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[Mason11987]

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.

Mason11987's World Viewer.

I'll just ask it then  Could you complete the xml items (specifically the events) that aren't completed, and add additional ones?.  For example, something like a "birth" event for Hist figs could be really useful.   No pressure obviously, but if you need a break from adding awesome real features to the game, I can promise that if you expand the xml I'll do more really cool things with it.

[Veroule]

In the latest talk you mentioned some of the items that make the underlying and developing requirements for mounts.  First of these is velocity and how it affects pathing/turning. Will the addition of different travel rates like walk, jog, canter, run, etc. be available to all entities or will it only be applied to mounts?  If it is available to all entities do you have plans to make dwarves in fortress mode choose to move at different paces during work or only in response to threats?

[Nintenlord]

When you finish/continue the legends XML output, are you going to add a single root node required by well-formed XML document?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML#Well-formedness_and_error-handling
Also, any chance you release a XML Schema or equivalent specification of legends XML output? It can be used for auto-generating code for programs that read the XML data, so it can make reading utilities easier.

[Quatch]

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.

Here are a few ways to think about placing sprawl, including diversifying the sprawl:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_place_theory http://geography.about.com/od/urbaneconomicgeography/a/centralplace.htm
Summary: How close and how many of each size of community, in what general distribution (assuming no terrain factors). Each size of community up is 1/3 as frequent. An equivalent principal for area of communities (1/4) and administration (1/7).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_village
Summary: Sprawl shouldn't be uniform, but instead follow and concentrate on pre-existing roads (or transport features like rivers and shorelines-- I note your example does this, but that may be due to the plains being placed there.) (see also, induced demand)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentric_zone_model
Summary: The travel time to the central market determines what it is profitable to do. Milk needs to be produced very close to consumption because it spoils in travel. Therefore dairys will be in the first ring of sprawl, must charge more for milk per volume than grain(or other transportables), and can afford to pay more for land). You could work out a terrain-based time to market using something like a least-cost path.

[zwei]

Since text is finally getting separated from map tiles, what about another parts that could use non-tile treatment? I am talking about minimap in dwarf mode that has awfully low resolution and is not really helpfull at all.

Is is basically resolution of ~10x10 pixels for whole embark, not nearly enough to get any information.

[Quatch]

Does anyone even use the mini map when playing on a 3x3 or larger embark? After scanning around the region during the embark pause I just turn it off. Especially with Baugn's zooming. Now, let me put that zoomed out bit over there...

[NW_Kohaku]

I use the minimap for the fact that it puts dangerous creatures in red squares, even when they are on different Z-levels, which helps me tell at a glance, say, how close to my fort the Seige has gotten.

[G-Flex]

Since text is finally getting separated from map tiles

Wait, what.

[nbonaparte]

Since text is finally getting separated from map tiles

Wait, what.

Few pages back. Baughn even put up a screenshot.

[Baughn]

Now there's an idea. To make the mini-map useful, we'd need procedurally generated "jumbo" tiles - squares covering more than one current tile.

The apparent solution to good TTF will require something like that anyway - no, it will not work very well in the next release, just hopefully well enough for modders to test tilesets - so I might as well make it a little more general.

No promises, it'd be extra work for toady, but it should be possible to have a mini-map that has a tile-per-pixel (or multiple-tiles-per-pixel) resolution instead of the way-too-many-tiles-per-tile we get now. I can at least try to make that possible.

[Greiger]

Ok, another green question from me.

Plains civs have farms now from what I gather. I assume goblins will have hunting sheds or livestock pens or something like that for meat gathering, elves will have...elf stuff.  Will modders be able to pick and choose which kind of structures are available to a civ?   For example replacing the majority of a [CARNIVORE] race's farms with hunting lodges or animal pens or something?  Like reducing farms to 5%, hunting lodges up to 35%, livestock pens to 35%, woodcutting outposts to 15%... and so on and so fourth?

[Untelligent]

Like Kohaku, I use the minimap for letting me know when a dangerous creature's close to my fort. Even if the minimap got a resolution upgrade, I can't really imagine using it for anything else.

[Quatch]

Like Kohaku, I use the minimap for letting me know when a dangerous creature's close to my fort. Even if the minimap got a resolution upgrade, I can't really imagine using it for anything else.

Well, imagine it as a separate view pane with independent scale. The basic idea of knowing where you are in a horizontally sprawling fort is useful, but if you could add overlays independently (such as the depot access overlay, or the suggested structural overlays, room value, outside/inside, temperature, etc.)

Could be very fancy!

[Arkose]

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.

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.

Does this mean that members of the fortress could rent housing off-site, sleep in their country cottages and commute to the fortress to work?

What about in the other direction; could we optionally rent out rooms to dwarves and other civilized creatures that don't belong to the fortress's labor pool?

What about being able to designate certain other buildings as available for use by visitors, possibly for a fee? (Allowing off-site farmers to visit and use your infrastructure to mill their own grains, for example.)

[NW_Kohaku]

I would expect that, barring some form of mass transit or interstate system, dwarves who go to live in a satellite village off of a city would go there to work as well as live.

I actually like the idea of having dwarves capable of simply choosing not to stay.  If you don't treat your valuable, highly-skilled dwarves right, they'll take their highly valuable skills and go _{find a new} home.