I'm not going to proofread this time... I hope the answers match up and stuff.
If the civ decides to wall off the bad area and try another way, can the walled off portion have some sort of strong, locked door instead of really walling it off?
It would be cool to eventually do that, especially when there's writing and they can engrave a sign above the door.
Will this interact with the dangerous areas decisions above? For example, after a tunnel is completed, it can be breached by nastiness. Could it then be considered too dangerous and another would be tried to go around it while that would be walled off?
The second tunneling topic was regarding tunneling beasts/siegers attacking you in dwarf mode, so do you mean the siegers making a different decision after they make a tunnel?
Will other underground features use these caves as a framework? Will cave rivers run through it with subterranean pools forming lakes? What will actually differentiate these from the actual surface?
More to the point though, with this underground revamp, is there any plans with getting rid of the bizarre beginnings for cave rivers, so that they don't appear out of nothingness?
We were planning to run rivers this time around, but it's something of a hassle, so there aren't actually any flowing underground rivers yet. They aren't essential for most things, as the giant lakes will provide infinite water from edges, but it'll be nice to put them in. Not sure I'll have time. Regarding the rivers appearing out of nothingness, it's kind of a tricky question, as rivers can be sourced by many different tiny water flows slowly building up as things go downhill, many of them just absorbed water in the ground. Nothingness isn't all that different from that, especially if we don't want to put slight aquifer water everywhere that kind of forms into neglible trickles or something, as mining would then be a great hassle any time you also wanted to have a river starting up. Real world examples of underground rivers sources (sources as in the beginning of a river, not a reference, though I guess that's an inadvertent pun) that are more interesting or modellable are welcome.
Does this mean that those creatures will have towns or nests of some sort?
I'd prefer for antmen to have tunnel nests and things, yeah, but I don't know that I'll be able to do many of the things I want to do. It's all a time issue. Ideally, if the underground animal peoples have crude weapons, then they were made somewhere, whether it's a fixed location or a nomadic camp or something, so eventually there should be something.
Will there be any change to civs interacting with your fortress due to the underground critters? Right now we pretty much have War and Trade (even No Trade civs will come and trade, they just don't bring much). Will we have way to make civ entities more hostile/neutral/friendly then we currently do?
Right now, any feature-linked civilization is marked as hostile just because that's the faster way to go, but it wouldn't be all that difficult to shake that up. The annoyances are making sure things like trader wagon paths and so on respect the proper edges and so on, and I don't remember what structure is in place for that and if it's a pain to alter quickly. So it's another eventually direction things can take now.
Are there going to be additional layers dedicated to this, below the standard 15 Z-levels down? For instance, cave features start at Z-level 16 and go down to 20? And then perhaps layer HFS down a bit further, say Z-levels 21-25? Or are the number of layers and range of these features going to be completely random?
Yeah, the 15 thing is out the window. For slower machines, it'll probably eventually allow the layers to be drawn in and packed into the same small space you've got now, but in any case:
Underground goodies is always a welcome addition, but what do you think of the performance hurdles you may have to leap, Toady? Path finding is a notorious CPU hog, and to introduce large, open expanses with multiple paths and covering many z-levels would cause a lot of headaches for most computers.
The very worst path finding issues, from things like trapped pets and flying HFS hunting for surface buildings are more bugs than basic path finding load, the pets especially, and those may or may not be addressed depending on how bad it is. I haven't noticed a slow down at all just having them there and having armies of critters wandering around in them. Anyway, I don't want to turn this into a pathfinding thread. We have plenty of those.
Possibility for unending attacks
I'm a bit confused on this particular item. Does this refer to a never ending siege or something? Cut off from all outsiders as goblins set up camp outside my fortress' doors? Marching armies of goblins coming to reinforce the frontline as the first trebuchets are being fired onto the mountainside? Or am I getting my hopes up...
Ha, that's an interesting interpretation.
I thought it referred to fixing the problem that if your fort exists long enough and faces enough sieges, eventually you won't get any more because you'll have killed all the enemies in the world. Actually, your version would probably be cooler.
I don't think so, because I was getting sieged in my 120+ years old fortress even. Perhaps Toady will give us a proper answer.
I was under the impression that the unending attacks was just the chasm, cave river, magma pools, Ect. endlessly respawning critters once killed. Like it did back in 2D when losing was fun, instead of now where losing is just difficult.
Yeah, it's about underground attacks rather than sieges. In the current version, they don't really happen at all. This time around, there should be a great deal of unending torment should you elect to mess with the cave layers. Dealing with just walling them up is more of an improved sieges thing, which is in the next group of items to be handled after this release.
Will there be ice caverns under glaciers, by the way?
Within the glacier? The caves and vertical connections carved out in the ice should remain icy, but I don't have anything particular planned for them, just as the dirt/sand layers get caverns when they shouldn't really exist. Almost all the main layers are down in the rock though.
Do we get for the map-painter-thingy a option for placing caves?
Will the naming be z-axis-sensitiv? To illustrate this: Can be under the "plains of fire" the "caves of stone" under which in turn are the "Deeps of slaughtering" and the "cave of the dead borgle"?
There haven't been any changes to the map painter. Ideally you'd be able to place sites and historical figures and all that sort of thing, but it's kind of a far future goal.
Each cave layer region, which is a certain depth and a certain portion of the world map, gets an associated name and creature populations and civs and so on, and this should show up in the legends screen. It's planned to allow you to name them instead of just giving everything names (that should be true of undiscovered above ground features as well), but I'm not sure if that's going to happen this time or not. Lots of things to do.
Will the new wound system make megabeasts survive more?
Will megabeasts other then demons be able to take over goblin civilizations? Will any civilization be able to be taken over by a megabeast?
Will soldiers be able to act as civilians when not on duty? AKA, have a squad that act as farmers when not on duty?
Will "stacked" squads work better? As in, have more of a chain of command then just the squad leader.
Will criminals be handled differently? Will there be saner punishments for things?
Will there be any updates to traps?
Will crossbows be handled in a more realistic manner?
Will the manager screen act differently? Will the manager system be different from what it currently is?
Will noble demands be updated?
Will a more supply/demand type economy be implemented for the dwarves, instead of the fixed prices that are currently used?
Will Liasons respawn?
Will killing nobles have more of an effect on the world?
Will the Guards be more tied into the military?
Will Royal Guards actually defend the nobles now, as in, will you be able to assign royal guards to certain nobles, to increase happiness?
Will Fortress Guards get assigned jobs to take care of any dwarfs going crazy/tantruming, so they will drop whatever they are doing and go tackle the guy, making them actually useful?
Will Fortress Guards be capable of calming down dwarves who are tantruming via social skills?
Ahh.. . Ah... system overload. Many of your questions were addressed in subsequent posts, but I was too lazy to cross reference so I don't know how satisfied you are.
Toady, I know we haven't gotten to the squad control area yet, but are you planning to put toggleable training limits on the dwarf soldiers while sparring sort of like we have on the workshops?
There are lots of ideas for sparring we were going to explore. I'm not quite sure how you'd gauge that sort of thing in "real life". There are training courses with time spans and training courses with tests, for example. It might be fun to mess around with those concepts, but we'll see what happens. I don't remember if we had any plans along these lines... I don't think it came up in the thread notes but I may be wrong. I'll note it down in any case.
Any ideas on what to do about mass, psychic revelation of the cave's interior?
I am concerned about the same thing. While it's definitely not up to me, I think an ideal situation at this point would be to reveal one Z-level above your explorers and one Z-level below as they reach each new ramp or dig a staircase into a lower level. After all, it's dark down there. Layers of water could also inhibit revealing, so that an area has to be at least significantly drained before it can be discovered. Something like that would be great on existing lairs and reclaimed fortresses as well.
So what did the new implementation of map revealing end up looking like? It did occur to me that maybe you could do some rough LOS stuff, like only do LOS calcs for dwarves on the fringe of revealed areas.
So yeah, the new system is to have a 60 or so tile flood out from your dwarves as they go underground, and any time they get within 30 tiles of the 60 tile flood (flags are kept when the flood got out to 30, roughly), it'll flood out again, picking up those flags and placing new ones, so it moves out in a kind of chunking way. It doesn't move out continuously as that would be too slow, and it doesn't respect LOS for the same reason, but it does flood out around corridors and so on, so though you can see around corners, you don't completely overcome walls.
I thought it worked all right, certainly preferable to what it was doing before, though there is currently a bit of babysitting to do if you want a squad to explore an unexplored area, since they can't take orders to walk into a hidden zone. Some new commands/actions will be necessary, probably. It is a little strange to not know quite when it's going to expand your view, especially in more twisted areas, but I don't think the effect is all that bad. I'm a little leery of doing LOS stuff, as it might clunk down in places with lots of corners if your squad is constantly on the move, like adv mode. There could be something there though.
Are those big quasi-circular deposits normal? I've never noticed them in that pattern before, but in the screenshots it's pretty apparent that you get a single big circular splash of Other_Stone in each tile of your n-by-n embark site, and that you get different ones between layers. So the upper left corner of my embark site could have MICROCLINE on one layer and ORPIMENT on the next layer down, and then alternating layers of cyan and yellow, with little regard for how a sandwiched cylinder of such godawful colors came to exist.
Yeah, that's how the big deposits have always been placed and yeah, it looks terrible. Hopefully deposits will be made more interesting and unpredictable, but I wouldn't be surprised if that didn't make it into this release, since it's not strictly necessary for the slated underground stuff.
The pattern generally isn't noticed unless a map is fully revealed, which is why I haven't been quick to change it, since it is suiting its purpose without being too obstructive. At some point I'd like to do more with it, and do things like veins over multiple z levels and so on, but it hasn't been pressing.
i think Fungy and plants could grow on walls and the ceiling as well as on the ground. Would it be possible (and easy enought to implement) to get such behavior? Oh and Flora that only grows on walls/the ceilling?
I remember seeing some wall fungus on the Planet Earth, and in my old apartment. It would be cool, especially in a multi-z cave, to have things you have to get at up there.
Toady can we get a little video of the Underground features as soon as they are done?
I dunno. They don't move. What did you want to see a video of?
Toady, with the new underground layers, is there a possibility for sand to show up there as well as in the surface layers? Along the banks of the water areas, for example?
There's nothing new yet soil-wise.
Toady will there be some sort of semi-chasms? So chasm like formations that lead into a cave(-lakes) rather then to the nothingness beyond - like if the ceiling of said cave just collapsed?
The bottomless chasms and pits are gone right now. HFS might involve them, who knows? But in any case the vertical connections will all be finite (haven't done them yet), though before climbing we're aiming on making most or all of the adventurer accessible.
Will the new underground layer be exportable as a detailed map?
How will the descriptions fit in adventure mode? something like "l" > "a - elf swordsman" > "d - description"?
The graphical one? The layers touch everything pretty much, even at the pixel levels, so it would just be a black void or large colored splotches if you differentiate the zones through the world.
For descriptions, yeah, something like that. I don't remember if I did it yet, but it would probably be from there. It's a little buried for something that should be more visible. It could also show them when you talk to somebody, maybe.
I wonder if active attacks (as opposed to passive attacks, where creatures just wander around and maybe run into a dwarf and maybe attack him then) will be a tag that we can put on non-entity (non-civ) creatures?
So you mean something like actual predation from [LARGE_PREDATOR]? Or something else? There is a difference in the AI there vs. [BENIGN], if I remember, but it isn't all that dramatic.
What is your favorite development for this release?
What do you think is the most significant development?
That depends on what we mean by significant. Squad changes and underground changes will have the most significant impact on regular play, I think, aside from all the new fun bugs. Future-wise, the entity raw positions and material/tissue changes will enable many things that I want to do. My favorite stuff is HFS-related.
Question for Toady, does a poisonous material have to be injected, or otherwise handled in a special way to take effect as a poison, or will a blade made out of a poisonous material automatically poison any cuts it makes?
There isn't a lot of incidental stuff right now, at least for new checks. If you have some crap smeared on something and it gets transferred over, it might trigger a contact syndrome, but materials themselves on a solid object aren't respected. They are for hurled globs if I remember, as those get turned into a splatter on a BP. We'll get there eventually. It shouldn't be a huge annoyance to do as there aren't all that many object to object contact events.
What about the new Fun Stuff? It will be more varied now (we will have different kinds of HFS) or it replaced the old one?
All the old HFS, location-wise, is gone and is still being replaced by new HFS. I'm not sure if the old creatures will survive or not. It depends. I didn't get through it in Underground Month, but I'm still going back to do it as it is a requirement. I just wanted to get into entity positions and squad control as those are the last two main topics and I'll then have a better big picture at that time.
As a side note, is there going to be some kind of mechanic in place to prevent dwarves from simply flooding the entire underworld with limitless water from a brook, like people do with caves now? It seems a bit too easy to just flood anything right now.
Water leaving off of edges should prevent a complete flooding of the underworld, as the water would run off the edge, but you could get a lot of water down there and cause problems for creatures, especially in any depressions, it's true. I guess there are a few things that could be done, but I'd like to keep the freedom to do what you like in there as well. Even a brook has the ability to fill a gigantic impermeable pit if you give it enough time, and I don't think that's a bad thing. Game-attack wise, many of the critters down there can swim and some can breathe underwater, so I don't think it'll be a game breaker, even if you could fill it up, which might be hard with edge drain.
Obviously you have some scenarios and such for underground creatures and events. How soon (or likely) do you think it is for applying such functions to above ground locations?
The scenarios are quite vague ("attack from cave civ"), and I'm more for removing them and putting them in world AI than I am for extending them. That's half of what the Army Arc is about (the other half is allowing you to attack them). The new underworld civs are a step away from the fixed "trigger map feature attack" scenario and toward giving them more choices and options as other civs will have. At the same time, there are certain game events, which occur above ground, like sending item-thief wilderness creatures with a certain frequency, and that's already more prevalent above ground. Sieges are essentially the same way, at least with the civs that you don't have to anger first.
I guess you could still define many separate phases through the life of the turtle, with increasing size.
I believe you can only specify a start date, a stop date, and a growth rate during that one period.
The appearance modifier (hair length, etc.) growth factors work that way, but size is a little more versatile. You can define a series of time points and the average size of the creature at those times.
Dwarves currently have:
[BODY_SIZE:0:0:100]
[BODY_SIZE:1:168:1500]
[BODY_SIZE:12:0:6000]
Which makes them grow linearly between the last numbers at the year:day numbers on the left (I haven't thought about the actual numbers much, so ignore those). You could just as easily do:
[BODY_SIZE:0:0:100]
[BODY_SIZE:1:168:1500]
[BODY_SIZE:12:0:6000]
[BODY_SIZE:15:0:6500]
[BODY_SIZE:18:0:8000]
[BODY_SIZE:50:0:16000]
to make something grow along a different curve. Individual size variability is handled via body appearance modifiers like body length, and those can only have one spurt. So a creature can grow in total size along a weird curve, but only have one growth spurt per dimension. BODY_SIZE itself doesn't set up infinite growth, but you could set up modifiers for body length/width/height that all constantly grow like hair at the same rate forever, and this would have the same effect.
Question to toady: Will the stuff made from bones (bolts,(x-)bows) depend on the relativ size of the used bone. For example will be making a bolt from a pikes bone impossible while i still can make (hypothetical) a needle from it?
Right now it's still as strange as it has ever been. It'll need to be handled at some point, but I'm not sure when that will be.
Will the new creature update (as in: the more elaborate way creatures will be put together,) affect the way fat, bones, and meat are handled and produced by the butcher shop? Will it affect butchering at all?
Will there (if not by the next update, then ever) be a way to obtain (or even mod in) specific "food" type organs (like liver, kidneys, sweetbreads, etc.), specific cuts of meat, or other special substances (that white phosphorous "pouch" comes to mind), via the butcher shop?
Butchering will probably be affected, but it's currently one of the loose ends. Ideally you'd be able to get all of the organs out of a critter, but the game needs to be handle both the volume of the objects created in that case and any "game-breaking" elements, like one animal giving you way too much food (right now it doesn't account for the size of an object to tell you how much it fed you for example).
Will siegers be able to siege with other non-mount creatures, or other sentient creatures?
Like kobolds and goblins?
Gobs have trolls as it stands, and there's that creature pref thing for leaders in the entity positions section which could also have an effect. We'll have to see how that plays out.
# Remove demons as forced powers for goblins and have such arrangements arise through mega-beast behavior
Toady, how do you think this will turn out? Any megabeast could be the leader of the goblins' civilizations? Or only demons, but they will need to enslave/kill/destroy first to win such position?
It would be cool if such things could occur to other races too. For instance, we could have a demon-led evil human civilization.
Not all megabeasts are intelligent, so it won't be anything, and the demons will have a proclivity toward wanting to have minions at their disposal, but yeah, they'll need to win their position. Goblin society makes it easier for them to do, as they are used to kowtowing to the stronger among them and don't care much for appearances, whereas humans are far too xenophobic and afraid of strange things to allow a demon to go through some mechanic like a duel for warlord status -- the same tag that'll make humans consider pointy ears and glowing red eyes less attractive or scary in general might control this. I'm not saying this is all going in now, but we are getting started. In any case, a demon can't break into the hereditary dwarven system or the foresty religion of the elves. And kobolds just don't understand or care about that kind of thing. So goblins will tend to be the natural fit. This in the stock universe we don't care about all that much -- the interesting thing will be to program in a first pass on the mechanics and selection process a demon will use to figure out what it wants to do with its life. It would be cool if eventually the demon can exploit the religious process to turn a group of human bandits into a demon cult or something, but for now, it's just straightforward violence and domination. A demon might pass into the rulership of humans in this way as well, but it would have to not get killed by them first.
I don't mean to promise anything here, but this is the way we really want to push things. Having the important figures in the world able to start to make decisions like this that create a more dynamic form of play is one of our primary goals in embarking on this whole project to begin with. The somewhat silly raw tags that'll come up during this first pass will eventually be expanded just as the tissues and materials have been, into something that makes more sense, but it starts like this, and it has to start some time, which is why this particular demon example has been singled out for exploration.
Oh another question for toady: Silver and Gold are very soft so you can make out of 100 grams Metal multiple kilometers of very fine thread (for silver a very fine thread which weights at 2 Kilometers length only 1 grams). Would it be possible to weave them to fabric (or into fabric) like Adamantine-strands?
I ask because priests and Nobles (in RL history) did often wear clothes that had parts made with Gold/silver-threads and while you are reworking them anyway it might be a valid demand for them.
I remember looking up the processes for making wire, and I think it seemed like something I wanted to do. I don't remember the exact techniques and dates, but dwarves should certainly be able to do things with metal with a bit of flair in any case. The way I've set up the material raws here is probably a bit lacking, since I just wanted to make sure the game could do what it used to do first, so making metal isn't something that's done starting from the metal itself, but rather a rock, and those strands aren't woven in as additions or as parts of existing cloth. But yeah, I'm all for that, and other things you can do with metal wires that don't involve dwarf-made electricity and so on.
Will pressure plates in adventure mode be fixed?
I don't remember how they are broken. You just have to turn them on in the init, unless there's some bug I'm forgetting. The real bug is with cage traps. If you turn traps on, those lock up the game, which is why they are defaulted off until I fix it.
in the next version, dwarves will start to trim their nails and take care of their hair and beard. Is it the first step towars dwarves dedicating more time to themselves ? For example, not letting their clothes rot and repairing them, and, later on, buying things they like ?
Well, you could call it that, but I'm not sure they'll get their freedom until I do more with job priorities, which'll be the next real trip into their little minds, most likely.
Will there be priest nobles? And if so, what will they do?
Will we be able to set in the civilization file what nobles/such you get in fortress mode for your custom race? Cause if so my naga finally get some priests which'd be awesome. Yes i know they wont do anything but if i could define part of the fortress as a temple and have them hang around there it'd be Awesome squared.
The idea now for the priest update is just to get that working with the new entity position system at all, in some way. I'm not doing a sweeping religion revision. That said, you can add pretty much anything you want to the entity positions raws. If you want every society something called a "priest", you can, though they won't necessarily be tied into in-game religions unless you use whatever limited mechanics I set up, which likely will have nothing to do with dwarf mode at this point. If you do set up a position called the "Most Revered Naga" or something though, and link it up as a site position or however the others are done, you'll get one for your fort though, or however many you wanted, either through appointment or election, and as migrants or internally, whatever mechanics we end up with at the end.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items (Read 3664602 times)