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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
... I get the impression that the game is going to look a lot like Final Fantasy X in the new version...
The monsters are all undead/ghosts, the global church conspiracy is run by ghosts, the villains are all undead, Bruce Willis was a ghost all along, and the total global population of actually
living people shrank down to about 50 while nobody was looking.
Somehow, it seems like "Adventurer Role: Slayer of Night Creatures" might need to look more like this:
Adventurer Role: Exorcist- Waki miko ofuda throwing?
In fact, I have to ask some questions about this...
With night creatures, you mentioned that you might need to do some questing to find a weakness to a night creature. Will it actually be impossible to kill night creatures without exploiting their weaknesses? (As in, is there no way to simply chop them into a fine enough paste faster than they regenerate, or just drag them away from whatever magical power source they have to kill them "the hard way", so that we must rely upon finding a weakness, no matter the difference in strength or skill our characters have with our enemies?)
Likewise, if some sort of religious practice to divine weaknesses or to exorcise undead must happen to kill certain creatures, will we, as players, (at least some point in the future, perhaps having to wait on general magic system) have the ability to become one of those religious figures, capable of divining or performing exorcisms of ghosts or reversals of curses on our own, and can our fortresses train exorcists or the like to combat un-slabbable ghosts? Or do we have no power to fight these things on our own?If we have no way of making our fortress completely safe from having an undead uprising, that's all well and good, so long as we have some way of actually dealing with them. Anything like a zombie you killed the first time you can probably kill again.
Ghosts, however, are invulnerable right now, and if slabs don't stop them...
Making ghosts
undefeatable and having the dead goblin siegers just come back as vengeful ghosts to pick off your dwarves one-by-one at their leisure like after-dinner mints because you have no recourse against them doesn't sound fun at all, it sounds like the game just forces you to abandon a perfectly good fort for no reason.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: The Development Page (Read 1611037 times)