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[Naryar]

All the new stuff is gonna be awesome. Especially the kill order cancel, that was annoying. Although does it cancel some parts of the kill order when some creatures selected are killed ?

Also, villains... Will they cackle and twirl their long, greasy, handlebar mustaches and make slightly ridiculous plans and be generally incompetent ?

And more importantly, when will WE adventurers be able to take up a defined villain role other than wanton, pointless slaughter ?

[Abitbol]

The dev page has changed. The following updates will be full of awesomeness

[orius]

•cleared kill orders after completion

This is good.  Removes another aspect of micromanagement.

The hero role stuff sounds promising too.  Right now there isn't a lot to really do in adventure mode except monster killing quests and exploring tombs and towers.

[Quatch]

Responding properly to personal fire issues (all modes)

That is a lovely way of putting it. /newspeak

[Vattic]

Will these:

Not being able to hit a giant in the head, hitting a dragon in the head as a reaction when it attempts to bite

Combat styles involving weapons or natural attacks with associated stances and moves

Certain moves may only be available as specific counters, while others might just be regular attacks

Also include things like much larger creatures being able to stomp on much smaller ones and similar? Larger creatures could just barge others using their bulk as a weapon. It need not stop at attacks of course, darting trough a giants legs would be cool.

[Abitbol]

Will these:

Not being able to hit a giant in the head, hitting a dragon in the head as a reaction when it attempts to bite

Combat styles involving weapons or natural attacks with associated stances and moves

Certain moves may only be available as specific counters, while others might just be regular attacks

Also include things like much larger creatures being able to stomp on much smaller ones and similar? Larger creatures could just barge others using their bulk as a weapon. It need not stop at attacks of course, darting trough a giants legs would be cool.

This reminds me the fact that every creature occupies one square even the largest. Is it planned to make the largest creatures occupy more that one square(sounds complicated) ? Or change the range of the largest creatures melee attacks ?

[Chronas]

This reminds me the fact that every creature occupies one square even the largest. Is it planned to make the largest creatures occupy more that one square(sounds complicated) ? Or change the range of the largest creatures melee attacks ?

The pathfinding cost would be nuts.

[hermes]

The dev page has changed. The following updates will be full of awesomeness

Oh, wow.  Not a few eternal suggestions have made that list, and the Hero/Villain arc is really promising.  Reading through the goals, it feels like a lot of the Villain and other entries will rely on NPC personalities, and I'm wondering if the personality rewrite we've heard about is going kick-off this next dev arc.  Anyway, a great list of features.  The non-lethal submission system also sounds interesting, is that going to be like throwing booze at a dwarf to get him off you?

(Footkerchief quoted the relevant personality rewrite info in this post.)

[NW_Kohaku]

Will theseAlso include things like much larger creatures being able to stomp on much smaller ones and similar? Larger creatures could just barge others using their bulk as a weapon. It need not stop at attacks of course, darting trough a giants legs would be cool.

Also known as the "thrashing" or "stop, drop, and roll" attack...

It would be a step towards curing the problem of elephants dying from 3 hoary marmots nibbling them to death.

The current relative size issues mean that small creatures in great numbers often have much sharper teeth, relatively, than larger creatures (hence, giant cave spiders have teeth so large that they become so blunt they can't chew through a helmet), and as such, attrition beats power and mass.  Letting a dragon that is being climbed upon like a jungle gym by a dozen axe dwarves simply roll over and crush its tormentors would go a long way towards putting the fangs back in a largely defanged megabeast.

This reminds me the fact that every creature occupies one square even the largest. Is it planned to make the largest creatures occupy more that one square(sounds complicated) ? Or change the range of the largest creatures melee attacks ?

The pathfinding cost would be nuts.

The pathfinding costs would not be "nuts", they would require entirely new connectivity maps, which in turn require new pathfinding code. 

Just like how fliers can't fly using the current connectivity maps that are only built for dwarf-like walkers, and swimmers can't swim, and magma-swimmers can't magma-swim.  (The creatures that do so pathfind by brute-force flood-filling, which is horribly inefficient for long-distance pathfinding, so all fliers or swimmers lose the ability to fly or swim when they are tamed.)

It's just a flat truth that at some point, Toady's going to have to overhaul pathfinding, and put in a more robust system if he's going to have all the things he wants to put into the game work properly.  Those new connectivity maps are going to have to include flying, swimming, magma-swimming, and two-tile-wide and three-tile-wide etc. paths for each permutation. 

Given that he's going to have to do that, then a modular hierarchical system that doesn't have to recalculate the connectivity of the whole friggin' map every time a bridge is raised would be the logical next step, and overall reduce connectivity update times.  Hierarchical pathfinding itself would be a massive time-saver for normal long-distance pathfinding, and jump point search could fill in at close-range pathfinding. 

The dev page has changed. The following updates will be full of awesomeness

Oh, wow.  Not a few eternal suggestions have made that list, and the Hero/Villain arc is really promising.  Reading through the goals, it feels like a lot of the Villain and other entries will rely on NPC personalities, and I'm wondering if the personality rewrite we've heard about is going kick-off this next dev arc.  Anyway, a great list of features.  The non-lethal submission system also sounds interesting, is that going to be like throwing booze at a dwarf to get him off you?

(Footkerchief quoted the relevant personality rewrite info in this post.)

That's the same devpage we've had since 2010, but with the "short term release schedule" removed.  Did you guys forget what had been on there? 

[Kogut]

So Caravan Arc is dumped?

[Quatch]

That's the same devpage we've had since 2010, but with the "short term release schedule" removed.  Did you guys forget what had been on there?

...Yes. Also, apparently I loaded it from cache :P

[NW_Kohaku]

So Caravan Arc is dumped?

I think it's just part of "Adventure Role: Trader" now, or something...  Basically, shuffled in with other things. 

[Footkerchief]

Everyone should make sure to Ctrl+R the dev page -- when I first went there, I was still seeing the old one.

[Knight Otu]

That's the same devpage we've had since 2010, but with the "short term release schedule" removed.  Did you guys forget what had been on there?

And a bit rearranged (though yes, that's mostly from the hero role being upped).

So Caravan Arc is dumped?

Several caravan arc goals have been shuffled into the other development goals (the 3d minerals/mine maps and villager schedules of the former release 2 have been added to the Trader role, for instance). There's a number I can't find, but I guess they're counting as goals that were already on the list. And since Toady hasn't quite gone by just the goal groups, I'd say that Caravan Arc continues along with the hero stuff, or after that.

[Cruxador]

It's a shame we've lost the more concrete and linear plan for the caravan arc. It was real handy to be able to point people at it and say "this is the current plan". It might not have been all that solid of a plan in how closely actual development correlated to it, but the huge list of features doesn't tell you anything about what's planned for the near future compared to what might still be a few years out.