Bay 12 Games Forum

The question I have is this, does Biome Support work in an absolute sense or does it only work in a relative sense.  So if I set [BIOME_SUPPORT] to 10 for all environments does that increase the density of the settlements of that faction as opposed to setting everything to 1, or does it only work relatively so that this will do nothing at all since all values are the same?

Link to Book

Last week I finished a second edition of my (presently solely online) book, the Staff of Zelzhin, improving the spelling and redoing the formatting of how I notify people about languages; I felt I should set up a thread for it.  It is a fantasy novel that fits well with the kind of themes of Dwarf Fortress, it initially involves a bunch of young men in your typical epic fantasy kingdom being conscripted from their peasant village to fight against the dwarves. 

But the plot of the story really isn't just about dwarves fighting humans. 

I am also presently working on a sequel which is to be titled the Empire of Spikes.  You will find out who the emperor is and what spikes have to do with it in the Staff of Zelzhin.

I thought that with prophets in the game maybe the player could appoint their own prophet dedicated to a god that the player decides the name of.  So in effect the player's spiritual presence in the game becomes a deity and the deity is called whatever the player call it, plus has a caste, creature-type and spheres as well.  In effect the player-created god's religion then behaves rather like any other religion, with the extra caveat that the success or otherwise of the player in various roles can influence the success of that religion.

An extra mechanic is the ability to reveal or conceal the player's role.  When playing a fortress/adventurer the player can choose to declare that they are in fact God X.  This is naturally a double-edged sword, is they do well then it strengthens their faith but if they do badly it undermines their faith.  If they conceal their role, there is a possibility that someone with enough foresight might still figure out the player's role in events.

Also, avatars in general could exist and false avatars as well, whether the false avatar accepts their divinity or not.  It would be possible for the player to have a false avatar of the player running about the place and all sorts of fun if the player runs into the false avatar or the false avatar's followers and challenges their claims. 

Taking over an abandoned attempt from Amostubel in creating an expanded dictionary for Dwarf Fortress, I finished the dictionary for use in my mod Forgotten Realms Direforged. This took me almost a year to complete and having finished the new version of the mod, I released a vanilla version of the dictionary as I had always planned to do once the work on the mod release was complete.

This is the version. It consists of a stripped down and simplified version of the mod's dictionary, intended for use by other modders to make their own mods without having to do all the work and for anyone who wants to use the dictionary stand-alone.

Credits to Amostubel for the original dictionary.

Link
0.5 Changes
Removed a number of redundant words.

In order to allow us to play as existing historical characters, we need to consider the potential for abuse by the player in which having brought himself to ruin in one game, he can just retire and take over the historical character that leads the force threatening them and deliberately lead them to ruin before returning to his original perspective. 

I propose as a solution a system by which all positions in the civilization are given a particular score according to their relative importance, written along the lines of 10/100/1000/10000.  If the player rises to that position, then their score is increased to that level provided it is lower than the player's existing score.  The score however is per site government or per civilization and allows you to assume the role of any historical character whose position is scored equal to or less than the players score WITH the relevant entity.

The score is refunded if the player retires the character alive, or the character dies in a manner unavoidable to the player like old age.  If the player's character manages to get killed in a violent manner then the player loses the equivilant score as that character is worth.  So a king is worth 10000 and the player's score with that civilization is 20000 and the player has the king throw himself off a cliff then the player can play as the next king of their civilization, since he would then have 10000 points.  If he kills off that king however then he is back to the bottom of the heap, playing as an adventurer along the lines we have at present.

Fortress mode converts into adventure mode terms because the highest ranking position in your fortress turns into a score with your own site government/civilization government once you retire.  That would mean that if you played all the way until you were the capital, the highest position would be able to play as the mayor *of* your site or you could play as the king of your civilization.  Equally you could play as any of the nobles in your civilization but not the mayors of any other site.

At the moment, much as with many things animals while physically quite developed mechanically, are rather lacking in the behavior front. I have come up with a list of basic problems with animal behaviors that annoy me and their solutions.

Birds on the ground
Birds and other flying creatures presently always spawn on the ground and then take off when the player approaches, whether to attack or flee.  While it might be the case that we would find a bird or other flying creature on the ground, chances are that that would not be the normal manner in which to encounter them. There is no good reason for this, the game generates the Z-Levels above our heads as we pass, hence there is no reason that the birds cannot be generated in flight. This could be defined in the raws quite simply and easily, by default the bird groups are generated at a random Z-Level above our heads but there is also a small chance that they will generate on the ground.  Custom raw definitions would allow us to eliminate this altogether by setting the grounding value to 0, but equally we could set the value to 100 so that things are as present.  Related to this is the situation with pheasants, chickens, guinea fowl, peacocks and the ilk, they need a tag that tells them that they prefer to walk, keeping them from using flying except when they cannot reach their destination by any other means.

Predator/Prey behavior
At the moment everything is either [LARGE_PREDATOR] or [BENIGN], the absence of either tag causes creatures that are considered hostile but yet fail to act as such.  Predators attack creatures that are of a different species, while prey flee from creatures that are of a different species, this is a pretty solid system if simple, but it results in a silly situation.  Predators attack things that are too big from them to have any reasonable chance of harming while prey flee from things that are minute and they could crush underfoot effortlessly; basically in dwarf fortress elephants really are scared of mice.  I propose that these tags be made size dependent, a predator creature attacks only things that are below a certain size while a prey creature flees only from things that are above a certain size.  Otherwise the creatures should remain passive but the whole group should respond as regular enemies do if hostility is initiated against any one of their number, this would be the default behavior.  In this system a creature can be both predator or prey, or neither.

At a more advanced level there are a number of other things to consider adding in.  One of these is pack strength, predators should have a modifier that basically makes other things appear smaller than they are as per size calculations based upon the present strength of the group, so only a very large pack of wolves will hunt a human and a lone wolf will flee from one.  Certain prey animals could benefit from a threat range, this is a number of squares within which the creature will respond either with hostility or flight should a non-specific enter it; certain creatures while herbivorous are also extremely dangerous to get close to.  Another consideration is the reputation of one's species, entities probably ought to have a multiplier value defined that determines how big the prey animals are that the civilization can hunt, for instance if we have 10X value then we will kill off things 10X our size, so a human of 70000 would kill things up to 700000.  This ought to change the behavior of the creatures in biomes where that entity is close enough to hunt, this would override the normal default logics, causing creatures to flee from creatures even if they would be too small to normally fear them if they reside in biomes where they are hunted BY creaures of YOUR species.

The mechanics of hunting could do would other improvements as well.  Creatures that are prey animals should not stop running away until they are offloaded and creatures that are alerted should not be possible to sneak up on, basically they should be given extravision.  Extravision should be a general thing in this sense, alert creatures should no longer be constrained by their normal field of vision becoming impossible to sneak up on until they return to the normal unalert state.  Predators on the other hand that are hunting the player should methodologically follow the players tracks, stopping only when they find something else to eat.  That means that dumping a pile of meat on the ground along your tracks once the predators are out of sight should work to facilitate your escape.


Intelligent 'Animals'
Groups of intelligent creatures basically bite the biscuit when it comes to dysfunctionality at present.  Aside from fixing all the bugs that presently exist, one idea that really should be in is simply to allow us to define items IN the creature file DIRECTLY.  Instead of having all item bearing creatures HAVE to belong to an entity, we simply give them non-tracked items generated as soon as they are loaded and decide where to put them on the creature as normal.  The behavior of the creatures should also be unique, basically non-entity dwelling creatures should respond intelligently to threats in the enviroment.  That means that they would not simply run away or attack but would instead respond according to a 'reputation' that the nearby entities have given your own creature-type.  If your entity eat sentients AND hunts expect to end up killed, otherwise you should be able to have a chat with them or maybe even trade items. 

[REACTION:EXTRACT_GELATIN_FROM_CARTILAGE]
[NAME:extract gelatin from cartilage]
[BUILDING:KITCHEN:CUSTOM_A]
[REAGENT:A:150:GLOB:NONE:NONE:NONE][UNROTTEN][REACTION_CLASS:CARTILAGE]
[REAGENT:B:1:BOX:NONE:NONE:NONE][BAG][EMPTY][PRESERVE_REAGENT][DOES_NOT_DETERMINE_PRODUCT_AMOUNT]
[PRODUCT:100:1:POWDER_MISC:INORGANIC:GELATIN_TEMPLATE][PRODUCT_DIMENSION:150][PRODUCT_TO_CONTAINER:B]
[SKILL:COOK]

[REACTION:MAKE_JELLY]
[NAME:make fruit jelly]
[BUILDING:KITCHEN:CUSTOM_J]
[REAGENT:A:1:POWDER_MISC:NONE:NONE:NONE][UNROTTEN][REACTION_CLASS:GELATIN]
[REAGENT:B:1:BOX:NONE:NONE:NONE][BAG][CONTAINS:A][PRESERVE_REAGENT][DOES_NOT_DETERMINE_PRODUCT_AMOUNT]
[REAGENT:C:1:TOOL:ITEM_TOOL_JUG:NONE][EMPTY][PRESERVE_REAGENT][DOES_NOT_DETERMINE_PRODUCT_AMOUNT]
[REAGENT:D:1:PLANT_GROWTH:NONE:NONE:NONE][REACTION_CLASS:AM_FRUIT][UNROTTEN]
[PRODUCT:100:1:GLOB:INORGANIC:FRUIT_JELLY_TEMPLATE][PRODUCT_DIMENSION:150][PRODUCT_TO_CONTAINER:C]
[SKILL:COOK]
I cannot seem to get these reactions to work. My gnomes built a kitchen and butchered some animals, they seem to identify the reagents correctly as cartilage (I added a custom class to the material) and a bag.  However however much they add in no actual gelatin powder ever comes out, even though the product seems to be written perfectly, indeed pretty much identically to the powders in the game raws.