Toady, for someone creating a martial art style is there a flaw to expanding the movesets within the style to rediculous proportions? Is there a point where the game will tell you "Hey, the style is large enough. Any further and people will have trouble learning it"?
Perhaps an example: In boxing, there are six basic punches, and while someone might modify the cross to set up a hook better, the six punches are taught the same way to everyone. This is because they all work together and are a good basis for boxing, even if they don't suit someone's style of fighting perfectly. So I guess Neoniveck is asking if something like that could happen--people change their fighting style, but teach their students the basic moves that they modified, because those moves are more general. That might be hard to model, but if it makes it in at some point, that would be awesome.
Yeah, the idea I guess I wasn't getting across well was that there wouldn't be a martial arts skill, but rather skill with individual moves and individual stances and other elements of an overall style, and these could be shared between styles or partially shared in the form of underlying skills or what have you. In that sense, you can add as many moves as you want without messing up the balance -- if you add more moves and you wanted to "master" a style, you'd have a lot more to learn, and it would take longer. The related moves might be faster to learn, but that doesn't really spoil much, since the extra benefit you get would be inversely proportional to the overlap with skills you already have, where the overlap would determine the learning synergy... or something. The idea being, that if you want the most range in your arsenal, you'd have to spend the time to get that capability. Hopefully it will all work out well.
Will there be a sense of some moves being stepping stones for others? Or rather will there be a system where learning some moves are more difficult, even with great skill, without learning the moves and stances those later skills are built on?
That would be a reasonable thing.
How far are you willing to allow martial arts, outside of magical martial arts, to defy real life peaks of athletics? Arrow Catching? Metal Shattering Punches? Armor ignoring punches? Ripping people's arms off? Though I realise that a lot of what I just mentioned could be after someone reached Legendary skill.
Once you can do magical things, you have a magical martial art, so anything that stretches the limits would probably have a system behind it, even if the system is something like "people in this world can become super beings through practice," which is something like how it works now.
I don't get the current martial art thingie people are talking about, will we actually learn and create moves using some interface or something like that? If not that, then what? Tis be confusing.
Yeah, that's right, though it would happen after I have a system in place at all, which isn't happening for this release.
Are the world-gen seeds going to be different in the next version? If not, can we try to recreate current worlds using existing seeds? I know the UG stuff will be different, but would things like continents, overland rivers, and biomes be the same?
Yeah, worlds are quite different, so the seeds are splattered. The changes I made fixing the pole temperature bug probably splattered even the basic generation, but I guess it's not 100% certain that seeds are corrupt for continent shapes -- of course, if there's a late rejection over underground stuff, then it'll land on a different map overall, etc. It's difficult to preserve overall maps even using multiple seeds, since it has to assume right now that a civ placement rejection could be the result of the land's shape, but some work could be done in that direction over time, especially if a lot of people care about it. At the same time, worlds will probably never truly be safe from having their basic seeds splattered by revisions.
why are harpy's animals and not animal people?
A harpy is more like a minotaur, which you might also call an animal person in a sense, but neither beast is one of the Animal Peoples. The Animal Peoples are generally critters that have assumed a somewhat more humanoid shape, without any piecemeal hybridization other than the possible sprouting of limbs.
Sort of a noob question, but what exactly defines that a giant's or even a titan's default strenght is any different from, say, a dwarf's default strenght? The SIZE tag?
Yeah, the body size and body appearance modifiers that influence size give each creature a size, and then the strength operates within that. It also matters how large individual parts are and how dense they are and so on, and specific velocity multipliers can be applied which are meant to convey something about the geometry of the situation. What the strength attribute is getting at is multipliers that are applied in addition to all of that, so that, all other things being equal, you can still have differences based on musculature, etc. In a sense you could use the attack multipliers for that, but strength can also be improved and applies to more than just attacks (hauling, speed, etc.).
I was wondering what he thought of the possibility of including this suggestion either now or at some future date?
Yeah, I saw a reference to that too (cobwebs as bandages). It's certainly a reasonable thing. I do them as a thread item right now, which sort of screws things up, so a bit would need to be done.
At one point during the recent talk/podcast someone (I forget who) mentioned the concept of dwarves leaving the fortress on personal matters ("My grandmother is sick"), and the problem of players getting irritated when dwarves just wander off. I was thinking, what if this sort of things replace the current "On Break" system? I.E. Dwarves don't go "On Break" but instead they have reasons to either leave, or at least stop working (a period of mourning after the death of a friend maybe?).
It would certainly augment the "on break" stuff, and I understand there are some annoyances with that, but breaks are really meant to be times for dwarves to sort their crap out, but sometimes there's just not a lot to sort out, and there aren't a lot of leisure activities. That will change over time.
*When trees get tissues?
- How realistic will they be?
*What will it names be like;
- "bark" "wood" and "hollow" etc.
- Or will you do it more correctly with xylem and phloem?
*Will it use the same vascular tag as creatures, or perhaps even circulatory?
*Will the root system be of realistic size?
*Will different kinds of scar tissue and fungus attacks that cause large parts of trees personalities be modelled?
*Will trees be able to grow in odd ways, such as:
- merging whit a tree growing to close?
- growing into an enveloping an object?
- falling in a storm but continue growing in a new direction?
- have the main trunk die but a branch continues to grow and becomes the new trunk?
*How will hollow trees be modelled?
*Have I provided enough question for an entire tree-themed podcast yet?
*How different will different kinds of trees be?
*Will elves try to protect trees from stuff like draught or fungi or insects, or only from sapients?
*Will hollow trees contain decomposed wood and other common things?
*Will tree roots affect erosion rate?
*Do you often take walks in any woods, and do you tend to look at especially interesting trees and wonder how you can model that in DF?
*Will there be any candy for tree nerds?
*How much will you do with different kinds of smaller plants and undergrowth?
*Will you ever model grass species and such?
*What about different kinds of flowers in meadows and gardens and such?
*Will you model vegetation height and/or how it's affected by being cut for hay, grazed by animals, etc?
*Will at some point a farm use a unified system with the grass that grows on normal ground, so that it being abandoned and such have proper effects?
The trees will probably end up with tissues the same as creatures have, so their realism is tied together, whatever you meant by that. I might avoid xylem and phloem if there are more common names, since those words are fairly recent and I don't want the game to sound too science-fictiony, even if it was unavoidable for minerals where I didn't have better names (everybody's favorite microcline is an example of one that sounds a little too sciency for my tastes in the fantasy game).
I'd prefer to have realistically-sized root systems, including shallow roots and taproots and all of that, but it might depend a bit on how the underground plays with it. Of course, having roots breaking in through the ceiling of a cavern is cool, so maybe it's all good anyway. It'll also make things like gathering tuber-type things more fun.
I'm not sure about redirection and so on. Once trees go multitile, it's easier to consider, but subtle differences within a tile provide more irritations. This is especially true of hollow trees.
Yeah, some of the first computer games we ever planned were walking through the redwood forest in California as elementary schoolers, and lots of other places like that. It's a little harder to get out now, but it's one of my favorite things to do. And yeah, I'm often stuck wondering how I can model this or that, in any situation...
I really want different grass species and flowers and so on. It's ass the way it is now. Vegetation height for such small things is a bit irritating, but it could be done with a block event in the same way as spatter, then all sorts of neat stuff would arise in the high grass, and it would be fun to do ascii wind visuals and stuff.
I'm not sure about unifying farms with everything else. Game balancey stuff has to come first there, but it could be done.
I think I skipped some, but that's okay. You can ask again, he he he.
Will there be an option to re-add [demons as forced rulers of] goblins and to other custom entities, letting you force any given race to take a certain creature as their initial civ leader?
It's a reasonable enough thing, but it's not currently an option. It's something I could consider doing once multi-race entities are better supported in general.
Hmm i have a question to the surgeons and Docs.
How can we train them? Would it be possible to get corpses (Animals, Siegers, dead tantrumers) on the table for training them? Could you entwine that with with a taxidermist like profession.
Right now you have to have one ready or train them the hard way. The suggestion is reasonable, and I know in a lot of the material on ancient doctors it constantly referred to people either experimenting on corpses openly or sneaking off to get some work in on them.
OH another question: Will we get parasits like tapeworms?Creatures that can live inside of other (dead) creatures? Combined with poisons and deseases and mind altering effects they could be very exiting
He he he, yeah, we are fans of parasites (in a sense), and it might come in right when we add diseases, since we'll want causes, but of course diseases in general are out for this release.
Hey Toady, can you give us a list of what kinds of surgeries will be done? I'm just not sure how deeply you programmed it as far as that goes. I mean like, will we see them performing open heart surgery, fixing internal organs, stopping internal bleeding....
Right now surgeons work to stop bleeding (including bleeding that comes up from their oopsies), repair compound fractures and remove rotting tissues, including amputations. If I remember, most internal surgeries were out of the range of what can practically be attempted, but to some extent I might have just run out of time since the medical notes prepared by SirHoneyBadger were super thorough and covered way more than I could for this release.
Is rotting tissue the only reason they amputate? They should also do it in the case of extremely painful injuries or breaks that won't heal, or when there's a lot of damage to the limb's circulatory structure.
Bad compound/etc. fractures were supposed to lead to amputations but I haven't gotten a chance yet. That's something that's sort of hanging right now and may or may not happen, but yeah, lots of reasons to amputate. An I was Bitten guy just lost his leg to a hungry tiger, who only got halfway through the leg itself before being hit by a guy with a pickaxe. Very proper. So yeah, not being able to save the limb should happen more often.
Are we going to see societies that use amputation as punishment? It'd be funny to add "Getting a hand chopped off" to punish_severe for things like stealing. You could also have surgeons acting as torturers in societies where that sort of thing wasn't looked down upon. I can see a goblin putting out an elf's eye in order to convince him to give up the location of the druid's hideout, or hobbling dwarf prisoners to keep them from running away.
He he he, yeah, it's a very reasonable thing. The more the better really. Right now they just torture people to death or abuse their corpses lots of ways in world gen, and that should become visible and be extended to the not-killing-them realm.
Toady's comment about the dragons that grew until their size ended up negative made me wonder... Can we give creatures a negative number for growth rate? So for example could we start the world off with Megabeasts that have size 300 and a growth rate of -1 per year... untill they reached size 50... after 250 years... That way they would really clean up during early world gen ... but after a while they would be much easier to take out.
Yeah, there are two ways you can do negative growth rates. Body size currently works in a piecewise linear fashion, so you just define (age,size) nodes and it draws lines between them -- it doesn't care whether the size is going up or down. In addition, you can have negative modifiers for length/width/height, so that a creature shrinks in one or more dimensions over time -- this also influences overall size. Size itself is not allowed to be negative, if I've located all of the problems.
Toady, I know that assigning gear to squads will be made easier, but what about checking if there is enough gear for everyone? That is a huge PITA currently.
A quick summary of the items that have to be manufactured to properly equip the army according to one's orders?
Yeah, it would be good to see. I think it currently sucks. There might be something in the mess of notes for cleaning up squads to cover part of that, but I've noted it down.
To bring up a semi-old topic on raw numbers for shear strength and the like, wouldn't crystal structure matter for those? A lot?
The current numbers let you simulate overall fragility against different forces pretty well, but as for how things actually fracture once they've hit the breaking point, yeah, there's more information necessary, and it does make certain situations sort of weird.
If sutures appear in the characters inventory much as a stuck-in item, will it be possible to rip them out and re-open a wound; and if not for this release, will similar effects like tearing and loosening of stiches be something you look at in future revisions?.
Are the sutures eligible targets for wrestling? Would ripping them out cause bleeding and/or pain?
I've got code in that'll handle the sutures being torn out in terms of bleeding and pain (much like a stuck-in), but I don't know if they can be targeted. They are explicitly skipped by most item-considering bits. Ah, it appears that they can be targeted. Sick.
Can BODY definitions for creatures be included in caste definitions or must all instances of a particular creature use the same body?
Say I have a race, the "Chef-Magi." This race has two castes, the Basillusionists and the Marinara Mages.
Now, if I had to use the caste system to allow a creature to have both males and females, I'd have to make FOUR castes: male/female Marinara Mages, and male/female Basillusionists.
Will there be a "body part" system for castes that allows one to define sets of attributes in the raws and use them as a shortcut for the caste info? More generally, can/will the creature body part system be extended to entities and other elements so that one can define an entity using shortcuts like [ETHICS:DWARFLIKE] and then below that make exceptions/additions?
Can one cast be a normal creature and another caste be a vermin?
The number of tokens that are creature rather than caste specific is very small. Creatures handle the overall name, biome, whether the creature is considered fanciful/doesn't exist (for art), vermin information (so, no, Fault, sorry!... too much depends on that right now), whether groups hang together closely, whether it is mundane (from real Earth for age name purposes), population information including good/evil/savage, if it is equipment, sphere information (not sure how long that'll last, but there were annoyances), and that looks like it (they also have some general categories that have caste overrides, like child names and speeches for adv mode). Everything else, including body information, is held in the castes.
For your chef example, if I understand it, you'd have:
[CREATURE:CHEF_MAGI]
*** insert creature stuff I mentioned above here ***
[CASTE:MARINARA_MAGE_MALE]
*** define all generic marinara information: bodies, attacks, profession names, whatever ***
[MALE]
[USE_CASTE:MARINARA_MAGE_FEMALE:MARINARA_MAGE_MALE]
[FEMALE] <-- this overwrites male
[CASTE:BASILLUSIONIST_MALE]
*** define all generic basillusionist information ***
[MALE]
[USE_CASTE:BASILLUSIONIST_FEMALE:BASILLUSIONIST_MALE]
[FEMALE] <-- this overwrites male
There's no copy-pasting involved there, since the length bits are all written once. Now, if the basillusionist and marinara mage shared information, you'd have to do a bit more work, but copy-pasting could still be avoided. Note that in this example, males and females would breed with each other regardless of their overall group. There's no way around that right now.
As another example, if you had body differences between the males and females within one of the larger groups, you could do it like this:
[CREATURE:CHEF_MAGI]
*** insert creature stuff I mentioned above here ***
[CASTE:MARINARA_MAGE_MALE]
*** define all generic marinara information ***
[USE_CASTE:MARINARA_MAGE_FEMALE:MARINARA_MAGE_MALE]
*** define specific marinara female information
[SELECT_CASTE:MARINARA_MAGE_MALE]
*** define specific marinara male information
[CASTE:BASILLUSIONIST_MALE]
*** define all generic basillusionist information ***
[USE_CASTE:BASILLUSIONIST_FEMALE:BASILLUSIONIST_MALE]
*** define specific basillusionist female information
[SELECT_CASTE:BASILLUSIONIST_MALE]
*** define specific basillusionist male information
You go around in a circle like that since you don't want the male info sitting in the male before you derive the female from it. There isn't currently an easy way to erase info once it lands in a caste, aside from things that are overwritten like male/female and various other simple quantities.
You can also use [SELECT_ADDITIONAL_CASTE:token] to add more than one class to the list of castes you are working on. If you haven't defined a caste yet, all of your information is stored in a default caste, and then that gets dumped into the first caste you define. If you never define a caste, it creates one at the end and dumps the default caste into it.
In the case that you have information you want in all four castes, you can do this:
[CREATURE:CHEF_MAGI]
*** insert creature stuff I mentioned above here ***
*** insert shared caste tokens here ***
[CASTE:MAR_MALE] <-- default stuff is dumped in here
[USE_CASTE:BAS_MALE:MAR_MALE] <-- default stuff moves here too
*** define all generic bas information ***
[USE_CASTE:BAS_FEMALE:BAS_MALE] <-- default stuff and gen bas stuff moved
*** define specific bas female information
[SELECT_CASTE:BAS_MALE]
*** define specific bas male information
[SELECT_CASTE:MAR_MALE]
*** define all generic mar information
[USE_CASTE:MAR_FEMALE:MAR_MALE] <-- default stuff and gen mar stuff moved
*** define specific mar female information ***
[SELECT_CASTE:MAR_MALE]
*** define specific mar male information ***
It's a little convoluted (as is the situation itself), and there might be a faster way (and I might have screwed up!), but there are no copy-pastes of what might be dozens of tokens in each information segment. You have to be a little careful, but you can build any tree of castes using this system, at least in terms of the information percolating up, because you can select and derive from a node at any time as information is added. Note that the default caste isn't necessary here -- that information could also be added to the mar male after the mar male is created. The default caste is just a minor convenience.
That would actually make sense since there are sutures that are biodegradeable and meant to be able to be absorbed or whatever by the body, or otherwise simply break down harmlessly.
Yeah, I was aware of that, and the ones we are could fall into that category -- although I really have no idea, so I put in the qualification so no one would complain about me just saying that the sutures dissolve if in fact being taken out is more appropriate. I just need to read more I guess, or somebody can remind me.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items (Read 3662792 times)