Toady, does this latest update mean we could see druids leading dwarf civs or something?
You mean if they aren't hungry? I think only the humans and dwarves do it right now, and they'll probably use names like overlord and administrator or something (concerning conquered sites).
* The next release is going to have changes to the reactions raw, though it hasn't been finalized yet. Could you give an overview of the changes and/or some highlights, even if the details haven't been nailed down yet?
* In the next release, will blood be extractable from corpses? If so, will what's extracted be generic blood, or specific to the creature? (For example, if you wanted to make a reaction which used dragon blood as a reagent).
* In the next release you'll be able to define creatures which are made entirely out of (for example) dwarven livers, and when asked if you could define a creature which was made out of whole dwarves Toady said "yes". Will it be possible to define a creature that is made out of (for example) whole gremlins, which will, when it dies, fall apart into living gremlins? Or fall apart into gremlin corpses?
* How far in the future are the plans to allow for booze to be brewed out of material besides plants? (Bone wine made from bones, dragon wine made from dragon blood, etc)
The reaction raws accept the format that regular jobs use, if I remember correctly, though things like containers aren't probably supported in many cases, probably. I haven't finished that part yet. A few more workshops are supported, but not most of them.
Blood would be extractable if you set it up as an extract material for the creature, but I don't have a container-based butchery at this point so it wouldn't come up during the regular process. If you wanted to use dragon blood as a reagent, you could do it by setting it as an extract mat and then doing the perform extract job though, yeah.
You'll be able to make them out of dwarven liver tissue, but yeah, I didn't intend in whatever reply I gave before to imply that you could use some sort of collection of small dwarves or something to build a creature.
If I'm remembering correctly, you could set up a reaction job as it stands now that would let you make a custom drink material, although I'm not sure if you'd have to hide the material inside some sort of unused plant definition to actually get the dwarves to drink it, since their alcohol drinking job might still refer back to plants. There are going to be lots of little issues like that to iron out in mod support, once the bugs are fixed for the vanilla game.
On the appointment of a Baron now, will we be able to appoint someone that currently holds an elected position (e.g., the Mayor)?
I don't think I addressed this one specifically when I replied on the 22nd -- yeah, you should be able to select any dwarf that doesn't hold a higher precedence position than the Baron position. In an unmodded game, that'll be everybody.
In other news, this thread is now longer than the old "The NEW Future of the Fortress" thread. Perhaps its time it was phased out? End of the double threads in a single niche?
Yeah, I dunno. They used to be a bit more different, and now they are both fairly broad. Anybody have a reason to keep the other one unlocked or as a sticky?
The philosopher should talk to dwarves, like the mayor.
It appears that the complete redesign of the position system in the next rev should allow this kind of thing.
We'll see. It really depends on the specifity of the "responsibility tokens", or whatever the position raws will use to assign responsibility to entity positions. In other words, there'll probably be a hardcoded list of duties that can be assigned to a position, but we don't know whether there'll just be a single COMPLAINT duty or more specific stuff like WORK_COMPLAINT, PERSONAL_COMPLAINT etc.
Is this an accurate description of the responsibility assignment stuff? How specific are the responsibilities going to be?
Yeah, that's pretty much what it is like. I think there's a MEET_WORKERS responsibility right now. Ideally that could be expanded upon, but sometimes there's not a clear expansion so I just leave it. Consider yours with, say, WORK vs. PERSONAL or MINER vs. CRAFTSMAN, which would both be valid looking at something like mayor/philosopher vs miner guild/crafts guild -- not that guilds are back, just an example.
In general, I'd like to have a different responsibility for each of the occurrences within the code of a responsibility use to the extent that they are different, maybe with some customization on top. For now, most things that your appointed guys do are represented as separate ones, and there are some extraneous vague ones for positions that aren't fleshed out, like religious ones. So priests just get "RELIGION", since they don't do anything yet. That will be expanded into both new religious responsibilities as well as bringing old responsibilities into the religious entity as soon as they are needed.
Currently, anytime a new town/fortress is created, it is from a new group entity spawned from the civ entity. Is a new system in the works that will allow the group entities to found multiple towns/fortresses? That way, the human town run by the the group The Scourge of Rags founds a new town and the group's leader becomes a count. I know the humans are sort of in limbo as far as leaders right now, but I'm interested in the scope of what adding multiple-site (sub-civ) entities will allow for leaders and/or government types.
Yeah, this is the idea, and yeah, it's also totally in limbo with the rest of the varied positions. The basic ideas for humans in not giving them a higher civ structure was to experiment with ideas of their local town leaders managing to become a Warlord or whatever they want to call themselves (could be random) and then capture a few nearby cities and call that their domain, and they might work it out so that one human becomes chief among them (and could create his or her position so that it is then a position which operates through succession), or they could continue to squabble. How they react to external threats and all that is also in limbo -- the post-release army arc stuff will continue to give answers or choices of answers for these questions.
He is currently on his month end break from Dwarf Fortress.
He will HOPEFULLY start updating on the first of June.
You might be right, but there was also this:
Given the overall shape of the month, the month-end project work is mostly cancelled this time around, so I'll be pushing straight through into June, with maybe a day or two off DF.
Yeah, that was a weird stretch. My linux died in there while I was trying to finish 40d12, and some other stuff came up (the temperature shot up and forgot to whip out the fans for a day, so I almost died too and got very cranky), so although I ended up doing a little bit, there wasn't anything worth writing about. Kind of a bad debut for my first cancelled month-end break. The temperature still really sucks in here. I'd have to cat-proof my windows somehow before I can open them, and so much cigarette smoke comes in from outside that I can't do it for long anyway.
Another thing to remark it is the behaviour of the Buzzard-men. I am not sure if it can be modelled somehow but scavengers not scavenging a huge freshly dead creature would make me suspicious. Not that Bram was thinking about that in the first place. What i want to say is: Would it possible that the NPcs draw conclusions like this if they get the right knowledge?
It's the sort of thing which would be very cool. We often dev-up similar things, but they all share the trait of being very difficult to set up unless you address them as particular cases, which isn't the gist of what is wanted. So, when we get out there a bit, we'll see if we can actually do anything, or if it remains less impressive.
Never have I thought Toady working alone was a problem. But we just had an entire month worth of simply putting things into the raws...and it's only about half done.
Oh, indeed, that's sort of exactly what I meant. The raw changes aren't really hard, just time consuming, if I'm to understand Toady. This, as opposed to coming out with new changes and dealing with the new challenges they bring about, is more or less data entry and cleaning out obsolete code.
It's definitely not easy, but at the same time would probably be a better task to give to a few low level employees, you know? I wish Toady had such a luxury.
It's a bit more involved than that and would be hard to delegate. The data entry itself has been mostly done for a while. Last month was sort of a hellish slog, but it's nearly all coding, and it all has to keep an eye on the future to avoid having to do these kinds of rewrites frequently.
In general, yeah, I'm not happy with how long the release is taking, though I'm not going to be too critical of myself since it's hard to see how these things are going to work out sometimes. Save compat or not, the material rewrite had to come in at some point, and excluding the rest of the release, that's probably still six months (not even done yet), for little immediate return without additional features. Picking off some of those low-hanging fruit that popped out of the definition rewrite like descriptions could have waited, but there are downsides to a dry six month release as well. The entity rewrite was necessary for the military stuff, which is still the ostensible goal, so the several months going into that is also a chunk (you have to count time spent on entities prior to starting the material/underground stuff). Then there's the underground update, which goes nicely with the military rewrite and also the material rewrite but could also have waited. The combat rewrite was partially necessitated by the material change, since too much wouldn't make sense without it, but the specifics of the health-care rewrite might have waited (though I'm not sure what impact that would have on playability, since I'm not sure if the number of broken limbs won't increase somewhat). Anyway, yeah, there are a few more dependencies in between them, so I'm not going to acknowledge the absolute exclusivity of the groups of changes for this release, but I do acknowledge that it definitely could have come in more than one giant section, but I think more than two or three parts would have had led to some heavy downsides caused by some very, very dry longish-wait releases.
Last month was particular bad, though. Sometimes I just don't have a lot to talk about, because what I was doing was boring as hell for the most part. I have fun writing up the dev log entries like the one I wrote for today, but now that I've talked about it, I have to do it, which is still cool, but there won't be that much more to say that hasn't been said (there's not even a lot that can go spectacularly-and-amusingly wrong during testing here, just plain wrong, which isn't fun). I don't really have any ideas for how to make the log more exciting during these times, especially without seeming like I'm deflecting from the fact that we are in a boring stretch (as it would seem perhaps if it became a cat blog for those stretches). The dreariness will happen again during this release cycle after squads as well, as there are still a lot of routine changes to make.
It would be better to make it faster than more exciting, but I don't know how to do that either, now that we are fully underway.
I'm still ambivalent about save compatibility preservation as I've been handling it. It wasn't fully responsible for the decisions that led to the long release wait, but it was an encouraging factor in piling on a bit more than I needed to pile on. On the other hand, world preservation is only going to become more important to people, especially when they are allowed to get out there themselves beyond running isolated sites, and I'll probably be happy in the long run to have made so many save-breaking changes now once the main elements of the army arc are complete, rather than wrecking worlds that people have invested in. Nobody really cares now, but if people don't care later, we aren't doing this right.
In any case, we're well along now, and all I can do is try to be a little more careful with my scheduling for future releases. For instance, we mentioned a while ago that we were thinking of doing improved sieges or sending out armies plus looking at the top ten on the voting thread plus one thing of our choosing. I don't think that would take a year again if it were all done at once (as if I've ever been right), but after this process we'll probably still stick more or less with that sequence -- but definitely grouped into several releases. There would be no reason not to do all of the voting items independently for example, if I'm remembering them correctly (it does represent a few lost days, since releases themselves take several hours to prepare, especially now that I'm on three partitions over two computers).
There are reasons not to break up improved sieges that much, since a too-incremental approach there, aside from lessening the impact, would also involve way more AI rewriting each time, and improved sieges require a lot of mechanics that aren't in the game yet. My previous inclination would just be to do it all, but if I want to do more releases, I might have to backtrack and do things like the vehicle rewrite as a first goal, which is essentially wasted time until they are used, which leads to complaints and ill-will, just as many elements of this release garner complaints for their apparent lack of utility. The material component of the release never had a chance, I think, in terms of public relations and expectations (broadly speaking, I know many of you were excited about it -- and I have no real way of telling how upset people are. Donations have been okay so far.). You either spend some months working on something with very few immediate benefits and do a release that changes nothing, saying it's good for the project in the long-term, or you explore some of the benefits, which leads to further delays and some new features. It's not so clear-cut, as there are always short-term projects laying around that might be used to spruce up a dead-weight release without delaying it too much, but it is a conflict that's happening and which I have to think about when I'm planning what to do next, which is something that sucks personally, since it screws up the flow of the project, though I think it's good to keep you all happy as well.
In terms of my well-being and interest in the project, I do get irritated by those kind of considerations, but by my own self-observation, which isn't going to be perfect, I don't think any of the annoyances surrounding working on computer games are remotely close to burning me out or making me tired of trying to make a living this way.
I think the concept of playing the world is great, but from a practical standpoint, I feel the game needs to give the player strong incentives to do so before it becomes important to ensure saves are compatible for that reason. Artifacts from previous fortresses, your old dwarves from your last abandon coming in with an immigrant wave, releasing fortresses to the AI and then having caravans from them arrive bearing goods produced at your last fortress, things like that. The Army Arc may contribute to this, especially if you can interact with your previous sites (send a squad to scavenge your old ruins to recover artifacts or powerful weapons for your new fort?), but it could also make things worse it you end up killing off hostile sites, thereby making the world less interesting over time, rather than more interesting.
Having addressed the general sentiment above (ie, yeah, it's not so important now, but if it ever is, I'll be glad I did some of these basic projects now rather than in the future, for the time-consuming breaks at least), considering just the army arc, I think that yeah, it has often been a theme with us that unless the world is somehow designated to be marching toward some kind of apocalypse, it's always going to tend toward a more homogenous environemnt (lots of selection and no mutation, basically). When the idea for DF was smaller, it was planned to be built around that process (the Age of Myth etc. names come out of that planning, when the ages were going to pass into strictly mundane modern times where you'd engage in some archeology for example on your old artifacts... kind of an interesting game in the end, though we can capture a lot of that without having to push forward the timeline into the modern era). However, killing off everyone in, say, a medium-sized world is also a fairly long-term enterprise, and in addition, even a dwarf-only or human-only world should be fun enough to play once there are enough diplomacy, factions, intrigue and world-wide power struggles, and there's always the monsters of the past to reference and resurrect. I'm certainly not saying worlds are all that interesting now, except in certain specialized cases (legends reading, messing with adventure mode retirement, reclaiming/revisiting an old fort now and again, etc.).
Just to make sure we're all on the same page, I'm speaking of save compatibility being opposed to frequent releases in terms of how my maintenance of save compatibility between versions leads to a piling up of save-break features and then a large messier delay, as happened here and with the Z-axis (the Z-axis wasn't the only save-compat change saved up there).
Are we going to see enemies using formations as well? And will that be set by civ? So, goblins might be a bit unorganized but Humans are very strict and kobolds have no discipline whatsoever?
This is the idea for the improved sieges section, to have this stuff around for use. I think it might be a waste to do it this time around, with the changes there slated to happen "soon" for sieges, and I think it might be good to have a release of dwarf mode formations to iron them out before getting down to the AI. But yeah, definitely. Formations or lack thereof are one of the main things that will give opposing forces character, as with their mount choices and so on.
Formations are all planned to be saved at the entity level, so the specific choices can be variable -- whether or not there'll be a specific raw format for them is up in the air. I certainly don't have any objections to bringing it down to that detail level (rather than just using a few tags to guide a generator) if people want to take it there. It shouldn't even be that time consuming, since you just need to parse them and then they are ready to go -- though they might need AI hints or some very tragic things could happen.
If formations turn out to be useful/fun enough, there might also be some tool requests I suppose. If you can export formations and then load them in in subsequent games, it would probably save people time, much like the embark load-out exporter.
As for what formations will be possible -- we've talked about it a little bit so far, but that's an ongoing discussion, and one you are welcome to participate in. A general idea would be to lay out the weapon type (or broader, melee, ranged, whatever) positions by number, with a few types for extending to larger groups (form a line this way etc.) and instructions for what to do when the formation is obstructed (obstructed melee to the front, etc.). Formations could be used to flank and surrounding people (at first if you are doing the controlling yourself, AI is harder) -- by transitioning between two formations or turning off adherence to a formation you might achieve 2 or 3 to one or back attacks on enemies, and things like facing already matter in the game. This should give a tactical benefit.
Later on, when you can do things like charge and set polearms against a charge or possibly attack more than one square with a polearm, they will matter much more. I really don't know much about formations, historically. The more that comes up the more they will be useful. The AI can be taught things (at least to some extent) as we discover what works best in play.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items (Read 3663671 times)