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[ryno]

my first post in the thread

Would you consider implementing powder physics? I feel that Dwarf Fortress is known for it's simulation systems, but a lot of what is going on is not obvious. Physics simulations however are a very upfront way to reveal complexity, and they can be amazing fun. I consider the water physics to be one of the strongest features of the game, and I'm wondering what your thoughts on sand physics are because I feel this is a core building block of a sandbox environment.

[Coolie]

Would you consider implementing powder physics? I feel that Dwarf Fortress is known for it's simulation systems, but a lot of what is going on is not obvious. Physics simulations however are a very upfront way to reveal complexity, and they can be amazing fun. I consider the water physics to be one of the strongest features of the game, and I'm wondering what your thoughts on sand physics are because I feel this is a core building block of a sandbox environment.

Powder physics in deserts would be really neat, and pose a real threat as I imagine it's pretty hard to build an underground fort on shifting sand dunes.

[Putnam]

Any hope that export legends functionality will be added to Steam version?

yes, it's just a matter of adding a button and i've already successfully added it back as a nice threaded thing a while back, it's just a matter of getting the UI together

[dikbutdagrate]

In DF Talk #28, you brought up "[adjective] dwarves" as a creature variant originating from mythgen.
The example of cloud dwarves and cloud dragons is a strong example of a shared spherical association. There's a pretty strong cultural background of what a creature associated with the sphere of SKY would be. Power of flight (either innate or as a spell), tissue layers could be given air-themed colors like sky blue or clear, any other interactions they can access would typically be either centered in the sphere of SKY or allowed to trickle in from related spheres.

1. This seems like a question of making the data structure for creature/object variations robust enough to have spherical and arbitrary tagging. Will we see the raw-defined creature variation object be expanded to serve the purpose of directed randomness in this way?
Like the idea of a single variation comprising [CE_ADD_TAG:CAN_SPEAK] + [CE_ADD_TAG:SKILL_LEARN_RATES:SPEAKING:200] given the sphere of SPEECH, when a creature is speciated to fit the magics of the speech domain. Likewise, different "dragon" abilities and bodies could be stored in the creature variation file with the creature definition calling those in a way that the world options can briefly look at the creature files to make buttons for.

2. Will we see the concept of a religious sphere also become opened up to modding? I know sub-domains of ANIMALS was talked about, but the idea of adding new spheres seems like something modders could do easily if the data structure was editable. The god descriptions and language symbols, and a new substructure for putting together creature variants.
Some way to discriminate variant generation by creature tags, that way we don't get redundant silliness like "talking dwarves" and "dark goblins" that describe what they already do. "Bardic dwarves" sounds more apt for an already-speaking creature and is more a flavor matter, but unless the concept of a goblin in DF is reworked to not always originate from dark pits there's not really any meaningful separation between a dark goblin and a banally evil regular goblin. Likewise, you'd need elves that don't live in forests for "wood elf" to be a meaningful discriminator, etc.

3. I'm also interested in the "humans, and one to two other things" scenario because it means either original entities or some sort of defined structure to elevate certain types of creatures. There are a couple of non-civilized mythical creatures in the game, and there's different attributes that would be expected of them. Satyrs love music and parties, gnomes can go in both really dwarfy (the tinker archetype) and really elfy (mushroom houses/"underground wood forest retreat") directions with that Paracelsian link to earth, and animal people should at least pay lip service to their ecological niche (diet and biome primarily). Gorlaks are described as good, so it'd be unusual having them originate a cruel and selfish civilization.
We also can sorta expect what a spherical variant of an entity would look like. Dark elves, if they're more broadly embodying the concept of evil rather than benign non-illumination, would behave in a certain general way. We'd expect them to dwell in cavern layers and dark pits, use evil words in their names, enjoy cruelty and hostility, just basically follow the goblin blueprint. Not all entity changes are created equal, as I'd imagine fire dwarves might be more passionate and prefer settling in warm biomes, but the subspecies is similar enough to integrate with the mountainhome unless there's a cultural rift with ice dwarves.

4. Fully procedural creatures, to me, seem like they'd benefit from a lot of the same variety that humans would, interestingly enough. I guess you'd need as much information you can in generating their entity definition, and without editing something that exists you'd need the spheres and the creation myth to really guide what it starts as. I guess even single entity tokens could be contextualized in the mythgen "such and such god revealed to this race the secret of brewing" and that would add the brewer job and the brewing reactions
Having such a huge list of associations is an argument against opening up the spheres, but would it be an extensible dev foundation to use object variations (in the specific technical sense we have now) as a way of grouping entity tokens mythologically? Not moving the entire entity def to applying variations, because that just reinvents tags, but things like making the various alloys is something that wants to be grouped. I don't want to learn about how the dwarves learned to make rose gold twice just because there's two separate reactions for it, it makes more sense that civs would learn about alloying metals as a whole

                   
Being concise tends to be helpful. Also, I'm not sure #3 is even a question.

[Miuramir]

Doesn't ichor date back to the Greeks?  Seems a bit of a stretch for someone to try and copywrite it.

The word does, but not the definition of it being applied by DF.

Ichor was the blood of the gods of mount Olympus. And as far as I am aware, the word ichor was not historically used in referring to mosquito and ant men blood. ...

"Ichor" was used at least as early as H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror" (written 1928, published April 1929) to describe the strange bodily fluids of chimeric combinations of human, creature, and otherworldly horrors.  This work is generally believed to be out of copyright in the US; as while it is still a year or so out from automatic public domain status, it would have had to be renewed, and several searches have found no evidence that it was.  (See Copyright status of works by H. P. Lovecraft for some discussion.)  I'm not really a Lovecraft scholar, so I'm not sure which work of his or his circle was the first to use it in this way; horror writers of the period borrowed heavily from each other; so the actual source of this could be considerably earlier. 

It was commonly enough used word in horror, fantasy, and gaming that by the mid-1980s it was starting to become a cliche; a series of Mythos-inspired ink prints "H. P. Lovecraft: Illustrated in Ichor" from 1984 is but one example.  That said, the evolved sense of it to describe circulating bodily fluids that were not ordinary blood, and usually nasty if not actually toxic, was useful enough that even Ursula K. Le Guin decrying its use as "the infallible touchstone of the seventh-rate [writer]" in 1985 didn't stop gamers in particular from continuing to use the term. 

[sofanthiel]

Hello!  This is my very first time posting on the forum
First and foremost, I just wanna say that I, like many many others, am a big fan of yours and your creation.  Now, the questions:

On the development page and in some DF talks, you've mentioned that you're planning to add ships and other moving fortress parts to the game.  My question is: will boats and other vehicles be modular and customizable objects that the player can construct block-by-block, or rather fixed structures, that are simply big blueprints the player adds resources to until the desired building is finished (like the trade depot, for example)?

You've also mentioned that you have plans to implement a society system into the game that reworks justice, economics, and culture.  Will the society system affect individual creature morals?  For example, it is currently impossible for dwarfs to butcher sentient beings.  Could a civilization of cannibalistic dwarfs that get mood buffs from doing the currently forbidden things be generated?  Will these systems be flexible, or stay the same for the sake of preventing the possibility bad PR (from what I've read, the mermaid thing could be considered an example of this)?

While both of these, if ever to happen, will come in a far far future, and are most likely subject to change, I'm still curious about your current plans/thoughts

[Bumber]

will boats and other vehicles be modular and customizable objects that the player can construct block-by-block

Yes.

Will the society system affect individual creature morals?

Yes.

[WereDragon]

After watching your interview with blind, do you mind elaborating a little more on how we are going to deal with assigning ammo to squads of marksdwarves?

Also is there any chance of marksdwarves using melee weapons that they are given as a backup? I.E if an enemy manages to reach my marksdwarves, but they have a hammer, would you want them to use the hammer, or would you want them to be ranged only troops vulnerable in melee.

[cliff987]

I apologize if this has been asked, but will there be an option for legacy controls? I can't really play the new version. Too many years with the old. I know that's a me problem, but figured might as well throw my two bits in.

[voliol]

I apologize if this has been asked, but will there be an option for legacy controls? I can't really play the new version. Too many years with the old. I know that's a me problem, but figured might as well throw my two bits in.

Welcome... back! to the forum cliff! Questions to Toady in this thread should be marked in lime green so he can find them easily. Legacy controls as the same key-bindings as before are not planned, but keyboard support either hybrid or full is for some unknown date.

[Shonai_Dweller]

After watching your interview with blind, do you mind elaborating a little more on how we are going to deal with assigning ammo to squads of marksdwarves?

Also is there any chance of marksdwarves using melee weapons that they are given as a backup? I.E if an enemy manages to reach my marksdwarves, but they have a hammer, would you want them to use the hammer, or would you want them to be ranged only troops vulnerable in melee.[/colour]

You'll want to move that [  / color ] tag to the end of your text to make it correctly Lime Green.
(As I've done here).

[PatrikLundell]

I apologize if this has been asked, but will there be an option for legacy controls? I can't really play the new version. Too many years with the old. I know that's a me problem, but figured might as well throw my two bits in.

There are a few reasons for why restoration of keyboard control won't use the same key bindings:
- The keyboard controls were very inconsistent (a number of different schemes for what was essentially the same control action used in different places), and that's rather messy for newcomers and not great overall.
- Functionality has been shifted around, so some new functionality isn't really the same as any of the old ones. Binding the old key to to something that's sort of the closest to an old usage isn't exactly great.
- When restoring keyboard control (it was intended to be almost entirely scrapped last summer) for a new audience provides an opportunity to not only consolidate "the same" actions to use the same keys throughout, but also to reshuffle keys bindings to keys that make more overall sense currently, rather than using whatever free key that sort of could be connected to some new functionality when that was added.

Will it be a pain to relearn keys? Yes.
Will it result in usage of muscle memory that's no longer correct for years to come? Yes.
Will it be better in the long run even for dinosaurs like me? Yes, unless the ability to form new memories have failed, in which case the game will probably be unplayable anyway.

I think it will be possible to change the key bindings, but I suspect it won't be worth the effort unless you need to because your (non US) keyboard doesn't provide a reasonable access to some keys (like everything that's used to "build" composite characters out of a modifier and a base character, like e.g. î on mine, where the circumflex isn't printable with a single key press, at least with normal keyboard processing routines).

[cliff987]

I apologize if this has been asked, but will there be an option for legacy controls? I can't really play the new version. Too many years with the old. I know that's a me problem, but figured might as well throw my two bits in.

There are a few reasons for why restoration of keyboard control won't use the same key bindings:
- The keyboard controls were very inconsistent (a number of different schemes for what was essentially the same control action used in different places), and that's rather messy for newcomers and not great overall.
- Functionality has been shifted around, so some new functionality isn't really the same as any of the old ones. Binding the old key to to something that's sort of the closest to an old usage isn't exactly great.
- When restoring keyboard control (it was intended to be almost entirely scrapped last summer) for a new audience provides an opportunity to not only consolidate "the same" actions to use the same keys throughout, but also to reshuffle keys bindings to keys that make more overall sense currently, rather than using whatever free key that sort of could be connected to some new functionality when that was added.

Will it be a pain to relearn keys? Yes.
Will it result in usage of muscle memory that's no longer correct for years to come? Yes.
Will it be better in the long run even for dinosaurs like me? Yes, unless the ability to form new memories have failed, in which case the game will probably be unplayable anyway.

I think it will be possible to change the key bindings, but I suspect it won't be worth the effort unless you need to because your (non US) keyboard doesn't provide a reasonable access to some keys (like everything that's used to "build" composite characters out of a modifier and a base character, like e.g. î on mine, where the circumflex isn't printable with a single key press, at least with normal keyboard processing routines).

I appreciate the reply, I understand the reason for the changes. I'd still like a classic mode, though, and would like to hear from toady specifically. Until then, I'll be using old versions. I COULD probably manage on a version that didn't need the mouse.

Also, you didn't really need to make the quip about memory. It's rude, and some folks do have memory issues.

In addition requesting a classic control schema doesn't take anything from the game, though it DOES require dev time, which I understand. I'd like to think the added utility to what had been an ascii, keyboard based game for over a decade would be nice, bring folks into the newer versions, and keep the spirit of the original around for a while longer.

[PatrikLundell]

@cliff987: I thought I was poking fun of myself... I apologize if people think it was directed at them.

Once keyboard support has been restored, assuming key rebinding is supported, it might be possible for interested parties to come up with a way to create a "classic" key rebinding tool that recreated the old bindings as much as possible. However, it might be tricky to change UI movement keys "back" if it isn't possible to bind the "same" function to different keys in different contexts.
Also, I personally think it's probably better to bite the bullet and relearn a new scheme rather than relearn a set that's partially new.

[Schmaven]

Once keyboard support has been restored, assuming key rebinding is supported, it might be possible for interested parties to come up with a way to create a "classic" key rebinding tool that recreated the old bindings as much as possible. However, it might be tricky to change UI movement keys "back" if it isn't possible to bind the "same" function to different keys in different contexts.

Although the process to get to them is often different, some of the same keys have been retained for various workshops and furniture in the premium version.  I imagine it's only a matter of time before more complete keyboard support is added, different though they may be.  I suppose there may still be technical hurdles to be overcome in that area.  For me, the seahorse sprites make learning the new keys worth it. 

Do you plan to add more keyboard control before or after the adventure mode update?