Thanks to Untrustedlife, iceball3, Shonai_Dweller, Knight Otu, Inarius, monk12, thvaz, MrWiggles, Random_Dragon, Daniel the Finlander, Japa, SimRobert2001, Silverybearded, reality.auditor, BlackFlyme, Button and anybody I missed for helping to answer questions!
When it comes to deities, will they always be somewhat randomly generated, or are you considering making RAW defining deities to be an alternate option that one could take (if/when you get to it)?
I'm not sure which parts of the myth stuff are going to be in parameters/raws initially. Getting an actual specific historical figure (e.g. a deity) out is more "world editor" territory. It would be nice but it is more work.
if animal men receive any improvements following the introductory launch release phase of thier occupancy within your base, would you be able to set them additional labours not typically assigned to workshops? IE: task amphibious races to unrestricted building functions in underwater/lava (with magma safe clothing) settings such as the breaching of aquifers due to [nobreathe], or task legendary climbing ability flying races to scaling inaccessible rough wall verticality in order to build walls/haul/deconstruct?
I didn't have anything particular in mind, though certain of the animal people would be useful for non-standard tasks.
do you have plans to make the children and spouses of nobles act like nobles? No, I'm not a masochist, why do you ask?
I know you said you'll be planning on hunting down bugs for a while, but what new features do you plan to work on next?
I don't have particular plans there -- the status/family(law/customs/etc.) update might touch upon that, or that might be missed. It depends on what form it takes.
The current idea is to spread a bit from bugs into fixing some of the issues with adv rep/rumors/etc. and other things that make that part of the game un-fun, do some other simple suggestions, and then try out a 64 bit version, and then start the artifact/myth stuff (which we will have a dev update for when we map it out more clearly).
Is there any hope that with the upcoming development dealing with prehistory that we will finally see the dark fortress [CHAT_WORTHY] bug fixed allowing us to raw define chat worthy nobles for civs with dark fortress sites?
Now animal people are in the spotlight, are you going to implement something like [LAYER_LINKED] for surface animal people giving them basic weapons and armour.
Also, are you going to add in stone weaponry to equip both surface dwelling animal people and potentially the existing layer-linked ones as well.
There's hope for bugs on the tracker, though there's a lot of them. We're going to continue working on them for a while. I don't remember the specifics of that report in particular.
We aren't going to get into the animal person entity for now. Not sure when. There's some backing necessary to make it work. Layer-linked didn't exactly turn out well.
Will adventurers be able to write diaries at some point?
Basically, every recorded event (dingo attacked, killed a deer, wandered around, climbed mountain) you could maybe find in legends mode, written in a paper we carry around, which can be found by other adventurers.
I imagine you'll get more control over the writing you can currently do over time. There isn't a diary right now, and I don't know where that fits in with the invention of the autobiography and the chronicle and all that, in our knowledge system, but we wanted to do diaries back in the original 2002 plans, so it'll happen sometime.
Toady: One of my biggest dreams as a modder would be the ability to lock the use of certain outfits and entity items to certain genders and positions (No men in dresses, royal guards/champions with unique outfits and weapons, different professions having preference for different outfits like priests). Would this be able to be added easily along with making clothes in various sizes for multi-creature forts?
Nah, it's harder and not really related at all, since it gets more at the clothing generation functions and the clothing AI, rather than the jobs. I don't know when it'll next be looked at.
I've noticed that you can restrict visitors from coming into your taverns, libraries, and temples. Will this ever extend to being able to ban certain races (of both visitors and your fort's own population) from accessing these locations? Like let's say I'm okay with letting human visitors and animal people hang in my taverns but elf visitors aren't allowed anywhere near my beer. Or let's say I want to treat the elves that are already within my population unfairly.
I didn't have particular plans for this. I'm not sure when we'll open up that can of worms.
Will we ever be able to create production orders for statues/figurines/engravings of specific things?
We were planning to do it at some point, probably with the material stuff. It's up on dev as "Ability to order the construction of a specific item or decoration of item in complete detail". This would include statues and figurines, though I fear the interface for that. I'm not sure about engravings, but it could be handled the same way, roughly.
Toady... you monster... you fixed the sapient corpse butchering/eating/wearing.
I'm sure I'll end up figuring out a workaround before this gets answered, but was this a deliberate change or a side effect of something else, and is it just one tag or am I going to have to hunt down several to "unfix" the "fix" there?
Are you going to revert the "no using materials from butchering sentients" adventurer rule, or at least make it ethics-dependant? If you DO make it depend on ethics, could outsiders be free to commit cannibalism?
I don't recall changing anything in particular. I don't quite understand where the exact barrier is occurring. I don't recall a wear-based restriction message in adv mode.
Scholars stealing books from our libraries when they leave: intended, happy accident, or bug?
I think it's a bit buggish since it's too micromanagey and violent to control it the way it is (since you'd have to drown them or something). They should probably politely leave stuff that isn't theirs.
While 34.11 and previous versions "spawned" sieges had often gob weapon masters, this does not happen in either df2014 or 42.x with the new "marching armies" of those versions and all the goblin sieges through the years i faced in any of my forts are always made of low skilled gob soldiers or recruits.
And considering they take 2/3 years to decide to come to your fortress in 42.01, it's important to note that the current dwarven military training can easily deliver a couple of legendary dwarves in only a couple of years by simply them sparring, transforming those gob sieges that were supposed to be threat a simple walk in the park when a single legendary dwarf can kill a dozen of those invading gobs by himself in no time.
So do you have plans to have gobs training their military skills in their dark sites the same as dwarves does in your fortress to get sieges challenging again ?
I've made note of it.
Toady, I've yet to get any titan/megabeast-worshipping historical figures as immigrants, despite targeting my worldgens towards creating them. Did you disallow them from immigration, or have I just been unlucky?
Also, did you take titan/megabeast worshippers into consideration when implementing the worship need & who you can build temples for?
I didn't do anything in particular with them, so they should show up like anybody else. I'm not sure how frequently it happens in world gen now though. I think you can target your temple toward any worshipped figure in the fort, unless it is busted.
I encountered groups of human and dwarven astronomers and scholars and mathematicians hanging out on a hillside near the fort, there were a few soldiers nearby guarding them, which made it a real pain in my ass to try and feed off of them. They hung around talking some, just kinda hanging out quietly some, in little clusters of 2 to 5, before heading back inside the fort to the library.
Much like my previous encounter with a cheetah hunting an ibex, this looked like a really natural sort of behavior, astronomers hanging out on a hillside at night studying the stars, guards escorting them, I would not have been surprised to see a telescope set up out there if they existed.
Did you include anything to encourage this behavior, or expect something like it, whereby astronomers and philosophers and naturists and such actually go outside and observe their surroundings?
Nah, it was just lucky. We don't have very much scheduling yet outside of tavern visits, fakeish well trips, strolls, and going home at night.
I know they're small cute things, but is an adventurer gorlak supposed to be unable to open doors? I mean, he can hold a spear just fine...
Nope. I guess that's broken.
Right now we can accept people into our fort and they will be sad being separated from loved ones. Will dwarves ever immigrate to our fortress to be with their families? Also, will dwarves ever emigrate from the fort for any reason?
The sadness at separation is all due to kidnapped relatives, if I remember correctly, though you do have the family need thing which isn't as much of an emotional drain.
1. Currently, the coordinates output in the Legends.xml file for sites are very imprecise and can be off by a substantial amount from where the site actually is in-game. Is there a plan to remedy this? Like, accuracy to at least the tenths or hundredths place instead of to the ones place.
2. Region borders are not exported at all. Is there a plan to implement this?
I didn't have any particular plans. There are lots of site variables it doesn't export yet, and lots of variables in general, and it's a long project to complete. There's a better rectangle stored within the site which it could put out if it isn't there. If it's just doing the x/y for the world map tile print, yeah, that one's pretty bad.
Region borders like the forests? There's lots of map data it isn't dumping in xml, but a lot of it is in the images. The entity influence areas aren't really important yet.
1. Will we ever have possibility to ask "What's happening?" or at least "to whom you serve?"in adventure mode?
2. I have seen a lot of loyalty cascade in adventure mode, for example than i rescued all merchants(about hubdred) from market and lord and some priests from temple, i created a band, captured hall. After it i leave the hall and one o priests that follows me tink that now he is lord... they started argue(i meant only speaking, it was in 40.24) and after hour IRL of shouting "I hear ... became a lord" they started a fight. After some point more and more merchants draws their knives... and after 10 minets IRL of fighting and about thousands pages of logs they killed my compainons and me. That's happened? In Legends i find only "Violent disagrement"
3.Is now any ingame method in adventure to understand to that faction nps belongs?
4.Why then you asked vampire about itelf in menu "ask about someone" he said : Vampire ... - it's me.
5. If you hear that army moving to settlement, how fast it will travel? Should you wait for weeks? For mounths?Will it come or not if you in settlement? Can player see how invaders capture the hall? Or it's only in abstract?
6. If you kill anyone you see in camp of marsing army, is it stop? Or enemies will load from absrtract to real and continue marsh after you leave camp?
7.If i order "to wait" me for rescued that has no family, in fortress and after it retire adventurer and unretire fortress... will him/they asked to be migrants?
8.That reasons using mayor to accept this if fortress retired?
9.That i need to do to see negative effects of alchogol to dwarves in fortress mode? If i created a burrow with one barrel of any kind of wine/beer/etc will it work?
1. You can ask about emotional state as well as troubles. There'll be more over time.
2. I dunno what happened. We're going to make some of the conflict causes more clear so we can work it out.
3. Nothing easy I remember. We'll probably be adding a few soon.
4. They say something like that when you ask where they are. They might have the same reply if you ask them what they think of themselves, since they aren't able to do that now.
5. It only takes days in general, and there are some stale rumors. You should be able to watch them capture the hall if they want to do that, but more likely it'll be a rampaging army, and the local-view destruction of buildings etc. isn't coded yet.
6. If you kill the soldiers, the army will be dead.
7. Hmm... I'm not sure. If they have an army controller from you, it might tie them up, but they are supposed to go stale after some days.
8. I didn't follow this one.
9. To see if they are drunk? Or too drunk? You can see their personality changes in their thoughts to see that they are drunk, but if they are really drunk, you'll have to look for vomit or dead bodies.
Do you have plans for demonic fortresses (aka curious underground stuctures) to come back in any way, shape or form? Or were they supposed to be replaced by vaults?
I expect the myth generator stuff will cause a seismic event of sorts as regards all of the different things like that. I'm not sure what we'll have after that.
Are there any plans to bring back the idea of DF2012-style quests? As it stands, when discussing "army on the march" and "abducted child" rumors, the player is given the option to talk the other person into joining to escape or aid in a rescue mission, respectively.
Maybe beast, camp, and town harassment rumors could yield the option to offer to deal with the problem, starting it as a quest? Logically, the "agreements" section of the Quest log might be the best place to record and track agreements to exterminate bandits or beasts.
Do you plan to come back with quests or assignments in adventure mode in any way?
It is impossible to know how to build good reputation with a entity just following rumors. Killing bandits harassing a hamlet cause people to call you a killer. Kill a vampire and people will call you murderer.
I don't know that it'll be strictly DF2012-style, since we removed those for a reason, but it'll be improved significantly before we move on to the 64 bit stuff and beyond. There will be more recognition of what you've done as regards the "inquire about troubles" rumors, and some better handling of the ones you personally want to do interface-wise and socially (whether that's through promising to help or just expressing interest or "quest marking" it or whatever). The hearths will care about all the "troubles" stuff, instead of just other hearths... hopefully we can make people sort of sensible about what is actually dangerous to their communities. We have a list of about twenty smaller changes along these lines we want to finish as we do bugs and simple suggestions.
How soon do you think we'll be seeing multi-part weapons?
How soon? I have no idea. The instruments didn't really give us enough for it, though it was something I guess. It isn't necessary for the artifact stuff, though random things happen.
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1. Will we ever be able to customize our adventurer's likes and dislikes like we can their personality?
2. Will we ever get more Legends Mode tabs? Like for music/instruments, maybe?
3. Currently, underground plants are seasonal and aboveground plants can be grown at any time. This makes no sense. Will it ever be fixed/changed?
4. Now that we have dwarves suffocating on their own vomit, will there ever be some kind of dwarven CPR or other advanced medical procedures?
5. Will vampires in worldgen ever drain historical figures?
6. Will there ever be prisoners we can free in dungeons?
7. Will people ever commit crimes in worldgen?
8. Will we ever be able to find stolen children if they're anywhere besides in a dark fortress?
1. Yeah, though it's more likely when they matter more, since it'd take a bit of time to handle all the varieties.
2. Sure, dunno when. The art and instrument stuff are candidates now, if people want to read those paragraphs.
3. It made a tad more sense when there was no aboveground farming and there was seasonal flooding of the underground, maybe, but yeah, it's kind of strange now. Not sure when we'll get to the nuts and bolts of aboveground farming, since there's a lot to do in all of the various modes and it won't matter until they actually use those things post w.g..
4. It wouldn't matter... I don't recall actually making the vomit suffocate them yet when they are ko'd, though it seems like the sort of thing I'd do.
5. They should, since the regular goblins can already murder them.
6. It's a rare situation already from w.g., but I don't actually know what happens with them. It should be more common. We were going to get to some of that with the activation release before, but we cut all the prisoner/slave transport stuff over time.
7. They hardly commit crimes after world gen -- I imagine we'll start to see this when we have the first law release (after the artifact/myth stuff), but that it'll take longer to get to the full-blown justice/punishment release.
8. Yeah, I just haven't handled the odd cases at all yet.
Right now, human villages aren't very interesting when compared to their towns, who now have several different types of buildings. Are there any plans to expand the buildings available to the smaller sites, so that we can perhaps see the occasional small inn, shop, or shrine in them?
Yeah, there are a few things we're going to do at the different steps of the process, though towns will probably be quite a bit more interesting because they have more stuff and people. We didn't get to the inns we were expecting for this time, and the embark scenario release is going to involve several new situations which'll take place in smaller communities. Eventually we're also hoping to get to various smaller scale economic things like communal mills, ovens and fishing and so on, but that'll be farther off.
Now we have guests arriving to use our Taverns and Libraries, what are the goals for their interactions with other Fortress facilities? I ask because a visitor got into a tavern brawl and broke his arm, but seems to be ignorant that there's a hospital across the corridor.
I don't have particular goals in mind now. People mentioned the hospital as a good candidate for the location treatment, and there are a few other things like your justice area and so on that might work, and work with the embark situation stuff. I don't know which way it'll go though. It's certainly reasonable for them to want medical care.
How long does it usually take for a whole new release (Mac and Linux included) to compile these days?
Five hours or so? Four if everything goes really smoothly. That's for the whole release. The compiles themselves are about 60 minutes each, though linux actually goes on four cores so it only takes about 15-20.
Are there any plans to expand upon the information given about books, poems, music, etc?
I think we show all the information that's currently generated and stored, but maybe I missed stuff. Or do you mean new stuff? We can always do new stuff, but it'll be a bit before we loop back around to those.
What happens if I tell a stinking tree huger hippie (read elf) citizen to cut down a tree?
That was one of the few cases I actually handled, so hopefully it works. It depends on the elf having elf ethics though. An elf that fully converted to human ethics before deciding to live at your fort wouldn't have any problems.
What affects the different types of visitors that show up at your fortress? For example, how do you get monster hunters to show up? I've never gotten one with two several year long taverns. Alternatively, is there anything that causes more mercenaries to show up rather than bards and poets? Can you end up attracting more of one scholar type than any others, like have 80% of your scholar guests be doctors?
People seem to not be seeing monster slayers -- it just takes reaching the underground, but apparently they are being fickle. I'll need to look into it. Some mercenaries prefer fortresses that are dangerous (that is, people have died recently), while that'll turn off some of the others. I haven't differentiated the scholar types yet that way.
Might merchant caravans ever occasionally choose to fight when the player tries to seize goods, especially early on?
It's a reasonable suggestion.
Will there ever be an Adventurer Mode theme?
I never seem to get to any new music, so I wouldn't anticipate anything.
When considering the future of legal systems in various towns throughout the world, are you thinking of going for emulation of legislation bodies (including but not limited to the monarchical leader of the site), with change to law occuring over time in preference to the (potential) self interest or pressures from citizenry, OR are you considering keeping abstract and flatly inline with the site's local's and beliefs?
The plan is to have it be very varied, obscenely involved and mighty-morphable, though it all depends on what exactly we get to. We won't get to all of it, but hopefully the framework will be solid enough this time to support laws changing over time in a number of ways (common law w/ through judges, civil law, merging systems and accommodating customs, vampires, etc.). We have to make sure the associated historical figure and event load doesn't get out of control, though. It'll be interesting to see how that goes.
How do worldgen vampire purges work? Do they just vanish, courtesy of an unknown act of the gods, or are there actual events involving vampire hunters/peasant mobs and such?
It's a minor history collection, but it shows up in the main list and is expandable. Right now the vampires can flee or be executed. We were hoping to get to some duels and innocent victims, but it ended up pretty sparse for the first pass.
what compiler will you be using for the eventual 64bit DF?
Right now the plan is to use the MSVC that people suggested for Windows (2013 community, or whatever), and the test program worked with that. I have no idea what the linux/mac configurations are or how it would work there.
When might the master/apprentice system enter fort mode and a skill system overhaul so that some dwarfs can only get so far in a skill and the speed a which they progress a bit like how attributes are limited?
Would this also mean dwarfs would need to learn how to craft certain items either from their master or reading it from a book/scroll, thinking that scholars would be able to study weapons and other objects and come up with a detailed design of it then that could be given to another dwarf to try and then think of a way to craft it.
I'm not sure when I'm going to get to that sort of thing, but it's something we wanted to do. We're going to be a bit cautious with the restriction of action based on skill/knowledge, since it might make certain forts totally unable to act, but we're planning to use negative qualities for that situation (and maybe completely stop some jobs). We'd like to kind of build up the knowledge and so forth along with the adv mode skills stuff, and then work that back into dwarf mode in the cases where it isn't too micro-fiddly, but I'm not sure how it'll be, or whether regular teaching etc. will come in before we even try to involve knowledge.
Would giant elephants be large enough to qualify to be multi tile? (vertically above one layer but structurally the same) and would any of the multi-tile animals/creatures/mega-beasts/other relate to what your dwarves at ground level can reach? (unable to sever very much other than the legs of a bronze colossus for instance, without crippling it or gaining elevation?) or would it work normally?
Regular elephants would qualify as multi-tile if we are particular about it. It depends on how much we want to fudge the "2m x 2m x 3m" tile guesstimate we float around. An elephant trunk itself could get a little - if we are weird. ()E- It starts to look bad.
The test dragons had separate limbs and a neck with a 157-yen head and a slinky tail, and you wouldn't be able to hit any part you aren't next to. I'm not sure about all of it though. It's harder to make random and mod creatures look good, and the tileset issue is also large and multi-troubling... though I don't want to go with a block/blob approach either. The counter-pressure is that trees and other future features are going to make one-tile giant creatures sillier and sillier, until they become too silly. Tall creatures are harder since you can only see a slice of them, so they always look bad, but the idea is that you'd be able to jump on them and the dragons and be on a specific body part, if we are lucky enough to make it work at all.
How are Kobold names generated?
It's just goes by a list of possible consonants and vowels, with different endings. The vowels aside from the last two should all match. depebeDOGUS, etc. It's how we used to talk to our cats growing up. It might still happen with Scamps at times.
Any plans regarding whether that delicious brain-rotting venom will stay as the way it is?
I'm not sure. It'll be a deadly neurotoxic scorpion, but if we go with a real one that lives in the desert, it might be slightly different.
Do undead created by evil weather effects exhibit the same changes to undead that were in the devlog?
Yeah, we don't have a mechanism right now that puts some sort of nethery-bad soul into them. I could make them stronger and faster (and might), but they won't block or get combat opportunities.
So a normal human zombie will die if you cut it's head off, at which point it can be re-re-animated, then die if you cut an arm/hand off, can get re-re-re-animated, and then be permanently dead once you chop off the other arm?
Something like that, yeah. I don't really like it, but I don't like the other way either. The thing that was Really unacceptable was that pulping the head killed it, but chopping off the head didn't. That was very strange and has been fixed now. The arm thing I could be talked either way on depending on nothing in particular. I'd prefer it to work some other way altogether, but that'll take some improvements to the magic system I think.
Can we still found armed and armored zombies in sieges or towers?
I didn't change anything about that... there are still a lot of contradictions with the zombies. They still somehow follow the necromancer like an army, despite not having any thinky behavior aside from attacking the living, and a necromancer even requires 50 of them to build a tower, as if they could be directed to do something complex like that. I imagine it'll slowly come into shape as the specifics of magic come in, and that'll hopefully lead to more interesting wizard towers etc. etc. as well.
Hey Toady, cool game, I'm a big fan. I read in the dev overview that the ability to pass long periods of time in adventure mode is a work in progress. How's that coming along? It would be fascinating to enact a "2nd world gen" to see the consequences of player actions over significant periods of time.
Doing an actual second world gen is not going to be in the cards, since it's too hard to put everything back in the bag. The best I can probably manage is the ability to set how long the calendar runs. That's the sort of thing which will be randomly added when it comes up.
Do kids play with imaginary friends now? Do said imaginary friends not show up on the relationships screen? Because there's a kid playing with "Orshetdanman", and I can't find any "Orshetdanman" in the fortress.
I'm not sure what that is... That seems too long to be an instrument name, but I think Button's suggestion of an artifact toy is good. The make believe activity doesn't specify anything yet.
I'm currently in the practice of obsidian casting, and I know damned well that a fair number of the floors and walls I'm casting in aren't magma-safe, but they hold anyways. One day, you're going to have to fix the system so that walls and floors made out of non-magma safe materials won't hold magma, but in turn perhaps you should make it easier to construct a magma-proof room. For instance, when I order that stone blocks be made I could order that they be made of magma-safe stones.And when I go to build floors or walls, there could be a handy option to restrict myself to magma-safe materials. What are you going to do to these ends?
I don't expect it any time soon, since there are various technical issues with making non-magma safe material walls affected by temperature or even magma specifically. At that point, it would be a high priority to allow people to continue using magma in their fortresses.
As it is, coins are worthless outside their country. Will there ever be money-changers, maybe when there's an economy update?
Yeah, sometime around then. We'll probably do something small just to make it a little less confusing first. They aren't supposed to be completely worthless now as goods, and you could sell them for some amount of local coins, but that might be broken or have a way-too-unfavorable exchange rate.