Thanks to Knight Otu, Putnam, Eric Blank, Max^TM, Shonai_Dweller, Valtam, PatrikLundell, MrWiggles, Evans, Dirst and anybody I missed for helping to answer questions!
Do you have any change in mind for the communication system between people?
You mentioned a long time ago the possibility of using tones and intentions while you speak to another person as modifiers, like when you fight, which would be awesome by itself, but I would love knowing if eventually we will get a more robust system, highly tied to the psychology of dwarves (conversations change drastically between different people, etc.)
Keeping on this line, will we get more stuff that make our adventurer's personality matter more? For now, the only thing that changes between one or another is the needs you have, derived from your personality, but it doesn't affect interactions between beings at all, which I kinda expected
We'd still like to add personality modifiers to conversations, but the payoff is low compared to other systems considering the sheer number of utterances we have to alter/respect now -- even for the pieces that don't have to be respected on a per-utterance basis, it's tough to devote the time. Ideally, each character would have their own voice, but that's proven impractical so far. That said, we still really want to make some progress in this area.
Making the adventurer's personality matter is also tricky, since it can easily break the game by restricting choices at nonsensical times, so we have to be careful -- needs were a nice squishy not-severe-penalty way to get started. I'm not sure where it will go from here, but we'd like to find other such ways to get you in your own skin without railroading you at all.
Events that aren't seen by an escaping witness don't become common knowledge until a year later, I think, and are never passed around as rumors.
Does this mean that we can't really get away with theft/murder scot-free? People will always learn of what happened in time? How do we hide something, then?
They don't end up blaming you -- it's just a hard problem to keep things completely secret from all the game's systems forever. The historical event becomes known, but the incident report and rumor don't get converted into reputation changes. It'd be ideal to keep track of who knows what about everything, but it's not feasible memory-wise. So you might see supposedly unknown events bleeding into artwork and conversations after a long while. There could be additional controls put into place, but it's all hard work for less return as you go.
Was there ever some system of DF simulation that got later removed because on the second look it seemed to you "too much detailed"?
Which of the features currently in game is the biggest system that you see as "too much detailed, needs rework"?
I think things like economy don't qualify for the first question because it is still planned to be added back in some way.
Eric Blank mentioned the arsenal dwarf or whatever it was called, which is a good example -- too much bureaucracy for too little gain. Putnam mentioned genetics, but if I remember, that was more a problem of getting it to work with any future appearance designer (which is still something of an issue even with the simple genetics), though I don't 100% recall and there were likely other problems. As for the current stuff, there are things like the military screen which are bad, but I don't necessarily want to take that level of control away. VPL labor setting is another -- it would be ideal to replace the spreadsheetiness of it with something better and less fiddly, but there are dangers there as we've discussed in the past.
Why aren't hospitals included in the new locations system? When they are included, will "chief medical dwarf" become an occupation instead of a title? Are there going to be other occupations in the hospital?
Hospitals might be a somewhat closer fit, but there are all sorts of systems that want to be under one umbrella. We didn't attempt to change any of them in that release. I'm not sure how it's going to unfold -- occupations could merge with whatever happens with guilds vs. workshops and all that as well.
Regarding creation myths (though it'd apply to regular myths as well), two things:
Firstly, is there really only one belief system per race? I'd find it odd if every culture in the world possessed identical creation myths and beliefs, so will the system be able to generate separate religions? I highly doubt creatures of different cultures and religions would hold the same creation doctrine, after all. Religions splintering off/combining, and growing/shrinking in power could be interesting. Cults that don't believe in souls, or say that a different god created their race, for example.
Secondly, by 'fake myths' I mean, can it generate myths that are actually false? In the GDC video, you did mention you can have religion and myths without fantasy existing, but is it possible to generate false gods or magic while still having some of it be real? Like, two kinds of magic runestone exist but only one of them actually works; or two gods but one is just made up by a cult.
If so, could the player could set an option for "All true/Some true/All false"?
We've observed that the system can be used to create myths for civs in settings where there isn't a "correct" story for creation, though it does get into many of the problems we experience throughout the game with incorrect information. Certainly, there could also be false stories created in fantasy settings with a "correct" story, but it isn't as high a priority as just getting things to work at all with the main story, and it introduces complications which have to handled explicitly (which takes time, and therefore makes the prospect of a "some true" first release decrease). There's still hope though, and it's true that some of the best payoffs are in systems where a correct system can confront an incorrect one at different levels of power.
Given that the switch to 64 bit seems to be addressing some hardware limitations of the game, are there further steps planned in that direction? Like addressing CPU limitations?
Nothing so specific or that we are super optimistic about. It has been kicked around a lot in here. There's some hope for microthreading, and people have helped a bit there, but there are just a lot of small problems adding up as well, all with varying levels of hope attached to them.
Will civilizations ever own artifacts? I know bloodlines can, but I mean like governments/institutions controlling art; the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, for example. On that note, will we ever have procedural flags, anthems, or dances that are unique to/associated with a civilization? Can you play someone the song of your people? I could imagine playing a national anthem for people that are currently at war with that nation would probably result in a bar fight.
Currently, in the case of entity position symbols, some general "treasures", and holy relics, the artifact claim is stored at the entity level. All of the initial art forms are currently attached to a specific civilization, but it doesn't understand them in a national or cultural way, I guess, in a way that would cause conflict. I'm not sure if anything'll happen later on.
In the event of adventure-named artifacts, how will naming them be handled? Will they just use the old system of randomly naming a weapon they grow attatched to, or will the player be prompted to construct a name for it? Because the latter system is bad enough about creating "the spurting banana" levels of derp for titles and such. :V
I imagine it'll use the name construction screen, which makes the name your fault.
How extensively (do you think) DF will need to be rewritten, code-wise? How extensively is it rewritten between updates?
What were the biggest updates in terms of features and code changes?
What was the easiest thing to implement? The most difficult? What did you enjoy/prefer? What do you hate/regret?
What do you intend to get rid of/replace that is currently existing?
Do you mean, like, ever? Anything is up for grabs, for either rewriting or replacement. How extensively it is rewritten really depends on the update. Adding the Z coordinate was one of the most comprehensive, but it was also pretty shallow most places. Other changes like adding tissues didn't come up everywhere but they could really gut individual parts of the game or otherwise totally screw them up (combat, butchery, etc.). I don't have a good answer for the easiest/most difficult type questions... I get a headache trying to rank and categorize code additions since there are many years to consider and I don't remember them all well.
What is the significance of the ubiquitous hex-sequence "D08A"?
If that's 35536 (plugging 8AD0 into a hex converter), that could correspond to -30000 as a signed 16 bit integer. That's an invalid local coordinate, so if it, say, looks up an item's location after it has been removed from the map, it might return those coordinates to stop a job from continuing. Using a more typical looking number like -1 is dangerous since you often have calculations that look near the left/top edge of the map and might use -1 when scanning around, and using a large negative value is less annoying than having a whole separate flag in many instances, even if it's less clean.
When the fantasy level slider is in place do you have any plans to keep some sort of dangerous creatures deliberately attacking the fortress even at low fantasy levels?
Ie. High-moderate fantasy we have the titans, megabeasts, weres, etc. Will anything scary attack at low fantasy level? Giant (enraged?) creatures maybe?
It'll be difficult to answer questions about the specifics of how it'll work out until we are deeper into it. For instance, if there's that horror slider and you crank it up in a zero fantasy setting, does that just make everybody grumpier? It's similar for this question. Ultimately, the "sliders" will tweak lots of little parameters (much like Create New World vs. using the advanced parameters). So a basic slider low fantasy game will be something generic, but if you want this or that, you'll be able to get more of this or that as we add parameters.
-Can you please explain why land creature spawns are preferred over water creature spawns?
-Can you say off-hand how much work would be involved to make ocean/lake critters more frequent?
I don't know -- I'd have to check this one as part of a bug report.
How popular is the 64-bit version of Dwarf Fortress compared to the 32-bit version?
These aren't necessarily all complete downloads, and it's only directly from the main site (as opposed to dffd), but it's all I've got.
/dwarves/df_43_05_win.zip 53,426
/dwarves/df_43_05_linux.tar.bz2 7,835
/dwarves/df_43_05_osx.tar.bz2 6,648
/dwarves/df_43_05_win32.zip 4,247
/dwarves/df_43_05_legacy.zip 1,518
/dwarves/df_43_05_legacy32.zip 1,117
/dwarves/df_43_05_win_s.zip 584
/dwarves/df_43_05_linux32.tar.bz2 438
/dwarves/df_43_05_legacy_s.zip 158
/dwarves/df_43_05_legacy32_s.zip 158
/dwarves/df_43_05_win32_s.zip 125
/dwarves/df_43_05_osx32.tar.bz2 95
Aside Adventurer and Fortress modes, do you envision having any other modes to play the game in? Or would future additions just vary the content of those two? (playing as a monster in adventure, building a town in fortress) Asking very much in the 'what I think now' sense.
We had a bunch of ideas on the old dev page, but I'm not sure that's the way things are going. Old items like "play a monster!" seem now like just tweaking how elephant man adventurers are regarded by others. There could be some things in the more distant future that don't quite fit the current two paradigms, like playing a deity, but even that could just be seen as some amped up form of adv/dwf mode (like playing a powerful wizard). I have a world debugging mode which is vaguely like being an observer-only deity, and something like that could eventually be incorporated, or be merged with an editor mode.
But for something like starting a new specific game mode where the title screen would say "Dwarf Fortress"/"Human Town"/"Adventurer"... perhaps that isn't in the cards so much now? The specific ordered events which made the early dwarf mode "dwarf mode" are something the game is leaning away from (stuff like autumn caravans and timed invasions and barony triggers), and we're going to see some new ways of thinking when the embark scenarios come up. It might be possible that some severe blending happens at that point, especially as the game starts to appreciate more and more the realities of worldgen, like there being human populations at dwarven hillocks and all that. "Human town" mode might creep up on us that way -- we've already seen it with the goblin monarchs you occasionally get, and the new tavern visitors/residents. In the end the modes might just end up being "playing a site" and "playing a historical figure" -- the only real new mode we'd need there would be a civ-wide one, perhaps, though that could still be pretty easily centered around a capital or leader if one exists. You can start to think of other edge cases from there.
Are we going to see anything with creatures gaining intelligence, for example, dragons growing wiser/smarter with age, gods granting random creatures intelligence (probably for no good reason like everything else)?
Also
Are we also going to see any "raised by X" scenarios and if so can that happen to the player before the start of adventure mode?
I have no idea! I don't think it'll happen any time soon, though the gods will probably raise some races up from animaldom on occasion in the new myths.
Are there any planned expansions to night creatures during the magic release, either the addition of new ones or changes to existing night creatures to make them fit in with the magic in myth generation? Will necromancers and bandit leaders be asking for artifacts, or ever go seeking them personally? If a civilization's artifact ends up at a necromancer tower do they understand how to siege that? Will vampire purges ever have the chance to go wrong and end with the vampire destroying a whole village or something?
Nothing explicitly planned -- however the night creatures sit right in the guts of the stories as one of the few explicit subcategories of creatures, and necromancy as well is bound to be exploded as generated magic systems come into play, so things are likely to move one way or another. I haven't gotten to the fort mode diplomacy stuff for this release yet, so I can't offer anything for behavior regarding asking for artifacts. Civs will use heroes vs. towers as it stands, I think. Dunno about the future of vampire purges.
What are some artifact effects that you are excited about adding?
Are creature size changes going to effect clothing differently (examples: cloth, silk, etc ripping apart from the size increase (possibly leaving wearable rags for your new size, if your size doesn't increase too much) and metal taking much longer to break apart most likely hurting the player in the process) anytime soon?
On a related subject, are you planning on making an effect for wearable artifacts that makes the artifact change size to fit the wearer?
Lastly, are we ever going to be able to wear clothing that doesn't fit? For example wearing a large robe/coat/shirt so you don't freeze to death if you don't have anything else.
Edit:Oh you can't forget the effect where the wearer grows/shrinks to the size of the clothes when worn.
Recently I haven't really been thinking of artifact effects separately from the general magic changes... and I don't really have favorite effects I can bring to mind. The generation process is the exciting part for me right now. Zach is excited about telepathy and being able to see through other people's eyes. Scamps is excited about summoning rodents.
It would be cool if size changes mattered vs. equipment, but I don't have a timeline. It's made more complicated since some of the body changes can occur when the creature isn't loaded fully.
Artifact size changes are something you read about, so it's a fair addition, but I don't have specific plans. Generally, everything sounds cool. Not sure what'll happen.
Are red squirrel men (just as one example) covered in fur, resembling humanoid versions of red squirrels, or is the description intended to be a more literal one, with an ordinary human that just happens to have a squirrel's head and tail? ("A person with the head and tail of a red squirrel").
Yeah, as Dirst noted, they are covered with fur or scales or feathers. I agree that the descriptions are misleading.
in certain cases it is possible to demolish structures by simply deconstructing them with a campsite. The method by which a campsite can overlap a structure is an edge case to say the least*, but the end result is still a hole in the ground that used to be an underworld spire, or a sacked keep, and so forth. Sadly these structures are still listed as being intact, but due to the permanence enforced on campsites they remain demolished. Would you happen to know if any of the changes you've made with temples/kobold sites, and artifact tracking would touch on things like the world being aware of campsites and events/changes made within them? Related to this would be things like a campsite tavern attracting customers, temples attracting pilgrims, and so on.
No, I don't think current work is related. That'll just have to be handled separately.
It would still be better to have some engravings and the ability to ask directions.
I wonder how easy that would be. You could always look up the mapdata and plot routes but would that be the shortest route or the intended route? Would the engravings have to be created on the fly when you enter a fortress / deep-fort or can they be precreated? (which i guess they could be if forts safe layouts like cities)
Markerstones around streetcorners would be nice or painted signs but that would need new decorations code right?
We have a few intermediate map levels that understand the larger structure of sites even when they aren't fully loaded, so the directions themselves aren't so hard to do, but it can be hard to get it all across succinctly in a way that actually helps, especially in a conversation or on a little sign, and yeah, we'd need to do a bit of groundwork if we don't just have pure text instructional engravings.
Given that now kobolds are now recieving attention, will their methods of acquiring goods/or domestic production lines be looked into? Given that all cave born kobolds become theives, whilst all town settling (abandoned/loosely overtaken abandoned towns) acquire unnatural town roles, as before, their entity were equipped spontaneously with weapons derived from ores for daggers etc, more domestic roles would also improve local kobold cave population upkeep if they could produce food on site and make it harder to penetrate with all the spare populace milling around, collectively stronger for skulking sieges also with more population.
Well, I doubt it'll be much improved by what we're doing, but there'll likely be some local professions associated to some of the new room types. Weird problems from whatever's going on in abandoned towns sound more buggy than anything.
Toady, you said that in the magic update, one of your big goals was to allow wizards to end up being able to make a new servant race with magic. My question is will we be able to control what exactly our servant race will look like?
We're hoping to get to something like that eventually, but that has a large interface attached to it (since exact appearance is linked to actual body parts and tissues etc. all the way down the line), which'll increase its skippability as the release becomes more uncomfortably long. For that reason, it's hard to say what we'll get to in the first pass.
How varied will the different magical effects be that the myth generator can churn out? Standard stuff like healing, levitation, resizing, teleportation, or maybe something more outlandish?
The more you drill down to individual effects, the less outlandish they seem, but any of the ones in your list can be made outlandish through the side effects, requirements, etc. attached to them, as well as by attaching two or more to the same magical event. We had some examples in the GDC slides, but it is all based on a pretty standard list of a few hundred effects at the core (of which we'll only get to a fraction on the first pass). I think even in the beginning, the links between the magic systems and the creation myths should stop the game from feeling completely standard, but we won't really know until we get there.
Because of the complexity of the magic arc and more specifically functions of the wizard towers being personal to a wizard's behaviour and objectives Site with appropriate chambers (laboratory, library, ritual, summoning, etc, Quests and tasks and duties (as seen in the development subsection "Wizards"), could we expect to see them involved into a seperate mode putting the player in charge (a adventurer scenario?) if they are not immediately a adventurer feature with overlapping fortress mode implications?
We've had a few other projects that were entirely in that vein, and whether it ends up being an outgrowth of the current adv site-building or something new, I'd expect an eventual attainment of something along those lines. Nothing can be promised for the first release, of course.
1) Are there any plans to expand on interaction with intelligent wild creatures in Fortress Mode? Right now, whenever you encounter something like a merperson, a plump helmet man, a troglodyte, a kea man etc, your only option is to kill them and have them stay in your refuse forever. Are there any plans for us to be able to perhaps communicate with these intelligent beings, perhaps teach them to leave the fort alone or even invite them to join the fortress as citizens? Since animal people joining civilizations is something that already happens in worldgen, this kind of interaction could serve as an extension which can be directly controlled by the player.
2) Related to the above, are there any plans on expanding on intelligent wild creature behaviour? Currently, they all act like unbutcherable useless animals, despite being able to speak and equip items. I mean things like animal men wearing clothes and carrying weapons, or troglodytes arriving to the fortress wearing loincloths and carrying wooden clubs for that authentic caveman feel.
3) Will we see the (semi)megabeasts receiving any buffs with the introduction of magic? Currently, they are rather non-threatening compared to forgotten beasts. And speaking of which, how will they fit into mythology? Can we assume they'll have larger roles in more magical settings?
4) Speaking of magical settings, after watching your GDC 2016 presentation, you commented on magic-less worlds not possessing dwarves, elves or goblins, which we could also see in the raw files you presented. Does that mean these magic-less human-only worlds will only be playable in adventure mode? Or are we *gasp* getting official playable humans in fortress mode, if only in this kind of world?
5) Final question; you mentioned the HFS is gonna be more integrated to the world with the introduction of magic. Any chance we'll be able to create custom demons with modding? The tokens exist but they do nothing on user-defined raws.
1-2) Various things have come up over the years, but we haven't gotten to any of it yet. So it falls into the "we'd like to do more, but no timeline" category.
3) Yeah, the situation has kind of blurred and blown open there, at least as far as the stories are concerned. It sort of depends on the further implementation of deities in some cases, since some of the megabeasts are lifted to that status in certain myths (cosmic primordial dragons and what not). Difficult to say how much and to what extent on the first pass though, since the first pass has so much to do already.
4) Hard to say what's going to happen -- easiest is adv only. Next easiest is some crappy human fort mode that sucks and is just like regular fort mode. I think it would be a waste to do more with it until embark scenarios shake things up a bit (as described above in this fotf post).
5) It's quite possible that you'll be able to link your own creature objects up in a way that can be used by the game. For instance, in the presentation, goblins were explicitly allowed to be created either on their own, or from a curse on one of the other main races -- it would not be super difficult to force a custom demon type object to assume a role that is demonish in a way understood by the generator. Of course, there are many possibilities that won't be realized on the first pass, and we'll continue to add to the system as we go.
Would you consider making the lives of the DFHack and other tool creators easier somehow? It seems like if Dwarf Fortress had an init or command line option where it would print out the memory address/offsets of all the key structures, then the community would be on much easier footing to quickly catch up to DF releases. That wouldn't expose any proprietary code or be nearly the effort of implementing a full mod API, since all you'd need to add is print statements for requested structure memory addresses, right?
There have been conversations along these lines over the years, though it has been a while on this particular matter. Utility people can and do PM me. I really don't recall where it was left last time it came up, or if it was decided that finding memory addresses was the fun part?
Given that creatures are going to be able to put in opt-out tags for creatures or items to prevent them from become subjects of the game-world mythology and to entities to prevent them from generating myths at all? I say this because in the case of modded creatures the generated mythology may be completely out of place given that their own canonical origins in the mod world are completely different. Also if magic and stuff are dependent upon mythology will it be possible to force certain outcome of various mythologies in those regards directly in the entity raw files without the myths having to actually be generated. Lastly how much control are we going to have over the nature of the mythology that is generated, can we for instance define a specific origin for a creature/entity so that when it's myths are generated this will always be the starting point?
Right now, there's sort of this nebulous "animals" group, for instance, that may or may not include some of the weirder vanilla subterranean creatures. There's going to have to be room for stuff that's just kinda in a place without getting name-checked in the myths.
I don't understand the second question. Do you mean can you define interactions in the raws without them being linked to myths at all? That should still be possible, including whatever new effects are supported. There'll be a boundary at some point in the definition of a raw-file magic system where it runs up against the generator (requiring a certain landform, say), where what you are asking for is basically a world editor beyond what the raws currently offer. A world editor is on the table for this stuff, but also one of the things that's hardest to justify the time spent for the initial release. After we get that, and specific deities and landforms and etc etc can just be added to a setting, then it's easier to do, and presumably that'll also help us with worlds where you want to say, define all the deities and related magic systems explicitly, but at the same time, allow the world map to vary, but still have, say, a particular site with properties X, Y and Z.
I'm not sure exactly how much control there will be at first over the direction of myths. We added a few parameters for the presentation, but it'll be more involved by the time it gets into the game itself. I can't promise anything specific, but a lot of scenarios are pretty easy to support, and I should be able to be responsive to concerns (until it bumps up against the previous paragraph).
There is some "rumor system" involving the discovery of the player's inns or even the entire fortresses?
Will the player's fortresses have the possibility of a dwarf or visitor being these "shadier" people?
Site reviews were separated from the main rumor system since they had to carry more information, but it's similar. The inn's location is made available to super-curious people from the beginning, just to get the ball rolling, though technically we could have made that always happen through caravans or something (that didn't seem reliable enough, and world traffic is still in many ways abstracted anyway).
I'm not yet sure how the shadier types are going to operate, if they'll be new people or just the personality/value-compatible ones -- it'll be up to testing.
I played a plump helmet man adventurer this day. I have to say I'm kinda disapointed that my adventurer cannot perform a dance nor play a (not wind) instrument. Sure he cannot speak, but dancing / instrumenting should still be possible.
Does dancing uses the CAN_SPEAK flag ? Could it be changed easily ?
I don't recall what it takes. It could be super easy but I thought I looked at it once and skipped out (since I had only a few minutes set aside). If it's on the bug tracker, it has a chance of being handled like everything else.
Are there plans to, in adventure mode, take up positions that are currently only holdable by npcs? I.E everything from bartender to King to Baron to priest? And if so how do you plan to implement this?
It'd be ideal, but it's a slow process since there are mechanics/interface to implement for each of them. Adventure mode has been slowly improving and expanding, and that's all part of it.
I would guess the gobos can also extract rumors from kidnaped children and prisoners by torture (i hope so atleast) ?
We haven't done anything with it yet, and it doesn't do anything with adult prisoners post w.g., which is where the rumors are more closely tracked.
With what Mel_Vixen just asked, will we be seeing NPCs lying in the game rather than just changing the topic or not knowing?
Nope, not any time soon. The information is hard enough to track as it is without keeping extra layers of wrong information.
In relevance to future thief/shady person adventurer roles/careers, will playing a role of gathering intrigue be more valuable and perhaps profitable if you say were in the position to feed juicy information to a demon master who then uses that information in world generation to forumate attacks and use you (and accountability for truthfulness/competency) as their earpiece.
It certainly makes sense that being near some gears and levers of power wouldn't be bad for somebody selling information, though it's anybody's guess how all that is going to play out. The agents in this release will set the early stage for that kind of thing being possible though, and we're looking forward to doing more.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1444434 times)