1. You've mentioned sphere-associated regions replacing good and evil regions. Can we expect ALL of the existing spheres to be represented in there (not in the same world necessarily, but all in the pool that the game chooses sphere regions from)? Some seem obvious like death-associated regions having the current evil region effects of reanimation or other nasty weather, some spheres could lead to cool things like dream-associated oceans, but some spheres don't seem to make as much sense for this system. A forest associated with "oaths" or a desert associated with "rumors" are hard to come up with magical or otherwise interesting effects for. Can we expect less interesting spheres to be omitted? Or do you guys think you're creative enough to be able to come up with interesting enough effects for all of them?
2. On a similar note, are some magical artifacts going to be similarly sphere associated? Will it be possible to have a revelry-associated magical scepter, or an agriculture-associated armor stand, for example? There's a whole bunch of spheres so it seems crazy-ambitious to try and come up with world region and artifact effects for all of them.
3. You've talked about changing the underworld into something completely different on a per-world basis, based on procedural myth stuff. Are there plans to try to preserve the "digging too deep" ending of the game between worlds in spite of this? I always kind of liked playing devil's minesweeper.
4. Since there are going to be new origin myths for different species, where does that leave the relationship between goblins and demons? Are the narratives just going to be twisted to fit the current status quo (ex: goblins were created when the gods cursed the dwarves, then a demon grew from the primordial fungus pits and enslaved the goblins) or is it going to be more dynamic, where goblins might not have had a demon master at all depending on how they came to be? If demons aren't necessarily a package deal with goblin civs anymore, might intelligent demons be able to manifest in the normal world during mythgen of certain worlds through some other means?
5. Since regions and magical systems are now going to change dynamically over time, is the myths update going to include a way to have a world re-enter world-gen after you finish a fort, in order to generate more history before playing again? Seems like a lot of effort to make things dynamic is going to waste if the average playtime on a single world doesn't last long enough to see those effects progress much. It would also be cool to see how wars and civilizations change over the long term based on the actions you made in your fort.
6. You've talked about players having to make decisions about whether they want to use an artifact, given the harmful side effects they have, like a staff of fire that pulls your fortress closer to the fire plane and causes everything to light on fire. How do you plan to communicate information about their uses and risks to the player? In some cases where the downsides aren't too horrible and it's not too hard to figure out what's going on, just making the player experiment and try using it could be fun, but the stronger the negative effects are and bigger the consequences, the less likely players will risk it at all. It's not worth playing with the Flaming Obsidian Mug of Lebesnóton if there's a chance it might fill your fortress with magma because you don't know what it does in advance.
7. How might players actually use magic in fortress mode? You've shown screenshots of the myth gen describing how dwarves could sing or speak a word or whatever to make some kind of magic happen, but right now we can't force a dwarf to sing or speak a word on command in fort mode. Will we be able to control when and where a particular dwarf uses a particular kind of magic? If some magic artifacts are clothing, will we get functionality to force a non-milita dwarf to wear a particular piece of clothing as well?
8. You've talked about religious sects forming in your fort and demanding certain things, like nobles. Is this system going to be integrated with temples or magic? I'm imaging a system where building a grand, high value cathedral for a cult will increase the success of their worshiping and rituals, improving your relations with a deity, which in turn could grant you strange moods to produce magical artifacts, blessings of good harvest/success in battle or other such benefits.
9. Similar note, right now dwarves can worship megabeasts like gods, presumably to appease them so they chill out and stop destroying everybody’s cities. This doesn’t actually do anything at the moment though. Might this relationship be expanded upon? Do you think we might actually be able to keep forgotten beasts at bay by worshiping them? Or maybe even convince them to attack your fort’s enemies? Or do you guys like the one-sided worship as it stands? It is kind of fun to think of dwarves desperately trying to appease the eight-legged bismuth porcupine that doesn’t care about what the dwarves are doing at all, and just wants to kill everything.
10. You’ve mentioned how worlds without magic will still have origin stories, they would just be fictional. Does this mean that worlds which DO have magic might also have fictional elements to their myths? Such as false gods, magical rites which do nothing, artifacts which are said to have certain magic effects but actually do nothing, etc. Would the players have an easy way to distinguish between fake magic and real magic, or would experimentation be necessary?
(PatrikLundell had a reasoned perspective on all of these. Adding more thoughts below.)
1. I doubt we'll get full sphere-effect coverage on the first pass, but at the same time, I think a forest of oaths and a desert of rumors are the more interesting of the examples, and there are many ways those can be realized, even just using the current systems, though it'd be preferable to have more systems in place (at least for oaths; rumors have a good-enough system for this -- even if the trees just whispered a random rumor from the world periodically, that would be something and quite a powerful place to camp a spy, or an entire 'listening post')
2. Same here; and yeah, some are definitely more ambitious than others. At the same time, having some sort of revelry artifact that made your fort into Party Central would be pretty cool, and there could be a few directed pushes here and there to make fortress artifacts more specifically interesting (and not always about killing things or defense or raw industry.)
3. Digging should certainly be interesting; I'm not sure it'll always be a similar sort of thing with a grand and sudden disaster though. The most Vanilla worlds might preserve the entire current setup, though we have not at all set in stone what "most Vanilla" means. It has dwarves. We know it has dwarves.
4. The goblin-demon relationship is a good candidate for a raw-defined, vanilla setup. The whole concept of 'demon' will float as the sliders move; we've made some semantic charts for 'demon', 'fairy', 'angel', 'titan', 'god', 'force', 'spirit', etc., and we're trying not to be beholden to English entirely when assigning categories to supernatural creatures, as that can be really limiting. This might lead to a bit of exposition on a new word that is central to a given world, and hopefully that on its own won't be a stretch; huge vocabulary drops are rough, but a crucial new category or two isn't so bad. And oftentimes, the English words will be sufficient; a variant of 'titan' will often be applied to any large-enough pre-god race, for example, as those are common associations for that word. Small pre-god races can't easily be called titans though; you could apply a diminutive to them, like... "The Little Titans", heh, but that doesn't always work so well. Or you can use "fairy", as they have the 'smaller' and 'a bit apart from traditional pantheons' associations that work well enough. Failing that, the "<random word>s", which it goes on to describe a bit. I imagine there will be lots of metrics and concept lists and all that to try and get the best output we can.
5. It has already been mentioned how it is hard to re-enter worldgen. I just wanted to acknowledge that there is a sort of "but we'll never experience the End Times, 500 years away!" bit here that can be a bit frustrating. An easier short-term solution is to have a world gen setting that prefers to place the play start date near crucial times on the myth calendar; this only works for the first batch of play-throughs in that world of course, before things settle down again (or the world is annihilated forever.) But the problem of restarting worldgen is not an easy one; it's clearly the best way to get certain kinds of layered pay-offs, but it's not easy, especially when the best pay-offs come specifically from recognizing the information which would be the sort that needs to be put back in the bag, as it were.
6. Yeah, exposition in general is a core problem with this release. We don't want any undeserved instadeath triggers, and if blatant expository paragraphs and giant warning windows are the only way to pull it off in a given case, we'll go with that. But yeah, research is also possible here. There is a certain element of Acts of Desperation we'd also be happy with, in a fort that is already falling especially, as that'll have a pleasant reverberation to future playthroughs in that world, even if the fort itself is a smouldering instadeath crater with demons buried underneath.
7. I expect this will be as PatrikLundell suggests; buildings work as usual, low-level atoms like 'sing'/'gesture' etc. would just be part of the ritual which is performed automatically (adv. mode is another matter -- I expect a lot of that will also be automatically, but only when it becomes more annoying and less fun, a line I'm not sure will be obvious every time.) There are some issues that have been raised in the past, particularly as it relates to clothing and also ammo/reagents; unsurprisingly, these are the things that DF already handles poorly (uniforms and bolts, respectively.) We'll just have to generally improve this stuff as/before it becomes cumbersome.
8. Yeah, I expect this'll be how it works -- as PatrikLundell said, the proper full integration of fortress groups is set for a later-than-magic release, but certain religious/magical aspects might find their way in.
9. The current system is amusing, but we wouldn't mind expanding it. Not sure what'll happen though.
10. I think PatrikLundell's thoughts here are sufficient; the only thing I have to add is that it's actually hard for us to handle certain types of falsehoods now, due to how the rumor system is set up, so there might be practical implementation difficulties here and there.
1. When the new Magic System comes out, will it be customiseable for modders to add other magic related things with raws?
3. If we have a Werebeast in our fort and send them out to a hillock, will they eventually worm their way back to fight or cause problems in the hillocks?
1. Yeah. The backbone of the current magic system, the interactions, are in the raws now, and that's not going to change. The procedural stuff will also be text-file directed. As with the procedural creatures, certain specific new cases (who knows which) might remain hard-coded as they grow into maturity, but we're intentionally trying to keep that from happening wherever possible, making sure everything 'vanilla' can be shut off (which is a requirement for the no-magic slider position at the very least), and thinking about formats which allow people to inject their own guiding data into the procedures with varying degrees of vagueness.
3. I have no idea if they'd be selected as a monster invader; their civilized status might preclude that? I don't think they'll return as a general migrant, as I understand it.
1. One possible magic effect that has been mentioned is mind control. When it comes to player adventurers being mind controlled how will the loss of player control be handled? Will the player get to watch as the magic user controls their body?
2. Will there be cases of non-complete mind influencing magic where the magic user suggests for a person to do something? If so, if a player adventurer is subjected to it how will the partial loss of control be handled? What mechanics will be in place to ensure they obey the non-dominating mind magic?
3. Once the myth and magic update starts being released will there be more types of weaknesses for night creatures, cursed individuals and corrupted magic users? Currently were beasts are weak to certain metal weapons. Will stuff like holy symbols, natural terrain features and certain times of day be possible types of weaknesses?
4. Will types of curses be generated at myth gen or when the curse is given? Will generated curses have their weaknesses set on generation or will the weaknesses vary from curse to curse within the same type of curse?
1. It's too early to say. Speculating, the duration of the effect would be key here. Not good to retire the adventurer if it's a ten-second effect, almost required to retire the adventurer if it's a life-long effect (even if it can be cancelled somehow later.)
2. It's on the effect list (it's a common dnd thing, for example), but we haven't established rules for how it might work or if it'll be in on the first pass. Some rules are easier to enforce than others (direction of movement or restricted locations, for example; these are simple, along with prohibitions on speech, etc.), and we can always just use the rules we can enforce, and try to increase that list as methods are conceived of.
3. It is part of the night creature hunting role; it'll still be on that timetable, but the two things could end up being related, yeah.
4. Could be either way, and sometimes it's the same thing. I'm not sure about internal variation; typically that sort of thing is more annoying to do, but it'd be nice to have a framework that supports it.
As worlds become increasingly procedural, how do you see greater geological formations being impacted? Will any number of worldly influences cause the existence of more esoteric layer stones, for example, or will the procedural occurrences of the world make our planets particularly "Earthen" in all it's lands? Assuming players do not mod in bedrock formations that would otherwise make the world different, of course.
In the event that stone layers and similar mineral formations occur that are not what you would see in real life, how do you see handling it? Will stone layers be created by probable cause (such the present known terrestrial and extraterrestrial formations, as well as preset fictional minerals reasonably expected to be caused by things that influence stone layers in a consistent way during mythgen or otherwise), or will there be a subcategory of rare procedural minerals that are generated in tandem with whatever could influence it?
An example of the first case of the second question: Slade. In particular, it forms as a mineral layer as a result (or related to) the existence of air pockets beneath the crust.
That makes me think of another question.
Do you think slade would be a subject of interest for our magic-researches to be in the post mythgen eras? Or is slade in particular intended to be completely unapproachable, resistant to any mortal effort to glean useful information from it?
Also, at the end of the day, does your vision of slade have it as being truly indestructible? Specifically, in dis-regard to reachable game states, would there be a force in the universe that can damage or otherwise handle slade? This is more of a lore question, as the question of whether dwarves can do it might lead to my favorite slade-carving maybe-glitches being fixed, hehe
I suspect things will start to become more otherworldly if you don't have your sliders rescuing you from added strangeness; there are different fantasy takes on this. Some settings are very earth-like (and often said to be an ancient or future Earth), others have localized or a special subset of oddities but are still earthish, and others are only earth-like in certain broad ways (vegetation, humanoids, etc., more like science fiction at that point.) We hope to attain this range on the first pass; the hard part was the specific earth-like flora/fauna/etc, and that's already done in the raws to a great extent, thankfully. The other hard part is the map rewrite, which will allow us to deviate considerably in the overall geometry.
Miuramir and KittyTac covered minerals/layers more or less. A raw-defined mineral like slade can be given a creation story consistent with its properties. If there are templates for mineral classes, they'll be allowed to have more varied origins (we currently only have this partially, in hard-coded form, with the vault materials.)
As for the lore of the most Vanilla possible universe, I'm not entire certain; I imagine slade to be indestructible, in mundane terms, but clearly demons can shape it and thrust it about. I imagine it and adamantine would have some complex relationship. Are these numbers set up so processed (not raw) adamantine can bend slade but they both fracture at the same time, when tremendous force is applied?
Were the issues with local administrations abandoning the sites we conquer potentially caused by a skills issue, like the local administrators just not having enough discipline skill to stick it out with the threat of insurrections brewing? If so, will we see that facet kept, where cowardly administrations might actually abandon their holdings and come crying back to us with excuses for leaving?
No, it was a much more simple calculation everybody uses for the insurrection balance-of-power check. Personalities didn't enter into those raw numbers at all, as I recollect. Not sure what it'll look like when we get back to it.
will you be fixing insurrections this release cycle, or do you plan to return to them some time after myth and magic?
I'm not strictly anticipating it, but it depends on various factors (villains, further army work, etc.) The main issue is that you can't yet order large blobs of hill dwarves around, so using the current code, occupation by your fort's own forces is almost impossible, over most sites -- it's further exacerbated because the insurrection code doesn't care about skill or equipment yet. But if it becomes an easier-to-implement, fun, surmountable challenge, as we add other things, we can have another look.
Do you use a profiler to find performance problems?
On Linux, previously, though I never really figured out how to get much actionable information out of the charts. Now that's a moot point, as I'm laproscopically operating Linux through a tiny virtual machine window that has enough trouble with a regular compile.
Last time I tried something on Windows I couldn't figure out how to turn it off during the loading of a save (rather than profiling from start to finish), and it couldn't load a save without crashing. If the latest MSVC one is available on Community, I haven't tried it yet.
What is the difference between "vassal" sites and "economically linked" sites from a gameplay point of view? Economically linked ones are the ones that peacefully align themselves to you, right? Will they have the same functions and uses as normal vassal sites or do you plan on making them more different, giving them other uses or limiting them in their uses compared to vassals?
Did you already decide what you'll work on in this coming month? Will there be more improving/fixing/tweaking of the site administration stuff for now or will you jump straight to one of the next things (villains/adventure mode parties/mounts/etc)?
Did you and your brother come closer to a conclusion about how you'll handle mounts in the game? There were some interesting game design questions in the past about the implementation of mounts and because you said they are potentially one of the next things being worked on I was wondering if you have a better idea of what you want to do with them by now. For example: How to balance player control vs the animal having its own mind and also whether mounts will come to fort mode before the big wait or adventure mode only for now? If nothing changed in regards to the design of mounts, just answer "nope".
Vassal isn't really used right now, but it's in place for when you have, say, a few barons under your fort's count. Once you get a baron, it changes the market-linked ones to be direct holdings. They are still market-linked, which is the green link from the map export in legends mode, and is meant to reflect realities of the economy rather than what the nobles think is going on. I think there will be differences once we have more information stored, especially economically and in terms of how e.g. fairs work.
The report tomorrow should have the plans for next time.
Mounts. Nope, nothing new to report. Still looking forward to it.
Toady, I believe it was mentioned somewhere on the changelog that you implemented a fix to address county titles not upgrading themselves according to nobles, are you still satisfied with the active jobs quota for county title "level up" and state of the county system in general now that other civilization factors are coming into play or is this currently pending your attention later on in development? Your thoughts on the matter would be interesting
I'm not satisfied at all with the baron/holdings triggers generally, since there is no economy, but I'll have to live with what we have for now. Whether or not you get a title should be a completely political matter between your fort and the monarch, which respects the economy but where that perhaps has little to do with a particular elevation.
What happens if during a raid, someone holding an artifact dies, either one of your soldiers or someone of the raided place?
Also, when you explore a cave or lair, they don't seem to find dragons and other megabeasts. Why?
It looks like the artifacts just get marked as lost on site, which should let questers find them, and will also place them in a random location if an player adventurer swings by.
No idea on the dragons. It doesn't look like there are e.g. civilization requirements in the code when it goes through and checks for defenders. Could be anything.
Right now, all subterranean water sources are huge pools of stagnant water. With the underground rewrite that's been hinted to occur around the mythgen update, will we see a return of flowing underground cave rivers?
One of the core requirements of the map rewrite is to support underground cave rivers; taking the river idea from the surface and generalizing those structures so they work on more localized layers (I'll basically be using something like manifolds here, where there can be a rich non-uniform globe/universe-spanning structure connecting standard local 3D play areas in a seamless way; spherical/nonzero curvature shapes continue to be annoying, whereas flat spaces with interesting topology will be possible.) This should also allow us to not load the entire underground column no matter where you are, though we do have the eternal battle with gravity there to sort out (falling into the unloaded.) So once the map rewrite is a go, you'll have, hmm, at a minimum I'd expect underground rivers, neat not-always-layer underground bits, cylinder wrap-around worlds, multiple cameras, and some kind of planar travel? I'm probably forgetting some obvious freebies. The basic rewrite of the old code is hard, scooping up all the free stuff afterward is just fun and not so difficult, if I'm correct. But the hard part is hard. Hmm, not hard. A slog. A gigantic gigantic slog. Like "search in files for <x>". 10000 found. Okay. Same as the z-coordinate.
What is the range for "nearby" sites joining you?
It was supposed to be a day's walk, like 9 world tiles or so. But somebody already had one at three days away? So it seems buggy.
How mod-able do you intend the first pass of the myth gen and magic to be?
I ask because in the suggestion forums it was suggested that the first pass was going to be less/un mod-able.
I know that what is intended might not make the finale cut but as someone with a desire to mod in a specific magic system (Dominions 4) I'm really curious as to what the "goal" is in term of mod-ability.
...
I only hope there is enough player control to not be force to accept a magic system we don't like.
Shonai_Dweller had lots of relevant quotes. I just wanted to emphasize that I don't think this'll be a problem. Magic systems will go through a few text-file filters, and the magic systems will also be generated into a text-file compatible format (as they are currently with necromancers etc., but with more exposed text to control it), so you can create any system that's supported manually and turn off anything else. The open questions are more along the lines of how closely we can link a player-authored magic system into a generated mythologies (if the player in such a case still wants one), and whether those mythologies can be made to (pretend to) produce the system in some coherent way, and on the other hand, whether a fixed player mythology can be put at the front end and then be used to generate different but consistent magic systems. It would be ideal if each 'chronological' piece of the process could be made as authored or as generated as desired. Minus a bit of coherence, I think that'll be straightforward enough to allow.
This certainly isn't a case where you'll have to live with our bogeyman and forgotten beasts again, though you'll of course be able to crank the sliders and do that too. As stated above, certain bits might still be hard-coded as we sort them out, but you'll be able to turn them off, if they are related to the magic slider at the very least.
Do you think dynamic combination of magic will be possible with magic, an example being mixing water and fire magic on the fly to create steam or fire and earth to create magma or would such combinations need to be predefined?
Something needs to be defined somewhere; what the atoms are is up to the system. If we rely on chemistry etc. out in the typical game mechanics, we'll have the things we current have (magma and water produces steam and obsidian etc), plus anything that is explicitly added. If the system uses predefined conceptual nodes, like the spheres, then they can hop around the friend/parent/child/opposition relationships they have, and spell effects might be related to that. So, as a potential example, a light effect might miscast into a (generated) sun effect, which could be very bad -- I'm not sure what we'll have in this first pass, but this is the sort of thing that should be natural for it to do, as sphere-effect coverage grows. There's also a cross-over zone with stuff like the "sphere" regions; if a region is interacted with and its attached symbols change, then its properties might shift dynamically.
We don't currently have a (possibly generated?) sphere/concept math, like <sphere:earth> + <sphere:water> =e.g.= <sphere:muck>, but this sort of thing is possible and might come in with alchemy. There are various ways this can be done, and we've toyed around with a few of them in side projects. Not all ~120 spheres need to be represented; it could pick, say, 8 sufficiently "far apart" spheres at random, and then use whatever mixing system and generic sphere-effect generators to handle situations, with coverage and possibilities being increased as we add effects and conceptual linkages.
My anticipation now is that we'll have some of this to start, a few classes of generated system with this kind of behavior, and then it will improve and broaden over time.
Famous historical warriors stop using their weapons the moment they name (and decorate) them. Is this intended (It's now hanging on a wall never to be used), something unfinished for later expansion, or a bug? It's kind of odd having all these legendary single kill weapons around. Also worldwide artifact production from all races (except dwarves in player fortresses) stops after initial worldgen. I reported it as a bug, but is it?
Yeah, as Inarius says, it's kind of somewhere between unfinished and a bug. The item moves to a special inventory structure, and the game doesn't know how to handle that right now, but it should be added.
Artifact production stopping isn't teeeechnically a bug, but I don't mind it being treated like one. We don't have the industry or economy or anything, so we're not 100% perfect on having the proper industries and so forth picked, once worldgen stops (where we do sim more of this stuff), but there's enough information to wing it, and it's an important part of the game.
do you plan to add non-lethal madness ? Something like, talking about strange things, OCD, hallucinations.
Yeah, we are all for modeling personalities and other effects of various kinds. No idea exactly when. It seems more likely now that the first behavior along these lines will be magical rather than strictly psychological.
Why is it that bridges are indestructible?
This is more than a decade in the past, so I'm not really sure anymore, and it depends on the context. For invaders, for example, it would inhibit their continued invasion. If you mean flammability or something, then the game is generally bad that way I think, and it might also relate to just how weird bridges were vs. fluids in the 2D version.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 3134715 times)