What is the state of keyboard control in DF and what plans are there for it going forward?
Eric Blank:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8424321#msg8424321DG:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8424366#msg8424366Yeah, we have hotkeys for the top level actions, and an optional cursor you can turn on for designations and buildings, and macros work with those things. Keyboard support for other menus will take time, but we'd like to get to all of them.
Are the vanilla raws split into multiple zipped folders going forwards, or was the "vanilla_buildings" example just an example?
They are in multiple unzipped folders with their own info.txts, all within a "data/vanilla" folder. All/some of them can be removed from the load order when you create a world.
I personally think that 30$ is a good price for such awesome game but people in russian community ask about possible region prices.
Kitfox says they'll be following Steam's guidelines on this! I'm not sure if we have those numbers or if it's all set automatically.
In a Watsonian sense, how do you think a DF world gets its first anvil, given how you, in gameplay, need a forge to make an anvil... And you need an anvil to build a forge.
demonbunny3po:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8425773#msg8425773Paaaad (op):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8425860#msg8425860Egan_BW:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8425863#msg8425863Schmaven:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8425865#msg8425865Lemunde:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8426328#msg8426328Eric Blank:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8426344#msg8426344Ha ha, I don't have anything to add to the discussion. We do have gods that made slabs somehow, so there are possibilities even without relying on stone anvils, molds, etc.
This may have been asked before, But how much test coverage does your code have?(2022)
I can't feasibly support anything like expansive unit tests, but I have some things like that scattered around in places that are accident prone.
How moddable will DF be with workshop support? will people be able to change core features of the game (different farming mechanics, different combat mechanics, new systems, etc) or will it be limited to using modules already in the engine?
voliol:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8425551#msg8425551Yeah, it's basically the same as before, with objects etc. Steam Workshop doesn't provide any extra capabilities on its own, and I haven't been able to create a giant API or anything.
Will you include earnings from the Premium version in the monthly Bay 12 Reports? It's hard to speak for others, but I know I would appreciate the transparency.
Also, if it hasn't been disclosed by this point (the start of December), will DF Classic/ASCII mode be ready at the Premium launch?
I think there may still be Steam rules against certain data releases, so I'm not really sure. Tanya has been talking about potential sales numbers a bit on Twitter and such, so it seems like we may be able to release some data. Because of how the wheels turn at Steam internally, we won't have any precise earnings numbers until mid-February, but we should have rough sales numbers very quickly.
As you've probably seen, Classic is shortly after launch now - basically the next thing I'm working on, and there are just a few things to clean up. I can't predict what's going to happen with sudden issues and etc. after launch, since it'll be a whole new universe, but if things are settled quickly, it shouldn't take very long. The conversion is mostly done - there are just a few display issues (title screen, world maps, buildings don't print, sky looks weird, a few buttons don't show.)
1.Will non grazing animals require food before magic?
2.Right now adventure mode is basically unplayable in big cities. Will we get the option to add a population cap to sites?
3.Will gods have personalities after magic?
4.What can we expect the villains to do in our forts once the Villain Update is done?
1. There's nothing particularly pointing in that direction before magic. We'd probably need smaller portions for the little beasts.
2. It's something we'll be looking at again when we get adventure mode updated. I'm not sure what the outcome will be - depends on how regular optimizations go.
3. It seems probably that there will be some distinctions drawn for the creation myth generator.
4. The existing w.g. plots beyond the artifact heists include assassinations, embezzlement, sabotage, coups... so that's the kind of thing I'd expect. Sabotage of course in the fort setting could lead to all sorts of troublesome behaviors.
Just watched the new video by Kitfox on YouTube, and I’ve got a question. I’ve noticed that the game doesn’t pause when a smaller screen pops up. Will it be possible to move these screens around on the screen so they don’t cover up what you don’t want them to cover up?
They are not currently movable! This seems possible, though you can have various things open at once and overlaps are really not handled well by the engine, so we'd have to make sure they can't cross each other.
1. Might creatures (particularly forgotten beasts) made of fluid, gas or powder get buffed before the big wait? Seeing as how they're really fragile and a bit underwhelming (despite monsters like this in fantasy often being extra dangerous/hard to kill).
2. Will it be possible for off-site/worldgen combat calculations to be made more accurate at some point? Outside of the "literally viewing the battle with a second camera" thing planned for after the map rewrite, that is.
According to what I've heard from others, basically nothing factors into the outcome but combat skills, size, and the leaders tactical skills (basically none of their special abilities or comparative body material durability matters); and battles are all a sequence of 1v1s, so sheer numbers can't "overwhelm" an opponent, at best being extra dice rolls for one individual to get a lucky strike in.
3. Are animated worldmap tiles in the plans for the post-release graphics enhancements? Stuff like moving water/rivers, those "sparkles" in good aligned forests actually sparkling, "heat haze" for hot biomes, etc.
1. I dunno, there's a lot to do and it's a very specific sort of thing. But yeah, something does need to happen.
2. Sure it's possible. Have to be careful about a lot of things so, since we don't have easy access to the unit definitions and we can't use any CPU time on it.
3. We didn't have particular plans for it. The world map is caught between several different uses and it probably needs a different print mode for each one.
1. Will the world gen rewrite / myth and magic include constellations? Processions of the equinoxes? It would be really cool to have, say, "The Astrological age of the Shoe Cobbler end with the Cavy Pig Apocalypse, for so it was written in the beginning," for example. Also it would give all my astronomers more stuff to do 
2. Tropics and Sub-Tropics would be very nice to have, rather than the random distribution of deserts and jungles, even if the implementation was "quick and dirty" so to speak. Any plans to include that? And trade winds? Oh I can see how this would affect boats and trade... hmmmmm....
*Since the game already has wind values based on latitude, it looks as though this was already an intended feature, but never fully implemented? I'm not sure if you intend to go the full nine yards and include axial tilt and such.
*edits for clarity
3. A recent combat log indicated that: "A forgotten beast bit off Urist McDwarfbaby's head! The part went flying in an arc!"
Infant mortality being what it is in DF, will there be artwork for dead dwarven infants / infant body parts? Or will changes have to be made now that the game is being published and distributed to a wider audience than before?
PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8428324#msg8428324Urist McWiddershins (op):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8428404#msg8428404PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8428534#msg8428534Urist McWiddershins (op):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8428600#msg84286001. We have some of these notions in the knowledge/scholar side of the game already, but they don't mean anything in the game. We know stars exist from adventure mode. I'm all for playing around with it, but it's uncertain when these things will advance. We have notes about conjunctions and other magical happenings and such, and they are somewhat appealing because they are pretty easy to do by themselves.
2. Trade winds etc. haven't been relevant yet so I haven't spent much time on the wind model. Distribution of deserts and jungles isn't entirely random. It depends on rain shadows and latitude currently, though the overall rain distribution is randomized at first since the weather model doesn't give us much to work with. I expect it to be better around the time we get to boats.
3. We haven't drawn living babies yet and are hoping to get to that soon. I'm not too concerned about this. They had dead Spark in Ultima 7, and I think we'd be at about that level. I guess if you're unlucky you could get an intestine drag? This doesn't bother me at all, but I guess we'll see what happens.
What sort of FPS does the new version run at? Have there been optimisations that make it run faster?
Can you limit the fort's population size from inside the game now, rather than having to do it through the init files?
For that matter, have most of the modifiable values which affect gameplay which were located in the init and d_init files been put into the main game?
On a side note, have you seen this thread? If so, what do you think of Putnam’s discovery?
It's a bit faster. Compiler upgrade really helped as usual.
Yeah, you can set almost all of the init/d_init options from inside the game now. There are some things like additional font support we still have to do in some way or another.
We were somewhat aware of that, if you look back through our comments, regarding pathfinding. But the 20% going to some kind of cage vs not cage or wtvr definitely has to be investigated. Fortunately we've been in discussion with Putnam on this kind of thing, and hopefully progress will be made. I didn't see it there, but I think the typical item temperature etc. stuff also came up. In any case, yeah, you have to go where the slowdowns actually are, and fix them.
You mentioned in the interview the other day that the 200 or so animal people don't have the layers info in their graphics RAWS to show clothing, hairstyles and such visually. That's a lot of data, so seems reasonable.
1) Presumably there's no hard-coded restrictions on adding these ourselves in our mods (for those of us who play in worlds where rat people are far more important than elves)? Or will we run into issues with elephant-man helmets?
2) Is this something you consider as needed for releasing Adventurer (since surely no-one ever plays parties consisting entirely of dwarves, elves, humans and goblins)?
Apologies if it's all been answered before. Been in hibernation while this arc gets done.
From my understanding, the creature variation templates will continue to only be for creatures in the upcoming release, instead of being generalized for all sorts of objects. I imagine this is some technical issue, but on which level?
And if it ends up being expanded/replaced by something more general, do you think it could work on graphics tokens as well? Admittedly a bit suggestion-y, but I think it could shorten the graphics files quite a lot using the argument functionality.
1) You should be able to do it, yeah. It's just a ton of effort and art and such, especially if you want profession-based colors and specific items and all that. Some middleground would be easier to accomplish. I'm not sure if a full conversion would also hit a tech barrier - it's just a ton of data.
2) In that vein, we may also attempt a middleground ourselves. They already have fake clothing but it would be nice at least to see weapons.
Yeah, we haven't generalized creature variations. It's not so much a tech issue per se as it is a time issue. It's something I should be able to do, just generalizing the post-load-text-changing stuff, now that all the definitions are just sitting around before they are all finalized.
Yeah, presumably using some kind of template etc. would work for graphics to some extent. It gets complicated because you need to give the tile pages and positions and those aren't always consistent, and some are larger than 1x1 and some aren't, etc. But in principle yeah, there's a lot of compression that could be done. Even within the single dwarf definition I'm assuming.
1. Are duplicated raws still a problem, or will mods later in the loading order that use the same ID for an object (eg, a creature) replace/overwrite definitions in previous mods?
2. Is there a way to disable/toggle certain raw files, within a single mod/package from the workshop? For example, after downloading a "More Creatures" mod from the workshop, having some ingame menu that lets you toggle say, amphibians off but keep the mod's birds. Or alternatively, some other solution that allows a single Workshop subscription/page to contain what is technically multiple mods (so that "granular" mods don't have to post a million entries to the workshop).
I had the same concern. Several people specifically asked me to add support for removing certain features from the mod I'm curating, which I did by splitting it into multiple parts as well as the single all-in-one version. With the steam release, will this modularity be possible from a single download now, i.e. uploading multiple object folders in the same steam mod and disabling the ones you don't want?
1. We discussed this re: CUT etc. in your future post.
2. There's nothing like that. We're open to expanding what the system can handle, especially to overcome non-ideal situations like the one you describe, but there was only so much time we could devote up to this point.
With the changes to loading we made for the SELECT/etc. stuff, where all the mods exist in text space before they are processed, I think it should be easier at least. I'm optimistic we can get to a good place here, though I'm not sure if we'll need to eat the full scripting pill first or just keep burying ourselves in esoteric syntax. This causes a bit of inertia since it's not something I have a lot of experience with.
How long has the changelog grown to, presuming that you've managed to keep one this whole time?
Ha ha, I did not! It just didn't feel feasible this time, and the circumstances were all much stranger, so I set myself free of it. Changelogs will be kept again after launch.
When will the caravans become more selective in the items they are willing to buy as well as the prices they put on items. They would act as real traders other then garbage collectors. They give a list of what they will accept. They may be convinced to take other stuff if it is of high quality and rare however.
How far off is the Improved Mechanics Update? (feasible trap mechanisms, springs, gears, ropes, pullies, piping, conveyer belts, maybe rock crushers, hydraulics?, Pneumatics?, etc.)
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8429988#msg8429988Silverwing235:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8430096#msg8430096I assume when we do the economy stuff after the civ update after the magic update we'll see a very different trade system. I'm not sure what changes we'll make before then, since we just don't have enough information about resources and production.
I think Shonai_Dweller is more or less correct on the timing of the next pass on mechanism-type stuff.
The Dwarf Fortress development page mentions "automatons and magical prostheses" as part of Myth&Magic. These features seems innocent on the surface level, but actually raise a lot of question (hopefully not too many to answer):
1. Are the prostheses only for limbs, or will there be ones for every organ?
2. How will prostheses fair in comparison to the original body part?
3. Will there be magical prosthetics that give the user magic powers?
4. Will it be possible to:
4,1. attach a prosthetic in addition to a being's natural body parts? Imagine a craftsdwarf having 4 arms, 2 natural and 2 artificial, increasing work speed.
4,2. replace a healthy body part with a prosthetic one?
4,3. mix and match parts (replace a dwarf's legs with prosthetic arms)?
5. How much of a dwarf's body can be replaced until he is considered an automaton?
6. Will automatons be able to take roles of nobility?
7. Will there be automaton models besides the standard humanoid worker?
8. What will be the upkeep costs of an automaton (I presume they won't need food and alcohol)?
9. Will you be able to have an automaton-exclusive fortress or play as an automaton in adventure mode?
10. Will it be possible for one to achieve immortality not via necromancy, but by replacing aging flesh with machinery/putting one's soul into an automaton body?
Mr Crabman:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8430097#msg8430097SamBucher (op):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8430106#msg8430106voliol:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8430403#msg84304031. Yeah, once magic and metaphysics and such are involved, some additional doors open here, and voliol's correct to bring up the different possibilities based on soul concepts and 'centers' for different functions being randomizable.
2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10. Mr Crabman handled all of these! The only thing I have to add is that we don't know what we're going to get to at first, so I wouldn't expect everything all at once.
You had said in villains part 2 a fort takeover could happen. Could you shed some more light on what this entails? And how the fort behaves afterwords? Does it become some big bad hq afterwords? Will villains use it as a base for future operations?
It isn't particularly planned out! But it would be pretty frustrating if a villain pulls off a coup and you just lose, since it would be a hidden thing you didn't catch, kind of like if a vampire could simultaneously gobble everybody at once. So it makes sense to let you carry on in some capacity. The counterpoint here is that you might not have as many commands and hopefully it wouldn't be too little or too irritating to play. So we're just exploring the idea now. And as you suggest, the AI for the villains would have to be expanded significantly, for whatever aspects of the fort you aren't running, and that's another issue. At the same time, once you have this capability, you could play something like a dwarf gang working down in a human sewer and have it kinda work, which would be pretty funny.
Will we be able to visually identify wild plants, or will we still need to mouse over/select them?
Will we be able to see the specific weapons used in a trap?
With the recent balance changes to farming, have you considered making greenhouses from glass roofs/walls?
How do we identify the differences between animals and their savage giant cousins? Do they have different art, or are they larger than a single tile?
Are there any Beasts/Titans that will take up more than one tile, or is that something you're not interested in doing?
What time will the game actually release? Is it a "rolling release" where every timezone gets access at midnight (or some other time) or a global release where everyone gets it at 0000XXT?
Mr Crabman:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8430909#msg8430909voliol:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8431017#msg8431017As an update to voliol's reply, which was correct at the time, we'll now have outdoor plant graphics for launch! We still need to do products, maybe differentiate certain crops (e.g. wheats), and perhaps differentiate between shrubs w/ usable growths and shrubs that are out of season or already picked, but it's much more varied outside now.
Yeah, weapon traps show differences in weapon, but they don't currently reflect multiple weapons.
Ha ha, greenhouses would take a bit of work for the game to understand! Wikipedia puts them slightly out of date (mid 1400s) as well.
Yeah, giant animals have much inflated tiles, but as Mr Crabman says, it's all visual and not mechanical. There are lots of problems to overcome in implementing actual multi-tile creatures.
I'm not sure how releases work on Steam! We have one button that we press, and this 'releases the game' as I understand it. My assumption is that this would be everywhere at once, but if Steam's internal workings make it function differently, I don't know.
What will happen in the new version if you kill off the original dwarf caravan in the first year(drowning chamber)? Prolonged war? Will you ever get another dwarf caravan, perhaps from a different dwarf civilization?
You still can't fight your own civilization. There are technical issues with that we have to overcome at some point. Generally, diplomacy and such needs to be improved for it to feel at all proper between your fort and any of the civs.
1. I’m very excited about the upcoming changes to the "difficulty" of trading & farming in the Steam release, as “balance / challenge” has always been a big interest of mine. Are there plans down the road to similarly tweak other systems with an eye for balance, e.g. changing how easy it is to feed a fortress via trees / fishing, or certain combat options like cage traps having outsized effectiveness?
2. Similarly, with the eventual “army / siege” update down the line, are there any plans relating to the consistency / relative strength level of goblin sieges? I know it was only a “gamey” stopgap measure at the time, but one aspect I appreciated about the old goblin siege mechanics in the pre-0.4x days was reliably knowing a goblin siege would turn up in the first few years of new forts (if listed as a neighbor), and subsequent sieges would usually be roughly proportional to your fort's wealth / size, regardless of what other things may have been going on in the world.
1. Yeah, we'll see some big changes when we get to the siege stuff for sure.
2. It's still always worked this way, and we've rebalanced the formulas for the launch, but there's the overriding trouble of population. If the goblins don't have the people, they can't send them, and we're always going to have to work around that going forward. Really, if you've killed most of the possible goblin invaders, the humans and elves and others should probably be filling the vacuum. Or something horrible could happen, but I don't want it to be too gamey. Of course, we never really came to terms with the opening of the underworld and how that should impact all subsequent games and the world generally. There's a lot to work with I think.
So is ORANGE confirmed for being a new color in classic?
I was looking at some of the screenshots you had hosted of the new classic mode recently, when I noticed the color difference.
PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8431157#msg8431157voliol:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8431176#msg8431176We changed the 16 colors rgb files to make troublesome ones like the dark blue not be so unreadable, especially against the non-black background of Premium. Those colors will still be available to change.
If you were cursed by a witch to live out your days as an animal person, which would you choose?
Eric Blank:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8431093#msg8431093Ha ha, yes, it is very kind of the witch to let me pick. I'd normally be inclined toward toads and slow lorises and cats, as favorite animals, but perhaps it's more fun to choose something that can fly!
1. Do the new STEAM_TAG and STEAM_KEY_VALUE_TAG tokens accept any string value at all, or are they limited to pre-defined values (and if so, what are they)? Normally I see Steam workshops only using a limited number of tags that mods opt in to, like this for example:
(image w/ some tags, but not lotsa tags)
2. Can mod descriptions be multiple lines? For instance, by putting newlines in the DESCRIPTION or STEAM_DESCRIPTION tags, or by using one tag per line? Same question goes for the changelog.
3. I see that files still have headers, like so (the first line here):
item_helm
[OBJECT:ITEM]
Currently this header is required to load the file (it determines the loading order of files and such), and must be unique; is that still the case, or is it vestigial?
4. Can different mods have files with the same name? Like, can another mod use `item_helm.txt` in its own object file at the same time as vanilla is loaded (provided that the object IDs inside the file are unique of course), or will it cause some conflict in processing later down the line?
4b. And if duplicates are allowed, does the header (from question 3) need to be unique between mods?
5. What is STEAM_METADATA used for?
1. Right now they allow anything and stuff just pops up in categories on workshop as far as I know. Many games seem to stop doing this, ha ha, and perhaps we'll be no different and start processing out most tags before we upload them. For now, there aren't any restrictions. This may quickly become unwieldy or otherwise ungood.
2. We don't specifically have a syntax for paragraph breaks. I do have an internal parser that has them for things like legends mode paragraphs and such, but it also uses [] so I'd need to handle that carefully.
3. It's mostly vestigial - I'm not sure it does anything with that line after it loads it, or if it just skips the first line these days.
4. I don't think this'll cause a problem.
4b. I don't think the header needs to be different. The top line is pretty much dropped after initial processing.
5. I have no idea! It's in their docs, and we support it, ha ha ha.
And yeah, since we've been doing questions etc on this since the AMA, I was also thinking this morning about automating a CUT before any new object. I'm not sure if this introduces problems? It seems like it definitely solves more problems than it causes anyway.
Now that we've got a listen for the soundtrack, I want to preface my question with reassurances that the ambient music tracks are absolutely amazing and I'll probably listen to them when I go to sleep later.
At the same time, The vocal tracks like Drink & Industry and a very clearly upgraded Koganusan have given me goosebumps on a wholly different level. Assuming there are no hidden surprises on the music front for The Release, what are the chances of other vocal tracks such as Tankard Basher and Danger Room, or even more all-new tracks finding their way into future updates?
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8431372#msg8431372I'm all for more work in this direction. Those are Simon's tracks of course, and he worked on the DF versions with Dabu, so it all depends on availability and the success of the launch and all that sort of thing. I love the new music though and would gladly see more.
And, yeah, hopefully we can officially support streaming music mods as well - there are some tech barriers to overcome there (most of the load time at the beginning of the game is prepping music, and more music is more prep, whenever it happens), but it can definitely be done.
I'm guessing the answer is yes, but is there a CUT_CREATURE and SELECT_CREATURE equivalent for all OBJECT types, including the graphics-defining stuff and creature variations?
And what happens if one uses a CUT_X tag (or SELECT_X) on an object that wasn't defined yet? For example, if CUT_CREATURE:DWARF, but the user disabled vanilla raws and has no other mod defining DWARF beforehand? Would `SELECT_CREATURE:undefined_creature` just silently not do anything or would it create the thing on the spot?
We have CUT and SELECT for most objects. But we don't have it for the graphics side yet.
I think CUT/SELECT calls on non-existant objects just quietly fail. Creating objects by default with SELECT seems kind of dangerous since it would be empty and might not be filled by the calling mod.
Author
Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 3140757 times)