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[3]

Regardless, I'll need some input on making a flame creature, or I'll need some free time when I don't feel like playing or coding.

Well, for my part, as I said, it's probably best to keep flame tissues extraneous to avoid bizarre scenarios like the creature not being able to kill anything while being completely unkillable itself.

Personally the way I'd go about it is make a chance of a fire tissue layer (after every other tissue's been applied) on whichever bodyparts (it could be the entire body, or be a chance of just one limb, or something), then if the layer's applied, do SELECT_MATERIAL:ALL, HEATDAM_POINT:NONE, MELTING_POINT:NONE, BOILING_POINT:NONE.

That way you'll end up with a creature that has a firey body/limb but otherwise acts like anything else.

[Vorthon]

Or you could make it secrete the Flame material as a gas.


I like the secretions tag.

[Girlinhat]

*Marks on her list: Fire, deal with it later*

[Captain Mayday]

Underbellies - That's not really possible.  I think it would be with some effort, but not really.  To be perfectly honest, creatures in DF are a series of spheres attached to each other, with each sphere having layers like the earth's crust and junk shoved inside, like brains and livers and ribs.  There's some vague idea of direction with left/right arms, which mostly helps determine gauntlet use I think, but it's supposed to help in wrestling and surprise attacks?  There's not a good way to define an underbelly though.  That being said, you can paint a false underbelly, by defining a body part named "underbelly" and then giving it an appearance, so you can have "she is red, her underbelly is white" but the underbelly wouldn't really be there.

I've done some work here. It's possible, but definitely don't use an additional body part.
The best way, I found, was to actually layer the tissues in a way that the bottom/front were the underbelly material only, with everywhere else being covered by the other stuff.
Sadly, since bottom and front do very little at the moment, you absolutely must coat the entire body part with underbelly before laying the rest on top of that as a partial cover. Otherwise you can get the situation where something strikes the body part, missing both underbelly and other tissue, and getting straight to the fat/whatever.
Then you can do the description part (as you noted), and have it actually be there.

[Girlinhat]

I think, if I'm going that route, I'd make the underbelly and main flesh by paper-thin and, well, made of paper, on top of the usual tissues.  So, you'd have bone, muscle, fat, skin, underbelly+hide.  That way it could maintain the regular style of combat and some additional details.  Advice on that?

[Captain Mayday]

I think, if I'm going that route, I'd make the underbelly and main flesh by paper-thin and, well, made of paper, on top of the usual tissues.  So, you'd have bone, muscle, fat, skin, underbelly+hide.  That way it could maintain the regular style of combat and some additional details.  Advice on that?

That's how I did it for my dragons, yes.

For other stuff like dogs etc, you can just use the fake underbelly since it's just differently coloured hair.

[Urist McGyver]

As for names, http://www.rinkworks.com/namegen/

[Girlinhat]

You (or someone) already sent that link.  I still don't know quite how to apply it.

[Cotes]

Can you do hedgehog-like creatures by the way?

[ahonek]

I think some people still don't quite grasp what you're trying to do. A link to the name-generator website isn't so helpful unless you want the program to make HTTP requests to the website in order to generate names.

Alternatively, it looks like his source code is openly displayed in the web page's HTML, but you'd have to convert it to C++ of course. This would be a good exercise in terms of transferable programming skills, but not necessarily very productive toward the goal of name generation.

Honestly for now an easy method might be to just read an English dictionary into memory at runtime and just pair a random adjective with a random noun. It'll get you interesting placeholder names anyway, until you take the time to write something that utilizes the symbol table.

EloquentPipe isn't a very good name for a dog with 4 eyes, but it's certainly in the style of DF.

[Girlinhat]

I say it's quite good o.q

Thus, every single randomly generated name shall be "Eloquentpipe".

[NotPete]

The EloquentPipe strikes the EloquentPipe in the arm with his left horn and the severed part flies off in an arc!

Maybe take words from the in game languages and mix 'em up?

[Girlinhat]

After some thought, I decided to change the way I structure the program.  It was biome - aggro - body parts - tissue thickness & flavor parts.  Now, I'm thinking it will be biomes - forms (spider, humanoid, serpentine, blob, etc) - aggro - body parts - tissue thickness and flavor parts.  I'm also thinking about forgetting using a body_detail_plan and instead painting tissue types on the spot, aside from some universal tissues like eyes and bone.  Those are usually safe to apply everywhere.  But things like muscle thickness and fat placement will be defined as needed.  This should allow some freedom of control over how things get layered and vary according to biome and form, and allow for some different tissue types, like bronze bones or skin made of spider web.

Now, with that in mind, is there any new advice you people would like to apply?  I've decided to go ahead and include the caverns in the plan, but not oceans because it can be difficult to actually interact with ocean creatures.  I could make some amphibious creatures if there's enough desire, but at this point I'm ignoring oceans.  Also magma sea, I can include that if there's some worthwhile examples to place.

[Urist McGyver]

The random creatures are going to be wild only? I say that because it wasn't clarified before if there's a possibility of them to be tribalistic.

If you're gonna place them in caves, it would be fun to dig down and find an Eloquentpipe village.

[Girlinhat]

It's theoretically possible, though this means adding an entity file for them.  Not a huge deal in and of itself, but another step to consider.  The chance for common domestics will be included as well, rare for large aggro critters.