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[PatrikLundell]

What are the criteria for a civ to be declared dead on embark?
The reason for the question is that most civs that should be dead refuse to acknowledge it and maintain they're merely struggling (with the attendant caravans, migrant waves, monarch, etc), and I'm trying to hack them into realizing they're in fact dead, as I realize fixing the bug is likely to be a low priority correction. It can be noted that the actual criteria used are harder than the ones that exclude "dead" civs from showing up on the civ selection screen: hacking the selection to allow all of the dwarven ones to be used result in roughly the same ration between "struggling" and actually dead ones on embark (somewhere between 1:3 and 1:20) as in the vanilla case where you only have a single dwarven civ and it ought to be dead. I've had some minor success hacking the entity_populations entry (DFHack term) to set the population to zero before finalizing the world, but that works only in a minority of the cases. I realize you may be reluctant to answer the question as it risks opening the floodgate of hacking/modding info requests.

[AceSV]

Hey, s'up. 

I saw in the July Future of the Fortress reply that you can't make a spherical world with square tiles.  There's actually something we make in 3D art called a "cube sphere".  Basically, imagine drawing the grid lines onto a cube, and then puffing out the cube into a spherical shape.  Here's a picture of how to make one:


It's still not perfect, but more even than the traditional long-lat layout, and the smaller the grid, the less it matters. 


EDIT:  Here is a YouTube video for people to see a cube sphere planet being made, https://youtu.be/dixS2nn9nK0  Hopefully that will answer some questions about how it works. 

[Rose]

How do you render the parts where 3 tiles meet at a corner in 2d?

[AceSV]

How do you render the parts where 3 tiles meet at a corner in 2d?

If it's a sphere, then why render it in 2D? 

Each tile still has 4 sides, so if you're walking around on the map in classic DF tiles, going up, down, left or right will take you to an adjacent tile, just that these won't necessarily equate to N,S,E,W.  The spherical shape is kind of a distraction, just imagine that it's a 6-sided cube with grids on each side. 

EDIT:  I just added a YT vid, hopefully that will be more clear than trying to explain it with words. 

[Rose]

But DF is a 2d game composed of square 2d tiles.

[PatrikLundell]

To add to Japa's comments:
- DF has a 2D world map. A cylinder is comparatively easy to implement as you just wrap around to the other side when crossing the side edges. Of course, you could do the same on the top/bottom:  it wouldn't match any real world shape, but it would work. Toady doesn't seem to be too keen on 3D rendering, and that probably applies to the top level as well.
- The internal addressing logic of DF is in X/Y coordinates on 3 different levels. Replacing that with some other addressing scheme that makes sense is probably not trivial.
- Even if you were to replace the internal addressing scheme, you'd have to come up with some way to quickly and easily address "nearby" tiles, at least up to 3 world tiles away currently.

[AceSV]

So I guess it sounded to me like Toady was saying "I would make spherical planes of existence, if only I knew how", and I'm saying, "oh, how about a cube sphere?  have you heard of that?"

The cube sphere is still, for some intents and purposes, a cube, which can be represented by 6 flat X,Y maps stitched together, so using this method does not have to be a complete departure from the existing system.  It should function basically as you suggest, a cylinder with a wrappable top and bottom, except that it does match a real world shape, cube or sphere. 

[therahedwig]

the problem is to represent a sphere the squares on the grid aren't squares, they are polygons. 3d convex polygons with four nodes.

It is also, if we unfold the cubesphere to make a 2d map for your dwarves and adventurers to walk about, we get the following issue:


If your adventurer is at B2, going UP ends him in C2, and going right ends him in B3. So far, so good. However, if your adventurer is at B3, going up should lead him to C2 as well. See how awkward that'd be visually?

Edit: What could be possible is that maybe a generated world just has 6 different regions and switching between them is a slow operation ect. Then we'd have a cube world at the least. Or just 6 different regions whose initial generation comes from a sphere, but they don't necessarily have attached borders. So maybe you need cross an ocean or special mountain range or whatever by boat to get in the next region. /random thoughts

[Slozgo Luzma]

Two questions regarding distant future development details:

Under the "Creation Myths and Magic Systems" arc, you mention that mythic artifacts could come from sources that are either divine, natural, or from ancient races. Do you envision these randomly generated ancient races as being something like the Hindu Devas or Norse Aenir, where they are magical epic versions of the believing race? Or more like a precursor style or superior ancestor, like Tolkien's Numenoreans or something similiar? Neither? Both?

Additionally, we have randomly generated art styles and musical instruments: will we eventually get cultural weapon, raiment and even tool variations along the same lines, with their own names? Like a civilization can currently have a bagpipe that can play two octaves and has a flat tone, will we have short swords with bell-guards, flared pommels, no-dachi blades, and a blood channel? Or a mace with flanges and a curved grip?

[PatrikLundell]

I believe procedurally generated weapons are intended, at the least. A technical issue with those is that they actually have to "work", i.e. combat performance attributes have to be generated as well, not only the descriptions.

Personally I don't look forward to clothing and/or weapons/armor getting the instrument treatment, because I find the random naming to be a pain, and royally so if I'd actually have to decode what each random name means so I can produce and equip the desired ones (and do so every time they need to be produced). However, if naming was using a usable base name with embellishments I'd like to see it (i.e. a grok one handed sword, or a blurf robe, or, even better, having the descriptive part first, such as short sword of the grok type, long sword of the kur type, cap in the murfak style etc.). If you get means to learn how to produce foreign equipment you need to have a way to compare the specs (if you only have goblinite/visitite as a foreign equipment source you'd probably always prefer masterworks local equipment to lower quality foreign one when local versions are available).

[RobotFighter7]

Two questions regarding distant future development details:

Under the "Creation Myths and Magic Systems" arc, you mention that mythic artifacts could come from sources that are either divine, natural, or from ancient races. Do you envision these randomly generated ancient races as being something like the Hindu Devas or Norse Aenir, where they are magical epic versions of the believing race? Or more like a precursor style or superior ancestor, like Tolkien's Numenoreans or something similiar? Neither? Both?

Additionally, we have randomly generated art styles and musical instruments: will we eventually get cultural weapon, raiment and even tool variations along the same lines, with their own names? Like a civilization can currently have a bagpipe that can play two octaves and has a flat tone, will we have short swords with bell-guards, flared pommels, no-dachi blades, and a blood channel? Or a mace with flanges and a curved grip?

Just going to butt in here to say that "blood channels" (fullers) are for weight reduction/balance and have nothing to do with blood flow. A stabbed organ is going to bleed, it doesn't need to leave the body for that to be a problem.

[bluephoenix]

Two questions regarding distant future development details:

Under the "Creation Myths and Magic Systems" arc, you mention that mythic artifacts could come from sources that are either divine, natural, or from ancient races. Do you envision these randomly generated ancient races as being something like the Hindu Devas or Norse Aenir, where they are magical epic versions of the believing race? Or more like a precursor style or superior ancestor, like Tolkien's Numenoreans or something similiar? Neither? Both?

Additionally, we have randomly generated art styles and musical instruments: will we eventually get cultural weapon, raiment and even tool variations along the same lines, with their own names? Like a civilization can currently have a bagpipe that can play two octaves and has a flat tone, will we have short swords with bell-guards, flared pommels, no-dachi blades, and a blood channel? Or a mace with flanges and a curved grip?

Just going to butt in here to say that "blood channels" (fullers) are for weight reduction/balance and have nothing to do with blood flow. A stabbed organ is going to bleed, it doesn't need to leave the body for that to be a problem.

As a medieval reenactor that cares about these things, thank you haha. The fuller also gives swords some additional strength, a bar of steel with a groove/fuller is stronger than just a flat bar.

[FantasticDorf]

We already have some 'cultural' shields associated to human civs which appear, and elf arrows, both are collectable and to a extend usable by dwarves, though the more likely scenario is that these races will be trying to kill you with these weapons before they ultimately fall prey to your defences.

Really depends on what we could do that isn't just aesthetic or likely to create lots of unnecessary additional entries for weapon types with only minimal differences between them and long bizarre names, a sort of similar reception to the instruments as we currently have them which require you to look in the symbol creator to determine what exactly they are without accessibility to get a description in out of the GUI, in a situation like embark preparation.

Do you know your Iron Ugzhuzhu from your Iron Broadsword? They are both the identical object (generated one has a different hilt) but if there isn't enough differentiation between them, you may as well restrict it to wholly distinct weapons because it will be a pain to sort.

[Random_Dragon]

Do you know your Iron Ugzhuzhu from your Iron Broadsword? They are both the identical object (generated one has a different hilt) but if there isn't enough differentiation between them, you may as well restrict it to wholly distinct weapons because it will be a pain to sort.

Yeah. I've already said this needs to not happen with critters, especially critters that're trying to kill you. Unlike with names that use in-game languages, the existing generated creatures use names that at least tell you what to expect. They have a theme, in a language you can actually understand. "Hill titan" tells you at a glance that it's something you need to examine in depth, whereas "ugly fucko ogre" or what-have-you can be written off as "bigger than a human but not massive, immune to KOs but can be bled out or suffocated, no fancy death poison" immediately, without having to examine them.

[AceSV]

Rather than exactly generating weapons, you could have civs pick randomly from a pool of weapons.  Like, you have the raws for katana, arming sword and khopesh, and the civilization picks one at random.

Personally, as a weapons enthusiast, I'm used to encountering terms like dao, mambele, urumi, tuck, flyssa, nagamaki, and so on, and needing to figure out what they mean, so it wouldn't be that bad, as long as you can easily read a description of what the weapon is.  (hopefully, not as painful as the instrument descriptions)  It would be interesting to have weapons that are calculated based on their construction, like if you can say, this is a dwarven splurg, a sword with a medium curve, one-sided blade, 4 foot blade, 2-handed handle, minimal guard, 1500g weight, and each of those things means something to the simulation. 

If you were to implement randomized weapons, there should be some sense of evolution and adaptation, not just randomly assigned.  For example, the Chinese two-sided sword, jian, became the one-sided saber, dao, which was adapted by various other cultures, becoming the Japanese katana, to the east, and the Mongol cavalry saber to the west, which then became the Turkish kilij, Arabian scimitar and Mughal/Indian Tulwar, while in China, it became the thicker modern dao, pudao and dadao.  Or in Europe, the ancient and early medieval period saw a lot of bladed weapons in a time when armor is relatively uncommon, but as platemail becomes the norm in the late medieval and early renaissance era, we see more maces, hammers and picks for defeating armor.  Or in England, farmers going to war use their billhook tools turned into polearms, this becomes a national weapon of England and a symbol of English pride and prowess, so they keep using it well into the late medieval period when the rest of Europe is using pike formations.  (similar story about the ancient egyptian khopesh)