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[therahedwig]

allowed work orders to be automatically restarted with different frequencies (always/monthly/seasonal/yearly), respecting any conditions.

Any conditions? What kind of range is that 'any'? What is the craziest condition you implemented, or will be possible with your implementation?

[Untrustedlife]

Well, generally it's when they kill someone (a sapient someone), isn't it ?

That's a fairly easy one to pull off, but there is also being a child of a historical figure, being some sort of explorer or adventurer, being a leader of any kind, or making some sort of notable object whether it is an artifact or just some masterwork crafts and becoming a legendary crafter.

About language, I think that it will part of a "Culture" arc, because there are a LOT of things to do (and very interesting one) to differenciate cultures. Look at what Ultima Ratio Regum has tried to do on this part.

 But about dialogue and conversation I wondered something.

Some RPG have very advanced (of course, scripted) talks between you and your PNJ companions (such as, for example most Obsidian games), while others have very minimal or no "psychological" interaction. How do you envision interaction between you and your companion(s) ? Are you happy with the current state of this part of the game, do you plan in a middle/long term to change it, and if yes, how (=to what) ?

Toady wants to allow marriage and romance at some point, and if you can have romance with anyone, why not your followers?

In any event, as long as there's a Language Arc in the future, I can't imagine there isn't further rewrites of dialogue that will go with it.

About the language arc, I wonder if toady is still planning to procedurally generate actual text snippets/paragraphs in books for players to translate or if he has completely decided that that probably isn't "doable", it wouldn't surprise me if he still wanted to accomplish it, he isn't one to shy away from something so challenging.

[NW_Kohaku]

About the language arc, I wonder if toady is still planning to procedurally generate actual text snippets/paragraphs in books for players to translate or if he has completely decided that that probably isn't "doable", it wouldn't surprise me if he still wanted to accomplish it, he isn't one to shy away from something so challenging.

I'm not so sure it would even be that challenging... you know, unless you wanted it to make sense or something. 

Strictly speaking, if you just used some sort of chatbot program off the shelf that just generates conversational-style text, and then used the mostly already-existing code to just find and replace words in English with words in Dwarvish, you'd be done. 

Language arc mostly needs to do things like be able to conjugate verbs, (I.E. right now, "anger" is "ustos" in dwarvish, and "angered" is "ustos", and "will be angry" is "ustos", and "angrily" is "ustos"...) as well as set up rules for grammar, rather than just being "Mad Libs" pre-built sentences where you fill in the nouns. Then, you can get things like replacing the exact extent to which a peasant will emphasize the monster in question.  (Not every creature will be described as, "It has killed KILL_NUM in its thirst for destruction!", although even gradients can be created with simple fill-in-the-blanks for how its destructiveness is described.)

[WordsandChaos]

Well, generally it's when they kill someone (a sapient someone), isn't it ?

That's a fairly easy one to pull off, but there is also being a child of a historical figure, being some sort of explorer or adventurer, being a leader of any kind, or making some sort of notable object whether it is an artifact or just some masterwork crafts and becoming a legendary crafter.

About language, I think that it will part of a "Culture" arc, because there are a LOT of things to do (and very interesting one) to differenciate cultures. Look at what Ultima Ratio Regum has tried to do on this part.

 But about dialogue and conversation I wondered something.

Some RPG have very advanced (of course, scripted) talks between you and your PNJ companions (such as, for example most Obsidian games), while others have very minimal or no "psychological" interaction. How do you envision interaction between you and your companion(s) ? Are you happy with the current state of this part of the game, do you plan in a middle/long term to change it, and if yes, how (=to what) ?

Toady wants to allow marriage and romance at some point, and if you can have romance with anyone, why not your followers?

In any event, as long as there's a Language Arc in the future, I can't imagine there isn't further rewrites of dialogue that will go with it.

About the language arc, I wonder if toady is still planning to procedurally generate actual text snippets/paragraphs in books for players to translate or if he has completely decided that that probably isn't "doable", it wouldn't surprise me if he still wanted to accomplish it, he isn't one to shy away from something so challenging.

Theoretically not necessarily impossible, but it would be fiddly. Off the top of my head you'd divide general statements into categories - questions, answers, greetings, etc.  I suppose you'd have to get the program to recognise each separate part of a sentence, like 'Hi, how are you?' and then structure something around that. So:

'Hi' is the greeting - it's interchangeable with a number of other single word greeting, or possibly some more elaborate ones.
Then you've got the question type - in this case you can conceivably swap 'how' out with 'why', 'where', 'what', etc. Then 'are' could be one of a similar list,  - 'were', 'do', 'can', etc.  and then the subject - 'you', 'he', 'she', 'it', 'they', '[name]' etc.

Of course, that has the ability to generate some... interesting questions, and it's pretty simplistic. But it does get quite stodgy when you start going into all the sub-categories any one word can occupy depending on context.

[Libash_Thunderhead]

Will human residents drink water instead of booze?

[vjmdhzgr]

Will human residents drink water instead of booze?

If you go halfway across the world to a legendary dwarven tavern, would you drink water instead of booze?

[Dirst]

Will human residents drink water instead of booze?

If you go halfway across the world to a legendary dwarven tavern, would you drink water instead of booze?

Hey, if dwarves understood the motivations of humans, they'd probably get sieged less often.

[Sver]

Like if their "sit near fire, all sad and thirsty" tactic isn't enough.

[NW_Kohaku]

Historically, there was reason not to drink the water, what with people dumping their sewage into the same waters their wells were connected to and all.  The brewing process killed the germs, whether that was alcohol or tea or later coffee, since it involved getting water up to or at least near boiling.

Europeans drank either (weak) alcoholic drinks or (herbal) teas in the time period DF is constrained to. 

If you're talking about adding more drinks, then adding tea brewing makes more sense.

[Untrustedlife]

Historically, there was reason not to drink the water, what with people dumping their sewage into the same waters their wells were connected to and all.  The brewing process killed the germs, whether that was alcohol or tea or later coffee, since it involved getting water up to or at least near boiling.

Europeans drank either (weak) alcoholic drinks or (herbal) teas in the time period DF is constrained to. 

If you're talking about adding more drinks, then adding tea brewing makes more sense.

I would play with tea brewing if toady added that!

[DG]

*DG was unfocused after being unable to sample a suitably quixotic tea preference for too long*

[BenLubar]

I've been doing some math about possible tile sizes. It takes an average dwarf 9 ticks to walk 1 tile, which equates to 10 meters at WolframAlpha's 2.5 mph estimate. This means the map sizes in the "Create World" menu are Wales, Israel, Portugal, Germany, and Iran. A standard 4x4 embark is about 910 acres, and with 200 dwarves, that's about average (142 people per square mile) population density. Does 10x10 make more sense than 2x2 tile sizes?

[Bumber]

I've been doing some math about possible tile sizes. It takes an average dwarf 9 ticks to walk 1 tile, which equates to 10 meters at WolframAlpha's 2.5 mph estimate. This means the map sizes in the "Create World" menu are Wales, Israel, Portugal, Germany, and Iran. A standard 4x4 embark is about 910 acres, and with 200 dwarves, that's about average (142 people per square mile) population density. Does 10x10 make more sense than 2x2 tile sizes?

Dwarves have shorter legs than humans, so are probably slower. They probably aren't in much a hurry to begin with. It's not a good idea to work backwards from speed when we don't know how fast a dwarf should be.

Tiles have been loosely defined as 2 meters wide, at least until Toady decides to rework them. Creatures and items have been given definitive volumes in the raws, but that's useless when everything fits in one tile.

[King Mir]

*DG was unfocused after being unable to sample a suitably quixotic tea preference for too long*

If you're that unfocused, are you sure that was tea?

[DG]

It was inevitable.