Thanks to DG, Putnam, Dirst, BlackFlyme, Button, vjmdhzgr, Japa, Untrustedlife, Manveru Taure:ne'r, burned, falcc, expwnent, Bumber, PatrikLundell, Shonai_Dweller, Knight Otu, ZM5, Eric Blank, TheFlame52 and anybody I missed for helping to answer questions!
many myth questions which I attempt to address with a rambling reply
First of all, perhaps the word "myth" was a poor choice -- the stories generated are (optionally) true. If you set the "fantasy rating" of the world to zero, it still builds a series of events, but those are then just stories (perhaps at a civilization level, not really decided how they might interweave between civs). If you set the parameters to allow for it, then the story is correct, which creates a kind of shared lore for the world. Each race has a different thread of the story they tell based on which events resulted in their creation, mostly, though there are some differences in emphasis which can make the racial stories sound quite different from each other. I haven't tried to mix false and real beliefs yet, and that might just lead to confusion.
The myths it creates can lead to varied game elements, especially since you can just turn them off and on with parameters. We won't be able to get everything in all at once, but we should have a healthy first pass. This could change the end-game in player forts significantly, for instance, or make a certain form of magic occur everywhere, opening up new workshop/job chains etc., whereas other magic would resist industrialization/familiarity. There are various frequency/bloodline/requirement variables that come up, so individuals of a given race won't all be the same. We're hoping to add new landforms in the first release (giant region-sized cosmic egg shell fragments, and so forth), and eventually get to entire planes that you can visit in either mode (the difficulties there are the same as the difficulties with getting a separate off-site battle map up in fort mode, pretty much, and we'll probably handle them at once, in the distant future). Important artifacts will come up in the first pass -- the generator has stuff like looms that guide all of fate and so forth, and I'm not really sure how your interactions with those will go.
We're not quite sure how the exposition is going to work -- there's worldgen itself, where we're hoping to make the process highlight the important world elements and mythical events instead of just giving you the current technical rundown. Legends mode should have lots of information, and we're hoping it comes up in conversation/written works/art etc a bit as possible, as it does with historical events. Certain elements might occur in chargen and the embark screen as well, if they apply. It still remains to be seen just how confusing it all is and where we'll need to focus. If you set your world's fantasy rating to the maximum, there won't even be dwarves, just some playable race with random traits and a random name, but at least that exposition problem comes from opting-in through the maxed-out parameter, so it's not crucial to get it right immediately.
as excited as I am at the thought of being able to dig/channel/ramp without dfhack, I must ask if you have any plans to add deconstruction tasks? Though I'm not sure they would be what I was hoping for given the site restrictions, as I mostly find myself wishing I could take apart the wall of a library to get the lagfest scholars out, or open blocked paths from underground forts/dark fortresses/vaults.
will we be able to disassemble our own constructions and free up materials for reuse later on?
Yeah, you can remove constructions, but since it only happens on your own sites, it's just useful for modify your own maps.
What part(s) of a general's personality dictate(s) their actions/effectiveness?
I haven't spent much time with this so it's very placeholdery. The civ leader's personality comes up more than the general's, since the civ leader decides where to attack and when. For that, it compares the army strengths, ethical mismatches, past disputes and other historical events to confidence, ambition, propensity to anger, excitement-seeking and recklessness in a few different passes. A general's actual effectiveness in a given battle is just a function of the tactics, leadership and organization skills they pick up in world gen as they go. Since there isn't much data in world gen in terms of position/strategy/tactics/logistics/etc. etc. etc., there's not much to work with so I only went that far.
I understand you aren't actually re-doing site maps right now, but will the changes you're working on for sites that cross between map tiles mean anything for cities in the future? Can cities be larger if they don't need to worry about map tiles? Are there other roadblocks to cities taking up the same space that several clustered-together villages do now?
Cities already go across world map tile boundaries, and I'm happy with their size. They seem to be have appropriate core areas for period cities, though perhaps some of the nearest villages should be a little more built up, and the artificial popcap of 10000 is forced by cpu/mem, but the area is still about right (about 2.5 square kilometers depending on how you consider tile size). The main problem is that we can't have more village areas overall, and that's not likely to change due to technical constraints.
Are there any plans to add a stress-reaction equivalent to going catatonic? It stands out a bit in that the existing forms of insanity all got fleshed out with tantrum-equivalents of their own, while the new type of permanent affliction didn't get an equivalent. Or was there a particular reason for stress-vulnerable dwarves not having a comparable temporary affliction?
The basic issue is that there are three relevant propensities in the personality facets (anger, anxiety and depression), and if a dwarf is low in all three facets, none of the end results matched their personality, so we just had them check out using some old catatonia code. Stress-vulnerability isn't the same as the other three facets, since it impacts the speed of the descent more than pointing to a type of manifestation, and, yeah, right now the random selection of a tantrum type for low-facet dwarves is not satisfying. It's not meant to be a final system or one that even makes much sense, but it's not high priority to change it either.
As of this coming release (.07) will carpentry workshops built in player fortresses be usable by adventurers? Or is there some kind of code difference between workshops built in fort mode and adventure mode since the later are probably more temporary and the former are really old code?
Are there any plans to make other existing workshops that occur in world gen or player fortresses available to adventurers, or will that kind of thing be put off until you decide on the final configuration for adventure mode crafting?
How closely together can adventure mode sites be placed? If you put two next to each other can you build to their edges or do they have a one tile gap prohibiting construction as in fort mode?
There's no difference between the workshops. If you have logs and a carpenter's shop in a fort, you'll be able to use them.
I'm not sure how the ordering is going to work. It's not superhard just to add more workshop support as we go, and then switch the whole game over to whatever workshop replacement we come up with later. The real work is probably in fortress mode anyway, so I don't think there's a lot of lost time to be concerned over, at least how it has gone so far with carpentry.
If I recollect, you can still build on the edges in adv mode, and you can place them right next to each other. The game-breaking isn't as clear as it is in fort mode with siegers/wilderness creatures, though if you are dedicated you can mess up the army pathing a bit with a string of adv camps. That sort of exploit isn't a high priority, but we'd like to handle it better at some point.
With map tile boundaries about to fall, can we expect similar limitations/hard-coding to disappear as well?
Do you expect, or did you already think about problems, roadblockers and obstacles regarding these? In other words, are there limitations where you think "it's just a matter of writing the code", and others where you just don't see a way to lift a restriction without major problematic implications and consequences?
I'm thinking about things like not being able to build/designate most things on the outermost tiles of your site, changing the dimensions of a site after defining it (for example increasing size on reclaiming; or decreasing size, "splitting" the site in two), overlapping sites, and similar restrictions.
This can probably be answered by anyone with a better overview of the way DF currently works (because I think technically, you can do these things already), but I'll green it, just in case.
In the past, you could connect an isolated site (for example, embarking on a remote continent) by concatenating "dummy sites" on locations you can normally not embark on with 3rd party tools: embark, abandon immediately, just so the game thinks this is a reachable site. If you'd do that all the way to your isolated site, you would then get migrants, caravans and so on.
IIRC, this behavior changed when actors started to physically move on the world map.
When adventure mode crafting/constructing/digging will be expanded, we could already theoretically build a bridge over an otherwise unpassable border (a small ocean for example). You could also do the opposite, and build a very long wall, creating a barrier. Does the game recognize these site changes already in terms of where actors are allowed to move? If so, all of them, and on all abstraction layers? Or are only some limited by player-made barriers? Can you for example pass an impassable wall by quick traveling over it?
I don't think the timing of other hard-coded issues is related at all. It really depends on what I'm working on at the time. There are various issues with the potential changes you've listed, so I wouldn't expect them any time soon.
It understands more about movement in worldgen sites -- for player sites, it doesn't keep track of where armies/travelers etc. can move, and it's likely to be a complicated problem to solve. When we have worldgen walls and so forth, we might see some attempts to manage it, but it's not a priority right now.
How are insurrections calculated? Does the number of hearthpeople play a factor? Does it work differently with adventurer lords?
Let's see... it goes by each cultural identity at the site, and it only considers those where the majority opinion is against the occupation or ruler. They assume that the occupier is initially strong (since they conquered the site), so perceived strength starts at 100%. That is changed in a few ways -- it is adjusted with the actual occupier populations, so if new hearthpeople come on or hearthpeople are killed, the percentage changes (it can be above 100). It can also be changed by active rumors/witnessed events -- if somebody was brazen enough to start a conflict with the occupier, it goes down by 1%, and kill-rumors of entity soldiers drop it by 5%. If there's still a rumor of an insurrection that was crushed, strength is stuck at 100% until it is forgotten. If perceived strength ever drops below 50%, an insurrection can begin, randomly. So the odd thing is that it doesn't consider raw numbers or actual outcomes at all. There's a lot of work to do.
Will moods ever result in new items and even one off workshops (like a big magic magma forge from a possessed dwarf that causes some of the dwarfs that work it to add to a cursed armor and go insane soon after) being created?
When might it be that hydras regenerate quickly and even grow back heads as well as forgotten beasts made of fire and even blobs not dying in one hit?
I'm not sure how moods will change going forward. The new magic system stuff is likely to have an impact on them, though I'd suspect more on the properties of existing items than some new product... although the generated magic systems do have some procedures that can be followed to make certain new objects. Hard to say what'll go in until I get there.
I don't have a timeline for changing the particulars of combat or doing regeneration.
My max speed wet from 2.5 to 3.999 and I was so fast I could jump over rivers, so I did. I then went on a rampage in the nearby human civ, and since the mist stuff was all over me, I infected many more people with creeping mist husk-ism I went on to kill over 500 people and became legendary in several skills. My "friends" who i infected (but wasnt in a party with) also got several kills on their own (some had over 30) . After my unfortunate death to bogeymen. I went into legends to look into how my buddies whom i infected held up, I noticed something odd, legends mode didn't label them as "creeping mist husks" though they still had their kills and they for some odd reason they still lived in the hamlets we destroyed (possibly by themselves) I thought this was odd so I created a new adventurer and found one of them hanging out in a house in one of the villages (killing any living things who went by) eventually killing me. It was still a thrall, but wasn't labeled as one in legends mode, is this a intended feature or a bug?
Also will people who get infected with this stuff ever lose their citizen status and rampage the world a bit like one would expect an evil thrall to do, the fact that they maintain their status as citizens in the hamlets they helped kill off is very odd and immersion breaking, and they didnt even get a reputation for killing either do you plan to remedy this?
That sounds like a bug. They should have lost all of their connections when they got husked, but apparently they still maintain attachments.
Having every NPC act properly is an overall goal, but it's a difficult problem.
Are we ever going to get the old "Halt in the name of the Blankety Blanks!" bandit announcement back? Also, will kobolds ever be able to talk to other kobolds?
Updating bandit ambushes was in our list of things to do in the shorter term to make adventure mode better, but we only get through a portion of that list in these releases. Somehow that ended up with adventurer-created sites this time. Kobolds aren't supposed to be able to talk in a meaningful way to other kobolds, but they should talk more as a general behavior.
The question arises, in the farther future of Justice Arc development, how do you intend for cases of death under mysterious, or disputed circumstances to be sorted? Will there need to be an autopsy done by the Chief Medical Dwarf? Will there be a new elected or appointed Fortress Coroner position? Could the gods give us a sign?
I'm really not sure how it is going to work out at this point, since it is a difficult problem to leave enough evidence around when crimes may or may not be happening at any time, just in terms of memory/cpu considerations (just look at the existing hf spatter, taken as "transfer evidence", and how that gums up the works -- all of our rumor systems etc. are the same, we'd need more systems, then it would need to be fed into some sort of analysis etc etc). So we'll probably end up winging it with our adv mode criminal stuff, and then see how that goes back to impact fortress mode. We do have a lot of data sitting around already, and people do make some of their decisions based on witnessed incidents and rumors already, so maybe we'll glide into something kinda okay where the game can make a credible approximation as to who it thinks would be responsible for some crime or another.
will it eventually be possible for us to modify the generationion code of the creatures that are currently procedurally generated like titans, werewolves, demons, ect?
That was the hope, but it's difficult to find a format for that, especially for the text parts.
Do you plan to ever make the north and south have opposing seasons?
We were hoping to do it with the original release of the two-poled worlds, but there was some just-annoying-enough hurdle or time-consuming rewrite that got in the way. I suspect we'll overcome it the next time we are in the neighborhood.
Are there any plans to make constructed walls/floors engraveable?
It's a popular enough suggestion, but I don't have a particular timeline for it. Handling the situation is in the quite large "simple suggestions" list that I chop away at every so often.
Are there plans to change from workshops over to zones/locations so dwarfs could have their own kitchens or even a small blacksmith shop in a 3x3 room in their home and if thats the case when might this be done?
A workshop rewrite and zone/etc. consolidation has been on the menu for years, but I don't have a timeline for it.
Will we be able to build using available materials or only logs? If I have blocks or boulders could I use those instead? Naturally I would expect the hauling time to be slower for boulders vs faster build-time with blocks and so forth.
Just logs. I'll handle new materials as their production is added.
I've got a Legends log here in which a goblin bard with a Dwarven name took up an apprenticeship in the dark pits Canyonjackal, then became a Baroness of her original, dwarven civilization. For the next 150 years the log has her alternately taking part in competitions in the fortress Wingshoot, and murdering randos in Canyonjackal. Is this a bug (code treating one histfig like they're in two places at once) or a feature (histfig returning home to participate in festivals)?
Hard to say without looking at it... feels buggish? People can travel for competitions, but it's odd that the Baroness isn't living in the right spot and still does pit murders (which are a local matter).
Will being able to change the colors/tile/etc for track indicators end up in the raws? The yellow/green is easy to see but in some areas it makes it hard to see where you're even at, much less where you're trying to track towards.
It'd be preferable if all those things could be customized, but it's a very large list now (including every hard-coded item, etc). I'm not sure how any changes will unfold.
Will dwarven merchants ever haul their wares on the backs of dralthas?
Will we ever see caravans and sieges come from the caverns instead of above ground? Will we ever be able to start a fortress in the caverns and have to dig up to the surface, instead of starting on the surface and digging down to the caverns?
It's much more likely to happen when we get to the deep dwarf trade from the edge of the underground layers (probably with the firstish embark scenario release). We're certainly planning to have a cavern start scenario, though it is very hard to say now what will be in the first batch since there are so many options.
Seeing as you spoke about on the podcast about optimisation and said there was alot that could be done code wise. Seeing as all players judge how playable the game is by FPS and some have even have refused to move on to the newer versions because of degraded perfomance, how do you judge when to do optimisation of something?
Some of the creatures act a bit strange such as wolves not wanting to attack a long dwarf and dwarfs canceling jobs because of keas will there be a pack mentality for the wolfs and something to make dwarfs not worry about birds that are high in the sky?
There appears to be a limit of group of creatures on the map and some even get stuck due the climbing (fish refuse to leave, some that arrive in the caverns just sit there on the edge if they're in water) would this also be moved over to init values for each level of the map for the amount of groups that there can be?
I generally go by the saves I receive these days for general optimization, since they are always farther along than I ever get. New features I just test as much as I am able, so there's sometimes a bad period in between when their true lag potential is discovered and my getting around to hearing about it and cleaning it up. Some issues with low FPS in advanced forts are more intractable, where it involves large numbers of items, say, or temperature calculations. Others like locked pet doors or whatever are just waiting for me to remove that feature entirely.
There are group morale calculations already, but it's all sort of rough and broken in various ways.
I don't have a problem with moving more constants to the init file, though there's a logjam of requests like this.
Is there a limit to the number of books one person can write? There seems to be.
Yeah, there's a cap for technical reasons. It could probably afford to be smeared out or softened up, but at the same time, world gen will fall apart if everybody that can write is allowed to churn out historically-tracked books.
Anyway, will we eventually see in-game effects of pulping besides just the flavor text? By that I mean, if a blunt attack causes a creatures head to "explode into gore", will we see an explosion of eyes, teeth and skull fragments, similarly to what happens when teeth are punched out?
There are already functional effects, and blood I think, but like, a proper splat? I suppose that could happen, but I don't have particular plans.
Will there ever be lasting effects from mangled body parts in adventure mode? As ith every injury, travelling or resting seems to heal up any tissue capable of healing, meaning that a mangled body part is utterly shrugged off unless nerve damage occurred.
Yeah, that'll be changed. Right now, the way things are overall, we aren't in a rush to fix it, but eventually it'll be handled.
How high/low on your to-do list is the implementation of draft animals and the support necessary for them (feed bags, feeding troughs, etc)?
It isn't in the short-term dev plans, so it's in the amorphous rest-of-stuff with everything else.
Toady do you plan to improve NPC dwarven fortress generation, right now they are very random, and hard to navigate do you plan to make them more navigable in the future?
I am aware that you can use travel mode and < and > to go back up to the surface, but it is very hard to get out of forts if you don't do this.
Easier local navigation of worldgen forts is on the short list of adv-quality-of-life issues that we've been working on. Sometimes the hallway to the staircase is in a really terrible out of the way location, and life would be easier if it were at least incorporated into the main wide halls.
Will npc adventurers get any site building skills during this cycle? Would be nice to run into a monster hunter's mountain lodge full of Forgotten Beast bone figurines.
Will adventurer sites become inhabited by refugees/wandering kobolds/dance troupes/marsh titans if they're abandoned? Is it possible to abandon an adventurer site or will it always be taken over by some random person after the adventurer is dead?
Will civilizations be able to send soldiers to adventurer-created sites to reclaim them, should the adventurer die, or to forcefully take them over should the adventurer still be alive?
We're not going to do any of that this time -- smaller NPC sites are still a concern overall in terms of how many there should be and if I need to take any storage shortcuts.
Your sites are treated like camps right now. I don't know that anything interesting happens with camps, but that'll slowly merge with village halls over time I suspect as the bandit/village-leader roles get closer together.
How is Scamps doing?
Scamps is enjoying that it is hot enough that I'm not wearing long sleeves today. There is more exposed flesh to tear in ambush.
Will Adventurer Sites have the same limitations as dwarf sites?
In essence, can we build a monastery in the middle of a mountain range or a stationary "boat" over an ocean, where you can't build fortresses?
I don't think it cares, but you'll have to haul your own wood there to actually create a wall or floor. That could be annoying for mountain or beach sites. You'd also have to locally travel to the mountain site each time with new wood if it's isolated in the middle of a range.
I've noticed that when you start Fortress mode, the world explodes into war. What are the differences between how wars start in worldgen and during fortress mode? What would you say is the intended median wars per civ per year in each mode?
There are too many differences to easily list, really. There is so much more information after world generation, especially with locations/armies. The war counts are interesting though. Is there a corresponding large amount of peace declarations? The whole rhythm just seems different, and broken. I'll have to look into it.
Will retired adventurer sites be susceptible to insurrections? Current ones?
They don't have larger cultural-identity-linked populations, so it wouldn't happen.
How would you go about adding in a skill cap for dwarfs much like theres a a cap on their attributes?
When might dwarfs be able to be put into a vegetative state?
Seeing as the next update is pretty mostly the artifact one, in Fortress Starting Scenarios For "Possible expansion of religious and family concepts to provide sufficient scenarios" does that mean that some culture's and religions will be discriminatory?
Will Fortress Starting Scenarios change the way requirements, demands and mandates are done so they extend to the point where nobles can have their own laws even jus primae noctis?
I haven't really thought about how high-level skills are going to evolve. It seems like the new knowledge system is going to get shot all through that stuff, and I'm not sure how the simple numeric skills will react or even survive it.
I don't get the second question.
We just need more grist for the mill to get even basic "remote temple" or "clan mining operation" scenarios in place properly. I don't think discrimination is necessarily implicit in expanding the framework, depending on what you mean, though I'm not sure which way it'll go.
Yeah, or whether there are even nobles at all, or which ones, or whatever. We want to blow it all up and make it better.
I was wondering if he was really just going to continue fixing up merchant bugs or if he was now ready to replace them altogether, something he said he put off doing this time because it would take so long due to very old code).
That masterwork bug is a new introduction, and I fixed some of the unretire problems with others left over (partially dependent on save version). The economy stuff necessary for a good rewrite is far enough away that I expect there will be more bug fixes in the shorter term for this stuff.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1884003 times)