Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Neonivek]

Is it possible to have poisons make dwarves bleed arbitary substances?

Because if so, it would be pretty simple to make a deadly plague.

That barely makes sense. Do you mean like Sweat, brains, water, pus, rot, or skin?

Or do you mean black liquids, toxins, poisons, skunk sprey, acid, or maggots?

Yes a Disease that makes you bleed maggots until you bleed to death, and each of those maggots are capable of infecting someone else, would be a cool disease.

[smjjames]

As far as the current devlog, Toady, you DO know that Haemoglobin, the protien that carries oxygen, uses iron, right? Although that could be the reason why it was faster to pull up since its already in the body in good amounts in the blood.

By "faster to pull up" he meant it was sitting at the top of the material list or something.  I'm still not sure what you'd be getting at though.

I thought maybe it was because the iron was already there. I wasn't quite sure what Toady was getting at when he said faster to pull up either.

As far as the current devlog, Toady, you DO know that Haemoglobin[sic], the protien[sic] that carries oxygen, uses iron, right?

While this is technically true, it doesn't actually imply that filling a person's veins with molten iron shouldn't kill them.

I never said that filling a persons veins with molten iron wouldn't kill them. I just thought it was interesting that Toady used iron out of anything else that he could use.

[piesquared]

Well there IS Captain Ironblood...

True, true, but that is an exceptional case. These were fresh-out-of-the-wagon recruits, not nigh-immortal killing machines.

[siege improvements?]

Not this release. Most people do voluntary things to improve their siege experience at this point - "no traps, no lock-in" and various mods (orc mod, dig deeper, legendary lands, etc). One thing the next release *is* supposed to have is underground invasions through the new cave and tunnel systems. This at least means there are two fronts to defend, and improved squads will give you the means to do it. Read dev_now and dev_next and the big posts linked in dev_now. Siege improvements are coming, just not the next release.

Wasn't there something recently about support going in for transparent tiles?  Maybe that was on the 40d16 branch?

The 40d# branch improved the OpenGL implementation (and by extension linux support) and changed tilesets to use .png files with support for transparency. However, graphics sets are still at heart a substitution for characters, and only one character per tile is displaed at a time. I gather there was some speculation that as things stands a combination of over-sized tiles and transparency could allow some sort of isometric graphics set, but there isn't *quite* enough behind-the-scenes stuff to actually allow that.

Hold on a second, that brings up what I feel is an excellent question:

With the 40d# merges yet to come, what are the chances of making it possible to do a drop-in replacement interface?

Personally, I see no loss of performance running "stone sense" alongside DF. Probably because I have a dual-core computer and stone sense is a seperate process. I'm burning half my CPU with idle processes as it is, it'd be sweet to run the (hugely upgraded) interface on one core and the background on another... while still letting other people run the minimalist character-set "graphics" on their non-dual-core computers.

We now know that there is a discrete portion of the code (that you've let other people mess with) that handles both input (macros, keyboard, mouse) and output (OpenGL, zooming, general display). And with "40d# merge" still on the list of things to do... it seems like this might be possible, if difficult. It also seems like *now* would be the time to do it, while you're basically replacing the interface anyway.

[Daywalkah]

The final test was to inject molten iron into the starting dwarves as a blood contaminant and make sure that doesn't go well for them.

Toady, this is probably the most diabolical/extremely evil and cruel thing I have ever heard of. I never thought testing could be so fun!

[G-Flex]

As far as the current devlog, Toady, you DO know that Haemoglobin, the protien that carries oxygen, uses iron, right? Although that could be the reason why it was faster to pull up since its already in the body in good amounts in the blood.

That's kind of like saying that having pool chlorine in your blood is the same as having salt, though. There's huge difference between metallic iron and a complex protein containing an atom of it somewhere.

[Neonivek]

This is of course ignoring that the Metal Glob of Iron in that Dwarves blood is likely many times greater then the iron in the blood itself prior.

[Aqizzar]

The final test was to inject molten iron into the starting dwarves as a blood contaminant and make sure that doesn't go well for them.

Toady, this is probably the most diabolical/extremely evil and cruel thing I have ever heard of. I never thought testing could be so fun!

I don't know, I think the original health care tests may have been worse, where he randomly broke dwarves' limbs to see if doctors came for them (and they didn't).  Or the first bodyplan and appearance tests, where there were dwarves with their organs outside their chests and teeth poking through their jaws.

[Footkerchief]

Is it possible to have poisons make dwarves bleed arbitary substances?

Because if so, it would be pretty simple to make a deadly plague.

Nope.  The available poisoning effects are "pain, swelling, oozing wounds, bruising, blisters, numbness, paralysis, fever, bleeding, coughing/vomiting blood, nausea, vomiting, unconsciousness, necrosis, impaired vision, drowsiness and dizziness."  The bleeding only refers to the creature's own blood material, not arbitrary materials.  A proper implementation of contagious disease is coming later.  Although if you were willing to give dwarves poison gas for blood, then yeah, you'd have a plague every time anyone bled.

With the 40d# merges yet to come, what are the chances of making it possible to do a drop-in replacement interface?

[...]

We now know that there is a discrete portion of the code (that you've let other people mess with) that handles both input (macros, keyboard, mouse) and output (OpenGL, zooming, general display). And with "40d# merge" still on the list of things to do... it seems like this might be possible, if difficult. It also seems like *now* would be the time to do it, while you're basically replacing the interface anyway.

Toady made two long, in-depth posts here and here about his stance on including support for third-party interfaces.  However, the 40d# branch encompasses very, very little of that.  It's primarily a rewrite of rendering and low-level input processing.  The bulk of the interface -- menus, tiles, text output, and so on -- will remain untouched.  So now would not be an especially good time for that undertaking, even if Toady was sure he wanted to do it.  In fact, it's an especially bad time, since Toady has already cut features to get this release out faster.

[smjjames]

Fog would certainly be interesting. Though it doesn't need to enter the flows.

It would leave room for Poisonous Fogs that crawl over the land.

Or even better, pockets or sources of toxic gases (volcanic fumes anyone?). Not sure how that would be handled, but the potential is there.

Unfortunately, we lack any way of moving said gases and gas masks don't exist.

As far as the current devlog, Toady, you DO know that Haemoglobin, the protien that carries oxygen, uses iron, right? Although that could be the reason why it was faster to pull up since its already in the body in good amounts in the blood.

That's kind of like saying that having pool chlorine in your blood is the same as having salt, though. There's huge difference between metallic iron and a complex protein containing an atom of it somewhere.

That wasn't what I was talking about, I just thought it was interesting he chose iron because iron is already used in the blood. I know there is a huge difference between a glob of iron and a protien carrying an atom of it.

Is it possible to have poisons make dwarves bleed arbitary substances?

Because if so, it would be pretty simple to make a deadly plague.

Nope.  The available poisoning effects are "pain, swelling, oozing wounds, bruising, blisters, numbness, paralysis, fever, bleeding, coughing/vomiting blood, nausea, vomiting, unconsciousness, necrosis, impaired vision, drowsiness and dizziness."  The bleeding only refers to the creature's own blood material, not arbitrary materials.  A proper implementation of contagious disease is coming later.

I know disease is coming later, but some of those stuff makes me think of some of the nastier diseases like Ebola or some horrible disease they usually have on pandemic themed movies.

[smjjames]

Edit: Was half expecting a post to come up in between....heh

[piesquared]

Toady made two long, in-depth posts here and here about his stance on including support for third-party interfaces.  However, the 40d# branch encompasses very, very little of that.  It's primarily a rewrite of rendering and low-level input processing.  The bulk of the interface -- menus, tiles, text output, and so on -- will remain untouched.  So now would not be an especially good time for that undertaking, even if Toady was sure he wanted to do it.  In fact, it's an especially bad time, since Toady has already cut features to get this release out faster.

Ah, I may have been wrong about just how much of the interface was involved in the 40d# stuff, and there are certainly some good points in that post. Still, the 40d# stuff followed that post by a month or two, and seems to have worked out to his satisfaction.

edit: you fixed the second link, further edit to follow.

further edit:

Hrm... I still think that following his experiences with 40d# a little of that might have changed, but I suppose the self-imposed sense of obligation towards major interface projects should still stand. My major point is that someone has completed a full, real-time, multi-z-level isometric viewing program that I at least find satisfactory. At the same time, significant changes to the interface code are imminent.

It would seem to me to be an auspicious time to re-address the issue, if anything has changed. If not, I understand perfectly and I certainly won't mention it again.

[G-Flex]

It worked out to this satisfaction, but on the other hand, it didn't actually change the interface; it's almost entirely behind-the-scenes stuff. The only real change I can think of in terms of what the user can see (aside from keybind stuff) is the zoom feature. This is pretty different from actually significantly changing the interface.

[sweitx]

It worked out to this satisfaction, but on the other hand, it didn't actually change the interface; it's almost entirely behind-the-scenes stuff. The only real change I can think of in terms of what the user can see (aside from keybind stuff) is the zoom feature. This is pretty different from actually significantly changing the interface.

I also agree with that interface changes should be left till much later, and Toady's concern with 3rd party interfaces.
Personally I see the current interface not too much of a problem (does take some time getting use to).  But I can do a lot of thing very fast with Autohotkey (works perfect with Dwarf Fortress).

[Footkerchief]

It worked out to this satisfaction, but on the other hand, it didn't actually change the interface; it's almost entirely behind-the-scenes stuff. The only real change I can think of in terms of what the user can see (aside from keybind stuff) is the zoom feature. This is pretty different from actually significantly changing the interface.

This, and it deals with the parts of the engine that Toady won't have to update to accommodate new content.

Hrm... I still think that following his experiences with 40d# a little of that might have changed, but I suppose the self-imposed sense of obligation towards major interface projects should still stand. My major point is that someone has completed a full, real-time, multi-z-level isometric viewing program that I at least find satisfactory. At the same time, significant changes to the interface code are imminent.

Stonesense is cool, but it's very much in its infancy, and the next version is going to throw enough curveballs at it (and other memhack/visualizer projects) that you won't find it satisfactory anymore, at least until they find the new offsets and figure out how to work with the new material system, deal with fog-of-war areas, etc.  It isn't yet something I'd hold up to Toady as the exemplar of what could be achieved with a graphics API, although it's getting there.

[Untelligent]

New dev update is awesome. I was disappointed when I tried to inject a really hot extract into something in the current version and it didn't burst into flames.