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[voliol]

Since 47.05, I have been unable to generate worlds with the classic evil biomes.

don't get me wrong, goo rain and dust are both deserving of an evil embark.
but I miss the challenge of dealing with all the nasties that came with certain biomes.
Stuff like roaming undead animals and flying hungry heads that scour the earth hunting anything living.

did you remove standard evil areas intentionally?

You might have had bad luck. I've had forts doomed by evil camels since 0.47.05 I'm pretty sure, and the primordial evil biomes not spawned by demons, mummies, or other evil critters I think can be sphere-unaligned.

Edit: I just realized that the worlds were genned in earlier versions, whether I remembered correctly or not. Disregard this.

[dikbutdagrate]

Are there any plans to improve the state of Dwarven recidivism in game? I see there are changes being made to the current stress system, will any of these improve matters?

A dwarf that gets thrown in prison for starting fights will likely only get worse while in prison, no matter how crazy expensive ritzy you make said prison.

[Deno]

If I remember correctly, when talking about the myths&magic update, you mentioned procedurally generated races and worlds that may not include dwarfs. Does that mean that fortress mode will be expanded to make all civilizations playable regardless of what race they are? Are there going to be mechanical or technological differences between different races and civilizations?

[PatrikLundell]

@Deno: Lime Green is used to draw Toady's attention to the posts containing questions so they can be found when answering.

Procedurally generated playable races more or less requires all races to be playable. Humans will have to be playable as completely mundane worlds will have nothing but humans.

Procedural races would probably have procedurally generated technologies, while the current setup would have something similar to what's present today, but playable. Thus, dwarves would probably be the only ones with steel, and be better at mining than everyone else, and so on.

[dikbutdagrate]

Procedural races would probably have procedurally generated technologies

I almost drooled on myself while contemplating that statement. Dude, it could be so good. "Procedurally generated technology" - ie. Overly elaborate inventions of arcane artifice, which may possess a macabre nature at times, whose sole function virtually equates to that of a basic rudimentary household technology circa 800 C.E.

Hey Pat,

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

What if a civ could be randomly determined to use an oddly specific animal tissues to manufacture those old school vintage animal batteries, like the frog batteries of the 1800s? But instead of like frogs, or toads, it's like giant praying mantises, or even hydras. Actually, would necromancer towers likewise invent technologies during world gen? If batteries could be a thing, I imagine necromancers could develop them as well, but would also reanimate them, of course. Hence you'd have giant electrical undead praying mantis batteries with lightning powers, and no exoskeletons, otherwise known as Procedurally Generated Lightning Zombie Technology™. The zombies would likely power the tower itself, and consequently allow it to shoot lightning bolts at intruders. That'd be neat.

Actually, my spoiler comment above reminds me, We have pump screws which convert dwarves labor into power for the sole purposes of pumping fluids, but why don't we have a device for converting dwarves labor into power in general, like a treadmill? I wouldn't mind assigning all of my animal dissector migrants to power a fort's machinery, as this would facilitate a use for these dwarves. Perhaps even a giant hamster (tame), if such a thing were possible. Apologies if this is more line with a suggestion, but this has actually confused me for a while.

[Schmaven]

Actually, my spoiler comment above reminds me
...
I wouldn't mind assigning all of my animal dissector migrants to power a fort's machinery, as this facilitate a use for these dwarves. Perhaps even a giant hamster (tame), if such a thing were possible. Apologies if this is more line with a suggestion, but this has actually confused me for a while.

I don't see why someone couldn't pretent pumps are treadmills and have those migrants pump water through some water wheels to generate power for the machinery. 

[dikbutdagrate]

I don't see why someone couldn't pretent pumps are treadmills and have those migrants pump water through some water wheels to generate power for the machinery.

While you could do that, despite it requiring a bit of work in designing, channeling, irrigating, etc. The reason you'd likely want to avoid having to "pretend" it's a treadmill is to avoid having to deal with fluids at all, as this can become a major concern when attempting to maximize, or merely improve, one's frame-rate.

Quick riddle: "This thing all things devours: birds, beasts, trees, flowers; gnaws iron, bites steel; grinds hard stones to meal; slays king, ruins town, and beats high mountain down." The answer is: the frame-rate.

Rivers are easily the best natural power solution short of utilizing exploits, I mean marvels of dwarven engineering. And windmills are less than helpful, at times.

[voliol]

If I remember correctly, when talking about the myths&magic update, you mentioned procedurally generated races and worlds that may not include dwarfs. Does that mean that fortress mode will be expanded to make all civilizations playable regardless of what race they are? Are there going to be mechanical or technological differences between different races and civilizations?

They talk about this a bit in DF Talk #25. There will be a pass at different kinds of embarks for different civs in the Embark Scenarios update. However, that comes after Myths&Magic, so to begin with the playable procgen creatures will have to live in dwarfy ways, with e.g. outpost liaisons.

One [stumbling block for playing as non-dwarfs] would be just the overall framing story, like we probably don't want the mountain homes of the humans like sending you a liaison that requests that you uplift a baron, in like the same way and stuff, right? So there'd be certain restructuring and the current thinking on that had been to do that with the Embark Scenarios. To kind of think about why you're there and then that would be more structurable. Of course that would come after the Myth & Magic release, and this is kind of the big point on that is that with the Myth & Magic release you set those weird sliders over to have non dwarf play because you're playing a like three legged mollusk. Then, I mean, human town mode seems attainable when you've know done three legged mollusk mode. Of course three legged mollusk mode comes before the Embark Scenarios in this timeline, so you'd still have some kind of like output liaison scenario probably with your three-legged mollusks. So it's one of these things that we're approaching in this modular fashion.

[PatrikLundell]

I'd expect the technology cut-off to remain at about 1400 even if technology is procedural. That would mean electricity is out of the question, but magic opens a completely different can of arcane worms.

[clinodev]

In the 06/06/2022 DevLog, you talk about tutorial site selection.

The game searches the world for an optimal tutorial location - forested, brook, pretty flat, shallow metals, if it can get all this - and plops you down there after a short animation.

While that might be as good as currently released site search* could get a new player, (and wise men might differ, I'd add flux and deep metals at least, and mountain zones with aquifers are guaranteed to contain sedimentary stone, and very likely iron, for instance, while your flatland shallow metals might well be alluvial gold and cassiterite) PatrikLundell's excellent embark-assistant plugin has shown that searching for sites with those criteria and iron ore specifically, for example, is scarcely slower than standard searches, and well-worth the effort. We know that real-world classical and medieval humans were quite capable of finding iron and copper ore mining sites (which tend to be "shallow") to the point ore deposits in Roman Italy and Spain were often marked as existing but too far from forests or rivers to be economical, and thus ignored, and in DF they're often shown in outcroppings and river cuts on embark anyway. It seems odd dwarves would ever build a fortress on a site devoid of shallow weapon-grade weapons ores, honestly. You can smell high grade iron and copper ore after a rain, after all, sand is pretty obvious and critical to industry. etc..

*[Edit to add: I set up to do some testing on how often those parameters (forested, brook, pretty flat, shallow metals) produce a good tutorial embark, and was immediately reminded that you can't actually search for "forested" with the vanilla site search, so clearly you've done some expansion, at least for the locked tutorial search. Hopefully this makes my questions redundant, and we're already in for greatly expanded search!]

With all that in mind, are you considering expanding the site selection search for Premium, at least for tutorial embarks? It seems like a low-effort, high return change, and would act as more of a difficulty lever than many other changes. Searching for sedimentary layers [edit: or really much better, particular metals and minerals] would produce a far higher chance of good sites, for instance, than "shallow metals".

Expanded search in embark-assistant.

Additionally, have you considered asking the "Do you want to do a tutorial?" question at the beginning of worldgen and locking the default "tutorial" experience to reasonable settings like "small" and "short"? This would go a long way towards discouraging the standard new player impulse to say, "I have a decent computer, let's choose Large and Very Long, heck, all max settings!" which leads to frustratingly long worldgens [Edit: and necromancer death worlds, and so on].

[Edit: Sorry to bang on about this. I know people who have played for years who gave up on finding iron long ago and who have never made steel, and newer players advanced enough to answer some questions in the questions threads who literally buy all their metal goods from merchants because they got bad early embarks and just assume weapons grade metals are rare, and iron anvils only come from the mountainhome. It adds to the false meme of DF being "too hard to play" and restricts their games terribly. Especially in a tutorial start, I hope we can say with confidence: "Okay, now that you're dug a little starting hall, dig around in the top 5 hard stone layers until you find magnetite, hematite, or limonite, (you'll get the "You've struck IRON, the muscles of the mountain!" tutorial message) and dig some out, so we can get you making iron bars for more picks, weapons, armor, and a spare anvil to hide from the keas!"]

[FantasticDorf]

In the 06/06/2022 DevLog, you talk about tutorial site selection.

With all that in mind, are you considering expanding the site selection search for Premium, at least for tutorial embarks? It seems like a low-effort, high return change, and would act as more of a difficulty lever than many other changes. Searching for sedimentary layers would produce a far higher chance of good sites, for instance, than "shallow metals".

You can render with the minutest bit of modding, the whole 'Sedimentary search' redundant unless modders always uphold some innate value about it such as its geologically/biome formatory relevant positioning (beneath oceans and low volcanism drainage if i remember correct) but they can still strip it of anything valuable to "waste your time" as it were. I think that's very unlikely to be implemented over the embark assistant still wrestling to show the raw info from the site in relative real-time from different parameters rather than pre-determined

In-universe explanations may still be on the table though for player usability without merging the embark-assistant tool right in, like pre-established geologic surveys which you pay a small fee of your embark money to have a contracted embark geologist dig a pre-dug hole for you and issue a report. That's kind of what stance a (knowledgeable) player finding out about it would take, just digging, taking (not ingame) notes of what rock types and layers viewed on the way down.

Trying to explain your report in a physical statue/slab/wooden sign slab next to the hole with pictures would be funny, but i think its unlikely.

[clinodev]

You can render with the minutest bit of modding,

Hopefully most people will play their first tutorial embark in a vanilla world, at least! 

In-universe explanations may still be on the table though for player usability without merging the embark-assistant tool right in, like pre-established geologic surveys which you pay a small fee of your embark money to have a contracted embark geologist dig a pre-dug hole for you and issue a report[...].

Honestly, in a world where any 12 year old can mine and smelt any ore, and cut any gemstone as well as the most ancient grandmaster in the mountain hall, just not as fast, I figure that dwarves with travel lust and caravaneers have been wandering the surface and the deep ways of the caverns since Armok created the Great Ancestoral Anvil all other anvils are descended from, taking notes on every magnetite mountain outcrop, tetrahedrite river cut, coal seam, and emerald-like gleam in a marble cavern pillar, and storing it in the mountain hall Libraries. When the Mountainhome sends out an expedition to build a fortress to check goblin expansion in the East, they first send word to the scholars who pour over their scrolls and examine their quires to find a location that suits both the security needs of the civilization, but gives the fortress dwarves the best chance to build and to live in comfort with great wealth.

I edited my earlier post some, but I don't think it affects your reply.

[FantasticDorf]

You can render with the minutest bit of modding,

Hopefully most people will play their first tutorial embark in a vanilla world, at least! 

That's by no means a gurantee, a lot of newer players run straight for the tilesets/supported usersets with LNP, reinforced by the recent DFhack survey posed to Reddit users, where actual big tier modifications typified for ascii aren't that common you can guess for first choice but masterwork mod players (graphical + technical in modding) benchmarks a entire popular generation of DF players with some up 8 to 10 years ago still occasionally popping up in the present, because they'd heard about the steam release & a very low key amount of hype for modding to pick up again afterwards.

Speaking of that Survey, here it is for Toady incase they hadn't seen it.
<Link>
Though DFhack is obviously seperate, what do you think of the filtered polled data in parallel to your current work on the steam release?

[Toady One]

Here's a reply to about keyboard stuff I posted earlier in the month: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8380435#msg8380435

Does breaking into the caverns still essentially destroy your FPS?  I remember the game losing a ton of FPS back in the day if you broke into them, and it was one of the reasons you didn't want to do that.  Has this already been mitigated, and I am so stuck in my old ways that I never realized it?  Will the steam release include performances fixes for these sorts of common FPS losses?

We haven't observed this, and I'm not sure what it would be.  Something to do with webs and looms?

The information provided about being able to change the difficulty settings (encounter triggers, wealth, etc.) on embark made me curious about two distinct things. The first was the changing of these setting during an active fort without having to go to save files. Even if this required the game to save, quit, relaunch, and reload, this would be a fantastic storytelling tool, one that is already heavily used by many DF storytellers.

My second thought/question extends on from the first... In the future, could we see these variabes being modified dynamically in the game itself?
This is slightly complex to explain the use-cases of, but I'll try to be conciese...
Certain collections of modifiers could be made and defined as 'Periods'. A 'Period of Peace' might start when there are no wars and most factions have good relations. This period would slightly nudge the conflict rate down by modifying the settings approapriately. Similarly, if relations between many factions are bad, but haven't yet resulted in war, a 'Period of Tension' might occur, which raises the likelyhood of certain kinds of hostilities, reduces the elf-enforced tree-cutting limit, theives are more common, etc. Finally, to continue the example, a 'Period of Conflict' might start when a large number of wars break out, or a lot of sites are conquered, increasing the likelyhood of raids, seiges, and other threats, before things eventually settle down again.
This could later be tied into the economics, job assignments and other systems, so that these things also vary, such as having more guards during a 'Period of Tension' and harsher prison sentances, and weapons and armor being in high demand during a 'Period of Conflict', making them more valuable as trade goods.
Obviously, this is a big, long term kind of thing that would need to be strong enough to be noticable, but also not so strong that it derails things too often. Balancing would be a nightmare.
I'm curious if this kind of abstracted mood or relations layer is something that you have considered, or your thoughts on it more generally?

clinodev: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8379318#msg8379318

Yeah, as clinodev says, we'll be able to change a lot of stuff on the fly, and which settings go in at the world level, which at the embark level, and which at the any-time-at-all level comes down to player happiness now rather than anything technical.  Right now difficulty is set at embark (including customizing all of the trigger values), but there could be an option to make that available as a settings tab available during play.  I imagine some people will wanna be locked in, and others will want to freely change things.

Exceptions include most world options, which are almost entirely in the world gen parameters where it makes sense to have them.  Like, once it generates X titans, there's no point in changing that number.

I'm not personally super interested in an abstract later - I'm interested in the simulation giving rise to stories.  For instance, one of the goals of the army arc (which we may not attain depending on the political side) is to get rid of the need for siege triggers.  However, I'd be willing to support stuff that's (1) easy to write and maintain, and (2) plays nice with the simulation.  A stark example of this is the "disable invasions" difficulty option.  It's obviously not part of the simulation, but it can easily live alongside the simulation and I don't have to work much to keep it around.  So we may see things like this expand our difficulty options as people suggest them.  Another caveat - stuff like the periods you describe would fit right in with deity influence etc. etc., so may in fact become part of the simulation if things go that way, on a per-universe basis.

More questions about the irritation mechanic: 1) Is it a behaviour attached to a token on a creature (such as all or some giant animals through CV's) or a always present enviromental hazard?

2) And does it apply to the naked wildnerness animalpeople as we know it already? (though i would be suprised if animalpeople aboveground were united into their own civ-group alongside subterrenean people given the extreme variety, much least that'd mean a expansion of the entity file, or some hardcoded function)

I dont want to get the idea that a sudden stampede of irritated rhinos can be misinterpreted as a pseudo-siege, but there is getting a slight perceptive disparity over what 'irritation' means and its participants with your ostrich example of mundane animals as a overall mechanic. But maybe im just overthinking it.

1) I think it just applies to any aboveground wilderness population creature.

2) The aboveground animal people don't have entities or anything, and they get hit with it as well.

With the internal menus for the settings coming, will we still be able to change the settings in d_init.txt, init.txt and other such files? I'm personally more comfortable with editing the settings with a text editor, so I'm curious to know if this option will still be available.

These types of files should still exist, yeah.  I'll have to save the settings changes people make, and that can just be in text.  I'm not sure if it'll end up in a separate file, etc.

Will both version of the game receive the same updates other than graphics/UI/mouse support stuff?

Ziusudra: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8379671#msg8379671

Once we get Classic ready, yeah, it's all the same code base, so everything that isn't a menu needing adaptation comes for free, and once the number of menus needing adaptation isn't the whole game, I should be able to keep up with that for every release as well.  The new vanilla music and art are Premium only of course.

Does the premium version have tools like this?  For example, if I can designate a bedroom, then copy and paste it a few times, then that will be faster than even the keyboard controls currently are.  Once they are dug out, can I then place all the room's furniture I need, then copy and paste those into the other bedrooms?  I don't want you to actually just become a clone of other games, but all these other games have these Quality of Life features for a reason. 

I mentioned blueprints last month as something that's on the table, but we don't have anything like this yet.  Building placement definitely needs a bit more help.

Are there any plans for updating stockpile settings to either:

    Allow stockpile priorities (Important/High/Medium/Low, defaults to Medium for example) - similar to Rimworld and other games
    Change Allow stockpiles from both give/take from either linked or any, to allowing individual link/any options for either give or take? Ex: Main storage stockpile is set to take/give from all, and it is linked to give to bar stockpile #1. Workshops and such wouldn't be prohibited from taking from the main storage stockpile without a link to the main stockpile.


I bring up #1 because having a low priority central general stockpile has obvious benefits, allowing you to set up more targeted higher priority stockpiles elsewhere. It would make sense for stockpile links to override priority settings.

If option #1 is not viable, then I bring up #2 because it would be useful to have a central general stockpile, and occasionally link new more targeted stockpile to it somewhere else without limiting everything else from taking from the central general stockpile. At the moment once you've introduced one linked stockpile, you're essentially forced to establish links to every workshop or other stockpile that would have otherwise had access to the central general stockpile, making it an all or nothing choice which can cost someone a lot of time depending on the amount of workshops that might use that central general stockpile.

I think this is an area of opportunity that would benefit from some type of polish for new future users.

There've been a number of different suggestions about this over the years.  I'm worried about CPU load with priorities, where every item in every stockpile would be more potentially restless about its storage, and item storage is already troublesome CPU-wise as is.  It feels doable with some kind of under-the-hood management system orchestrating it, making it something other than auto-links everywhere, but that would be a larger project.  On the other hand, adding some extra options for how links work vs. workshops taking from piles seems more manageable, unless I'm missing something.

Will it be possible to turn off tooltips?

That's not in there now but would be quick to set up.  I'll keep it in mind for the settings stuff I'm about to start.

What was the nature of the bug tipped by Putnam?

Will the fix have a visible footprint on the in-game cultures? I.e. will there be fewer/more books in a given world, or some properties of the former being rarer/more common?

Does this book change imply authors in WG will spend less time reading books, or less time writing books about books? Necromancer towers can often contain books about the writing of a book that details the history of a book, which is a rebuttal of a book, about the author, all by the same author. Could really do with some books on what they think the meaning of life and death is or magical theory something, though that's more for myth and magic update.

With the impoverished word selector, are we looking at additions to the vocabulary and symbols lists again, or a workaround that let's them choose off-topic vocabulary?

And do you/Kitfox have a plan to deal with Steam mods that might contain adult content, like the words you removed some time ago, "nude" mods, cow woman milking, manure etc (you know it's going to happen)

It was authoring the various books that need historical information about the author.  They went over the totality of history too often, and history is always growing.  I was troubled at first that it wasn't specifically art-form related, but the world gen times prove that this was the big block.  It's possible that the authors no longer attempted books when art was turned off because of the various writing forms and some of their linkages to the other art stuff, but I'm not really sure.

Any changes to books should be unnoticeably subtle, and only for certain authors - authors still go over all of history, but they keep track of where they left off and cache a large number of events they'd like to write about (it was the repeat authors that were the real culprit.)  Once an author has been involved in a hundred events, it starts overwriting the cache based on importance, but most authors don't get to that number of events in their lives, so it's just not going to affect anything, or if it does, it would mean that the authors with super eventful lives focus on (lots of) stuff that's important, which is an improvement, but it would really take a lot of events to be noticeable.  The zanier books about stuff that isn't important (important to us, anyway) will still be frequent.

The impoverished word selector thing is still there as far as I know, and I don't know what the deal is.

We haven't talked about mod moderation with Kitfox yet.  I know Steam has tags for adult content and permits all manner of matter.  I'm not sure if they'll want to have a say as well.

Are blade scabbards planned for the future, and if so, would they be able to go on one's hip/waist? (More realistic (for longer weapons at least) than on upper body.)

I think we mentioned them somewhere in the vastness of notes but I'm not sure when.  The current 'strapped' stuff supports the upper body and waterskins get stuffed in pants and such, so there's some precedent floating around for various configurations which might be possible.

To clarify regarding designations; does this mean that a mouse only or wasd+mouse designation method will be the default, with the traditional keyboard-only approach having a way to be enabled for players who prefer that method?

Something like that, yeah.  More generally, when I get to other menus, I'm not sure if there will be one universal way to opt-in to keyboard selectors/etc. that you won't have to invoke over and over, just once.  That seems preferable.

How are you holding up given what is probably a lot of stress? Do you worry that the game will not be recieved well? Are you drinking enough water?

This question was asked before June got especially bad.  Now I dunno.  Wasn't a great month, but I'm still here.  The game's always been weird but I think it'll be okay.  Water every day, possibly enough.

Will we be able to click and drag round and rectangular shapes for constructions/designations, à la mspaint?

Is there are reason you're not doing pre-sales to boost your income for the time being?

Haven't added brush shapes yet.  I don't know that we'll get to that at first, but it's certain possible to do that kind of thing now.

My second-hand understanding is that pre-sales are only permitted for large companies that Steam knows are capable of paying the pre-sale money back if something unexpected happens, but I don't remember where I heard that.  I don't recall ever seeing an indie game with pre-sales, but I might be wrong.  Things are fine now, in any case.  The community has responded resoundingly and decided to keep us afloat.

Will cooking plants ever drop seeds?
Do you have any plans for logs themselves to wear out over the centuries, and if so, would that include constructed buildings? Would we have to do dwarven demolition of old surface buildings?
How come there's such a limited selection of creature tags you can put on a syndrome with CE_ADD_TAG?
Have you ever considered adding config options for features like unretiring breaking forts and such?

Cooked seeds: Saving seeds from cooked plants as part of cooking is on the list of things to try to get in, since it can be harmful to new players especially.

Log rot: I don't recall any plans here.  We only ever did the moss to show age, but definitely lots more to do.

Tags: They all need to be implemented manually, since weird stuff sometimes needs to be dealt with, so we just do them as they come up.

I'm not sure what you mean by the config option here.  Broken forts just sounds like bugs to fix, and retirement certainly has its share, but maybe I'm just not thinking of a way to parse 'breaking forts' correctly.

There was some mentions of the Z-status screen changing earlier, which reminded me of some not so DF related things I've been wanting to ask:

Did you possibly intentionally (or subconsciously) choose the z-key for the status screen because it was used in the Ultima series (Ztats) and, I think, some other old crpgs?

Speaking of Ultima, you've mentioned they've influenced you in world building, so my next question:

Do you have a favorite Ultima game or which one influenced you the most?

Yeah, Ztats...  I don't remember specifically if that's what we were thinking since it was so long ago, but it seems likely.  I was certainly aware and can still visually the command coming up in the little cursor area on the lower right.

Let's see, we played Ultima 3 to 8, the two Underworlds, and the dinosaur one but not the mars one.

My favorite is 4 because it was so different from anything before, but the improvements from 5 to 7 were pretty inspirational in terms of how the world was becoming more interactive, and the first Underworld has a really striking claustrophobic survival atmosphere that I haven't felt recaptured in any game I've played since, though I haven't played a lot of the new survival-style games.

Is there going to be a more user friendly animal stocks page?  I would like to be able to sort them by name, type, etc; but in the current DF version, they are all in a giant list by join date, which is kind of pointless and hard to figure out what you have.

The current Pets/Livestock info menu mostly does this; name sorting works, though the type part is weird/broken now.

I was in the object testing arena playing around with melee ranged hybrids and i ran into some issues, but it got me thinking (the issue was there are no quivers in there but anyway)

Will the object testing arena be in the first release?

As an extension, will i be able to make and save presets (grand master axedwarf with all relevant skills and full armor as an example) itd make repeated testing nice, one 5v5 can be misleading

When a dwarf has a crossbow they try to stay back, when they have a melee weapon they tend to rush the enemy, how do they behave when they have both?

What makes crossbows such a bad melee weapon?  (gave a steel one to a bronze colossus and they only bruised their victims to death yikes that’s ineffective)

Ive seen dwarves parry arrows, how good are they at it at comparative skill levels when compared to a shield

Arena: It's one of the borderline things for the first release, with Adventure, Classic, etc.  I know it's really important to modders, etc., and is presumably a lot quicker to do than, say, all of Adventure mode.  But now it's July, and we'll just have to see what happens as we work through everything.  I haven't planned any major new features for it.

Crossbow melee weapon (I assume people that replied know more than me about this at this point, after all the testing):
Ziusudra: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8381057#msg8381057
FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8381102#msg8381102

Parry: The main code I'm finding here is that, for projectiles, the defender's parry roll is halved, and their block roll is doubled.

Will there ever be Randomly generated Martial Arts? Will dwarven children ever play-spar with each other and get combat experience?

FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8381188#msg8381188
Schmaven: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8381238#msg8381238

Yeah, we had some specific plans for generated martial arts, and it was even kinda-sorta in Armok 1.  But we haven't gotten back around to it in all these years.

If we added child play-sparring, I have no idea how much it should actually count.

Have the artists recovered enough of the art to do a showcase video any time soon? I found those were both very enjoyable and gave a clear image of how the GUI worked in practice.

We're not there yet.  They aren't working on any new stuff until the video-needed art is redone, so we'll really be doing videos again as soon as it's possible.  There was just an awful lot to replace.

Q: Regarding the groundwork of "religious hunting orders", will they avoid forming in the death religion* or will a alternative explanation like ethical legality on necromancy/nightcreatures be introduced to motivate their behaviours?

        Since the main proprietor of give & take for slabs (creating devoted followers who raise & destroy the undead) is the god itself as the source. Seems good for making bodies, but not for a clear view of what the sphere would now represent.

We've tried at times to tie the spheres to justifications, as with the releasing of demons by all sorts of spheres for a variety of reasons.  So hopefully we'd be able to provide an actual justification for why things happen when it comes to opposing necromancers in various ways.  Obviously there's the practical reason of not wanting the world to be dead, but it's good to go beyond that, even as it relates to intelligent undead becoming poets or whatever and figuring out what is going on with society after all.  Maybe some of them will be cool with that.

1.Right now necromancers can attack your fort at any time if you are close enough. Is that intentional?
2.What changes to traps can we expect before magic?
3.Will mothers stop bringing their babies to battle in the near future?
4.Do you plan to implement proper civil wars, and if yes, when would that be?

FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8381619#msg8381619

1. Yeah, it's set up like that, though we've changed the sizes and some of the ramp-up formulas now.  They don't have a reliable entity definition, so the regular trigger system doesn't apply to them.
2. One idea is that a simple hallway setup shouldn't be able to stop every siege, and we'll keep messing with stuff to accomplish this.  I'm not sure if that means leaning more toward AI changes, rather than changes to trap mechanics.  The big stuff we wanted to do with traps has to wait for the map rewrite.
3. Probably not, though we've taken into consideration all the various ideas surrounding childcare and hope to get there sometime before the far future.
4. One avenue we'd considered more recently was the coup stuff we have for the villain release.  The claimant stuff from before never panned out, and I'm not sure when it'll be revisited.  Internal civil war discussion also came up when we were looking at the stress code and miserable forts.  But I'm not sure.  Over the course of the army stuff, which is happening after the release gets cleaned up and villains get sorted, there will be a lot of new army UI and mechanisms, and things will become tempting from various directions I suspect, especially if the player is given a freer hand to mess about with their own civ.

So the question is: have you ever thought of playing as an intelligent magical artifact?

We have various odd notes, some regarding what sorts of objects generally we'd want to allow.  I remember one weird brainstorming triangle averaging between items and creatures and landforms, trying to capture as many possibilities as we can so that the code can remain 'future-proof', but I don't recall specifically if we considered intelligent items as a player option (we'd certainly considered them as a thing.)  Waiting at the bottom of a river for 2500 years seems like it would need some kind of speed-up option, anyway.

In the recent update it said, people tend to worship frequent attackers of the same kind. Is this where it ends, or does/can it go further?
like i.e. a contract involving sacrifice of humans or cattle in exchange for peace/protection or something?

FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8382675#msg8382675
PatrikLundell: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8382815#msg8382815
FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8382821#msg8382821
PatrikLundell: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8382878#msg8382878
Rumrusher: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8383284#msg8383284

As suggested by the replies, nothing very interesting happens currently on top of what has already been mentioned (initial beliefs, prophets forming a simple religion, which can then spread as usual, etc.)  I didn't check for shrines.  The abstract religious infrastructure for megabeast religions increases, but I'm not sure it results in shrines, and I'm not sure if the resulting shrines have dice and what would happen if you roll them.  Perhaps nothing, though megabeasts do have spheres attached so it might just go with it.  We'll have to wait for adv mode to be updated!

Does this new version address the super annoying issue of all military dwarves losing their assigned rooms every time you send them on a mission?

Not yet.  There are a lot of bugs to fix.

would it be possible within the next version to define megabeast worshipping religions on entity.txt? Or are they entirely by design w.g circumstantial?

It would be a new feature push to do anything formal in the entity files.  The w.g. stuff initially happens at the historical figure level, and any religions that are formed later by prophets happen in the usual way (piggy backing off the civ def.)

Are the changes to farming depth based, or specifically surface soil and cavern based?

Have there been changes to farming that make irrigated stone plots on arbitrary levels less effective?

Encouraging players to dig a little deeper is lovely, but not at the expense of the Deep Plots that provide for the Dwarven Wine drank by the master smiths working at magma forges just above the lowest levels, when they take their rest.

In this general context, I've also been asked by dirty hill dwarves:

Will the changes will make actual outdoor plant surface farming less effective?

Yeah, it requires the actual cavern surface.  Have been contemplating ways to allow people to farm elsewhere, while still requiring some undersurface contact.  This could involve, say, a soil gathering zone to place/improve a plot elsewhere, or something to do with irrigation.  It's not just that we want people to dig a little deeper, we want the caverns to matter at all.  Without several changes they might as well just be walled up whenever you find them, which is really not great.  Also notable, the underground 'poor soil' farms work, they just aren't as good, and have to be much bigger to function as before.

Outdoor plant farming is unchanged.

don't get me wrong, goo rain and dust are both deserving of an evil embark.
but I miss the challenge of dealing with all the nasties that came with certain biomes.
Stuff like roaming undead animals and flying hungry heads that scour the earth hunting anything living.

did you remove standard evil areas intentionally?

FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8384735#msg8384735

Yeah, FantasticDorf is correct, though I've already forgotten the details.  I don't remember specifically why regular zombies/evil creatures etc. were a casualty of this, or if they exist anywhere outside of demon/necro/mummy influence zones.  We moved the nightmare stuff to certain of them, but of course that doesn't really come up in the fort (we could have bogeyman in those regions attack isolated dwarves sometimes and just ignore the day/night part of it if we were cruel I suppose.)

On the topic; with the changes being made to sustainability away from shallower layers to "more rich" farmland beneath what are your thoughts on the current state of cavern wildlife, and are we likely to see any biome alterations/isolated spheres in the caverns for the next version?

I'm going to save everything like that for the map rewrite/magic release now, I think.  Sometimes it's fun to throw in surprises, and we have a few for this upcoming release (on top of the return of more robust underground animal people we've already mentioned), and it may happen again before magic, but it's all ultimately going to be gutted so there shouldn't be too much time spent there.

Are there any plans to improve the state of Dwarven recidivism in game? I see there are changes being made to the current stress system, will any of these improve matters?

A dwarf that gets thrown in prison for starting fights will likely only get worse while in prison, no matter how crazy expensive ritzy you make said prison.

The stress system has changed a lot, and my impression is that situations like this in general can be handled a little better now.  But they still won't like being in prison all that much!

If I remember correctly, when talking about the myths&magic update, you mentioned procedurally generated races and worlds that may not include dwarfs. Does that mean that fortress mode will be expanded to make all civilizations playable regardless of what race they are? Are there going to be mechanical or technological differences between different races and civilizations?

PatrikLundell: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8385449#msg8385449
dikbutdagrate: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8385472#msg8385472
voliol: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8385504#msg8385504

Yeah, we'd have to make more critters playable for sure, and there'd naturally be differences.  At the very beginning, before the first release, things would obviously start all being very dwarf-like, since that's our starting point, and then it's a matter of expanding and restricting to make the differences arise.  Anybody's guess how different they feel on the first magic release.  I imagine there'll still be quite a bit of residual 'dwarf feel' for the other/procedural start options, with some striking differences, and that they'll then continue to grow apart.

We have pump screws which convert dwarves labor into power for the sole purposes of pumping fluids, but why don't have a device for converting dwarves labor into power in general, like a treadmill?

Yeah, there was a point some time after screwpumps where animal power was considered, with some kind of treadmill / conan-wheel-for-animals situation of some kind, but we never got to it.  I'm not sure when we'll get a chance.

With all that in mind, are you considering expanding the site selection search for Premium? It seems like a low-effort, high return change, and would act as more of a difficulty lever than many other changes. Searching for sedimentary layers [edit: or really much better, particular metals and minerals] would produce a far higher chance of good sites, for instance, than "shallow metals".

FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8385616#msg8385616
clinodev (op): http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8385644#msg8385644
FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8385669#msg8385669

So there's a whole chunk of site finder left to do that straddles Stage 2/3.  The main thing for us is just making it more responsive, but we can consider other stuff while we are there.  I agree shallow metals isn't satisfying at all.

have you considered asking the "Do you want to do a tutorial?" question at the beginning of worldgen and locking the default "tutorial" experience to reasonable settings like "small" and "short"? This would go a long way towards discouraging the standard new player impulse to say, "I have a decent computer, let's choose Large and Very Long, heck, all max settings!" which leads to frustratingly long worldgens [Edit: and necromancer death worlds, and so on].

I dunno, this feels like a little too much, attaching the tutorial to world generation, though I'm not sure why.  Maybe it's not a bad idea overall.  I have some warnings on those options, the ones which cause worldgen to take longer than a minute, though yeah I'm sure some people will ignore them.

Though DFhack is obviously seperate, what do you think of the filtered polled data in parallel to your current work on the steam release?

Yeah, Alexandra gave us a related reddit link.  There's certainly a lot of relevant information for us.  Any point on toil reduction is important of course, and we haven't handled a lot of stuff that's in the survey for the release.  The military and labor are notably different now, but farming/nest-boxes/etc. aren't really.  Tracks are a little easier to make now, but we still need a track inspector.  And so forth!  It's a lot of good stuff.

[clinodev]

Thanks as always for the replies!