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[Willfor]

If they aren't in, I'm modding them in. I totally want a monarch butterflyperson.

[magmaholic]

or a moth man

[Footkerchief]

Hmm I wonder... Well I guess I'll put out the Footkerchief bait... but this question is driving me nuts

Toady do the sponsorship animals means that soon we will have giant and person versions of all the animals currently in the game? Are we that far from a Monarch Butterflyman?

I don't have an answer for that.  I do personally have mixed feelings about the inclusion of giant/person versions of every new animal, but I guess it mostly stems from the fact that it takes actual work (and semi-duplicated raws, which can have errors).  If giant/person variants were created procedurally I wouldn't care.

[Knight Otu]

Toady previously mentioned that he has a half-finished creature file of more animal men that he kind of tends to forget. In a DF Talk he also mentioned giraffe men, and that he wanted to be happy with the giraffe before he'd add giraffe men (which would likely want a separate body as well). As such, while the groundwork exists for adding more animal people, it might not be soon outside the sponsorship animals (and there, we don't have bee men, presumably because they'd want hive-like sites).

[Kogut]

why haven't you just made a check that removes "salt" from spaces that have nothing in them

thousands (additional) checks every single tick may be described as "Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaag"

Lag smag. Toady already describe checking for such thing, doesnt actually impact game responsiveness.

Everybody knows that DF is a giant CPU eater - and iterating over every single sock, rock and toe is likely to be part of it.

[Caldfir]

Hmm I wonder... Well I guess I'll put out the Footkerchief bait... but this question is driving me nuts

Toady do the sponsorship animals means that soon we will have giant and person versions of all the animals currently in the game? Are we that far from a Monarch Butterflyman?

I don't have an answer for that.  I do personally have mixed feelings about the inclusion of giant/person versions of every new animal, but I guess it mostly stems from the fact that it takes actual work (and semi-duplicated raws, which can have errors).  If giant/person variants were created procedurally I wouldn't care.

Yeah I have to agree with Foot on this.  In my mind at least it seems like it would be simpler to do it procedurally... although I know firsthand that there are some pretty major stumblng blocks with that, namely that many animals have very un-human shapes, and forcing them to be humanoid without killing the flavour is pretty hard.  I fiddled a bit with moose-men and the nitemare of hoof-based nonsense was quite awful. 

I am also a bit concerned that they might all get replaced next time Toady decides to take a look at procedral creature generation.  Right now we have FBs and Titans, but they tend to kind of suck.  Obviously at some far-flung point of the future this is planned to be fixed up and made more robust, and I can easily imagine that part of such a framework would allow some nifty giant/person variants.  Not to mention other variations as well, like "giant evil badger" or "gelatenous cave crocodile" or "mechanical aardvark" or whatever, and generally it is a good idea to just bring all that under the same umbrella when the time isright, rather than working very hard on wat will probably end up a placeholder (or at least that's the general approach the Toad seems to take with just about everything else).

TLDR: Toady spending time on making the variants seems out of character, because they are probably going to end up a placeholder. 

[PTTG??]

There are already Giant-X and Y-man templates. I'm pretty sure they work.

[Footkerchief]

There are already Giant-X and Y-man templates. I'm pretty sure they work.

They do some of the work, but the giants still tend to have about 30 lines of their own raws, and the people around 50.  More than enough to introduce bugs.

[abadidea]

There are already Giant-X and Y-man templates. I'm pretty sure they work.

They do some of the work, but the giants still tend to have about 30 lines of their own raws, and the people around 50.  More than enough to introduce bugs.

perhaps a tool for "crossbreeding" raws is in order.

[Hummingbird]

I'm sure there's an answer for this out there somewhere, but does anybody know whether the city underground will intersect with cavern systems at all?

[Urist McDagger]

I'm sure there's an answer for this out there somewhere, but does anybody know whether the city underground will intersect with cavern systems at all?

Yup. Toady does.

[hermes]

I'm sure there's an answer for this out there somewhere, but does anybody know whether the city underground will intersect with cavern systems at all?

Ooh, good question.  Even if the caves were limited in their depth and expanse compared to fortress mode, to be able to scramble down to some underground lake and make that a home beneath the city would be a wonderful way to play a dwarf.  Ever since playing Dark Souls I'm all for more vertical exploration in RPGs.  Are there any plans for city structures, of any race, to reach into the sky?

[Rose]

One would thing that elven glades would eventually.

[abadidea]

One would thing that elven glades would eventually.

Off-topic but I've finally decided that the way your avatar changes to a zombie sometimes must be a back-end script and my hat is off to you for managing to freak me out every dang time

[Caldfir]

I'm sure there's an answer for this out there somewhere, but does anybody know whether the city underground will intersect with cavern systems at all?

I don't know the exact quote, but I recall this being asked before, and Toady responding that he is specifically avoiding intersection of caverns and sewers/catacombs because you would most likely end up with holes in the cavern roof, so no adventurer could get up/down in a reasonable way.

I will look for the quote...
...located:

Do the various under-city structures sometimes meet with the highest underground layer? If so, how common is it? And will Forgotten Beasts and other subterranean creatures eventually come up through such connections to live in sewers (and whatnot) or attack the town? It sounded like the first bit was a "yes" from the devlog, but I'd like confirmation.
On a similar, but ultimately separate note:
You didn't mention basements or cellars. Does that mean you weren't working on them, or were they just simple enough that they didn't contribute to the complications you mentioned?
It seems like it would be somewhat silly to include all the awesome fancy underground stuff and not include simple underground stuff too.

We've thought about how it might look, but right now we are still avoiding the top layer (that mention in the dev log was more about threading the rest between the upper and lower limits, which are variable).  It's easy enough to hit it, but for it to have a point beyond the intrusion of flying beasts, we need the adventurer to have a way to get down to the cavern floor, which would mean the humans digging stairs or placing a scaffoldy stair or something.  It would be a fun place to have a lever and bars though, and a sign with a warning on it.  We haven't ruled out doing it, and it's always good to have more cavern access points that aren't far-away rare caves -- there still isn't much to do down there though, so it's not a key addition yet.

Basements/cellars were in my mind with the complication list in the "buildings" part, particularly because temples can currently have multilevel underground parts from before that aren't the new catacombs themselves.  I haven't done basements/cellars generally though.  They should be that bad, but doing them too thickly will mess with my sewer stuff -- the sewers try to follow the roads but have to skip them at times.