Note: I didn't proofread this. It's late.
On sizes, I think the factor is 1000, because you never know how much room you are going to need later. That'll let people be roughly the same while still being able to compare to each other, anyway. Relative body part sizes are relative in the sense that so you can use whatever numbers you want and it'll just sum them up (ie they behave like fractions of 1). The size itself is one number that you can set at different stages of the creature's life and it'll linearly interp between those points. Appearances variations cause the size number to increase, so if a creature is 25% taller than average and 10% more broad, it'll have a size of 1.25 * 1.10 * SIZE for the purposes of blood volume and damage resistance and so on.
I'm uncertain if all the butchering problems will be cleared up. That's a job that's coming up soon. Hopefully the hydra will be fixed, but I'm not going to promise anything as there's a lot to do.
I'm not going to worry that much about equipment this time around, and probably not until workshops are easier to manage. The restrictions will probably be roughly the same or looser.
Re: variability of siege towers (which is Not for this release), whatever you can currently build in the game over a number of tiles should work out if... things work out. It's just everything as usual with some code to move it as a group when it moves. There are of course irritating parts for that, but I have some code for this that'll make it easier that comes from adv mode map movement that can be adapted from rectangles to vehicle/tower shapes.
I wonder if adipose tissue is part of the standard tissue complement now.
Fat, yeah. Though I just did skin -> fat -> muscle -> bone for limbs, rather than including the visceral fat that surrounds the organs and ends up kind of looking like organs by itself. The fat layer is linked to energy storage and can resize with that, and the muscle layer is linked to strength and can resize with that attribute. (There are a few countdowns left on that behavior though). This means that a fatter dwarf should move slower but block damage more readily (and be hit more often). They had a fat guy stop a bullet without "actual" damage in trauma life in the er a few days ago so I guess there's some clear reality there.
Damn, the speed of the progress doesn't look good. Looks like I'll have to wait a while before I get to play with the new hairy dwarves...
Yeah, this is a slow patch of the countdown. And slower than I thought. And hopefully the slowest. It looses up a bit once I get the 1039 compile done (though that compile might be hell itself).
Toady, can be colours set too? And do get dwarfs and alike random haircolors/ one Haircolour out of an list? Can Hair become gray over the time?
Yes, yes, yes. Though I'm not quite sure what the second one is -- they can have different hair colors, though I still have to link them in groups so that they aren't all different on a single dwarf.
Toady can you give us an example how the raw of an creature will look after the update?
I'll do that once I get the 1039 compile done, as they'll look a bit more like they should look at that point, though I can't promise they'd be in the final form. As I'm cleaning up these mat/job issues now, I'm adding things as they are needed. I also need to go through most of the critters (which shouldn't take that long if my shortcuts work out) and do the text entry.
Well with what he said about unifying materiel raws it sounds like we would be able to chop down a fruit tree and mod it so if you shove it in a smelter you get "(10) Juicy apples"
I think you could probably do a kitchen reaction to make an edible item with the wood, but since plant items still go by the general race of the thing you'd have to use leaves or something like that. I don't have a good item for fruit yet. Though if you make the associated plant item to the tree edible you might be able to get away with it if the game still recognizes it's a tree, which I think it would.
Caravan plant stuff? What is that means?
Yeah, all of the plant products (including wooden materials like the barrels and plant cloth for the bags they bring) had to be moved over to the new system.
Part of the reason the countdown is so slow is that I had set out a few dozen categories, and when I went through the code to see the changes I'd need to make, the total came out around 1000. So I'm just slogging through. I think 8 of the countdown now stands for 471 things that were part of these categories, so I just knock off a number every time I finish one of the old groupings (or around 60 items in the case where lines have blurred).
I wonder whether heritability is being taken into account in some fashion for the new appearance stuff.
The 30 in the body part of the countdown after wounds but before venom and then site/civ stuff is mainly this. Hair and skin colors should be more or less preserved by offspring, and I think there will probably also be links for other appearance variables and perhaps att modifiers. Whatever comes up really.
No more " item in bedroom"?
That'll probably still happen. I don't remember if we had figured that one out or not.
Coral and amber weren't included in the creature mats. When I looked up amber, they weren't sure which kind of trees it came from for the most part, and it's very old, so it's not a species-linked material in DF. Coral will be likely be creature-linked later, but I haven't focused on the underwater areas yet.