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[smjjames]

yea, if a couple of arteries were punctured and you take into the fact that arteries have high pressure in them, you would have a hell of a BLOODY mess.

Pretty dwarfy, lol.

[Footkerchief]

Will we be able to aim when we have a crossbow in adventure cause im tired of shootin 5 shots and each one firing of a toe or finger.

No, you won't be able to aim at different body parts yet.  It's a Combat Arc dev item:

# Req230, AIMED SHOTS AND BODYPART SIZES, (Future): Should be able to aim at parts, AI should do it too, body parts currently have relative sizes but it should depend on the creature rather than just the part type.

You'd have to be really, really unlucky for each of five shots to only hit a toe/finger, though.  The BP hit chance is almost certainly weighted by BP size. 

[Shoku]

It just occurred to me that this might be an opportune time to fix a longstanding (and hugely annoying) bug.  The function that calculates straight-line distance for job items ignores z-levels.  Here are a couple reports that include simple ways to reproduce the problem: one, two, three.  It should be a quintessential one-minute fix, but I know how that goes.

I don't see it as being a trivial fix, because there is a tradeoff between accuracy and speed. The obvious options would be to use full pathfinding (slow), or assign a penalty for each z-level (breaks vertically designed fortresses depending on the penalty).

I'm not about to post on very old threads, but if I was trying for a quick fix, here's two options I'd consider:

(1) (quick and dirty) A fixed penalty for each z-level difference. No more than 2-3 per z level (otherwise vertical forts get broken - I always have many z-level spanning stairs right next to my workshops) or (best option) have a Z_LEVEL_MATERIAL_SEARCH_PENALTY value in the init.txt file (default it to 2 or 3).

(2) (nicer, but longer to implement). Instead of using the full pathing algorithm, do a depth first flood fill on the fortress which should usually terminate very quickly if just looking for 1-3 items (which is when this gets used), and possibly have a cutoff (say a distance of 10 or 15 or settable in init.txt, or have 'filled' a certain number of points) where it goes back to a simpler calculation cases, in which case you already have a distance d you have checked to, so any item is at least d+1 away. As a nice bonus, the flood fill could store enough information (each square stores which direction it got filled from) that it provides a path for the dwarf (if the dwarf is already at the workshop - a common case), and a tentative path back, and full pathing doesn't need to get used at all (unless the geometry changes).

Some sort of full pathing already gets used when picking an item to construct something (say a new workshop), but I suppose that the hit there is hidden by the fact that it is a user interface driven action anyway.

I think we'd be well off enough if if did a straight line check to the nearest up or down stairs and then a straight line path from there for any z-level travels.

I'd think that the workshops could stand to do big pathfinding though if they just passed the path on to the dwarf, though I don't really know the ins and outs of pathfinding.

why would you want unprepared fish?

For the precursor to Tomato Ketchup on your tech tree.

Though technically I think that stuff was mostly made with the parts you don't normally eat so I guess that could show up along with the prepared parts like with butchery.

Oh my gosh, it's so close to completion I can almost taste it!
seems like it will be a Christmas release or something.

Goodness, I wonder what stops Toady from breaking down and releasing this before it is ready with people posting like this.

In what I'm sure is a totally unrelated note that nobody is talking about: have you looked at how small the list of unfinished items is getting? I will now prepare myself for a Christmas release and thanks to my pointing this out now everyone else can too as I'm certain they have yet to recognize it.

In the context of that caravan suggestion this might only be an unintended side effect, but I think it would be a cool idea in its own right. Removing the ability of Dwarves to eat uncooked/unprepared meat, alongside some new 'preserve meat' reactions, would be a cool flavor adjustment and -- like you said -- some really cool modding, especially maybe with other adjustments that would make food/booze more challenging without waiting for Toady to overhaul it himself.

Yeah, that would be a desirable side effect, unless you were playing Goblin Fortress.  I was mostly concerned that removing [MEAT] could also make raw meat ineligible for cooking.

Raw/cooked meat is really just the tip of the iceberg.  A robust system for cultural food preferences/taboos will probably require some research, since real-world equivalents use such a wide variety of criteria.  You'd have to take into account ethics, religions, geography, the creature's digestive abilities, and god knows what else.

It would be cool for trade/caravans, though -- economic advantage is much more interesting as a gameplay mechanic when demand can also vary.  Like if you have a great trade relationship selling exotic subterranean meats to the humans, and then they have a revolution back home and the new leadership imposes vegetarianism.

It's not that hominids can't handle raw meat, it's that we get increased nutritional value from cooked meat. Once we see the new health stuff it would be cool if we could make raw meat risky in terms of disease (basically everyone knows about the tricho-something worms that will happily sit in your muscle waiting for a giant cave spider to eat you or something in order to continue their life cycle.)

BAY12YERS ARE BIG JERKS WITH LARGE HEARTS

Isn't a large heart easier to pierce with arrows?

Silliness aside, I for one am glad that I'll finally see a new version come out since I started playing.
From the sound of things, it'll be worth it too.

If it's just large yes but if the body is scaled up there's more tissue to go through so not as much so.
As for how the game handles it... well who knows with the way size works now.

My roommate says members of heavy metal bands keep strange schedules.  Methinks the Toady One has most of them topped.
Or do you perhaps find the sunlight a bit... harsh?  As in "reduce your undead form to ash" kind of harsh?  Because if so, you should probably save yourself the hunting time and start soliciting donations of blood from the forum-goers.  I'm sure plenty would donate, though shipping might be a pain.

I'd guess he's just got my sleeping habits. Only the requirement that I wake up at a particular time (or not be awake by a certain time,) keeps me on a 24 hour schedule. Otherwise I gradually drift and should eventually come full circle.

Though television pulls me out of daylight hours if I watch it much as there's nothing interesting in the middle of most days.

They don't actually chop down the tree to get maple syrup do they? I always thought they drilled a hole and hung a bucket underneath to collect it.

Not very dwarven. Personally I'd make maple syrup with magma given the chance.

yeah, it bothers me a little that dwarves have rubber trees on their doorstep

Since we've got that notion that they could develop cultures where they all where togas or such I think it's fair to say that these dwarves don't need to be restricted to the Europe setting. We can justify the tech level by saying that you get this sort of thing any time you've got a bunch of kingdoms in this sort of proximity to each other without unification. Fairly realistic. For more precise details of this sort I think we'll need to wait for awhile yet.

Why?  The tree species present in an area should depend on the climate; if you happen to have a dwarf civ located in such a climate, they should be able to take appropriate advantage of the natural resources in their native surroundings.

it doesnt depend only on the climate, or the endemic ecosistems in australia would be very simillar to english, the thing is, i see dwarves as a nordic or germanic, they should have contact with the animals and plants that nords were in contact, and as far as i know, vikings reached north america and north africa, so elephants and lions are ok, but placing them in contact with potatoes and rubber trees is to much for me. yes i mod out most tropical animals and trees, i usually leave montain goats cuz they are so dwarven, and mod in pigs! i can't believe we have rubber trees but not pigs!!

Why shouldn't they be able to travel further if the geography makes it convenient?

A solution COULD be for some sort of tags for certain animals and trees to make sure they don't appear together in a single biome.

Though I sort of like Dwarf Fortresses "Small World" approach to everything.

Though I guess more could be done to make Forests and Rainforests, not to mention plains, Grasslands, and Savanahs... Unique

If we were alright with a little more complex world gen ((I mean if it's feasible)) such that biomes like forests and maybe even oceans grew and receded a little bit we could possibly have tropical animals all over until they got pinched off into smaller areas by encroaching biomes. Then it just takes some fairly ambiguous shuffling of the species in particular regions before the biomes shift their shapes and voila.

I'm thinking this kind of thing would be particularly interesting for the origins of undead creatures and with that in mind even once you got to the civ phase of world gen there would be reason to adjust certain biome borders.

Of course, getting it so that you don't just have a particular thing take over/pushed down to nothing during the reasonable range of years we prefer would be tricky but I bet getting world gen like that to begin with was too.

For bones, it could probably be adequately fudged by setting a STRUCTURAL_CURVATURE, STRUCTURAL_HOLLOWNESS and STRUCTURAL_LENGTH_PERC as a body part property, which would automatically set corresponding properties in any corpse pieces derived from tissues marked as STRUCTURAL.  Of course, then crafts need more detailed specifications about the dimensions etc. of their raw materials.

That seems like a real pain to me. Instead I'd say just make a couple of classes of skeleton types and assign them to creatures then let their size take care of a lot of the bone attributes (load bearing and muscle size are the big factors in bone structure I think. Either way there's only so much detail that's going to be useful for us.)

Ten items to go... I can feel the buzz of this release getting closer.

are you kidding? that buzz is building to the point where it feels like an approaching tyranid invasion.

Pretty sure that 'nids don't actually buzz. The buzzing of literal bugs comes from their wings, and the tyranids have wings more akin to those of bats or dragons.

They could have things like the little mini-wings on flies for stability?
*don't play it so that's an even bigger guess than I usually make.

I agree that rock salt is fantastic.

Abacus wizard, I totally agree with you about Tolkein's dwarves being Jew-ish--they definitely have some features taken from norse legends about dwarfs, but the overall vibe is almost middle eastern.  But yeah, I'm not sure when the whole scottish dwarf thing came along.  I'd be interested to find out.

But what do you think DF dwarfs are like?  Honestly, I think by the end of game development they will be very diverse in character, do to the increasing number of variable characteristics (appearance, pantheon, preferences, biome location, even ethics)

With beards covering the face you can even stretch the concept to the various head coverings Muslim women wear.

Well actually a lot of fiction keeps dwarven females out of sight and that actually fits pretty well as the point of cloth over their face was to stop them spreading disease while they gossiped round the market so much- though I'm not sure how anecdotal that is.

[Footkerchief]

It's not that hominids can't handle raw meat, it's that we get increased nutritional value from cooked meat. Once we see the new health stuff it would be cool if we could make raw meat risky in terms of disease (basically everyone knows about the tricho-something worms that will happily sit in your muscle waiting for a giant cave spider to eat you or something in order to continue their life cycle.)

Source?  Judging from what I found in a couple minutes of searching, cooking causes an unconditional decrease in nutrient content of a given piece of meat, although nutrient density increases mostly due to water loss while cooking.  See this article and the related table ("Percent retention of Vitamin B6, Vitamin B12  and Folate in cooked lean fresh beet or pork").

[Neonivek]

Well Footkerchief you also have to seperate the difference between the amount of nutriance in food and how much nutriance we get from that food.

Which you may or may not have done mostly because I am confused

[Flaede]

How about Bridges of Death?

Bridges of Death aren't a problem at all if you've taken the precaution of looking up swallows in the raws files and memorizing the pertinent information.

and being sure which is your favorite color

Oh, that one's easy, it's written up in your personality file.

[Nadaka]

It's not that hominids can't handle raw meat, it's that we get increased nutritional value from cooked meat. Once we see the new health stuff it would be cool if we could make raw meat risky in terms of disease (basically everyone knows about the tricho-something worms that will happily sit in your muscle waiting for a giant cave spider to eat you or something in order to continue their life cycle.)

Source?  Judging from what I found in a couple minutes of searching, cooking causes an unconditional decrease in nutrient content of a given piece of meat, although nutrient density increases mostly due to water loss while cooking.  See this article and the related table ("Percent retention of Vitamin B6, Vitamin B12  and Folate in cooked lean fresh beet or pork").

The cooking process makes the meat easier to chew and more digestible, allowing us to get more energy from the protein before it passes through.

[Footkerchief]

Well Footkerchief you also have to seperate the difference between the amount of nutriance in food and how much nutriance we get from that food.

Which you may or may not have done mostly because I am confused

No, you're correct, those aren't adjusted for bioavailability or whatever.  That may play an important role, although I suspect it'll vary strongly depending on which nutrient you look at.

The cooking process makes the meat easier to chew and more digestible, allowing us to get more energy from the protein before it passes through.

Just give me a source, please.

[Nadaka]

Well Footkerchief you also have to seperate the difference between the amount of nutriance in food and how much nutriance we get from that food.

Which you may or may not have done mostly because I am confused

No, you're correct, those aren't adjusted for bioavailability or whatever.  That may play an important role, although I suspect it'll vary strongly depending on which nutrient you look at.

The cooking process makes the meat easier to chew and more digestible, allowing us to get more energy from the protein before it passes through.

Just give me a source, please.

No. I find it quite annoying when I make an obvious statement of fact that is easily verifiable, and am asked to provide a source. Just google it, damn it. You can do so just as easily as I can. Its not like I am sitting here with a stack of textbooks magically open to the right page.

Hows this for a source. Eat some raw meat. Is it easy to chew? Nope. You will chew it less, resulting in less surface area, resulting in delayed digestion, resulting in less ability to absorb. Cooking partially breaks up long molecular chains, no source, just look it up. It will take more energy to break up a long chain molecule than several short chain molecules, no source, just look it up.

[CaptainNitpick]

The concept of any creature pooing anything magical is hilarious and reminds me of an old comic I read where a slime became enchanted because a unicorn peed on it.

Unicorn Jelly. I don't know how I remembered that.

"Everything, EVERYTHING about a Unicorn is sacred...and magical..."

[Mandaril]

an obvious statement of fact that is easily verifiable

Actually, no. It's not easily verifiable. For example the cooking article on wikipedia says nothing of this gaining/losing energy (that I could see). And it's not very obvious. The main thing about cooking is to make the food safe anyway.

I claim that the cooking process itself does not make the food more easily chewable. The reason why people may chew less when eating raw meat is that they do not like the taste of raw meat..and thus want to get it out of the mouth as fast as they can. It's a matter of habit. I am no food expert, but I can easily say that badly cooked food actually makes the food harder to eat/swallow. I claim that if someone eats enough raw meat, the "chewing benefit" of cooking the meat dissappears.

And if the cooking process REALLY increases the energy/etc. content of food, then at what point is it at optimum? I mean if you cook long enough the food starts to burn off (the going black thing) and it definately isn't better to eat.

[Footkerchief]

No. I find it quite annoying when I make an obvious statement of fact that is easily verifiable, and am asked to provide a source. Just google it, damn it. You can do so just as easily as I can. Its not like I am sitting here with a stack of textbooks magically open to the right page.

I've been googling it ever since Shoku brought it up.  I found this, which states that "meat cooking leads to an important decrease of protein digestibility by proteases of the digestive tract."  I also found this: "Cooking the meat decreased the protein efficiency ratio and nitrogen efficiency for growth."  In case you're skeptical about the use of rats as test subjects, this states that "We have no direct knowledge of the digestibility and individual amino acid bioavailability of mechanically separated meat or poultry for humans. However, it has been the general experience that the human digestive system is at least as efficient at digesting proteins as is the young, growing rat. It does not seem unreasonable to use results obtained with rats as an approximate model for humans, particularly ifwe allow a margin for error of estimation in any final evaluation."

Hows this for a source. Eat some raw meat. Is it easy to chew? Nope. You will chew it less, resulting in less surface area, resulting in delayed digestion, resulting in less ability to absorb. Cooking partially breaks up long molecular chains, no source, just look it up. It will take more energy to break up a long chain molecule than several short chain molecules, no source, just look it up.

Common sense is a notoriously bad way of conducting science, and this isn't even good common sense.

Disclaimer: no, I am not a raw foods advocate.

[Neonivek]

It doesn't even REALLY support the Raw Food advocates all that much anyhow. So your safe there Footkerchief.

Since the nutrician (Against the possibility of food poisoning) would have to be significantly improved.

Though this is rather off topic anyhow and even if we were to say "Ohh what about adding this to Dwarf Fortress" I would say "No!"

Though adding food poisoning chances to meats wouldn't be a bad idea.

Imagine if certain foods had a different chances of food poisoning or straight out poisoning individuals.

Poisoning can be done by the size of the poisonous contact areas vs. the rest of the body (so a Urchin which is all poison would be difficult, while a snake where you could just cut off the head would be simple)

Though I am thinking mostly in terms of foods like Clams

[AbacusWizard]

The way it's written, I think it's just that your blood stays in your body. It never leaves.

Dos this mean that if i pucture his lungs, it will flood inside anyway that that he will drown on his own blood as expected?

Topologically speaking, the "interior" of the lungs is actually "outside" the body, so if the blood is staying inside your body, it won't get into your lungs at all.

On the Arthurian note, I had an idea occur. Let's say the Sheath of Excalibur prevented Arthur from dying due to bleeding. And let's say it did this by replenishing Arthur's blood as quickly as he loses it. Finally, let's say because it's magic, it's pretty infinite in it's potential to keep replenishing his blood.

If those three factors were true, we could create a water wheel or turbine like device, put Arthur above it; and by cutting his veins, he would bleed onto it.

Power Generation!

(Oh man....I can't wait to make power from the blood of my enemies. Dun dun duuuuuuun)

- Kayla

Now that's dwarven engineering! 

[SirPenguin]

Some of you people are so petty over the silliest of things.

Glad to see Toady is on the underground again. It's definitely where the sexiest of changes will be coming from