Hate to have to ask, but when's the next answer block?
Right now, assuming my poor frozen hands don't hit the wrong keys too often.
TOADY: “I think it won't devolve into a sea of garbage slush”
You mean like how some of those Megabeasts are getting names like “Glorious Justice of Light” for slaughtering hundreds right?
That's right.
Would the spheres just affect what grows or happens in them, or could a sphere affect land growth?
Should be everything, yeah. The underground features have always been on the same system as the above ground features, but there just hasn't been time to do anything with the above ground stuff. When I do the underground this time, I'm going to maintain that connection (not saying the above ground gets stuff yet), so that when I get around to sphere stuff, everything can grow up together.
Also, are there any plans for sphere lands to change during gameplay?
Currently, savagery (and maybe good/evil, but I don't remember) drops as creatures are killed and so on, and I think the sphere system will allow that kind of flexibility too. The changes should also be reflected in the legends snapshots (eventually, I don't remember if they store good/evil/savagery now, so I might miss it the first time through).
How about dwarven tattoos that show up in the description?
Styling of cosmetic tissue layers might also include scarification, ritual or otherwise.
Unfortunately, I'm just doing styles like braiding stringy tissues and so on. I'm pro DF tattoos and DF branding and all that, but it's not going in right now. The new wound system should make image/art-based scars and tattoos (not sure if those'll be on the wound system) pretty easy for later.
Does that also apply to weapons/projectiles which are made from a material that has a very high/low fixed temperature? This could interresting effects if a fire-imp-bone-bolt gets stuck in a creature.
A stuck-in should transfer temperatures, yeah. A fixed-temp stuck-in should suck, yeah.
Is it still true that we can make reactions in these workshops (and if there are others, what are they?); and, can these new reactions handle items in barrels and/or vials, or corpse/harvested items like shell or horn?
The latter definitely, since that was the idea behind it. As for containers... it has been a while, but I think you can use the job flag tags, so regular job style container use would work, but you can't add new job tags, so using a new system in a vial... that might not work. Probably not. I never tested the new stuff (some butchery stuff still needs to be written), so I'm not fully comfortable with it yet.
Is there going to be different levels of pain sensitivity for different body parts and layers?
Tissues have a PAIN_RECEPTORS:# tag, so yes, at least for layers. I don't think we've seen any way for body parts to selectively override tissue properties or anything like that, though.
edit: actually the [SET_TL_GROUP:BY_CATEGORY:HEAD:HAIR] type stuff might be capable of that
Yeah, tissue layers (the actual tissue on the individual part) can override several aspects of tissues, but they can't yet override everything. Pain sensitivity is one of the things I'm pretty sure they can override.
So what are temporary criticals?
Stun/winded/nausea, that sort of thing. Anything from before that worked on a timer that wasn't bleeding/pain.
Will there be timestamps or some type of grouping on the combat messages to separate the combat messages into different combats for the unit in question? Or are they just going to be lumped together like the current announcements are?
Yeah, they are time-stamped (well, up to a point) and grouped by the unit.
How is health care going to relate to adventure mode? Will you be able to perform basic medical care on yourself and others? Will there be doctors (or whatever is appropriate to the race in question) in town for more serious procedures, like removing the crossbow bolt lodged in your skull?
I really don't know yet. I'll have better answers when I start healthcare... which should happen fairly soon.
How is crafting going to interact with all the specific new anatomy?
Will there be teeth/random body spike crafts? Specific organs as different cooking ingredients, or to get extracts from?
Some of this... I haven't finished butchery yet, so it'll depend on how much it feels like there's just too many crap items being generated and what I have time for. Ideally, it would at least keep things that have special functions. You can make crafts out of whatever parts it makes as long as their materials have the proper flags. It continues to virtually ignore sizes or sense that way.
Toady, are the new material properties going to effect people punching/kicking with metal gauntlets/boots?
I don't think they do, but I might be wrong, because I remember making a code comment about it. I've put in an additional note to check. Can't promise anything.
I'm seeing items get colourful, and I'm wondering: are we going to see a release with half the items done, or is that idea right out? It seems like the body construction issues are probably separable from the squads and etc, so we can playtest those while the squads code gets written.
I suppose this might have the disadvantage of two save format breaks in quick succession.
It sounds like it's out. Although I'm not sure why breaking save compat is such a big deal -- I'd be totally okay with compat breaks every 3 months or whatever. Having releases every 3 months would more than make up for it.
The main thing here is that I've been on the "Army Arc" for a couple years without much to show for it, so I made a rare promise early on here (maybe just to myself, I don't remember) to include the squad rewrites and military positions with this release, rather than a future release, and I'm going to stick with that.
Three more items, the largest being the bite/punch/kick/wrestle distinction in the natural attack skills/raws. I was considering adding custom combat skills for natural attacks and items at this time, but when I was going through it became pretty clear that it's premature, so I just took down notes for it instead for a later release.
Sounds interresting! Can we ask what your ideas on this are?
More importantly; where is the distinction for a Gore attack?
Tusks are neither punches, kicks, bites or wrestling.
Tusks are actually what I was going to fix with this custom system, because I didn't want to add a zillion skills for every weird thing, but it isn't going in this time, so they use the biting skill for now. The notes are just code tags mainly, for all of the places where a combat skill comes up (20 or 40 or something) there's something that needs to be handled by raw tags. It's not a huge huge project, but a few days is a few days delay now, so I had to trim. It shouldn't be a save compat issue when it comes up.
Also, for save compat, I know many of you don't care, but I still like to break it the fewest times possible. If I'm ultimately encouraging people to "play the world" or to play many games in the same world, it's important for me not to get in a pattern of tossing saves each time I update.
A request for Toady: With the new wound system and whatnot going in place, would it be possible for you to fix the bug where caravans bring dead animals in cages to freezing areas? I've even seen polar bears show up dead, and that just doesn't seem right.
The new release likely won't see that fixed, but when I'm in bug fix mode after the release, who knows? I generally catch a ton of the old ones at that time as well.
Will the new material effects be able to transfer some level of cold/heat/whatever resistance to someone wearing that material? For example, let's say we had a highly heat resistant creature who gains their heat resistance from their skin. If a dwarf is wearing leather armor made from that skin, will it give the dwarf some amount of fire resistance?
Does that explain why my dogs freeze to death but my dwarves don't?
Is it clothing or innate insulation that matters?
I haven't updated the layering effects yet (and yeah, the currently release version does layering through clothing and a raw variable), but there might be some impact from inventory, especially blocking things like fireballs.
You need to allow some sort of Tag that allows you to betray Symetry!
There's little enforced symmetry among the modifiers and tissue styling. It's all done via the layer selection. Because things generally work symmetrically here (like what your face looks like and so on), the tissue selections I do generally looks like "select body part by category - eye" and then I do one modifier for the eyes. Now, if I had instead added "select body part by token - REYE" it would grab the right eye and just add the modifiers for that part. This means that if you wanted asymmetry stuff, you'd need to double (or whatever) your work in the raws. Ideally, there'd be some tag that tells it how many modifiers to add based on the given selection, and I have some notes to that effect (mainly for creatures like ettins), but some of it'll end up being a future thing. In any case, I think you can do everything with tokens right now if you need high amounts of asymmetry. The one thing you definitely can't do now is make a modifier break symmetry rarely, as that would require a more complicated tag setup.
Toady, what format will the descriptions take? I'm assuming it will be something similar to the artifact descriptions, is this the case? Will there be a separate view for the wounds, so that we can see just the descriptions of the injuries, and not the rest of the dwarf?
Right now the descriptions are in a paragraph that you read. Wound descs are the nextish project, and the basic plan now is to have them both worked into the paragraphs (ideally, it would talk about your "remaining blue eye" and stuff like that, instead of talking about your blue eyes and then being like, "oh, and one of them is gone!") and also to have a more useable view for wounds. The form that takes might depend on some of the healthcare decisions that are coming up, since that'll be highly related.
This beg the question, can elves grow beards?
Zach and I went through this for each critter a while ago, and we decided that, yeah, male elves should be able to grow beards. We dig the people that say that maybe they'd even have more fur than other standard humanoid critters, and discussed that a bit at the time, since they are somewhat savage in certain habits, but ultimately they ended up without extra fur. Nothing set in stone.
I dont think toady intended to write a different word, it was just difficult to utter that which is so abhorrent to a dwarf.
Yeah, just had trouble typing shave.
a hardcoded list of styles to choose from, or styles totally in the raws with little helper phrases for the paragraph or something? -- and how precisely defined they'll be -- beards being a style that only applies to a particular patch of hair, while shaven-ness can apply to any type of hair, etc.
Like many things, I'm starting off hard-coded because I don't know what I need and it would be a waste to raw it before I know. The annoyances here are mainly how much I might end up allowing descriptions to be placed before or after other words and wherever in sentences -- I might not do much of it now, but the more that's mutable, the less I'm eager to raw it until I'm really happy with what I've got. You do have as much control as you want over which tissue layers are chosen and which styles those layers are allowed to have, so if you have a critter with their hairy head in their chest, such that a "pony tail" is sort of meaningless, if I'm remembering the format right you could disallow that particular style. In the proto-version I've got now, the dwarves twiddle their hair, beards, moustaches and sideburns separately. For things like goatees it'll take a bit more work, to get them shaving their cheek whiskers but not their chin whiskers, and so on, and I'm really not sure where I'll end up this time around.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items (Read 3665564 times)