How will the scars modify the combat text?
Will it be more detailed or the scars will only be visible in the descriptions?
The combat text should end up reflecting the nature of the wound. Scars themselves will only form after healing, so will be for the descriptions.
Or, are bodies still represented as trees in structure, but there's now a second sort of ephemeral connection between them using that AROUND:BY stuff? Kind of like "fuzzy" edges that don't supply any connection with the center?
Fuzzy edges, yeah. I didn't want to rewrite all the tree stuff, so ring-shaped creature thingies are still likely not feasible.
Also, is AROUND:BY symmetric?
I have noticed that while there is some vague positioning in the head area (further resolution of detail would be nice, but it's not necessary for this particular update), but what is lacking is positioning of organs that we had so looked forward to.
AROUND here is the opposite of SURROUNDED_BY. I probably should have used SURROUNDS, as AROUND is vague. Any relationship with a complementary word gets that relationship respected as well. I haven't done anything with the fingers, but it could be done. I'm going to wait for the engine to be more testable before I add all the tags I need.
Well, right now you can only add in 15 new reactions before it starts ignoring stuff at the top of the list.
Ah, I wasn't aware of that. I'll note it down.
Since I'm still thinking about metals, is there any plan to expand out the METAL_PREF tag in entities a bit more?
Ideally they'd use the metals available from their local ores and then trade them out, but there would be availability problems that way until the caravan arc, so I just abstracted it out. I'm not sure if we'll see movement on METAL_PREF until the caravan arc.
Dev_Next is probably the best summary we can give right now.
Keeping in mind that I'm only doing the yellow ones, he he he.
what happens when they wage war against a civ of magma-men ?
I hope it checks the edible and undead flags... I think it does... but I could be very wrong.
Does this mean we can rename any of the professions?
Job tags by gender. AKA no more valkeries with babe in arms.
Job tags by caste: How will the fort handle this? A different jobs list depending on the dwarf?
It's just a naming thing. I haven't done anything special or interesting in the caste vs. job direction yet. When I get to antmen for this release, that might very well change, but I'm not 100% sure what the outcome will be yet.
Gender ratios: What's the gradation on these? for creatures with 2 sexes, a difference of as much as 1% can cause huge effects on the population balance
It accepts any number from 1 to 100000 for each caste. They don't have to sum to anything in particular.
How much does this (skin thickness) actually matter in terms of combat? Will there be things that daggers can't cut through?
That's coming up very soon, so I can't say exactly how much. The idea is that a thicker tissue would matter a lot, so a bulbous creature with a large layer of lardy rolls would have a great deal of protection. It'll take some balancing, and I'm not to the point where I've tested it out. In terms of daggers being able to cut in general, it currently uses the shear properties for this, and if the dagger is a harder material it will form some sort of cut (assuming the strike is forceful enough to get beyond the shear fracture point for, say, skin), but on a titan, that should be neglible unless you make a hobby out of it.
Surrounds. Right now, the cheeks 100 surround the teeth, but ribs 5 surround the heart. What kind of scale do we have, and is it additive?
I haven't gotten here yet. Without relationships, it would probably check each against the chance separately, but it's not really a chance as there are different-sized attack objects being used. It might get messy, with some size vs. proportion comparisons or something, or remain cludged for now. I can update later.
Does bludgeoning damage transfer? (AKA is unlikely to do damage to skin or fat but will bruise muscle and break bone)
Yeah, though it's sort of cludged since there's a lot going on and I wasn't quite wrapping my head around everything. Right now it'll check the impact elasticity (which I guess is actually impact yield strain or something) of the outer layer, and that'll let it bypass impact fracture after a certain point (while still allowing bruises and ruptures without the layer eg skin actually breaking) even if the force is high enough (as the layer is assumed to have made way for the moving object in a sense). So if you make a michelin man style creature that's just a purely elastic material, a mace will be unable to harm it unless it has blood flow and can bruise and so on, while relatively inelastic materials like bone will fracture, even through skin. Skin has a lesser shear fracture than bone on the other hand, so a knife will cut through skin more easily than bone.
This can all use a bit of work, but I'm hoping to get something that seems sensible during play out of it this time around.
Looks like it's easy to make creatures grow as they get older. Can we shrink them back down?
Yeah, each of those body size values is just a point on a size vs. time graph, and they can be whatever positive values you like.
Will it be possible to make dragons that get bigger and bigger for all time?
I don't think it accepts NO_END for size times right now, but if you put the last point far enough out in time it'll work for most intents (unless you want a larger slope than that method can provide, but in that case, you'd likely hit the maximum size value which is currently 1000000).
Caste Changes: I think you said this was impossible?
Yeah. It doesn't know how to tie the BPs together, so it would need to be given sufficient hints (which could also work for maintaining wounds during polymorph-style effects to different creatures). I'll probably get to this later, but not this time around.
In the tissue raws, is MUSCULAR just to indicate a rippled texture?
It indicates that the tissue is involved in the movement of the limb, so its damage will effect the ability of the creature to use that limb to stand or grasp objects. It probably isn't going to be much different from STRUCTURAL as far as that goes, though non-break level damage will likely effect muscles, whereas break level damage impacts structure (I guess, not sure...).
How close were you to giving plants actual body definitions?
Not that close -- I'm planning to do multi-tile trees later on, and those would probably go hand-in-hand to avoid a rewrite.
Should eye and nerve damage hurt more? It's at stock 5 pain now.
I dunno. I've scratched my eye once, but I don't remember it being particularly worse, and I have no idea about various nerve damages. Right now the nervous tissue pain is set at zero, and I was going by the while-awake brain surgery videos I've seen. I dunno if getting your spine cut hurts or if it's like the brain, or if I'm wrong about the brain.
But will bp descriptions be visible in adv. mode?
Should be, yeah.
Toady, how hard would it be to add variable stat advantages/disadvantages to creatures much like DAMBLOCK or SPEED?
I'm talking a natural agility/strength/toughness/endurance boost or reduction.
That part is already in, I just haven't done dwarf mods yet (like their previous DAMBLOCK boost). You can feed in caste-level attribute ranges, change rates (each of the different kinds mentioned before like increase/rust/demotion) and capping percentages (how much the att can increase beyond the original value for a given creature).
Erm, will those variables in the material raws that Toady says are unused be used further down the update?
Not liquid densities or molar mass. I'm not sure about the other mechanical properties. Maybe not. It's sort of like the 30 personality facets. I slowly find uses for them.
Also, how come there is a basic metal material and then a whole metal raws which have considerably more metals in the first place, each using different variables?
The metal template is the most extreme example now, I think. Take the stone template -- all of the stones currently use it. They could afford to have specific values, but for now, the placeholders in the template will do. Templates pick up the slack, and especially in the case of creature and plant materials, stop you from having to type in a lot of redundant information about stockpiles and so on.
Surely Eyebrows and Eyelashes could be incorporated into the standard face definition? Or does it have to do with them being hair, and therefor effected by the color definitions?
Yeah, probably. I wasn't sure if I was going to use it for creatures that don't have such well-defined eyebrows. I might move things around once I get more creatures going.
I have a question: What EXACTLY do tags like [ITEMS_HARD] and [ITEMS_BARRED] mean? ... However, [ITEMS_HARD] is in the Bone, Hair, Nail, and Tooth template.
ITEMS_HARD tag on Hair was one of the bugfixing things I mentioned. Horse Hair Platemail anyone?
Some of those are superfluous as it stands -- jobs still use the same basic item types, and since you can't have a tooth boulder or tooth skin in vanilla DF, they don't come up. If you did have a creature that had skin based on the tooth template or something weird, the flag is there.
For hair, I think I was thinking of the previous keratin material I had before I separated hair and nails. It should probably be more like silk with ITEMS_SOFT. I wasn't thinking about it carefully since you can't get hair normally.
Some phase change temperatures are also set to "NONE". Is this intentional?
Some of them are intentional (since they just catch on fire or a liquid state doesn't make sense), but a few like soap that are erroneous have crept in, yeah.
All the layer stones seem to be [INORGANIC], but aren't some of them organic, like limestone and a lot of soils?
Inorganic is an imprecise word here that's used to denote materials that are used in building up the ground rather than living plants or creatures. For reactions, REACTION_CLASS and so on would govern behavior, so it's not going to matter.
So, now we have layered skins on body parts. Does this mean that the [INTERNAL] token does a lot more now?
Yeah. I haven't gotten to internal organ damage yet, so it's possible that flag could be altered to attach parts to certain layers in some way (rather than the current EMBEDDED and INTERNAL setup), but if I leave it, INTERNAL parts will be behind all of the layers.
What does the :STP] part of a body part token mean?
This means "standard plural". To save some typing, the game will just add an 's' to the singular word if it sees STP.
What is the difference in function between STANDARD_TISSUE and STANDARD_MATERIAL? Looking at the raws it looks like they perform the exact same function.
Many of the tissues match up with the material, but a tissue also has some additional information regarding pain and so on. In the course of modding, you might want some shortcuts that this can provide (as with the facial hair, to avoid typing the names repeatedly). Tissue templates are only used in creatures, while material templates can be used by plants and inorganics as well.
And shouldn't layering be automatic? What is the point of having muscle over skin?
It doesn't even know what skin is, I think (there is no SKIN tag), so the layers need to be defined somewhere, and it's good to leave as much up to the user as possible. Even in vanilla DF, insects, for instance, have the STRUCTURAL layer on the outside, so it can't use STRUCTURAL to place things on the inside (as with bones).
Query about the [CATEGORY:WHATEVER] tags in the body file. Is the list of categories hardcoded or will it adapt to whatever I put in there, so long as I adapt the other files to cover it?
Yeah, you can do whatever here. The strings aren't hard-coded.
For the HUMANOID body, the head has [DEFAULT_RELSIZE:500]
For all other defined bodies, the head is [DEFAULT_RELSIZE:300]
For the Dwarf,
[GENERAL_BABY_NAME:dwarven baby:dwarven babies]
[BABYNAME:dwarven baby:dwarven babies]
[CHILD:12]
[GENERAL_CHILD_NAME:dwarven child:dwarven children]
[CHILDNAME:dwarven baby:dwarven babies]
would seem to need the CHILDNAME to be altered.
Yeah, errors. Though who knows what I'll end up with for relsizes... if somebody accurately drew up the human taking those as, say, relative volume, it would probably look pretty scary.