Thanks to Shonai_Dweller, PatrikLundell, EPM, PlumpHelmetMan, Mel_Vixen, Bumber, Rockphed, FantasticDorf, KittyTac, Knight Otu, and anybody I missed for helping to answer questions this month!
Will the unfinished stuff you ran out of time to implement fully be implemented in the bugfix mini-releases following this one?
WHen the graphic overhaul comes (I'm aware that's a long time from now), will there be an option to switch back to ASCII? Not a graphics fan here.
Unfinished stuff works out all kinds of ways. I know people have been disappointed in the past by things that are left on the table, from years and years ago, and I'm not going to promise anything here. Some things'll be worked on, and others will sit.
I don't anticipate ever ending ASCII support. It would be a very different code-base where that was even on the table as a possibility.
- I don't mean to press for details about something that at the given time is a twinkle in your eyes, but are portals static constructions or wizard dependant temporary arcane constructs?
- Besides from nasties that might arise from going outside your existing plane, will there be any immediate danger in regards to world armies coming through the portals if they own the immediate site on the other side? (Goblin occupation for instance, see you're on the other side of the portal and instead decide to send a army right on through to you rather than walk the long distance to the overworld because you're nearer than everywhere else)
And finally
- Are portals likely to become secret generation features to be found after being placed in worldgen?
- Portals might not be constructed at all. There are really any number of models. The traditional 'gateway to the underworld' is possibly a portal. So are certain models of a possibly easy-to-cast teleport spell. Or one of those giant stone ones you might have to build. We're up for whatever.
- One of the issues with magical modes of movement is updating the AI, so it'll be on the table and we'll get to what we get to. If you suddenly have a goblin army teleport into your fort, that's how that world is, but that cuts all ways. Easy teleportation should change the entire world and its societies, in ways which sometimes aren't thought out in such settings (e.g. what would cheap Town Portal scrolls really do to those CRPG societies?). We might not think it out any better, but it'll improve over time, and the simulation will force us to come to terms with certain things.
- It's possible! The gateway to the underworld might be such an example.
Goblins are good at lying anyway as its actually on one of thier civ values that is frequently levelled up in skills that may generate potential pleasure, but would it be possible to "break" a spy on the opposite end of the personal individuals spectrum (Lying = Truth values) as a goal - past the currently impending update (at a later date if the system recieves more work to tie up loose ends described in the talk that are partially completed) - by exploiting a individual with high truth values who sincerely dislikes lying but is pushed into the role anyway by the selection algorithms.
I don't quite understand... you don't mean break in terms of interrogation, but break in terms of forcing a truthful person to be a crappy spy? Or do you mean interrogating such a crappy spy? It depends on the numbers I suppose, once we get to that point. There'll be the sense of duty and loyalty and fear on the other side, even for truth tellers, in terms of whether they'd maintain cover, but it might be possible for the numbers to get out of whack enough for a spy to just be terrible at it by virtue of their conscience. A lot will depend on the exact mechanisms.
I watched your talk on YouTube, and it seems like a lot of the systems in Dwarf Fortress are limited by the fact that computers have a limited amount of RAM.
What limitation of Dwarf Fortress itself has caused you the most trouble?
I don't quite understand what you mean by 'itself', like, is this independent of the RAM/CPU concerns? Then it's just the lack of implementation as we slowly work on things. But with RAM/CPU included, here are two things. 1. FPS death. 2. The entity pops that had to sub for historical figures -- it would be ideal if every intelligent creature could be tracked, mainly for relationship/history tracking purposes. But it wasn't possible to maintain that without the game remaining about small-scale squabbles.
This is only a TECHNICAL question (cause recent modding topics) and not because of Politics or whatever: Is the Gender of a being defined within the soul or is it defined by the bodies sex? In Fantasy there allready Genderbender scenarios - for example loki turning into female being. Also the orinetation is stored in the soul right? Would a fem soul in a Male body have bad thoughts?
I might be wrong, but I think there's currently a gender variable both in the soul and the body. But we haven't really addressed what differences mean, since it doesn't generate trans people (if that's the right model for it), and there are no soul swapping spells. I don't think it's a straightforward implementation, overall -- trans characters in games generally lean on the fact that their in-game societies also have strong gender norms, which we don't have in DF to any meaningful degree (eg, gender-restricted clothing etc.). There's a sort of trans-erasing assertion sitting there, which is bad (ie, it asserts trans people don't exist without such norms), but I think it's complicated to sort out the way things are structured, and I don't have a clear road forward (eg, how do we handle pronouns in the heterogeneous body/soul case without it looking like a simple bug to report -- the character needs a larger world model within which to state their identity). The first chance we'd have is with the status groups after the myth release, though basic soul swapping/stacking/merging/etc might happen earlier.
If a goblin disguised as a human (probably lots of tan paint, I guess) steals from the elves, and a human hears about it and approves, then later finds out it was really a goblin, will the human get a better opinion of the goblins?
Right now they don't disguise themselves as humans, naturally, but they can become an agent in a human-culture town with existing goblin populations. I don't think there are entity-level reputations that depend on anything but pure warfare/caravans/artifact-trade (unfortunately this is stored entity to entity as the "diplomacy state", without a h.f.-entity level yet), so they'd only maintain their approving reputation for the goblin, with the additional negative reputation that might come from the goblin association they learn later. This wouldn't be impossible to change, and there are already some "entity opinions" stored with local cultural identities as well (which it uses for e.g. occupations).
How possible with current systems are overlapping sites?
Like ability to embark on 1x2 area that already includes two 1x1 forts. Or even to create fort C on 1x2 area that includes right end of 1x5 fort A and left upper corner part of 2x3 fort B? Or making new 1x2 fort inside bigger 3x4 one? Probably all map tiles of new fort will need to be either empty or belonging to (ruins of?) forts of your civ.
If I disabled the embark restriction, the first case would be somewhat possible. Creating a fort that eats two parts of existing forts is harder, since those forts are saved to disk with their entire maps, and we don't want conflicting information there. It would need to enlarge the loaded area to include everything, which gets to be a problem naturally, or I'd need a multi-file timestamped map loader thing, which is also messy.
I saw in some of the myth generator screenshots mentions of souls. Will it be possible to have a Stormbringer-like magical artifact that can kill souls?
Will souls retain any of their qualities or traits from life, if they are reincarnated or sent to another plane?
Speaking of Stormbringer, is there a possibility of sentient or semi-sentient artifacts?
Ha ha, I'm not sure what a killed soul is. I mean, in DND there are demons devouring them as hags trade them, or something, which cuts against the notion of final disposition and judgement. Of course, that's not a problem, just a different way of thinking about things. So it'd depend on the metaphysics, I suppose.
How reincarnation works is also up to metaphysics. It might be that ancestor souls are added to the soul arrays of certain descendants, and able to communicate with them telepathically or something. Ancestors might be added to the soul arrays of all descendants... either way, there are certain additive effects to worry about as the memory gets piled up.
Intelligent artifacts are on the table, with the same issues there in terms of how crowded that table is for magic-myth.
What sorts of skills will be needed for magic? Or will that be combined with other skils depending on the myth generated and the magical task or item used.
We figured it would be a combination of existing skills and new, possibly procedural skills. For instance, a skillful dance might be used for some power, or it might depend on how well you (woodcraft) carve your wand, and then a new generated physical wand manipulation skill. Or you might need to... skillfully "Focus Your Goro", an entirely new skill and essence-type it generated for that universe.
Because animals can be set to be a internal supply of a civ, does this mean that the beastiary will open to be expanded because the pressure is taken off worldgeneration and [COMMON_DOMESTIC] tags to supply animals, and we will see more examples & variations of animals as a result?
In the default entities? I haven't changed anything beyond the kobolds.
Are these new display rack items going to be available to construct and place in adventure mode? If so, is it handled via hardcoded additions to the code, or will some raw handling of tool-based furniture for adventure mode be implemented? If the latter, I can see that being potentially useful for modding.
A wooden pedestal is available as a reaction in the raws, and adv site blueprints allow display furniture now, but there isn't any kind of larger framework.
With the new off-map squads, will we ever see a construction-oriented version of them? Say, a construction crew to build a road to the mountainhome, or an aqueduct, or a series of watchtowers and distress beacons?
'ever' is a hard word, as usual. At some point we hope to do these things -- in world generation, those roads are already created, and that doesn't happen post w.g., for instance, which is something we're slowly trying to remedy.
1. In some of the myth generator screen shots it was shown that some races might be reborn into new bodies after they die. If a player adventurer died while playing as one of these races would they get to play as the reborn creature? In cases where the race in question is reborn as a non sentient creature would player adventurers get to play as that animal?
2. I also noticed in some of the myth generator screen shots certain races will be able to have their souls merge with cosmic entities. In terms of afterlife game play, what would this entail for a player adventurer of such a race who qualifies for this specific afterlife?
3. If a magical organization gets big enough, would other means or training new magic users besides apprenticeships be possible? For example could 1 skilled magic user teach an entire class of fresh prospects? Also how big could the structures in which these magical organizations reside get?
4. In the first pass of the myth and magic update will there be both corruption affects that affect the whole body and localized corruption that affects one body part at a time and slowly spreads or just one or the other? If just one which? Finally will there be a special UI for viewing corruptions or will they be viewable by viewing your physical description?
1. This question becomes complicated, because we also wanted you to be able to play your time in the afterlife. So you might even jump into the e.g. reincarnation pool manually. It's a bit weird letting you play an animal, but I don't have a big issue with it.
2. I think in many cases the afterlife is simply too boring to play, after you see it. However, if we have a god/force mode that works, we could transition to that, and let you play for a bit after you die.
3. We are pro magic academy (in worlds where that makes sense). Not sure what we'll see first pass, considering we don't have academies for anybody outside of the occasional fort military demonstration. Size-wise, there's no reason why a magic organization can't inhabit their own plane, once we have them available.
4. First pass? No idea! Whole body corruption is probably easier. I don't know about the UI yet. The more we have, and the more you can have at once, the more likely it is it'll get its own view.
In the October 13th dev-log, you mention invaders getting spooked and going on a rampage. Is there any way to keep in the getting spooked part and just have them run away? I think releasing captive animals near the demanding invaders to scare them off would be an awesome way to deal with them.
I guess this is a morale question. They already have some calculations there, going by the numbers, but it's not nearly as interesting or functional as it could be.
Interesting. Would the preemptive response be to attack [agents in your fort] using current stopgaps be military, or organize unfortunate accidents for them? Until the Justice system is fleshed out, that is.
In the event that we kill a suspect individual, do diplomatic repercussions affect relations with entities by the victim's cover identity, or their real identity?
However you like, I suppose, as you normally kill visitors. I don't believe there are diplomatic repercussions for visitors that die in this fashion. That's a whole other matter that hasn't been addressed -- stuff like caravan accidents are handled with special code.
Will magical artifacts give Dwarves (and others who use them) extra attacks, such as fire jets and syndrome inducing stuff? And would it be removed if a dwarf removed the item?
Presumably there'll be stuff like this. The myth generator already creates situations like this, where some item is used to perform magic.
Are the new kobold sites an actual new site, or is everyone living in a cave going to have egg chambers?
Neither of these things -- inhabited cave sites are indeed all more kobold-like, since we don't yet have a general site specifier of the kind we eventually hope to have, but it also checks for an egg-laying capability before it places egg chambers.
Once mythgen comes around, can we expect engravings and sculptures to depict images from the myths of their particular world on occasion (especially the ones in temples)?
'Expect' is a strong word, since that release is so overloaded, but this is the idea, that myths would influence the culture throughout.
Will the spoils of war and enemy materiel be recovered from raids, or are they merely a "civ angering" action and little else?
This is sort of an economy question. We just aren't all the way there yet.
1. Will we be getting an overhaul of the calendar, with procedurally generated per-word calendar systems? By this I mean two things - both the mechanics of time passage themself(for example worlds where seasons last several years, perhaps even decades, like ASOIAF, among the more mundane options) and the recording of the passage of time by sapient beings(e.g. a different number of months in a year, the division of time into "eras"(like in the TES universe), an explanation of when year 1 starts(where applicable), etc.)
2. How will the generator handle the writing of spellbooks? Obviously this would require mages experimenting during worldgen and then writing their discoveries down, but how specifically are they going to experiment? A human might be able to see potentially interesting venues of further investigation, but how would a computer handle this?
1. Ideally. We've mentioned trying to proceduralize the sun and moon, and other stuff comes along with this. The main irritation is just the current hard-coding and things that kind of got lazily tied to that throughout. We'll be able to gut certain systems for the first release and others we won't get to. A lot of the myth/magic release is a series of such rewrites.
2. PatrikLundell was broadly correct for the parts of #2 I removed. In general, if the spread of knowledge or books isn't prevented, it just makes the world more magical, which is fine, in the same way the real world is filled with copies of certain religious texts. If they all happen to teach everybody fire spells, that's okay.
For experimentation, right now the game has, say, various chemistry advancements, and those are just abstractly realized, slowly, though a 'breakthrough' mechanic, without showing the exact experiments. So magic can be glued into this system, like any Civ-style game or whatever, moving up the trees, perhaps with certain non-scholarly prerequisites (as we have in the current scholar system, for certain nodes, like a number of observation years having passed, etc). Of course, it's more fun if all the little bits are there, and we'll have some of those over time hopefully.
Hello from Russian community of this game! Thank you for your work! We have some questions about this game:
Maxim Matvienco asks:
It seems like genetics is disable in current releases. If there are any plans of reworking it in nearest future? Would be nice to see some appearance tuples disabling/decreasing probablity of strange appearance combinations (something like black skin and copper hair). What about appearance prefrences? We already have favourite food, metals and animals, but no favorite eyes color etc. In other hand, standarts of beauty can be generated for each civilization separately during worldgen.
Second question: should we expect practical applying of scholar skills? Maybe something like discovereing "technological" secrets. For example: Optical engineer discovered secret of mirror or lense-making, which alows us to create them in glassmakers worksop (or u can just disable some already existing reations by default, so we require to discover them first)
Sergei Rybakov writes:
Are you planning to add ability to make cooperation for musicians in to musical groups, who will organize concerts and world group-tours? Will you add ability to sell fighters/mercenaries for short time? Are you planning to rise criminals among dwarves (vandalism, stealing, murdering, etc.)?
Will you add poison plants, which can be identified by experienced planter (with small chance to no-distinction, of course)? Will you make sport competitions?
(I removed the top question as it was answered)
Is genetics disabled? I don't remember doing anything with it, but who knows. I don't have any particular near-term plans. It's possible we'll see something appearance related when we get to customs and status groupings, though as stated previously, I'm wary of that. I don't know if there's a reason to decrease appearance combinations that are less common in real life.
The eventual goal is for all scholarly discovers to actually do what they say. But that's complicated, since each one requires some work -- like locks. Those would take some effort by themselves, and it all adds up. And yeah, this also includes going back and adding scholarly discoveries to cover all existing game items. And yeah, this means the game suddenly has a lot of mechanics cut out for primitive cultures... which is something of a problem, and hopefully workable.
He he he, certainly the performance troupes should do more, though I'm not sure what's appropriate. A world tour would certainly be more informal than it is in the modern day, and not much different from how they wander around now. Of course, the economic aspect would change this, when that's part of the game. Mercenaries also are silly now, without the economy, as you suggest. More criminal dwarves would be ideal as well. World generation has athletic competitions, and other festivals, and all of that should be brought forward into post w.g.
I'm not quite sure how to handle things like poison mushrooms. As you suggest, if you don't embark with the right skills, there should be risks. This also applies to stuff like carpentry. If you embark without a carpenter, you should be stuck with incredibly crappy wooden chairs and tables that don't even work right.
How far off do think you are from a combat system upgrade? There's a long list of things I've always wanted, like archer dwarves carrying side-arms, throwing weapons like javelin or shuriken, AI for multiple types of ranged weapons, AI not jumping off walls, hooked weapons, weapons that are good or bad at parrying, tip/base balance calculation, spiked shields, helmets that cover the face, gunpowder/explosives, construction-destroying siegers. It's a lot of realistic stuff that I assume you want to do at some point, I'm curious how far away that kind of thing is on your to-do list.
I don't have a good sense of when there'll be a concerted push on this, rather than the incremental stuff we've been doing. It has an alignment to the army stuff, which has also been relentlessly pushed forward while also being incrementally improved. The current vague thinking of [Artifacts -> Myths/Magic -> Law/Property/Customs/Embark (-> Boats) -> Economy] puts some years on the table, but incremental improvements could also account for a lot.
Once you've revamped economy and agriculture and allowed player fortresses to interact with hill dwarves, (way, way down the line, I know, but it's in the dev.html page anyways), will the player be able to sustain themselves with food anymore or will they need to rely on hill dwarves if they wish to have a decently sized fort?
In the history real world, before the agricultural revoltuion, a family needed about 3 hectares to sustain itself and 5 hectares if it kept animals. Obviously DF worlds are far too small for this degree of realism, but the point still is that a lot of land is needed for agriculture. Fort maps tend to encompass only 9 tiles and thus shouldn't have enough land to sustain too many dwarves. So will the player be reliant on hill dwarves for food? I'm rather curious about this.
Yeah, this one's a little weird... right now, I think the proportions are cut down quite a bit. People eat now in world generation, with towns supplied by the farming communities, but they don't need quite as much as they do in real life, since we aren't producing that much. The underground is very productive right now, and people like to run independent forts, but I'm not sure you should always be able to run 200 dwarves that way, and we did want hill dwarves to matter in some sense -- though we were just thinking about that in military terms initially. I imagine there are differing views on this, and it is the sort of thing that can be parametrized. Though this has effects worldwide -- if you can live isolated, other forts should be able to support themselves as well, and this also has population cap implications, in terms of out-of-control dwarf pops.
So I'm not sure what'll happen. When the economy is turned on fully, and famine is on one side, and population caps on the other... who knows!
What is The Manifestation lore?
Ha ha, just a debug tool. There came a point where watching the world in debug mode wasn't enough, and I needed to appear and mess with people, since using an adventurer to get the same situations was too difficult.
Is it possible the magic arc will include the offensive use of potions/extracts like the fire snake's liquid fire, or would such weapons be more likely to be addressed in a different arc?
Would the moving fortress part/boat arc also lay the groundwork for proper carts/wagons and invader siege engines (wheeled towers and battering rams in particular)?
Yeah, that's the idea, and yeah, who knows what makes it in on the first pass.
Yep, the idea is that these are all the same thing. There's a bit of a question down at the cart/minecart size, things that are just a few tiles, like if those'll be actual map sections or something more like the siege arrow that just sticks out from an item a bit.
How much do you aim to have the economics of generated or modded materials, objects, plants, animals, etc influence worldgen and general economic performance of civilizations and their sites?
In the event that it's significantly influential, how do you think edge cases will be handled, such as a random crop that makes society post scarcity for practical purposes, for example? This question would apply to any content, particularly randomly generated, that would fundamentally alter the balance away from the medieval-low-medium-fantasy we've been working with from the start.
Yeah, the balance we've had isn't necessarily the balance we'll end up with on all settings. Aspirationally, the economy will reflect what's there, no matter how messed up it is. Certain things, like the actual ramifications of something like nethercap (a fixed temperature material), would have to be programmed in piece by piece. We'll just have to improve as we go, steering away from the big problems and toward something reasonable. To the extent that remains possible! A post-scarcity society can still be interesting, and it can become pre-scarcity if something bad happens, which is also interesting.
I guess it's not part of the upcoming release, but in addition to 'recorded kills' as they have now, will artifact weapons ever gain 'reputation' by themselves? In other words, I get that naming my lute won't make it an object of desire for npcs, but if I go on to kill a bunch of hydras with it, could that change?
Yeah, we need a bit more there. Currently we're dodging issues by making items with existing claims more valuable to people, but we'll eventually need a proper infrastructure. It's time-consuming to set that up though.
Do relatives of citizens/migrants have a higher chance of immigrating than unrelated characters? It kinda sucks when your fortress can't have any children because all of its residents are married to off-site characters. Thanks!
I might be wrong, but if I recollect, it tries to bring the family. When the family can't come, it's often because the spouse holds an office in some other location. This is very common for historical figures. Of course, people should try to make this work, as they do in real life, by finding other positions, etc.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1444621 times)