Toady i hope you enjoy your little chrismas holyday.
There's really no need to spell it that way. Holiday already means holy day. That's the reason it sounds like that.
iirc regeneration speeds are in but not regrowth, which means a cut or something can heal really fast but cut-off thingslike limbs dont regrow jet. Thought regrowth wouldnt be that hard by comparing the actual bodyplan with basetemplate to select what has to be regrown. The how is another question thought.
A first implementation would be the same way cuts heal- you'd just have a flag for whether a creature regenerates major body parts or not and if so they'd go from gray to red to yellow to regular.
This would obviously need a variety of other considerations as you wouldn't want dwarves or whoever stitching up the little nub that was growing and sticking it in casts and things when nothing was really "broken." We've never so much seen the bone breaks and things so if it just acted like the soft tissues were out of commission it would probably avoid most of that from the get go.
Better system would probably use a similar display but specifically recognize the body part as a regrowing one opening up the option for ointments and things while possibly making the dwarf eat more often. At first I was thinking that giving them a narrower window to live through before starving would be an unwanted effect but regrowing a whole arm would be rather energy intensive and should rightly make a individual more likely to starve until they were back to maintenance mode.
The whole system would have the potential for use in all creatures as you'd be able to set variable healing rates for types of tissues. Skin and things like your tongue regenerate fast and usually entirely and lungs are rather resilient except for that lifetime of wear problem people deal with these days so you'd have all sorts of black lung options available.
-Toady is iffy if he would allow a Hydra to regrow more heads then it originally had, and if he did he would require some sort of limit.
Either way it would be rather difficult to farm hydra skulls. Setting up some kind of pressure plate maze chamber with a vorpal type trap and some water timers to keep the thing from losing all it's heads would be quite the time sink though.
It's difficult to guess when it'll be finished. I remember people betting for February.... 2009. And until recently, "Christmas" was a quite popular guess around here, so as frustrating as it can be, it's best to just wait & see.
Hey gais, I still bet it's out by Christmas! :DDD
You do realize that if Hydras regrow heads freely, we'll end up with >10,000 headed Hydras from worldgen, right?
Of course, such a hydra would likely collapse under its own weight due to DF's realistic treatment of bodies. This reminds me of a certain comic that I can't find the link to.
Ya, the growing double heads thing seemed like a less than ultra-menacing ability to me back when I was first introduced to the idea. It's probably supposed to evoke the idea of trying to avoid one snake biting you then two and so on until there's constantly one lunging at you. For the SUPER-fighters of the day being able to parry attacks from a lot of people was impressive but eventually those snake heads should be attacking too quickly for someone to deal with, which would presumably be the end of its ever having heads lopped off.
You could get some really interesting skulls if you were to only partially decapitate it- and if it doesn't work that way why the hell didn't people just maim the heads some?
Wait. What are you talking about? What bugs? How can you know which bugs to expect without actually playing the new version? Did toady talk about it on a devlog? Or on the latest short dwarf talk?
He's given a few words about the way he deals with really immediately-visible bugs up front and then gets the game stable before he releases it and then it may still have things like dwarves never waking up when we get our hands on it.