Interestingly even before you wrote this I'd started on it. Got the first 7 minutes done so far, but it's a lot of work, already 1100 words. Sample below for people to decide what style they'd like me - or others - to continue in. Can't guarantee for the accuracy of the transcription, nor for getting your names right, cept Toady, and I've gone at times for a 'what was said overall' method rather than transcribing each 'um' and 'er' individually. Anyway; here's the preview, such as it is:
ETA: first 20 minutes; stopping there for today as my attention is waning.
| Capntastic: | Welcome to the Bay 12 podcast. I have Nathan Miller here - Rainseeker - also Tarn Adams - Toady - from Bay 12, you know him from Dwarf Fortress. |
| Toady: | Hi guys. |
| Rainseeker: | Hey. |
| Capntastic: | Also I'm Capntastic. |
| Rainseeker: | Welcome Capntastic. It's fantastic to have you here. |
| Capntastic: | I'm glad to be here. In my room. |
| Rainseeker: | And I'm in my room, wow! |
| Toady: | Same here; this is fantastic. |
| Rainseeker: | Internet conversation here. The reason why we sound a little bit canned here guys is that we recently lost half an hour of our conversation. |
| Toady: | Yeah. And we're not gonna talk about the software we're using 'cause I wouldn't recommend it to anybody. |
| Capntastic: | Should we run through the questions we've already been through? |
| Toady: | Oh sure yeah. I can go through them again. |
| Capntastic: | Alright, then I'll ask my three real quick. Armok from the forums asks 'How is dialogue going to work; will it pass the Turing Test?' |
| Toady: | Yeah so, lots of people have tried to get little robots in chat rooms and so on to pass the Turing Test with various degrees of success and I'm not going to be one to even try, but we do hope to improve the dialogue from what we've got now 'cause basically what we have is sort of a substandard model of what you see in a lot of games where you basically select a topic and the guy'll say something back to you that's canned or whatever; and we can move away from that in steps. There are a lot of different things we'd like to try out in terms of being able to construct sentences from pieces, like 'I wanna ask where this is' or so on and say what tone you'd be asking it in; have multiple people involved in the conversation, so that you can be sitting there talking and as you talk in adventure mode time passes as you're talking and someone else could come by and engage in the conversation as well. The main power goal we had for that originally was this one where you'd slay some creature and then come into the town and be like 'Hey I just killed the dragon guys; here's the head' and you hold it up or whatever, and you're like 'Gather round' and you get a bunch of people to hang out and then you could tell the story of how you killed the dragon; you could drop historical events one at a time and select them and so on; people could make little interjections. It's a lot of work but like everything it'll proceed in steps most likely, but you see it's not really heading toward anything like the Turing Test. |
| Rainseeker: | And then you could demand the mayor's hand in marriage. |
| Toady: | Yeah. |
| Rainseeker: | His daughter's hand. |
| Toady: | Well, either one. We've got all kinds of different futures laid out for you and it's up to your decision making. |
| Capntastic: | In reality you could be marrying the dragon and it could all be a ruse. |
| Rainseeker: | A paper mache dragon head that you brought into town. |
| Toady: | That's right. |
| Rainseeker: | So what I wanted to ask you Tarn is, let's have a summary of what happened this month, and what's gonna happen next month. |
| Toady: | So this month was mostly squads. Mostly squads happened this month, and mostly squads happened last month too, and I didn't even finish. But I made some progress, we've got training up for squad members now; they do a lot more with their equipment and scheduling, so you have a lot of control now over what you can do with the squads. |
| Rainseeker: | What's your favourite new feature? |
| Toady: | Well I like, probably the hidden fun stuff I've been working on more than anything ... I took a little break to work on the underground again, putting some new critters down there which I've spoiled with more particulars up in the little choose your own adventure I put up on the devlog. I guess I don't want to spoil that here 'cause people should go play the little game that's up there. I like watching [the squads] go off to their little classes and watch them sparring, that was probably more fun. 'Cause the rest of everything else was really dry: just make sure they get the right equipment, make sure that they're following their orders without just wandering off to some room or just sitting there ... it was pretty dry. But next month I haven't quite decided, I'm still sitting here thinking about it because the stuff that remains in the list of remaining items ... basically all of the categories have a few things that need to be done. I was thinking of just going back to the top and just knocking some of those off and turning them green rather than having every category as kind of languishing in a state of almost being done. I'm still planning to get the game out by the end of the year, even if I have to cut features. Of course any feature cut is just going to be put off for a few weeks or something, it's not like I'm cutting features and getting it out of the door so I can go and work on some new game or whatever. So no worries there: if I say something's out it's only out for a little while. We're in pretty good shape here, I should be able to make the little deadline I've set for myself. |
| Capntastic: | Danarca asks, 'will we get more pictures of Scamps?' |
| Toady: | Definitely going to get more pictures of Scamps over time. We've taken some and haven't put them up yet, and we're still trying to capture video or a good picture of him playing with his new toys. He's a spoiled cat; he gets lots of new toys. His favourite one now is this ball of feathers that's attacked to a fishing rod - not a real fishing rod - but a big stick with a string hanging down from it with a ball of feathers on, and he goes nuts. We have this other one that has a mouse on it, a pole that goes out and has a string with a mouse on, and he'll chase that around and so on, but the feathers he goes nuts. I guess he just finds flying feathers more believable than a flying mouse, but he'll tip over small potted plants and chairs, and whatever's small enough for him to tip over chasing this ball of feathers around. He has this little cardboard tube he likes to run through ... we'd really like to get some better pictures of him now. It's one of those things I've been remiss about doing, obviously people want their Scamps pictures but I've failed so far to put any up for a few weeks but I'll get on it, I'll get some Scamps pictures, 'cause he's grown and people should see what kind of monster we're dealing with now. |
| Capntastic: | Danarca also asks 'will the 2D nobles make a comeback?' |
| Toady: | 2D nobles ... since some of them are there and some of them aren't there, and there are some new ones ... the ones I can think of that aren't there are the guild nobles; like there used to be mining guilds, crafts guilds, guilds for the farmers, and some creepy ones like the ones that came when you had a lot of dead dwarves, or there was the philosopher who would come and do nothing. Those dwarves are going to be back, and the main reason they're coming back is because we want to see what happens when you see different groups in the dwarven society, 'cause right now everything is pretty harmonious until people have individual problems, and then individual problems ... |
| Rainseeker: | Tantrum spiral! |
| Toady: | That's right, the whole fortress just falls apart. But there should also be this kind of intermediate problems that involve larger groups; this also ties back into religions and so on, so you can have a religious group in the fortress and a philosophical group started by some dwarf, and then the miner's could organise and then you have people caring about their families a little bit more than they care about them now which is basically 'oh, my brother or my wife died in a fight recently' or something, but they don't really care about their families other than that. And you can have one dwarf that's affiliated in some way with all of those movements I just mentioned - or groups - and that dwarf then has a lot more individuality and opportunities for dramatic things to happen; this is true in adventure mode too. A lot of the story and just general dynamics and movement of the characters and so on should be determined by these kinds of conflicts like if the miner's guild wants to do something that directly conflicts with what one of the religions wants to do: say there's a gold vein they want to mine out and some of the mineral deity guys get all uppity about it and start talking about how the gold is sacred or something like that ... |
| Rainseeker: | And what happens if one guys belongs to both ... |
| Toady: | Exactly; that's the question, what happens if a guy belongs to both movements, and then that's where you can get some really interesting things happening. Or what if a guy belongs to one movement and his brother belongs to another, then you have a tension between ... I mean you basically can just draw a bunch of Venn diagrams and see how kind of weird configurations can lead to things splitting apart and tensions, but also peaceful resolutions could be mitigated between the two parties by those two brothers for instance. So there's all kinds of interesting things that could come up just by putting more structure on top of things and having those influence people's behaviours. So 2D nobles are definitely coming back but we'd like to do it in a way that's not completely hard coded; we're doing some experiments now with the goblins to get them to have the structure arise out of their civilisation more based on their ethics than on the hard coding. It's not something where I'm promising the world on this, but it's something I'd like to experiment with to see what we're gonna get. This also turned out, as far as the timing of 'when are we gonna see this kind of thing', there's the return of the guilds, or I don't remember exactly what it's called, up in the eternal suggestions voting up on the suggestions list and it's doing pretty well. I said I'd take a look at the top ones there for next time - now by next time I mean the next series of releases 'cause I really hope I never have a release this long again, it's gonna be over a year - so in the short term we're gonna be looking at this stuff, it's not like it's just something I'm talking about; we're gonna look at this along with the adventurer's skills stuff and the improved sieges; job priorities; improved hauling; I don't remember if improved farming is up there; increased tile support for graphics ... whatever things were up there that people wanted we're going to be looking at. |
| Rainseeker: | All these kind of inter-fortress politics is really interesting; is there a way for you to track that or explain why things are happening or why dwarves are angry with each other? |
| Toady: | Yeah; obviously a lot of what happens in the game now doesn't get significant exposition, and sometimes you have to sort of plod through their thoughts to even get a hint of what was going on, so hopefully the major events that happen can happen at these sorts of activities that I've been working with the past week or couple of weeks - whatever it was - where you might have ... when a group organises they could have a meeting and it could announce that, and so it just suddenly says 'the miner's guild has been formed and is having a meeting', and you go watch what they do. It might be interesting to get - the same way we just did combat reports for this report, how when people are fighting you can just go and read what happened as if you were in adventure mode - it might be interesting to have the conversation engine, and this kind of goes back to what Armok was asking originally, it might be interesting for the conversation to be used in meetings so that you can see exactly what people are saying and be able to see a recording of their conversations; I don't think there's any problem with that. |
| Rainseeker: | M'kay, capn you wanna? |
| Capntastic: | Hey I think we're on to actually new questions now. |
| Rainseeker: | Actually if you want to do some older ones I can grab some more old ones I've asked. Here's one [Kilo24]; 'can souls be applied to inanimate objects and/or as part of artifacts?' |
| Toady: | So, for the current release - the one that's coming up - there aren't going to be souls beyond what I just added for the creatures. Right now the creatures can hold a number of souls but in practice they only hold one; that was to support possessions and so on in the future. But really all the soul is in the game is, it's got a name, it's got some historical information, the main thing it's got is skills and the personality, and the idea behind that kind of separation was to allow them to be put almost anywhere. They can be floating around in some kind of ghost or they could be stuck in an item, some of the framework's not there for that but they were created with that in mind, so that if you wanted to have some kind of artefact singing sword that hollered things as you walked down the dungeon corridors, and then you could stop and talk to it and ask it if you want to go left or right, and it'd be like 'I'm scared and I want to leave' or something, you could do that, and it wouldn't be that hard to set up, actually. It's in the future, certainly way in the future perhaps, but the framework is building up for that. |
| Rainseeker: | Well that's really cool. Here's another one from Kilo24 that was previously asked; 'do you have plans to leave constructed walls unengravable?' |
| Toady: | The idea there is that the way constructions currently work ... it's a bit of a hastle to have something both be a construction and an engraving. It's not really a super large roadblock but it was just enough of a roadblock for me to be like, 'alright, I'm leaving this'. Now that it is a little bit of a project to get something like that in it makes me sit and think, what does it mean to engrave a construction if the construction's like a brick wall or something? Does it mean that you put a smiley face on every brick, or does it mean that you kind of remove the top inch of the bricks and engrave something in there or would you want to bring up a pre-carved panel and insert it into a slot or something. There's a lot of different options and I just haven't moved on that 'cause I haven't really thought about what I want to do particularly. I'm not against it, I don't think there's a huge balance problem or anything allowing it, so we'll probably see something like that sometime. |
| Rainseeker: | Okay, and one more - I kinda like this one [Kilo24] - 'One of the arcs is focused on artefacts. What are some examples of quirks that you've thought to apply to them, and will artefacts be able to be created in more ways than a dwarf commandeering a workshop?' |
| Toady: | We haven't thought that much about what the artefacts are going to do. We've thought about it a little bit and in fact they used to have powers, but their powers were pretty simple; it's like one of them might have more storage space than they're normally allowed to or a weapon might just be better, change it's damage type, something like that. It wasn't really that inventive, back when we had that system. So, it's not something we've thought that deeply about. We certainly want to make magic seem magical, that's part of what we want to do. So we don't want tp just have a weapon that just says 'oh this is +3 fire sword' or something, we don't want to do any of that; not that we wouldn't want a weapon that can burn things or something like that. The other part of the question you'll have to remind me, 'cause I'm having a heat stroke. |
| Rainseeker: | Are you gonna allow artefacts ... |
| Toady: | Oh yeah, other ways to make them. There's a first step that's related to what we're doing now which was individual weapon familiarity and a dwarf maybe naming his or her weapon after the dwarf kills a certain number of creatures or a big creature or something, they'd be like 'I call this “Dragonslayer”' or whatever, that kind of thing. That in a sense shares all of the relevant things with artefacts right now because it would be a named object that gets saved in the histories and that's really all artefacts are right now, they have better quality I guess but they don't have any magical powers right now, and in that way I think that an artefact shouldn't be restricted to dwarves completely. I think the dwarven artefacts ... there should be something special about them, but I also think there should be older objects that are maybe even created during the beginning of world generation and other things that come up during world generation so that the world isn't completely devoid or interesting objects if you want to start with adventure mode or something, but at the same time ... |
| Interlocutor: | <quiet> |
| Toady: | Yeah, things like that, everything that you've read has stuff like this. At the same time the things that your dwarves do shouldn't just be drops in the bucket or something like that, it'd be kind of irritating too. There's a certain balance that needs to be struck probably, but we're definitely branching out. |
| Rainseeker: | Alright, I have a question from ArkDelgato, and he says 'After jumping is implemented how will the dwarves in fortress mode decide when to jump?' and also '[will it be] if the only way to path it there is to jump; any time it would help; or in danger?' |
| Toady: | Yeah, it seems like jumping isn't something you should normally do right? It's kind of dangerous. This is assuming that the path finding can be made to do this; I've been in some discussions and so on about to improve finding and jumping is one of the issues there because it doesn't work that well under the current system. But jumping for dwarves ... it seems like it shouldn't be something they do unless they are in danger, that would have to be a parameter there. In adventure mode I guess it would be something that only happens - I mean you'd be doing it all the time because adventurers are kind of crazy like that - [but] creatures that can't access you unless they jump should have to do it too, or else you'd be able to separate space between them too easily so they'd have to take risks like that. I think it'd be kind of weird wouldn't it if you had some pillars in dwarf mode that happened to allow you to get to your bedroom if you didn't want to walk down a hallway but just having the dwarves constantly hopping between them. It'd be kind of cute or something but it seems like it'd be really dangerous and some of the dwarves wouldn't really ... I don't see dwarves being big jumpers. Did I answer the question? |
| Rainseeker: | Yep, that was good. [Qloos] 'How will player created mod packs and graphical sets be affected by the upcoming major update?' |
| Toady: | I posted some of the raws online and if you've looked at those there are sort of massive changes, especially to creatures. So all of the creature raws that you've got - all the mods - won't work in the next version without modification. It's almost impossible to do a version supporting old mods because so many things have changes; it just wouldn't know what to do, it wouldn't know what you wanted, so those will have to be updated. Even things like items and plants - anything that you've added - will require some updates. Now there's some instructions in the new raw files that are provided with the game to tell you what the new tags are and so on and you can follow the examples of the creatures pretty much like people have been doing already to update. I don't think it would be an impossible task or even a really hard task to get mods working again. Graphics mods are basically unchanged. There's a bit that you'll have to do with the creature castes probably; for instance we support, say, ant men that have queens, drones, soldiers, workers if you want to add them in as four different subsets of an ant man, and so that kind of thing you'd have to go back and support it with graphics and there might be a format change there. Pretty much everything will be broken when I release but it'll be pretty easy to fix too. |
| Rainseeker: | Good. |
| Capntastic: | From Aqizzar; 'How large do you think the community is; what kind of feedback tells you about how widespread your work is and where do you think you're getting the most press these days?' |
| Toady: | Hmm, it's hard to tell how many people are out there. I mean you can tell from initial downloads, there are some thousands of those; the forum usually has a couple hundred people on it at any given time; press-wise it seems like we get a lot of press in Australia and a lot of donations have been coming from there recently so things seem to be going well there. Of course we're doing well in Finland, but it's not just there, pretty much every European country has representation. But I don't have any hard numbers, I just have to kind of go by what the breakdown is of donations and people sending me emails and things that I've seen. It seems like a lot of people that write video games have heard about Dwarf Fortress and tried it, <quiet> don't like it, so I get a lot of people like that have sent me emails and so on. I know just from what I've seen on our forum that, what, Warhammer Online, The Sims 3, the Valve guys ... you guys remember any other ones? Those were the three that jumped into my head immediately. |
| Capntastic: | Weren't the Warhammer Online or Sims 3 guys, there was a video and like one of the other guys was playing it in the background? |
| Toady: | Yeah, yeah. I think that was the Warhammer guys. Was there even some kind of weird contest like 'hey what game is this'? |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, 'hey if you know what this game is, email us and we'll send you a free tshirt'. |
| Toady: | Yeah that was funny. It's funny to see that happening. Generally people have been supportive from the computer game industry, that have talked to me anyway. I really don't know how widespread it is though; you always get new people with new blogs saying that they introduced it to their friends and none of their friends had heard of it; so there's still tons of people that might like the game but haven't heard of it at all. It's still spreading out, it hasn't saturated the possible people that have been interested by any means, so, it's good to still spread the word around. |
| Rainseeker: | I have a question here from dorf and this kind of goes along with the email kind of ... 'what is the oddest email you've gotten since the success of Dwarf Fortress?' |
| Toady: | Very oddest one ... Well I guess there was the ... There was a person that ... I wouldn't want to reveal too many details ... basically a person who had Dwarf Fortress help them realise certain truths about their existence and basically about how life is meaningless or something and that caused them to convert their religion. It was a long and serious email - I don't want to make light of it - people asked what the oddest email was and that's the hands down winner. But the person supports the game so I'm not sitting here making fun of anybody; but that's definitely the oddest email that I received and I thought that was kind of cool that the game could definitely have an effect on somebody who was ready for it. It kind of comes back to this point; people say that ... there was someone who was criticising the game because when you have random content, because it makes things up it can't contain an artist's vision, but I don't think that's accurate because I think a lot of certain things, certain cynicisms I have, do come across in the game and I think the person was picking up on that. So certainly you can still convey things even in a procedurally generated environment, or whatever they call it these days. |
| Rainseeker: | Right. Well, I have a technical question here; 'How exactly long, wide and tall is a tile in Dwarf Fortress? Are they cubes?'; this is from Lonewolf. |
| Toady: | What the traditional answer is [is] that they're not so big that a dwarf doesn't have to crawl under another dwarf to get through a corridor but at the same time they're big enough to hold a thousand dragons as long as nine hundred and ninety nine of them are lying down. On the other hand it's a serious question because so much would ride on giving an answer; that's why I haven't so far. Because the second that you give an answer the game becomes constricted and you need things to make more sense; suddenly everything needs to make sense. I'm not ready to do that; I think there's something to be said for it - something to be said for nailing that down - but it would really kind of invite things like multi-tile creatures and stuff that I'm just not ready to do. There are some good things about multi-tile creatures; I think they'd be kind of cool. But path finding would need to be changed heavily, and there'd be other issues with them. Would they be too easy to kill for example by hiding off somewhere that they can't get to and shooting at them or whatever; so they'd need to be smart enough to avoid situations like that which might be difficult. So that's kind of one of the main problems - the large creatures - why I haven't established a number yet. |
| Capntastic: | This one's from nagual678; 'So, why is the Bay 12 Dwarf Fortress site still terrible?' |
| Toady: | Is he the same guy that started that topic in General Discussion about the ... |
| Capntastic: | Yeah this wasn't actually a post in the thread; I'm just asking his question. Because I think a direct answer from you would be best. |
| Toady: | Yeah ... it's horrible because I haven't worked on it. And I agree with him by the way. I don't think the Dwarf Fortress site is as bad as the main bay12games.com site. I think the Dwarf Fortress site is okay. It could be better but I think it's ok. I think the bay12games.com site looks like it was made by a junior high kid in 1995 or something; before there was an internet. It was made ten years ago or whatever; we haven't updated it at all. There had been an offer - someone was going to update it for me - but that didn't work out and I really didn't like the way that went so someone else offered to update it and I was like 'I don't really feel like doing it' or whatever ... so nothing's happened with it, and I'm not sure what I want to do with it. I mean it should definitely be changed - it looks horrible - but it's just not my number one priority. |
| Capntastic: | I looked at it like every other ... like Nethack and ADOM, Dungeon Crawl and IVAN, and those sites are all just as bad if not worse, so ... |
| Toady: | Yeah ... at the same time it's fair to compare us not to other hobbyists but to the larger ... everybody, right? Because we're trying to compete with everybody and it could be better. Even not looking at other sites, just looking at it as it's own creature ... it's definitely ... it is ratty. I mean why do we have all the games listed on the left and then all the games listed at the bottom too with four links to the forum that all go to the same place. That question I can answer, it's because the links to the forum used to go to subsections and now they don't, but when I updated it of course I just changed them all to the new forum link without subsections and so ... I guess it's tragicness has actually built up over time; it's not that it's static, it's that it's worse than static. |
| Capntastic: | I like the little yellow pointy guy. |
| Toady: | Well now see going back to the Dwarf site I don't have as many objections about the Dwarf site. Some people don't like the fact that it's centre justified or whatever; I don't care that much about that ... I don't know why that bothers people or why everyone wants stuff on the left or what other things people have with it ... I wasn't reading that carefully there might have been specific objections in the thread but a lot of it wasn't specific. But no I love the little pointy guy; I don't think [he] needs to go anywhere; [he]'s fine. |
| Capntastic: | So, let's see, about a month ago me and my friend starting brewing beer. So I have a bottle here from my first batch and I just opened it. It's actually really easy to make. |
| Toady: | Does it have dwarven ingredients in it? |
| Capntastic: | Uh no. |
| Rainseeker: | Can't tell. |
| Toady: | Can't tell? It's proprietary ... |
| Capntastic: | Yea. I'm pouring it right now ... and there it is. It's carbonated, and it's fizzing; so everything looks cool. It's a porter so it's nice and dark. |
| Toady: | So you're going to try it now, is that the idea? |
| Capntastic: | Yes I just had a sip and it's delicious. |
| Toady: | Well that's awesome, does that make you a micro-brewer? |
| Capntastic: | Yes it does. |
| Rainseeker: | And Tarn you're a microgamer. |
| Toady: | I'm a microgamer. That's right, a microgamer. |
| Rainseeker: | So Capn what are you calling your beer? |
| Capntastic: | We don't really have a name yet, but it was ... |
| Rainseeker: | Perhaps <inaudible> |
| Capntastic: | The process itself ... it only costs like two hundred bucks to get this stuff you need. You know, it's a big kettle, and ingredients and a bucket and a big glass bottle to put everything in. It's just really easy to do, it's like you boil this for half an hour, and then you put this in and stir it ... the hard part's just keeping track of temperature and everything and making sure you wash your hands. A little bit undwarvenly, but ... |
| Toady: | So how long did it have to sit there? |
| Capntastic: | Um ... we put it in the bottles ... it's been bottled for about three weeks, and I guess that's like two or three weeks, so I guess that's the minimum, but then anything after that is like bonus aging, you know, concentrated deliciousness. |
| Toady: | But it was still good now? Just the sip that you took now? |
| Capntastic: | Oh it's really good now. |
| Toady: | That's right, so the bonus is going to send you up to the stratosphere. |
| Capntastic: | Oh yea, and um ... |
| Rainseeker: | Ok so this brings me to a question Tarn, do you drink? |
| Toady: | Do I drink? I don't have anything against drinking, I just haven't had an occasion to drink for a while. I used to drink more in grad school when there were parties and stuff; that didn't always turn out well. I don't know if I can go into any of that. |
| Rainseeker: | So are we going to have dwarven drunkenness? |
| Toady: | Oh yeah ... you have to have that. Now I don't know quite how that's going to work in the game when they pretty much have to have alcohol all the time; I don't know if that means they're going to be drunk all the time. There might be differences in physiology with the dwarf where they only get drunk when they're seriously drinking or something, like if they're at a party ... when they're like doubling up a party or something and having several drinks instead of just one to get through the day. Whereas with the humans, the humans I try to model as closely as possible to real life rather than doing whatever weird system's going to happen with the dwarves, and with the other ones we haven't thought about so much ... what happens when an elf drinks? |
| Rainseeker: | I think that elves are going to have more vodka-esque things. |
| Capntastic: | More like ... wine spritzers. |
| Toady: | Of course they just drink blood anyway ... |
| Capntastic: | They have no qualms about just like biting some guy's neck off and drinking it. |
| Toady: | Yeah that's called uncorking. But there are a lot of interesting questions like that ... it happens any time we have a new mechanic that's related to one of the main creatures we have to go through and ask ourselves five different times what does it do, and we aren't interested, really, in building up our stock universe, but we figure we have five different groups ... they're not incredibly diverse, they're somewhat diverse ... and then as we start adding in things like ant-men, like all the animal peoples are starting to get their own civilizations now. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah I've noticed that. |
| Toady: | Especially in this version that's coming up; they're actually going to have them. Because back in 2D you had bat-men riding giant bats and they had blowguns made out of cave spider legs that they shot cave spider chitin - or whatever it's called, darts - through that were poisoned with cave spider venom and so on. So they had a civilization up to the point where they were building objects and they'll have that again for the next release. Then that leads to the question, what are the ethics of a bat-man. We know a lot about Batman's ethics I guess from reading the comic books and stuff but then there's ant-men; what are their ethics? What are the ethics of lizard-men? Are they all the same? And so on. We have all these non-inventive animal peoples races but it should allow us to explore some new ground anyway, especially in terms of geographic determinism, in terms of the different environments they have should change their civilizations a lot. So it's going to be interesting to go through; I don't know what happens when a lizard-man starts drinking. |
| Rainseeker: | Is it going to be possible for us to get civilizations like goblin civilizations that go in unexpected directions like maybe they get a leader somehow from an elven civilization who enforces their beliefs on the goblins or something? |
| Toady: | I only put in little teeny baby steps in that direction back when I set up those ethics; looking in that direction I made it so that the ethics sit inside the civilization so that they're mutable; it doesn't just look at the definition that you put in the raw files, but within each civilization they're mutable; but they don't actually change yet. But that kind of thing is what will allow certain individuals and even sub movements ... this is the kind of thing where say in dwarf mode if you have a philosophical movement spring up and enough of your dwarves adhere to it it should start changing the actual fortress civilization in terms of how it thinks, and whether that's happening because the actual fortress ethics are changing or just because a majority of the people follow the ethics of this movement ... it's kind of one leads to the other, or it should anyway. So we're thinking about those things, we're definitely not ignoring that kind of stuff, but it's just a matter of getting it done and that always takes a long time. |
| Rainseeker: | I have a question from Xanares; 'Having read your the future section of the old Slaves to Armok site where you mention orcs along with the dwarves, I was wondering why they didn't make it into the game?' |
| Toady: | I don't even remember. I don't know if any of you have played Armok I, because we had a number of stock creatures, and I don't remember if orcs were one of them or if we called them goblins; I really don't remember. To me those terms are basically interchangeable; one is more Tolkien and one is much older. |
| Capntastic: | More general? |
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Topic: Dwarf Fortress Talk #1: Feedback (Read 32947 times)