Can we see anything's description paragraph?
Yeah, although I haven't finished that yet for adv mode.
I know this isn't really a question and I apologize for being rude, but I have to ask Please? and Why? Making statues look like things is one of the oldest item-related suggestions on the entire list, and I can't imagine would take more than ten minutes of copying over the code for engravings. Sure it would produce lots of bogus crap like statues of clouds and dwarves surrounded by dwarves, but given the prevalence of statues it would be a step towards immersive art. If not a stop-gap fix, then when is updating statues and figurines going to make it into development?
There are lots of different ways in which statues and figurines can potentially come up, either as dropped item corpses, trade goods, or whatever, and all of it has to respect the creating civ and/or unit, site, etc. -- since the scenarios are different from engravings, it's not a copy-paste job, though many of the functions can carry over. And then you have to test and so on. But yeah, I did mention wanting to do them properly in the case we were talking about, meaning more descriptive body-related information, kind of as a precursor to potential animation or improvements or idealizations or whatever else you can do with it.
In any case, rather than ten minutes, a half-assed job of it without all that stuff took around two hours of what shouldn't be completely wasted effort.
Has Toady ever said anything about ever phasing out the "x"men, and replacing them with some less...bland creatures? Or does his like his hybrid hominids just the way they are?
We've thrown in and will continue to thrown in the occasional pregen'd odd-named creature to the stock universe, but the Animal Peoples are an easy way to get various common and other fantasy critters across without having to force you to study up on them. I don't think having a zillion oddly-named critters in the stock universe is a good idea for new people, or at least a direction we want to go. I'm ultimately more interested in being able to generate random creatures,
and am experimenting with that for next time,
and so I'll have to deal with those issues a bit, but I want to take it slow. Having interesting pregenerated critters that are unusual and unusually-named and so on will mostly be the realm of modding though, I think.
are there any plans to make item descriptions more useful?
Not in the short term really... the item types have settled down a bit since I originally skipped doing descriptions, so it's probably more feasible to go back to it, but I'd just need to find the time, partially, and partially I'd like to work in various specialized improvements and so on (like the current bucket handle).
Hmm, Toady, have you ever planed on making the languages procedural as well, so that there will always be words for creatures (even modded and *spoiler* ones), body parts, other randomly generated things not suitable for compound names, etc.? As far as i understood it you have some sort of program that generated the words anyway, and the work whit adding new ones is determining the grammar (which is the same for most creatures, or other things of a single kind), and filtering out accidental profanity, and making sure there are no duplicates. So it shouldn't be TO hard?
The program I've got generates the words and does the duplicate checks and so on. All I do is check for tone, and no just profanity, but any word (like "pepsi") that I recognize, which is a less trivial task, and one of the reasons I'm not eager to go over to in-game language generation. I'm not sure if that'll last though. We'll have to see how it works out when I get to the stuff up on dev_next for this.
Small question, but on the topic of new damage/combat system, will upright spikes finally do damage when creatures fall on them?
I haven't changed that procedure, so if there's a bug which I don't remember if it's in the list or not, then there's probably still a bug. They were supposed to do damage from the beginning, if I recall, unless I specifically put that off.
How will the Job Manager work with burrows? If I have a forge/smelter area for metalcrafting, for instance, with only my legendary metalcrafter allowed into that Burrow, but then I queue up 20 steel hammers.... will my metalcrafter's station be clogged up with hammers he doesn't know how to craft?
Or will I be able to somehow assign that particular order to the "Weaponsmithing" Burrow?
There are lots of iffy ways that burrows work with lots of other game mechanics right now, and I'm still noting them down and making plans for them. I don't remember if I have anything for the manager. I doubt it. I'll probably have a chance to handle it, but I can't guarantee anything.