Print

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

[tfaal]

One thing to bear in mind with mobile fortresses is that they aren't happening any time soon. Toady described mobile fortress parts, and that's one of the more pie-in-the-sky items on a list that will span years of development time.

[Cruxador]

What's the deal with "entity populations"? How much will this be abstracted?

It should be possible to optionally hide sections of the map during world generation

Seems to me that the easiest way to do this would be to just hide all terrain not claimed as part of a nation. This would also be the most extreme possibility within logical reason, which I consider to be positive, as long as it's a worldgen option.

Various benefits to having a well developed guild or sect are under consideration

Seems to me that the simplest and most logical benefits would be a small happiness bonus for members of a well-treated group, and, more importantly, an increase in migrants with skills appropriate to established guilds or worshipping a deity with an established sect.

Regarding Night creatures, seems like they're not explicitly vampires, but are more generic fairies and bogeymen that can take on all manner of abhorrent aspects. I doubt that they'll ever become more explicit, and I approve of this.

[Shrike]

That's incredible. Toady one don't go for no half-measures. I'm very much a fortress player, but all that new adventure mode stuff is really making me excited.

A shame it'll take so long to get running.

[tfaal]

What's the deal with "entity populations"? How much will this be abstracted?

Entity populations are set to be very abstracted from a distance, but gain detail when the player interacts with them. As soon as you start talking with a member of an entity population, they will gain a name and a history, though not one connected with any important figures. Hopefully, the implementation of entity populations will allow worlds to be more populous, and historical figures to be more interesting, now that they don't have to fill mundane roles. Entity populations will also provide a source for the armies that siege your fortress, and will populate the outlying settlements around your it.

[nenjin]

I'm guessing adventure mode is going to start getting the love once the bugs from the recent Fortress updates are mostly quashed. Gotta say, adventure mode sounds like it will be just as fun, if not a totally different kind of fun, as fortress mode once most of that is in.

[Neonivek]

Will the Trade Menu, in Adventurer mode, be fixed in the not too distant future? At least to the extent that you no longer need to do guess work on the prices of objects? (or a lot of calculations if you happen to have the price list on hand).

[Footkerchief]

What's the deal with "entity populations"? How much will this be abstracted?

This got a lot of discussion in the old FotF.  Unfortunately, SMF doesn't allow direct quoting from locked threads, so these quotes lack context (I don't have the patience to copy all the nested quotes).

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=30026.msg596140#msg596140

Fortress mode and anything that touches fortress mode (armies) are the main problems, because fortress mode can't accommodate large numbers and so will continue to make less and less sense.  There won't ever be 1000+ dwarves wandering around your fort, at least with processors the way they are.  So it'll be dealt with through various cheats and nonsense, such as your fortress only eventually containing elite/important/lucky people and only being attacked directly by the best squads of the larger enemy armies or at least by small numbers at a time.  Outside the fortress, you can have larger armies and fight larger forces, which kind of ties in with the notion of a broad spectrum of settlements arising around your fort itself (so the fort becomes more keep-like in a way, though not to the point of providing shelter to everybody in surrounding areas, though you could use external walls on the mid-level map near your fort for that purpose).  As long as you aren't zoomed in on it in fortress mode, it can be handled.  Army battles can occur in either the mid/world-level maps with the full forces, or zoomed in for specific interesting aspects of the conflict, with the number of troops loaded locally being metered, in frozen world time.  I think it can work, but your fortress will always be sort of an anomaly in time and space, in terms of how fast time passes (or how it stops passing suddenly) and how only a certain amount of critters can be stuffed in there.  The alternative is sort of a small-scale tribal warfare, which isn't satisfying for a general fantasy setting and doesn't give the world much longevity, or abstraction in the fort itself with units representing larger numbers of units, which I think kills a lot of what I've been attempting to do with unit differentiation, but mileage will vary there.

Adventure mode can make more sense since you have only a local picture that passes time in a more reasonable way (ie walking across the local map doesn't take 3 days or whatever).

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=30026.msg601337;topicseen#msg601337

Yeah, the genesis of this conversation in the previous posts was part of the last interview I did, in which I talked quite a bit about how abstract populations might be used to convey a proper sense of scale for a typical fantasy world while at the same time maintaining much of the historical data and individuality of the people you meet, so it's not so much a processor issue, and these critters don't all get saved or stored individually, though obviously it comes up a little bit since there's stuff to be handled.

[...]

This is all the central problem with fort mode really.  It's similar to the difficulty with retiring a fort and expecting it to be going on as you want it to continue on.  Jumping back and forth between levels of abstraction is a hard problem when there are things like the state of fluids and so on to consider, and so without a solution present I've been leaning toward having one main active area, at least for any reasonable period of time, with sub-areas available for relatively simple acts like army fights.

There's a bloat somewhere about "deep sites" which relates to the question of fortress sprawl.  I think at least having a main section that you are looking at in detail and other sections that you aren't looking at in detail (at worst, ever) is a tractable problem, where you could think of your fortress as the keep in the center of a giant capital, and you could have your dwarves off doing all sorts of projects all over while still maintaining a "realistic" sense of scope, without your dwarves being important enough in the workings of things so as not to become drowned in mediocrity.  You'd still have complete access top to bottom in one map column, so bad things could still happen locally, which is good, and it could give you all sorts of reports and various control over non-visible sections, and they could be realized for you in either (a) adventure mode, (b) in a non-controllable fortress mode based on the adventure mode representation.  This is easier since fluids don't come into play (since they can be controlled in general when you don't go all nuts with them).  I don't mean to harp on fluids though -- there are all sorts of problems.

[...]

Regarding China, which I had been reading about for some months intermittently due to my ROTK/Water Margin read, from the Battle of Red Cliffs (~200 AD) to the battle at the end of the Song dynasty (~1300 AD), it looks like the larger armies in the area were always around 200,000 troops (which is why I used this figure in a previous post), but there were lots of battles in the intervening time, so it could have been even higher.  That said, I'm not sure a large-sized DF map could be considered China-sized (especially in the sense of arable land, since we'd prefer a huge amount of biome diversity), though we don't actually have a scale, and abstracted populations would change the potential of it.

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=30026.msg1088744;topicseen#msg1088744

I think it's important to be able to have something like a riot in a city without necessarily having an important historical figure instigate the event, and in that way groups and whatever segments of populations it is keeping track of should be able to react based on entity ethics/history/whatever -- the main thing they'd be missing is the personality variables.  At the same time, I think it's important to use historical figures when we've got them, because those kinds of legends are generally more compelling.

[tfaal]

Wow, thanks Foot! Really nice overview of the idea.

[Neonivek]

Yeah Abstracted populations could finally allow HUGE maps, given that it would have to keep track of thousands instead of tens of thousands of individuals, which is something I wanted for a very long time.

Goodness Imagine a time when the Large maps are considered the pocket worlds.

I mean even on a slow computer it is the History Generation that takes the longest time.

[Mel_Vixen]

Imagine when we get citys in the size of a pocketworld. Including 3d-ness from mixed cultures ala Giant trees above and dungeon below. I can see loading and unloading of people as well as structures happen as a adventurer walks through a place.

[Neonivek]

Imagine when we get citys in the size of a pocketworld. Including 3d-ness from mixed cultures ala Giant trees above and dungeon below. I can see loading and unloading of people as well as structures happen as a adventurer walks through a place.

I don't picture that happening. That would be extremely massive. I am not even sure Rome was that large.

It would certainly be a huge city.

[Dante]

Huzzahs. Minor-change on a fortnightly/monthly schedule are going to do wonders to all these annoying barrels of spare time I have stockpiled.

[Acanthus117]

Wow, I am so psyched for this!

When we do butchering and stuff, will it still not require a tool, like in fortress mode? Or will we need a knife to butcher prey?

[Snap]

Can we get the ability to fill in/build a natural un-mined wall if we're going to have invaders digging up our fortress? I would not want half my fort blinking as a construction everytime I'm in the designation menu because of invaders. It's about the only way I can see giving them the ability to dig wiout annoying us too much. :)>

[Toybasher]

What about using medical skills in adventure mode?