Thanks to Max^TM, Shonai_Dweller, Putnam, Dirst, Random_Dragon, Knight Otu, Untrustedlife, ZM5, vjmdhzgr, Bumber, Sizik, NW_Kohaku, PTTG??, and everybody I missed for helping to answer questions! If your question doesn't appear below, it was probably addressed by one or more of these forum people.
What kinds of questions do you prefer receiving in the FotF thread?
1. When will (known bug or existing feature) be fixed/changed?
2. Is (behavior) intended?
3. What are your plans for (new feature)?
4. Please elaborate on (thing you've said you're working on right now).
I'd prefer to leave bugs and suggestions in their proper places, but clearing up confusion is good, especially with current dev logs where I might have phrased something poorly or missed something. Asking when something will happen is pointless in most cases. Asking about future plans is welcome, but the farther out something is, chances are I won't have as much to offer.
Seeing as there are hidden features that get added in some updates, why don't they also get hidden in legends?
Didn't take long for someone to just view legends and figure that out and tell everyone else about it.
When might ceremonies, celebration and competitions make it into fort mode and might we be able to specify the details of it much like artwork?
Mainly just want something else to do in fort mode that's a bit of roleplay.
Boats and multitile monsters seem to be the biggest challenge to implement yet z levels don't feel like they're one step down movement wise because of the change in stone layers, what might be the area of a square and the hight of a z level?
Well that might be a bit confusing, mainly just want to know how big monsters and boats might be and thats if they they span z levels.
Adventure mode comes closer to fort mode in terms of ability though will their time scales be brought closer and what might that mean for fort mode with the speed of jobs etc?
The map areas are 46x46 (at least I remember them being about that), would it be possible for the caverns to be inactive till they're breached or if it's not able to be done what would be the constraints?
How's the 64 bit coming if that has been worked on as of yet and how would you describe of what needs to be done in moving DF from 32 bit to 64 bit?
It gets to be too much trouble keeping a rolling list of what counts as hidden and what doesn't. We used to hide everything until it was encountered, but that made legends mode useless to people that just wanted to read the legends. I'm not sure what it'll end up looking like, but we'd rather just leave it open for now.
I'm not sure when we'll get further with the festivals.
For some napkin calculations, we use 2mx2mx3m tiles, but we almost certainly need to keep boats below 48 tiles or we won't have a chance with map load/offload operations, so very long boats won't be possible. Large critters suffer from similar problems, though we can mostly just have them sitting partially offmap without suffering as much as we would with half a boat (since boats have map tiles themselves and contain units and items).
There are no plans to bring the time scales of adv and fort mode closer.
There are several serious issues with deactivating the caverns when they aren't loaded, though we still have hope that we might get some sort of optimization along those lines at some point.
I haven't started the 64 bit test yet -- it'll mark the change from the random small features and bug fixes I've been doing into the artifact/myth/magic stuff. I'm not sure when that transition will occur. We'll surely need some more bug fixes after this release.
So, we'll be able to clamber up a mountain and make a site in the literal middle of nowhere, awesome, they're roughly the same as camps so we have an idea of the behavior there, can't travel through them as expected.
You mentioned "up to 3x3" so I assume we can choose the size of our sites on creation. Will it take into account things like the agility/innate abilities of our adventurers during the construction process? Oftentimes when using advfort to build I made use of my ability to just scale walls and jump gaps or even fly with certain races, or is that mostly abstracted during the composition/travel/rest screen cutaway?
Right now it just defaults to a 3x3 if it fits. All work is abstracted away on a travel-screen-style cutaway, aside from some workshop jobs that should take time but don't yet.
'Maximum Fantasy' setting will offer us a variety of procedurally generated races. Does that mean the Mythgen release will open up "Fortress Mode" to other types of site management modes (cities, pits, forest retreats, etc)? Or will the system arrange to always have an underground dwelling fortress building civ available? Or not and just let you play adventurer instead?
In the interest of getting a release up in a timely fashion, it'll probably just open up fort mode to races that can reasonably emulate it at first, and have a parameter to force at least one random race to be fortressy. The overall longlongterm goal is to open settlement building to everybody, of course, and we'll see what we can get away with/allow at this stage.
With the coming mythic changes, will there be ways in which myths can "decay"? That is, portals to different dimensions shut down forever, schools of magic forever lost, or once mythic and legendary things turning mundane when their "magic energy source" is cut off. (Such as a city on a floating island turning into a mere plateau, or the edge of a discworld turning into merely a chain of really stormy areas of sea on a globe with undiscovered continents.)
For that matter, you mentioned concepts like myths from different creatures/cultures that oppose, and some of which may or may not be true. If there are conflicting myths, will it be possible for us as players to affect whether they are true or not? (To dip into the more Elder Scrolls style mythic, where reality is partly subjective, belief or disbelief can grant or strip away divinity.) If I lead a crusade to wipe out believers of a contradictory myth, can I make that myth untrue, and take away its magical power? Can we, in play, make new myths, or shape existing ones in other ways?
Yeah, some of it happens naturally, just because in a game where things die and are tracked numerically, that tends to be how the world goes if you don't put in some effort at restoration. We have put some thought into this though -- even in the original Armok, we were hoping to have different courses available for the universe, whether it's fading out, or cyclic, or apocalyptic, or stuck in some perpetual gothic nightmare.
For elements where the default state is "permanent part of the world", it'll take some directed work. The notes we've drawn up from our various inspirations include some rules for change and some power-sourcing, so I'm hopeful we'll have some of this before the end of time. At the same time, it would be cool to have, say, a way that the world could become awakened to magic or connected to another reality as well. I'd like change to be possible, since it is good for stories, but what we'll actually accomplish is unknown.
I'm not personally inclined toward the "belief creates reality" model, but as a fantasy world simulator, DF should probably keep it in mind since it comes up often enough, and it would be funny to watch the ebb and flow of that in a computer simulation that doesn't have any escape hatch when things go horrible wrong. It has some overhead calculations, but those can probably be folded into whatever schism and other demographic calculations we end up needed when we get further with religions in general. But like most things, there's aren't particular plans. In terms of myth creation, we just have those megabeast superstitions in world gen right now. In the 0% fantasy setting, the myths will have to come from somewhere, though when we'll have new ones in play vs. ones that cultures start with is also hard to say. There's a lot to do.
You've mentioned a "fantasy rating" for worldgen. Do you think that will be in for the first release with myths, or is that for later?
It is almost assuredly going in on the first pass in some form. Whether it is broken up into several parameters or takes some other form remains to be seen.
So, the system for playing as a bard in this game is amazing, you can write music play instruments get people all happy, dance, do poems, play music, pretty much whatever you want however, people don't get bored when you play the same song five thousand times, and they don't throw money at you when you play really well, and if you are bad, they don't try to, for example throw you out of the tavern, do you plan to make it so people can become bored if you play the same song five thousand times (especially if the song is described as not even being very good in general) and get upset if you play really bad (or really crappy songs), or will people always be perpetually entertained by the same song (even if its a "badly written" song) and not throw you out of taverns for playing badly..?
There's lots to do! I'm not sure when we'll get a chance, but we'd like to do more with performances.
Will nations ever effect the terrain around them? Like say, a bunch of goblins dam off a river to make a lake, but years later the dam bursts, flooding the river valley?
It would be cool, but there are a lot of difficulties getting it to work correctly at the various map levels nicely etc., especially with the information it keeps stored in sites and armies, etc. Fluids are harder than most changes as well.
will it eventually be possible to start civilizations instead of merely being extensions of existing ones?
Like having a new group of dwarves come in from the edge of the map different from all others and which world generation knows nothing about? That plays against the simulation in a lot of ways, but would be kind of like the outsider adventurer. I haven't thought about it.
With visitors coming to the fortress will there be bandits and animal people that are armed that might wander into the map only to cross it or vist?
Might get bandits already but they only appear to belong to goblins.
Theres groups of bards so when might there be groups of scholars, mercenaries and adventures?
These groups or visitors that are residents living in our fort, being able to go offsite and coming back latter like scholars going elsewhere to meet others is this something to be done under Fortress Starting Scenarios when that deals with this type of stuff more indepth?
With the new myth system will this allow dragons and other megabeasts to be semi random?
When might more weather be added to regions like magical mist and fog that covers the whole region most of the time?
So why did being blind or having a lack of eyes only effect vision range and not being truly blind, though there appears to be sound and other senses?
When was the last time you had a good play through of fort mode if you can remember?
There are some bandit tavern-goers, but they aren't special in any way yet. There are also other kinds of travelers. But yeah, they don't do anything very interesting yet, and it'll be slowly improved. I have no idea when.
There are some raw-altering elements of the myth generator, but doing a good semi-random dragon had kind of been sitting there as an opportunity to get a lot of the randomization out into the raws in general... but I'm not ready to do that yet.
I have no idea when there will be more weather. The myth generator implied some additional chaos/primordial weather, so we might see that.
Ideally blindness would be more realistic, but that requires the coding of a lot of feedback and other changes.
I don't remember my last good fort mode game. I always have to quit to change something.
Hi Toady, I can see building a world directly from the raws, and going full Gray Goo with procedural generation... but I am interested in the settings in between. Do you envision the player being able to give any direction to the randomness, in essence increasing the scope of advanced world generation? Or will it start out as just an increasing fraction of the raw content being replaced by generated content?
I'm also curious from where the generated content comes. Is it a shuffled form of the raws?
The GDC myth-generator video shows that randomized races are in the pipeline. Will users be able to influence the random elements, and if so, by how much?
Yeah, that's the idea for a default game more or less, and any new myth parameters should just fit in with other world generation parameters (though some of them might be promoted to a Create New World menu level of importance). The vanilla game now is a mix of partially controllable random stuff plus the raws. It wasn't highlighted in the talk, but there were some magic tuning options, for instance, to let you turn parts of that off and on, and I expect it'll continue on that way, for randomized races and the other bits.
Yeah, it creates raw text and then processes it, just to keep me honest. The generation process is reasonably involved, especially for creatures, which is why it has been difficult to move it out into the raws. I'm still not sure how that's going to play out.
Will the player be able to read a creation story with 100% fantasy and one with 0% fantasy and be able to tell which is which?
People pointed out that the 100% fantasy setting currently removes raw creatures and replaces them with procedural ones, so you'd be able to tell. It's not difficult to make a 0% fantasy story incorporate random mythological races though -- it's more a matter of taste and readability than anything. So people with knowledge of the system's specific parameters might be able to pick them out, at least between the most extreme settings, but it shouldn't always be obvious, and it will hopefully be impossible to tell between a 0% fantasy and a default world (the only quirk there now is that a 0% fantasy world doesn't have fake dwarves and elves in their myths, which is also a matter of taste). Overall, the routines and events and all that are identical, though.
If animals ever get a rehaul to count individuals on a global scale migrationally etc. etc, would mundane animals that could survive the semi-cold and dark environment (grizzly bears for instance) inhabit sections of the caverns via non-megabeast guarded cave entrances? this may be additionally relevant to 0% fantastical worlds in which mundane flora may have room to breathe and expand onto the landscape and serve as a sanctuary from high aboveground settlement & hunting
We'd like to just have migrations at all first, and responses to depopulation that don't just involve old populations coming back exactly the same. I'm not sure how that'll play out though. Ideally they'd be able to react to non-standard environments, but that starts to create cpu overhead and so forth, so it's difficult.
Usually fantasy worlds are ranked by "magic prevalence"(which you have) and "really chaotic magic to extremely consistent controlled magic", with the extreme end of the chaos scale to the right being that magic can essentially be studied as a science and is perfectly consistent, the extreme left of the scale is where magic is extremely unpredictable and dangerous, do you plan to add a "How chaotic is magic" scale in addition to the magical prevalence scale? OR will we just have the prevalence scale.
I'm not sure which sorts of parameters I'm going to end up with, and I don't want to sidestep the conversation in the thread by just addressing the chaos slider issue. I think it started as a reduction of mystery to unpredictable chaos, which isn't what I mean when I say mystery. Some mysteries can even be solved. Handling "mystery" is a bit easier in adventure mode and there are plenty of ways to do it without going to a wild magic table. If I remember, which I might not since it was a while ago, the original "magic is mysterious" conversation was more related to doing something that wasn't "You get your Level 3 Fireball at Level 5". In those terms, the "mystery" bar is not as high.
As one example, imagine a magic that is like an invisible unspeaking companion, but not a full deity persona, and go from there (our nature forces or spirit magic might at times be this way) -- you can have analogs to a relationship and reputation with it, but since you can't talk to it and don't know what it wants or what it responds to, you can't get much useful feedback on your status -- at first, you might not even know it exists as such, just that the gesture you learned isn't 100% reliable. Successful magic-users come to understand the "personality" of the magic "companion" and can talk about it as they'd talk about a friend (or a dangerous ally, or just dangerous), and they can teach their students what they know, in terms of over-use and circumstances of use and hidden perils. With some effort, this would pass the "mystery" test for a time, especially with a single adventurer, and with a magic that gets restless or bored or attached, but not overly mad at you, that time could be a long while. If you come back with another adventurer, you'd know some of the ropes and it would be less mysterious, and possibly easier to exploit, but that's part of the game. On that score, the example is tweakable -- if everybody had a different magic "companion", then you'd have to learn the ropes all over again, and it would be much more difficult to play (since it would be harder for a teacher to help you), but harder to exploit. That's a matter of taste more than anything.
It is harder if you don't have the restricted perspective of a single character, but I'm not without hope. For a fort library, doing "dangerous" magical research isn't much different from digging an adamantine spire -- the spire is currently sort of unsatisfying and based (spatially) on a chance to breach, and an unsatisfying dangerous research system would rely on a simple chance for a catastrophe as you gain knowledge, though there's nothing wrong with putting your fortress on the altar of sacrifice if it changes magical knowledge in the world somehow, as an overall "playing the world" decision. It's true that it would be frustrating in a fort if you are trying to use an unreliable/dangerous magic to accomplish day to day tasks. I'm fine with certain magics simply not being safe or practical for fort mode, and the game would have to respect that as settlement-mode races are given magical powers. Giving the default dwarves magical powers probably qualifies as its own world gen parameter, though, since it does change the feel of the game. Fort mode artifact production merging with a magic system is another matter, and I'm not sure what forms that'll end up taking at this point.
What does the SUPERNATURAL tag do? The wiki claims that it gives a creature access to all secrets of a corresponding sphere, yet it doesn't seem to do that in 42.xx.
It is used as a tag in some of the randomized interactions. [SUPERNATURAL] creatures cannot be turned into werebeasts and vampires, and it is given to some of the generated creatures. I don't remember if it used to do other things.
will modders need to add their own creatures and such to the file itself, or will sentient, civilized races be automatically pulled from the raws into the myths in-game without having to create any additional files?
The creature files in the presentation were just a quick way to get the presentation going. I expect DF will use the existing raws for that portion. I'm not yet sure about the astronomical objects. The sun, moon and stars exist in the game already, with in-game effects (with adv mode lighting, werecreatures, etc.), and it'll be some work to support additions and subtractions -- which parts of the myth are respected will have to come in in sections to avoid a too-long release.
Why don't elves have fairs?
Taverns are two-story. Towers and keeps are multi-story. Will other buildings like houses or shops be multi-story in the future?
Is there a comprehensive list of divine materials in the game, but only some of them actually get generated? I've noticed that a few metals/fabrics are always the same combination of descriptor and sphere. Examples: sonorous lines/music, twisting metal/chaos.
For DF at this point, fairs are envisioned more as something like the
Champagne fair cycle, distinct from the holy periods and festivals. Elves don't have fairs because they don't value commerce.
I haven't done much with varying shapes of buildings. We'll get there at some point.
It builds the materials up randomly, but they don't have varied properties and many of the sphere-based options only have one or two words at this point, since we were just passing through at the time, so repeats are common and it does almost work effectively like a single list.
How do you plan on dealing with introducing a variety of magical abilities as the development progresses? I mean, I imagine you wouldn't be able to make one big fancy magic release with all the types of magic possible, as probably a lot of these things need to be programmed in and have a modicum of balancing, on the other hand, I can imagine that you might want to keep people on their toes when it comes to new features in magic. Is it going to be handled like hidden fun stuff? Or are you going to nicely put into the release notes 'transfiguration into aquatic animals is now possible'?
Hey toady how do you plan to handle the obvious AI implications of some spells, such as douse flames, summon water and change into plant, people have been arguing with each other over this stuff for the past few days nonstop, i'm sure you have thought of this, so can you elaborate as to how you will handle it?
It's very unlikely we're going to try for everything all at once, though as you know, we'll probably try for a little too much. We're going to try our best to chop it up. And yeah, there's probably some room for surprising people with an addition here and there, he he he.
For the change self into plant example from the talk, I was working from camouflage there, but yeah, the talk magic systems were thrown together very quickly and I'm not going to try to add a few hundred effects in a few days like I did there -- the talk systems didn't even have many of the parameters that were needed for them to make sense (such as duration/end condition for the plant effect).
AI-wise, I don't know that the current usage hints for interactions will survive the magic system generator, but for the random systems we have the advantage of only putting in effects we can understand and control, so I'm not particularly worried about the AI in general. Players will use them more creatively than NPC magic users -- that's true of everything in the game already. If you find that you lost an NPC you were chasing because it had turned itself into a strawberry plant near some other strawberry plants (because they have a routine that goes that far in the use of such an effect), then that's cool. If (when hunger etc. is implemented) you find yourself feeding a starving companion by turning yourself into a strawberry plant in a way an NPC wouldn't have thought of, then that's cool. If you end up not having a finger when you change back, then that would be cool too.
For complicated spells that go beyond one basic effect that the game can easily manage (since all the base effects are hard-coded and therefore can have tailored routines), we'd still have the advantage of the game having generated them (and therefore knowing what it was going for, providing some appropriate hints). Over in nightmare territory, we have player-authored spells that are then learned by NPCs -- it would be difficult or impossible for an AI to figure out what to do with those reliably, even if they have one basic effect (because the player might have given it screwy parameters). The player could include usage hints perhaps, but that would be exploitable by including deliberately incorrect hints (which is perhaps an acceptable cost of making the system that flexible, though even in single-player games some people don't like having to resist exploits).
So toady, will the artifact release be the release with the first iteration of the myth/magic system generator? And will you ever release the prototype so we can play with it?
We were vaguely leaning toward an artifact release before the first myth release which isn't about magic but more about artifact quests and thieves and gifts and w.g. production and so on, so that those things would be nicely in place in time for the magic artifacts to be properly enjoyed (and so the wait between releases is decreased). We'd like to split it up into pieces. But I'm not sure which ones. There are any number of ways to chop it.
What was with the [AMBUSHER] tag being removed from goblins?
Seems like there might be a bit too many of them...
What makes people become monster hunters and mercenaries?
A few questions more to do with "timeline".
What release might the mounts be more usable for combat?
Animal care really has been a useless skill so whats been stopping dwarfs from caring for animals?
Armor for animals how much armor could we cover of a dragon without immobilising it or would there be some special armor designs for animals that would be ideal to have it?
Goblins never had [AMBUSHER], unless there was a bug in some version. I checked the first version, 40d, and 40.01. It is for elves and kobolds.
World generation doesn't ask much of potential job candidates -- it can't give everybody personalities for memory/speed reasons, so people that occur first as mercenaries just sort of have that job. It just tries to have some people like that around. It can be made a bit more satisfying, but there's a lot going on in world generation so we don't have a lot of wiggle room.
I have no timeline answers for you.
1. Does this means perpetual jobs stick around even if the previous attempt failed (Current example: The collect web job on repeat will be removed if someone happens to destroy a random piece of web the job happened to have selected for collection)? I'd prefer the answer to be "yes" of course.
2. A follow on question in case of a "yes" is whether jobs then would sit around waiting for conditions to allow them to complete before allocation, rather than generating cancellation spam? (basically a sanity check).
3. A third follow on question in case of a "yes" to the second one is whether these conditionally suspended jobs would act as suspended jobs do currently, or whether they would act as unallocated jobs do currently, i.e. whether they would just be passed by until "activated" by conditions being met, or would sit at the top of the queue blocking orders below them until fulfilled?
There are perpetual work orders, but the jobs themselves aren't changed. Conditions will help with some cancellation spam, but there's still work that needs to be done to deal with work orders that come to be undoable.
With the myth generator, is it expected to ever be possible that the world mythology will involve the world being a disc floating in space (this has, I think, been asked before)? If so, my question is, if the myth level is sufficiently high that this is the reality, will it be possible to dig through the earth completely and arrive on the other side, involving falling through the void/flipping gravity to walk on the other side/something else interesting happening that would not happen in non-disc worlds?
I don't know what we're going to do with that sort of thing. Gravity flips seem pretty intractable with the graphics we have.
Right now, civs can live on past their expiration date in the form of refugees living in camps and abandoned sites. Will civs ever hunt down and kill enemy refugees? What about bandits?
Refugees need a lot of work in general, since they aren't understood as anything but an army.
Will a civ ever be "dead enough" that it will no longer be an option at embark, but still appear in Legends? Can a later group, which may or may not have any blood relation to the members of the dead civ, claim to "re-establish" that civ in the context of cutting ties with its real parent civ?
Yeah, adding the actual "dead" state to a civ is one of those world gen elements that didn't make it out into play yet. I'm not sure when the most likely time for it to come up is. Actually reawakening a dead civ has some associated complications, since the reawakener of the civ would be taking on everything in the object -- some of these variables should be attached to the name, but some of them shouldn't be, so we'd probably end up needing to do some work there.
Do the orders have something like always keep 100 booze on stock, or 30 in this stockpile, and 70 in that other?
There's nothing quite like that. The best you can do now is say, do 10 brew jobs if you have the necessary materials and also less than 100 booze on hand. It can't turn off a work order if you hit another condition (like having 100 booze on hand), though that sort of thing might come in on a future pass without too much difficulty. Hopefully we can steer it to a satisfying state over time. It doesn't interact with specific stockpiles.
This seems obvious looking back but I can't confirm it as an absolute rule: do bandits only mug citizens in an area with/around a well?
That's where they prefer to hang out, yeah, since they know there will be people going through there. The actual local mugging routine doesn't check for a well though, it just checks that their group is on a mission to torment the townsfolk. I don't know that they currently mug people in any sites without wells, but in that case I think maybe they just go to the site center.
Will all structures eventually appear in all settlements? Will we get temples in human dark fortresses and actual dungeons in goblin towns?
Right now there are some buildings that exist in legends that don't get maps, and we'd definitely like to fix that. There are also sites that become taken over by another group which should get versions of the new group's buildings, and we'd hope to do that, if it makes sense.
Regarding civilising, besides animal-men, why gorlaks and plump helmet men?
Are these 'test species' before you let everything intelligent civilise, or is there a "lore" reason? Like you see Gorlaks as far more likely to civilise than, say, trolls, gremlins or gnomes?
Yeah, gorlaks are supposed to be friendly and plump helmet men... are kind of animal people... in a very broad beyond animal way. Trolls aren't smart enough, gremlins are too mischievous and gnomes are too alcohol-crazed.
What are your thoughts on wholesale procedurally generating weapons and armour by culture? As an example, in one world your typical Dwarven civilisation’s armoury would have the equivalent of a cup-hilted Gladius, with double edged, straight, short wide blade, and they’d be more prone to wearing crested round top caps. In another they’d be forging cross-guarded single edged elongated kukri-style curved blades and their head -gear would be flat-topped crusader style full helms.
We're all for it, and toyed around with the generation framework with those horrible vault items. We mainly just need to balance the naming with ungainly adjectives vs. naming with language words. Both options are bad. We can probably get away with a culture-name adjective and better descriptions, at least while the objects have easy English counterparts. Moving away from objects that have English names would land us in instrument-name territory, but there's probably some compound word solution for most of those that doesn't involve pure gibberish so you can at least get the item's general purpose out of the name without having to go to descriptions for everything.
Can you give some insight into what circumstances cause non-sapient creatures to become historical figures in fortress mode?
...
I had a weasel become a historical figure after doing nothing except chill in a cage and get re-trained every time he reverted to wild. Eventually he died of old age. When I checked legends later, he was a historical figure.
We're also seeing some strange behavior in the Accelerated Modest Mod which suggests that a lot more critters are historical figures than would have been in 40.x.
I don't have much additional useful insight. It happens all over and it just raises one up when it feels like it needs one. It might be reputation/relationship stuff that percolated through at some point -- it's the sort of thing that would happen with the animal training, over some rep/rel function call without having to refer to training in particular. There certainly seem to be places now where the raising is premature, and I'll probably need to place more controls on it.
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) ?
Like most (all?) parts of the game, I'm not happy with it. People pointed out the romance/marriage stuff in the dev notes, and we'd generally like more banter and growing relationships and bonds (even if they aren't romantic). I don't think it'll be much different from how the conversations/relationships/reputations/etc. have slowly grown over time, but there'll be companion-specific improvements as we go. They have a very basic understanding now of why they are traveling with you (and can break the agreement in some cases), and I imagine some of the earlier improvements will be along those lines, and responding to your reputation-affecting actions they don't agree with perhaps. It's more difficult to give them their own distinct voices -- we already have a lot of data to work with that would help with characterization, but the amount of writing required and the way it all has to be chopped to pieces makes it a very difficult problem.
Any conditions? What kind of range is that 'any'? What is the craziest condition you implemented, or will be possible with your implementation?
When I wrote "respecting any conditions" in the log, I was referring to the conditions I have added for work orders -- just "how many <item> are on hand" (compared to a number using > < >= <= == !=) and "has <work order> been activated/completed", where <item> can be set to pretty much any string you can see in a job cancellation announcement.
With the upcoming myth generator it looks like random playable creatures can have all kinds of properties. Will dwarves ever start with things like immortality, lack of thirst, or lack of alcohol dependency; or are the creatures in the raws going to remain more static?
The raws are meant in part to offer some control for people that want things to be a certain way. At the same time, others will want some random elements as they play vanilla multiple times. We're all for leaving this up to parameters -- generally, as a default, I think dwarves will be as they are, but how magic works might be a bit up in the air with emphasis on artifacts and earth and metal and all that (default magic types might be for the raw spheres/etc.). There will probably be an option to let things get a bit more out of hand, so you could play a world that isn't fully resolved, say, so the reason why dwarves die (as prescribed by the raws) isn't decided yet. Ultimately, it would be cool if dwarves could then be cursed/blessed/whatevered with death during the course of play. It'll take a while to get to all that though.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1884359 times)