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[Skizelo]

quote:Originally posted by Aqizzar:
<STRONG>This also poses the questions, which may have been answered before-  Will a goblin site with a dwaven leader still attack dwarven sites?  With a dwarven army and everything?  If victorious, do they slaughter the civilians like goblins would?  Or does diplomacy come into play here?</STRONG>

I'm guessing they act as goblins, on the elfin-baby-snatcher principal. They may have some nifty temples though.
Also, what happened to site 76 (Ageshandals)? I guess that's where all the dwarves came from.

[ June 09, 2008: Message edited by: Skizelo ]

[Tamren]

quote:Originally posted by PTTG??:
<STRONG>Here's a question- do trees burn now? Toady One mentioned that "trees and towns don't fare so well once you visit them" to paraphrase what he said about the adventurer in the superhot world.</STRONG>

Dunno if they burn but almost everything has either a burning or melting point.

If you use one of those editing tools to up the ambient temperature then stuff will melt. I once saw a screenshot of a fort that was nothing but a giant pool of BOILING granite.

[Furious Fish]

Zinc boils when it touches magma on default settings. Hmm . . . now I'm thinking about a superheated zinc-mist trap.

[Dareon Clearwater]

quote:Originally posted by Furious Fish:
<STRONG>Zinc boils when it touches magma on default settings. Hmm . . . now I'm thinking about a superheated zinc-mist trap.</STRONG>

Put it next to your kitchen so you get fortified meals.

[Markham]

quote:Originally posted by Toady One:
<STRONG>If it goes all sci-fi or elemental-planesy, it'll warrant some new biomes I guess.</STRONG>

Urist Spacedwarf cancels warp:  Interrupted by giant space amoeba.

[Neonivek]

quote: Here's a question- do trees burn now?

I am not 100% sure but I think that screenshot he took... was of Himself and all the trees around him going up in flames.

[Sylverone]

I recently discovered and began playing the roguelike "Incursion". After reading some things on the site about it, a specific paragraph about the AI stands out to me as ingenious.

Quote:
--
"Monster movement is determined by a “sum of gravities” algorithm. Every thing that the monster is attracted to within its line of sight – an enemy it wants to attack, a magical item it wants to pick up, a portal it wants to jump into – asserts what is essentially a gravitational pull on the monster. Each target has a priority, which determines the base strength of the pull; the attraction gets stronger the closer the monster is to the target in question, meaning that it will “go for” nearby enemies in favor of far-distant ones of higher priority. If none of the monster’s targets are within its line of sight, it remembers the last known location of each target and will attempt to go to that location.

'If it is stymied even in this – it can’t reach the last known location, or it reaches the location and still can’t see the target, having no idea where it might be now – or if it just has no targets to begin with, then it will create its own. The monster will choose a random point on the map and attempt to walk toward that point. When it gets stuck and can go no further, it will consider that point resolved and choose another one. Further, when no actual real enemies are in sight, a monster will never step away from a wall. These factors together essentially allow the monsters to explore the dungeon on their own – by “following the right wall” and striving to reach random points on the map, they can navigate the dungeon on their own accord.

'When they are severely injured, or become scared as a result of a magical fear effect, monsters will turn and flee from their attackers. This is accomplished by turning the gravities of enemies into negative values, making them repel the monster instead of attracting it. When monsters are troubled by injury or maladies such as disease or blindness, they can diagnose this and will correct it if they have the means available to do so. For example, a monster struck by a poisoned sword will then drink a Potion of Neutralize Poison if it has one in its possession. Monsters can also fix maladies among their allies – an orc shaman might cast cure critical wounds on its fellows in battle, for instance."
--

This really stands out to me because it's simple, yet it mirrors to reasonable extent the way we act in real life.

It seems to me that it would be too intensive for Dwarf Fortress given all the other stuff it runs (the gravities algorithm would have to be run for every creature), however, since it seems to work so effectively, both in concept, and in the actual game, I thought it was worth mentioning here.

Go to the Incursion page, then click on th link that says "White Paper". Search for "Monster AI" on that page and you should find the whole write-up about the game's AI system. Seems pretty cool to me.

[Skizelo]

Sounds neat. Can you get a creature's orbiting? That's basically the neatest thing possible about gravity. I want an ogre who failed to achieve escape velocity.

[dreiche2]

To have a stable orbit you not only need gravitational pull, but inertia/impulse conservation, and I don't think you have that here or would want to have it...

Sounds neat, but to be honest I'm not sure if it's principles aren't kind of obvious, while any more specific implementation might have unwanted side effects.

Basically, in essence it boils down to wanting to approach certain objects, having different priorities for given objects/actions, and taking vicinity into account. That's probably implemented in any non-simplistic AI, isn't it? And it can probably use pretty simple algorithms.

As for gravity specific effects, I'm not sure you would want them (e.g. slow movement if targets are equally distant, being "distracted" from an earlier target every time some alternative passes by closer etc.).

[Mr.Person]

quote:Originally posted by dreiche2:
<STRONG>To have a stable orbit you not only need gravitational pull, but inertia/impulse conservation, and I don't think you have that here or would want to have it...

Sounds neat, but to be honest I'm not sure if it's principles aren't kind of obvious, while any more specific implementation might have unwanted side effects.

Basically, in essence it boils down to wanting to approach certain objects, having different priorities for given objects/actions, and taking vicinity into account. That's probably implemented in any non-simplistic AI, isn't it? And it can probably use pretty simple algorithms.

As for gravity specific effects, I'm not sure you would want them (e.g. slow movement if targets are equally distant, being "distracted" from an earlier target every time some alternative passes by closer etc.).</STRONG>

Well, it's certainly better than the AI's of most roguelikes. Incursion is fun, btw, but making a character is a real chore. The rooms are.. well.. interesting, not like the vague, boring rooms of Angband and Nethack. I especially liked thius one room that was all rainbowy and trippy.

[Sindai]

quote:Originally posted by Sylverone:
<STRONG>I recently discovered and began playing the roguelike "Incursion". After reading some things on the site about it, a specific paragraph about the AI stands out to me as ingenious.</STRONG>

Wait, how is this supposed to help DF? It's nice and elegant, but also pretty simplistic. DF doesn't really share many attributes with roguelikes other than the graphics and UI, so I'm not sure where it could fit in.

[Arkose]

quote:Originally posted by Toady One:
<STRONG>If it goes all sci-fi or elemental-planesy, it'll warrant some new biomes I guess.</STRONG>

Speaking of which: Would it be possible to eventually get biome definitions moved into the raws? (Not necessarily for this release.)

[Duke 2.0]

That AI talk sounds like something I Read from Here.

And I had a thought about Pathfinding from playing Settlers IV. With The Settlers III and on, the citizens move freely around the map to haul resources. After a while, you notice some paths being made into the ground from repeated walking. This got me thinking: Why isn't the game slow because of pathfinding? I can't attribute that to good algorithms, because thats like making up Technobabble on a Sci-Fi show.

Then I thought of how it could be done. Perhaps they only pathfind once, creating a route between workshops and stockpiles. Then when a settler wants to say, bring food from the bakery to the mines, they would do their own pathfinding from where they were to the bakery. From there, they follow the path  made when the bakery was made. If something is in the way, they try to make a new path to the workshop path again.

I imagine if premade paths between workshops are made and used(Perhaps even manipulated by the player) then some problems with pathfinding resources would be helped. Heck, even a simple designated "Ranch" where animals go would help a lot. Just somewhere where animals won't start wandering around the place.

I don't know how well it would work, but thats just my thought.

[Neonivek]

I think it is because Settlers extrapolates in their paths making it much more simple. (I havn't played it so this is a pure guess)

Dwarf Fortress however calculates a path for every single dwarf in the fortress and recalculates the path almost constantly.

[Duke 2.0]

Indeed. Dwarf Fortress needs constant pathfinding to account for all the changes in the landscape. However, things like workshops can have this feature because generally dwarves follow the same paths. Heck, even stockpiles could have paths made to workshops depending on what goes in the stockpiles.

Why have dwarves treat the production district as if it were an unexplored cavern?

Edit: Devnotes update!

And Toady, I have always found rivers flowing through mountains like canyons to be grand things. They almost always lead to a goblin tower, which makes me think of my adventurers paddling up a secluded canyon to a dark fortress to do some epic quest there.

And notice on the same map to the east there is a cave with the woods around it  cut, compared to the miles of forests around it. Do kobolds chop down trees now,  or is there another civ in there? Or do caves just get rid of trees?

[ June 10, 2008: Message edited by: Duke 2.0 ]