Currently in adventure mode, in large towns it's not uncommon to find characters murdered in the streets from random fights (especially if there are a lot of goblins). Will these events be considered crimes when the villains release is completed, and will it be possible for adventurers to "get to the bottom of it"?
It's not the focus, but the structures all overlap, so you might be able to figure some stuff out about random incidents you observe or bodies you find. Some of those fights are still bugs or bug-adjacent though, I assume, and I'm not sure what we'll end up with there.
What do you think of a "Minecraft resource pack"-like solution of having a menu where the player can define the load order of mods themselves, such that if a mod tries to create the same object as another mod, whatever mod is on the top of the load order would override the first version of the object? The same could go for mods trying to overwrite the same vanilla object (assuming merging objects can't be done).
Putnam:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8276419#msg8276419Having a settable load order is a reasonable thing, and I expect, yeah, people will want mods-of-mods to work that way. I'm sure I'll have to make some adjustments as we go, especially since I don't have time to do anything really complicated on the first pass. And I haven't gotten a chance to look at workshop integration yet, so I can't speculate on what we'll end up with meaningfully in any detail.
Children will help to do simple tasks, like hauling? Does this mean they'll have a limited labour menu? Now that you've taken a look at child labour, does that mean that they'll be able to, for instance, attend educational courses at guildhalls, or something, as well?
clinodev:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8275731#msg8275731PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8275800#msg8275800Yeah, stuff like hauling and cleaning, perhaps helping with food and water. We won't have time to do apprenticeship stuff, but we're leading into that as well - that'll also be related to the workshop profile overhaul that still needs doing. There won't be a lot interesting about this for the initial pass, but the mechanical distance between where we are and apprentices also won't be that far - there's some sense currently that because of the new labor behavior, tying individuals to workshops is a bit more important, which kind of naturally leads in to personalization of shops/apprentices/etc., though we have to be mindful of future workshop zones etc. during all this too, ha ha.
With the myth/magic update, is there anything planned regarding evolution or corruption of different races and species (sentient and non-sentient)? This could include either initial mythical origins, "natural" evolution and mutations, hybrid species, or unnatural/magical forces and experiments.
voliol:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8278301#msg8278301Just a note on your later custom groupings post (
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8278407#msg8278407 ) - since this already happens with deities (when they cover more than one sphere), I imagine this'll all come for free from the editor/param side.
Wouldn't it be nice to have more than 4 season music and perhaps sounds for workshops(hammers/wood saw etc)? As far as I understand it will require very simple coding (play sound.mp3 on loop when tile X is within N distance from center of the screen) but would add to perceived 'polish' of the game.
Same question as above, but animated textures(tree leaves/grass/snow). Seems easy, would look great, mostly a job for artists - what gives?
You mentioned switching engines? Could you elaborate? Do you plan to switch to something like Unity eventually?
On the topic of audio though, for the longterm, what do you think in terms of expansion of music and sound effects and ambience? Would you aim towards eventually having something with as much extensive variety as SoundSense for example?
voliol:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8279989#msg8279989Mr_Crabman:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8282592#msg8282592For the first two questions, music/sound and graphics, yeah, coding is generally not the barrier, at least with the kind of thing we are doing. But the assets have to come from somewhere. There are several professions involved here, and that takes money, time, and organization. We are doing what we know how to do with what we have.
The simple switch up to SDL2 makes the most sense first. We can't switch to anything like Unity in the time frame we are in, though eventually some switch to something is going to make sense compared to what I can do in a custom engine. It's just less and less practical to try to keep up with things on your own, especially if it's not something you're interested in (that is, programming for OSs/graphics is neat, but I prefer working on DF.)
In the longterm, though, yeah, I'd like to have it all - if we obtain the resources to produce it, integration won't be super difficult, though you eventually have to start worrying about channel limits/priorities/pools etc., or at least you did a decade ago when I last fiddled with numerous concurrent sounds in FMOD.
The Premium graphics currently show tiles from Z-levels below the current one (if no obstacles occlude them of course).
1) Will the Classic graphics also do this?
2) Will (clear) glass become transparent?
PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8280733#msg8280733Mr_Crabman:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8280760#msg8280760PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8280785#msg8280785Mr_Crabman:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8280791#msg82807911) Classic is one tile-per-tile in the old way, and it still uses the old colors so layering wouldn't really work. This doesn't mean of course that people couldn't leverage the new features to set up whatever balance between tiles and graphics they want as mods spring up.
2) As the Mr_Crabman noted, it's translucent now.
On the Steam build; the preview of the Trade Depot & Wagons / Pack Animals was nice, but gave me the feeling of being too much detail that most players will overlook. For the sake of your own time and mental energy, has there been any instances where you decided that a certain feature (graphics or UI) would be nice, but ultimately not worth the effort?
DwarfStar:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8281536#msg8281536Ha ha, yeah, as DwarfStar says, everything you've seen has been impacted by this, and generally represents some balance between getting stuff done and showing some detail. The recent bridges, for instance, could show the type of stone/block, or the different colors of glass, or have multistage raising animations. They don't right now, because it would be more work and we need to move on. And etc.
I think it was mentioned at some point that vampires would be getting a look-over/improvement in the near future? Are there any particular ideas being considered and would they be moddable?
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8281584#msg8281584voliol:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8281666#msg8281666Nothing to add to the replies here - nothing before Steam, villain-related stuff for villains, then whatever happens in myth/magic, which isn't specifically known for them.
1. Can we expect to see new spheres for the myth and magic release?
2. You've mentioned having dragons (and other megabeasts) be randomly generated not just in abilities, but also physical traits/appearance, but with constraints so they are still reasonably called "dragons"; do you have plans to set something up like this for the other, non-megabeast fantasy creatures as well, including dwarves and elves? That is, their appearance, physical traits and culture/default entities.
3. Speaking of entities, will entities be more varied (and random) in the future? It's slightly odd that all members of a species have the same cultural ethics and societal structure, except when they are subsumed into a civilization of another primary species.
4. At some point, will siegers/other creatures no longer have omniscience about which way to go into a fortress and actually potentially even wander into dead ends if someone say, builds a maze?
5. Will hydras eventually regrow destroyed/severed heads?
6. Will there eventually be more motivations for necromancy than obsession with one's own mortality? I'd imagine there are more reasons someone might seek to become a necromancer.
7. Do you mean it used to be the plan to expose [monster generation logic] to the raws, but they won't be anymore? Would this be more restrictive than the original plan? I'm afraid I'm not clearly understanding this response/what is meant by "mythgen/editor".
PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8281795#msg8281795Mr_Crabman:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8281835#msg8281835Schmaven:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8281870#msg8281870voliol:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8281887#msg8281887PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8281994#msg82819941. There are some concepts we're missing, for sure, and we may find ourselves missing them as we go. I ultimately want to focus on sphere combinations/etc. that are procedural, using what we have to build more interesting intermediate structures that differs from universe to universe, since there's a sense in which the spheres get samey no matter how you handle them, but since most of them relate to fairly basic ideas, that's also kind of unavoidable. Also, a plane that has, say, some light/astro state that isn't day or night or dusk or dawn, but something else, based on its unique situation, could perhaps have some sort of basic-level but still procedural sphere, and you can go from there for the other sorts of concepts. Which is to say, we could end up anywhere, ha ha. But of course even getting some basic stuff in for the already-existing spheres will take us a long way.
2. I don't have specific plans here, but it might be a natural progression - the dragon concept was the test case, but once the syntax is in, it wouldn't be tied to dragons at all.
3. Yeah, that's one of the major points of the embark scenario/entity rewrite/law/etc. release to follow the myth stuff. They can currently vary in certain ways, but not others, and we'd like to get it all to a variable state, even within one civilization over time etc.
4. To some extent we're going to try this, or something related to it, in terms of thinking about death heavy-areas at the very least. Taking away omniscience means storing knowledge though, in some form, and for maps this gets expensive and/or slow, rapidly.
5. It's a common enough feature for them so I expect something like that will happen. All of the healing-type effects from shrines were added fairly quickly, so I didn't really consider how they might be used on existing creatures etc. They might take some tweaks, but maybe we already have enough. Not for the "two heads replace one" thing you sometimes get though. That's a bit harder!
6. It'll all be blown wide open once necromancy isn't the only one we have, and that's the next time we're taking a look at it most likely.
7. voliol's correct that the details haven't been worked out. Broadly, if we don't switch over to a full scripting language, there's definitely some kind of restriction on what can be exposed (the FB generators aren't super complicated, but parts of them rely on code), and I'm not sure we'll be able to make that jump. However, many things that the generator uses, especially interesting parts like the body bases and how they are interacted with, should all be out in text files. There's no reason to have more than a hundred little animal body descriptors hard-coded, and pulling those out also has implications for centaur generators and everything else. So much so, that it starts to get messy, and the details haven't been worked out, ha ha. In any case, I expect the combination of parameters and editors available should more than compensate for certain facets of the process still being wound up in code. A lot is going to come out to text, and be integrated far more intricately than we were initially imagining.
Are there any plans to revisit the issues with military equipment for the steam release, e.g. woodcutters and miners not being able to use their work tools as weapons? Any other changes planned regarding squads and military interactions?
We haven't gotten started on this yet, but it's coming up soon since both the labor rewrites and military stuff are looming. And I'll probably have to rewrite the entire tool/weapon assigner to get rid of the raid bug. Because of that, I can't speculate as to where it'll end up yet. I'm pretty sure civilian equipment is just going to have to be handled differently altogether.
1. Will the map rewrite bring us liquid tiles other than water and magma? Rivers of blood would fit right into some more evil biomes, and a moat of honey would be interesting (exhausting siegers with the sheer viscosity of it).
2. Will the map rewrite also be where water no longer freezes instantly?
3. At some point will tiles other than water be affected by temperature? For example, dragonfire being able to actually melt stone walls, or constructions (and other terrain tiles) being able to catch fire and burn when appropriate in contact with magma or fire (ie no more wooden walls to block off magma).
4. Will shields eventually no longer be immune to dragonfire when blocking it? (and presumably other attacks that the material shouldn't be able to withstand).
5. Will werebeasts/other transformations always regenerate the body fully on transforming? There's something to be said thematically about wounds carrying over between forms (I presume this is a technical challenge, especially where body parts don't match up 1-1).
6a. What are your thoughts/ideas about magic related to fate/prophecy/destiny both in worldgen and in play? As in, its technical feasibility and how it could work.
6b. Same question as 6a, but for magic relating to time travel/manipulation? Like stopping time or slowing it down (which I guess is the same as speeding the user up sufficiently technically), or slowing down/freezing the time of specific objects or creatures, and traveling to the future and the past?
7. This might end up being related to the previous 2 questions funny enough, but are there any kinds of magic that you would have liked to have eventually, but which you consider just too impossible/impractical computationally to ever do?
-----
8:
I've got a long question here (well, more a short question, and a lot of explaining what I am asking about); how does the magic generation work/how does it apply constraints at different levels?
By this I mean, some magic may have certain costs, or certain effects it can have, and ways to be learned, sources it can be accessed from, methods by which it can be cast, ranges it can affect, whether it persists or requires constant maintenance, and all kinds of other limitation/ability/way it works.
But some aspects/constraints in a given magic system often can vary between individuals, or bloodlines, or species, or sources (gods, natural forces etc), and other aspects within those same groupings may remain the same, as constant rules and/or themes (and these aspects can naturally "nest" as you go deeper), and these constraints all help to give the magic system a unique "flavor", as well as cement it around some consistent themes.
So my question is, how is it planned to work for DF, roughly speaking? What's the system whereby constraints are imposed during worldgen (other than spheres), sometimes at different stages/steps, and how would it decide what scopes to place the constraints at? To be clear, I'm not talking about a myth&magic editor, or even modding or advanced configuration here (because clearly you could force certain constraints manually this way), but the vanilla generator, with configuration being limited to the basic worldgen screen and whatever simple options that has.
I ask because from what I've seen with the mythgen stuff talked about elsewhere, it feels like the only global constraints any world would have, would be magical spheres, and other than that, a lot of it looks just random for each interaction with a given species by a given god/primordial creative force, which seems like it would end up with a bit of a kitchen sink of magic in every single world, rather than allowing it to be possible all magic center among some limited themes/restrictions like most magic systems (themes other than spheres of the actual spells being cast that is); I am probably mistaken though, which is why I ask.
PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8281994#msg8281994Mr_Crabman:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8282373#msg8282373PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8282435#msg8282435Mr_Crabman:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8282540#msg82825401. Yeah, as PatrikLundell says, doing the framework here is a priority candidate, because it changes underlying stuff quite a bit. But hard to say what we'll end up with. Allowing any material to be supported all over the map requires quite a bit of data, which is fine for spatter/walls, but with flows it can get out of control rapidly, so we'll need to be careful.
2. This is unclear - it's not as involved as adding other liquid types, so getting the structures right early isn't as crucial. It can probably mostly be handled with existing stuff.
3. I don't even remember the reason we didn't do this originally. I'm not sure if it made fire demons and dragons too cave-in prone, or if there was some other issue. Maybe it was glaciers? It should certainly be done at some point.
4. It'll probably stay the same until we add some other ways to defeat them, or maybe we are at that point. Dragonfire temperature is totally ridiculous of course currently - I'm not sure what it should actually do, like plasma the air and destroy the whole screen or something. Certainly not safe for wooden shields.
5. Yeah, the body part/tissue layer match is the main issue, relating to a lot of our other body problems (centaurs, half-dwarves, etc.)
6a/6b. I think PatrikLundell covered these well enough.
7. It's all like that pretty much, ha ha. The time stuff is hard to even start, but having giant sloshing or manipulated fluids, or a proper embedded thought/persuasion spell, or context-aware luck spells, or really anything that isn't a crisp little effect. We can just get things up to a certain point, and the simulation is going to carry it to some interesting places, but there'll be a lot more we just can't do.
8. Regarding the current prototype, we just haven't done a lot with this yet, and we didn't spend very much time on it at all, since we aren't actually working on it yet. It isn't close to what we expect to have by the first myth/magic release, but more to demonstrate what the overall idea is, and to give us a feel for what sorts of problems we'll be facing early on.
There is a touch of what we were hoping to have come up, with the primordial creation bits - these are already more restricted than "our creator deity gave us powers in some spheres accessed through <random method dump>", and sometimes the wands and books made from them would require a whole quest (and sometimes not), and feels the most like your example when it has statements like "all magic in the world is X". And the more stuff you add like that, the more you can restrict/connect/change, and the more parameters you can then add, so that sliders etc. start to feel more and more meaningful.
"Sliders" here are all of the parameters you might mean by "global constraints" in your question, and when we say things like "low magic universe" there'll need to be a ton of code to enforce what that actually means (and, as currently with map gen, a lot of extra parameters controlled by more general default sliders/settings/categories.) Low magic might mean that all creature-innate magic for the main standard playables is turned off, or heavily restricted in a way that balances with other available forms, so that the game can be confident that there isn't lots of magic being done all the time. There's just going to be a growing parameter set and lots of bookkeeping I expect, but it feels like it'll come together.
Do you worry that some things that are currently regarded as spoilers/secrets may be spoiled for new players by the myth generator/viewer?
I don't have quite the same view about the endgame as part of the community has and don't really use terms like clowns and circuses. It doesn't seem like much of a spoiler because it's reasonably similar to one of the biggest media franchises ever. Still, we wanted to have a sense of discovery available when engaging with the myths, so some of the default/common paths through might obscure some things, including some of the deeper secrets that might count as generated twists etc. Other people will just want full data dumps to read through.
1. Are there plans to have the stone materials be tweaked to make them less inferior to say, bones? (in terms of sharpness and whatnot at least)
2. will the guildhall zone option in adventure mode allow for training idle followers within the designated zone? and if so could those followers form a guild?
3. How do Adventurer camps interact with the world? are they recognized as actual settlements that people migrate to and such, or are they nonexistent entities in the eyes of the factions of the world?
PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8283925#msg82839251. It should depend on the stone, I imagine! I'd certainly be up for updating/incorporating those values, but I don't have time to source stuff. Obsidian of course is its own nasty thing and will remain sharp, to honor my two inch Oregon High Desert scar.
2. I didn't do anything at all with this, and I'm not sure when I'll return to it for adv mode. It would be cool to work on peaceful stuff again over there sometime.
3. They don't have one of the traditional types (city, mountain halls, forest retreat, etc.) so they aren't viewed as settlements. Certainly at some point we're hoping to expand what you can make and how it is understood.
wolf men armor fits dwarves and weighs a bit less, cougar/hyenna man sized armor fits dwarves and humans alike and weighs a bit more. wolf men have adult size 55k, dwarves 60k and cougar/hyenna men 65k. in a previous question thread you wrote the rule seems to be like 6/7, creature size 7/8.my question
how does armour size scaling function exactly? what's the exact min and max equip size for dorfs, as the wiki states 52.500 (emu men armor) still should be wearable, but actually isn't and has the prefix "small" once you craft it. when you craft armor in fort mode which defaults to dwarven size, what actual size is the armour? exactly 60.000 for adults? do you get negative combat rolls or something like that for wearing armour that's from another creature but lacks the prefix 'small' or 'large', meaning you can equip it normally? on the other hand apart from the weight itself, are there maybe other beneficial factors, like hyena man armour beeing slightly larger? the stats like coverage are still the same tho.
Yeah, the armor will be a bit thicker and also heavier, which contributes to potential clunkiness vs. armor skill, though the thickness calc is a bit weird so I wouldn't count on it helping particularly.
The formula for armor volume looks like it uses the coverage and layer size as percentages, and multiplies those by... some grid built from the number of up steps and down steps, computed in each caste... how is the grid built... okay, take the relsize of the upper body body part, times the total size of the creature, divided by the total of all the relsizes. So, the percentage of the creature that is upper body, basically. That is the basic number. Then, depending on how many up or down steps you take, add 25%. So if you have 2 down steps and 1 up step, it would be 175% of the basic number. (Notably, it doesn't try to look at limbs or lower bodies or legs or whatever - it just adds a fixed percentage.) It works similarly for pants, boots, and grasps with their up/down steps. The head just uses the basic number (and for all these other items, the basic number is relatively to the head/lower body etc. part - if you have differently sized grasps, or differently sized heads, I think it just uses the last one.)
At a glance, this is of course pretty ridiculous with the layer size values we have - a shirt has layer size 10, so the shirt is 10% the volume of the upper body (plus 75% for the max ubstep), so 17% the volume. That is very very bulky, and aligns with some bug reports I remember.
I didn't run any tests here, so I could be missing all kinds of things.
For small/large, the formula I see is
wearer creature size <= item creature size * 6/7 means the item is too large
and
wearer creature size >= item creature size * 8/7 means the item is too small
because there's an = sign in there, that means 52500 is right at the too-small cutoff and cannot be worn.
Are you and ThreeToe continuing the Premium fortress you've been showing in the Steam Community Updates?
If so, how far along is it?
Unfortunately he's been struck by the same issue that hits me regularly, that you just have to constantly restart as development continues. For instance, until I redo the mod/graphics setup so that the graphics aren't in save folders anymore, he needs to start a new fort whenever the graphics are updated, which is all the time.
Exactly what is on the table in terms of siege improvements until the magic update?
1. What sort of content is on the table for the interlude between the steam release and the myth and magic big wait?
2. What is one interesting graphical challenge you or your team has encountered recently in preparing the steam release of dwarf fortress?
voliol:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8284059#msg8284059PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8284155#msg8284155For the table questions, I've given all the siege information there is currently over at the dev page voliol linked to. There are also things in the overall siege category that are definitely not happening, like moving fortress sections or multistory siege engines, or anything else that relates to map-rewrite stuff. Then for the broader table question, we have finishing the villain release, siege improvements, getting the adventurer armied up in some way, adv mode medical stuff, and doing some more with the fort and commanding larger armies. Likely some other things will happen as well in this process. And all of that will have to respect our new itchy steamy reality, whatever that means - if that means more bugfix releases, or certain graphical additions as we go, it's difficult to guess from this distance.
1. Quite a few functions/screens in the Premium release have had some pretty significant changes, like with "zone bedrooms/other rooms", and also the announced plans to consolidate all the "look" functions into 1 menu, and being able to send items to the trade depo from the items themselves; what are some other screens and functions you expect to also have significant improvements like that? As opposed to say, workshops, which do have some improvements (like seeing what is located there at the same time as the jobs, searching the list of job types, and mouse controls, and obviously all the polish/readability), but otherwise look relatively similar to before in functionality.
2. Is it planned for workshop jobs/the searchable list of jobs to have icons representing the item type to be made/job to be completed beside them? I saw it's absent from the news screenshots, but I assume this could be chalked up to it just not being implemented yet, but just wanted to be sure.
1. There's no way the military screen is staying in its current form, ha ha ha.
2. I'm not sure what we'll end up with there. Unlike the item/creature lists etc., a tile isn't immediately linkable to every job, because they don't all have one clear output item, so it's a whole task sorting it out, and there are a lot of them. Fortunately, most of them are related to a single item.