Do the food production/starvation routines during worldgen factor in any of the actual plant tokens (such as seasons, growdur, etc.)?
Nope. I'd rather balance against a simple yearly planting cycle rather than the current numbers until the farming rewrite. Once we have a clearer handle on farming, supporting that sort of thing should be more natural. I expect the numbers will be quite a bit different at that time, probably, since the growing seasons are all pretty short right now.
Toady do you mean Goblins don't need to eat in any future update or that Goblins won't need to eat until you can get it working properly?
Toady: Could you clairify a bit on the "Goblins don't need to eat" bit? Just curious how that's going to play out and what the reasoning behind it is (from a world lore perspective). Also, even if goblins don't eat what about any other future carnivorous civs? Wolfmen or the like? Do you see yourself adding in herding-based civilizations to accommodate that? Even in our history we have examples of very successful civilizations that did very little actual farming and mostly just herded animals around. The Mongols are probably the best example of that.
In any future update. I know a few people were dismissive of our decision and called it a cop out, but we thought about these situations (including the Mongols) and rejected them. Goblins that herd meat animals are insufficiently scary to us. Goblins that die exclusively violent deaths in great numbers in a potentially vegetationless wasteland are better, and we want to explore a wider variety of possibilities than humans allow -- humans can be Mongols, because the Mongols were human, and we hope to support some human variety eventually. There are beak dog considerations, etc., but those aren't fundamental -- wrangling some critters isn't as image-shattering as having large herds of meat animals ranging over grasslands with goblin ranchers.
Have you thought about whether dwarves should have an advantage to accessing resources that are deep underground? Do you think this should this be a purely cultural affinity for digging, or should there be some physiological reason why men and elves can't dig down and mine the spoilerite?
I haven't thought about it much, or come to any conclusions anyway. I'd hate to have a strong physiological barrier, depending on what that means, since it would screw up adventurers in abandoned forts. The actually spoilerite stuff could just be hidden technical knowledge.
How will night creature creature weaknesses, important ways to deal with specific monsters, making sure they're permanently dead, etc. be dealt with? Especially for night creatures way out in savage lands where nobody's heard of them and information-gathering might not be possible?
It'll certainly be the same between them, at least with the creature types that live in both civilized and uncivilized places. Without knowing how to kill stuff, I imagine putting yourself in those sorts of situations is kind of like drinking a mottled potion in order to identify it. It's an unsafe choice. It's obviously a game problem if you have to do like 7 steps to put something down and there's no access at all to that information -- this points to making the information always being attainable once it is required, with the information only being obtainable by supernatural means when it isn't widely-held (or even guarded) mundane knowledge. This is a common theme -- going to see the seer or commune with the spirits, etc. The gathering of the information might be the more challenging quest in the end, but the information should be out there somewhere... it might even be a task to figure out where to get the information in the first place. Those sorts of layers will come in over time, but we're not planning to jump the gun on creature weaknesses, especially in some game-breaking way.
Are there plans to have some entities inhabit the sewers and catacombs (as opposed to just wandering around like the undead), if so what kinds? eg. sewer hermits, black market traders.
And...
Will the undead be given life by a necromancer of sorts, or a god, or the spirits of dead entities, or just.. something else? (I'm thinking of Threetoe's story, Warriors of the Dead, where the soldiers who come back to the "real world" have returned from a kind of hell, could the undead be populated from entities who have actually already died in worldgen history?)
Edit - Have been going through all Threetoe's stories recently, and another question popped into mind...
How can one access the catacombs? In Dragon Quest the priest accesses the catacombs from a church, will it be like this, or through the sewers, or something else?
The easiest non-animal/non-monstery thing that fits in with what we already have would just be a bandit analog. Working in other stuff is most likely a later thing with all that's on the plate now.
There will be some pseudo-justifications for the initial undead stuff, and a lot of them will be previously living world gen people -- the historical ones are tracked, and all the entity pop ones are now too, by cause of death and location. We've been exploring and doing some code on a large variety of afterlife stuff for some months now, but there's no concrete timeline on that, so likely they'll just return from "the dead" if they are being brought back as themselves (rather than just an animated corpse).
Temples are back in this version, and there can be catacombs access there. There can also be sewer access and probably links to other dungeons.
In a world where undead exist, why would anyone bury their dead at all? Why not just chuck everyone in the crematorium?
Will a city surviving a zombie apocalypse have an effect on burial practices in-game? Do they "learn" to do something different in how they bury their dead using some sort of method to stop another mass rising?
Also, will there be a "safe" method of burial, such as incineration and slabbing, or will that just produce some other kind of undead in a zombie apocalypse?
Undead uprisings are extremely rare events. It is rational that a culture will generally take only the minimum level of burial protection.
Some people think the undead exist in our world, and possibly did in greater numbers in the past depending on the kind, and still do/did burials of whole bodies in many places. Without zombie uprisings there are just minor traditions, I think, as PTTG?? brings up.
Adding cultural reaction to widespread zombie attacks is fair to explore, although having it pop out naturally from some sort of basic AI is not in the cards most likely. There will still be large concentrations of unhandled bodies at places like battlefields, probably, especially if the culture that worries the most about the undead loses. Your fortress dwarves are free to improvise in advance of course. I doubt there's going to be a 100% safe burial method for your dwarves, but being respectful will almost always be the better choice (although being respectful and also placing the coffin in a sheer pit might be the best choice in certain areas).
Are the quest givers going to reward us with anything beside fame and glory in the near future ? (Urists, Weapons, Amulets and different useless/useful stuff.)
It's certainly reasonable for people to do things like that, but I don't have a timeline for it. We're slowly getting to property notions, and once we arrive at manors in Release 3, it might be ready, but not until then.
What sort of situation is likely to prevent bodies from being laid to rest properly? Or are these walking dead active for some other reason?
For things like curses that are passed on (vampirey werewolfy stuff, for instance), having a proper burial isn't relevant. There might also be problems that arise inevitably from criminals that are executed or that die in a dungeon, regardless of the burial.
Have you considered the possibiitly that since your making sewers and other building structure about including graveyards?
Perhaps even a possibility that the graveyard could be haunted you maybe you'l have to go extermine the undead? I think that would be sort of fun.
Footkerchief brought up the old goal there, and we've also got the new dead piles from world gen to people the catacombs with bodies. That has made graveyards a much lower hanging fruit, but I'm not sure if we're going to do it just yet, if it involves burial in soil, since we don't really have that covered. In the underground catacomby places, coffins can be placed exposed. There will be giant crypty pyramidy sites independent of the towns again, on the other hand, but unlike the old ones they'll have a proper world gen tie-in with historical undead (in part). It'll either have something already awakened in world gen, or just a giant place on the map where you are like, yeah, I'll go there and disturb the dead and take their things. Dwarf embarks probably possible only on the ones you can't see, I guess. Dwarf embark is always tricky, because it is inevitably silly.
I was wondering: Will night creature generation ever be able to produce night creatures that feed on/are repelled by abstract concepts, such as happiness, the laughter of children, contentement, rage, etc.?
Assuming that someday there will be monsters feeding off emotions and other abstract concepts, do you think we could have creatures that simply prefer or dislike people with certain personality or appearance traits to some extent(for example some creatures could eat only people with scars, some would prefer people who get angry easily, some would completely avoid people with 6 toes and drop dead upon touching them, etc.)?
I'm not sure what it'll ever be able to do, but as we add more effects, things certainly become more powerful -- if what I'm doing is analogous to the very beginnings of a magic system generator, then having power sources come from any creature variable is fair, and having supernatural creatures feed/powered in the same way all fits back in.
With settlements back into adventure mode, will we see thirst and hunger be added in during the next release or a subsequent caravan arc release?
It's probably not entirely unreasonable to put it in now, but it might have to wait for Release 5 (when the world is activated), or when proper hunting goes in.
Once caravans and such get tracked on the local map, will things be flexible enough that you can do things like... go in with a flying adventurer, wall up the entrances to a city, wait for them to starve because food caravans cant get it, then buy the food from those caravans, fly over with it, and sell it on the black market for insane amounts of money?
There was already a discussion about the pathfinding component, and that's the main obstacle in this case, if you aren't there babysitting the gate. If we simplify it to say, waylaying the caravan as it travels then yeah, people will have a high demand for food eventually, and it'll probably take a much longer time for their suspicion of you to be put in the game, unless they are your enemies automatically due to some magical factional thing from the caravan murder.
Do the various under-city structures sometimes meet with the highest underground layer? If so, how common is it? And will Forgotten Beasts and other subterranean creatures eventually come up through such connections to live in sewers (and whatnot) or attack the town? It sounded like the first bit was a "yes" from the devlog, but I'd like confirmation.
On a similar, but ultimately separate note:
You didn't mention basements or cellars. Does that mean you weren't working on them, or were they just simple enough that they didn't contribute to the complications you mentioned?
It seems like it would be somewhat silly to include all the awesome fancy underground stuff and not include simple underground stuff too.
We've thought about how it might look, but right now we are still avoiding the top layer (that mention in the dev log was more about threading the rest between the upper and lower limits, which are variable). It's easy enough to hit it, but for it to have a point beyond the intrusion of flying beasts, we need the adventurer to have a way to get down to the cavern floor, which would mean the humans digging stairs or placing a scaffoldy stair or something. It would be a fun place to have a lever and bars though, and a sign with a warning on it. We haven't ruled out doing it, and it's always good to have more cavern access points that aren't far-away rare caves -- there still isn't much to do down there though, so it's not a key addition yet.
Basements/cellars were in my mind with the complication list in the "buildings" part, particularly because temples can currently have multilevel underground parts from before that aren't the new catacombs themselves. I haven't done basements/cellars generally though. They should be that bad, but doing them too thickly will mess with my sewer stuff -- the sewers try to follow the roads but have to skip them at times.
Also, what factors will influence undead activity? Will there be sudden undead outbreaks?
The area stuff is randomly distributed, so it's just ongoing. The organized attack stuff will be according to availability until we get to Army Arc/Release 5ey stuff... the ghost outbreaks are already in... some of it'll also depend on the attacks by individual creatures that can convert fort members, perhaps stealthfully, and then you'd have sort of a sudden outbreak. We'll have to see how that works.
Will road (and other civil construction) materials vary with local/economic availability and/or class/economic districts within urban areas?
Hopefully -- furniture is going to use the numerically stored items, but the larger constructions I think right now just use local stone at will. Except the grates that connect the sewers up through shafts to the roads... for some reason those are all rainbow colors now.
Will there be a HAS_SEWER_LAIR or similar tag so that modders can specify that certain creatures like crocodiles or grimelings inhabit sewers?
I took this macabre break from the sewers right before I added critters, so I don't have the clear answer yet, but I imagine it'll be something like that, since we're only going to want certain vanilla beasts to be down there, and different than the river critters that sometimes get in there naturally.
Toady, does this mean we can create zombie viruses in fortress mode?
Yeah, curses will be able to give rise to curses in various ways, and something relatively like some existing varieties of zombie apocalypse should be possible, even in vanilla DF. In general with all this stuff, there is a danger with the world dying, which on its face increases as the dead come to outnumber the living more and more (although the game can place arbitrary controls on these things to prevent too much going on). Could be up to world params, or chance, or be tightly controlled. But from a mod perspective it should be possible to get something done. In some broad way, it's going to be able to treat different sorts of curse behavior in all three modes (world gen, adv mode, dwarf mode), so it is hoped custom curses will at least somewhat work as expected. Obviously there will be bugs and oversights and incomplete portions to revel in.
How far away, tentatively, is adventurer-enabled mining and constructing?
...
I know it won't be around the bend for a while. Such as, what are the biggest things in the way at the moment.
The site thing you mentioned is pretty much the only significant obstacle, and as you also mentioned, it's partially handled. The rest is just sitting down and doing it, which involves thinking through how tool-heavy adv mode should be, I guess, and how much time should pass mining through stone walls, for example, and if it influences dwarf mode mining times at all. Tile-by-tile constructions are silly in many cases, but I doubt that'll change before or when we get to them in adv mode.
Simple questions: are there plans for PCs be infect-able by night creatures in upcoming versions? If so, will there be a way for PCs to cure themselves, and upon succumbing will infected PCs remain under player control, or will the transformation be considered equivalent to death, converting the PC to a (potentially brutal) NPC for a later adventurer to eliminate?
It's most natural to make adventurers susceptible to all the trouble, since that's how it works when you don't change anything. We're for making the affected player playable if they can do enough of the bad things available to the non-adventurer creature, and that may or may not be in the cards.
These underground features will have coffins, doors, statues, small bridges over the sewer channels, or they will be bare for now? And the houses in the city? There will be furniture?
All of that should be in by the time of the release.
How many houses will be abandoned and ruined and how will it eventually look? Will some of them be falling apart enough to breach underground? Will there be any kind of creatures(or just bands of outlaws) living in them?
Will cities occasionally perish, leaving infested ruins that we can embark upon?
There is a very exaggerated population cycle that goes on in the cities now, so it might actually be frequent to have uninhabited structures making up a great section of the city, if they don't have some reason to go away. Haunting houses and bandits and things all hoped for, should get to some stuff. If the undead get out of hand during world gen, there will be trouble spots, yeah.
With all the new monsters, night creatures, undead, titans, and demons... is there any consideration being given to how the different races are actually going to survive? Will there be great heroes, other than the player character, that actually stand a chance against these threats? Or can we look forward to entire worlds dying off by the year 200?
Alternately, if we can look forward to massive death from armies of undead, will these creatures take over and form a new society that we can then interact with in some way other than killing them?
I think Neonivek brought up the ineffectual nature of the megabeasts. There are already heroes in world gen, but they aren't really fleshed out. As we progress, they will be, to make your companions and adversaries more interesting.
The new night creature curses will be a new little test for world gen, as mentioned above, and we'll have to see how the world does. Since there are caps on the overall living population, due to technical constraints, the dead bodies being tracked almost always come to outnumber the living as the years roll on. Depending on how raising works, that doesn't bode well for the living without controls. A powerful "contagious" curse could also be a problem. Ideally, you'd want situations where you can sometimes play in a half-dead world, but not so much a fully dead world. There could be something analogous to the megabeast percentage for world gen stoppage -- it could just stop world gen if it detects that the world is a zombie infested hellhole where humanity and dwarfdom are just barely clinging to life, so you can have fun there. It's not difficult to cap outbreaks to keep the world under control, through params probably.
Will curses be associated with particular creatures, or will they be associated with particular areas, or both?
For example, lets take the obvious "living death" curse. Do creatures suffer from the curse because they have been attacked/cursed by a certain creature (as is the case with most "infection" kinds of zombie apocalypse, or vampires) or do they suffer because they died in a certain area, perhaps without taking precautions (burial on unhallowed ground in an evil biome, for instance)?
Both areas and creatures will have curses, and the system will be expandable to artifacts and so on later. It's not unlike a magic framework in the end and could become that in time, though were obviously focusing on a narrow slice right now without tackling some of the stumbling blocks.
Will the new night creatures be hardcoded (like the current ones) or will they be placed in the raws (and thus be removable for modders)?
Though the "interactions" as the curses are currently called are rawable, the ones in the game will almost all be randomly created for each world and thereby dependend on world parameters. You'll probably be able to turn them off entirely, although the parameters might not be fine-grained at first to preserve some surprises at first.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: The Development Page (Read 1612779 times)