note: again, no proofreading!
I wonder if that means someone who is very strong can actually increase their "Size" or if someone who is very strong only makes their muscles larger inside their body relative to everything else.
However: If fatness is linked to energy storage, well... do dwarves have different metabolisms or natural fatness? If not, I'm wondering if we'll get issues where any well-fed fortress ends up full of fat dudes and no skinny guys whatsoever. It would be hilarious, yet problematic/unrealistic.
For both of these, it depends on how far I get with it this time around. I'd hope to be able to handle both properly.
So really, really huge creatures will have really, really, huge guts, which when ripped and teared, should hypothetically become blood baths of biblical proportions?
Haha. The blood won't actually flow, but it would be pretty badass if the amount of blood splatter was linked to actual blood volume loss, i.e. you cut off a Titan's arm and all the nearby tiles get drenched in blood.
The current version already sort of does this (as those that are bleeding a lot leave larger puddles), but yeah, it's a pain to track too much info about blood on map tiles (though it might happen when I do the liquid type expansion that's sort of a prereq for having terrifying areas with rivers of blood and all that). I'm probably going to do a bit this time with blood events that track more information about blood stains beyond the bits I've set aside now, but that'll depend on a few things (time, mostly).
This actually makes me worry slightly. DF is ultimately a fantasy game, and there's a few creatures in the raws that don't strictly obey the laws of biology. If fat stores energy and you make a big creature with no fat storage, will it pass out all the time from exhaustion?
Only if I handle it really poorly, or a modder neglects any relevant tags. I'm sure there will be bugs though. All kinds of bugs.
Actually, he listed three jobs. That take place in three different workshops.
This implies (at least, without too much wishful thinking) that the reaction raws have been generalized to accept any workshop.
Nope -- the three workshops are some of those with the easiest jobs/interfaces currently. Updating something like the crafts or forge shop would take more effort, and for those item crafting shops, there are also additional issues, such as their future form after some of the req/bloats come in. It's a much larger project, and something I don't have time for for this release.
Do these support racegloss or something like it? Is there any support for selective racegloss so it's not just picking just _any_ appropriate material but limit it somehow
Right now, for tissue materials, you pick a specific material either from the inorganic/plant raws, a material from a material template like "skin template" (which you can then modify with additional tags), or a material from a previous creature (or make a new material from scratch). I haven't updated race-glosses yet, and I'm not sure if I will yet (it's in the countdown but isn't a top priority). That was always sort of a strange hack to get an extra descriptor out in front of the creature (it was used originally for animated trees which aren't even used in the game anymore -- the elven druids used to cast spells on the forest outside the 2D cliff).
I can't wrap my mind around the idea of a game that models the color of your guts.
I actually went through images.google and the color entries on wikipedia to try to match things. I'm not fully satisfied, but I think it'll do. I think I whiffed on fat and just made it yellow, but I also made some other things mauve-taupe and ecru, so it all balances out.
I'm hoping we'll be able to define phases of development (i.e. [Child] of creature has its own tokens, and at [Age] it becomes [Adolescent] and its tokens change).
Not yet -- I didn't want to deal with wound/inventory transfers yet for completely different bodies, but I'm hoping to get there in some future release.
Hm, so iron men are solid iron all the way through? Are hollow body parts implemented?
They are, yeah. You could do hollow parts by adding an "air" material as the inner tissue layer, but it should probably be supported through more info on the layers (as with hair/skin). Not sure I'll get there this time around. This is going to make iron men much, much harder, but they aren't supposed to be easy, without some kind of trap or something to take care of them. Adventurers don't yet have enough tools to handle them, most like (like ropes or the ability to make their own pitfalls or whatever), but this'll certainly give me more impetus to add such things.
It would be cool to reanimate the empty molted exoskeletons of giant cave spiders.
Zombies are actually an interesting problem that's part of the wound countdown... instead of just lowering their bodypart hitpoints to simulate rot, it'll have to go ahead and do the rot explicitly.
I seem to recall making pants out of bunny brains in Armok 1. Will we be able to do the same thing with the new version I hope?
I stopped right in the middle of this so I don't have the specific tags for you yet, but the brains would probably need to be given some kind of skin tag so that the tanner knows they can be made into leather that can then be made into pants. That would make the bunny kind of nasty. In later versions, it's the sort of thing you might ask an adventurer to do, in which case it might outright refuse to follow the order or have your adventurer just play with the brains for a bit or have the adventurer make a crude pants figurine or have the adventurer wipe them all over his or her legs, at my discretion, really...
I wonder, does this ugrade include gender-differentiation ?
There are different entries for the genders. I have not added any body changes. I'm sure that won't stop other people. I haven't yet decided where if anywhere I'm going to go with that, but chopping off the little warrior and having it flop against a wall or something is probably too distracting to my nation for me to include in the vanilla game, although the lines of the other potty-oriented stuff. I don't have any personal objections, but it's not at the top of my list either.
Can we give all the necessary tags for survival to a single body part?
What stops you from doing this currently? I never tried it. They'd be like the Armok 1 fleshballs I guess, although Armok 1 fleshballs selected their blood color from a list I think, as skin colors varied among other creatures. We're almost there.
Can we now make pig tail sock puppets?
Or will we just be limited to "pig tail man"?
I haven't changed how toys currently work. You could make a monster, but nobody could arm its bottom. Do you mean sock puppets as a toy or as something terrifying that attacks you? No, there was no scarring childhood memory...
With you being able to TECHNICALLY apply gases and liquids as materials for the creature I wonder how long this puts us until we can have characters who are gases or liquids... Or at least until Blood is actually a seperate material.
Blood is a separate material now, but we'll have to wait for wounds to see how far I get with temperature effects for weird outer layers and "pin~ata" effects, like using a gaseous inner tissue layer or gaseous blood materials. The quick approach is to ignore it. I'm not sure what I'll feel like at the time.
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The more complicated ideas for messing with creature materials and morphing them and doing all of whatever is of course further away than the next release, but part of the idea here was to set up the groundwork for that sort of thing so special effects can be put in without adding any glossy variables on top of the creatures (that then need to be handled with every other mechanic as special cases). I'm pretty happy with how things are going right now, as opposed to Armok 1, where I went with a strict bottom-up approach and never really wrote a game part for it. There are still a few ways (in particular, item components) where Armok 1, while crude, is far more general than DF, but I'll address those over time as well. Not for this release though!