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[Diablous]

Wait, doesn't fire imp leather just set you on fire without any dragonly assistance required?

Wiki'd it. Didn't find anything.(didn't look too hard) But I think it has to do with how long its been out of magma so it can cool down.

[kaypy]

Wiki'd it. Didn't find anything.(didn't look too hard) But I think it has to do with how long its been out of magma so it can cool down.

Ah. I just had the memory of enough "butchered fire imp == dwarves on fire" horror stories not to want them anywhere near the fortress... Hmm... Risking immolating dwarves now in order to get fireproofed soldiers later would make an interesting game mechanic...

[Diablous]

Wiki'd it. Didn't find anything.(didn't look too hard) But I think it has to do with how long its been out of magma so it can cool down.

Ah. I just had the memory of enough "butchered fire imp == dwarves on fire" horror stories not to want them anywhere near the fortress... Hmm... Risking immolating dwarves now in order to get fireproofed soldiers later would make an interesting game mechanic...

Butchered fire imps straight out of the magma do give boiling burning fat that has killed at least one dwarf and started fires.

[Footkerchief]

Yeah, I've always liked the way DF made you double up underneath plate for exactly that reason. I guess what I'm trying to figure out is how much difference the different metal factors make for armor. Are different metals going to be better for chainmail and others for plate? Or with armor is it just hardness that counts, essentially?

The next version does have a "structural elasticity" flag to distinguish plate from mail.  In practical terms, that probably means that, for a mail shirt or whatever, the metal's impact yield point (higher value = more resistance to blunt impact) is ignored, although its shear yield point (resistance to cutting) is probably unaltered.  So if metal X has a high impact yield and low shear yield, and metal Y has a low impact yield and high shear yield, you'd definitely want to use metal Y for mail, and you might or might not want to use X for plate, depending on what your troops will be up against and how much protection plate ends up providing against blunt attacks.

Armor (and weapons) will be much more interesting now that there's no "one right answer."  It's a good thing we're getting the new squad equipment interface at the same time, so that you can be all like "Quick, change into heat-resistant armor so we can fight off the fire imps!" without having to forbid everything.

Butchered fire imps straight out of the magma do give boiling burning fat that has killed at least one dwarf and started fires.

Yeah, it's just the fat, and I think it may be a defect in the raws -- the current version has creature tags to set ignite points for every creature material except fat.  Fire imps have a special ignite point for their leather, but they don't have one for fat, so it just spontaneously combusts.

[Hondo]

Armor (and weapons) will be much more interesting now that there's no "one right answer."

Yes, this is something I like a lot. The usual linear progression of materials in games is kinda boring. Steel will PROBABLY still be the best choice in most cases, but even when it wins out I bet the difference between steel and some other metal with the right stat for the situation will be less dramatic. I don't know enough about metals or his systems to guess at how it will break down, though.

[Walliard]

I could have sworn the correct plural was actually "Princes Consort". After all, we Brits have Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip, not King Philip.

Only because we're a patriarchal society that can't handle the idea of someone being a king, yet his wife is in charge.

[Dr. Hieronymous Alloy]

Yeah, I've always liked the way DF made you double up underneath plate for exactly that reason. I guess what I'm trying to figure out is how much difference the different metal factors make for armor. Are different metals going to be better for chainmail and others for plate? Or with armor is it just hardness that counts, essentially?

The next version does have a "structural elasticity" flag to distinguish plate from mail.  In practical terms, that probably means that, for a mail shirt or whatever, the metal's impact yield point (higher value = more resistance to blunt impact) is ignored, although its shear yield point (resistance to cutting) is probably unaltered.  So if metal X has a high impact yield and low shear yield, and metal Y has a low impact yield and high shear yield, you'd definitely want to use metal Y for mail, and you might or might not want to use X for plate, depending on what your troops will be up against and how much protection plate ends up providing against blunt attacks.

Armor (and weapons) will be much more interesting now that there's no "one right answer."  It's a good thing we're getting the new squad equipment interface at the same time, so that you can be all like "Quick, change into heat-resistant armor so we can fight off the fire imps!" without having to forbid everything.

Ok, I'd read that as adding "elasticity" from the item (plate/chain), on top of whatever elasticity the item had. So, for example, adamantine chain or cloth would have a bare minimum amount of elasticity (because it's woven of fine threads/links with some "give" to them) whereas adamantine plate would have none. Conversely, a "plate" item would have higher "hardness" but less "elasticity."

So it'd make sense, say, to make adamantine chainmail rather than plate, because adamantine is already hard enough and cut-resistant enough that making plate armor of it is gilding the lily (unless someone comes at you with an adamantine sword), while giving it some elasticity and give and cushion by making it into chainmail or cloth would make sense, since that way it'd resist bludgeoning some yet still be "harder"/ more "cut resistant" than any other material.

If I'm correct and that's how it works, yeah, things will get interesting -- the "right" type of armor will depend on what you have available and what you're being attacked with. For example, if you're facing a lot of goblins weilding iron weapons, and you'd probably want iron platemail if all you have to work is iron, but might be better off with steel chainmail if you could make steel.

DO you think that analysis is correct, or am I way off ?

[Aqizzar]

Every answer raises another question, so here's a Couple more for the pile- Toady, some thoughts-

I'm surprised the position definitions include titles like "chief medical dwarf".  I was under the impression positions would be a universal list that entities would draw from and append their creature-name to, not specific to each civ type.  There's no functional difference aside from programming elegance, but is this the system you plan to stick with?

The magma man includes the old tag [CANNOT_UNDEAD].  Is there any plan to add an [ALWAYS_UNDEAD] tag, for creatures like nightwings and foul blendecs?

Have you had a chance to actually run a functionally complete program, bug fixes aside?  If so, have you noticed any difference in performance and framerate?  Because I've been afraid of all the new detail to keep track of being a possible slowdown.

[Jiri Petru]

Will dwarves automatically choose weapons made of better materials? And by that, I mean better materials for the weapon type. I suppose adamantine would be brilliant for swords, but terrible for hammers. Will dwarves automatically prefer, say, iron hammers to adamantine ones?

The reason I'm asking is that this "different materials for different weapons" thing sounds intriguing, but impossible to remember at the same time. Straight material progression is easy to remember. Materials suitable for some purposes only gets to the area of "user-unfriendly".

[Shoku]

DO we know anything about how the new material changes will impact weapons? i.e., will adamantium be a bad material for hammers now, since it's so light? Will the best hammers just be made from whatever's densest?

Adamantine is a bad material for hammers, yeah:

We could perhaps make a special variety of hammer that was comically large and thus only practical to wield if made from light material.

[Lancensis]

The magma man includes the old tag [CANNOT_UNDEAD].  Is there any plan to add an [ALWAYS_UNDEAD] tag, for creatures like nightwings and foul blendecs?

Jury's out on the Foul Blendec (although I would say it's not), but I've never seen anything that suggests a Nightwing is undead, apart from their alarming staying power.

[Dwarfu]

Are player powers of promotion hard-coded and not reflected in the raws?  I thought we were going to be able to appoint the baron, and I noticed the others we previously appointed (treasurer, manager, etc) are now appointed by the expedition leader/mayor...

Looking back at the dev log, it doesn't sound like you can appoint the baron exactly: "You can also pass up the barony entirely at the cost of forming trade agreements with the homeland ..."  So APPOINTED_BY isn't entirely what it looks like -- the player may still have a degree of control.

I'm pretty sure you CAN appoint the Baron, to wit:

since your baron is an internal elevated position now

your outpost liaison will come and allow you to make the king's selection of the new noble from your populace

But I agree, the appointed by may not be exactly what it appears in the raws, as I thought I conveyed in my question.

[Demonic Gophers]

The magma man includes the old tag [CANNOT_UNDEAD].  Is there any plan to add an [ALWAYS_UNDEAD] tag, for creatures like nightwings and foul blendecs?

Jury's out on the Foul Blendec (although I would say it's not), but I've never seen anything that suggests a Nightwing is undead, apart from their alarming staying power.

Well they don't breathe, and they don't bleed.  They feel no pain and never tire.  I wouldn't consider it anything like a certainty that they're undead, but they don't seem have a remotely normal biology.

[Dwarfu]

Again, with the above quote in mind, I didn't see the Advisor...is he out?  Do the raws also indicate that we will now house the diplomat and liason if we get the king, or are those just for current civ level stuff right now?

At the moment the Advisor is what you call the Liason when they're at the mountainhome instead of roaming the countryside. So I imagine not having a separate entry in the new raws implies the same will be happening (although whether it will handle the name change is an open question).

Prove it.

[Footkerchief]

I'm surprised the position definitions include titles like "chief medical dwarf".  I was under the impression positions would be a universal list that entities would draw from and append their creature-name to, not specific to each civ type.  There's no functional difference aside from programming elegance, but is this the system you plan to stick with?

There were probably several reasons to avoid (or postpone) a templating approach specifically for positions.  First, the positions are heavily interdependent (APPOINTED_BY, PRECEDENCE) which makes it somewhat awkward to reuse them piecemeal.  Second, positions aren't the only part of entity raws that need something like this -- I expect we'll see full entity variations if the creature variations work out well, but right now they're an experiment.  Last, there wasn't a pressing need, since the number of raw-defined entities is still pretty small and there's little potential for reuse.

The magma man includes the old tag [CANNOT_UNDEAD].  Is there any plan to add an [ALWAYS_UNDEAD] tag, for creatures like nightwings and foul blendecs?

Jury's out on the Foul Blendec (although I would say it's not), but I've never seen anything that suggests a Nightwing is undead, apart from their alarming staying power.

Yeah, foul blendecs, being corrupted but not necessarily undead, are kind of a preview of the dev_next item "Generalization of "zombie" and "skeleton" to broader curses/sphere-related alterations."  The CANNOT_UNDEAD tag will probably be removed in favor of more specific relationships between creature and spheres, or something.  An ALWAYS_UNDEAD tag wouldn't have much of a future.

Have you had a chance to actually run a functionally complete program, bug fixes aside?  If so, have you noticed any difference in performance and framerate?  Because I've been afraid of all the new detail to keep track of being a possible slowdown.

It doesn't sound like the "new detail" is much of a problem:

Given the materials changes and such how will the new version compare to the 40d series in terms of speed?

It's more the underground layers and so on that can potentially have effects, I think.  There's a slight speed loss from tissues when it actually has to monitor temperatures, but it mostly doesn't have to do that.  I haven't done a lot of huge fights, but the arena didn't have a huge lag from the new model as far as I've noticed.  There are a few lag issues that need to be resolved in world generation and during embark, but I should be able to handle them.