Footkerchief went over some questions a few posts ago:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=84398.msg2279763#msg2279763I had some of these answers typed out yesterday, so rather than skipping them I might repeat/contradict/augment my previous statements.
Would it be possible for these limbs to assemble into single frankenstein/abomination-like creature?
I haven't done custom bodies yet because although I've had a custom body framework in for about as long as we've had bodies, that framework has never been tested so won't work without a lot of help. We were planning on doing those things (using the light red N), but if we get to it we were thinking of limiting it to otherly-sized body parts, sutures and grafted-on weapons, which is all do-able without going to full custom bodies.
What sort of research would help you the most? And how should the research be presented: tables summarizing the findings, links to sources where you can get the data yourself, or both? Are modified and annotated RAWs ever useful, or is it better to focus on creating forum posts with the necessary information?
Filling in the missing/incorrect/vague numbers I've got is the most useful thing that can be done now, since I'm most likely to be able to use it. Tables are fine, as long as there is a source for it, and having it already converted into the game's units is best. Raws are fine too, as long as they are sourced, and not so different from the originals that a diff utility is useless.
In the upcoming release, will only human historical figures try to seek those secrets?
I mean, goblins and elves have little reason to search for immortality obviously, but what about dwarven necromancers?
There are a lot of immortal creatures in DF, goblins,elves and giants coming to mind. They know the secret of immortality? They can teach it?
I think this is important for the sake of consistency.
What races can necromancers arise from? Just Humans and Goblins? Or can Dwarves, Elves, Kobolds, (and modded races) become ones as well?
I'm curious about what kind of requirements are going to be placed on who and what can learn secrets. Could an ordinary wild badger learn the secret of necromancy, and if it did, would it build itself a tower and start raising the dead? And if there are requirements for secrets, will they be settable on a per-secret level? (Like "the secret words of wisdom" requiring [INTELLIGENT] to learn and [CAN_SPEAK] to use, for example?)
For the example I've been using, it is restricted to mortals with can learn. Can speak might also be required, since kobolds shouldn't be able to read slabs. The restriction tags available are the same as the ones you can use for the syndromes, so it's still ongoing. You can use the current arbitrary string classes and specific creature tokens, so it's really whatever creatures you want. They don't have anybody they want to teach it to at this point, but there is a tag for it. I'm not sure what the future holds there.
Can we make subtle region curses? I'd like to see little hamlets full of backwards, mutated townsfolk.
It doesn't all have to be zombies, but I'm not sure any of the effects qualify as subtle with what I've got so far. Once we get to vampires, which might include small body modification effects, then you could make a region curse that makes people have giant hands or something, but I can't promise anything.
Have you settled on what these 'secrets' will allow? Would you pretty please be able to post a list (so, immortality, raising and binding undead, rapid healing, etc)?
You mentioned that new secrets will be able to be modded in on release. What kind of functionality on release are we looking at for that system? Will secrets be able to change attributes, give new body parts, or anything like that, or will it just be tags like [IMMORTAL] or whatever for now?
I'm not sure what all is going to be available yet. Partial changes to bodies (new parts etc.) are the most time-consuming and won't be included this time. Once we are through vampires I should have a better idea.
Toady, will necromancy be possible in the Arena?
How will the new syndromes/curses/interactions affect the arena mode? Will the undead option be removed in favor of the generated undead? Or will arena mode be left alone for the release?
Right now for testing I've allowed one interaction effect to be applied to a given creature at creation. That doesn't let you specify how much flesh has rotted away, but it does let you test things like secret effects and so on.
Will curses/syndromes be curable in a way that does not kill the person who is cursed? For instance, if a gang of werewolves attacks my fort, can I trap them and then apply some cure, turning them into normal dwarves/humans/etc which could then be friendly and join my fort?
It isn't available as an effect right now, but it's certainly a reasonable thing to consider for later, especially if curses get to be a game-ruining mess that isn't your fault. I'm not sure that applies to grave robbers. We'll see.
How often do you currently check out suggestions forum?
I look at the front page every two or three days. My closer reading is still several months behind.
In the case of an adventurer, will we be capable of receiving training as a religious figure or whathaveyou that lets you acquire this sort of weakness-revealing information on your own, and become a "Adventurer Role: Slayer of Nightcreatures" in the sense of being a traveling exorcist? Or must you go out and find those religious figures and ask them on the weakness for every night creature you run across?
There's nothing wrong with learning things in advance rather than on a case by case basis. If we don't have time advancement, it's more of a char gen issue, which would be cool. We'll see if this is necessary during testing when we have our first creatures with weaknesses/etc., which might not happen this time.
In the case of a fortress, we can't go out and search for religious figures to perform a divination for us. Will we have fortress temples where we can interact with the priest, and get them to tell us how to kill a nightcreature that can only be killed by exploiting some weakness? How will we even manage to control whether dwarves can exploit a weakness, for that matter? Will there be a "coat your swords in syrup" function going in any time soon? Or will Fortress Mode nightcreature weaknesses just be pushed off?
It's probably not going to come up for this release. I don't know what's going to happen after that.
Will we be able to mod secrets to be known/used by appointed noble?
I, for example, would like to make "The Castle" series mod where ruler grants imortality to best-of-best (swordmaster, armorer ..., but also cook, doctor ...).
I've heard a lot of talk about "secrets" lately. Is the Dungeon Master's ability to tame exotic creatures also going to be one of these "secrets"?
It's possible to get sort of tech-treey with it, but I haven't done anything like that, and it's not set up to point to certain positions or to have positions confer any abilities on their own. The larger questions surrounding knowledge and technology have not been resolved.
will Legends mode at some point include additional economics information about towns such as main exports and imports or average production of various goods?
There's more information now, but it doesn't currently track any long running stats. It'll want to have some sort of reputation/generic information for color purposes if anything, and it'll derive that from past trade, but I'm not sure when it'll happen.
Are necromancers going to send their armies to all nearby sites?
(to harvest bodies)
or only to fortresses? If so, what is their common motivation to focus on dwarves so?
Also, will these small towers grow larger as the number of minions grows?
Nothing happens during play aside from attacks on the fortress and local raisings in both modes. They focus on battlefields in world gen for bodies right now and raise whatever they find there. We wanted to do site infiltrations to bring corpses up from catacombs etc. as well, but it's an if-there's-time thing at this point.
If the player in adventure mode/armies in the future dwarf mode slaughter a village, will a necromancer be able to harvest their bodies / create an undead city while in-play? or will the necromancer rise be restricted in a short worldgen that happens between one adventure/fortress and the next one?
Nothing happens on off-loaded sites yet once world gen is over. There will be peaceful interactions during play once we are further through this series of releases, then the army stuff is after that, which will include megabeast/night creature/bandit/etc. actions.
1. What about necromancers will allow them to raise things? Will they make some sort of magic object which simply raises any dead in the area? Will they use some sort of nebulous power thats inherent to them? Will they be somehow able to raise themselves if they die, such as a Lich.
2.Will the necromancers make only one kind of dead or will there be multiple types with different duties, something like a ant nest. Will there be ghouls which scavenge the dead, living meat wagons to carry them, hulking flesh golems for combat, living pipe organs broadcasting the arrival of undead armies, etc, or just a wave of zombified woodland creatures?
3. Is it possible that the leader of a dwarven civ, perhaps the king at your fortress even, might become a necromancer while you're playing? What would happen if they did? Would they suddenly just become an enemy while standing in your fort and promptly get slaughtered, would they run off and disappear off screen before returning years later with an undead horde, or would they remain in power and you would just have what amounts to an invincible population in which any member who died was raised almost immediately.
4. Now that we have the general raise dead curse effect, will it be possible that this effect is placed on artifacts or items? Ie, that Shiny blue sword found down in the Curious structures near the bottom of the world might have the unfortunate effect of raising your enemies to try to kill you over and over.
1. They learn the secret, and then they can do it at will. Magicky system type stuff like costs/conditions etc. will be put on over time. All I have now is whether or not it needs a line of sight and a range.
2. It'll depend on what the generator ends up doing. In the example they just raise corpses right now.
3. It's not possible right now.
4. Perhaps at some point, but I haven't done anything with existing artifacts.
You talked on the dev page about adventurers interrogating bad guys for information. While I understand that's a ways off, could that theoretically work for magical secrets?
There's a tag, and I'm not sure if it'll stay or be used yet, but it basically says if the secret is recordable in a way that non-deity people can understand. In that case, pumping people for secret knowledge would be fair when we get there, I think. A wizard game we made some years back focused in part on the different wizards torturing each other for information, so I expect it at some point.
The absence of a 'jungle' biome have puzzled me a long time. Surroundings like "Polluted", "No-Gravity" and "Irradiated"(magically, that is) might be a bit out-of-place, but still possible to mod in.
In the future, are you planning on implementing other kinds of biomes and surroundings?
The tropical moist broad leaf forest or whatever is the traditional "jungle" biome. There's a general coverage of biomes as far as I am aware of them, though there are many specific things that aren't addressed. As far as weird effects go, the regional interaction stuff is an initial step toward that, but I'm not going to do much with that for now.
With this... would it be possible to easily add an init option or worldgen parameter to re-enable dwarves embarking on top of other people's sites? I'm curious whether this would make the game respond 'properly' now if dwarves try to embark on a dark fortress or somesuch, making for something interesting.
Actually, would it be possible to allow the dwarves to embark on 'hostile' sites in general in the main game, as long as there's no friendly population there? It seems like "deal with the undead, then settle in their tower" could be a fun (and challenging) way to start a fortress.
Adding an init option wouldn't make the game respond any better than it was when it was broken, so I think I'm misunderstanding something. There's something fundamentally silly about allowing those embarks, but I don't have a problem with the init option in principle. But it takes time to make sure that everybody is properly hostile in that artificial environment, so I haven't been eager to fix it up. That said, we've been toying with the idea of allowing some embarks on thoroughly bad places. We'll see what happens.
Regarding zombies ripping off the dog's head. Did they claw or bite it until it came off, or is there actual dismemberment in wrestling now?
I haven't changed anything, and I didn't check the combat report... just found a head on the ground. This was prior to the head raising which now occurs, so it stayed there for me to find.
So, since corpses can be raised without their heads, how do you (at least temporarily) kill a zombie/skeleton? Will a complete corpse zombie still die when it loses its head? How bad off does a corpse have to be to be un-raisable? Especially when animated limbs/etc. go in, how do you kill those?
Same as it has been, with the "hitpoint" stuff, until we redo crushed-to-a-messy-pulp as a concept. Any animated creature has to sustain banging around proportional to its size and it'll collapse. It can be raised again immediately if it is still intact. Right now we're using a sort of weird definition, where you have to have at least one head or grasp left if your original body had any of those. If your body is weird enough not to have a head or grasp defined, and it is still marked as being from a "living" being, then it can always be raised, which would amplify your need to go after the source instead, if possible. This makes completely exotic monsters trouble in evil regions, and I'll have to see if additional precautions are necessary. I don't want to adopt a cumbersome tag system for this, but we'll see what's necessary. A body could be marked as pulped if it is successfully felled a number of times, for instance, until we make pulping a reality.
Will we be able to find and use slabs that contain knowledge of secrets? So my adventurer could find the "slab of death" and then go run off to build a tower and raise an undead army to conquer the region?
It's still undecided in terms of being able to use them. We're hoping to get to it. You wouldn't get to build a tower either way until we get to that more generally. We've discussed having your (living) buddies be able to help you or be assigned construction tasks in the past, and it's roughly the same to let your undead buddies or buddy parts help out too. I guess it's arguable whether cutting off a zombie's arm so that you'd have two workers would be beneficial. It probably depends on the job.
Imagine, you get a quest from a priest of Merra -the blessed blossom- to attack a shrine to Armok -God of Blades- and kill it's priest. If both temples are located in the same civilization, how will this work out for your relations with that civ? Will relations with temples be seperate from those with civs? Will effects on relations be more confined to sites.
That scenario isn't possible the way things are now. The religion has its own entity, but people in the civ would still get angry the way things stand. Of course this should be changed.
Will raising the tower involve the secret itself? What kind of terrain modification/construction will secrets be able to do? Will shape, size, etc. of towers be randomized?
Right now they just need 50 zombies (I think) and then they are assumed to have a decent work force, and we haven't expanded out to interesting things like terraforming. The towers will be randomized somewhat, though they are smaller and less interesting than the larger dungeons, unless they have a dungeon underneath.
From the sound of Threetoe's teaser in the Dev Log, it sounds curses can possibly alienate you from normal not cursed individuals. Will these curses be causing effects that might make you unpleasant for normals to deal with?
For example, a curse of sores or a curse of ugliness. I imagine these types of curses might make it in because of how they are tied to mummies in fiction and simply want to know if they are within the scope of working on mummies. The idea of a curse making you an outcast is not uncommon either and that what it sounds like could happen from the Dev Log...
These powerful beings that can be disturbed. Will they all be Historical Figures that have been buried or will they be other Fun things as well?
I'm not sure exactly how it's going to work yet, but something that separates you from people is what we are after, whether it's warty or a bad vibe or whatever ends up happening.
We are starting with historical figures that have been buried, and perhaps that's all we'll get to.
Author
Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1204597 times)