Hopefully this is everything.
There are a lot of ideas in the new list about adventurers doing things, but very few about them getting compensated for their efforts, or requiring money in any way. Can we expect this to come into play as the bounty system is implemented? Will the typical heroic option of turning down a reward for a reputation bonus be available?
For money requirements, part of the idea of the trader role is to give you things to do when you are really rich, and we're still kicking things around there. In general, DF's adv mode is going to be able to rely far less on equipment power boosting as a form of metered progression, so the role of markets/shops isn't quite the same as in a normal RPG, though money might be one practical way to get at certain artifacts or masterwork equipment that you'd otherwise really need to work for (more so than just picking it up in some random shop in the woods -- which is how it currently is). There are things on the list like being able to buy a horse, pack mules or hiring bodyguards. 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), and we don't have the multiplayer component that would allow you to enjoy just hanging out with people for any period of time.
Ultimately though, some of the satisfaction of playing is probably going to need to be shifted to things like world effects, like saving villages and so on, since things can be permanently changed in the game for the worse if you don't try to help. Reputation should be a significant form of compensation, not just for the free offers of food and stuff, but in the sense that after a point you'd be able to call on all of a town's warriors to come with you on any misadventure you like if they respect you enough, and that'll extend your ability to do things significantly.
I haven't thought about it, but I suppose the effect of turning down a reward should be entity ethics-dependent as much as anything. You could get a significant reputation boost from some of the humans, say, but you might just be considered rude, impractical or a chump by other cultures for refusing a reward.
Y'know, with the the features of the "thief" adventurer role, the petty warlords presented under the "villians", and the (presumably poor) farming settlements under these warlords, a Robin-Hood type adventurer sounds quite doable. Are there any plans for giving money to impoverished peasants?
A Robin Hood was one of the archetypes we were considering as we were working out these roles, and we tried to get some of the necessary pieces together. There needs to be some more well-defined tyranny and probably some playing around with the fortress mode subgroups, maybe, to get the right dynamic set up, then it should be possible to do things like peasant rebellions and so on. When we get site resources in and start differentiating sections of the town (which are on the dev page), there will be a notion of relative wealth, but we still need to get at poverty. I think the night creature famines might actually end up being a launching point for some of how that works, though I'm not sure how much you'll be able to help people at first. So yeah, it's a kind of scenario knitting together some of the fringes of the posted notes, but we aren't sure how things are going to work out.
Are there plans to get constructed (wooden, Bituminous coal, Platinum) balls for rolling traps?
We didn't have specific plans, but since we have trap components, including a spiked ball, it would certainly be a reasonable and pretty easy thing to do. It would just need to know that it can roll (which is simple if it's just a tag or something). If that extended to... like rolling cylinders or something, as flavor it would be fine, but I haven't thought about how to implement a more complicated rolling profile.
Though I do have one question. In an adventurer made structure (or site or whathaveyou) will items inside still be scattered around to the hills? Or will that be removed for adventure made sites? Removed entirely? Removed only in locations where it doesn't make sense?(Fully sealed underground rooms, etc)
It'll probably start with the removal of the scattering mechanic for the adv sites. We have to be a little careful with your things. After that though, there should be some reemergence of theft/scattering depending on the qualities of the site. There's a balance to be struck, because it would be fun in a sense to use the villain hunting process to have a chance to track down the guy that took your stuff, but it would be incredibly annoying to have to do that very often (or even a few times).
Anyways, as for the quickly passing time thing, would it be possible to set the number of hours (between 1 and 12 sounds reasonable) you want to have pass by rather than the always 8 hours for sleep? Until something interrupts you anyway.
We were going to let you blast through an entire season if you wanted to. It has to know how you're going to handle food and water, and there's the matter of what's going on in the world, but the latter is already a current problem since the game advances to the next spring when you start a new dwarf game. Once villains are active, it could interrupt you if something comes up, but the dirtiest and most simple way would just be to have them frozen in place. Hopefully it won't come to that. The short-term idea was just to be able to advance abstractly through some steps of farming if you want (which is why it is in the farming section) and to fix up the silly sleep countdown.
(waterproof axles)
Could you explain this? Do you mean a way where you could have a rubber gasket or something around an axle someplace or at the attachment point to power compartmentalized mechanisms? Or maybe have a mechanism which is compartmentalized, but has am extension through a waterproof barrier which the axle is attatched to? Those ideas may be beyond the era that you want DF to be in, but hey. I certainly wouldn't doubt Dwarven ingenuity and if they can create a water based computer, then I'm sure they can create waterproof axles/mechanisms.
If I understand the problem, it's that the current axles are prone to flooding because water can flow through them, and people want to have a tile that has both an axle and through which fluid cannot pass. Like many of the mechnical things, I don't really have solid specific implementation ideas right now, but it seemed like a reasonably easy and good target, especially because it has been requested in the past. If the basic scenario just isn't feasible, I won't do it, probably, but it seems like a problem that should have a solution that isn't too modern, at least at some rough level of efficiency and in water shallow enough for high pressure not to be an issue.
What exactly is a Night Creature?
what are the plans for infectious lycanthropy/vampirism/etc?
I don't think it should be like a zombie-outbreak scenario, but having some way of catching monstrosity could be a lot of fun in both modes. I'm especially thinking of getting a werewolf curse in adventure mode and trying to keep it secret from the townsfolk while hunting for a cure. Or just eating everybody and attracting the attention of monster hunters.
The first few paragraphs here are a good example of what we were thinking they'd be like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_AnnisBlack Annis, also known as Black Agnes, is a bogeyman figure in English folklore. She is imagined as a blue-faced crone or witch with iron claws and a taste for human (especially child) flesh. She is said to haunt the countryside of Leicestershire, living in a cave in the Dane Hills, with an oak tree at its entrance.
She supposedly goes out onto the glens at night looking for unsuspecting children and lambs to eat, then tanning their skins by hanging them on a tree, before wearing them around her waist. She would reach inside houses to snatch people. Legend has it that she used her iron claws to dig into the side of a sandstone cliff, making herself a home there which is known as Black Annis's Bower. The legend led to parents warning their children that Black Annis would catch them if they did not behave.
Ideally we'd like our night creatures to end up like that. We wanted them to be randomly generated and mostly unique, though there could be classes of them that would let the groups that help you have legitimate strategies (since they'd have a chance to know what they are talking about). The examples Haspen mentioned (vampires, banshees, werewolves, ghosts, etc.) are all fair ones. "Trolls" sometimes have this role as well, though our current trolls are DND/Tolkienized and might not work, but fairy tale/night creature style trolls that kidnap people or kill them in the woods should be generated. Current trolls that get out of the underground might be able to play their part, though maybe they are more like semimegabeasts and not specifically night creatures, and might already being on the rampage with the villains before night creatures are even made. Grendel is kind of like that too. There are probably more similarities than differences, but night creatures were supposed to be a little more mysterious and insidious.
It is our hope that the thief role suspicion mechanics can be co-opted to allow for paranoia (that made the dev page, anyway), and anything night creatures can do to people should be able to happen to you. I guess it would have to be the werewolf-style ones and not the "drained slave" style ones. It would be funny if you have to face your failed night creature slayer as a subsequent adventurer.
When stone fall traps are going to actually be stones falling from a level above, will catapults at the same time also be changed to they actually fire stones in arches and can hit multiple Z-levels? Also on the topic of siege weapons, are there plans for aimed/diagonal shots?
We want to have them fire in arcs, yeah, though I'm not sure what is going to fall out of the siege engine changes. It would of course be cool to siege a site with a bunch of crazy dwarf-built siege weapons you build up that can blow out designated sections of wall and do all kinds of horrible things to structures and soldiers alike. It relates back to how the lifts and other stuff works out. It's weird in a way to build siege engines tile by tile, and a little fussy if you just want to do something normal, but there's going to be a good system living in there somewhere.
Will enemies with picks and mining skill intentionally deface engravings (they dislike/hate) to try to depress/anger the dwarves?
He he he, it's funny that that would be a valid strategy.
Since we are talking about making stone be able to roll when come off of a ramp,could it be possible to say make a really long path ramp that the stone can roll down into a long hallway and then roll down that hallway crushing whatever is in it's way? Ala Indiana Jones style?
He he, yeah, that's the idea, anyway. For each downward ramp the boulder should probably get several extra tiles in straight rolling distance (via its overall velocity which is diminishing as it rolls on level ground). If you gave the boulder a giant 5 level ramp, I guess it should be able to shoot out of the side of your fortress and you could make a kind of catapult that way. Hopefully whatever velocity mechanic that goes in will allow better transitions between those kinds of movement, and it would also be able to support having you kick somebody's sword along the ground and off a cliff and have it all work out.
WILL it be theoretically possible to make a for that actually inches it's entire bulk acro0s the map?
Near the end of the log, you make a reference to "Moving Fortress Sections" do you have any brief ideas what this will entail for a player and to what extent they will be able to use it? i.e will we be able to have multi-level lifts and other such things available to aid with hauling large amounts of goods?
Will moving fortress parts require anchors? (Essentially, will walking fortresses be possible, or will they require long piston chains and a single support to work?)
On the subject of moving fortress parts:
Will we be able to put workshops/stockpiles/etc. on them?
Will this effect how constructions are currently supported and what happens to them?
Example: can I link bridges together to form a path that extends slowly in the shape of a spiral towards the inner sanctum.
Can we control the time it takes to do these?
What kinds of transformations will be possible? Piston-dropping platforms? Winched systems? Gear-rotations?
Will there be new methods to get power? Or will we still be limited to the previous?
Can power be acquired by moving constructions?
Example: Can I create a dwarf-powered generator powered by my main hallways rocking back and forth as dwarves walk through it?
On moving fortress parts, would things like walls like the ones in indiana movies be possible? Such as rotating and moving walls that you can build, select and link to some mechanism and asign a function to them, as to create crushing wall traps, rotating secret doors, and whatnot, or the moving parts will all be predefined like the contructions on the uild mode?
We don't have a lot of specifics here yet. The idea has simply been judged feasible and fun and something we want to do, especially since it relates to boats and siege engines as well. It'll certainly involve the ability to move a section of fortress complete with items, units, buildings, stockpiles etc., because a boat or siege tower would also want to do that. The work in adventure mode has mostly prepared the game for those kinds of coordinate shifts, though there are probably some weird exceptions. If there are rolling siege towers, there will probably be absurd wind-powered self-contained fortresses with levers that can be set to change the wheels and get them going in any of the four directions. For walking ones, I'm not sure. If you have a dual lift that can alternately anchor on each leg, and there were something set up to get the lifted leg sliding forward, and a way to get the slider slid forward contained in both or one of the legs, it might work, but I'm not mechanically-minded and really have no idea what exactly is going to pop out of this stuff.
Rotating etc. walls should be possible, and we'd like to move beyond specific predefined constructions to allow you a bit of creative freedom (so that you'd be building your wall crushing traps from a few pieces and somewhere in that process you define the direction, etc). Having the dwarves understand how triggers open their way for them is still beyond what I can do, but things that act like the current lever-operated doors are fine.
What's the deal with "entity populations"? How much will this be abstracted?
The posts that Footkerchief quoted are still the deal.
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).
I probably won't mess with the trade menu until the new markets go in, but I don't think that'll be too distant. The lack of entity populations is going to hold up a lot of things, and once those are in, the markets (and farms and little houses) scattered around become near-term items. Annoyances with trading will then be fair to consider and trade should be more commonplace, so something will probably be done. 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. In the end, it's not supposed to be annoying and hopefully it'll stop being so as we work through it.
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?
Right now it requires any object with an edge. You can use any edged weapon (you start with a dagger as part of your equipment now), and if you get to the point where you don't have one, you can sharpen a stone if you can find one (they are almost everywhere). Later using a stone will take longer and perhaps mess with the quality/yield of the products, but that won't happen until we're abstracting time better.
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.
If it's the blinking, that could be init option'd away or given a hide mechanic. In general, it might not be unreasonable for *dwarves* to make a construction that replicates the appearance of a natural wall, although it's a little weird, especially if you can put two tiles together as if you are filling in the entire space again. Maybe it should require two stones to do that, or something.
What about using medical skills in adventure mode?
He he he, I'm not sure why we didn't consider that when talking through the roles, especially since it came up a lot before. Maybe we're too inclined to fatalism with our adventurers. We'll try to find a home for it.
Will plant-gathering from wild shrubs go in fairly early? I can't find it specifically mentioned on the list, but it seems like something that's fairly simple, both survival-wise and programming-wise.
I remember mentioning it when we were writing up basic skills, but I couldn't remember if it was already in the game and forgot to check. Like medical skills, it should definitely be in the lists. We'll work it in somewhere.
will other jobs in fortress mode requires or benefit from tools? like smithing require a hammer, carpenting require a saw, farming requiring...the farming thingie, etc?
I think, if I remember correctly.
That Fortress mode will still be extrapolated when it comes to tools, while Adventurer mode will still require them.
Yeah, the idea now is just to leave it the same, and explore various things in adventure mode where book-keeping and general catastropic meltdown won't be as much of a problem. If reasonable unannoying alterations can be made to dwarf mode, that'll be cool, but it's not crucial.
I notice that form the Dev pages, that Squad Formations weren't listed. Has that been pushed backed even further?
Yeah, within the larger military goals, we weren't sure what the best spot is, so we're just letting them float. It's something we want to do, but they don't have a home yet.
Yay for soil to being more interesting. So, what about more stuff like this? Fossils, burried bones, very rare occurences like very old coin, tool, armor piece or weapon?
There was something about burying entire ruins in soil in the treasure hunter section I think. Throwing crap all over around then and in old battlefields might be appropriate, but we'll have to see what comes out of it. When I stick boulders down there, it's specifically at first to give the adventurer some more easy rock without having to mine for it, so that'll probably be all that comes out of that specific list item.
Toady, I'd be very interested to hear your musings on fighting skill progression in adventure mode.
Specifically your ideas on balancing early game and end game challenge with tangible character progression and any thoughts regarding the current methods of training skills. Will any of it be involved more than coincidentally in your upcoming work?
The combat styles/moves will probably be the most significant dev stuff for this, and we're planning on having you be able to do things like learn new ways of fighting from people with whom you have a high reputation, so that if you help a town fight off some villain's henchmen etc. you'll be able to get better at being a hero. Balancing challenges will still be your job -- there just aren't a lot of easy challenges now in adventure mode, so we haven't really gotten a chance to see how well that's going to work. Once there are "bands" of three bandits or marauding goblins being naughty, then you should be able to get your foot in the door without doing an insane assault on a dragon or 50 goblin tower, and once your foot is in the door, you can continue to learn and help people out in reasonable ways and become a better fighter. For the flip-side, being a thief or villain, you might not have the same support network there for you at first, but you'll still be able to pick your targets -- when there's entity pop sprawl, there will be lots and lots of easy targets.
Once the combat flow changes are in, we're hoping to have some of the instant deaths and coin-flipping stuff mitigated slightly, so that it will be a bit easier to withdraw from a challenging situation, if you don't get yourself completely surrounded.
For training, especially with people throwing rocks for 5000 turns and so on, that kind of thing might as well be part of the pass-a-season mechanic, so that if you want to meditate on your left hook under a waterfall for 20 days, you can go ahead and do that. The tradeoffs would be your character's age, possible reputation fade, leaving whatever sites you've raised going fallow if you aren't working out from them, etc., so it shouldn't be an utterly unreasonable/spoily mechanic.
Ultimately, part of character progression might be more leveraging reputation you've been working on to accomplish larger goals than becoming an unstoppable one person army, but there will probably be an element of that if the combat/moves styles can drift into the insane. It's probably a good thing for a world gen option, so that you can have people that are people or people that are like Fist of the North Star or that glow with hero light and go all Cuchulain on people and stuff, just by controlling the upper reaches of the combat skill system.
How much will personality and/or personal capability play into a historical figure's desire to obtain or keep power, whether legitimately or as a Villain-type character? Might other factors come into play as well? Currently, even a powerful creature with maximum ambition will not necessarily obtain entity positions if they are open, possibly even taking up farming. I guess this might tie into leaders abdicating without fail if a POWER rolls into town and claims divinity.
Personalities come up in world gen, but they are kind of lacking, because the modern system is so non-judgmental, he he he. There isn't much of any intra-entity strife, so they aren't used for that anyway. So we're going to end up augmenting it with additional goals and "virtue/vice"-type stuff, and that should let us have people work out their ambitions in a consistent way, and then we should have more meat for the succession/schism stuff. I'm not sure about the future of the current personality facets. They are useful for things, but not so much for this. Freeing up some of the boring professions for entity pop people should also give us more room for personal ambition among the realized people (or appropriate people can be elevated from entity pops if they don't arise -- it's somewhat disappointing not to trace everybody back all the way to the beginning, but it's the only reasonable way at this point).
Toady, what degree of finesse are you planning on giving orders to followers? I.e. would it be possible to order a group of followers to dig *this* location or collect fruit from *that* specific tree? Also, any plans on being able to force loyalty beyond acting as a guide? Oooh, and can we get other people to enforce said loyalty for us?
I want to be able to order a slave gang to excavate those ruins, while I lounge about with a platter of fresh, slave-picked, strawberries, and if anyone thinks about shirking off or running away, having my well paid slave drivers chase them down.
I wanted to stay away from getting into having the adv mode stuff be just like dwarf mode, and ease more slowly into the group/job abilities there, to keep things varied for myself as much as anything. I don't understand the forcing loyalty part -- for the people you've interrogated? Ideally, though, you'd be able to give more and more orders, so that they'd be able to guard or work or build up your place for you, even if they end up being kind of dumb about it. It would be cool to have one of your followers be able to run their own villain-style network somewhere, so that you can be a kind of criminal overlord. Once the villains are in and working, that should actually be well within range.
I know sound/music is a low priority, but is there any chance for new music to be added to the game in the near future? I mean, I absolutely love THE dwarf fortress music, but I can only listen to it for so long. In my opinion, I believe music adds alot to the atmosphere of games. Everybody knows the great feelings of nostalgia when they hear video game music of days past.
I've had trouble finding time to record anything for a while now, so I wouldn't expect much here. It's one of those things I really want to do, but yeah, it's low priority overall.
(looting sites)
Will this include slaves or prisoners to ransom?
entity_default
[ETHIC:SLAVERY:PUNISH_CAPITAL]
How will ethics be further fleshed out to cover these situations?
Will this include creatures as well? I really want to rescue my kidnapped children and enslave any goblins not fortunate enough to die in battle.
The non-dead people will be non-dead and they'll just become refugee-migrants or remain site dwellers if you don't do anything with them. Hopefully we'll remember the kidnap victims so they can be rescued. Important prisoners are legitimate and there'd need to be new ethics for that, but I'm not a dwarven slaver fan... I guess it might be an issue that needs to be handled with humans, anyway, and if it's not too complicated we can support modded stuff for fort mode. We'll have to wait and see how army movement etc. works, and how fortress immigrant groups end up on the map, and how your entity pop dwarves end up working... there are a few things to think about.
Will the adventurer reactions be able to include reagents not normally seen in fortress mode, such as those random pebbles and loam?
Yeah, the only reaction I've got in there now is the reaction that makes a rock with an edge on it, and it uses the rocks you can pick up from the ground (which don't occur in dwarf mode). As long as you can isolate it as an item in adventure mode, you should have a shot at using it, though there are probably weird exceptions that just need a new token.
Pushing this just a step further, setting up evidence so that someone else gets accused in your place (dropping the bloody dagger in his garbage, money under his bed, or whatever), then fearing as the legendary investigator tracks one by one the clues that lead to you, would just be an amazing experience.
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how the tracking/suspicion/paranoia stuff plays out. Framing people might end up being the norm rather than the exception early on. That would lead to alibis and so on, and we'd just have to take care not to get carried away with information tracking, but it might be able to wing it respectably (it knows the random peasant didn't kill the guy, after all, so whatever possibly-generated alibi he's got is fine). The computer has the advantage of knowing you are the guilty party in advance, so getting that to work out fairly is just a matter of balancing things out, and then adding in the details that make it fun.
Having to observe and copy people's behavior so the disguise works would be interesting.
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. It's the kind of thing that would be farther out, but we've written up a lot of dev stuff in the past on ceremony and ritual so it's not out in outer space.
Will you keep improving the underground in the short term, and add incentives to dig down and face the dangers to find useful stuff? I'd love if you could bring back cave rivers
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.
Another way for a fortress to fall (very common in history) would be a traitor inside
Getting a dwarf to betray the fortress from the inside would require them to have contact -- which would make your broker or mayor/leader the best candidates among the important dwarves (any migrant or entity pop dwarf would do once you are established though). I imagine that would be fairly traumatic for players though, if you've got no way to handle the situation.
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?
Well, documentation is documentation, and we've obviously been lacking there. Having random metals would allow for a natural improvement of the descriptions for the stock stuff, so maybe that would be a good ticket. We got the reaction lists up for stone sometime in the past, and I guess it would be something like that, where it would be able to compare the value of metals. I don't want it to display kPA values and stuff, but I guess it could display a list of the common metals and show where your dwarves think the metal/material in question fits in to the picture.
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...
I've got the key up now, but I'm not quite sure how much the "partially done" color is going to come up or if there are going to need to be any refinements of that. I don't have a long term schedule of things I'm going to do, and I'd like to keep working that way so that I can maintain some flexibility and avoid any release delay horror.
Hey, Toady, will adventurers ever be able to use workshops, or will we be restricted to the 'buildingless' reactions?
We haven't decided what the future of workshops is in adventure mode. If the use of tools keeps up, it might be that we just keep simulating things, or that we'll throw in the workshops for things we don't get to simulating promptly. There are lots of discussions around generalizing/extending the workshop concept in dwarf mode, instead, so that it would be somewhat more like adv mode is shaping up, but we're really not sure what's going to happen there. So for now, the things that you do in adv mode will be tool-based actions. That should get us quite a way, until we start getting toward metal-working and furniture making, at which point we'll have to see if we slip back to workshops or try something more ambitious.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: The Development Page (Read 1609832 times)