Bay 12 Games Forum

Another monster from the caves found its way into the stairwell. Maybe I need better doors, you might think, but this time it was a forgotten beast who flew up through a hole I dug when I was mining out a rock crystal cluster, and I forgot to patch it. So maybe I just need a proper to-do list to remind me to patch holes I dig into the caves.

Anyway, I thought I was screwed, but it apparently wasn't a very strong beast (some kind of dove with "noxious secretions") because it went down relatively easily when faced with my fledgling military, although it did take down 3 unarmed dwarves, including my original expedition leader (who was also a legendary weaver after he went on a strange mood).

A bunch of surviving dwarves who were involved in the battle got caught in its gas, but symptoms have yet to present themselves in any of them.

Raise Army Totambu, Dragontail West, Dak'Fron
Raise Navy in Myrkwasa, Tigonus, Dragontail West

Build Magic gems x2 Tigonus
Build spices x2 Pothago
Build x2 Magic Gems Totambu
Replace silver for Magic Gem in Dak'Fron

Attack Highrock Coast with x2 Navy from Southwestern Iliac Bay
Attack Northeast Iliac Bay x1 Navy from Southeastern Iliac Bay

Move x1 navy Tigonus bay to Southeast Iliac Bay
Load x1 army into Sentinal Navy
Move x1 navy Sentinel port to Southwestern Iliac Bay

Move x1 army from Kozanset to Totambu
Move x1 army from Abibon-Gora to Alik'R West
Move x1 army from Pothago to Kairou
Move x1 army from Pothago to Myrkwasa
Move x1 army from Kairou to Alik'R West
Move x1 army from Myrkwasa to Alik'R West
Move x1 army from Dragontail West to Dak'Fron

Declare war on the orcs for treaty breaking

Attack Mournoth x1 from Totambu (worth a punt)

Shield Totambu

Close your eyes

Phobophobia, because there is nothing to fear but fear itself.

And the number 17, because heptadecaphobia is thing apparently.

At the upper end, a dumb storage of every single possible position[1] vector-multiplied with every possible ruleset[2] wouldn't technically need to be AIed (at least, not more than the matchbox AI. Of course, the total moves of a standard chess-game (under the one configuration of rules) isn't trivial, so even if shaving off 'edge' conditions to remove 'possible' game positions with 16,384 white pawns covering a 128x128 board[3].


For every case where "someone changes the rules of Chess and beats the chess machine easily", someone else could have anticipated those changed rules and created a Artificial-Nonintelligent solution to it (except that the possibilities are (effectively?) boundless). Depending upon what changes are made, it might well be that the current breed of self-training chess AIs (onese that are told "these are the rules and the limitations, go and develop your general strategies") could be fed a changed-rule-chess and do better than a human.


Of course, this assumes that a human hasn't (despite perhaps their best efforts) induced humanlike preconceptions into the "universal engine" AI.



[1] Covering all possible possible ones, not just 'standard possible'. Like the consequences of having multiple initial queens per side, boardscapes of arbitrary size and/or geometry.

[2] To cover the potentially very simple (en passant and castling don't exist, everything else as normal) to the potentially more complex (multi-leap knights, 'huffing' as per draughts) and the potentially weird (pythagorean piece, allowed to make any board-move that is Rank˛+File˛=Diagonal˛ for integer 'Diagonal') or at least possibility-multiplying (promotions for more than pawns, "portable wormhole" rules, dice-rolls and Chance/Community Ches(s)t-style cardplay), and of course whatever's needed to deal with hexagonal/non-Euclidean/other-than-2D boards.

[3] 'Clearly' impossible.^{[citation needed]} Oh... unless the chess-rules involved have been cross-contaminated with something like 'Reversi', it's black's move and they hold a transmutation power in reserve; all the while allowing the gameplay to have actually gone double-kingless without ending the match!

Clappedsear: the Loosing and Losing of Peace

Clappedsear is famous to the many scholars of the world. Home and origin point of Kanil Inchwhip, the largest and most powerful bandit tribe of those anarchic days, and a uniter of the many peoples of the land.

It all began with Uja Speakercuddled

Source: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Z86x1
Uja was born in the year 64. Although she was too young to be aware, she grew up surrounded by the end of the war against the goblins of the Plagues of Forking and the beginning of the undead invasion by Cor.

Uja was an orphan. She grew up surviving day to day with a group of other orphans from the war, including Kanil Inchwhip.

Despite peace being won with the goblins the encroaching undead and within her own teen years the dwarves unleashed an army of demons upon the world in ignorance. These pressures led to the orphans of all these wars being forgotten.

Starvation was present everywhere and death from exposure, due to lack of shelter, was also common. This initially pressed Uja into uniting and controlling a band of other orphans to claim resources. Although further research would need be done to confirm it; It could certainly be argued that all the bandit tribes that would make up the Anarchic Plains were gangs of orphans initially.

Although her gang would have originally run in the farmlands near Inkyrouts the wars would have pressed the group west to the now abandoned lands outside the destroyed Plagues of Forking.

The future chief worked hard to not only unite her band, but many others as the wars continued and so finally she was in a place to establish her own fort at the age of 31.

Source: https://posercontent.com/architecture-for-poser-and-daz-studio/medievalsmallcastle
Here she built a refuge for all fleeing the wars and created a place that members of very society made up:

-Survivors of the Plagues of Forking
-Human refugees fleeing the war of the undead
-Dwarves fleeing the war of the demons
-Goblins who were enslaved to the demons and fleeing
-Elves fleeing war in the north against the humans and goblins
-Even goblins from the Arctic north found a home there

The culture of the tribe would be very live and let live. Although when conflict would arise, as it inevitably would with so many different kinds of people and ideas present, it was allowed to escalate as far as it needed. The fort never attempted to resist the anarchic tendencies of the land they were in and instead thrived within it.


If there is one thing that was known to all who called her friend or foe, it was how vicious Uja could be. Indeed, it was her, who commanded Kanil to singlehandedly massacre an entire fortress of rivals, although they turned out to be invaders from the north it is difficult to imagine that she knew that as well.
She also played factions against each other. Once a battle broke out she would simply side with the winning side and only grow her influence further. When this wasn't an option she sent potential rivals into doomed situations, such as Kanil being commanded to halt an entire goblin invasion.


Her morals were questionable, but the chiefess craved peace.

Regardless of how historians may look back and condemn her she came the closest of all to uniting the many races and cultures of this world without wiping out any of them.
The descendants of royalty and military leadership in each civilization lived in her fortress


Sadly, her dreams died young, as the invasion of the White Stork Tumam and his undead horde led to her end. The defenders of Clappedsear held out valiantly, but they could not hold against the ceaseless advance of the undead.

Strange historical coincidences surrounding the Fort:
-Uja married late and her husband had several children from a previous marriage, one of whom is the inventor of the fabled and little known, third secret of necromancy
-The granddaughter of the elven princess lived in the fort and was one of the greatest fighters of the final battle
-Members of every religion and many cults were in the fort
-Uja started the trend of putting bounties on wraiths in order to keep morale high with victories and challenges
-Kanil Inchwhip lived and trained here and would later destroy the invasion of the undead
-The fortress would eliminate many regional threats including local night trolls and rampaging predators
-The last legitimate heir to the dark throne of the Plagues of Forking lived here
-In its last days it had a larger population than any city currently on the planet at the time

Disclaimer:
Due to my autism and ADHD, brevity isn't my strong suit. Please bear with me.
I'm very much a novice when it comes to programming, as I'm still waiting to do Computer Science at university next year.
I apologise if any of these ideas seem incoherent.
I'd like to make some suggestions for gameplay features, UI improvements and lighting, which occasionally uses the very, and I mean very, basic programming knowledge that I have


Gameplay:
• Burrows that are set to activate only at certain times of the year (e.g., right before the Full Moon) as players like myself would often forget to do this manually
• Option for making doors with food tray slots, to allow for food to be delivered to prison cells without opening the door


UI:
• A back button for the 'Embark' menu that sends you back to the map, so players don't have to spend several minutes reloading their save when they want to choose a different location to embark
• Option to toggle between the pre-50.01 soundtrack and post-50.01 soundtrack
• Hotkeys visible on icons as a separate sprite on a separate layer to their respective icons (an ASCII character, maybe); changes depending on what it's bound to.
  There's currently a mod for the game on Steam that implements a similar feature, but it instead takes a less ideal approach by changing the icon itself, which renders it inaccurate as soon as a
  hotkey is reassigned
• A way to disable anti-aliasing when zooming in on sprites
• If it's not too much trouble; re-implementing the ability to not only play the game with true ASCII graphics, but in a Linux terminal or Windows command prompt instead of a window, similar to
  versions before 50.01. No strong reason for wanting this option, other than performance and nostalgia.
• For the above, I can understand why this might be difficult or impossible to implement, mostly because the ASCII terminal UI would need to be maintained separately with each update to the Steam
  version's UI
• Switch priority of areas designated for mining without changing the shape of the mining designation


Lighting:
If the current devs are interested in implementing any of the features in this section, I suggest doing performance tests with and without the feature to determine whether or not it's worth doing so. I've heard that lighting checks might make the game too performance-heavy to be acceptable, which is why I'm suggesting multiple compromises

Lighting Idea A:
• Add a bioluminescent material that the player could order to be painted or smeared on the walls of their fortress. This only benefits non-dwarven races,
as it'd make sense for dwarves to see in total darkness, meaning it's completely optional to the player. At the cost of harming trade, diplomacy, and influxes of monster
hunters, there may even be an advantage to having no light sources in your fortress whatsoever, as invaders from the surface would struggle to find their way around.
Some measures that could be taken to lessen the performance impact of lighting calculations include making the light check apply exclusively to non-dwarven, non-cavern-
dwelling creatures, or categorising the light levels into a boolean; either 'no light' (0) or 'light' (1). I suggest making all light levels invisible to the player in
Fortress Mode unless toggled; similar to how water depth is displayed.
Shadows would be placed behind areas obstructing a light source unless open to the sky

Lighting Idea B:
• If you don't want to skip light checks, and you want to add a third level for shaded outdoor areas as well as the edges of bright sources of light ('1'), this would make
it so that humans aren't blinded by otherwise-minor variations in light on the surface. This makes the highest light level '2'. Light levels would be '0', '1' and '2',
respectively. Where '0' and '2' meet, have a transitional zone with a value of '1' which only appears on the side of the transitional zone that'd otherwise be '0'. There
could be a fourth value too if you absolutely want there to be one (with values ranging from '00' in binary to '11')

Lighting Idea C:
• Light levels stored using a 2-bit integer (ranging from 0 to 3) and updated whenever a light source is placed or obstructed;
'0' for 'no light' (visible only to cavern-dwelling species and dwarves), '1' for 'extremely low light' (lowest visible to non-cave-adapted races and species with adaptation), '2' for 'low light'
(lowest visible to humans without adjustment), '3' for 'high' (visible by any race). If this can be implemented without significantly harming performance, try a 4-bit integer.
Best to assume that it doesn't change angle with the time of day and instead changes with the season, since time runs very fast in Fortress Mode.
Glass blocks could make the brightness of light passing through go down by a value of '1' for every second or third layer of glass, as glass in real life isn't perfectly
transparent; the amount of floors it can pass through before totally blocking light would depend on the type of glass

Lighting Idea D (most likely to be performant and avoids lighting checks, too):
• Humans and other non-dwarven, humanoid races could carry lanterns when visiting your fort,
without which they couldn't see in areas that have never been open to the sky or are, more specifically, underground.
They'd only be able to see a certain radius around themselves in the dark, unlike dwarves.
Someone carrying a lantern could be seen in the dark by someone who isn't carrying one, regardless of distance.
Caverns with (glowing) fungi could, as a whole, be defined by the game as places where anyone can see, much like the surface.
I'd like to note a potential caveat, which is that pets from the surface wouldn't be able to see underground unless Idea C is implemented in a way that allows them to do
so under certain conditions.
As for how the pets of dwarves would be accounted for under such a system, one idea involves pet food that allows them to better sense their surroundings underground

Too much watching

Quote from: Eric Blank on May 15, 2024, 08:27:56 pm

Im willing to bet Air-to-air AI fighters would be easier to program than air-to-ground. Fewer things you have to program the AI to correctly identify. If it can reliably tell the difference between the aircraft you and your allies are using and those of enemies and non-combatants, then militaries might even give it the OK to fire at will at any target it identifies as an enemy aircraft.

Then the enemy tries to mess with AI and things become messy.

Look at a simple example. Chess engines. They beat humans easily... But what if we change the rules slightly? Human players will adapt instantly and successfully apply all their experience from regular chess. The chess engine needs to be retrained\reprogrammed.

Theoretically, for chess-like games where there is a clear goal and a turn-based gameplay, you could make an "universal engine" via neural network, it's just that it's going to be very inefficient.

B. SPACE DRAGON