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[ryno]

What are your plans for aquatic animal people? Are they meant to be bound to the water to breathe?
Perhaps plans for interactions with the boats or visitors to underwater settlements?

the idea of underwater cities in dwarf fortress sounds extremely exciting to me. without such things i would love for them to be able to live on land instead, but if the seas were ever populated with content, then their aquatic restriction would feel justifiable, unique, and wonderful.

Therefor i too am curious about Toady's plans!

[A_Curious_Cat]

What are your plans for aquatic animal people? Are they meant to be bound to the water to breathe?
Perhaps plans for interactions with the boats or visitors to underwater settlements?

the idea of underwater cities in dwarf fortress sounds extremely exciting to me. without such things i would love for them to be able to live on land instead, but if the seas were ever populated with content, then their aquatic restriction would feel justifiable, unique, and wonderful.

Therefor i too am curious about Toady's plans!

I seem to remember that he posted that he wanted to have underwater civilizations, but that it wouldn’t happen until far into the future.  However, that was a long time ago, and he didn’t go into any detail, so I’m also interested in what he might have to say.

[DPh Kraken]

What are your plans for aquatic animal people? Are they meant to be bound to the water to breathe?
Perhaps plans for interactions with the boats or visitors to underwater settlements?

the idea of underwater cities in dwarf fortress sounds extremely exciting to me.

Interestingly, civilizations can settle on ocean tiles, though they cannot generate buildings (or their inhabitants) underwater when visited in adventure mode. Would love to see the merfolk with their own version of forest retreats made of kelp and coral, while coastal humans could build stilt-cities.

1. On the nautical theme: Is it likely we might have a way other than a complete vehicle system to explore the sea (such as a water-breathing syndrome, fish mounts, or wagon-style simple boats), so that oceanic adventures may be had? Was reading about Sinbad, and it feels totally in-line with the Adventure Mode vision: expendable companions, fire-breathing elephants, roc eggs, random haulers to foist your artifacts on, and even a Ñ!

2. I just learned that religions cannot form around Titans. Is this because such a religion should instead revere an associated Force, given the former's description as a "ancient force of nature"?

[FantasticDorf]

Interestingly, civilizations can settle on ocean tiles, though they cannot generate buildings (or their inhabitants) underwater when visited in adventure mode. Would love to see the merfolk with their own version of forest retreats made of kelp and coral, while coastal humans could build stilt-cities.

1. On the nautical theme: Is it likely we might have a way other than a complete vehicle system to explore the sea (such as a water-breathing syndrome, fish mounts, or wagon-style simple boats), so that oceanic adventures may be had? Was reading about Sinbad, and it feels totally in-line with the Adventure Mode vision: expendable companions, fire-breathing elephants, roc eggs, random haulers to foist your artifacts on, and even a Ñ!

2. I just learned that religions cannot form around Titans. Is this because such a religion should instead revere an associated Force, given the former's description as a "ancient force of nature"?

With some personal modding adjustment, from taking a pack-crocodile with you amphibiously cross continent works as well in adventuremode, though the implication would probably be you have to leave your full-aquatic mount behind rather than take it with you, sort of like the tropes of needing to buy a boat each time you want to go on the water because the game doesn't have the capacity to save it. Flying and water mounts already get access for map-level controllers, but protecting the rider to visit these underwater cities i think might need some magical intervention (of a object or a ability). Basic boat mods including summoning it whenever have been done in the past, like a coracle made for riding single use.

Building your own boat out of wood similarly to a adventurer base would be interesting for all the nessecary but optional mechanical alignments, a windmill for a sail needing to get gears going to the waterwheel paddlers.
Elves already have a reverence for titans seperately through their feelings about nature. Many different races aren't nearly as antagonistic as the titans are to them, since they'll lament their death when the news circulates in adventure mode.

[Pillbo]

Hey Toady, congrats on the engagement!

Since dev plans/roadmaps have changed a lot over the last couple years, I was curious where improvements to wildlife fit in to future dev cycles? Things like making animals (including sentient creatures like gorlaks, dragons, megabeasts, etc.) eat, hunt, and interact more with the world around them. Also ecological interactions like the plants influencing the animals that appear, animals influencing plant populations, prey avoiding predators, predators following prey, etc.

[dikbutdagrate]

2. I just learned that religions cannot form around Titans. Is this because such a religion should instead revere an associated Force, given the former's description as a "ancient force of nature"?

They can. I have a largely unmodified save where one such religion appeared. The main thing they can't do is curse people who worship their cult, and knock over a statue. They also don't appear able to generate dice. But cults can form as of .5x whatever.

[Putnam]

2. I just learned that religions cannot form around Titans. Is this because such a religion should instead revere an associated Force, given the former's description as a "ancient force of nature"?

I know where you got that, but you misunderstood: titans cannot be religious, unlike megabeasts, is what I meant there. They cannot worship another being.

[voliol]

Congratulations, Tarn, on getting married!!!!

[DPh Kraken]

2. I just learned that religions cannot form around Titans. Is this because such a religion should instead revere an associated Force, given the former's description as a "ancient force of nature"?

I know where you got that, but you misunderstood: titans cannot be religious, unlike megabeasts, is what I meant there. They cannot worship another being.

Ah, fair. I had seen firsthand the weirdness of custom dark fortress civs with pantheons, where the demonic master ended up worshipping gods because they started as a "natural-born citizen" of their empire. It'll be quite interesting to see boss monsters develop in the coming updates as they diverge from typical human actors.

[aSpatula66]

How soon can we expect map memory to appear in the beta? I hope it's a priority since it's a very important and useful feature to have especially when exploring underground. I can understand how it would be difficult to implement with the new graphics though.

[A_Curious_Cat]

Congratulations on getting married, and may you have many happy years together!

[Toady One]

Thanks!

Are maps ever coming back to legends mode?

jecowa: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8556201#msg8556201

Yeah, there were just some minor display irritations, so I didn't get there for the initial release, and since then we've been caught up in fixes and adv stuff.  Legends will get its finishing sometime soon after adv beta is done.  It all needs to be finished.

You and Threetoe have stated in the past that you plan to soon add some kind of "healing magic", mostly to help adventurers heal their wounds and replace the current "fast travel to wait" system (unless I'm misremembering or have misunderstood things). How exactly do you plan on adding this, and are you afraid that it might undermine the game's current medical system, especially in fortress mode? If so, how do you plan on preventing that?

Right now, we're playing around with primordial substances that aren't stress-free to obtain, from sites.  So they won't be immediately disruptive.  But yeah, it's definitely a universe-setting-level change to go further into healing and making it easier to access, similar to the way other magic like teleportation would heavily disrupt existing mechanics.  Erring on the side of expanding parameters rather than preventing disruptions.

do you know exactly what causes this bug? https://dwarffortressbugtracker.com/view.php?id=11458
I believe it's the source of many a worldgen crash for people who have modded civs in their games.

will we see an expansion of good-sphere utilizations, like major blessings, spreading influence from rulers and such? On that note, how about neutral or non-aligned spheres?

DPh Kraken: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8556498#msg8556498
evil_pigeon (op): http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8556505#msg8556505

Hmm, hopefully that bug is fixed.  I recall the chefs one anyway.  But if there's still crashy behavior in the latest version I guess there's more work to do.

I'm not sure which'll be the first big good effects we'll see coming in.  It has to be something that has an effect in game, and since we don't have economic activity post worldgen in the wider world, the typical blessings (farming etc.) don't make much sense.  The primordial tutorial stuff we're doing now is another candidate, for neutral stuff, but not before the beta is done.

One more UI overhaul?

yeaaaaahhhh...  everything will be fine.

Btw, when are we going to get the October report?

Ah, I had marked it off by accident.  So, October 31st apparently!

Would be possible to have the beta branch available in itch.io as well? Sorry, I searched the forum but I couldn't find a definitive answer about that.

Maybe I'm wrong, but to me it seems it wouldn't be too hard to make it available in itch.io. I decided to move away from Steam and buy the itch.io version instead (even though it's twice the price of the Steam version in my country), but I have the feeling that Steam is always favored over the itch.io version. I had the same problem to get access to the Linux version via itch.io in the past.

I appreciate if you can clarify this distinction between Steam and itch.io. Thanks!

Putnam: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8557886#msg8557886

Yeah, Steam is a bit more convenient for betas, and only a few percentage points of players are using the beta overall, so I haven't been doing itch or classic beta versions to streamline uploads and compile times.  And generally they'll just be crashy garbage, for smaller features we did in beta.  But obviously something like this is different.  Though hopefully we'll just be out of this beta soon, we'll have the lua beta starting sometime after that, so it'll be good to figure it out.  Just sent Kitfox a note.

When the planned Lua-implementations are done, maybe it would be a possibility and a good idea to set up a team of modders from this community. They can use the new tools to work consistantly based on a shared roadmap with the devs. The additions the've created can be part of the official release, optionally switched off using settings. What is your view on this?

Criperum: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8558322#msg8558322
Ziusudra: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8558407#msg8558407
FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8558434#msg8558434
aSpatula66: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8558438#msg8558438

Yeah I agree that people will self-organize regardless, and both Putnam and I are open with questions and such, and as with DFHack we'll work with people on specific matters as it comes up.  I'm not sure why we need an official collection of turn-offable mods when there's the workshop etc.

Is the "Development" tab from the website (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html) planned to be updated again at some point ?
I guess plans and progress can be followed from reading through the forums, but I am wondering if this is the only way now or if I am missing some other roadmap somewhere.

I'm not going to update it until the Steam update is complete, since it's mostly just been interface stuff in the same vein for the last some years.  The items up there are still basically correct, still basically next, and still not done.  The idea of doing larger arcs is out, but the chunks are still what we want to do.

I'm not sure which format would be ideal, really, since nothing in the past has really been all that accurate.

What are your plans for aquatic animal people? Are they meant to be bound to the water to breathe?
Perhaps plans for interactions with the boats or visitors to underwater settlements?

is it an oversight that Sponge Man wasn't given ExtraVision to see like Worm Man received?

ryno: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8558629#msg8558629
A_Curious_Cat: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8558643#msg8558643
DPh Kraken: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8558731#msg8558731

I'm not sure we ever decided what to do with the aquatic animal people, the ones that require water to breathe (rather than the mammalian ones.)  The land-based ones don't have settlements either now, so it all requires a lot of work, and the water ones will be more difficult and strange.  The first push with this was (on land) going to be the entity rewrite stuff, with nomadic groups.  Now that's just in the mid-range upcoming pile.

Sponge people are complicated by their lack of complication...  the peoplification process gives them more abilities, but sponges started very simple.  However, they should probably be playable ha ha, and maybe extravision would be good.

1. On the nautical theme: Is it likely we might have a way other than a complete vehicle system to explore the sea (such as a water-breathing syndrome, fish mounts, or wagon-style simple boats), so that oceanic adventures may be had? Was reading about Sinbad, and it feels totally in-line with the Adventure Mode vision: expendable companions, fire-breathing elephants, roc eggs, random haulers to foist your artifacts on, and even a Ñ!

2. I just learned that religions cannot form around Titans. Is this because such a religion should instead revere an associated Force, given the former's description as a "ancient force of nature"?

FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8558925#msg8558925
dikbutdagrate: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8558968#msg8558968
Putnam: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8559041#msg8559041
DPh Kraken (op): http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8559218#msg8559218

1. Feels likely as we get to more magical exploration and map stuff, yeah.  Loading ocean maps deep under has some tech problems I recall, but after that, it's just the lack of stuff.

2. I think the comments addressed this one.

Since dev plans/roadmaps have changed a lot over the last couple years, I was curious where improvements to wildlife fit in to future dev cycles? Things like making animals (including sentient creatures like gorlaks, dragons, megabeasts, etc.) eat, hunt, and interact more with the world around them. Also ecological interactions like the plants influencing the animals that appear, animals influencing plant populations, prey avoiding predators, predators following prey, etc.

As usual I'm not sure exactly when we'll get to even regular NPC scheduling AI and such (which feels vaguely like megabeast AI).  The hero role stuff on the dev page vaguely referred to megabeast intelligence improvements so it's not that the roadmap changed so much, but there's always a lot going on.  For the ecology stuff, it's a lot of work with data and such.  The biomes we already have form the first correlation for plants and animals, but there's more to do of course, especially in terms of making it dynamic and responsive.  We don't track any animal locations (there's a bit of this w/ hunting up on dev), and it's hard to do it all over the world without burning the computer.  For behavior of individual loaded creatures that are in the play area, it would be cool if animals behaved more like animals, and generally to have a broader range of behaviors and interactions.  Not sure when we'll do any of that though, since it doesn't fit with the existing groupings.

How soon can we expect map memory to appear in the beta? I hope it's a priority since it's a very important and useful feature to have especially when exploring underground. I can understand how it would be difficult to implement with the new graphics though.

Yeah, we're just trying to figure out how to display it.  All the code is still there, we just need graphics that work.  Possibly something sparse rather than trying to get faded/gray colors to look good, but I'm not sure.  Sparse could also look bad.

[A_Curious_Cat]

Thanks for the answer, Toady One!

[PlumpHelmetMan]

Thanks for the answers as always Toady, and congratulations on your engagement!

On another note, looks like I have the honour of posting the first new FotF question of the month:

Are there plans to return the "L" button function to adventure mode keyboard? Much as I'm excited about all the new features that are coming, having to hover the cursor over everything I want to look at is the main thing keeping me away from the mode at the moment.

[Eric Blank]

We don't track any animal locations (there's a bit of this w/ hunting up on dev), and it's hard to do it all over the world without burning the computer.

I would assume that's just not feasible at all unless you limit it to one individual or group per (sub?)region/per species in a region, but if the objective is simply to provide wildlife encounters for the adventurer to hunt/track/avoid more explicitly than randomly popping up when you walk around on the local map, then is using the army code to create wandering 'armies' of wild animals spawning/despawning around the player possible instead? Can armies be created and destroyed arbitrarily enough for that to work? Not necessarily a complex mechanic gameplay wise, but it could be made more complex by conditions like season/time of day being taken into account. And armies also create trails of tracks that can be followed even in local play. If you can hide certain armies from the player until they are close enough/their tracks are discovered then that can contribute as an additional hunting mechanic. But you wouldn't get to seek out animal dens this way; they wouldnt have any.