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[zwei]

What I am talking about in that thread I referenced is, at its most extreme, starting to remove the whole need to assign labors to dwarves, because they start deciding what jobs they want to take up on their own, based on financial incintives from the player and the personality and likes of the dwarf.

Frankly, ability to have "5 mason volunteers" is something i would love.

Consideirng how awesome us manager dialog with removes huge part of  micromanaging workshops (how great it is to be able to queue 20 barrels, forget about it and be sure that you get those 250 barrels eventually.)

[Shadowfury333]

I'm not sure what you mean by "The Majesty Paradigm" (and Google didn't help much) but...

Majesty is another sim game based on a fantasy world. It is also very autonomous.

For the record, I like the ability to add/remove labours, but I wouldn't mind a secondary interface for managing non-workshop jobs, if that was possible. I do find the manager very convenient for goods I don't need produced constantly, like metal goods

[NW_Kohaku]

Actually, when speaking of automation, I remember something I should have asked last time, as well... (Sorry to stack so many questions...)

When we start adding in crop rotation as an integral part of farming, crop rotations typically took place over 2 or 3 (or occasionally even 4) year cycles.  This implies that we will need to have the ability to schedule farm activity over serval years in a repeating cycle, and increased complexity, and presumable necessity, of fertilization would imply that players would want to see some sort of ability to schedule fertilization, as well.

How much automation do you forsee allowing players to set up with regards to their farms?  Will this be something similar to the new Military screen, where we can set cycles of an arbitrary length in years for planting and harvesting, as well as amounts of fertilizers to be used, and will we have some means of linking a water source to a farm, so that dwarves can have an automated watering system (such as the "sprinkler" system I suggested in my last post) that does not require player input? 

Will we also be able to have an inport/export to text file feature, similar to Worldgen data or Embark Profiles, so that when we set up a working system we enjoy, we can reuse those systems in future fortresses (or even share them with other players)?

On the vein of import/export capabilities, I also wonder if we will get abilities to import/export other reusable data that is often annoying to input, such as uniforms in the military screen, or the upcoming job priorities and standing work orders.  (So that we could simply upload a script of standing orders for every fort we embark upon, such as adding jobs to create more alcohol whenever stored alcohol becomes less than FORTRESS_POPULATION * 2.)

In further automation, could we ever see something like a burrow that auto-designates any tree within it to be cut down, so that repeatedly designating the same areas that you have built as tree farms are no longer another seasonal player micromanagement task?

(Yes, sorry, sorry, it was long, I know...)

[Mephansteras]

Random question: When are Adventurers and Fortress Mode dwarves going to get Mounts? What are the current hurdles involved in allowing those, since invaders seem to use mounts just fine?

[Mel_Vixen]

Random question: When are Adventurers and Fortress Mode dwarves going to get Mounts? What are the current hurdles involved in allowing those, since invaders seem to use mounts just fine?

As addition: Will it be possible to use the natural attacks (firebreath etc.) of a mount while being mounted? How about using wagons and similar constructions like the later siege Engines?

[Dakkan]

Will mountable creatures also be able to be a civilization/intelligent? Elves would make excellent dwarf-portation. Maybe not the best of scenarios as a good example, but the idea of intelligent creatures being captured and mountable would be interesting, a generic one off the top of my head would be Dragons.


Ooh, or whales. Fear me, mighty Krill Empire.

[IronValley]

Perhaps it would be a good idea to have the current mounts function properly first?

Is it possible with the current code to have other civs ride war trained animals? Because normal (tame) mounts act on their own, and tend to flee.

[NW_Kohaku]

Geez, what's with all these questons about mounts?  Don't you know there are more interesting things going into the game?  (yes, this is sarcasm)

Anyway, yes, another question I had on Improved Farming:

Pests and weeds are planned for inclusion in the upcoming farming changes.  One of the advantages of crop rotation, however, was that most such pests and weeds would actually target specific species or families of plants, and that crop rotations would prevent diseases that target certain crops or weeds that specially choke certain crops or insects that prefer to feed on certain crops from becoming too prevalent to combat.  (For example, Boll Weevils being cotton-specific pests, or Corn Borer moths whose larvae target corn.) As such, will pests and weeds be differentiated by specific target crops they go after, which can be combatted with more elaborate crop rotation?  (With, say, diseases that grow in the area being tracked off-screen?)  Or will there just be generic pests that always attack?

(When farming becomes a profession for Adventurers, I just might actually start playing Adventurer mode...)

[Areyar]

I am a proponent of a more specific and more natural procreation mechjansm for plants, but other organisms as well.
Emergent behaviour should take care of most processes from a small set of basic rules.

for instance:
-all plants drop(variable dispersion) seeds if they are not harvested.
-Seeds are food to some small animals.
-seeds will germinate into seedlings if their favoured conditions are met. (min_floortype/req soil/mud etc, moisturelevel/near water, etc) else, seeds can lie dormant for years, waiting. attrition applies though.
-lifespan: most small plants live for a season or for a year, while trees require years to grow from saplings, but generate much more fruit individually and annually. each growth stage can have a timer. seed, sapling, mature plant, fruit ripening.
-dead plant matter: dead shrubs, saplings and unharvested crops currently do nothing, but could be food for bugs, creating natural fertilizer. like seeds, bugs can be food for small animals.

Tracking of several variables (such as richness) for each soil tile may be a bit much though.
tracking seeds and plant development would probably create a bit of lag at seasonal turnovers, but otherwise they require no pathing etc.

</rant>

[NW_Kohaku]

-seeds will germinate into seedlings if their favoured conditions are met. (min_floortype/req soil/mud etc, moisturelevel/near water, etc) else, seeds can lie dormant for years, waiting. attrition applies though.

The problem with that is that we are trying to make soil conditions only be recorded for tiles that are farm tiles, rather than having it be tracked for every tile on the map, where the costs of recording nutrient data would be massive when you multiply by the hundreds of thousands of tiles that can be on a given map.

[Syff]

The problem with that is that we are trying to make soil conditions only be recorded for tiles that are farm tiles, rather than having it be tracked for every tile on the map, where the costs of recording nutrient data would be massive when you multiply by the hundreds of thousands of tiles that can be on a given map.

Note the "you'd get some really great varied local landscapes" part of Toady's comment, so he's clearly thinking beyond just farms.  How about just the muddy/soil tiles, then?  (Unless we're looking for really weird floating spore trees or something.  Which do sound pretty cool, actually)

Could add even more FPS limitations on massive fluid projects, though some of the stuff with having actual pipes (instead of muddy hallways to fill with roads) might help some of that.

[NW_Kohaku]

Note the "you'd get some really great varied local landscapes" part of Toady's comment, so he's clearly thinking beyond just farms.  How about just the muddy/soil tiles, then?  (Unless we're looking for really weird floating spore trees or something.  Which do sound pretty cool, actually)

Well, I would only see that mattering underground, with all the muddy tiles over random stones.  Aboveground, all the soil is very likely to be the same kind of soil, which should mean the same nutrients (unless we are talking about having a model for having certain patches of soil be depleted or especially fertile randomly before dwarves show up, or have models for water runoff that leech nutrients in certain areas more than others... which seems extreme even for Toady).

Could add even more FPS limitations on massive fluid projects, though some of the stuff with having actual pipes (instead of muddy hallways to fill with roads) might help some of that.

I think what we need is a reworking of the fluid system, honestly.  The current iterate-by-tile random water motion is simply not the most processor-efficient model, and when it starts killing fortresses, it means that Toady's going to have to streamline it eventually.  I believe the best solution is a "by fluid body" rather than "by tile" solution, but it requires a major shift in the way that water flows are calculated.

[Syff]

Well, I would only see that mattering underground, with all the muddy tiles over random stones.  Aboveground, all the soil is very likely to be the same kind of soil, which should mean the same nutrients (unless we are talking about having a model for having certain patches of soil be depleted or especially fertile randomly before dwarves show up, or have models for water runoff that leech nutrients in certain areas more than others... which seems extreme even for Toady).

I read it more as different biomes/etc having different soil properties, so a forest on a higher pH soil might play host to different plants than a forest on a lower pH soil, or something like that.  Variation on what the local level is like, rather than variation within the local level.

[NW_Kohaku]

I read it more as different biomes/etc having different soil properties, so a forest on a higher pH soil might play host to different plants than a forest on a lower pH soil, or something like that.  Variation on what the local level is like, rather than variation within the local level.

If that's all, then it's a much simpler solution than that - you don't need to track starting soil levels, you just need to associate certain mineral levels with certain types of rock or soil, which was already part of the recent Improved Farming discussion...

(For example, limestone, chalk, or rocksalt (or anything high in calcium, sodium, or magnesium) would be naturally alkaline, while igneous rocks like granite are moderately acidic, while shale and coal are strongly acidic with sulfuric acid)

These might best be written in as interinsic parts of the inorganic raws.

[Quatch]

While underlying rock is important in generating soils, recent glaciology is critical and often mixes things up substantially. Only in tropical soils and very thin soils are you likely to always have a strong relationship between underlying rock and soil.

I don't actually recall hearing about glaciers and their effects on soil forming, or how soils are chosen in game.