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Author Topic: Future of the Fortress  (Read 3125699 times)

FantasticDorf

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #120 on: March 29, 2018, 07:57:32 am »


He did actually mention mundane adventurer only worlds. But it might just have been pondering.
Meh, since "adventurer" is about to include leading armies into battle and tactical skirmishing, don't think it's too bad of a thing.

Candidates. Candidates, people, some things may or may not appear. We don't even have a army to command in any particular mode just to outline the distance between here and there, but we do have militia squads, which practically are little militarized companion troupes of sorts.
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Shonai_Dweller

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #121 on: March 29, 2018, 08:25:58 am »


He did actually mention mundane adventurer only worlds. But it might just have been pondering.
Meh, since "adventurer" is about to include leading armies into battle and tactical skirmishing, don't think it's too bad of a thing.

Candidates. Candidates, people, some things may or may not appear. We don't even have a army to command in any particular mode just to outline the distance between here and there, but we do have militia squads, which practically are little militarized companion troupes of sorts.
Armies is the point of the next 6 months of updates according to the Bay12 report (plus villains - PC Gamer).

Sure, we might not get far enough to play with them in Adventurer by the end, but we should be close enough to get it thrown into mundane worlds during mythgen.
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Daniel the Finlander

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #122 on: March 30, 2018, 08:19:10 am »

Will we be able to interact with deep dwarves (dwarves living in Mountain halls) as well? The dev plans for the near future exclusively talk about ”hill dwarves” which I assume only means dwarves living in hillocks.
« Last Edit: March 30, 2018, 08:24:24 am by Daniel the Finlander »
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FantasticDorf

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #123 on: March 30, 2018, 08:46:23 am »

Quote from: FantasticDorf
Will we be able to interact with deep dwarves (dwarves living in Mountain halls) as well? The dev plans for the near future exclusively talk about ”hill dwarves” which I assume only means dwarves living in hillocks.
  • Are we likely to see some subterranean map interface & the Deep-Dwarves this cycle before the Magic Arc?

I've already asked this question previously in the thread for next month's upcoming reply so i'll lump it together for you and Toady's benefit. Heres me hoping that deep dwarves don't slide away as a development goal entirely in favour of procedural races before everything is shook up so violently by the magic arc generator's random structure.
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Shonai_Dweller

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #124 on: March 30, 2018, 08:59:32 am »

Quote from: FantasticDorf
Will we be able to interact with deep dwarves (dwarves living in Mountain halls) as well? The dev plans for the near future exclusively talk about ”hill dwarves” which I assume only means dwarves living in hillocks.
  • Are we likely to see some subterranean map interface & the Deep-Dwarves this cycle before the Magic Arc?

I've already asked this question previously in the thread for next month's upcoming reply so i'll lump it together for you and Toady's benefit. Heres me hoping that deep dwarves don't slide away as a development goal entirely in favour of procedural races before everything is shook up so violently by the magic arc generator's random structure.
I don't know of course, but Toady's mentioned that the underground is in a really bad state and needs to be overhauled a lot before the underground civs get any love. While I think he was talking about batman at the time, I imagine this might effect the birth of deep dwarves too. Still, let's see what happens. For army raising and such, they're mostly abstract like hill dwarves so maybe it'll be OK.
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Oreos

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #125 on: March 30, 2018, 03:39:44 pm »

I have a few questions about Adventure Mode and Magic I would like to ask.

*Will Adventurers be able to raise, and command armys to attack, raid, destory, or take over town/cites/forts/etc.?
*Will Adventurers that control a town/city/fort/etc... be able to issue commands to the city to focus on one thing (Like trading, building, expanding, or training a army)?
*Will Adventurers beable to research magic on their own, and be able to enchant objects with said magic?
*How Powerful can an Adventurer become magic wise? Will it be based on a stat?, and if so can they ascend to godlike magical abilities, or will there be a upper limit?

« Last Edit: March 30, 2018, 03:58:43 pm by Oreos »
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Shonai_Dweller

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #126 on: March 30, 2018, 04:34:38 pm »

I have a few questions about Adventure Mode and Magic I would like to ask.

*Will Adventurers be able to raise, and command armys to attack, raid, destory, or take over town/cites/forts/etc.?
*Will Adventurers that control a town/city/fort/etc... be able to issue commands to the city to focus on one thing (Like trading, building, expanding, or training a army)?
*Will Adventurers beable to research magic on their own, and be able to enchant objects with said magic?
*How Powerful can an Adventurer become magic wise? Will it be based on a stat?, and if so can they ascend to godlike magical abilities, or will there be a upper limit?
First, you should define a timeline. "In the future", yes all of that is up for happening. No concrete plans for the far future of course.

Second. Dev notes were updated this month including adventurers leading armies as a possibility for something happening in the next few months, so yes. Read the dev notes.
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King Zultan

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #127 on: March 31, 2018, 04:11:33 am »

I don't know if this has been asked before.

Will outsider adventures be able to make up there own poetry, dance, and musical styles at some point in the near future?
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Magistrum

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #128 on: March 31, 2018, 09:25:21 am »

Because it hasn't been asked for this release yet:
Will rebel groups be able to form their own distinct civilization?
Instead of just having war with your own civ, or moving back to your original civilization.
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Shonai_Dweller

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #129 on: March 31, 2018, 05:05:29 pm »

Because it hasn't been asked for this release yet:
Will rebel groups be able to form their own distinct civilization?
Instead of just having war with your own civ, or moving back to your original civilization.
Do you mean the bandit groups and 'better necromancer towers'? I don't see "rebel groups" mentioned.
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FantasticDorf

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #130 on: March 31, 2018, 05:35:11 pm »

Because it hasn't been asked for this release yet:
Will rebel groups be able to form their own distinct civilization?
Instead of just having war with your own civ, or moving back to your original civilization.
Do you mean the bandit groups and 'better necromancer towers'? I don't see "rebel groups" mentioned.

Tied into conspiracies & generally implemented insurrections i think, i mentioned it a while ago in the old thread in a related question for the 2016 december Fotf

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Seems meaningfully relevant now we're actually being delivered to a point where conspiracies & more use for criminal elements like assassins are tangible candidated goals.
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Toady One

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #131 on: March 31, 2018, 05:53:49 pm »

Thanks to Knight Otu, Bumber, Shonai_Dweller, DG, PatrikLundell, King Mir, golemgunk, Manveru Taurënér, PlumpHelmetMan, FantasticDorf and anybody else that helped to answer questions this time!  Remember that for each name above, one or more questions might not appear below; please check below your question post for a reasonable answer.

Quote from: Shonai_Dweller
Specifically which portions of the rest of the Improved Sieges notes (besides prisoner stuff) are you leaning towards leaving us with before the Big Wait?

Not the traps or moving fortress sections bits, as they are premature without the boat-style stuff (or whichever comes first, but we'll want the map rewrite.)  More the thinkering and improvements to soldiers bit.  Possibly digging, but we're not going to hit everything.

Quote
Quote from: Rubik
In the actualized development log there's ''ability to interrogate prisioners(both modes)
Can this be understood as that we'll finally get torture and good cop bad cop in fort mode?
Quote from: Beag
One of the things mentioned as a candidate for a pre myth and magic update feature is interrogating prisoners in both modes, in adventure mode will we have the option of using non lethal beatings to make a prisoner talk in addition to verbal coercion?

Nope.  Dwarves have [ETHIC:TORTURE_FOR_INFORMATION:UNTHINKABLE].  At the same time, they do hammer people to death, and might also be able to form a rapport with their target, so it's possible we'll see multiple interrogation methods.  The baseline is just having some interaction/narrative moments with captured people that advance villain and other 'stories' by giving you information to act upon.

Quote
Quote from: Asin
Could you please elaborate on "adventurer party support" in the "Improved Character Creation" section of the development page?
Quote from: Beag
How diverse will we be able to make our adventuring parties? For example could someone make a party of a human, an elf, a dwarf, a goblin, an animal person and a gorlack? Also can we make them of various statuses like having a demigod, hero and peasant in the same party?

As a prelude to certain myth/magic stuff, I wanted to entertain having the player be in control of multiple entities.  A nice hopefully straightforward way of doing this that fits our previous dev goals is having a party rather than a single adventurer, like a certain lineage(s) of RPGs.  So you'd be able to create a party using a modification of the current adventurer creator (without many restrictions, I'm thinking; they wouldn't have to have shared backgrounds, though maybe you'll be able to define relationships, time permitting), and then either control a single one of them as you do now (with an ability to switch freely, or not, depending on how you choose it to be in creation), or control all of them simultaneously during more tactical moments (this would be slow, especially as it doesn't work on an AP-style or real-time system, but you'd be able to switch back and forth, so you could just do the important bits.)  This is theoretically very easy to do, provided I abide by certain restrictions like not being able to switch to a party member that isn't in the local area (or if I do, handling the map offloading, combat consequences etc etc, which is why I lean against it for a first pass).

Later, any number of metaphysical situations could fall under this same umbrella, whether it's controlling multiple avatars of the same deity, or mind control, or multiple possessions, or mental connections with a bunch of animals, etc etc, and it should all work out of the gate if the party system is working.

Quote from: Putnam
How could "Reflecting on negative circumstances that were missed while drunk" work given that drunkenness is a syndrome? Some sort of syndrome effect?

Ah, sorry, it's not directly related to syndrome changes at all.  What I meant by this was that it is silly that they get "felt nothing when their child died" just because they happened to be (really) drunk, and they don't care even when they sober up.  There'll be some retention and reflection upon circumstances with some personality modifiers, so the important moments in their life can be revisited and have emotional effects, possibly lingering for years, allowing the long-term stress etc. to come into effect if the dwarf ever has a sober moment; this'll also let the game have a handful of events that sort of define where a given dwarf is at right now -- whether this leads to "character development" in the form of longer-term personality/value changes etc., I'm not sure, but whatever I do here will contribute to that.

Naturally this also applies to positive circumstances, forming a core of strength for them to rebuild from; the dev page has that common negative case listed, but it'll be a general system.

It'll all be part of the stress balancing stuff, and hopefully I can make all the changes listed there work together.  There are various landmines such as an obsessive, cheerless dwarf taking one small event and ruining their life with it as it festers in the long-term memory buffer...  maybe this isn't a bad thing, but if it's too predictable or common or powerful, it'll just make the game broken differently than it's broken now.

Quote from: ZM5
Are you planning on expanding the dark pits/fortresses, hillocks, hamlets, and smaller forest retreats to have similar "facilities" as towns do?

I notice dark pits sites have taverns, libraries and so on listed in legends, but they don't actually exist in the game proper. I don't recall seeing those abstract locations for hillocks, small forest retreats and hamlets, but those could definitely use having small versions of those. Hillocks and dark pits in particular seem like they need some improvements, considering they seem to lack armory areas, and drinking mounds dont even have furniture or booze.

Secondly, is the small size of current mead halls intentional? I noticed that after 44 they're a lot smaller than pre-44, and don't seem to ever go as many z-levels down as before.

Yeah, we didn't get to everything, so there are some weird abstract buildings that aren't realized.  Not sure when I'll loop back around.

The mead halls were intentionally made smaller; I'd like the spaces to reflect some purpose, instead of just having random large partitions that don't do anything, although I didn't get fully there.  I expect them to oscillate as more functions come into play over the years; this applies to all the larger buildings, including the big goblin towers and so forth.

Quote from: Shonai_Dweller
All this launching of wars, attacking, assasinating and interrogation of gorlak prisoners is fantastic stuff, but there's an issue with dwarf ethics/values right now which makes npc dwarf sites never, ever launch attacks against their enemies.

I know it's not hardcoded because I copy/pasted my 'bad dwarf' modded race (who were attacking in worldgen) values/ethics into the dwarf entity and they started going to war. And of course regular dwarves will attack players who provoke them right now.

So, I guess my question is, are you going to nudge npc dwarf sites to be a bit more aggressive during wars this time around? It gets kind of lonely fighting by yourself.

Ah, I remember at some point saying I'd look at this, but it has sunk into the general notes.  I'll check it for next release.  To clarify again, this is after wars have already started, they don't participate?

Quote from: Manveru Taurënér
Do the plans for permanent changes to occur to myth-level elements during regular play include changes to races? It's a fairly common fantasy theme after all to have races be cursed and/or corrupted and become dark elves and whatnot.

Somebody mentioned that it can already happen in the myth generation prototype, and that leads to the same mechanisms being available during play; there are various little difficulties that pile up when transforming creatures, but we've (somewhat) handled them with things like werecreatures, so it seems possible, even if it starts rough around the edges (like everything else.)  Turning races into other races or newly generated races is easier than altering an existing race (giving them horns, say.)  This is related to the half-elf problem, and the centaur problem, and we'll need to tackle it all at some point, but it's difficult.

Quote from: Sooner535
Will combat speed be slowed slightly to allow players to look at fights better? I notice that once over 10 units get into a fight I don’t care enough to look which really hurts things imho, idk how much this would affect things but maybe a slight increase in body part HP or lowering of weapon damage? Or perhaps is this exactly how you want it to work as is and the showing of combat info will get better at some point?

Will you be able to read books in fortress mode eventually? Or even write the books?

Will we ever see larger shields introduced to the main game? Even just a tower shield that reduces speed slightly but has a higher chance to block would be acceptable (then you have buckler for speed, tower shield for defense, and shield for inbetween

Will we ever see a hobbits type fantasy race? More peaceful little guys that just farm and try and stay out of the way?

Changing the general speed of things is quite complicated, so I'm not leaning toward that; and there's nothing so simple as HP to alter.  The summaries could certainly afford to be improved over the lengthy chronological reports.

Dwarves read and write books in fortress mode, though it only happens at the library, and books are only currently written by people with scholarly knowledge (I think.)  That'll be expanded a bit over time.

I imagine we'll see other shields at some point.  We lost one opportunity when I didn't do formations, and I still haven't done the main combat push yet.

I'm not sure about a halfling-style race in particular.  They certainly fit the mood of popular fantasy the game is trying to emulate; the upcoming myth generator has generated all sorts of weird critters, but there's a sort of almost-human mold that it doesn't aim for yet.

Quote from: DoctorDorf
The last section in the starting scenarios mentions the relationship between the fort and hill/deep dwarves. Will we get to see the dwarves living around our forts demand things in return for their tribute? E.g. will they come to the fort for justice in disputes, or maybe as temporary refugees fleeing from an invading army? The theoretical idea of being surrounded by farming hillocks and have the fort focus only on government, mining & warfare could be really good!

That's part of the idea behind the framework rewrites leading up to the start scenarios, yeah; the ability to specialize and also being related to the broader world.  The only bit there that might not happen is the refugee bit, as the number of people will likely outstrip what can be supported, so it'd have to happen more symbolically (some families only), or abstractly (sheltering near the fort, but not in it), or in dribbles (manageable numbers passing through the fort to safe areas above/below ground, depending on the threat.)

Quote from: Rubik
The 'medical improvements' listed in the dev log are for adv. mode only, or we also are gonna get improvements in fort mode healthcare?
Could you elaborate on the type of improvements you've thought?

Adventurers can't currently do anything, pretty much, but hope not to die; no splints, stopping bleeding, etc., and there is nobody to help them, even medical professionals that already exist in forts/towns can't help them.  We'd like to start down a road of getting that toward fort standards.  This process might have effects on the fort, as adventure mode work tends to put a microscope on dodgy systems, but there are no particular fort plans in advance for that particular dev item.

Quote from: Vivalas
All the updates recently related to the army arc make me really excited because I love how we can now interact with the world in meaningful ways. Is real-time battles with the full glory and gore of the combat system one of those things that will wait until the map rewrite? It's a bit silly maybe but I love thinking of how DF could rise to the top in yet another gaming genre as the best RTS / strategy game once the army arc gets more and more realized, albeit just in small steps for now. (Total War but in a procedurally generated world with detailed body simulation anyone?)

It's not possible to show off-site battles without the map rewrite, without fully retiring your fort for every battle.  So it'll have to wait for that, but we're looking forward to it.  Diplomatic missions and other situations that don't have to but might possibly go horribly wrong are also candidates for the off-site camera, and many other things.

We are vaguely thinking of toying with the ability to have multiple fort cameras to prepare ourselves for this, as a kind of addition to camera hotkeys (Bumber and others have suggested similar); mods might do this already, but it would be cool to have split panes or corner windows showing other parts of the fort or following people while you play, and it should be doable in an FPS-lite way (though caution is required.)  Not sure exactly how that interacts with cursors etc., but it's figure-outable.  This could then be linked into the off-site stuff when we get there.

Quote from: Mechanoid
Will the medical improvements to the military system extend to animals, pets, and mounts? To fortress mode so dwarves will operate a proper veterinary hospital service? Civilization Ethics behind putting down a pet or mount which is too badly wounded to live?

If the player can give items to companions, and mounts are kind-of those, would this allow player-controlled pack animals to exist? Mounts with war gear like armor/uniform? How will this be integrated into the military screen?

Finally fixing the "Amphibian mount drowns their rider" problem?

+ Will mounts/pets have to be fed by the player or are they abstracted to handle it themselves while traveling? Will fortress mode animals be feedable, finally, to avoid starvation while the fortress guard rides their war horses through the stone floor halls?

Don't have a particular veterinary plan at this point.  I can see a future where adv mode medical + pets leads to a pretty sharp turn in that direction, though I'm not sure if that means little kitty splints and so forth.

Pack animals have been languishing on dev forever (in Trader role), and wouldn't be entirely hard to support at this point (once mount-style pets are in), though I'm not sure if they should use the full barter interface.

Dunno about particular bug fixes, but as usual, adv mode tends to put a microscope on things, and if players are dying all the time due to mount-water interactions, it'll be up there.

I imagine they won't require supplies at first, the same as companions.  No particular plans for fort mode animals in near-term.

Quote from: Hapchazzard
1. Will armies be able to defect/rebel/desert/turn to banditry under the appropriate circumstances?

2. Similarly, once we are able to appoint administrators to conquered sites, will the sites be able to rebel?

3. Will we be able to send messengers to nearby sites to request military assistance in case of a siege? Or request additional troops from the Mountainhome to garrison the fortress?

4. Will passing armies sometimes request temporary hospitality at your fortress, with the ability to accept or refuse?

5. Will we be able to yield the fortress without a fight to invaders? Related, will there be mechanics for your own fort being occupied (such as a hostile garrison being put in place)?

1. There's nothing like that at this point.

2. Similar to #1, although there are a few more levers to make this one more likely in the shorter-term.

3. This is quite possible, though the specifics are up in the air.  All the bits about off-site army orders and exchanging dwarves with the hills in the new dev section relate to this kind of thing.

4. Part of the problem is the number of soldiers being prohibitive occasionally, part of the problem is them not really needing it; sort of an economy/supplies critter.

5. The path toward this is slowly opening; having to send of tribute is a starter possibility.  Other bits would take quite a bit of integration and might be best informed by the later scenario stuff, as there'll be more in-fortress politics there (making the support of occupiers easier.)

Quote from: Greendogo
Can you elaborate on the current efficiency of the program in terms of world building?  Would you remark as to the feasibility of separating the world building part of DF into a separate slave-executeable which we could put on servers to allow worlds to be built by faster computers (probaby maintained by the community)?

I'm sure it's broken in some way, especially since I recall there being open bugs on it, but could this theoretically be accomplished through the existing command line stuff?  I have no idea how servers work, but DF can be set to just make worlds and quit, and I know people have done this in the past.

Quote from: Fieari
How do you intend to make procedurally generated magic become "thematic"?  Most fantasy works organize their magic around one or more themes, each theme having all magic working similarly.  For example, some split magic into elements, or into schools.  Brandon Sanderson is famous for particularly intricate magic systems... such as all magic requiring the user to ingest and "burn" metal inside their stomachs to cast spells.  All fantasy magics that are more than fairytales have SOME organization to their magic.

I presume spheres would be involved.  Will the RAWs have to expand to have lists of ways the spheres can influence magic?  I know the myths will direct how magic works... but coherence is important!  If a fire spirit is the source of magic in the world, how will the game know to make fire always part of the cost, or the effect, of the magic?

golemgunk and Shonai_Dweller mentioned using the creation myths for thematic consistency, and that's the starting principle we're going to work with.  In the prototype, the spheres are linked to creators and creation methods and these are passed down the tree of causation; when a magic system is needed, magical effects attached to the proper spheres are preferred.  It works pretty well on a very basic level.  And we'll likely end up doing quite a bit more along those lines, criss-crossing the system with various conceptual linkages until it's vaguely good enough.  Post-creation-myth actions can also be attached to spheres (or intermediate structures/concepts), so that, for instance, some grand betrayal in early historical world-gen can spawn a new magic system themed around deceptive effects.

There's a danger of being too on the nose sometimes, if you always go with the most obvious sphere, and we can try to leaven everything with some purely random elements, or have some higher-order procedural conceptual symbols that link together spheres more esoterically, something that can survive exposition but also give some more variability, e.g. the same way "fiery" can link up to "passionate" in some languages, and perhaps be linked to some canonical event or character.

Non-spherical rules can also arise from creation; if the universe begins with a primordial chaos of salt, and some creator turns salt into fire and water as a first step, then that universe's systems can respect 'salt' as the sort of basic element, with fire and water having a secondary but important status, and this can become a foundation for various generated systems.  These have the fault of being somewhat random or rigid depending on the amount of guidance in their generation, but enough of these together should increase the variety a great deal, and pull the game away from "oh, there's a Fire God magic system again."  Rules defining what life is and what happens during death, dreams, etc., can also interlink in non-spherical ways that enrich the systems, and we've discussed in the past using invisible personalities/'souls' to model half-living magical forces in ways that can link up with divination and miscasts in ways that go beyond tables and dice.

I'm hopeful things won't feel utterly mushy or random, nor too rigidly obedient to obvious connections, but it remains to be seen what we can actually pull off.

Quote from: deathpunch578
Will there be any limit to how powerful magic is?

Shonai_Dweller mentioned the existing costs in the myth generator, and certain sensible limits (the power for anybody to destroy the world at will is technically fine, but sort of inconvenient since you'd just have to roll up another world once history fails to complete).  So there are restrictions we'd need to place in advance.  However, we're quite intentionally going to let high-magic worlds upend typical balance, as that's part of the point of them.  Manveru Taurënér mentioned Tales Foretold spells, and we're generally going to allow high coverage and high power when the player sets the parameters for it.  It's quite likely that there'll be some very high-powered bits upon the first release that weren't completely reckoned with, and we'll have to decide what to do from there.

I'm starting out with the view that, say, a world where everybody can teleport at will is going to absolutely not catch even a good portion of what that implies, about how the world would change and which institutions would last and which new ones should exist, and whether there'd be a functioning society at all, but that it's still fun to (possibly) play in a world where more and more of it is tackled, rather than cutting the feature immediately in all worlds.  The parameters should let us gate the odder stuff once we get a feel for it.

Quote from: PatrikLundell
Have you considered asking the community to perform some bulk tasks where someone would take on the task to organize the collection of the results to return it to you in a "finished" shape?

It has mostly come up organically, and that's fine for now.  Aside from the management issues, nothing ever seems settled enough to commit to "hey, it would be cool if everybody wrote up 800 lines of <effect A text> variants."  I don't want to commission work that will be thrown out when the format gets cut to pieces by some procedural grammar issue later on (though in this case, they'd clearly be somewhat salvageable.)  I haven't even been using my own formats -- the speech folder, for example, has been getting less rather than more use, with more and more hard-coded, because the proper flat file version of that has to respect various layered data insertions, and eventually procedural language systems that aren't even written yet.  Aspirationally.
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Toady One

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #132 on: March 31, 2018, 05:54:14 pm »

Quote from: Grand Sage
With the work on sieges and raids, would you consider revising the old wield check bug, so that at least some of my dwarves can have mauls?

Also are mounts something we can look forward to before the big wait?

Why does the off-map fighting code use the highest tactician skill and not the one from the commanding officer?

Is the current tribute system the final solution, or are we going to get a more hostility friendly "pay or die" system?

I think thats it for now. Also, I really hope you go through with adding a messenger system, so that there is delay between order and execution. Actually, that triggers another question:

Will Messengers be a profession for themself, or are they just gonna be millitary people?

It hasn't come up, and isn't exactly the sort of thing that would here.

Mounts for adventurer mode are up on dev.  Dunno about the fort, as it's a bit more work.

I believe there's a bit where it checks for position responsibilities, which might promote the militia commander regardless of skill, but it doesn't do it for every squad leader.  And I'm not sure it's keying on the right responsibility.

I'm not sure how tribute'll change.  It's way too early to call it the final system.  You can always raid when they refuse, so it's not too far off that, but I understand sticking it all together.

Both systems exist in life, and I'm not sure what we'll go with here.  It might be annoying if a single squad member goes off-site for long periods, unless the squad is specifically set up as a messenger squad or something.

Quote from: Eric Blank
With tribute being offered from subjugated sites now, will that translate to recieving tribute and/or taxes from sites which belong to a land-holder position or monarch in your fort? Can we recieve slaves or war prisoners if our civ permits them?

Do you think these items would be private property of that noble or fort property? Would they hoard items/creaturea they like and distribute the rest?

Might we also see tribute for heroic deeds performed by one of our dwarves, say slaying a beast that killed many people?

Yeah, eventually this should link up with the proper, existing land-holder stuff; dev has some words to that effect, though it mixes uncomfortably with some of the start scenario stuff.  Dunno about respecting mods; that always lags behind a bit.

Property in particular is the start scenario bit that is just not settled.  There are all sorts of ways to cut it, even with one object or plot of land multiple ways, and we'll be trying to explore that properly then.  Until then, I'm totally skipping it.  The general idea for fort mode is that you'd officially represent some entity, and the non-personal part of the noble might be included in that, or an on-map noble might be in conflict with your interests (and not in the silly repercussionless drown-the-nobles way we have now.)  The hope is that a lot of this would come out of the focus and the systems, and that, for instance, changing focus in some way to a different entity would work; for instance, changing to 'be' the new government formed after a prisoner uprising, rather than losing the game.  I don't yet understand how that should go, though.  It seems like the sort of thing that requires certain limits to avoid disrupting the play/narrative flow.

Rewards for heroic deeds make sense; we failed once to add them, I think, along with the support for the journey stuff.  That all sort of flows together, the interest in having some forms of sensible tangible gratitude with practical benefits for everybody (except the beasts.)

Quote from: Beag
2. On the updated development page one of the pre magic release candidates is showing personal relationships with people. What personal relation ships that you can think of do you think you will include before the myth and magic arc and what effects would these relationships have on gameplay if any?
3. Another thing listed on the updated development page is the ability to acquire positions in civilizations, how would our adventurer's go about acquiring these positions and what game play effects could they have if any?
4. Finally yet another thing listed on the updated development page is medical improvements for adventure mode, what ways of tending to our adventurers medically do you have in mind? Furthermore will our adventurers be able to acquire skills related to medical care?

2. Ah, this won't be anything new.  Just things like companions/former companions and so forth that might otherwise get lost in the mess of the 'Q' screen.
3. It all kind of depend on how far the military bits go.  You can imagine getting a barony through building various reps with the civ (the 'where' part is another question), but it would help if you could do something relevant with your hearth (if you have one.)  It also ties into the villain bits somewhat; if a hearth/barony goes rotten, you might be elevated by dealing with it.  The "intrigue" portion there is just flirting with the idea of player-led villain antics.  Some of that depends on how, say, advisor/agent-driven plots unfold when we do villains.  It should be difficult to win a barony without traditional rep-building actions, but social skills should matter somewhere, though we'll have to do it without lying (other than identities.)
4. Just the current dwarfy stuff.  I assume (lack of) skill will come into play, though it'd only be obtainable through practice or chargen as things stand.

Quote
Quote from: FantasticDorf
Do you personally see your current development progress in this quarter as the unofficial hurrying of the 'Hill Dwarf' arc forward before the Magic Arc or do you think you are being conservative with saving advanced development of the Hill Dwarf arc for later?

Are we likely to see some subterranean map interface & the Deep-Dwarves this cycle before the Magic Arc?
Quote from: Daniel the Finlander
Will we be able to interact with deep dwarves (dwarves living in Mountain halls) as well? The dev plans for the near future exclusively talk about ”hill dwarves” which I assume only means dwarves living in hillocks.

Hmm, it's not everything the hill dwarves were going to bring, so it's somewhere in between, assuming I get to a lot of the candidates.  The whole bit with fairs and markets and other embark-scenario-feeling tie-ins won't be there, but some exchange with associated sites and the army bits are certainly in Hill Dwarf territory.

Shonai_Dweller mentioned the state of the underground; it just didn't end up quite as usable as I thought it would be.  The game gets confused by armies with underground coordinates, which complicates everything else.  The map rewrite will gut that system and the 5 layer map and everything else, so it's prudent to wait now, and hopefully emerge into a better-thought-out map system that can more easily support movement in vertical directions.

Quote from: Random_Dragon
What was the first thing that came to mind that led to the player being unable to exchange items with children NPCs in adventure mode?

I don't recall what came up first.  All the reasons you listed were reason enough, though!

Quote from: GoblinCookie
You talked at lot earlier about a myth editor.  What exactly do you mean by that? Do you mean an actual program that allows us to modify the actual mythology of a generated world, a set of world-gen parameters manually entered in prior to initiating the myth generation or an actual script internal to the DF program which takes moddable raws as input and 'edits' the default mythology script's output.  I would prefer the latter arrangement, so we could define that for instance the moon will originate from the sun, but the generator will determine randomly exactly how that happened.

There's the ability to set parameters for myths (where your moon example would likely arise, similar to the current raw files; the prototype already has txt astronomical bodies, but not their causation), but generally when I talk about a "myth editor", it's different from that (though possibly linked.)  On the editor side, I'd like people to be able to define and interlink objects as they please, without relying on generators.  It'd likely be within DF, but hopefully all compatible with raw-style files if you'd rather work in a text editor (and possibly the text editor would be the first release starting point for it, I'm not sure.)

But yeah, there's this interesting half-way point, where the generators do part of the work; things already work that way with all the raw files in DF, there just needs to be some additional tags and files to control a bit of the myth flow.  The editor itself might also include generators, so that if there are bits of your hand-crafted setting you don't want to do, it can just, say, generate a side pantheon for you, or let you sample several mythical event chains and you can keep-and-tweak the one you like.  We'll start with some stuff and let people go from there.  I can also see us outpaced by mod utilities on a lot of this once the format is settled and we've moved on to embark/property stuff, assuming we get there in the first place.

Tricky part seems to be the other editors, for worldgen/postworldgen, which ostensibly include things like site maps.  Hopefully that won't completely outgrow the friendly text format, but it seems hard to avoid.

Quote from: Beag
1. In the list of candidates for pre-magic release features one of them is our adventurers giving tactical commands to their companions, what sort of commands might we be able to give our companions in battle? Would it be just basic stuff like attack or hold or do you have more in mind?
2. Another thing listed among the candidates is pets and mounts for our adventurers, would we only be able to acquire these pets and mounts at character creation or could we tame creatures out in the world post character creation to be our pets and mounts?
3. Will skills relating to animal handling and riding be added to account for the new pets and mounts?
4. Going back a bit, in Cado's Magical Journey it was stated in the mechanics review at the end that becoming corrupted past a certain threshold might grant you special powers, would these corruptions related powers be listed in the myth generator?

1. I don't have anything complex in mind, though a lot can happen in the development process if it's easy enough.  But we could just end up with the basic attack this, save me, stay back, etc. mold of things.
2. The fort mode taming takes a while, but elf adventurers seem like they'd have the advantage here, the way things currently work.  I'm not sure I'll do the lengthy taming process from fort mode, though that would eventually be fun.  You might also be able to acquire animals in town, though that requires a bit of property-adjacent coding and hopefully isn't a nightmare.
3. This seems likely.  Some sort of mechanics as well might be necessary, the interface between you and your mount.  It seems weird to just let you move them exactly as yourself, but anything else is potentially too cumbersome.
4. It's possible; the prototype presents a lot of lists, but that's not the in-game format.  I'm not sure how much exposition there'll be for any given element, versus things you should discover or learn in game.  If it is well-known that 'faded' people can pass through walls, and they are common, this seems like something to present if there's enough exposition bandwidth overall.  If the fort dwarves or adventurer are the first faded people in history, this seems like a moment of discovery.

Quote from: EPM
So about villains.

Does this include self-motivated "supervillains" that operate at world-level? As it stands, the goblin civ leader-type demons and very old vampires/necromancers are the closest we have to what I'd call true 'villains', though the planar stuff and magic release will probably introduce more. Megabeasts and titans are closer to rampaging wildlife, lacking greater motives. Thieves and even deadly ambushes or sieges are typically relevant to a single site, they're enemies but not villains with distinct motives. That's my own sense of semantics, however: A villain is a sapient character with a motive, rather than a beast or a minion.

For example, an elf that sets out to turn two human civs against each other using cover identities and assassinations.

Yeah, that's the idea, though often I imagine they'll be position holders or the existing sorts you listed operating with a new set of tools that providing a nested or branching structure to be discovered, with, as you suggest, some sort of larger exposable purpose.  We don't have the framework for many of the common motivations, but we have enough to get started.

Quote from: kontako
In the Creation myth and magic systems dev log you set a point for ancient races and their actions, do you intend to allow for large gaps in time between creation and play (something on the scale of 5000 after creation) - perhaps a length of time we can control as a slider when specifying our world whether we'd want to play just after creation or ages beyond.

In my mind it would use unspecified periods of time, with intermediate ages between creation and play.

Onto something slightly more relevant to current development
Would the 'Return of minor disruptive behavior and arrests' point enable us as fortress overseer to arrest citizens and visitors as we please?

I'm still not sure how measured years are going to interact with the back-half of creation; I imagine it could be very fuzzy.  But at some point, something will happen.  There's no reason to stay on one calendar, but there is a point where the measurement starts to matter internally.  Part of it has to do with location and historical figures; world gen proper is slow because so much is going on, and there can be an earlier, faster period, but it would also be fundamentally unsatisfying on certain axes, because the data just wouldn't be there driving the sim.  It's going to take some experimentation with the actual program to see what works.

The ability to arbitrarily arrest people isn't tied to that item specifically, though I know some people have asked for it, and there'll be a new area introduced by all the villain stuff, like if you suspect somebody is up to no good but there isn't a crime listed on the justice screen.  There'll have to be downsides to random interrogations, but that's easy enough to manage.

Quote from: Nihilist
1. Is making latched attacks(specifically bites) interact with armor layers again any where on the radar for the near future in bug fixing rounds? Right now an armless, legless elf is more dangerous than an limbed one. They also don't seem to respect armor deflections.

2. Now that armor can break, is there any plan to change how force penetrates armor? right now if armor is pierced,
 the attack loses about 5% of it's force. This lead to all armor layers on a part tending to break at once.  Maybe subtracting the value required to penetrate the layer from the remaining force?

1. Is it on the bug tracker?

2. It used to do that, but most of the momentum has to carry through or maces don't work at all, though with the newish application of force to parent parts (which is also troubled, according to the tracker), that isn't quite an issue, however a hit to the center part would need to be managed, including falls.  There's probably something to do with the deflection modifier as well, since this is supposed to model force being directed away, but it only handles absolute deflections rather than lessening the damage from partial hits.

Quote from: Shonai_Dweller
Will a retired player fortress accept a tribute demand? What happens on unretire? Is there a check from the original demanders to notice if tribute isn't coming any more? Will they go to war over it?

Hmm, I don't think any of that is handled.  I mean, I think they can be forced to pay tribute, but it'll be ignored on unretire (since the player can't currently pay tribute -- this is one of those things that will change in the future, at which point the unretire should also automatically work correctly.)  Demanders don't care about unmet tribute requests; as with trade caravans, there is no tribute 'army' moving over the surface, since we haven't handled items yet (other than spoils and artifacts), so we just assume things are going smoothly until there's more reason to care.

Quote from: FantasticDorf
Do you feel confident in your foward planning with this development step and ways that players may attempt to break the game with forced administrators or self-founded hillock sites in ways such as sending a troupe of half-pet half/citizen tamed gremlins from vanilla or modded creatures to be the the population or forced administrator?

As confident as usual, anyway.  Many things get fixed afterward.

Quote from: Magistrum
Since the mortality rate for my inexperienced tacticians is the same as their underlings:
Will we be able to set squad leaders to not fight?
Or at least not right away, only in the case of losing or somehow forced to, by bad circumstances.

Also, because I would like raids to be a heavier project:
Will there be support roles for raids, like haulers, pack animals and field medics for distant expeditions?

Now, for something more general:
Any plans for using Unicode characters, in interface or for tiles?

I don't have particular plans for squad-member level settings.  It kind of depends on how the army improvements bit works out, as it'll have more positional information to work with, and the position of the leader will probably be special, whether they charge in or not.

The support stuff is tied into economy matters, so I won't be doing that stuff now.

Unicode was one of the options, though we aren't actually working with text, so the options are broader and I'm not sure it'd be good to load in a giant unicode thingy into the texture atlas, however that would work.  Certainly an extension of the characters available is becoming more and more of an issue, whether that means moving to a tileset or some hybrid approach to continue the traditional look of the project.  But we're basically out of Code page 437 characters, and have been for a while.

Quote from: Mel_Vixen
With the Map-rewrite on the Horizon can we expect more nonmagical features as well? Stuff like Tablemountains, proper Canyons, postglacial landscapes with houssized boulders and the like that (iirc) planed once upon a time?

Also now that we have a worldscreen can we expect to be able to build roads and/or tunnels to other places?

Yeah, the map-rewrite is going to specifically allow neat nonmagical landforms structurally, whether they make it in or not at that time.

I'm not sure when to expect road/tunnel(/wall/etc) building; it'll be more likely when roads matter more (likely an economy thing.)  Tunnels matter for travel, but we haven't really gotten into the underground civ connections yet for various reasons.  So I think the world-spanning constructions will follow naturally after other features that make them matter more to the core experience.

Quote from: George_Chickens
Are there any ideas that you had begun to implement in the past that were so difficult or gigantic that they were abandoned or put on the permanent backburner?

The economy!  He he he.  I don't remember if there was anything else like that...  we removed some of the previous magic stuff and turned it into the upcoming difficult and gigantic myth/magic stuff.  Perhaps a lot of things are that way.

Quote from: thvaz
Do you consider any system in the game as completely done (apart from bugs, etc)? Which ones?

Does grass feel done?  People can't pick and do things with flowers yet, and some other stuff, like collecting hay and so forth.  Ignoring other liquids, I'm not sure water feels done, because of ice not being where it needs to be.  People brought up geology, but we don't even have 3D veins yet (the map rewrite should give us a window on this), and there are so many other landforms and other bits we'd like to do there.  More to be done with weather, but properly separated out, some of the basic cloud formation stuff is probably as good as we need or want to process.  Everything else I can think of needs a ton of work, a lot of which is already on dev or otherwise noted, but maybe there's something.  The things I've gotten full points for toward version 1.0 mostly still have work to be done that ties into other list items (say, job priorities and automation, or the move/attack split -- these things were accomplished in some basic sense, but will always have tweaks and helpful modifications to be made, or in the case of the manager/automation, giant optional additions that don't get me any 1.0 credit but will probably be done as we go anyway.)

Quote
Quote from: squamous
1.It was mentioned in the upcoming feature section that adventurers could gain positions of nobility and engage in intrigue and conspiracy and whatnot. As political marriages are a major part of many fantasy settings, could we expect some sort of rudimentary courting or marriage system in the near future?

2. Will we be seeing any new civilizations pop up any time soon, like above-ground tribes or independent bandit entities?
Quote from: ZM5
I wanna add onto the above-ground tribe question - are there any plans for additional tokens that would allow megabeasts and sentient wild creatures to spawn with weaponry, whether they are named artifacts or just mundane equipment? It would certainly allow some of the semimegas, especially the minotaurs, to be a lot more formidable - along with that aboveground animal people could spawn with clothing instead of being nudist tribes.

Also, were we to see aboveground tribes of animal people, how would they be handled? Would they be considered minor entities, similar to the underground animal people currently in, or would they have a separate system? I'm mostly concerned for modding purposes since IIRC there was some issue with underground animal people where if they're considered parts of these tribes it also doesn't let them join civilizations and be playable in that way. I don't remember if that still holds true, admittedly.

We're not likely to do the marriage stuff in the near future.  At this point, I'd prefer to do all the custom/law/property stuff before getting into adventurer-level considerations there, though that wouldn't be strictly required and hasn't mattered much up to this point.

New civs soon?  No, but the procgen magic races should blow some things wide open.  Same goes somewhat for the megabeast question.  The myths have various new critters of this kind, and it may or may not be easier to handle equipment matters (in the way that vault critters can have equipment, for instance.)

I'm not sure how the aboveground animal people will work.  It hasn't come together yet.

Quote from: Shonai_Dweller
Are you going to use the new detailed battle system from raids in regular worldgen? Or would that slow it down too much? Would be nice to see some of the new info on superior tactics, terrain and such in historical battles. I suppose hist-figs don't have generated equipment in worldgen, do they?

Part of it was always used there, well before any of this new stuff; I just didn't move over the new historical events yet.  I thiiiink the new squad fighting can make it over too, but I'm not sure; it'd be a theoretical speed hit, but perhaps negligible.  The hist-figs don't have generated equipment, but even in play, it has an equipment modifier it applies based on the available civ materials for people that haven't had inventories generated yet.

Quote from: DG
With minor modding the current game allows fort mode to be played with humans, goblins, elves and even kobolds. Presumably this hasn't made it into vanilla because they aren't as feature complete as dwarves and not yet differentiated enough. Is the work around the myth generator likely to change this? I assume some work will need to go into shoe-horning randomly generated high-magic-world races into fortress mode and am wondering if you think this will end up incorporating the original races as playable in vanilla at the same time or if they will wait for their own specific releases focused on the features you want present before making them playable?

It might be too much work to support them, and it would be pretty simple to ensure that one of the procgen'd races ticks enough of the fort mode necessities.  Mainly the digging part, since outdoor constructions are still clunky.  If we get to a point where an outdoor race would be fun to play, and has enough of its other bells and whistles respected, I'd be fine with that.  It just doesn't feel like we are quite there.  Overall though, I think procedural fort races will build a bit of that development pressure, the way things often work, since supporting their other quirks will be something that can be done more piecemeal without it feeling utterly broken...  and then suddenly I might realize or be reminded, "oh, human castle mode is basically ready" or something like that.  (naturally, the 17x17 sites wouldn't be supported due to memory concerns** -- another road into this is the scenario-related smaller work sites that everybody will have; "human lumber camp" is another possible path to playable humans.)

** (though without digging and with the map-rewrite, loading a 17x17 human embark suddenly becomes totally feasible, as the deep elevations which would normally blow-out memory and create an underground-life pathing nightmare could simply be ignored; though citizen path-finding would probably be slightly more costly as the map would be less compact -- that doesn't mean we'd be able to have all 10000 citizens of one of those human capitals loaded, but it does mean you could play a 200 person human 'town' with a small market and have the usual FPS problems, but no more than that)

Quote from: Oreos
*Will Adventurers be able to raise, and command armys to attack, raid, destory, or take over town/cites/forts/etc.?
*Will Adventurers that control a town/city/fort/etc... be able to issue commands to the city to focus on one thing (Like trading, building, expanding, or training a army)?
*Will Adventurers beable to research magic on their own, and be able to enchant objects with said magic?
*How Powerful can an Adventurer become magic wise? Will it be based on a stat?, and if so can they ascend to godlike magical abilities, or will there be a upper limit?

Dev has the basic ability to do some of this as a candidate for this pre-magic period.

There is no active economy in the towns, so this won't come up until we have that.

Research and enchanting are part of the magic release, yeah.  There are any number of ways it could work; the idea of the creation myth generator is to build magic systems that work different ways.  Ascension to godhood and stat-based magic are on the menu of possibilities.

Quote from: Zultan
Will outsider adventures be able to make up there own poetry, dance, and musical styles at some point in the near future?

I don't have particular plans to change that soon.  They are just missing all of the cultural framework as part of their creation, and I'm not sure how we're going to handle that.

Quote from: Magistrum
Will rebel groups be able to form their own distinct civilization?
Instead of just having war with your own civ, or moving back to your original civilization.

Generally having new cultures able to form is a goal in changing the frameworks, after the magic stuff.  History is bizarrely static right now, and the current frameworks are not easy to work with in those terms.
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Shonai_Dweller

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #133 on: March 31, 2018, 06:16:37 pm »

Quote
Ah, I remember at some point saying I'd look at this, but it has sunk into the general notes.  I'll check it for next release.  To clarify again, this is after wars have already started, they don't participate?

According to Legends info (via, Legends Viewer - the diagrams are useful), when a Dwarf civ is in a war, they'll only ever be the defender (except in special cases caused by player raids). Looking at some wars right now with some 20-30 battles, Dwarf is never the attacker.

Now, some of those battles seem to involve clashing armies meeting half-way between sites, so they're not just sitting at home taking sieges. Maybe it just defaults them to "defender" because they didn't start the war overall? There are certainly no 'dwarf attacks site' events though.
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FantasticDorf

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #134 on: March 31, 2018, 06:39:40 pm »

There are many figurative answers for this, lack of a attack_trigger, general disinterest without obscenely opposed ethics & possible issue with world generation selection for wars. However in post-generation with the raiding system, they attack from a defensive position in a retaliatory fashion, which seems to nod towards the attack_trigger theory, but only send out a handful of men (may just be a population thing)

A war started in world generation, and ended very differently with a entirely different set of mechanics post-worldgen activating directly afterwards. Ill attach it to my note on the relevant bug report here

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