Is there a plan for the interface to provide some sort of farm management overview to see or control individual seed reserves and material flow into produce which does or does not drop seeds?
I'm still working through the special buildings, so we should see soon! The seed use restrictions from the old 'z' screen certainly don't seem to be enough to keep seeds on hand.
Will the "police" system be reviewed?
The situation: the guard notices a thief who steals an artifact does not prevent the crime but runs past the criminal because he needs to first report this to the sheriff.
Will it be possible to add to the guards the ability to prevent a crime based on the situation, and then only report it to the sheriff?
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8243481#msg8243481Dankrou (op):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8243493#msg8243493With the UI updates, are there any plans to have skills consolidated eg metalsmith and metal crafter, fish cleaner/dissector
Are there any plans for an in game glossary or recipe tree? Eg Iron is made of 3 different ores: hematite, lignite and magnetite. Combine with flux stone to make pig iron
PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8243981#msg8243981Yeah, I imagine PatrikLundell's correct, in that certainly some of the skills are underused, but they might still be with us by Premium time.
You see the glossary information scattered around a bit, hidden in portions of the 'z' screen and so forth, but it could afford to be a lot better. It's still not decided exactly which direction the tutorialization will go, but certainly that kind of information should be available.
Have any discussions been had about future Steam releases/add-ons/DLC? Things like new music or art packs. Presumably you wouldn’t want to lock any gameplay behind another paywall, but do you envision the $20 Steam version as being the only DF-thing someone would be able to buy?
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8244100#msg8244100chinesecosmo (op):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8244134#msg8244134Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8244161#msg8244161Yeah, I think the only discussion we've had at this point is about the music - it's a reasonable thing to want from the musician's perspective and we're all for it if they decide they want a separate sale item for that. I don't recall if a decision there has been finalized.
1. Regarding the previously mentioned upcoming army update, will there be anything like joining another party rather than leading one yourself? It's a bit difficult to describe, but like, you could say enlist with an army for a time in adventure mode and your character will be dragged along the overlord in whatever direction the army goes, participating in battles and sieges and all that.
2. Also regarding the army update, will it be possible to see stuff like cities being overrun by soldier and stumbling into battles?
3. A lot of demon stuff seems to be tied to the existence of procedurally generated demons (ie custom demons won't spawn unless they're enabled etc). Are there any tags or adv worldgen edits I could make to negate this?
4. Will future releases let us create custom modded night creature experiments?
1. PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8244292#msg8244292Yeah, that's the exact issue - when you are a subordinate character that isn't in a fairly free-roaming role like an agent, there's potentially a lot of waiting around and fruitless busywork. Theoretically this can be managed, but since we don't want to bring the game away from a simulator and introduce drama mechanically (as we do with the current dwarf mode sieges, which aren't ideal at all), it's a harder problem. If the player does end up as some kind of lieutenant in the army mode, it might be to expand hearthpersonesque responsibilities to have some more structure perhaps, or to be involved freely in some larger goal where you can draw some more people -- or as you say, as part of a single march and engagement. As long as you don't end up on guard duty for months at some peaceful location it should be kind of okay.
2. When we added the armies splitting into ~10 groups and rampaging around the cities on the travel map, there was the question at the time of doing just as you say, and it was put on the back burner since we couldn't raze the tile-resolution buildings properly. That's still true. I'm not sure at this point how that'll be managed or when. It would be sensible for it to be an option even for the player where it makes sense, but we need some mechanical stuff.
3. For the spire-creating demons, looking at how it works, having UNIQUE_DEMON and CAN_LEARN/INTELLIGENT on them should put them in the candidate pool, without them needing to be procedural and even with the proc demons set to zero, but you can't turn off the spire process for generated/raw creatures with those tags (UNIQUE_DEMON is overloaded in that sense.) I may be misunderstanding the question. Do the custom spire demons not appear in world gen if proc demons are turned off (Bottom Layer needs to be turned on, since the spire connects)? Or do you mean after digging?
4. What piece did you have in mind? That when an experimenter runs an experiment, it might have a pre-determined outcome based on some tags/raw text linked to the experimenter type or otherwise? Right now it's all linked to the procedural system, but having another way to get there would be reasonable. This probably fits in cleanly with myth/magic concepts of corruption etc., and ways of converting people magically with various outcomes that are either random or not.
Will animals that die from old age ever be butcherable / if not, will an animal trainer be able to notify you when they are nearing their natural lifespan?
Will swords and weapons be able to be encrusted with gems?
And lastly,
Will there ever be an option to migrate a fortress? As in taking some of your current dwarves, supplies and animals and building some wagons and starting a new fortress, either abandoning or retiring the other one?
PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8244983#msg8244983We haven't changed anything about these yet. They all seem reasonable enough to me, but it's hard to say when I can get to changes in directions that don't fit some current plan, as usual. PatrikLundell's right that the ability to interact with old forts in some way seems to fit in with the embark scenario stuff.
Recently, I was thinking about automation in Fortress mode.
Just looking at the workshops, there are three possible situations:
1- you have to choose a task in a workshop to build an object (a bed).
2 - you have to synchronize some workshops with different raw materials / tasks to get an object (soap)
3 - in Fishery it is not necessary to order any tasks, if there is a fish, the dwarf fisherman will do the task alone.
I understand that if everything were automated the Fortress mode could become contemplative and possibly boring, but if you have to be attentive to every step or detail the experience could become tedious and overwhelming. For that reason it is important to strike a balance and I suppose this question will often be a headache when designing DF.
My question is:
- Looking into the distant future, what role will task automation play or how far do you hope it can go?
- If the player does not have to worry about certain routine things, what do you hope he can get his attention to during the game?
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8245732#msg8245732FrankVill (op):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8246891#msg8246891Yeah, the responses mention the manager, so ignoring that and looking more broadly, it does seem like ideally you'd want to be able to look at the player's goals, or responses to challenges and choices they face, and have the game be able to respond to their resource/labor priorities. This is difficult in various ways of course, but having the dwarves be able to reason about supply chains, even retool workshops (after they get broken up into furniture-and-zones), or whatever, in response to broader goals might be neat if it isn't a total disaster (and the player opts in to that level of autonomy?). The 'autolabor' style profession stuff is kind of like this - I haven't done it yet, and I imagine it takes serious tweaking to get it right, and the player might still want to interact with it, but overall one could make a program that plays dwarf fortress well enough to have a thriving fort, and in that way it's possible to consider all other aspects of the fort as automate-able, especially when it comes to basic needs and so forth. Of course, players working with supply chains directly can be fun, but we're assuming for the question that it isn't the focus, that we have a player who isn't playing it for logistical challenges (a playstyle that should still exist when there's some more automation, it would just be more engaging with more interesting logistics.)
So what does that leave? Assume the basic industry of the entire fortress is completely automated etc. Certain kinds of issues don't come up, and player engagement is reduced. There's still, theoretically and in this future, a lot left! The outside world is one - sieges/diplomacy/trade, villains/vampires/etc., or finding a way to avert the end of the world should worldgen hand you one. The underground is another. The player can design their fort, and with the map rewrite, we intend the underground to be more varied and interesting, and this should lead to player conundrums and stakes and choice and risk and all that sort of thing, as they go about dwarfifying the space. There's the social side of the fort - the automator can reply to basic needs here, but you might still have to make decisions about limited resources. How do you resolve individual and subgroup disputes? (assuming here we are a little further along, as you said, the 'distant future', so that we have a richer selection of these, touching all of the aspects of dwarven society)
In our theoretical we-are-good-at-automating model, dealing with all of this could be automated as well, assuming the automator has player goals or default settings to make choices, but if the player likes some aspect of the game, they could engage with that aspect (e.g. change the default setting to their 'goal' on an ongoing basis, which is a fancy way of pressing a button I guess, ha ha.) Tying all this together, there will be threads running through the ongoing story of the world that the player can now engage with as they choose, and the theoretically-automated aspects they aren't interested in respond to their decisions to help them realize their story goals. Arguably, the story side is strengthened because the increased dwarven autonomy has increased their characterization a bit, especially if there's enough give in the automation for it to have personality links/etc., beyond responding to player input. The game already does this in its small way; dwarves do lots of things on their own already.
Player attention-wise, I think we'd be in good shape if we had all of this - at that point, if the player doesn't want to engage with any aspect of the game, it's probably not the game for them.
(reiterating that I don't think I'm going to attain this level of automation, but we do hope to improve the vanilla game, even a bit with e.g. labor, as mentioned, before the Premium release, and can consider looking at any aspect of the game that's broadly considered drudgery.)
I'm wondering if there was ever a conceptual idea to establish some sort of volunteer based team whose aim was to track down and find solutions for the backlog of bugs that has built up over time. Now I realize that The Toady One doesn't necessarily need or want help, but I am seeing this from a less then direct angle. The plan would be for a group of volunteers who are familiar with at least parts of the game's code to try and pinpoint what is causing certain bugs, attempt to solve it, and then provide a report detailing what was changed and where in the code. Other volunteers, ideally the more experienced, would go over the report and try to determine if said solution is "safe" and would not cause errors elsewhere in the game, and should they feel confident in a solution they'd publish it. Toady himself could then choose whether or not to act on it, I definitely will not rule out cases where a found solution to a bug might cause problems in later versions and so may be found undesirable, but DF players would also have a choice to act on it.
Mind something like this could already exist in some form and I'm just not aware or failing to recognize them.
Inspired by Ariosto's question - has an idea of test suite been raised?
What I mean here is external piece of code that runs some scenarios and compares if their output is as expected.
That would eliminate the need to extensively play-test all new versions of the game to validate every single action.
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8245855#msg8245855PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8245912#msg8245912Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8245951#msg8245951Ariosto:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8246520#msg8246520Yeah, I'm very impressed and grateful for the volunteer efforts that have already taken place. It's certainly gone beyond what I thought possible without having the source. Naturally, people would spot more if they had the source. But that isn't the only consideration, of course. The process is certainly going to change with whatever happens after the Premium release, but it's too early to say how that'll play out until we see what that even means.
As far as I can tell, setting up unit testing etc. requires a person that maintains the unit tests. With just me, it's just another part that can break, if it's really comprehensive. I do a lot of tests, and it's never enough, as we all know, but I do catch a lot before it goes out the door. I'm just not sure that setting up more of a framework on my own would solve problems or create them, especially since I'm not a trained QA/dev tools person.
Is "bogeymen" pronounced /b?.gi,m?n/ or /b?u.gi.m?n/?
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8247369#msg8247369Ziusudra:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8247374#msg8247374Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8247379#msg8247379voliol:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8247431#msg8247431Ha ha, Zach and I say it almost like the u before the 'butter' alveolar tap, but not quite, like 'bug' all squished. No close back rounded vowel stuff like boooogieman, but if I were talking about "The Bogeyman" who is coming to get you, I'd say it more that way (though possibly spell it boogie or something.) But the DF creatures have almost their own pronunciation for us now, and mostly we sing a song 'bogeymen(x6) duh-nuh-nuh-nuh'. B'guhmin, stress on first bit, but last vowel is the only one that is hummable and survives.
* In terms of baby mismanagement, would mothers in the military be programmed with better baby handling UI (putting them down for one), or are prospective parents (dads and mothers all) going to pick up any incidental babies on the battlefield and start using them as improv shields. (yeah that'll sort their stress-balance out all-right) like they roughhandle their own offspring.
* And how do you expect to handle some of the odder fringe cases of babies left behind from experiments or semi-intelligents (sieging and wild trolls comes to mind killed in the midst of combat) who don't really fit into the category of being socially presentable unless you have some weird hands-off goblin creche thing going on to encourage it.
The pick-up code has high priority, but the adoption code can be slightly lower, to avoid situations like that during disasters. Maybe it would be proper for all babies to be scooped up rapidly, but the distraction does seem like it might lead to a higher rate of loss in any military engagement where a baby is involved (um, yeah.) Although I don't recall if baby retrieval is higher than combat now or not.
Goblins integrate into the towns currently, as do escaped experiments, so I don't see why those babies wouldn't be adopted normally. It might be tricky if their parents are around - I don't recall, for the siege babies, whether the gobs/etc. pick them up? Or do the sieging parents just dump them and then e.g. run away? If their parents are alive but elsewhere, there might need to be an additional practical adoption measure. The parent detection code might also get confused if somebody is brought back to life, though the way things work now, I don't think there'd be a baby in those cases, maybe, since they are all w.g.? But it's still an issue.
Is there something like an official pronunciation guide for the languages in the game? I've always wondered how all those dwarven vowels are supposed to be pronounced.
voliol:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8247827#msg8247827Nilsolm (op):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8248032#msg8248032Yeah, voliol is correct. We just had the ascii tiles to work with and didn't try to attach a particular sound to them for any of the languages yet.
Why can't we make wooden training maces & warhammers?
FantasticDorf:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8248200#msg8248200If I recollect, the reasoning at the time was that they take the edges off, which was a source of death/maiming in training. I don't remember if material weight/combat effects came before or after? Do mace dwarves spar with regular maces or do they not spar at all? Are there injuries with the real maces if so? In terms of real-world stuff, I'm not really aware of what distinctions were made or how much training weapons were ever used, for any weapon type. Just solving the bleeding problem at the time, but open for additions and changes.
Does the new UI and/or tutorial promts for Premium DF imply there's going to be a makeover of some raw files, such as reaction raws? Or will the UI/tutorial simply interpret the old raws in a new way in that regard?
We don't have any plans to change how the existing raws work, at least beyond some bug-fixes we made to trees and so forth. However, there might be some additional text options added before the end, to fill tooltips and stuff like that. But mechanically, stuff like reactions will work they way they did before, whether we need some new text fields or not.
With the map rewrite, coupled with the Myth & Magic release, will there be a possibility of solid clouds that we can walk around on- that will float over the scenery beneath?
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8249281#msg8249281PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8249318#msg8249318Yeah, we're hoping to support that kind of thing. The verticality, the lack-of-caveins, and the procedural material aspect. And I suppose we always have to ask what happens if you whack it with a pick.
Are there any plans to add off-site (wildlife) hunting missions?
Any plans to allow the creation/filling of a wagon and sending it to trade off-site?
PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8251979#msg8251979PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8252562#msg8252562Yeah, PatrikLundell has this one - we're hoping to do more with this and have only gotten to do a little bit with the off-site system so far.
Currently on the Steam store page, you have listed as a requirement:
Graphics: 1GB of VRAM: Intel HD 3000 GPU / AMD HD 5450 / Nvidia 9400 GT
which I'll note are all 10-12 year old.
Now that you have a lot of work into the new graphics, and your multilevel view and so on, does that still seem like a reasonable requirement for Premium, or is it likely to be revised up?
I suspect it's probably not far off, but they're old enough graphics solutions that it might have been the default text filled in on the store form or something. 
(I've been asked about this a few times recently, which I take as a compliment for you and the artists.)
Ha ha ha, I don't recall writing those, but I vaguely remember the discussion, and I imagine what happened is, yeah, either autofill or that one of us just pasted some near-seeming requirements and it sort of creates a family tree of these between projects that gets outdated as it goes along, ha ha. I don't even know the names of any graphics cards these days. All of the art so far is 10MB in png format - I don't know how to check the exact compression without going into the code and summing it, which I'm not doing right now, but checking quickly from a few of the files, it ranges from 5-1 to 20-1. So we're maybe loading 100MB now, plus some more room for the procedural stuff. There are tens of thousands of 32x32x4 textures, but 10000 32x32x4 textures is only 40MB it turns out, ha ha. (modulo any storage buffering stuff that may be going on, extra padding is often added internally for speed as I recollect)
So if you're talking about the 1GB part (where maybe the OpenGL stuff used by SDL goes, but I'm not actually sure it ends up there or regular RAM), we're not close yet and with the amount of art remaining, I don't anticipate approaching that. If people add all sorts of graphical mods with zillions of creatures etc., we'll have to see what the strains end up being - at some point, some level of mods causes most games to have issues, at least in my limited experience playing with them.
Today some modern roguelikes are starting to simplify the user interface. For example, Caves of Qud uses the Space key to perform any action on an element that is close to you, Cataclysm DDA uses Enter to concentrate, classify and order all the actions that your character could do at a given moment (they are still not easy to play for those who are not experts in this genre, ha ha).
In order to make Adventure Mode a little more newbie friendly to the Premium version, what do you have in mind about the user interface?
We're still months out from starting it, so we haven't decided on much there yet. I still have to refamiliarize myself with the mouse side of roguelikes to see what practices have developed (naturally the keyboard can still be involved here, though I'm not sure how the WASD is resolved when diagonal movement is so important.) We've had small odd half-versions of the things you describe, hidden in the ever-growing 'g' and 'h' lists, for example, and it would make sense to do something more surfaced and friendly with that, though a giant list doesn't seem fast to use or super-friendly - it does show all the possibilities at least.
The recent interviews have made me wonder: in the myth and magic update will possible generated playable races include hybrids similar to centaurs? For example a human upper half and a tiger lower half?
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8253931#msg8253931PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8253953#msg8253953Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8253955#msg8253955voliol:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8254021#msg8254021Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8254026#msg8254026PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8254084#msg8254084Yeah, as the responses show, it's mostly a matter of timing and the Centaur Problem. There are various issues that need to be addressed, and it'll depend on the flow of the work the release in the arc at which I attempt to tackle it, more than it would for something like the map rewrite, or the myth generator, which go in first because they have to be in for the whole enterprise to function.
I remember there was Talk of the possibility of creating a new game mode, the so-called 'deity mode', fleshed out from debugging tools. If I remember correctly the limiting factor was the fact that all a player-deity could do is curse random people and affect some rolls or something. Are you still optimistic on that front? Assuming divine overreach gets a revamping e.g. during the myth release, could deity mode be a possible byproduct, however rudimentary?
Right now when I want to search something and I make a typo or something and search something again, the forum tells me to wait 5 seconds, except I often estimate badly and wait for only 3 seconds or something, so I get the error message and have to wait 5 more seconds, and so on. Also, the 'display more relevant results' option is useless and should not be the default (it should be 'most recent results' instead). Could you please fix it?
During the 'finish the villains release' period, will player fortresses be able to weave nefarious plots of their own? I guess raids sort of count but I was more thinking of assassinations, hostage taking, and generally more complex endeavors involving handlers and sleepers on foreign sites, just like foreign entities do with your fortress.
Now that literally every single character in the world can mount stuff except for citizens in fortress mode, what are the remaining technical hurdles?
Could you explain the detailed mechanics of how insurrections and claims work? The wiki is really lacking.
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8254129#msg8254129Yeah, deity mode still works, in some form or another. People don't do much just standing around - they don't bustle yet like they do in fort mode, so there's something reactive missing from it though as things currently are in the sites.
I assume the delay is in there for incidental bot reasons or something?
The 'c' screen ability to send people out, and the way the plots are stored, makes this mostly a matter of finishing the post w.g. implementations of these plots and then adding the interface for it. Mechanically it should work the same way, so it has been on the table, similar to the adv mode stuff.
I imagine for fort mode there'd be some irritations getting the two to be in the same place, but it's not much different from pets or animal jobs there. If fliers are involved, there could be additional issues.
Claims aren't really worth explaining, since they don't do anything. The information about insurrections isn't surfaced very well, and it's not really fleshed out against some of the stuff that came later. It polls all of the cultures at a given site randomly about once a day (if you aren't in dwarf mode, since it's a bit involved -- we've just turned them off for towns etc. while you are in dwarf mode, until they work better), and checks if they are happy with their rulers. Their baseline opinion right now requires them to have been conquered, or to have harsh laws in place (e.g. vampire rulers), or for the ruler to be cruel personality-wise (this was before we had anything like the religious purges to put that into practice.) Then it checks the size of the occupying force vs. the population and runs through all the rumors to see if there have been zoomed-in combats with the occupiers and how many have occupiers have died (this includes the adventurer, and unless something odd happens, it'll be the only source. Each conflict and death reduces the perceived % by 1. So in a large city with a small occupying force, one fight is enough.) Once one local culture feels ready to go, then all the cultures that feel that way will join an active insurrection (they'll generally flip the same way if they don't belong to the occupying group.) These are abstract events that run for just a few in-game hours, and they are resolved pretty abstractly based on the pop numbers (this was before any of the post w.g. group combat if I recollect.) That determines the outcome and possibly the removal of the occupiers. But it's all very mushy now, and to the extent it works at all it suffers especially in that you can't even see the active insurrection.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 3136258 times)