Are all bridges the same right now, or do they vary? Covered bridges, open bridges, so on and so forth.
They vary in length and also width! He he he. It is boring.
Will we have to discover a bridge or be able to swim across a river to cross one in the next version? Or is it still possible to ignore rivers completely by using fast travel?
Currently in towns you have to use bridges on the zoomed-in map. Away from the map it is still a to-do to change anything. In the next few days, I'm going to be changing rivers quite a bit, and if they are all crossable by swimmers, I think it might help the expedition feel to force you to cross manually by a road or by swimming. I'm leaning that way anyway. You wouldn't have to zoom in for the walkable brooks.
And in world 1, there don't seem to be any, presumably due to a lack of death gods. Are the necromancy secrets generated regardless of the presence of death gods?
They can also be held by death demons, though I don't think they share or use them, so effectively they don't come up. I'm not sure the lack of towers is due to the lack of death gods though. It depends on the length of the generation, and I don't remember how long it was. The towers tend to come up a little later, once there are significant graves to raid (enough to get zombies to build a tower). It could be that there were no death gods though. That happens sometimes.
Will town maps like the one you posted be available to export through Legends Mode (once an adventure visits a town) or will they remain a dev only visual?
Basically, I'm asking if a city/town site map will be exportable in the format shown in the dev log or not.
I guess that would just take a button from the site list in legends. It would be reasonable to add the button.
Are we going to get more specific in-period names for businesses that are used within the game?
I'm more or less for it, in general, if we have something that fits. I don't know quite how esoteric it gets though, and what we're going to have that matches up. I've seen lists of names but I don't know a lot of the specifics. What did you have in mind?
So if a Were-dwarf dashes for the closest target during a full moon to attack. Will it be any target, including other Were-dwarves?
And I'm curious about the disguises.
If a disguised vampire gains a title through the military, will said title stay if the disguise is busted? Or maybe that isn't not how the disguise system works.
Weredwarves respect each other, as long as they are the same beast form.
Hmmm... titles... I think it probably would never show you the way it is. It should probably put the title on the identity name, although ideally the titles they get would be an extra identity for even regular people, so that people can have more than one from different places.
Why did you choose to only let body parts with a head or grasp be animatable by necromancers, and not all body parts or those with a stance (e.g. feet and legs)? It seems sensible to be able to raise someone's lower half.
I don't remember now if there was a reason any more compelling than thinking a foot twitching around was unscary. Or a lower/upper body with nothing else attached. A lower body with two legs is probably okay, but you might as well allow everything at some point. It might be revisited when there's pulping.
Do the wooded areas have free-roaming swine, or are all pigs penned up as things are now?
There are various animals out in the wastes. It's all very simple though. Pigs aren't treated as special -- it distinguishes only grazers and non-grazers at this point.
Are there any pictures of the new cities/towns in the zoomed in city fast travel screen? Perhaps we could see one of the maps already shown compared to the in game city travel screen if it's not too much trouble.
I'm actually fairly excited to see how they compare since I find the maps that are being put up now to have a strange kind of beauty and I hope at least some of that's carried over.
I haven't made pictures because I'm not happy how they fade out into the surroundings, and even when I get to it, it'll still be a bit blocky, but I guess that's okay. I'll probably remember to put one up when I work that out -- you can recognize the intersections from the graphical maps, more or less, but they lose the distinction of the individual buildings, and they aren't as colorful.
Do the "Breeds" only apply to actual breeded animals or do they extend wild animal-populations? Say all wildhorses in a certain region looking similiar?
It doesn't extend to wild animal populations, but I think that's a reasonable way to do subspecies stuff and it would be cool to throw in variations that way. The raws themselves would need to have more variations in the wild animals first before it would matter. Some of the domestic ones too for that matter...
When you get such things done, how much interbreeding between different breeds/populations do you anticipate their being? How much variance is there in a cat (or any other domestic animal) population at the moment, and how much would you see as ideal? I know such things would be influenced heavily by the size and age of the population, but I'd appreciate some general thoughts on the situation.
What would interest me is if and how the pet keeping species decide which traits they favour and want in a animal? I could see Humans for example keep atleast 3 kinds of horses 1 each for light and heavy cavalery and one as work-horse.
Are there going to be any gene variances (in cats) from inside a town, or is it going to be mostly one kind per town? Are there going to be any ways for animals to travel between towns besides trade? What are (will be) the triggers for a trade in these animals?
The breed allows for some variation now, so it's a bit more (too?) flexible than the word would suggest I suppose. The breed definition restricts the available genes, but doesn't specify them entirely. I think ideally there'd be animals bred toward specific purposes, as well as perhaps a stray population of some of the animals that takes traits from both the breeds as well as at random (or perhaps all the way back toward being random -- or further, specialized for stray living, since a lot of the breed characteristics wouldn't be adapted to that environment). I think animal trade is quite limited now in world gen. It doesn't worry about mixing populations or anything either. Overall, it's very simple, but it's a start.
Toady, you ever going to take a look at odd river intersections, eg. the triangle as seen in world 1, near lake?
They look terribly funny and not very realistic when encountered when playing, and a 4-intersections have disastrous results.
I'm not sure if it'll be addressed with the upcoming river changes for adv thirst. They do look strange and can be buggy.
Are there any plans for zoomed-in travel maps for player-made forts?
I haven't done anything with it, but I suppose it could use something like the dwarf mode minimap at the very least. I still have some travel map issues to work through. I'm not sure if I'll get to that. I also wanted to changed the dwarf mode embark town blocks to something with a little more detail (even if you can't embark on the towns).
Any plans on making the rivers look more natural? Like less straight segments with sharp edges?
Any chance to have the paved roads look different (not brown) from dirt roads in the map?
The ones away from towns look a little better (away from intersections). I haven't thrown in the curviness in towns as a matter of expedience, but I assume this will change at some point.
Roads look different on the in-game travel map. It hasn't been important for me on the graphical map, which I've been using to debug. It could be changed by the time it gets added to legends export, but I'm not sure.
I don't know if adventure mode uses the same pathfinding system as fortress mode but, does this mean that adventure mode will incorporate the fortress mode path-designation mechanic - say by auto assigning roads and paths a lower (or is that higher?) pathfinding weight? Could/would this be extended to all terrain in general?
It isn't currently doing anything interesting in the towns. I'm not going to address anything there until it's necessary, when people move around during the day again. It would make sense to use the traffic designations, since they are in place in dwarf mode, especially to stop them from running up on the bridges walls to cut corners.
will there be farming related disaster in worldgen like locust swarms or salt buildup that cause an area to produce little to no food for a period of time or, in the case of salt buildup, become unfarmable due to improper/unsustainable farming habits?
There's nothing like that now. There are vague plans, but I dunno when it's going to happen. It's a handy way to change the world and get people to move around, but there's enough difficulty as it stands just keeping the towns happy in the first place, until we get industries and trade settled a bit more.
Are the animals in the villages/pastures owned by particular people or are they considered a part of the village entity - who gets angered when livestock is killed by an adventurer?
I think it's probably an entity issue at this point. I assume it'll be sorted out when I do the first adventurer livestock, since you'll have to buy something from somebody (if you are polite).
Now that we have both trolls and bridges represented pretty well, will there be trolls under some of the bridges? Maybe not in this update, but will traditional fairytale notions like that get a nod eventually?
There's that whole "Age of Fairytales" thing to worry about, and our current spouse-converting trolls are derived from the darker variety of those stories. It'd be almost legit if those trolls could talk a little more than their kill list rants. Having them live under bridges as an option would be cool, and I think spreading out to give an ogre or beast here and there some extra character would be good. Thinking realistically about when stuff like this might start getting looked at, I'd say there's a chance when megabeast AI kicks in as the sort of proto-army arc. One model of getting the army arc started up is to get the megabeasts and bandits running around properly, to get moving groups in play, and then growing and coordinating the groups, and it could still turn out that way. The personality stuff that'll be in place before then should give them a proper character, even if it doesn't align with fairytales for many of them... then we just need to have them accost goats and lost children.
What's the average population of a city? Each new family that settles in one determined city will build a house or we will end with filthy childrens living in the sewers?
People that aren't specifically sewer dwellers (all adult criminals or beasts or mans or kobs at this point) get to live in houses. I don't know when poverty will be explored -- the manor stuff on dev leads to distinctions, but I'm not sure if they are between rich and not rich or if poor goes in somewhere around there as well.
The new town maps are looking increasingly better, but I still dislike them for one thing: the circularity. Each settlement is a perfectly circular web of roads. And no matter the size of the village/town/city, they all take up the same space. It gets repetitive and boring very soon. Unfortunately, it looks that it's such a fundamental part of Toady's design that it's impossible to change. I suppose the circular web is the very building block of the new towns that can't be replaced.
Also I really hate all the random roads - there's way too many of them in the village parts of the map. But I've already rambled a lot about it here so I won't repeat myself.
(EDIT: But looking at the older town pictures it seems Toady has reduces the number of roads a bit, so there's that.)
Oh and I miss the old villages. Those were great!
Most of what you think as roads in the pictures aren't roads, they are there just to divide the fields. It is obvious though that the same process to decide where the building will be constructed is used to divide the fields, but the end result is very good.
I'm pretty sure they are all roads. I guess you could say "nah, they're hedges" on maps like this one, but when you look at, say, this town it's apparent those lines need to be roads so the farms can get to their homes. But so far we've only seen town maps. I'd love to see a proper village.
Toady, could we see a map of a village? I don't know if there's any strong distinction between towns and villages now, so take "village" as a settlement of ~100 people with no market.
And what happened to the old village maps we've had a couple of versions ago? I suppose the code was scrapped?
Thanks.
The old village image is actually as circular as the current versions and, unlike the new ones, it was made explicitly as a circular web -- parts of the web aren't realized because they are waste etc., as with the current maps, so neither the new nor old map ends up completely circular. The current villages are blobbish just because they occupy site rectangles and a circular blob is a more natural shape to fill out a rectangle, but the algorithm works on the square grid required by the moving load area, with a 3x3 subgrid for each square, and can be adapted without too much effort to various shapes (basically by setting yes/no flags through the grid -- it'll fill out whatever shape it is given, and it already does this at with respect to the river/ocean/lake blocks). It takes on a bit of a rounded character locally on the edges because corners and three way intersections are down toward the square boundary to degridify the picture. The main problem is more that the sites can't merge with each other and all have to occupy rectangles. They'd have different shapes and merge more naturally if that weren't the case (having a diagonal boundary with a neighbor for instance), but that will take more work to change. If it happens that sites stop occupying rectangles and can begin to come closer to each other along different boundaries, the site growing algorithm can adapt to that just as it adapts to rivers and other boundaries.
Within one town, my principle concern was dividing up the plots in a way I could use them for both towns and villages while at the same time respecting the square load areas (which the previous village code was a total flop for). The roads have been a secondary concern up to this point, but the divisions you see on the map can be defined as paved roads, or dirt roads, or as hedges or whatever else when it comes time for it. Any division below a paved road is currently realized as a dirt road. My starting point for merging my town and village maps were web-searched maps along these lines:
http://historic-cities.huji.ac.il/germany/aachen/maps/braun_hogenberg_I_12_b.jpghttp://historic-cities.huji.ac.il/british_isles/london/maps/braun_hogenberg_I_A_b.jpghttp://historic-cities.huji.ac.il/belgium/bruges/maps/braun_hogenberg_I_16_b.jpgwhich can have some outlying structures which aren't even on roads but instead within the plot divisions of whatever kind, but overall I think I probably agree with your sentiments on roads, and I don't intend to simply emulate pieces of pictures without respecting the underlying structure.
For villages, the plot model is still the manor picture that came up before, minus the manor and church etc.
http://www.bownet.org/jvulgamore/Charlemagne%20and%20Franks/Manors/Plan_Mediaeval_Manor.jpgHere is the current village output:
schematic,
tilesI'm aware that there are various other possible setups for villages, but only so much can happen at a time. I'd like to set up
these sorts at some point, and I was hoping to have them already, which associate fields more to individual families without respect to a central manor, since I don't want manors everywhere -- the long strip fields should even be able to lean away from the two major axes with some careful treatment of the vertices. It will be ultimately stuck to 48x48 tile grid sections though. Otherwise the AI will be impossible later. There are a zillion different things to do though, so you'll have to continue to suffer through these limited similar maps a while.
Assuming that the patch is closing in on the release date, what are the immediate development plans after the post-patch celebration? Is the Caravan arc going to still be the primary focus in development, will there be other planned features from the Development Page which might have an unexpected priority jump? I know these are broad questions, but I'm just wondering what what Toady has in mind, even if it's just a tiny speck of a planned idea for the next update.
The post-patch celebration being the bug-fixing releases, of course. This release obviously took a long time, and that time has clarified some things about that release list that is going to switch up the order a bit, I'm pretty sure. Currently what's been decided is that the birth/death/succession stuff and the personality stuff will be moved up. That'll crystallize into something definitive sometime during the bugfixing.
I really enjoyed the monthly report containing the actual numbers of issues left to work out. Any chance of that happening more often in the devlog?
I decided against having a running countdown during the last long release, when it became more of an annoyance to manage than a motivator for development. So probably not. I've never really found a good way of communicating release timing, because there isn't a good estimate of the release time. The list of issues I greened out before doesn't really work, since there's always a mass of crap to cleanup after it's all greened out. I'm ostensibly doing that cleaning list now, but it's always a three steps forward two steps back kind of thing. I'm just trying to log as much as I can, as boring as lot of it is, with the vague idea more or less that I'm moving down the issue list from the report, even if I expect a few big bumps up ahead there, where one optimization issue or another might eat a few days or more all by itself.
Can working gloves and gauntlets be created by adventurer reactions yet? Will that be in this release?
I haven't changed it. If it isn't changed I can throw it in with the bug fixes if I'm reminded.
Toady, you mentioned that you had an abundance of bone materials in cities that builds up making the number of bone crafts unreasonable. I think one problem with this viewpoint is that in the real world bone material often has many more uses than are present in the game and in large industry and small industry alike the bones get used for all sorts of things. For instance, there is a small amount of bone ash present in many pet food brands (for cats and dogs) even though the higher quality companies try to limit that amount for health reasons. Many early cultures used bones for needles or knitting needles (Dwarf Fortress lacks knitting, btw). Also, bones were often used as jewelry, something that already occurs in the game. I think if you wanted to increase the usability of bones and thereby decrease their build-up in city stockpiles you would need to make the market for bone larger by increasing the demand for bone crafts or bone decoration, or other uses such as bone meal for fertilizer. I think this would be much more realistic than trying to limit the production and accumulation of bone. If you don't want the stores to be full of the stuff, why not make it more prevalent as something that is actually more useful for the townspeople?
I was looking for a short-term fix, which was rebalancing the number of bone crafts made and just letting the rest of the bones sit. I'm all for adding more industries, but I'm trying to arrive at a release now. Hopefully there will be more bone industries in the future. There certainly are a lot of bones!
When modeling demand for objects, is it done by a hard-coded object class (ie, all food has this demand, weapons have that demand, art has the other demand, and so forth), flat aspect (everything is equally in demand, and supply is the only concern), or is there an element in the raws that determines how it much it will be used during worldgen (set plump helmets to low demand and sun berries to high demand, modifiable to the other way around if we want)?
The raws don't interact with it right now. Towns just want a certain number of each thing on hand based on population, and the differences in specialization lead to differences in supply, so things have places they want to go, in each of the general categories. I believe it also quibbles a bit with how much of each specific type in a category is on hand, to simulate rarity costs, but I don't remember how much. It gets to be very number crunchy but there's still some room to move for customization, and I imagine it'll get more complicated over time, but there's not a whole lot going on right now. There are those weird trade valuation things it uses in fortress mode, for instance for pictures containing animals with ART_IMAGE_ELEMENT_MODIFIER etc., and that should probably be expanded into something that respects all of the objects in a more uniform way.
Will the economy be "grounded" in the world-gen scale, where gross supply/demand is balanced and then individual producers take their cues from those global values, or will you try to balance it from the bottom up, where producers make as much as they want/can per their situation and personality, and let them react to market forces as they emerge?
The villages are sort of mindless producers right now, and that lets their associated town use more of a bottom up approach where it can afford to screw up without worrying as much about basic survival -- at least at a minimum population level. It doesn't mandate anything at the world level -- the world could end up devoid of certain types of goods if nobody has occasion to make them. Food is reliable enough now that the system isn't completely disasterous, but I'm sure there's already all sorts of silliness, and I don't have a problem slapping some weird global behavior on there to fix things (the unnaturally clunky supply/demand stuff counts perhaps in some way, though it isn't the same as a forced global agreement).
I don't suppose you got pictures of the hole to the underworld. Or at least a better description. Was it a hole to the first cavern layer, or were we in danger of having hordes of hidden fun stuff all up in our faces? Or was it both, and you are hiding some sort of new thing in the caverns from us because it brings you mirth when you see our outraged reactions to unexpected things.
It went all the way down, and because I was embarking dwarf mode, the breach detector was triggered and it even gave me a helpful announcement telling me I was going to die.
You are re-enabling thirst with dungeon and sewer exploration in mind. Does this mean that we should be packing full waterskins--i.e., are there going to be hazards (contaminants, diseases, etc.) inherent in drinking sewer water as we find it on the floor or in channels?
It would make sense not to drink that water, but it doesn't currently penalize you. There isn't water in most of the dungeon, so it won't help you everywhere, even if it does remain clean for a while.
Will drinking vomit and blood as a staple be subject to horrific illnesses?
Could an adventurer drink forever by making himself ill to drink his vomit to get ill etc. ad infinitum?
It seems like a reasonable enough thing, but I haven't done anything with it.
Toady, you mention that placing designations over multiple z-levels is now possible, and you give the example of long up/down staircases. It seems logical that this would extend to designating 3d areas for digging and channeling as well, but will designations over multiple z-levels also be possible concerning the setting of traffic areas and/or building item properties?
Yeah, anything in the 'd' menu.
And will the dwarfs dig the multi-z designations without needing to be babysat so they won't cause collapses?
Nothing has changed with how they select which designations they dig. Whatever happened before when you designated them manually will happen now.
How do the vendors yell? Is it a specific/new application of the Vocalization tag? AFAIK that tag doesn't work on a profession level, but hey, what do I know?
I'm pretty sure it's gonna end up entirely creature independent. The civilized critters don't keep a lot of speech down below yet, since it's more of an entity thing, and there isn't a lot of speech there either. I'm not even sure the extent to which travel mode is going to be involved, since there's not a good deal of data to work with at that level (though there is some). Just a little fun aside. Eat/drink/river/etc. is the next big push.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1205107 times)