That sort of thing is why "Writing" is under the Treasure Hunter section on the dev pages. Should be cool when we finally do that stuff.
I've been wondering what your idea of a Hill Dwarf settlement is. Do you have a specific idea in mind right now for what those settlements will look like, or is that something you haven't really gotten too far into thinking about yet? The dwarven ability to combine above and below ground aspects seems like it lends itself to a lot of variation.
Yeah, and hill dwarf is just a name, since the settlements external to your fort will also possibly include deep groups you've sent to colonize the underground layers which could be massively cave-adapted and somewhat alien, in addition to others along the mountains rather than in lower-lying lands. We don't really have specific images in mind though. For the low-lying ones, we don't want it to end up human, but we don't want it to exactly be hobbity either, since that would be sort of a hack job. Perhaps most of their farming would still be underground, as odd and disrespectful of the sun as that is. I'm not sure what the main restrictions are... that it can't be more fortressy than your fort, I suppose, although it could be more wally.
With adventurer sites, are we going to see people building their own homes/shops/farms/etc? Or is it going to end up like fortress mode, where the player designates everything and then the people go and do the work?
If they do end up building their own stuff, will that eventually be an option in fortress mode? It'd be interesting, especially as the fortress gets larger and the player is focused more on world/army stuff, to be able to give your dwarves a lot more autonomy.
I'm not sure on the specifics, but we're aiming for it not to be like fortress mode, since we have that. Ideally, it would feel like you fill whatever role you actually fill. So if it's your place to order somebody to do something, you can do it, but that doesn't mean they have to do it. We'll have to concede ground to game stuff, but that's the idea. Since you start from nothing, presumably, they could end up with more freedom than the preexisting sites, since things need to be built. I'm not sure about fortress mode either. We had just started on that back in the beginning, with the shops, where they'd pick the type of shop and buy inventories for them and then sell them (however that's supposed to work with the whatever the economy was). It's something to think about with the upcoming taverns there. Should they be able to set those up, or do their own room furniture? There are styles of play that will undoubtedly conflict there.
So Toady, what else do you plan on implementing before this release is over?
The last big question regards the night creatures we didn't get to. Stalkers and constructed undead, new ghosts and animated furniture and things. It's not clear what'll happen there. I'm going to continue on with the things that need to happen, and we'll see later on if I put any of those in. It's hard to say how I'll feel about it then. Releasing would be good, but I won't know until I get there.
Is there any plan to have undead scale with the power of the necromancer?
Eventually it'll be a full magic system with a whole lot of scaling sort of things and tweaks and specific personalized alterations to effects and various coolness, but for now it is utterly dull.
And will there be any way to connect interactions to something like a crafted item type or building type?
It isn't currently there. As a generalized magic system, it's definitely supposed to touch upon all of that, but it hasn't done so yet. It's a time/priority thing as usual.
Is it possible to drag a dwarf and everything on them to a corpse stockpile before looting their body for socks? Could it be treated like a special case of moving an injured dwarf? Can properly buried dwarfs be raised?
Nothing has changed so that's not possible. The hope sometime is to get that done, but it invites a horror of bugs. If a necromancer gets a tile-wise line of sight on a body, including those in your coffins, then the body can be raised. I think because the body becomes a unit, a ghost probably won't additionally be disturbed, but once you knock out the zombie... I'm not sure. It would physically match the old dwarf in id, and so possibly excite a ghost, but it wouldn't have the right historical or unit id, so maybe not. Probably not...
Is it possible for an Interaction to add someone into an entity, for Vampire Civilisations and such
There isn't an effect like that right now.
Are there plans to complete the XML dump in the near future, or is this a very low priority?
I generally add some things to the dump each time, but sitting down and completely it entirely in one go has associated snags so it hasn't happened. There will be more done for next time, but holes as well.
For a question, will there be more mundane problems in cities for adventurers to take care of, such as the ever-popular dwarf mode task of dealing with as swarm of feral cats?
As the life of people becomes more complicated, this will be more natural, but right now they don't have lives. Once they have life goals etc. from the personality rewrite, we'll be at the starting point of one of our overarching conceptual goals, which is to allow you to pick out a person or family and help them indefinitely, as a sort of proof-of-dynamic-world thing, even if it is a strange thing to do. That still wouldn't necessarily get at the mundane side of life, but it would be related.
Will the following ever be possible?: Your adventurer and his companions are taken captive and sold to a slave caravan transporting them deep underground to the caverns for days, joining in with the other inmates and captured subterranean folk to fight off attacking underground monsters while the evil goblins and dwarves who captured you bet on survivors, finally ending your trek in a deep slavery trade depot, whereupon non-player characters are sold for hard labor and the player character must somewhere along the way devise his escape.
There are precursor elements for that in world gen and you can find slaves in adventure mode that came about from world gen. Natural extensions of these systems would involve the player in whatever way, but as with everything, it currently sits as it sits.
On the topic of wrestling, especially with the prospect of zombies getting iron grips, are there any plans on making the grapples generally more detailed? I sort of had to imagine a particularily brawny (mass advantage?) adventurer just going and dragging zombies latched onto him along if he cannot break their grips. Perhaps to intentionally haul himself (and the latched zombiepile) off of a cliff while praying in order to get out of that situation.
Yeah, there are a slew of dev things on wrestling, and dragging was in there. Combat arcish, whenever that happens.
How exactly does the syndrome and/or interactions involved in drinking vampire blood work? How much of that process is part of the interaction system itself?
And on a related note: How would an adventurer learn about the properties that a certain vampire type would have? Will there usually be enough information for an adventurer to make a decision dealing with whether he wants to drink the blood or not?
It's all the interaction system. The blood is linked to the historical figure, and the historical figure has a syndrome that carries body transformation information. There is no vampire creature definition, so there are no new materials, so it has to run a trace essentially when you eat any material attached to a specific being. If it loses the connection as it sometimes does between historical figure and generic creature, then the blood would just be, say, "human blood" and have no transformation capability.
The notes up online had things about entity groups that would tell you about vampire capabilities and so on, but we didn't do that, so there isn't much of anything now. Of course, there isn't much variety now either, so it doesn't matter much.
Currently dwarves in fortress mode will carry other dwarves who are injured to their beds or a hospital. What obstacles stop invaders and adventurers from carrying comrades?
Time and priority, same as everything. Nothing really consequential. I guess the invaders need to give a crap about anything before they'd do that.
I couldn't help but notice that gremlins (only creature with the [MISCHEVIOUS] tag) have a maximum of 1 per (season/year/area?).
Would this count as a bug, a leftover from previous versions or intentional design?
[POPULATION_NUMBER:1:1]
That determines the overall population, which isn't really important, rather than the attack rate. Was it something else?
How urgent is the need for a vampire to feed? Will they starve to death or grow weaker if they don't feed for a long time? Or is it more like a somemthing they are just driven to do without any real benefits to themselves other than filling their bloodlust?
Nothing special yet.
If flammable objects (cloth, wood furniture, booze, hair, etc...) catch fire, do they eventually exhaust their fuel and leave a "bar" of ash behind? Or do they burn indefinitely like the "bin o' flaming lignite" of the past?
Nothing has changed about this, but a lot of objects have always burned and disappeared, rather than leaving something or burning forever. It's all still the same. It's just the firebreath/fireball effect that has changed.
So if creatures can breathe items, can you can make a ballista-beast that shoots like an actual ballista, or does item-breath just drop the items at the target's location?
It's not that versatile, but more might end up happening.
Is there/will there be some sort of panic mode for them[creatures on fire], so that they would dive into water/roll on ground to put out the fire?
I suppose that has been sitting on the back burner for years, and it hasn't been moving either.
Are severs regrown when regaining original form?
And will the healing behavior be controllable (via modding) later on, once wounds are saved?
Yeah, the body is currently rebuilt. Hard to say what'll be possible later. Any change will be in the raws, anyway.
Will legendary combat skills make for tougher werebeasts?
The generalized fighting skills as well as the biting and grasp attack style skills will all be used, as the soul is the same. An adventurer could also pick up their weapon as it stands.
How will supply and demand effect / not effect created/displayed wealth?
Dunno yet. It's definitely something that'll need to be addressed though, since the numbers will all become fluid/meaningless.
If someone gives birth while under were-transformation, what do they give birth to?
Given that were-creatures are apparently implemented as a separate creature definition that lacks any kind of caste and gender, and that only female can give birth, I'd expect that this can't actually happen, and that existing pregnancies are postponed until after the transformation. If for some reason a werebeast does manage to give birth (perhaps through modding), I'd expect the child to be a full-fledged beast type without a human (dwarf, goblin, kobold) side.
If I recollect, it'll remove any pregnancy where the gender variable doesn't match when the pregnancy is ready to go. If not, then yeah, it'll be born as a pure werewolf without any transformation back. Hmm... unless I transferred the birth race variable directly, in which case the baby would be born as a werewolf and then immediately and permanently transform back into a human/dwarf/etc. In any case, testing/handling pregnancy was one of the notes in the vampire section.
I read that there's gonna be immortality, possibility for both players and NPC's.
The question is are they still vulnerable somehow? Do they die by decapitation?
Immortality rarely means unkillable.
It stops aging and adds a few other random effects. Decapitation and bifurcation are always lethal to the living, whatever syndrome they have. It won't always be that way, I think, although in the case of decapitation there's the tricky question of whether the soul goes with the head or the body. If you want the thing where the guy walks over and puts his head back on, you kind of want the soul to still be in control of both units, which isn't currently supported at all by the framework. Maybe just being in the most mobile one is crucial, but then the head couldn't grimace and stuff.
What can you "learn" from books? How does one learn to read?
How is the content of books determined?
Is there a variety of subjects/genres?
Can the player write as well as read?
Do they show up any place other than necromancer towers?
Can books be made in dwarf mode?
Are books on the short list for recreational items when the tavern/inn update comes?
It's way too early, but I'll give the current answers, as unsatisfactory as that is. You can pick the reading skill now from character generation, and that says whether or not you can read. Unlike other skills (because there isn't anything like long-term training at this time), you can't learn to read later. The content is determined by what the author in world gen knows, and that isn't all that much. Right now the necromancers are the only writers, and they don't even have decent skills -- just their secret knowledge. Not sure when that'll change. Players cannot yet write, and I haven't done anything in dwarf mode. I'm not sure when or where they are going to come in to other places.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1204287 times)