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.
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.)
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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)
*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.
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.
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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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 3125695 times)