Does this mean that we will also be able to rip off/bend limbs?
That's a future dev item, but this time around I think it would take a specially set up creature with a weak material making up [JOINT] parts that are part of the connecting tree, followed by a joint break move.
antivenom
That was in there, but I think it's heavily anachronistic the way it was done. I haven't gotten to health care yet, where this sort of thing may be addressed, but it'll possibly be via those weird useless plant extracts. There's also the possibility of resistance through exposure, which I'm slated for now, though I don't think this time around will see intentional exposure in small doses (I think that works through building up antibodies, much like proper antivenoms, but I'm not sure which venoms it works for or to what extent).
Will poisons be able to be applied to plants, stones, or trees?
Poisons are a general property of the material, it's just a matter of getting at it in the proper way, which won't generally happen. However, if you made a certain dust poisonous now, and then did a cave in, you could get the inhaled poison effect for the stone, for example. You could make a plant extract poisonous, but there wouldn't be much use for it as things stand.
The issue is how Toady is going to try to bridge the strong (though unknown division) between players who want a more realistic dwarf fortress and those who don't mind the supernatural element.
Even Turning off magic isn't enough.
I don't think this is a difficult problem. The general idea was to operate through world gen params. Of course, some of the stock creatures have their magical properties, but there could be culls for them as well. I think we'll start to see more of this once I get to the sphere-related random stuff -- there are already params for good/evil regions, and those will need to be retooled.
With a more realistic appreciation for weight as far as weapons are concerned, does this translate to all object interaction? I forsee problems with players using venerable tactics like lead bins, which the dwarves then can't pick up and move.
Yeah, that part works the same as always. The weight changes are for strikes. Eventually, especially in adv mode, some things should be too heavy to move, but when that happens, dwarf mode will definitely need to be handled as well, in some proper way.
Hopefully the "affected classes of creatures" will be flexible enough that you can make classes as general or specific as you want. I think Toady mentioned, as a possibility, identifying poison classes by arbitrary strings that you can just stick on creatures and poisons
Yeah, they are just arbitrary strings. I'm doing immunities today, which will also work via strings as well as specific creature tokens, I think.
Will I be able to rip and tear a GCS's venom-dripping fang and stab it with it to paralyze it?
Will it be immune?!
They don't drip, unfortunately, unless you make them work by secretion instead of a special injection attack. If you did it that way... I think that would partially work. A sever transfers contaminants, so assuming the secretion, you'd get a venom-covered fang (hopefully not a contact poison or you have gloves on!). However, I don't think the game would react correctly to using the fang as a weapon. There's still not a strong enough notion of body shape -- it still works through attack properties, so the stabbing would be lost as things stand. You'd be able to transfer the venom, but not as an injection. The question of immunity is up to the raws.
TL;DR: Alcohol and drugs should be weak poisons, poison effects should be created for them should be usable by creatures, poisons should be turned into general substances and allow positive effects as well as negative.
Yeah, I alluded to this in my dev notes on the 2nd -- poison effects are already just "creature interaction syndromes" on the material. That I don't have ingestion yet is the main barrier to doing alcohol, and as I add in positive effects, everything else would work out (of course there'd need to be AI and jobs and so on to use things for whatever purpose). The framework is in place, it just needs to be used for more things. It can also be extended to things that have nothing to do with materials, though for that change a bit more would have to be done to syndrome indices. I think I mentioned "gaze" attacks there, though at some point you have to worry about a proper extension to the full "magic" framework, which is something to be more careful about.
Will the new body raws let us get shells from non-vermin creatures now? And possibly from vermin that aren't fish that have been prepared?
Yeah, you should get shells from everything that has a shell that is large. From vermin... I'm not sure. You could never really butcher them, right? Just extract or eat when starving? It probably wouldn't work, but there are still outstanding items on the list so it's not 100% settled.
So, now that we've got proper material temp handling, will we see steam come back as a possible weapon source?
It's different, certainly, but I'm not really sure. The main problem in the new versions has always been the contact time and that the temperature difference between steam and flesh is very small (compared to say boiling metal). If the gas can condense and settle as a hot contaminant you'd have the highest chance of getting something to happen I think, and those items are still outstanding on the list, I believe ("Handle a few material contaminant issues" has a temperature-related item anyway, and some quibbles with mat state).
Wow. If material clouds are going in, that means you could have things like demons kicking up clouds of elf-bone-meal dust as they stampede through horrible dungeons. Or caravans leaving clouds of sandy dust in their wake.
This is true. I haven't gotten to the newer related suggestion topics (I'm a few hundred topics back right now, which isn't really that much, but it has been a while since I got a chance to catch up), though I was reminded of this reading my book a few days ago, with the armies raising up dust. Certainly something to be explored now that we have more to work with.
Toady are we going to be able to apply impact to Material breath or is this going to wait until you set up Material Projectiles or an expansion of the material breath system?
Or what I mean is... Can the Gold Dragon Vomit a cone of gold so hard that it can knock people out?
^^^ I imagine if the material is in the solid phase, it'll get forced to become a powder. Likewise liquids and mist.
I think since the powder breaths are modeled on dust, they might have a instant KO effect, like cave-in dust, which I had noted down but haven't fixed yet. I suppose in your example you could use a solid glob projectile, which in this case would be frozen gold dragon vomit. It would fly out and possibly hit somebody, possibly in the head, possibly knocking them out, but it's not ideal. The exact properties of flows are pending many more variables and possibilities -- under the new system these aren't too difficult to add, but they do need to be put in explicitly.
Is there a possibility for a pre-release publish with wounds?
This looks like such a massive coding effort that will inevitably will have infestations of vermin ( bugs ). When will you have a partially functional release for us cats to start the vermin removal process?
I'm committed to having the squad stuff in the next release. Armies have been put off for too long, so each major release must have certain elements to ensure progress. The code is also partially gutted for the entity positions changes, in any case, so it just doesn't work right now.
there are going to be new options for adventure mode? Like mining, choping, and a very basic building system.
It's up on dev_next, which I guess puts it in the five year plan instead of the ten year plan. I'm looking forward to it, but things take a lot of time to get to.
What are the new entity positions? I see references to the manager, bookkeeper, priests, guards, liason, the monarch and spouse and nobles in general, but nothing specific on anything new (other than it seems gobbos will worship/follow megabeasts now).
Everything noble/appointment related is going out into the raws. So you can have various properties, and if you want to unite all the responsibilities of the bookkeeper/manager/broker under one position you can do that, or change the names, or succession properties, caste restrictions, all that sort of thing. The main point for this time around was to add some structure to the military, as the current set-up of having any dwarf under any dwarf in weird nested squads is weird. These changes were especially required for strategy/army AI on the world map post-world gen, and that's necessary to get to improved sieges/sending out your own armies.
With materials changing so much about equipment, how are you planning on handling the Soldier's trading up to better equipment? Obviously, a fine Steel sword is an upgrade to a fine Iron sword. But what about a Masterwork Steel hammer compared to an Adamantine hammer? Or a basic Iron shield vs a high quality Copper one?
Mostly I'm trying to figure out what the rule of thumb will be for what equipment to make. I realize even you might not have an answer to this until you play around with stuff some more, but I'm really curious how all of this will work.
Yeah, I'm going to have to mess with it -- it'll likely be some formula on the weapon itself that assigns it a value. The weapons have little attack profiles, and with their quality and material, it should be enough to say within reason which one is "better". This'll also be weighted by whatever individual weapon pref system I set up, as they grow used to the ones they have and so on. I'll have to update further when I get there.
I know I might be behind on this one, and that it's been brought up about 50 times, but in the spirit of the previous post I'd like to know if bronze weapons (and armor too, I suppose) are going to be more effective than iron weapons under the new systems being implemented, as in reality bronze is actually a sturdier material than base iron, although not steel. Does anyone know?
I posted some raws in the dev update earlier. I don't think that part has changed, but here are the relevant values in the current raws:
[INORGANIC:IRON]
[SOLID_DENSITY:7850]
[IMPACT_YIELD:1080000]
[IMPACT_FRACTURE:1080000]
[IMPACT_ELASTICITY:635]
[SHEAR_YIELD:130000]
[SHEAR_FRACTURE:200000]
[SHEAR_ELASTICITY:159]
[INORGANIC:BRONZE]
[SOLID_DENSITY:8250]
[IMPACT_YIELD:1080000]
[IMPACT_FRACTURE:1080000]
[IMPACT_ELASTICITY:600]
[SHEAR_YIELD:137000]
[SHEAR_FRACTURE:241000]
[SHEAR_ELASTICITY:200]
This puts bronze as a slightly better cutting weapon and a slightly heavier hammer, with the same resistance to denting (I didn't have numbers on impact for bronze, if I remember, so those are copied). I didn't have any edge values for them, so you can put the same maximum edge on either one.
Do we get an possibilty to milk poison? I didnt would like it to kill the half of my spiderfarm for some vials of stun-ex.
Also i have some questions on breath-attacks:
Will they be able to pass throught grates and bars?
Can we determine (over the raws) how long the "compact clouds" ,which breath attacks with gases might leave, need to disolve/decay. Some aerosols disolve/decay pretty fast but others are rather longlived.
Can we determine the range of such an breath attack? An Lindworms poison/stench breath might have an shorter range then an dragongs firebreath.
on an sidenote:
Can we get maggot/mold coating of roting meat/material?
Yeah, you can milk whatever material you want now.
If boiling crap now passes through grates/bars, they can too. I don't remember the bug status on those off the top of my head.
There are no properties currently for gaseous flows, aside from their temperatures, so that's boring, yeah.
Right now, material breath weapons have just a few limited types, so you can't set specific numbers. I'll need to fiddle with them some more to figure out what's appropriate, and I don't have a timeline on that.
Maggots and mold should come up later, but we won't have them for a long while. They'll possibly come up when I'm tormenting farming/food supply into something more entertaining. That's a dev item but I don't have a timeline again.
Is necrotic venom going to target a particular kind of tissue?
Yeah, you can set this how you like, up to the tissues token or whether you want to hit all the vascular or muscular ones (or all of them). You can also select body parts in the (new) standard way (by arbitrary category string, individual token, or functional flags).
Lets asume we have an creature "A" with an Materialbreath and an dragon "B" with firebreath fighting with "A".
What hapens now if this two breath attacks meet each other? Especally if the "Material-breath" was from an material with an low ignitepoint. Or an Water-breath meeting an fire-breath?
Nothing happens right now -- flow on flow interaction is a CPU issue and not likely to be addressed soon, though there is some hope there since it currently combines flows of like type and could therefore afford some comparisons on flows of differing types, but those would need to be very streamlined.
Will it be possible (perhaps through modding) to have world with stuff like entire clouds or banks of say, mercury mist/fog/etc and have that wander around the map ?
I'd like to do eerie clumps of persistent gas (rather than the crappy LOS shrinking adv mode fog there is now), but I'm not sure when that'll happen.
Why not making the plants directly to creatures?
My main concern with plants is doing multi-tile trees properly when that comes up, and also extending out to things like fruit and flowers, so I'm not eager to tie them to creatures to closely. It could happen that it works out that way, but I have more to do with plants first.
This is an interesting point, because creatures could conceivably spit globs of a material that ignites at room temperature -- think napalm. Although I'm guessing burning projectiles and burning contaminants are edge cases that won't be handled properly just yet.
Yeah, I don't think they get the temperature update calls, though I don't remember.
I suspect that when things in DF catch on fire, they remain at a hardcoded, universal "fire temperature" until consumed. It might make more sense to have a material property for the combustion temperature.
The current version has an ignition point to the extent that it has materials, but there's also a set temperature for fire attacks. The new version also has the ignition point, used in the same way, but it has more materials so behavior should be a bit more diverse, though things like the map are still static.
Have you considdered that they will act as a 'deflecting armour' in wrestling when applied to a bodypart and that a floor covered with goo/blood/vomit will be more difficult to walk/run/fight/stand on because of it's slipperyness?
I haven't done anything like that yet. It'll be fun to start getting into that sort of thing now that we have the new spatter system. I have a ton of notes to put up, and you guys have also written up a bunch of ideas that I still need to read. I'm hoping to mine the spatter/contam system for all it's worth over time now. I'm certainly for having all sorts of clumsy troubles and nasty slippering sliming uncomfortable experiences as you slush all over the place. Like the end of Caligula II.