Footkerchief and Knight Otu and Mr Wiggles (and others maybe) answered several questions, and those aren't included below.
There was a bit of a discussion about save compatibility. I think in this release we've been moving slowly in the direction of it being practically impossible... and crossed that line a while ago. Between the map changes and all the interaction stuff, it's not going to be feasible time-wise to keep things operating smoothly in old saves.
I'd hesitate to hazard a guess in this release date discussion. If I say something, it'll end up taking twice as long, if my past estimates are any indication.
Have you actually used a book in adventure mode combat?
Nope. I have been pretty respectful with the books so far.
Will we be able to mod in book-making with this kind of tracking in Dwarf Mode? I already have modded reactions that use bindings and pages of different materials, but I'd like to know if I'll be able to get the game to track them.
I still haven't tested it, but I think you should be able to do this through modding. Getting writing to appear on the pages is another matter, as that's not something that happens yet outside of the specific world gen cases.
Any plans for hereditary curses? "Your family shall suffer for seven generations" seems like a pretty common tropes, and it would be funny to see babies spontaneously combust because their parents had a nasty run-in with a mummy two years ago.
Also, and I know this isn't the question anyone wants to read, but is there are roadmap to the next release? Like, right after the mummies and tombs? Or is there another thing after the Mummies before release?
We don't have any specific plans, but it's a reasonable thing. I think we were thinking of doing some kind of generation counter for vampires so that you could do things like power dilution etc., and that might be related, but it wasn't done either, so it doesn't matter yet.
There were the vampires, as you now know, and there's a lot of city cleanup left to do, and I have to finish up the sponsorship animals, new tags or not, before the release. Maybe that's it. As long as vampires took to finish, the city cleanup will take longer.
Is it possible in the new version to link powers to a particular job skill? Such as giving elven druids some psudo-magical curses, or shapeshifting?
There's nothing like that. It's the same issue as a dungeon master. I don't want skills or powers to arise out of nothing if I can help it.
Will non-vampire migrants also be drawn from historical figures? If a vampire adventurer retired in a human town in a Human Fortress-playable world, could that adventurer migrate to a player fortress? I'm asking about human towns since dwarf settlements are presumably still a broken feature.
Does the Justice revamping mean that the bug with baron-appointed nobles e.g. the hammerer will be fixed?
I think this question shows how long it has been since I answered FotF... but yeah, we have historical migrants, both vampire and non-vampire adventurers as it comes up. A human could go to a human fort, and yeah, humans in dwarf forts are still a no-go.
The hammerer was fixed. The dungeon master is still in limbo.
How extensive will the Justice rewrite be this time? Will the new tweaks only apply to "witch-hunts" for vampires/werecreatures, or will it also apply to failed mandates/tantrum-related crimes?
Mandate crimes were left the same -- the wronged dwarf in question assigns the convict immediately. Tantrums have been moved over to the new system.
Will it be possible to actually choose to 'feed' your vampire-dwarf, possibly establishing them as your ruler?
And will dwarven vampires be able to feed on enemies, like goblins and kobolds? Or, for that matter, tame animals?
They only feed on critters that are asleep, so it's pretty much limited to your citizens. If you choose not to convict, that's up to you, but it'll probably lead to your site getting a bit of a death trap status.
How will a blood-drinking vampire murder be announced? Will it be obvious who the attacker was?
The witness report is announced when it is brought to the sheriff or, failing that, after an in-game week, assuming the witness is still alive. We've tried to make it non-obvious who the attacker was, but we have almost certainly screwed up on a number of scores, which we'll just have to sort out as they are brought to our attention.
Toady considering the world's cultures. Where do you think Mummies will go with that in consideration?
I'm not knowledgable enough about the world's mummies to answer this question. Our mummies don't even have their bodies prepared yet, so that would be something. That requires corpse inventories and new industries. I'm sure there are a zillion other things, but I'm not sure what you are getting at. Did you have something in mind?
What happens if a vampire was unmasked? Is it possible to keep him after a non-lethal punishment? And does he try to behave after he was punished? Like, only drinking blood from animals or volunteers from that point and stuff?
If the sheriff is sent to punish a suspected vampire, and the accusation proves true, will the vampire passively accept punishment or fight back? Will there come a point where it's obvious that the dwarf is a vampire and can be targeted as an enemy through the squads menu or will it always remain a matter of civil justice?
The evil monster part doesn't really bother them as much as it should at present, and the vampire stands up and takes its punishment. A hammering is difficult to survive, but should it happen, then the punishment is served and the community naively assumes the convict is reformed. It's reasonably silly as things stand, and we'll have to do more in the future.
How does a being decide to assume an identity, and when does it decide to abandon the ruse?
Currently it's very simple and isolated to vampires entering forts and the world gen demons. Vampires cheerfully accept their executions, which is silly, but criminals dodging punishment more generally isn't something we've embarked upon yet.
Do these vampires actualy fear or get burned by the sun? If they do, well, since fortress mode has no day night cycle (since times goes so fast in fortress mode it'd look real silly, like a flickering lightbulb), how will it work?
They probably don't or else they'd just burn on arrival
We thought we'd get to that, but the adv mode stuff wasn't quite up to it, and it's pointless in fort mode. So that'll be for later in adv mode, and I'm not sure we'll ever do it in dwarf mode.
Is it planned to fix in this release bug 972 (Diplomat/liaison arrives, immediately dies of old age (and other old age issues)) to prevent automatic death of all mortal historic figures appearing in old forts?
And is it planned to fix (in new version or following bugfixes) impossible mandates (slade - bug #782, blue jay tooth etc - bug #1623) due to strange preferences (wagon wood - bug #3676 etc) - as common workaround is to never assign sheriff position, what will be impossible in new version.
I have to get to the birth/death/succession reform of world gen before there's much of a point of fixing that bug. If I remember, I've put in a check were near/post death people don't come to the fort anymore, but that doesn't attack the core problem. I think that's Release 5 on the list, though I've become more recently inclined to think birth/death/succession/personality rewrite should be pushed forward so the world will be alive. I should get to the heart of the game at some point before several more years pass.
If I don't get to mandates, and I probably should sometime, they can be raw-snipped, but there should be a healthy number of bugs eliminated during the next bug fixing round.
I'm curious as to whether you've thought seriously about procedurally generated poetry and text, and the depth of complexity you'd hope to have in each, and your goals, both in regards to their practicality to the player for things such as trade or gathering information (more "artistic" or "well-written" texts being worth more, divine texts being useful to gain an idea of a god's sphere alignments, poetry/warsongs giving the player an idea of the elves' gracefulness or the goblin's brutishness) for any procedurally generated texts - unless these were all elaborate in-jokes I failed to get
We have to distinguish whether we are talking about making the actual readable text, or whether we are describing the properties of the text. It's obviously a very tricky task to produce text that you can read which on top of that has different qualities of writing. I doubt I'll ever be attempting that. Producing better legends mode text which can then be used elsewhere should probably be the priority. I was hoping with the grammar rewrite to produce some text so that it could do translations which you could see happen on screen or which would be partial translations based on your language knowledge, that kind of thing. But it's a large task to do if you go beyond the most simple, practical text for that, and it complicates later real-world translation work as well. Procedural poetry is something that I wanted to mess aroud with, but more to horrify than to entertain.
For just describing text, everything is fair and we've taken some steps in that direction for this release.
Does the recent devlog mean that we can create a race with an adventurer-only caste, and have one of our adventurers of that caste show up? Does it prefer historical figures to generated?
Is there a frequency trick to distinguish castes like that? As far as I know, generated migrants from every caste will always show up, if they belong to the civ, unless you guys have already figured something there. Any adventurer you have of the correct race, regardless of caste, will be available to show up to the fort. It doesn't always use historical figures if it has them, but it quite often uses them.
So If an adventurer shows up in my fortress, will he bring all the stuff I've gathered in his backpack? Can he be of other race than dorf?
Toady, how does immigrating to a new fortress affect things like artifact creation? Can my smith who was possessed in my last fort immigrate and get a fey mood in a new fort, or will he be billed as "creator of libushtastic" even though said artifact is still moldering in the halls of the old fortress?
Also, relating to the question about adventurers and backpacks, will immigrants from old forts be wearing the same thing they were when the fort was abandoned?
My understanding is that the new migrant will still be burned out and have the creator tag. The immigrants should have their old stuff, but it might end up calling the "dress for local environment" function on every immigrant, which would cause them to lose their clothes. Adventurers keep more of their crap, but they still end up dropping stuff on the edge of the map. The races have to match. I haven't gone back to clean up all the problems there. That was one of the inn/tavern goals if I remember, getting multiracial forts to work.
It looks like there is a randomized trait for vampires that makes them impossible to blend in dwarven society (for example, Nosferatu-like vampires). These "monster" vampires would try to blend in anyway? It isn't clear from the last devlogs.
As it ended up, they are all non-monstrous (except when they are drinking). We'll revisit it later I think.
What happens if the player sees a dwarf's corpse before any of your dwarves do? Do unannounced corpses show up on the stocks screen?
It doesn't matter if you see it. A dwarf still needs to show up for it to announce. I don't think I've dealt with the stocks screen, and I probably won't for this time. There will be a lot of things like that which let you see indirectly, some that should stay in and some that shouldn't.
How will vampire blood and the eventual potion system interact? Will a draught of blood be prepared like a potion and dwarves will choose to drink it or not on the same system? Do you picture doing anything special there when you eventually implement this stuff?
I really have no idea how all of that is going to work. The way world gen and the personality stuff is going, there'd be dwarves that would take an interest in that sort of thing, but I don't know if they'd be bottling it up and sharing it or exporting it abroad.
Did you get Scamps a halloween costume?
Nope. I was off doing crayon art and handing out candy from my grandmother's place. Scamps was left alone. It was a dull day for him.
Will it be possible that a member of the starting seven is a vampire before embark? Will vampires check the population of a fort before emigrating? Can another vampire come to a fort if one is already present? Will the lying skill be used for claims and counter-claims of vampirism and will it provide skill xp? If unmasked do vampires have an option between fleeing off map and fighting to the death (their own or the forts)?
The starting seven don't get to be vampires, so yeah, they can be treated as safe. Vampires don't know the other vampires in the fort, and you can get more than one. They tend to come with the larger migrant waves, but they don't look at the overall population at this point. We didn't do vampire lying skill in part to avoid detection, but we should probably go through the skill list and just not have it show the lying skill for anybody that has a secret identity. Vampires submit to punishment as it stands. Criminals in general should have more options.
Will vampires have a different bite attack than regular dwarfs? Or will they have more levels in biting? Will different werebeasts have different skills, such as werecabybaras being excellent swimmers?
Bite attacks are still a mess, so I don't want to assert anything about them. The bigger teeth probably matter to some degree, but they only have those when they are drinking blood -- I haven't done voluntary transformations so they don't use them at other times. Werebeast definitions don't use much along the lines of actual knowledge about the creature in question. Whenever forgotten beasts care about that sort of thing it'll carry over for werebeasts.
If you retire an adventurer on a mountainhome (currently an empty plot) then that adventurer can become a migrant. Does this mean your elf or human adventurer can retire on a mountainhome and become a fortress mode migrant? And as a sub question, if your adventurer retires on a site of a different civ or species, will that adventurer be able to migrate, or do they need to be on the specific civ site?
Nope. It does racial checks to prevent the current bugs that you still get when your king/queen is a human/elf and migrates in. That needs to be fixed. So everything there is still based on racial matching. Your adventurer does need to retire at the right civilization. All of the historical migrants come from the same civilization. We'll probably want to change that later, I guess, to some extent, since there are already inter-cultural migrations in world gen.
How will lycanthropy interact with moods?
I think it'd cancel the mood job, which may or may not drive the guy more crazy than he already is as a werebeast. If the gone-crazy mood doesn't stick, then the guy might actually be fine when he turns back. Without trying, I'm not really sure.
Will you leave the magic debug button in as an init option?
Nah, I don't want to have to support it.
Does this mean that the player must take action, or will the sheriff eventually mete out justice on his own (like now) based on the information available to him at the time (say, after a week or so)?
At this moment, the player must take action on murders and tantrum crimes if you want somebody punished. If you are the official will of the fortress, the sheriff shouldn't take an official action without your approval, I suppose. It could be fair to automate that with a sort of "after two weeks, pick the one with the most witnesses, if any" kind of thing, but that would still leave crimes to deal with where the course of action isn't clear. We were thinking about having mob incidents occur if you leave crap sitting around for too long, but I didn't get there, and I'm not sure anything like that should happen without an active move from the player in the wrong direction or if you were to explicitly turn some future automation off and then not do something about a crime that has 8 witnesses or something.
What happens if the only witness dies on the way to the sheriff?
The next person to find the body will take up the torch and give it another shot, but they'll only report that the body was found -- the actual eye witness report that names the attacker is lost.
Is it planned to make vampires init/worldgen option?
There are already world gen parameters for it, though I don't remember if vampires and werebeasts are distinguished there.
Will a dwarf's personality have an impact on reporting a crime like feeding/recovering wounded does? In other words, will a dwarf who loves chaos get a bad thought for upholding the system by reporting it while a dwarf who loves stability and order gets a happy thought?
Second, do dwarves just stop/finish their current task and report the crime or will they ever attempt to intervene? For instance, will Urist McLegendary+5Miner go find the sheriff or will Urist McVampire become Urist McBrainShatteredViaExtremePickination? On a related note, what about pets? If Urist McVictim has a pet Giant Cave Spider, does Peter McParker watch his owner get drained or does it defend him?
I didn't think the "liberality" trait really worked, if that's the one, since a dwarf that isn't a traditionalist shouldn't let monster murderers slide. Another thing the personality rewrite should help with.
Nobody tries to intervene. It's messier to introduce different levels of hostility (the current fistfights are clunky -- they are a job!). The first foray into that is still slated for the tavern release.
Can Dwarves be sentenced to death dirrectly now instead of the usual many strikes?
A dwarven death penalty still stands at 50 hammerstrikes.
Will we be able to summarily order the execution of anyone we wish?
Nope.
With this "J'accuse!" button,
1) you can accuse anyone or only those dwarves who have decent evidence against them?
2) What happens if you accuse an innocent dwarf? angry dwarf friends?
3) Is there such a button for every commited/noticed/reported crime? or is it a generic button to accuse a dwarf of a certain crime.
4) Will there be more random/mandate crimes now? e.g. Consumption of sewerbrew is forbidden.
1) You can accuse anyone, once you've got a crime.
2) There are some thoughts for ridiculous convictions and some happy thoughts for good ones, but there should be more. A difficulty comes in when you convict somebody that you know is guilty (because you saw it in the main screen for example), but it isn't backed up by witness reports -- if you convict an innocent guy or the guilty guy, should the fortress reaction be different? We didn't want the dwarves using meta-cheating-information to decide these things, but I'm not sure it'll be avoidable with all the lack-of-police-work we've got going on in the fort. There just isn't a lot to work with yet.
3) Once a crime is recorded, and it isn't a mandate-related crime (which are still out of your control), you get it in a list along with a list of witness reports, and you can then choose to convict a dwarf of that particular crime.
4) We haven't added any additional crimes aside from what we've talked about.
Are all murders perpetrated by vampires? Or can a natural dwarf just decide to murder someone s/he doesn't like if s/he has appropriate personality traits, etc? Or would a dwarf only kill another dwarf in the context of a tantrum, as is the case now?
Yeah, tantrums are the only other murders. That and fell moods.
Is this complete rewrite, or extension of current justice system?
It sits somewhere in between code-wise, but I'd say it's more of an extension since I didn't change much of the imprisonment/law code.
Toady, does a witness to a murder only ascribe cause if they see the actual blow being struck? As in, if I had a dwarf get attacked on his own (say by a vampire, for instance), but he manages to escape to a populated area only to die of his wounds, will the dwarf that witnesses his death report the vampire, or just that the dwarf has died?
Also, what happens when there are multiple attackers? Does only the person that strikes the final blow count, or can multiple attackers get reported?
I think it needs to be a killer blow for the witness reports to be generated with an accusation. Multiple attackers like two dwarves throwing a tantrum simultaneously? Or two vampires with the same target? I suppose it can happen, but there are so few crimes right now that I didn't deal with any of that. A related and more general question applies to attributing the kill in the legends, and it doesn't worry about that either. I'm not sure when it's going to be changed.
Say that two dwarves are walking down a hall and another dwarf near them lets out a roaring laugh, fell and terrible, before striking down one of the two and dragging off the corpse to the nearest workshop. Does the other dwarf report this as a crime or are the only crimes recognized those that involve vampires/werewolves?
Tantrums are reported, and I think this one might be too, but it could be that the old punishment exception applies to mood dwarves. I'm pretty sure I gutted all that, though I could be wrong. So I'm expecting it to be treated as murder. If you defer punishment until the artifact is done, well...
Does this mean the royal guard is gone, or will the hammerer promote into it like the sheriff does as the captain of the guard with the fortress guard?
Yeah, it's all official out of the raws now and deleted. I'm not sure when it'll be replaced or what with.
Is the hammerer still going to need a hammer, or will he improvise if no hammer is available? Can we set his weapon/equipment preference in the military screen?
The hammerer still uses a hammer. The skill, if any, can be put in the raws. If you get rid of the skill in the raws, I think they'll use whichever weapon. They might even beat somebody to death with a crossbow, come to think of it.
From the dev log, it sounds like you're done with Justice. You haven't mentioned implementing the Grudge mis-accusations that you earlier said you planned on, though. Did you just not mention them, are they going in soon, or did you change your mind? What about a converse situation with friends of the murderer being the only witness(es)?
Grudge-holding dwarves can level false accusations, although they only change their witness reports as it stands. I haven't made friends try to cover it up or anything else.
Can interactions be applied to weapon attacks?
As a property of the item? There's nothing like that. Contaminants can be spread around, but nothing deliberate.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1204342 times)