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[FantasticDorf]

Hello, Tarn! Glad to see you're doing well.

Will the army update include formation movements for militia/soldiers? Do you plan on generalizing such a feature to include more group behavior, e.g. families hanging out together, friends going in groups to the tavern etc?

Questions that border on suggestions tend to fare poorly in the "nope didn't think about it" scale without being carefully worded, but there are a few things listed out on the army arc on the bay12 site already, as well as what you can infer from past FotF replies and press events.

Specifically, i would point you to the "Pre-Magic Improvement Candidates", as these are the nearest term things outside of what's immediately needing attention of the adventurer mode, continuing the spriting work (into things like missing artifact sprites and other edge case things, with baby-sprites and some ramps being recently finished), and other loose ends with the helpful oversight of Putnam.

[SamBucher]

What's the current status on bringing back square tilesets to the ASCII graphics mode, or other tileset resolutions beyond the standard vertical rectangle?

[Thisfox]

I don't know about anyone else on Mac, but I bought the game when it first came out on Steam, with no Windows machine and no intent to buy a windows machine. I still have no regrets, but I have owned the game for a while now, with no way of playing it. I tried wineskin, no success as yet. I suspect I'm not alone. Good to hear that a version I'll be able to play is still on the cards! Very exciting. I've missed playing DF for so long, good news is good. One day my game will return! Gives me something to look forward to.

[Silverwing235]

Hopefully the "gnarliness" to be fixed in adv mode includes experiments and other procgen things having semi-blank appearance data and other shenanigans in chargen, right? Also not intended, I guess, was being bounced back to 'choose your character' as though everything else were covered in gum and superglue, when all you wanted was, say, a change of the character's civilization?

[malarkor]

Hi there,

is releasing the source code of 0.47.* some day a possibility to preserve the history of DF and all the community art work, mods and add-ons made for it? Specifically this could live on as an Bay12 "overseen" community project, that aims at fixing at least some bugs and performance issues as well as maintaining modern systems compatibility.

A somewhat restrictive license could protect the current day economics of DF.

Thank you for this game and kind regards.

[FantasticDorf]

Hi there,

is releasing the source code of 0.47.* some day a possibility to preserve the history of DF and all the community art work, mods and add-ons made for it?

A somewhat restrictive license could protect the current day economics of DF.

Thank you for this game and kind regards.

For all foreseeable plans i imagine Toady could have, the DFFD still exists as does hosting every version new and old on the website, as well as the. ver.50 and 47. are only as detached as the code and summary changes required to get the steam version in its present state. There are other DFlike titles that have been achieved without DF source code, such as Rimworld, 'Gnomoria' and 'Towns' (a blast from the past on those last two)

About the DFFD mod/save/asset hosting site specifically and its database, things happened and many files were orphaned and profiles gone (including my own). Its not possible to completely secure a 100% of publically accessible content all of the time without human error, and having the source code or not wouldn't really cover all bases, as there have been technical issues too in Tarn and Zach's efforts to develop the game on more than one occasion.

Lime green for questions please.

[malarkor]

Hi there,

is releasing the source code of 0.47.* some day a possibility to preserve the history of DF and all the community art work, mods and add-ons made for it?

A somewhat restrictive license could protect the current day economics of DF.

Thank you for this game and kind regards.

For all foreseeable plans i imagine Toady could have, the DFFD still exists as does hosting every version new and old on the website, as well as the. ver.50 and 47. are only as detached as the code and summary changes required to get the steam version in its present state. There are other DFlike titles that have been achieved without DF source code, such as Rimworld, 'Gnomoria' and 'Towns' (a blast from the past on those last two)

About the DFFD mod/save/asset hosting site specifically and its database, things happened and many files were orphaned and profiles gone (including my own). Its not possible to completely secure a 100% of publically accessible content all of the time without human error, and having the source code or not wouldn't really cover all bases, as there have been technical issues too in Tarn and Zach's efforts to develop the game on more than one occasion.

Lime green for questions please.

Thank you for the answer. I edited my question to be more precise.

[BlackAion]

Sure, but I don't think it overcomes the core problem.  Things plopped in infinite wildernesses aren't related to each other, without a lot of extra effort, and are never going to have the same richness of history in their spaces.

With the new introduction of A.I. would it be possible to implement an A.I. into the program which would help these things relate to each other?

[LuuBluum]

Sure, but I don't think it overcomes the core problem.  Things plopped in infinite wildernesses aren't related to each other, without a lot of extra effort, and are never going to have the same richness of history in their spaces.

With the new introduction of A.I. would it be possible to implement an A.I. into the program which would help these things relate to each other?

Not particularly, no.

[BlackAion]

Sure, but I don't think it overcomes the core problem.  Things plopped in infinite wildernesses aren't related to each other, without a lot of extra effort, and are never going to have the same richness of history in their spaces.

With the new introduction of A.I. would it be possible to implement an A.I. into the program which would help these things relate to each other?

Not particularly, no.

I see. What exactly needs to be done to actually provide that same richness of history? Knowing that I can figure out what exactly am I asking for and how much work it would entail.

[LuuBluum]

Problem isn't the detail, it's the "why". Why do these people worship this particular thing? Why does the magic work this way? You can generate neat textual descriptions through AI if you want so that it just makes up random stuff, but it'd be completely disconnected from any other system of the game. What good is a mechanism to plop down neat textual descriptions of civilizations if it can't also churn out a history of them and their relation to the rest of the world?

[BlackAion]

Problem isn't the detail, it's the "why". Why do these people worship this particular thing? Why does the magic work this way? You can generate neat textual descriptions through AI if you want so that it just makes up random stuff, but it'd be completely disconnected from any other system of the game. What good is a mechanism to plop down neat textual descriptions of civilizations if it can't also churn out a history of them and their relation to the rest of the world?

I see. Would it be possible to manually create a number of keywords and then use the A.I. to form an historical narrative based off the keywords and based off the already existing world generating information? That way it could theoretically create a history for random stuff placed in an arbitrarily infinite expanse that wont contradict anything taking place in the rest of the world.

[LuuBluum]

Problem isn't the detail, it's the "why". Why do these people worship this particular thing? Why does the magic work this way? You can generate neat textual descriptions through AI if you want so that it just makes up random stuff, but it'd be completely disconnected from any other system of the game. What good is a mechanism to plop down neat textual descriptions of civilizations if it can't also churn out a history of them and their relation to the rest of the world?

I see. Would it be possible to manually create a number of keywords and then use the A.I. to form an historical narrative based off the keywords and based off the already existing world generating information? That way it could theoretically create a history for random stuff placed in an arbitrarily infinite expanse that wont contradict anything taking place in the rest of the world.

No, because those narratives would need to intersect with an arbitrary number of other narratives. You need each narrative to be aware of each other narrative at the outset.

The other issue, of course, is that this then needs to actually be tied into game systems. Which is generally quite awful to do from textual descriptions. This is why the game goes the other way around; it generates the text from the data. In short, the game would already need to have generated the history and all the useful bits of nuance before you could use an AI to generate what would be effectively superfluous "fluff text" as a description. Then hope it doesn't manage to contradict anything, or add new information that it shouldn't.

[Toady One]

Any chance we will get to see other export options back in the steam game anytime soon? Like the option to export historical figures or terrain info. Currently we can only export main xml file but that's only like, only a part of everything. A lot of people are still waiting for full functionality as it was in the pre-steam version.

Yeah, it's not as far away now.  Just need some buttons pretty much.  The code is all still sitting there, and I think the image export still works though it might need to be updated.

Will the army update include formation movements for militia/soldiers? Do you plan on generalizing such a feature to include more group behavior, e.g. families hanging out together, friends going in groups to the tavern etc?

FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8502087#msg8502087

Formations and friend groups wouldn't be strongly related if I did either one.  Formation stuff is on the table generally for the army update.

What's the current status on bringing back square tilesets to the ASCII graphics mode, or other tileset resolutions beyond the standard vertical rectangle?

This is a little messier than bringing back legends export, since there are various menus and tiles that need to be refit, and there's also the conflict between the play area and the interface area tiles (32x32 vs. 8x12) that gets a little strange when either changes, since play textures will bleed through when the proportions change.  But fundamentally that should be down to a few targeted changes, and I marked the spots in the code where it comes up, or tried to anyway, since we're planning to get this handled.

Hopefully the "gnarliness" to be fixed in adv mode includes experiments and other procgen things having semi-blank appearance data and other shenanigans in chargen, right? Also not intended, I guess, was being bounced back to 'choose your character' as though everything else were covered in gum and superglue, when all you wanted was, say, a change of the character's civilization?

I'm not sure what the priorities will be here.  All animal people have essentially bland appearances as well and are played more than experiments.  The reason it has to kick you back to the beginning if you change your civilization is that all materials and items and skills could be different, unless you are talking about something else.

is releasing the source code of 0.47.* some day a possibility to preserve the history of DF and all the community art work, mods and add-ons made for it? Specifically this could live on as an Bay12 "overseen" community project, that aims at fixing at least some bugs and performance issues as well as maintaining modern systems compatibility.

A somewhat restrictive license could protect the current day economics of DF.

FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8503736#msg8503736
malarkor (op): http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8503838#msg8503838

There are no plans for a full source release, same as ever.  We're still considering other options (e.g. worldgen), but I don't think they'd address your concerns.

Sure, but I don't think it overcomes the core problem.  Things plopped in infinite wildernesses aren't related to each other, without a lot of extra effort, and are never going to have the same richness of history in their spaces.

With the new introduction of A.I. would it be possible to implement an A.I. into the program which would help these things relate to each other?

LuuBluum: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8504224#msg8504224
BlackAion (op): http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8504259#msg8504259
LuuBluum: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8504273#msg8504273
BlackAion (op): http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8504455#msg8504455
LuuBluum: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8504458#msg8504458

Don't have anything to add to this.  Making an AI that can form the necessary systemic links would be amazing, and it's beyond my ability or the ability of any current system I'm aware of.

[BlackAion]

I see. So, worlds bigger than Earth or infinite wildernesses are off the table for the foreseeable future then.