Also, are there any plans to ever give animals and/or beasts-through-megabeasts, personalities?
There's not a lot to differentiate them. Although things like cats that don't bring vermin so often, and whatever else, would be possible. I'd have to think about how the simple behaviors of non-intelligent creatures could be made variable and how it'll react with the raws and changes to tags like VERMIN_HUNTER.
Actually it's a valid question. I think that military dwarves should be able to target and kill friendly dwarves/creatures(pets & tamed beasts) even.
I'd say it should be possible to attack dwarves, but with such a terrible, and cross-dwarf mood penalty that it almost always leads to a tantrum spiral.
It makes sense that you cant make the military attack a random dwarf, but will there at some point in the future be a way to use the justice system for that instead?
I couldn't quite square this with the notion in my previous post of you being the part of the fortress that gives official actions. For a fortress without internal conflict, suddenly attacking any of your own dwarves seems more like the province of a dwarf with their own agenda. This goes for using guards as well. This sort of merges with the concept of immigrants and how/when they become an official part of your fortress. Once that isn't automatic and there's sort of a warming up period where the new group gets absorbed or rejected, you could force the rejection as an official process, and I'm comfortable with that being within your power.
I'm not 100% against this general notion, but I'm not sure dwarf mood penalties are enough. It should almost cause a section of your populace to cease to be under your control. Perhaps if half your dwarves generally fled the fortress never to return it should be allowed. It has to be something drastic enough that it highlights the change you've just made to your own role.
is there any chance of the next version being done in the august december timeframe?
I'd like to get it out as soon as possible, and I'm open to cutting features if I don't make it by December (not that that will be easy now that most things are in and it's just a matter of ironing out crap). August is very, very unlikely.
Do you own some sort of a boat? Canoe? Ship? You know, merchant galleon? Anything? Because if you do, I'm gonna mail you a nameplate that is black on white I milled out that simply says "Doctor Captain" that I think should go on your door.
The closest thing I have to that is a pet carrier.
Hey Toady, despite this update taking a fair bit of time, I don't think anyone is in a hurry to run off or stop supporting bay12, many people know this is something special.
I mean, sure, there are some people grumbling, but I honestly think they're a vocal minority, the supposedly useless cosmetical stuff and the material stuff is going to add lots of cool stuff and many people know that.
At the time I made that statement, I was just going by the numbers. It has gotten better since then, though we're still on track for the lowest month since February. It's now not a terrible month though, so it's okay.
So now that we can issue kill orders is Toady going to up the difficulty of the enemies somehow? That's what I'd like to know. I mean the last time an unwanted visitor entered my fort its cause I put it in a cage and put into storage (for who knows what purpose). While that may be perverted and all, I can't wait to see real armies attack the fort and give my half dozen champs reason to live.
In the next release, some enemies will be more difficult (or just plain different) due to the large changes to creature bodies, wounding, and combat. One of the primary goals of the Army Arc items on dev_next is making attacking/besieging armies more dangerous, but that's not going to get worked on until (probably) the release after this coming one.
Hopefully the new critters from below will also cause some trouble. We'll have to see how that turns out.
Here's a question: will alert statuses have control over other things, like could I make an alert status called "Immigrants!" that causes all carpenters to build beds? Or would that be more of a Manager feature?
Speaking of panic rooms... are we maybe going to get better doors? Or some way to set up a guard at a door (or have a special category of door, ie:portucullis) that will let other dwarves in, but not goblinoids? (or even setting the door to only open for dwarves, nil the guard). Or making locking certain doors part of the alert status.
They don't imply any additional civilian control right now, or anything beyond assigning civilians to certain burrows and changing squad orders.
If for some of us, we set the pop cap to something like 9001... can we appoint additional bureaucrats to handle the increase in people?
You could mod that in, yeah. A position with the meet workers requirement that has its number set to "as needed" would let you assign as many "work counselors" or whatever as you like. I haven't handled the meeting update yet, so it's possible there could be issues with having lots of people with the same meeting responsibility if I don't remember to handle it (since there aren't any examples of that in vanilla DF if I remember).
Toady do you have any plans to deal with the two main population problems in the game?
Namely Elves are too numberous (At least in the sense that there are SOOO many that they effectively turn surviving members of another race into Super Legends)
and Goblins are too few (From murdering eachother non-stop... Though this doesn't seem to train them too well)
It'll be more of an issue for me after this release when it starts to impact what happens in terms of sieges and so on, which means I'll probably working on it more in the near term as it comes up as a problem. If you do world param mods, reducing rain and shrinking the forests should control your elf problem somewhat.
Also, this question might seem a tad random, but are there any plans to make an entity's metal preferences more flexible?
At the moment, of course, an entity can only use the least valuable metal, the most valuable non-deep metal, and the second-most valuable, but this can be kind of restrictive to modders. Will this system still be around for the next release of Dwarf Fortress, or will there be some new, more flexible system?
It's still the same. The resource situation is hardly settled, so I didn't want to get focused on this.
By this do you mean you have to give all dwarves one set of burrows during an alert state or just that you can have them all going to different burrows during an alert state, just not different ones for specific alerts states?
Each alert state lets you have a different burrow list. What I was referring to was having different specific civilians or groups of civilians go to different places for different alert states, which you can't do.
Can soldier squads be assigned to patrol a specific set of burrows?
It's in the list of commands to put in for this release, but it's not a sure thing.
Could these burrows be used as a rudimentary way of selecting specific items for crafting, if that item is the only valid one within the dwarf's burrow? Say, if I wanted to have a mason make red furniture, I'd give him a burrow with basica amenities, a workshop and stockpiles of Realgar, Cinnabar and Petrified Wood - would that work?
Yeah, to the extent that you can control a burrow's stockpile contents, you can control what items are used in any workshop job within a burrow. It's not an ideal solution to the pick-materials-for-jobs problem, but it'll work as a workaround until I get to the eternal suggestion voting items.
What are the effects of heavy restriction on our dwarves? It's obvious that a dwarf that's restricted to a corner of the meeting hall will get hungry after a time and gain a negative thought from it, but what about, say, repeated changes of the alarm situation.
Example: I build a huge church in my fortress and mark it as "Temple Zone" with an alarm stance called "Praying time" that restricts all dwarves to the temple as to simulate actually serving a god there. The "Praying time" alarm stance is activated (by me) every month or ever week or something.
Will this cause negative thoughts because of "false alarm" or unhappyness because of "control" like the draft in the militia does in the current version?
I would guess the sort of adverse effect would be that if there is no food in a dwarf's burrow when he's hungry, for example, he'll go and get food from another burrow, possibly with additional bad thoughts in that he was not provided for.
Yeah, what Tenebrais said is a basic mechanic for this. However, due to the virtual house arrest you could put on a dwarf even if they are provided for, I think it'll go beyond this. I don't think dwarves should necessarily get upset by being shuffled all over the place, as long as they get what they need. If a dwarf's arrangements do not provide them with things like statue garden visits and so on though, especially when you have such things littered all over your fortress outside of their burrows, problems could arise. I'm hoping to handle this by expanding the notions of thoughts and happiness in some easy ways that should take care of it all without much fuss, but we'll see how it turns out. I just can't see a dwarf being happy with a really confining burrow arrangement, like "this is your bed, this is your workshop, this is your food stockpile. do not visit your friends. do not step outside into these hallways that lead to 95% of the fortress." If they have enough buddies and diversions to access, it should all be cool, assuming they care about these things to begin with, which some of the extreme personality types won't care so much about.
Eh, Toady appears to say that hauling isn't specifically restricted, maybe just movement. Here's hoping though.
If pathfinding is restricted to the burrows too, that will end most FPS trouble. Lacking that, a check whether the item is located in a burrow that dwarf is allowed to go in BEFORE pathfinding is called would help a lot as well. There wouldn't be four dozen dwarves trying to pathfind through the Mines of Moria anymore.
Toady, could you talk a little more about the interaction between pathfinding and the burrows system? Will dwarves not attempt to path outside their burrows? (Or at least terminate calculation of possible routes when they hit boundaries). That would allow burrows to prevent dwarves trying to find routes that take them outside or into the deep mines. Which would be pretty awesome.
In terms of hauling vs. movement, it's more the opposite -- hauling jobs are restricted by burrow assignments, but dwarves will pass through non-burrow areas during any of their activities (this was what was causing the entrance dance, and that's taken out now -- the pathfinding is hard to code for a fix that allows you to control exact routes). The item check is there for any job they might do, or any personal activity, so they shouldn't range all over the place for the last piece of whatever or the last sock to haul, provided they are burrow-assigned.
The restriction of pathing to burrows is a difficult problem on the other hand, reminescent of all of the other pathfinding conversations in that it would involve scrapping/updating pre-calculated connected components and all of whatever. In any case, since a content dwarf will only choose activities inside their assigned burrows (this includes the act of just milling around bored), you won't see them outside their burrows if the burrows are, say, convex, in terms of the paths through hallways and rooms you've got there. If their burrows are disconnected or strangely shaped, they'll path outside of them.
Take the deep mines example, for instance. If the deep mines were a Z level down and connected to the rest of the fortress by a single stairway, you should never see intermingling between the two groups, assuming they remain content and well-stocked, because although pathfinding would check the forbidden areas out, it would never actually find a route or anything to do, and there would be no destination in forbidden areas. If on the other hand, you have a situation like:
123
123
123
123
And a dwarf is assigned to 1 and 3, they will path through 2 all the time if the shortest paths go through there.
There are some intermediate solutions perhaps -- traffic ratings could be doubled or something outside of your burrows, for example, though the CPU costs on that might be rough without heavy memory use, so even something like that is tricky. Absolute pathing restrictions are harder though.
Toady, will we be able to assign children to a burrow?
You can, though I'm not sure if it'll last or what form it'll eventually take. It makes sense in some ways and in others it doesn't. Part of the problem involves quantifying danger and the effectiveness and seriousness of parental instruction in ways that don't really seem easy. If you are restricting the children to keep them away from areas in general, those prone to misbehavior and curiousity should go on little missions outside the burrow all the time, but if the sense of danger is real and the burrow restrictions have more gravity, this shouldn't happen nearly as often. In game terms perhaps this could apply to those burrows that are for all civilians during an alert state, but that doesn't get at everything.
im hoping theres some way to automate the assignment of burrows.
I like that idea! As a stopgap, I'd also like to be able to call up a list of non-burrow-assigned dwarves. That way, after I get an immigrant wave, I can just skim the newcomers and assign them around. It seems very complicated for the game to automatically change a dwarf's burrow assignment as time passes, as opposed to "on arrival" or "reassign everyone now".
Yeah, I'm not really sure what will be needed here. There's nothing right now. It's annoying to go through immigrants, perhaps, but less annoying than VPL settings already are, probably, so I'm comfortable giving it some time until we know what we need.
Are squad patrol routes fixed?
Absolutely all of the old code is out for them, so the bugs should be different, anyway.
I do suppose it's worth asking what the behavior standard is for burrows and outdoor activities; for example, do you have to designate the entire outdoor map as a burrow in order for woodcutters to work there, or is there a burrow option for "Goes outside"? Also, can burrows be enabled across Z-levels?
Burrows work across Z-levels, yeah.
If your wood-cutters are burrow-restricted, they'd need to have a burrow assignment for that, yeah. Something like a "can always work outside" order would get at the above ground trees, but now there might need to be something more general, like settings that indicate that wood cutting jobs for the dwarf are not burrow-restricted or something. It's the kind of thing that'll take some thinking about. I'd like to avoid a giant list of various modifiers, but perhaps that won't be possible.
1. Can burrows, like workshops, be assigned to both individuals and skill levels? For example, we might order all legendary metalsmiths to live in a forge-centered burrow and so forth.
2. Where can we assign burrows? From the burrow itself (with a list of all dwarves)? From individual dwarves (with a list of all burrows)? Elsewhere?
3. Can we assign burrows to positions (e.g. Mayor, Sheriff, Hammerer, &c)? So maybe the Baron will always live in a certain burrow, but if he dies we won't have to manually assign his replacement to that burrow.
4. Related to (3), will bedrooms in a particular burrow only be acquired (owned or rented, depending on that dwarf's status and whether the economy is active) by dwarves assigned to that burrow? So the aforementioned Baron, and nobody else, can claim that fancy bedroom in the Baron-only burrow (and again we don't have to assign it manually).
On a completely unrelated note:
I gave my dwarves [SLOW_LEARNER] to make things somewhat more challenging. As a side effect, my fey bonecrafter only jumped to Accomplished, not Legendary. Is that intentional, or just an oversight (i.e. you didn't consider moods when adding [SLOW_LEARNER])?
He he he, I only spent a day on it, so no to everything. As for what we do later, I'm sure a lot of it will happen. For #2, you can assign dwarves from the burrow screen. I'm not sure about assigning them from the dwarf, if you are talking about the full screen dwarf view, since people might want to see the map instead of relying on the burrow nicknames. Pulling up a list for a dwarf from the burrow assignment view might work, but it's all kind of annoying. There will need to be something like this though, and a lot of the other things people have mentioned as well.
On the slow learner thing, I don't know that either word really applies, since it's a mod situation, but I don't feel uncomfortable with what happened. In the spirit of modding, what the skill increase means should probably be moddable. I don't really have an interpretation for the mechanic, in terms of what it for dwarven psychology and/or the supernatural.
Would burrows have a system of higher ranked dwarves to represent the populous of that specific burrow?
If so, could a dwarf be the 'commander' of multiple burrows, or have multiple commanders inside a single burrow?
How about a burrow significance scale, in which burrows with higher ratings remain the dominant ruling factor with other burrows that overlap it's territory have their own representative to the larger burrow it has property in.
(Basically all these questions are asking about sort of making burrows into communities//town sections and making smaller burrows into neiborhoods and possibly guilds *Mason's guild, Rich Section Representative Urist McBlingBling, Mason's Guild, Poor Section Representative Urist McRockbeard. etc, having all the Mason's Guild representatives attend a Mason's Guild meeting;; Or having all the guild representatives in a section attention a meeting about that section.*)
Basically Sub-Nobles for the Burrows.
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Would burrows get certain qualities if majority of the members have something in common? Like putting all the cheesemakers into a burrow area making that specific burrow eventually automatically *or manually to save time* apply a CHEESEMAKER label to the burrow?
Making immigrant cheesemakers come and say "Oh boy, a place for me to fit in!" (Shortly before they accidentally trigger a trap at their burrow entrance, murdering them all.)
One of the reasons I called burrows ill-named is that the current implementation of them sort of loses the pun value that used to be in the name. They don't necessarily have to be large-scale city divisions now. You could just have a stockpile in a burrow and have certain dwarves assigned to that and other burrows. I've implemented the core idea behind the burrow mechanic that has been planned for some time (that is, controlling living/work space), so in that sense the name is correct and I don't feel I've jumped the gun or betrayed expectations, but the name should really probably be changed, with burrows being larger political units of some kind that might be loosely related to this system (a burrow could be a collection of whatever these are, for instance).
Question regarding kill orders: if for example a dwarf was directed to kill a fire imp that had ventured out from a magma pipe but by the time the dwarf arrives the fire imp has retreated back into the magma, what will the dwarf do? Will he loiter by the edge of the pipe or will he announce a job cancellation, enemy inaccessible or something, and return to his previous assignment?
At this point, if the critter is not accessible, the dwarf would ignore the specific override order and return to the orders associated to their schedule, though I haven't finished scheduling yet. There could be various bad things coming out of this, like dwarves getting confused as the imp jumps in and out of the magma, so the passing between override orders and scheduling needs to be metered in some way. I'll keep it in mind when I write the scheduler.
Will burrows affect partying and parties in any way? It'd be fun to have a VIP burrow where only the legendaries, nobles, etc. are allowed.
Ignoring whatever ends up happening for dwarves that are unhappy with their arrangements, yeah, dwarves will restrict all of their activity scheduling to areas which they are allowed to visit.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items (Read 3664316 times)