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[Rockphed]

I'm not sure if there's a bit of confusion about it generating maps on the fly, but I thought I'd jump in again to say that the maps it generates are still the same map.  So you'll always find the same buildings in the same spots for the same world.  It just doesn't have the tiles generated and sitting around somewhere, and it doesn't know what layout is going to be generated in advance -- but it will always make the same one.  This makes the maps more susceptible to being busted by changes between versions, but it's not something exploitable where you can generate a new map for a town on each load.

So the current issue where towns change maps between visits(or over night) will be fixed in the next version?  Sweet!  That was always the most annoying part of adventure mode.

[YetAnotherStupidDorf]

...I find your thoughtpaths hard to follow.

Did you quote the wrong person or am I just completely missing the point here?

Sorry, brain fart. Somehow I thought you was talking about wanting to have your own place in new version from old save.

[peskyninja]

Toady, do you have any plans of changing the current cave in system by the old one where large areas would collapse  or another system, if so when?

[mendonca]

There's a little bit of talk about this in Dwarf Fortress Talk #8, you could check through the combined manuscript (link below) or listen in.

http://www.bay12games.com/media/df_talk_combined_transcript.html

I think that is the last time it came up, someone else might be able to clarify.

[Jakob]

If say, we go on a rampage with our undead army, will anyone ever stand up and try and fight us? Like an army or some such? Killing everything in existence is bland when the most challenging fight is three or four guys in forts.

[Putnam]

If say, we go on a rampage with our undead army, will anyone ever stand up and try and fight us? Like an army or some such? Killing everything in existence is bland when the most challenging fight is three or four guys in forts.

I'm sure that's for the army arc, mostly.

[Footkerchief]

Actually, Toady; do you currently have any plans for making inter-species relationships possible, and letting other tame, sentient creatures assist dwarves? Not specifically as slaves, since dwarves consider slavery unthinkable, but through those (good) inter-species relationships, or as pets, or even for personal love for/interest in a certain field of work. I suppose it would be most helpful to the player to permit us to assign labors, but perhaps creatures that don't have a sense of desire for the labors set or duty to their home and loved ones, or have been having a bad day, would be far less likely to actually go do it. Currently, only fishing and hunting function for tame sentient beings.

Will it ever be possible for dwarves and Kobolds to live in peace?

This was discussed in DF Talk 5:

Rainseeker:   Our next one is from R A Browning, he is saying that a few of the members of the mining forum discovered that if you mess around with the raws you're able to embark with intelligent - or at least can learn and can speak pets - who are counted as members of your civilization, and can be given tasks like hunting, fishing or recruited into the military. If they aren't given any tasks they mostly stand around talking with one another and gaining experience at their little animal man parties. The question is this: 'Are there any plans to expand on this interesting phenomenon in later versions of the game, such as by allowing the intelligent pets to equip weapons and armor and fight alongside the controlling civilization, or to allow them to take up other labours on a limited basis?'

Toady:   The pet part, I guess, is the strange part of that. This actually ties in very very closely to the people that had the elf queen of their dwarven society show up, and then the elf queen was kind of broken. The problem is the old code, the oldest stuff, assumes that members of your civilization are all the same race, and the newer stuff just needs them to be potential participants; they need to have in most cases can learn and can speak, or in some cases just can learn, and then they can join into civilization activities. So what you're seeing with the pets is the same thing you seem with the elf queen most likely, you just wouldn't have noticed the hunting and fishing, probably because the nobles can't be recruited in general for that kind of stuff. So it's kind of a weird split, the weird part there is that they're also a pet. That I'm not sure how to deal with offhand. What does that mean, is that dwarven slavery, or is that just a really affectionate relationship or something? I don't know. But the answer about rebellions and things; anything that dwarves will be able to do later, they'll be able to do. We haven't really planned a lot for version 1 especially for massively multiracial forts with like ten goblins hanging out, but really when you get back to some of this entity stuff we were talking about, there should be a notion of them cliquing up a bit and making a sub-entity, at least for certain races. It's quite possible that goblins with all their kidnapping behaviour and so on don't really see the species of the creatures the same way and might not even clique up based on their goblin nature unless they're spurned by the rest of the dwarves or something. It's all going to depend on how that works out, I don't pretend to have the algorithms set up for making sure that stuff is going to work right, but hopefully that would be one of the main considerations when you start forming sub-groups like miners' guild is if there's multiple species in the fort.

Toady, do you have any plans of changing the current cave in system by the old one where large areas would collapse  or another system, if so when?

Here's the quote from DF Talk 8 that mendonca mentioned:

Then there's static things like cave-ins or your Red Faction: Guerrilla type stuff with collapsing structures and so on. Originally that worked when the game was 2D so any open subterranean area could just be assumed to have a ceiling that was willing to fall on you and as soon as you had an open seven by seven area on the 2D underground map then it would just collapse it on you eventually. In the later versions with the Z axis you've got these large connected structures that can spin and spiral all over the plan and as long as they're connected to something stable like the bottom of the map or the edge of map by a single tile then they won't fall over, because the seven by seven rule doesn't really make sense anymore, and that's something we can discuss expansions of.

This also came up in FotF:

When will you begin to implement more seige engines, or perhaps a mini mode such as the arena where the player is in command of the defenders or attackers and has catapults, seige towers battering rams etc at there disposal?, will it also be possible to implement a feature where destroyed towers or sections of walls would cause a cave in?

I imagine once the armies are moving around and you yourself are tasked to or otherwise want to overcome a castle's defenses, you'll start getting your prizes.  There's also the boat angle which I doubt will be the cause of vehicles (or moving siege engines) but could be.  Then there are the dwarf siege improvements, which requires pretty much the same preconditions as the adventure mode sieges.  So imagine as we are working through the Nov/Dec site resource/caravan/army stuff, we might not get to siege engines, but we'll be ready for it.  Any disconnected wall section would collapse, but having siege engines breaking pieces of walls might making improving the cave-in code a higher priority.

Toady has had ideas for improved cave-ins for a long time:

I read the cave-in algorithms thread, but nothing really jumped out.  Not that I've done much in terms of practical results.  I'm basically interested in trying to do things that are a little less local, rather than trying to get things to arise from rules that are applied to cells.  So far I've just collected information about columns of rock and their connections and weights, and done a connectivity check on the resulting graph, but I should be able to use the graph of columns to handle things like hanging statue arms with some care.  For instance, it shouldn't be too hard to pit the weight of a hanging arm against how much it is shearing against a shoulder joint, because it just needs to compare the weight to the material and surface area of the join with the neighbor.  Aside from the connectivity calculation, none of this has to be calculated particularly often, so it can get fairly complicated, and the routines used to do it can also be used to provide information to the user about potential cave-ins as necessary.  I haven't really had time to get much done with it though, since we are a bit behind, so I wouldn't even say there's a system at this point.

Will printing/scribing eventually be an industry with its own quality of paper, binding and creative content? Or will it be restricted to individual dwarven diaries much like engravings?

This was already pretty much answered; dwarves will eventually write both public and personal information:

For the long term do you have any idea what kind of role writing will play in dwarf mode? Like writing books about whatever the dwarf wants like engravings (books about books about cheese) or where dwarves actually record information that gets used for something later on?

In our original idea for the game before it became our main game, the adventurer was going to go back and find diaries and production logs, so we'll probably have something like that in addition to the types we've already got for necromancers.

is there a short term plan to integrate books in fortress mode?

I don't have a short term plan for it.

[Kogut]

It is impossible to stop military from charging towards enemies. Is it intended behaviour?

[kasan]

I'm still wondering what a poetry generator would end up like, but for that, I probably will wait for the grammar rewrite to keep it all in a system.

A simple haiku generator wouldn't take any real work.  Nothing says the poetry has to be readable and really make sense, but you could get a working haiku generator set to follow certain rules out fairly simply.

You'd have to attack the languages file and assign a value for number of syllables to each word then assigned the generator to pick words based on type (noun, verb, adjective, particle, etc), then to only use words that in combination match syllables of a total value.

I'm sure somebody on the forums would even attack the language file for you and get the values at least there and save you a few hours of counting words in your head.

edit: Bonus points if the generator only returns poetry written in the racial language pre-english translation.
A rough example of a working (web-based generator) would be found at http://www.everypoet.com/haiku/default.htm.  You can see that it may not make sense, but it fits the rules.

[Kogan Loloklam]

Footkerchief, that wasn't quite what I was asking. I was more asking if Kobolds whom were stealing the Left Iron glove that the goblin whom was eviscerated three seasons ago would always spark Kobold war parties, or if someday we could set it so the Kobolds loot the battlefields outside our fortresses with no conflict at all. I guess the Mechanics might work with sub-entities, but I doubt it since it would be a primary entity, the Kobold Civilization or raiding band or whatever. That would be from a separate site. More likely it'd use the adventuring band visiting a fortress kind of mechanic, when they have a task (steal items, sleep in inn, buy beer) that they go in, accomplish, then leave. Since it's already hardcoded to form attack bands though, that would cause problems. I'm looking to see if the form attack bands will stop being set in stone and start to be a little more flexible.

[Footkerchief]

Footkerchief, that wasn't quite what I was asking. I was more asking if Kobolds whom were stealing the Left Iron glove that the goblin whom was eviscerated three seasons ago would always spark Kobold war parties, or if someday we could set it so the Kobolds loot the battlefields outside our fortresses with no conflict at all. I guess the Mechanics might work with sub-entities, but I doubt it since it would be a primary entity, the Kobold Civilization or raiding band or whatever. That would be from a separate site. More likely it'd use the adventuring band visiting a fortress kind of mechanic, when they have a task (steal items, sleep in inn, buy beer) that they go in, accomplish, then leave. Since it's already hardcoded to form attack bands though, that would cause problems. I'm looking to see if the form attack bands will stop being set in stone and start to be a little more flexible.

Army arc.

[Neonivek]

Could be worse. Footkerchief could have said Carrivan Arc.

Ohh Carrivan Arc you are the Lynch pin in ALL features. *joke*

[thvaz]

Could be worse. Footkerchief could have said Carrivan Arc.

Ohh Carrivan Arc you are the Lynch pin in ALL features. *joke*

Carnival Arc?I bet this one will be the best.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

isn't cardinal arc the one we're currently on?

[Jakob]

isn't cardinal arc the one we're currently on?

I thought it was caravan.