Thanks to MrWiggles, Shonai_Dweller, Putnam, PatrikLundell, Bumber, Manveru Taurënér, ZM5, KittyTac and anybody I missed for helping to answer questions this time around!
Will certain magic practices be illegal or viewed with judgement? Like raising corpses right now, except it is hurling fireballs around or turning limbs into buckets of water because it came from some evil god or something
Linking cultural/civilization properties to myths and magic is on the menu, though we can't guarantee any particular aspect for the first pass. Raising corpses itself isn't even viewed as improper in most contexts right now.
Is there an in-universe explanation for how/why an elf is able to devour 80 humans in a single sitting?
Nope. Same as the "kill 1 to 100" non-hf people in army battles for each hf -- world gen is just fluffy in lots of places.
I'm wondering who created the curses_640x300.bmp tilesheet?
It's just the standard FixedSys font, think the pixels haven't changed much or at all from how it looked 30 years ago when I was writing BASIC games, but I'm not 100% sure.
Why is it that dwarves lie about their feelings, even when speaking to themselves about it? Such as "I am not afraid" or "I am not satisfied" when their thoughts menu says otherwise. Does it have something to do with a propensity to sarcasm/dishonesty, a bug, or something more specific?
I think there's a text bug somewhere between thought paragraphs and utterances, and as somebody said, they also say it that way when they know they should be feeling something, but don't. It isn't lying, but it's inartfully phrased.
Will your full-on site attacks count as a declaration of a civ level war, or will they be like the domestic conflicts between sites you sometimes see happening in human and goblin civs?
Yeah, you act as a representative of the civ for the time being, and start civ-level wars. I imagine that'll evolve once your relationship to the parent civ is clarified later on.
How do you choose which bugs to fix? Is there a particular filter on the bug tracker that you look at?
PatrikLundell and Bumber pretty much covered it. Recent bugs, bugs related to things I'm working on, crashes and corruptions all figure into it. The "Confirmed" filter set up by the bug tracker managers is a factor; and that's often tied to the presence of uploaded saves, which are very useful as time-savers. Forum discussions are also handy, when the other processes don't notice something that still seems very troublesome. The target is definitely not to fix all or even most of the bugs now; too many systems are on the chopping block, and some bugs have to be tolerated given the dev time we have to work with. But I'm open to certain sorts of improvements to the process.
It's very exciting to hear that you're implementing looting! Will there be specificity on preferring what to loot, and will worn gear (Backpacks, etc) have an influence on what can be carried,
or are these deferred for future arcs where they'd be more relevant?
I haven't created a very specific Loot Menu yet. I imagine this will happen, as people will want to direct the sorts of items returned. Worn gear doesn't impact capacity (it does affect battle results) -- we are still a long way from understanding certain things about how armies operate and will probably have to wait for the caravans to really get into it... the units being offloaded is costly, but the alternative is also (almost impossibly) costly.
About the various level of world magic level, will this also affect the type of rocks and land formation available on a world ?
By example i'm thinking about those "floating" rocks or big floating lands that are often seen in fantasy worlds, or floating sky cities made with that kind of material etc, will it be possible ?
Yes, we're specifically aiming for this. Part of it depends on the "hard" map rewrite (the one that'll support viewing armies in fort mode and also planes), and part of it doesn't. We've promised some sort of landform push for the release, but it'll be better if we get to the rewrite. I'd jump on it if it weren't a 6-9 month add to the release time. We're leaning toward it since it is so important to so many systems, buuuuut, yeah, big lump o' time.
1. Will practitioners of various forms of generated magic be given their own generated titles?
2. Will we be able to look at the generated myths post world gen to refresh on lore about a world's magic, races, mechanics etc. similar to how we can look up general lore in legends mode?
3. Will the myth generator also list any special traits about generated races such as ability to breath underwater, passive animal pacification etc.
4. Will magic be added to the list of values civilizations can have opinions on? If so will it just be a general magic value or multiple values for each form of generated magic?
1. This one at least is almost certainly true of the first release, since we won't have names otherwise.
2. The myths will be accessible there generally, though as I mentioned in another answer, some bits might be optionally hidden, regarding the deeper magical mysteries.
3. That's how it works currently in the prototype, and I don't imagine it'll change.
4. If I get to this (see other answer), it'll almost certainly depend on the magic type, though the supernatural in general might also evoke a response.
Will dwarves need equipment to grab livestock (chains, cages, etc) or can they just coax the giant elephants from the forest retreat to follow them with soothing beard strokes...?
The equipment doesn't matter there at this point (as above, it's difficult to deal with equipment generally), though I sympathize with the ridiculousness of what's going on in some cases. The animals returned are tame, so don't require special handling.
Does 'livestock' apply to remaining creatures that do not become involved in the conflict? (say if your soldiers were attacked by dogs) or total pool of creatures once the remaining conflict with the settlement's sentient occupants ends.
It runs the raid after any fight if your dwarves win, on the relevant site populations. It would be preferable to merge it all together more dynamically, where some dwarves could, say, be wounded and effectively lose a fight but a few get away with some loot, but it doesn't work that way yet.
1.Will it be possible that in some worlds you wiil be able to be a being that is in multiple places at once (e.g death)? and if so how it will work?
2.will legends mode contain the ways magc is done in the world?
1. We've thought a little bit about how godly manifestations and such might work, but less so from the perspective of a player. If we do the hard map rewrite, it'll be possible to open multiple map views anywhere in the universe and have both versions of the player there, but the interface there would still be annoying by default. Not unlike how a party might work; and like that, you might be able to put versions of yourself on autopilot, but also be able to switch to a "tactical" mode where you control everybody meticulously when it's important.
2. This is an open question; we might have an explicit spoiler option here. Finding the magical secrets of the world is potentially one of the very fun things about the magic release, but sometimes people would rather have all the data for a given universe, for various reasons. Our earlier experiments with hiding every historical event until discovered in artwork hid too much that was going on, but being a little cagey about deep secrets of the world seems different.
When it comes to raiding, will there be a "babysnatching" option at some point along with the pillaging/razing options?
At some point, heh. It would be good to support all options that all civs have, naturally, but we aren't there yet.
1. In worlds with divine magic will being in the vicinity of a temple or holy site improve the effectiveness of divine magic related to the appropriate site?
2. In worlds with healing magic capable of healing serious injuries such as severed motor nerves or missing limbs will our adventurers be able to hire a practitioner of such magic to heal their serious injuries they have acquired on their adventures?
3. In worlds with magic will our adventurers who have magic that can be used for utilitarian purposes such as growing a bigger crop yield, healing the sick, creating equipment etc. be able to hire out their services to NPCs for payment?
4. In worlds with magic in terms of magic phenomena that power magic such as a magic wind or sea or egg would being in close proximity to such things affect the potency of spells related to them?
1+4. One of the conditions in the prototype involves the presence of landforms, and it's possible this could be smeared out to a proximity concept. Unclear for the first release.
2+3. It seems reasonable, to the extent anything economic will be happening by this point.
(1.) Will holy relics be capable of casting miracles aligned with the spheres of their related god?
Like a DEATH god's relic capable of mass resurrection/death, or a metals/minerals/mining god who gives powers of mineral transmutation to their relic.
(2.) Will we be able to do more hostile actions to civs beyond attacking the one's our civ is already at war with?
For instance, taking civvies as slave labor, kidnapping rulers, creating puppet states, poisoning crops/water supplies to kill civ populations, and erecting pyres to burn population members at the stake as an act of atrocity.
(3.) With the arrival of magic and mythology, will civs field combat magic users in their armies and send them out during a siege?
(4.) Is there a list/has there been a discussion of the magic disciplines that civilizations will be able to possibly have?
(5.) Pitchblende exists as a mineable ore. Through supernatural means, would dwarves be able to refine uranium and construct a rudimentary nuclear weapon? Could we nuke elfkind?
(6.) Can gods be slain? Or perhaps rendered irrelevant through lack of worship, by killing all their followers and destroying all holy sites pertaining to them? Can their divinity be stolen and their powers harnessed or used?
1. This seems quite likely, as the artifact arc was put in first so that they could be involved magically from the beginning.
2. (see other answer two down)
3. This also seems quite likely, as necromancers already involve themselves in this way, and magical sieges are an important fun-time element.
4. We have a long and quite ambitious list in the prototype, but we haven't centered it in the public notes as it's definitely not all going in on the first release.
5. He he, there are quite a few technologies prior to nukes that might need magical counterparts in vanilla DF before we worry about having semi-realistic magical uranium, but once we get to regional magical disasters, then modding should be reasonably straightforward on this front.
6. The nature of what it means to be a god in a given world will be generated, at least. What that means on the first pass is unknown.
If we raid goblin sites, will we be able to bring back Trolls as livestock? That could be interesting.
It currently skips at-all-intelligent critters, and zombies, for various practical reasons.
1. When will Interactions start to respect USAGE_HINTs (and lack of) again much like pre-42.xx? { regarding tracked issue http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=9417 })
2. Will there ever be additional syndrome effects like combustion/ignite? Say eating a certain plant will cause the consumer to combust into flames.
3. Will being on fire have "degrees" of burning and more targeted burning (stepping through fire may only light someones legs on fire, and progress from there unless put out or stop drop and roll)
4. Will it be possible to raid sites and have not only raze and loot, but kidnap(baby snatch) as well (be it for goblin-like action, or for ransom, or both). Or even take prisoners? Maybe even apply the FORCED_ADMINISTRATION position on a site, and demand goods from them (we own you, send wagons to this fortress of cat leather and silver bars)
Though it is not quite a arc so to speak (like law arc) outside of sharing a resemblence of the theme will greater interactions of local sites raiding, fighting and demand tribute eventually lead to expanded connections of relationships on how those are imposed (via forced administration governments & puppet rulers) or freed from that imposement through rebellion and wars.
For instance a dwarven civ you may be playing at one given point in time may have been conquered previously by goblins in a vunerable weak point in their history and as such are bound into a peace deal agreement on threat of reprecussions & violence if they do not extract tribute from them.
1. I don't have a timetable for specific bugs generally. Clearly it would be better if they worked.
2. It's possible; seems like a candidate for certain magic powers.
3. It could certainly afford to be improved; the insular fat-first melting behavior is quite strange.
4. The tribute side of the question will be addressed by the next release. Having administrators and related mechanics is on our wish-list for the pre-magic releases. Atypical measures for dwarves aren't so high on the list.
We're also hoping to flip the tables on this one, to place demands on the fort you can choose to comply with, though I seriously doubt we'll get to the point of having a hostile administrator appointed over your fortress. Generally, we're hoping to get to various villainous behavior that can drive some interesting sieges and non-sieges to tide things over for the Big Wait which'll come with the magic release, and the 'c' screen has made this sort of things much more accessible.
Are there any technical updates or replacement systems that you really want to implement that you've held back on so far in order to maintain save compatibility? I know how that's an important consideration, but perhaps Mythgen is a natural time to "break" the game again? (In the name of progress, of course).
Yeah, definitely. I have a file of them (from bags/boxes to prep for zone-workshop, etc etc.) Mythgen is almost certainly save-breaking -- it would be possible to get it to load up some stunted version of the older saves, and adapt them, maybe, but I think I'd end up tying myself in knots trying to respect everything, especially if the map code changes. It's a good opportunity for a clean break, and then other code can be updated. I can still load up relevant saves from the bug tracker in an older version, so that shouldn't be an issue.
So, military tactics, leadership, organization and terrain are all taken into account, which is great, but will the report actually read like a battle, or will it still show as one on one fights?
There are some additional historical events now that reflect the new information. We're still missing positional information for portions of the forces (both in events and in reality), which would add a lot, but the situation is improved over the duels.
Do you have any mythgen update plans on re-adding skeletal undead back into the game? It seems that all undead now are just some variation of a zombie.
As ZM5 stated, they kinda-sorta exist, in that fully-rotted corpses are raise-able, but it seems the skeleton corpse naming is broken? Does it not call the old ones skeletons anymore? Do corpses no longer rot fully? I've not yet revisited that family of bugs.
Will the military tactics skill affect combat rolls for on-site squads, or just while they're off on missions?
It doesn't affect the on-site squads yet. I imagine doing the formations years ago would have helped with that, but sometime we'll sort it out. As usual, when things don't happen directly, I create little bits of conceptual impetus around them until it becomes unbearable, he he he.
Can military tactics be transcribed into a scholarly profession and pursuit? To teach yourself the Dwarven art of war like a 2bit Sun Tzu.
Will other unused or old skills like 'leader' (im aware military dwarves learn it slowly) see more use within the new raiding & reclaiming system to complement the re-emergence of military tactics.
Knowledge and skills haven't been unified yet. It would make sense at some point. Leader is used off-site now, if the squad has multiple members.
What form will tribute take and how will it arrive at the player’s fort?
Chests of coins? Items brought by a caravan? A line-item entry on the civil relationship screen?
It'll be like a caravan that you don't have to pay for (well, except with potential blood and tears and such.) They drop crap off at the depot. Not done yet, but that's the current approach. Like the looting, there isn't a menu to make it specific yet, but we'll get to that in time.
Are there plans for procedural food? Using the system we already have for describing dances and poems, it might not be that hard to port it into describing food recipes.
Knight Otu mentioned the history here; just one of those for-many-years pushed off-things, but it's something we'd like to dive into at some point. For now, Caves of Qud will have to supply the world's procedural recipe needs!
Could ghosts be potentially weaponized as a willing action on the ghost's part? For instance, a dwarf who swears to protect the fortress in death and does not hold any grudges against his fellow dwarves. Could one have ghosts that could be commanded to guard certain areas?
Do you have any more plans for supernatural ghosts for future arcs or are you happy with how they are
We have reasonably extensive notes on ghosts and other undead/spirit critters. We just haven't had time since the original night creature pushes to do much with them.
Now that its effectively possible, if improbable, that one could conquer the world in fort mode, will we actually see civilizations die? Will their refugee pops eventually relocate to other civs or surrender, or perish in the wilderness, to where the civ ceases to exist? Can we be the last civilized race in the world?
PatrikLundell mentioned that it's sort of broken, and that hasn't been updated yet. Now with more direct reasons to clean this up, there's some hope, but there are technical issues with the "entity population" tracker that might have to wait for a save compat break to really fix the problem decisively.
Will there be something to do with prisoners besides keeping them in a room or killing them? Setting them free, with or without weapons, if they go away? Exchanging them for loot or specifical tributes?
I may be missing something, but I don't like genocide being the only option to end wars.
The thing goes on (and worse) with underground creatures and cages: the situation of non speaker learners is particularily chilling. You cannot keep them in your society, you cannot release them peacefully, you cannot send them away, you cannot let the caravan bring them away. You cannot even kill them fast and mercifully - if with a terrible name - with the butcher option.
You get to the paradoxes. The forum is full of stories of dwarven civs that take Troglodyte prisoners and - not using their labor because that would be slavery - seclude them in pits to throw monsters on them and get pleasure by the resulting mess.
Would it be possible to address the intelligent and not so intelligent caged creatures situation, for example offering them the "visitor" status?
That would allow them a choice to stay and contribute or freely go away. It would grant the fortress (and the player) the chance to welcome them in liberty or to refuse their contribution (if offered) too, staying ethnically pure and dwarfy.
We have some features on the candidate list for the pre-magic releases for dealing with this, but it hasn't been decided yet. Formalizing the prisoner status and differentiating them from caged animals would be quite welcome, at the very least.
Are raid squads and artifact seekers ignoring other armies, megabeasts, husking clouds and so on as they travel across the map right now, or is there a chance of encounters along the way? If there isn't, is anything planned like that for this set of releases?
There aren't any army-army interactions generally now. Without the greater "army arc" tactical positional bits, it has seemed like a waste to code the fights up, but on the other hand, it is sort of ridiculous, compared to the average adventurer experience with wild animals and so forth. Not sure how it'll turn out.
Was there a video/audio or even a transcript of your talk at Migs17?
It turns out there's no video; I went ahead and uploaded my slides
here. A lot of it won't be news to people that follow DF, but some of the slides are potentially new or interesting.
My 0.40.24 experience was that goblin sieges were staged from the same site and drawing members from that site, regardless of whether the site was under control of another civ or independent, resulting in an end to sieges when the site ran out of warm bodies to send. My current 0.44.05 experience is that the staging point jumps between at least two sites, possibly based on whether the original one is under control of the goblin civ or not. In addition to that, the force composition indicates the involvement of a 3:rd site.
Have you made any changes to the army recruitment and/or army staging logic to explain that (possibly in conjunction with dealing with the army pathing issue)?
It looks like the current method is to gather all sites currently under the umbrella of the civ, cull the list of sites that aren't connected pathwise, cull the list further based on whether the site has at least ten free people to send, pick one of the remaining sites, and collect an army from its population. So the staging point does jump now. They shouldn't have people from multiple sites in one invasion though -- that is a bit of staging code that I haven't gotten to yet, as I've stubbornly held on to the dream of messengers, etc. As an interim, they should probably also pick the site with the most remaining people instead of randomly choosing so that there are fewer intervening dud sieges of ~10 goblins.
Just how customizable will the myths be? Could we potentially create our own gods and magic systems, or will it work like world gen?
Yeah, as people mentioned, the editor is important. There are some nuances here; the current myth generator supports the addition of abstract objects that will be created (e.g. a comet in addition to the sun), and some of that'll probably be supported more fully with the first pass. Also, magic systems are already supported somewhat in the raws, and we don't want to slip backwards with the release on that front, so there'll probably be a baseline level of support there on top of whatever else we get to. And then once we get to the proper editors, you could, say, create real-world pantheons, etc., and hopefully eventually also create as many fixed legendary events and properties as you like.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1443598 times)