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[Toady One]

nethack

Nethack is one of the "Big 5" roguelike games, along with Rogue, ADOM, Moria and Angband (I think).  Dungeon Crawl is probably played more than Rogue, though, these days, but Rogue was first.

[Toady One]

This weekend I plan to get through, or most of the way through, the 40th core item, which is handling all combat revisions and bugs.  For instance, a dwarf crossbowman that gets shot by a goblin crossbowman will fire back the stuck-in bolt first rather than bolts from the quiver.  This is odd.  Hardcore, but odd.

[ September 30, 2005: Message edited by: Toady One ]

[Toady One]

The necessary bugs are sorted, which takes us to 40/192.  Now for the stuff stuff...

[Silleh Boy]

i noticed there seemed to be 'wrestlers' in the menu's at one point in the movies.

are they fighters?
if so, how viable are they as fighters?
if not, are they there to entertain?
or, do they indefinately tie up their foe with choreagraphed moves, that hurt neither of them in the slightest?

[Toady One]

Wrestling is most of what I'm working on now.  For a while now, creatures have been able to grab onto other creatures with their mouths, and shake until a chunk or limb comes off.  Now I'm adding joint-locks, chokes, gouging, take-downs, those cross-swords power struggle thingies and a few more.  You'll probably be able to see it on the inventory or health menu, while it is happening, but right now all you can see is a magenta background around anybody who is tangled up.

Combatants without weapons just traded punches, and that takes too long. In general, I've found that by adding these complications, the flow of the army battles ends up looking a lot better, instead of people just trading shots.   It was certainly true when I added dodging away to other squares and charging into the opponents square (makes fighting on bridges a lot of fun to watch...).  You'll still want your dwarves to have a weapon though...  even if one of them is a great wrestler, going for that first grab will be dangerous against a reasonably competent armed opponent.

[Silleh Boy]

so basically, if we distract an enemy with one dwarf, a wrestler could run up and disable them while dwarf number one stabs them to death?

[Toady One]

yeah!  that's the spirit!

I went ahead and added spines as well...  now you can have permanently paralyzed dwarves to care for forever.

It'll take an hour or two more of programming to finish the 40th core thingy (a few more wrestling moves).  The next 9 or so core things are a bit faster, and I should be able to do 2 or 3 a weekend.  At that point I'll be able to say how long the next 10 of the remaining 30 would take, and so on.  I'll always be knocking off a few of the requests/bugs/required changes as I go along.

[Aquillion]

Not to get all eugenic (eugeninisitc?), but in game terms, is there any reason why the player would want to keep a paralyzed dwarf alive?  Can they still do some things, or are they completely helpless?

And also, can dwarves build dwarven wheelchairs for them, like in LCS?  Or could they just wheel themselves around in a wheelbarrow?

[ October 03, 2005: Message edited by: Aquillion ]

[Toady One]

There is currently a bloat concerning prosthetic limbs.  Now that I've added spines, it might have to be extended along the lines you describe, but I don't think it will delay the first release having a few of these guys around.  In part, you'd want to keep them alive because their friends and family will become stricken by grief if they don't make it.  Incidentally, relatives and friends also get angry if the body rots while not in a tomb, so you'll want to arrange for the proper arrangements.  Also, the number of deaths influences the amount of migration you have.  So if the dwarf merchant reports back home that your fortress is a total death trap it would be worse than saying you have some permanent guests in the hospital.

But yeah, according to the current code, they will always seek to be placed in bed and demand food and water, since they consider not being able to walk a "major injury", even if they can't heal.  Prior to this system, there were some horrible horrible happenings where dwarves crawled around trying to feed and water themselves, but they'd keep passing out and dropping food.  One such dwarf starved to death next to a well because he kept dropping his food to drink and passing out again.  It's kind of unfortunately that most of the altruistic behavior has to be explicit in the code.

[ October 03, 2005: Message edited by: Toady One ]

[Gezol]

You mentioned something before about selling captured enemy leaders to caravans. I imagine certain traps can capture enemies alive, but can the wrestling skill also be used for that? And what can you do with captured enemies once you've got them? I'm picturing lots of possibilities, some of them rather evil...

[Eagleon]

It'd be like having your own little Sims! Muahaha.

How about some battlerager armor for the wrestlers? It'd make them a bit more deadly if there are bladed ridges and spikes to rub against the enemy with. >

[ October 03, 2005: Message edited by: Eagleon ]

[Toady One]

Yeah, there is a cage trap you can make.  When I added them, I had mainly envisioned them as a way of capturing animals to train.  This is the current functionality.  Certain unintelligent enemies can be trained.  Any captured enemies can be sold or offered to your own or allied leaders, just as an artifact of the trading code.

The rest of it is contigent upon the addition of the livestock bloat, which might be stretching it.  If there are large animals being milked, egged, shaved and butchered, then captured enemies might also...  be...  well, that doesn't sound all that dwarven.  It's funny -- goblins get wasted a lot, but Tolk didn't really have them captured all that often, as far as I remember.  Yet the good guys were captured all the time.  What happens in other fantasy stories is either successful or unsuccessful attempts to get the creature to understand "the error of its ways".  Or if it is a troll or something it might be changed into a big fluffy and good dog by fairies or something.

[Toady One]

You can add spikes to armor right now, as a decorative improvement...  strange that they don't actually come up in fighting...  maybe I should jot that down somewhere...

[Gezol]

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...

I would favor treating them as a different category from livestock, though. I think even evil dwarves would probably draw the line at milking, shaving, and butchering goblins...

[Toady One]

Don't forget the eggs!  Mmmm....