Thanks to LordBaal, Knight Otu, MrWiggles, Putnam, Dirst, finka, Shonai_Dweller, PatrikLundell, Vattic, lethosor, King Mir, Japa, burned and anybody I missed for helping to answer questions this time!
Are people going to have further reservations against engaging in combat with upcoming emotional tweaks? As it is, if there is something that is considered a civ enemy, the dwarf civilians tend to opt for engaging it in combat if it is not threatening enough (say, a wild Dingo Man who got in a scuffle with one of the war dogs), or is the current behavior intended?
Will we be able to issue orders to dwarves, military or not, to avoid engaging certain units, or otherwise force/order them to provide quarter to their opponents?
I don't think the situation has changed. Dwarves'll jump into active combats to try to save people they like, but it isn't great in practice and I'm open to improving it. It would be best not to have to micromanage their behavior though, if possible.
How will visitors petitioning to become citizens interact with population caps? I assume the petitions themselves will work like Liaison visits where we get a new screen with the relevant information and a choice about the petitioner. Will we still get those petitions even if we've already hit our cap?
As it stands, I think visitors can always petition to join, and visitors can always go up the visitor cap. Anybody that actually becomes a resident counts against the pop cap, but you can go over if you accept a petition when you are at or above the pop cap (you just won't get immigrants after that). You can also say no to petitions, of course, so the pop cap remains under your control.
Will people petitioning the fortress be a mechanic designed for that single purpose, or will it be part of a framework allowing for different kinds of petitions?
ie. For the imprisonment of the valued upper class, the banishment of a troublemaker, making a certain deity the official fortress religion, a declaration of war, etc.
The petition system should work for any future relevant agreement when we get around to it. Right now there are residency and citizenship petitions, but yeah, anything similar that goes through official channels should ideally end up there as we go.
Do dwarven children (and children in general, I presume) get any negative thoughts if there are no toys to play with? Also, how does a child determine which toys they can play with? Will they just take things they like from the stockpile? Wouldn't this cause some issues if you intend to trade those items?
Many stockpiled objects are subject to use already, so I'm not sure why this is any more of an issue. There's no unhappy thought at this point, though certainly we'll need to do something over time for toys to truly have a point. Right now they are content to make believe or do music/dance stuff.
Do children gain social or physical skills from playing with toys? Or even combat skills, like dodging? Toys irl help babies develop their minds and coordination (iirc), so it would stand to reason that a new system of Dwarven Child Care(TM) could be coming about! (You know, to replace other...methods...involving zombies, small animals, and dull spikes, for instance....)
I haven't gotten into anything like that.
Will other races (for example goblins and humans) play too ?
Will we see children play in Adventure mode, too ?
If goblins and humans play too, what is the determinent of "being able to play". Can animal-people children play too ? Or any other intelligent race ?
Could a Dwarf children without arm play, too ? (And by that, I'm also asking about any other race who cannot manipulate with fingers)
Yeah, intelligent children of all sorts play, including adventure mode children (it gives an announcement when they start an activity or if you come upon it midstream, though there aren't generally toys around so stuff like make believe is more common). They need to be able to pick up a toy to play with toys at this point, but they can still play in other ways.
IIRC, the ability to define reaction menus in the raws is going in in this release. Are we going to be able to add any of them to hardcoded workshops, or only to those defined in the raws?
You can add custom reaction menus to any building that currently accepts a reaction. Many of those are hardcoded workshops/furnaces, but the usual ones are still unusable (jeweler, etc).
Will the adventurer be able to serve drinks and food at a tavern?
Will there be singing (and not the story telling/poetry stuff)?
You can't currently take any of the new occupations.
In the generated musical forms, there are often singers and chanters (and speakers) of both poetry and nonsense sounds. There is a skill for singing (which also applies to chanting) and a skill for speaking.
First: Are there any plans, however far in the future, for expanding relationship types? At the moment we have a number of positive relationship types, but only a single negative relationship type - Grudges. Do you plan to divide the negative relationship types up at some point in the future so that players can see why a Dwarf might dislike another? grudges at the moment see to cover everythign from mild disdain to murderous hatred. It'd be interesting, if feasible, to narrow that down into categories - envy, rivalry, obsessive, dislike, hate, etc. I'm really interested by the potential to elaborate on the stories that we are currently able to abstract from the interactions of our dwarves under the current relations system, by providing more varied sources of !!Drama!!
(after Putnam brings up adv mode reputation types)
I know that, it's more the mechanics aspect of it: we've got acquaintances, friend, family, lovers, spouse etc, which seems to cover neutral and positive. And then negative has 'grudge' which is assumedly everything under one heading, from mild disdain for someone you met once, to murderous hatred. I don't know the mechanics all that well, but different opinions/rationales create different actions/responses.
Second: Do you have any further plans for the catacombs and other underground areas? At the moment they're interesting to walk around, but they're mostly just filled with statues and are otherwise empty, negating any good reason to explore them.
Yeah, the dwarf mode relationship screen uses a much, much older system that could afford to have an injection of the new reputation code (they use a lot of the new code, but it doesn't get displayed in the relationship list, if I remember). So a dwarf can actually understand that somebody that gets in a fist-fight has violent tendencies, but that isn't reflected. They can also form specific feeling about people that have, e.g., killed their relatives. So partially it's a display problem, but at the same time, yeah, encoded states (the grudge in particular) need to be worked over into the new system.
The whole "treasure hunter" adventure role on the dev pages is about diving into underground areas and other such places and making that more challenging and rewarding. We just haven't gotten anywhere on that yet. At least the artifact release could lead to some real rewards as a first step.
Will there be provisions for myth creation within the world at a later stage? With creatures and gods created within the minds of the races that in fact do not exist. This may be an interesting addition to religion and legends mode in general.
The idea on the table now for the myth generator is to have slider(s) that go from "all myths are fake, no magic, no dwarves" to "no raw/objects creatures at all, weird magic" -- depending on how it all works, we can tease some of that apart so you can have a low-magic-low-religion world that is still dwarfy. It'll be molded as we go, but the broad strokes are reasonably straightforward (in terms of cutting/allowing content), and the myth generator doesn't care whether what it is generating is real or fictional in-game (it can produce weird ideas about the origin of the universe on the fly as needed). At the midpoint of all sliders, you'd have typical fantasy races with a myth generator that leads to a somewhat more global situation than we have now (where all pantheons are local), but where such a situation (with real, local gods) could still roughly happen, if that's how it really is. It's just harder to do sweeping religious cultural differentiation when there's a single clear unlost constantly-manifesting metaphysical truth about the universe that presumably acts as a corrective to pantheon-level schisms, though they can still differ on the smaller points and blow those up, or differ on interpretation depending on the manifestations and their own will to correct. Etc etc.
will there ever be greater levels of interaction with deities? For instance having them come visit a fort to curse/bless stuff or seeking them out in adventure to kill them/seek some kind of blessing etc. would add an extra layer of FUN as you couldn't necessarily differentiate between these God visitors, and the traveling demons who like to impersonate them. You could also tailor the gods gift/curse to match their godly purview aka God of trade or God of war etc.
We haven't done much with it, but the upcoming artifact release is going to veer heavily into this territory. It's unclear exactly what we'll get though, since we won't get to most magical things on that pass.
I noticed in some recent posts that you said that you might wait on games until the economy comes in later on. Does that mean that you are considering reducing taverns part 2 to just recipes and moving more quickly to artifacts? Or are there more things that you plan to add in taverns part 2?
Are the recipes and procedural generation of games still in plans for the release after this one?
I haven't seen any updates about gambling and dwarf games in taverns, and they're still listed as "future goals" on the dev outline page. Are they still going in this release?
So, yeah, we had planned to break the tavern stuff up and get two reasonably short releases in. Then we did the normal thing and this release ended up not quite as short, and then we started feeling a little uncomfortable continuing on in the same vein for too long. And getting a bit over-excited about the myth stuff as we played around with the generator side project. Coupled with the gambling vs economy+justice problem, we are leaning toward the artifact release now after this. I still really like the random games and recipe ideas though. They may find side generators of their own lighting a fire under them before long.
Also, I was wondering how you conceptualise the fog of war within fortress mode. I notice that there is the thing happening that the caverns are obscured until we start exploring them. But it seems that once tiles are revealed, that we can generally see monsters in those tiles whether or not they can be seen by an individual dwarf. Is it a design decision to let the player see creatures that dwarves can't see? Or is your idea that later, we will be limited to knowing what our dwarves know? Just curious!
It's a processor issue partially, though the dwarves are all doing more LOS stuff as of 0.40.01 I think. I'm not sure if I'd restrict your vision even if I could though -- the vision ranges it uses are short, and you should be able to see sieging armies march across a flat map at you from the edge if you have a lookout without that restriction. So there hasn't been much impetus to push forward on it, and we instead have used the invisible ambushers to hide important critters that want to be hidden, and the one-time hidden map to provide a sense of exploration below (which will matter more when there's more to find).
Toady what are you going to do differentiate transformations that change a npc's soul/mind (like spouse conversation) and transformations that do not? Will willpower have any effect on the transformation of there mind/soul?
I'm not really sure -- spouse conversion isn't a proper interaction/syndrome effect yet, and I haven't considered how it would work technically. As we move into general magic effects, I imagine various "resistances" will be possible, whether by willpower or some other trait/item/etc., to maintain playability against wizards. I suspect there will also be times when magic-using creatures aren't meant to be contested though, he he he, so "class balance" won't drive everything. It's difficult to say what'll go in on this magic pass in the artifact release until later. We might not get to a spouse converter update, but other soul-level stuff might go in. We're leaving it all on the table until we cut down to a set of artifact and other powers we think will be the most entertaining for a single release.
How do you pronounce “Cichi Cichi”, the name of the poisonous berry from Threetoe’s stories?
I think we might have said chee-chee chee-chee.
NOOOOO! Tell me at least that musically-inclined necromancers will at some point be able to command their skeletons/zombies to play instruments and conduct Bone Orchestras?
Who knows what we'll get to. There'll probably be music-based magic before people order animated critters to perform music/dance, but hard to say how it'll go or when.
Will there be salt evaporation ponds in order to harvest and export salt? This could be cool for coastal fortresses -or towns- to be able to send their production in the inland regions.
With specific industries, it's hard to say when or what is going to happen, since I don't yet have a timeline for the way through that. The production side of the economy will see the existing industries become more active post-w.g. (there's already some w.g. stuff, though it's mostly invisible) before new ones are added most likely, and then we'll see how work areas develop etc. How new fort industries are added as we go is anybody's guess.
How do the new performance areas understand Z-levels? Is there a risk if a statue garden is set up on a battlement that drunken Dwarves will be dancing off the edge all the time? Or knocking livestock over the edge. Will there be tumbling down hills?
and
You mentioned on twitter that invading armies don't really know why they're there right now, and so they can't be swayed by music, or really anything else to give up their murderous/thieving intentions. Once you have a different system in place (whenever that will be) do you intend to have invaders judging the situation at the fort as individuals or will they continue to have more of a generalized morale?
The dance floors they pick out for themselves are blocked out on activity initiation from within the zone they are in, so there shouldn't be anything too catastrophic.
There will probably always be some fudging going on with large armies of invaders -- they can't all have personal moments all the time, for the sake of the processor, and some sort of generalized morale is a fine thing for an army battle. We want them to be able to understand and change their intent though, so that something like a sudden diplomatic, dramatic or magical moment would even be possible. Right now nothing can get through the "army controller", and the army controller should really be more of a (possibly very strong) suggestion than a puppet string.
With the addition of potential animal-people to Fortress Mode, will we see adjustments and fixes to the old flight and swimming pathing issues that keep units from flying or swimming and get them stuck?
It's difficult/near-impossible to really fix some of the problems in a satisfying way, but we'll see what comes up. I haven't had a good deal of experience with modded flyer-dwarf civs and their bugs, and the new fort critters haven't caused me trouble so far, though I'm sure all of the same issues apply, so it'll rely on saves/reports etc. My go-to solution would simply be to mostly turn off their flying, though, depending on the bug. No general pathing expansion has panned out so far.
At the moment foreign race soldiers working for a site are given equipment from the civilization they originally migrated from but according to the soldier classes of the civilization itself. Not only does this result in soldiers going to battle wearing foreign insignia on their armor but more seriously it results in soldiers lacking weapons if the civ they came from lack that weapon. With the ability to make armour and clothing for different race critters in fortress mode, will this situation be fixed; also will weapons/cloaks/backpacks/quivers/flasks also resize as well?
I haven't changed how equipment generation works, so any bugs there are likely to still be in the game, but they should use the equipment you make for them regardless of that. I haven't added sizing to anything that didn't had race-sizing to begin with (e.g. weapons, etc).
Reading about how performers can make mistakes made me wonder whether pupils (or fans that only saw the performance once or twice) can misinterpret their master's work, potentially creating all new forms of dance and poetry based on a mistake.
There's nothing like that. Morphing a form into a new form would require a specific push in that direction, which we didn't do, even for people being intentionally inspired rather than making mistakes. The new forms which are generated in-game by artists don't rely on other forms.
Will we see necromancers team up with vampires? Like, the vampire goes on break, drinks a dwarf dry, and then lets a necromancer friend raise the corpse as a zombie?
It sounds like a cheerful match. None of the untoward characters really have any interaction with each other (aside from the general ones everybody can do), which is a shame, since it would set up more interesting plots. We can only hope for the future. We have various notes about villainous lieutenants, plots and allegicances, but so far nothing has moved forward. A main part of the artifact release is to have the artifacts be useful, desired by those that could use or just covet them, and to have a plan put forward for the actors to obtain them from others (including forts) through their own actions or through their agents (including advs) -- this may provide angles for joint villainous action, as we plan to spend a bit of time with NPC agents to continue livening things up.
Would you ever consider livestreaming DF development (e.g. on Twitch)?
I haven't watched livestreamed development, so I don't know how to make it unboring. Everybody that has come by to film etc. here has had plans to showcase development, which they then scrap after a few minutes because it is so dull.
Will the exact mechanics of training levels ever be explicitly explained? I have observed that a creature's pet value is is inversely proportional to how many of them need to be trained in order to advance through the training levels. I have also observed that maintenance training, war or hunting training and training already trained infants into fully tame animals all contribute less to training levels than training a fully wild animal does; this has caused me to hypothesize that the contribution of any given training session to the training levels is directly proportional to the increase in an animal's training level caused by that session. I have also heard from another guy who trains a lot of animals that training levels do have an effect on in-fort training
Pet value... like the trading value? I don't see any of that in the code, but I might be missing something. Every tame animal job increases overall fort training points for that animal by 10, and the fort training knowledge levels are attained at 30, 100, 250 and 500 (it zeroes points when it increases level). War and hunting jobs are also worth 10 points, but a maintenance job is only worth 3. Looks like training infants is 10 too, though I could have missed some conditional on any of these. If your fort level is higher than the civ level for a given animal, 10 points of knowledge are transferred with each caravan that gets off the map (so it'd take 88 years worth of caravans to bring the civ all the way up to "expert" I guess, but just 3 years to get every subsequent fort to start at "few facts"). Sounds like the sort of thing that could be sped-up with all the new knowledge/books once we start linking in-game industries to it. There's also the unexplored matter of why your civ level would be lower than your fort level if your fort is the last one, as opposed to part of a large civilization, and why a trainer migrant coming from an old expert fort would lose knowledge.
The fort level of knowledge has a strong effect on in-fort training. If you know nothing about the animal, the animal training roll must be 30 to get past semi-wild and 100 to be masterfully trained (with 40/50/65/80 for the others). "Few facts": 20/30/40/60/70/90. "Familiar": 15/20/30/50/60/80. "Knowledgeable": 10/15/25/40/50/70. "Expert": 5/10/20/30/40/60. The calculations for skill rolls are complicated, but by these numbers, your trainers are almost twice as good at expert-level fort knowledge, if they weren't already great trainers in their own right (in which case they'll probably crack 100 most times without help).
Does this number tag indicate the exact number of units to be used per reaction, the max number of units to be used per reaction, the max number of products per reaction, or the exact number of products per reaction?
How will this new tag interact with multiple-reagent reactions?
It's the max number of times it generates a batch of products per reaction (so it is a reaction tag, not a product or reagent tag). Reagents are used up until the max is reached -- and this just applies to those kinds of reagents which led to multiple products to begin with (bone stacks, etc.). Many reactions involve bringing a simple non-stacked/non-divisible item over as at least one of the reagents, and those wouldn't be affected, since only one batch is possible.
I know lots of people have lots of opinions on the matter, but what do you see as the main potential of a 64 bit Dwarf Fortress?
People answered better than I could, but for me, the starting point is getting rid of the 2/3GB limit on memory, since it is hit more and more in-game these days.
Will bookcases be used for anything outside of designated libraries? How will they behave in adventure mode? If they're unwalkable tiles we won't be able to stand on them to access books, so we'd need to use the command for interacting with a building, right? Will we be able to both place and remove from them? Will it be restricted exclusively to books?
They are walkable for simplicity this time. We'll probably want them to be unwalkable at some point, since attaching bookcases to book-shaped levers and so on seems popular, but I just treated them like other storage furniture for now. They aren't used outside of libraries. Was there not an adventure mode command to put something in a chest/cabinet etc.? Seems like the kind of thing I wouldn't have done yet. Those all have the same fate, and I didn't change anything for this time. At the same time, a book doesn't need to be in the case to be recognized as being in the library -- it just needs to be in one of the library's zones.
Have you decided how you will distribute the 64-bit builds (once they're ready)? Will it be a single ZIP per OS, containing both 32 and 64-bit executables, or one ZIP for OS/bitness combination?
I'll probably have a bunch of separate zips, but the list is getting long the way it is formatted now. But that's the way I'm leaning. We'll also enter a sort of annoying save compat territory -- even if I manage compat between the bitnesses, 64-bit saves will often be too large for 32 bit DF to load. I imagine there could be "false" bug reports over this, but I'm not sure how to handle it without spending a zillion years coding calculations estimating memory sizes before load or something.
Has Toady ever thought about implementing some sort of function so that some of your fortresses can be saved and used in new worlds you create? Likewise an Import function where you could add several fortresses to a new map ( or if it was possible to an existing map somehow ) you create or get from other players?
I could perfectly live with restrictions to what was imported (such as only the fortress empty of dwarves and anything they have made ).
burned had the big quote about the raws and historical information on items etc. being difficult to move between different worlds. So if something happened it'd most likely just be a simple map, perhaps with general info about things like door positions etc. The context that we've been thinking about this most lately is in terms of a general world/site/hf editor. That broader prospect also has large format/compat issues -- the editor save format would need to be virtually guaranteed to be compatible with future versions (much more so than active worlds/saves). It might be doable in text (which is future-safer), though that would be bad for maps themselves (since they'd be way smaller in the compressed binary format -- the arena text format isn't rich enough). Anyway, the game is getting far enough along though that we can kind of start to think about how an editor might work without slowing down overall development much. We were toying around with prototyping it, but there are many, many, many things potentially on the plate for the next few releases, so it's unclear if we'll get a glimpse at something like that. Seems potentially entertaining, anyway, to be able to make worlds or places directly for w.g. or fort or adv and pass them around.
1. I've noticed that in 40.24 all my retired adventurers are asexual, do we get to choose our adventurers sexuality?
2. Does the ability to choose your adventures personality open the possibility to choose your adventurers preferences or deity and worship level in the near future?
3. What skills have been added to adventure mode character creation and adventure mode in general?
4. With the addition of writing things in adventure mode what if any "support" crafting is available, for instance can the player make parchment to write on or is writing "paper" only available from world gen sources?
5.You mentioned writing a (bad) essay, does this mean that there are negative quality levels for music, dancing and writing or just that it was bad by comparison? if there are negative quality level what are they called?
6. You mentioned player character having feelings in adventure mode what sort of feelings can an adventurer experience and what event or action can effect an adventurers feelings?
1. Putnam mentioned that they are "indeterminate" -- it's just a place-holder until we actually have actions that allow you to set it. We might have explicit setting where in-game behavior isn't enough, but we haven't done anything more with it yet.
2. I'm not sure when, but full customization of worship and other preferences certainly fits with the rest now.
3. Just the art skills and a few of the conversation skills, if I remember. I don't think I added the scholar skills since you can't participate yet.
4. There's no new crafting in adv mode, aside from composing things and writing them down.
5. No, it just seemed bad. I haven't added a basic quality to written content, and I'm not sure if I will, though it seems like there could be something (and it would match the engravings etc. to judge them "objectively" in that way, even if it's a little strange to not dig into why it is considered so).
6. They generally have the same circumstance/emotion code as dwarf mode, though they have a few extra ones that occur in conversations and aren't able to do many things dwarves can do. It's just like the dwarf mode thought window though, with their little quotes about their emotions.
So, are monarchs going to be particularly interested in wearing crowns or other type of regal headwear, or you don't see dwarven nobility swinging that way?
Also, will we be able to equip our military with trinkets after this release?
That's all still the same. It would be nice for there to be more outfits and so on, but it also adds logistic troubles we are already swimming in, particularly with the military.
Will adventurers have a need to bathe with this release, or is there still just an invisible counter for dirtiness somewhere? Speaking of which, since world gen civs can go through the complicated process needed to make paper, are they any closer to managing world gen soap?
and
With the new item modification changes will glazing something increase skill now, or is the new multi-material code entirely different from whatever causes that bug?
None of this came up.
do you manage performance (read:fps rate) of the game in some specific way or just go back to optimizing code when perfomance falls below an "acceptable" level?
is there any specific timeframe to transfer code to multithread?
Pretty much the latter. There are various things that go on -- optimizations while I'm working, suggestions from people that slowly get incorporated, and so on. It's not an entirely passive process, but there isn't a flowchart or anything.
There's no timeline for multithreading. As far as I can tell from conversations and forum threads about this, it would be difficult or impossible to do at all in a large sense. There's more hope for targeted improvements, but that still has the problem of me not knowing a thing about it or where best to apply it, and the risk of a months-long delay with zero gain on the other end.
How do adventure mode taverns function? Are booze stockpiles managed in some way, or do they just regenerate while the adventurer is off-site? Do npc dwarves drink, dance, fight and sing without nudging from adventurers? Do they drink too much and die all over the world while the adventurer isn't around?
We aren't diving into the w.g. stockpiles in any serious way yet, and there's no post-w.g. production, so we're just doing a replenish on map gen for now. Once we have post-w.g. production and consumption of the resource stockpiles in whatever the first economy release will be, then doing more realistic stocking of the tavern will be on the table hopefully as part of a coherent system.
Everybody intelligent in the tavern who is so inclined does all the new stuff without nudging, when they are in play. They don't drink and die all over the world though. They visit taverns all over the world, but it doesn't try to simulate specifics in any way yet.
Why do the king and nobles always stay in the capitol, even when said capitol has been conquered/destroyed?
Is it different between world gen and post? Post w.g., I haven't looked at the refugee code, but perhaps they don't join refugees because of their site position links or something. Nobody understands how to leave once a place has been conquered (rather than running beforehand). The whole army thing is fundamentally unfinished and uninteresting right now.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1882316 times)