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[NCommander]

Is their plans for artifact armor that affects (be it positively or adversely) the attributes of the user, such as strength, speed and other things.

I don't know if Toady's ever answered this directly, but the answer is doubtlessly yes.

Toady's occassionally said magic items should be more than just a simple "D&D +2 broadsword" so, there's actually a chance that it's 'No'. At least not directly. 'Turns you into a vampire thereby raising your stats', perhaps?

Actually the help screens actually had a action on magic items and identifying them in the GUI which has been there since the beginning I think. I don't think magic items exist beyond the help screen though Giving items syndromes is already semi-doable in the code, and DFHack can actually make those objects so possibly ...

Looking at Dwarf Mode right now, what systems in your mind are currently "mostly placeholder" vs. more or less complete?

[Toady One]

Thanks to Miuramir, PatrikLundell, Button, Mr S, Shonai_Dweller, vjmdhzgr, Ekaton, MrWiggles, FantasticDorf, thvaz and anybody I missed for helping to answer questions!

Have you considered reading more Discworld books?

I had a few more from when I read the pyramids one (Guards something I think and whatever came next), but that was ~a decade ago and I didn't read them.  Then I didn't circle back around and don't really plan on it.  It's hard to find time.

Do you think that, similar to graphical tilesets, there will be a list/file which will allow assignment of specific character codes to units by profession and/or the rest of the item set?

I'm not sure what we'll end up doing.  d_init has picked up some of the newer tiles, but I don't know what to do with everything else, or how the needs of people have changed with the various mods that are out there now.

Apologies if I've asked this before, but is there a chance of you ever devoting a release to polishing off the raws? I appreciate the practicality of the case-by-case strategy you use for adding tags, but it does tend to result in some frustratingly rigid parameters.

I'm not sure what you mean.

Now that we have fully customisable job instructions (btw thanks this is really great) do you have any plans to look at the various stockpile options and break downs? Such as what comes under each category, the filter options and even a search option?

I just have the list of suggestions people have made, rather than particular plans myself for this sort of thing.  I'm not sure when I'll get there.

Either through Adventure or Fortress Mode, will there ever be some way to convert part of an Evil or Good biome to neutral (neither)? If nothing else, will there be some way to stop Evil Rain or Evil Clouds, such as through prayers to a deity, through magic, or some other mystical effect or reaction?

Similarly:
Will there eventually be a way for the actions of an Adventurer to create a new Evil or Good area?

My understanding is that evil/good biomes are going to be reworked as part of the myth/magic stuff. However, the underlying question of whether sphere influences can be induced/manipulated/adjusted by the player is a good one (as well as the follow on question of whether this will happen* in the near or the far future, if the answer is yes).

Yeah, that's the hope we've put up now with the new magic notes -- that these things would become changeable parts of the world, at least a lot of the time.

1. Will there be artifacts with "souls", like a talking sword or maybe a soul jar that an important person could store their own soul in. I think you've addressed this topic before and said you wanted to implement it sooner or later, but will it appear in the "artifact update"?

2. Will your dwarves be able to create artifacts that are actual living(or non-living) units? Like a golem of some kind.

3. Will there be multi-part artifacts? Say something really powerful like a door to the demon/god realm would need both the door itself and the keystone needed to power it that is made separately.

4. I think you've said something about artifacts getting different effects depending of what caused their making (fey, inspiration by gods, possession etc.). What are the current plans regarding the differences?

1. We're hoping to get to intelligent artifacts with a magic release, rather a pre-magic artifact release.  The magic notes are broad though, and it is unclear what will be in the first pass.

2. That's also up in the new notes.  Hopefully we'll see some of it.

3. We've had artifact sets in the dev notes for a long time, but I'm not sure when we'll see it.

4. The working theory for a while has been to link effect types to sources through spheres or other such mechanisms.  That's still the plan as it stands.  We'll see what happens when we get to magic, since we might pivot to other/additional systems as the need arises.

Have games, recipes etc. been put off completely from this release arc? If yes, are they planned for the artifact release? Or boats? Or starting scenarios?

are recipes and the cooking overhaul still on the table (so to speak) for the near future?

Yeah, I've put them off and have no idea where their new home is so far.

Why are some large predators like the Dingo and Wolf not hunting or war trainable, while other large predators like the Leopard and Lion are hunting / war trainable? (Also applies to Giant versions.) Even more confusing: Why is the Black Bear not hunting / war trainable when both Grizzly and Polar Bears are?

I don't even know.  Combination of copied raws, dubious specific thoughts, and history tidbits?  They should probably all just be turned on or something.

Which features are you most looking forward to working on post-myth arc? Or does it vary from day to day?

Yeah, it's hard to say.  Boats sound fun, but all of the embark scenario stuff is post-myth as well, and a lot of that will be really interesting.

With the introduction of alcohol inebriation, taverns, and temples, I feel as if the effects of the stress system have become quite rare. It's almost as if one needs to intentionally and actively stress out the dwarves to actually see the effects of it nowadays. It's not like we need to go back to the old days where a tantruming dwarf can send a fort into ruin, but is the current state of almost-permanent euphoria among your dwarves intended for now?

Inebriation is certainly broken with the dampening effects on other emotions, since it essentially turns off part of the game for a well-supplied fortress.

just what do PATTERN_FLIER and UNDER_SWM do?

PATTERN_FLIER controlled the bat riders with paralyze-dart blowguns that used to fly through the 2D chasm.  It isn't for anything now.
UNDER_SWIM controls whether or not something displays as blue when it is at the surface of the water in a 7/7 square.  So a human would still show in its normal colors, but a fish displays as underwater.  It's an old tag, so I have no idea if it still does that correctly.

Ocean Titans don't seem to get generated anymore. Can we expect to see them terrorizing the seas when boats are introduced? We currently have Sea Monsters but they're limited to evil regions and don't have that randomly generated charm.

I'm not sure what to expect out of boats overall.  I can't commit to one thing over another.  Monsters attacking boats would be more fun if the monsters were larger...  but we'll take what we can get.

Do you plan to add more noble positions in Fortress mode--especially ones with special requirements (like offices)--or to strengthen the requirements for the noble positions that exist (like bookkeepers consuming writing material)?  If so, is that a near-term milestone or a long-term one?

I'm not sure what's going to happen since the embark scenarios and the corresponding framework rewrite is going to drop a bomb in the entity position system.  I'll be more concerned with getting new responsibilities and diplomacy-style events sorted out then, and whether requirements survive in their current form is up in the air.

This might not be for this release, but is indeed a question for the future of the fortress. How much independence or free will for the dwarves or any being that composes the population of your fortress you intent in the end? I mean, eventually we'll end up with "civilian zones/areas" where the dwellers can do whatever they want?

To further what I mean, I'm imaging zones where they can make up their own rooms/houses, workshops, markets, churches, taverns and so on at their own wits within the same site of your fortress.

The player is meant to be the "official will" of the fortress.  That implies that dwarves should have a lot of freedom if the fort government isn't all-encompassing.  At the same time, it's hard for them to manage their resources sensibly and could be frustrating.  We might start seeing more of this with some of the embark scenarios once the framework is in place -- perhaps the structure of laws and customs will stop the player from controlling certain aspect of dwarven life directly when they are in a given scenario.  Writing the AI will be a challenge, but we're all for messing around with it in pieces.

At GDC it was said that you can set the myth level, that limit the stuff that can happen on the world, humans as some example have an ultra low mythic level and so they can happen even with a ultra low myth level.
My question is, does setting your world mythic level to a high value, force the world generation to generate high mythic level creatures/stuff, or the world will generate itself logically as it always do and if it the generator "feels" a higher mythic level thing is needed it will put this thing without rejecting the world?

The way it worked in the presentation, everything had a minimum and maximum range, and it used everything that fit the range, whether it was at the low end or the high end.  In the game, it might not be able to fit everything, and it would probably just exclude things at random.  It would be bad if a high-rating world had only mundane things in it, but that would be unlikely or impossible based on the number of raw objects it wants.

As armor stripping is being added, might that also mean weapon using NPCs would be capable of wrestling attacks? Currently this is not so if NPC is in possession of a weapon. Default is attack with weapon, punch or kick.

They just use a free grasp when they specifically want to do this kind of wrestling.  They don't know how to handle it if they are holding a weapon and a shield, say.  I haven't expanded their thinking more generally.

What are the requirements for an opponent to remove helmets? Does the creature in question need to be intelligent, or can large predators remove helmets as well?

I guess people know better than I do how it actually worked.  It was supposed to be a free grasp + intelligent, but I've seen non-intelligent creature doing lots of wrestling through the years.

In real life, losing a limb is very painful. In Dwarf Fortress, losing a limb isn't painful at all. Is that going to change?

I'm open to improving it.

Any ideas on what went wrong with monster hunters? Don't think anyone's spotted one through the whole release period.

I haven't gotten a chance to look into it yet.  Are they even in legends anymore?

As part of adding armor item damage, are there any plans to allow dwarves or other crafts-persons the ability to repair damaged armor? Or will players be forced to either obtain or make new armor and either sell or smelt badly damaged armor?

with the new system of weapon and armour damage, do you intend to implement a way or repairing damage? if repairing is implemented, will it require more resources (some more bronze to repair a damaged bronze item etc). does (should?) the damage apply to artifacts? i like the idea of repairing any of my military's named items, even if they aren't artifacts.

We'd like to let them fix the items, but we didn't get to that and I'm not sure what's going to happen.  It might be that materials will be required for repair if you want the item to not degrade in some way, but I'm not sure what it should depend on or how far it should go.  Material use might be too much, especially for items that take just one resource item to make in the first place.  Artifacts aren't currently damage-able, but that might change once artifacts become more numerous and some are more important/magical than others.

Will armour and weapons be able to be repaired infinitely or could there be a diminishing effect? Could we, in the future, see 'status' effects, like rust on metal? Like if you leave a sword or a helmet in a pond, it rusts.
Could we eventually see books burn to ash? As much as the thought makes me uncomfortable, I'm imagining a scenario where a great store of information is lost from the world when a fortress library is destroyed by a dragon/forgotten beast/angry dwarf with a torch.

Rust was in the old dev notes, and the more stuff like that the better, but it's hard to get to it.

Will it be possible for modders to introduce some 'hardcoded' elements into mythgen? Like, for example, a God of War named Mars, or a God of Music named Eru Iluvatar? How much do you think it'll be possible to shape mythgen over time?

I've resisted hardcoded historical figures (of which deities are a subclass) up to this point, but when we build up the editors from the dev page, we're certainly going to allow you to use some editor elements in your world and generate the rest.  Myths and historical figures are specifically mentioned on the dev page, so this would include the ability to add a particular deity to an otherwise random universe.  There are difficulties that come up along the stitch points about when it should grab something hardcoded and so forth, but the myth generator in particular was written with that in mind.

[Toady One]

Wonder if Toady has ever thought about having cannons at least in naval warfare. If not then I suppose the plan is having them filled with catapults and ballistas? Also, does the plan of adding boats includes making them in fort mode/being captain in adventurer mode? Will boats mean we could have river docks on fortress mode to trade greater quantities of merchandise?

Will you be implementing some sort of port that can be built in fortress mode? That would make ocean embark more interesting and also being able to build ships/wagons to send to trade with other cities?

I don't have a hard line on ship cannons really.  I'm not sure what we'll end up with.  That would lead to cannons on land, though, and that starts to move away from where I want vanilla to be.  It's hard to say what the first boat release would have, but we're certainly aiming for adventure mode captains.  I think it would be cool to have ships coming in vaguely like the wagons do, yeah, and we were hoping to get to it.  Underground lakes too, once we do the deep dwarf trade stuff -- that might be more dwarfy than a cliff-less ocean fort or one on a navigable river, but we'd try to support as many embarks as we can (and it should happen naturally if boats are on those waters).  Building boats at the fortress is a bit more complex and is the probably the sort of thing that would fall victim to a time shortage on the first pass, but we'll see how it all blends in with moving fortress pieces and all that.

Do you envision ships on the ocean only for the first release or so, or is it important to make the system generalized so that ships, riverboats and moving fort walls all come out at once?

It's important for the system to be generalized from the beginning, however, that doesn't mean I'll get to everything!  Riverboats would require some work on making rivers more navigable, and moving fort walls would require an associated interface and possibly new items.  So even if the moving map system is general, we still might have to pick and choose based on the timing.

With the political system will we be able to play as judges or lawyers or have a trial in adv mode? I think that this is much needed with the thief arc - if you are caught you should stand a trial according to the laws of the civ you stole something in. Simply being sentenced seems not enough. I really want to be sent to a penal colony in the game and organize a rebellion there.

I'm not sure what order things will come in after the law framework is in place, but as usual we are all for simulating as much as we can and generalizing the frameworks so that the adventure can play as many roles as possible.  You can get a long way with sentence-only, but of course it's more fun to have more.  Though, from experience on other projects, the information tracking required to get a general evidence system up is difficult.  Fortunately, we're part of the way there with rumors and so forth, but it isn't nearly enough to pass muster in a trial setting.

will we see swords breaking into two separate pieces (blade/hilt etc), or gauntlets lose a finger, or chain mail lose some links? lots of fantasy about reforging broken swords, after all. items losing pieces would likely cause item bloat in many cases, and a pretty major rework even if it didnt bloat (so not any time soon i guess).

We've been hoping to have item components for a long while, but it hasn't happened yet.  Yeah, it's an important part of a lot of stories, enough so that it would be worth it to figure out the various issues.  As long as it isn't overzealous about blowing items into pieces all the time, the bloat shouldn't be an issue.  It would be kind of annoying to have an indoor battlefield littered with all sorts of shards and shreds to clean up beyond what we already have.

any plan to reorganize stragglers job interfaces (like jewlery workshopt) to the new system?

It's a different interface from the others, so it has been slow to move it over.  I'm not sure when it'll happen.

Wonder if the manager will get any upgrades for things beyond workshop orders. Like mine x amount of coal or fell x amount of sand pear trees.

New manager system is very usefull feature, but is it any plans to add [d]etails feature for bags/barrel related jobs, since now "mill 10 rye flour" or "brew 10 River Spirits" and all other jobs (as I see with more than 1 reagent) cannot be automated without annoying tricks. Or at least is it any plans to add specific products to manager check list? Because "brew alcohol here till it's less than 10 River Spirits" will make life easy enough

Will there be some more fixes/enhancements regarding the workshop details menu? Or is the actual status considered as finished? I am especially referring to clay workshops and non-hardcoded reactions/reactions for muscial instruments for other workshops like the mason.

I made this thread (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=158090.0) for more detailled information, what I mean. Not sure, if I shall make an entry at the mantis bug tracker for this or whether those are features for the suggestion forum.

I don't have particular plans, but am open to continuing to add this sort of thing, especially between the content releases.  I'll be looking over suggestions as always -- stuff just gets lost in here, while suggestion threads are read and sorted.  Fixes are possible sooner, though I won't get to everything.

Back in the 2D days, we had to build a road for wagons to get to the depot, and smooth floors if the depot was underground.  Are there any plans to reinstate that requirement (or something similar/equivalent)?  I always found it added a nice bit of in-game realism, that this (not-so-)distant outpost needed to connect with whatever roads were in the vicinity before getting the massive caravans and more efficient communications with its home base.  And given that the near-future plans include interactions with nearby settlements, this seemed like an appropriate time to bring it up.

Yeah, world-spanning roads and walls and bridges sort of fell into disuse there somewhere, probably because the economy/caravan arc did not come to pass as planned.  And yeah, we'll probably see this come back up as we do the embark scenarios and then the economy work.  I'm not sure exactly how it will play out though.

Since kobolds, or at least kobold sites, are getting an update soon will there be any expansions to poisoning weapons or world gen traps to make them comparable in challenge to the other major game races?

Since they're smaller than goblins, occur in lower numbers than goblins, and don't even have armor it seems like the environment will have to be more difficult to navigate, at least until the mechanics are in for tossing scorpions at people or poisoned nets or whatever else has been predicted for them.

Do you have any plans for felled trees or piles of rocks blocking paths for multi-tile things with wheels like wagons or siege engines? Obviously tiles are very fluid when it comes to moving over furniture but it seems like there'd be something missing from the arrival of goblin siege engines if big piles of logs in their path don't need to be cleared out, allowing the dwarves more time to flee or maneuver.

Are elvish abilities (growing weapons, communing with animals) going to become components of the nature sphere under the myth generator, or remain abstracted for the time being? There was a power goal about talking to rabbits and leading them on a revolt, will that make its way in there? Are those terrible wooden armors going to see some kind of magical boost to put them more on par with other races, whether its in regards to strength or the new armor damage system?

Will/do semi-artifacts gradually wear out and is there going to be a way to get armor to semi-artifact status in adventure mode if you're really desperate for that adamantine helm to be passed down to your grandchildren once they're implemented?

It's possible there'll be some kobold additions, but we're not sure exactly how far we're going to go.  We'll mainly aim at it being possible to recover anything without 200 kobolds sitting on top of the items, but we'd like to do additional work.

Don't have particular plans about logs or rocks.  There was a bit of talk about pile tiles as a way to stop quantum item piles, but I don't know what'll happen.

I'm also not sure when we'll get to any particular powers over others.  There will be an expansion, and we'll try to touch on various things, but there's so much ground to cover I can't promise anything.

There will probably be some artifacts being worn down as we add more of them.  We were thinking about letting adventurers name anything they want.  As long as they doesn't give it magical damage-proofing, it should be fine, though it would be odd for people to suddenly care about everything you carry.

Will Threetoe write any more stories any time soon?

He is working on one now, based on an unfinished lore-heavy game project we were working on, but it's a bit slower with the number of rewards each month (problems we want to have!).

Toady, do you mind talking a bit more about how do your brother and you work, everyday ? Does he bring the idea and you the code ? Does he help you on debugging, or code himself, test the game ?

How do you manage/distribute time? Do you have any fixed schedule like 4 hours a day trying to build with new compiler, then interrupt and 4 hours to work on new features, then interrupt and 1 hour reading mail, and so on?

It always changes, sometimes just as time goes along and sometimes based on monthly responsibilities (for instance, today I'm basically doing Future of the Fortress and tons of Patreon emails and no programming at all).  For the last months, when things are settled down, we have the morning period from 9am to 5pm, where Zach is over at my place, well, first it is email and forum stuff, then Zach arrives.  He'll write reward stories and we'll talk about whatever needs to be talked about intermittently as I program whatever the current project is -- I don't split between new features and the new compiler right now, since I don't fork, it's just new compiler/64 bits and planning.  Recently, during the long compiles we were doing the new artifact/magic pages and the related notes, for instance.  Then there's an evening block from 5pm to 11pm, at Zach's place, where I do B12 emails/etc. and side projects if there is time (I guess side projects vaguely count as new feature forks, since that's all they've amounted to so far).  Then there's a late block from 11pm to 1 or 2am, where I just catch up on random whatever.  I can read, or set up a compile and read.

will eventually(way WAY back if ever, probably) invaders be able to repurpose your fort to live there, while you are still there? like for instance if your dwarves are stuck underground, the goblins could make a fort on the surface.

I'm not in a rush to do that sort of in-play-zoomed-in settlement AI at the dwarf time scale since it would only come up in very strange situations like this.  If the underground civilizations underneath your fort start to behave a bit more intelligently as we build up, say, underground animal people, whenever that happens, then a few things might start to happen more naturally.  There's also a chance that the different embark scenarios will lead to expanded fort-mode AI.

By "editors for fixed worlds" is that what you were talking about at Dwarfmoot with people being able to create their own worlds and sites and make Moria replicas, etc?

Yeah.  We've had that crappy altitude painter, and the modders have done quite a bit so far as I know, but having a fast, integrated way to do site/world maps and historical figures would be cool and hopefully not too time-consuming to maintain at this point in some future-proofish format.  It detracts from the overall mission in the sense that it's not a generator, but we decided it would be fun enough that that doesn't matter, and it continues to force us to be honest and consistent with our generated output.

What would "bleak and horrifying" entail? Would this include some of the things that have traditionally been avoided in Dwarf Fortress for various reasons, such as sex and (lack of) consent and whatnot? (There were, I think, some other similar things that I don't remember off the top of my head.)

Oh, and at the other side of the spectrum, is "No death [...]" to be taken literally? Will there be no death at all in this setting (and what would that mean for the demographics and such of the worlds)? Or just no death due to fights and wars and the like?

Nah, we weren't thinking of going that way.

Yeah, no death at all.  Use of the attack button in adventure mode removed, etc.  We were thinking of intermediate setting(s) where wars and attacks against intelligent critters would be off, but e.g. hunting and butchery would be permitted, so you could still do the ranch-fort thing without worrying about wars or extortion or whatever.

Will we be able to play as said intelligent artifacts? Will we at least be able to talk to them?

I don't think you'll be playing as an item any time soon, just for technical reasons.  If there are intelligent automatons, that would be an outside possibility (since presumably those would be "creatures", though even that is not clear).  I think talking to intelligent artifacts is quite possible early on -- it might be one of the only ways to know they are intelligent at all.

It seems that, in the development page, you want to give a very important role to artifact(s) in the next version(s). For now, artifacts are numerous in Fortress mode, meaning that, if other fortresses and cities produce as many artifacts as us, there will be a LOT of artifacts all over the world. Does this mean less moods and artifacts in the future or is this intended ?

I'm not sure the player fortress frequency will need to be changed.  The artifacts in other parts of the world will mostly be in other parts of the world, and I think in a gameish fashion they probably just won't make as many as player forts, so we shouldn't have a total glut.  We'll see though.  We'll have to deal with it if it gets really confusing, and if player artifacts become more magical and powerful, they might be less frequent in some worlds (while in high-magic worlds, there could be lots of magical items without them having artifact status).

Will we be able to put quests to retrieve stolen artifacts on our fortresses? So instead of risking our dwarves in the mission, outsiders would do it.

He he he, I haven't thought about it.  I guess it would be similar to more proactively seeking monster slayers rather than waiting for the (apparently broken) petitioner to arrive.

Will the expanded magic system allow for crafting reactions granted via interactions/artifacts/etc? If so, will a crafting reaction learned via interaction be usable in adventure mode? If so I can see this being very useful for modding, like making elves able to innately shape wood, or otherwise add reactions that aren't immediately accessible to ALL adventurers.

I'm really not sure how it'll work -- there will be effects that create things, and effects that require reagents, but that doesn't mean it'll be the same as a crafting reaction or involve that system at all.  It'll need to group or break apart those pieces of interactions, to put multiple effects or pieces of interactions under different umbrellas.  It's unclear if reactions would get looped into that.

1. Why it is impossible to distribute the computation to find the path of creatures between the threads?
I know, here are  a lot of problems with no-blocking a??ess to memory, but for example i can't find any objections to separate eery hundred of creatures in fortress to different processor, to create fortresses with population more than 300+ dwarves.
Other idea is to separate working with world outside of fortress to other thread - i think here is no need for big changes for it.
Ok, it's just not suggestion - i sure  you thinking all this and found some problems, and i just intrested to find more about these problems.
2.Whether the dwarves have the opportunity to remarry?In some sutuation, with some ethics, with law-realese, etc.
3.Would player be able to animate inanimate objects and plants with some magic systems? For example, it would be possible to assemble an army of Ents or swarm of knives?
4.About intellegent artifacts... what about books that can impact on the psyche and beliefs of reader?
I mean, that could be done some of these things that's vampires, parasites suck the soul, or anything like that.
5.What about runic magic or something else similar to it?It's really dwarf-style.
6.Are you planning diversify the dwarven politics? Make meetings, protests, get to fight for the financial situation?
7.Are you planning natural calamities and disasters? Floods there, earthquakes, volcanic?
8.How do you imagine the mental weapon in the DF?
9. Would seasons impact on agriculture more realistic?
10. Will there be further developed composite objects, in addition to music. tools? I meant things like to see armor made of plates, rivets, leather straps, or, for example, chain mail from a pile of steel rings, wooden spears, and the tip of the handle of the crossbow, arcs etc.
11. Will it somehow resist exploits? Would impose restrictions on the amount that can accommodate a tile (excluding living creatures) that there was no quantum warehouses?//
12. Do you plan to modify the skills system? The ideal option in (not)my opinion - the separation of knowledge required for the job, attributes, and motor skills. That this would be the most it. Cutter can easily become an engraver, having due talents and woodcutter quickly learn to chop enemies. Any same varschiki potash and soap-boiler are good brew. And vice versa - the jeweler will be hard to learn how to dig, and craftsman of the soldier will be released so-so.
13. That C++ feature is our favorite? Especially in modern C++.
14. How many classes in DF code, summary?
15. Have you any plans to replace hell(as location) to genrated system, included into myth generation? For exmple, in world with zero fantasy we should n't have hell.
16. Can you tell more about how you represent fragments of primal egg and other generated mega-location, how big they should be?
17. Pleaaase give as some screeeens from myth generator, demonstrated in video from conferetion...
18. And some  Scamps
19. If you still remember , how the revolutions works ... What reasons are possible?
20. Why where are so few hunters monsters?
21.When the game learn to understand that civilization is dead and why it is so difficult to code?
22. I know, in DF more features then I can find, playing for ages of real time...
Possible you can tell as more about one random feature, that you really like but but it is rarely used?
23. Have you even use genetic alghoritms\genetic programming or neural networks?

1. Pathfinding generally has some sort of buffer, and we'd need to allocate extra buffers and be careful of how they are used by multiple path-finding critters.  It's not insurmountable, but I don't even know if there'd be a speed advantage once you start adding overhead of that size on the large maps we have.  Probably, if the buffers are partial, or something.  You can't just separate out the rest of the world -- the fortress is part of the world through consideration of historical figures and the site and all that, and there are shared writes we'd have to be careful about screwing up.  I don't relish attempting it.
2. Yeah, it makes sense.  There are just some minor technical barriers (some of the data storage would cause the old spouse to be forgotten, I think, and screw up the legends).
3. It's listed as an effect in the myth generator, but it's unclear which ones we'll get to on a first pass.  We had animated trees in the game during elf invasions long long ago.
4. The non-intelligent books can already affect beliefs by being read, he he he.  Anything else is fair.
5. People like runes for dwarves.  Due to the sphere setup, there'll probably be a bias toward stone/metal/artifice type magic for dwarves in general, so I wouldn't be surprised if that eventually becomes fairly common in the random magic systems in the cases where dwarves get magic.
6. The embark scenarios with the new custom/law/property frameworks should see the first of that, and hopefully it'll get more complex over time.  Some of the first planned embark scenarios are pretty explicitly of a different political setup than the current expedition leader/mayor one.
7. Yeah, dunno when though.
8. I don't understand this.  Like psychic combat or a debate?
9. Yeah, ideally.  There are involved suggestions for this and we come from a family of botanists and gardeners, so you'd hope we get there.
11. It almost happened with the helve/stone axe, and there'll be other opportunities as we go.  We want item components.
12. It's a difficult problem, I think.  Ideally tile sizes would make more sense and be better respected.
13. I don't know much about it and haven't followed all the changed.  I just know that auto is my friend.
14. Probably not as many as there should be...  "class " and "struct " occur a total of 2300 times, but that's a huge overcount, since it includes friends and other non-major declarations.  I'm not sure how to get at the real number.  Visual Studio's Class View has a list but I don't see how to count it.  Tried to paste it into a text file to count the lines but it doesn't have line breaks.
15. Yeah, it's up on the new dev notes!
16. It would be best if you could have biome-sized ones.  We'll do what we can.  The current geology layering would pretty easily support having a biome whose ground is made out of mineable "cosmic egg shell", I think.  It would make a nice home for your dwarves.
17. Like additional screens?  Weren't there some floating around?  I can cook up some more but they might not be relevant to what's coming on the first pass, if you look at the total list of magic effects and what won't be implemented.
18. Scamps is on my lap right now but I don't have a camera.
19. I don't follow...  like the uprisings in adventure mode?  I think those are pretty bad, if they work at all.  Just based on perceived strength of an occupier based on rumors and popcounts or something.
20. Like the monster slayers?  There seems to be a bug or something.
21. I'm not quite sure what this is in reference to.  A bug, or doing it in play?  Something I said earlier?  Setting the dead flag itself doesn't seem completely impossible, checking through living historical figures every so often and site populations and armies, though there are probably some annoying side issues there, and perhaps a speed hit if we aren't careful to flag who should be checked and when (when a histfig dies, say, and other cases).
22. I'm no good at pulling single favorite things out of my head...  I think the forum has found everything in the various minor observations and easter egg threads.
23. Nope.

In the wonderful new dev page on artifacts and myths, you mention "creative actions taken by gods and ancient races" as a source of creatures, land forms, etc.  Will it be possible for creatures in the raws, that will be physically present in the world after generation, to take part in these actions?  I think of one of my modded races, and some domesticated creatures, as having been altered or created by another modded race.  I would love being able to make the creation myths reflect this.  Also, I could imagine powerful wizards creating creatures as servants, or a lasting legacy, in the latter stages of creation.

You also talk about portals that can introduce new materials and creatures to a world.  What will determine the things that can come from these portals?  Will it be possible to limit raw-defined creatures to originate from a particular sort of portal, or from portals in general?

One of our ultimate hopes of these magic systems has been that a player wizard or fortress experiment would be able to create a new race, yeah, but it is kind of a pinnacle goal rather than something that is likely on the first pass.  With the vaults, we intentionally added the ability for new raw objects to be generated after year 1, and that was done with this sort of thing in mind.

The portals would be portals to other places, and those other places would be the planes from the myth generator most likely.  The nature of the plane would determine what comes through.  Over time, the myth generator will likely allow specific raw linkages to occur, but since the planes aren't decided in advance, I'm not sure what'll be present on the first pass.  It could be sphere or otherwise based.

To follow up on what you said during Dwarfmoot, the second half of my question was about how modders would interact with the myth generator.  Do you envision giving modders some control over worldgen?  Not to get too suggestion-y, but something like packing default worldgen parameters somewhere in the raws.  Or letting certain game objects appear only under certain conditions.

The randomness/magic settings stuff will allow some control along those lines, and however the editors function will also impact it.  I'm not sure how it's going to work, though.  Your overall point makes sense to me, about allow raws to function as a full-fledged setting by giving them an option to bundle together with params and whatever other new stuff comes in.  I'll keep it in mind.  Perhaps any editor-based world would be such a bundle, even if most of the elements (including initial myths) are randomized and just use parameters.  Then people that do total overhauls could just do them as an editor world.

Do you play not make it possible to hold on to something and move (ei so something that is very strong and could fly can grab someone, fly, and then drop them for deadly damage or enable land mob to grab a enemy and pull it somewhere)?

I'm not sure I understand, but we had some combat dev items about dragging people and there might have been an old powergoal etc. about monsters dropping somebody from a height.  We're all for it.

Is their plans for artifact armor that affects (be it positively or adversely) the attributes of the user, such as strength, speed and other things.

Toady's occassionally said magic should be more than just a simple "D&D +2 broadsword" so, there's actually a chance that it's 'No'. At least not directly. 'Turns you into a vampire thereby raising your stats', perhaps?

When we get to the magical artifacts, after the pre-magic artifact release, those are certainly on the table for artifact powers, since they are easy to implement and still affect the game.  A lot of it might become more involved, or contingent on various in-game factors from the myths and so forth.  High-magic worlds might see people with magical armor that isn't even necessarily of artifact status.  But yeah, I'd expect things like that to also be strange in some way, or at the very least myth-inflected.  It's quite possible that some generated world would just have a nice object though, free from compromise and mystery and confusion, due to some kindness of the RNG.  Then that fantasy setting would just be slanted toward that thing, which is fine.  The more the game reacts to its presence, the better it will feel.  And then there's whatever we end up with on the first pass, which hopefully won't be too generic.

This may be somewhat of an odd question, but are there any plans for a megabeast lair revamp?

What I mean is, and it links with the second question I want to ask, will there eventually be more types of sites that serve as lairs, and will some of them be more like randomly generated dungeons in the vein of vaults, with minions and such and the megabeast serving as the "boss" at the end of it? Of course there'd still be the more simple burrows/mounds and such as obviously a large dungeon wouldn't fit a roc or a hydra, but if there's eventually gonna be randomly generated sentient titan/FB-like creatures then it'd probably more fitting for them to settle in more elaborate sites with worshippers or some other types of servants.

As for the second question: will there be more randomly generated dungeons and whatnot later on? For example, abandoned aboveground castles and fortresses with zombified peasants and other servants, and an evil king/queen wielding some type of artifact weapon or amulet that lets them raise the dead and also makes any type of undead obey.

We're all for it, and a lot of our ruin planning for the treasure hunter role was based around this sort of thing, and magic with expanded wizard base concepts will help as well.  For our particular megabeasts, I'm not sure exactly what else we'll get in the near-term, though.  Having megabeasts grabbing artifacts already raises various questions, and it would be nice if their lairs weren't boring.

Looking at Dwarf Mode right now, what systems in your mind are currently "mostly placeholder" vs. more or less complete?

Everything is subject to change.  Some of them just won't change because I don't get there, but I don't really think of the game in terms of complete vs. incomplete so much.  Just in terms of where the plan will take it, insofar as the plan has been made, and which parts of the plan are closer than others.  There are lots of things that we'd like to merge (like the whole zone/pile/room/workshop/etc.), but it's unclear what we'll actually get to...  none of it feels very done to me.  Is there anything that would survive the rewrites we already have posted on the new or old dev pages?