Thanks to thvaz, burned, Untrustedlife, Shonai_Dweller, lethosor, PatrikLundell, Dozebom Lolumzalěs, Rubik, Rockphed, LordBaal, Fleeting Frames and anybody else that helped to answer questions this time!
have you already or intended to poke at how adventurer entity claims only operate on the site government level, and if so (or if not really) was it just how it turned out that all the sorts of interactions one would want to operate as a site lord seem to function better as a civ level ruler, and similarly, are the artifact quests/ownership being passed down mostly at the site/family level, or is it that plus the civ level stuff going around too?
The site level governments have been sort of evolving/broken for years, and we've set out the embark scenario release as the place where we are going to gut that entirely. The idea of "entity membership" changed -- people on site now don't need to belong to the site entity, but they often do, and the idea of a cultural identity emerged from that, separate from the site leadership, but it's still a mess. I couldn't really parse your paragraphs leading up to your question though, so I'm not sure exactly what's going on. There are artifacts at the civ and religion entity levels as well.
are there any other quirky little easter eggs you would think people would have figured out by now, like being able to actually work as a tavern keeper, or the lack of sunlight when dead, perhaps a way to use a wheelbarrow in adventurer mode? I haven't been able to figure it out, not for lack of trying.
Nope, nothing I specifically set aside that I can remember.
You mentionned in the 16/11/2016 post that you gave a talk at the Practice conference at the NYU Game Center.
When you'll reply to the next FotF, if there is no news from it, would you summarize what did you talk about there ?
I talked about some important design decisions and managing a simulation over the long-term -- the addition of the Z coord, the stuff that goes on invisibly in the sites during world gen, some mistakes like the first economy and that quartermaster dwarf, the evolution of the body systems and the personality systems. If you've been following development closely the whole time, there wouldn't be much new there, although most people would probably pick up a thing or two. I'm not sure when they are going to post it. I think it took a few months last year to make it online as well, maybe, so I wouldn't have necessarily expected it by now.
How is the major to minor severity assigned on release notes and bug tracker?
PatrikLundell answered the bug tracker part -- that's set by the reporter. The release notes distinction is just based on how broken it made the game having the bug there, in my estimation, but it's not important or consistent.
Are we gonna see Animal Caretaking being implemented anytime soon? I'd like to keep my war beasties healthy so they can participate in more than one fight per life.
It's not part of the ordered timeline, which runs for the next three releases. Dunno what'll happen exactly.
So, will I be able to bring artifacts to the demon for rewards with this update if I so wish, I don't want to have to be the good guy and you mentioned npcs doing it in the recent devlog so will players be able to do it?
Demon/goblin civs use agents because they can't use typical adventurers, since they kill strangers on sight. That hasn't changed. You'll be able to meet the agent and give/trade them an artifact if you like, but I'm not sure they'll break cover for you. So we aren't there yet.
Do Goblin agents have to report back to their masters or send messengers to update their civ's information?
Yeah, the information doesn't travel back automatically. Somebody actually needs to bring it and pass it along to the goblin's capital site/civ entity, and that journey is theoretically a way to catch them in the act. I imagine they'll become more sophisticated with this part as we add other ways of communicating/encoding, or additional links in the chain, but for now it is the same person doing the traveling as does all the contacts at the target site.
Both as a Norwegian and the future possibility of trireme styled ships and harbors, I have to ask
"Will there be fjords in worldgen? And will they be populated with parrots?"
We still haven't brought official cliffs back. We have climbing now, so we're part of the way there. There are parrots in the game. I'm not sure how they get enlisted on boats so often but people seem to do that.
With the planned 'stolen artifact recovery squads', what's the range of the artifacts you'll be able to send people out to recover? Artifacts stolen from your fortress? Artifacts stolen from your civ hundreds of years ago? Artifacts not stolen from you at all but your mayor thought they'd look pretty good on his shelf after hearing a drunken elven bard sing about them? Will there be an actual 'game' element to this (recover artifacts to deal with noble demands, cure a depressed population or something) or is it just something fun to do?
and...
When the new spies come to check out your artifacts, will there be any way of working out who they are? Will the fortress guard or other diligent dorfs notice them acting suspiciously and accuse them?
Oh, also...
You mentioned peddlers on Twitter the other day, will they also turn up in fortress mode? Does this mean you're replacing the old merchant system finally or will both systems remain for now?
Artifacts you know about. Not sure exactly what the issue will be with positive thoughts or noble demands -- as we've seen, those aren't really useful game mechanics without strong negative effects, and I'm not sure we should really drive the screws in right now when it would just feel more like a revert to a kind of gameiness we've been slowly leaving behind. The remedy we'd decided upon overall was embark scenarios, for more varied and player-directed structure that doesn't feel as arbitrary as noble tantrums -- it would feel less gamey if your religiously-themed fort went sour after losing its central holy relic for example, and your fort became obsessed by necessity with recovery missions.
This time, it's mainly about getting dwarf mode map interactions started. That said, there's a place for some lasting work in this release now that "artifact claims" exist as game objects, regardless of scenarios. We haven't started fort mode work yet, but we're considering petitions on behalf of lost family heirlooms, as well as your fort looking like easy pickings if you don't try to get site treasures back. It'll depend in part on how the new artifact-based diplomacy feels. There's also the matter of going after an artifact that is held by somebody you currently have peaceful relations with -- that'll introduce a form of gameplay, since you'll anger whoever is holding it and have to deal with them in the future.
Not sure -- you can find vampires yourself, or the dwarves can do it, but the agents don't slip up in the same extreme way because they don't have to overtly drink blood. It'd be possible to make a religious dwarf able to spot a fake prophecy and make a report to the sheriff, for instance, or that could be the player's responsibility (though it might be annoying to cross-reference the lore). Probably more fun if the dwarves are involved.
Peddlers might peddle in the fort depending on time, but I'm not replacing the merchant system yet.
Will what we can display in display cases be governed by ethics? Since humans have the ethic [ETHIC:MAKE_TROPHY_ANIMAL:ACCEPTABLE], would they be able to display animals in cases, as opposed to elves, with this ethic: [ETHIC:MAKE_TROPHY_ANIMAL:UNTHINKABLE]
Can corpses be placed in display cases? Is there a size restriction, or can you put a sperm whale skeleton in a museum of natural history?
I vaguely remember this from an older fotf, maybe... there was some discussion of museums vs. trophies, and we decided to just allow it all at this time. No size restrictions either that I can find.
The old priest classes had a tag where they could mention cults and heathens and such apparently, is this going to be coming back/built on with the holy relics and such, or is it even active but only under certain conditions now?
I don't remember anything like that (I just remember the "house rash" death 'noble' and so forth). In any case, we have a few new religious things for next time, but that'll be more amplified as we get into the actual myth stuff I imagine.
Can spiders actually crawl around on ceilings and stuff? Or does the climbing system not support that yet?
Also when looking at legends you can see "so and so devoured so and so" however when you are a werebeast all you can really do is kill things, I cant devour creatures , neither can animals so if I play as a giant dingo or something in adventure mode I am unable to devour people, is this planned?
The climbing code supports hanging from the tile above, but no creature has that ability for regular ceilings, if I remember, even if they should.
There's no timeline for eating things without butchering them first, or while they are still alive, but it would be consistent with the goals of the project.
-The dragon had disolvent stomach acids in his belly. Does that mean that eventually materials will have chemical propierties like acidity or flamability, as most materials have phisical propierties now? That would reeeealy add stuff to the game
-The empty space that was considered his stomach spawned naturally those acids. Will we, in the future, have more creature creation mechanics as that?(Im talking body wise, having defined forms on bodies and organs) Will the creation of those materials ''consume'' nutrients from the food we eat, or will it work like infinite spits like we have now?
Yeah, but I'm not sure to what extent. Should we make Lye and Oil of Vitriol interact properly? Will there also be Green Fantasy Acid? No clue. The CRC is big, and hard to program, but there's some room for it and we already have some scholarly knowledges in place for particular things.
We have secretions on particular parts already, if I remember... not sure if that's how it would work internally. There's a point at which you are wasting your time going too far with tracking how nutrients turn into this or that bodily fluid, but there's a place for finite amounts and nutrition and such.
Do you intend fortress or group name to ever have any significance to who shows up to join your fortress?
Yeah, there was a power goal that involved place names being possibly related to nearby features/concepts etc., and the new prophecy system has actually brought us a bit closer, under the hood, to language being related to objects. It'll be a long road, but hopefully we'll continue to make the language system make more sense (although names don't always need to have clear links to anything).
Will these new character types apply for residence and/or citizenship, or will they just show up as visitors "useless" for fortress citizenship diversification purposes (both for the next release and for the fleshed out versions)?
We haven't gotten into fort mode at all yet, so it's not set in stone, but we might have a little here. Once we hit the embark scenarios related to religion (which are slated to be in the first batch of scenarios, in the release after myth gen), the new types and their actions will be way more integrated with your specific fortress status/rules/etc., but we might do residence/citizenship now, related to temples -- they don't have new truly meaningful fort activities though, so it's still vaguely useless. Peddlers and criminals might have to wait longer to be significant (caravan/crime stuff, respectively), though we might do a tad with peddlers.
Agents on the other hand might see quite a bit of action in the fort, and their use of identities might be a driver for whatever integration of the new types there is in fort mode (so they aren't always fake), though we could also just have them use existing professions that integrate if we feel the need to cut corners for time.
Can we as players be prophets, pilgrims etc? Can we make up bullshit prophecies?
Will we be able to peddle, as adventurers?
What will be the requisites to becoming a criminal
What is the purpose of pilgrims(what will they tell you when you ask them why are they traveling)?
You can peddle right now, though it doesn't change your unit name. We aren't focusing on crime yet. Pilgrims travel between holy places, and they can talk about their journey, but there isn't a formalized pilgrimage route or anything, so you can't get a unit name change and embark on it yourself. Making a bullshit prophecy depends on an interface I haven't yet created, kind of like the art image interface. Not sure if I'm going to do that this time or not, but we'll eventually want it for making arbitrary language formulations that can translated into utterances/orthography etc.
From the dev.goals page, complex social situations and interactions, like deep conversations or logical reasonings, seem to be the base of a lot of goals. This makes sense, as a game that wants to generate stories like DF, needs complexity in every branch of the game
Now, social simulation games like sims (just an example) are something I really love, and I would like to know where will the limit of complexity regarding psycho/social behaviour will be
Powergoals 119 and 120 are somewhat what I dream to have in the game. Complex behaviour and the adequate implementation of it in the game
None of those goals ever got checked off because they tend to have some subtle interaction behind one mechanic or another. But we're slowly circling several of them. That Hero of Askabar thing is related to identities, etc., and people can spit now, he he he -- but we haven't started having guards control space at all yet. So I have some hope that we can keep working toward it, but yeah, there's also this sort of specific drive forward in the 119 conversation that we won't have without a lot of additional underpinnings. Not sure what the limits will be. We'll just keep adding things.
Is there any way for spies to discover the identity of other spies? What happens if they do work it out and they're from opposing civs? If it's possible, how do other townsfolk/soldiers etc react if a spy's cover is blown?
Do spies from the same civ recognise each other? Does anything happen if they run into each other?
If a human adventurer walks into an evil goblin town where a human civ spy works, will that spy freak out like the rest of the goblins or will he ignore the adventurer?
Oh, and just in case...
If a goblin invasion wipes out a town, will their spies survive? If not, will the entire civ melt down in a colossal worldgen loyalty cascade?
They don't have a mechanism for it now. Spies from the same civ only recognize each other if they have some prior relationship. I think then they might stupidly greet each other by their actual names if you overhear a conversation. The human civ spy will hang back and not attack, I think. I think the spies will survive world gen invasions... I think they'd get out through the same code that saves prisoners.
Will we be able to accuse people of being spies?
'You despicable two-faced crook, know now that I have seen through your lies, and I will see to it that your treasonous ways receive the punishment they deserve!'
"What is this madness? I'm a vampire, not a spy, I mean... wait-"
I'm not sure how that's going to work out yet -- at some point, we should really demand evidence, but it might be too soon to try that.
I thought I had stumbled upon an amazing new item decoration option in the raws when I tried using the [DEFAULT_IMPROVEMENT:SPECIFIC:ROLLERS:HARD_MAT] format with HANDLE to add some detail to my weapons and it worked. I had assumed that any improvement specified would work, allowing STRAPS on shields or PADDING on armor, but realized after checking in an unmodified save with dfhack I found that 0 (HANDLE) and 1 (ROLLERS) are present whether you change them or not.
Was this intended to be something we can add our own variations on top of? Was the HANDLE improvement intended to be included or just an afterthought? Also, there was an option in the globals list for what dfhack calls itemimprovement_specific_type which doesn't work at all, was that supposed to be the syntax for modding in improvements, or was it an existing feature that was deprecated (or mysteriously unavailable, like ART_IMAGE) at some point?
Handle is really really old (from buckets, and a very early release if not the first) and was supposed to branch out into a list of other specific improvements. That was before we thought we might try to generalize item components. We came close not long ago (when I was messing with helves, I think?), but it didn't happen. The rollers were just a quick hack for a thing I needed at the time, since components weren't in the cards. 'Specific' improvements will likely be scrapped for something that interfaces with some generalized component scheme, but I have no idea when we'll attempt it now, or whether we'll be able to pull it off well/at all, since a more generalized item definition is complicated and has to play nice with a lot of systems.
What kind of overlaps does agents have on conquered provinces & spying on rebel/factional groups? I know goblins have frequent factional groups, very little law enforcement (without modding in local militias to duff up troublemakers) and a well exercised death penalty for treason, but obviously without knowing who is traitorous or possible pretender, they can't do anything about it pre-emptively. Might agents infiltrate these groups as well as keep tabs on disgruntled people in occupied settlements/new conquests?
If you acquired by pure chance a king who does not respect law loyalty or honesty (possibly and most likely a sadistic vampire) within the very entity ethical dwarven kingdom (with all the promoted virtues against it etc etc) might they employ or atleast encourage more homegrown agents of their own to use to further their own interests. It'd be nice to have a crooked king bring in some criminals & shady dealers into the court & the taverns at much the distaste of the local population of your fortress.
We haven't done anything with it, since there aren't really conspiracies right now, just insurrections that spring up and are immediately overt and violent, if I remember. Agents would only be useful in that capacity if they had something to thwart before it reaches that stage, which also requires something more like a regular criminal justice infrastructure, since you'd then send guards or whatever after them.
Yeah, it'd make sense, but we're not there yet, as above. We need more criminal justice/guard/policing infrastructure (regardless of whether it is used justly).
Will there be coliseums or arenas at some point? Could provide interesting solutions for strength-worshipping civilizations to settle issues, as well as other scenarios, i.e one of the fighters dying from a poisoned weapon being provided, or rigged matches, etc.
Second, will there eventually be sites such as hamlets and the like that aren't affiliated with any civ by default? Could also provide for some scenarios like towns full of zombified villagers in evil biomes, perhaps governed by a necromancer group.
Lastly, will there be some sort of token that allows a creature to appear by default with weapons or clothing? Would make minotaurs and the like a lot more dangerous, and also really helpful for modding.
Sure, no timeline, as usual. Had power goals for it I think.
Yeah, the embark scenario/custom/etc. release will change the degrees to which sites are associated with the civ. The civ plays a dual role right now as a culture as well as having those entity positions/government stuff. So the hamlet will always have some kind of culture, but it might be complete divorced from any sort of larger government.
Not sure on default objects. We're moving away rather than toward that sort of thing, with the myth generator, but there'll also be a move sometime toward fixed elements/editing, which sounds more like what you are going for.
These days, do you find it easier to implement adventure mode related features, or fortress mode features, or to simply work on worldgen frameworks? Which kind of work is exciting you the most, and which one do you think is more of a hassle?
Also, did you survive the lutefisk this year?
I don't think the mode is the main determiner of ease/interest most of the time. 3D maps are still prone to issues so I find that kind of irritating sometimes. The upcoming myth stuff is obvious exciting, but playing around with agents and religion has been cool and touches on some of our other interests, so I'm not impatient to immediately move on. I don't think it's possible to break it down into a type of work or mode I like.
We did lutefisk on the 30th (it's a few hours after as I'm writing this). Didn't get sick yet, so maybe I'll make it!
Will a priest have access to some magic from gods, and if yes, will it be different from a wizard's magic ?
Depends on the creation etc. myths it makes for that world -- gods might be fake, or gods might be the source of all 'magic', or there could be several different groups with some more removed from gods than others, and so on. It isn't going to force the normal priest/wizard distinction from classical RPGs, though versions of that sort of thing might be common enough in settings it rolls up.
Initially I was convinced that high armor user skill had an effect on armor deflection rate, specifically that it increased the rate of "but the attack glances away!" results, though I was working on the assumption that, as the impacts with a higher rate of deflections and armor absorbing damage gave higher experience, this must represent a larger success on the skill roll.
After testing more I realized I had never really encountered high armor user without high dodging skill and tested that, resulting in a higher rate of "glances away" results, is that in fact a dodge result? Is there any sort of effect from higher armor user besides reduced encumbrance?
Yeah, your "deflection roll" is based on your armor use skill, but in the first calculation your dodge roll counts more and replaces your deflection roll if it is higher. That roll is thrown into an equation with the hit roll to get the "squareness" of the attack from 0 to 20. There's some pure luck at this stage though, and the squareness can sometimes be increased regardless of the rolls.
Later, the same deflection roll is used directly with relevant worn items one by one to modify attack momentum using the material/etc. -- dodge rolls don't enter into this. Item familiarity can increase this deflection bonus.
In addition to speed, high armor skill also decreases your "clunkiness" with heavy worn objects. The clunkiness sum applies a minus to many skill rolls (mostly combat, but a few non-combat).
In the future Myth/Magic release, are there plans to expand prayer in adventure mode? Will talking to a player's deity eventually get a response if they are devout enough, or grant blessing, gifts, or tablets/secrets a la Nethack?
The first myth release has a lot of potential directions to it, so I don't know what's going to happen on the first pass. We've already mentioned the possibility of a playable afterlife, which could involve quite a bit of deity interaction, and that sort of thing also happens when people are still alive in some settings. If it's appropriate based on the world structure after myth gen, there could be all sorts of stuff as we go.
You mentioned asymmetrical relationships due to the new code for creating spies and agents. Does this also mean that ordinary relationships in fortress mode will also be asymmetrical? Could this mean the possibility for unrequited love, or love triangles?
Also, in a similar vein,
In a recent fortress I noticed that two of the original seven dwarves had become lovers. Later, they were in the hospital and I noticed that they got into a huge fistfight. One of them had been enraged. Is this planned behaviour? Have relationships now become potentially aggressive as well as positive?
It has been possible (with a little more work) for a while, but I haven't changed anything yet.
There isn't something specific related to the relationship going on there.
Why are there no tents in bandit camps? Will they have them at some distant point in the future, or are they supposed to be tent-less?
The tents were added with armies, and they are bad. The current bandit camps were going to have a different evolution. The "hideouts with basic fortifications" and infiltration stuff from the hero role on the dev page was supposed to relate to making varied and interesting bandit camps, in part, but we haven't arrived there yet. Then there's the whole missing nomadic/semi-nomadic/etc. groups of people, and how that relates to different living arrangements, the first chance for which is the customs/property/laws stuff. So I'm not sure what's going to happen exactly.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1443929 times)