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Messages - voliol

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1456
DF Suggestions / Re: Thoughts on transgender dwarves?
« on: October 17, 2019, 01:26:17 am »
Hoo boy, here we go again. Discussions with this kind of topic tend to go out out of hand, in the end being riddled with transphobia and the like. Before getting locked. Oh well.

I think it is the same dilemma as when topics like detailed slavery and sexism is discussed; should features that primarily exist to make some dwarves’ (and humans’, and goblins’) lives horrible be added for realism, even though they fulfill an unclear role gameplay-wise? With slavery and sexism you could also separate from related factors (having a population, having sexes), and have only clearly ”evil” civs (i.e. goblins, elves) endulge in them, but dysphoria for transgender people sadly tends to be inevitable, even if they are brought up in dwarven civs.

As DF has a historical setting, I think it’s worth noting that the modern definition of transgender people and dysphoria is relatively new. Historically, societies would deal with this by having a third gender (though those may also have other causes), or not at all. It is a difficult case, as the records are in all likelyhood incomplete. It is similar to how we don’t know of horribly many homosexual historic people from societies where homosexuality was shunned.

Well, if the Tarn brothers believe they have come up with a solution that works somewhat, it should be fine.

1457
DF Modding / Re: Any mods that just fix bugs, etc?
« on: October 16, 2019, 02:48:22 am »
The Modest Mod fits your description pretty well. It's pretty much French Vanilla unless you use one of its extra modules.

1458
DF General Discussion / Re: Future of the Fortress
« on: October 15, 2019, 06:06:47 am »
From an earlier answer, regarding the spheres:
Quote from: Toady One
Quote from: Fieari
Quote from: Fieari
How do you intend to make procedurally generated magic become "thematic"?  Most fantasy works organize their magic around one or more themes, each theme having all magic working similarly.  For example, some split magic into elements, or into schools.  Brandon Sanderson is famous for particularly intricate magic systems... such as all magic requiring the user to ingest and "burn" metal inside their stomachs to cast spells.  All fantasy magics that are more than fairytales have SOME organization to their magic.

I presume spheres would be involved.  Will the RAWs have to expand to have lists of ways the spheres can influence magic?  I know the myths will direct how magic works... but coherence is important!  If a fire spirit is the source of magic in the world, how will the game know to make fire always part of the cost, or the effect, of the magic?

golemgunk and Shonai_Dweller mentioned using the creation myths for thematic consistency, and that's the starting principle we're going to work with.  In the prototype, the spheres are linked to creators and creation methods and these are passed down the tree of causation; when a magic system is needed, magical effects attached to the proper spheres are preferred.  It works pretty well on a very basic level.  And we'll likely end up doing quite a bit more along those lines, criss-crossing the system with various conceptual linkages until it's vaguely good enough.  Post-creation-myth actions can also be attached to spheres (or intermediate structures/concepts), so that, for instance, some grand betrayal in early historical world-gen can spawn a new magic system themed around deceptive effects.

There's a danger of being too on the nose sometimes, if you always go with the most obvious sphere, and we can try to leaven everything with some purely random elements, or have some higher-order procedural conceptual symbols that link together spheres more esoterically, something that can survive exposition but also give some more variability, e.g. the same way "fiery" can link up to "passionate" in some languages, and perhaps be linked to some canonical event or character.

Non-spherical rules can also arise from creation; if the universe begins with a primordial chaos of salt, and some creator turns salt into fire and water as a first step, then that universe's systems can respect 'salt' as the sort of basic element, with fire and water having a secondary but important status, and this can become a foundation for various generated systems.  These have the fault of being somewhat random or rigid depending on the amount of guidance in their generation, but enough of these together should increase the variety a great deal, and pull the game away from "oh, there's a Fire God magic system again."  Rules defining what life is and what happens during death, dreams, etc., can also interlink in non-spherical ways that enrich the systems, and we've discussed in the past using invisible personalities/'souls' to model half-living magical forces in ways that can link up with divination and miscasts in ways that go beyond tables and dice.

I'm hopeful things won't feel utterly mushy or random, nor too rigidly obedient to obvious connections, but it remains to be seen what we can actually pull off.

1459
DF Suggestions / Re: Sphere magic and associated effects [community suggestions]
« on: October 13, 2019, 02:06:01 pm »
The Good/Evil (and possibly Benign/Savage) systems have been stated to be planned for removal. However, many of these Spheres fall in line with what the Good/Evil biomes already represent, like the DEATH, DISEASE and NIGHTMARES spheres, that are already being used for evil regions in the upcoming version. And the Good spheres are ones like Wealth and...

Peace:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

1460
DF General Discussion / Re: Future of the Fortress
« on: October 13, 2019, 04:12:10 am »
Quote from: Enemy post on October 12, 2019, 09:27:33 pm
What happens if a necromancer tries to incorporate a modded creature with custom bodyparts into one of their hybrid creatures?

The experiments are seemingly not very dependent on the source material, they seemingly mostly count limbs. I suppose if you had a centipede-creature as either your main race or lifestock you could get some funny results.

Quote from: Toady One
[...]
an individual necromancer sticks with one of each kind once they have a successful experiment (that is humanoid, small quad+, large quad+, giant.)
[...]
Quote from: Beakromancer
Will magical experiments have different traits depending on what creatures they were made from? For example, a creature made from elfs being at peace with wildlife.

EDIT: A better example would be a creature made from dwarves needing alcohol.

EternalCaveDragon: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8005095#msg8005095

Haven't done anything like that yet!  The creature generator does understand the input creature (at least on the first humanoid, before it starts defaulting to the same result to save memory), but doesn't use it beyond counting limbs and stuff to see if the output should be humanoid/quadruped/etc. and also the basic size.

I guess it is interesting that the word "humanoid" is used. Are the "humanoid" necromancer experiments actually humanoids, made from any captured creature with the right body plan (uses one of the HUMANOID body tokens, or has the right amount of stance/grasp parts), including livestock that do? Or is it just a shorthand for an INTELLIGENT/CAN_LEARN creature, in which case "humanoid" experiments from snakeman and centaur civilizations would not end up truly humanoid?

1461
DF Modding / Re: [MODDING] 0.44.x GENERAL MODDING QUESTIONS THREAD - NOW IN ALLCAPS EDITION
« on: October 13, 2019, 03:02:48 am »
Are all item types improvable? I've made a reaction where dwarves improve hot dogs by putting ketchup on them (silly, I know, but it is for the lolmod), and while the hot dogs and ketchup are brought to the workshop, the result is seemingly an un-improved hotdog. Interestingly enough, the amount of non-improved hot dogs (according to the manager) decrease while doing so, despite the amount of hot dogs not actually decreasing. The hog dogs are CHEESE items.

1462
DF Modding / Re: [MODDING] CREATURE & ENTITY QUESTIONS THREAD
« on: October 13, 2019, 02:43:45 am »
@Brolol, do you get any error messages? I feel like it might have to do with it not finding any material for the given tissues (for whatever reason) and then defaulting to using boxer mats. It seems strange, especially since there are no specific boxer mats defined, but at least an error message would put some light on the issue.

@MaxTheFox Using a conjunction of SET_TL_GROUP and TL_RELATIVE_THICKNESS:0 should work.
E.g. if you want to remove the muscle of the lower body, do this:
Code: [Select]
[SET_TL_GROUP:BY_CATEGORY:BODY_LOWER:MUSCLE]
    [TL_RELATIVE_THICKNESS:0]The tissue is still there, but it has no thickness, so it hopefully shouldn't show up in-game.
note: I accidentally posted this while editing, if you saw a strangely unfinished reply that's why. I also realized my own question I put here was not a creature/entity question. My bad x2.

1463
DF Modding / Re: What's going on in your modding?
« on: October 12, 2019, 01:00:18 pm »
Are wererabbits in the game already? For extra halloween-feel, why not werebats, werespiders, werecats, and werepumpkins?

1464
DF Suggestions / Re: Let us mod the reload rate of projectiles
« on: October 12, 2019, 12:46:06 pm »
I'm sure this has been a popular request for quite a while, but +1 to the top suggestion either way.

1465
DF Suggestions / Re: Ambiguous graphics
« on: October 07, 2019, 02:29:09 pm »
Quote from: Blastbeard on October 06, 2019, 03:45:18 pm
Quote from: voliol on October 06, 2019, 02:28:01 am
I think the Japanese alphabet (kanji) would be a bit overkill, especially since we have to consider that each character can have 15 different colors, ignoring background colors. Many of them I also believe would be too detailed to fit nicely in low-resolution tilesets.

Cyrillic I agree would be a good start, though, and as some kind of overkill might be needed, let me suggest something like the PxPlus fonts from The Oldschool PC Font Resource. With cyrillic, greek and hebrew, plus some extra technical symbols, I would say it is pretty conclusive. It also has the upside of including most roman letter variants, so if we ever get to mod the text it would be compatible with many translation mods.
Spoiler: Example picture (click to show/hide)


You say overkill like it's a bad thing, but you've got a point about the problem with details and resolution. The differences between chinese characters and anything derived form them can get pretty subtle in some cases, and if they can't be displayed properly we're back at square one of the "What am I looking at" issue. I was going to mention arabic, but you run into the same issues there.

I didn't know that the runic alphabet and old italic were in unicode, but that's been fixed. I think those two scripts would fit in nicely with DF's overall theme, so if we had a way of tacking those onto PxPlus, that might just be all we need.


Overkill is mostly bad for the who get tileset artists, who get more glyphs to work with. Still, detail was my main point, and I'm very much up for trying a full chinese character full support graphics pack whenever the steam update comes (or if it is possible now with TWBT), just to see how parsable it would be.

Brogue I remembered using some strange characters, among them old Italic/archaic Greek Koppa(Ϙ), but when I looked it up (i.e. opened up my Brogue folder) those characters turned out to be downsized and thus fuzzy versions of a high-quality font, instead of being made pixel-by-pixel. I get the feeling these alphabets (the runic and old italic) might not have pixelated versions yet.
Nonetheless, some 50 new characters in the standard DF tileset style should be able to be procured with help of the tileset-making community. Now that Kitfox are part of the equation, getting help from the community on things like this should also be less risky.

1466
DF Suggestions / Re: Ambiguous graphics
« on: October 06, 2019, 02:28:01 am »
Quote from: Blastbeard on October 05, 2019, 10:51:45 pm
Including symbols from other alphabets would greatly increase the the number of characters to work with. Cyrillic would be a good start, as it's distinct enough to prevent confusion in most cases but similar enough not to be too jarring.
On the other hand, if you never want to see the same symbol twice, the Japanese alphabet has over fifty thousand characters, although only about two thousand are in common use.

I think the Japanese alphabet (kanji) would be a bit overkill, especially since we have to consider that each character can have 15 different colors, ignoring background colors. Many of them I also believe would be too detailed to fit nicely in low-resolution tilesets.

Cyrillic I agree would be a good start, though, and as some kind of overkill might be needed, let me suggest something like the PxPlus fonts from The Oldschool PC Font Resource. With cyrillic, greek and hebrew, plus some extra technical symbols, I would say it is pretty conclusive. It also has the upside of including most roman letter variants, so if we ever get to mod the text it would be compatible with many translation mods.
Spoiler: Example picture (click to show/hide)

Quote from: Atarlost on October 05, 2019, 11:00:45 pm
Quote from: Shonai_Dweller on October 05, 2019, 06:15:18 pm
And since the next development arc after Villains is likely to see an expansion of the standard tileset, now is a very good time to suggest places where it can be improved.

If there's going to be a more comprehensive revamp I'll float the idea of switching to assigning creatures letters by some sort of taxonomy.  Eg. 'a'mphibians, 'A'nimal people, 'b'irds, 'B'ears, and so forth.  Breadth of category would obviously vary by how common it is with civilized races keeping individual symbols.  This would be more controversial I'm sure because people are used to the current symbols. 

I'm not sure how I feel about this. 'a'mphibians and 'b'irds both feel like too wide groups; you wouldn't want to confuse an ostrich for a raven. 'A'nimal people I suppose could work, but you would still have to check what kind they are each time. 'B'ears already use B, except for the 'P'anda.

1467
DF Suggestions / Re: Speed
« on: October 01, 2019, 01:04:09 am »
I suppose it is the windedness you get from pain/blood loss. Since 0.42 I'm pretty sure we've had some combat updates though, such as pain being proportional to the body size (people don't pass out from breaking a toe), and damage on the extremities spreading to connected body parts (a FB slaps your finger => your entire arm might twist off; people break their necks if you bash them hard enough in the heads).

1468
DF Modding / Re: A list of stupid mod ideas
« on: September 28, 2019, 04:00:43 pm »
Quote from: Asin on September 28, 2019, 12:50:11 pm
Welp, Minecon is live, and we got news of a nether update, with a new race (that will attack you, unless you wear gold, then they will ignore you, and it is possible to barter with them) called Piglins, with hostile Piglin Beasts they hunt for food. Why mention it here?


...New civ for my Minecraft civ mod thing I've been working on.

It also seems like a mountain rework is coming down the line. Quite a bit down the line (by minecraft standards); at least 2 major updates away. Still, it seems dwarfy!

1469
DF Suggestions / Re: Better mod loading
« on: September 27, 2019, 01:08:30 pm »
Quote from: darkhog on September 26, 2019, 10:17:20 am
Well, it might be that the Workshop would require players to upload entire customized DF installation (including exes) and there being some kind of launcher that would handle that (launching separate installations based on which mod user wants to play). That's how I'd do it if I needed money fast and wanted to release ASAP.

But of course, it'd be great if something like mod stack happens.

Yikes, that would be horrible. I much prefer your mod-stack idea. +1

If we are having a mod-stack though, I foresee some structural changes to the raws themselves.
For one, why not simply consider the vanilla raws mod #0? This way most of the code would be the same for dealing with vanilla items and other mods (for mods of mods, or compatibility mods). The vanilla raws could also be turned off fully for total conversion mods.

To allow for maximum compatibility, and easy editing, the mods could use three different types of object-related declaration tokens, instead of just the existing OBJECT_TYPE (a short I will use for CREATURE, ENTITY, ITEM etc. tokens, that declare a new object) declaration:

[NEW:OBJECT_TYPE:NAME] - What we have now. To avoid duplication errors, objects declared this way should overwrite objects earlier in the mod-stack. For the sake of compatibility with older mods, [OBJECT_TYPE:NAME] acts as a valid synonym.

[EDIT:OBJECT_TYPE:NAME] - Allows for the editing of previously declared objects, by adding tokens. Useful for mods that edit the same objects, e.g. adding modded reactions to the vanilla entities, or compatibility mods. Could have SUB-TOKENS similar to the creature variant ones (ADD_TOKEN, REMOVE_TOKEN, something for further editing castes/materials/tissues within the object). Otherwise, simply adds tokens. If no object of the OBJECT_TYPE and NAME exists, returns a compatibility error message.

[REMOVE:OBJECT_TYPE:NAME] - Removes an object. For those that don't like a certain object, especially useful if the vanilla raws are considered the top mod of the mod-stack, and vanilla objects thus cannot be otherwise removed. May or may not return an error if there is no such object.

The vanilla raws would of course not include any of these two latter declaration types, as they are only useful for mods further down the mod-stack, but I believe a system using something like them would be optimal in case of a mod-stack.

1470
DF Suggestions / Re: Advanced Weapons
« on: September 27, 2019, 12:24:00 pm »
+1 yes please :)

Quote from: Atarlost on September 27, 2019, 02:05:06 am
Quote from: DerMeister on September 25, 2019, 05:42:08 pm
Quote from: Atarlost on September 25, 2019, 04:59:04 pm
Ranged melee doesn't get really useful to NPCs until combat formations are introduced, but they could be programmed to drop them and use a secondary weapon if they can't safely back up, or if their opponent has reclosed the distance before they could make an attack. 

I'd consider a [Wearable:X] tag for secondary weapons.  A spear is never going to be wearable.  Even a short spear is most of the wielder's height.  You might be able to tie one to your pack, but you wouldn't be able to access it quickly.  A longsword is wearable for an adult human, but may be too long to hang from the belt of an elf and is almost certainly too long for a dwarf.  A shortsword is wearable for a dwarf, but might still be too long for at least some kobolds.
Spear will be wearable for troll or ogre.
Trolls and ogres probably shouldn't be able to use conventional weapons at all.  The relative handle diameters are too small for much larger hands to grip properly if their hands are in proportion to their bodies.  There's a reason small diameter tools like awls and screwdrivers and fishing poles have larger diameter handles.  If they're intelligent enough to make weapons they should have their own racial weapons that smaller creatures can't get their hands around. 

The "X" in "[Wearable:X]" is the size of the applicable creature, no?

Atarlost's point is a good one, what about a "[SIZE_DIMINISHES_FORCE:X]" where any creature over the size of X wielding the weapon gets a force penalty, to make the force equal to the same attack by a creature with the size of X. It is not the most elegant model for this, but I have no idea how one would do it truly realistically, and a notion of it in the game would surely be nice.

Basically, if a giant (size 9'000'000) tries to wield a human-sized spear with [SIZE_DIMINISHES_FORCE:100000] (an arbitrary number for now) it would not hit with the force of a giant, but of a humanoid the size 100'000.

A [MAX_SIZE:X] token I find unrealistic, as one can stick a toothpicks into blocks of cheese or fruit IRL, although not with great force.

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