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[lastofthelight]

So I was listening to this http://www.bay12games.com/media/mspa_forum_call.mp3 - which is basically a 4 hour interview with Toady. And he mentioned that he has coded in DF, a feature whereby one of your dwarves can get a dream of an undead invasion. And following that dream a wizard will come and ask for a dwarf. And if you refuse, every dwarf who has died in your fortress will return as a zombie to attack you, and every dwarf who dies will become a zombie.

I would like to request that this feature is re-activated. Apparently it was shut off and never turned on for players, or something, but is coded.

THIS WOULD BE THE MOST AWESOME THING EVER. PLEASE TURN IT ON!

[Capntastic]

No.    The reason it was taken out is because hard-coded events don't mesh with the game.

Obviously, these sorts of events will be able to happen as a matter of cause and effect, rather than "if year = 4, generate death wizard"

[lastofthelight]

You mean...hard-coded events like HFS, invasions, caravans, and megabeast attacks?

[Christes]

HFS as we know it is going out too.  Invasions, caravans, and megabeast attacks are connected to the outside world (connected poorly atm, but that will improve)

[Derakon]

In other words, something like this will eventually be part of the game, but only once it's properly integrated.

[lastofthelight]

It seems like a pity to wait 3 or 4 years (or more, if ever) for magic and wizards to get completed for this to be integrated, when turning a simple 0 into a 1 in the code somewhere could give us the awesomeness of a dwarven zombie apocalypse.

[Grendus]

Unfortunately, some things have to be hard coded. Since there are only three states for a living being to be in (alive, dead, or undead), hard coding these in wouldn't be a huge problem. With spheres and invasions, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to have, say, an evil creature creating it's own sphere could assemble an army of undead for invasions or even raise an army from your own dwarves, assuming they aren't projecting a strong enough sphere of their own (possibly a good use for the religion or magic arc) to repel his power.

Edit: from there, it wouldn't be hard to set up the raws in such a way that entities strong enough to exert a sphere could create armies or assume control over civilizations. Instead of a hard-coded zombie invasion, how about sphere wars between randomly genned dwarf gods and their servants against the remaining mega-beasts and demons left behind and their servants.

[Christes]

Well, I don't think that's an issue.  The issue with hardcoding more surrounds the way the wizard is artificially generated when it comes to your fortress.

Having creatures that make undead from dead as an ability is awesome, as long as they're created during worldgen

[lastofthelight]

See, the point was that this is already coded. Even if its put back in as an optional ini feature to turn on, it would be awesome to have. All of these other ideas are, while neat, not coded. But my original suggestion is present in the game, right now, just turned off.

[Christes]

Well it was coded for a version long ago iirc.  It might now work anymore.

[Aquillion]

I would assume that it was broken a long time ago -- things have changed a lot since those really early versions.  This assumes the code wasn't simply torn out when it was removed, which it almost certainly was (Dwarf Fortress is likely hard enough to maintain as it is, and the more code you have in there, the harder it is.  Better to remove something that isn't intended to ever be used again.)

On top of this, even if Toady could reactivate it, doing so would likely lead to more bugs in the future -- the code for it would require maintenance eventually.  He would have to investigate many of these bugs, even if he didn't want to maintain the 2d invasion code, because it might not be obvious that that code is causing the problem.

Basically, maintaining a fork for a feature that isn't intended to last -- which is what this would be -- is generally a bad idea.

[Bricks]

See, the point was that this is already coded. Even if its put back in as an optional ini feature to turn on, it would be awesome to have. All of these other ideas are, while neat, not coded. But my original suggestion is present in the game, right now, just turned off.

There were a lot of things present in the 2D version that simply don't exist now.  And they aren't the matter of flipping a switch.

@ Grendus:  There are currently three flavors of living things - normal, zombie, and skeletal.  Dead things aren't really a state, and I'm not sure that the code right now would allow for dead bodies to come back to life.  Especially those that decayed.  Would every totem, bone bolt, and chunk in your fortress magically start hopping across the floor, vigorously trying to poke and bump the dwarves to death?  What about creatures, like the Bronze Collosus and the Iron Man that leave behind statues instead of corpses?  They could be reanimated, too, although it's not something that falls under the definition of undeath.  What about true resurrection or intelligent undead like vampires and liches?  There is an arc (I think that it might be called the "curses" arc) that is all about generalizing curses such as zombification, which I believe is part of version one.

@ lastofthelight:  Anything that you mentioned as "hard-coded" are things that Toady intends to change.  Which is why we are given the option to turn many of these OFF - they don't live up to the standards of the intended final product.

TL;DR:  There is no magic "make a wizard turn your fort into house of the living dead" button, and time invested in it would be wasted.