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[Silverybearded]

Personally, I'm just wondering why zombies going AWOL and joining performance troupes is considered a bug.

[FantasticDorf]

Personally, I'm just wondering why zombies going AWOL and joining performance troupes is considered a bug.

It'd assume that the necromancer asked them to, because even immortal beings of immense evil enjoy a good show.

Spoiler: "Spooky Musician Inside" (click to show/hide)

[therahedwig]

Personally, I'm just wondering why zombies going AWOL and joining performance troupes is considered a bug.

It might get a little less funny once all necromancers' schemes flounder because they don't have any intelligent lieutenants :p

Mind you, I think everyone seems to agree that a lieutenant whose necromancing boss is unable to give orders(or just uninterested) should get a bit more agency in how they fill in their day... If only because a zombie running about trying to hatch an escape plan for their captured master while moonlighting as a bard seems pretty interested :p

[iceball3]

Thanks for the answers, toady! It's always great to hear from you.
After a few years trawling through DF's raws, i noticed that a quite a few values seem to be set as placeholder or default values. For example:
-The attack-recover period of all weapons and almost all natural attacks (excluding kicks)
-The force multiplier of natural attacks
-The bodily-material toughness and thickness of everything made of flesh and bone, particularly concerning the lack of differences between beasts of drastic size difference (this may just be intended outright)
-The lack of differences in base stat attributes between beasts
-Plant thread and various other flexible materials fracturing with little bending or impact force, in particular, they seem to have various of both yields and fractures set as low as 10,000 in many cases.

My question is just thus, in your opinion, are these values:
-Intended to be as they are, as the role they serve is vague and combat calculations mysterious enough that they work good enough as is?
-Placeholders for an eventual material and physics detail rework?
-Left at values that work well enough, specifically so the modding community and contributors can refine the values for full conversion mods or otherwise general contributions?
or
-Some other intention?
 
There are quite a few things I know that -are- planned that would largely change the balance of materials, which is why I figure that a lot of the values acting as placeholders for the time being would make sense, like the multi-material-weapons feature and so forth.

[PatrikLundell]

:
6. Will the evil regions spread from towers also have evil weather and blanket re-animation effects, or will it just be a normal region with zombies?
:

Due to the way the DF data is structured, it's easy to spread Evilness/Savagery/Salinity... properties, because they're all stored on a world tile level. The regional interactions (with reanimation being one interaction effect), however, are tied to the regions rather than the world tiles that are part of those regions, so tying it to world tiles would require a restructuring of the data, which I suspect will be done as part of the Myth&Magic map rewrite. Flora and fauna is likewise tied to the region rather than tile level, and would require additional checks to exclude e.g. Evil plants from the non evil parts of a region if those plants were added to the region (there's probably something similar in place currently to ensure Temperate/Tropical and Savagery matching, so it might be easy to just add an Evilness checks to it).

[iceball3]

Does this mean that salt vs fresh water preferring animals don't actually check regional salinity or am I missing something?
Not that it's too important at the moment: animals don't really thirst or hunger, let alone experience saltiness.

[PatrikLundell]

Does this mean that salt vs fresh water preferring animals don't actually check regional salinity or am I missing something?
Not that it's too important at the moment: animals don't really thirst or hunger, let alone experience saltiness.

Salinity is the other basic parameter (besides Evilness) that lies outside of PSV control. I believe the whole region has the same general Salinity level (but I haven't checked) in the same way the whole region currently has the same general Evilness level. With such a logic the check happens at the allocation of the flora and fauna to the region: in the case of Salinity it controls the biome where the Salinity makes a difference ([fresh/salt water swamp/marsh/lake/river] and the biome defines the base set of flora/fauna from which the actual set is drawn from), and in the case of Evilness the level controls whether Evil/Good flora and fauna gets added to the set drawn from.

[FantasticDorf]

Does this mean that salt vs fresh water preferring animals don't actually check regional salinity or am I missing something?
Not that it's too important at the moment: animals don't really thirst or hunger, let alone experience saltiness.

Salinity is the other basic parameter (besides Evilness) that lies outside of PSV control. I believe the whole region has the same general Salinity level (but I haven't checked) in the same way the whole region currently has the same general Evilness level. With such a logic the check happens at the allocation of the flora and fauna to the region: in the case of Salinity it controls the biome where the Salinity makes a difference ([fresh/salt water swamp/marsh/lake/river] and the biome defines the base set of flora/fauna from which the actual set is drawn from), and in the case of Evilness the level controls whether Evil/Good flora and fauna gets added to the set drawn from.

Don't forget temperature or season either, a apocalpytic event that overwrites the weather such as the sun blotting out (lets say its a vampire's cult's fault) for pernament winter and biome conditions could be catastrophic in sending away animals entirely and shifting jungles into taiga, causing tree & plant die-off's.

I wonder how dynamic the new evil sprawl will be, a case that a pre-existing evil patch of land with creatures inhabiting it will suddenly population boom from the expanded space appropriate to their breeding cycles (LOTS of beak-dogs over marshy default world generation) or will creatures spontanously appear when the biome is changed?

[KittyTac]

Will there be a setting for the power of magic? So that in some worlds, wizards would be godlike, in others they would be on par with mundane sentients, and so on.

[Eric Blank]

Will every secret-knower with a reanimation effect try to take over the world, or does it depend as well on their personalities or other interaction/syndrome tokens or other factors?

It matters to me specifically because I have mods with multiple secrets with reanimations, but I didn't want all of them to be aggressive world-conquerers or even necessarily villains in the first place.

[PatrikLundell]

@FantasticDorf: All kinds of stuff ought to be possible post the map rewrite. We obviously don't know what the data structures will be like at that time, but they'll probably support such things. I don't see temperature upheavals or major magical effects happening before the M&M release, though.

If you wanted to ask Toady whether flora/fauna would be influenced by Evilness you'd want to Toady color the question.

@KittyTac: There will be several sliders, and strength of magic as well as how common it is are probably candidates for these controls.

@Eric Blank: As far as I understand necromancers aren't all after world conquest. Some ought to be content with reaching the goal of surpassing their mortality, while others may be "scholars", content with sitting in their towers to do research (possibly with some forays into graveyards to gather more research material).  However, it's those that make a (foul) mark on the world that are written into the history books...
The secrets themselves don't have any agenda, as far as I understand, although the power may well tempt many of them down a slippery slope. However, I don't think there's anything that makes using the secrets morally permissible by any civs as it currently stands, so shunning, persecusion, etc. is probably hard to get around.

[therahedwig]

@KittyTac: There will be several sliders, and strength of magic as well as how common it is are probably candidates for these controls.

Well, up till now there's been talk about tone, randomness and magic/mundane sliders, and there's been talk(pc gamer interview about magic) about how to make sure the magic gen will create fun and interesting worlds by limiting magic, but there hasn't been talk about a slider for how powerful regular joe smoes can become. It's not even evident how feasible that might be, so I think the question still makes sense

@Eric Blank: As far as I understand necromancers aren't all after world conquest. Some ought to be content with reaching the goal of surpassing their mortality, while others may be "scholars", content with sitting in their towers to do research (possibly with some forays into graveyards to gather more research material).  However, it's those that make a (foul) mark on the world that are written into the history books...
The secrets themselves don't have any agenda, as far as I understand, although the power may well tempt many of them down a slippery slope. However, I don't think there's anything that makes using the secrets morally permissible by any civs as it currently stands, so shunning, persecusion, etc. is probably hard to get around.

Darn it, now I want histfigs who become anatomy/disection/medicine scholars to also be entangled in necromancer fighting, because those assholes keep stealing all the good bodies!

[Miuramir]

Will there be a setting for the power of magic? So that in some worlds, wizards would be godlike, in others they would be on par with mundane sentients, and so on.

We know that there will be at least one sort of slider for generating mundane vs. strongly magical worlds / settings.  What we don't yet know is how many sliders, and how they would be split up. 

In my opinion, to meet the stated design goals there will probably need to be *at least* two sliders; one for "how significant / powerful magic can be" and one for "how common magic is".  E.g. the Tolkien legendarium has very powerful magic, but compared to many fantasy settings (especially fantasy games) magic is quite rare.  Conversely, an action RPG type setting might have extremely common magic, but it's not capable of changing the world on fundamental levels more than, say, a good firearm could. 

A third useful axis IMO would probably be "cost and cost efficiency".  In some worlds, the main limitation on magic is that it carries prohibitive costs of various sorts.  (This might be mana / energy, selling one's soul, cost of rare / exotic / dangerous / forbidden consumable materials, personal behavior limitations / vows / geasa, or many other things.)  In other worlds, mana recharges with a quick rest, components if required are mundane shopping items, etc.  Looked at in another way, if your goal is to explode an area ("fireball"), is it more or less efficient to do so with magic than with chemistry / engineering?   

Side thought... A setting where magic is moderately common, but at least partially obeys conservation of energy such that a mage has to eat an appropriate amount of extra calories might be amusing, and an excuse for why DF farming is so easy.  "Urist McAncientAstronaut is lifting the massive ashlar blocks of the great pyramid project into place with his mind, and is on a 20,000 calorie a day diet..."  

Hmm... reality check.  Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (who despite being huge, is quite dwarfy in many ways) has a training diet of ~6 kg of food a day, with macros of ~850 g protein, ~460 g fats, ~790 g carbs.  That's about 3,400 + 4,140 + 3,160 = 10,700 calories.  Given a lower tech setting without protein powder and where carbs (bread, beer) are the cheap calorie option, Gaston's "five dozen eggs" a day is actually a reasonable part of a balanced training diet (60 eggs is ~380 g protein, ~320 g fats, ~30 g carbs; ~4,650 calories) for someone "roughly the size of a barge"

[falcc]

Most of the questions I had have been asked already so here's a random one totally unrelated to the current work.

There's a different tile for creatures that swim under the water, there's a sun direction, there is field of view, so: Is it possible, if only in a long-term development sense, to have reflections off of water and/or silvered mirrors?/color]

I was listening to something in the LudoNarraCon talks before yours and was reminded that photorealism can't handle reflections at all. But even when your graphics are a bit more sophisticated, will it ever be possible to 'l'ook at something reflective and have the game know what tiles should be visible in that thing from your own position? Or, could a reflective mirror assembled somewhere add to your adventurer's field of view tiles?I'm just super curious if your kind of graphics have this advantage over non-text games.

[MrWiggles]

Df Ray Traces!