With the new changes to squad equipment orders, will this also effect hunters?
They are sort of unusual, along with miners and woodcutters, as users of objects not linked to squads, but I can put something in, yeah.
Shouldn't you be asleep Toady?
I don't even know anymore. The holiday break ended with me having my hours shifted over to 10am-2am, where I'm sort of tentatively set now. Nocturnal drift is almost inevitable though.
Will gold gas condense into molten gold? Or scatter into gold powder?
Can gold powder be melted into gold bars
Will molten gold cool into usable gold? (Bar? Ore? Lump?)
Then there is the question of if the Gold will turn into a lump of molten gold or coat the walls and floor with gold.
Gold gas, like the other game gases, currently disappears after a time. It'd be possible after I get through with the blood stuff I'm working on today to have it coat a map square with a thin layer of gold dust, but I'm not going to be able to commit to anything. There are also temperature tracking issues here, which I'm mostly going to avoid for now, probably, by omitting temperature for map spatter and just calling it material spatter without much reference to state.
I believe any metal powder item would be able to be melted down, but I could be wrong about that. They pass the "meltable" test, but there might be further restrictions elsewhere I'm not seeing.
Molten gold liquid items will cool down into a solid "glob" item, which could then be melted down, yeah. However, you'd need to make sure the creature with golden blood (say) bled out in roughly one place, or you'll just end up with an unusable tile coating that fails to achieve item status.
Maybe the liquid state needs a "mist" sub-state
Yeah, I haven't yet taken the water-specific clouds and merged those with the boiling material clouds, but when that happens there will need to be an additional material mist cloud (and probably also a material dust cloud for solids too). It should be a pretty easy change, though I'm not sure if it'll happen this time around. It might, since it's a save compat hassle to put it off.
Metal boils at extremely high temperatures, and when it does, it goes away almost instantly. Does this work properly in the game, or does gold vapor hang around like steam?
It hangs around right now. That could be changed. I wonder if it's enough to look at the temperature and the molar mass to get the speed, for the most part? I've forgotten almost everything I ever learned about gases, and I don't remember if that was even in the list to begin with.
What about poisonous aerosols? Sarin as Blood for example? Can an dwarf poisoned by inhaling it? Toady how will poisons work? I mean the kind of poison that for example that attacks nerves. Will it damage and destroy them leading to Paralysis? And do we get airborne Poisons? What about the raws for poisons anyways? IIRC there was an template but how does that get extended? How get for example materials handlet that are for Dwarfs poisonous but for elves not?
I'm really curious how the sickness stuff will be handled. <list of stuff>
Toady, the poison system in DF will be similar to the Armok I. system? (links post from 2001! with smilies!)
I'm not there yet, but I've got a fairly diverse list of effects that I'd like to model, so I think I might actually hit most of what has been mentioned, though I'm not going to promise any particular thing yet. The effects will be in the material raws, and I'm not sure, but the effects might be given something like poison class strings that could then occur in creatures to make them susceptible, or it might be better to give creatures groupings and then have the poison classes linked to the grouping (ie mammal, ape, canine, etc.). Injection is clearly going in. Inhalation wouldn't take much either as creatures already interact with flows and it already knows if their respiratory systems are working or not and if they have one. Contact poisons shouldn't be so hard, though there are a few hassles. Ingested poisons are a bit odd, as ingestion is entirely abstracted right now, so any effects would either be immediately or involve an onset variable which is destined to be written out and therefore a bit of a waste (by abstracted, I mean, it's going to be 'important' later to be able to do something like swallow a key and have it track the key, and that would also more naturally facilitate all sorts of digestion/absorption-onset poison effects, as it could just stuff the food item in the stomach and have it digest... this would also make vomit work better in a sense).
I suppose blood will act like an object in the next version, or in the future. What if magma blood will hit a dwarf for example?
# Req359, CONTAMINANT TEMPERATURE EFFECTS, (Future): Most importantly, metals that melt over creatures should have an effect, but the temperature of contaminants isn't currently stored.
Hopefully that one makes it in.
Yeah, the currently-released version has spatter of blood on to creatures, and it also doesn't do much. And this version might not either. I'd like to do it, and with the new blood it's more practical now (since I have access to a full material raw), but I'm not sure what I'll get to this direction for now.
Any word on poisoned weapons this time around?
They used to be in the game (in the form of batmen with GSC-poison-coated blowdarts), and all the code for adding blood contaminants from item contaminants is still there, so they could very well make it in, especially as I add new underground features and the vectors of torment within. As for adding a job that allows dwarves to poison their weapons, I've always had an internal resistance slowing that down as it didn't seem particularly dwarf-like, but I'm sure it'll go in at some point, quite possibly with some new ethics and potential backlash, or something.
Will there be a way to actually view corpse wounds? Will corpses be able to receive more wounds?
Hrm, I don't really know. Maybe not, as item viewing has often gotten the short end of the stick, though the appearance paragraph generator could very well be applied direcly to the corpse items, and they have all the info, so maybe it will go in. Right now, corpses don't receive additional abuse, but given that Armok 1 had that whole corpse processing thing well underway, there will eventually be lots of things in this direction. Adventure mode could very well become creepy, and the adv skills arc is probably when we'll be going there.
Does this mean that hydras won't die if you chop off one of their heads?
Looking at the code it seems like they should survive, but I haven't tested it. The final part of the countdown includes a hydra test, as the hydra was one of the motives behind some of the changes. But yeah, as people said, bleeding will probably need to be controlled.
IIRC Toady has mentioned something about regrowing body parts a while ago, so yeah, we gonna have this feature in the future hopefully.
You can have them grow in over time from, say, length=0, but there's nothing like regeneration at this point.
Also, Toady....what does this means exactly?
"01/07/2009. Some more unit information for corpses"
Various appearance/wound data is transferred to corpse/pieces now, enough to kind of give a snapshot of the creature at the time. So you could cut off one of the hydra's heads, and if you manage to keep it from rotting somehow, you could come back in ten years and be like, "you looked younger back then!" But the main utility is just tracking colors and so on, so that leather makes sense and all that.
Is Toady still in line for a Feb release date?
I don't think I ever mentioned that, but if I did, it's certainly not going to happen now. I had been hopeful about the late March/early April thing, but in general things tend to be a bit later than I hope for. I think I'd need to do around 10 a day to hit April properly, and I've been going somewhat slower than that, even after that really slow patch was completed.
Has it been indicated in this version whether reactions will be able to both use and create things that are inside barrels or vials or the like, such as alcohol or other extracts/powders/seeds?
I think but can't promise without some further work on countdown things that aren't done yet that you'll be able to use stuff in containers. I'd have to check if they grab containers for the new liquid products, but I wouldn't count on it. There were a few things left to do in the reaction countdowns so I can't really be specific yet.
I think I saw that the raws have the density of the layers making up creatures. (I could be wrong.) If this is the case, will the weight of creatures depend on how big each layer is? Also, do body parts have layers and layer thicknesses defined individually? (They probably do, just checking.)
Right now, because weights are used so little for creatures (only for the corpses right now, really), I think the weight part has been completely put off. The body parts all have layers and individual thicknesses, yeah, and eventually, yeah, the weights will be correct and layer dependent, but it was easy to gloss over this time.
What I really want to know is if we can not only have a creature that's a water blob and turns into a living ice boulder when freezing, but having it turn into a living cloud of steam if the temperature is high.
He he, nah, that's definitely some extra work. Right now, tissues like to be in a single state (or they will be when I handle some of those "magma man" issues), and deviations from that are considered damage.
So! Genetics!
How customizable will this stuff be? Can we specify that a certain trait is, say, recessive... or linked to another certain trait...or make a trait that skips generations...or that is tied to non-appearance features, like personality, or physical ability?
Every few generations, a dwarf is born with a beard like pure gold--and these dwarves are said to have legendary strength and a fierce temper to match?
I'm guessing these are all "very no" for now, but I have hope for the future!
I am glad that Toady also included variables we can set ourselves and all that...
I wonder if Toady will take the next step and add in some type of speciation into some later release.
Now if you could track the genetical mix in populations and subpopulations during worldgen we could get some diverse animal familys.
Yeah, definitely need to stick with the whatever-is-the-least-possible-change-is-what-I-meant thing here. It's really not that earth shattering, though it allows the things that I said. That said, the idea was to set up a framework for these kinds of changes. The code that handled colors in a dom/rec manner right now for instance is very easily adapted to handling abstract genes, so the challenge is more to decide on a raw format and how/which effects will be linked and so on.
As far as speciation goes, yeah, it doesn't track the wilderness population genetics at all, but it would be one of the things that would be interesting to try out. In the nearer term, it wouldn't be so so hard for somebody like a caravan trader to notice that all of your dogs have a very narrow genetic profile compared to the abilities, and for the trader to comment on that and ask for a breeding pair, or for you to define specs for a breed, or to have the game add that information to the legends and have the breed appear later on as its own subspecies through the dwarven and other empires.
But yeah, it's mostly about setting up potential right now, rather than doing anything super duper.
(Re: golden-bearded monarchs) All this should be doable in the next release.
I think maybe some confusion arose when I mentioned that entity positions can be linked to castes/gender. I don't have any appearance variable links at this time, but it's certainly the sort of thing that can be explored now, and it wouldn't be all that difficult to add, really.
what would happen if a cast were given both the MALE and FEMALE tags?
In this case, as it's stored as a variable instead of a flag, last tag wins, and there's no further trouble.
eugenics stuff
Yeah, I'm quite mindful that when I mentioned people can breed dogs now, of course the enterprising player is going to be doing all sorts of whatever who knows. The timeframe is probably a bit grueling to get anything like that started with dwarves though, as you'd need something like a 12 year fortress to even get started, but the only restrictions I think I'm planning to put in place (in a future release) are having creatures notice when they are being selected against -- it's sort of a tricky problem, but if the last ten dwarves to die all had red beards, I think the other red-bearded dwarves might start to notice and either flee or take action against their leaders, and that's certainly easy enough to code, though applying it outside of a controlled environment like the player's fortress is more difficult. I'm vaguely worried about how much untoward player experiments will crap up the forum with flamewars and racism, but I don't think it'll be so much that it can't be handled properly.
From a more "gamey" perspective, and looking back at pets again, say, breeding things to be larger doesn't really have a downside at this point. What are the downsides to explore? More food (assuming pets need to be fed later) and genetic disorders, especially when you are at the edges of the allowed parameters for a given creature? It would be cool to have little dog breeds that do little dog breed jobs like ferreting out pests and so on. They are also easier to carry and knit sweaters for, though that involves creature weights and item sizes, neither of which are really handled well.