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[ror6ax]

What's the biggest impediment for enjoyable, fast development of new features (let's say map rewrite), code-wise?

Could you share a bit more about what goes into migrating a piece of old menu to the new system? What are the issues you faced in porting UI in general?

Has Mantis been working as expected? Do you still find it useful to have community submit bugs there?

Any chance for adding sound effect on UI element clicks for additional feedback?

Any plan to make food prices less OP?

What is your favorite steam mod for the game and why?

How has the collaboration with DFhack team been recently? What is the vision for the future now that some things from DFhack like sorting are natively supported? Will you or Putnam be looking into porting more features to the game?

[aSpatula66]

Why are migrants restricted to the main species of your civilization?

I recall that this was intentional, mainly because different species can have different clothing sizes and that creates some headaches with the present labor system. This does seem like a question of being able to define and label your fort's relationship with the greater world.

It sounds like an issue with the game not making it clear how to/it being tedious to make clothing for differently sized species then. Although 3 out of 4 main species have dwarf sized clothing so it would only be an issue with humans and animal people.

[KristoffPL]

Regarding the soundtrack question from last time - the Fortress Mode soundtrack should have wavs now!

Ahhh thank you so much Toady!!!

[Buttery_Mess]

Up until now, the artistic team has mostly been playing catch up to existing in game assets. When it's done with that, will there be the opportunity for new plants and animals to be added to the game? Or should I stop praying for hawthorne, magnolias and fuschias to be added and mod it in myself?

As it stands, in adventurer mode, nothing can really keep up a jogging pace for that long without getting knackered. Although endurance is varied as is recuperation, afaik recuperation can't be trained. Consequently dwarves, or anything else, can't ever really train to run marathons. Is this something that might change when you take another look at combat? What really stands out in the combat code that you want to take a look at?

[Eric Blank]

It's safer to mod in specific species yourself than wait for any to be added. I doubt we're going to be seeing any new creature sponsorships anytime soon.

Also, it was possible in 47.05 at least for a dwarf with super dwarven endurance to jog through entire sites and the countryside. I did that on my latest adventure in the Museum before becoming a vampire. But that was with superdwarven endurance, starting with decent endurance to begin with.

I agree that the threshold should be lowered though, or stamina use for jogging and running specifically lowered. However, combat is a different story entirely from running. Historically people didn't fight all day, units of men had to take breaks. So changing the stamina usage of jogging and running gaits makes more sense than changing all stamina usage. I wouldn't call professional athletes' performance "superhuman," as that implies going into the realm of fantasy. This is a fantasy game, so it makes sense that it should be possible to exceed what real humans are capable of, so you should be able to match real human capabilities without having to become "superhuman." A superhumanly endurant person should be able to exceed what a human can naturally do, like jog triple marathons or indefinitely. But still eventually tire during combat. We have to save room for the NOEXERT tag.

And humans are one of the few real world species that can actually do that, too. Dogs and horses can, but we selected certain breeds especially for endurance running, others not so much. Maybe humans should recieve a buff to endurance stat, but the attributes are supposed to be based on a human average, so maybe every other species should get a negative endurance modifier! Again, reducing the stamina usage of the gaits would have the same effect, and reducing it further for humans specifically would be sensible.

[Buttery_Mess]

I've been trying to get into working out in various ways lately, so I suppose jogging has been on my mind, but yeah, humans are supposed to be able to jog indefinitely which is kind of our super power. Certainly it's possible for us to run a marathon, and plenty of people are able to run even more than that. It's kind of bothersome to me that my adventurers seem to get puffed out very quickly after even a light jog, and I can't train their recuperation stat.

[Zaerosz]

So I haven't been on these forums in years, but a Reddit post I just saw shocked me enough I felt it needed to be brought up here.

This user claims that a dwarf in their fortress succumbed to melancholy, but a cave-in incident caused his skull to be shattered and his brain to be severely damaged; following treatment and recovery, that dwarf is no longer suffering from melancholy, has resumed eating and drinking, and no longer has any memory of his family. Is this an actual deliberate feature (recovery from insanity, I mean, but also the memory loss) that went undocumented at some point, or a fascinating bug that (IMO) should be elevated to feature? Or just a rando on the internet making up stories, I suppose.

[Eric Blank]

Wait, traumatic brain injury isn't actually linked to anything in the soul, it wouldnt affect memory, personality or insanity. And his treatment should have been "resurrected from the dead by a necromancer" if anything, because any major brain injury is instant death.

Either his game was heavily modded so the brain isn't the only THOUGHT body part, he got NOTHOUGHT and NO_THOUGHT_CENTER_FOR_MOVEMENT added at some point, or these claims are total bullshit.

[aSpatula66]

Hmm, resurrection using dfhack would cure insanity and cause the dwarf to forget about their marriage (but not the rest of their family.)
Sounds to me like this person just resurrected their insane dwarf after they died from brain damage. And left that part out.

[Toady One]

I've noticed that during worldgen, there is a huge boom of new sites during the first hundred years or so, after which expansion quiets down, some roads start being made, some crypts/monasteries...

Since worldgen has been made significantly faster now, would it be reasonable to slow down how quickly civilizations expand? I guess I could increase the site cap, but I'd rather have a world that's 500 years and still growing steadily.


Also, one small feature that's been missing since the steam version came out that is really bugging me:
You can't click on gods in the relationship tabs anymore! That's how I found out ages ago that my civ had their own special gods in the first place! Right now it seems like I have to build statues of them or hunt them down in legends mode to find out what appearance they have. Is this coming back?

EDIT: Oh and yeah, birthdays of my dorfs! I miss knowing those.

I'm not inclined to slow down the rates myself for vanilla.  I'd rather more disasters happened and there was other tumult with groups and such than to have less stuff.  It seems like the only relevant variable here is the abstract entity population rate (since hist fig rates are based on too many things.)  Exposing that as a parameter at some point would be reasonable for people that want a different pace.

I'll check that those are in the list of unfinished old business, and add them if not.

I recently noticed that none of the vanilla entities have stonecutter or stone carver as permitted jobs, and although modding them to have stonecutter works fine, adding stone carver does nothing and creates an error in the errorlog.

I also noticed some issues with mummies in adventure mode, they only curse you after exiting and re-entering combat with them and their curse is missing text (it just appears as "" in the announcement log.) Mummies not cursing you is something I've noticed in the previous version but the thing with text is likely because of how speech files were changed with the steam release.

Okay, I'll throw them in the bug pile.

What I meant was that although the civilizations have headwear and underwear assigned, NPCs never spawn with them as clothing. From my observations, legwear on the UNDER layer doesn't appear, bodywear on the COVER layer only appears on thieves, headwear on the UNDER layer appears but headwear on other layers don't, except for items on the COVER layer which only appear on thieves. All this only seems to apply to clothing and not armor though. I've also noticed that NPCs only generate with one clothing item per bodypart other than feet which do generate both socks and shoes.

Yeah, I didn't make an intentional change here, so I'll throw it in the bug pile.

Is support for wider/larger fonts for ASCII mode planned?

Yeah, we haven't gotten around to breaking free from the 8x12 and 32x32 limits on interface and play area elements.

Why are migrants restricted to the main species of your civilization? It makes no sense that even if half your civilization is non-dwarves they can't arrive as migrants. Maybe the first two guaranteed migrant waves could be only dwarves and after that non-dwarves are half as likely as dwarves to migrate to your fortress if you want to keep the amount of non-dwarven migrants low.

I addition to making no sense, I feel like it's a large contributing factor in spreading the misconception (especially among newer players) that species = civilization. Although I think the DF wiki is equally to blame given that they don't even have separate articles for the elven species and elven civilization, or the dwarven species and dwarven civilization, etc.


Also, why do people only immigrate to your fortress, instead of emigrating from your fortress? Maybe they would only do it if they're unhappy with your fortress and you permit them to, so that you have some control over it.

DPh Kraken: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8541078#msg8541078
aSpatula66 (op): http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8541268#msg8541268

Yeah, as DPh Kraken said, this was about clothing as I recall.

Emigration is a much bigger deal because it takes from the player, and it was also harder to implement in the past.  It has been on the table for a while now, I just haven't gotten around to it, but I have to be careful swiping citizens from people.

What's the biggest impediment for enjoyable, fast development of new features (let's say map rewrite), code-wise?

Could you share a bit more about what goes into migrating a piece of old menu to the new system? What are the issues you faced in porting UI in general?

Has Mantis been working as expected? Do you still find it useful to have community submit bugs there?

Any chance for adding sound effect on UI element clicks for additional feedback?

Any plan to make food prices less OP?

What is your favorite steam mod for the game and why?

How has the collaboration with DFhack team been recently? What is the vision for the future now that some things from DFhack like sorting are natively supported? Will you or Putnam be looking into porting more features to the game?

Just getting done with adventure mode, ha ha.  Then I should just be able to get started.  For the map rewrite specifically, some of the ways the underground layer stuff is woven into everything is going to be difficult to tease out piece meal, but it's the aim to try.

I just need to set up some scrollbars and index some textures and place some buttons.  It's not very elaborate generally, just mindnumbing at this point.  We dodged the largest issues by sticking with the ASCII grid.  Some of the layering is still annoying because we can't have graphics and text over each other more than once, which makes certain subwindows impossible to do, especially at smaller overall resolutions/window sizes.  It would be easier if they could all live together nicely without thinking about overlap.  Keyboard support is of course an ongoing challenge.

I know the Mantis has had some bumps, which I haven't heard about recently, so hopefully it's working.  I haven't really been deeply into the new Mantis yet since the basic menu work isn't done.

We already have the sounds avaiable, I just have to link them in, for adventure mode menus.  For fort mode menus, we need to have a whole meeting with the audio team etc. since the two engines for the modes need to be linked up etc etc.

Food has always been a bit weird.  We tightened a lot of the prices for the initial release, but if food prices are still out of control, they should be fixed, yeah.

Not aware of the mods currently.  Been pretty tunnel-visioned on menus and the surrounding matters.

Everything's been going well with DFHack as far as I can tell.  I don't have a specific list of DFHack features that I'm looking at at this time but I'm sure it'll come up again.

Up until now, the artistic team has mostly been playing catch up to existing in game assets. When it's done with that, will there be the opportunity for new plants and animals to be added to the game? Or should I stop praying for hawthorne, magnolias and fuschias to be added and mod it in myself?

As it stands, in adventurer mode, nothing can really keep up a jogging pace for that long without getting knackered. Although endurance is varied as is recuperation, afaik recuperation can't be trained. Consequently dwarves, or anything else, can't ever really train to run marathons. Is this something that might change when you take another look at combat? What really stands out in the combat code that you want to take a look at?

Eric Blank: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8542362#msg8542362
Buttery_Mess (op): http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8542372#msg8542372

I'm not sure when we'll get new plants and animals!  The art team isn't really the blocker there, just the current ones not feeling fleshed out enough kind of.  Things like capybaras being the only ones with sounds and all that.

Ranged combat is the worst.  Endurance generally is trouble for sure.  How death works could be changed.  Skills should be more interesting.  Special attack opportunities are deeply silly and should be integrated into some whole other mechanism.  And so forth.

This user claims that a dwarf in their fortress succumbed to melancholy, but a cave-in incident caused his skull to be shattered and his brain to be severely damaged; following treatment and recovery, that dwarf is no longer suffering from melancholy, has resumed eating and drinking, and no longer has any memory of his family. Is this an actual deliberate feature (recovery from insanity, I mean, but also the memory loss) that went undocumented at some point, or a fascinating bug that (IMO) should be elevated to feature? Or just a rando on the internet making up stories, I suppose.

Eric Blank: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8542521#msg8542521
aSpatula66: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8542526#msg8542526

Yeah, there isn't anything deliberate here anyway, ha ha.

[Putnam]

Brain damage causes instant death, generally, so I have my suspicions.

[Telgin]

Brain damage causes instant death, generally, so I have my suspicions.

I know this is getting a bit off topic, but this is something that I've wondered about for a while.  I've heard anecdotes that units can survive brain injuries in DF but I've never seen it.  Is this actually possible or are these people mistaken, misremembering, or experiencing bugs?

[Buttery_Mess]

Thanks for the replies, Toady!

[dikbutdagrate]

Tarn, I correspond with you more than most of my relatives, what's an example of a style of M&M (magical) item effect prohibited by each of the following classifications of effect start-up time? 
    a.) Magical item effects which are constant.

    b.) Magical item effects which trigger off a conditional.

    c.) Magical item effects which can be engaged by a creature in game through its behavioral AI once in its inventory, acting as a form of equippable interactions 

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

           --- a. [MAT_FIXED_TEMP] is the only example I can think of for effects like these in game. Although, maybe certain syndromes count?
           --- b. Very confused by these, haha. I have no idea what a mad lib setup for these would even look like. You do your thing with these Tarn!
                   The reference examples I came up with for these were demands associated with nobles; and [MAT_FIXED_TEMP:{<= 10000}]  + [SPEC_HEAT:1], trying tossing a material with these tokens in water (or covering them in any contaminant, actually.) It'll go from freezing cold to surface of the sun level hot.
           --- c. There's lots of stuff to draw examples from in game already.  So understanding these seems pretty intuitive.

[Toady One]

(I don't understand the use of "prohibited" here)