I moved the questions on the new city maps etc. to the top for convenience.
Toady, will we be having cities that extend beyond the walls? or cities without walls?
Yeah. It can handle multiple internal walls/gates (tested, but doesn't place any yet) while still managing a fairly decent building density, and it retains the old fields outside of smaller town maps (walls or not), though I might have to rewrite the field placement code to correspond to more manageable shapes that link in with the new system if the towns end up changing more over time after play begins. Right now the towns are very shrinkable/extendible, but fields are less so.
Chalk me up for another person who think the cities would likely be a bear to navigate, by the current standards of navigation in Adventure Mode.
When towns have various important buildings in them and other stuff to do, will there be any plans to prevent intra-city walks from being too long and monotonous?
Will there be any kind of navigational tools like signposts or slabposts, or perhaps even a system where villages guide adventurers in place so that the player doesn't easily get lost in these cities?
The things we are looking at now are letting people move along roads on the travel map (they already appear there), and where internal walls make that have too small a resolution, to provide a new zoomed-in-3x map splitting the travel map that a resolution appropriate for all city travel. Then there's asking directions. You should not end up having to take 800 steps to get straight across town -- if there is a road without obstacles, it should just be the 15-17 steps on the travel map, and if there's an intervening wall or river, you might have to take ~50 steps on the 3x map. We'll see how these maps interfere with a sense of exploration in new cities, and then uncover them as you move around, perhaps, or limit their use in extreme cases perhaps. In any case, I'm going to try to remain mindful of the annoyances.
Will building materials reflect the location of the city and the importance of the building?
I imagine a city on the plains will have mostly brick buildings, with only the city hall and the cathedral made of stone. We just need to get adobe bricks or more charcoal from one log or animal poo fuel, because it'll be easier to build it out of wood now.
Each building stores its material, so theoretically it shouldn't be a problem once we get into important buildings. Right now it just throws a civ wood in there. It'll be good to differentiate even the simple buildings a bit, but that might have to be done through shop signage for the shops. I'm not sure what the deal is with paint or whatever.
Those city designs look crazy awesome! I have to ask though, will we have things like central keeps, inside a second wall?
Also, will the cities get divided into districts? Say a livestock/butchers/tanners section downwind of the city, or cramped and dingy slums/ghettos & more expensive and spacious rich districts?
I'm not sure when castles will be placed in the towns. It can handle it map-wise, so it's just a matter of time -- world gen would need to respect city+fortress combinations. The cities will have some division to them. I'm not sure if there's going to be a rich/poor distinction until the manor release, and even then I guess it'll be up to the town -- it is my understanding that depending on how property acquisition worked etc., you might have highly integrated towns or towns with separated rich/poor areas. Right now, we just have the division of labor that arises during world gen, which will allow us to divide up the town somewhat based on the workshop types.
Also, will there be variations of city layouts beetween different human civilizations? Like, if a civ makes more "organic" looking cities another may make them more rigid (larger roads, no curves, etc.)
Eventually. First I need to get anything working, and then variety can start to arise, both in the overall layout and in the individual buildings. The number and regularity of intersections, road width, building size etc. is all pretty easy to control now.
How does the building process in world-gen work? Are the large buildings like walls or castles built gradually, segment after segment, or do they just pop into existence overnight? Is there some resource gathering going on? Basically, I'm just wondering if it is possible to encounter a city with unfinished walls, or a castle where just the keep has been finished.
You can't see anything happen gradually yet. There are stone resource stockpiles, but it doesn't tie into giant constructions yet. Eventually it should work out -- the walls and towers are pretty modular, so having half-constructed buildings that get finished during play outside of view is certainly feasible, though making it happen if you are sitting there staring might not be quite so easy.
Are all those orange rectangles ALL buildings?
Yeah -- I haven't done larger buildings or market squares or whatever else, so we just have lots of similar buildings (some of these will have internal walls). It'll be a bit different by the release, but we aren't really going to get into it until taverns/manors/inns a few releases down the line.
For a city of the size presented, are shops going to be scattered throughout? Is there going to be one great central market? Or little clusters of shops serving different parts of the city?
In the maximal cities presented, there will be at least one giant market, and perhaps some smaller ones -- they'll probably be stalls grouped by type, some permanent. Then there will be shops -- for now, perhaps the majority of the buildings depending on the most prevalent professions.
What models are there governing population growth and decline? Where do you want it to go - a simple and streamlined abstract model of growth and decline based upon a tally of upward population growth forces and downward pressures on populations, or a very gritty and detailed model where every wave of disease is tracked, so that there will be history events of the great city fire of 231?
The problem with that is that starvation doesn't seem to be modelled very well at all - people just keep eating normally right up until there's only food for 30% of them left, and so 70% of the population just sits there and waits to die.
Starvation doesn't work quite that blindly in world gen, but even when they try to save up for hard times and go as far as infanticide (cutting pop growth rate), they can't really forage or disperse right now -- they don't know how to move -- which is when they start to die off. It has all of the food and population tracked numerically, so they just need more methods to deal with unexpected crop failures or missing caravans or overall food shortages. Since it is tracking everything, historical citations of specific instances of famine etc. is just a matter of detecting/adding historical events now when something bad happens over a period of weeks. The new slowness in world gen comes from pushing all of this info around. When we get to disease, I'm sure that'll be tracked site by site, pop by pop, over the years as well.
I'm no expert on what a carnivore can or cannot eat (It probably varies between species) but when you get around to getting goblins properly eating in worldgen would any dietary changes have any effect on fortress mode? Or are the checks to see what a civ can eat separate between worldgen and the game modes? Are you satisfied with the goblins' current menu?
Goblins are not going to need to eat. That is intentional. They might enjoy eating certain things though, but I don't think any significant changes are going to come from it.
the grass raws include now tissues which is nice but could it support more indepth stuff like a simplifyed body-defintion (which would be nice for shrubs too).
I'm not sure how that's going to play out. They won't have limbs like creatures do that are always the same. Multi-tile trees need to have different shapes.
Will trees and shrubs ever be expanded on (in terms of the Evil/Good) more so, like grass. We have one Good and one Evil for each, I think, but I it seems we have lots of fantasy-flavored grasses.
I think there are two grasses were there might be one tree for each sort of thing, at least for good/evil/savage. No clue when that'll change.
When animals get revisited, are we going to be able to designate fodder spaces that get filled? Currently you can't just tie up a grazing animal somewhere and expect it to live long.
I don't know what the mechanic will be, but something will have to happen there with hay and whatever else.
How do Grazing, Hunger, and grass growth work alongside each other?
To be more specific, I can see that the GRAZER:X token allows X hunger to be removed for every unit of grass eaten.
What determines the rate at which hunger increases? Is creature size a factor?
Is a 'unit' of grass simply 1/4 the maximum amount that is growing on a space?
If creature size is a factor in determining rate of hunger, why is there such an enormous difference in how much hunger is removed?
The average creature gets 1 turn every 10 frames, and one of those turns has to be used moving, so any creature with Grazer:19 or less cannot feed itself. An elephant, which only removes 12 hunger per eating of grass, is on a countdown to starvation the instant that hunger is in place.
Hunger increases 1 each frame, but they don't have to move to eat, so elephants can technically survive (they gain 2 per 10 frames for 1000 frames then have to move once, net positive), but in practice they won't likely survive long since they have to do their movement very effectively to keep it up. It'll be better when they can browse. I haven't revisited the overall system at this point, but I doubt the hunger variable would survive it.
Are the hardcoded "fire breath", "fireball toss", "dragon fire breath", and "shoot web" behaviours considered complete, or placeholder? I ask because breath attacks and secretions with associated materials have been added. The glittery balls of fire that fire imps toss look pretty, but they don't appear to do anything in arena mode, even if you get hit by dozens. Back in 0.28.181.40d, those balls could be lethal, so the code appears to outdated. Do you intend to merge the hardcoded breath weapons into the material breath system?
Obviously it needs to be changed, but I'm not sure what the solution is going to be.
Toady, with your mineral veins rework are we gonna see the return of chasms and underground rivers?
That probably won't be the time for it, but the placement of larger scale mineral features that span more than a 48x48x1 will increase abilities there a bit for the future.
For the "explorer/archeologist" adventurer role type... what are the plans for generating ancient ruins and dungeons and so on? Is the ideal something like a random Legend of Zelda, with each room elaborately linked up by your great precursors? Are they going to be anything like the caverns we have today? Or should we expect them to meld into the rest of the world as easily as possible?
It's going to be based on what happened in world gen, but some strange things will be added to world gen to make them more interesting -- tombs and prisons, etc., and once a location can be used over time for different purposes, it should be interesting. A given tomb might be sort of weird and Zelda-y in that way, since it can engage in arbitrary trap-and-interesting-thing placement under the guise of keeping out graverobbers and respecting the dead. I think the last two DF Talks had some related Q&A with a bit more detail you can find in the transcripts.
will be there a separation between the handling/working of fortress/civilizations relationships and fortress/fair relationship? that is, is in the plans having fair out of fortress control (apart quantity/quality influenced by zones and wealth and stuff like that) and detailed trade agreement between civilizations/important sites (and the keyword here is detailed) or something like that
Without hill dwarves, fairs associated to the fort would occur on fortress grounds, and you'd have that sort of control over what's going on there. Also, normally, the fairs will involve various trade agreements between whoever, but in fort mode, the time is compressed and a little screwy that way, so it might be that fort fairs are far more fort-centric than other fairs that occur on sites. We'll have to see how that plays out. I'm not sure if that addresses your questions though. I don't have all the details yet.
Are there any plans for an in-fortress economy in the near future (I mean as part of the next few updates)? It's not specifically mentioned on the list but seeing as this is the "caravan arc", i though might be hidden under a larger goal.
When we get to taverns and inns, we'll see what comes up. That would be a time to try something, but I'm going to stay focused on the stated goals as best as I can. Which isn't saying much, I guess, he he he.
When 3D mineral veins are in, how will you know when they go upwards or downwards (without digging stairs everywhere)?
If you reach the end of a vein, digging down in one spot shouldn't be a big deal, but if they have a weird spidery shape up and down then it might be harder, but then you'd be hitting them in more places on every level anyway. We'll have to see what comes up.
Now that we have bamboo, will we ever be able to chop it down and make bamboo crafts? Currently it is only a grass, which is technically correct, but...
It's probably on the same unstated time-table as hay and straw.
Say, I was thinking of the future multitile trees. Will this mean multiple types of wood from variaous 'tissues' as well?
For instance high quality log, fit for working into anything (or the planks IIRC you mentioned once). and branches/roots (low quality wood/debris), perfect for coalburning, building fences or stuff requiring small bits of wood (bolts, beads etc?).
It could. I can't promise anything. The main thing will be to get elves up, probably.
What happens to the hill dwarves when a fortress is abandoned/destroyed?
Toady: How do you see Fort mode migration waves changing in light of the Hill Dwarf feature, if at all? Would it still be the primary source of new dwarves? Would people migrate to become Hill Dwarves instead of Fort Dwarves?
Migration will need to be changed -- your main source of new fort dwarves might just be hill dwarves in some situations, though far-away migrants that get admitted to the fort would probably be more skilled on average. In that way, it's hard to see how a lost game could accompany anything but the total loss/conquest of the hill dwarves as well -- either through battle or morale failure. The start situation might involve some notion that links continued play to certain dwarves (one religion, one family, etc.) that takes many of the hill dwarves out of the equation. In that case, perhaps a loss might not involve losing the settlement at all, but I haven't really thought about it much yet.
When the caravans begin to move around the map, will there be caravans for every trade route or caravans that travel along multiple trade routes?
To clarify, if Town A has trade routes with B, C, and D. Will we see three caravans coming and going between the towns or will Town A have a single caravan going to B, C, and D?
Will the caravans be sent by bigger towns going to the smaller towns or will the smaller towns send trade caravans to the bigger towns or will both be possible?
It's going to depend on who is running the caravan and what good exchanges are involved. I can see a single caravan making it across the world or local carriers that never get away from one town. I'm still not sure exactly how the larger ones are going to work though. This release will have people moving between towns and villages, but the rest is going to get sorted out later in the release list.
It sounds like there are some geology changes anticipated in Release 2. Is there anything that players could research that would be helpful?
Hard to say... I'm going to try to add some new overall structures to it, and if people have favorites it might speed things up a bit.
Are you happy with the way Vermin have turned out? Recent updates have brought in very small non-vermin creatures such as rabbits, guinea pigs, chickens, etc. Where does the line fall?
It's certainly an uncomfortable line. I didn't really want to make chickens vermin though, since it complicates pasturing/nest boxes, and that bumped the line down to something odd, and there are some bugs to be fixed. I'm not sure what the future holds.