As usual, I skipped the ones that have been answered during the course of the thread.
There's been some discussion about studded weapons since the big update earlier this year. Specifically I'm wondering if, for example, a silver mace studded with lead would do more damage than a normal silver mace due to the added weight?
Improvements to items don't do anything weight/damage-wise yet, but we'd hope to have it matter at some point.
Is it possible that we'll ever get the ability to spawn the randomly gen'd fun stuff, forgotten beasts and titans in arena mode?
I'm pretty sure there's no technical reason it can't be done -- it would just be kinda crappy since the creature list would have fifty types of anonymous forgotten beast, and so on.
If you used the ones from the world, they'd appear in a large list, but it could also create new definitions on the fly, which would then just be Beast 1, Beast 2, etc., and you'd know which was which because you made them right then. On the other hand, I'm not sure how I feel about spoiling all that stuff by making it so commonplace. I guess legends mode already does that partially.
Will sneaking adv. mode characters who ambush targets that are oblivious to their presence get aimed shots? In other words, if I sneak up on an enemy goblin, it does not see me, can I get a free aimed shot with a high bonus (maybe not quite the same as if he were helpless), in essence a "back stab"?
Not right now. Sneaking is a weird over-powered thing, and until I do the proper section for it I'm probably not going to mess with the aim chances for it. Once sneaking is more fair, then actually getting up next to somebody should have bonuses.
Can you add some randomness to armor penetration? Now that you're cleaning up the stuff, it would be nice to slightly randomize the current "material X always beats material Y" system. How hard would that be to add in? Maybe add a certain percentage of randomness to material strength in the hit calculation?
You can change the coverage variable if you like. Armor can be overpowered, but I don't want to change it the wrong way.
In the dev log story you got attacked by goblins who were part of their civ and not just bandits. Were you at war with them? If you'd been a goblin of that civ, would you have encountered them? I'm just curious how it handles actual civ patrols with regards to your adventurer and your reputation.
Can your heroic reputation affect how hostile civilizations treat you?
The local bandits that say "halt" should not attack members of the same civ, though there was a bug report of some kind related to that. Since the report involved historical figures, which local bandits generally won't bring, I'm not sure what's going on there. The local bandits look at your heroic status with their civilization. So if you have done some quests local to their area or killed one of the megabeasts, you'll have a hero status even with the goblins/etc. In that case, they feel they need to send a larger group at you. If they can't field the larger group, they don't send anybody. This multiplier is larger the fewer people you have. So if you've got 10 people with you, they might send, say 30 gobs instead of 20, but if you are by yourself, they might send 6 or so instead of 2.
Cheesemakers around the world want to know: will the companion display include a way to dismiss companions?
As you might have seen, you still can't do this. It's definitely going to come up when you are leading a group from a site, where you might want to just bring some of your people on a given task, but I don't know if that's going to happen during the caravan stuff.
Will the numerous rock types eventually each have some sort of use, or do you plan on keeping them as they are now, with most of them being fairly identical.
There was an idea to do a bit with chemistry, and the ideal for us would be having as much chemistry as you could reasonably do with them (which is of course not going to practical). I don't have a time line on this. If it leads toward giant semi-realistic acid bath traps and stuff, that might be a motivator.
Are boogeymen and the like always going to be this prominent? It's cool that they're spotlighted now but I can see it getting kind of annoying once the game is more complete.
The release of 31.17 was a sucess amongst the playerbase, with few bugs and complains about the new mechanics. One of the complains is about the onipresence of bogeymen when alone at night. There will be some fine tuning about them in the future?
Nah, traveling alone in the night is too interesting a situation to always have every non-savage forest/plain/swamp bogeyman infested, but we wanted to try out this kind of atmosphere. Once there's more of a reason to reclaim a piece of the night, we'll do that.
Does that mean [elves are] small as compared to humans (like Santa's elves), or small compared to dragons, colossi, and the like?
Yeah, they are a little smaller. Humans are 70000, elves, gobs and dwarves are all 60000. The standard I want to stick with is that humans and greater are capital letters.
is the combat screen showing the attack modifier before the actual skill roll, or is it showing the actual shoot difficulty/damage?
It is before the attack skill roll. I didn't want to give away the skill level of your opponent, though you can pick up the fighter/dodge skill to some extent by the amount of opportunities coming up. We were going to have a "judge the skill of the opponent over time" thing that made the text change to accommodate your level of knowledge, but it didn't make it in.
Toady, can you please elaborate on the following?
HABIT:<habit token>:<percentage> - Obviously there are GRIND_BONE_MEAL, EAT_BONE_PORRIDGE, and USE_ANY_MELEE_WEAPON, and I assume the percentage is the likelihood of this being the case. Are there any other habit tokens I haven't listed?
HABIT_NUM:<TEST_ALL or a number> - At a guess I'd say TEST_ALL allows for all habits listed to have a chance at being added, while a number would limit it to a specific number of them being applied to a given creature.
NIGHT_CREATURE_BOGEYMAN & NIGHT_CREATURE_HUNTER - what are the effects of these, please?
Yeah, there are several other habit tokens, currently used by night creatures.
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=70239If you set HABIT_NUM to a number, it should give you that exact number of habits according to the weights.
BOGEYMAN puts them in the list of available BOGEYMAN defs.
HUNTER will place them as a world gen beast. You probably also need SPOUSE_CONVERTER on a caste for it to use it, and you'd want CONVERTED_SPOUSE on a caste as well. Somebody mentioned this not working or causing world gen crashes, but I haven't reproduced it yet.
Regarding castles, what tags or responsibilities would cause a historical figure to become the lord of a castle if we don't want to use VARIABLE_POSITIONS (whether ALL or CUSTOM_CASTLE_HOLDER)? It seems military responsibilities may be a good bet, as the law givers appear there as well, but that's just a quick assumption.
RULES_FROM_LOCATION should do it for any position, though they probably build extra castles even if you don't have positions for them.
Playing as a hammerer, I bashed the hydra in the guts. The Hydra Vomited. Do Hydra's vomit from all of their heads at once, or is it just one head and the other heads continue to do their thing?
It is magical vomit that does not require a mouth or head or anything. I guess I could say that's going to change once we think a bit more about nutrition and digestion and swallowing diamonds and keys and stuff, but I'm not sure I want to think about it until it is time to.
Will there be a way to give items to our companions? And perhaps an easier way to equip weapons? (Just had to wiki it.)
Have Lashers been fixed in this release? I seem to remember people talking about Lashers demolishing things, but the Lashers I pick up just chip the bone...over...and over...and over again.
We have to get to companion equipment sooner than later, since it can be very frustrating to either lose a weapon or just have lots of excess armor that shouldn't be excess. It isn't in for 0.31.17 though.
I haven't changed lashers. It should be done, but I'm not in a rush, at least until we get to the serious combat rewrites.
Toady, bit of a tangent here but do you have any plans to look at worldgen battles again any time soon? Seems to me there's a weird skew towards the defender winning.
For example, utilising my modded in avari race, the following battle occurred:
A: 1243 Avari, 7 losses
D: 714 Elves, 228 Grizzly Bears, 879 losses.
Defender was victorious.
The battle didn't take place in a defended structure, so I'm not certain why they'd be judged as victors.
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Are you suggesting that a mixture of 63 bears and elves would deter an army of over 1200 enemies who have already all but won? Or that the Elves constructed an unassailable wall from the corpses of their compatriots? Possibly the Avari merely grew bored with killing bears and Elves and went home?
As I already noted, the Elves didn't have any defenses present, it was mainly a battle in an open field. I can see the Elves fleeing, hiding away amongst the bodies, or being completely wiped out, but I think 'victory' is a bit of a stretch there.
Attackers have a certain amount of time to achieve their objective, and the defenders are defending some position whether it is their town or not. Whether we consider it sundown or a supply problem etc., the attackers left without wiping the elves and bears out entirely, which is the only goal they have right now. Certainly not good for the elves, and it probably wouldn't be called a victory if the world gen wars had more positional/sequential information, but as it stood it was a failure to meet an objective that contributed to the chances for the cancellation of attacks from the Avari side overall in the war. Like the last bears and elves rose up from the body piles and found the spent Avari marching/flying/whatever away, and cheered, until they looked around.
Eggs we get eggs! Heck eggs! How are you planning to do them? I mean just outline how they work internally?
I figure I'll probably go all in with multiple materials, item type, and laying of objects. Not as sure about nesting. I'm not sure about cooking or having the nature of materials change when cooked.
Will there be quests to retrieve at least one body part of a member of a community who was abducted and killed by a night creature to allow a proper burial?
We were planning to allow you to rescue the captives that are still alive after world gen, but it didn't happen. I wonder if people would want the prepare chopped liver of their relative, if you can somehow recognize it. It seems like getting the body back from a predator/cook creature might be beyond what somebody would ask for, but I dunno.
I noticed something with the targeting system. There seem to be these things like 'opportunity shots' that are marked with a blue '!'. How are these decided over turns? Is it random, or do you send a certain algorithm depending on the situation?
Also, the bogeymen's dodging skill is a bit absurd. Are you considering to lower it a little bit in the next few releases?
It is based on the fighter/dodge skills for the defender and the fighter skill for the attacker (it was also attack/weapon skill, but I had to drop that for the time being), but there is a strong random element to it as well. In general, if you find yourself not finding a lot of + of ! against an opponent, they are probably a better fighter than you (in terms of the fighter skill), but you might have sufficient specific weapon skill to overcome that.
Nope. You aren't supposed to mess around alone at night and fighting against the bogeymen isn't supposed to be easy. Aside from the overall drift away from bogeyman ubiquity mentioned above, we were considering some other countermeasures that lone travelers might use. Simple things like camp fires, torches or iron. That sort of thing.
In other news, are stables planned to be implemented in the next release? Going in adventure mode and saving up enough to buy/rent a horse would be pretty cool.
Yeah, this should happen in the next non-bug-fix release.
When are you planning to turn hunger and thirst back on?
Couldn't you just assume you're hunting and drinking while travelling?
Well, let's assume we are travelling then while we are instantly teleported across the map.
Seriously, follow this line of thought and we will end with a ASCII Oblivion.
We do have a travel map already that abstracts walking through 48 tiles, and I think it's a good thing, so there's room for some abstraction. We want to put hunger and thirst back in, and we don't think we want to abstract hunting. On the other hand, if you have a stack of food set up as your travel food then it should just consume it instead of forcing you to go to the local view. It's going to depend a lot on the overall pacing of travel in the end, so we won't be able to say for sure until we try some things out.
With ThreeToe's mention of pigs and chickens in the devlog and the November report... does that mean that the domestic animals, and any other tamed animals for that matter, will actually appear in adventure mode hamlets/towns again?
Yeah. We hope for a rather large collection of farm beasts wandering around villages. And perhaps pigs and chickens in the town yards as well. Everybody likes to keep pigs and chickens.
Toady, I've noticed you have used the term "we" a lot more lately when referring to the development of the game, and ThreeToe now appears to be posting on the dev log page. Given the page has also received an overhaul to show which one of you is posting the update, does this mean that ThreeToe will have a larger (or, better said, a more public) role in the development of DF?
It was kind of annoying to see the state of the Threetoe article on the wiki, so we thought we'd try to reflect the work he's been doing a bit more evenly on the log.
Or did something change in this release that reduced interactions like babysnatching in history?
Is it different from 0.31.16? I can see the introduction of entity pops totally destroying the previous proportions, but I can't think of anything for 0.31.17 itself.
In the old dev notes, you mentioned wanting dragon attacks to be righteous, with dragons flying around torching villages from above, picking people up and dropping them from great heights, and generally being really dangerous-- because of their wings. Yet default dragons in DF have been lacking wings for quite a while. Why? I know mythology has plenty of wingless dragons too... but now we have cave dragons, which I'd imagine to be the wingless kind. So why no wings on the regular dragons?
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Yet we still have giant eagles with wings... not perfect, nor with all the grand AI to use it, but still there...
I changed the flying AI fairly recently, so it hasn't been all that long since it was time to revisit it, though maybe that was for people riding eagles, I don't recall. But more recently the thing with dragons has been the idea of doing a semi-specified random creature generator, using dragons as the prototype, and getting it all out into the raws etc. That is, I want a generator that'll take information from the raws and produce various dragons that are all somewhat recognizable as dragons, but still different from each other. I guess that's not too far off what has been with night creatures already now, but that doesn't have a raw format. We'll assuredly have flying dragons and intelligent speaking dragons once that happens, but it's sort of a damper on dragons until it does.
Toady, how close are the entities to respecting borders, and war between civilizations of the same entity definition? Human on human wars would be a nice touch here.
The upcoming association of hamlets/villages to the town markets is going to force me to come to terms with loose boundaries a bit, as will the desire to set up some kind of difference in available trade goods. The way it is now civs are more like the checkerboard alliances you might expect from later game town trade wars or something. Human on human wars were going to be the main element of the release after the caravan one, with the site resources there being part of the basis for it. By the time we are adding that sort of thing in, I imagine that even if the checkerboard situation isn't altered, it'll still be a matter of different cultures being under the control of different warlords in different blobs not strictly related to the civ/culture. I'm still not sure exactly how that's going to be -- right now positions are registered with civilizations, but that might have to be loosened a bit to allow people more autonomy. Entity pop mixtures within a town might be more common by that time. Bandits are sort of the pioneers there, but even for this last release we were planning to have the occasional dwarf or goblin living in a human town, it just didn't quite happen, at least not the way we wanted it to (I think it can come up sometimes).
Is there a possibility that sooner rather then later, the fortress embark local map would be improved to show underground features and have the display alternate between displaying different features that are on the same map tile?
I imagine it would be popular as an option, but I can't promise a timeline for it. There is going to be a related issue arising with setting up supply/demand in that the variety of minerals would probably be better off being more restricted. In that case, there might be plenty of places without great minerals, and it would be annoying to plant a fort on one of those. In addition, it could be problematic to limit start sites further than sprawl has already limited them. So there are some things to deal with there.
With the trade upgrades, will items you trade away ever return? For example, could you sell a masterwork steel sword to a human caravan, have that civ get angry with you, and have a soldier using that sword attack you?
This is the eventual idea, however, it might not happen until they are pulling armies from the entity populations. So if not the next major release, then the one after that. It could be that armies are still generated but draw items from the stockpiles for the next release in a sort of hybrid approach, but I'm not sure how it is going to end up.
Just how in-depth will the caravan arc be? For example, if I flood the food market for years straight, will the populations of cities I trade with skyrocket to reflect the increased availability of food? And, if I were to suddenly cut off that access, will there be mass starvation? Also, will this, and, say, poisoning the food exports be viable ways to weaken others before trying to attack, when that comes up?
I'm not sure if you're going to be able to have much of an effect on the food market, since that isn't going to be your specialty as a dwarf fortress vs. the thousands living in human villages. Steel weapons, on the other hand, could cause trouble eventually. We'll be tracking every item to some extent -- depending on the amount traded out, it might have to abstract down to type and material, but we'll try to keep as much as we can.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: The Development Page (Read 1610585 times)