I'd like to see some salamanders.
We do have olms already, although others wouldn't hurt.
I probably would have responded to other parts of your post, but wall of text, dude.
All this time and I've totally misunderstood what olms were.
And ya, I know how huge posts are but I can't shut myself up and I can't be here to post all of the time forever. Probably better that it all be hidden with how much of it was that anthropomorphizing and evolution topic :b
A little more plausible one is the martain invasion one, the martians are really powerful, yet they fall to an alien (to them) pathogen which we deal with easily.
Not plausible, not at all. The idea that there would be a world where a species can make it into outer space without being aware of microbiology is ridiculous. Also, wouldn't they have some sort of suit used for earlier explorations?
If they are so bad ass as to not need some sort of suit to hold pressure, protect from temps, and whatnot, then they probably have bio-ized themselves, unless you think life could advance that far in outer space.
Even if they were DNA,RNA,amino-acid based they would probably not have the membrane proteins that most viruses use to get into cells. Birds and pigs are similar enough to us that we can get some of their diseases but most of the time a disease is more species specific than that. Bacteria have a better shot as they're often quite hardy and really just need to be able to engulf a small variety of compounds- you'd probably find a bunch of them the chemical basis I described above but they still might run into relative dead ends and not really grow to a level where they were of any concern to the aliens.
Aliens not based on those things are significantly more removed from the whole range of chemicals anything on Earth is equipped to deal with. A few organisms would still be able to eat certain sorts of alien chemicals but the number rapidly drops off as the system changes. If you had some of those silicon based lifeforms that you see in scifi (much less probable IRL but oh well,) I don't think anything here would be able to eat them. You could still get traces of bacteria on them just like you have bacteria sitting right on a rock but that's not going to do anything.
Surely rope ladders are easy?
Say for each bit of rope you can go 2 tiles, here is some psuedocode:
/*Assuming x y z are the starting point of the ladder, z is the height axis and starts from the top, and you replace the stair function with proper code*/
PlaceObject(x,y,z,STAIR_DOWN,"Rope");
int height=1 ;
bool done = false;
while (!done){
if(Map[x][y][z+height+1]==true||height==rope*2){ //If we cant go down
PlaceObject(x,y,z+height,STAIR_UP,"Rope");//Place up stair at position
done = true; // We are done
} else {
PlaceObject(x,y,z+height,STAIR_BOTH,"Rope");//Place up and down stair
height++; // increase height
}
}
But what does the pathfinding do? If you designate stones for dumping below a rope ladder does a dwarf rush down and realize he can't haul the stone back up, cancel the job, and then watch another dwarf climb down to try to dump the same stone?
I wonder when diseases and epidemics will be implemented. Quarantines, medical labs, vaccination. I think it could be a bloat for the healthcare arc.
A virus that is carried by rodent and animals could murderize the whole fortress in a single day. Then, there will be a legitimate reason to kill all animals. Also, old-school medieval warfare: use the catapult to hurl diseased animals at the attackers during a siege. Or start a whole pandemic that kills everything in the world. Ahem, I'm getting ahead of myself...
That could be an interesting way of "starting" the world actually.
The Stand: Dwarf Fortress Edition.Erect posture and opposable thumbs are required for 'manual dexterity'. A culture can easily use non-facial gestures and postures for nonverbal communiation. Reduced muscle mass is not required at all. I don't see any reason to be baldfaced, again- though I suppose this is in the "human" direction.
A lobster-man could easily not be erect but have suitable dexterity with the correct sort of foremost limbs.
Well if we're talking human features enhanced you run into the issue of which features are human? Until Jane Goodall's work we thought war was specifically human but now about all we've got is art.
Many creatures create things for appreciation of others/to attract mates. Now, before you say "that's not why we do art" consider rock musicians.
I meant art for art's sake. There's obviously some degree of aesthetic thinking in the other animals but only man and dwarf ever make artifact socks that can't be used except for placement on a stockpile somewhere. You could call the trinkets animals trade mate-attracting-tools and rock musicians could just be really good at a sort of mating dance.
I was thinking more like that guy who's been carving the crazy horse memorial.
The new version being out (almost) in time for Christmas would be awesome, even without rope ladders. 
Although I still wonder how our computers'll handle the extra z-levels (if I understood that right) and features and body parts.
You can just manually adjust how high the sky goes, and I think how deep the Earth goes as well so if your computer isn't uber you can just use appropriate settings.
Personally I don't know how I'd handle building a fort that skipped a beat for the underground layers then went back to it's usual business so I'll probably try to make them pretty close together if there's not some magical ore-getting thing I'd miss out on thanks to that.
"000802 □ [creatures] snakemen can get through fortifications"
Wouldn't they be thin/contorting enough do that? Along with a few other creatures.
It could be a suitable feature but as it stands fire imps can get through fortifications (not personally observed but someone in a thread about this bug said that they too can wander-path right through them just like water creatures if they're near.)
Could actually be pretty FUN if you had digger types not tunnel into your base but right up to it before they fed poisonous snakes through the freshly carved fortifications.
But now that we have gotten this far, why stop at only two components (man/animal). Why not animal/animal to any degree of complexity? The traditional snake/lion/goat chimera, for example, the lion/human/scorpion manticore, or the human/lion/bird sphinx. More at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mythological_hybrids
I'd wager because snake-lizards and boar-pigs aren't very interesting while shark-sparrows are just too silly.
It has a name, creatures that are not human but resemble humans are called "humanoids". Bipedal movement, erect posture, manual dexterity, these some of the basic traits of humanoids. They might not even have opposable thumbs or reduced body hair (wookies are humanoids too), but resemble us in other ways.
And now I think I've recognized a problem. Ostrich-men seem like they would rather immediately lose the traits that made them an ostrich. At almost any degree (other than the surreal) they wouldn't have anything different that a chicken-man and that's an awfully large variation to go losing.
Maybe I'm just not seeing enough ways to do it...
Reminds me of a notion Tom Robbins puts forward in his novel Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates. He refers to essential traits of humanity such at these (his list is Humor, Imagination, Eroticism, Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics), and submits that only a small subset of humanity can really claim to exhibit all these traits in proper fashion, and therefore only this minority are really "human." He borrows the term "missing link" to refer to everyone else.
Sounds awfully close to Aristotle's ladder ._.
I already to spent a full minute scrolling over Shoku's Quote-Rebuttal of Doom. Stop. All of you, stop this now.
Only one minute?
I'm actually quite impressed that a forum do so well to keep from falling apart over the subject.
But yes, we've far overreached the point of diminishing returns for the topic.
For those of you wondering how to anthropomorphize Jellyfish:
This artist(s) should really have the torso hang out the bottom of the jellyfish bell. The way it stands those jellyfish men eat with their butt and lose the whole directionality of their tentacles.
Sure they've have to swim backwards and the point of our eyes is to see where we're going but some jellyfish have little eye-things so it should work out fine.
Yea, the 'starfish alien' thing is what I was trying to do with the multiple combo back a few pages.
Really though, any real aliens are likely to be very non-humanoid.
Personally I'm pretty tired of starfish aliens being so Earthy. It seems like the first thing that pops into people's heads for -aliens that's not a human- is always reptile or insect followed by a list of other animals and maybe a plant or two. Even in something like spore all they do is let you scramble Earth animal parts...
but this is really not a topic for this thread. I might start up another thread for this but I'm really lazy about figuring out where to put those and how to introduce a topic.
Nah.
EDIT: Well, we could talk about just how flipping green that list is. I mean YEAH! Holy SMOKES. GREEN.
Oh man, I can't ever get enough of this green items talk. I was hoping the whole time that somebody would interrupt that other stuff for this.
Okay fine, so what should we talk about? What the 40 new underground critters are?
Being on the subject of the devlog, YES that is what we should talk about.
Or speculation about ropes/ladders and so forth. It's pretty open really, but not that open.
So what can we expect them to be other than bugs, bug-men, wild animal-men, and weird slime things?
"There's 40 new creatures for the underground" isn't getting talked about because trying to talk about it is asking us to pick 40 things out of infinity. Give us multiple choice where you can't use calculus to show that the odds of our being anywhere close have approached zero and sure, you can expect talk about it.
Otherwise what the hell are people supposed to do? Work up a daVinci code series of crap based off of the number 40?
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items (Read 3666816 times)