Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Doorkeeper]

Really cool graphics of the world map in the latest devlog. The swirling, blending evil ocean on the far west coast caught my eye. Thanks to all the artists and contributors.

In the world pics, I can see sites that are normally hidden initially by default (lairs, vaults, labyrinths, etc.). Presumably you did not travel to all of them in adv mode and just used a setting to unhid them all, in order to showcase their sprites. Is this setting a feature that we can expect to utilize in the next release?

[Shonai_Dweller]

Really cool graphics of the world map in the latest devlog. The swirling, blending evil ocean on the far west coast caught my eye. Thanks to all the artists and contributors.

In the world pics, I can see sites that are normally hidden initially by default (lairs, vaults, labyrinths, etc.). Presumably you did not travel to all of them in adv mode and just used a setting to unhid them all, in order to showcase their sprites. Is this setting a feature that we can expect to utilize in the next release?

I only see caves which are a standard Advanced Worldgen option to make visible. Are there vaults and labyrinths visible on this map?

--edit
Thought I spotted a cave bit can't see it any more. The thing is the desert is presumably a tomb, not a vault, right?

--edit
Ah, it's a shrine according to wiki map legend.
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Map_legend

-editedit
Ok, spotted the labyrinth, sorry.

[Doorkeeper]

For the vaults, there are three in the NW, with the human and dwarven settlements. On ASCII, they're dark gray blocks. It's a bit hard to distinguish them in the graphics version, but basically it's a simple gray building with a single entrance and a flat roof.

edit: speaking of caves, I just noticed there's no way to distinguish between a cave and a lair in both versions. I know for certain there is at least one lair shown on the maps (on the bottom near the left-center, there's a roc lair in the mountain range that's represented as a green dot on the ASCII map), but the others are ambiguous. I didn't think about that. there are no caves on the map, and the sprites for caves and lairs are different.

[Lemunde]

I think I brought this up as a suggestion a while back but seeing as you're working on graphical stuff now, are there any plans for adding icons for items and creatures in menu screens next to their names to better differentiate them from each other?

[Su]

i know golden salve is currently useless as anything other than a trade good [and considering that crafts are much easier to make, one might say it's useless even for that], but does it have anything planned? based on the name i'm guessing it'd be part of the healthcare industry.

previous mentions of golden salve in this thread were in the context of it being a magical item.

[voliol]

I think I brought this up as a suggestion a while back but seeing as you're working on graphical stuff now, are there any plans for adding icons for items and creatures in menu screens next to their names to better differentiate them from each other?

Toady reads all the suggestions on the suggestions sub-forum (at least the top posts). While getting response is tempting, it would be preferable if direct suggestions like this do not clog up FotF, especially when the expected answer is ”perhaps”.

Either way you suggestion is a GUI feature, and currently Toady should be working on pre-GUI graphics support; they* haven’t gotten to it yet and I doubt any final decisions have been made.

*Toady and Threetoe, the latter of whom has supposedly been researching the GUI redesign for some while.

[evil_pigeon]

Are there any plans on how other factions or elements can change biomes like the towers now can? Like elves expanding forests?

[Manveru Taurënér]

Are there any plans on how other factions or elements can change biomes like the towers now can? Like elves expanding forests?

The magical parts of it I know have been touched on a bit at least, Threetoe's story "Forest Befouled" and the follow-up answer in DFtalk comes to mind if that's of interest, though it's from a while back so I'm sure plans have been refined since as the magic arc draws closer (such as how good/evil regions are stated to be expanded/changing into sphere-based ones).

Rainseeker:   Question here from Gorobay, he asks: 'If befoulment, as in Threetoe's story Forest Befouled, will be an interaction?'

Toady:   Well that was a pretty messed up story if I remember that ending there, where the poor ... there were various dead things ... Yeah, so it kind of leads to the main overall question, like 'Where did these evil regions come from?' Some of them probably started out that way, but ... they obviously have to arise during play, I think, because that would be very interesting if you've got some kind of evil thing sweeping over the landscape or some horrifying event that happened that caused a whole place to turn corrupted in some way. So there are various ways to consider it and if he means would befoulment be an interaction in the sense of interactions ... he must be talking about interactions as we've been talking about them, as in a kind of magical effect that changes the world, and I think that's the best way to do it, because it's either that or it's some kind of scripted thing that says 'This region became evil' which is kind of how they're made now right at the beginning of the world; it just picks some regions and makes some evil.

But if it has internal consistency to it then it can lead to all sorts of interesting things as ... you know, it's kind of how we've strived to make all of our mechanics so that they all lock together, so if there's an interaction somehow, like if you take the evil thing example, that some horrifying thing happens - I mean there would have to be some kind of like 'How horrible is this event?' meter; in that story I don't remember quite what it was but it was bad, what happened in the water, there was something very bad that happened in the water in that story, that you are welcome to read - and that would count as ... The game should be able to recognize - especially if its matters of life and death, it's the easiest thing to recognize - 'Something bad just happened to a bunch of innocent critters' and that means that the interaction ... what I was getting at is that the interaction, then, there could be a regional interaction that has a trigger of something happening - there might have to be other conditions because you don't want it to happen necessarily all the time - but if something horrifying happens, whether or not it's a specific sacrifice or just some bad event, then what it could do is call down the effect with the target being the region, and the effect would be some kind of evilification procedure. Then that would go ahead and happen and what that would do would be to put evil regions on the same footing as cursed individuals, meaning that there would be a rhyme and reason now to what's happening, and I think that's definitely how it's going to go when we finally do answer the question about where all these evil regions came from; there are going to be procedures by which they're generated.

I think ... it's not just that, right? There could be ones that still are starting as evil regions because I think that's also a traditional way of doing things; 'This place is bad, it's always been bad, and no one asks why' and there is no why, right, there's just a bad area, but it's more interesting when there's a story behind it so generally I think that's how it'll actually go. We've already got some regional effects that are the region acting on people in the region, like something that ... you could make an evil region that gives you blisters or make an evil region that curses you for the rest of your life so that you can never perform a skill roll again, which is bad news, so you wouldn't go there. But the regions ... it isn't in now, but the region could just as easily be a target for that kind of thing, it's just the sort of thing that needs the will to push through the couple or three days it takes to do it, and that's it. Hopefully that answers the question ...

[PatrikLundell]

Are there any plans on how other factions or elements can change biomes like the towers now can? Like elves expanding forests?

Civs have been able to reduce savagery to eventually enable settlement for a very long time, so one additional case is already present.

Myth & Magic will (gradually) introduce all kinds of effects, and as spheres replace the cruder evilness/savagery scales they ought to have their own effects (not all as spreading biome affecting influences: some might affect critters [creativity, for instance] or act through other avenues). A water sphere effect could for instance increase the rainfall and introduce/strengthen aquifers, lakes, and ponds, with the first eventually resulting in a biome change (and new/expanded lakes would as well). Sources of sphere effects have been discussed in the past, including one time major rituals, ongoing magic/religions activities, artifacts, critters (like some of the current demons, but with a broader range of spheres, and not necessarily inherently evil), divine (or other god level power creature) intervention, geographical features (the famed cosmic egg shell could definitely spread some sphere effect(s)).

Note that some of the specifics mentioned here are my own speculations on what effects might be: Toady may have other ideas, and what eventually gets implemented (and when) is yet another thing.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Two part question:

World history can take a long time to generate. Which is fine, I like my highly detailed histories and characters and know how to cut things down and speed things up if I really wanted to. Are there any different, faster ways of achieving this that you've thought of, or have actually experimented with in side projects that could output the same amount of detail with the same amount of functionality (ability to easily export to other viewers, etc)? That's just a hypothetical tech question of course.

Come Mythgen, you maybe said once (I may have dreamt it) that it'd be good to be able to browse the Mythgen output during history worldgen. To be able to do anything with the game during the latter stages of history generation would be very cool, technically what possible ways are there to go about doing this?

[eightball8776]

1. Are there plans as part of the magic update for deities to interact with the world beyond the currently present demon bindings and curses?

2. Will some worlds have deities be historical figures that exist within the world as opposed to how the are now and if that is possible, will it be possible to encounter and fight them in fortress or adventurer mode?

3. Is becoming a deity in adventurer mode a possibility?

[Su]

3. Is becoming a deity in adventurer mode a possibility?

you can only impersonate in the current version. seems like the sort of thing you'd expect to make it in to the magic release though.

[voliol]

1. Are there plans as part of the magic update for deities to interact with the world beyond the currently present demon bindings and curses?

2. Will some worlds have deities be historical figures that exist within the world as opposed to how the are now and if that is possible, will it be possible to encounter and fight them in fortress or adventurer mode?

3. Is becoming a deity in adventurer mode a possibility?

Yes, yes and yes, all three of these are planned for the myths&magics arc. Lots of other features are too, though, and not all will make it through to the first release. We’ll see what happens, it’s a few years into the future so I imagine it’s still up in the air even for the brothers Adams.

[Toady One]

With the UI update has any consideration been given to limiting the line length of text? Perhaps with an init.txt option?

What is the context here?  Before, aside from the many screens stuck at 80 because they weren't updated, everything was on the same grid and so it doesn't seem to matter much.  Or are you talking about making it less than the width of the grid for some reason?  I don't know yet what's going to happen more broadly yet.

Yes, less than the width. With widescreen being the default and ever increasing resolutions the game can have lines of text that are a few times longer than is comfortable to read. Even the default of 80 is difficult when there is a lot of it. And the current zoom functionality doesn't adjust on the fly at all well.

Ah, yeah, this should be feasible.

For Toady, so far regarding the steam version, have you been forced or for practicality sake's have to make a compromise in the dwarf fortress development, feature wise I mean?

Shonai_Dweller: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8134881#msg8134881

Obviously there is a different workflow now, but we haven't started a new feature arc yet and I'm not sure how much slower that'll be generally, if at all.  We haven't cut or changed anything up to this point, aside from now working on artwork rather than villains/army stuff.  I've stated many times in the past that I chose ASCII originally to make sure development was moving smoothly, and that was certainly correct for somebody without artists.  I've also stated that I'm not much of a manager, and that bringing on artists would be difficult for me, but here we are!  So hopefully things work out.

I should reiterate, not because of this discussion, but because of a few others floating around, that this decision was not taken lightly.  Being able to access healthcare, even with a slowed development process, will be better for DF development overall.

Similarly, if you mean 'forced' in terms of the publisher relationship, and again speaking in the context of broader discussions, literally the only hard power they have is over artwork and music, in terms of what they pay for.  That was the deal, and we haven't experienced any problems there -- I think it was probably a bit more work volume than they expected (in terms of gibbons alone, who could have anticipated, ha ha), but the response has been positive, so that's been cool.  Certainly there is a power dynamic in terms of everything going smoothly and getting stuff up on the platforms, etc., but there haven't been problems there either.  The pace has been fine - everybody's happy currently.  A year from now, people will likely want the ship to have sailed, and that's true of us too!  Any changes caused by that will just be in terms of the first-release scope of UI/art etc. stuff that we get done to get the game up and running.  We want to make as many accessibility/art/etc. changes as we can, and that work can go on forever - so it'll have to stop at some point, just practically speaking.  Then we'll release and keep working.  Beyond that, I'm not sure what the dynamic will be.

In the world pics, I can see sites that are normally hidden initially by default (lairs, vaults, labyrinths, etc.). Presumably you did not travel to all of them in adv mode and just used a setting to unhid them all, in order to showcase their sprites. Is this setting a feature that we can expect to utilize in the next release?

Shonai_Dweller: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8136974#msg8136974
Doorkeeper (op): http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8136982#msg8136982

Ah, that was just me in debug mode, yeah.  It isn't something that has been added as an official feature, though that would be a reasonable enough thing, for the campaign makers and cartographers and such especially.

I think I brought this up as a suggestion a while back but seeing as you're working on graphical stuff now, are there any plans for adding icons for items and creatures in menu screens next to their names to better differentiate them from each other?

Yeah, that has come up, and we're hoping to do some things along those lines.  We won't know specifically what we're up for until the restructuring process is further along.

i know golden salve is currently useless as anything other than a trade good [and considering that crafts are much easier to make, one might say it's useless even for that], but does it have anything planned? based on the name i'm guessing it'd be part of the healthcare industry.

previous mentions of golden salve in this thread were in the context of it being a magical item.

voliol: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8139011#msg8139011

Like any possible final form of the purring maggot, the golden salve is a perpetual loose end.  Dunno how it'll change.  Health-wise, the new divination healing effects have certain opened up some possibilities, but the doctors would still need to understand it.

Are there any plans on how other factions or elements can change biomes like the towers now can? Like elves expanding forests?

Manveru Taurënér: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8140983#msg8140983
PatrikLundell: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8141018#msg8141018

I don't have much to add to the replies.  The myth/magic/map-rewrite stuff is going to open all the doors there, and with the theme of change being central to that process, I expect a lot of additions in particular here.

World history can take a long time to generate. Which is fine, I like my highly detailed histories and characters and know how to cut things down and speed things up if I really wanted to. Are there any different, faster ways of achieving this that you've thought of, or have actually experimented with in side projects that could output the same amount of detail with the same amount of functionality (ability to easily export to other viewers, etc)? That's just a hypothetical tech question of course.

Come Mythgen, you maybe said once (I may have dreamt it) that it'd be good to be able to browse the Mythgen output during history worldgen. To be able to do anything with the game during the latter stages of history generation would be very cool, technically what possible ways are there to go about doing this?

The output detail comes from the process, so I'm not sure if this is just an optimization question?  I don't have any special way to make the same amount of detail appear any faster.  I'm sure there are a billion different ways to construct a history generation process, and I'm sure some of those would be faster, but I don't have any specific sweeping ideas there that I haven't implemented already, or which haven't been grouped in with say the map rewrite or the entity rewrite - certain parts of those will probably end up being faster, but there'll also be a corresponding increase in the level of detail which makes it a wash.

Mythgen and history are conceived of as happening in strict sequence currently, yeah, so we were hoping some elements of mythgen could be at least displayed during worldgen, to pass the time if anything, and making it interactive somehow would be preferable.  Naturally if we want you to be able to go through some sort of baby legends mode while worldgen is still chugging away as fast as possible, we'd have to do some work to make the interface responsive - this is either thread territory, or it requires at least a more broken up set of calls (it does a year at a time now before reading commands, as I'm sure you've all noticed.)  It's all on the table.

I'm not sure if you meant anything beyond this - there are more extreme ideas about altering worldgen mid-process, but that's more of a mode question.  We still don't have any good "put the cat back in the bag" ideas about restarting worldgen, but while worldgen is active the first time, sky's the limit, really, in terms of pausing it and messing around, or whatever else.  But we haven't settled on anything, other than getting some broader myth info out to people during history generation.

1. Are there plans as part of the magic update for deities to interact with the world beyond the currently present demon bindings and curses?

2. Will some worlds have deities be historical figures that exist within the world as opposed to how the are now and if that is possible, will it be possible to encounter and fight them in fortress or adventurer mode?

3. Is becoming a deity in adventurer mode a possibility?

Su: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8142571#msg8142571
voliol: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8142594#msg8142594

Not much to add again here - all there have been considered and are likely in some way, even early on, but we also have nailed anything down.

[clinodev]

Thanks as always for the replies!

Strange how few questions you've gotten the last two months.