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[FantasticDorf]

Blind's interview helped put a perspective that changed my standpoint from where i was when i read the steam announcement a few days ago, a adventurer release with villians part-2 simultaneously would be ideal but i wouldnt pressure to put it all on release. Im in the non-strange beast adventuremode camp, its ready when its ready.

I was going to say previously that a lack of adventuremode would deprive exploration of worldy details players like myself get a kick out of thinking about how the fortress is part of this interesting generated world with topography and people building out of strange house materials (stonesense builds are popularly photogenic as ever, especially with ways to show it off naturally with the premium multiz it being natural), but i think there's more ways to get around this if players can just observe from a similar first person perspective, zoom out, jump between, it would definitely tick a checkbox for myself with combat and all other things of being a physical being being optional barriers to the non-violent/non interactive adventuremode touristy option.

[PlumpHelmetMan]

I ultimately won't complain about whatever Toady decides is best, but personally I'd prefer to have Adventure Mode present in some form at least from the get-go.

[darkhog]

I think it should be put on Steam as soon as you got the fort mode done. It's the main draw of the game (heck, it's in the game title). Adventure mode and the Linux/OSX ports can wait (DF runs quite okay in Wine/Proton anyway). There are plenty of great roguelikes you can pass the time with until Adventure mode is added back (I personally recommend Unreal World), while DF fort mode is really one of the kind, other DF-like games, even 3d ones like Gnomoria, Stonehearth, etc. simply can't compare.

//edit: There's no need for Workshop/achievement support on release either, that kind of thing can be added later on.

[kitfoxgames]

Steam Community Update 16 March 2022: New Furniture Colours

Full text:

Hello!

Jacob has been working hard on graphics, and we have some new capabilities there as well. He's prepared palettes for all of the material colors. Some community members (Lexi, Jenifer, and Rose) did a lot of work in particular on wood colors back around 2017, and the ASCII version only ever showed them as one brown color, ha ha, but now you can see all sorts of wood colors. Here are some bedrooms with new furniture images for stone cabinets, wooden chests (the planned ones use the old image), stone doors, and stone hatches:



And here's a happy colorful tomb with new wooden casket images, using specialized wood color palettes (so a 'red' wood object and a 'red' stone or metal object use different color sets.)



The pictures here use a pretty random mix to show the palette variety, but you can select the material while you're building or placing furniture if you'd like to arrange items according to color.

I've been updating the remaining menus as we work through the first step of the roadmap we posted last time. I've finished the justice menu (aside from interrogation reports), the petition system, and I'm about halfway through diplomacy. The dwarven justice system covers crimes from bar fights to vampiric bloodsucking, and punishment can be anything from a few days in jail to a reforging by the hammerer. The petition system is used by people that want to become residents of your fortress who are not from your selected dwarven culture, and also by religions and craft guilds who want recognition and spaces devoted to their groups.

- Tarn

[[HYBRID BEING]]

Nice. (Maybe it was already answered somewhere, but) Would it be possible to select a variant when placing furniture and stuff? How variants are going to work anyway - would variant be determined at creation or it will be handwaved and selected (randomly or by player) when placed?

[Bumber]

Weird perspective strikes again!

[Timeless Bob]

IMHO Dwarf fortress really shines with the creation of historical relevance.  As fortress after fortress populates the world, the fact that the histories continue to happen "off the screen" and don't particularly focus on what the Player Fortresses do or don't do (unless the Players decide to go full aggro with armies and suchlike), really sets this game out from all the other roguelike city builders.  Legend mode is almost impenetrable without 3rd party "translators", (or people like me who relentlessly research, gathering facts and linking genealogies to reveal historical connections.) To be able to have those histories available in the game as "stories" or "books" would blow all other similar games out of the way.  The current single fact story or book about something are hooks into Legend Mode. It woukd be amazing to have those hooks directly access Legend Mode via a link in-game, revealing further links to other names, other histories: an entire wikia of crosslinked rabbit hole exploration.  It makes the Dwarf Fortress game that much more massive to come out of one of these deep dives with the realization that your carpenter was once the daughter of the deposed queen or that the reason your new migrant has ranks in discipline and swords is because they participated in a desperate battle last year to retake a cave and had to then defend it from a FB that came rampaging up from below...

To have that rich history available in stories and books, (rather than the current one line teasers) would make this Steam release really pop.  Adventure mode, when it comes along, would benefit from this also.

[Mr Crabman]

IMHO Dwarf fortress really shines with the creation of historical relevance.  As fortress after fortress populates the world, the fact that the histories continue to happen "off the screen" and don't particularly focus on what the Player Fortresses do or don't do (unless the Players decide to go full aggro with armies and suchlike), really sets this game out from all the other roguelike city builders.  Legend mode is almost impenetrable without 3rd party "translators", (or people like me who relentlessly research, gathering facts and linking genealogies to reveal historical connections.) To be able to have those histories available in the game as "stories" or "books" would blow all other similar games out of the way.  The current single fact story or book about something are hooks into Legend Mode. It woukd be amazing to have those hooks directly access Legend Mode via a link in-game, revealing further links to other names, other histories: an entire wikia of crosslinked rabbit hole exploration.  It makes the Dwarf Fortress game that much more massive to come out of one of these deep dives with the realization that your carpenter was once the daughter of the deposed queen or that the reason your new migrant has ranks in discipline and swords is because they participated in a desperate battle last year to retake a cave and had to then defend it from a FB that came rampaging up from below...

To have that rich history available in stories and books, (rather than the current one line teasers) would make this Steam release really pop.  Adventure mode, when it comes along, would benefit from this also.

I hear Toady says it would be technically possible (easy even) to make Legends mode browsable while playing fort or adventure mode, but the problem is that it kind of reveals too much; like, vampires wouldn't be able to hide their identity, and you'd know about armies setting off to attack your fort way before you logically should be able to find out; stuff like that.

If that information problem could be solved, this sort of thing would be pretty cool to see.

[Dr. Melon]

[...]
To have that rich history available in stories and books, (rather than the current one line teasers) would make this Steam release really pop.  Adventure mode, when it comes along, would benefit from this also.

[...]

If that information problem could be solved, this sort of thing would be pretty cool to see.

If it were possible, it'd be interesting if the browser only displayed the history & legends "known" by the fortress civilization, its librarians, and perhaps even sculptures and art produced by the inhabitants. It would give an additional gameplay effect to amassing a large library and having a large engraving chamber, as the available knowledge would expand as citizens of the fort added their knowledge to the pool by creating and cataloguing. It would also allow nefarious actors like vampires to remain hidden (unless someone who knew their true identity moved in to the fort and wrote a book about them or something equally Fun)!
Naturally, browsing Legends outside of the fortress mode would behave as-normal.

[Laterigrade]

IMHO Dwarf fortress really shines with the creation of historical relevance.  As fortress after fortress populates the world, the fact that the histories continue to happen "off the screen" and don't particularly focus on what the Player Fortresses do or don't do (unless the Players decide to go full aggro with armies and suchlike), really sets this game out from all the other roguelike city builders.  Legend mode is almost impenetrable without 3rd party "translators", (or people like me who relentlessly research, gathering facts and linking genealogies to reveal historical connections.) To be able to have those histories available in the game as "stories" or "books" would blow all other similar games out of the way.  The current single fact story or book about something are hooks into Legend Mode. It woukd be amazing to have those hooks directly access Legend Mode via a link in-game, revealing further links to other names, other histories: an entire wikia of crosslinked rabbit hole exploration.  It makes the Dwarf Fortress game that much more massive to come out of one of these deep dives with the realization that your carpenter was once the daughter of the deposed queen or that the reason your new migrant has ranks in discipline and swords is because they participated in a desperate battle last year to retake a cave and had to then defend it from a FB that came rampaging up from below...

To have that rich history available in stories and books, (rather than the current one line teasers) would make this Steam release really pop.  Adventure mode, when it comes along, would benefit from this also.

I hear Toady says it would be technically possible (easy even) to make Legends mode browsable while playing fort or adventure mode, but the problem is that it kind of reveals too much; like, vampires wouldn't be able to hide their identity, and you'd know about armies setting off to attack your fort way before you logically should be able to find out; stuff like that.

If that information problem could be solved, this sort of thing would be pretty cool to see.

Oh, of course.

Maybe you could tag each bit of information as ‘known’ or ‘unknown’ by each particular civilisation or settlement or people-group. Although with a world full of groups, that becomes a lot to track.

[Starver]

In a full-on DF philosophy, every fact (and 'fact', given we already have dissembling and assumed identities for vampires and being developed for player-use for reputational purposes, and the whole Villains thing) might need to be marked as "known by <entity list>", possibly with nuances of "believed by...", "heard as runour by...", and even "disbelieved by..." (known to be said, but over-ruled by a contrary fact(/'fact') or opinion), etc.

Obviously this would be cumbersome as an 'everyone vs. every fact' (vs. every degree of knowledge) multidimensional array. Still complicated to maintain as "<foo1> knows <bar1, bar2, bar3, ...> and/or "foo1, foo2, foo3, ...> know <bar1>" (both forms would double the storage needs, and add more time to save developing changes, but would save search-time if you potentially needed to check bidirectionally).


Though with cascading entity grouping it could be quite interesting. When enough of a site is marked as identifying some information, re-store that as the site knowing this. Enough related sites acknowledging a fact shuffles it up to a civilisation-level knowledge dispersion. And racial-level beliefs and even possibly to world-level if a form of concensus (like "who is that god-level exterminator wandering the world?") is established that widespread.

Talk to an individual (or otherwise need to know what they 'know') and you could find that they personally (dis)believe something that is actually differently recorded by one or other group they belong to which might be used to either add uncertainty ("well, I always thought... but my family is convinced that...") or extra commitment ("the fools all think... but only I know The Truth!").


Well, maybe not simpler, and potentially starts to eat up the memory/cycles you'd hoped to save, but could be interesting.

[Schmaven]

Books take time to write, so by that reasoning, if in-game legends browsing only allowed access to data 2 years  old (or some other delay) or older, that would nullify the attacking army clairvoyance issue.  Having legends somehow accessible in the other modes would definitely bring attention to a largely overlooked aspect of the game, and I think that would be good overall.  Even if it made catching vampires easier.

[Mr Crabman]

Books take time to write, so by that reasoning, if in-game legends browsing only allowed access to data 2 years  old (or some other delay) or older, that would nullify the attacking army clairvoyance issue.  Having legends somehow accessible in the other modes would definitely bring attention to a largely overlooked aspect of the game, and I think that would be good overall.  Even if it made catching vampires easier.

Ehh, I think that would be a poor solution to use, because there can be a lot of data that should not be logically accessible to your fort/adventurer (especially the adventurer) no matter how old it is; for example, information on another continent when boats/ocean travel doesn't exist in the world so you shouldn't be able to know anything that happens there, or just plots/secrets in general (plots could easily span over long periods of time).

And equally, there's a lot of data that should be accessible even if it's less than 2 years old; books don't always take so long to write, and events can happen in your fortress, or later in mythgen they could be known about in distant places very quickly (granted this won't be for a long time, but adding a bunch of temporary mechanics that Toady will need to remember to replace with proper ones later is a bad idea).

It would be better to just take the time to implement a proper solution to the information problem, like what the other repliers talked about (tracking what info different groups actually have access to).

[Ziusudra]

In adventurer mode at least, entities, (maybe) groups, and individuals already keep track of known info.

[Laterigrade]

In adventurer mode at least, entities, (maybe) groups, and individuals already keep track of known info.

Yes, but sometimes they know things they shouldn’t, or don’t know things they should, like the locations of certain individuals or certain things happening in their region, at least in my limited experience.
Tightening that up would be one more thing giving Adventure Mode verisimilitude, and making it fun to play.