Thanks to PatrikLundell, pikachu17, Random_Dragon, KittyTac, Shonai_Dweller, Rockphed, Knight Otu, Miuramir, Untrustedlife, and anybody else that helped to answer questions. I didn't include one larger suggestion post. It has always been a blurry line, but we should try to keep those over in the suggestions forum.
Interesting. So would a region-wide explosion instakill the player if he/she was caught in it, instead of just propelling them away, THEN killing him, because digging on-screen is prohibited in the latter case?
This was related to magical explosions being able to destroy tiles, and I don't think a region-wide explosion would concern them specifically, depending on what we mean by explosion. In general, experiencing map-changing catastrophes is something that's hard to do with the loaded area staying intact, or even some of the intermediate structures, so it'd be hard to implement going through it (and for little relative reward vs. the time spent, if it is just everything being vaporized, though I understand wanting to be there for that moment). It would likely black out and end the game -- something we are trying to avoid for forts if we can help it, at least without telegraphing a bit. I'm not sure if that restricts the larger explosions to prophecies etc., or follow-just-this-recipe to end your fort gloriously (and some pre-effects for you to experience). We'll have to feel it out -- region explosions won't happen in the code without specific implementation, so we have full control over the circumstances under which the procedural systems bring them into being. But yeah, I don't think "non-diggability" will be an issue there, since they wouldn't have tile-based considerations.
Other kinds of region-wide disasters (more in line with the current blood rain, etc.) would be fully compatible with having the region loaded at the time, and some of those might raise diggability/fortress integrity questions. We'll handle that as we go.
Will civs be able to send missionaries or crusades someday, or otherwise make alliances or enemies based on religion or divine allegiances? Any thoughts on what that would be like? What say would the player have?
It's hard to say what the order is going to be, but we'd like to get to more done. We've started with some isolated and easier cases, like pilgrims and prophets. With the embark scenarios, we'll have religious groups attached to sites with specific purpose, and the player would be involved with lots of decisions there. But this is more about the issues of a larger body, whether it's a state-linked church or an independent and larger religious group that could order a larger action like this, and I'm not sure when we'll have those. As an overall consideration, we'd hope that civ/etc. level decision that involve a player site as a smaller unit become less annoying overall than things like noble demands, and become more interesting in terms of politics and diplomacy. We're building up some parts for that starting in the embark scenario release, though as usual who knows about any sort of timing.
Why don't you get an AC unit for your place? It is too expensive in US? Your energy bill would raise too much? Every year you seems to have the same issues with heat.
It's not easy for me to set up a window unit in my apartment, though a few people have done it so it's figure-out-able. I generally only lose a few days work on the hottest days, and some sleep. So I just make do.
Speaking of which, is there a reason only some tags are supported by syndrome CE add/remove tags? Is there any future plans to expand the scope of supported tags? Asking because full tag support (ala creature variations) would certainly be a holy grail for modders.
Yeah, some are harder than others, due to optimization-based precalculations and other issues that make adding/removing a tag a non-trivial operation. For the first syndrome pass, I just did the ones I needed and any super-easy ones that looked like they'd just plug-and-play. There are probably some easy ones left over that I missed, but I'm not sure. First magic release will get us more of them, or at least some related effects that blow by the notion of simple tag changes and do the necessary work the game requires. Stuff like body/material changes certainly requires specific effort.
What specifically does the worldgen population cap do? It seems to have a strong relationship with the histfig count unless it is set too low.
Is it related to the entity population values?
Are there any places where the number of non-histfig members of a civ or race can be found?
The dfhack structures have a tree with df > global > world > world_data > sites > inhabitants, and summing all the inhabitants in the sites gives a value which is VERY close to the one from the world_sites_and_pops.txt export, does the exported version include histfigs or something?
TOTAL_CIV_POPULATION from the world gen params? That one? Looks like two things. Prevents births of new historical figures being scheduled post w.g. if they'd go over the cap, without respect to civ. During w.g... apparently some needlessly messy thing. So every entity def has that max pop number (10000 for most, 2000 for skulking), and that's used to control the number of historical figures which can be born in one civ (so 10000 max hfs for most civs, though at the beginning that is capped by the total of the site pop caps as they grow in infrastructure points). But if you have the total civ population set (15000 default), it takes the total number of sites from all civs, and looks at what percentage a civ owns, and potentially gives you a new cap. So if you have 10% of the sites, you are only allowed to have 1500 hfs, rather than the 10000 hfs you'd normally be allowed. I think this was set up to prevent one civ from dominating the hf pool if it didn't have the sites to back it up. This has nothing to do with entity population or non-hf pops, and I don't think there are artificial controls for those anywhere (not sure). The name TOTAL_CIV_POPULATION is confusing since this mechanic probably predates entity population entirely (though I'm not sure). I don't think it prevents new hfs from being elevated when needed either, though elevated hfs are counted against these caps when it checks for new births. So really this just seems to stop an hf-heavy, low-site-percentage civ from dominating the birth pool. Ideally we wouldn't need this stuff, but not everybody can be historical, so some messiness is required to manage memory/cpu.
I don't think the number of non-hfs is isolated anywhere in the text dumps, though you all seem to have access to the various data points through utilities.
So the world civilization pops from world_sites_and_pops doesn't seem to use the broken overall entity population counters. It goes through all living historical figures and adds them into the counts. This can include things like historical zombies, but not gods that have that form. Then it goes through all the site non-hf pops, not including zombies, and adds those in. This can include sewer dwelling outcasts and any other pop on the site (aside from zombies). I'm not sure where the ~3000 discrepancies are coming from.
1. In fortress mode, will random (and normally worthless) artifacts gain some amount of magical ability. Becaus I do notice there is a sh*ton of usless artifacts, gloves of mittens that do not have a pair, or even a ring that was a wast of som precious resources. It would smply make them less of a wast its that did somthing related to magic.
2. Also in fortress mode. Could you make a pact with a god or som similar being to give you divine metal other then from dungeons. A ritual or exchange sacrifice, maybe build lots som item.
3. As a demigod in adventur mode, could you get some orders/quests/requests from your parent god. With all consivable consequences?
4. Might there be big rituals that you can do in the fortress, ( build some giant rune siècle sor equivalent for the magic of the world)
5. (If 4 is true) could some terrible accident happen with them, causing a dissaster. Set off all the volcanos, rain blood for a bit, maby resurrect all the dead everywhere(zombie apocalypse). Maby explode your fortress, or even teleport it to an alternat dimension, causing dimensional risk storms. At just simply makes your region haunted.
6. Make magical defences for your fort.
7. Could you colonize another dimension if you built a fort on a stable portal and then build on the other side.
1. For the magic release, it's likely that we'll get something there. But even before that, artifacts now have a bit of worth by virtue of them being treasures that are offerable/claimable and so on. We don't have a lot there yet, but the idea of treasures being valuable outside of their utility is something that should be considered. Though I understand that it is disappointing when a dwarf makes a spiked loincloth instead of an axe.
2/3/6. Not sure what'll happen with the magic release. There's any number of valid ideas.
4. It'd be cool to leverage the building aspect of fort mode to do some cool large-scale magical effects. Could also be tied into the religious embarks later.
5. We've had some discussions about accidents here in the past -- there's some balance to be had there. Sudden impossible-to-prevent non-understandable fortress destruction is bad, but the more of a buy-in the player has, the more they can flirt with disaster. Part of the "losing is fun" motto should be the ability to completely obliterate your fort in order to further the story of the world. After all, the current end game content down underground should have world-changing effects, it just doesn't because we don't have proper world-reaching AI for the involved critters. That end game is a magical disaster from a certain perspective, and more of that should be possible.
7. We had specifically considered inter-dimensional mining. The seed might have been planted by some of the Manual of the Planes elemental earth plane reading from our childhood, or maybe not. In any case, it requires the use of secondary load areas, which we've already mentioned in the context of off-site raids as well as portals. It's all the same code, pretty much. I guess there'd be some sort of tab you can flip between, like, your main fort, the goblin site you are attacking, and your gem-rich pocket dimension accessible from the portal you constructed (or wtvr). There are CPU concerns, of course, with having multiple maps open, but having extra block columns loaded in a new map is more or less equivalent to increasing the size of your fort (aside from however portal pathing works, but shouldn't be so bad since it can be flagged from certain tiles where A* just says, oh cool, another connection, though the heuristic might get mad), and certain of them can be made thinner (for instance, the goblin site you attack might not need the lower blocks loaded, or it might, depending on cavern connections). So we'll need to control for overall size -- if you have a 3x3 fort, then you have 7 extra block columns left over to get to a 4x4 fort, and perhaps you'd just get a warning box as you get toward the normal warning box size, or whatever. It's too bad we can't have the whole world open!
What level of importance, if any do you think would be appropriate for individuals to predicate their reactions based on their recorded of generated histories? For example, will being a tradesmen/slave/leader/orphan have any direct measurable impact, or is the combinatorial complexity of trying to dictate how an experience shapes someone beyond the scope of Dwarf Fortress and it's Adventure mode?
Are individuals identifying with or believing in social stereotypes and biases based on one's profession, background, or appearance out of scope?
I know there's some scratchings of what I mentioned currently in place in the values system, but as it is, the intricacies, troubles, and emotional baggage that most experiences, professions, and positions would presumably have in real life are mostly either absent or impotent, ingame. Whether they're important or not is not my call, nor am I really sure of it personally, either.
They do use their history to some extent, and specific events in their lives to see what they think of people, but mostly regarding things like murders or entity affiliation. They don't consider their professions. Adding things like that is part of the game, and people have slowly become more complicated, though I'm not sure there are clear-cut ways that should go. The 'status'/'customs' part of the embark scenario release will introduce some generated groupings and then considerations that are more along these lines, and hopefully something of a cultural understanding of how different groups of people are viewed in a given society and what they might think about things. But yeah, there are potential issues there of how systemically grinding and miserable the game gets to be as you replicate real-world systems, and it can be a difficult call. Of course, civs with a vampire ruler killing tens of thousands of people should be sort of miserable, and perhaps interpolating between what we have now and the ramifications of such a nightmare will find certain issues of individual and systemic real-world prejudice and oppression arising inevitably.
So we'll be entering that room with the embark scenario release, and it's not clear where we're going to go. In a non-earth world, we don't need to necessarily grapple with racism and sexism, but on the other hand, DF has humans, and humans have a track record. That said, if it starts generating prejudices based on, as you listed, appearance, is this even going to be a game people want to play? If you are playing adventure mode and the game says you are the wrong color or sex etc. to speak to somebody, or your dwarves start spitting no certain people, or worse, I think we incur a deeper obligation with our players out there in the real world than just saying "oh the generator did that, no big deal".
Completely edge case question, but interested for a mod I have. If an [UTTERANCES] race (like kobolds) had a caste that could speak and didn't have [UTTERANCES], and you convinced a member of that caste that you were a genuine kobold using the new fake identities mechanic, would the rest of the civ become non-hostile to you? Or does it not work like that? Would they even give you the chance to explain yourself?
I'm not sure how mixed caste stuff works in general when it comes to stranger-kill ethics vs. kobolds just killing everybody -- it might just poll the race-level var for "any caste w/ utterances" and always start fights. Assuming we get past that, you shouldn't have to get clearance with everybody (to prevent spammy annoyance of replaying the same encounter scene over and over -- not sure if that problem's easily solvable in any non-gamey way), but it is a little weird. If you met the non-utterance person first, that'd be it, of course, but I think you'd be fine if you get clearance first. Maybe.
1. What sort of divine laws will we see in the first pass of the myth and magic update if any?
2. If someone broke a divine law would the deity in question in fantasy worlds be able to curse them for breaking it?
1. It's unclear if we'll get into divine law in the first pass, because the law release is part of the embark scenarios stuff, which is the next release after myths. So there are two ways it could work out -- we do divine law as a prototype for all law, or we do divine law with/later, once the actual law framework is in the game. This is totally up in the air and will depend on what the features of the myth release ends up being.
2. Yeah, that's basically what's going on with the current vampire/werewolf curses in an unformalized sense. Those curses should be placed within a framework of what's divinely legal or customary. It might not be a written law "don't topple the statues", but there'll eventually be more of an understanding of what gods or collections of gods care about.
In your weekly update, you mentioned that artifacts were passed around extended families. Does this mean artifacts will pass from, say, uncle to nephew? If so, will you be transferring that to government positions? Will we finally see someone besides the eldest child inherit a position?
They pass to people with the same family id, but it doesn't have a hierarchy associated to it that would be used for heirs. We're not to that point yet.
What, if anything, will be changed/new in Legends mode for this the artifact release?
People mentioned the book/artifact split and that there's more XML exported. Those are the larger changes. There are 11 new events I think. I think the myth release will cause some actual shifts to how it works, though we can't be sure how much since the first myth release is already signed up for a lot of heavy lifting.
My question is though, do you ever plan to add a post processing step to map generation where it looks through the region names for specific keywords (e.g. "Worms" or "Centaurs" whenever you add them) and actually say decides to spawn a population of centaurs on "Centaur Isle" or specifically makes the grass worms in the "hill of worms". Or some feature that is akin to this.
Shonai_Dweller mentioned that it should be the other way around (features -> names), and we just don't have that much metadata on the words yet -- we have those larger "symbol" groupings, so some names fall in a very large ballpark of being correct, but hopefully we'll be much closer as the framework for prophecies starts to take over other parts of the game and replacing the name structure. That'll introduce a flipside problem of names being too literal/specific, probably, and we'll have to make an effort to let them branch out a bit and become more obscure.
How well defended are world-gen artifacts, do they ever get placed in tombs with the world-gen rulers? And if they are in fact hidden in the tomb are they elegible for quests?
There isn't anything interesting there yet.
What was going to be covered in the dev item "support for the journey" (seems to have been skipped for this time?)? Is that something like hiring hill dwarves and such to assist? Or sending ahead word for supplies to be prepared?
Yeah, we were hoping to have some helpful, say, hearthpeople go along, and perhaps give you some free access to food/equipment etc. We wanted it to be unlike the typical we-won't-help-you-but-please-save-the-world quest givers, but we didn't get there. The ducks don't seem to line up well on anything even tangentially related to economic stuff, because there are some formalities missing and everything ends up being too much of a too-large placeholder. Got closest to having helpers, but something came up even in that case. Don't recall what. We'll get there eventually.
Once the myth gen is integrated, will we be able to see what the generator has created?
We're hoping to get something along the lines of what we had in the myth gen demo, with hyperlinks and so on, that you would be able to view from legends, but it's not 100% clear what is going to happen there. There's also the matter of exposition outside of that, where you'll be able to see some part of the myths as they are generated prior to world gen, especially if it takes time (so something has to be on the screen). Then there's all the in-game links to myths, where you'll be able to see the dwarven story of their creation (a subset of the overall myth), and whatever vector are used to deliver that. But yeah, I think some people probably want the myth generator as a world-building tool much as world gen itself has been used that way, so I think you'll be able to interact with the complete myth in legends mode or something similar. The settings for the myth generator and the raws and any potential editors and all that are going to be enough of a project that there could be a stand-alone test generator included there, just to see if things are working, but I'm not sure.
Has the stress system been fixed for the next release? I recall someone mentioning that the effects from inebriation were too strong, has this been confirmed yet? The stress system as it stands is quite a pity, I have never even had a dwarf with positive stress level before, which basically removes an entire facet of the game.
I haven't changed it for this release, but it's high on the list of things to address in the bug-fix releases that follow. I'm pretty sure just from the thought paragraphs I've seen that inebriation is way too powerful, especially in the way that there are never later realizations even if the person becomes sober, so it's like they don't know about their own life at all. Though that's actually somewhat difficult to implement -- moments for people to pause and reflect on the right things without killing the processor.
Even if you mod inebriation out, I think stress might not be powerful enough, or as somebody noted, there are too many positive effects that outweigh the occasional huge negatives that should wear away at people. So overall, we added a lot of things, and it pulled us away from the gamey and broken tantrum spiral, and made people resilient, as in real life, but maybe too resilient/complacent and certainly not interesting or tied into the game flow in a proper way. So there's another balance that needs to take place, hopefully adding some neat new mechanics that make it better overall. But it feels like it needs a political change, not just a psychological one... that they shouldn't all go individually south as a result of misfortune/mismanagement like before, but they should just fire you, ha ha ha. Insta-loss revolutions/elections are annoying, for the same reason as the demon timer was. So you should be able to control them through the revolution, once the embark-scenario release mechanics are in place and we work with them a bit, with subgroups like guilds again, etc. Lots of stuff to think about!
Currently, it seems planned that worldgen will go through two stages: "creation"(mythgen) and then "history"(current history generation). Are there plans to possibly add an in-between stage for ancient, poorly recorded history before "Year 1" for historical events that happened in the remote past? To elaborate, this would be things like "around 7000 years ago, The Hammers of Dwarfiness was founded by Urist McLegendary" or "around 3500 years ago, the legendary dragon [DragonName] was slain by the human hero [HeroName]". Right now it would be infeasible to generate over 5000 years of proper history(few people have the PC or patience for it), and there's not much distinction between proper, well-recorded historical events(e.g. a major battle that happened just 54 years ago) and vague, legend-sy events that happened possibly before even writing existed(e.g. the founding of a civilization).
So, is there some sort of system planned to support this? It would really help with worlds having a feeling of ancientness and tying "creation"(mythgen) and well-recorded history in a more logical way.
The intent of the myth generator is to tie the Beginning to year 1 world gen. So some of the late parts of the myth generator already have this feel (we've taken to calling it The Dawn of Time and The Dawn of Space as both time and space start to resolve more and more, no idea what it's called in academic lit/history/etc.), but the question game-wise is when to step forward, and that's hard -- a full w.g. style transition mode is probably not feasible, since algorithms don't just adapt to that kind of thing easily. There are legendary cities and so on that come up in the myths, and Garden of Eden style places where races can start out, even some named individual actors from the races, but when should the minute details of the economy be applied, say, like they are in the current w.g., where it understands all the industries and has numerically counted stockpiles? If those things aren't understood, initial artifacts won't be area-appropriate, for example. Right now our answer is that we don't introduce mundane items etc., and once the myth explains the raw files (ie, we understand why humans age and die, etc.) and there are initial populations, then we transition immediately to year 1 w.g. But that'll change no doubt when I start the myth release, as numerous practical concerns arise.
So there's room for the sort of legendary myths that involve the playable races that don't involve the map, and it sort of has to happen to some extent, but the disappointing side is the more we stuff into that mode, the more stories there will be that are missing crucial features (like proper items and geography). Then there's the whole playability question. The more stories you push into earlier modes, the more you want it to be playable, essentially the same as breaking out mid-myth and just starting at year 1. There could be some solution that arises that allows us to go earlier, but it'll involve work like an sudden early map generator that lets you break out of myth gen halfway through and readapts the raw files to reflect their half-realized status. This is linked in to the ability to have post w.g. world changing effects (like an 'awakening of magic' or wtvr), which might ultimate change the loaded raw files in some way, though that's quite hard as well.
Will a deity be able to create some sort of artifact book and pass it to some race?
We haven't added new and specific literature yet -- Rockphed mentioned the existing slabs, and we also have false prophecies now, but I think that's it. The magic/myth side isn't until the next major release.
In the most recent dev log you mentioned prisoners, is imprisonment specific to goblin sites right now or do other civs do it aswell now in the coming version?
Can we rescue them in adventure mode?
Yeah, everybody can do it, and they are the same as the world gen prisoners. Somebody mentioned that those might not work in some sites. I haven't changed that, but if you can find them in adv mode, you can rescue them, and dwarf squads will be able to rescue even non-findable ones.
Will the origin of holy relics be moddable at all? I'm thinking a raw tag on the priest position like [HOLY_BODY_PARTS] or something that we could add to custom positions. It would be nice for mods which have extended religious positions in Force based religions.
I don't recall adding anything for the religious positions, but I can take suggestions in a thread. The specter of the myth release is kind of lurking over the religious changes, since it is bound to get a little destructive, but the relics themselves will probably be mostly independent of whatever happens with myths so we can likely work some suggestions in.
Will sea creatures be expanded upon when boats are out?
Will there be such a thing as Sea FB?
Will FB have access to magic?
We already have that weird sea monster, so it seems reasonable enough. Were there ever ocean titans? I don't recall. In any case, hard to say what'll happen. People brought up multi-tile tentacles, and that'd be one of the perks of tackling multi-tile creatures, but it's a difficult problem, especially as it relates to raw files and getting a little too close to models and keyframe animation and all that stuff which is an enormous dev time sink.
FBs have to be explained by the myths, and that opens them up to magic systems, since it is all interlinked. Some of their descriptions already sort of imply a magical nature, and the eventual hope is to have all of that be consistent with what is actually going on. The current vault sphere-linked creatures are especially guilty of this.
How will we know if all the dwarves in a squad have been taken prisoner? I know the dev pages mention 'rumours' of a squad's demise but specifically what will happen? Will it be noted on the map (and does that just update with prisoner figures automatically)? Will someone be able to give an account of their journey?
Will prisoner rescue squads pick up other prisoners if they're at the site and of a friendly civ? What if they're not of a friendly civ?
Yeah, prisoner rumors are annotated, and there's also a mode in the new world map screen that lists known prisoners, but the main problem is getting the rumor back in the first place. Goblin sites don't leak a lot right now, so the rumor idea was flawed. That said, a squad generally has some survivor (a portion of the squad can be captured, only rarely the entire squad), and if even one dwarf gets out, you can get the whole story. We don't have a specific storytelling sort of thing where a collection of events can be relayed to you coherently by a third party, though that is an eventual goal. Right now we just have the rumor dumps (in the new format), and of course the mission reports for the dwarves that do make it back.
But yeah, prisoner rescue squads will rescue other prisoners (sometimes random humans from world gen too). Once they don't return, it won't be too long before you realize that an entire squad was imprisoned or killed, and you can then risk a rescue. Small/lone squads of dwarves sneak better, so sometimes it makes sense to send a single dwarf on a rescue mission, so you don't have to risk your whole army. Even if your dwarves aren't listed, you can still attempt a small-party rescue by sending a general purpose site raid, since the raid squad will always try to sneak first. Later we'll have more specific orders and options.
Hmm... I don't remember about non-friendly prisoners. I think there's a will-they-attack-my-civilians-at-home check but I'll make a note.
Will there be a lot of Kobold Quest references in the new kobold caves?
They prioritize poisonous critters, but it isn't specifically associated.
It seems that there are various things in DF that are always the same (dwarves, elves, counts, barons, swords, halberds... etc). Will there eventually be a feature that procgens civilization structures, weapons(like instruments) and civilized races(like clowns)? I could imagine a 'randomness' scale that controls the races, weapons, cultures and so on, but not geography, history gen, and stuff like that. It would probably scale between "Alien Culture" to "Familiar Places" or "Entirely Random" to "Very Predictable".
KittyTac mentioned the sliders we've brought up -- it's unclear exactly what form they'll take. We've mentioned having randomness and a sort of horror factor, and I imagine it'll become a larger array of settings. When it comes to what can specifically be randomized, everything is on the table -- we've already used the vaults to test code for randomizing items. They aren't good, but the framework functions, used by the god-linked beings you find in vaults (both randomized item definitions and material definitions). Now randomizing everything leads to exposition problems, as we've discussed in here previously, but aside from a little warning box and whatever the first-pass exposition looks like, I imagine the first release with the full random settings will just let you do as you like and we'll continue to try to improve it, so people that want to experiment can mess around and we can get a feel for it.
I'm curious as to how you're considering sorting out the baby survivor issue. Is it not possible to just imprison them (presumably they'll starve or something)? Are you thinking of adding something detailed later (orphanages, temples, foster families, sacrifice at dawn) to deal with them?
Yeah, I was just gonna throw them in prison, but the way the functions were set up, it'd take an extra hour or whatever, so I made a note and moved on. Lots of things like that. Dunno about later, but the orphans in the fort certainly deserve something.
Will we be able to be recruited by traveling NPC adventurers and act as their subordinates?
That's a tricky thing because of the travel, so I haven't gotten into it. If you are companion, do they just move you around the map while you watch?
Will we ever see an expansion on the cavern plants like we did for the aboveground? Or keep them more basic for newer players?
Speaking of underground plants, will the weird seasonal-plant inversion ever be fixed? (I refer to the fact that despite the cave river being long dead and gone, the underground plants still only grow during certain seasons, while the aboveground plants can grow at any time. This is exactly the opposite of what you would expect, and what makes sense.)
I'm not sure when I'm going to get to it next. The underground plants are different from the aboveground plants of course, since the underground ones are made up, and presumably we'd just start generating them. Perhaps that's a reason why we haven't worked much with fixing up season bugs etc., as there's this inevitable looming destruction for it (though I know people have favorites that should live on in some form/optionaly). Not sure when.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1444914 times)