screenshots
All right, I'll get some set up over the next whenever. If I feel bad about one screen or another, I can just move up the testing items for that before I capture it, since I'm going to have to finish those before the release anyway.
Is there a tag to randomise the associated spheres of a creature? And if there isn't, is it possible for you to implement one before the next release?
Damn. I was hoping to have something impersonating a god that wasn't a horribly evil monster and/or associated with deformity, but I suppose that will have to wait.
You could mod in POWER megabeasts with positive Spheres.
Yeah, that'll work -- if you add [POWER][MEGABEAST][INTELLIGENT_LEARNS] and then any spheres you feel good about for a given creature, it should impersonate those gods. The only downside to this method is that the name of an individual creature will draw from all the spheres, so you'll get a wider, mushier selection of names the more spheres you add. It might also cause more wars, since there's more opportunity for conflict (or even worse, if you have conflicting spheres on one creature, the behavior might be a bit confused -- not that they'd attack themselves, but the code won't get it, anyway).
Will we be able to breed animals for use as mounts? I'd love to make a croc farm and have an army of crocodile riders.
Dwarves won't do anything with mounts in Fortress Mode yet. You can breed crocs, but they won't ride them. It's coming later.
There will be more opportunities for the dungeon master to tame captured critters, but yeah, no dwarven mounts at this time... and it's always a weird thing in general. They have short legs.
And a random-ish question, how did you do the dwarf/elf/etc. language stuff? Did you sit down and just translate every word in the dictionary to dwarfish? Or did you have a program randomly put together words?
I think he used a word generator (theres one over on the modding section, or at least a link to one) and checked for any real words or any bad language (as in words that are spelled the same as a bad word in dwarfish or english, he did make them translate into naughty words, but thats different). I know he answered a similar question to this a while back, but no idea where it is.
Yeah, I generated according to some rules and then went through and did a manual check. In addition to real-world words and especially obscene words, I also did a general "tone" check for dwarves, humans and elves, so that (against an English speaker's ear, anyway) the "evil" words should sound more "evil", etc., generally speaking. I didn't do the tone check for goblins because I wanted their language to be a bit more alien, though I made a few adjustments here and there.
I haven't taken a look at any of the devlogs or such, but assuming that entity spheres still exist, wouldn't those fit the role of an entity's "values" better than the current ethics system? Couldn't a demon/titan/power creature - randomly generated or not - simply check its own spheres against those of the civ it's trying to take over?
I remember having this conversation with someone on here or Zach at some point... Right now, entities only have sphere lists for their race and for their religions, but not for their general society. Spheres mostly work for a value structure (and doing it that way enhances the deity etc. sphere lists as well), but there might need to be a valuation on top of them (in the same way the ethics have both a type and an associated value/punishment, and there's the notion of whether you are applying it to entity members or strangers or animals, etc.) We'll have to see when we try to flesh things out. It could be that all of the ethics can just be changed into spheres in the end, with those extra qualifiers on top of them, though it might get weirdly meta if there is a god of religious observance or something. It also overlaps with attributes and personalities.
I'm curious why the "Update guards" part of Entity Positions is going to be difficult. I have an inkling that they might be muddled with regard to unit type vs. entity position, maybe along with thieves? I guess we'll probably hear about it in the dev log soon.
All of the old flags associate to being a fortress or royal guard in dwarf mode need to be updated to position responsibilities associated to the leader of the squad and so on, and that change can impact law enforcement and tax collection code, but there are other items in there like adv mode guards and how they worked in world generation to fight things like mega beasts that attack towns and so on. I had twenty or so items staring at me, and certain things could be pushed off.
Is wandering off into the wilderness to tame animals something that all leaders are going to do?
Right now it is common to military strategists just because they are the ones that might make use of them in dwarf mode. It'll get tweaked before or shortly after the release, probably.
Toady how far are we from having military or groups (like guards or adventurers) mobilise against (Semi)Megabeasts rather then individual duels if ever during World Generation? Was it done for balance reasons? Is that how it currently works but it just doesn't report every attacker going up against the megabeast?
I wanted to have heroic figures emerge, and yeah, it's just individuals right now, but there's no real reason to stop groups from going up against beasts now that they can hold their own. It's just something they need to be told to think about pretty much. Hopefully I can get everything working within a reasonable framework when I do the leader AI stuff prior to improved sieges, then random adventurers will probably be the weird edge case that needs to be shoehorned in.
Toady, would it be possible to improve "normal" wrestling (choosing close combat on combat preferences) by stopping it from grabbing fingers and other currently useless parts and make them only accessible through the wrestling screen? Its just its a bit annoying to have to target all your blows when you just can't afford losing turns by trusting on close combat and seeing your adventurer randomly grabbing fingers and stuff. A more amusing option would be allowing these parts to be broken through wrestling, but yea, just a minor thing. You might want to put this off for now since there's still major stuff to be worked on.
Yeah, it's a combat arc thing. It's trashy right now.
Toady, how much controllablity is going to be implemented in the declaration of war between (custom) civs and the timing and frequency sieges?
And
When will there be varible cultures and ethics within species, such that occasionally a human may become a babysnatcher, steal a baby and then have to choose between being exiled or returning the child when discovered fellows? Or perhaps one civ in a species primarily being a den of thieves and choosing to trade in a black market style, while other civs in the species may prefer to manufacture their own trinkets.
The next version will have basic support for ethics varying between (for instance) two dwarven civs: "I'll also be lifting ethics up into an entity instance rather than entity raw definition set of variables, so that they can vary between civs and change during play. Not sure how much I'll actually do with that now though." That quote is from last September, at the very beginning of work on this release, so the situation has likely clarified since then.
Yeah, I didn't get a chance to do anything with it, but the copy occurs, so they are sitting inside the entity instances. It makes things easy enough to change without affecting other civs, but nothing happens yet. Once there are some more actions going on with individual leader and group decisions, especially in play, it'll be easier to know what needs to be done there.
I don't understand how Kobolds can't speak an intelligble language, they are a species with [CAN_LEARN],[LOCKPICKER], and [trAPAVOID] and yet they can't turn their [UTTERANCES] into something comprehensible. Though I do like the concept of them being low tech and primitive society, perhaps if they just had a limited vocabulary or something like that.
# Core90, PROPER KOBOLDS, (Future): Of course, this means different things to different people. To us, a proper kobold is neither a chihuahua man nor a mini-draconian, but instead sort of a small mammaloreptilian humanoid with pointy ears and yellow eyes with a penchant for trickery and mischief, context-based sublanguage, poisonous critter collection, traps and kleptomaniacal hoarding.
The kobold language is based entirely on how we used to talk to our cats growing up. The nonsense words would have a roughly consistent meaning for days at a time, but it was very fluid overall, and it's not really about communicating novel ideas to people, especially those that weren't around when a given word became attached to a given object.
Are the tentacle demons, Frog Demons, and SOF still in? Given that the 'demon' entity is now replaced, what about the lesser demons?
They are still around, along with some new stock ones. The old "demon" is gone.
is there a form of limited randomisation or large scale individual appearance?
For example, having a race of creatures that all have humanoid 2 arms and 2 legs and head, but number/size of fingers and toes, length or nonexistence of tail etc -randomized without distinction of caste?
Oops, I need to make a slight correction to this -- the appearance variables are explicitly attached to body parts. I didn't read the dwarf raws carefully enough earlier. However, I'm still sure that the appearance variables won't change/reflect the relative BP size or anything like that.
I don't remember where it was at before, but the length/height/broadness modifiers affect relative BP size according to a percentage and it is accounted for wherever that number is used (combat in particular). You can't make the number of parts like fingers vary though.
is the new random system capable of making non-creature-like creatures? I.E. humanoids made of fire, for obvious reasons?
There are a few, yeah, but mostly we are coming from the creature angle now because it removes the need to have additional descriptive sentences, and we can ease further out from there to avoid too much mush, both in variability of forms and where they are used (from unique rare beasts to vermin to wilderness beasts to civs, probably). The humanoid demons are quite humanoid though, so you can almost take the monster type as a facial feature description for them. I think they borrow the finger/toe number from the base creature as well (I spent a little too much time on that, he he he), and it doesn't bother varying that because we didn't want to spam that sort of thing yet.
So a cavy demon twisted into human form would be a humanoid with a guinea piggish face, a complete fur covering and three toes on each foot, but it would walk around like the traditional demon (with the possibility of using equipment and so on). Moving on to describe that situation without falling back on the "cavy" descriptor is more difficult. Even the humanoid bird demons have arms in addition to wings -- I think the bird animal peoples now get armish wings instead with hands on the end, since having armless bird animal peoples is kind of like having... birds.
But yeah, generalized "blob" or "quadruped" or "humanoid" vomit/fire/mud etc. beasts are supported as well.
Is there a chance that a megabeast will fail at tricking humans into giving it rulership over them? Also, if the humans have already accepted a megabeast as a ruler, is there a chance that they will realize that the megabeast is not in fact a god and try to overthrow it?
Also also:
Will a megabeast taking control of a civ thereafter act only with the interests of the civ in mind, or will it continue to have independent ulterior motives?
Right now the impersonations all work and nothing interesting happens afterward. It tracks the impersonation, so doing more will be possible as we grant more people and groups more autonomy. It should be more of a situation/event collection like an infiltration or beast attack, like "The First Meeting of Vim and the Terror of Lambs" or something, with properly opposed activities (expanding on the current demon duel, which ends up that way).
The megabeast essentially merges with the culture now, but their spheres and personality traits govern how they proceed with respect to starting wars (which is about all they can do). Other civilizations can hate a leader that personifies spheres they don't like in the same way that they start wars with leaders that worships bad-sphere gods, and demons make this kind of thing more likely. On the other hand, it can also pull civs toward peace, if the other civ's leader worships a god similar to the demon.
Toady from what I read the deeper you travel down to the earth the more difficult your encounters become as the presence of the HFS starts to corrupt the surroundings. Do you have plans to make Spheres from Spherical lands, Sphere specific Creatures, and/or HFS have active corrupting influence over other existing creatures either in history time or especially real time? Like a Adventurer going insane (or mutating) from his travels in hell or a Civilisation of Savants due to their distance from the lands of wisdom? As opposed to doing this all from year 1 of World Gen
Yeah, I have some sphere-related corruption notes under the dev next zombie/skeleton curse generalization. Hopefully that can all come together with the syndrome code and creature randomization and whatever else to do things. Then you can just hang out in certain jolly forests for a while instead of taking dance classes, or something.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: List of Remaining Items (Read 3663917 times)