Speaking of which, the context for that was a ghost who was continuing to perform his Animal Trainer duties from beyond the grave: he was carrying meat to tame a caged creature. Do you intend to preserve/formalize the previously-unintentional Helpful Ghost behaviors in fort mode, or are those on the chopping block?
Ghosts are usually satisfied by making a slab for them, will we have flexibile choices for how to handle semi-scripted events like "please banish the ghost from my house" to do what is expected normally, or twist the quest to ask and fufill what the ghost wants in order to let them rest for good?
FantasticDorf:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8021083#msg8021083Ha ha ha, it would be funny to keep stuff like that, but when we got around to looking at them we'd need to make sure they don't interfere with the regular operation of the game in some horrible way.
The concept of a ghost being able to pull off its own rest assistance or needing special conditions isn't in the game currently, but certainly it's a common enough thing that we'd hope at some distant point to be able to do that sort of thing, in the contexts of the generated metaphysical stuff. For now, the ghostly lts are just a simple exercise in the existing name stuff.
I know this is pretty far into the mythical and magical future, but you bringing up soul mechanics just filled me with such curiosity I have to ask, even if the answers will probably be pretty lightweight. It's pretty cool just to see your vague plans for the future either way.
Do you think certain generated Underworlds will be filled with the ghost/spirits/bodies of those who end up dying and going there, as some Mythgen slides mentioned certain Dwarves going to the "wild world" upon death with the same text color as other similarly ominous sounding places in other slides?
For that matter, what do you hope the variance of generated realms to be? Could there be realms which are essentially massive buildings when it comes to environment, ala some interpretations of Hell? Likewise, could some unpleasant dimensions like the Underworld be focused on darkness or cold rather than heat and flame like the current underworld in your vision? I'm curious, since across fantasy and especially real world mythology, evil planes can be so unique and varied - even different interpretations of Christian cosmology say Hell is hot, dark, bloody, etc.
Since reincarnation also seems to be a thing in Mythgen, would a sort of spiritual "history" be possible? Like where a Dorf or other entity's past lives are chronicled historically, I think it could be pretty neat. Possibly something that could be tied into divining-type magic whenever worlds generate with it.
Finally, will high-fantasy worlds where races are unlucky enough to be generated with mortal souls have a greater desire for immortality among individuals? Or at least more of their personalities generating with a fear of death?
Afterlife: We hope so, yeah! We've wanting to do something like this for a long time, getting all of the metaphysics straight with as many of the consequences as we can. There are various issues, of course. With our population caps the way they are, the dead come to outnumber the living very quickly, and this has memory/speed/etc. implications when trying to house them in any meaningful way. Fortunately, because they are dead, and probably contacted/visited in some odd way, we can probably just have them drift in and out for the most part, in any number of ways, or otherwise not track them fully.
Plane variety: As much variety as we can support, really. The current systems get us a lot, and the map rewrite will get us a lot more (especially as it relates to a Dante-style hell, or any of the other sorts, well beyond regular square-planes-with-elevation.) And there are still all kinds of things we'd need to capture after that which we probably won't get to immediately (large weather phenomena whipping around, lightning/energy crackling about - these are all on the table, but it's a vast table and the first release after the map rewrite still won't do most of it.)
Reincarnation history: Ha ha, yeah, it'll likely be important in some of the magic systems to manage the soul identities well. The way the histories interact with a partial identity wipe is the tricky part - and we already see this in situations like night creature transformation, where the old status of the creature is virtually lost, making the legends read poorly. To make it more satisfying, it'll need to understand where the transition points are and refer to them properly. They aren't incredibly frequent, so it seems manageable, but when the reincarnations are really bustling, and we have ~20000 historical people going into another 20000 and etc., we have to be a little careful. Though with the current id numbers and naming systems we have, we really just need a few extra data structures. Gets a little expensive after many generations, but that's also manageable (with a softer version of the current culling system, say, where some souls just drift off into the non-historical pool for a time.)
Fear of death: I dunno if that's how it works. I suppose in high fantasy you might mean settings where the ones with immortal souls are more obviously correct about it (due to their souls flitting about and so forth)? Among my religious and non-religious acquaintances for which I have any inkling of it, fear of death seems equally common or intense, though none of them are seeking physical immortality as far as I know, he he he.
Will the sphere of a secret affect the type of area it spreads, if it spreads influence over the surroundings at all? Like how necromancer towers spread reanimating (I would assume) evil areas, would a secret with the blight sphere kill vegetation, and deformity evil creature populations like the described freed demon spheres? Or is the reanimating region spread part of some specific feature of the necromancer code itself?
voliol:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8021070#msg8021070A reanimation effect, or the fact of having a sphere-spreading ruler critter (the new usable tag currently applied to unique demons), spreads the field. But using a magical interaction power in regular play doesn't do anything. It's likely to be blown up by the magic release entirely, so messing with in-play sphere-region casting effects seemed counterproductive.
Thanks Toady, the slides [for the FDG talk] would be appreciated.
We're going to try for one better first, if we can - quite likely I'll be giving a very similar talk in November, and we're focusing on getting it recorded this time in a nice recording-oriented room.
When there are more types of secrets, what will be the different ways of learning them?
PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8022479#msg8022479AliceRed:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8022709#msg8022709MadMonkey (op):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8022736#msg8022736FantasticDorf:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8022744#msg8022744As FantasticDorf says, there are really any number of possibilities. The myth generator throws a bunch of them into the mix, but which ones actually get implemented will depend on how things are going at the time as much as anything, as usual. But innate abilities of different kinds, teaching of various forms, exposure of various forms, supernatural mentors/patrons of various kinds, as starting points, and then you can get to stranger systems until things are as odd as six-stage parasite life cycles I guess.
Can you tell us any details about what the Steam tutorial will look like? Are you going to cover specific key/menu navigation (build vs. designate), or more general concepts like 'how to farm'?
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8023295#msg8023295Yeah, as Shonai_Dweller says/links, we don't have additional specific information. But we are aiming to get people happy inside their first fortress, whatever that might take. A lot, maybe!
1. How will food management work for adventuring parties. If we're able to control them all, will we need to take their food and water supplies into account? Will they get food by themselves or will we need to manually control them to feed them/put food in their inventory?
2. Will it be possible for adventurers or armies to travel across mountains in the near future? Right now they can isolate huge portions of the map from each other, so I was wondering how it would affect things like criminal conspiracies and new traveling agents like exiled religions/player-sent minions. Will they be able to move across the world or just their local region?
3. What exactly are the things that influence whether an animal man population will join a civilization? So far I am fairly sure a high respect for nature influences it but everything else is guesswork.
4. You mentioned new interactions like creating fog. Will there be any interactions that allow you to heal missing limbs besides the current werebeast method?
FantasticDorf:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8024412#msg8024412iceball3:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8026263#msg8026263voliol:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8026369#msg80263691. Ha ha ha, there appears to be a tag in the notes called 'must resolve' for this one. So we'll get it done, whatever that means. I don't recall the current behavior. I'd lean toward making it as non-irritating as possible, and failing that, turn it off for them. I don't want you to have to flip manually between characters for every nibble or sip. In two of our previous projects, we had companions go grab stuff off by themselves, including shopping, but that's a little trickier here so I'm not sure we'll go that far immediately.
2. Ultimately, mountains (mostly) isolating portions of the map is good, since they do that. But it is inconsistent now, for a variety of reasons. But most of the inconsistencies run the other way now (travel being too permissive - right now people except for you just run across mountains.) This does allow networks to keep in touch a little more easily. We were hoping to have better passes or functional tunnel pathing or whatever, but it hasn't happened yet.
3. Let's see. Has a 'market' town (of whatever kind), values nature, speaks. The populations need to be nearby, which means having wilderness with savagery values around in vanilla. It also skips ocean and lake tiles.
4. It's a bit silly, the context in which they occur, since, as people have noted and was also clear at the time, the divinations would be quite popular if the worst thing that can happen is being an animal for a week, where on the other hand you can grow your arm back. Although, realistically, being a small animal is very scary, being preyed upon would suck, and you'd want a friend to take care of you, but people would manage. Still, yes, but it's ridiculous.
About adventurer party sizes, in particular: Is the current limit of 6 hardcoded, or planned to be user-adjustable? (I speak with the viewpoint of one who has designs on a proper "Thorin & Company"-style setup, post mythgen.)
At some point, if six was hardcoded (I don't recall that from a year ago), it became not the case. Even Ultima 4 had eight-member parties if I recall, so I have to go at least that large. I don't think there's a limit currently.
Is there any plans to implement dwarven nurseries, to potentially provide "proper" childcare for dwarves, and potentially lower the number of warbabies? Related quote and suggestion from Scriver and others below.
FantasticDorf:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8026861#msg8026861feelotraveller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8027092#msg8027092FantasticDorf:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8027093#msg8027093feelotraveller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8027442#msg8027442Clearly the current system of wearing babies into combat and also allowing all orphaned babies to crawl off into the magma unattended is a little too hardcore for almost any conception of a dwarf. Not sure when we'll change it, obviously. But we'd like to do something, yeah.
How far away is the villain system from producing a stereotypical fantasy thieves guild? In my mind it can be boiled down to a criminal organisation that might not actively invent or undertake plots but who's permission (and a tax) is required before professional criminal activity is undertaken in their sphere of influence. It may or may not have some sort of tacit agreement with a legitimate government. Is a thieves guild something you'd like to see come up in certain gens?
PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8026960#msg8026960FantasticDorf:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8027095#msg8027095So, yeah, bypassing the major and ultimately necessary issues that PatrikLundell brings up (economy, laws, etc.) for this to make sense, we are sort of sitting on something vaguely like it now. The higher up villainous orgs don't do as many gigs, and we do have a tax system for any org that is under their umbrella - they kick a percentage up to their immediate parent, and that might happen a few times. Once the organizations grow closer and ultimately join with the top one, the individual criminals still kick money upward. (Mercenaries also pay a bit to their companies if they take individual contracts, which can happen as part of a plot.) But this isn't understood in any meaningful way that the player can see - if they steal stuff, they won't be noticed as a competitor, though other non-player gangs in the town are in some very limited sense. And also, yeah, law enforcement can be made lenient as part of a bribery plot.
So, whether that's "organized crime" or a "fantasy thieves guild", I'm not sure quite how those concepts overlap, but we're headed toward various versions of that as we go.
You've filled up the world with plotting villains, zombie apocalypses and monasteries while updating the interface with org charts to help people to find their way around while giving them pets, companions and strategic combat to keep them distracted. Do you think Adventure Mode is now close to Fortress Mode's level of "being somewhat like an actual game" now? Relatively speaking of course, I know there's tons more to add which will enhance both modes.
(I know Adventurer has it's "better than fortress mode" fans, and I'm one of them sometimes, this is just about Toady's opinion, based on his past comments on the state of Adventurer compared with Fortress).
Ha ha, I dunno - it still feels like it needs more structure, tied in to the societies and individuals. Due to its relative microscope nature vs. fortress mode, it might be hard to shake that feeling. I'm not done with the investigations though. That was supposed to be an important rafter holding something like a game up. But it feels like we still need some more basic above-board political structuring that'll let the world change, so it feels like you have a properly reactive story, rather than something on-the-balance destructive or oblivious. Dwarf mode has these problems as well, but it can escape the feeling of them by having the whole fort there bustling and providing more fluidly creative options.
I have some questions about the incoming updates to fortress mode. Earlier this year it was mentioned that the player could notice plotting if they saw that two or more dwarves spent too much of their time talking to each other. Assuming this is how plotting is going to be implemented:
1. Will seeking social interaction only extend to plotting dwarves or are other dwarves going to gain this ability in this update?
2. Is plotting/interacting socially going to take only dwarven idle-time or is work-time going to be affected by this?
3. Will visitors be included in plotting? (i.e. a migrant arived on the fort, and after a year or so a vilanous traveler that happened to know them came to ask for a favor and leave, or vice versa; Or even someone up the chain maintaning contact with an agent in your fort for interciv plots)
4. Would dwarves that overheard plotting be able to catch part of the plan and feed that information to the justice screen, or will they simply accuse dorfs of plotting?
5. How adversarial can dorfs get now? If that migrant was the spy all along, when they become incriminated, will they see no reason to keep their act and start fighting everyone?
1. Do you mean in terms of fixing the stress/needs stuff? We'd certainly like to fix that side of it up.
2. I'm not sure yet. It would be nice if plotting overlapped with idle time, but plotters might not have their schedules align and we'll have to see. Dwarves are supposed to chat at work already a bit.
3. Yeah, visitors will very likely be involved, due to how the villainous networks are structured (some of the handlers can't afford to just move to your fort permanently, and if they did, somebody would just need to visit them anyway, if we're dealing with an off-site villain.)
4. The current plan is to send the information to (some probably new part of) the justice screen, using the same system more or less as we're developing for evidence in adventure mode. This'll also slowly point toward restructuring the entire criminal justice system for non-villainous crimes around more of an evidence-based approach as well (on top of the current witness reports), but we won't do that now.
5. If they want to die, I guess! Maybe it'll be best to take a stroke of the hammer instead. We haven't gotten to fort mode yet, so it's not decided. Perhaps they'll need to make a choice. We're leaning toward you mostly being able to collect information from people though, when you can, just to keep the plots intact, so even if they do go pseudo-berserk, perhaps you'll still be able to capture them. We've also talked about capturing siege prisoners by now at some point as I recall. We'll also be dealing with this sort of thing in adv mode presently, though mostly there we can just keep using the yield system. Although we'll see. Imprisoning people is way more popular in world gen now, and we might need to come in line with that by allowing you to march people off to jail, ha ha ha, just to keep the systems intact.
1. Can necromancers/demons utilize mega beasts in their experimentation? For example making a new creature using parts of a dragon and a human?
2. Will new races created by necromancers have some abilities of the creatures they were created from? Some examples would be a carnivorous diet or the ability to fly.
3. What do necromancers/demons do with new races they create assuming they don't escape? I'd assume they wouldn't just kill a creation they spent so long working on.
4. If a player playing as a race created by a necromancer/demon visit's that necromancer/demon's base would they still be hostile to that player even though the player is of a race they created?
PlumpHelmetMan:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8031394#msg8031394FantasticDorf:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8031603#msg80316031. PlumpHelmetMan answered this one. They just use settlements.
2. FantasticDorf answered this one. Not yet!
3. Yeah, they can become valid cheerful populations within the tower, even assuming positions in the necromancer's organization/schemes along with the undead lts and ghosts. Assuming they are intelligent humanoids. The quadrupeds and monstrous critters are kept as pets and used in armies.
4. The player would be classed as a night creature and every zombie would therefore be cool with their presence. The intelligence critters can still use their heads, and because the player would be coming from a place where it is known that there's an established population of the new critter that is no longer down with the evil plans, I think it is fair for them to be stopped, as a human-town gob would be at a demon tower. Of course, you can assume an identity etc. To the extent that works. I think it'd work (or not work) like the goblin identity checks.
1. Will there be any form of beta access keys for the steam release?
PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8031728#msg8031728Yeah, the current plan doesn't involve an open beta. As for what happens after that (see PatrikLundell's comment), that I don't know. Regarding beta-every-time, I doubt that - we were leaning toward the experimental/stable branch setup other people have used in the past, and as far as I can tell, Steam supports that. On those occasions when we have save-breaking versions, once the Steam version has been up, as far as I know, Steam will update the game when I update it on the site. I haven't used Steam enough to know about various branching possibilities, but we'll need to look into that as we go.
Do you think the collectiom of criminal networks and further developments down the line in Law And Order might end up with enough foundation to support a new game mode, a la Liberal Crime Squad? Or will the scope of player control largely be confined to the two current perspectives: that currently being single adventurer liasing with individual contacts and communal independent settlement (adventure and dwarf mode respectively)?
We've just added the player-controlled party to adventure mode, and that may lead to some distribution of play. Even in this coming release, you'll be able to split your group up, for instance, and control either half (even if you end up unable to freely switch between them over long distances, you could still meet up and then take control of completely different characters.) So it comes down to some other questions, about how sites are administered, say, and how time passes. Bits of that have also been slowly changing in adv mode over time. I expect stuff will just get more mushy, toward whatever style the player is leaning into.
Speaking of Uruk-hai, how far would you say the game is now from being able to generate a simplified version of LOTR? It seems to me that the villain update will give us quite a few of the pieces: artifacts that can be the subject of plots (albeit not magical ones just yet), intelligent undead servants furthering the agendas of their masters, alliances, and supernatural overlords corrupting the very land with their influence and twisting natural creatures to create their own servants are a few of the elements that I can name off-hand. Of course you'd probably have a better sense of that than me, which is why I'm asking.
Ha ha, 'simplified' can do a lot of work there - we are already done by some metrics. So it depends on the kinds of things you want. As you say, we are getting more coverage as we go. But, on the other hand, for stuff like having a functioning fellowship that has various interpersonal push and pull to it, we aren't really close, though we could make some modest progress if we leaned more that direction. And take, say, Rivendell vs. Lothlorien vs. Mirkwood elves - those places feel very different from each other on any number of axes, and we don't attain much there, just a few surface trimmings. And so on. Lots to do.
With conspiracy and world conquest now strong themes within the game, are we going to see books being written about the topics, and these themes also reflected in the art and artifacts generated during world gen as with other historical events?
Anything that happens with historical events will happen with these, yeah, probably in somewhat ridiculous fashion at times. I'm not sure if they were already blowing the cover identities of civ-affiliated agents in random engravings and books and other artwork already, but there's not much to stop them. Due to the sheer number of events, it hasn't been a pressing priority, and there are some technical hurdles, but we might try to keep certain events more secret before the end, especially if it starts to screw up investigations etc.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 3138069 times)