Could you modify the spatter system in a way that it interacts with the current water-system? Say that a a blob of Salt(-dust) can "cover" a cube of Water but gets treated as if it is dissolved in said cube of water?
Yeah, there are those two weird flags that spread around for salinity and so on, but nothing else for contaminants, and yeah, it's a question of speed and also memory. It's not as terrifying as the restrictions on fluid types in general, since the rules for moving contaminations around could be pretty simple, but there's still the question of amount and location and spreading out so on. The ideas are still kicking around for this one, with no clear solution at this time.
Is there any other uses for artifacts planned that doesn't involve the magic arc? Such as making whoever has the benefit of using an artifact weapon or owning any artifact of any kind very happy, a commander carrying a important artifact in battle increasing his/her's soldiers morale, possibly increasing their ability to go into battle trance, and more negative results of losing an artifact?
There used to be a system by which artifacts became "possessed" (as in ownership), "hidden" (as in some loser hiding it) or "dropped". The dwarves would pass along the artifact as long as it was dropped, and any dwarf that picked up the artifact and decided to get a possessed marker on it would seek to get it back, until it was hidden (at which point your adventurer could go to find it). That's obviously a little to strange to come back, but that's kind of what we are thinking in a vague way -- they don't have to be magical at all to be coveted and influence decisions overall. Dwarves aren't really autonomous enough at this point to have higher goals like this with any kind of precision, but that should come with job priorities the way we're thinking about them at this point. There was also a notion for any valuable object of having your adventurer be able to arrange for them to come into the ownership of important people, which is one way you might move up in the world, but that's also unformed.
For Fort Mode, what do you think the ultimate representation of the player will be?
Toady, I too wonder about the player's actual role in the game. Not definitively speaking as the developer, but just being close to the game, how do you interpret what the player's semi-direct but resistible control over the Fortress actually represents?
I can't really separate out my play experiences from my planning, since they are bound together. The idea we're currently working with and what I think it should seem like is that any command you issue should be traced back to some position of authority, and that each action can be taken to have been given by an appointee you've placed, civilian or military (the expedition leader or mayor if nothing else fits). In that sense you'd be the "official" part of the fortress. When guilds come back in, there will probably be ways in which they enhance player control and ways in which they impede player control, and any enhancement would come again in the ways in which they can are attached to an official capacity (better work orders or whatever millions of things) and the impediments come in the form of opposition to a more central official capacity (work stoppages etc.).
In this sense also come things like noble demands -- these aren't taken in an official capacity, but in a selfish capacity (even though mandates carry the force of law behind them), and so are impediments to player control rather than enhancements of player control. Of course, these are sort of trashy and could be considered placeholders for future systems (not that we have a particular better system in mind, so the term placeholder is a stretch, rather it's simply a weakness of the game), but the overall point holds that as they depart from their official role, they are not agents of the player but are acting on their own and this is reflected in your lack of control.
One hope in the attachment of your actions to official actions is that absolutely everything you do could then be traced back to a dwarf or set of dwarves. This is good for legends, it's good for retribution and thoughts of revenge and revolution and specific targeted action with respect to that sort of thing, and so on. Theoretically this system would also allow you to play different subsets of the fortress if you wanted to, but I'm not sure it'll ever be so cleanly delineated as to allow that kind of thing. It might be cool though, and it would certainly have a boat-load of adventure mode ramifications in terms of positions you might attain there, so it's good to think in these terms, I think.
The barons/etc. are also interesting in this regard, as they are in a sense an embodiment of official capacity, but there are two entities to deal with -- the site and the civilization. It could end up being that you can control them in the sense of their official site capacity and you do not control them in the sense of their civilization aspirations and interactions, at least those interactions that do not involve them as representatives of your fortress.
There are lots of gray areas in all of this (partially because the view has been evolving over the course of the project). There's also the matter of the transition from your fortress to a more global perspective as the army and diplomacy and caravan stuff comes up -- whether that means any change in the overall description of the player's role remains to be seen, as your fortress and official actions taken therein can still be site-civ-oriented while still having world impact, or you might take on larger entity capacities as your main noble or any other global-oriented dwarves/operatives attain status at the civilization level. It's important that it comes out of the fortress in some way in terms of the sense of accomplishment and continuity, I think.
I'd like to know if the new creature DNA genetic what have you is capable of kicking out albinos.
I don't know that I'm knowledge enough to understand at what you're getting at here.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items (Read 3666048 times)