Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[GRead]

I wonder if dwarf fortress will ever get dynamic 'pools' of items to start with, with which all kinds of mundane creatures and plants can be made?

Let me clarify this.  I don't think this is a useless question, just one in need of interpretation. 
Of course, if I interpret wrongly, then I get to take full credit for this question.  Which may not be good...

Basically, could a site get a "pool" of things that are related to the spheres that are present, from which creatures and plants could be randomized from. 

So instead of a completely random animal and biome generator, the randomness would be restricted depending on the biome and spheres available.  (eg. carapace/rock-like bark would be associated with savage areas)

DF doesn't actually have a random animal generator; while they aren't historical figures, the animals that show up at your fort are drawn from wilderness populations. So if there are no sasquatches in the tundras of frozen icy death, you will never encounter a sasquatch in a fort established there. Plants are similar, though they don't have a population or anything. There just aren't enough at the moment to really notice; only a handful of plants have limited growth areas.

[jseah]

Wasn't there some mention of a random creature generator?  What with the talk of dwarflungmen. 

[Thor]

In the new version, I plan to create infact two seperate fortresses, one ruled by men, and the other by women, connected by a deep-road in the new caverns. Ofcourse trading and all the important jobs with high ranking would be divided as you couldnt have 2 managers, but my questions remains so:

When dwarves have children, is that baby going to be practically attached to the mother until it becomes a child? or is the father also able to care for it?

Do Dwarves breed via spores as the animals are?

I'm somewhat of an absolutist, so any male in a female population city would kinda be a problem for my little experiments in dwarvern characteristics breeding.

[Rockphed]

This is directed at GRead.  Unfortunately, I didn't quote him and a couple people posted while I wrote this reply.

Aha!  Somebody who hasn't been paying enough attention to the development to properly answer questions!  Allow this barely informed newb to eloquently elucidate education.

This probably deserves spoilers because most of my information came out of spoilered text, though not all.  Then again, if you don't want the next version spoiled, WHAT YE HECK ARE YE DOING IN THIS THREAD.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

In the upcoming version, there will, in fact, be a random creature generator.  Mostly it will generate random demons, but it will also generate some more benign titans.  These critters will mostly be confined to the deep down, but some will wander the surface being evil.  Or good.  Or whatever.  These are the forgotten beasts and "titans."  Titans is in quote to differentiate them from the megabeast.

The creature generator does not, at this time, produce an entire species.  Instead, it creates a single individual.

Somebody mentioned, though I am not sure on sourceage, that the set of available body parts is hard coded rather than drawn from the current raws.  I hope it is instead drawn from the current raws, but that is just me.

At any rate, DEATH TO SPAMMERS.

[Cult of the Raven]

I have a question. If you mod a large fish (like carp) to be available to bring with you on embark, is there any way to have it come in an aquarium, or will it just flop around on the ground helplessly? I'd like to have a koi pond in my fortress, without requiring koi to be native to the area.

[silverskull39]

I have a question. If you mod a large fish (like carp) to be available to bring with you on embark, is there any way to have it come in an aquarium, or will it just flop around on the ground helplessly? I'd like to have a koi pond in my fortress, without requiring koi to be native to the area.

You could always make it amphibious. put [AMPHIBIOUS] in the carp raws, and as long as you don't take away the [IMMOBILE_LAND] tag it shouldn't be able to go anywhere under its own power while out of water. That will make it able to breathe air or water so you can drop it in a pool at your leisure.

[GRead]

This is directed at GRead.  Unfortunately, I didn't quote him and a couple people posted while I wrote this reply.

Aha!  Somebody who hasn't been paying enough attention to the development to properly answer questions!  Allow this barely informed newb to eloquently elucidate education.

This probably deserves spoilers because most of my information came out of spoilered text, though not all.  Then again, if you don't want the next version spoiled, WHAT YE HECK ARE YE DOING IN THIS THREAD.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

In the upcoming version, there will, in fact, be a random creature generator.  Mostly it will generate random demons, but it will also generate some more benign titans.  These critters will mostly be confined to the deep down, but some will wander the surface being evil.  Or good.  Or whatever.  These are the forgotten beasts and "titans."  Titans is in quote to differentiate them from the megabeast.

The creature generator does not, at this time, produce an entire species.  Instead, it creates a single individual.

Somebody mentioned, though I am not sure on sourceage, that the set of available body parts is hard coded rather than drawn from the current raws.  I hope it is instead drawn from the current raws, but that is just me.

At any rate, DEATH TO SPAMMERS.

Actually, that's not what I meant by 'random'. Random in this case meaning the game randomly generates deer or wolves or whatever for your fortress, which it doesn't. It grabs the wildlife from the regions wildlife.

I would still dispute it though. The original question was in regard to 'mundane creatures and plants'. Maybe we're just mincing words here, but I would hardly call the new random content 'animals'. Yes, there are creatures in DF that are randomly generated, but it is not used to create random animals to populate the world, rather significant creatures that are a series of unique entities.

[Rockphed]

Ah, well sorry for misunderstanding you.  And yes, the random creatures don't really count as "wildlife."

[Shoku]

Well, the last several pages show this topic has clearly outlived its usefulness. Time to lock it and move on, I think

Right. Toady has himself said that he wants to avoid such megathreads - on the other hand it was usefull for getting questions answered regarding changes in the new release. A Fotf for bugfix releases would be a bit much but for releases with multiple feature additions it would be recommended.
Thus i say we wouldneed a new Fotf but with a different infra-structure. For example would it be very usefull to document all "question answering" posts in the op.

This thread has us also enlightened on some of the inner workings of df which was definitely a very nice thing.

While I would agree with you, its not yet time to lock it and move on as the new release hasn't come yet.

Actually I'm very much a fan of the lucifer school of thought when it comes to forum settings.
The only downsides to forcing people to use the sections and threads of a forum as intended are that it takes a lot of effort to police people thoroughly and that a small fraction of people hate having rules so they become major pests when you tell them that they don't make the rules.

I just went through all the pages from 1000+ onwards and counted 7 posts positive and 12 posts negative towards the concept of page-counting/release prediction games.  It's not surprising (or really a terrible thing IMO) that reaching page 1000 using standard settings is something which would be noted.  But right now those complaining about the noise are actually making almost twice as much noise.  Myself included, but I'd prefer to think of it as meta-noise.

So then you're saying that each post person making a positive post about page count should be held responsible for 2.7 clutter posts? Can't argue with that.

井ell I, for one, 着on't 見ee the big significance about 頁age 1000. It's just an arbitrary 数umber and as others have 鋭ointed out it varies depending on your settings anyway.

Besides, 吾 got on 頁age 800. So 吾 着on't 要eed to 職ost some meaningless arbitrary 職ost to get on 頁age 1000 to feel important.

You must be a hoot on birthdays and new year.

Whoa, what the hell happened to the character encoding in that post?

Anyway, the issue isn't that people care, it's that this thread has become full of completely useless spam.

Actually that would have to have been done intentionally. Too many of those are Japanese characters I recognize as having the meaning of the word they are in. Presumably the ones I don't know also make sense.

Actually, that's not what I meant by 'random'. Random in this case meaning the game randomly generates deer or wolves or whatever for your fortress, which it doesn't. It grabs the wildlife from the regions wildlife.

I would still dispute it though. The original question was in regard to 'mundane creatures and plants'. Maybe we're just mincing words here, but I would hardly call the new random content 'animals'. Yes, there are creatures in DF that are randomly generated, but it is not used to create random animals to populate the world, rather significant creatures that are a series of unique entities.

I don't understand why you would want populations of wild animals confined to the embark region. Deer and such wander around a region, really only having their range limited by biomes they cannot handle and physical boundaries.

[Neruz]

This is directed at GRead.  Unfortunately, I didn't quote him and a couple people posted while I wrote this reply.

Aha!  Somebody who hasn't been paying enough attention to the development to properly answer questions!  Allow this barely informed newb to eloquently elucidate education.

This probably deserves spoilers because most of my information came out of spoilered text, though not all.  Then again, if you don't want the next version spoiled, WHAT YE HECK ARE YE DOING IN THIS THREAD.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

In the upcoming version, there will, in fact, be a random creature generator.  Mostly it will generate random demons, but it will also generate some more benign titans.  These critters will mostly be confined to the deep down, but some will wander the surface being evil.  Or good.  Or whatever.  These are the forgotten beasts and "titans."  Titans is in quote to differentiate them from the megabeast.

The creature generator does not, at this time, produce an entire species.  Instead, it creates a single individual.

Somebody mentioned, though I am not sure on sourceage, that the set of available body parts is hard coded rather than drawn from the current raws.  I hope it is instead drawn from the current raws, but that is just me.

At any rate, DEATH TO SPAMMERS.

Actually, didn't Toady say that Animalmen are now randomly generated from animals rather than being premade?

[Shoku]

This is directed at GRead.  Unfortunately, I didn't quote him and a couple people posted while I wrote this reply.

Aha!  Somebody who hasn't been paying enough attention to the development to properly answer questions!  Allow this barely informed newb to eloquently elucidate education.

This probably deserves spoilers because most of my information came out of spoilered text, though not all.  Then again, if you don't want the next version spoiled, WHAT YE HECK ARE YE DOING IN THIS THREAD.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

In the upcoming version, there will, in fact, be a random creature generator.  Mostly it will generate random demons, but it will also generate some more benign titans.  These critters will mostly be confined to the deep down, but some will wander the surface being evil.  Or good.  Or whatever.  These are the forgotten beasts and "titans."  Titans is in quote to differentiate them from the megabeast.

The creature generator does not, at this time, produce an entire species.  Instead, it creates a single individual.

Somebody mentioned, though I am not sure on sourceage, that the set of available body parts is hard coded rather than drawn from the current raws.  I hope it is instead drawn from the current raws, but that is just me.

At any rate, DEATH TO SPAMMERS.

Actually, didn't Toady say that Animalmen are now randomly generated from animals rather than being premade?

No, that's a templates thing. A lot of people thought they were just up and generated off of the animal type but that was just a major thread derail.

[Retro]

On the 'animalmen' thing, can I get this clarified-- is 'animalmen' just a catch-all term that could mean ANYTHING-men or will they largely be based of off existing creatures? Like, could there be... I don't know, microclinemen? I know the new HFS or Forgotten Beasts or whatever may be based off of materials and so on, but is there a restriction on the animalmen generation?

Not greened because I imagine the community can clarify.

[Lancensis]

I know the new HFS or Forgotten Beasts or whatever may be based off of materials and so on, but is there a restriction on the animalmen generation?

Yes a large restriction in that there is no automatic generation. It's a misunderstanding arising from the new templates which allow you, when creating a creature yourself to say "this is just the same as the frog entry with extra legs" and use the extra legs template to quickly and succintly create a many legged weasel, cow, sparrow and octopus, or a range of animals that all have firebreathing, or can talk, or are made out of animate grease. One of the templates he showed was a sort of anthropomorphiser kinda deal, and there was some confusion with people thinking that you could create a template, and the game would automatically apply it to some creatures.
Similarily,

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

there was a related belief that Forgotten Beasts would be based off custom animals, when they depend on some hardcoded details. Shame I know. But yeah, there are lots of materials for them to be made from. I'm not sure how custom materials interact with that.

On the 'animalmen' thing, can I get this clarified-- is 'animalmen' just a catch-all term that could mean ANYTHING-men or will they largely be based of off existing creatures? Like, could there be... I don't know, microclinemen?

It's not a cast-iron distinction. At one point Toady made an off-hand comment in the Dev-log about the new creatures not including many "-mans", which presumebly refers to things like microclinemen, or vomitmen (although I'm holding out for that last one). On the other hand when the "animalmen" societies are mentioned, I don't think it refers to Ironmen, and Mudmen having societies but rather to ratmen, antmen and probably things like troglodytes just to confuse the issue.

[GRead]

I don't understand why you would want populations of wild animals confined to the embark region. Deer and such wander around a region, really only having their range limited by biomes they cannot handle and physical boundaries.

Yeah, it's hardly ideal. Assuming I'm reading Dev_2009 right, Toady plans to do more with wilderness populations in the future, but has put it off for now as they are more complex than the underground.

I'm moving over to layer entity populations now (the various underground animal people), fixing up their equipment and other issues. These will all come from the same overall populations, which can be depleted and slowly come back if there are enough around. General wilderness populations are a little more complicated, so that's not in yet for them.

I would hazard a guess that the complications stem from what you're talking about. World regions are less discrete than underground layers, and to handle them properly would involve allowing neighboring regions to interact with each other. This is something I imagine the underground doesn't need to worry about...

[Neruz]

On the 'animalmen' thing, can I get this clarified-- is 'animalmen' just a catch-all term that could mean ANYTHING-men or will they largely be based of off existing creatures? Like, could there be... I don't know, microclinemen? I know the new HFS or Forgotten Beasts or whatever may be based off of materials and so on, but is there a restriction on the animalmen generation?

Not greened because I imagine the community can clarify.

It's only animals, and iirc only non-vermin animals (at the moment).