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[Deon]

I'm pretty sure that it would be almost impossible to mod the RAWS so much that it would crash the game due to RAM overload. I modded DIG DEEPER in the last version to have over 500+ changes and it was still going strong, nobody had problems.

Yeah I don't think that it's an issue too. Probably there's some error in the raws which is not showed in errorlog but causes crashes. DF can be crashed by anything, i.e. by a creature with a wrong bodypart connectivity or something else, like a plant with leaves set up wrong.

[Footkerchief]

I'm currently making revisions to Used's variations/bodies and moving them around (and adding some new stuff).  I should reiterate: the BODY tag (and the BODY_DETAIL_PLAN tag) used inside a creature definition still belongs in the creature raws (or more commonly, in its creature variation).  I'll post some examples illustrating the correct use of this stuff... soon, hopefully.

Re: hemolymph, I couldn't find any reliable sources on the color -- the article linked by Used reads like it's by an amateur, and has no citations.  For now we can stick with the colors used by vanilla DF.

• make spiders milkable for anti-venom?
• make specific webs?
• how long does a "TIMEUNIT" take ingame? - I met the value with the syndroms

1. The game used to have useless antivenin, but it got taken out.  There's no AI support for it, so there's not much point.

2. Specific webs?  Each spider will have its own silk material, just like it will have its own blood material, its own fat material and so on.  That's how DF's creature materials work unless you go out of your way to do otherwise.  However there's probably no need to further customize the silk material.  Our spiders probably shouldn't leave collectible webs around, since the dwarves would probably try to make clothes out of them or something.

3. The wiki has a good explanation of time units as pertains to syndromes.

[Footkerchief]

More updates... the OP of this thread is now much smaller, since I moved most of the how-tos to the new Guides page.  We'll soon need some guides on how to implement stuff, but that's in flux right now.

I revised Used's work on arachnids and moved it to our real animal lists.  A generic arthropod is now on the arthropod page, and there are now some generic arachnid body parts in the arachnid section.  There's also a generic spider, and several individual spiders.

Points of discussion:

• Prototype convention for body token naming.  Our creatures and creature variations don't need explicit tokens -- the script will generate them automatically from context.  However, DF's handling of body parts doesn't lend itself to templating.  Even though we define certain bodies in Arachnida, the creature variation for Aranae (spiders) has to make explicit references to those bodies, so we have to name the tokens manually.
  
  This is just a stopgap I added while revising Used's work.  The current system for defining bodies and tissue layers is pretty clumsy, and I'm mulling over some more drastic solutions, such as:
  
  
  • Assigning body parts to "tissue categories" like CHITIN_FAT_MUSCLE, and then using a genericized body detail plan to automatically add tissues based on those categories.  This prevents the body detail plan from needing an exhaustive list of body part categories.
  • Not using body detail plans at all for tissue layers, instead adding them all individually in the creature variations (and individual creatures when necessary).  This approach lends itself well to templating.
  • Removing the necessity for each variation/creature to redeclare the BODY tag.  This would mean that our wiki templates for creatures and creature variations would have special fields for adding new body plans or removing existing ones.  The option to redeclare the entire BODY tag would still be available as a last resort, of course.
  
  
• I think I had another point but I don't remember it now.

I'm currently busy applying for jobs in the ol' IRL, so I don't know how soon I'll get a chance to implement these changes.

[Fieari]

Hm. I think I see why you don't want "webber" for -all- types of spiders, as they'd get everywhere, but shouldn't the Golden Orb Weaver at least get webber?  I have some of those things in my backyard and trust me, their webs DO get everywhere, and I think they should be harvestable. Someone actually made a sheet of cloth from their webs once (admittably, from thousands of spiders, but the point stands).

[Footkerchief]

It does currently have WEBBER.  If we add other orb weavers, we'll move the WEBBER tag into a creature variation.

[Lancensis]

Remember not to start PREFSTRINGS with "their" everyone. The game already adds in the "their" in dwarves' character profiles. If you give a creature [PREFSTRING:their tentacles], the game will display "Urist Oddlover likes squid for their their tentacles"

[Footkerchief]

Also, watch out for typos in general.  Looking over the spiders, I spotted quite a few minor typos and some major ones (misspelled creature names, and earlier there were misspelled tokens).

[Lancensis]

I can't recall if we ever came to an agreement on this, but are we going to be adding [FANCIFUL] and [DOES_NOT_EXIST] to the generic creatures? I think [DOES_NOT...] is a no-brainer, but Fanciful is more contentious. I know it gives a bonus to the value of an engraving, but does it make the subject more likely to be engraved? It seems more likely to me that a generic spider would be the focus of an engraving, especially in the setting.

[Footkerchief]

I'd be okay with FANCIFUL.  It's not a big deal either way since it'll be handled automatically by the script, so it's not like we'll have to change the tags for several hundred abstract creatures.


On a related note, we have a top-level creature variation that will get applied to ALL animals by default.  Currently it has three tags:

Code: [Select]

[NATURAL]
[MUNDANE]
[CREATURE_CLASS:GENERAL_POISON]

Anything else that needs to go in there?


If anyone has feedback on the body/tissue ideas I was throwing around earlier, I'd love to hear it.

[Lancensis]

Code: [Select]

[NATURAL]
[MUNDANE]
[CREATURE_CLASS:GENERAL_POISON]

Anything else that needs to go in there?

I can't think of anything unless we want to give them all [BENIGN]

If anyone has feedback on the body/tissue ideas I was throwing around earlier, I'd love to hear it.

I'm not so hot on the first idea, but the second and third seem reasonable to me. I think I'd sooner go with the second option, because the third would require using tags to remove body parts/tissues, which I can imagine getting confusing fast (to me at any rate). This is just personal prejudice, mind.

[Footkerchief]

I'm not so hot on the first idea, but the second and third seem reasonable to me. I think I'd sooner go with the second option, because the third would require using tags to remove body parts/tissues, which I can imagine getting confusing fast (to me at any rate). This is just personal prejudice, mind.

I should clarify that none of those options were (completely) mutually exclusive, and any approach we decide on will probably involve some mixing and matching.  Here's a more rigorous breakdown of our choices, with solutions that are more or less mutually exclusive:

Problem A: the BODY tag, which specifies all of creature's body parts.  Variations and creatures need to augment/replace their parent variation's BODY, which requires a GO_TO_TAG and other crap (since the BODY tag must be specified before tissue layers are applied).  This involves massive amounts of repetition.

Solutions:

• A variation/creature manually uses GO_TO_TAG, REMOVE_TAG, ADD_TAG, and GO_TO_END to replace the BODY.
• The wiki templates have a special raws_body parameter (like the current raws_start and raws_main) for overriding their parent's BODY.
• The wiki templates have two special parameters, raws_body_add and raws_body_remove, so that a variation/creature can augment its parent's BODY with minimal repetition.  They also have the raws_body parameter for situations where it's easier to start over from scratch.

... this was going to be a longer post, but for now I'll just post what I had time for.  Problem B is applying tissue layers to those body parts, and it's largely a separate problem, with myriad solutions, none of which are particularly satisfactory.

Overshadowing all of this is the Hail Mary nuclear option of devising a new metalanguage for defining and tissue-izing body parts in a way that leaves them open for extension.  Yes, I'm actually considering it (mostly for the sake of ruling it out).  It's the kind of overhaul that'll have to make its way into vanilla eventually, anyway.

[Footkerchief]

What up Ark Project, I'm going to the zoo.  Also caste bodies throw a monkey wrench into friggin' everything.

[Fieari]

Is this dead? I'd like to help, but am confused at how to do so at this point...

[Footkerchief]

It's not dead, but my participation is pretty much on hold right now.  My thought process re: bodies/tissues ground to a halt last month, and I decided I'd better take a break and come back later with a fresh mind to evaluate our options.

I realize that this isn't just my project and that it's not fair to stonewall everyone who wants to implement creatures, but at the same time I think there's a high chance that the project would die for real (i.e., turn into an unmaintainable mass of garbage) if we tried to tackle bodies/tissues with the ad-hoc methods used in vanilla DF.  I always had that worry, but our foray into implementing arachnids really cemented it.  So I'd rather take the time to do it right.  (additionally I have a lot on my IRL plate right now)

Anyway, there IS a way to help right now.  Our creature lists still need a lot of work, particularly in these sections:

• Bony fish
• Insects
• Birds
• Snakes

[Solifuge]

Sorry to practice VILE NECROMANCY here, but with the release of Captain Mayday's VBASE modding toolkit, making new critters is significantly easier to do.

Anyway, I wanted to check if this was still semi-active, since a lot of work was already done here, and I was just recently starting on a Zoology Mod using VBASE with a similar goal in mind. Rather than create such an extreme variety of animals all across the board though, my goal is to focus on making Archetypical creatures. For example, when adding in birds, rather than creating entries for the Emperor Penguin, Macaroni Penguin, Chinese Penguin, and so on (each with nearly identical attributes), I'd create a single archetypical Penguin entry. However, some animals are different enough to warrant diversifying them; for instance Sea Turtles and Snapping Turtles, though they share a name, live in different climates and have very different attributes.

The golden rule I'm working off of is that, so long as a Dwarf could tell a reasonable difference between any two animals in a group, and would interact with them in a noticeably different way, they deserve a separate entry.

Anyway, the reason I'm grave-digging here is to see if you, or if anyone else who contributed to the project, was interested in merging this project with the VBASE system, and working on implementing a simplified Ark Mod. I've got a Archetypical Zoology Mod Thread started here, to give an idea of what I'm talking about.