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[Dame de la Licorne]

will the embark skill point system (a) still be the same as in the current version (where we would assign points to say, wrestling, and the dwarf would automatically get points in all the associated sub-skills such as biting, kicking, punching, etc.)

Wait, it works like that right now?  The closest thing I can think of is migrants arriving with groups of loosely related skills, but I haven't seen anything like that when allotting skill points myself.

No, right now when you want a wrestler, you put skill points into wrestling (up to 10 skill levels total per dwarf, max of 5 skill levels per single skill), and the current version does not have the new sub skills (such as the biting, punching, kicking, etc.).  I'm wondering if these sub skills show up in the embark skill list, and if so will the embark points and/or skill selection system be different in the new release.  If the sub skills are "hidden", I would assume the embark system will stay the same...

[Footkerchief]

This whole new need to explore, even in fort mode (awesome) makes me wonder, will we be able to directly order dwarves to go to a place or stay out of a place? Beyond burrows you'd need some way to order exploration.

Toady mentioned that it currently takes a little bit of micromanaging to keep a squad moving into an unrevealed area.  No different than many RTSes, really.  As for staying out of a place, that's just done via burrows, I think.

Any ideas on what to do about mass, psychic revelation of the cave's interior?

I am concerned about the same thing. While it's definitely not up to me, I think an ideal situation at this point would be to reveal one Z-level above your explorers and one Z-level below as they reach each new ramp or dig a staircase into a lower level.  After all, it's dark down there. Layers of water could also inhibit revealing, so that an area has to be at least significantly drained before it can be discovered.  Something like that would be great on existing lairs and reclaimed fortresses as well.

So what did the new implementation of map revealing end up looking like?  It did occur to me that maybe you could do some rough LOS stuff, like only do LOS calcs for dwarves on the fringe of revealed areas.

So yeah, the new system is to have a 60 or so tile flood out from your dwarves as they go underground, and any time they get within 30 tiles of the 60 tile flood (flags are kept when the flood got out to 30, roughly), it'll flood out again, picking up those flags and placing new ones, so it moves out in a kind of chunking way.  It doesn't move out continuously as that would be too slow, and it doesn't respect LOS for the same reason, but it does flood out around corridors and so on, so though you can see around corners, you don't completely overcome walls.

I thought it worked all right, certainly preferable to what it was doing before, though there is currently a bit of babysitting to do if you want a squad to explore an unexplored area, since they can't take orders to walk into a hidden zone.  Some new commands/actions will be necessary, probably.  It is a little strange to not know quite when it's going to expand your view, especially in more twisted areas, but I don't think the effect is all that bad.  I'm a little leery of doing LOS stuff, as it might clunk down in places with lots of corners if your squad is constantly on the move, like adv mode.  There could be something there though.

[ArkDelgato]

Ideally, an adventurer will be able to walk from some of the surface cave entrances all the way down to the worst the underground has to offer, passing through the various layers.

Nethack 2 - Slaves to Armok

[sweitx]

Ideally, an adventurer will be able to walk from some of the surface cave entrances all the way down to the worst the underground has to offer, passing through the various layers.

Does this mean that the HFS will be directly connected to the surface?  Or will there be some sort of reasonable barriers for it (such as an artifact admantine door).  Or will the adventure be able to "dig" their way into HFS?
Reason I ask this is because if HFS is connected to the surface in some way (adventure can reach it), won't there be a problem that the moment you embark there, you'll have to contend with a crap load of HFS?

[Sean Mirrsen]

This makes me really, really want to have ropes in Adventure mode.

[Footkerchief]

This makes me really, really want to have ropes in Adventure mode.

Yeah, exploring the new caves will be really cool (infinitely better than the current caves, at any rate), but it's still slightly lame that you can just walk down into them.  It'll have a whole new aspect of danger and excitement once your very ability to navigate a cave (and return to the surface) depends on expendable items like torches and ropes.

I'm imagining a scenario where you rappel down a vertical cliff face, leaving your rope attached for the return trip, slay the beast (or do whatever you came to do), come back and find that your rope's been stolen by a band of kobolds, who you're forced to track down and confront in the gloom of their cave.  Or maybe you could just stay down there for a year eating mushrooms, farming pigtails to braid into a rope, fighting off crazed undergrounders, and licking mutant olms to get high.

Or you could hunt down kobolds and collect spidersilk loincloths to tie together into a prison rope, and also maybe eat the kobolds.  Yeah, I'm glad the Adventurer Skills Arc is getting some near-term love.

[Arkose]

This makes me really, really want to have ropes in Adventure mode.

And climbing, and jumping, and mining.

(And falling, and cave-ins.)

[PermanentInk]

Do the new caverns all start non-revealed in Dwarf Mode?  If they're all connected, do they get fully revealed as soon as the connected area is breached, or has there been some "fog of war" improvement that I missed?  It seems like the way things insta-reveal in Dwarf Mode, "exploration" would go pretty quickly.

Also...

What kind of effect are all these new caverns having on the pathfinding load?

I guess it's no different from if you dug all those areas out yourself, but I'm still curious if there's a perceptible/measurable difference.

[LumenPlacidum]

Fog of war.  Things are only revealed incrementally as your dwarfs get to them.

[Footkerchief]

Do the new caverns all start non-revealed in Dwarf Mode?  If they're all connected, do they get fully revealed as soon as the connected area is breached, or has there been some "fog of war" improvement that I missed?  It seems like the way things insta-reveal in Dwarf Mode, "exploration" would go pretty quickly.

Yeah, it's basically fog of war underground now, with (apparently) permanent visibility in revealed areas (although I personally think it would be awesome if it worked more like adventure mode, where you can't see stuff you shouldn't be able to).

04/03/2009: [...] I also think I'll be able to update discovery/revealing of the local underground so that it depends more on where your dwarves have actually been, instead of revealing everything. Active LOS around every dwarf isn't feasible, but it can push the frontier off through the connected areas when a dwarf is vaguely nearby, anyway, so that there can be enormous connected (adventure-explorable) caverns without having them pre-revealed just because you have some dwarves tinkering around far, far above.

So yeah, the new system is to have a 60 or so tile flood out from your dwarves as they go underground, and any time they get within 30 tiles of the 60 tile flood (flags are kept when the flood got out to 30, roughly), it'll flood out again, picking up those flags and placing new ones, so it moves out in a kind of chunking way.  It doesn't move out continuously as that would be too slow, and it doesn't respect LOS for the same reason, but it does flood out around corridors and so on, so though you can see around corners, you don't completely overcome walls.

I thought it worked all right, certainly preferable to what it was doing before, though there is currently a bit of babysitting to do if you want a squad to explore an unexplored area, since they can't take orders to walk into a hidden zone.  Some new commands/actions will be necessary, probably.  It is a little strange to not know quite when it's going to expand your view, especially in more twisted areas, but I don't think the effect is all that bad.  I'm a little leery of doing LOS stuff, as it might clunk down in places with lots of corners if your squad is constantly on the move, like adv mode.  There could be something there though.

[Mechanoid]

This makes me really, really want to have digging, plant gathering, and butchering in Adventure mode. So, you know, my adventurer doesn't die from starvation/dehydration after traveling for days through the underworld.

Also:
Will it be possible to start a fortress on top of the 100% mountain areas in the next version? Can adventurers travel over mountain tiles on the world map?
It would be nice if fortresses had more starting location choices (lol moria recreation) and to have a dwarven civ start in the middle of a mountain range, a true mountain-home. It really sucks when you're scrolling for a place to start a fortress and find an awsome 4x4 or 5x5, but all the tiles are mountains and you can't embark (or you spend weeks walking around a interloping mountain range between you and your cave critter kill quest location)

[G-Flex]

Your fears are allayed partially by the fact that "good locations" won't REQUIRE mountainous terrain anymore.

[Time Kitten]

But I agree that the best location would be actually bridging under an actually impassable impassable mountain.

[zchris13]

Maybe halving the distance the flags travel to 15 feet per activation would make more sense. But I'm sure you have put alot of though into this, Toady.

[AbacusWizard]

Tunneling enemies, remember?  Although that means you could get HFS after having not dug at all, I guess.

This could work if Tunneling enemies had a "preferred" stone types to dig through. Since they're always encapsulated in Adamantine, you could just set they're tunneling preferences to "Never dig through adamantine, but it's OK to dig through anything else" and you could have the best of both worlds.

This makes perfect sense to me. In lore terms, you could think of it this way:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

In the ancient mists of prehistory demons plagued the world, terrorizing the mortal races who called out to their gods for protection. The elven gods bent entire forests into mighty cages of wood and vine, but the fire demons just burned through them. The human gods sent mighty armies against them, only to see them fall or be dragged away screaming (possible source for those unnamed humans?). The dwarven gods tried burying them in the very earth, but the demons melted through the rock as a mole digs through soft loam. The gods themselves despaired.

Then it was that only the dwarven gods, masters of earth and ores, devised a solution. All of the gods' attempts had failed because they were using pieces of Creation against creatures outside of Creation. So they created a new metal stronger than all the other gifts of the earth, imbued with divine essence itself. They called this wondrous substance adamantine, and tricking the demons into assembling together in one place, they called into being a rough sphere of adamantine around the demons, trapping them. Then they caused mountains to rise up over the sphere, locking the demons deep within the earth where they would stay undisturbed for all time.

In time, the legends became distorted so that the dwarves remembered that adamantine was a wondrous metal, and a gift from their gods, but they had forgotten why it came to be...

I like this; make it canon.