Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Mandaril]

What about having the ABC system in DF, abut having a molecular bonds-simulating script generating a bazillion such reactions?

I can already see my CPU screaming for help and dying a slow, horrible death.

This update looks very exiting! Properly organized military! I can already see in my head a military layout & proper squad rotation for fortress safekeeping and patrolling surrounding envirioment. I can also see emergency shelters (burrows, "last line of defense") in case something goes horribly wrong inside fortress itself. *evil grin*

Keep up the good work Can't wait to get to play around with squads.

[jasonxfri13th]

Why don't we build up every thing from scratch. Lets start with the DNA, maybe we will be done in a few million years.

[Christes]

Technically, you could do it with pen and paper with an abacus, but that's beyond the point.
 You want Toady to implement molecular bonds? Nowhere even close at this point.

This is why DF is awesome.

[jaked122]

nitroglycerin

[LordZorintrhox]

nitroglycerin

No, no, no, you got it all wrong.  Ammonium Perchlorate is where it's at.  You put that crap on anything and light it and it won't go out.  It has like 50 times as much oxygen per mass as air, and it's solid.

[Tenebrais]

I would like to see, ultimately, the chemical composition of rocks simulated rather than just putting different kinds of rock in certain strata. This, and perhaps randomly-generated wildlife (perhaps simulating an evolution system in worldgen) would be a great step to making unique, somewhat alien worlds.

[Mel_Vixen]

Actually we talked already with toady about that Animal genetics. For that matter i keep this quote around:

I advise to read this Post of toady one and the 3 or 4 following pages of the thread.

Also the devlogs from the 11/12.Jan.2009 might interest you:

•            01/12/2009: 852. Finished up the inheritence I was working on yesterday. Right now it'll do dominant-recessive stuff with the color variables, and it can also do that with the appearance variables or do averaging. It's pretty simple at this point, but what's there now could be used to, say, breed your dogs toward certain colors and body dimensions, as well as whatever facial features there end up being (though the colors and patterns would be limited to whatever is in the raws). Of course, the process might involve a lot of culls as there aren't a lot of controls on which animals breed.
             
  I also handled the starting "wounds" for skeletons and zombies, wound pain (so the original goal which initiated the wound/layer rewrite, getting rid of phantom limb pain and other annoying permanent pain situations, has been met), sever stub wounds, and some edge cases concerning parts melting off leaving other parts that need to become severed limbs and so on.
•            01/11/2009: 856. Took a break from wounds today to add "genetic" inheritence for appearance variables. The day ended with some kinks left to be worked out, though I've come a long way from where I was this morning with nobody having kids and all the gods dying of old age.

[Areyar]

Ah I loved breedin the norns, even keep an old dosbox(w98) around, despite not being able to install it (no room). Creatures (tm) doesn't run on NTFS or32bit or whatever.

I have to recant my remark on AND/protein folding.
I just realised, you can do DNA folding.
It has been done a few months back in a biotech/nanotech collaboration: Using proteinfolding software adapted for desoxiribonucleicacids, autoassembling DNA scaffolding has been produced for a cube.

You don't really need prediction software for this though: annealment and complementation of sequences can be predicted fairly easily on paper.

Also using such programs, unnatural forms of DNA have been predicted, such as triplestranded and reverse DNA.
It is not a common occurrence though, nature likes it's DNA linear and knotfree.

[/offtopic]
Anyhow, to breed selectively and reliably, DF-animals need to be converted from spore fertilization to contact fertilization.
(so that populations can be isolated and bred.)
 

[Mel_Vixen]

Well as soon DF gets Multithreaded (even thought i would like to see efficient improvements first) it could also made into a cluster/cloud program which then shares a region with thousands of players and calculates the DNA of millions of individual creatures down to every grass-leaf with the help of the PCs of said players .

edit: Message Passing Interface ( MPI 1.2) can do both at the same time

[jpwrunyan]

Applied math applied physics
You are all odious
When goblin come only thing to apply is axe

[Random832]

It has like 50 times as much oxygen per mass as air, and it's solid.

um... air is 20% oxygen by mass.

[LordZorintrhox]

um... air is 20% oxygen by mass.

You know, in the fun of mentioning it, I did the usual flip-flop on per mass and per volume in my head and kinda went over board with the hyperbole.

What I really meant was that things can burn pretty well in the normal oxygen content of air on their own; a house for instance can go up in a towering inferno with nothing more than a match and the ambient oxygen.  Air is 20% oxygen by volume, and 23-ish% oxygen by mass, but Ammonium Perchlorate is roughly speaking 60% oxygen per mass.  Not so fantastic.

However, even though it is wrong, the hyperbole gets the point across as air has a density of 1.2 kg/m^3 and Ammonium Perchlorate has a density of 1950 kg/m^3.  So, in one cubic meter of air there is like 285 grams of oxygen, and in one cubic meter of Ammonium Perchlorate there is something around 1100 kilograms of oxygen.

You light something up with Ammonium Perchlorate on it, and it will not go out.  Pour some on a Snickers bar, like four table spoons, and light it: behold a three-foot in-extinguishable fireball of blinding red flame as all 200,000 calories of energy are released in a minute.  That's enough to bring a gallon of near-freezing water to just boiling.

Of course, compared to liquid oxygen, there is no contest: it is at least 30% more oxygen dense.  Though, it is at -222 degrees C...

[Techhead]

Thermite is fuel and oxidizer mixed into one handy mixture, and it's MUCH safer to store and handle than ammonium perchlorate. Not to mention, aluminum releases a staggering amount of energy when oxidized.

[jpwrunyan]

Thermite is fuel and oxidizer mixed into one handy mixture, and it's MUCH safer to store and handle than ammonium perchlorate. Not to mention, aluminum releases a staggering amount of energy when oxidized.

Chemistry blather is sucking oxygen out of thread
Please make to stop
 

[Toady One]

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,

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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.