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[Toady One]

There were issues at small sizes that might help with darts and which have definitely been handled for bolts.  Contact area always influenced the chance of penetration, but there was a division at one point that made small contact areas round up, so any small numbers were just getting washed out.  I'd still need to test darts.  Elastic clothing still has some too-magical properties that I might even deal with before this release if they keep coming up.

Yeah, I considered adding additional structural material information systematically, but too late.  By the time I had finished the initial mat/tissue rewrites and thought about doing it, it was already too far in the cycle to go back and add it without blasting myself out by an unknown time yet again.  Now it might be worth it to get it in in pieces, so it can query the item (or ground or tissue or whatever) for the unified information, and failing that, fall back on the specific tags.  Anything that doesn't involve a long delay would be good, and it's definitely called for.  At the same time, we could consider some of the ideas that have been floating around about material quality and so on, so that you could have more minute changes occur to smelting/forging/whatever processes that give the material rather than the item some quality.  It should be possible to do it without jumping off another cliff.

[G-Flex]

There were issues at small sizes that might help with darts and which have definitely been handled for bolts.  Contact area always influenced the chance of penetration, but there was a division at one point that made small contact areas round up, so any small numbers were just getting washed out.  I'd still need to test darts.

In case I wasn't clear (I don't know how well I explained it), what I mean about darts/arrows can be summed up via analogy to bullets: Obviously, bullets are pretty tiny so you can't stab someone very deeply with one even if you could get a grip on it, but when you fire them with a gun they can go clear through a person; what I'm unsure of is if the game has any notion of this (of the entire body of a piece of ammunition piercing through to the next layer, such that it can go deeper than the ammunition itself is long).

[arghy]

Re: fishing, my experience is that after a few years the population gives out and never comes back. 20 year fort on a brook here. Stockpile your refuse inside D:

I thought this to but my current fort seems to be replenishing on the season changes with nothing but an aquifer but my other fort was completely exhausted with a brook, several ponds and the entire under ground ocean on 2 cavern levels. I've noticed brooks drying up alot on most of my forts but i've also had aquifers run out of turtles also.

Hell now that i think about it i even had entire oceans dry up but i've only ever had 4 ocean forts so i have no idea if this is normal or not.

[Toady One]

There were issues at small sizes that might help with darts and which have definitely been handled for bolts.  Contact area always influenced the chance of penetration, but there was a division at one point that made small contact areas round up, so any small numbers were just getting washed out.  I'd still need to test darts.

In case I wasn't clear (I don't know how well I explained it), what I mean about darts/arrows can be summed up via analogy to bullets: Obviously, bullets are pretty tiny so you can't stab someone very deeply with one even if you could get a grip on it, but when you fire them with a gun they can go clear through a person; what I'm unsure of is if the game has any notion of this (of the entire body of a piece of ammunition piercing through to the next layer, such that it can go deeper than the ammunition itself is long).

Ah, no, I see you mentioned that now as a separate issue from the darts, and yeah, we haven't done anything with it.  Between darts, bolts and arrows against their regular targets, it isn't nearly as important, but there are some cases (like shooting a dragon with an adamantine bolt) where it would need to be addressed to get the ideal behavior.  When I do the sweep area vs contact area thing for swings, it'll probably involve very similar changes, so I'll try to keep it in mind.

[G-Flex]

I think it's more important with smaller ammunition like darts, because then (as is now the case, I think) you can easily have situations where even with a very strong dart fired at very high velocities, wearing a thick enough cloak will stop it dead in its tracks. It's definitely less of an issue for arrows, but could still theoretically be one in some situations (theoretically, in DF-world at the moment, you could stop a heavy adamantine-tipped arrow by holding up a bedsheet in front of you, because it wouldn't fully penetrate. At the moment, it just matters less because all layers are contiguous and clothing isn't likely to be super-thick, but it would still be nice if something like the shirt-and-coat on someone's back absorb a bit of the momentum but allow complete passage of the projectile).

[Toady One]

The held vs. flying penetration depth shouldn't be the issue with darts vs. clothing, because the clothing isn't deeper than a dart even if you are stabbing somebody with it, once the basic numbers are fixed.  But the contact area bug was turning it into a "sharp" fly swatter.  The elastic clothing also tends to be completely unrippable, because it just goes "nya nya elastic!" and nulls the edge without sapping the momentum -- there's going to have to be a middle ground there to allow elastic/structurally elastic tissues/clothing to give way beyond their material properties but also eventually pay the price and tear when some point is reached.  It's a sort of "big picture" rip that isn't captured fully by any local property.  Making penetration depth able to go beyond the depth specified in the item raws will be for projectiles flying deep within large soft targets.

[G-Flex]

Yeah, the elastic-material issues were probably giving me a false read on how things were playing out there.

Making penetration depth able to go beyond the depth specified in the item raws will be for projectiles flying deep within large soft targets.

This was also at least as major a concern to me, but the dart-versus-cloak sort of scenario was just easier to describe, I think.


By the way: How is the protection offered by ribs (and similar parts, although I think those are really the only probability-driven example) calculated? It seemed to me during my testing that the chance for a rib to protect a shot was rolled separately for each relevant rib, leading to ribs not protecting very often, and also leading to a situation where if I increased the number from 5 to something that caused more consistent protection, I wound up with situations such as the one in my signature, where too many of the ribs protected something at once. If that is the case, will this change at all once relative bodypart positions come into play more later one (as I think I remember you saying they will at some point), such that the game will be able to figure out which particular rib should get hit, resulting in more consistent protection without as many of the five-ribs-broken-at-once-by-a-hammer scenarios coming up?

[Orkel]

There's also the little balance problem of sure-kill arteries. For example, in fortress mode, a soldier can get a cut in his cheek which results in a cut artery, and he bleeds to death in seconds before any chance of a dwarf rescuing him. Arteries should cause heavy bleeding, but they should bleed to death slower so there's a chance of survival.

[cephalo]

With all this talk about bolts, I'm hoping that we'll be able to use marksdwarves in the next patch. I'm not so concerned about the damage as whether I actually see a bolt leave someones crossbow and travel somewhere.

[Footkerchief]

There's also the little balance problem of sure-kill arteries. For example, in fortress mode, a soldier can get a cut in his cheek which results in a cut artery, and he bleeds to death in seconds before any chance of a dwarf rescuing him. Arteries should cause heavy bleeding, but they should bleed to death slower so there's a chance of survival.

That was almost certainly due to this bug, which was fixed a few hours ago.

[Orkel]

There's also the little balance problem of sure-kill arteries. For example, in fortress mode, a soldier can get a cut in his cheek which results in a cut artery, and he bleeds to death in seconds before any chance of a dwarf rescuing him. Arteries should cause heavy bleeding, but they should bleed to death slower so there's a chance of survival.

That was almost certainly due to this bug, which was fixed a few hours ago.

Great.

[FuzzyDoom]

This release will be amazing! I'll finally be able to embark in a dangerous biome and not have to worry if my guys will all die because of a few military bugs.

[Orkel]

My test for that was to set up two lines of 11 crossbowmen each and just wait for a good shot, but the heart wound ended up being a guy getting shot in the arm, dropping his crossbow, running over to the opposing line, and jabbing his stack of bolts into somebody's chest.

I quite laughed at that. From today's devlog.

[Josephus]

Yes, I did too.

I sigged it, just for the pleasure.

[Mel_Vixen]

So this bolts then used the skill for impro weapons as that happend?