Have you ever considered changing the lycanthrope 'Wereass' to 'Weredonkey'? I know it's technically correct, but thinking ahead to the Steam release, might be best to just nip that in the bud, as it were.
A side note to this, but it appears demons/forgotten beasts made of vomit can also come about - definitely a bit overly 'gross-out humor' for the tone, IMO?
clinodev:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8310619#msg8310619ZM5:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8310705#msg8310705PlumpHelmetMan:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8310778#msg8310778Mr_Crabman:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8310863#msg8310863ZM5:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8310889#msg8310889PlumpHelmetMan:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8311051#msg8311051Ha ha, yeah, I'll probably change it. I don't mind the vomit as an in-universe thing, but the donkey name would put those creatures in line with the naming convention for the domestic animal (and any future wild donkey if we ever get those.)
Hello! I've been working on a game myself that relies strongly on procedural generation, and I have a few technical questions as to how Dwarf Fortress world generation works behind the scenes. First of all, how does each tile decide which biome it's a part of? My game uses a chunk-based system, and I have a voronoi diagram for assigning biomes. A voronoi sample is done for each vertex of the chunk, and if there are any discrepancies then a voronoi sample is done on every tile.
Secondly, how are erosion passes handled? I can't think of a way to do it that wouldn't bleed over into nearby chunks.
Finally, how is it decided where lakes and rivers start? I know that they just go downhill after being placed, but I'm not sure where to place these water features in the first place.
PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8310892#msg8310892Yeah, as PatrikLundell writes, we have several fractal fields and the biome is determined through a formula mainly based on latitude, temp, rainfall, and drainage. Using several separate fields allows some interesting overlap to take place to break up blobs of similar biomes.
There's definitely bleeding over into nearby chunks! We have a finite top-level world map, at most 257x257 in size, so we can store those fields after generating them and do whatever we want to them. Then we generate new fields when we zoom in, using those changed stored values as the edge seeds. Of course you can't change fields as easily once the game starts since it'll spoil fractal generation for maps already made, but this is in world gen so it's okay.
We run several fake river passes to erode the landscape, starting the rivers at the base of the mountain elevation and going to the sea. And there's also some running backwards up from the sea if I recollect since it helped smooth things out. After many, many passes that just change the landscape but don't place water, there's a final pass, with the starting points at the base of the mountains. Since so many erosion passes have been done, there's usually a pretty clear path to the sea at this time, so most of the rivers will succeed in finding ocean and be placed - there's possibly also a backwards process here since it seems to help. I don't recall exactly how the lakes work, but it isn't something complicated like seeing where actual flat spaces or properly erodable places or flow blockages are - it might just expand out from random points, or something not too much more complicated than that, though at some point rainfall in the basin is taken into consideration for the flow levels.
How complex would it be to restructure stockpiles to accept modded materials?
For example, I can mod bone blocks into the game, but I can't add 'Bone' to the 'Blocks: Other Materials' menu in stockpile options, and consequently the bone blocks aren't accepted.
Could stockpiles theoretically be pushed to the raws, or would this require some kind of code that scans all of the reactions to see what can be made of what materials?
Yeah, either solution is time-consuming, though I'm theoretically for doing something like this at some point. Putting it in the raws is probably the safest thing to do since the first several incarnations of a scanner would likely miss stuff or add them to an inappropriate category at times. The sizers on the various stockpile fields forget where they come from, so save compatibility would be a whole thing and there are probably a few other issues (it can't be a raw-only solution because of the generated creature mats etc.), but it seems solvable and not hopeless anyway.
Have you thought about revamping the three main splash pages for the graphical release?
Bumber:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8311505#msg8311505Hmm, yeah, I dunno. It would make sense to direct people to the Steam and itch pages more clearly, I think, but the site is definitely also going to remain the home of Classic DF as well as the old DF versions, and it feels historically proper to keep some visuals of that in place.
On a technical level, would you be willing (or perhaps as part of the steam release) to build DF for ARM architecture? Mostly for Raspberry Pis and other SBCs. No idea how much of a hassle that would be, but the latest RPis are powerful enough to run DF without immediately meeting FPS death.
The Steam release'll have enough trouble keeping the OSs we have, and we're definitely going to jump those hurdles before adding new ones. I'm not sure how much of an extra support burden I'll be able to take on overall.
The new video of Zach playing a desert fort has a ”stoneworker’s workshop” (seemingly) instead of a ”mason’s workshop”. The workshop also includes some tasks that reside in a craftdwarf’s workshop in the currently available versions of DF, such as those for slabs and pedestals but notably not the crafts. Does this mean all those tasks will now be done by a mason (perhaps renamed to ”stoneworker”?) and that only the common crafts such as figurines and rings will stay with the stonecrafter/craftsdwarf’s workshop?
Edit: And a question for ThreeToe: In the desert fort, you locked a door between the fort and the caverns because ”monsters might come”. Knowing building destroyers roam down there, that obviously won’t work in the long run. Was this intentional to lead new players to discover !fun! and antimeasures against it on their own? Or do you simply play more open forts like that?
Yeah, we redid all the stone jobs and names. The whole mason thing has been bothering me for years and years. It's still not perfect, but I like it a lot better now. There are stonecutters, stone carvers, engravers, and masons. Stoneworker is the skill group word (like woodworker or craftsdwarf or farmer), so it made the most sense for the shop. Could almost be called the stone carver's shop, but then the engraving (for slabs) would have to be done over at the crafts, and slabs still felt hefty? I dunno. Could easily change our minds on this again, but at least they aren't masons, ha ha ha. Stonecutters do the fortifications and smoothing, while the engravers still engrave walls and floors. Masons are just used for stone building placement, but we'll likely involve them in stone tile constructions at some point.
Threetoe: I will only tell you this because you are a committed fan asking questions on FotF. So, to tell you the truth, I actually saw a troll wandering down in the caves and was hoping it would wander by the door to break it down.
Just checking regarding the MAGICAL creature-caste token:
No function, presumably a placeholder.
Is it actually a piece of scaffolding left sticking out, or is there more to it?
Hmm, is seems to do similar stuff to AT_PEACE_WITH_WILDLIFE and VEGETATION, in terms of hostility. In fact, it looks completely interchangeable with AT_PEACE_WITH_WILDLIFE, and the VEGETATION caste flag is also interchangeable with it, except that the VEGETATION flag creatures are also valued in artwork more by civs with the plant sphere. My only guesses are that this relates to the ent-type tree creatures that used to be animated by the elves, which were possibly tagged as MAGICAL and VEGETATION (which would be redundant, so not an excellent guess), or the wizard character that used to come and take a dwarf to avert the ~year 6 undead invasion and which would be nice not to be killed by a lion or something and is definitely MAGICAL.
Thanks for all the effort you are doing 
I have never felt so excited about a game!
I have a doubt, I understand that the videos so far are not going to be the final product, are there any plans to add an option to enable/disable the flicker on dwarves and entities? I feel a little weird to see sprites that don't have the characteristic flicker of the game, especially I feel that the feeling of movement when moving from one frame to another is missing
I don't understand this one - is there a characteristic flicker in the ASCII version? To me the happy face symbols are on one tile, and then they are on another tile, and there's no flicker at all related to movement or otherwise, and it works the same way in the Steam version. Whether or not there should be sliding movement in the graphical version is a different question as I understand it. Things I can think of that are like flicker are the flashing legendary dwarves, the /-\|/ animation when there are multiple creatures in a tile, and the status symbols that flash over them, but those things don't relate to movement.
hey, not sure if this has been asked before but will the map rewrite include being able to actually mod in structures? so instead of having to use something like CAVE_DETAILED or CITY in your entity file you'd be able to insert your own raw defined structure.
voliol:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8315871#msg8315871It is one of the more complicated things to take out of code, especially if you still want to understand meaningfully what areas actually are, sometimes a few nested layers of meaning/ownership/map links/etc., rather than just creating a space that looks a certain way. We'll see with the editors and things how much progress we make there. Although I don't think my site/dungeon maps are particularly good right now, some of the generation is pretty complex, and touches all sorts of pieces of the game. This would be difficult to capture in a text format, and would require a pretty huge API even for a scripting language to get at all the things queried by the code. But that doesn't mean we can't go further than just having a few tagged types as we do now.
Will the existing menus be polished by artists or what we've seen is the final product?
What are artists working on currently? UI feedback thread has been silent for months.
Will the game have own sound effects or at least support workshop mods to add them? I mean sounds of menu interactions, environment and unit sounds etc.
Gnomoria has a concept of darkness in caves being a source of monsters. That makes room-making more demanding and purposeful. Same with cave-ins - they seem to be rather rare now so I'm not incentified NOT to make a huge-ass 40x40 square rooms everywhere. Have you considered these or perhaps other ways to make fortress design more engaging as a game mechanic?
What is your opinion about the dwarf fortress-lite genre that seems to be blossoming? Do you consider those to be competition to DF?
Have you/Kitfox considered hiring a professional UX designer who would help find optimal solutions to the arguably quite challenging problems DF has to offer?
Mr_Crabman:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8316668#msg8316668Ha ha, there are a lot of fresh placeholders that go in with the menus, produced by myself with paint. Definitely not finalized!
Artists are working a bit on plants, FBs, kobs and such, but we definitely entered an in-between zone since I have so much menu stuff to do. At some point I won't be so far behind and new art posts should pick up again.
Sound plans aren't finalized yet. I'm not sure if we'll be able to release with that much, since it's a production track we just don't have much capacity for currently (though we have some event sounds and will likely end up with some menu sounds at least.) I'm not sure if I'll set up a whole system in advance to support non-vanilla sounds, since we might be able add them later and we'd want to support those sounds properly, which includes me taking cues/software/fmod help from sound fx devs, and it would be best not to have to rip out another system with a bunch of existing mods to do it.
We had some ideas about how to bring cave-ins back, yeah. Lighting has some old thoughts but I'm not sure how or when or if that's ever going to actually come up. Generally, we just don't have a lot of proper function to our locations. When they do have functions, like the dining room currently, suddenly furniture placement and stuff matters. So as we make locations do more and mean more, it should help a lot. But that's a fairly long road.
I mean, if there's something called the dwarf-fortress-lite genre I think that can only be good for us, ha ha, though business/marketing stuff isn't my realm of expertise.
Getting a dedicated UX designer is kind of the same issue with the sound stuff - we have some resources, but not a ton. Obviously it's best to get people like that involved early, but it's just not in the cards. Kitfox can afford the artists and the music, but not a lot of full-time DF people generally. There are ways to get more money, but that's been true for a while now, and we're using the approach we're comfortable with. If the release goes well, adding UX people would be late obviously, but then we'll have some additional options. At the same time, we're slowly expanding the people testing the builds, people with various qualifications, so I'm anticipating a lot of sharp suggestions well before the release, at least, beyond what we're already getting from the community and etc.
Are there plans to eventually expand on senses, such as echolocation, more indepth/functional hearing, viper-like heat vision etc? Right now the [EXTRAVISION] tag seems like a sort of crude prototype version of echolocation in a way.
EXTRAVISION was a tag that made e.g. undead with rotted eyeballs unbroken, ha ha, though I don't remember the first context of its use. We'll likely continue to just add things as they come up.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 3136193 times)