Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Urist Imiknorris]

Yes, elves for the elf people

<Standard response re. Blood Gods, Skull Thrones>

[kuketski]

Or you could just assign weapons to be coated in whatever via the military menu.

Then to preven poisoning sparring partners, you should be able to set another weapon for training.

Unless you want whole army to:
run all the way to a weapons stockpile,
drop training weapons,
take combat weapons,

if weapon is not coated,
       go to mixtures stockpile,
       take mixture,
       do coating

and only after that they are ready to battle.

[Mr.Person]

Toady, I think you should spend less time on Dwarf and Adventure modes and spend more time fleshing out world-gen. Sure, add some random fun stuff whenever so you don't get bored, but it's going to be much more interesting in both Dwarf and Adventure modes when wars are regular, leaders have personalities and send you on quests, night-creatures are in, overland groups like raiders and thieves are terrorizing you, and of course, traveling groups come and go to talk, trade, and give quests. I think most of this stuff or foundational work for it is already the near-term goals, though, it just seems that some very vocal players want you to fix problems with Adventure and Dwarf modes when you're almost certainly going to have to gut whatever system you'd be "fixing" now anyways. For instance, you could add better hauling in the form of carrying more than one item somehow, but when it comes time to to fix Mining skill gain by making mining take longer, the main culprit of hauling taking too long, having too much fucking stone everywhere, will already be solved.

Wouldn't it make more sense to have a strong framework and foundation for the game before trying to flesh out Adventure and Fortress modes? The easiest way would be having a lot of enemies and a whole slew of foundational bare-bones systems to add features on to instead of slowly iterating the framework and adding features immediately once the framework for that one feature is done? There's no reason to gut code or anything, I just think Adventure mode would benefit more from having quests than from having an unwieldy ability menu to do everything in Fortress mode... when if you wanted to do that, you could just play in Fortress mode with a hermit in the first place. And we all know Fortress Mode is already unwieldy enough as it is, no reason to make an already complicated system even more confusing.

Besides, the game generating quests from events taking place is the one feature of the entire game that excites me the most. Nevermind random critters or complex fight scenarios or whatever else, just the game looking at the state of the world and generating something fun for the player to do from the existing structure is really interesting.

So I guess if you want to skip to the really short version, my advice is to make the quest system and all necessary framework for it ASAP. Are you adding the necessary conflict generators for the quest system in the near future? If I remember properly, you're planning on doing villains soon, which is good, but to really work, the quest system's going to need more than JUST bandits to catch and thieve's guilds to break up.

[kuketski]

If I remember properly, you're planning on doing villains soon, which is good, but to really work, the quest system's going to need more than JUST bandits to catch and thieve's guilds to break up.

Well, villains IS the major threat and therefore main source of quests.
No creature(except megabests) could create such a threat as squad of well-trained master thieves or rouges or just bandits. They could slay, kidnap, steal, rape, burn villages+kill the male+take the females with them and so on. Or you could be that villain(criminal lord, razing towns and stealing virgins to add them to your harem and sex them to build army of your offsprings) and NPCs will take quests to kill/catch you.

They could implement different tactics, use ranged weapons and armor.
They are avare, that some day someone WILL come to get them and therefore they`ll be either hiding or constantly changing their location.
Or fortifying like hell.

i cant imagine same amount of threat(and fun) caused by, say... a huge pack of wolves!
one ambusher with a bow and they are dead.

Just like it was in Middle Ages (and, alas, sometimes happens even now) the sapien beings is your main enemy.

[turgidtoupee]

I'd really like to see a feature where one can choose what race one plays as in fortress mode, similar to adventurer mode. Playing as other races is really interesting, and as long as dwarves are the default (like humans are in adventurer mode) I think it'd stay true to being dwarf fortress. Plus, you could even have a quick start function like in adventurer, where the player's given a site and a team and can just get on with it.

Technically you can already do this; the other races aren't fundamentally different from dwarves, though, even if you mod the hell out of them.

However, not only are other races in fort mode planned to be in the vanilla game at some point, but at that point they should be more different than dwarves and possibly even have unique game mechanics along with them. Excerpts from the old dev page:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

• HUMAN TOWN: You should be able to control a human town, as you control a dwarf fortress, but with changes appropriate to the new setting. Related to Req469 and Bloat146.
• GOBLIN/KOBOLD/CAVER: Controlling the bad guys is an obvious extension, and you've got the whole friendly happy world waiting for your raiding parties.
• ELF FOREST RETREAT: Yes, elves for the elf people -- but thinking more general, as we list all these racial civilizations, we should think in broad terms and use the civilization definitions to allow any type of civilization to be played. Elves will provide some necessary extra elements for this process. Mixing the cliff dwelling, wilderness dwelling, town building, ethics/sphere-aligned/religious tendencies into a robust interface for civilization building is a long-term goal. Related to Bloat25.

Among other things.

I know you can already do this, but it requires changing the entity file. I meant I'd really like some explicit support and a way to do it in-game, cause playing as a different race can add to the experience and make it far more interesting

[kuketski]

Toady, you`ve fixed bug issue with migration in 0.31.14, but will it still be possible to get other races with immigrants? Like conquering other civ`s towns and citizens in world gen assimilates them?  I think, that full-Human squad will be a nice addition to fortress`s military force!

Will you include sexual selection as eugenics and civilizations evolution mechanism(like some dwarves prefer stronger, but shorter mates with red hair and, therefore, their childs will be radhaired, stronger and shorter and they`ll conquer their grace-loving elven friends)?

[Untelligent]

Or you could just assign weapons to be coated in whatever via the military menu.

Then to preven poisoning sparring partners, you should be able to set another weapon for training.

We can already tell the dwarves to use different weapons for combat and training.

[James.Denholm]

Or you could just assign weapons to be coated in whatever via the military menu.

Then to preven poisoning sparring partners, you should be able to set another weapon for training.

We can already tell the dwarves to use different weapons for combat and training.

Wait, what?

[Untelligent]

Pretty sure that was one of the things added in the military menu overhaul.

[Urist Imiknorris]

My day has improved.

e- yay for [UNDIGGABLE] tag.

[Untelligent]

Undiggable tag is nice. Doesn't really do anything new though unless you want a really hard rock that you can dig. Or a not-hard rock that you... can't.

Interesting.




Too bad diggable Hidden Hard Stuff still probably doesn't play nice with the rest of the game.

[zwei]

Undiggable tag is nice. Doesn't really do anything new though unless you want a really hard rock that you can dig. Or a not-hard rock that you... can't.

On contrary!

Undiggable veins/clusters in normal layers!

Something that can harm your digging operations but also something to foil digging enemies.

I can imagine elaborate scheme where you cave-in several apropriatelly shaped veins to create trully inpenetrable room.

[kuketski]

Undiggable tag is nice. Doesn't really do anything new though unless you want a really hard rock that you can dig. Or a not-hard rock that you... can't.

On contrary!

Undiggable veins/clusters in normal layers!

Something that can harm your digging operations but also something to foil digging enemies.

I can imagine elaborate scheme where you cave-in several apropriatelly shaped veins to create trully inpenetrable room.

hehe...
such perfectly shaped veins requires hellish luck.
Building iron/steel wall will be quicker and more realistic.

Can you imagine building missile silo by cave ins?
steel underground walls is the best way to prevent digging in by the invaders.

[MagmaMcFry]

Will there ever be a translation of DF to other languages?

I could imagine three variants:

• Overcode all grammatic expressions to be translatable (REALLY hard, REALLY messy)
• Modify a version directly to change the language of all displayed text (then either upgrade all separate language versions or directly abandon the language-modified game)
• Make a "Language" object to insert appropriate names into expressions of the chosen language (best solution, one distribution can support multiple languages)

I would really appreciate any translations, I've got a lot of german friends who would play the heck out of DF if it wasn't English.

[Knight Otu]

Support for translations was on the old dev pages as well, as part of the presentation arc. Specifically Core 54:

Core54    TRANSLATION SUPPORT    (Future)    though current font implementations restrict this process at the moment if non-ASCII characters are to be involved.

Now that true-type support is in, if buggy, the mentioned hurdle could be smaller, actually.

Since most announcements are already identified by a token for the announcement init file, those tokens could be also used for translation files, though many, many other texts would need tokens as well.

So it might look like
[REACHED_PEAK:"Du hast den Gipfel des %PEAK_NAME% erklommen.]
[CREATURE_BLIZZARD_MAN_PREFSTRING_2:eiszapfenartigen Zähne]

The latter does mean that such strings would have to be definable in the raws (so rather than [PREFSTRING:terrifying features], we might have [PREFSTRING:COMMON_PREFSTRING_TERRIFYING]), and that mods would have to be able to provide additional translation files.