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[Fishersalwaysdie]

EDIT: referring to BDRs' post  

Awesome!!!11

That would be all.

[ November 04, 2007: Message edited by: Fishersalwaysdie ]

[death_cookie]

It's a matter of mood. Highly advanced craftsdwarfship is fine. Say, automatons might be possible if they are, say, artifacts, or otherwise extremely difficult to make, and a product of epic skill, not a product of applied scientific knowledge. Lovingly crafted magical clockwork statues that walk around are good. Mass-produced robots... eh. There's a fine line to straddle. Personally, so long as the right feel and mood are preserved, you can add a lot of neat things. What those are is up to Toady. I'd personally like something without explicit industrialization except in the most rudimentary of ways, with the more advanced technology in the setting being indistinguishable from magic or, better, being an expression of extreme skill.

Dwarves are not human, and this is not the Earth. So, for example, the aluminum thing makes perfect sense, because the little fellas are almost supernaturally attuned to stone and metal and things. That's thematic. It preserves the feel of the game for dwarves to have the secret to working aluminum.

Taking Tolkien as an example, a lot of the magic in Middle-Earth takes the form of epic craftsmanship. Dwarves make magical toys, not through sorcerous stuff, but just by being naturally magic badass craftsdwarves. The same goes for floodgates that open instantly and rock mechanisms. They're dwarves. That's their thing.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

Writing from a purely technological analysis based on the real world, the only practical reason I know of for why dwarves can't make basic guns or canons right now is because it's not supported in the game. They have all the precursor technology needed for it, and all the materials, and the technology level of the world is plenty high enough. The reason it might seem "high tech" to us is merely because in the history of the world, European alchemists were absolutely miserable at chemistry. Gunpowder was not invented by the Europeans, however; they imported it from people who weren't just obsessed with turning lead into gold and fabricating life. The Chinese have written references to experiments with combining sulfur and saltpeter to explosive effect as early as the 800s, and gunpowder saw military use by 900s. The earliest surviving record of a written gunpowder recipe is from 1044, and it has multiple recipes for military gunpowders, depending on the type of weapon the powder is developed for. By that time it was already important enough that they had export bans on saltpeter and sulfer to prevent other nations from copying their technology. If we were to set a "1300 cutoff", the Chinese already had hand guns, hand grenades, cannons, chemical weapon smoke bombs, and trebuchet-thrown bombs, and Muslim chemists was also developing gunpowder-based explosives for battle and refining the gunpowder recipe to modern standards. Meanwhile, European armies were still coming to the conclusion that, oh cool, bows are essentially obsolete next to the crossbow for military purposes. There's really no technological or in-world explanation for dwarves being unable to develop gunpowder, and it doesn't break the sense of high fantasy for me at all, because I know that fantasy can in fact be bigger than Europe. Gunpowder isn't steampunk, it's not even high tech or post-fantasy era technology for a lot of the world, it's just not Tolkien. But the same can be said for crossbows and plate armor.

Electricity generation and use, on the other hand, is more out of reach for the dwarves. Although they technically have most or all the materials and manufacturing technology they would likely need to wire up the caves, string Christmas lights everywhere, and build a generator room, there is a large knowledge gap before they could know how to do that. They chiefly need to understand magnetism, electric charge, and electromagnetic induction first. Without magnetism in the game world in the first place, they aren't going to get very far with that. Even once they have it, there is so much they would need to understand before they could manage it. This is what makes electricity much more "steampunk" -- robust understanding of electricity didn't come around until very late in history, because it's complicated, and it's not just sitting around to be studied, like the understanding of mechanics that goes into the existing machines. Electromagnetic fields are invisible and it's very hard to figure that kind of thing out on accident -- it's a very big step to go to electricity, even if you're sitting on top of a mountain of magnetite and building mechanical steam defenses.

I wouldn't quite hate it if the dwarves had electricity, and I would probably leave it enabled if it was an init file option, but it is pretty implausible for them to know how to use it. Gunpowder on the other hand, from just looking at the game world, I'm almost surprised they don't have it.

[ November 04, 2007: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]

[Sukasa]

The same question, then, should be asked; for the most part you can't see magic, at least until you've made it manifest.  So, if you can't see magic, how then did anyone figure that out?  The other thing is, do they need to understand the how and why of electricty?  It would stand to reason that if A) the damn thing works, and B) I can make it again and again, even if I don't understand it why would I not want to use it?  The thing is, while understanding completely how electricity works is nice, it's not completely nessesary to know.  For all we could know, a dwarf discovered it while accidentally dropping something magnetic through some stacked iron barrels and wondering why he got a zap from the copper bars strewn around (that conveniently happened to form an electric ciruit) or whatever.  No understanding of the exact forces, but if can remake and shape the circuit however he wants, it's not much of a stretch from 'Oops I dropped this wierdly-acting rock through and Iron barrel and got shocked" to "Let's spin the rock through a loop of barrels with slots in one side via an axle and shock those damned elves!"

[Sheez]

quote: You STILL dont understand it, dont you? Its all about the GAME WORLD. We have trolls and dragons, we have even WIZARDS added now. This is a fantasy game, NOT steampunk, this is NOT ARCANUM or any crap like that.
Fantasy = magic.
I dont see that WHY should the concept of the game be changed from fantasy to steampunk. Majority of the people would surely prefer magic over a steampunk world.

Of course. You're correct. Congratulations, you've won the internets. I'm sure we're all very proud of you. How could I ever continue to argue faced with that brilliant piece of evidence to the contrary of everything I've written?

A few thoughts:

quote: I'm getting a bit too verbose in this thread, but the bottom line is that clockwork stuff is nifty, and bellows are cool, but there's a level of complexity where stuff just becomes un-dwarven and cheesy gimmicky.

You will hear no arguments from me on this. That is why, were anything along these lines to be implemented, they need to be looked at seriously considering their impact on the game world. Then again, this is Toady. When hasn't he done that with DF?

BDR, that is awesome. I approve.

quote: And I came up with another use for electricity: Heaters. Great for maps where water would otherwise freeze; you just heat the water and it won't freeze within a small radius!

Yes! I would even be content with coal-fired furnaces at this point though..magma is just too erratic.

death_cookie: if an automaton took a year to make, required decent resources to craft and maintain, and had to be repaired after a fight? Yeah, I'd be so down for that. I mean, there has to be some sort of reason why everyone doesn't have them. However, they ought to be pretty dang beefy too. Not Iron Colossus strong, but decent nontheless. It'd be a reason to build up a force of them, given time and the appropriate infrastructure. Heck, you might even need to specify a purpose for the automaton before it's finished, so you might have mining automatons or fighting automatons...but nothing that requires a higher brain capacity (no wizards, say, or alchemists).

Johnathan. Excellent post. You bring to light the idea that knowledge, especially that regarding technology is cumulative. It's a good thing to keep in mind when trying to figure out reasonable limits on what might be possible and what might not. Again, dwarves may have that superior sense of metallurgy and of the properties of stone and metals themselves to have discerned something of how to generate or store electricity. I'm far from an expert however, and Toady's dwarves could be far and away from figuring that out, so I won't make any assumptions there. I will, however, say that it would be almost unbearably cool to shock those goblins to death with copper floor tiles.

[Jonathan S. Fox]

I think with magic it's easier to pull out an excuse, because we don't really know how magic works, so it's easy to make something up to explain it. I mean, it's magic after all. With that said, I tend to agree with Sukasa; in a world where the only magic is practiced by D&D style wizards with their noses in books, and where magic is more of a science than an art, it is going to be hard to explain why they don't have real-world technology to compare with their degree of magical development, because that makes magic equivalent to advanced technology.

You could certainly make an explanation for dwarves having electricity, I don't deny it at all. Certainly chemistry itself was a very trial and error science. It's just that there's no real-world parallel for anyone having that level of electrical technology in this sort of period. With gunpowder, the same isn't the case; a lot of people think it's unrealistic, but in reality that's far from true. It's just that most fantasy is based on a part of the world where chemistry as a science was junked behind horrible alchemy, and so didn't really get into the gunpowder business for hundreds of years after its first use in war.

But hey, 我喜欢学中国 -- I like to study China. That's one of my passions. I have no problem with fantasy having Chinese technology levels. Others might. No matter how it goes down, it's a decision as to the preferred feel of the world, and what toys we want the dwarves to play with. I'm personally very partial to gunpowder because I think it's simply unrealistic of so many fantasy settings to prohibit any mention of it, especially for more practical and technology-minded cultures, as the dwarves have shown themselves to be in their preference for crossbows. And I don't mind unrealistic steampunk, including electricity -- it's just another take on fantasy, and a very interesting one at that. But I think it's true that if the argument is to go for realism and history, there's some weight against electricity.

[ November 04, 2007: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]

[Tormy]

quote:Originally posted by Jonathan S. Fox:
<STRONG>Writing from a purely technological analysis based on the real world, the only practical reason I know of for why dwarves can't make basic guns or canons right now is because it's not supported in the game. They have all the precursor technology needed for it, and all the materials, and the technology level of the world is plenty high enough. The reason it might seem "high tech" to us is merely because in the history of the world, European alchemists were absolutely miserable at chemistry. Gunpowder was not invented by the Europeans, however; they imported it from people who weren't just obsessed with turning lead into gold and fabricating life. The Chinese have written references to experiments with combining sulfur and saltpeter to explosive effect as early as the 800s, and gunpowder saw military use by 900s. The earliest surviving record of a written gunpowder recipe is from 1044, and it has multiple recipes for military gunpowders, depending on the type of weapon the powder is developed for. By that time it was already important enough that they had export bans on saltpeter and sulfer to prevent other nations from copying their technology. If we were to set a "1300 cutoff", the Chinese already had hand guns, hand grenades, cannons, chemical weapon smoke bombs, and trebuchet-thrown bombs, and Muslim chemists was also developing gunpowder-based explosives for battle and refining the gunpowder recipe to modern standards. Meanwhile, European armies were still coming to the conclusion that, oh cool, bows are essentially obsolete next to the crossbow for military purposes. There's really no technological or in-world explanation for dwarves being unable to develop gunpowder, and it doesn't break the sense of high fantasy for me at all, because I know that fantasy can in fact be bigger than Europe. Gunpowder isn't steampunk, it's not even high tech or post-fantasy era technology for a lot of the world, it's just not Tolkien. But the same can be said for crossbows and plate armor.

Electricity generation and use, on the other hand, is more out of reach for the dwarves. Although they technically have most or all the materials and manufacturing technology they would likely need to wire up the caves, string Christmas lights everywhere, and build a generator room, there is a large knowledge gap before they could know how to do that. They chiefly need to understand magnetism, electric charge, and electromagnetic induction first. Without magnetism in the game world in the first place, they aren't going to get very far with that. Even once they have it, there is so much they would need to understand before they could manage it. This is what makes electricity much more "steampunk" -- robust understanding of electricity didn't come around until very late in history, because it's complicated, and it's not just sitting around to be studied, like the understanding of mechanics that goes into the existing machines. Electromagnetic fields are invisible and it's very hard to figure that kind of thing out on accident -- it's a very big step to go to electricity, even if you're sitting on top of a mountain of magnetite and building mechanical steam defenses.

I wouldn't quite hate it if the dwarves had electricity, and I would probably leave it enabled if it was an init file option, but it is pretty implausible for them to know how to use it. Gunpowder on the other hand, from just looking at the game world, I'm almost surprised they don't have it.

[ November 04, 2007: Message edited by: Jonathan S. Fox ]</STRONG>

Well, as someone has mentioned it...what will happen with this game if things like electricity will be added? Now just tell me that. Do you really think that electricity will be added ONLY to give some power supply for lamps? Do you really think that after that point there wont be more advanced techs being added? Like someone has said we will surely end up with firearms, bombs and hell knows what else. Perhaps 1 year after electricity gonna be added 0.2 versions later they will be constructing a Large Hadron Collider.
Well no thank you.
Either way, if something like this will be added, I can just only hope that we can turn it off in the ini files. Perhaps the same should be true about magic. That should be also optional maybe. I dont know. What I know is that I dont want any sersous technologies in DF.

[ November 04, 2007: Message edited by: Tormy ]

[Sheez]

quote: Well, as someone has mentioned it...what will happen with this game if things like electricity will be added? Now just tell me that. Do you really think that electricity will be added ONLY to give some power supply for lamps? Do you really think that after that point there wont be more advanced techs being added? Like someone has said we will surely end up with firearms, bombs and hell knows what else. Perhaps 1 year after electricity gonna be added 0.2 versions later they will be constructing a Large Hadron Collider.

You've played this game. You've seen the care that Toady has put into it. It is a masterpiece, a game that menaces with spikes of awesome. It is a labor of love and time and he has done nothing I've seen to compromise it. Do you really think that he's going have dwarves shooting lasers? Do you imagine that he'll implement stealth jets for the elves? After all of this time put into making a fairly fantasy oriented world, do you imagine that he's going to turn it into a cyberpunk-themed world? Have some faith, man. Just because some of us would like Toady to put in technologies that may be in conflict with your vision of what a fantasy world doesn't mean that we want to see this game continue to develop until it's post-modern. If Toady were to make a similar, separate game that did that, maybe. But it's Dwarf Fortress now. And that's the game we want to play. I like gears and rivets and maybe you like lightning bolts and fireballs. Doesn't mean we can't play the same game man.

I can see electricity being used for a number of purposes. Lights, yeah. Traps, sure. Maybe helping in certain alchemist-based experiments. Or powering automatons, if that ever happens. What else should it be used for? I mean, if that was it, I'd be happy.

[ November 04, 2007: Message edited by: Sheez ]

[Grek]

Electricity will not lead to dwarfs studying quantum physics. You should be able to figure that out. I doubt it would even result in lightbulbs. It's prety hard to make a lightbulb by hand.

[gimli]

Sorry but WTF? Electricity? What about no?   :mad:

[qwertyuiopas]

A simple(for Toady) solution:
a raw based tech tree thing.
example
[mechanics]
   [required:and[stoneworking,year:200]]

in the workshops part,
[tech_required:mechanics]

and so on.
with simple logic stuff,  like and,or,not you can have fancy patterns that allows semirealistic situations.
[tech1][requires:nothing]
[tech2][requires:and[tech1,chance:0.6]]
[tech3][requires:and[tech1,or[not[tech2],chance[0.01]]]]
[tech4][requires:and[tech1,tech2]]
[tech5][requires :or[tech2,tech3]]

and so on....
and if its in the raws, you can let modders add things like tech level appropriate crafts(toy blocks, then toy steam engine, then toy space ship...)

and an init option to turn off any tech node, or on by default, or(default) use requirements. much like starcraft's[available,unavailable,or researched]

[ November 04, 2007: Message edited by: qwertyuiopas ]

[Jonathan S. Fox]

quote:Originally posted by Tormy:
<STRONG>

Well, as someone has mentioned it...what will happen with this game if things like electricity will be added? Now just tell me that. Do you really think that electricity will be added ONLY to give some power supply for lamps? Do you really think that after that point there wont be more advanced techs being added? Like someone has said we will surely end up with firearms, bombs and hell knows what else. Perhaps 1 year after electricity gonna be added 0.2 versions later they will be constructing a Large Hadron Collider.</STRONG>

This argument was silly the first time it was made and it's still silly now. Just exclaiming something as if anybody who disagrees with you is in denial of reality isn't really a sound argument and doesn't persuade anybody. I would defy any to come up with a good reason as to why dwarves will inevitably be shooting AK-47s and charging up particle colliders if they have primitive electricity or gunpowder. About the only thing I can think of dwarves realistically using electricity for off hand would be lighting, electric heating, traps, and electroplating, though some may like the idea of rare automata as well. And early gunpowder weapons were so primitive that most westerners simply have no idea how well they already mesh with fantasy settings -- there are so many drawbacks that it's be similar to how combat magic is envisioned in most settings, a very specialized, potent weapon, but with a huge list of drawbacks that prevent it from displacing the sword in combat. I can understand that many do not want those things regardless, but goodness, at least have decent reasons if you want to claim that it's the end of the world.

[Zulaf]

Now i dont have any arguments against or even for technologies going in especially if you can shut it and magic off before spawning a world.

BUT i do have a suggestion for how both should react to each other.
Anyone ever play Arcanum? I think if tech where to go into DF it should be like in that game.I think that they should both have distinct and completely different advantages. Instead of just being able to use both and getting both advantages.

For those who dont know what it was like in that game heres the wiki page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcanum:_Of_Steamworks_and_Magick_Obscura

[gimli]

quote:Originally posted by Jonathan S. Fox:
<STRONG>

This argument was silly the first time it was made and it's still silly now. Just exclaiming something as if anybody who disagrees with you is in denial of reality isn't really a sound argument and doesn't persuade anybody. I would defy any to come up with a good reason as to why dwarves will inevitably be shooting AK-47s and charging up particle colliders if they have primitive electricity or gunpowder. About the only thing I can think of dwarves realistically using electricity for off hand would be lighting, electric heating, traps, and electroplating, though some may like the idea of rare automata as well. And early gunpowder weapons were so primitive that most westerners simply have no idea how well they already mesh with fantasy settings -- there are so many drawbacks that it's be similar to how combat magic is envisioned in most settings, a very specialized, potent weapon, but with a huge list of drawbacks that prevent it from displacing the sword in combat. I can understand that many do not want those things regardless, but goodness, at least have decent reasons if you want to claim that it's the end of the world.</STRONG>

Dude I dont get it.
You said electricity should be used for:
lighting, electric heating, traps, and electroplating.

for the love of god, why should Toady spend a single minute coding this crap in?
lighting = torches
electric heating = campfires, magma channels
traps = we have enough traps already
electroplating = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroplating  -> YEH we really need this in Dwarf Fortress!   :roll:   :mad:

[Jonathan S. Fox]

I said electricity could be used for those things, and that I can't think of anything else that dwarves would realistically use it for, responding to the suggestion that electricity would obviously lead to some unspecified technology that nobody would want.