So with intelligent undead, who have no emotion yet behave in many ways like regular members of the fort... is it all an act? Are they just "pretending" to be the person they once were? Are they operating entirely on habit? What are your thoughts on the philosophical implications of having motivated people with zero emotions at all?
This whole concept is extremely interesting to me, characters like Spock and Data in Star Trek always get me thinking hard about what exactly it is that motivates people, and how much of the human experience is directed by emotion.
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8163868#msg8163868Yeah, it's true we haven't thought much about the undead particulars, because the nature of things isn't at all established. Emotions as they stand in DF are separated from thoughts, and are all reactive to them, and that's not very accurate. The last thing I read put calm/agitated + positive/negative affects as the base and everything else as being entirely socially malleable (early on), including fear responses, and that would change a lot of things - so the rules depend on where the models end up going vs. how much we continue to adhere to a more traditional model for the sake of narrative. But yeah, part of what Shonai_Dweller was referring to is the idea that the myth setup is going to define what, in a given universe, mind/soul/body/emotion/thought means, and undeath modes should end up more controlled by that. There's a series of implicit rewrites here, and avoiding a lot of work up front will also be a consideration. So who knows ha ha.
1. On some Steam version screenshots, some creatures seem to be multi-tile. Can we expect multi-tile creatures then?
2. If Steam version is going to expand upon overground farming, can we expect NPC farms?
3. Also re farming, can we expect to be able to dig stones from the ground and fill holes with dirt? So far when you’re farming above ground you end up with a lot of holes in the middle of the farm, if you happen to have stone tiles in the middle.
PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8164160#msg8164160I don't have anything to add to PatrikLundell's reply. Won't be a lot of time for new features, and those we do get will be specifically related to the heavier usability issues.
1. Will animal training ever extend to herding?
2. Will we ever have fences to keep livestock separated without a full wall?
3. Will we have dog breeds at some point? General domesticated breeds, selective breeding, explicit (dif name, sprite) or just trait-based? Sentient breeds, half-breeds?
4. Will fort mode ever receive a more real time clock with day-night cycle?
Bumber:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8164758#msg8164758PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8164826#msg81648261/2. Herding is a bit of specialized tech work (I imagine, having never done it), but I'm all for happy dogs with jobs. All for fences, but not sure when that'll happen, for both of these.
3. The work we did on gene pools etc. was aiming toward dog breeds, and in fact there's a breed object in the game that tracks genetic profiles, it just doesn't set it aside visually for the player in the ways you suggest, and it doesn't make new ones - at some point we hope to get further there. I'm not sure what it'll end up focusing on at first.
PatrikLundell's reply on #4 covers it.
I know dwarf appearance varies by civ, but does it also vary by sex? Could a particular civ have, say, shaved heads being in fashion for women while braided hair is all the rage for men?
There's nothing like that currently. I think it'll still vary e.g. eye color if only one of the castes has eyes, but I'm not even sure about that.
With new music coming to the Steam/itch.io release, will the 2 tracks already present in the current version of the game be remastered (re-recorded), removed from the game completely or left as is? I feel like a lot of people associate those particular tunes with Dwarf Fortress (myself included) and it would be a nice to be able to hear them in the new version of the game in some form
I don't feel comfortable re-recording them; the title music wasn't even composed, just played on the spot, and I've long since lost the main song, though I know people have written tab down for it. We'd considered, for instance, playing the existing tracks in Legends mode and some other spots. Due to the sound quality, they wouldn't fit in with the regular rotation as a default. But it is possible they will find homes.
When the 'randomness' slider is in effect for worlds, will that change the composition of Forgotten Beast & other procgen creatures? As in- would a low random world severely limit body plan & materials, or a high random world incorporate even more potential body plans.
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8166251#msg8166251We haven't gotten very far into this, but that's come up the few times we've come up with examples or set up the mythgen stuff - we restricted ourselves to humanoids at the midrange settings, and then brought on the blobs and quadrupeds and others when it is cranked all the way up. I expect that'll be how it works, for civilization races. Forgotten beasts are a different kind of example, since their relative rarity and (usual) distance from civilized areas makes them able to adopt stranger forms at lower settings (including the default, where blobs and others seem just fine.) Now, that doesn't mean that the rare critters can't be even odder at high settings -- energy beings, dual-planar beings, half-invisible beings, other oddities. That also leaves room at whatever the top levels are for civilized beings to also be that odd. We'll have to see how it all gets teased apart and then also matched up with what's ultimately playable. Even civilized blobs and quadrupeds introduce the need for certain AI changes, as modders have discovered (esp. w/ fliers, etc.), and weirder beings might just not be feasible for civilized play on the first pass.
I'm curious why monthly donations end in odd cents. I'm thinking exchange rates from foreign currencies?
LordBaal:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8167088#msg8167088Yeah, the fees from Paypal can make them odd. The exchange rate on Paypal can make them odd. The Patreon cut/fees can make them odd. Also, some people give odd numbers as well. 13.37 is popular as you can imagine, and back when it was showing cents on the end of the Patreon number, somebody would very very often (like every few days, different person every time) change their amount so that the displayed total ended in 69 cents. It wouldn't surprise me if the only reason Patreon removed the cents from the display was to curtail this practice, ha ha. Changing the whole dollar amount to end in 69 is a heavier proposition.
Do you think that the map rework or any future updates or changes will introduce a more dynamic and individualized way of generating buildings?
Reading through the comments that came before this question, the issue seemed to be the use of various prefabs vs. something more involved, perhaps using parameters in various algorithms and placing various metastructures over how they operate. I'm not sure where we'll end up at this point. We've mainly just experimented with bare-minimum algorithms, metadata, and parameters to this point, to finish whatever task was at hand, without giving much variability to a given creature/site/building, and it's quite a bit of work maintaining even those, compared to lists of text grids.
Overall, before we even get to buildings, we're committing to a higher level of variety when we get to the rewrites, and we'll see if some of that works in terms of defining processes for built structures. Algorithms and parameters are preferable in that they let us hook up cultural/usage/change-over-time/etc. data over larger spaces more organically, but they are harder to maintain and harder to vary/control. Both approaches can be used, but up to this point we've been stopped from using a large corpus of text map data in part because overarching changes tend to obliterate such files entirely (which makes them hard to maintain too, I guess, in that sense. We have a lot of masters here, in terms of civ data, history, 3D landforms, and other issues, which can't be overlooked.) If both things are more modular, which is part of what we'll be messing with, it'd all be a little more future proof, though modularity also sterilizes things. It'll be fun, anyway.
I know this type of thing is hard to predict, but a question about the Myth/Magic/Map Rewrite. Assuming the (hopefully) extreme estimates are correct it could be 4+ years for the whole update. What I was wondering about is how modular that map rewrite code itself will be. I know the myth/magic stuff can't work without the map rewrite, but could the current game work with the map rewrite? If the rewrite doesn't break the game would there be any benefit to releasing that part to break up the Long Wait?
voliol:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8168410#msg8168410PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8168512#msg8168512Yeah, I haven't particularly changed my mind on bundling some stuff in with the map rewrite. I don't see a benefit to putting it up if it doesn't bring something new with it; I'm not even sure why players want it if it adds nothing by itself. PatrikLundell's mention of testing is something at least, but weighing that against it being a ~year-long dud still leaves the addition of other features attractive to me. That said, the intervening Steam release could also have an effect on how the Big Wait goes down (I have no idea what, but it seems possible. The proposed fixer-upper branches are one part of it, but the sense of releases may change in whatever unknown way over that time.)
1. Will the military update allow non-party adventure mode NPCs or fortress dwarves to ride mounts around? Would larger ones be able to have howdahs or an equivalent to support multiple riders? Mostly thinking of elephants here but maybe the amount of passengers could scale according to size, I dunno how it would work.
2. In the previous FOTF you outlined how in the far future different dimensions would work. How much could modders customize these other dimensions? For example, could I make a scifi mod where I make a different "dimension" to represent different planets and moons in the solar system (taking into account stone/minerals, flora and fauna, etc), and create civilizations for each? Or at least create civilizations in the dimensions that are added? Obviously that'd take a lot of processing power but I'm just speaking hypothetically.
3. What sort of raw data currently inaccessible to modders do you think will become available in the near future? Just off the top of my head, there's water, the weather descriptors, the color of the sky, stuff like that.
4. What exactly is the difference between armor levels 2 and 3 in regards to how entities decide use it? I know both correspond to melee units, representing chain and plate armor respectively (with the exception of soldiers of a civilization, which can get level 2 or 3 chest and head gear), but I can't find much information one what causes a civilization or NPC to decide to/be able to equip one or the other.
5. In adventure mode I have seen NPCs in taverns wearing armor made from multiple materials that were exclusive to a single civilization. So it was wearing armor made from metal exclusive to Civ A, and also another piece made with metal exclusive to Civ B. I'm curious how that works. Do NPCs loot equipment or gain access to materials from particular civs by spending some time with them?
PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8168904#msg8168904squamous (op):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8169074#msg8169074voliol:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8169081#msg8169081therahedwig:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8169112#msg8169112PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8169410#msg81694101. Yeah, no idea if that's where we are headed with the military stuff that happens post-Steam at this point, in terms of random additions that surround the core stuff - mounted dwarves is never at the very top of any list.
2. However the generator can relate the planes, however that's modularly cut up, should be available to modders. I don't currently know if that'll include things like x/y/z coordinates; it very well could, but I wouldn't commit to it. For civs, there's the two-mode model that has come up a few times: time/civs/space as they occur in myth, and time/civs/space as they occur in current worldgen. In the examples I've spoken about, the civ action in other planes always happened in mythgen, and then was essentially relegated to "hidden/lost/destroyed" by the time regular worldgen started.
However, some of the setups we've considered as core mythgen scenarios don't work this way. For instance, having two 129x65 worlds that are paired to each other in whatever way takes about as many resources as running history on a single 129x129 world - they can share the cap or have two smaller caps or however. Then we'd have full rich histories in two worlds, and they can be intermingled by portal travel or divine intervention or whatever. For the infinite planes etc., we'd have to be much more careful, but it'd still be possible to have crucial places (travel/plane hubs, divine seats, capitals, etc.) have complete rich parallel histories, lessened only by the way that extraplanar things that touch them seem to disappear more or have less of a defined-yet-sprawling character (compared to worldgen farmland/etc.) We should be able to get a long way like this though, in some senses as far as a lot of the works set in such multiverses which also focus almost entirely on the important bits.
In other mushier infinite setups, there might be nothing historical at all away from the core play zone, if there is even one of those.
3. In the near-term, before the rewrite? Nothing particular comes to mind, though the Steam release itself is going to open up quite a bit of modding possibility (in Classic as well), just more on the interface/display side of inaccessible stuff. After the rewrite, much more, but I'm not sure what - the generation parameters and whatever editors we get first will drive that.
4. It gets convoluted, so I'm not sure how this plays out now, but it looks like it chooses half the possible level 3s to be part of the uniform for invading soldiers, so that they have a mix of 2s and 3s. Do humans, say, when they come to invade, wear the level 3 sections with any consistency, in a given civilization? The code is so old and goes on such a walk now it'd be easier to just check an army to see if that happens. It doesn't look like it's used anywhere else at this point.
5. Hmm, they don't do specific looting aside from artifacts. And when it generates inventory items, it appears to use just one civilization. There's a lot of code here, so it's not clear immediately if there's another path where it might use more than one. It's also possible the civilizations themselves are picking up the materials through other means, though if they don't use the material elsewhere that's less likely.
Hi Toady, I've got a modding question which I haven't been able to find an answer to. What purpose does "REQUIRED" serve in the COUNTER_TRIGGER syndrome effect, and are there any other arguments which can be used in its place? For instance, the example vampire interaction contains the following line:
[CE:COUNTER_TRIGGER:DRINKING_BLOOD:1:NONE:REQUIRED]
On a similar note, the wiki details 8 counters for use with the COUNTER_TRIGGER effect, but does not reference a source for this information. As such, are there any other counters available besides those included in the following list?
ALCOHOLIC
CAVE_ADAPT
PARTIED_OUT
MILK_COUNTER
EGG_SPENT
GROUNDED_ANIMAL_ANGER
TIME_SINCE_SUCKED_BLOOD
DRINKING_BLOOD
It looks like REQUIRED means that the effect can't proceed if the counter exists but does not lie within the range provided. This looks like it is meant to catch some obscure case where you can have more than one of the same counter, but I'm not even sure what that situation was. It doesn't seem possible now. With COUNTER_TRIGGER, it always checks to see that the counter exists and is in the range provided, so it's redundant now, possibly.
Those are the only counters available. The game has various others, but there's no interface for them. They mostly relate to things like individual military training timing, animal training timing, hospital usage, etc.
As Steam moves on to Villains and "stuff to do before the Big Wait" do you think you'll have another shot at cleaning up fortress unretirement? Or are the various bugs ("hostile" visitors who aren't, visitor number explosions, etc) caused by underlying issues that need save-breaking rewrites?
The issues I've seen there don't seem to be related to save issues, although sometimes that hides under the surface. Certainly as fair to take a look at as any of the serious old bugs.
Are there any plans for non-dwarven (or fort race) migrants that exist in your civ and mixed civs?
I've been wanting to play a fortress thats kinda like Dorwinion and has a dichotomy between two different species of sentient people working in harmony, but I'm wondering if mechanically that's something that's going to be in the works.
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8171854#msg8171854FantasticDorf:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8171872#msg8171872PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8171920#msg8171920People mentioned the ways you can get some small number of other creatures in the fort. We've been slowly working up to more integration - the main issue remains stuff like clothing, which isn't very satisfying with the permanent residents, I think. Having a default fort be 50/50 (if the civ is) needs more work on that kind of mixed production to be a more regular situation.
Are the icons sliders and other graphical parts of the interface that you're adding locked to the official tileset? I'm just wondering how the new interface will work for anyone who doesn't buy the Steam version. Or indeed in Steam's curses tileset, is that Curses plus graphical icons? Different icons to match the ASCII style? Presumably all the new rectangle drawing tools and such will be fully functional?
Are all new UI elements and any changes to current ones supporting keyboard only input?
They are locked, insofar as everything else is - it's set up currently as the creature graphics have been, where you link up images with text files and so forth, and the fancy image sets aren't going to be in DF Classic (which is likely what the Steam curses version will be, same as the free one.) That does leave us the question of what DF Classic is, when we've been aiming for "no graphics but as many of the interface improvements as possible." We'll very soon reach a point where the changes will require some sort of substitute. Whether those are literal text buttons (with line outlines and ASCII symbols inside), or something else, is yet to be seen. The way the interface currently works where it still respects the old grid somewhat (rather than the new graphical layer, which doesn't respect the old grid, other than being a grid at all) makes it much easier to handle ASCII parallel work on an ongoing basis.
Yeah, the continuing plan, which seems feasible thus far, is to maintain keyboard alternatives everywhere. There are some questions here and there about how some nested widget might work, if various little tick boxes end up being convenient, and so forth, but having quick key/sequence methods is important.
You mentioned in the dev blog that we're now able to set designations during unpaused play. Does that accompany some control over the play speed during play? Everything happens awfully quickly at 100FPS and awfully slowly at 5 FPS, will we have some ability to set min/max FPS during play?
I have to say that not having to pause the game to make any changes when things are running slow sounds like a great feature, I think I spend more time paused than running in older forts.
Su:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8172217#msg8172217Uthimienure:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8172237#msg8172237We haven't added any speed controls yet, and as Su writes, all we can do is make things go slower. 100FPS does have them zipping around a bit, and it feels slightly more uncontrolled now that the tiles are larger, so we may end up with a half speed option for people that want one. And of course, pausing is still an option.
In one of the recent dwarf fortress talks you mentioned a spell where the user sacrifices a bit of their flesh to bruise their target. Seeing a spell no one in their right mind would use made me wonder; in addition to the other myth generation configuration settings would how balanced magic is be another possible setting we could configure when generating the myth for a world? Like at one end is very underpowered the the other end is very over powered?
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8172337#msg8172337Eric Blank:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8172364#msg8172364DG:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8172477#msg8172477Yeah, I agree that being able to balance all the world's magic would be quite tricky. Point values are already in the prototype, and it balance costs somewhat around these (I didn't spend a lot of time on it there!), and that helps. But even simple synergies and other 'exploits' people are quite good at finding would be trickier to find and attach values to. But the general sense of power is much easier to deal with (even if that also slips up sometimes) and will assuredly have settings. In the prototype, we did these on a sphere-wise basis, attaching weights to different effects to shift the types of magic. That worked okay and can be built upon.
Is the public going to get access to the Myth Generator program at some point? If not, why?
It seems like something you've already completed that doesn't seem to have much reason to not let people use, and it seems pretty cool and fun.
Ziusudra:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8172723#msg8172723pikachu17 (op):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8172726#msg8172726Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8172730#msg8172730I don't have anything to add the quote Shonai_Dweller found. It would/could create problems down the road.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 3136974 times)