Footkerchief answered several of the questions previously. I'm not including those here.
Will there be any sort of Fortress mechanism where a werebeast can infect a dwarf and disappear without the player noticing? Something like the kidnapping, maybe, where if someone other than the individual affected sees the were, he's detected, but if not, the dwarf is infected without notifying the player?
It doesn't work that way now since it is a post-ambush attack which'll be announced and also appear in the combat logs. It's hard to savage a dwarf without telling the player about it.
By "boundaries of the site grow.." does this imply that sites are now resize/shapeable? Is this possible in fortress mode?
Nope. It just happens in world gen when it is easier to do those things.
will we be able to add tags with syndromes?
can we put any creature tag inside a syndrome now? Can syndromes tweak stats?
The new creatures will have enhanced stats? Like a vampire with superhuman strengh or a were-creature faster than both the humanoid and the animal it changes to?
Many tags are available, but not all tags will be available. I don't have a final list, but more are added with each night creature so it should be a goodly amount, anyway. Syndromes can tweak stats by a percentage or by adding/subtracting a fixed number.
Are the were-creature transformations and rampaging directly linked, or separate effects that are both applied in the generated curses? Could we add, for example, a contagious madness curse with no transformation, or a regional curse that would temporarily transform everyone into stray cats on nights of the full moon without making them hostile?
If a creature is killed while transformed, will its corpse be based on its transformed state or its original body?
Can gaining a secret lead to megabeast or semimegabeast behavior?
Yeah, being crazed is a different thing, although I'm not sure if it considers a crazed person threatening enough to elevate to a historical threat, so that might not work quite like it should. People can be transformed without becoming hostile.
Currently, genders are separated via castes with the appropriate gender tokens added to each caste. With the guards changing from male to female and back, does that mean the guard's caste is actively having its gender token changed, or is the guard picking any caste with a [FEMALE] token for a female transformation, and any caste with a [MALE] token for male transformation?
That particular bug was from a variable I was setting out of order, so it was thinking the caste was the null value -- that means that it chooses it at random, so it was jumping between the castes randomly. There weren't any actual gender transformations in play. It was a side effect from the werebeast bug.
how much random is material weakness? right now the fortress and the adventurer are severely limited on what materials are usable for smelting weapons or available to purchase at shop.
It always uses weapon materials right now.
What form will Were-animals take? Will they be half man half animal or will people just become animals. I mean, a demonic satyr half goat half man is pretty awesome, but just becoming a goat...less so.
At the current time, they become humanoid animal hybrids a little larger than a human in general.
Will it be possible for a curse to bestow different forms on a person at different times? Like a werewolf that turns into a half-wolf-half-human when the moon is waxing gibbous and waning gibbous but turns into a complete wolf when the moon is full. Or even a were-zodiac curse which turns the poor guy into a different were-creature every month.
Yeah, in modded form. None of the vanilla random ones do that.
will we get a sex change curse?
Haven't planned anything.
Heres another for you. Will the game have certain curses take precedent over others? Ie, if I get bitten by a vampire and then by a were-moose, will I transform into a blood sucking moose man every full moon? If I raid a tomb is it possible that I'll find an undead necromancer vampire were-axolotl?
Also, is it possible that someone who is turned into a were-whatever might get the shaft and turn into a were-carp and suffocate?
Also also, sometimes you say things like "If there's time", as though you're on a deadline. Do you set deadlines for yourself? If you do, are they based on dates or on certain key/bare minimum features you want to have in?
And lastly, how many more monsters and things are gonna go in this update? We've got necromancers/new undead, were-stuff, and vampires (I assume), is there anything else planned?
It doesn't allow some combinations. Right now it allows for a vampire werebeast, which is strange, and may or may not be allowed. I don't think any of the werebeasts are strictly aquatic, but if I screwed that up I'm sure we'll see it when it happens.
I don't have strict deadlines, but sometimes it seems like things are taking too long, compared to how much I want to get along down the scheduled releases. I also obviously have a habit of going off on tangents and things, so it's best not to promise too many things or say I'm going to handle too many cases so that it doesn't get too out of control. We're certainly a bit out of control already for this release, but I think it is still okay.
We mentioned some others in DF Talk 14. We'll decide how many more we're going to get to as we get to each one. It could be that we spend too much time on one or the other and don't feel like we can finish, in the sense of the last paragraph.
Does the were-curse "discriminate" among its victims- does it apply to all creatures bit by a cursed individual, or only to intelligent creatures, or some other set of criteria? Would this criteria be something that would be variable, either in game or via raw modding?
Do necromancers choose to settle in evil biomes, or do they set up shop wherever?
Werebeast bite victims will only catch the curse if they are intelligent, I think. I'm not sure if that'll last as the only criterion. That part is moddable. You can do classes and creature tokens as well as test for individual flags and active syndromes/syndrome classes. The individual flags available for testing are the same as the ones now available for syndromes, which is a growing list but not all the flags by any means. I'm just adding them as I need them.
Necromancers try to build their towers a bit away from civilization, but they don't particular care where.
If weaknesses to odd materials start coming into play (weremeerkats weak to silver, evil regions populated by blistered giant rabbits weak to gold, demons weak to nothing but other demon bones, etc.), then would that open the possibility of broader material selection in fortress mode? Obviously right now there's no sense to making gold swords and hammers, but if you've got the possibility of things like an outbreak of lycanthropy where they're actually necessary due to material weakness, it starts making more sense to be able to do that.
Yeah, if it came up that we started tormenting people with esoteric stuff, we'd need to start having reasonable ways to get at counter measures.
So, how are wounds and missing limbs handled when you transform to something else?
If my left front hoof gets chopped off while i am transnfromed to weregoat, will i miss left hand when i get turned back to humanoid? What about more complex stuff ... like what if my military dwarf has broken leg with cast on it, broken arm with splint, bandaged and surtured hand? Will his were-self still have surtures is his transformed limb and wound and retain other medical stuff?
It negates wounds now, but I'm considering stockpiling them so that your old wounds reappear when you revert. The difficult part is moving the wounds over to the new form, and I'm not doing that. All medical devices pop out or come off when you transform.
When a were-curse is bestowed, is the creature selected completely random? If yes, is it going to stay random, or will it eventually depend on the god in questions or something?
It is random now, from among a pre-selected list (due to how creature defs currently work), but ideally the god would be able to justify their specific decision.
Will dead creatures still have the generic "his upper body is gone" in their description now that corpses can be raised?
That comes from the body parts being moved over to the corpse object, which hasn't changed. It just shouldn't print anything, but it still does.
Will the new were-curses stack?
For instance, if a dwarf is bitten by a were-elk and turns into a were-elk, and the dwarf is then bitten by a were-groundhog, what will happen? Will the dwarf remain a were-elk? Become a were-groundhog? Become a bizarre hybrid were-elkhog? Turn into a randomly-mutated abomination similar to a forgotten beast?
It disallows stacking since they all happen at the same time anyway.
1. Will body modification curses revert on death? That is, if a transformed werewolf is killed, will the corpse be a wolf or a human?
2. Are there any methods for curse contagion other than bites/wounds?
Right now they don't revert, and I don't have further curses, though a visual ranged or non-visual ranged curse transfer could be modded in, or a poison curse transfer.
a creature turns into a wareform, or as a vampire turns into a bat, will it drop all its equipment/clothes? or are they magically kept in inventory but inaccessable?
They drop things now. A full werewolf fort is a mess. I don't know if further clothing management is in the cards for now, but we'll see what happens.
When attacking a were-creature without using their weakness, are they merely resistant to damage (I imagine this'd be the easy way), or do they rapidly heal instead (more traditional)?
You mentioned that you had set it such that it is possible to defeat a were-creature without the weakness as of right now, but would be willing to change it later on as the slayer role is developed. Is this a variable that can be set via the raws? I can imagine modders wanting to make a non-random creature with a particular weakness that MUST be used... which would be entirely fair for non-random creatures.
They are more resistant. Growing limbs back is something I haven't done, so mere rapid healing wouldn't really help, I think, although they should have that as well.
You can set the divisor to be high now, and you might be able to set the multiplier to be zero. That would make attacks not work at all.
Do big cities get sacked much in world gen? If we go into a ruined city in adventurer mode, what can we expect to find? Interesting things?
They get sacked as much as the others, but I'm not sure how frequently that is. There's nothing particularly interesting about a ruined city. Of course, there should be, there isn't now. It has the same underground as a living city, and there's nothing special dead up top.
What kind of relation will there be between strange moods dwarves have currently and the secrets/curses spirit-interaction stuff that's coming in this release? Will the two systems become one eventually?
The possessed mood will probably be tied in eventually, but nothing's changing for this time.
If a necromancer animates a severed hand, will you have to hack off all its fingers to remove its "graspers" and kill it?
Since we haven't done pulping, you just have to knock it down through the animated HP equivalent.
Will the dark blue night creatures include things that try to lure you to rivers and other bodies of water and drown you?
It's unclear if that's going to fall in the fairy color scheme instead. Probably depends on how the thing looks physically and whether it has a good side at all.
Can you talk a little bit more about ghosts Toady? Where they show up in adventure mode right now, what they can do there, or what they'll do in the future?
In the rush of all these Night Creatures, and the fact they've been here a while in fortress mode, ghosts kind of slipped under the radar in terms of the next release.
If it's working correctly, you can find ghosts when you visit your old fortresses. Ghosts haven't been a focus of this release since we have them already and don't have the others. We have some plans for them, but as before, I'm not sure that's going to be public.
You mentioned stalkers will have traits related to their deaths. Is this likely to be related to the gruesome executions that currently happen in worldgen, or will it mostly be new stuff?
There could be new stuff.
If a dwarf learns the secret of life and death from his or her deity, will they be able to migrate to your fortress and become a warrior that can re-animate body parts during combat one day?
It's not something they do right now, and historical figures don't migrate in (aside from the king I suppose, if that still works), but if for some reason your king were a necromancer it would work. I think the only chance of that happening would be to catch them at the exact right year before they go off to raise bodies. I think you are more likely to have a king that is a vampire the way things stand.
Is having a scripting language for manipulating things (much like DFHack is doing to a small extent) something you've considered? Like I said, it's been brought up a few times, so I was wondering if this was more of a post-1.0 goal
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With all these new tags I have to wonder. Do you foresee the RAW/tag system ever being outdated? After all, ultimately a tag is just a reference to something in the underlying hard-coding in the game.
There's a major accessibility issue in stepping up to an actual language, beyond whatever barriers the raws and the rest of the game already throw up. I also have no experience with it so I'm not sure how to get it linked in with everything while keeping the memory and speed healthy, since it would be pervasive throughout a real-time environment that already suffers from speed problems. I don't imagine that's guaranteed to go smoothly.
Constructed monsters? Will we finally be able to create creatures in workshops in Fortress mode?
We're starting with necromancer types making things. I'm not sure where it's going to lead, but we haven't scheduled any creature building stuff for the dwarves.
In the future, will randomly generated lunar cycles (such as having two or more moons, that sort of thing) become an important feature Re: werecreatures?
If we have two moons, just by virtue of the variables it'll be immediately necessary to reconcile them with the behavior of werebeasts. I don't know when we're going to do exotic astronomy though. It is a typical fantasy thing though, so very fair.
If you're using a severed arm as a weapon can it be raised while you are still wielding/have it in your inventory or must it be on the ground?
I don't remember... but I think so (code is off on another machine from where I usually find time to answer these). I know there's a comment in there stating that the projectile case had not yet been handled.
Will ingestion-related syndromes finally allow for alcohol to affect creatures, even if it's only in a binary sense (binary as in either you have the syndrome or you don't, as opposed to a continuum between "buzzed" and "hammered")?
I'm not doing it now, but something could be added with the ingestion effect.
How long (in real time) does the 'Full Moon' phase in Fortress mode last?
It lasts a little over two game-calendar days, whatever that comes out to in real time.
Can there be multiple different types of vampires with different sets of randomly generated traits in the same world?Like for example, a set of vampires that sparkle in the sun and enslave the minds of pubescent children, and one that burns in the sun and has greatly boosted speed, as opposed to just one or the other. Assuming that's a yes, how frequently do you anticipate new vampire types will be made, and how many in general do you intend to have in a given world or city?
My mind is aflame with randomly generated Camarilla/sabbat politics and wars of the night in DF, though of course such things won't actually be possible until we get group politics in general.
It makes a number of vampire and werebeast curses at the beginning. Ideally, they'd be able to make a purely unique curse each time, but what we've got is equivalent if none of the curses are repeated. How often curses happen should probably end up being a parameter, since there isn't really a wrong answer and it's a flavor determiner more than anything. We might end up getting to individual territoriality this time around, just to keep villages from being depopulated too often, but yeah, real group politics will have to wait.
Will sunlight always be a bad thing for vampires?
Right now it doesn't take things far from the classic models, so yeah. The most would be a variety that doesn't care. Anything more exotic has to wait until we can avoid the gray-goo effect of complete randomization through more careful exposition than we've got now. Sticking with archetypes makes that a little less necessary.
Toady, many of your forumites are repeatedly linking the Wikipedia Vampire Traits list. Are you actually intending to try to implement all these traits, or is this merely wishful/hopeful thinking on the part of your fans?
Another question...
Werecreatures first appear by being cursed for defiling a temple. How will vampires appear? There are many ways suggested by stories...
I don't think it's feasible to do everything there now. Just doing some things is okay. We haven't settled on the method for the first vampire (just using profaning for the moment). Saying there was an improper or screwed up burial is the easiest way, but it would be better to inflict it upon somebody who has been bad. There aren't really any criminals aside from bandits now, unless you count the mass executions, which could be a good way to go if they happen often enough. Or we could use some new criminal stuff if it is going in for stalkers anyway.
Will vamps have withdrawal symptoms from not getting theyr bloody fix? Stuff like raging, aging rapidly, loosing strength etc.?
It seems like something should happen, but since they won't always be able to hunt during play (mostly they won't, being off in the world some place), it's not important to do that until we get them activated.
Will we be able to have any control over the kind of vampires that sprout out in world-gen?
You can remove them and mod your own in, but there's aren't fine-tuning parameters for any of the randomly generated content. I'm not sure what those parameters should be.
Will vampires always get away from suspicious villagers, or will the townsfolk sometimes get proactive and take the pitchforks-and-torches route? Will anyone ever get mistaken for a vampire?
It doesn't randomly wipe people out with mistaken identity, but that's reasonable enough to do sometime. I was considering doing world gen mobs before the release. Unclear how it'll turn out.
Will it be possible for feeding to be non-lethal and non-infecting?
Will vampire's victims always die when feeded upon?
Right now none of the feeding infects, but we'll see how that goes -- if a vampire feeds every week, having vampirism be contagious through a simple bite is a world ender, I think, so we've stuck with vampire-blood-drinking for the moment. There isn't non-lethal feeding now, but I don't know how it'll turn out.
will the forgotten beast generator be updated for next version to include all the new tags that got created while working on Night Creatures?
There are some handy tags, but I'm not sure we're going to get at a lot of the potential there this time. I suppose they should be turning all your dwarves into gremlins with gremlin breath by now.
How vampires decide when to create more vampires?
Can vampires learn the secret of raising corpses? If yes,the system can then handle two types of night creatures on the same historical figure. This means we will have vampire werecreatures?
We should be doing the answer for that soon. It seems like it should be something romantic or companiony if it isn't the sort of conversion that happens with each meal, if they can't make any otherwise immortal friends. The vampire in the recent devlog might have offered to convert his wife, say, and the vampire could occasionally or even systematically follow through on immortality cult promises, though that would up the competition for food.
The secrets of life and death are only passed along to mortals currently, so I think when vampires lose their mortality, they are no longer eligible and don't care in any case, though the added power might be welcome to them (secrets of life and death are only sought by people that want to be immortal, but include powers beyond that, so it isn't consistent now). Necromancers tend to cut out from society too soon to profane any temples. When other vampire creation methods are working, necromancers might become vampires more often.
Given the advent of very time-dependent creatures, have you considered reworking the time compression in Fortress mode? If not, how do you envision creatures like this working given the time scale?
I mean obviously vampires make absolutely no sense in Fortress mode where it's "always day", and even werewolves may have a maximum of 30 seconds or so of screen time given the current time compression.
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If it continues to be abstracted then vampires will function identically to werewolves, in that they stick around for a few 'days' or some such nonsense.
I think it's fine now, and about as good as it can be without significant work. It is neither day nor night in fortress mode, and even then I don't see why vampires have to vanish after a few days, especially if there's a lot of subterranean space or if the sun isn't lethal to the particular kind that's around.
With the food (and material) based symptoms and weaknesses now being available, would (accidental) food poisoning from improper tableware materials become a sufficiently low-hanging fruit for reasonably expedient inclusion?
It makes it a step closer, but I don't think it'll be fast-tracked or anything.
Can already-immortal races (whether elfs/gobs or modded ones) become vampires? How would the reputation system handle that?
I suppose it could happen rarely if one moved to a place with temples, and once the vampirification method changes then there might be more opportunities. The reputation system currently checks only for unnatural agelessness, so it all works fine with respect to races that are already immortal.
Now that gods are active in worldgen (and with ever more activity working its way in), are there any plans on the horizon for reworking the system wherein gods are specifically and intrinsically tied to a specific civilization?
It does seem a bit strange if you start thinking about when civilizations will (presumably at some point in the future) have beginnings and/or endings. If a civilization crumbles, do its gods die? Are the gods of every civ the same but with different names? Can one civ "import" worship of a god from a nearby one?
Yeah, once the gods are real, it's something that comes up to be addressed. When none of the religions were known to be accurate, it didn't matter. The number of pantheons might end up being cut down, and they might share members with multiple names between different civs. There could be gods that are more local. When we do the correct creation myths, there'll be some group that did that, and other amazing events, and those gods would need to have some sort of edge. Or it could end up more exotic or involved sometimes.
If an acknowledged vampire is ruling a civ and oppressing people, as the one in the devlog did, will adventurers receive missions to kill him? Will anyone else take over if an adventurer kills him or will that have to wait for in-game succession?
Yeah, that is the intention -- it is not done yet, but it is nextish, hopefully with a sizable helping of wasting cultists. In-game succession is necessary to replace rulers. That's Release 5 as the schedule stands.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1204280 times)