Will the event knowledge system be reworked any time soon? There are a lot of cases where, say, a location is mentioned to an adventurer, and it doesn't transfer to the adventurer's talk menu, the adventurer's log/status screen, and/or the legends screen (with legends not revealed by default).
iceball3:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7874889#msg7874889a52:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7875441#msg7875441There's no upcoming systemic rewrite, no, so the information would be useful.
Will we see an overhaul of military invasions before the big wait? Right now they invasion mechanics are more than a little wonky, with armies arriving in small groups over a period of weeks before finally gathering and launching a weird and anticlimactic attack on the site that the player can't really do much about. That's my experience with it anyway. Will this change at all in the future? And also, will the previously mentioned adventure mode military improvements (adventurers leading armies for example) be implemented either?
The army rewrites up on dev cover most of that, yeah, including cleaning up the general feel of it; there's just the question of whether we actually get to all the dev candidates, which is the overarching question hanging over the entire pre-magic cycle here. It depends on the timing, as usual. As the villain release gets larger and farther out, the army stuff becomes less likely. I'd like to do it all, but we'll really have to see. We're not going to make any decisions until after the villain release, as we're handling the stress/social stuff and other bugs. It'll either be time to finish up the dev candidates, or time to embark on the myth/magic stuff.
I have some questions about new devlog (as usual at this point, sorry if im overflowing you with questions).
Will trading companies be able to open a branch warehouse in our fortress? If so will multiple companies be able to do it? Will this be the same with religion? What would be our benefit from letting them open a warehouse in our fortress? Will they build it themselves or we will have to construct it for them?
Also this one is kinda offtopic and i think its been answered here before but can Toady put screenshots in devlogs? Or site's engine wont allow it? It would be fun to look at forgotten beast warehouse administrator picture. Or at any picture related to the new things being made (especially when it comes to the big wait)
Will there be trading outposts in player fortresses? Will the player be able to send their own trading outposts?
Can I request that you post more screenshots of the game in your devlogs? I know sometimes you do, but I really do think it would be very helpful (and hype raising) to post more of them whenever you have an interesting feature to preview, like what you did with the myth generator.
Regarding trade outposts, ha ha, we are right on the edge of that sort of thing, suddenly! I'm not sure we'll go farther than the likely human merchant caravans being replaced by the worldgen/post w.g. historical traders, just because it's additional work on a release that has grown and needs to not grow much more. No idea on how it would work specifically if we do attempt it.
therahedwig:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7876421#msg7876421Doorkeeper:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7876467#msg7876467golemgunk:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7878256#msg7878256More or less agree with golemgunk here, that it's harder to take meaningful images of legends-mode type stuff -- I'll sometimes spend time reconstructing a tale from a world's legends instead, as you've read. Back when we were doing village maps, etc., it was way easier to think of screenshots to do, then I pretty much fell off there. I will try to think of it, but not sure I'll improve much there for this time. Certainly the myth/magic stuff will have more, when stuff starts getting interesting out in the world. But I'm not sure villainous plots generally will really have a lot of opportunities for a screenshot that adds anything.
When you talk about silly additions, what do you mean? My experience with previous additions is that the silly stuff is normally caused by weird interactions between recently fleshed out systems and systems that are still placeholders.
As Dwarf Fortress gets more complex, how do you check for bugs? It seems too complex to exhaustively search the event space, but just turning it on and seeing what pops out seems likely to miss things. Maybe I should specifically ask how you came to check what happened to the trade warehouse when the fortress got hit by a forgotten beast?
This is correct on the phrase 'silly additions':
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7876641#msg7876641As for bugs, I just (try my best to) make sure every block of code gets a run through. This often involves logging data, and for stuff like what I'm doing now, checking through legends. So it's through luck/diligence that I spotted the forgotten beast assignment, and for that kind of bug, it'll always come down to a certain amount of testing (since it was a missing piece of edge-case logic, rather than a fault with existing logic or a crash), and I can only increase my chances by doing a bit more checking and being attentive. Structurally, I can prevent bugs like this by, for instance, homogenizing checks for appropriate position holders, etc., and make those corrections and take preventative steps when I can, but there are limits there, and I am also still sloppy sometimes. But generally, individual additions to the code can be given a proper workout without the overall complexity impacting whether or not they work as intended. In some small sense. The overall weird, buggy nature of the game is perhaps confirmation that it's just a giant trundling mess that we herd as it rolls about at this point.
Q - What kind of conditions need to be met before companies* manage to shake hands with dwarves and set up a building belonging to another race in the middle of a market town?
Q - Do organisations present in other civilisations go any further towards the modularity of cities pre-site rewrite development goals? Much in the mind that a long time ago you released development pictures of how villages are formed out of preset pieces but arranged appropriate to population sprawl with space for fields etc. Now we have more structures like these warehouses placing themselves between everything.
*(to keep the answer simple rather than addressing other 'organisations')
I mention this because dwarves and humans tend to be pretty friendly anyway, building roads between one another and regularly taking in adventurer traffic compared to elves who are warlike over cultural dogma and aggrieve other civilisations against them for repulsive habits. There would be circumstances where through player interaction the company's trade would break down if the player took action though right?
The only other example where this happens I can think of is when enemy civilisations decide to build fortifications over a site, like goblin trenches (which don't really do anything to boost positional advantage last time i noticed) usually as a occupier, rather than a voluntary action with overlapping stakes & shares in a city.
I was considering forcing the recipient to also value commerce, but that would pretty much stop outposts entirely. So, currently, the existence of a rich trading company and abstract trade route is enough to grant permission; even with goblins, the abstract trade route doesn't specify where the trades are taking place, though perhaps it can use the "murder all strangers" ethic as a guide there. Overall, I don't have enough customs/etc. data to work with; I suppose I could have added another ethic for it, but it felt like I was already too far afield to get into it.
A lot of this stuff points toward the modular site rewrite, yeah, and as stated above I'm trying very much not to get into that, heh. The new outposts are pretty manageable, as isolated square-type buildings/zones go. I'm more thinking of it now as another data point for the eventual rewrite, especially as it relates to an entity having a foothold within another entity's site in a more public fashion than e.g. sewer-dwelling criminals, though certainly I'll just need to do the rewrite sometime.
1. With human religious groups getting revamped will priests in temples offer religious conversions again?
2. What intrigue quests/interactions do you have in mind for player adventurers to do with religious groups if any?
3. Will elven religion get it's own share of intrigue work? Maybe involving the closest equivalent position they have to a priest, aka druid?
4. In terms of general intrigue and plots in what ways will religious groups interact with other groups both good, evil and neutral?
1. I haven't changed anything there this time, though I no longer remember what happened to it in the first place.
2/4. Still not there yet! We'll describe a plot from the game sometime on the dev log, I promise. Once we've locked that in, it should all apply to your adventurers well. But I'm hesitant to offer up plot points I end up not being able to pull off. I have a feeling some of them are just going to prove unworkable and I'll then salvage what I can -- we've been doing a ton of pre-villain work to help some of them out.
3. I'm not sure it'll have a particular flavor to it, since there's just not a lot to work with there yet. However, the druid can by virtue of their personality become a villain, and then by virtue of their position, most easily pull strings within their own society according to their responsibilities. The druid's responsibility being "RELIGION", we arrive back at #2/4. Generally, we'd like to get as many villain levers linked up with position responsibilities as we can, as it would make the societies feel more themselves overall and make the stories feel correctly directed -- but there are a lot of responsibilities. So we'll see how it goes!
I have three-ish questions.
1. How raw oriented are the new companies/religions/organizations? While I expect it is mostly hard coded, will they respect ethics and values? Like an elf company refusing to buy or sell wood, or a civilization who is absolutely disgusted by commerce completely lacking companies in the first place.
2.Would an organization that was controlled by a villain or completely corrupted by a villain's plot act villainous? Killing a villain is one thing, but killing an entire evil corporation or cult is another thing entirely.
3. In the absurd case that this does happen (potential bugs notwithstanding), could your entire fortress be roped into a villainous plot and you remain blissfully unaware?
I realize that it may be too early to say if these sorts of things will make the cut before the Big Wait, but can't hurt to ask.
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7877181#msg78771811. Yeah, the commerce value is a pre-req for company formation already, but as stated above, it was too restrictive to disallow companies to use trade routes in place that don't value commerce. There's some more specific work that needs to be done. The trade goods mimic the trade route -- I don't remember if world gen respected ethics properly in the (mostly invisible) existing trade system, but it just follows that.
2. They act through their leaders right now, so replacing the head with a non-villainous head who isn't corrupted will clean their behavior up. If every position-holder is compromised, it would be difficult to clean it up, but it's still just those people. We are missing that notion of the broader culture of the membership, but there isn't an applicable situation right now. That is, we haven't introduced value drift more broadly into entities, just in that specific way with books and philosophers. If we did value-drift a civ toward worse values, then if a position holder is drawn from the non-historical pool, you'd have that value set in leadership, finally. That's kind of indirect, though. The histfig-entity-population interface is still somewhat weird.
3. Your fortress is completely historical, so it's actually more susceptible to this kind of thing, and theoretical could run into just such a mess. We'll see how likely that is when I get to the fort mode additions; it might not be that common if a large portion of the dwarves turns out to be incorruptible for whatever reason. Ideally, the villains would be able to work on a lot of your people, given enough effort (and assassinate/etc. the rest.) At that point, yeah, your fort would just be a corrupted dump; play-wise, this could be fairly petty, like, your crafts are being smuggled out and then when you tell your sheriff to do something about it, they ignore you, and then you fire your sheriff and put another one in, and they ignore you too -- then the migrants all arrive, I guess, and you put them in all the power positions (since they are more likely to be clean). Then you could have everybody else arrested and locked up forever. Villainous resistance to executing that plan is under consideration, but even if the simple plan works, you'd certainly be paying a price for your earlier lack of crime-fighting. (the assumption being here that you can root out corruption if you pay attention to witness reports, clues, etc., if we get that working!)
1. Will villains continue doing their evil stuff after worldgen is finished? I wonder if i can start an adventurer and just pass over some villain like necromancer, will he continue doing his netbuilding/getting corpses/etc. so when i come back to this plot it would be even in worse case than when i first saw it? Will we be able to observe bandits attacking targeted people?
2. Will some villain plots be solved by someone else (at least in worldgen)?
3. You mentioned small crimes so should we expect prison/courthouse type of buildings where they will go if being caught? Or this will be worked on later in law arc?
4. Will you fix fortress retirement before the big wait?
1. This is the plan, to try to keep worldgen and post-worldgen additions as close together as we can. There are always hiccups with this, but we're going to make an effort. Naturally, villain mission goals like "Assassinate X" might look much more silly zoomed in than they do when you are farther away, as we won't be able to teach them very much about discretion, etc., but that's fine for now (they'll either wait to be offloaded, or be indiscreet, depending on my programming mood that day, most likely.)
2. Yeah, counterintelligence is a big part of this. The e.g. "Keeper of the Seals" position will be kept busy. They of course won't be doing actual investigations the same way you'll be able to do them, especially on this first pass, but they will be able to spot corrupt people at times in some abstract sense.
3. Most of this will probably wait. Dwarven justice hasn't relied upon courts to this point, so we can probably continue on without them. And the law stuff is clearly important here.
4. Dunno what bug stuff is gonna happen.
1. Will plotting/intrigue mechanics ever be generalized and used by non-villains, for non-villainous ends?
2. I know we won't be able to go to other planes in the near future, but will there be cases where other planes can overlap with the normal world? Like a haunted area where the veil between the living and the afterlife is thin, or (in an extreme case) a throne room for a deity that (in theory) simultaneously exists in multiple planes.
1.
Knight Otu:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7878037#msg7878037Renarin21:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7878717#msg7878717Yeah, even in the most innocuous cases, the frameworks we are putting into place will be available for use. When we actually get to such uses is another matter entirely, but it's nice to have it all there in a general way. In fact, the agreements used for adventure mode party membership and guides are being used as the principle framework for villainous agents, so we are already using non-villanous mechanics to create villainous ones.
2. Those are the sorts of things we have in the notes for the map rewrite, yeah. The ability to have maps intersect in various ways, with various overlaps or extra (discrete) dimensions as needed, or to be in one map area, and then have it merge with another map area's properties as blocks are loaded, until you are over in one and not the other, perhaps without an easy way to return (e.g. entering a faerie land at a woodline.) The more scenarios we game out in advance, the more we can support with the new infrastructure, with the general restriction that we'll be working locally with 3D cubes of tiles (similar to the current model), and that it's vaguely important to be able to see regional maps that are intelligible in most places (just due to the restrictions of the display, preferring overall world structures with a 2D sense is necessary, though we can still manage interesting vertical caverns and other oddities.)
First, some villain questions:
1. a) Will the intricacies of a villain's schemes depend on their intelligence, so that there's a difference between the plots of some random street thug, an experienced court spymaster and a god of deception?
b) Speaking of schemes, I remember you talking about the investigative process in the game and piquing my interest. What kind of non-verbal clues will the player be able to encounter when investigating something? Letters, out of place items, gold coins from a specific location that were used as a bribe, etc?
c) Are there any plans to improve the observer skill in the villain update? What kind of improvements do you envision?
2. Will characters that are immortal/have extremely long lifespans(elves, magical creatures, deities, mortals augmented by life-prolonging magic) that are intelligent enough potentially have schemes that span centuries until they come to fruition? Will they be able to have numerous contingencies and back-up plans in the cards if things deviate from their predicted course? In general, how complex could plots get when dealing with creatures of vast intelligence and age?
3. How will the motivations of a sapient creature of an extremely alien mindset be simulated? Things like Lovecraftian/non-anthropomorphic deities, or forest spirits, or daemon-like entities representing some obscure sphere?
Now, some questions about magic:
4. Will there be the potential for certain magical spells/actions to become relatively common knowledge (among mages, at least) but the actual reason why they work is completely unknown/misunderstood? Say, the general consensus of why tarot cards work in the world is that Mykhanor, the God of Fate, is dispensing wisdom (and this would be the knowledge the player also has, at least initially) while in actuality Mykhanor isn't even real and the work of tarot cards is actually the product of local spirits messing around with them (but almost no one knows this).
5. How would possessions work when it comes to the player? I can imagine that completely losing control of your character wouldn't really be fun, but at the same time the entity's control of you shuold be simulated in some way.
6. Will dreams be a thing? Since dreams are an extremely common source of prophecies in fantasy, I assume that at least prophetic dreams will be a thing, but what about non-prophetic but somehow relevant dreams as well?
7. Since I assume regular, run-of-the-mill legends are also planned, will sufficiently important legends be able to 'morph' with a civ's creation myth to produce some kind of hybrid?
1. a) To some extent, though worldgen can't always be picky due to the volume of what we're working with sometimes. We have basic stats/skills, anyway.
b) It's not entirely clear what we'll actually be able to pull off here. Letters are the easiest, since we don't actually have to write their contents, and they can assert whatever facts we need the player to know. Then we'll try to step down from there to make it more interesting, using cultural markers/symbols, items, spatter, whatever we have available (which is quite a lot by now!) If we don't find a way to make that clear, we might have to highlight it in pretty obvious ways (on a skill roll or whatever), but at the very least, it'll be good atmosphere.
c) I don't have a specific plan at this point; it's the kind of thing where the day we add in non-verbal clues, we can be like, oh, cool, yeah, "observer + intrigue skill = cue for player on this clue item" or whatever. If we're lucky, we can make it feel less cludgy.
2. I am limited myself in not possessing either (too) advanced age or vast intelligence, so the schemes will likely be pathetic, cosmically speaking. Still, we have the computer to do some bookkeeping for us, so if an elf/gob/necro agent is activated at just the right time 200 years after being corrupted, the villain will sure seem smart. It's difficult to plan for second or third order contingencies generally, but just a small collection of precautions/chain events will come off seeming pretty cool, I think. And the immortal villains that are obsessed with network building should end up with quite a bit of material, though it'll have to be replaced frequently.
3. I'm not going to try right now. The myth generator is going to give us a ton of material there, hopefully. We can even have player-inscrutable goals that make some sort of cosmic sense once we have metaphysical objects to play with. I'm not sure if this'll be particularly satisfying, since it is inscrutable, but I think it's worth playing with to see what kind of game/systems come out of it. For instance, in the magic model of a force that has moods/personality, where the player has only the ability to use inaccurate divination to maybe get a vague idea of how their magic is feeling today, a supernatural creature might have a much clearer window into the force, or even a way to converse with or otherwise change it. Even presented in an almost straight-up fashion, that could be quite interesting, and then we'll have that experience available to modify and layer with new systems and exposition, according to our sensibilities. I'm hopeful, anyway. Of course, the more alien the entity is, the harder it is to properly model, but maybe just being random with a correct-feeling gloss starts working at that point.
4. This will almost certainly happen in some way, yeah, though the specific possibilities will be up to what we get to. But the triggers for effects won't always depend on complete understanding.
5. Yeah, I'm not sure yet. If it's permanent/serious, you might just have to retire and play somebody else, so the possession can take full effect and not be hampered by the current restrictions on NPC local play.
6. PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7879500#msg7879500Regular, sleeping dreams for everybody would be a questionable processor hit, but being able to ask somebody about their last dream and then having it generate on the fly would be feasible. Generally, we can just spool out random stuff with some sort of salience metric against the person's life (so their friends are more likely to appear, etc.), but it isn't a high priority. On the other hand, if we do dip into some sort of dream realm/magic stuff, we could use similar methods to the populate an entire temporary pocket map or whatever and get all Dreamscape in there. But yeah, just a totally random thing that's likely to happen on a lark as much as anything.
7. It's a tricky problem, generally, to get them understood in that higher structural way so that the morphs can also be kept internally consistent (even on a really basic level.) We'll have to see how successful we are with the basic 'fake' myths, and go from there.
Why are the Adventure overview improvements marked as partially done? Are you planning to rework them/do something more with them?
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7879523#msg7879523therahedwig:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7879770#msg7879770I don't recall exactly what it was (it's in the notes), some information tidbits that I wanted to get to but didn't. There's just more to be done. In this game, of course, "done" is never really *done*, exactly, so "partially done" is even more nebulous. But I definitely didn't feel like I got where I wanted to be, and there are outstanding specific notes to that effect on the dwarf computer.
1.With Trading Companies, would embargos and trade wars now be a thing? Depriving an area of its trade rather than outright invading it?
2. Will plots be able to smuggle things by taking control of the companies?
PatrikLundell:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7879862#msg7879862Have you considered updating Mantis (the bugtracker software) to the latest version?
Ah, yes, I downloaded it recently, and just need to find time somewhere where I feel free enough to deal with what'll likely be a series of issues getting it to actually work.
About magic, religion and word functioning:
Do you plan to add option for reincarnation in belief system or world functioning? If so, would you think about reusing the soul structure, or rather just make it a basis for a new one (which maybe would be more similar to real-world religions).
What about spells resurrecting people (not zombies)?
About the general stuff:
Dwarf Fortress seem to be influenced in many parts by works of JRR Tolkien, either directly or indirectly (like through fantasy games, DnD etc.). When designing current dwarves (mainly their behaviour, character and mental abilities), were you influenced by The Hobbit, where the dwarves are basically whining machines, or the similarity is coincidental? Because if it is intentional, then I must say it's spot on (a compliment). If not maybe you had that vision in the back of your mind?
Reincarnation is in the current myth generator. The issue of soul re-use is complicated, since most (?) reincarnation models don't have the memories/skills/relationships/etc. cleanly carrying over, but they are often available in some nebuluous sense.
Resurrection is already a (unused, possibly buggy) spell effect in the currently released version, if I remember.
Ha ha, yeah, I'm sure that had a lot to do with it. Even the cartoon was popular in our house growing up, and our dwarves are quite a bit like that.
How exactly are more complicated reactions going to be used during world gen?
Shonai_Dweller:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg7880292#msg7880292Sorry the A part of the Q&A rolled around before you could clarify. If you are talking about the moddable "reactions", then it is indeed broken there; it's a chore to code up the economic stuff in a way that respects all the reagents properly, so they often get, say, bronze, without access to the ores needed. The pressure to fix that will increase once the economy's running and we set more jobs out into the raw files. Feel free to repost your question for next time if that's not what you meant.
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