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[iceball3]

I suppose it would be worth not ruling out the possibility that the topics system would allow civilizations to develop weapons designs and improvements based off of core recognizable weapon types (polearms, swords, axes, etc) via developments made by weaponsmiths and related scholars.
To what extent, mechanically speaking, would you currently think of cutting off involvement of topic development from the technological capabilities of civilizations in worldgen? For instance, topics which allow civilizations to develop siege weapons, military tactics, weaponry in general, civics (site types and similar) etc.

Do you think general proclivity a race has to particular topics (weighted and/or circumstantially influenced preference), or topical whitelists/blacklists are the optimal way of determining what scholars in a civilization will introduce to them, for Dwarf Fortress?

[ArmokGoB]

Do/have you ever run valgrind or any similar programs on the DF source code?

[Zavvnao]

Would it be possible to get monsters to yield and quit eating people without killing them?

I am only asking from a story telling point of view, as there where heroes that solved things in different ways.

Like the Maori god that smashed a Taniwha's (a dragon-type creature from New Zealand) teeth in to make it stop attacking humans.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Would it be possible to get monsters to yield and quit eating people without killing them?

I am only asking from a story telling point of view, as there where heroes that solved things in different ways.

Like the Maori god that smashed a Taniwha's (a dragon-type creature from New Zealand) teeth in to make it stop attacking humans.

Heroes do venture into the wild and 'tame the giant panthers' and such. I imagine that involves a fair amount of teeth smashing sometimes.

[Bulwersator]

How you imagine motional strength of dwarves? Similar to real-life humans or tougher? I ask as it dramatically changes from version to version in game (34.05 dwarves are emotionally resistant to everything, including lack of alcohol).

[vvAve]

Are there any changes to artifact generation? Leather spikes, coal grates etc. are somewhat immersion breaking.

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:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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


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. 

There is also a nice example in SimEarth although I don't know which method they used.
https://youtu.be/B2qr4N-24js?t=2m51s

[FantasticDorf]

Would it be possible to get monsters to yield and quit eating people without killing them?

I am only asking from a story telling point of view, as there where heroes that solved things in different ways.

Like the Maori god that smashed a Taniwha's (a dragon-type creature from New Zealand) teeth in to make it stop attacking humans.

Heroes do venture into the wild and 'tame the giant panthers' and such. I imagine that involves a fair amount of teeth smashing sometimes.

Probably, but that's not really explained and we might get a more in-depth explanation if player adventurers at a later date are able to summarily tame a creature (yeah you'll have to mine info from toady for comments about that)

You can't "break" a panther into being trained by hopping on its back and riding it around for a bit i would think, and those 'heroes' are doing it by cheaty methods that will probably be removed for a less opaque future system.
Also on the point of monsters yielding, it would probably have to account for how serious the confrontation is and whether both parties are intelligent and motivated enough to accept mutual de-escalation. And to also see how trustworthy/calm both parties are, if either of you are lost to rage you could flip out at any second and go back to fighting.

[lethosor]

Do/have you ever run valgrind or any similar programs on the DF source code?

This isn't current, so the "do" part is still a good question, but I remember he mentioned running some leak checker on it (maybe just on Windows) a couple days before 0.40.01. I don't remember if it was in the DF announcements board, an old FotF thread, or somewhere else, unfortunately.

[593shaun]

When you make the myth and magic arc, do you have plans to allow us to add our own magical artifact effects, or will they be hard coded only?

As a follow up, do you plan to make artifact effects exclusive to selected item types, or completely random (for example, would I be able to make an effect (however generic it may be) to raise the strength of the wielder that appeared on hammers and belts, or would I then be able to get a door of strength)?

Also, unrelated, but I was also wondering if you had plans to add hardening with oxygen and corrosiveness to materials.

I apologize if these questions have been asked before, I don't come on these forums often.

[Shonai_Dweller]

When you make the myth and magic arc, do you have plans to allow us to add our own magical artifact effects, or will they be hard coded only?

As a follow up, do you plan to make artifact effects exclusive to selected item types, or completely random (for example, would I be able to make an effect (however generic it may be) to raise the strength of the wielder that appeared on hammers and belts, or would I then be able to get a door of strength)?

Also, unrelated, but I was also wondering if you had plans to add hardening with oxygen and corrosiveness to materials.

I apologize if these questions have been asked before, I don't come on these forums often.

There's an editor planned. It's part of the mythgen arc, but I imagine it'll be a few releases before it's worked on. That'll give you control over artifact effects apparently (no hard information yet, just the list "Maps, sites, entities, historical figures, artifacts, myths, etc.")

[LordBaal]

Huge congratulations for the incoming marriage! (Didn't knew were else to put it on the forum)

[Max™]

I felt really silly when I remembered gluing the opposite edges of a square together produces a torus. Go go gadget donut-worlds!

Like, we've got a damn mathematician here, various dfhack wizards, and not to tootle my own sad little horn but I enjoy reading dry mathetical papers and such myself... how did we miss this?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Do/have you ever run valgrind or any similar programs on the DF source code?

This isn't current, so the "do" part is still a good question, but I remember he mentioned running some leak checker on it (maybe just on Windows) a couple days before 0.40.01. I don't remember if it was in the DF announcements board, an old FotF thread, or somewhere else, unfortunately.

Folks were doing this with the 32 > 64 bit bump to help him track down the last few bugs.


I had a question but I was up for a couple of days writing scripts and then trying to figure out how to set up keyconfig rules for ublock so my head is fuzzy and I'll get back to this part after I get done looking at square > torus gifs... oh, I remembered, I have been meaning to ask this for a while but always get sidetracked!

What exactly is required for a spouse converter to actually transform their prisoners? I've tried having [NIGHT_CREATURE_HUNTER] + [SPOUSE_CONVERTER] + [LARGE_PREDATOR] along with setting the orientation to 100% hetero and making sure the converter/converted have matching max age or no aging tokens.

Adding [LAIR:blah] tags and such seemed to help at times, as did the inclusion of relevant child tags/size~age tokens, but it wasn't until I tried setting [POPULATION_NUMBER:x:y] and [FREQUENCY:z] that I had my first successful abduction > transformation > reproduction results with a dual caste (converter+spouse) creature.

Afterwards through trial and error I had occasional success at getting a quadruple caste (converter male/female+spouse male/female) creature to properly abduct > transform > reproduce but I have no idea why I can break it just by things like taking the pairs of castes defined earlier and trying to assign traits to both with select_caste: and select_additonal_caste: lines to condense the raws some.

Does [BIOME:foo] have anything to do with converters? Does frequency actually matter or did I placebo myself?

[Bumber]

Like, we've got a damn mathematician here, various dfhack wizards, and not to tootle my own sad little horn but I enjoy reading dry mathetical papers and such myself... how did we miss this?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I've heard of toroidal worlds, but they're less pleasant to visualize while maintaining aspect ratio for squares. Notice the shrinking during the first fold and stretching during the other.
I'm pretty sure you get a surface that passes through itself if you don't.

[AceSV]

I like the idea of a toroidal world for some sort of "plane of existence" out there.  But like bumber mentioned, if you portrayed the surface of the torus with squares, you would have stretching and shrinking because the circumference of the outside is greater than the circumference of the inside. 

But that got me thinking, what about an offset square grid? 


This would effectively work like a hexagon grid, but allows you to use the same quadrilateral graphical tiles as before.  If you mapped a torus or a long-lat sphere to a hash grid, you need bigger squares at the outer edge of the torus or at the equator of the sphere.  Alternatively use more squares instead of bigger squares.  So the total map is kind of a trapezoid instead of a big square.  Although I guess you could still do that with a hash-grid, now that I think about it...

I'm sure someone will want to point out that an offset-square/hexagon grid can be clumsy to navigate with keyboard, and for all these people, I would point out that all such problems could be solved by simply using a mouse. 

[Max™]

I don't even use a mouse though. I've got a trackball sitting over to my left in case my mousekeys.xkb setup glitches out or something, but I'm not nearly ambidextrous enough to use it for gameplay of any sort, not to mention all of the functionality I would lose by replacing a whole numpad+adjacent keys+modifier keys with a frickin' pointer and four buttons? Nothxkbai and all.

It would irk the shit out of me to force a weird side-to-side swagger for any units walking north/south but not any other direction, though that does make me wonder about having a larger tilesheet to work with so you could include half tiles in different combinations or something?
   │^__^│
│   ^_|_^   │

Comparitively though, a torus seems like the simplest method for df, if Toady was gonna embark on such a complete rewrite as that would require I think everyone would prefer it be one for multi-threading or something similar.

Note that I don't mean literally build and display the game world as a torus, just that it is an easy way to picture how the top~bottom+left~right linkages would work, never bothered me playing Asteroids or Star Control or Bravely Default or (keep inserting games like this) so why not if it meant no more isolated corners/edges being left out of the fun?

Like, we've got a damn mathematician here, various dfhack wizards, and not to tootle my own sad little horn but I enjoy reading dry mathematical papers and such myself... how did we miss this?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I've heard of toroidal worlds, but they're less pleasant to visualize while maintaining aspect ratio for squares. Notice the shrinking during the first fold and stretching during the other.
I'm pretty sure you get a surface that passes through itself if you don't.

Yeah but on the scale of even a 17x17 it's a simple enough solution to just have the map coordinates link up so the moving into the map blocks in the north and west edges of the {0,0} travel tile causes the appropriate map blocks along the south and/or east edges of the {815,815} travel tile to load on screen.

Oh, that's a good question: myself I usually think of the 48x48 tile chunks as "embark tiles" due to their use on the embark screen/fort dimensions, and the 16x16 embark tile chunks as "world tiles" accordingly. Do you have a more official--if you will--terminology that you use, and are there different scales you use/think of the game world in terms of besides those?

Travel mode moves you basically on the embark tile scale and using dfhack in or near a site it's easy to see that altering the coordinates of your traveling army by x+1 moves you over 1 "site travel" step, but it takes an x/y change of 3 or more to move your spot on the wilderness travel map, so you could call 1 embark tile 3 travel tiles or 16 dwarf scale tiles I guess?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)