Part 2
In what situation would we encounter these mists? Spreading from a creature? Just sprawled about underground?
The mists move around the environment, entering from the edge (or rarely springing up), and they move like a cloud say 40 tiles across. They can be outrun by a healthy individual.
Are the mists a visible thing like miasma?
Yeah.
With these randomly generated materials, what sort of things will we see? Will they just have random names/hardnesses/etc. or will there also be ores of their own random metals (or even ores that have to be combine with other random ores to make even more random metal)?
Do you think it would be possible at all (even if just through modding) to entirely randomly generate every single material in the game for each world?
I haven't done any of the non-flowy ones yet, and I'm not sure how the rest will work. Although it would be hard to avoid mush in the complete case, it is a goal to make full randomization possible as a setting. I think I've talked a bit about the exposition we'd want to include with that, although the ideas are all unformed right now. Good exposition would be difficult if absolutely everything is random. You'd either have to plunge through without knowing what's up or just settle in for a lot of reading of bad mechanical prose.
Come on think how awesome it'd be to have a nice fledgling fort going strong and then a wave of faint yellow fog comes creeping in from the east. You don't know what it does so you send a dwarf in toinvestigate. His eyeballs melt his skin rots off and bleeds to death little more then a skeleton. And the he starts to move. So you have to quickly build a hacth cover to seal off your fort to stop the zombie gas from coming in the stair well. or if you are building above ground you have to lock all the doors an make sure the walls a high enough and that no one goes outside into the lethal murk, and a lone crossbowdwarf is stuck atop the highest tower unable to descend as the fatal gloom has penetrated the very fortification meant to protct him. Can you honestly say that isn't worth a week or two of added waiting. Good thing come to those who wait.
-Edit, And what if there were good interactions as well? Like if there was a mist which increased healing by a thousand, and made lost limbs and severed nerves grow back? Imagineif the fog rolled in so you sent your whole population out to get healed. And then A vile force of darkness comes! So you send in the militia and there's a battlefield coated in blood as the everhealing dwarfs and goblins fight and fight severing limbs only to grow them back again.
So i must ask OH Great Toady One will this crazed fever dream of mine ever be a reality?
The first paragraph kind of happens now, although it probably doesn't flow around as nicely as you'd like when it hits obstacles. I don't have any interactions for good regions, but they are supported.
will this 'randomized material' system be tied within the reactions and within the job manager for reactionless workshops?
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depending on what will be available and how, random metals and stone may affect the fortress jobs.
without considering the availability of random stuff for digging:
bronze colossus leave a stone statue, will 'random metal colossus' leave an usable statue? that is, usable in rooms and in workshop.
magma man leaves obsidian, will 'random molten man' leave usable stone? that is, selectable for use in the stone menu and available in mason/trap/etc workshops
considering the availability of random stuff in layers where it can be dug out:
will those dug stone be available for jobs? will random ores be available for smelting? what will be the use of those smelt ores within the forges? right now, metal using jobs (weapons, armors, anvils, bins) are strictly defined in raws and the job manager allows to create specific metal jobs ("seven iron dagger", but also "smelt copper ore" and alloys)
Once random materials do go in, I think the main obstacle along those lines would be any job that would need to be listed in the entity raws. I'm not sure what the examples are. I think smelting would work, since you don't need to add every new ore to the entity raws. Alloys are in the entity raws. We could do something like adding permitted classes which cover a variety of jobs, etc., but it wouldn't work out of the box if we just added random metals and expected the alloys to function. Since the random stones/metals would be "inorganic", I'd expect the furniture placement to all work.
if burning and melting things isn't intended behavior for the mist, what is it supposed to be doing?
Aside from the husk zombie thingy, they can also be various poisons. The rain has a limit on how bad the poison can be, while the mist can do pretty much anything supported, like making the eyes rot or whatever.
Actually couldnt sand be handled via the new "gaseous stuff in regions" addition? I dont mean a full fledged Dust-storm (which would still be cool) but small clouds of wind driven sand that literally sand you down if you dont have clothing/protection?
Also how do those gases work in the game? Like smoke/miasma/steam?
You could probably have dust storms to some extent with the new interactions, but you wouldn't be able to get a specific material match with the region's soil, and they'd be small. The mists are like smoke/miasma/steam, maybe slower.
Hm...if it rains blood from actual creatures...would it rain potentially toxic blood from procedurally generated/modded-in/etc critters? That could be Fun really fast...
It rains the blood from civilized creatures, but if you mod in a civilized creature with strange blood, that kind of blood would occur in the blood rains.
Is the regional mist omnipresent or does it show up periodically, like rain?
It pops up every once in a while from the edge (or if you are unlucky, it springs up).
Is it intended for the vampire to only feed on living, fresh, same specie creature, even in the hypothetical version 1 ? In short, what is the final plan ?
I don't have strong feelings about it. The sleeping condition is a convenience for me, and I'd hope to at least get rid of that. After that, having some random wiggle is fine, I think, although I suppose forcing feeding on the living keeps things active. Some kind of ghoulish thing that feeds on the dead is also cool. Having a vampire hang around with barrels of ox blood is odd, but once we use blood in cooking etc., maybe it'll come up.
Will the regional emission that causes the blood rain still be able to do solid materials or was that removed after the "dandruff snow" thing?
The vanilla ones are all blood or liquid slime, but mods can use powder as well. I don't have regular hail yet, and there aren't solid glob regional emissions either.
How do the dwarves react to [mists]? Do they get bad negative emotions and try to run away?
Do mists happen underground in caverns? That, would be really, really, terrifying. On the same note, bloody rivers (Nile)?
The mists are bad news, and I haven't done more than the major effects.
Nope, nothing new happens down there yet.
Because some of us will embark in "hell-on-earth" sites, will there be an announcement when zombifying/face-melting/vomit-inducing weather conditions start?
Yeah, it gives you an announcement when a mist enters the screen, and it gives a message when the rain starts.
I wonder if the "evil weather" respects the weather simulation so that there is more nasty stuff happening in wet places.
It only respects the interaction timing. We'll need to do something later that relates more to the water cycle and less with magical blood/slime. It would be cool to change the properties of the rain in one way or another, rather than just adding a new freak weather event.
will mist sink down mineshafts if they are uncovered?
will different mists/weathers hit the same region, or will it be specific to each region?
If mist is specific to region? and how will it act in regards to moving across a multi-biome map. Will it just disappear as it crosses the boundary for it's biome?
How many of these new region effects can happen in the same location as other region effects? How many varieties can we get at once? Does the regional undead thing function differently than material emissions for these purposes?
The mists will probably plop right down there as they move, even a bit oddly if the shaft connects straight up to the sky. I think the random generator only adds one form of freak weather at most per region now, on top of whatever it decides to do with the undead. When the mist gets out of its region, it'll drop off quickly. Due to a quirk I haven't handled with region populations, the husk style undead don't get represented in world gen populations.
Do dwarves try to avoid at least the worst of the stuff (like turning into a bloodless husk) or will he have to either manually block those areas out somehow or accept resulting losses?
Dwarves are still stupid. I can probably work on this and fire a bit during the bug-fixing cycle if I remember. Scanning around in 3D for a flow event is a little expensive, but I think it can be dealt with.
Will there be special mists or rain in relatively "good" areas?
I didn't get to that for the generated ones. It is supported in the format.
How does the evil rain interact with the Adventure Mode character?
The evil rain will poison you however it poisons everybody else (these are the evil material rains, not the blood rains). Dizziness/nausea/etc. screw up your various rolls/skills. Evil mists can husk you if that's what the mist does. As far as I understand it, if you are husked as an adventurer, you'll still be playing but everybody will attack you.
Will every Terrifying region have evil weather (assuming that Terrifying surroundings are what you meant by "hell-on-earth")?
No, but it's fairly common. It'll also happen in the other kinds of evil regions. The text just refers to the savagery rating, and I didn't link the effects to the savagery. Whenever I do the sphere region/planey stuff, the material events will have to be refined to fit with the expanded themes, and that would carry over to the embark interface.
Will Dwarves have resistance to fog/rain? As in one dwarf who is susceptible to disease would die quickly from Fog/rain while one who rarely gets sick would die slowly.
If I recollect, the poisonous effects from the rain can be resisted, while the more localized mists are not resistable.
has the hammerer's [PRECEDENCE] value changed?
It is still 150 (which is less important than the sheriff and the expedition leader, so I think it is fine), but I did remove all the room requirements etc.
The last world I tested had a vampire that managed to get abducted by a gloom troll and turned into a "spouse of the gloom troll vampire"
So, in the quoted case, would the quest to kill such a creature be considered on par with killing a Gloom Troll Spouse, or on par with killing a vampire?
The heroism increase depends on the creature's skill, difficulty rating and whether it is a semi/megabeast. Vampires can have high skills, but it doesn't currently try to rate the difficulty imparted by syndrome changes. So it'll be at least as good as killing a gloom troll, and possibly better, but it doesn't properly measure the total challenge that comes from the material resistance etc.
If this vamp were to propagate would he make normal Humans to his "basic" vampire type or to his new mixed type? What about his weaknesses? Would the powers stack? Would be the child out of this unhealthy combination be also a vampire and troll? How would the behavior change? Will you take this stuff out? I hope not!
The vampirism syndrome and the race are independent, so the basic vampire status passes around in its own vanillaish way. If you have racial material resistances/weakenesses and a series of syndrome-based material resistances/weaknesses, I think they all stack (or work against each other as the case may be). The child would be a pure troll, if the spouse can have a child -- vampirism should render the spouse sterile, but I don't know if it actually worked for that weird troll event, since I didn't check.
Whenever we handle general vampire "half-breeds" and all that (that is, when the sterility tag is removed), then we'll handle the troll.
Will night creatures ever abduct player-controlled adventurers and turn them into night creature spouses? If so, would you maintain control of your adventurer after the transformation, or would this be considered a "Game Over?"
When abductions go into adventure mode, the adventurer will by default be as fair a target as anybody else, unless I run into some messy problem that forces me to add a special exception. Without a special exception, you are just another historical figure. Adding the whole transformation process is something of a project, and we'd have to consider what it means for you as an adventurer to even see it happen to somebody else before we consider you going through it yourself. Once we have a process in place for a generic historical figure to be converted in place while you are on the map, putting you through that is pretty straightforward (being dragged somewhere would require some kind of interface/travel change as well). I'm not sure whether you'd get to keep playing. You get to keep playing as a mist-husked zombie right now, which is the default position, but it is unsatisfying in the same way that allowing you to assume the role of a historical ruler would be, because you don't have the relationships/reactions from others/etc. associated to the role (aside from the very basic result of being attacked).
I'm curious, does this diaspora of dwarven families arise from children or parents actually migrating from fortress to fortress in worldgen, or is this movement abstracted?
It doesn't form a path and have them on the road, but they do move from site to site in terms of living in one place and then living in another. The exception is populations displaced by war, which have a period of time living in the wilds before resettling (if they can). More generally, every historical figure has a concrete location for every week in world gen (in some cases this location can be the forest they are wandering, rather than a site).
What are the obstacles to just assembling the starting seven dwarves as if they were a migrant wave (and possibly replacing their skills)?
From a design perspective, location and skill replacements are pretty much the only obstacles. Roughly, you're either going to be drawing dwarves from all over the world, which is weird, or you'll have a limited selection of skills available from your area, or you'll be mind-wiping people that have histories (which makes choosing historical figures half-pointless and strange). Personally speaking, I'd prefer to choose dwarves from some locality with some start scenario explaining what's going on and dealing with having a non-perfect skill mix, with the option to elevate non-historical dwarves to fill gaps.
In the end, it's not exactly a huge problem, if people don't mind wiping skills it's not a hard thing to do, and now that we have historical migrants in general, this is an avenue that has opened up.
will trading something to the mountainhomes allow you to request it from the outpost liaison later on?
We haven't gotten into that sort of tracking yet (it tracks the items, but doesn't place them in the proper resource categories), but theoretically that sort of thing would begin to happen when there are resources moving around in play more regularly, and when trade agreements are improved.
Not sure if it's too technical to be asked, but Toady : how can a necromancer line of sight affect a non-necromancer targetting something ? Do you mean targetting as in chosing which body part to attack or the "fire crossbow"-type targetting ? And finally, what do werewolves have to do with any targetting at all ?
Targeting as in determining friend-or-foe status (so whether or not to target in the first place). There's a lot of information to check, and one part of it wasn't being cached properly, so it ended up being calculated repeatedly.
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 haven't done it yet, but now that I have these animals in, I think I'm not going to add in many new types of animals until we've done some justice to what we already have. That justice might include a monarch butterflyman and giant monarch butterflies. It might count as an unhealthy obsession, but it is part of the game.
Are there any plans for city structures, of any race, to reach into the sky?
The little keeps can be several tiles tall, and they have crappy maps now. Similarly for the pyramids and things, which can be quite tall. In the future, there will be the giant trees and whatever else. Once we have cliffs and canyons, we can start getting into some cool settlements there as well. I think there's something like 10 or 15 sky tiles that are allocated now, which is enough for most purposes, but you might have had something else in mind. When we start to get a bit more weirdly planar, cloud kingdoms or really tall towers might be called for. I'm not sure if the really tall things would always be associated to a civilization.
Toady, what is your stance on SOPA and the like. I reckon (from Dwarf Talk) you are pretty paranoid about such things.
There's a General Discussion thread on this topic, and I don't want to get into much of a derail in here, but we're against SOPA/PIPA. I have no expertise here, but it seems that also holds for the people that wrote and sponsored these bills, given the amount of flailing and backpedaling which happened after the blackout.
Will armour ever have a noticeable effect on speed and dodging? I mean, will leather armour have a concrete advantage over steel when it comes to fast response to attacks and a dodging boost?
EmeraldWind brought up the combat/move speed split, the lack of which has caused a lot of the delay in implementing a lot of things like this. There are effects based on armor weight/armor user skill, but it doesn't cover much. There's a "clunkiness" penalty to rolls and an overall speed penalty, I think. I'm not sure what the overall deal should be with armor weights. We're missing things like padding under metal armor, and I don't know anything at all about how leather armors work with that or how much they should weigh or encumber compared to other armors. There's kind of an RPG tradition there, but I'm not sure how it should actually work.
will titans, forgotten beasts and mega beasts automatically rise from the dead in regions were normal creatures would? Also would this only apply above ground, or all the way down to the circus?
I think the regional targeting goes all the way down, at least when you are in play. Layer population creatures aren't altered in world gen if I remember, because they can overlap regions. That should be resolved one way or the other.
The regional animation effect targets critters that are in the GENERAL_POISON class, and among randomly generated creatures, I think that's all of the ones with blood. So those corpses will rise (or be generated as zombies if they start in a bad place in world gen).