Bay 12 Games Forum

Currently dwarves have a whole list of 'favorite' things, foods, gems, rocks, pets as part of their personality quirks.  And we also have a huge variety of professions that we can assign them to with no regard whatsoever for their personal preferences because they simply have none in the realm of jobs.  Adding a 'favorite' profession that a dwarf will get a bonus happy though from doing "Relished the opportunity to work at his life's calling".  The players still retains full control over setting professions and new migrants existing skills are only slightly more likely then random chance to be their favorites.  Also favorite professions should not be evenly distributed across all professions, just as many people dream of being janitors or burger flippers I imagine few dwarves dream of being lye makers or wood burners, their should be a clear tilt towards crafting and more 'elite' stuff particularly metal and gem crafting.  Favorite professions could serve as yet another way to distinguish dwarven culture from that of other races.

This is a spin off from another thread ware I suggested a noble that would control the gate or door to your fort.  After a bit of brainstorming I'm fleshing out the idea and looking for feedback.

First off the Gatekeeper has to be under the players nominal control for this to be a useful noble (their should really be a distinction between the useful 'bureaucrats' and the useless 'aristocracy', this guy will be a member of the former which people generally like).  The player has to put a Doorway or bridge under the control of the Gate Keeper for anything to happen, this would just appear as a new option in the door menu as a kind of in-between lock and unlock. 

Second creatures need to understand that doors can be opened for them, especially caravans and traders, wagons shouldn't bypass the fort if the drawbridge is up, rather then come to the edge of the bridge or door and 'present themselves' for admittance.  Which in game mechanic speak means they telepathically transmit their desire to pass through the door to the GateKeeper, they then wait a reasonable time before trying another path or leaving in a huff.  The GateKeeper will either accept or reject the request (more on this later) and if accepted an open door request will be initiated.  Note that only Keeper controlled doors will licit this wait behavior, locked doors are just passed over as they are now.

Actually opening the door/bridge might require a lever pull in which case the player will need to indicate which lever is appropriate to pull at the time they set the bridge/door in question to Gate Keeper control.  For a conventional door the GateKeeper dutifully comes over and opens it.  Or if the player chooses on the door menu a member of the Fortress Guard may open the door, much like the Trade Depot allows someone other then the designated Trader to trade.  Their might be some downside to this but I'm not sure what would be appropriate yet.

Lastly the ability of the Gate Keeper to reject some prospective entrants needs to be controlled on the Noble screen as this is THE key feature for a Gate Keeper.  Theirs almost no end to the possibilities here, the simplest options would naturally be to accept or reject the various trade caravans, don't like elves (and don't want the bother of cleaning up the drowned bodies) just don't let them in, they should eventually get the idea and stop coming all together.  If some of the ideas on random visitors are ever implemented theirs another thing you can keep out.  Perhaps you can let in merchants only if their buying or if their selling or have a particular commodity.  Migrants are another thing people want to have control over but theirs already an excellent thread discussing an officer specifically tasked with population management which is a very different issue so I'm loath to try to control immigration through the Gate Keeper.

Many of you may already be familiar with the Khazad project, its an effort to explore the best possible UI for Dwarf Fortress, along the way we had our first spin off project dfhack lead by Peterix.  It was an outgrowth of the map reading code I'd initially obtained from Sinoth's 3Dwarf project and which was heavily upgraded by Peterix.  We felt it would be a great boon too other programmers to have its core map reading functions available as a library and indeed it's been getting used for just that.  I'm now pleased to announce the start of another side project of Khazad, the PathFinder Project.

As you all know Path finding is by far the biggest drag on DF's FPS and the main limiter of Fortress size, indeed the current #4 suggestion on Eternal Suggestions is "Speed Up Pathfinder".  Many programmers have suggested  ways to improve the speed of these path searches or ways to over-come certain limitation inherent in the current implementation.  If a solid system can be demonstrated we hope it will be incorporated into DF, to this end the library will use the BSD license.

I've invited a number of programmers and designers together to work on this task.  Our initial team is already large but more are welcome to join (to compensate for those individual unfortunate enough to be hit-by-a-bus)

Puzzlemaker (lead)
Slogo
Draco18s
Silverionmox
Sunken
numerobis


And what project would be complete without a mission statement:

Create a flexible BSD licensed C++ path-finding library specialized for grid based systems like that of Dwarf Fortress and able to efficiently handle rapidly changing map geometry and other challenges such as but not limited too multiple travel domains, multi-tile creatures, variable movement cost terrain and path caching.

The idea here is that the library will be very modular and easy to include into a game, acting almost like a server in which it receives an initial dump of map data from the client, and then during game play the client sends map updates on changes and path requests and the server sends back the needed paths.


Khazad & dfHack would provide a platform for testing, viewing and measuring how effective it is (by use of a path request generator) and allow the programmers to concentrate on pure path finding without worrying about anything else.  The first task is to of course do a bunch of design work some of which will take place here, everyone is free to help out on that but please do keep things on topic.

Move Bowyer to Mechanics group, Crossbows are complex machines and seeing as they can currently be made from both wood and bone their not exclusively under the domain of woodworking.  Think of a crossbow as a hand-held Ballista, and their made by mechanics.  Hopefully crossbows will require mechanisms and rope in the future making it more clear their mechanical aspect.

Now of course their should be a way to make a normal bow at some point, if that gets added at some point their should be a bowyer and a "crossbowyer" (I think I just made this word up) as two separate professions, the bowyer in woodworking group and the crossbowyer in mechanics group.  A crossbow could even be made by combining a bow made by the bowyer (made from wood and rope) and a mechanism, thus making a crossbow a three step process (after all they are uber deadly machine guns so it's probably a good idea to make them harder to get)

It occurred to me that some of the programming techniques used in programs like Reveal might be able to 'wipe' a game of DF of the flags that cause the mineral spamming that everyone hates.  I propose that an investigation be made into the feasibility of developing a 'silencing' option to be added to Reveal or as a stand-alone program.

I believe it should be possible too do this without revealing the rock as I have found that on occasion when I tunnel into a U shaped vein and cross it twice.  I only get a discovery message the first time I cross the vein, the subsequent crossing triggers no message indicating that messages are fired not by simply exposing rocks different then the surrounding area but by revealing a tile of the the vein for the first time after which that individual vein will be silent.  Thus in principle it should be possible to silence veins and Clusters that are still hidden.

By a combination of memory dumping before and after a reveal message is displayed is should be possible to determine ware the reveal message flag is set and then intentionally set that flag throughout the whole map (the player will probably need to designate at the bottom level as with Reveal in order for the map to instantiate).

Like everyone else here I've had issue with Dwarves rushing out of the fortress to loot the dead of their possessions either after a caravan ambush or a fine goblin massacre.  That stuff is often useful for its metal content and illogically high resale value.  But as soon as you let them go outside and set collect refuse every single idle dwarf will rush out to grab those items.  Often real work gets neglected or dwarfs with valuable skills are over-exposed in the wilderness ware their subject to more ambushes.

Currently the only way to get a Dwarf to refuse these haul jobs is to remove "Item Hauling" but this will prevent them from doing ANY useful hauling inside your fortress.  Thus we should have a differentiation of Hauling inside & outside the Fortress (ideally with the ability to define space as explicitly inside or outside as has been suggested many times already).  The outside Item Hauling skill would be called Scavenging and the indoor equivalent "Delivery" or "Mover" something to that effect.  This job would cover a broader range of item types as theirs much less point in differentiating between hauling stone, food, animals, wood and items when inside the fortress, the common factor is that the start & end point of the hauling job and everything in between is inside the fortress.

The current Stone, Wood, Refuse, options would change to meaning to refer to jobs that bring an item from outside the fort inside or visa-versa.  Wood and Stone Collection might also become part of the WoodCrafting & Mining skill groups as their so closely associated with them.  Scavenging becomes a catch all for collecting any item from outside the fortress and might also have an Herbalist like ability to generate items when their are no known items to collect, the items generated in this manner would almost always be worn, broken and dirty, more scraps then items, bones and shells would be common.  But their might be some vanishingly small chance to find almost anything like a Ring of Power.

The main idea here is that the end-points of a Hauling task are probably in the end just as important too us as a method to classify and assigning the tasks as is the item being hauled.

One of the major problem in DF is the lack of any necessity or incentive to export raw materials from your forts.  It is currently far to easy to get your own manufacturing and crafting lines up and running and for you to process all of your raw materials into finished goods.  The growth of a proper settlement should begin with one or two raw material industries such a lumber or food which transition to intermediate products like metal bars and culminates in the finished goods exporting apex.  At the same time imports to a settlement should start with finished good and transition to raw materials to support the domestic industry.  A few of the factors that need to change to help bring this about.

Immigrants for industries that don't exist - the current random immigrant wave includes skills for a great deal of specialized crafting which the player hasn't actually started doing yet which both entices and facilitates creating a diversified economy.  Their is some counter logic of course, craftsman want to move to an area ware they would have a monopoly on that skill and could gain reputation out from under the shadow of their superiors.  But the current migration pattern feels far too random and unrelated to the natural resources or activities of a fort.

Almost no overhead to most industry - almost all workshops take nothing more then a block to make so physical overhead is practicably nil, the hollowing out of storage space and creation of bins is more of a limiting factor then the workshop itself.  More tools or parts for making workshops would help along with more time needed to construct them, for one I think many workshops like the craftshop should be made with one or more tables as they are visually implied to have tables.

Profitable production with neophytes - almost every industry will turn a profit of 100% with an unskilled peasant as even without quality modifiers the finished 'form' of an item is worth twice that of the raw form.  Better workers just make more profit.  Three solutions present themselves, make the dabblers fail in occasion and lose a unit of raw materials, have bellow normal quality levels which have modifiers smaller then one, or limit the highest profitability crafts within a profession to higher skilled members of said proffetion, example Helms currently have a value modifier of 15 and greaves 30, the helm could be made by a crafter of Competent or higher level while greaves would require Talented or higher.

Traders crave crafted goods - trade wagons negotiations with your home civilization always offer large bonuses for one or more craft goods, they almost never offer premiums for raw materials which presumably the larger more developed cities should want.  These premiums should start with exclusively raw material bonuses and transition to crafting goods as your fort grows in population and wealth.

Lack of Market saturation for sold goods - The bidding systems in which you push up the bar for items you want more of and in return pay a premium for is a good if primitive means of showing supply and demand relationships but no equivalent occurs (to my knowledge) on the selling side of the equation.   This could work by having the sales you make one year (actual quantity of goods sold) affect the premiums offered the next year.   That said the premium offers need to be far more consistent from year to year, a minimal simulation of what the economy of the other civs makes and needs should occur so they have consistent purchasing patters.  Then on top of that pre-existing demand the sales you've made can depress prices.  This dose two things it can make reliable focused industry viable, if you know food is going to bring a premium over not just one but many seasons then creating a food export industry is attractive.  Its also self balancing to a degree as your exports can't grow in an unlimited way without depressing prices so long term diversification is also encouraged producing the desired transition to crafting.

Overly expensive imports in early game - I would consider importing certain commodities if caravans would only off versions that are in my price range.  Platinum decorated spears and giant spider silk bags of flour are simply outside of my price range in the first few years.  As I'm only interested in utility for these critical tools the decorations are nothing but dead-weight.  Its quite stupid to offer these fancy items to a group of piss-poor settlers, the caravans are wasting valuable space that could be used for useful items.  Caravans should bring predominantly finished goods but those items should be simple utilitarian ones at first and gradually increase in quality as your fortress wealth increases.  The goal of any logical caravan would be to offer a fort items that are beyond its own capacity to produce, so once your able to make basic weapons the caravans should bring higher grade ones so your presented with a real strategic choice to buy high quality or do without and save money.

I've been doing some research on Dye and Dyeing and how it can be better represented in DF.

Their is currently a rather limited system that's narrowly focused on cloth, what we should be thinking of is an all encompassing PIGMENT system which covers all color altering practices.  Cloth dyeing would be a part of that system but other things that can be colored would also be included.  I've been brainstorming on this and narrowed everything down to four categories.  All Pigments would have the ability to be used in at least one of these ways but some could be used for multiple categories.

Animal Fiber - Any thing that is protein based animal hair such as wool, protein tends to bind with other molecules well and a wide variety of things can color it, not presently in the game but expected to be included some day (resent improvements in creatures raws should facilitate this).  Wool was in fact the primary source of cloth in the medieval Europe.

Plant Fiber - Anything that is cellulose based like cotton, presently in the game and the dominant type of cloth.  This category also includes whole wood for purposes of staining and varnishing.  Cellulose tends to be harder to stain with fewer possibly dyes that require stronger chemicals.

Skin - Anything that is or was skin, bone or horn, Tattoos on living creatures or staining leather fall under this category.  Parchment was the dominant writing material of the middle ages and is a form of skin thus falls in this category.  Plant based paper might also be included here just for simplicity sake of having all ink be interchangeably, most ink was in fact used on on parchment and paper interchangeably.

Hard Surfaces - The final category is not based on a single material because the defining property here is that the material dose not bond with the pigment.  Stone, metal glass and other inert materials can only be colored by mixing pigment with something that will stick to the surface of the material aka Paint.  Various binding ages have been used such as egg yoke (tempra paint), oil, wax, gum and in the case of Frescoes the plaster itself is the binding agent.  Most mineral based pigments fall in this category as they are chemically stable and can't attach without a binding agent.

Some of you may have noticed that silk is missing and this is intentional, my research shows that silk is able to 'dual-class' and accept anything that would dye either Plant or Animal fibers making it superior to either.

For the first three categories a number of additional chemicals are needed to dye most things and these chemicals are called mordants.  My research shows at least a half dozen such chemicals and I'm still sorting through how they were historically used and made but its clear that some abstraction is necessary to make something that the player will have any hope of using.  More on that stuff some day in the future, for now what do people think of the 4 categories as a basis for the dying and coloring of all things?