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[Sowelu]

I'm just wondering, what is the Hydra test that was mentioned in the final stuff?

I believe the hydra test is "Spawn a hydra, and make sure it behaves appropriately when you cut a head off, IE not dying until it loses all its heads".  A unit test for a weird case that is very important to get right. 

[SirHoneyBadger]

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.

With "knowledge" coming in, in whatever intended form, and considering personalities--and the possibility that different critters might have more or less complex personalities, have you considered a more complex division of intelligence (and with it, emotional complexity, if not emotional depth) than what we've currently got? As in, the difference in intelligence between a dog and a cockroach (and between a cockroach and a rock), between a particularly dull dwarf and a particularly smart dwarf--or even intelligence significantly beyond human/elf/dwarf/goblin?

[LordZorintrhox]

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?

They don't imply any additional civilian control right now, or anything beyond assigning civilians to certain burrows and changing squad orders.

Yeah!  The almighty Toady has answered my prayers of query!

Ahh, so I can fudge it then.  Like, set a burrow that just happens to have some carpenter's workshops set to construct eight or a dozen beds, but have NO dwarves assigned to it, until I change alert status appropriately.

Sounds good.

[Toady One]

Toady, with military scheduling, is it possible to schedule soldiers off duty, to where they do engraving/mining/normal tasks?

Even if they are legendary?

Should be, yeah.

With "knowledge" coming in, in whatever intended form, and considering personalities--and the possibility that different critters might have more or less complex personalities, have you considered a more complex division of intelligence (and with it, emotional complexity, if not emotional depth) than what we've currently got? As in, the difference in intelligence between a dog and a cockroach (and between a cockroach and a rock), between a particularly dull dwarf and a particularly smart dwarf--or even intelligence significantly beyond human/elf/dwarf/goblin?

He he he, it'll require some more specifics for me to really understand what you are getting at here.  Around the time I do job priorities, I'm going to have to rewrite a ton of stuff, and I have some ideas of how a dwarf will work, and turning off or dulling parts of that to simulate "lower" creatures would work (to the extent that much of it is used outside of your fort, which'll be a while), but I'm not really sure what coding higher orders of intelligence even implies.

Yeah!  The almighty Toady has answered my prayers of query!

Ahh, so I can fudge it then.  Like, set a burrow that just happens to have some carpenter's workshops set to construct eight or a dozen beds, but have NO dwarves assigned to it, until I change alert status appropriately.

Sounds good.

Yeah, in general, just the basic function of burrows is going to allow all sorts of workarounds.  You could have haulers stock up the wood in the burrow you described before any immigrants even arrive, and you could put a repeat bed order on the workshops as well, just sitting there, so any dwarves you assign just kick into duty as long as you want, as long as there's wood around.  It would work well enough until we get more tools.

edit:  Although, regarding "changing the alert status appropriately", as I said above, specific civilians can't be given specific assignments based on the alert state at this time.  I'm not even sure the alert state is really appropriate for that...  unless the alert state is split up into different things, like you could have several work squads with several states or whatever, but it'd be independent from squad scheduling and their general alert state orders.  Needs more work.

[Org]

Toady, with military scheduling, is it possible to schedule soldiers off duty, to where they do engraving/mining/normal tasks?

Even if they are legendary?

Should be, yeah.

Thanks Toady. That will be nice.

[Untelligent]

Speaking of hydras, with the body and tissues revamp, will the hydras (ideally) drop the correct amount of skulls?

[Thndr]

Thanks for answering my questions Toady, and don't worry about not meeting my expectations on a base implementation of a system that has future plans of improvement. I know you plan to introduce cool stuff for it later

--

Now another set of questions: For kill orders, are they specific to a dwarf, or a fortress?

If it is fortress wide, can you treat kill orders like a sort of squad activity or even a lower priority bounty that doesn't override major orders?
For example a default kill the fire imp immediately order would look like:

Code: [Select]

Kill:               Fire Imp
Priority:           URGENT
Danger:             3 out of 5 stars
Minimum Party Size: 3 (or 2 of decent skill or 1 of great skill)
Reward:             None
Where if the party size is greater than 1 that the all meet up at a designated meeting spot and forming a temporary squad before venturing out to murder the accursed fire imp?


Or are the kill orders for the next version just a base implementation that could be expanded on further later?

[Footkerchief]

With "knowledge" coming in, in whatever intended form, and considering personalities--and the possibility that different critters might have more or less complex personalities, have you considered a more complex division of intelligence (and with it, emotional complexity, if not emotional depth) than what we've currently got? As in, the difference in intelligence between a dog and a cockroach (and between a cockroach and a rock), between a particularly dull dwarf and a particularly smart dwarf--or even intelligence significantly beyond human/elf/dwarf/goblin?

He he he, it'll require some more specifics for me to really understand what you are getting at here.  Around the time I do job priorities, I'm going to have to rewrite a ton of stuff, and I have some ideas of how a dwarf will work, and turning off or dulling parts of that to simulate "lower" creatures would work (to the extent that much of it is used outside of your fort, which'll be a while), but I'm not really sure what coding higher orders of intelligence even implies.

Maybe I'm missing something, but what SHB is describing sounds like it would be covered by the new mental attributes coupled with creature-specific default attributes (as mentioned in the dev log for 03/01/2009).  Although I'm sure the mental attributes, like the personality traits, aren't taken into account everywhere they should be yet.

[bjlong]

Toady: Possibly shuffling people to and from places would have a small negative thought associated with it. Maybe doing it enough would give them a personality tag, like "doesn't feel like s/he has a home anymore," which would stop the negative thoughts. Possibly this tag could be removed after some time in one burrow/bed, with a positive thought like "was happy to finally have a home." But this is low-priority, and should probably wait for the next release you work on burrows.

Also, as for the attacking dwarves in the fortress, there should be set of revolutionary counter-actions that your fortress would go through, possibly based around a small core of dissidents that would throw "parties" to plot and scheme and generally be revolutionary. I'd think that they'd be out of your control, and that you could later play the fortress as the revolutionary people if their coup succeeds. But this should probably be put off, as well as attacking dwarves.

Furthermore, all these updates are AWESOME. I cannot express how awesome. No, Chuck Norris and Mr. T don't compare. Possibly with Bill Nye, though.

[Footkerchief]

Also, as for the attacking dwarves in the fortress, there should be set of revolutionary counter-actions that your fortress would go through, possibly based around a small core of dissidents that would throw "parties" to plot and scheme and generally be revolutionary. I'd think that they'd be out of your control, and that you could later play the fortress as the revolutionary people if their coup succeeds. But this should probably be put off, as well as attacking dwarves.

If you're interested, there was a Suggestions thread this month about rebellions, plus another one from last year.  They both touch on the player control issues a bit.

And yeah, between giant dev log entries and forum wall-o'-texts and the recent podcast, there's been an insane amount of new info recently.  It's almost as good as a release!

[DG]

Toady, will the player be able to assign animals to a burrow?

This would be an elegant way to allow the player to set up pastures and meadows for specific animals rather than have all strays congregate in meeting zones. I imagine designating a 20x20 burrow area outside on some grass, label it "Horse Pasture", and assign only horses to it. The horses would then (obediantly and rather unrealistically for now) trot over to the area and mill around there, which I think would be more atmospheric than horses dawdling about underground in a stone dining room. I'd imagine that they'd be eating the grass as they trample it to dirt and I think it would be a great touch.

Some bloat: Later you might require a dwarf with the "Herding" job activated to chivvy the horses to the allocated area and make sure they stay there. The number of animals he could control would depend on his herding skill and he could be assigned hunting dogs that would help him in his task and let him control even more, better and faster. More reason to train hunting dogs. Also, you could designate a secondary animal burrow underground and set it for emergences. When enemies invade and the alarm is raised the herder would bring his charges underground to the towercap farm where they can safely wait out the seige. If there is no herder the livestock of course won't react to the alarm and will stay outside in their meadow to be slaughtered by goblins.

[SirHoneyBadger]

Well, a cockroach is likely to be almost identical to every other cockroach out there. Even if it wasn't, it probably wouldn't matter that much.

Domestic animals might only have slight personality differentiation. Some will be nicer than others, some braver, some happier, etc. Not much variation, but a little.

A dog on the other hand--well, we've all had or known dogs with a lot of personality, and some more intelligent than others. Cats too--Scamps for example. So they might display a wide range of emotions and characteristics, they'd just be lacking in human-level intelligence and sophistication.

The next step up would be the Slow Learners. They'd be able to use and make tools, and may even have a crude language (or be able to learn one), but would lack in more abstract thought. Apes and trolls would fall under this category. They'd have distinct personalities, which would be more sophisticated and complex than our pets.

More than human intelligence might indicate a being that was able to instantly learn skills and devices to which it was introduced, and to remember everything eidetically, to get automatic bonuses to anything it attempted-including melee combat-to consistently create tools of masterwork, or even Artifact quality, and to predict with some accuracy, the likely outcome of a series of seemingly random events. Their personalities might be unpredictible, or even multiple.

[Leafsnail]

Would it be possible to assign borrows in areas you haven't mined out yet?  For instance, let's say that I want to find a magma pipe which I know is on the map, but it's quite a way away from my main fort.  Could I assign a big borrow in an area where I want to dig, and get haulers to take food/ booze there for the miners?  It would be preferable to have unskilled haulers running back and forth to the mining area than my miners spending all their time running back to eat/ drink.

[LordZorintrhox]

Would it be possible to assign borrows in areas you haven't mined out yet?  For instance, let's say that I want to find a magma pipe which I know is on the map, but it's quite a way away from my main fort.  Could I assign a big borrow in an area where I want to dig, and get haulers to take food/ booze there for the miners?  It would be preferable to have unskilled haulers running back and forth to the mining area than my miners spending all their time running back to eat/ drink.

I am pretty sure he mentioned that you could assign a burrow to an area with a mining designation so that only your legendary miners would mine it, if it has a vein of something.

Which means implicitly, yes.

[LegacyCWAL]

I don't think any suggestions about this have been mentioned yet, but:

The ill-named burrows

What about "boroughs"?