Thanks to Shonai_Dweller, Nibblewerfer, FantasticDorf, PatrikLundell, golemgunk, Bumber, Valtam, Egan_BW, Random_Dragon, Japa, therahedwig, lethosor, Knight Otu, Miuramir, and anybody I missed for helping to answer questions this month. Keep in mind that sometimes multi-part questions are partially cut when some of the questions are answered and not others, so please go back and check around your post if something is missing!
have you seen the bug report/encountered the zombie-merchant bug in a town?
Do you mean zombie like zombie, or zombie like the merchant just sitting there because they are historical figures and have become stranded in time? I remember something like the latter. I'm not sure it'll ever really be handled until they have a proper place in the world with the economy stuff.
Any new tags? I have a mod, and I just wanna be sure what the new tags are so that I may update the mod for the upcoming version!
There are several, mostly related to the new entity animal stuff, but I don't want to encourage premature updates in case they change near the end, which they often do. They'll be in the file changes.txt with the release.
Do you have any ideas for other HFS level spoilers that you aren't revealing? I'm curious about whether or not I will be surprised by anything huge that isn't in an update log.
Not in this release. For the myth release, there's a lot of stuff, but I'm not sure if anything will be held back in the logs or not, since it is an explicitly magical release.
In-game languages: is the new framework intended for the next couple releases? What are the current plans language-wise? Specifically, do you have any of the following in mind?
- A description of the phonologies and how they map to the orthographies
- Procedurally-generated historical sound changes
- Creature-to-creature spread of sound changes (resulting in dialects, etc.)
- Inter-language influences/borrowing
- Morphology
Yeah, those are in the notes (except for individual creature-to-creature spread, since that's probably too granular to ever make it in), but it hasn't been a priority. We've taken a small step toward it with the way that prophecies are stored, and I imagine it will continue in that way.
Will magical explosions be able to destroy natural tiles?
Hard to say what sort of effects we'll get and where -- oddly, blowing apart a whole region of the map is somewhat easier to handle than the digging-related implications of locally exploding tiles (regarding sieges, fortress integrity, etc.). As we've said before, we lean toward digging being allowed, but local map modifications of that kind should be toggleable (on a world-gen basis, anyway).
1. Will some civilizations prohibit the use of magic?
2. Could some possible corruptions from magic include growing extra limbs such as a tentacle or a tail?
3. Could magic users hide their corruptions under heavy amounts of clothing?
1. Hard to say where we'll be with that -- we don't have laws, or the status/group-based stuff that'll be in a little before that, but after the myths. At the same time, we have stuff like the ethics tags to control behavior, and something like that could very well come up, though entities never really had a clear necromancy policy, so who knows.
2. We'd like to get body modification in. It's a difficult problem, due to for instance the way wounds are stored and lots of body information is precalculated, but it needs to be handled at some point, and we might finally be there with the magic release.
3. Somebody brought up crime/disguises for this one, and that'd be the first time we'd get there, most likely. As usual, the more mechanics we have related to a given missing feature, the more pressure builds toward the addition of that feature.
Will dwarf civs now attack other sites they find annoying in initial worldgen, or is provoking them enough to retaliate only something the player is able to achieve?
Once they're at war will both sides continue to send armies to attack each other's sites, or will your civ end up turtling in the way dwarves do right now?
What season will dwarves attack in?
Any season? Just Autumn? Any chance to see a seperation of 'friendly merchant visit' and 'gonna kill ya all' active seasons?
I'm probably missing something, but I'm not sure what the turtling thing is. I don't see anything at first glance that causes dwarves to behave differently. Perhaps low population capitals?
Active season no longer has anything to do with invasion timing.
Toady, in your most recent update you mentioned sending your expedition leader to raid a mountainhome, which the dwarf did not survive. The civ responded with a small siege of ten troops. Was this small force sent because you sent such a tiny force to attack? If one sends larger forces to raid sites, will the civ send larger retaliation forces?
I think it goes by number of attacks -- they bypass the triggers, but it ramps up as usual after that.
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.
During world gen, during the civ movement phase, it checks for a living associated historical figure. Failing to find one, it goes through the associated entity populations and sees if any of them have positive numbers. If that fails it marks the entity as dead. The entity population bookkeeping has always been sort of problematic, so it wouldn't be surprising if that screws 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.
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You told something about cylinder worlds, will the game support toroidal planet? Stuff like this thing presented here http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2014/02/torusearth.html ?
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People addressed most of the issues -- therahedwig's diagram is the main one with seamless loading. It just doesn't work in 2D. Changing over to six separate loadable areas would be a step backward and require separate and messy handling.
I don't know exactly how it'll turn out, but code-wise supporting wrapping on either edge is similar enough that it would probably be supported.
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?
It could be both, certainly the first. The precursor type is a little harder to do technically, since it's a mushier divide between creature definitions and the game doesn't like that very much (the sort of thing that makes common stuff like "half elf" very hard to add).
PatrikLundell mentioned some problems w/ procedural items -- right now, many exist (clothing etc.) but they have been relegated to vaults. People are used to variously-named instruments, but extending it out is harder and a lot to ask in terms of the player's information bandwidth. There's a middle ground more where your question is, where items can have modifications and so forth. I'm not sure when we'll get to that sort of thing. We've been stuck with bucket handles as the only specialty modification for a very, very long time.
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?
Ha ha, it's not an easy question to answer -- as far as I know there are many schools of thought and pitfalls. Right now, as far as I remember, we don't blacklist anything (except maybe for some physically impossible stuff) or have any preferences, but I'm not sure, and of course the entities have hard blacklists for equipment which isn't part of the knowledge forest. No idea how that'll play out when it's all joined. We could use the values/personality stuff in some clumsy way to point civs in some direction or another, as well as circumstances like whether they are in an eternal war or not, that sort of thing. We haven't really engaged with it since the knowledge system is still almost completely disengaged from other mechanics.
Do/have you ever run valgrind or any similar programs on the DF source code?
With the latest (or one before that) msvc, I lost my Windows memleak detector, but I was clean up until then. I haven't run a check with a replacement yet. Also used the static analysis with the latest msvc and found some interesting bugs.
Would it be possible to get monsters to yield and quit eating people without killing them?
Shonai_Dweller mentioned the worldgen taming journeys, and it's another case of worldgen mechanics not matching up with in-game mechanics. It would be fitting to have some extra reasonable/heroic behaviors.
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).
We're thinking of them about like people until we have a clear reason to deviate, since it helps the stories along. Perhaps because of how the AI is always going to be bad and inflexible, we can consider them a bit more unreasonable and set in their ways.
Are there any changes to artifact generation? Leather spikes, coal grates etc. are somewhat immersion breaking.
Haven't done anything to patch any of that up. That problem isn't really limited to artifacts either. A lot of the materials don't work quite right.
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.
Nonsensical artifact effects are counterproductive, I think, so there'll likely be some restrictions. I don't mean nonsensical like silly, but ones that literally don't make sense.
Like rust? It is in a dev note, but not a priority.
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?
- 16 * 16 world tiles for features
- 7 * 7 world tiles for "nearby" biome creatures
- 3 * 3 world tiles for region info
- 16 * 16 region tiles per world tile (called embark tiles by Max)
- 3 * 3 tiles per region tile for various features, including "local features" (they don't cross these boundaries, currently). I've got no name for these.
- 48 * 48 embark tiles (in my terminology, dwarf scale in Max') per region tile.
So for a 17x17 pocket world:
[w17]x[w17] in world tiles --world map export scale
[r272]x[r272] in region tiles --wilderness travel scale
[e816]x[e816] in embark tiles --near-site travel export
[t39168]x[t39168] in local tiles --on foot scale
Ha ha, I'm not sure official names are useful -- they are often the worst names since the purpose of the structures has changed over the years, etc. In any case, we have the 16x16 world tiles, which are called "feature shells", since we used them first to handle groups of map features for save/load. The 16x16 maps of a single world tile are called "midmaps", but there are 17x17 maps of sites at the same scale called "site realizations", and those also have 51x51 versions which are blown up (and also exist in the site realization). Armies move at this scale (three times the midmap scale, but it doesn't have a name) -- generally the coordinates are stored as (ax,ay) for the world, (mmx,mmy) for the midmap, (smmx,smmy) for the three-times-closer army scale, and (x,y,z) or (lx,ly,ly) for the local in-play tiles. Aside from the "mm" for midmap and the "l" for local, the reasons are lost to time... "s" might be for site, and "a" might be for area. A single midmap tile is the 48x48 play tile unit (doesn't have another name aside from "midmap tile"), and it is made up of a 3x3 of 16x16x1 play tiles, and each of those 16x16x1s is a "block" (so a midmap tile is 3x3 blocks). The 16x16 is also sometimes taken with all Z levels as a "block column" (which handles cave-ins and some other data). Stuff like weather and biome creature areas are all one-off arrays/functions and not given useful names as far as I know.
What's the story on getting non-dwarves in migrant waves or animal-people visitors? Seems like animal-people don't show up in player fortresses nearly as much as they do in generated fortresses.
Since we didn't know how non-dwarf citizens would turn out (in terms of clothing production etc.), they are disallowed as general migrants. I'm still not sure where we're at there.
Is the situation on how frequently we see animalpeople citizens likely to change by the hill dwarf arc? pushing for a community of tiger men citizens created from retired adventurers/migrants into a self contained extranous community so that we can get semi-occasional migrants from them.
With all the migration changes in that release, it's quite possible. I don't yet have a good feel for how annoying it is to have a significantly non-dwarven fortress in terms of clothing etc.
With stuff like secret identities and family members will our adventurer log eventually show more information about the npcs we know like job and family relations?
It would be useful and cool. As it matters more and more, it'll probably happen.
1. Are there plans for entity tokens that would allow you to alter the extent to which entities interact with artifacts? Like, could we make it so they would only ask politely for artifacts, and never fight over them, or vice versa?
2. Will Kobold sites remain as they are now, just spawning in a single cave (although with an upgraded layout) or have the ability to found sites like the other civs?
3. Will Necromancers be able to hunt down artifacts and if so, how?
1. I haven't done anything with that. I'm not sure if I feel comfortable with artifact-specific flags or if I should just respect stuff like values regarding warfare etc. throughout.
2. They don't spread out.
3. They have an entity somewhat related to the bandit entities. Those don't have agents, and they only send out certain sorts of groups. They might undead-invade sites preferentially based on artifact claims, but it would be a pretty unusual circumstance, and the undead invasions are separated out a bit so I'm not sure artifacts would be fully considered (rather than just some numerical modifier based on claim grievances). They won't be able to find a lost artifact right now.
is there anything in game that alters how quickly someone crosses the map in travel mode? It seems like it assumes a default rate for all armies on the map, is it something fixed like 1 travel step = x time units on the day/night display? It feels strange that a unit so fat or overencumbered they move at 0.099 can travel at the same rate as a modded hyperspeed unit which moves at 10.000 does.
We just haven't done anything with this yet -- armies don't understand mounts or equipment or anything, so there wasn't much point. It slows you down a bit if you are sneaking.
With the introduction of diplomacy and tracking those diplomatic actions of handing over artifacts to pay off some goblins etc. does offering gifts via the trading screen have any effect to what they think of you?
If I remember, giving gifts has always mattered a bit (fading over a period of ten years), in terms of positive relationships. Now, instead of just a numeric advantage, it can satisfy claims. I haven't changed the numbers, but it could afford to tell you more about them somewhere.
How many passes do you envision for the myth gen release? In the case of the cake being too big to eat in one go, which elements are low priority and less likely to make it?
If you raid kobold civs, will they send full-blown retaliatory ambushes like other civs?
Can you raid cave civs (i.e. animal men) in the unlikely event of them having artifacts?
Can you raid necro towers to retrieve their books about the secrets of life and death (considered artifacts)? Can necros retaliate in response?
Can you raid non-civ specific sites like shrines, labyrinths, lairs, etc.?
If you raid a civ of a given race, does the whole race stop trading with you, i.e. is it possible to have both caravans and invaders from a single race at the same time?
Do named objects have artifact properties, e.g. will the naming of a weapon in worldgen increase its effectiveness in combat?
If enough demands from a goblin civ are being satisfied, can you enter a state of peace with them?
What does 'start trouble' and 'generic raids' mean? Do you just send dwarves randomly killing people and destroying buildings or is there a general purpose such as bringing back loot (in what form?), prisoners, animals, knowledge etc.
Is there an experience boost in combat/tracking skills when dwarves come back from raids? Is it random, fixed or target-dependent?
Can you send a long term resident mercenary to raid his own civ?
Are there any implications off-map if some of the dwarves you send are vampires/werebeasts/necromancers (i.e. does the werebeast fight in transformed form if the raid happens during a full moon, does the necromancer raises dead off-map, does the vampire feed upon his fellow squad members etc.)?
Does a raid squad need food and drink or do they just feed on whatever they find in the countryside?
It's too early to say what's in and out. It'd be easy to go on with it forever, which would be a bad idea. So it could end up being one release where we just try to do what we can. It'll be hard to break down the first release into smaller sections (aside from the artifact release, which is sort of a broken out part), since there are deep skeletal changes that'll require a lengthy non-compileable period.
Kobolds never sent full sieges (just distractions, now including some beasts), and still don't. They want to take things and always send thieves.
Cannot raid site-less entities like underground animal people.
Can raid necro towers. Necro response unclear due to weird undead invasion mechanics.
Can raid non-civ sites.
Races do not act as a group, so you could have a caravan and invaders from the same race by dealing with different civs differently.
Named objects do not become artifact quality.
Goblins are generally predisposed toward fighting with you, but satisfying a demand can avoid a war over that artifact specifically.
If you bring back some crap from a site, you'll have that crap. It probably won't be an important part of your economy though, at this point.
Combat skills off-site are an outstanding nugget -- there were some annoyances post w.g. with merging skill profiles between local units and historical figure defs. Should be solvable but not 100% clear.
Yeah, mercenaries don't care at all at this point.
No special handling of vampires etc. on missions.
No army food/drink handling yet.
Does the new xml you're making available include the procedurally generated instrument and music descriptions?
Yeah, I put them in there -- mostly just the description paragraph and not a variable-by-variable tagging, since that'd take a lot of time to do.
In some worlds will there be special ceremonies/rituals priests can/need to do to receive more power from their deity?
It's hard to say what'll make it in. Those sorts of deity-magic relationships are on the table, though I'd expect it not to be quite as graded and mechanical as, say, dnd priest magic (as of 2nd edition or whenever I last saw it).
You mentioned that animal thieves who steal artifacts will become historical figures in last devlog. At the moment, however, I believe beast attacks stop post-worldgen outside the player fortress. Will those named keas return only to the fort (wielding the artifact?) or will they go thieve from other civilizations post-worldgen, once thus recognized?
Since animals that steal artifacts become historical figures, can you make the option in one of the .txt files for all animals that steal things from your fort, regardless of whether they steal an artifact, to become historical figures?
Is there a extremely minute chance that keas arriving from off the map could already have stolen artifacts or stolen objects that you could take off them?
As artifacts grow in power over future releases, might we see animals that steal artifacts become elevated to greater status?
For example: The assumption is that artifacts will eventually become like The One Ring or Excalibur, so would a kea that steals The One Ring become a Gollum-like creature, or would a kea that steals Excalibur become King of the Britons?
They sadly just hang out -- they can't declare lairs or raid like w.g. beasts. For that reason there's also no reason to elevate non-artifact critters yet. No animal thieves entering the map are historical.
No idea what will happen with artifact powers. It'd have to handle cases of "upon holding/wielding" powers w/ animal thieves though, since they'd probably trigger by default in cases that aren't handled explicitly.
Come the mythgen release, do you think we'll get any details on what lies beyond the borders of our maps? For example, if some worlds are meant to be exactly what we see, perhaps floating on the back of a turtle? While others are meant to be part of something bigger?
Probably? I have various riffs on the turtle idea in the generator notes, but haven't done any of them in the generator yet. We had some issues with having civs outside the main world that could send invaders without any ability to reply (which was sort of in a very early version), so the region-within-a-world model isn't as attractive now, even though it is in the list of default gen params. It'll be especially weird when planar travel comes in and you can reply (if it makes sense) to planar invaders, but not to some barbarians that come in from the edge. Though there could be room for a kind of infinite home plane as well, where it has to cope with the idea of civs going on and on forever, which is sort of interesting, but mushy.
When artifacts are given magical effects, will we see them affect a creature's intelligence and personality? For example an animal with the Can_Speak token or a necromancer who suddenly has the urge to raise a family as their main goal?
Hard to say what's going in on the first pass. Critters will be more mutable as more effects go in, and we'd like to have personality effects as well as the ability to endow intelligence or other basic property changes. The former is especially likely since it is already possible with syndromes (as with alcohol).
When boats are added, will there be nomadic groups/bandits/travelling merchants that live on and travel up and down rivers?
It would be cool -- I have no idea what'll be first. Boats are on the table as something to come before the economy release since they are so important to the economy, but in that case, they wouldn't have an economy to work with, so they'd be... (fake) fishing? Raiding? Proto-economic? It could go any way. Or we might do some land caravan stuff first.
Will World-gen artifacts be able to be of any weapon/armor type, like the fortress artifacts? Or do they only make artifacts of items from their own civ?
Looks like w.g. mood dwarves use the same old function from fortress artifacts. I think holy relics on the other hand might use something which respects the entity.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1442450 times)