and messengers and all that.
The search posses themselves would be easier to fix. I've seen posses in towns during testing, but I don't think the camps can do them despite what I had hoped for. And they are just an army on the map, so it'd be good luck to even notice that a town was hunting you.
Author
Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1883895 times)