I'm not sure if this verges on the suggestion-ey, but I think it's a general enough idea that it must be something you've thought about before, and I'm just curious in which ways you have considered it, and how it influences current development.
A while back now, Ultimate Ratio Regum developer Mark R. Johnson was spending a large amount of time programming in AI behaviors involving time tables for work, having farmers man the fields, guards stand guard and replace each other at the appropriate time, etc., and to have that all work out regardless of whether the player is present, absent, or appears or disappears midway through such a scene. Currently, the NPCs in Dwarf Fortress in adventure mode tend to stand around inside their homes for the most part and do nothing.
Have you considered programming in the daily lives of NPCs (in adventure mode/outside of the fortress) in terms of going to work, eating, going to sleep, etc., and if so, how do you envision this for the future? Do you think it would be difficult/straightforward/possible to make it flexible enough that every day is not necessarily the same as the last, i.e. so that it doesn't interrupt more specific behaviors that don't fall under the purview of the everyday routine (that I think are currently much more developed already)? Also, on which other features (such as the economy or other social/cultural frameworks) does it rely, as far as you can see?
Yes, this is planned.
Adventurer Role: Trader
* Site resources
* Villager/farmer schedules/activities
I imagine the absence (mostly) of this sort of AI currently influences how you might add some things, like in yesterday's devlog about (among other things) priests converting part of a community; I imagine that currently happens in a rather abstract manner, but once AI is more fleshed out, if it ever is, I imagine you might want to make this sort of thing more visible/make it so that it 'actually happens', so to speak. (I realize it's currently just WG stuff being described in there, so it would have to be abstract anyway, but I'm talking about when this shows up in other parts of the game.) Do you think this sort of thing is something best done relatively late (risking having to rewrite many other things that were at first abstracted) or early (risking you might not have all the prerequisite systems in place for it)? (Note that I'm not asking for a specific timetable or some such, obviously I know that's impossible to give at this point.)
Afaik, part of the reason those villager schedules are underneath the trader role(apart from the fun task of finding that one asshole who farms pineapples), is because these schedules are probably going to be determined by what a civ requires them to be doing, which in turn is influenced by notions of property/customs/laws/economy, etc. Mechanically there's a lot of stuff that'll be opened up by the starting scenarios arc. There's for example already things like festivals/fairs and inquisitions in world gen, that do not happen in play, and fairs in particular are intended to replace the notion of the yearly caravan at some point. With that type of stuff in mind it is not unreasonable to imagine a conversion minded priest to walk onto your fortress' fairs and have them start converting. Hell, given how bards and scholars work, it isn't unlikely these priests will be able to do this within this arc, hobbling into your tavern and turning all your dwarves pious. That'd fit right into the whole linking and intrigue stuff this arc is focusing on.
And, even in the current hamlets and towns you do see villagers heading out for a walk, going to get some water, etc. It's not much, but there's something there :p
The thing is that the laws and property stuff will do well to wait for the mythgen stuff because if you are gonna have gods walking around your world, it'd be good to have the civ's laws form opinions on those. But because the myth arc will take a long time so there's sufficiently cool stuff for gods and such to do, the villains and intrigue stuff is being done right now so players can chew on all those evil schemers in the world. That's the logic behind the ordering of the current devplan. And after that we might see expansion of these systems(more cool magic stuff, or more civ stuff for us to mess with), or we'll see work being done on parts that haven't had much attention like boats and other multitile goodness.
If I'm reading this correctly, we won't have to worry about megabeast worshippers turning into cults this arc?
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 3137841 times)