1) When will you be able to butcher sentient creatures after an ethics change and then use the gleaned bones/meat to make food/bone goods?
2) Can features that aren't planned to work for Dwarves specifically still be encoded, especially for modders and fiddlers?
3) Are there any plans for making cobaltite useful?
4) Are there plans for a thievery/stealth skill for stealth squads which you can use against your enemies to steal artifacts (like Kobolds & Goblins) as well as babystealing missions should you choose to go evil or modify your ethics to allow that?
5) Are there plans to fix the glitches related to fortress mode necromancers where the things they revive are still hostile to them?
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7937921#msg7937921Dragonslayerelf (op):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7938163#msg79381631/2/4/5) handled by Shonai_Dweller.
3) Ha ha, yeah, it has kind of an unfortunate name for something we don't use specifically for that element. I'm not sure if cobaltite specifically was an ore used in dyes/glass coloration (cobalt has other ores), but that would be the sort of thing we'd do when we get to adding more diversity to those systems.
A question about your general vision (not the short-time stuff):
Many stories and games (both video and PnP) implicitly involve some level of "dramatic convenience", e.g. a mayor's daughter gets kidnapped just as your party is visiting the town, or you stay at a tavern and just happen to overhear a villainous plan, or the protagonist randomly finds a magic McGuffin ring in a river. What is your opinion on such things? Would you include an option for the game to behave that way (to nudge/induce interesting events) if you could? Is it even doable? The kidnapped daughter example above, for instance, would involve rewriting the near past, as the game can't predict which town will you visit next, and the kidnapping has to happen in advance.
I'm asking because in real life epic adventures are rare, and I fear a realistic medieval simulation may be a tad boring.
I remember you mentioning an option to stop worldgen just as something big is about to occur, but it's not quite the same thing as it fits the player to the world, not the other way around.
Another question, on the myth generator:
As there are going to be various race-creation myths, is a good old Darwinesque natural selection on the table? Either as a divine myth ("the mountain apes were our holy ancestors and diligent work made them into what we are now"), or as something scholars could discover (even contrary to preexisting myths)? Or is it not medieval enough?
therahedwig:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7937965#msg7937965Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7937970#msg7937970Yeah, I'm generally not in favor of, say, a 'director' feature for this project. The most I think I'll do/have done is add some delays generally when people go off to do things. So if a group of people is getting together to go off and rescue somebody, they might wait an extra day, even if that's a very bad idea, just to give you a chance to see more organization and get in on things. But that would also happen on the other side of the world from your character, just since it's easier to maintain that way. I think a counter-balance to life being boring, if you don't want it to be boring, is that the character's life is much more expendable than your own life (or the life of a real person in medieval times), so you should be more easily able to make things happen around you or take risky opportunities as we go, though we aren't far along there yet. In the end, we're trading a tightly scripted story for reactivity and emergence. And we have some other general measures at our disposal -- if the world does really end up boring, and the player desires, the overall temperature of the boiling pot can be increased somewhat. But it is a different sort of critter.
It wouldn't technically work with our 1400 year cutoff or whatever, but having more natural origin stories is in line with the low/no magic slider for myth generation. I assume at the lowest setting with a human-only no-magic invented-myths-only, we're stuck with a pretty scientific tale, though I haven't thought through what that means exactly; perhaps people just being as confused on the matter as they were in 1400. I have no idea if we could actually support, say, myths that tried to tie creatures together on evolutionary trees or anything like that, especially in a way that works in any meaningful way. We've toyed around with it in side projects, and it's quite doable in that context, but it's harder if we have to support all of the features of raw creature defs. Somewhat like the centaur/half-elf/etc. etc. problems.
Are there any features you once considered implementing, but now view as impossible to add due to time constraints?
Will there be a possibility for the player, as an adventurer, to join in on already existing plots?
I'm sure there are such features... but we still have a lot of time left, and stuff like the map rewrite are still major refactors, so I'm not sure I'm thinking in these terms yet. There are large families of things I just have let drop off, like animal sounds (capybara only? that is odd), which become harder to get back to.
Adv joining plots is still an open question (compared to adv being a main villain or hunting villains, which will go in.) There's more infrastructure etc. in terms of conversation/interface required to put you in the middle of things, especially as it relates to you actually interfacing with plot elements (like embezzlement, which we want to keep as abstract as possible for now.)
So if I recall correctly, this villain update was originally intended to be the last update before a Long Wait. Given how much it's ballooned, are you still planning to start the Long Wait as soon as it's finished? Or are you considering this its own Long Wait that you'll be doing rapid-fire bugfixes after?
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7938322#msg7938322So there's the whole Steam thing to fit in here now, ha ha. But the plan is still the same here, and Shonai_Dweller has it right. We'll be fixing bugs for a time after the villain release, until it's stable, and this usually involves other bug fixes. Then we'll work on the Steam release for however long that takes. Obviously the Steam launch is an unknown in terms of how much maintenance will need to happen and then be ongoing there, especially with the very first release. Once the dust settles, we'll need to decide on how many of the pre-myth features on the dev page we want to do; there's enough intervening excitement now that I really have no idea what we'll think at that time. Then the Big Wait begins, with some ability to patch up bugs as they come up, so we don't get in another weapon trap crash situation.
Will you ever make the myth generator you showed off at GDC in 2016 downloadable? I would quite enjoy playing with it and modding it and stuff. I am a game dev myself so it would be cool to just read through a few of the creation myths (without having to read only screenshots) just have a little text blurb that says, "THIS DOES NOT REPRESENT THE FINAL MYTH GENERATOR AT ALL!" In bold next to the link to stave off any untoured expectations or some such.
If you dont want to i get it, maybe just share a couple more screenshots then?
Maybe explain a bit of how it works,
I understand its agent based and turn based correct?
Will the final one work the same?
If its agent based and turn based, Would the player ever be allowed to pop into one of the gods during creation to take their "turns" for them, as that is a "role" people would want to play, that would be a fun mini game. Probably a messy interface though.
Witty:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7938343#msg7938343I think agent-based and turn-based makes it seem more 'fair' than it currently is. There are a few timers and priorities and importance metrics that are also used, so the actors aren't in any kind of fair competition for time/actions or whatever -- there's not enough matter there for it to play as a 'game', not the same way we can do it in world-gen. Sometimes the cosmic egg just feels like it has been sitting around to long, and an event is forced. It's preferable to do this as little as possible, since any metric or forcing makes the stories feel more samey, and I suspect the first real pass will have enough matter to be more satisfying here.
I don't have any fundamental objections to a myth-play mode, though it's not the focus for the first time through. I'm not sure it'll be at a point where it's truly interesting to play initially, though I suppose even clicking on the set of verbs and objects etc. might be kind of neat, or choosing which concepts to emphasize during a creation, etc. It would be kind of funny to play in a world over a sequence of forts/etc. and always know that you were personally responsible for one of the threads of creation, especially if it comes up somehow.
Do you plan to ever give dungeons/sewers/catacombs proper animal populations/incursions? It would be cool to fight the giant rats in the sewer/basement (prolific fantasy trope)
Priest: “yeah so the giant rats built a nest in the catacombs, could you clear it out for us”
All thats really in dungeons/catacombs right now is some criminals, sometimes,and ultra rarely some kobolds and even more ultra rarely other random historical monsters that have moved in, rarely some animal men, who half the time don't even initiate the combat. And the occasional tomb with a mummy.
Knight Otu:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7938542#msg7938542Untrustedlife (op):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7938548#msg7938548We were having difficulties keeping people separated from natural populations, if I recollect. Animals need to be a little more chill, outcasts need to be a little more careful, spaces need to be better defined, etc. It's silly when a giant brawl breaks out whenever you happen to load the map. At some point we can hopefully manage this in a way that doesn't involve a massive violent depopulation when you visit.
Do you recall what inspired some of the cavern critters in the next_underground file? Like where did you get the idea for green devourers, voracious cave crawlers, or molemarians? What even is a draltha?
PlumpHelmetMan:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7939190#msg7939190Zach and I had a paper notepad and just took turns drawing a bunch of pictures. Everything in next_underground came from that one session. We selected our favorites (or really, most of them) and discussed what names we'd use and what properties they might have afterward. But the initial images were all just brain mush - so I suspect PlumpHelmetMan is correct, though you have to allow for other childhood image-builders like Fantastic Planet, Gandahar, Wizards, etc. A hungry head could pop up in any of those; creeping eyes and maneras and rutherers and dralthas and moghoppers and all that are just part of the same stew, with various mental cutting and pasting and amalgamation. Could certainly accept otyughs and carrion crawlers as antecedents for green devourers and carrion crawlers. We even had a largish rubbery neo-otyugh toy as children (ha ha, this site says the LJN AD&D Bendies subseries from 1984, that looks right. We had the carrion crawler too! And the roper. But not the grell or the chimera or the hydra, I think.)
Molemarians, on the other hand, are just an amplification of the naked mole dog, which is more of an animal-people style obsession with the various critters of earth. Like, what if a naked mole rat were also a centaur, but still more mole rat than human? The important questions. Armok 1 even had mole dogs I think. We visit them at the zoo, or did. I don't remember if they are still there.
Are there any plans for us to be able to play races other than dwarves in fort mode, such as a fully fleshed out structure for goblins, humans, etc?
Are there any plans to allow us to optionally manually control raids/pillages/invasions and be transported to the battlefield instead of only seeing a report after-the-fact?
Are there any plans to make roads actually traversed? I was thinking of making a fort on the roads and halting anyone passing by, but no one ever came unless they were specifically coming to my fort.
Untrustedlife:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7939331#msg7939331PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7939417#msg7939417Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7939478#msg7939478therahedwig:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7939485#msg7939485Will there still be a sort of 'Wizard tower' mode for wizards(as per old dev notes), or will our interaction with wizards be primarily adventure mode shenanigans with occasionally a wizard histfig messing things up in fortmode? Or is everything just gonna melt together and we'll see prison-colony-on-a-magical-mountain-run-by-wizards-that-are-an-offshoot-of-a-dwarven-civ-and-they-are-also-a-mercenary-band-mode?
Untrustedlife:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7939498#msg7939498Untrustedlife:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7941793#msg7941793With the villain stuff, yeah, doing a wizard mode in a sense just got a lot more likely than we were originally planning (where the focus for adv mode was being a wizard's agent instead.) There is a sort of tension between fort-mode-wizard-mode and adv-mode-wizard-mode; they are both equally valid ways of thinking about it, depending on what you want to do and the time scale you want to deal with. I don't have specific plans in the first pass to try any true mode hybridization, but it feels like we're starting to orbit that kind of thing.
With the expansion to relationships between historical figures that's been discussed for this pass, are there any plans to do the same (in the background of course) for player adventurers? I remember reading somewhere that currently adventurers don't have any romantic/sexual orientation which results in them not doing things like taking lovers or getting married and having children. The fact they will stay with their previous traveling companions where they retired is pretty nice. But for a player like myself, where being able to get an adventurer to retirement is something of a rarity, it'd be kind of nice to know my former adventurer became more of a part of the world aside from whatever accomplishments they achieved after I take my focus away from them.
Is there anything you've hard-coded into retired adventurers to prevent them from certain activities (besides relationships which I think you've mentioned before). So things like joining merc bands, becoming a goblin poet master's apprentice, etc?
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7939502#msg7939502EternalCaveDragon (op):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7939507#msg7939507therahedwig:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7939648#msg7939648Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7939657#msg7939657Egan_BW:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7939727#msg7939727I haven't changed the way the romance stuff works yet - as stated in the replies, we want to add some more support first.
Otherwise, I don't recall any additional flags or restrictions, and it's certainly not the intent. It wouldn't surprise me if the way they are incorporated into their chosen retirement community stops them from doing something or another, but that would just be an entity-membership-type bug, similar to the ones we had with their constructed sites/entities. As far as I know, they can do stuff; what I don't recall is if they are retired with a 'heroic' profession or if it just considers them, say, peasants. That would influence their post-play choices; it should probably be a decision made by the player when they choose to retire.
1: Will magic users be able to effect the geography of the world?
2: Will magic users be able to play with physics in any way? As in gravity say?
3: If so, (after boats are implemented I would assume) would fortresses in the middle of the ocean be possible? If able, a magician could part the ocean for long enough to build the framework, for example.
4: Also if so, would floating fortresses be possible in any form?
5: In adventure mode, will flying ships be implemented in anyway, or even be possible? I just really want to descend on an unsuspecting town from the sky to raid and pillage.
PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7940370#msg7940370Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7940395#msg7940395I'm satisfied with this pair of responses. We're planning to get to some of this, even on the first pass, though clearly we've been talking about stuff like even mundane boats as a later feature, not a magic release feature, and we'd like to do it all by around the time boats are done.
So...snatching is now officially a villaneous behaviour. And player adventurers can indulge villaneous behaviour themselves...does this mean our long-held dreams of playing a proper band of goblin snatchers is now possible?
I haven't gotten to adventure mode yet, but, yeah, I'd have to explicitly not support it at this point. The only way that would come up is if I have trouble with, say, the delivery of the prisoner to your location, or something.
I have some questions/suggestions for Fortress Mode:
1) More suggestion, than question. Wild animal people and some creatures like trolls, gorlaks and troglodits [CAN_LEARN]. How about possibility to train them, when they encaged, making them a citisens of your fortress? They are almost useless now, but can be very useful for creating of multinational fortresses.
2) About religions. Will there be a possibility for dwarfs (or others) in your fortress to found a new religion? Maybe as a very rare happening? Or this only world-creational option?
3) Can religions spread with books? How about optional holy bibles for some of them?))
4) About mecenaries. Can they recruit citizens of your fortress for their band? Maybe, unhappy citisens will be willing to leave fortress and join such bands, and they will file a petition, denying which will cause even more bad thoughts?
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7942071#msg7942071PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7942097#msg7942097Dragonslayerelf:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7945395#msg7945395Ha ha, yeah, suggestions are best in the suggestions forum. I read stuff there.
Will the addition of a steam-supported graphics pack negatively affect future feature additions? Regarding them, an example you used was worm people living in the intestines of a world-monster for whom being dragged into lakes of bile by ghosts was a constant mortal threat. It seems unlikely that this kind of procedural possibility could be accounted for even with a whole professional team of graphics artists. I worry that features like this that don't seem to be able to reasonably be integrated into the official steam version are more likely to hit the cutting room floor than to be available in the free version only or some other compromise, but I would like to hear the official stance on it. How exactly will the graphics pack work with the level of procedural generation DF will eventually support without compromising the original vision, if it is even possible? It seems like a pretty big challenge.
If we just have to color a stone floor pinkish and call it good for a time, that's fine with me. Stuff like recolored spatter is already supported to some extent, and doing color-based liquids is reasonable simple (supporting random flowing liquids in the first place is the hard part!) But if we get really out there, I think people will be cool with the weirder edge-case stuff having a rough look for a time. At the same time, I've found that our artists are quite self-sufficient and would just need a bit of guidance in terms of what I'm working on to do something like give us a few fleshy floor pictures, and of course, stuff like animal people are already a big part of the game. We're working on some strategies for e.g. forgotten beasts, and procedural humanoids are roughly the same problem. So I wouldn't worry about this just yet. When we're in the thick of it, further down the line, doing all sorts of random magic stuff during the Big Wait, I'll see if I start feeling any of these pressures, but I feel good about it now. In terms of integrating graphics with mods/packs/txt files etc., we're still working that out, but the thorniest issues are going to need to be worked out for the first Steam release - subsequent stuff shouldn't be so hard, at least once we solve the forgotten beast problem (which is a core procedural system and will influence a lot of how magical graphics get coded/supported, I suspect, depending on how much FBs themselves get gutted.)
1) Just what will enhanced graphics mean? Graphics tiles for things like items, landscape components, shrubs/grasses, and map icons?From the patreon page thats exactly what it looks like, so theres my answer Will things, modded things, that dont have graphics support show up as normal ascii tiles?
2) Will the steam version get steam workshop support for mods?
3) Will the steam version technically be downloadable on the bay12games/dwarves page? Steam only lets you run the newest version of a game and will immediately overwrite your current game files, which id have to backup before updating, and if i want to play older versions of the steam game it would be absolutely necessary to have access to it there.
4) How different will the "classic" version end up being?
To be fair ive been playing for 12 years now, since i was 14, and this is new and scary and im not sure if i like it, but if you think its necessary for you, you know whats best.
Meph:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7942969#msg79429691) If the modder doesn't indicate graphics, then that would be the default, yeah, though adding in a line for the creature to point to some default included graphical tile might start to become a practice. We might also do this ourselves, to prevent ascii from being used if the Steam graphics are on. I'm not sure what other projects do for mods that simply don't provide graphics - I suppose it depends a lot on the game.
2) Yeah, as Meph said, this is the plan.
3) I am not 100% to what extent other games support old versions etc. - I know we are going to have the ascii version available as a branch, and I'm not sure if they'd also let us put up old stable versions? I don't have the savvy to set up my own website that would gate the old steam versions properly. We are entering an era now where one would be purchased and one wouldn't be, so I can't set up free downloads of the graphical ones.
4) As Meph said, the classic version will be mechanically identical, and just not include the assets and specific steam stuff like achievements. It'll have all the same modding capabilities; I don't think Workshop interferes with that at all, is my understanding.
Are whatever enhancements that are going into the graphics system to support these new tiles going to be folded back into "classic" or are classic users to make do with DFhack/TWBT (and crashing Adventurer...)?
I'm sure modders will find ways to make DF even better, but the classic and steam versions are both going to get a number of goodies, including a lot of what TWBT currently does. You'll be able to do all of the graphical stuff in classic in your mods, presuming you are ready to draw or otherwise grab your own assets; the current plan is to just continue using txt files as we are currently, though there might be some new syntax there to keep save file size down etc. etc. We'll be careful to structure this in a way that doesn't impact mod portability, etc., as best we can. For instance, a default Steam save should not copy all of the default assets to its own folder (as it does currently), to stop it from becoming giant - this also means supporting pointing at default assets, and giving modders a way to have their own graphics installed in a save-independent way, perhaps? Classic could just display in ascii and also yell at you if you don't have your save's mods' graphics installed (while still working); maybe smaller graphics mods could continue to piggyback along inside of saves, just to save some compat trouble. There are a number of things to consider, and we want it to work both in classic and in Workshop. There might be some sticky points. We'll see once we get out of villains!
If you don't mind me asking; the circumstances of the Steam launch are troubling. Do you ever go jogging, bike riding, etc.?
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7943638#msg7943638Untrustedlife:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7943645#msg7943645Pillbo:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7948040#msg7948040I'm not an athlete, but here's a small offering:
https://twitter.com/theothertuklus/status/1112167287920877568I should probably emphasize generally that bipolar has nothing to do with exercise, and exercising outside is probably worse for skin cancer, though I have no idea how all the bodily systems work together there, so maybe it's a wash. I'm eating better than I used to (though some of those early reports were also exaggerated.)
Do you anticipate that non-Classic will have equivalents to the options found in init.txt and d_init.txt?
If so, would this extend to custom tilesets/graphics?
clinodev (generally, to all Steam questions):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7943735#msg7943735Yeah, we're likely going to move quite a bit of those in-game (or at least support changing them in-game), as people won't be expecting to mess with txt files when they launch a game from Steam. (no reason that won't happen in classic too)
As for custom graphics, that depends on Workshop, I think. I don't know enough about how it works yet to be specific here.
How will The Announcement affect DF development?
- In the near term: The writing of a new graphics engine will obviously take time, so
1a: Do you have a ballpark guess of how long it will take, i.e. days/weeks/months/seasons...?
1b: When do you plan to write the engine? My guess would be that you'd finish the villain release and a few essential bug fix releases and then do the engine, followed by bug fix releases of things found while the engine was produced. The dev page hasn't been updated to cover this yet (as of this writing).
1c: Are you adamant in doing it yourself rather than contracting competent community members for the task (especially if the 1a estimate is beyond "a few weeks", as I would expect it to be)?
- In the long term:
2. Do you intend to change the way you work as a result of this? I'm primarily aiming the question at how you deal with bugs during the rather long (semi) major development cycles, as a Long Wait with a growing pile of reported bugs and no bug fixes is likely to result in DF being labeled as abandonware by many. I expect a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth concerning bugs whatever you do due to the nature of DF and its development, but some outcomes are worse than others.
Edit: 1b and 2 have been answered below by quotes from other fora, and so have been de-Toadified color wise.
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7943751#msg7943751Knight Otu:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7943778#msg7943778PatrikLundell (op):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7943790#msg79437901a) Ha ha ha, my guesses have always suuuuuucked. Finishing villains? Well, we're already in negative months on that, but let's say with all that's going on, it took three more months, being flippant because who knows. Then we stabilize for a month. Then the true Steam work begins, and takes... X months? It'd be good to spend time on it, because every bit of accessibility work helps with our first impression here, but we also have to get it released. Aside from some issues with software rendering I've discussed with mifki and Tanya etc. and we are going to work out one way or another, I'm pretty confident on the basic rewrite (the trailer graphics are all in-engine and those rewrites all took ~a week). The artists are working now, can work while I finish villains, and then continue to work as I start in on the Steam stuff, so I don't expect any delays there. So the X months comes down a bit to whatever else we are going to do with menus and tutorials and that sort of thing. Even the beginning, how world gen makes a world and then spits you back to the main menu -- it needs to be more friendly from the first moments. And we're going to work on that for a time. Bugs of course are also in play here, especially bugs that relate to this purpose.
1c) We'll see! I can do everything but the core important bit of using more modern graphics stuff way down in the guts (the code that is already released with the linux version and will remain public.) The interfacing with all of the DF code, etc., is all a straightforward slog and doesn't seem to depend on the underlying architecture (between software rendering, vertex buffers, shaders, whatever.) mifki (and others?) have worked out a Windows DLL solution to one of our issues etc., though I'm not going to be able to be more specific here until I'm out of villains and in the weeds properly. As you say in your reply, there just isn't a good time to start on this (especially if health has a say!), so I have to take this approach where I finish the stuff I'm working on, and then get into the Steam stuff. So I'll have to be frustratingly vague for a bit, because I just don't have certain answers yet.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 3137435 times)