No proofreading time! Out the door!
So what is a "soul" from a mechanical perspective?
Souls are what give you your personality. All the mental, emotional, social, preferential types of stuff that dwarves have now--that might include skills--is part of your soul. The fact that you like rose gold, that you're quick to anger, that you dislike Bomrek, stuff like that is soul stuff.
In future arcs, when a spirit can possess your body, your soul gets kicked out or displaced by someone with different preferences, different mannerisms, different motives, and possibly different skills. Your body's strength stays the same, but the new soul controls your empathy.
Issues with undead having souls, to me, is stuff like: Do they still have the same soul as their original owner of the body, except the body is decayed? Do they all have a generic soul, defined by their animation by dark magic?
That's my understanding anyway, which may not be correct.
Sowelu's take is correct. It includes skills as well. As for undead, it should probably be universe-dependent, though I'll hack whatever in this time around. I think there's a dev_next item on extending undead notions, and this will come up again there.
in many movies, stories, cartoons, etc starring skelletal antagonists, when a limb is severed it continues to (attempt to) attack the protagonist, sometimes recombining into semi-complete or even overcomplete bodies.
how would this work soulwise?
Is a soul an undevidable boolean (has/hasnot) or will it be in the form of a integer 'soulforce' as alternative to the health/energy of living creatures?
Which would allow limbs to inherit a soul-portion proportional to it's relative size, while the first would likely require a centralized location (skull/enchanted soulstone/mindrune/magicbottle/etc).
The soul is an entire structure containing all sorts of information, and a creature can contain many souls (no cases of that in-game currently, but it is supported code-wise). If undead were actually controlled by a soul rather than some kind of animation, then the extra moving limb could either represent a soul splitting, which could work, or the original undead could be populated by many souls, and one could jump off into the arm, or the soul could somehow be in both without splitting and maintain control over multiple 'creatures'. In the first and third cases, you could keep on splitting indefinitely (with whatever restrictions), but in the second, you'd run out after you ran out of souls. It's really just up to whatever gets coded. It should be pretty versatile as I add more and more possibilities.
Toady - You've mentioned a few times that you haven't specifically done anything with item degradation (I don't see it in the list either), but that with the new physics-based item properties it' closer to possible. Just how far off is item degradation/damage?
I think that's what "Consider item/attacking part damage" refers to (hiding at the bottom of Wounds/Combat). Could be something else entirely though.
Yeah, that's right. It's definitely a "consider" instead of an "update" or "implement" though, in the sense that I'm not sure if it's the proper time for it.
Hopefully those artificial "% damage" will be gone in this next version.
Footkerchief mentioned the blunt/edge etc. part for admantine vs. lead, but yeah, I'd just like to reiterate that the "damage" and "block" numbers have been replaced by the various mechanical properties. All of them have uses now, though many are just for wrestling (ie can you twist or bend the material and break it). Impact elast/yield/fracture, shear e/y/f, and maximum edge come up the most.
Obviously they rely on brute force due to a heavy end, but you also need to be able to swing the damn thing, and you can't swing a 100-pound mace very fast, now can you?
This is somewhat accounted for now, though I can only test it out properly once I've greened out the wounds and skills/atts portions. The swing velocity depends on strength and the weight of the object among other things, so a truly large object will have its raw mass cancelled out by the lameness of the strike.
I'd do a search for this but I don't know what it might be called and haven't noticed anything referring to this in the wiki, but is there a way of customising what mineral discoveries cause a game pause state to occur (Also the notifications themselves possibly), as I'd like to be able to leave my dwarves to mining whilst I glance at some other program/website/uni-work/etc? For instance I might get several interruptions due to Alunite or Orthoclase (etc), though I'm quite happy to recieve interrupts for bauxite or gem tiles.
This is often requested, but I've been putting it off until I have time to redo how announcements are stored. Then you should be able to customize the responses for all of them (no announce, announce but no pause, pause, pause and zoom, etc.). Dunno when that'll happen though.
Yep, I agree, huge cities would be awesome to have. Perhaps capitals should occupy multiple world map squares for example.
Site sprawl is one of the dev plans, although the larger question is more murky. It's often an initial goal to have tons of people and very large armies and so on, but that also causes a dilution of a lot of the things that I like about the game and have been working on (for instance, consistency between all of the characters over long periods of time). It's difficult to merge them properly, as it can't store information once you break a certain threshold and would have to generate it instead, at which time it becomes very hard to keep the history consistent. We've often thought about ways to address these problems, but the lack of clear satisfying solutions also means that things will remain at their current scale for a while. I don't need details on every critter all the time, but if somebody that is uninitialized distinguishes themselves during a battle to the point that they rise to historical status, they'd have no backward tie-ins to all of the history without a lot of work, and this is bothersome on a few levels, both technically and with what we want the game to be like. Of course, this is what happens in the current game, but if you've been following the various army dev discussions, the plan was to use actual historical critters during in-game fights instead of generated ones, just as currently happens during world gen. Anyway, ongoing saga. I'm certainly for lots of critters provided they aren't gray mush.
This would require creating a second layer of legends. The top layer would be "Battle of Boatmurdered, Felsite 208 - goblins fled the field of battle" but there would be a sub-legend for each of the following events:
* Death of a legendary dwarf
* Death of a legendary foe
* Naming of a weapon
* Death of a dwarf holding a named weapon
* Death of a megabeast
* The death of any dwarf who has made more than N kills already in the battle
* The death of any foe who has killed more than N dwarves already
* Some critical hits ("Oy, did you see that?! I'll be telling my grandkids about that one.")
If the events can get scores for importance, then the legend of a given battle would include only the top 25 or so scores, giving engravers a huge library of events to choose from. If the engraver has some latitude to adjust scores (for personal friends or dwarves of the same faith) then you could end up with engravers distorting history based on their unique biases.
Re: layers, we have the duels nested in battles nested in wars in the legends screen, etc., and this is all part of a "historical collection" system that allows practically unlimited nesting (so for instance, the death of a legendary dwarf nested in the battle is already handled). They also all get importance scores (this controls which events get listed in legends mode under one of the filter options, though I don't remember exactly how that works now). The issue is that there's just not enough going on yet around the world during play to have it matter all that much, but we'll definitely be working with this as the army stuff continues.
Does this mean that the old 2d system of having creatures randomly hop out of the magma and the river is coming back?
Yeah, and other hoppings out of other things and stuff.
Also, I hope aboveground rivers serve as off-map access points for aquatic creatures too.
This is more of a bug that anything... I don't remember if I attempted it and it isn't working, or if I missed the case the first time around. It shouldn't be that hard, but it's sort of tangential to the work and probably won't be attempted this time around. Or maybe it will... I'm not sure.
I hope when the creature raws update is done the modders get to look at them.
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In the new version do redundant organs have any benefit?
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How would i setup colour patterns for things that arent eyes (like scales for instance) and how would they look/be listed in game as i assume such features are viewable as part of some sorta text regarding the creature in question?
Yeah, I put up the temporary dwarf earlier, and I should put the others up once I green-out that section.
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They should work out better, though, as somebody said, it really is the bleeding that is problematic. Losing one of your hearts in real-life would be fatal (similar to getting, say, your aorta ripped open). So for a creature like a hydra, it will depending on blood loss, yeah, and I'll probably have to work with them a bit to make them survive properly.
site finder issues
There are a bunch of threads in suggestions that I've been collecting, so when I get to this again, I should have a much nicer site finder. Won't be this time, though I might have to mess with a bit when I tear up the underground, and for the release after this it'll depend on time.
(on dynamic play area) Shrinking would probably be a hell of a lot easier than expanding, depending on how the game actually calculates what's in a local square.
Fortunately, with all the adv-mode walk-around-and-load code, expanding shouldn't be so rough. All of the down and dirty technical crap was handled there. I think the main issues are sites expanding over world map square boundaries (such sites are not currently supported) and also things like an incoming migraton or something that is halfway on the map and then gets their incoming point expanded over so they should all suddenly appear or whatever. Nothing impossible, just a stack of annoyances as usual. Also, allowing excessive expanding and shrinking would probably be quite easily abused.
But after the last big countdown, the first release included a bug where "sleeping" creatures just fell unconscious trying to sleep, eventually dying of thirst. A game-crippling bug that took a half an hour to catch, after months of preparation.
Of course I only introduced that one a bit before the release and just didn't do a last playthrough. I'll probably do a last playthrough before I release this time in honor of it, but yeah, there's likely to be a load of errors. As usual I'll be doing post-release cleanup before I get started on another larger release.
My best bet would be something in the underground features
If the current crappy tunnel connections are any indication, there will be various outstanding issues, he he he. At least in dwarf mode you can just remodel them.
Somebody define what he means by "Fireball" please?
I mean the imp and demon ones, yeah. They hit the inventory/body parts and increase their temperature now... but it's all vaguely unsatisfying. Fire is sort of an outlier in the new material system.
i liked the number format progress more, because i saw it on one view and havent to look through the things that got changed... maybe we could use? :>
Wait, use what? If you don't want to spoil yourself on the lists, you can watch the pretty colors go cyan then green for a rough idea. You can also quickly click the spoil button and back to get a general color impression, he he he.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items (Read 3630079 times)