So I guess the Material Breath is one big step towards expanding the system towards ranged attacks of all forms. So will we see natural ranged attacks in the not so distant future beyond fireballs and breath?
He he, I don't know how far off, but yeah. Now, these "breath" attacks aren't actually linked to anything at all yet (see below), so you can pretend for now that it's a whatever, if the attack involves a material.
I know your removing Good and Evil in the not so distant future... but what would be your guess of the Spheres which would be closest to good and evil? Actually undertaking all the Sphere related Spherical Land conversion of the Evil/good lands seems like a lot. I am guessing the dev item refers to you taking the first steps? What exactly does that entail if I am allowed to ask.
You mean not close to good in the moral/whatever sense but in the close to good in terms of having unicorns and fairies and fluffy wamblers occur as they do now? If a unicorn is associated to particular spheres (luck, say) then it would be luck-lands that get them, rather than anything else (unless luck is linked to other spheres, then there's some chance of pulling them over to those as well). The evil lands either get the "evil" creatures or the undead curses, so when those are sphered out, it would be handled that way. Of course, since there are like 100 spheres (and will be many more no doubt), yeah, this is a large project overall, especially when you get away from the stock raw monsters and ask which random creature/veg/etc. traits should be linked to spheres and try to do every sphere justice. If it also gets deity links at that time, you have the local civilizations associated to the deities to consider as well, so an "evil" god sphere-related land near a human civ might take the human body definition and then sphere-twist it into something that is meant to be a mockery of human form (good ones do the same thing but the twists would not be seen as a negative thing, though they could still be terrifying). In real-world mythological examples, a lot of this depends on the cultural values associated to certain animals, though simple things like stripping off the outer layer (ie skin) or adding fire breath or making the skin a different color etc. all work as well, and I've got the tools to do all of that now with this revision. As long as the sphere/cultural links are reasonably maintained, I think it won't devolve into a sea of garbage slush (as a more trivial but current example, take god names vs. some of the other names -- sphere-links tend to make the god names "better", in one sense at least, though clearly it all needs work).
Not sure where I'm going to start with it though.
Conceivably we could make that spitting dinosaur from Jurassic Park now, eh? Or a similar creature whose venom instead causes the spittee's eyes (or brain!) to dissolve, but leaves the rest of them intact?
Yeah, that should all be fair game, though I didn't actually manage to get to the digestive component of some venoms at this point, so you might have to be content with the eyes or brain just dying/rotting for a while.
Are you going to give us details about how all the numbers work in the raw files?
There are some details in the material template preview.
As a note, some of those "unused" ones have uses now -- all of the things like compressive/tensile/bending/torsion get used during wrestling, but that's about it I think. They are around if we need them now though (not that it was easy to find any numbers, so most of the numbers are copies of ones I found for other materials or types of force...)
So, will we be able to smelt the gold globs that these theoretical gold dragon things spit? I'm assuming yes, bu don't want to get my hopes up yet?
A while back, Toady said that metals will now revert to a 'glob' state when a molten bit of metal cools again, which can then be turned into bars, so almost certainly yes.
Yeah, if it's a liquid glob, it'll have to spatter enough on one spot to create a liquid item, though it's possible for the liquid glob to remain intact as a glob as well probably. A solid glob will just bonk into somebody and fall to the ground, probably, though there was still something there to be done I think.
Will material loss from re-melting be fixed?
I don't think anything is slated for this time around on that.
I wonder if Toady will program in possible storage for material breath and other venoms
hmm, will injection/breath attacks be dependant on some internal organ or just be spawned in the mouth/poison attack body part? the ultimate solution would probably be something like glands+bladders for each substance that is drained whit the attack, (and could later be expanded to other functionality like stomachs and such), maybe even stuff like size change depending on fullness and the bladder rupting from being overfilled/a blunt strike while full/a slash/pierce attack and releasing it's contents into the bloodstream of the creature or even the ground...
They aren't even associated to body parts yet, but yeah, ideally there'd be both storage and body part times to lessen their strengths a bit and add more interest for things like extraction processes as well.
So we've got poison resistances now, which is awesome...Can we also develop vulnerabilities? (Can't recall the exact medical term right now, it might just be 'tolerance', but it's definately a bad thing) The real world is full of examples where being exposed to something once is bad, twice is worse, third time will kill you. For many people with allergies, each bee-sting or peanut is a worse reaction than the last, and people who've worked with toxic chemicals find that they are 'just fine' now, but if they ever touch a certain kind of plastic, they break out in a horrible rash, etc. Heck, there's a certain fungus-based chemical used in animal research that creates a huge immune response... It's really useful to stimulate immune production the first time, but the second time, it kills you dead. (Researchers have to be very careful handling it, because it plays by the same rules for humans too! Splash it in your eye once, and you'd better steer clear for the rest of your life!)
It's not something that's in yet. I remember having some idle thoughts along those lines given some of the stories I've read about multiple black widow bites, but it'll have to be a dev item (with all kinds of other allergies I suppose). I don't think it would be that hard to put in, at least, since, yeah, it could work along the lines of the resistance effects for the most part.
Familiarity with individual weapons, attachment to them, weapon mentions in legends
Are soldiers likes going to have an impact on this? For example, will a soldier who likes war hammers be more likely to become attached to his current hammer then one who doesn't specifically like hammers?
Also, will military dwarves get good thoughts from being assigned to use equipment that they have a preference for?
It's possible. We haven't gone through the details for the familiarity mechanic yet. As usual, I'll be keeping track of what people bring up.
It was 10/22/08 of the 2008 progress blog where he guessed february, btw.
"I've been handling a little under 20 a day on average, which puts the release around February. So much for a more rapid release schedule."
Oh, never realised that was an official estimate!
Well, perhaps to speed up the release Toady could delay some non-essential things in his to-do list?
That wasn't so much an official release estimate as a nullification of any previous optimistic statements, although I think I had the February-March timeline in my head way back then. There aren't that many things I can push off now, so I will continue to strike a note of vague non-optimism for a release any time soon.
Toady, have you ever read Tom Godwin's The Survivors?
Because every time I read it, I feel like you keep making shout-outs.
Nope. I don't think I've read anything by Tom Godwin unless I'm forgetting something.
Anyway, tangent aside, I was wondering if fixed temperature secretions were possible with the new system.
Should be. Liquid fire is if I remember. There will probably be some interactions that don't make it in though, so I'm not sure precisely how well they will work for various horrible applications.
I feel compelled to note that if I'm reading today's dev log right, you'll be able to mod in air-filled gas bladders for big fishies and then stab them and air will leak out.
Yeah, though, air would have to be added as a material... and then it would appear as a visible flow within the other air. On the plus side, I think (not sure, might need something) that you could also make a flier with a giant air bladder that is filled with a functional gaseous tissue within the [FLIER] bladder so that when it loses the contenst of the bladder it'll fall to the ground and have to walk around on its stubby little legs. The missing part might be how flier is linked up... oddly, the gas tissue might have to be [MUSCULAR] or [STRUCTURAL] instead of [FUNCTIONAL], but I'd have to check. In any case, there's probably a solution in there.
Is there any word on any kind of cloth based armor or something similar? What it sounds like so far is that hammers will be king.
No doubt we're going to need to mess with this a bit, though it'll be nice if these changes I'm making force future changes that force armor to natural align with how it was actually used (ie with some padding). The equipment changes are still not fleshed out entirely, and if the fights feel really weird when I'm able to run some serious arena tests, it'll be more likely that I do something with this.
By the way, what's the official explanation for why we can't go build on peaks?
It was more of an adventure mode thing. High mountains aren't as interesting if they are easily civilized. There's going to need to be some addition exploration style settings I think before this gets sorted out. If you have "higher" exploration settings, your dwarves shouldn't even be able to settle outside of known areas without a prior expedition (either as an adv or as an oregon trail style thing). With low settings, you'd be able to start wherever. It would be cool to get that old 7 cities of gold style vibe in there, where you could explore new areas, name them, find important features and report back and so on, slowly building up maps and all that. There aren't nearly enough expedition (vs. pure exploration) games like that these days, even if it was flawed itself.
I bemoan the lack of liver, spleen, and kidney function.
It's just delayed! Though I'm really not sure if I'll make it back to the magenta ones. It would take a few days, and whenever I can shave a few days off the release at this time, it seems like a good thing.
All it needs now is more realistic attacks like stings (with pierce damage) for attack with swords (or sabers which my elves got) as addition to the normal damage types. Sometimes i just want to bash out some teeth with the shaft of my Spear/Pike(/moded polearms) or make an cut/slash with its blade.
The weapons all have multiple attack types now, but it's really a baby baby system until the combat arc. I'm not sure there really be used at all this time around (I just needed a replacement for what was there). The sword has a thrust/slash/flat blade/pommel whack associated for example, but I don't think it'll do much of anything with AI/interface them, and since items don't currently have parts or multiple materials, there just isn't a lot going on yet.
broken rib into the heart
Wow, apparently this actually happens.
Yeah, we were trying to keep it aligned with horrible things we've read about and seen. We haven't even scratched the surface of our Trauma: Life in the ER viewing. For instance, a car impact knocked a woman's stomach up through her diaphragm to rest next to her heart and lungs, but all of the organs themselves were just a little bruised. The surgeons just pulled the stomach back down, sewed up the diaphragm, and she was fine after some rest. We don't have that level of body part to body part interaction yet, though the current guts popping out through the holes is similar.
So, what are the odds that, with the new bone fragment rules, it actually gets MORE dangerous to have a skeleton than not?
I'd say pretty good. It's a numbers issue in what's probably a very complicated dynamical system, and so only the vast testing of the community will really bring it up.
Yeah, who knows so far... I haven't finished wounds, so I haven't gotten a chance to do much testing and certainly not for balance. Of course, a skeleton should help you stand up and stuff as well, but that's all abstracted away and not required for creatures that don't have them.
I wonder if with properties like SHEAR and such, it'd be possible to determine the fracture pattern of a hard material; large chunks, or a dozen tiny slivers?
I think that'll need to be specifically detailed in the future -- one of the main properties of minerals for example is how they fracture. I don't think you can get at it just from the numbers I have, especially since some of the materials aren't even homogenous in real life (eg things like fracture planes etc.). Not sure precisely how I'll handle this, aside from putting it off for now, he he he.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items (Read 3667184 times)