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[isitanos]

I thought we put the comments directly addressed to Toady in green, not only the questions. Anyways, I removed all the green, I don't want to spend time figuring out what to highlight or not.

[Toady One]

I read all of the posts in this thread, but if you want a reply to a specific point, then I guess that's what should be green.  I worked through more than half of the new questions this morning, and I just went with one of your actual question mark questions, but if you've got a few things you want me to focus on, you can highlight those.  It'll be difficult to get to everything.  I should be able to post my next giant reply tomorrow or the next day, depending on how everything else is going.

[Fedor]

I don't know about anyone else, but I personally am seeing a game that I can play and enjoy right now.  The new underground is nine kinds of fantastic, a whole bunch of stuff has been fine-tuned and optimized, the SDL-powered interface has unlocked massive potential and already delivered several neat features, and basically DF is cooler than ever.

That said, I am running into two problems, only the first of which is clearly being addressed:

1) The military system is extremely cumbersome.  Sure, you can do great things with it, but what I mostly want to do is simple stuff - get dwarves to train reliably, see them usually picking suitable weapons and armor for training and war without having their hands held or taking so long that enemies rampage through the fort while they re-equip, make them return to civilian work, or rally troops and particular civilians as needed to combat a threat.  The 40d system accomplished three out of four of these things.  However, at present, doing these things is very tedious, highly confusing, and doesn't always work.  Too many things have to cooperate perfectly for something good to happen.  A couple of examples:  While the demonstrations and drills used in training are way cool, my dwarves spend inordinate amounts of time waiting for something to happen (which it may not, even if I let them waste months of game time) meanwhile gaining no skills.  Also, when ordered to attack something, a group of dwarves tends in my experience to mostly stand near the target, watching one dwarf fight it.  In short, it's hard to know when something isn't working because the player skipped one of the many required steps, or because the game doesn't have that feature polished yet.

2) More generally, I'm seeing a worrying increase in the sort of complexity that, instead of making the game cooler and more fun, makes it more confusing and unfriendly.  Item properties are a particular beef of mine.  I have no clue how to do anything with the following numbers, understand what they affect in game, or determine what values will accomplish which result.

Code: [Select]

[MOLAR_MASS:64000]
[IMPACT_YIELD:1080000]
[IMPACT_FRACTURE:1080000]
[IMPACT_ELASTICITY:600]
[COMPRESSIVE_YIELD:1080000]
[COMPRESSIVE_FRACTURE:1080000]
[COMPRESSIVE_ELASTICITY:600]
[TENSILE_YIELD:200000]
[TENSILE_FRACTURE:550000]
[TENSILE_ELASTICITY:124] 110
[TORSION_YIELD:200000]
[TORSION_FRACTURE:550000]
[TORSION_ELASTICITY:200]
[SHEAR_YIELD:200000]
[SHEAR_FRACTURE:550000]
[SHEAR_ELASTICITY:200]
[BENDING_YIELD:200000]
[BENDING_FRACTURE:550000]
[BENDING_ELASTICITY:124]
[MAX_EDGE:10000]

[nuker w]

The 'numbers' are, i'm guessing, used by Toady to make fighting alot more realistic and making what an item is made of and what type of item it is count. Whilst it may appear harder to mod, it will let the general playing alot more enjoyable.

[Psieye]

The military is painful because it takes a lot of knowledge to be certain whether it's the game screwing up due to a bug or the player screwing up due to lack of knowledge (or bad habits from 40d). Given time both will be sorted, but we're all impatient by nature to be playing a long-term alpha game anyway so we get frustrated. My view is that Toady is simulating the bureaucratic nature of militaries - you put in effort to get the administrative machine set up and then it does everything you want (once the bugs are ironed out) with much less effort. Yes that means simple stuff is actually harder to do with no preparation beforehand. Realism & long-term fun vs short-term fun, there will be many people that disagree with Toady's choice.

As for materials system complexity, it's DF's nature to get ridiculously complicated and detailed. But I assume you didn't complain of the huge variety of rocks and gems you can dig up? Just like how you'd need to dig out some (high school level) geology lore to understand the many kinds of rock (and if you're at university level, get disappointed with it), you need to dig out some materials science lore to understand the material properties. Those numbers are the exact variables materials scientists use to classify materials. As far as practical knowledge of "change this number to get this effect", people have been researching that over in the modding subforum so ask for a summary there if the wiki doesn't already have it.

[mendonca]

people have been researching that over in the modding subforum so ask for a summary there if the wiki doesn't already have it.

Or change the values yourself, plot a graph of combat effectiveness vs. value based on weapon type / armor type etc., and publish the results yourself!

Really, with the Arena, there is no excuse.

[Neonivek]

I feel a bit guilty for contributing to the question flood Toady got. Especially since my question wasn't really important in the sense that it would be answered if I waited long enough (though truthfully it is my #1 most annoying part of Adventurer mode... #2 being the new caves)

[Mel_Vixen]

Well toady seems not to much bugged by the questions. It maybe help him even to get his thoughs straight and some stuff recaped. It helped me often enought times. Also answering question helps to keep the contact to the players.

[G-Flex]

2) More generally, I'm seeing a worrying increase in the sort of complexity that, instead of making the game cooler and more fun, makes it more confusing and unfriendly.  Item properties are a particular beef of mine.  I have no clue how to do anything with the following numbers, understand what they affect in game, or determine what values will accomplish which result.

Honestly, that's only really a problem for modders. As a player, all you need to know is stuff like "X is tough and pliable" or "Y can be really, really sharp". A little bit more explanation regarding the internals would be neat for modders to have, but ideally, you shouldn't really need to know any of that; you should just be able to give a material values that make sense, and the results should make sense (please note the "ideally" here; I don't think we're to that point yet).

[Quatch]

Along with the in-game encyclopedia for new creatures, would it be possible (and useful vs above comments) to procedurally generate descriptions of what the various metals are good at?

The game knows the critera for good armor, ranged, slicing and bashing equipment, and could probably do something like:

Bronze is a hard metal with little flex (I'm making this up), frequently used for armor and edged weapons. It's low density (Again making up for sake of point) makes it less useful in bashing weaponry. Bronze equipment has been seen on $list_of_civs. Bronze is made from tin and copper, which can be found in the following rocks (list rocks you've seen that have had it, include civ knowledge?).

[Intelligent Shade of Blue]

Okay this is pretty non-important, but I'm curious...

Toady, re: the development page, inferring from one of your blog entries, it seems light blue is the "to be in the next update" color. Will there be other colors to tell us what you're working on, and possibly a key of some sort to say what the colors mean? You know, something that looks somewhat similar to the old dev page...

[Mandaril]

Okay this is pretty non-important, but I'm curious...

Toady, re: the development page, inferring from one of your blog entries, it seems light blue is the "to be in the next update" color. Will there be other colors to tell us what you're working on, and possibly a key of some sort to say what the colors mean? You know, something that looks somewhat similar to the old dev page...

In last development thread (for development of 31.x) it was something like this:
-Doing
-Doing
And between those two are several shades of blue, deepening as thing gets completed.
-Done
-Maybe not doing in this release
-Definately not doing in this release

[Neonivek]

He doesn't need Red or Purple in this case.

Nor does different shades of blue really seem all that needed.

[Dakkan]

I would definitely prefer a darker color for finished.

[Neonivek]

I would definitely prefer a darker color for finished.

I meant more in what the colors meant.