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[GoblinCookie]

Does this coexist with LNP and any graphics pack?

Probably (never tested) but I do not think that the new creatures will have special creature graphics but will use the default graphics.  One strange thing that might happen though is that nymphs will show up as being satyrs because they are considered to be two castes of the same creature and hence the graphics pack will depict them as satyrs.  I have not removed any vanilla creatures as far as I know, while plenty of modifications were made none of them should affect graphics packs.

[GoblinCookie]

I have now got to work on adding in gnomes, the rock gnome creature is up and running along with it's lantan gnome clone (lantan gnomes *are* rock gnomes really but there is no way to make the entity differences stand out without a different creature).  I as usual noticed a number of irritations in version 2.0B during play, also bat people managed to escape the entity cull, these have now been fixed.  There may be a 2.0C or not depending upon whether more bugs are spotted or whether the next version is released before 2.1 is and raw changes are involved in it.  The new raw files can simply be copy-pasted over existing files but bat people entities will not vanish if they already exist in a world.

[GoblinCookie]

While trying to rescue kids from a golem infested dire goblin fortress the dread linnorm that was in the process of being overthrown by a rebellion (a juggernaut eventually managed to snuff his/her life out) managed to cast weakness on everybody in the whole fortress, including me.  I thus tracked down a major bug in the D&D pack, the interaction names are different between creature level and the core interaction in the interactions file.  To put it simply, the game was registering two targets, target A & D, the second of which had no limiting criteria with the effect that every onloaded creature was being targeted by the interaction.  By looking through the file I discovered that the same problem effected a large number of other interactions, Deboche having failed to change the Cs in the files to the A target name, so I changed all the core interactions to use C target name. 

I will not probably be releasing another subrelease owing to my having been killed and hence not being distracted anymore from gnoming by actual gameplay.  This leaves us with the question, will gnomes be out before Siege of Dragonspear is released (31st March)? 

[Rekov]

The creature adding plans are to add Gnomes, Dwarves, Elves and Humans in that order.  These will be released in bundles, the 'non-evil' creatures form a group of entities opposed to the evil versions of those things and a collection of other creatures, mostly evil as well; the situation is to end up with equal numbers of these non-core races to match up against the core races.  Creatures from Direforged or D&D do not count in this scheme, so the present pack works out as 4-4 with Lightfoot/Strongheart/Ghostwise/Fey VS Fomorian/Goblinoid/Xvart/Tasloi; future race expansion packs are supposed to work on the same basis.

This sounds really cool. I'm excited for the elves to get in, but I suppose I'll be waiting a little while .

Are all of these different races going to be playable? And how different are they all going to be?

[GoblinCookie]

This sounds really cool. I'm excited for the elves to get in, but I suppose I'll be waiting a little while .

Are all of these different races going to be playable? And how different are they all going to be?

They are all too different and that is a problem.   

To put it another way making something playable is a major commitment.  The game engine guarantees that a playable civilization will be generated, which means that the moment that you make something other than vanilla dwarves playable then you run an ever increasing risk of having no dwarves in the world and hence you want those playable civilizations to be up to scratch inherantly.  There are also a huge number of mechanical difficulties, these difficulties mean for instance that any giants are going to be unplayable since the game does not scale well; with giants we have giant size items and hence you will end up with several dozen bars to make one pick for instance.  Not to mention how unbalancing it is to produce 1 cloth piece cloaks which are thick enough to pretty much provide a level of protection against most creatures weapons equivilant to a full suit of armour for smaller creatures.  It is fortunate indeed that d&d giants are not fans of large amounts of clothing or else we would be in trouble . 

Smaller creatures are a different matter, smaller creatures are generally harder to play than larger creatures but enjoy cheaper item costs.  They are however a mighty problem in adventure mode because of all those hardcoded items that cannot be scaled down by modding; you could say that large creatures are a fortress mode problem while small ones are an adventure mode problem.  Assuming that they path properly in fortress mode, flying creatures are out because nothing can dig their way through walls yet, meaning that basically flying creatures are totally over-powered since they can place all their living quarters out of reach to all invaders.  To recap then playability is rather determined by the following set of questions.

1. Is the creature substantially larger than human size?
2. Is the creature able to fly?
3. Can the creature have a fully developed government system without breaking with lore?
4. Does the creature rarely ever see the sunlight?
5. Does the creature have a society that can be adequately represented given the presently implemented mechanics? 

The last question is far more subtle than the other questions to answer.  The basic problem is that everybody in DF presently lives in Communist Utopia/Communist totalitarian dystopia depending upon the player's skill and level of morals.  In relationship to the vanilla creatures this is a non-problem since there is no body of lore to establish that they live in any other kind of society but for the D&D creatures it is a problem; particularly for the evil ones.  The vanilla goblins can simply live in Communist totalitarian dystopia where the player deliberately plays without regard for the welfare of his goblins, but all the baddies in D&D are pretty much all either living in organised societies built on slave labour or in quasi-anarchical or anarchical bands; neither of which can be represented by present game mechanics.

That said, two kinds of gnomes the rock gnomes and lantan gnomes are set to be playable next release.  The present game mechanics do gnomes very well since the latest major release is pretty much gnome heaven with all it's libraries and discoveries we now basically have everything we need to represent gnomic society in DF terms.  D&D dwarves are not ever going to be a problem since Our Dwarves are all the Same .  Halflings are waiting for the arrival of proper meals and fortress mode festivals since at the moment everything is too serious for halflings.  Elves I am not too sure about, playable elves should probably wait until greater options exists for automation of production since it does not befit them to simply sit around the place waiting for the elf boss to give them work.  Humans are variable depending upon the nation, the centralised/collectivist nations like Neverwinter would be playable right as things are, anarchistic nations like Luskan will be unplayable forever probably, maritime nations like Baldur's Gate would obviously need ships, money-worshipping crime ridden dystopias like Amn will need Capitalism and magical nations like Haluua will need a fully developed system of magical research.

[Rekov]

Thanks for the in depth and thought out reply! It's certainly a lot to think about, and I appreciate being able to learn some of the thought process going into this mod.

[GoblinCookie]

I had not expected to have to release a 2.0E but I found a pretty nasty bug while playing with my new lantan gnomes fortress.  It seems I have somehow overwritten the reactions file with the vanilla one, meaning that leather cannot be made properly since all skin counts as a glob not as a body part  .  It should not be too long before next release but I could not bring myself to leave a bug of this magnitude out there any longer than neccessery. 

Simply overwrite any old save games reaction_other with the new version.

[GoblinCookie]

This is it at last, I did beat Siege of Dragonspear by a day.   

What this release mainly does is add in gnomes and two races of said gnomes are playable.  At the moment the gnomes are pretty basic, being basically smaller dwarves with different values and personality as far as game mechanics are concerned.  They are in no way complete, I have plans to add in aluminium smelting, guns and jelly, along with some new clothing that will be used by some other creatures than gnomes; this will have to wait however.  In the meantime however I wish to pay attention to integrating Knight Otu's latest Direforged work and integrating the rest of Deboche's creatures as well as making updates to them in line with the latest releases (basically emotion based interactions).  I also wish to do some experiments on the dark fortress creatures to see whether increasing the allowed number of historical characters per site will help offset the tendancy of the goblins in the capital city to be replaced by the populations of stolen people.

[GoblinCookie]

I discovered that hobgoblins did not have names due to a missing entity token, this has now been fixed.  Unfortunately there is no way to add names into old save files since entities do not use the raw files once genned.

[GoblinCookie]

There were too many militia captains in playable civilizations I decided.  I realised however that I could restrict the militia captains to major sites which would leave minor sites with just the commander and hence there would not be the situation where there is excessive numbers of pointless militia captains lying about the place but only an acceptable number in major sites; the minor sites would only have a single squad guarding them (if this were fortress mode) while larger sites which are more valuable have a full set of militia captains because since a surprise attack on those locations would actually accomplish something they need a more extensive army to guard them. 

I spent a fair deal of time trying to test out a new scheme in order to ensure that there will be some number of the babysnatchers main race will actually remain in the capital.  It seems that babysnatchers are not assigned based upon the total number of historical characters that choose to become babysnatchers.  Instead the babies are first snatched and then a babysnatcher is created/found in order to take responsibility for the snatching.  This means that counterintuitively the way to reduce the instances of babysnatcher races being ethnically cleansed from their own captial by their own slaves is to increase the total number of historical characters in the babysnatcher race. 

I think (but am not sure having an insufficiant sample size and an inability to generate completely identical histories even from the same history seed) that the problem is that the total number of historical characters is capped for each site but that stolen babies are all historical characters and get chucked into the site until it overloads the 120 historical character limit.  This prevents the local historical characters from reproducing while non-historical characters are increased/replaced based upon the breakdown of the historical characters in the site, so if the original say goblin population gets killed off but there are no goblin historical characters left in a site then no new non-historical goblins will be created.  By making the total number of historical characters essentially infinite then the heap of historical characters being thrown at the central fortress does not keep the local goblin historical characters from being able to reproduce when there are available historical character slots at a global level.  When Toady One gets round to fixing the chat worthyness bug, the situation will be able to better because the positions will soak up historical characters from elsewhere given that the snatched babies are not allowed to take them. 

[GoblinCookie]

Relased 2.1D in order to fix a minor bug concerning the creatures in the goblin entity file other than goblins.  They all have properly sized daggers now.

[Rekov]

I've been thinking about what you wrote a little ways back, especially this bit:

4. Does the creature rarely ever see the sunlight?
5. Does the creature have a society that can be adequately represented given the presently implemented mechanics? 

It occurred to me that drow could probably be fairly easily implemented in DF. Rhenaya had a pretty neat drow mod many years and versions of DF ago. As I recall, she had different weapons, spider themed pets, different noble positions, most of which required a female, and some draft animals.

I imagine with the current day DF, their emotions/needs/sexuality could be tweaked a bit to make them a little more distinct from dwarves. That's the real issue with the drow, I think, is making them sufficiently different from dwarves to be an interesting and unique play style.

[GoblinCookie]

While playing the Last Dwarves I realised that the expedition leader does not have the accounting responsibility (aka the bookeeper), this has now been rectified.

I've been thinking about what you wrote a little ways back, especially this bit:

4. Does the creature rarely ever see the sunlight?
5. Does the creature have a society that can be adequately represented given the presently implemented mechanics? 

It occurred to me that drow could probably be fairly easily implemented in DF. Rhenaya had a pretty neat drow mod many years and versions of DF ago. As I recall, she had different weapons, spider themed pets, different noble positions, most of which required a female, and some draft animals.

I imagine with the current day DF, their emotions/needs/sexuality could be tweaked a bit to make them a little more distinct from dwarves. That's the real issue with the drow, I think, is making them sufficiently different from dwarves to be an interesting and unique play style.

I can conjure up a drow personality, a drow value set, a drow set of ethics, a drow government and so on.  I cannot however conjure up a playable drow society because the mechanics simply do not exist for it, a drow society is essentially based upon slavery but there are no mechanics for slavery in fortress mode and barely mechanics in adventure mode.  The closest you can get to it is to have a slave caste that exists but is disqualified from all positions, but then a large portion of the children of the elite randomly get assigned to be slaves when really they should not.  Slavery (or something similar enough to be usable) may well be coming along with the fortress starting scenarios so that problem may be solvable in the long run.

The real problem is problem 4, the subterranean problem.  If you embark you will end up on the surface digging down, which is fine enough for dwarves or gnomes; but a drow embark should start in one of the cavern layers.  Once it becomes possible to embark in the caverns then one of the hurdles to having playable drow would be gone even if I cannot make it compulsary.  There is a major problem with subterranean civilizations because there are only two truly subterranean sites, the cave and the mountain halls.  I thought earlier that it might be possible to restrict a fortress civilization to mountains; hence forcing them to build nothing but fortresses and mountain halls. 

This was to be the model for drow, duerger and derro, but when I tried to implement with derro I found that a fortress cannot build a second fortress without having hillocks nearby and a fortress civilization cannot build mountain halls except along tunnels between fortresses (I knew that already).  As a result I was ultimately forced to abandon my plans for the derro and make them a cave civilization with a twin layer linked entity, the same appears to be what is coming for the drow sadly.  So you will be able to encounter drow wandering about the caverns and you will be able to find drow cave sites, which means you will be able to trade with them if they did not get cleaned out during world-gen. 

[Rekov]

Toady did say he was planning on doing cavern embarks at some point. It was in the lsat Future of the Fortress reply, actually.

It's much more likely to happen when we get to the deep dwarf trade from the edge of the underground layers (probably with the firstish embark scenario release).  We're certainly planning to have a cavern start scenario, though it is very hard to say now what will be in the first batch since there are so many options.

That does look to be a ways out, though. Slavery does sound like it'd be a vital and necessary mechanic of that kind of thing, though.

I suppose that gives me some time to finish off the tileset I've been working on. I really have very little skill at this pixel art stuff.

[Pvt. Pirate]

well, drow don't necessarily only carve into the rocks, they also wander the underground and even wage war on surface civilizations, so settling them to the caves and the underground would sound fair enough.
but creating the society with all its matriarchy and slavery will be a hard to solve necessity.