Thanks to mifki, Zarathustra30, expwnent, Knight Otu, LordBaal, RoaryStar, Putnam, Dirst, Heph, Cruxador, Vattic, SimRobert2001, MrWiggles and anybody I missed for helping to answer questions. Please check just after your question up in the thread if it doesn't appear below!
since music/poems/dances seem to be civ specific, will there also be a degree of cultural diffusion where nearby civilizations learn/adopt some of the traditions of their neighbors? It'd be neat if stuff like local cultural regions and stuff would emerge over time in game.
We have the innovations spreading through books and teachers, and we have artists writing books and teaching their students as well, and those students can be from various cultures, but it doesn't have an easy way to go back to the student's town once a student leaves home, since they'll either remain with their troupe or go off to become a noble and not pass on artistic data. With the festivals I'm working on now, it might be possible to have a broader transfer, but right now it doesn't transfer local forms from one place to another, and I don't have info for adopted forms outside of individual knowledge yet or any form evolution (just the occasion new form).
So at the individual level, we have some diffusion, and we have books that get copied around spreading through the world, but nothing new gets in the bones of the civs yet -- but we're right on the brink and it's not very difficult now to take that step at some point.
With the additions of poems now, obviously poems will need to be written on something at some point. Is it right to assume we will see some type of paper industry added into the game, along with actual book production. Have you thought much about how this will be implemented, for example, whether books have to be handwritten or if there will instead be printing presses? Possibility of informational texts that could help dwarves learn new skills (this might be most balanced without printing presses as such books would therefore be time-consuming to produce, and therefore expensive)?
If you make libraries available to fortress mode, could they be used to improve dwarf skills like diagnostics and architecture?
Would reading books give some dwarfs a happy thought?
Do different forms of art, music, poetry, and literature have the typical ranges of quality (masterwork, etc.) associated with them?
Are there any upcoming plans to include training manuals or something similar for dwarves to train skills with?
We've been fudging books for a while now, and I'm not sure if that's going to change yet. Depending on how you think of the printing press, it's either before or after the 1400 cutoff it seems, so we could toy around with that later. Right now, everything is hand-copied in world generation in the libraries.
There are currently no practical skill books. We need to link innovations to existing skills, and we need more innovations that cover existing skills. And there's probably room for generic books describing the basic work of professions beyond that, perhaps -- it depends on what a skill means as the knowledge system expands.
I haven't yet associated the typical quality levels to poems, though there are related skills and it might fit to do so, since we already assign skill levels to engravings and so forth. I'm still messing around with it.
what kind of experiments are you doing with your test myth generator? Is it something that came up because of the addition of temples, or something that may end up being folded into starting scenarios? What kinds of myths are we talking about, and how crazy can the results get?
These myths are meant to take the world from its starting point (whether that's primordial chaos, or an endless mud flat, or a cosmic egg, or coupled divine beings, or nothingness, or an endless cycle, or whatever), and then bring the story up to the point where the year 1 situation of world generation has solid backing, in terms of the existence of the proto-civs, the land, the megabeasts, the underground, all of it. Yeah, we started playing with it more seriously because of the upcoming w.g. artifacts and the religious stuff coming for start scenarios, and now we're pretty sure the myth generator will be put in the game either before or during the first w.g. artifact release, since they'll be tied together. And who knows what else will happen.
I'm not sure how to evaluate the quality of the results -- say, after some stuff happens and we have some freshly created dwarves, the celestial ibis mates with the sun and lays an egg which contains the progenitors of a giant-sized race who all come to reside in their lost city and forge the device which weaves the destiny of the dwarves and the dwarves rebel and break the device and that's why dwarves grow old and die now, or whatever. It just grinds away and things happen, tossing in different worlds and nature spirits and forces and races and artifacts and second-generation gods and whatever. At the end there's a kind of overlap where everything is explained (why dwarves die, etc.) but you've also sort of started history -- this leads to questions about whether you'd be able to play in an actual Age of Myth where dwarves don't yet age and the sun doesn't exist, or something. As usual, the number of options will simply expand over time, and the myths will only be partially used at first. It leads to lots of interesting relationships that differ from world to world, and we'll try to use those in the ways people talk and what they can do, but it's a large project.
I also tried to experiment a bit with building origin stories from the facts at hand, so it can trace back and find the relevant events and make a paragraph containing only the pertinent bits, so different races might see things differently, but that's all very rough. There's also the matter of the current "localized" pantheons, and how that will play out when there's actually a unifying correct story is unfortunate, in terms of cultural differences. We might play around with distortions of the true data, and just having everybody be partially wrong (or everybody is right, in their way), but that's always hard, especially early on when we don't have a good handle on the data structures for correct data. Lots of options, lots of ways to handle it, and we'll only get to some of them. We might be approaching the point where we can actually have a nice slider for the simple world gen parameters, in terms of supernaturalness (although dwarves would stay at the lowest setting for a long while yet).
When engravings and statues can be commissioned, will this extend to being able to demand poets and musicians compose pieces pertaining to specific HFs or events?
It seems within the realm of possibility -- setting up the menu for specifics of the poems would be kind of a nightmare, but sending in one focal point (and materials) is about what we're planning to do for the other artwork, so it should all work together.
Since there will be taverns, doesn't it mean there will be more units on the map? Is it possible to have more population related settings?
It isn't much different from the merchants that visit you with several units. Without the start scenarios, the settings for how visitors work will probably be simple and artificial if we have any. I'm not sure yet exactly how you'll publicize your existence in this first release -- it'll either just happen or be a on/off switch.
Two tavern and mug related questions:
First, have you considered adding 'breaking mugs' as a celebratory tavern activity? The breaking of the mugs would generate happiness in the craftsdwarf who made the mug, and the breaker of the mug, with the happiness generated being dependent on the craftdwarfship of the mugs? Dwarves would always collect the best mugs they could from the stockpiles.
Second, have you considered allowing artifact mugs and musical instruments to be added to taverns as part of the décor, increasing the happiness of dwarves that see them in much the same way as levers can be admired? Perhaps do the same with figurines, jewelry, and scepters in temples?
I haven't considered it at all -- right now a broken masterpiece mug would make the craftsdwarf upset, unless this is an idiom I'm not familiar with.
I'm not sure how the association of objects with taverns will work -- we're going to just get started on the specifics of dwarf mode activities once I polish off festivals. Certain instruments need to be placed as furniture, and they can be admired. I'm not sure about other objects -- I haven't done anything with displaying items yet.
From what has been shown of the music/poetry style generation so far, it seems like the differences between styles generated by different cultures are all pretty much random. Is this correct? And, if so, will this be the case for other kinds of generated knowledge, such as combat styles? Or will other things factor in? For example, with music styles, might a culture's exposure to another music style factor into the generation of their own music style, perhaps basing their new style on the other resulting in a style sharing certain features? For another example with combat styles, will a culture frequently exposed to a specific combat style or enemy generate a combat style geared towards countering the other combat style or particular enemy?
I'm starting with people generating new forms from scratch, because the morphing/influence of forms is more work. It's certainly doable, but it'll take more time.
I could swear I remember seeing you say you wish there were an easier way to switch between fort and adventure modes. Do you have any ideas on how you would be going about this, or when you would be shooting for pushing it out?
There are plenty of ways to think of how it might be, but I don't really like the idea of just being able to become one of the dwarves at any time and then switch back. It seems like it'd nullify fort obstacles and it would also destroy the autonomy of the selected dwarf and their circle of relations. So that sort of direct/flippant transfer isn't so high a priority for me. Something more controlled seems fine, especially when we get to the point of assuming the role of a given historical figure as a beginning for adventure mode. No schedule as usual.
Is there a reason why we can't construct most buildings near the edge? We can build floors and draw bridges and use them to seal the map anyway. So why not walls?
It was originally to stop sieges from breaking if I remember, but it is as old as the left-right orientation of the map so it has probably been outmoded in many ways. I'm hesitant to mess with it.
Will it be possible to create or completely change the poetry/religion/combat styles of your civilization while you play Fortress/Adventure Mode?
Will it be finally possible to make acts of profanation or heresy in Adventure Mode?
Will players be able to create their own cults and religions with their own laws and rules?
I don't think you'll have manual control over art/etc. at this point. Not sure if it'll be related to the ability to further specify item construction jobs from the dev pages.
I don't remember if there's any direct way for you to topple furniture like dwarves do, so it might not work that way. The rest depends on how dwarf temples evolve and whether or not violence against temple people is recognized, but there might not be any in dwarf mode yet. I bring that up because the adventure mode mechanics for that will likely be working with whatever happens in dwarf mode.
I'm not going to do any rule setting until the start scenario rewrite guts everything.
What do you see as the long term future of poisons and poison classes? Will there be generated poison classes so various creatures could be immune to one another or susceptible to one another? I know poisoning isn't very Dwarfy, but could creatures gradually develop immunity or cures for various kinds of creature poisons? I'm thinking fish growing immune to anemones, but also adventurers developing poison immunities through controlled exposure.
Yeah, I never got around to doing anything with those classes, but the whole idea was that there'd be groupings for immunity purposes as you describe. I don't know much about the controlled exposure stuff -- depending on the critter, I've heard everything from that being reasonable to it just causing worse anaphylaxis on repeated exposure. In general, exposure and so forth are important for our fantasy stuff, and it'll hopefully all be handled in a single system that could be used for whatever syndrome.
How do you feel about ancient technologies such as Hero's steam engine (62ish AD) and the Antikythera mechanism (205 BC)?
I don't have strong feelings about them, and a lot of what I've encountered seemed to be speculative. To the extent that people demonstrate things, we can continue to add innovations. I think differential gears come up somewhere below. I don't want to turn DF into a steampunk game, but valid stuff that can be done with steam within the cutoff is fine. There are some things people might have figured out but didn't for whatever reason, and we'll be leaning away from those.
When will humans finally be able to steal dwarven steel making technology? We could do it by 1400, and we are very good at stealing ideas.
I'm not sure how I'm going to handle that -- we'll have a better idea once reactions can be tied to innovations. It might be the harder problem to prevent stealing at that point, the way people write things down.
What's the timeframe for the current release? Will this one be another year+ in development or are we moving towards a more frequent cycle of updates?
We're finishing up the framework/world gen/legends part, and then we have a dwarf and an adventure part to do. My history of development time estimation indicates that I should not bother trying to guess. The general idea is to try to do things in smaller chunks. Pushing recipes and games out of this release and into the next one has been useful. Now I just need to get through the next two sections without doing anything too extra, and we'll be fine. The libraries/innovations were the only real sidetrack unrelated to taverns so far, and each of the giant releases have been worse on that score I think. The multispecies fort stuff is a bit nebulous timewise -- that really depends on how the code cooperates when it is told of its new responsibilities.
That interview does put a new spin on Toady's multi-tile creature experiments. I hadn't expected boats to be on the short list for the fifth spot. That's just boats, and not full vehicles, I assume?
As with other additions, we'll go down the road for a bit and get where we go. Boats are going to be coded as general moving map sections, which presumably covers giant traps and siege engines as well. As you say, boats are in many ways the easiest one to do (although a few things about them like sails are harder than, say, a generic moving wall section).
Toady, is Needlegrass intended to be Achnatherum, Aristida, Stipa, or another genus?
I don't remember. The ones that didn't get jotted down in the raws are lost to time. I don't recall having a preference either.
Do you look at real "reclaims" for inspiration?
Not really... the reclaims were one of the first mechanics, and that was just a Moria thing at the time.
Will dwarven dancing be restricted to taverns? Or could extremely happy dwarves (such as those just completing an artifact or realizing a life goal) spontaneously break out into dance to celebrate?
We're starting with taverns. We have those celebration dances, but I wasn't thinking of something so spur of the moment at the time...
Will cats and small children be in danger due to sections punctuated by kicks?
I hope not!
Would it be possible for dancing to be weaponised/afflicted? I'm thinking along the lines of dancing mania: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania. I have a compelling mental image of the potential for a forgotten beast to coat a Fortress in dust that renders dwarves unable to do anything but dance until dead, or a Pied Piper character who just shows up at the fort and leads Dwarves off the map with their mesmerising music...
Secondly: How do hostiles deal with music? If a Goblin army lays siege to your fort, and your tavern area happens to be throwing an amazing gig, are attackers in ear-shot likely to drop what they're doing and just start rocking out because the bard's got sick flute skills?
It's not possible to do that yet, though I guess it is a step closer now that we have dancing, so that's something.
I think it might actually be possible that the attackers will hear the music and some of them might even be moved to tears by it... but they can still accommodate their other emotions and motivations, so it wouldn't change the outcome -- combat priorities are pretty high.
How does a tavern compare to a dining hall in the mind of a dwarf? If both are available, do they prefer one over the other for their parties or needs?
Also, do songs, dancing, etc. only occur at parties, or will we see people doing them just for fun in their down time?
We're at the cusp of figuring that out -- a dining hall can be part of a tavern, or it can be owned by a specific dwarf, or be its own public place. We'll have to play around with it a bit to see how the social needs get satisfied -- I'd assume those would default to a tavern, where for a special occasion there might be choices, and some dwarves would prefer the quieter dining hall to eat if they don't have their own room.
There aren't parties in the same way as before now, so the songs etc. will be during down time. As stuff comes in to replace the old parties, we'll see them there too. At first, most of the goofing around will probably happen when enough dwarves are together in a spot and they just decide to group up.
The newest devlog mentions worldgen teacher-student links. Do you think the framework you'll set up for this will end up being the same framework you'll eventually use to model the transfer of other forms of knowledge? Like fighting styles, etc.?
Probably -- the necromancers, artists and scholars all do things with the same link types.
Will festivals and competitions continue to occur after initial worldgen?
If so will they be something 'adventurer bards' can take part in?
And following on from that thought, will your fortress be nominated as a potential festival location?
As a kind of capstone to the release when we are at the end of the adventure part, we were hoping to get a festival competition in there, maybe even a prize. It's up to time considerations at this point.
For fortresses, it's a number-of-critters concern, I suppose, if the festival isn't local. Depending on how the festivals I'm working on now are coded up for world-gen (there will be several different kinds), we might see some naturally happen for the fort locally, but of course there'd need to be some backing code since it's a played mode with more detail.
Will there ever be more ways to capture animals?
He he he, well, you'll probably be able to psychically lasso them from your flying boat in "ever" time. I don't have a particular plan on this. I'm not sure when we'll be herding animals and things like that. I agree that it shouldn't all be traps and cages. We might have a bit more work on this once you can keep adventure livestock, but I'm not sure.
What are your thoughts on putting real-life illicit/illegal drugs in the game? Specifically, I'm expanding the products made from the real-world plants, and I'm not sure whether it would be appropriate to add hemp buds and their associated syndrome.
We already have a ton of alcohol in the vanilla game and aren't against adding the drunkenness effects from that, or deleterious long-term physical effects. I wasn't in a rush to add hemp effects when I added the plant, but I don't have a strong view on that in the game.
Have you thought about establishing "forts" in cities? I'm thinking anything from walled communities to ghettos to Christians worshipping in the catacombs.
Yeah, it comes up a bit thinking about things -- it would be fun to have some kind of dwarven merchant colony later on. It's very similar to hill dwarves, though there has to be space made if you have building permission on the surface or sewer levels, which is a little harder since we've only just done a bit with flexibility in structures. It would be an entertaining scenario, though it wouldn't be able to load much of the city at a time.
Does that mean that the "skill system" that we have for jobs and combat will eventually be replaced by a knowledge based system?(a dwarf who did a certain job for his entire life is considered an expert in that area and a dwarf who has been doing a job for 2 months is considered a novice)
Will said knowledge be transferred via family relationships?(Urist's parents teach him how to be a blacksmith/Urist's wife teaches him poetry)
Will dwarves be forced to learn things by themselves?Vanod's home is being constantly harassed by criminals.He decides that he had enough of them and since there are no warriors in his village he starts to train some combat skills by himself by fighting the wild animals that roam nearby his home.
Will vampires/werebeasts and any other night creature that you are planning to add to game be able to marry other night creatures and have vamire/werebeast sons?I feel like this would be a nice alternative for generating new night creatures instead of the very rare profanations and an awesome quest to have in adv mode.
Skills won't be replaced, just complemented -- there's still a large element of practice in everything. Books should only help with that, not push it aside.
Once we add innovations that span all of the professions, they'll leave the scholarly realm and there will be other knowledge transfer methods.
Self-teaching is the default right now -- in world gen, people join the "hero" professions and pick up skills, and your dwarves eventually learn to do any job you assign them. Having harder-to-pass gates of entry would be a new thing, and the innovation system might be the way that ends up happening. At some point, we were also going to add low quality items (if the same system stays in, it would be from -1 to -5 with tasteful adjectives), and this would be what you get from your zero-skill dwarves. Rising out of that state might not be achievable through practice alone, depending on what's going on.
We had some weird power goal about curses passed through bloodlines. We'll support it at some point.
Are there going to be any entity tokens to customize what types of art forms civilizations get? Like if I want dwarves to only make dances that are really slow, or elves to have mostly fast music. Is speed of music even part of the styles I haven't looked at the dance or music styles since they seemed really complicated. Anyway, there's probably things one might want to customize other than speed.
I mean in the entity. I'm not asking if you can make it physically impossible for goblins to do dwarf dances.
I haven't done specific tokens that customize art forms. There are a ton of parameters, and I don't even have a basic raw format yet.
Will different civs be able to write their own "national anthem" or something like that?
There are commemoration/celebration type songs, and there might be military music, but I don't specifically have generic national anthems. I'm not sure when that sort of things started up.
Will musicals have a look in?
I'm not doing anything with plays, though the dances sometimes have portions that act out stories. Plays are important, and I'm sure we'll get there sometime. I don't know anything about the development of musicals in particular.
Do you feel that older art types like engravings require work to bring more in line with these new art forms? Statues and engravings are entirely 'what', whereas poems and books seem to be far more 'how' based.
Yeah, all of the visual arts from sculpture to architecture to engraving (to the ones we are missing completely) don't have any broad stylistic information that we now have for poems, music and dance, and it would be good to understand something like "forms" in a similar way so that cultures can be differentiated and evolve. We had a clumsy stab at sphere-based temple architecture before, but it needs to be more coherent than that was.
Will adventurers be able to compose songs, write music, and choreograph dances? Form a traveling performing troupe of your own?
I'm not sure exactly how it is going to work out in terms of menus and all that, since it could get quite complicated and I'd really like to avoid that right now, but you'll be able to do some basic things. I'll know more when I dig into the adventure side of things -- just getting tavern maps and visitors up and running will be necessary first, and dwarf mode work will also determine some things first.
Is the work you intend to do on farming with tracking moisture going to be laying the groundwork for some future farming updates that you plan to do or will this probably be your only pass at farming for some time? also do you only intend to track moisture for "dirt" tiles and exclude plain stone so as to minimize computing?
Are you talking about the entry on the development page? There are more items than moisture in that section. I'm not sure when or what we'll be doing exactly.
What is the effect of art on the world? In a recent devlog it is mentioned that a human created an art form for moral lessons in a gobling civ, does the civ change its moraility based on the poems? Is art right now only for entertainment? Will we ever see the pen being mightier than the sword?
Between art, religion and philosophy, I'm sure we'll see something, probably a touch this time. Certain philosophy books and certain poetry has specific variable content based on values/ethics, and entity value variables are freed up from the entity definition. The only thing we lack now are processes which cause something to be influential enough to change the base values. We have the books and troupes -- we don't have speeches or other social behavior for scholars, aside from taking students. It might be a bit much to do movements now. There's a vast periphery now of new possibilities around the recently added features that'll be taken advantage of as we go, in any case.
The most recent features add new interactions to the world beyond "stab/rob/eat them" among the races. Indeed your last dev log (03/16/2015) seem to indicate certain easiness on the interaction. I'm simply curious, how a grown up, free human walks to a goblin site door and ask to become an poetry apprentice? What do it takes to survive such endearing quest?
I don't want to be perceived as judgmental or even critic of your work because certainly I haven't earned such rights, and I know DF lore is based but quite different from the standard fantasy setting, however still, don't you think it's a little out of character for goblins to mind about poetry like this?
It's always been like that since we've had populations moving around -- we haven't worried yet about goblins being accepted into human towns, and so forth. We wanted to have some mixtures instead of complete separation, and there are possible trade links everywhere, instead of a state of total irrevocable war. The valid issues will be handled to some extent as we go (including issues with the grown-up abducted dwarves and all that). Right now people can become students of nearby masters that they can reasonably have heard about.
Will art forms evolve? For example, musical forms might, over time, change, merge, or even split into two different styles?
It has to be done manually, so to save time I'm just sticking with the from-scratch generators for now. It's certainly a fair thing to do -- there's some ickiness with slight alterations and delineating when something becomes something else, since the computer doesn't handle half-merged content well.
Will the next release allow religion to inflitrate a civ like poetry?
(referring to the study of poetic elf forms that returned to his civ. Human Seeker of truth finds religion in dwarvish god of hate, and starts a temple in his civ.)
Will 'schools' of (dance/poetry/song/exc.) Attempt to supress divergent styles?
Will religions have style flavors, and if so, can they be declared heretical?
Will religions try to destroy each other and purge megabeast cults and other non-civ religions?
Will favoritism lead to teachers spreading knowledge of rare forms only to their "best student"?
If the previous is true, could that lead to murder?
Mostly I am curious about the kinds of murderous motivations these new changes might add.
Edit: aaaaand updated devlog expanding this train of thought...
Will religions sometimes consider certain knowledge heretical and hold book and/or people burning to supress it?
And if so...
Will religious hit squads(or other 'suppression of knowledge' crews) show up to kidnap tavern patrons or even your own dwarves? And can you choose between giving up or hiding Uristileo possibly risking an inquisition attack and Civil War in your fort?
Nothing so violent yet... this release isn't really focused on the religious aspects. We'll get there in two stages with the myth generator and then the religious start scenario framework changes (which will presumably include quite a bit of w.g. framework work to make the start scenarios fit into the world).
We are considering some artist/scholarly antics, though.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1890048 times)