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[Hari Seldon]

Edit: go to my My Dwarf Fortress fan site to play as a Velociraptor now!  This mod is in alpha/beta!

(C) H. Kyoht Luterman

The silly drawing above depicts correct positioning of the femur. With the body held at a 20 degree angle (as in walking or running) the femur should never go past vertical. The unfortunate raptor on the right has moved his femur past this point, and thus dislocated it. Dromaeosaurid leg bones disarticulate once extended past vertical. Keep your raptor femurs happy, never draw them over extended!

My Dwarf Fortress fan site has the body_default_classified.txt file.

*SPOILER*
Yes I know a creature update is coming that will remvamp this.

However, the way the common (non-randomized) creatures are set up will probably remain somewhat the same, or else we'd have to specify how many arms, legs, organs, etc. each common (TETRAPOD) creature had and that would get annoying.

Basicaly I am suggesting that non-randomized creatures (even plants!) follow the evolutionary classification system to most efficiently eliminate redundancies and handle variations with small sub-classes of pretty much only the body parts that changed
/*SPOILER*

So I am putting forth a suggestion for how to get TETRAPOD creatures in the game the usual way with a modular system including:
1. TETRAPOD:DIGITIGRADE ex: dog
2. TETRAPOD:PLANTIGRADE_HUMANOID ex: human
3. TETRAPOD:UNGULATE ex: horse
4. TETRAPOD:TAUREN ex: centaur but could be any quadruped lower body
5. all of the usual (non-mutant) finger/toe/hoof possibilities for those animals, however this time it also includes joints!  And dewclaws (dewtalons) and thumb spikes!

TETRAPOD basically gives the creature a head, upper body, lower body, and 4 limbs.  I didn't want to get into CHORDATA because that would only do one thing, give the animal a spine, so this isn't going to be a 100% everything evolutionary tree, just the parts that effect the body type in  a major way (ex: tetrapod vs hexapod vs octopod, then choose reptile, mammal, bird, insect, or spider, then choose digitigrade, plantigrade, or insect_feet is what I'm thinking of for the future ... for Magma Men they just get TETRAPOD_SIMPLE and then the creature file adds the rest)

PLANTIGRADE, DIGITIGRADE, and whether or not they have _HUMANOID at the end gives the creature hands and/or feet (for DIGITIGRADE the feet ar called paws of course) and whether or not those are GRASP and/or STANCE.  Also DIGITIGRADE have one more leg bone, the pastern.

UNGULATE had to be written because they have one extra leg bone ... the cannon bone ... so we can't just GENGLOSS DIGITIGRADE.

TAUREN was written because the front limbs had to have different ID than the humanoid arms to avoid confusion of GENGLOSSing the front legs to have horse-nomenclature.

I didn't actually distribute these improvements to the DF animals myself because I don't want to do that then find that the next version of DF breaks compatibility.

I changed lower arm to forearm and lower leg to shin because if the animal is digitigrade then the "pastern" part of the leg being below the "lower leg" ... that sounds awkward compared to below the "shin."

Whether Birds' bones are broken or not should effect how easily they get WINDED!  Because the air sacs in the bones store fresh air for the lungs to use during exhallation!

Quadruped animal name limbs reference: http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/mammals/dog/label/anatomy/labelanswers.shtml

Horse limbs names were also used, only for Ungulates and Taurens, with the only change making the TAUREN quadruped forearm into foreleg since we don't want to confuse it with the human forearm!) and that info is easy to find.  I used it because with so many limbs, keeping track of what does "front pastern" mean is that on the human body or one of the horse limbs? would be a problem.  I don't use cannon for front pastern and shank for rear pastern as the non-TAUREN DIGITIGRADE "wrist-limb" names because they sound too much like a horse when describing say a dog or cat ... especially shank, and in fact pastern is used in real life for non-ungulate digitigrades (as the dog anatomy link I gave in the previous paragraph shows.

[Chariot]

Nice

I've considered doing similar myself, but wasn't planning on getting more detailed than QUADRUPED:MAMMAL, and i haven't gotten around to even doing that.

[Hari Seldon]

Well, for creatures with a SIMPLE body, the skeletal differences of DIGITIGRADE PLANTIGRADE and UNGULATE can be ignored (and actually is in my example, I leave the SIMPLE body types alone).

But even more fun is what if skeletal remains were not SIMPLE and you could have a palentology setup for common creature fossils in the ground ... for practically free?  On top of the planned random fossils that Toady One is probably planning.

Yeah I haven't figured out what to do with MAMMAL, REPTILE, BIRDLIKE (ex: some dinosaurs and all birds ... whatever more official name there is for BIRDLIKE would be nice), SPIDER (depends on if (aside from 8 legs) spiders are all that different from inseects ... if not I might group them together as ANTHROPOD or whatever), and INSECT right now.

I mean MAMMALS and BIRDLIKE would get HOMEOTHERM but each creature could have a different HOMEOTHERM value depending on how much insulation they have so actually that sould go in the CREATURE definition not the BODY definition.  BIRDLIKE would get BIRDLUNGS and possibly GENGLOSS feathers (though a few grown-up large dinosaurs/dragons could stand to lose their chick-feathers since they no longer need the insulation they retain enough body heat).

REPTILE and INSECT would not get a HOMEOTHERM except perhaps the freezing point of water for obvious reasons, completely uneffected by their LAYERING (can't do this right now) except how long it takes for them to freeze.  INSECT of course gets all of those weird insect organs, including having every single one of their organs BREATHE since their lungs are distributed in that fashion.  Once BREATHE and WINDED is actually effected by size you simply could NOT get INSECTS to be winded no matter how many organs you destroy ... only by clogging up their oxygen-absorbing network of tubes could you do that, or by blocking the opening in their body that has all of the tubes branching from it in the first place.  If we want to get fancy, COMPOUND eyes could have a hard covering (since they do).

Things such as whether all birds have round eye pupils not vertical slits could be used to help improve even GENGLOSS details of all animals and plants across the board very easily.

The GENGLOSS could even be nested like the skeletal systems are currently.  For example, classifying shells taxonomically could group them by however they're grouped but for the sake of argument how about by how many foot-holes there are then whatever then whatever and you could describe them in that order, nested so every shell automatically gets a pretty long description.

In the end, I'm waiting for the new body system from the next release to see how much of this I can do.  I can't really do any of it now except the GENGLOSS.

[Bricks]

This is very cool.  I was thinking about updating the humanoid body types, inspired by my anatomy class... But that has to wait for the next version.

As for BIRDLIKE - is AVIAN appropriate?

Spiders, if I remember correctly, are pretty different from insects as far as body plans go, but you could use the basic spider body as a basis for other things like scorpions, and maybe even crabs.  In the next version, the insects/arthropods/etc are going to have a more noticeable character with the new materials.

[smjjames]

Yea, birds belong to the Aves class and avian is freqently used to refer to birds or bird-like. Its probably common enough that many people will understand what it means.

[Hari Seldon]

Seldon has been posessed.

Seldon is muttering *must build this mod because it would be Fun*

Seldon has produced the DFPaleoMod at his Dwarf Fortress Fan Site

You may play as a velociraptor (even has appropriate lizardman baby graphic which looks exactly like a 'raptor!).  Err you could turn off speech for your 'Raptor if you want but I was trying to keep Adventure Mode interesting.

All creatures have all of the improvements (except for breaking them down into MAMMAL, AVIAN, etc. since that doesn't really do anything right now) discussed above, as well as JOINTS when appropriate!  Many many animals lacked joints, only humans and (I think) domesticated animals reliably had joints implemented (except for things like the Bronze Colossus of course), and now that's fixed!  Wrestling fun!

The mod is not quite finished since it cannot handle creatures with different numbers of fingers/toes on their forelimbs compared to their hindlimbs if they don't have hands (ex: old QUADRUPEDAL creatuers had 4 feet and they had this problem as well).  But my brain has been fried for the day.

Playing as a Velociraptor is actually a challange mode since you are SIZE 5 (why not SIZE 6?  because you are only 1.6 feet tall at the hip and more importantly weigh in at only 33 pounds).  Despite being small you are not allowed EQUIP since you have terrible hands for such things, and are not allowed armor or weapons because you're an animal.  You can speak to people, though, so you can have more fun in Adventure Mode.