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[NW_Kohaku]

OK, I held off on posting in this a couple weeks ago, because the devlog implied we'd soon be having a release.  Now it looks like this is scheduled for next week.

Here's my plan: As soon as I get the new release, I'm just going to focus on finding out what, exactly, is caste-level moddable.  That will tell me what I can and can't do with the civs.  After that, I'll reformat this whole thing to take maximum advantage of whatever I can mess with.  This means that if I find a neat thing I can tweak on caste level, I'll just plain invent a creature that does that if I have to.

However, in news of further refinement of my original idea, I've been putting thought into the five sub-races that will be part of the main group.  The more I thought about minotaurs, the more my mind was split between making them basically just tall, badass dwarves with hair in different places, and making them... basically cow-men as something of a joke.  That is, they're huge, mean-looking beast men... and are herbivores with [prefstring: haunting moos].  Likewise, I am considering making aranea and lamia become carnivores, so that meal time would be a little more interesting, and everyone wasn't just "funny-shaped dwarves".

I also really do want to move towards making it be "no humans"... in fact, I'm now imagining the world's lore as being something of an Avalon or Fairyworld or other name for a world of the fae, where the various fae races vie for supremacy, and humans tread only in their most fevered nightmares, or in the bonds of slavery from beyond the veil.  Perhaps the backstory can include a severing of the fae world from the waking world of men.

I also put thought into the way that the Burning Scourge would work.  Aside from making some sort of seige-capable magma-immune, trap-bypassing, amphibious and sometimes organless creatures, which basically makes a seige like opening up HFS (enjoy), so that no one set of traps or solutions to a seige (aside from send a champion hammerdwarf after it) would work, I've been thinking of just making them a race of... basically goblins interbred with humans who were so heavily tortured as to lose their original shape, and become "demons", although this mythos would have no demons proper...

Although I had briefly thought of making an "angelic" civ that just happens to be of the "flaming sword of God's revenge" kind, rather than the "heaveny choir" kind, and would seek to destroy all other civs relentlessly.

[NW_Kohaku]

Kohakus do their best now and are experimenting. Please watch warmly until it is SCIENCE!

Sorry, a little Touhou meme... I'm going to have to suppress the urge to do that any time I get to talking about kappa.

Anyway, I'm now beginning work on reverse-engineering what is caste-moddable, and what isn't.  (First, I will need to run a quick crash-course fort to find out just what castes work like "normally", without mucking around with things.) 

If someone wants to contribute discoveries that they themselves have made as to what is caste-moddable, by all means, go ahead.

[shadowclasper]

This is the best Idea I have ever seen.

I WILL GLADLY HELP YOU IN YOUR SCIENCE! WHEN YOU NEED A TESTER I SHALL BE THAT TESTER!

[NW_Kohaku]

TEST 1:

Skeleton Test.

OK, this actually involved two tests...

First, I tested whether simply putting the whole of the skeleton/flesh/material whatever stuff in castes to see if it would just blow up in my face.  I more-or-less hamhandedly copy-pasted the whole chunk of code into the caste segments.  It fortunately passed this "it compiles!" test.  Not much, but it's the first step. (And one should never sneer at making the damn thing compile.)

The second step was to actually make a seperate caste for a creature with a different physiology.  I made a lamia, since I could largely just copy-paste in the Serpantman data, and make it run on that.

This second test was also, much to my relief, a success.  It was difficult to tell it was a success, at first, however, because in spite of using caste names, there was no indication of who was a dwarf and who was a lamia until I went looking at the wounds screen for who had a tail instead of legs.

Must put "caste names" in the suggestions...

Anyway, this is one of the most important tests of what I can do with castes, as it was something I was worried would not be there.  If I can have caste-level skeletal structures, I'm fairly sure sizes and personality traits and attributes are all caste-level as well, although I'll be doing tests of all that when I get to it next.

For now, I'm still just trying to make heads or tails of what everything in the raws even do...  I really hope someone makes a decent interface for this sort of raw-editing sometime soon, because these raws are hideously complex to begin with, but now I'm going to be adding in basically entire sub-creatures a few dozen times to a single entry, which will make a single major race become a 40-page-long monstrosity of text.

Anyway, I'll probably try tweaking sizes and attributes or something next time in a minor test I expect to succeed.  After that, I want to get a grip on what these personality traits and such do, and what other aspects of a creature I can tweak.

Given what kind of detail I get out of the absurd pupil description features, I might be able to get something going where these lamia will have randomized scale patterns, and hair colors that match their scale colors... but that's all minor "bloat" stuff...

Although, honestly, I think I might just take some of this crap OUT of the description... I mean, seriously, why are EAR SHAPES randomized, here?


edit:

TEST 1.3:

Not really a true test, but I wanted to see what would happen if I defined the creature's skeleton, and then a caste skeleton with that lamia... well, it wound up creating an incrimentally larger number of body parts.  I had two upper torsos, three heads, lower torsos, and tails, 6 upper arms, 8 lower arms, and 10 hands.

... I'm not sure exactly how that works out, but basically, I think I created a poly-dimensional creature with extra limbs being created to attach to all the different existing duplicate body parts, creating a sort of appendage fractal.

Incidentally, a dwarf with two legs and three tails (which are defined for stance) can walk just fine.

[warhammer651]

this looks like a very nice idea. I am looking forward to the results.

I mean, seriously, why are EAR SHAPES randomized, here?

So we can tell if they hang low and wobble to a fro?

[Rimbecano]

I also really do want to move towards making it be "no humans"... in fact, I'm now imagining the world's lore as being something of an Avalon or Fairyworld or other name for a world of the fae, where the various fae races vie for supremacy, and humans tread only in their most fevered nightmares, or in the bonds of slavery from beyond the veil.  Perhaps the backstory can include a severing of the fae world from the waking world of men.

I'd keep humans in, but spread them out a bit, and don't make them stand out (IE, most, but not all, of the civs having a fairly small element of humans).

I really like the "imperial" civ with its antman / human division, though with the antmen I think it becomes something unique, so I think it would be advisable to take the Roman imagery away. The civ has its own image, and borrowing too much from the real world would detract from that. It also manages to "hide" the humans well without simply turning them into a boring minority. (IE, the image you get comes from the hordes of ant-men, but there are humans pulling the strings). In other civs humans can be hidden by making them boring minorities, in yet others they can in fact be non-existent, in yet others you might do something else. The point is in not letting them be the image-contributing factor of any given civ, whether they're there or not, and whatever position they hold (and the point is also in having variety in the different civs as to how they are kept out of the image, so that there's no general pattern to draw attention to them).

[NW_Kohaku]

I'd keep humans in, but spread them out a bit, and don't make them stand out (IE, most, but not all, of the civs having a fairly small element of humans).

I really like the "imperial" civ with its antman / human division, though with the antmen I think it becomes something unique, so I think it would be advisable to take the Roman imagery away. The civ has its own image, and borrowing too much from the real world would detract from that. It also manages to "hide" the humans well without simply turning them into a boring minority. (IE, the image you get comes from the hordes of ant-men, but there are humans pulling the strings). In other civs humans can be hidden by making them boring minorities, in yet others they can in fact be non-existent, in yet others you might do something else. The point is in not letting them be the image-contributing factor of any given civ, whether they're there or not, and whatever position they hold (and the point is also in having variety in the different civs as to how they are kept out of the image, so that there's no general pattern to draw attention to them).

Well, what I'm working towards now, those imperials would be just a bloodthirsty variety of sidhe. (WHEEE! MYTHOLOGY!)  That makes them another kind of fae.

That leaves just one "true human" left in the trader civ, which I can sweep away into a mixed-breed.

Humans would then not truly exist in this world, and be a sort of parallel universe where humans might occasionally stumble in (and I was thinking of making something like a human having a nightmare appear as a wandering creature if I can find a satisfactory way to do so later on), who tend to be absorbed into being a new strange hybrid creature of human and fae.

[Rimbecano]

Well, what I'm working towards now, those imperials would be just a bloodthirsty variety of sidhe. (WHEEE! MYTHOLOGY!)  That makes them another kind of fae.

The thing is that the humans with their blandness and mundaneness fit better here. They're the leaders, but by being human, and thus not so different from us, they let the focus be on the antmen.

[NW_Kohaku]

TEST 2:

Attributes and almost everything else above the castes test.

(Yeah, that sucks as a name, but whatever.)

Anyway, seems none of this is crashing the game or making ears instead of eyeballs, although I have no idea when something really just goes back to default if it isn't declared for all the castes.

In fact, after a couple of ever-more drastic mods, with regular dwarven women getting an agility range between 5 and 5, and males and lamias getting an agility range between 5000 and 5000, I wound up with fairly average scores, with nobody even mentioning agility.

Bizzarely, I think this means that while you can completely change the body shape of a creature in the caste level, you can't make them stronger or faster...

Maybe there's a caste level way to mod this?

[Rimbecano]

Anyway, seems none of this is crashing the game or making ears instead of eyeballs, although I have no idea when something really just goes back to default if it isn't declared for all the castes.

It might definitely be worth checking the error log. The game doesn't seem to throw up much in the way of error boxes, so you may well be missing something that's being silently passed into the error log.

[NW_Kohaku]

Anyway, seems none of this is crashing the game or making ears instead of eyeballs, although I have no idea when something really just goes back to default if it isn't declared for all the castes.

It might definitely be worth checking the error log. The game doesn't seem to throw up much in the way of error boxes, so you may well be missing something that's being silently passed into the error log.

Heh, there is quite the flood of error messages in there...

Mostly stuff having to do with "broad iris" or "high cheekbones", though...

I don't see anything relating to attributes in the error log, just the various descriptions of ear lobe shapes that have yet to be properly implimented.  (I guess that means I can just delete all that crap without any negative consequence?  But what if a new version patching that up comes out?) 

Height and Weight are in there as well, though, which is unusual.  I did just put it in the caste-level section, though... so that means that you can replace a body with a serpentine body, and then you can't make them weigh something different? (Although it does still say "BP Mod" in front of height, so maybe it's eyebrow height or something?  A search says that there's a BP mod for "ear height"... I mean, really Toady?)


Ah, someone in another thread said that it won't show divergance from the "racial norm"...

Actually, I just realized all I have to do is use the Arena and take over my dwarves that I create, and then there's a button to look at my stats, and it certainly says my male dwarf is superdwarvenly agile.

The female had 778 speed, and my male had 1718 speed from setting them to 5 and 5000, respectively.

... Seems like quite a low difference, especially with the last version basically making you a [speed:0] character with maxxed out stats.

... According to the power of my maths, 1718 displayed speed is a speed of 482, while a displayed 778 speed is actually 1185...

The old (five bonuses) superdwarvenly agile was 450 speed, so that's something in the same ballpark. 

I'll have to try seeing what happens if I try to pass 10,000 as a stat, instead, though.

[NW_Kohaku]

My friends, I have done many things in the name of science - nay, SCIENCE! - all under the notion that I was a soldier in the long slogging march of scientific inquiry.  I thought that nothing was sacred, that no tabboo existed without being a temptation to shatter it.

And then I saw things... I did things...  Horrible things, in the name of science....

Test 4:  Total cast moddability test.

I... I have milked a male dwarf.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This proves many things... first, that [INTELLIGENT], which now includes the use of [CAN_SPEAK] as well as other things, IS, against all sanity, caste-moddable.

This means that you can embark with a species that can mate with what effectively amounts to its own livestock.

Male dwarves with the [INTELLIGENT] tag removed were treated as if animals, including having no labors enableable, but allowing you to butcher them, instead, like the way that the (p)rf menu of (v)iew lets you set butcherable for livestock.  Due to a minor bug, they still would have enabled all the labors they would normally start with, like Fisherdwarf if you used the "Play Now!" embark.  So I couldn't enable or disable labors, but they had fishing enabled, anyway, similar to the Dungeon Master's smithing labors.

This also means practically EVERYTHING is caste moddable.  Yay.

[Naes Draw]

And then I saw things... I did things...  Horrible things, in the name of science....

Test 4:  Total cast moddability test.

I... I have milked a male dwarf.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Dear gods what have you done?

[NW_Kohaku]

TEST... umm... 13?

OK, so I've been putzing around with [COMMON_DOMESTIC] after I made some milkable male dwarves, and made some "Elf Cows" and "Elf Bulls" as additional castes of elves.

This lets me buy psuedo-elves on embark.  If I can breed them, I will be able to make them have (regular) elf children, which may possibly be part of my own civ.

[TheLoneGunman]

While using the Caste system for everything sounds great, I'd like to see you try including different creatures into one Civ instead of them all being one species of different castes.

If you look at the Animal People's Entity Entry you'll see that there is more than one type of creature allowed within the Civ. This may prove useful for your SCIENCE!