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[Gezol]

I'd figured that you wouldn't be able to get eggs from something you could milk, but then again, goblins could be monotremes.

Way back in this thread you said that there were dwarven philosophers, but that you didn't really know what they did. There wasn't any trace of them in the movies and I assumed they'd been dropped because of that. It occurs to me that this might actually be a useful role for them, getting captured, intelligent enemies to see the error of their ways. Then again, making it possible to convince goblins to become productive citizens of the fortress might strain credibility almost as much as raising them for their tasty, nutritious milk and eggs...

[Toady One]

Does a platypus quack?  Probably not.

The philosophers don't come right now until you have 100+ people.  Then they just hang around.  I have a list of things that they'd do.  Like complaining about living arrangements for people and stuff...  I'll look for my full list...  complaining anger and death levels...  not enough satisfying jobs...  people without homes...  too much punishment...  not digging deep enough...

[Demon]

Couldn't the philosophers do something useful, like try to cheer the other dwarves up??  It sounds like all the do is make your other dwarves angry...

[Toady One]

Well, they are more like activists now -- they complain to the mayor, and the mayor can then make mandates regarding these conditions, which the player can then follow (or not).  In that way, they make the player aware of general problems that they might not have noticed.  Perhaps they could play a more direct role though...  on the other hand, dwarves develop friendships with people, and I could make the friends do more.  They do a bit now, but it is a marginal effect.

[Jim]

The philosopher dwarves should also be able to babble enemies to sleep.  It would be cool if they were really sarcastic too.  Say that you make severe tactical errors in battle.  A philosopher dwarf could say, "Sometimes even God makes mistakes."  If a lot of dwarves die in construction or manufacture related accidents, a philosopher dwarf could say, "Any leader can achieve his vision so long as he has ambition, fortitude, and an endless supply of expendable labor."

[Silleh Boy]

maybe we could capture, shave, milk and butcher the philosophers, and feed them to the enslaved goblins. maybe not.

[Toady One]

philosopher's stone...  or EGG?

[Eagleon]

You just blew my mind.

Umm.... <insert>

[Aquillion]

quote:Originally posted by Gezol:
<STRONG>The possibilities I thought of for captured enemies were interrogating them, letting them go with promises not to return, ransoming them back to wherever they came from, imprisoning them, enslaving them, or executing them, the last two of course being on the evil side of things. Possibly the interrogation as well, depending on how it's done. Sounds like this would be bloat stuff though...</STRONG>

Hmm, good vs. evil, philosophers...  Here's an idea for a bloat!  Keep track of the trends in 'society' somehow--whether the Dwarves, as a whole, are bloodthirsty or peaceful, whether they're nasty or nice, good or evil, etc.  Philosophers could play a role in changing your civilization.  If the dwarves were bloodthirsty and nationalistic, they might demand that prisoners be executed...  hippy dwarves might object to it.  A player who wanted to could try to socially engineer their dwarves to match a specific philosophy.

I can see dwarves' philosophical outlook being tracked by a handful of variables...  "Nationalism", for instance, would measure their loyalty/devotion to the fortress, while "humanism" (or dwarfism) could measure their feelings of goodwill towards fellow sentients.  These things would all start pretty low, but developing them (and deciding how far to take them) would be an important part of building a lasting civilization.  The fortress could gain more complex reputations based on them as, say, a place with strict justice or a place with social equality...  Those reputations would affect relations and so forth.

And you know what this means, don't you?  Liberal Dwarf Squad!

[ October 05, 2005: Message edited by: Aquillion ]

[Harlander]

I just spent hours watching all the Dwarf Fortress movies. All I can say is that given how compelling it was to watch, playing it will probably be a transcendent joy.

OK, I can say more than that:

Events in the game seem to lend themselves to the player mentally filling in bits of the story; like the tragic tale of that hunter who went crazy and starved to death. That sort of thing adds a lot to a game of this sort. Well, that wasn't very well said but I think you know what I mean.

[Toady One]

Harlander!  It has been a year or so.  You are still a level 2 programmer?  I want games!

Yeah, I think it's addictive and immersive -- even if I've never properly played into the mid-game because it still crashes occasionally.

I remember you asked something about Armok statistics a long time ago.  Dwarf Fortress lends itself well to that sort of thing, even if it doesn't have teleporting body parts.  Right now, for purposes of migration and merchants, it tracks every job and item completed over the history of your fortress, and all of the major events, as well as your principle artisans and their masterworks.  The idea is to kind of share this information at the end in a nice synopsis (or "legend"), so that you can read an account of your fortress whenever you want.  You'll also have any movies you recorded.  I don't know how "cookie-cuttery" it'll end up sounding, but they might be fun to share with people.

[Harlander]

Well, I think I've got a bit more XP since then.  I've dabbled in a couple of projects since then, but my staying power isn't very good and I tend to get distracted by other things, other projects, real-world happenings and shiny things.

I had an idea for a top-down Elite-esque multiplayer game where you could design your own ships. I only got as far as the polygon editor for that (which I coded in a weekend of frenzied work) before somehow losing impetus.

I started work on what I hoped to develop into essentially a roguelike version of Neverwinter Nights, but I couldn't even get a decent LoS algorithm to work, and fiddling with that was ultra-frustrating.

I did finish one 'game-esque' thing, a networked collaborative writing program (in glorious Java) with a mode where everyone submitted a line to continue the story, then voted for the one they preferred (they couldn't vote for their own) and were assigned a score based on how many votes they got.

All this isn't taking into account the projects I had to do for my degree course, of course.

I've been under a bit of malaise project-wise  of late. I'm figuring I might be able to pull myself together once I've started my new job (sonar programming, woo!) but right now the empty days leave me feeling a little drained.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Ooh, and thinking of it: decorated items. At the moment, you have things like images of humans, dwarves, crops, animals and whatnot on your decorated things. Would it be possible to have stuff like scenes, like 'this is carved with a scene of celebrating dwarves, surrounded by food' and whatnot? Maybe with details, like 'this cup is decorated with a bone carving of a fox, with the eyes picked out in tiny ruby quartz crystals'. It's not a big thing, but, I dunno, it might be cool.

[ October 05, 2005: Message edited by: Harlander ]

[ October 05, 2005: Message edited by: Harlander ]

[Toady One]

Yeah, it's easy to get distracted.  I'm like a level 2 programmer, but I'm finally persistent after years of letting projects die.  And there are no shiny things here in my room...  where I am all the time.

The item improvement ideas sound good.  I had some notes along those lines for the decorations, at least regarding using specific details for certain objects.  Like instead of saying "the cup is studded with iron", it could stud the handle or some particular part, and I could do different ones for each item -- you could use jeweled eyes for your statues then, etc.  But I hadn't thought about "improving the improvements", which is more what you suggested with the bone fox with ruby quartz eyes on the cup, and that would be cool and open up a lot of new avenues.  As far as scenes go, up to this point I had planned to do that for masterpiece engravings -- if you saw the dwarf detailing the fortress, occasionally they'll bust out a masterpiece, which will be fleshed out -- it could commemmorate a battle you had previous won, or the psycho hunter that died, or whatever.  I don't see any harm in moving a portion of that, or things like you suggest, over to items...  it's all one big happy bloat.

[Harlander]

The most annoying thing about the failure of my Elite-clone project was that some people stole the project's name and used it for their own thing! *grr* I  mean, it's not like they'd think of calling a 2D space game "Flatspace" independently, is it?

Right now I've been turning the idea of a Princess Maker-esque thingy in my mind. I haven't fleshed it out at all but I think I can use Python for some rapid prototyping once I turn vague ideas into less-vague ones.

[Gezol]

Ooh, the masterpiece idea sounds really cool. Also certain decorations could occur more often depending on what happens in the fortress. So for example, if the dwarves hunt a lot, then the decorations often have themes of animals and wilderness. If they have lots of farms, then it's things like plants and dwarves working in the fields, weapons and battle scenes if they fight a lot, etc.

Also, certain decorations might be more common on certain things. So, you might get things like dwarves standing over the bodies of their fallen foes on weapons, maybe, but peaceful plant designs on storage bins. There was this one spike-covered cabinet in the movies, which seemed a little unlikely to me, but then again, maybe that's a standard dwarven design...