heat stuff
Yeah, many homes here are air-conditioned, and maybe some of the new apartments, but this is a pretty old place and just has heaters. It's not so much the numeric temperature. I used to walk to the university in Texas through 100F+ for over an hour, and when I was growing up in California it got up to 114F, and I've been out in Death Valley. That's all a nice bake, and it's only hovering around 90F here, but it feels way worse than any of that. My current weather reminds me more of the 100% humidity New Hampshire summers, which were icky bad, though the humidity is only up to 40% here and it still feels more horrible. I guess the lack of air movement or maybe just this apartment has something to do with it, because yesterday was the worst pretty much any time ever for me. Never had a cat panting before, he he he... well, not without really playing hard with the chase toys for a long time.
It also sucks because it hardly cools down at night -- at 1AM it was still 75F last night, which is great by itself, but it's high enough to keep the apartment hot and stuffy. Today is supposed to be the same, though it's just ramping up to it now, so I can still think clearly, sort of. Mr. Scamps is panting again though... such a depressing sight. Zach is gonna have me out of here in a few hours I think.
Will the 'run to the safety burrow' affect visiting friendlies?
Nope. I'm not sure how I want to handle them. They aren't yours, so any order should qualify as an advisory at most, unless you are actually taking them prisoner, especially if there are no obvious threats. Being able to move non-dwarves to whatever death chamber you want is too much control, though clearly there are always work-arounds anyway.
Toady will there ever be some sort of mark that indicates that a martial art style; if it be a main style, a branch, or subset; is complete or complete as far as your skill is concerned? Will you ever be able to go back to an old "I don't know squat" style and fix it up?
Complete? I don't understand. I've never met a serious martial arts person that thought they were done with anything. Do you mean applying new knowledge from new styles to moves that you learned before in old styles? Or something about style construction?
As for toys, will they ever be character building devices? When you look at many toys now adays, or even back then, you see a lot of them seem to be built around the idea of child placement. So will a Child who plays with his Wooden animal end up liking that specific animal? Will a Child who plays with his miniforge-easybake-oven become a Foodsmith?
There was some talk about developing child personalities from a fairly blank template, and I think that's a fair suggestion to be included there. Although my dad did try to have me play with some things that I ignored, so I guess there's a bit of back and forth there as the child develops.
I have a question that has already been sort of raised - how much injury is it going to take to stop a dwarf from being able to teach things? I mean if my legendary axedwarf manages to lose both his arms (in seperate incidents I guess, or he'd be dead) he should still be able to teach people how to use an axe, although not as well as before.
Also, will the teachers be teaching shield use and armour use as well?
They don't care about injuries much at all right now. If the injury actually lowers their effective skill level, it'll also affect their teaching. I still haven't sorted all the equipment issues, but it's possibly they might not be able to teach axe without the proper equipment availability (including their ability to carry it).
They can currently teach weapon skills, wrestling, dodging, punching (grasp strikes), kicking (stance strikes), shield and armor use, yeah. They can also teach general close-quarters/ranged combat principles. They won't actually teach kicking though, since it's not a primary attack for dwarves -- biting is the same way. If you have a mod where biting is the primary attack, they'll teach biting instead. If you have multiple primary attacks, they'll teach all of the relevant skills. I think if a tantrumer learns throwing, they'll also start teaching the dwarves that, he he he. The examples throwers give in class based on their wealth of experience must be pretty funny.
Next version question: with the new contaminant system, will water flows (and magma, I guess) be capable of washing away contaminants from creatures and items? Currently they just deposit an additional covering.
The actual contaminants-on-units system didn't change that much, so I don't think anything has changed there yet.
What is the plan for stabilizing/freezing development on the d# branch prior to release? Now that the OpenGL stuff is solid it appears to be venturing into 'experimental' development. Are there hard goals for this particular branch?
I haven't gotten a chance to look at d14 yet, but the input was still a bit wonky, and there were some other actual problems. Those are the issues for me. I've asked people to clear any additional projects with me. As long as it works, I don't think it needs anything else, but if there are some other things to be worked on, as long as they work, it doesn't matter so much, since I won't have the main branch ready for merging for a while yet.
Are there plans to change booze production to need a water source?
Yeah, I don't remember if this is up on dev or just something that has come up before. It's kind of in the same category of making pets eat again. It needs some peripheral work to make it feasible. In this case, I'm just a little worried most about having more ways to get water, especially on maps where there would be some reasonable ways to get water that you can't exploit (ice/rain/etc.), and booze is currently your only anti-thirst measure, as wrong as that is. Ideally, yeah, you'd want them to use some water.