rope-climbing animal fixes
It's more of a technical matter. I know how to check for grasps, etc., but it doesn't matter. There will be catastrophic lag if animals can't climb ropes, since the game can't handle path restrictions that don't affect everybody (locked doors, etc.), once you are down to dwarf-style movement. The sorts of general, sweeping pathfinding rewrites which will need to happen eventually but which are incredibly time-consuming are the only fix here.
But why aren't mace and war hammer the same skill?
Like you say before this, there are arbitrary things like all sword skills being the same, which should be changed. Anyway, here I considered the forced strike angle for the hammer to be a large enough difference. As far as I know, the head of the mace can be used from any direction, but you'll only want to use the front or back of a hammer in general, which seems like a different enough thing.
What I mean is a sense that a martial art style is complete; ignoring subsets, alternate styles, and when applied to different mediums; not a martial artist being complete. So to rephrase: Will there be a sense in this game that a martial art style is complete or can it effectively end up with hundreds of moves, stances, and meditations and keep growing?
-Reminds me of an old phrase: Beware not the person who practiced a million moves once but the person who practiced one move a million times.
The Second aspect was, can you take an older style you created that was horrible, but lets say otherwise complete or not, and improve it and/or replace some of the aspects?
To add something (I am a horrible person) to it: In Martial Art styles will there be Fringe/esoteric moves or movesets, outside of alternate versions, that are not required for Mastery of the style but are available to those who need to learn it? Actually this could be expanded to will all martial arts be structured in a similar way with the same paths to learning it or can there be a martial art where the main style is in fact the basics and mastery is picking up one of the alternate styles or Subsets and another where the main style is all that is required for mastery and the subsets represent offshoots?
Yeah, I still don't quite get the first part. A martial art can have a series of moves and so on, but people are always changing crap. Certainly somebody could say it is done, and then somebody could change it later, which I guess is your second thing. So you could take the Super Flying Kick school, created by some idiot adventurer, and have a student take it seriously and then refine the stupid signature move to make it less stupid, yeah, that's the sort of thing we have in mind in a very general sense.
I'm also not sure what you mean by mastery of the style -- in the sense of obtaining something like an entity-based rank? Then yeah, the parameters for that could be whatever they are for any other entity position. It might be a demonstration of a certain subset of moves, or how long you've been in an army, or it could be based on how much you can pay your instructor. I'm guessing that the skills themselves would be specific-move-based with synergies on top of them for the overall stances and general move types etc., so in a practical sense, style mastery would just be having high skills in whatever moves and other disciplines the style has.
why not allow the player to decide? Even if he doesn't want his dwarves using those things, he might still want to manufacture them for export. And who's to say you should be FORBIDDEN to allow your dwarves to use these things? If you don't think they're dwarven, don't use them.
For example, if your playing a Race that things murder is wrong why should assasinating your own people be acceptable? Toady doesn't want to eliminate the ability to do so but so much as when you do something strongly against the morality of the race your playing you are demonstrating an extreme shift in ethics in that town/fortress/retreat and thus bad things will happen such as the bulk of your population abandoning you. There is more but that is just a small introduction to the subject.
My personal preferences would be to allow them to use poisoned weapons, but let the ethics of some dwarves interfere (using poisoned weapons might give dwarves who care about such things an unhappy thought, and might have diplomatic repercussions by having other dwarven groups look down on such behavior.)
Yeah, I addressed this somewhere up there or before, but anyway, ultimately the idea is to allow you to make decisions counter to ethics at the price of the happiness of traditional minded dwarves (or all of your dwarves if the ethics of the situation go beyond a simple surface tradition situation). However, most of these things are also lower priority in general. I should get to certain things like poison weapons for dwarves at some point, but likely not this time around, unless you are grabbing poison weapons dropped by others (in which case your dwarves probably won't give a crap this time around).
Will the underground stuff be found readily available on all map tiles?
Or will we have to search around and hope to get lucky?
If you've got the default parameters, there should be stuff wherever you start sufficient to make your life interesting, even if there'll be too much stuff for you to have everything all in one place.
We will have more control when making attacks in the adventure mode, or the hit location will be still solely a matter of luck?
Not this time around, though aiming is certainly planned for later. I guess it's not that much work, but there are lots of things.
Toady do you prefer questions in here be in Lime Green as well?
Yeah, I think it's useful. I put this off for a few weeks, and I probably missed some of the plain color questions.
Poor scamps! Is it that surgery?
I hope it's not declawing.
No, it's not declawing. It was denadding. Scamps is no longer wearing his collar, which makes him a super happy kitty, content to scratch the hell out of everything with his intact beast-razors.
i think the wounds-display with light-grey to dark grey and all pain colors inbetwen will be there still?
Fortunately, light gray is out, and everything is in the init. I still like dark gray for severs, but you can change it if you want.
Is it possible to hack something off by parts, e.g. having three arrows (broadheads assumed) strike precisely and end up severing an arm at the shoulder?
Wounds see previous wounds to some extent, but not in that way yet. An arrow could pass through a previous breach in a tissue, but if it wasn't a total breach, it wouldn't know how to add to it. Well, I guess that means you could get a cumulative sever with a broad weapon, but only if you are swinging hard enough to break each single tissue.
Related but separate, would a Stone Colossus (or similar) shatter (or appropriate) due to brittleness on proper strike from pick or hammer?
(Chisels were the original thought, though unlikely that one can apply properly in battle)
It depends on how far Toady has taken the material properties into combat damage. The pick breaks stone because it applies a large weight onto a small point. If Toady has worked the proper factors in, the pick's impulse applied to a small damage area (these are in, as far as I can tell) will overcome the rock's impact yield, and since it cannot be dented like metal, it will shatter.
There are a couple of notions at work here, and we've got one and not the other. The stone would be damaged, and break in that sense, but there's no notion of overall cleavage/fracture/whatever type characteristics. Some things should shatter into little pieces, or break off in sheets, or whatever else. So right now, you'd plant your pick into the stone colossus, but it wouldn't get appropriate larger fractures spreading over itself. Modeling that sort of thing isn't out of reach, at least in a rough yet effective way, but it's not going in this time around.
Does it figure out a sense of dimension for bodyparts like limbs and extremities, or is it just a matter of part size?
It sounds like bludgeoning damage hasn't been merged with slash/pierce, even though contact areas are being tracked now. Is it being kept separate just for combat text purposes or something?
Well, there's contact areas and contact areas, he he he, and edges are assumed to be at a small enough scale that my numbers don't resolve well there. Edges move partially over to different calculations, using the shear value differences and their "edge" numbers without worrying so much about the particulars of the vanishingly small surface area of the slice, whereas bludgeoning weapons use the overall contact areas and do more actual pushing around in a more straightforward way. It's sort of crappy and cobbled together, but hopefully it'll work out. The edges still keep track generally of how much they are slicing through and how much momentum is behind them, so slashes are different from thrusts in that respect. There's nothing here that wouldn't make an engineer vomit though.
In general, I don't have enough dimension information to do a really good simulation. Critters parts have weird shapes, so I haven't fussed that much. It oftentimes conflates total surface areas, volumes and depths, in ways that don't necessarily scale realistically, but it's not like I can do much about what these things look like. As long as the results are good over the range of sizes and actions in the game, it doesn't matter as much, but some extra raw variables will probably come in over time as problems arise.
Regarding the new healthcare system, will there be a form of combat medicine where the docs can quickly run out to an injured dwarf and try to patch up the bleeding or at least keep them alive until they get to a field hospital or whatever. The Geneva convention doesn't exist in DF, so we can't count on anything like that.
I think I had something about soldiers having some helpful stuff with them, but I haven't done anything yet. Healthcare should be up again after I finish the combat revisions.
The silk-shirt thing's got me wondering if that inter-penetration of material layers will work at all. Driving metal armours into flesh, cloth-fibres into open-wounds and the like - increasing the difficulty of treatment and chance of infection in some cases.
I've delayed item damage until after this release, so I haven't done anything here. The compound fracture model doesn't accept any information from the inventory yet, and this should essentially work that way, kind of linked in with the stuck-in system for weapons. It could be done before permanent item damage I suppose, but I doubt it'll make it in this time. It shouldn't be too hard to do that sort of thing later on.
Also regarding health care: Will there be neurosurgery?
He he, I wonder what they will actually do after I'm done with this pass. Just go in there and apply stitches if necessary? If there's a bug, maybe they'll give you a brain splint.
This made me check the raws preview and it turns out NERVOUS is still a property of the spine body part, not the tissue. I wonder if that was intentional.
Yeah, right now the tissues get a FUNCTIONAL tag which shuts off all of the BPs extraneous functions. It's clunky, but it was faster to adapt a lot of the old code that way. I can strip them out to tissue or tissue layer tags over time. Fortunately, there aren't a lot of single body parts with two different tissues that have two different non-muscular/structural functions, so it's not a big problem overall.
Could we set wounds before a fight? Can we set up a concrete situation like slash with a certain force onto a specified bodypart, for example to test materials.
He he, I don't want to think of the interface for a wound generator. Doing something like a single damage application would be reasonable, and I have some debug buttons for that which might as well be moved over, but we'll have to see what actually gets in there, since it would take a little work.
How much of a resource hog is area mode relative to fortress mode?
There's a lot less happening, but I haven't checked it in a concrete way. If you drop a zillion guys, you still get some initial pathing lag and so on, but the weather model and the item sorts of checks that come with the dwarf mode are gone. It seems pretty fast.
Any chance we could get Unfinished Arena as a toy while we wait for the major update, or is it too deeply entangled with everything else?
It would probably be possible in some way, but I'd probably end up burning a lot of extra time if I do that, so I'm just going to get this whole mess out of the way. Then we'll be in a happy place where releases can be more frequent in general.
Could you alter the raws to make trees from a vascular material such as, say, entrails? If you do, will they bleed when you chop them down?
Yeah, I'm still not quite sure how trees should work, since plants generally have more variable numbers of limbs and connection relationships between them, so pretty much all you can do is make it out of the entrail material and add a blood extract (that wouldn't bleed). Ultimately, plants should move over to a unified system with creatures, which would be cool for a lot of reasons, but I'd have to square that with how their body works and also the future multi-tile trees, as well as all the current plant jobs and edibility etc.
Why is size kept as a signed value in the first place?
Toady leaked the combat formulæ for 40d, so actually all that would appear in them would be extra bonuses/penalties because the size differences ARE expected to be signed and are what matter.
Yeah, I'm not part of the in-crowd as far as the intricacies of mixing signed/unsigned variables, and the bugs that come out of signed/unsigned conflicts and weird rollovers are harder to find than the more straightforward stuff that happens for sensible reasons (like this negative size bug). The combat formulas involve negative numbers and subtractions, so I've been trying not to mix.
We had mentioned a while back about the bug where the number of smelter reactions is capped. Has this been fixed, and if not are you planning on fixing it for the next release?
It's languishing with some other things in my list under "Handle a few misc. bug reports and minor interface requests that have arisen", so that should be handled before the release. Apparently I
noted it down there in December 2008, he he he.
I wonder if the melting of a tissue layer (e.g. subcutaneous fat) causes subordinate layers (skin) to slough off as well.
It's all a little weird right now -- it will for actual subordinate layers in the raw tag sense (hair on skin), but for skin over fat, which is more of a layering relationship the way things are, it's more like the fat melted first and drained out of the lion's nethers. I think it'll be better to kind of simulate things further with heat damage from blood in vascular tissues or something, so that temperature damage happens way earlier and in a more systemic fashion for blooded creatures.
Has combat debugging gotten you fed up enough with the wrestling interface to change it to a two-step system (select attacking part, select targeted part)?
Ha ha, almost. I don't remember if I have a good reason not to do it yet or if I just hadn't gotten there. I certainly can't think of anything off the top of my head.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items (Read 3668488 times)