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[Putnam]

Lame. I don't need to do that [​i]at all[/i].

[Egan_BW]

haaaaaaax

[Random_Dragon]

_{Maximum heresy.}

[Untrustedlife]

Lame. I don't need to do that [​i]at all[/i].

You are a wizard, Putnam!

[NW_Kohaku]

You are putting words in my mouth and that isnt cool, I said I'm fine with the AI not being able to exploit magic like players can, I didn't ever say I'm fine with them not knowing how to use it, nor did I say i'm fine with them running around killing themselves with it, obviously its not a good thing if they don't know how to use it.

It's not putting words in your mouth, it's an examination of the likely logical consequences of what is being talked about.

I didn't make up the notion of a spell to turn yourself into a plant being put into the game, I simply listed off the many, many ways such a spell could do more harm than good in an AI that, almost definitionally, cannot make the kinds of judgements that would be required to make such an extremely situational spell do more good than harm. 

Getting excited to the point where you lose your critical thought as to the consequences is exactly what I'm chiding against.  You're expecting the moon, and then waving your hand and saying Toady will somehow find a way to deliver the impossible in record time.  (And you're so excited for what it does in Adventurer Mode, for that matter, you don't seem to stop to consider the consequences in Fortress Mode important.)

And yes, Toady will break the game with major updates.  He does it every time. Again, I'll just point back to the unstoppable werecritter epidemics that eradicated all civilizations the first update they were added in.  Or, you know, the giant flaming mess that was the new Military screen in 0.31.01.

Sure, it might be broken at first, yes toady needs to consider these things, but no, i'm not worried that it will destroy the game and the game will die because toady is too ambitious. Yes he needs to make them really smart if he wants it to not break the game, which is why he mentioned he probably will rewrite the whole usage hints system to prevent these kinds of idiotic things I am not denying that.

Yes you have a good point, but no I don't think toady will destroy his game.

If the argument is about "DESTROYING DWARF FORTRESS FOREVAR!!!1", then you're putting words in my mouth.   

However, again, if we're talking about needing to rewrite the AI to actually sanely handle these things, then history has proven that time spent gaming out how, exactly, these sorts of interactions are likely to be broken, and demonstrating how to pre-emptively fix those problems would be time decently well-spent, and it would also help keep people down on the ground with realistic expectations. 

Just looking at how vampires have worked has been a good example of Toady needing to have all the sundry consequences pointed out before he can actually clamp down all the major edge cases: Vampires first came in with thousands of dwarf skull necklaces, which was totally not obvious or anything, including somehow juggling hundreds in their hands because their necks were obviously full up on skulls. Vampires at first would brag to adventurers about their thousands of humanoid kills they got while spending exactly "5 years" in every job.  He only recently set up "vampire hunts" to stop the depopulation that could occur from a large vampire population in the sewers.

You construe things I say to mean things that I dont actually mean, when I say "partially sane" I meant that they won't kill themselves with it. I didnt mean, "oh yeah its totally okay if they kill themselves with it.", I want them to be smart enough to use it sanely, however I am totally fine with them not being able to exploit it like players can, you cannot write an AI that can exploit things the way a player can in almost any situation, there is a reason the AI in the game "civilization" cheats. ANd why the AI in df will probably need to have some sort of advantage.

You talk as though DF doesn't already "cheat". DF cheats when Toady has to give up on sieges being a challenge, and instead has to create 50-ton flying webbers backed up by fire-breathing T-rexes made of bronze just to keep players from steamrolling everything in the game with steel, training, and numbers that the AI can't hope to match, much less all the sundry automated traps players can throw at it.  He adds amphibiousness, heat immunity, the ability to just plain make traps and pressure plates not apply to creatures, adds NO_STUN, and all sorts of other tokens that exist explicitly to counter common, easy methods of beating the AI.  These are all cheats already, that all exist solely to prevent the trivialization of what few threats remain...  And even that doesn't work, so the HFS has to rely upon literally infinite numbers of giant flying syndrome-spitters to keep players from trivializing colonizing the HFS.

You trivialize letting DF cheat more than it already does, but what that does is ultimately make the game impossible to play without exploits. (At least, more than DF already does demand exploits...) Further, I have to ask how this could possibly be balanced when the game randomly will or won't have magic, or what magic is available is utterly random.  Maybe some magic exists as a "hard counter" to another otherwise powerful magic... but just doesn't exist in this one world, so that powerful magic is now unstoppable.  (To make an example using extant game mechanics, imagine if dwarves had the power to web, and no other webbing creature existed. Wouldn't that just slightly wreck game balance?)

You also are trivializing what it takes to make the AI not kill itself with its new powers... because, once again, DF has a really bad track record of introducing new AI routines that don't involve repeatedly killing anyone who has them until at least a few months of updates.  (Again, let's see a show of hands of how many people lost dwarves to climbing a tree and then starving!) You're simply stating Toady can do it without putting any real effort into considering what it takes to actually make such things happen.

The AI rewrites are easily the most difficult thing to balance in any game, and Toady has a tendency to leave things with see-sawing game balance pretty wildly before he tunes things in quite right. Things like trying to find the set of circumstances where turning yourself into a plant wouldn't be rendering yourself defenseless but a clever camouflage are so incredibly nuanced that they basically do not exist in computer games that have people dedicated solely to improving the AI; Again, that's why I had that side-rant about why most computer games just rely upon absolute invisibility instead of worry about sight cones, since it's simply easier to handle.

This isn't hyperbole. This isn't pessimism. This is pattern recognition.  The AI for the new magic will be broken.  It's just a question of how absurdly self-destructive it will be.

What I'm saying is that even "merely" asking for the AI not to kill itself with the new magic powers is still asking too much. The best we can even hope to do is find the most unavoidably self-destructive things and shout to Toady that he remember to forestall those cases and edge cases.

This is an issue I never thought about, currently the only AI in the game that actually eats is the dwarf mode AI. Creatures in adventure mode dont actually eat (except the player). But letting them always know their powers does seem reasonable enough and is probably the only way to do it without a massive amount of work.

Again, "thinking about it" is what I'm trying to push...

Anyway, creatures in Fortress Mode DO eat, and I'm more worried about Fortress Mode because the interface for controlling Fortress Mode is necessarily going to be more indirect, and therefore difficult to keep sane. 

Dwarves don't even meet their own needs, even if they will complain about not meeting their own needs right now.  (That is, dwarves that complain about a lack of socialization will still go to the library to read instead of the tavern to socialize.  Dwarves will want to get married when they are asexual or have "commitment issues" that mean they refuse to marry. Dwarves will want to claim items that are in your fortress, but have no AI routine to actually just grab them.) Just because dwarves "know" what is bad for their magic, doesn't mean they will actually avoid what is bad for them, nor will there necessarily be anything you could do to help them avoid those actions.  Meat, obviously, would be easy to avoid with fortress-wide bans if it were your primary race, although if you had multi-cultural forts, then things become more and more complex. Also, if the taboo is not food, but no dancing on Tuesdays, what are you going to do, flood the tavern to interrupt tavern-goers every Tuesday? Some players can handle that, but most will need a real interface overhaul to even keep playing the game.

It's honestly these interface overhauls I'd find more interesting than anything. Maybe not as flashy as gaining a new magic spell, but having some real, actual control to direct behaviors with dwarves could yield some extremely useful behaviors for modders or those who are simply inclined towards more elaborately micromanaged dwarven behaviors... although I'll need to put that in the next post.

[Max™]

Lame. I don't need to do that [​i]at all[/i].

Nonbreaking [​b]spaces[/b] ftw!

Incidentally regarding the "climb up a tree and starve to death" thing, that's a specific dwarf mode thing, I've never seen adventure mode npcs climb a tree unless they were chasing me or trying to get away from something like fires I set.

[NW_Kohaku]

This actually brings up an old response I think warrants revisitation...

Spoiler: Toady quotes, including a long, old one (click to show/hide)

Toady, where do you see the ability of players to affect AI behavior?  Will we see something that goes more towards having the ability to directly script dwarven AI to use certain items or take certain actions using some logic operations or a rudimentary scripting ability?  Or do you see this as being more a matter of dwarves having to somehow learn how and when to properly perform actions or use items from the properties they have in the raws alone?  While I'm obviously interested in the effects this can have, I'm also interested in what sort of game design philosophy you have about what level of control you want players to be exerting over their dwarves.

At the extreme end of the potion/material discussion, out beyond what maybe anybody was asking for, I'm absolutely against having to master some sort of scripting language just to get dwarves to poison their weapons.  At the same time, it'll be difficult to get dwarves to use certain exotic syndrome-causing materials in a reasonable way that satisfies a player, especially one using potion mods.  Maybe it'll end up being usage hints in the raws and classifications in-play for use in the military etc. with some sensible defaults.  Ideally they'd be able to handle it like food, water and alcohol (to the extent those aren't broken), and perhaps those would be brought into the same system.  For more exotic actions and random weirdness, maybe there are cases in the mods where you'd really want to write some kind of script down, especially for a non-dwarven mod race that does something or other, but that level of support is pretty hard to prioritize when I don't really need or want it for dwarves.

On the other hand, writing from the perspective that every command the player gives will be credited to fortress position holders, if an appropriate official were to order that a liquid, with usage hints/whatever in the raws, will now be used for something entirely outside those bounds (like coating a weapon with syrup), that action might be anything from brilliant to quirky to wasteful to tyrannical to suicidal, depending on the situation.  The dwarves aren't currently capable of judging their officials and it's a very difficult problem most of the time.  If a randomly-generated creature has a weakness to syrup, maybe coating the weapons with syrup is simply a practical strategy, and in that case syrup wouldn't have the "weapon coating" usage hint in the raws.  That coating action is entirely up to player ingenuity, much like ordering the creation of a complicated machine, and it's a reasonable thing to allow.

Manually ordering a dwarf to perform a specific series of actions that can't be presaged in the raws/code might be the only way to save your fort and might be a reasonably orderable action made by some official, but that kind of power can degrade the atmosphere we want to build.  It's going to depend on the specific cases, but for the sake of guiding discussion on a wide range of future topics, I think it's best that the player feels that a dwarf's autonomy is being respected.  The thing that makes dwarf mode not strictly a hands-off simulation is that you are allowed to compromise dwarves' autonomy if they hold fortress positions, to the extent that you are selecting actions that fall within their position's purview.  If an order typically makes it feel like the dwarves are being controlled like marionettes, forced to do things against their will, etc., the order should probably be altered or removed.  Presently, there are a ton of things that dwarves don't care about that they should care about, but this is the overall idea.

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).

Toady, how will players be expected to control dwarves with procedural magic, or procedurally created whatevers with magical powers that have dangerous effects?

Will their uses always be automated through usage hints, even if, say, "fading", to use the GDC example can mean that creatures will eventually kill themselves if players have no means of throttling their use outside extreme or indirect methods like forcing dwarves apart from enemies or whatever situation triggers use of magic?  Or will there be ways to script conditions under which your charges can use magic or are told to hold their fire?

Likewise, is there going to be automated "needs"-style attempt to discharge negative consequences of magic like "fading" in the same way that a dwarf automatically goes to feed themselves when huger gets too high? Is this going to be some zone like a hospital or tavern, or would it be something you handle through goods production, or some sort of social behavior you need to script through some new interface?

Likewise likewise, magic in the GDC example uses "fuel" items to power magic - is this something you expect to be some sort of extension of the military uniforms to have fortress members equip "magic ammo", even if it means all civilians have to wear military uniforms? (Something of an exploit, but one players use on anyone not a miner or woodcutter, regardless...) Is this, alternately, something that you see occupying a different interface, like a unified magic-instruction interface?

Finally, if we're talking about libraries being places of magic research that blow up your fortress, will that mean there are methods of controlling what research actually takes place?  To use the HFS example, one can always not dig, and one can have a good sense of how far you are digging to get a sense of what risks you are taking. Procedural tech trees, meanwhile, cannot so easily physically convey the concept of that danger, and is there even a way to stop such fortress-destroying research without outright shutting the library down or resorting to de facto demanding savescumming from players to prevent arbitrary fortress death?

(Also, for the record, I'd rather have player-editable usage hints, since that, at least, means the playerbase has the power to fix some exploits and problems, even if it also means the playerbase can create them, as well.  Button's Modest Mod in particular comes to mind.)

Spoiler: squicky consequences of strawberry plants (click to show/hide)

Also, this is a massive digression, but why would a strawberry be the "finger" of a strawberry plant?

It's the baby of a strawberry plant.

Eggs are chicken periods, and fruits are plant fetuses. 

The plants we, as humans, prefer for harvest are all hermaphroditic even though plants can be any of male, female, or hermaphrodite (depending upon species) because we prefer to have every single plant bear fruit.  It's simple math of productive yield - male plants that produce no fruit are useless, and female plants are only useful when you keep male or hermaphrodites nearby.

If you want to go with some sort of "logic" that eating strawberries off a person-turned-plant would require removal of some part of the creature, you'd be talking the pregnancy or genitalias of the transformed creature, because that's exactly what fruits and flowers are.

[Bumber]

Spoiler: squicky consequences of strawberry plants (click to show/hide)

Also, this is a massive digression, but why would a strawberry be the "finger" of a strawberry plant?

It's the baby of a strawberry plant.

Eggs are chicken periods, and fruits are plant fetuses. 

The plants we, as humans, prefer for harvest are all hermaphroditic even though plants can be any of male, female, or hermaphrodite (depending upon species) because we prefer to have every single plant bear fruit.  It's simple math of productive yield - male plants that produce no fruit are useless, and female plants are only useful when you keep male or hermaphrodites nearby.

If you want to go with some sort of "logic" that eating strawberries off a person-turned-plant would require removal of some part of the creature, you'd be talking the pregnancy or genitalias of the transformed creature, because that's exactly what fruits and flowers are.

I was thinking the same thing.

The dwarf picks a strawberry.
The strawberry plant's geldables are torn away.

[Random_Dragon]

"Oh hey, you got me a bouquet of plant dicks! How romantic!"

[PatrikLundell]

Spoiler: squicky consequences of strawberry plants (click to show/hide)

Also, this is a massive digression, but why would a strawberry be the "finger" of a strawberry plant?

It's the baby of a strawberry plant.

Eggs are chicken periods, and fruits are plant fetuses. 

The plants we, as humans, prefer for harvest are all hermaphroditic even though plants can be any of male, female, or hermaphrodite (depending upon species) because we prefer to have every single plant bear fruit.  It's simple math of productive yield - male plants that produce no fruit are useless, and female plants are only useful when you keep male or hermaphrodites nearby.

If you want to go with some sort of "logic" that eating strawberries off a person-turned-plant would require removal of some part of the creature, you'd be talking the pregnancy or genitalias of the transformed creature, because that's exactly what fruits and flowers are.

I was thinking the same thing.

The dwarf picks a strawberry.
The strawberry plant's geldables are torn away.

Firstly, the argument presumes transformation takes place with corresponding parts to corresponding parts (where is a strawberry plant's brain located?), rather than some vague transformation of the whole.
Secondly, while flowers sort of correspond to genitalia, they're single use, and many plants (including strawberries) produce multiple reproduction units, so a more reasonable correspondence would be temporary sterility (because the next egg/current set of sperms is lost). One might consider miscarriage as well, but fruits are evolved to be eaten as a means of spreading the seeds (which often survive the passage through the digestive tract and then gets planted together with a lot of nutrients), while children are not. I doubt seeds of this magical strawberry would be viable when "planted", though...

Thus, I'd say the loss of a finger (or toe, or ear) would be a suitable representation of loss of "essence", as temporary sterility means nothing in game play terms (even less than fatigue).

[NW_Kohaku]

"Oh hey, you got me a bouquet of plant dicks! How romantic!"

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Dicks and vag, capable of - and intentionally bred to - self-fertilize.  They're all hermaphrodites, lest you forget.  Enjoy your bouquet of freaky incestual plant orgy!

Firstly, the argument presumes transformation takes place with corresponding parts to corresponding parts (where is a strawberry plant's brain located?), rather than some vague transformation of the whole.
Secondly, while flowers sort of correspond to genitalia, they're single use, and many plants (including strawberries) produce multiple reproduction units, so a more reasonable correspondence would be temporary sterility (because the next egg/current set of sperms is lost). One might consider miscarriage as well, but fruits are evolved to be eaten as a means of spreading the seeds (which often survive the passage through the digestive tract and then gets planted together with a lot of nutrients), while children are not. I doubt seeds of this magical strawberry would be viable when "planted", though...

Thus, I'd say the loss of a finger (or toe, or ear) would be a suitable representation of loss of "essence", as temporary sterility means nothing in game play terms (even less than fatigue).

A "suitable representation" how?

Even by your own argument it's a completely unsuitable choice, since fruits are meant to come off and be eaten, and are easily replaced. These are traits that fingers do not share. 

Even if you want to avoid the obvious implications of the reproductive system, then hair at least shares the quality of growing back.

Or more simply put, there's a reason why were creatures have automatic regeneration upon transformation in this game.  It obviates the need to worry about what sort of damage should be represented when a were-creature loses a tail then transforms into a tail-less humanoid.

[Dirst]

The change in biomass during transformation makes the whole thing silly anyway.  It's magic.

That said, a relatively simple way to "pay for" damage is blood loss.  Not sure exactly how that is handled in the current DF health system though... any symptoms other than "pale" then "dead"?

[Random_Dragon]

I love the fact that the argument over potential details for the magic system is so strong that a mention of plant genitals only derails it for maybe a couple posts. o3o

The change in biomass during transformation makes the whole thing silly anyway.  It's magic.

It is interesting when a magical system has a specific logic to it. It doesn't have to, and indeed shouldn't, correspond to the real-world logic. But still. XP

[PatrikLundell]

A suitable representation of "essence loss". A loss of a finger probably doesn't have any game play effect, but losing too many on one hand at least should have an effect. If hair had any use, I could easily accept all or parts of it falling out (or growing white/grey/purple...). If we're dealing with replaceable stuff that provides a game play penalty, blood loss might have done it, but it won't cut it with the current implementation. If we're dealing with what's currently available, a finger "mangled beyond recognition" might do it. Permanent destruction of the reproductive system is too harsh on one end, as most players probably don't want to give that up, even it it actually isn't used, and too lenient on the other end (once the payment for the license has been made, any subsequent magic abuse is free).

And yes, auto repair on transformation makes things easy. However:
"Visit the Deepstubborn regenerative clinic, now using the acclaimed 'Strawberry' regenerative technique. No ailment too severe to treat*

*Death not included. Nor are...".
Crutch walking would be a useless skill, unless the magic belongs to some advanced tier requiring a lot of research to master.

[fearlesslittletoaster]

Toady, would having unpredictable and dangerous magic be discovered in fortress mode really be a bad thing? Setting up a library, and presumably letting people into it who ponder magical things, would be a player choice. If the fact that things could go horribly horribly wrong was known then it would just be another thing that could be really... !!FUN!!

I realize this could also be rather frustrating in some ways, but from my personal perspective I find the idea of engineering around the problem really entertaining. I would be tickled pink if I got to design a series of "containment protocols" and I would love to have a fortress end something like,

"Urist ran through the hallway, away from the screams of the militia dying to buy him a handfull of breaths, a few hundred more heartbeats. Thank Armok that was all it would take. He passed the last of the fine bronze doors to the living quarters, saw the plain granite door to the room. They'd laughed and toasted to the idea when it was first brought up, but the scholars had been insistent that a plan be put in place. Now he knew the learned ones had been wiser than anyone gave them credit for, though not wise enough to avoid whatever mistake had brought the THINGS through. The door opened at the push of a finger, swinging on perfectly balanced hinges. The lever stood alone on the rough stone floor, and Urist dove for it with the desperate eagerness usually reserved for booze and better socks. 

The lever moved easily enough. He heard the shattering crash as the very heart of the mountain descending to block the exits, even over the screams that were right outside now. The screaming went on a while, maybe minutes or maybe forever, and then for a brief moment silence reigned. Then the door shuddered with the first blow, but the warmness creeping up the walls from a floor now almost too hot to touch meant no matter what happened the THINGS would die. Urist clenched his fists and waited, knowing he could get one swing in before they were one him. For all the good it would do, but a dwarf didn't die without a fight. The door shook and began to crack and he had a few moments to wonder if the blood of the stones or the THINGS would get him first. But really it didn't matter. They wouldn't get out into the world and that was all that counted."