At what rate of new game-crashing bug reports are you going to move on to the merge and the other remaining issues? Three days since the last one that gets reported, a week since the last one that gets reported?
Nah, it's nothing like that. The issues are all being worked on at once, roughly according to what I think are the worst ones. I have some things I want to finish, and bad things crop up, but I've also been working on the old list. The military/equipment bugs are the last issues I think I really really need to fix from the old list, and there might be a few things from the new list as well, though you'll just get to experience most of that yourself. It's going to be a fairly dirty release. That shouldn't come as a surprise to people that were around for the original or the first Z-axis release. Newer players spoiled by the relative stability of 40d can either play or wait while we all sort things out in a series of quick releases, but I wouldn't expect something that works very well in all areas at first.
Is [POWER] a caste level tag? Does that mean I could give all the races an "evil overlord" caste that would take over civs that respect [ANY_SUITABLE_POWER]?
POWER is a caste level tag, but ANY_SUITABLE_POWER is gone. Still, POWERs work with take-overs and impersonations, and you can set up a favorable situation. However, if you have a caste for a given civ, they won't act to take over their civ or other civs -- it's only the independently acting creatures (megas, semis, demons, titans) that do that sort of thing now. An evil overlord megabeast power could be set up that would gravitate toward certain civs at this point.
In regards to dipping things into poisonous substances. Will the "poison coating room" I described earlier work? To recap - it's a room where weapons are dumped and some poison is vaporized in the middle, causing vapors to condense as a coverage of poison on the weapons.
Vapors don't condense around items or walls or anything, if I remember. I don't think a liquid would even work here, since an item that lands in a square with spatter doesn't automatically gain that spatter as a contaminant. It's pretty difficult to get a contaminant on an item right now if you don't jam them into something or have them around a combat in somebody's inventory where goop/blood is flying around.
Will pointy weapons still be able to corkscrew through several organs?
I think somebody may have mentioned it, but yeah, they can, but there are organ relationships now that should control the strangeness a bit.
With more detailed body sizes and relative bodypart sizes introduced, as well as attack sizes and areas and stuff, will it be possible (anytime soon) to have items that aren't one-size-fits-all? Weapons, specifically. Since we can now determine the grasp size of a creature, approximately, we could afford to have weapons that no longer need tags to determine what size a creature must be to wield them one- or two-handed.
I don't quite understand. The current ones aren't one-size-fits-all... do you mean more like one-size-variable-fits-all or something? In any case, we are a bit closer to having something like grasp sizes, but without knowing the shape of body parts, the overall bp size isn't really that informative either, compared to the current method.
Because in the new version, if you have a full adamantine plate armoured knight, that absolutely nothing can penetrate, will a lucky swipe or stab be able to poke through the eye into the brain, or cut the neck/throat, rendering armor useless (if it happens)?
It depends on the coverage variables. Items that cover less than 100% would make the people wearing those susceptible to attacks from thrusts or smaller weapons, beyond bashing issues. At this point I think a fully armored knight might have full coverage though...
Can we set the level of the water in the Arena mode?
Water can be placed, but you can't place walls at this point (except by placing magma and water on top of each other), so you just kind of splash on people. There's a pool on the lower right side and some other running water. It should be improved over time.
Toady I know that you are not going to run entity for every single being in a population because it would be too slow so your reserving it for important individuals. Is there any thought of allowing large groups of people to have decision power? How will these groups be seperated if they exist at all?
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Basically what I am asking is that since every individual cannot make true decisions during World Gen will groups of people be used for the unimportant? How are people put into groups if there are any? (examples include Class, job, religions... blaw)
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I am asking the question because he didn't touch upon it except to say he wouldn't be running decision processes for every individual because there are too many.
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Ill drop it
He he he, I think I sort of understand. I think it's important to be able to have something like a riot in a city without necessarily having an important historical figure instigate the event, and in that way groups and whatever segments of populations it is keeping track of should be able to react based on entity ethics/history/whatever -- the main thing they'd be missing is the personality variables. At the same time, I think it's important to use historical figures when we've got them, because those kinds of legends are generally more compelling.
can you use the USE_MATERIAL_TEMPLATE token in a material template? e.g. could I define a SHINYMETAL_TEMPLATE that copies most of its values directly from METAL_TEMPLATE?
Nope. I want to generalize the creature variations to just let you tack tags wherever, in whatever raw, but I need to adapt the load code for materials to allow that to happen, and there was a point as I've mentioned before where converting to some kind of proper scripting language might make more sense.
Would it be possible to give a creature acid (or some other material that works roughly the same) for blood, which would cause contact damage to items it bleeds on and/or harm anything that fights it melee? An example of this would be the Xenomorphs of the Alien films.
There isn't any damage to items aside from the current damage over time to clothing etc., but you can make poison blood and it'll splatter all over the place and you can make it rot whatever creature tissues it touches (including tissues that don't normally rot).
Are there any plans to eventually apply the changes to the military interface to civilian dwarves as well?
Specifically, I'm thinking about establishing work crews, so that my woodcutters, for example, would leave the safety of the fortress together, stick fairly close to one another while cutting down the designated trees, go on break as a group, maybe even help each other out with the more stubborn trees (once wood raws are in).
Somebody mentioned burrows, which can cover for some of this, but I don't have specific plans for this. It's a reasonable idea. The notion of them sticking together could also be coupled with the escort idea somebody mentioned before.
Does this mean that megabeasts with aquatic biomes will be able to travel across their biomes and attack forts?
I've only handled wilderness creatures (megabeasts work more like invading armies). I don't have any aquatic megabeasts, but it wouldn't be hard to support them for modders inclined to add them. I guess that would apply to aquatic armies as well, but I'm sure there are lots of additional issues there.
Hey Toady, out of curiosity, do you write unit tests for any of your code?
Anything I'd think of to do there seems like it would be too annoying to maintain and prone to introduce bugs in the unit test when I try to maintain it, when it comes to setting up the objects etc necessary for the test. I don't have any experience with it.
Toady, would it be possible for us to get an early sample of the RAWs
so we can have a nice start on modding?
It seems like they are settling down toward the release date, but they'll probably just be released with the release in whatever state they are in.
With all the changes to the underground, how is Adamantine going to be handled? Or is that info classified?
Classified, at least for the first five minutes anyway, until everybody knows.
With all this talk about castes, I have to wonder, will it be possible to dynamically alter the ratio of castes of wildlife/invaders coming to your fortress? Or is that fixed in worldgen?
What I mean is, most of the siegers (other than local leaders etc) are currently randomly generated. And altering the raws of creatures changes them 'on the fly'. So will it be possible to mod in castes of goblin that are much larger, tougher and rarer, and then progressively alter the caste ratio in the raws to make the tougher ones more and more common as your fortress progresses (to provide a challenge)?
If you actually alter the raws as you go, the ratios for invaders would change, yeah. Once invaders are taken from actual populations that wouldn't work, but it will for the next long while.
Any chance we could see the combat report of that?
I don't have one saved, and I'm not sure the temperature-related explosions even get filed off in combat reports, though they make the traditional announcements in adv mode. There are a number of minor issues presently with getting tangential information properly filed in combat reports.
That's actually a good question. A friend of mine recently asked me "Is Dwarf Fortress heteronormative?" jokingly, but I seriously do wonder that.
Heterosexual marriage, children and all that went in fairly quickly to establish world gen with simple, ongoing histories, and so you'd be able to continue on your possibly isolated fortresses as well. We've even got a marriage sphere, since gods of marriage are very common. These days it might look like a political stake driven into the ground, but that's simply not the case. As for where it goes from here, it's sort of a choice of which realities you want to model, which you want to idealize, which you want to omit, and how they are all prioritized -- I've added lots of physical characteristics now, without racism, and that more or less points toward adding sexual orientations and having them all merge in naturally in every society.
will the same world gen seeds still result in the exact same world, or will there a be more random factors with the new features?
Is it possible to unify the random number generator across all platforms? Currently a seed will almost but not quite make the same thing between mac/linux/windows.
Theoretically, seeds should get you the same world on all platforms for a given version of DF. There are sometimes problems between platforms because of compilers reordering/compacting statements etc., leading to a skippable random call being omitted on one and not the other. I remember we caught one before, but they are annoying to find, especially when the differences start in the histories rather than just having different maps or something major. We'll just have to deal with it as it comes up, but it's time-consuming to fix, so it won't be an immediate priority.
Since dwarves can make weapons they use named/semi-artifacts, will it be possible in the future for dwarves to get attached to workshops? Like say a fortress has only one craft dwarf, and he pumps out crafts for years, could he get attached to it and get unhappy thoughts for other dwarves using it?
He he, it would be fun to explore that stuff. I don't have any plans for it, but the named buildings from adv mode should find their way into your fort at some point, and that stuff would start to become more possible.
How will zones work with the new burrows system? Will various zone types be burrow-specific? Will it be possible to relate zones to specific burrows; alternately, can one, say, feed one burrow with a dumping zone for (dumped) materials coming from another? Who'll end up tasked to do the jobs?
Can Garbage Dumps be assigned to Burrows?
Have you experienced any new behavior quirks brought about by the Burrows code? Or has it been relatively smooth testing?
I think I asked this before, but is the burrows interface in a state where you could show us some screenshots?
How will division of items between stockpiles in different burrows work? For example, If I have my craftshop making arrows and wine and whatnot in one burrow and several different burrows where my military live scattered about, how am I going to make sure that all of them actually have decent stockpiles of food/booze/ammo in their areas?
Burrows right now are just optional areas to which certain dwarves are restricted. They don't particularly interact with buildings, zones or piles. If you need stuff brought between burrow piles, for example, you'll need a dwarf that isn't restricted to an area that covers only one of those piles. I imagine we'll find ways to expand their use and interactions later on, but they are a pretty simple object at this point.
If 1? is now 1kg, will item weights now include fractions? For example, an average earring would be less than 10 grams, which would work out to 0.01?.
Or will 1? work out to 10g or so, just to keep things as integers?
Would it be possible to mod it so that the weight stuff equals pounds? Or is it something that is only accessable to Toady (in other words, hardcoded)?
If it is less than 1, it just says <1. It tracks things down to the milligram, although it is mainly just down to centigrams due to some dividing and multiplying up that goes on. Having conversions in the init that show kg instead of the Gamma or do a conversion and show pounds would be easy -- I was thinking of doing it earlier, but haven't, and so now probably won't for this release.
Has the bug where magma buildings are unbuildable on reclaim been fixed in the new release? I'm sure you and Zach and the other testers have done a few reclaims by now.
That moving volcano bug was the only issue I found this time around, and it seems to be working.
Are there any changes made to the sites_and_population or world_history files for the next version?
I haven't done a lot with them, but I think it might separate out inside/outside stuff and it'll account for the new important positions in the world history file. I got some way in on an XML dump to partially replace these, but I'm not sure I'm going to finish that for the release, and I'm not sure I can continue on it at all until the format issues are resolved. Currently I don't know of anybody that is planning to use it for anything if it actually is in XML. We can just reopen that later.
Will healthcare options cost dwarves money in the economy?
The current economy needs to be obliterated when I start working with the caravan stuff, so I haven't done anything more there. It's all free.
If a dwarf reaches Legendary in a particular skill and then never uses it again, will the skill rust down to below Legendary and make the dwarf become subject to the Economy once again?
Not from rust, but if they are actually demoted through prolonged disuse, yeah. Looks like a dwarf planning to retire should work that extra mile to really secure their future.
Now that "souls" are separate from bodies, will ettins eventually have two souls, one for each head? What about hydras? Could possessed moods eventually come from a dead historical figure, former legendary worker of the fortress, or some other spirit temporarily inhabiting the body of your dwarf?
I think ettins probably will need two souls later on, so they can argue. For a hydra, I could go either way. I can imagine them just being one creature, or hissing at each other on occasion. And yeah, possession would work properly when we get there. It's all very place-holdery now, but it wouldn't be hard to create a soul, stuff it in a dwarf, and swap active souls for a mood for example. That infrastructure is all in place. Some confusion would come in the legends, where you'd want to make note of the situation. It would probably credit the body and not the soul right now.
Will arena mode have some sort of copy and paste mechanism? It would make making large numbers of similar creatures much easier.
It retains your last selection (including items and skills), so as long as you make them all at once, it is quick to do.
when will we be able to forge non-dwarf size weapons and armor?
Probably when agreements with humans become more interesting. They just pay more for certain weapons right now, but it would be fun to have them commission several human breastplates, for example.
Btw, is there *any* posibility this could be altered to allow for a specific case? For example, if the starving dwarf in question *loves* (eating) purring maggots, he could pass up the regular food and go for the maggot.
They account for foods they like now when picking things out, but I don't think they recognize live vermin as the same meat they enjoy -- in any case, since maggots are an economically valuable vermin, they shouldn't rob you of them even if they like them, if they aren't starving.
Are there any plans to model contact metamorphism?
The heat from a body of magma will metamorphose the surrounding rocks for up to several Km, depending on the temperature difference and the size of the magma body. This can create ore deposits, particularly in limestone or other carbonates. Basically, you'd only see obsidian around the magma pipe at the surface. At depth, there would be a halo of metamorphosed rock, possibly containing ore or gems.
Any plans to add dikes?
It would basically be a magma vein. Not that important, but it might add some variety to fort design
how about a worldgen param that replaces all water with lava and soil layers with obsidian?
I don't have any very specific plans now, but I'm open to anything that I can do that makes sense. Wider-ranging features are harder to add just because of the map connection data. That's the reason the veins etc. still live with 48x48x1 areas -- it's not impossible to extend them, just very inconvenient and so it slips in priority.
Will ore smelting be changed to always require coal fuel? As it is, in Real Life, Cinnabar is the only ore that can be smelted (into Mercury) using nothing but heat, while all other ores require a reducing agent, usually coke.
If it's not super-annoying to play, I don't mind making things more realistic. Without coal deposits, you'd need more trees to die, and that's wholesomely dwarven, but if you can't send lumber parties off-map, it might start to get too extreme to demand one unit of coal for every single ore item that is dropped.
Can we actually extract materials from living animals (which arent vermin) with this release?
will we be able to milk sentients? How far are we from bands of dwarves attacking cow man settlements, killing most of the males, and taking the females back to the fort for a life of slavery?
Just materials from adult MILKABLE-caste fortress units that don't have CAN_LEARN. It doesn't have to be milk -- however, it'll go to a bucket, and it'll be sort of worthless there if you don't want to classify it as a barrel storable mat like milk or if it isn't edible or something.
Could it be possible to mod in a God Emperor-esque leader that only spawns once for the civilization (at the beggining) and when it dies the civilization collapses?
You can caste-restrict positions, but that won't guarantee the caste exists at first, and civs don't have any collapse triggers like that.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items (Read 3634572 times)