Footkerchief answered several of the questions in thread, and I've omitted those.
I mean market economics. Supply and demand.
As an example, currently if you build only luxurious bedrooms, the poor dwarves don't get to use them at all yet most bedrooms will stay empty. That's of course not realistic; the price will be what the market can bear, and no more - basically, the dwarves should bid on bedrooms.
(As an aside, "and no more" only applies where there are no ongoing maintenance costs, but since such things aren't in the game yet.. well, if the market couldn't bear the maintenance they'd go derelict, not just stay empty.)
Of course, bedrooms are just the most obvious example. This applies to everything that enters the economy, including money itself; minting more (without a corresponding increase in economic size) should cause inflation, minting too little deflation - and as real life shows, both can be very bad things (though especially deflation). Insufficient money would cause the economy to not work properly, too much.. well, that depends on how, exactly, the new money is distributed.
I can think of plausible exceptions to the economy, like nobles not wanting the rabble to have rooms as good as they do, but they should be exceptions - not the rule. Which is to say, first make the market economy work, then consider noble/personality-driven exceptions.
Will dwarves, other than nobles*, get mood-thoughts from encountering dwarves at different relative wealth. Such as a poor dwarf seeing a rich dwarf. Would that depress or inspire? Instill envy? Can dwarves sense the magnitude of wealth difference?
Yeah, supply and demand are up for the trader role, and they'll start once we have the amount of things counted up on sites and the availability established through trade connections. Demand is a bit trickier, but it'll be more clear once the resources are in use. That will propogate over to your fortress vs. the caravans. The specific elements of the dwarven economy that exist more in isolation could be handled once that's up, but I'm not sure which of them will survive. The introduction of sprawl around the fort could change the rental situation drastically, but the overall price setting would apply there, assuming rooms in your fortress aren't so rare and the outside population so vast that they aren't all the exceptions you mentioned. It's hard to say how it'll turn out.
As for the reactions of one dwarf to another, part of the problem has been that the personality system we are using doesn't really lend itself to questions like this. It is a very non-judgmental system. We're working out some changes to it that'll work for villains and also apply in situations like this, where a dwarf might be given to envious thoughts, for instance, though it's a special case and there are going to be a lot of avenues that open up once we have the new information. I'll have to be careful with the distributions here to stop all of your dwarves from being deeply, deeply flawed, beyond what you might expect from dwarves.
Is this the only impact these attributes currently have? Some had guessed that there were other impacts:
Memory: skill gain/rust rates
Focus: how long a dwarf stays at a task
Willpower: possible this relates to tantrums, happiness, insanity, or possibly other effects
Are these: currently in place and working, currently in place and not working, planned, or not planned.
Those were the ones I found, and I think that's it. The guessed uses are not in place and not planned in particular. I don't think memory should work that way, anyway, at least not for many skills.
With relation to 40d, you had said that various jobs were required to get a Baron: " 4 of the following: 25 crafting jobs, 25 metal-related jobs, 25 wood-related jobs, 10 gem jobs, 25 stone jobs, 25 food jobs. " Also, some have mentioned constructed roads as being required to get a baron. Are these requirements now obsolete?
The baron never needed a road, and yeah, the old craft diversity requirement is gone now. Just trade and production now, with 20 dwarves. Upgrades to count and duke should just require further trade and production. The population requirement was kept at 20 in consideration of smaller fort people, and you can make it even smaller in the raws if you want.
Any plans for flows in the ocean that cool or heat up the land (and have impact on the weather sim)?
Defining the overall fixed ocean currents would be an interesting way to create more biome variability without a CPU hit, and doing cyclical things like El Nin~o or something might be fun, though I don't understand it all that well. More information about the oceans will make boats more interesting off in the future as well. On the other hand, any ocean behavior that has more of a dynamic component is more dangerous, unless it's strictly seasonal or happens in some other cycle that doesn't gobble the processor. Dynamic stuff that's dependent on the existing overall weather situation is fine too (like how rough the seas are).
When will dwarves (and people in general in adv mode) have more needs, economically speaking ?
Also, speaking about markets, how does the owner of a market decide what item he can take from the fortress property ? It didn't seem like he was buying them, just taking what interested him from the stockpiles.
It's not going to happen until after we get to the basic rewrite for the items in the larger economy. After that, it's still hard to say. Adding needs might track with villians most closely in the end.
I don't remember if fortress store owners have to pay for their wares, but even if I knew, it would be just as likely to be bugged the other way.
Toady in terms of martial arts where weapons are concerned using your body to attack instead of a weapon in most games gives you an oddly powerful attack. In this game weapons are clearly supperior excluding the infamos "Eye gouge". Are you going to balance the non-weapon techniques of weapon fighting and if so how are you going to do it? I assume it is going to be by "Opportunity" so a character in a weapon lock would find it a great time to get those powerful kicks out.
Are we going to see some Hermit/Monk Sifu? Though admittingly there is a LOT less of this in Europian culture
An item made of superior materials than the body materials would generally be better in a non-magical setting, given equal training time. In a magical setting, which would include martial arts that behave like magic, anything goes, as powerful as magic can get, and we'd want to try to respect that fact all around, so that if it is easy to learn, people wouldn't bother with weapons so much in general, if they had access to the knowledge. In thinking about the generation of magic systems, we're trying to remain mindful of easy learning/industrialization of magic. It's not a bad thing if you want it, but it is extra work to support that kind of setting.
Could we get also notion on liquid density and according floating for buildings? I guess it would be required for things like ships anyway.
So Tokyo-3 style buildings could be built on, say, 5-level deep water, with large air tank in their basements, and their lowering/raising would be as easy as draining water tank or refilling it again.
Yeah, we were going to handle that with boats, but whatever comes first comes first. We have the masses/densities/volumes for items, but we'd have to fudge entire map tiles somehow. Once you've got a size for a tile, and it understands that a given collection of map tiles is a single object, it can calculate the water displaced by each Z level of a structure easily enough, I think, so you'd be able to come up with the depth to sink the mass to, up to a Z level, and a sufficiently loaded/flooded ship would drop down a level or more.
For the record, I don't get what's the excitement about having every single underground feature in every single fortress. Which means that once you've seen one fortress' underground, you've seen them all. Rather than regularly having, say, all 20 interesting features, I'd rather have 4-5 picked at random, and hopefully some variation on the contents of each of these. For obsessive compulsive or very casual players that must absolutely have them all, or for the time where you absolutely need a specific feature for a community game, some option that adds these features to the underground after embark would be perfect.
The all-feature thing is requested, especially back in 40d, but it's not what we were talking about here. Your 4-5 suggestion is along the lines of the situation I was staying would still cause trouble, because even if you only have 4-5 features, or one per layer per 4x4, say, you'd still have a glut of them as you walked over the adv mode map. It would be like increasing the density of the new village map I posted by sixteen times and making them all really neat. It's good for fortress mode, but very weird in adv mode. Like a carnival or something.
In legends: export xml, historical events, each has a type. I've discovered 33 different event types:
add hf entity link ? add hf hf link ? add hf site link ? attacked site ? body abused ? change hf job ? change hf state ? create entity position ? created site ? created structure ? created world construction ? creature devoured ? destroyed site ? entity created ? field battle ? hf abducted ? hf died ? hf new pet ? hf razed structure ? hf reunion ? hf simple battle event ? hf travel ? hf wounded ? impersonate hf ? item stolen ? new site leader ? peace accepted ? peace rejected ? razed structure ? reclaim site ? remove hf entity link ? remove hf site link ? replaced structure. If you could tell me how many there are, and/or what they are, that'd be fantastic. Thanks!
Some of them aren't in use:
events
<type>field battle</type>
<type>attacked site</type>
<type>destroyed site</type>
<type>plundered site</type>
<type>site tribute forced</type>
<type>new site leader</type>
<type>site taken over</type>
<type>hf destroyed site</type>
<type>site died</type>
<type>site abandoned</type>
<type>created site</type>
<type>created structure</type>
<type>replaced structure</type>
<type>razed structure</type>
<type>hf razed structure</type>
<type>created world construction</type>
<type>reclaim site</type>
<type>creature devoured</type>
<type>hf wounded</type>
<type>hf simple battle event</type>
<type>hf reach summit</type>
<type>hf travel</type>
<type>hf new pet</type>
<type>hf reunion</type>
<type>hf died</type>
<type>hf abducted</type>
<type>add hf entity link</type>
<type>remove hf entity link</type>
<type>change hf state</type>
<type>change hf job</type>
<type>add hf hf link</type>
<type>remove hf hf link</type>
<type>add hf site link</type>
<type>remove hf site link</type>
<type>first contact</type>
<type>first contact failed</type>
<type>agreement concluded</type>
<type>agreement rejected</type>
<type>agreement made</type>
<type>peace accepted</type>
<type>peace rejected</type>
<type>diplomat lost</type>
<type>body abused</type>
<type>agreement void</type>
<type>merchant</type>
<type>artifact hidden</type>
<type>artifact possessed</type>
<type>artifact created</type>
<type>artifact lost</type>
<type>artifact found</type>
<type>item stolen</type>
<type>artifact recovered</type>
<type>artifact dropped</type>
<type>entity created</type>
<type>entity incorporated</type>
<type>masterpiece arch design</type>
<type>masterpiece arch constructed</type>
<type>masterpiece item</type>
<type>masterpiece dye</type>
<type>masterpiece item improvement</type>
<type>masterpiece food</type>
<type>masterpiece engraving</type>
<type>masterpiece lost</type>
<type>impersonate hf</type>
<type>create entity position</type>
collections
<type>war</type>
<type>battle</type>
<type>duel</type>
<type>site conquered</type>
<type>abduction</type>
<type>theft</type>
<type>beast attack</type>
<type>journey</type>
First one is regarding sites - are there plans to move the way sites are generated into the raws, and if so, are there any plans on when it will happen?
Second one is regarding ethics, in particular the KILL_PLANT ethic which prevents deforestation around an entity's sites. This one is awkward for me because I'm trying to mod an entity that lives in forests and doesn't cause that sort of deforestation, but will still accept and trade wooden goods. In a larger sense, could such "terraforming" be moved away from ethics and into some other raw flag?
I don't have any specific plans or timelines at this point. Things are obviously still in flux, and I don't know what I need to or can put out there.
Mephansteras mentioned OUTDOOR_WOOD -- taking off that tag wouldn't mess up the ethical situation would it? They might not export wood then, but they should accept it (assuming you have the ethics set for it).
Judging from your answer dumps you have thought about fortress that move around the world map.
Have you thought about ones which move vertically? Ala Journey To The Center Of The Earth, or perhaps going down a volcano in a submagma sealed fortress.
Aside from lifts moving up and down, I haven't thought about it. The bottom of the map is well-defined and not very far away in general, so I'm not really sure what else it would involve.
Will there ever be a change to the flow system that makes it so my flooding traps work without me closing off the water source first? When fluid's 7/7 it teleports to the end of the flow, but that keeps things in between (such as goblins) from being pushed (into a fifteen-story drain, for instance).
I'm not sure. It'll depend on how practical it is. I remember there were some flow direction calculations that I had trouble tracking or at least getting to look good.
Toady, how are you going to handle food production for the various entity sites? For example, will a farming civilization like humans produce more food and therefore have larger populations than a non-farming civ like Elves or Goblins?
Yeah, it'll be necessary to track the food stores and production numbers, but that isn't going to determine the populations entirely, since we're probably going to have different nutrition requirements and breeding rates for the immortal races and whatever else going on. Some of that will be going in this time most likely, if we want to keep goblins competitive, since I don't expect them to be farming at all, and if they live on hunting and raiding, they'll probably need to eat less to maintain proper numbers, but we'll have to see how that turns out. They'll have more layers to hunt in, but crops yield a lot of food.
On a related note, it seems like all of the two-handed weapons are from the Dwarf/Elf/Goblin point of view. That two-handed sword could be wielded one-handed by even a smallish human. Same with Pikes, Great Axes, and Mauls. This seems a bit odd. Shouldn't the humans have some weapons that are two-handed for them?
Yeah, the two-handed values for things like the maul shouldn't be 67500. I'm not sure why I set them that way.
How will the new population rewrite affect cave dwellers like the kobolds? Will they get things like small hunting groups scattered around their caves and small raiding parties wandering around attacking unwary travelers, or are they just going to remain as they are right now?
It's more the villain stuff which will get us there, since you'll have some groups moving around. The kobolds are probably going to be the ones least affected by the population rewrite, since they aren't going to get new living space, though they might be more apt to spread to empty caves.
How will sending out armies/raiding parties relate to embarking? Could you conceivably embark somewhere in the foothills of a mountain range and build a road going up into the mountains (by sending out teams of masons/miners), and then build your mountainhome in the peaks? What about the other way around - embarking in the mountains and building a road to make it accessible by caravan?
Since it seems like trading/travel/marching will be more specific in the coming releases, will geography matter to a fortress? That is, if the only/best way through a big mountain range is this one pass, could building your fortress straddling the pass be strategically valuable as a way of intercepting caravans/armies? If trade happens overseas eventually, could being a major port matter? What about controlling a specific resource? Finally, what are your thoughts on territorial behavior - goblins being more likely to attack a fortress that embarks in 'their' mountains, for instance?
Running two sites at a time where you have access to both of the maps is a messy matter. Limited things like road building projects are possible, or even site sprawl to sort of Moria-ize your main fortress, but actually playing the two maps is tricky, for the same reasons as fortress retirement, but worse.
Yeah, the geography should matter eventually. It should be like other strategy games with a map in that way, with all sorts of things going on, and hopefully the details of our map will allow it to thrive as we add more things to do out there. Once we have site resource stockpiles and then have the goods moved around by trade relationships etc., control of resource locations will become important.
Territorial integrity has to be maintained to some extent to keep the maps looking sane, and it tracks the territories in world gen for this purpose, and wars over claimed territory without a clear economic/etc. goal attached seem like a reasonable enough thing to have, though the game would need to quantify that.
Will all crops use NPK+pH (+water) as a model, or will mushrooms and other underground crops need to have alternative sources of energy? Even simply making it be NPK+pH+water+carbohydrates (which require the occasional dumping of some form of "dead stuff" as a source of carbohydrates for a non-photosynthesizing lifeform, even a highly efficient one like fungi) would break out of the notion that all crops are photosynthetic.
It would be preferable for them to need organic matter in their soils, but I'm not sure what'll end up happening. If the system ends up being specific enough to tell nitrogen-fixing plants from the others, it'll probably be worth doing mushrooms correctly.
Would you even consider changing the relationship that the player has with the dwarves right now (as unquestioned overlord and direct allower and denier of all things dwarves can and cannot do), so that dwarves can become more autonomous and individual, and possibly create a better simulation, while on the other hand, potentially dramatically upping the potential for Fun because dwarves are stupid and very likely to hurt themselves unless continually babysat, or perhaps more importantly, if it meant that the player had less direct control over his fortress, and had to rely more on coaxing the ants in his/her antfarm to do his/her bidding?
Our eventual goal is to have the player's role be the embodiment of positions of power within the fortress, performing actions in their official capacity, to the point that in an ideal world each command you give would be linked to some noble, official or commander. I don't think coaxing is the way I'm thinking of it though, as with a game like Majesty which somebody brought up, because your orders would also carry the weight of being assumed to be for survival for the most part, not as bounties or a similar system. Once your fortress is larger, you might have to work a little harder to keep people around, but your dwarves in the first year would be more like crew taking orders from the captain of a ship out to sea or something, where you'd have difficulty getting them to do what you want only if you've totally flopped and they are ready to defy the expedition leader.
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?
That sounds reasonable enough, though I'm not sure how water is going to end up working.
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?
It's a reasonable suggestion -- we'll have to see how things like harvesting fruit are handled, once we have things that can grow like that. It'll probably all fit under the same umbrella. Overall, it might just be zone/burrow environment management options or something, although there are parallels with farming that complicate it a bit. Removing the farm as a building might work best. (I cut yours to four questions, since preparing the post has already taken hours, feel free to re-ask in moderation)
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?
I don't know if fortress mode dwarves are ever going to get mounts, though modders will probably want them in any case. Adv mode mounts are in the hero section on the new dev page, and the hurdles there are just the livestock purchase/tracking that'll go in with adv mode sites as they progress, and the minor pathing changes to get them to move with velocity, which will probably want the attack/move speed split from the combat rewrite first.
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?
There are annoyances with moving wagons around that I might avoid for a long while. They are under the trader role on the dev page, in any case. I don't know about mount attacks. I suppose it depends on how trainable a mount is. It would probably be more fun to let you be able to tell your mount when to attack, and safer in town, but it feels a little weird to allow total control.
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.
Strange. I haven't had that problem, and the mounts should be subject to the regular invader/marauder code. If the mounted humans etc. are always running off, it's a bug. I'm not sure what training was involved for horses used in war in real-life. The current attack bonuses are a little weird and would be even stranger applied to mounts.
Currently, creatures pass on physical characteristics to their children. At least theoretically, this is respected in worldgen and over generations of breeding yields nations of dwarves who appear ethnically similar to one and other, but ethnically distinct from those of other nations. How will the entity sprawl interact with this genetic data-transfer?
I haven't decided quite how to do it yet, mainly because I was hoping to mingle things a bit at the overlaps. At the most simple, it would just take the full range of the initial historical pairs and realize villagers from that range when they are generated (that would make citizens a bit more diverse than they are now, since there wouldn't be any selection, but it would still be a subset). It could use the surviving hist figs instead if it wanted to have less variety. Ideally, it might track a bit more information. We'll see when I start generating villagers as units on the local map.
How far out will this entity sprawl, er, sprawl? Will cottages and hamlets start to pop up somewhat far from the city centers? Will we get an indication of sprawl on the embark screen -- perhaps an additional local map screen, similar to the relative elevation and steepness screens? Will we even be able to embark on the sprawl, or will the majority population and their homes be too abstract to actually create for now?
It depends. Many of the villages I've been reading about have their buildings centralized, but there are examples of villages with homesteads spread out as well. Fields and pastures will spread out in any case, and I haven't settled on a display there. I'm not really satisfied with the picture I put up, since it is quite monotonous, especially if a village only ends up eating a 1/4th of its square with tilled land. On the other hand, the embark screen's local squares could show the tilled land more reliably, and those pictures could just replace the terrain tile, which would no longer be accurate itself. Once the adv mode maps are in, it won't be too abstract to realize, and I'm hoping to get to the basics this time around, but embarking on dwarf mode would need to be restricted then, especially in towns, as you'd just have too many people. The focus of the viewpoint on the adventurer gives me more ways to deal with lots of people in that mode, and embarking on towns has always been sorta silly anyway, since they don't react to your presence.
With the entity populations and according site rewrite, what are the chances that more religions spring up, even if only as small shrines? Currently, it seems that it's almost always the same divinity in a given civilization that gets a religion dedicated to it, so that when you see a Cult of Gold, you know that it is likely dedicated to, say, the dragon Sloron Gemheat the Flames of Taxes.
I'm not going to focus on religions at first, but they have their spot with night creatures and fortress subgroups on the dev page.
During worldgen the dwarven civilisations are occasionally wiped out by war, with many dwarves fleeing to the hills. At what point do you see it being possible for the player to launch a reclaim mission on the original Mountain Halls? Do you see this as more of an adventurer mission that would be ordered by the king?
In fact, as sieges get expanded, could you attempt to reclaim a fortress that had been conquered and settled by an enemy of some sort? This would be way cool to do to fortresses lost in world gen, but even cooler if a fortress you built was lost in a siege and settled by an enemy, allowing you to reclaim with your own siege force to take it back.
The main obstacle is the crappy maps for non-player forts. After that I don't have a problem with allowing that, although we might want to get to start scenarios from the dev page first so that you could come in force again, when necessary.
Plus, if the farming settlements are anything like current towns, they'll get savaged by ravenous woodland creatures every time you come out of retirement. What's up with that bug, anyway?
Dunno. There was a problem with doubling wilderness population I thought I had fixed, but maybe all the problems are still there.
So lets see Daggerfall had 5000 villages and 750K NPCs. Lets say we have 50 civs on a middle-sized map with a average of 100 villages. 50 * 100 = 5000. Ok that record is broken! Now with 5000 villages a 50 village-people makes 250000 - not so much 
. But we have still 50 Mayor citys with say 3000 people each we get another 150000 NPCs. So 400K NPCs!
The villages currently have 100 people and support 150 people (the 50 from the dev log was the addition people living in towns), so 5000 villages and the accompanying towns would get you to your 750K goal. The 5000 villages part might be iffy though, especially on a medium map, since a medium map only has 16641 tiles, so you'd have farmed out almost a third of the world.
Will we get the villages be included into the xml output? How many historical persons are there per Village? Are there new Buildings (Barns, shrines, artificial ponds for fishing and fire-fighting)? Road-signs?
I'm still sorting out the adv mode maps, so I don't have any buildings yet. Villages are sites for the xml, though I haven't added the additional population information. I haven't thought much about the xml, since I wasn't aware of it being used by anybody and nobody ever mentioned it to me again aside from some dismissive remarks (and the other question above). If it is useful to anybody I can try to keep it up to date and fill in some of the missing fields. Was it being used by a legends viewer now? I don't recall if it was being used or if it was just mentioned in the thread.
That's a bit more sprawl than I expected, though I guess part of that is because presumably the farming villages occupy the same portion of region squares as towns. Maybe if villages could be larger than that? Anyway, it should be interesting to see how this works out for other races. Maybe the sprawl could be controlled in the entity raws as well?
I mentioned in the log that the little 3x3 gray squares are just the area for the village buildings. Crops and pastures etc. will be spread out from that, forming possibly an 8x8 or a bit larger, I think. The village buildings aren't precisely for the 3x3 either, although it might start that way. If cottages end up spread down a single road a little farther than 3 pixels, but in a narrow strip, that would be fine too. Large towns will also outgrow their 3x3s.
It looks like humans have gotten the most of the recent village development. How are the other races going to handle things? Are we going to see goblin villages and the like? And how are they going to be different from what you're doing with the humans?
The humans have received the attention at this point, but before the next release I'd like to get the dwarf and goblin models up. I don't want to commit yet, until something is in, but it should be in a log soon. They will be quite different from each other. Kobolds will remain mostly unchanged and elves can't receive proper attention until they have their proper trees.
Author
Topic: Future of the Fortress: The Development Page (Read 1612520 times)