By tabs, are you referring to:
1. Changing the display structure of individual pages, like say, having "relationships this figure has" be a separate tab to "things this figure has done in their life"?
Or:
2. A browser like situation where one can have multiple pages open at once, like having "Urist McExample" in one tab, "Aban DwarfGuy" in another, "The Kingdom of Monarchy" in another, "The Scroll of Lazy Name Examples" in yet another and so on?
Yeah, this is just a browser type situation. I haven't reorganized individual pages.
'Cause trouble' quests in adventure mode rear their heads again. Given the decent summary of them we have here, my question is:
It is currently unknown what actions are required to complete this quest. Attacking, killing, murdering, robbing, harassing, and arguing with the inhabitants does not seem to work, nor does causing insurrections seem to be the solution.
...my question is, Could you please explain how to do this; it's obviously been causing 'trouble' of its own for quite a while, which I for one am profoundly sick of? Thanks very much, and happy lutefisking, I suppose?
Edit: I had also intended to ask, regarding Kobolds' entity ethics, are those generally (frex):
[ETHIC:OATH_BREAKING:NOT_APPLICABLE]
[ETHIC:LYING:NOT_APPLICABLE]
[ETHIC:TORTURE_FOR_INFORMATION:NOT_APPLICABLE]
finalised, or not? Because if not...well, there is a certain source of highly probable misinformation floating 'round elsewhere, in regards to the Kobolds' (supposedly, lack of) verbal language based on this premise that I feel needs stamping out. Thanks again.
Theoretically, it takes a conflict incident, in which you participate, where one of the sides gets flagged with the target entity and the side that you are in is not that entity, but has an entity (presumably whatever hearth you are fighting for.) It's sort of a convoluted check through your head for rumors and witness events and etc., so I'm not surprised that it's breaking down, though I'm not sure where. Will definitely need both a tech and exposition pass at some point.
The kobold language is based on the language we speak to our cats with, and they understand it about as well. So we don't intend them to be able to do complicated things verbally, though the boundaries are iffy when it comes to trickery vs. lying etc.
Are there any plans to update the game files so as to provide additional wings to creatures who naturally possess four? And do you have any plans at this time for issuing a formal televised & tear-filled apology to the user who requested the damselfly and was evidently shortchanged?
No specific plans though it would be good if the files were correct. These aren't the only problems as I recollect, and generally we didn't have time to do much with any but the top sponsored animals (mainly bees.)
There’s a bit of a discussion going on in one of the threads in the suggestions forum as to the meaning and origin of the phrase “fey mood” in relation to strange moods. Could you provide any elucidation?
Silverwing235:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8344188#msg8344188A_Curious_Cat (op):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8344536#msg8344536bloop_bleep:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8344968#msg8344968A_Curious_Cat (op):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8344978#msg8344978I don't have anything new to add; I think the Tolkien sourcing is what I was working from, though I remember it from the Silmarillion more than the Lord of the Rings, I vaguely vaguely recall, though I don't remember if it was Fingolfin running off to Morgoth or something with Feanor earlier.
1. The transition between z-levels and ramps still look a bit jarring to me. Are there any plans to add graphics or add shadows to destinguish levels from each other?
2. Looking at the new workshop design I'm curious: Are they single graphics or are they compositions? So - if I changed the graphics of the Lever, would that also change how the Lever on the Mechanics workshop looks?
3. I have to know: Will bars, grates and glass be see-through, so I could see what's below?
1. There are wall shadows and ramp shading, though in a jumble of ramps and open spaces at various levels it can still be confusing. I'm not sure what more we'll be able to do graphical, since we can't allow free rotation which is how that confusion is normally tackled. We were pondering just having a more abstract overlay to cut through the confusion that could be turned on.
2. They are separate images.
3. Theoretically this can be done, though it might be too expensive to query the floor material on the display pass. For bars and grates it is easier (you can see through open hatches currently.)
In the steam & classic versions, when a tile contains multiple creatures/items, will they still cycle (or flash) to show their presence as they currently do?
I hope so!
I believe it works the same way (that is, it flips between creatures, not items), though we haven't drawn up a replacement for the /-\|/- effect yet.
Currently in adventure mode the game performance struggles in human cities: the many characters in the area cause the game to lag, making it hard to play. However there are a lot of cool features in the game located in cities: taverns, catacombs, dungeons. Will the in-city performance be optimized by the steam release?
We haven't started converting adventure mode yet, and I think it's premature to say exactly how much we'll be able to manage before it crosses the point of being good enough for a release. It is a weird creature in a lot of ways, and a lot of things are broken about it (see cause trouble discussion above, for instance.)
Are there plans to merge or change the useless and rarely used professions (milker, shearer, etc.)? I know that you said changing them would destroy saves, but I wanted to know if a change like that is likely if old saves won't work in the steam version anyway because of some other changes in the code.
Also, are you going to rebalance prices? Wax crafts and mead for instance are very labor intensive and pottery uses a lot of resources, but they are pretty much not worth the hassle compared to stone or metal crafts. Prepared meals on the other hand are an incredibly easy way to get rich. I know that more work not does not always equal a higher price in a real market and perfect balancing of that would be a bit game-y, but honey and wax were very sought-after commodities in medieval times.
...
Let's say a 'Rancher' profession replaces gelder, shearer and milker. The jobs and the way we use them would stay the same, so if no milking job is started, no dwarf will do it. A dwarf with this skill would be more useful, that's my point. I also think that improving the job organisation is not necessary, especially with the new system. But my example doesn't really matter, I'll just rephrase my question:
Are there plans to change professions with the steam release?
PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8344812#msg8344812El_Stono (op):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8344869#msg8344869PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8345016#msg8345016We don't have any plans to change the professions, aside from what we did to reorganize the stone ones a bit. You can set up a rancher work detail using the new system with those settings if you like, and then assign dwarves to it. I'm not sure if we need to break it up further, to offer more control, on a per-job basis, though it gets a bit weird with the names and skills and such. I imagine we'll continue to see some updates (as with the stone) over time, but probably not another one before the release.
Just curious as to why the "Cull unimportant historical figures" option in world gen is so CPU intensive. Is it doing a simple check to see whether dead historical figures have led important lives, and if not flagging them for removal, or is does it attempt to retcon their lives to be a bit more important?
Yeah, it's just a simple check, but events and figures can be very numerous. I'm not sure if there are problems with it on top of that.
Mr. Toad, question: Why is it that the dwarves in world-gen are able to understand how cold an environment is, but not how hot it is? Meaning, they seem to avoid expanding when surrounded by temperatures of absolute zero, but will continue to expand into areas that are DF's equivalent to 2,556,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 degrees Fahrenheit. When I embark in those areas, I get notifications that my dwarf's eyeballs are melting out of their heads, and that my wagon has burst into flames. The rest of the dwarf civ doesn't seem to mind though.
Last one: If Dwarf Fortress could be played as a competitive real time strategy game, over LAN against a real human opponent, in which you share the same map, but with fog of war, and the goal being to wipe out all of your opponents dwarves, what would be your strategy for winning your first game? How would you maximize the value of your starting deployment material? And how do you stop the mad man who deploys seven dwarves maxed out in mining and dodge, who is making a break for the circus, in an effort to flip a coin on who ends up losing first once the clowns arrive?
PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8345849#msg8345849dikbutdagrate (op):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8345850#msg8345850Mr Crabman:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8345868#msg8345868voliol:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8345884#msg8345884dikbutdagrate (op):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8346059#msg8346059Was this modding the temperatures to extremes? Perhaps the cold check matches up with the biome stuff, so it happens to work out? But they considered ultra-high temperatures to be "tropical" still?
Competitive RTS: Ha ha ha, I'm not good at this game! It seems like it would be tricky to find and stop the enemy dwarves in time with fog of war active on a map of any size, though they would be closest to the demons at first which seems like trouble for them at least, especially since maxed dodge for an embark dwarf isn't all that high.
Will it be possible to customize the text colors used in various places, and how would this be done? The new cyan text (as seen for example, in the recent new legends mode menu, used for entities/civs) is okay to read in of itself, but I find it really hard to distinguish it from the normal white text around it.
A_Curious_Cat:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8346339#msg8346339Mr Crabman (op):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8346473#msg8346473Regarding your question in the replies, in the premium version, I thiiiink changing colors.txt is pretty much restricted to text now? All of the border elements etc. are all in the graphical files, as well as cursors and other interface bits that would otherwise be subject to the 16 colors. So you'll most likely be fine adjusting the colors there.
Why are wars fought over some issues more than others? For example devouring of bodies, tree or animal killing, and trophies. I've been testing warfare for a while and it seems like certain ethics are more likely to trigger wars than others. The main thing that seems odd to me is slavery, which Im guessing wars arent fought over so that dwarves and humans are not constantly at war. Will this be in place forever or will it be changed eventually? Also will noble succession ever be "cleaned up" for the intrigue release? With actual pretenders to the throne and such?
Ziusudra:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8346409#msg8346409Huh, yeah, it's only doing half of them, which makes sense enough for stuff like assault or vandalism (though even those would be enough to start a war in the right situation), but it's pretty odd that slavery isn't on the list, given history. I don't recall human/dwarf fights being the reason it's excluded, though a decade out or whatever it's probably hard to figure out.
I'm not sure when I'll get to fix the noble claims - it would be nice to fix it for the intrigue release, but that release is crowded so it's not possible to commit to it.
1. A recent devlog says the most important event of the last 1000 is shown every second in the "worldgen legend chronicles"; what determines the "importance" of an event?
2. Can you move the cursor/camera around the world during worldgen now? It would be nice to see during worldgen what places there are other than The Mischievous Hill in The Land of Funerals, and to have info about them.
3. Do the responsiveness changes or history readouts slow down worldgen any significant amount? I wonder if perhaps there is some threading going on here, since in principle it would be a lot easier to put UI (or "legends browsing") on a different thread to worldgen, than it would be to do the usual threading suggestions (which would involve huge rewrites), and it would come with noteworthy other potential benefits (like genning multiple worlds at a time).
4. How much is left now to be done before release?
5. I recall it being said that other OS compatibility would be investigated after the worldgen/embarking was done, around the time when modding and legends, adventure, arena and such stuff were looked at; since we're in that midst now, is there any news on the Linux support front?
6. With the new modding system, is there (or will there be) a way to have "settings/options" for mods in the mod loading menu? Currently it's possible to offer different versions of a mod, or to make a mod modular; just distribute a zip file on DFFD with multiple folders (or just files) inside it and tell people which folders or files to copy into the raws depending on the content they want.
But on Steam, the workshop only allows one "version" of each mod to be hosted per mod, so there wouldn't really be a practical way to make mods have parts that can be enabled or disabled (or to have different "versions" of the same objects), because uploading alternate mods to the workshop would get ugly in a hurry (polluting the workshop with many nearly identical mods). That is, unless it's possible for modders to define some options viewable ingame (like labeled checkboxes) that can enable and disable certain objects or groups of objects, or overwrite certain objects with alternative versions (or even enable/disable certain sections/raw tokens in some objects, so as to reduce duplication).
(toad: moved this up from your other question block): Can individual mods now group files into subfolders within the mod (either for mod option modularity purposes if they apply, or for simple organizational purposes with no functional meaning), or do they still have to be kept all in one folder with no subfolders (ie a "flat" structure of sorts)?
7. Somewhat related to the last question, one thing that seems like it would be useful is for mods adding new content (eg, new creatures), to be able to "support" multiple different tilesets (at least, the big/popular ones that many people would want) rather than just having only one set of sprites. Would there be some way of supporting this other than the somewhat clumsy solution of just posting supplementary mini graphics packs to the workshop? The "options" mentioned in question 6 wouldn't really be suited to this because for save compatibility reasons, options could probably only be set when first creating a world, whereas graphics should be changeable during gameplay.
8. How are mods differentiated from each other for the purposes of listing dependencies? One could imagine 2 mods happening to use the same name, which could lead to confusion when a player is deciding which mod they need to get (especially if they are mutually incompatible).
9. About mod loading order and overwriting; can raw txt files in different mods share the same name and header text (like `creature_ocean`), or would one overwrite the other? Obviously actual object ID's can't be shared and one has to override the other, but filenames/headers seem like they should be able to only have meaning in the context of that individual mod.
10. Have any decisions been made on what's going to happen to the "classic" fort mode music track now that it doesn't fit alongside the new ones? Is there some place for it in the Steam version even if it's not fort (or adventure) mode?
You say "The most important event of the last 1000", but how does the world generator "knows" what is "most important" ?
What is the not-so-graphical work being done the coming weeks? More Legends mode? Packaging for Steam/itch.io? Classic? Secret?
1. There was the available importance function sitting around, so I just used that - it's the one that decides what shows up in the event lists for each Age in the currently-released version's Legends mode. It preferences rulers, megabeasts, things like that, and you can get a feel for it there; there are too many events etc. for me to scour the data and list them easily here.
2. Yeah. You could always do that when paused or at the end, but now there's hover info too.
3. Nope, doesn't change the speed noticeably. It isn't multithreaded but there are a few timers so that it doesn't, for instance, render too often (as it does in some versions of the rivers countdown, where it can move slower than it needs to.) No surprising new feature gains either.
4/5. Gonna hold off on these (and voliol's question) since part of what we're doing is cooking up a public roadmap to take us to the finish line. I'm not sure when it'll be posted, might be some weeks, but it's one of things we're working on with Kitfox right now.
6. We don't have this currently, but doing something like it would be possible. I know Factorio for instance has mod settings you can do at startup and in-game etc. - but we don't have nice scripted files in a widely adopted format, so it's a bit trickier for us to get at things like that (or to do interface mods/API-style mods generally.) The mod subfolder question is similar. Right now they use the graphics/objects split, and work the same way they do in the currently released version within a given mod folder, but it wouldn't be impossible to add additional structure in a way that doesn't break them later if I don't get to it now. But it isn't going to be as powerful as e.g. Lua, nor can I easily switch to e.g. Lua.
7. I'm not sure I've quite understood this one. Like, if we have big popular set B, and default set A. Then somebody makes a new creature, they'd provide pictures of it in both A and B styles, and you can flip between them? This isn't supported right now, but it seems feasible enough - as a startup setting anyway, or on a per-load basis. Switching graphics sets would have to process a lot of textures and I don't see it as something that would be happening on the fly exactly (the classic version is a special case since it uses a very limited set of characters which can remain in memory.) It is at least the case now that saves don't retain any graphical information, so we shouldn't have compat issues down the line if we do more here (though of course that causes its own problems of needing all of the mods present in compatible versions to load a save.)
8. We use identifiers for dependencies. I'm not sure how to avoid trouble if people use the same identifier, since we don't ourselves control a central hub with links or anything like that - for instance, I don't know how much Workshop helps with that, or enables chains of downloads etc., if the modder provides some kind of workshop id/page, but our own system of dependency tracking has to work independently from Workshop. This makes it less friendly, since we don't have our own mod server. It shouldn't be too long before I finally get a chance to look at Workshop integration and we'll see what more there is to say, and if our own internal system changes to something that can capture both that and elsewise. Integration may mean mods have to have two identifiers for all I know, which'll be fun.
9. Identical filenames should be fine.
10. Haven't decided yet! One of the ideas was legends mode, another was somewhere in the credits. It's way too noisy to put it alongside the professional ones. We'll know more about this when the music is finalized; Kitfox is still working on some stuff there.
As many tabs as I want it is said, but how many tabs until the programme bites it?
This is actually a very important question that I'm interested in and wanted to draw your attention to. Maybe you (Toady) should artificially cap it at the point where it becomes unstable, if only to intercept "my game crashed because I opened 5000 tabs in legends mode" complaints.
It doesn't really choke and die as might happen to a modern browser if you go to several sites with lots of bells and whistles. The tabs are very light weight - just the text and some very small link info. That can be a lot of text, so I imagine if you open many thousands of lengthy entries you'd start to have issues, but you'll have more trouble navigating that many tabs generally I think.
Will it be possible for the scrollwheel now do actual scrolling in menus? One thing I noticed while trying to browse legends currently is that you have to use the arrow keys to very slowly scroll up and down, because using the scrollwheel zooms in and out instead, which maybe works for fortress mode, but is pretty uncomfortable when trying to scroll through a long menu (which is what a lot of legends mode screens are).
What image and audio file types will be accepted by DF for the likes of graphics or sound packs? Or has it not changed?
Would it be possible to support tilt-wheels for scrolling side to side? Also, would it be possible to support touchscreen gestures (such as pinch-zoom and two finger scrolling) on systems that have them?
Finally, I’ve noticed that it’s impossible to show the entirety of an embark even at the largest zoom level because part of the embark gets cut off by the black regions on the sides. Would it be possible to change this to allow the full embark to be seen (I’d kind of like to get a screenshot of my full embark, but it’s currently impossible)?
Mr Crabman (op):
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8348351#msg8348351Scrollwheel being linked to active scrollbars isn't done yet, though it's on the shorter-term to-do - there's some ambiguity so we'll need to decide how/if the cursor needs to be positioned sometimes (it's also competing with changing z levels, so for all the in-play menus it needs to be more tightly controlled), but it should be pretty simple to make universal in the scrollbar input once we figure it out. Although for a really long legends entry, rather than the scroll wheel, I imagine pulling the scrollbar is faster. All the legends mode entries (which don't fit) have scrollbars.
Audio: This hasn't changed. I imagine FMOD is pretty versatile, so I haven't tried to do anything new or fancy yet, and probably won't start until the music comes in from Kitfox.
Tilt-wheels/touchscreen: I don't have those input methods to test. Theoretically whatever SDL supports can be done.
Embark image: I don't think this'll be possible. In the existing version, there is the image export feature which produces what's effectively a screenshot of a z-slice, which you could then resize in any way you like, though maybe not what you wanted? (though we haven't got that done either)
Author
Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 3135607 times)