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[smjjames]

I already posted this question up on the .8 release thread, but I'll put it here for good measure.


Since the Arsenal dwarf is being removed in .9 and is on a vacation of indeterminate length:

For forts that currently have an arsenal dwarf, will those saves be compatible with .9? I'm wondering because my fort is at the point where I need to use an arsenal dwarf in order to do much of the military stuff, and so when the arsenal dwarf position goes missing (it's in the entity_civ file, right? Which requires a regen) what happens to those in worldgen an in your fort that currently have the arsenal dwarf position?

[Toady One]

In old saves, the position will be there, but you won't have to use it.  Save compat is fine -- I left the responsibilities in but they aren't used in the code except to load them and not throw an error message.  You can just fire your current arsenal dwarf.

[smjjames]

In old saves, the position will be there, but you won't have to use it.  Save compat is fine -- I left the responsibilities in but they aren't used in the code except to load them and not throw an error message.  You can just fire your current arsenal dwarf.

Okay cool.

[cephalo]

The arsenal dwarf could be fun if there was more feedback regarding his exact responsibilities. If the dwarves were holding three axes in each hand because the arsenal dwarf made a mistake due to incompetance, it would be comforting to know that.

[Intelligent Shade of Blue]

This could be blasphemy, but...

Will Armok ever make an appearance in DF? Like as a deity that all dwarves worship (in addition to their other, lesser gods)?

[Urist Imiknorris]

This could be blasphemy, but...

Will Armok ever make an appearance in DF? Like as a deity that all dwarves worship (in addition to their other, lesser gods)?

Armok is the player.

[Cruxador]

This could be blasphemy, but...

Will Armok ever make an appearance in DF? Like as a deity that all dwarves worship (in addition to their other, lesser gods)?

The answer to this is almost certainly "no", though of course only Toady can give you an absolute answer there. The popular thought on Armok now is that he is the player.

[Intelligent Shade of Blue]

This could be blasphemy, but...

Will Armok ever make an appearance in DF? Like as a deity that all dwarves worship (in addition to their other, lesser gods)?

The answer to this is almost certainly "no", though of course only Toady can give you an absolute answer there. The popular thought on Armok now is that he is the player.

While I'm familiar with the notion that Armok is the player, with the possibility of temples in fortresses on the horizon, I think it would be nice if there was a cult of Armok... What's better than having your dwarves building statues and temples in your honor?

[G-Flex]

It's my understanding that Armok is simply unnecessary. The gods in-game are randomly generated, so why the need for some specific one? It's not like there's anything known about him besides him being the "god of blood" anyway.

[Toybasher]

Will the heart and throat ever get any other use? I mean you fixed major arteries for the next update, but a blue heart (function completely lost) should be fatal, at the same time throat wounds should cause death from not being able to breathe like the old 40d days.

[Tehran]

In the case of supporting tiles for each game object, I need to figure out the deal with all the new SDL code before I can lay anything out in stark terms.

For when you implement full graphics support... are you going to release the game with its own tilesets already installed? And who would draw those tilesets? (As opposed to releasing it with just the capability to have tilesets installed.) I know that some of the traditionalists love their ascii, but we all know that the lack of graphics is what turns many people off about the game.

[smjjames]

Will the heart and throat ever get any other use? I mean you fixed major arteries for the next update, but a blue heart (function completely lost) should be fatal, at the same time throat wounds should cause death from not being able to breathe like the old 40d days.

We'll have to see with the new fixes in .9 and from what Toady said in the bug reports and the devlog, that stuff should be fixed.

[isitanos]

The principle problem is basically that luxuries aren't nearly as satisfying in the game as they are in real life.  People still tend to enjoy things (as players, not characters) like collecting stuff or gambling in a computer game, since it doesn't deviate too far from the real world equivalents, but a lot of luxuries would be meaningless (consider eating "fine foods", say, though if you are really into the roleplaying it works I suppose)

One thing that Gearhead (another roguelike whose themes tended to hit into this) used was tracking the player character's "mood" in terms of a vague mixture of happiness and exhaustion, and displaying it with a series of green + marks or red - marks on the screen.  When your mood is high, you get a benefit to your social / mental / manual dexterity stats and a bonus to any actions that require concentration; when it's low, you get penalties to those things.

Things like tracking through a sewer, failing at tasks, eating charred monster corpses and so on would lower your mood, while success, good food, soaking in hot springs and so forth would raise it.  It felt fairly realistic -- we've all had days where a bad mood makes it hard to do something, which makes you angrier which in turn makes you do even worse until you break whatever you're trying to fix or whatever.

The ability to accumulate bonuses by having a very high mood (at least until your mood slips back towards normal) also rewarded players for luxuries and such.  For instance, I'd always buy chocolate bars and carry them with me on long sewer missions.

Will adventure mode in DF ever track the player character's mood?  It's such a big part of Dwarf Mode that it seems like it'd be a logical thing to extend to adventure mode although, of course, I wouldn't expect players to go insane without something Lovecraft-style causing them to.  But there's various other things that could be done with it, like the bonuses / penalties I mentioned above.

This is a great idea, that would give a subtle but real gameplay role to luxuries. A good reason for people who are not too much in roleplaying to buy masterwork beds. For players that actually want to be a sewer dweller and not be depressed all the time (even though a kind of gloomy, self-destructive character would fit with that theme), what makes the player happy/comfortable could change over time. This is more or less the same idea as cave adaptation: spend a lot of time in the great outdoors, and caves/cities make you claustrophobic or dizzy. Live in a goblin society for a while, and you should be clueless and miserable at first when you try to integrate a human/dwarven society. And so on...
Some stuff should be just too much to handle though (i.e. you can't get used to it, or rather you can, but the only way is to become insane enough), such as the sight of demons, and other horrors.

Speaking of mood, could we have fey/fell moods for the player, where he feels compelled to realize a feat, with a potentially great benefit but also a great penalty if he fails? To avoid a sudden unexpected possession to ruin a game, it should probably be rather easy to foresee, for example if they only have a chance of happening if you push the above mood mechanic to extremes, or you make a visit to an out-of-the-ordinary place such as a god's altar, or engage dialog with a powerful demon.

[Toybasher]

Will the heart and throat ever get any other use? I mean you fixed major arteries for the next update, but a blue heart (function completely lost) should be fatal, at the same time throat wounds should cause death from not being able to breathe like the old 40d days.

We'll have to see with the new fixes in .9 and from what Toady said in the bug reports and the devlog, that stuff should be fixed.

No no no, I mean the heart counts as a organ so bruising can make it blue (blue means organ has stopped function entirely) Now two bruised lungs are enough to kill you, but a blue heart will not do ANYTHING dispite your heart has pretty much more or less stopped beating. (unless of course all creatures are zombies or somthing)

[Jiri Petru]

I have to be adding to the huge pile of questions, but, but... there are simply too many things I need to ask! 

The situation could change again when supply/demand goes in and that information is considered as acquirable knowledge, but at that point there could be something like a "chat with merchant" option or something that immediately illuminates all the rough pricing information, or that could just be automatic or something.

Isn't this what the Appraising skill is supposed to simulate? I mean, why have separate systems when we already have skills? The "chat with merchant" option could probably train the skill or add temporary bonuses.

Yeah, it would be a good angle on adding temple rituals etc. in a non-boring way, as well, since they'd be there for your infiltration.  Of course, then there'd need to be some kind of button to let you kneel in front of the sacred rock or whatever.

Have you considered how things like "kneeling in front of the statue" will be controlled in terms of interface, etc? I'm a bid afraid that as you keep adding more and more moves/things to do in Adventure mode, the list of commands will become so enormously long it would be unusable. I'm thinking rare things like these might be triggered through some item in environment - like the statue here. Rather than having the next-to-useless "kneel" command available at all times, the player would click "interact" or something on the statue, and the game would list all possible things to do there, including kneeling. Or something... The other issue is that the player might not know he can kneel in front of the statue and that the game would react (and kneeling everywhere just to try if it does something is a bit over the top), so a menu like this would definitely help. The question here is if you have thought about how to handle controls in adventure mode in a way that would both allow the miriad of functions and still stay user friendly at the same time?

The previous problems with cave rivers make me wary of them, but it would be cool to get the place looking nicer.  The underground is pretty dreary right now.  The treasure hunter role is the best bet there, probably, though that might focus on areas of concentrated local interest at first.  I guess enough of those makes for an exciting underground, but we'll probably need to find some middle ground stuff to avoid over-saturation.  Dwarf mode wants interesting stuff all over underground but it makes adventure mode cave exploration goofy.

How about if some features were added at embark? You could generate the word with the feature frequency optimalised for adventure mode, and then throw in some extra features when the player embarks in fortress mode. Or alternatively scan the neighbouring map squares and move the features from there to the embark idea or something. Or something... The question is whether retrospecting "cheating" like this (that could probably help even in other ideas) is something you might consider, or a thing that doesn't fit into your idea of simulating the world.

Another example might be ore veins and gems. Generate the world with realistic (low) amount of these, then throw in some extra ones to the embark area. Presumably hardcore players could turn off these extras in init, playing a realistic fortress in an area with a single metal vein, not veins of every metal possible. (Site finder would be needed to avoid completely empty areas, though)

-----

And a brand new question that popped in my mind when you were talking about ordering companions, having your own farm, and moving the time forward.

How about switching from adventure mode to something like fortress mode when ordering minions? You could control you farm like in dwarf mode, then switch back to your adventurer at any time and continue adventuring. Is switching game modes (or more precisely, levels of control) something you would like to explore, or again something you don't like?

The reason why I ask is that I'm almost terrified when I imagine having to command a farm from the "first person view". Imagine a farm with a couple of fields, some cows and pigs, and 7 servants. Still quite a small establishment I think. But the horror of having to find each servant, then order him using tal(k) interface, then some horribly complicated console thing for typing commands and locating them on the map...  How much easier would it be to switch to fortress mode, issue professions using the same system (v-p-l), quering a couple of jobs in workshops, drafting one guy to a military and setting him to guard the "farm burrow", then switching back to adventure mode. Now I can go kill an ettin and be sure the farm won't explode.

The game mode wouldn't have to be an exact copy of dwarf mode, nor do we want it to, I suppose. It could be heavily simplified, and could run in adventure-time instead of the faster fortress-time. I just think it would be much easier to control a farm/castle/hideout/cave/manor/etc. this way. We already have working code for stuff like this, so why not use it?

EDIT: It would be useful even for digging or building houses along with more people.

I think the issue here might be that it's too "god-like" and gives you more control than you would have if you stayed in "first person". But I disagree. Thinking about how dwarf mode works now, not only you can't control dwarves directly, but also all orders you can issue to your dwarves you could easily issue in "first person" too. For example issuing labours in v-p-l is like saying "You are responsible for handling animals and you two for fields". Quering a farmer's workshop to "make milk" and setting it to repeat is like saying "Brian, could you please milk Betty each morning?" And designated some trees to be cut is like "Guys, let's grab axes and get us some timber!" Perhaps it isn't so roleplayingish, but would be much, much more user-friendly.

EDIT: Also, this "farm mode" (for a lack of terms) could double as a way to fast forward time (if it used fortress-time) while staying in direct control.