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Topics - Digganob

Pages: [1] 2
1
DF Gameplay Questions / What does squareness do in combat?
« on: January 12, 2024, 03:17:16 am »
If you remove randomness in size and strength from humans in the raws, and spawn a couple in the object testing arena, and use quick stabs with a steel shortsword against an iron mail shirt, what you will find is that you may or may not penetrate that shirt. But strangely, the "squareness" of the attack seems not to affect that likelihood very much, if at all. I have sometimes penetrated with a low-squareness attack, only to have a higher squareness attack be blocked, on the same target, on the next attack.

That by itself is interesting, because it implies that there is factor which varies randomly from attack to attack which effects either the momentum of your attack, or directly affects the armor penetration check. But this also means that squareness doesn't do quite what we'd expect it to. If squareness determined what percentage of potential momentum actually hits the target, then it would more strongly determine penetration of armor. But its role is apparently very small, or nonexistent, in armor penetration.

So, my simple question is, what does it do then? I wouldn't think it is useless. It's one of the two factors to consider when making an attack. But its use is not obvious given this information.

Bonus question, if anyone has any ideas: What is the other random factor in combat? Since there apparently is one besides squareness, what might it be?

This was all tested in .47, by the way, the most recent version with adventure mode released.

2
DF Suggestions / Inscriptions on Artifacts
« on: December 24, 2023, 01:31:22 pm »
Artifacts should have a chance to have various kinds of inscriptions carved upon them. For instance, a sword which has some short phrase, or random proverb or platitude, written somewhere on it, perhaps related to the creator's personality. I think this would do a lot to add flavor to artifacts.

They could also have some commemorative inscription, such as "in memory of (creator's friend or family)." Or even something relating to a worshipped deity.

These could have a lot of story-telling potential. They add another dimension to the personality expressed in each artifact.

3
DF Gameplay Questions / Why is the battle axe chop contact area larger than the shortsword slash?
« on: December 10, 2023, 12:07:09 am »
As above.

4
DF Modding / A Question about Penetration and Momentum
« on: December 08, 2023, 12:23:41 am »
I seem to have either run into an issue either with my own calculation of momentum and penetration using the formulas provided on the following page:

https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Material_science#Attack_Momentum

Or otherwise, the formulas provided are obsolete, or simply wrong.

I calculated the momentum of a steel spear's stab like so, with an average human being the wielder: 1000/(1000000/70000 + 10*(1/3.14)) = 57.2395833333

Then I calculated the momentum required to penetrate an iron mail shirt, like so: ((155/430) + 21*(310/720))*12 = 112.825581395

There are bits left out of these formulas because they are irrelevant, particularly armor and weapon quality, which are 1, as well as the velocity multiplier of a stab, which is also 1, and so do not impact the formula whatsoever.

Now, as the momentum of a steel spear thrust is lower than the momentum required to penetrate an iron mail shirt, it shouldn't be able to pierce with a normal attack, right? Obviously not, a steel spear easily pierces, as I'm sure most of you would know, and testing easily proves that.

An additional observation is that if you calculate a battle axe's momentum using the same formula, you get a different result than is indicated in the table of momentums you would get with an average dwarf, that is: 85.574127907

This would indicate perhaps some inconsistency between the formulas, or some error on my part, but I am at a loss as to what may be the case. Can anyone see or tell me what the issue is here? Because obviously there's some error somewhere, and having reliable formulas for the use in modding custom materials and modifying existing ones is absolutely necessary, so if this is an issue with the formulas themselves then this is a major issue. I hope I'm the one who's made the error, and that I can simply be corrected.

5
DF Gameplay Questions / Armor User and "squareness" of Attacks
« on: December 06, 2023, 01:27:48 pm »
Quote
Quote from: Toady One
Yeah, your "deflection roll" is based on your armor use skill, but in the first calculation your dodge roll counts more and replaces your deflection roll if it is higher.  That roll is thrown into an equation with the hit roll to get the "squareness" of the attack from 0 to 20.  There's some pure luck at this stage though, and the squareness can sometimes be increased regardless of the rolls.

Later, the same deflection roll is used directly with relevant worn items one by one to modify attack momentum using the material/etc. -- dodge rolls don't enter into this.  Item familiarity can increase this deflection bonus.

In addition to speed, high armor skill also decreases your "clunkiness" with heavy worn objects.  The clunkiness sum applies a minus to many skill rolls (mostly combat, but a few non-combat).

I found this bit in a discussion from several years ago, and I'd like to ask if the bits about armor user and "squareness" (which is presumably the same as the current squareness of strikes you can see in adventure mode) are still true. The wiki doesn't seem to say anywhere that armor user actually increases deflection chance, and only mentions that squareness "increases damage," whatever that means.

Any information about squareness would especially be appreciated. It doesn't seem to be factored into armor penetration at all given the combat formulas found on the wiki.

6
DF Modding / Contact Area Question
« on: November 29, 2023, 01:16:47 am »
So there is no true difference between stabbing and slashing weapons fundamentally, it's just that stabbing weapons have low contact area, meaning low damage but high piercing, and slashing weapons have high damage and low piercing, correct?

This doesn't seem very useful for representing real differences between cutting types. Consider that if you're slashing at someone's arm, the length of the sword edge which is in contact with their arm at any one point is quite low. However, in the raws, a longsword has a much larger contact area for its slashing attack, accounting for how much longer it is, of course. That is useful for things like dismemberment, as you can obviously chop through a larger limb with that area. However, it also decreases the likelihood that the longsword will pierce a material, just as if it was a stabbing weapon with a larger contact area, no?

This is very troublesome for weapon balance, it seems to me. For modding, especially for weapon rebalancing, might it be best to find some baseline contact area for slashing weapons, to some maximum point where it might reasonably keep in contact with a given material. For some weapons this may be smaller, like curved swords and axes. This would also make larger, heavier weapons, like great axes, better at piercing, quite appropriately.

Anyone have any input on my observations? I want to have a pass at a weapon rebalance mod, and this is obviously some pretty important stuff to consider.

7
DF Modding / Weapon/Armor Materials' Rarity in Entities
« on: November 29, 2023, 12:11:05 am »
What affects the likelihood that a material will be used by a civilization for weapons and armor? Clearly it does not depend merely value, as silver is not of course as common a weapon material as iron is, despite the same material value.

Is there any other information anyone can give me that would indicate what materials would be more or less common? I want to add an intermediate steel alloy to humans, and I want to make it a little uncommon for any individual soldier to be using it. Or, perhaps, as common as it is for a dwarf to be using it.

8
DF Modding / How is armor strength determined in the raws?
« on: October 08, 2023, 04:29:23 pm »
I want to make different types of armor, but I am at a loss as to how armor strength is precisely determined. My best idea is that it is determined by LAYER_SIZE.

For instance, could you make two breastplate items, which cover the same areas, and are made of the same material, but which offer different strengths of protection? Or, for instance, make a chainmail shirt which is stronger than the vanilla chainmail shirt? Or a helmet that is stronger than the vanilla helmet?

9
DF General Discussion / Helmet Variant Suggestion Thread
« on: October 03, 2023, 12:38:51 am »
I will soon begin work on a very large mod, of which the primary purpose will be to expand the visual variation of helmets and, to some extent, armor and weapons of the different civilizations, by adding many different helmets to the game, each with a randomly-generated, and possibly randomly-decorated sprite.

What I request of the readers of this thread, is to offer suggestions for different historical helmet designs you wish to be added, example pictures and that sort of thing are certainly welcome, as well as ideas on which civilizations to add them to, ideas on the modding itself, etc. Any and every idea is welcome, even fantasy-type helmets. As noted earlier, variations of weapons and other armor will also be made, so suggestions for any of these are also welcome.

On the modding side of this, the method I will be using is the creation of many different helmet items, with a different ID of course for each one, which will then have different chances of being available for each civilization, so as to avoid over-saturation, and result in more unique individual civilizations. Each helmet type will then be given a selection of sprites, which will be chosen from randomly when worn by a given creature. Along with the variations in design of the different helmet sprites, some may include random decorations, things like engravings or horns or plumes may be selected from randomly as well, which will add another layer to the generation, resulting in a multiplicative increase in the possible variations.

As for the helmets' properties themselves, as the code lacks any tools for protection of different parts of the head, and so, all helmets will cover the same area: The head, and only the head. I have considered the coverage token, which in vanilla is used to make the cap effective only 50% of the time when a dwarf is struck in the head, but I have decided the use of this would only make some helmets straight upgrades to others. So all helmets will have coverage 100%, until tools are added to offer differing part protection for head items.

If anyone has suggestions or advice for the background modding side of the project, I will gladly receive them.

10
DF Gameplay Questions / Buildings with strange materials.
« on: August 25, 2023, 09:17:12 am »
While doing some science I embarked right next to a goblin dark pits, when I spied multiple small structures in my area. They were all of slightly different sizes, but all square, with an entrance and no door, with one tile thick walls, and a floor as a roof above it all.

The especially strange thing about them is that they were made of normally impossible wall materials. Specifically, leather, and plant matter. One was of wild boar leather, another of white stork leather, and one more of rope reed. I was playing with the steam version, and the leather walls appeared as constructed stone walls would, and the rope reed walls as dirt, but all with appropriate colors, the leather of a light brown, and the plant walls of green.

Anyone have any idea what these are? Any normal civilized site, I should think, would have blocked me from embarking, and as far as I know no one makes buildings out of leather or plant matter (besides wood).

Edit: I think it's a tent, now that I've done some research on it.

11
DF Modding / Entity with [UTTERANCES] creatures receiving dwarven names (sometimes)
« on: August 14, 2023, 09:55:10 pm »
My mod entity is producing historical figures with dwarven last names, despite their having no intelligible speech. They entirely lack the [CAN_SPEAK] token, but still have the [UTTERANCES] token, as kobolds do, and yet some of them, seemingly at random, and even at the very creation of the world, have dwarven last names.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

^ The raws for my entity. I think the issue might just have something to do with positions somehow, as even though they don't seem to adopt titles in the course of political careers, they didn't seem to (though I may have just not been paying attention) have any dwarven last names before I added them.

12
DF Modding / Mod Bug with Item Thieves
« on: August 03, 2023, 11:19:55 pm »
This is a bug that has to do with modded entities, so I am unsure if it should be posted here or reported as a proper bug.

If you have more than one entity with [ITEM_THIEF], it appears that all entities nearby with this token will send out thieves to rob you at the same time. I have had thieves visit three or four times now, and each time, both kobolds and my modded creatures with [ITEM_THIEF] in their entity raw came at the same time. Interestingly, however, they came as separate little groups, from different edges of the map.

13
DF Modding / !!SCIENCE!!: An ascent from the pit of hubris.
« on: July 28, 2023, 06:12:51 pm »
I have mistakenly posted research which was based upon erroneous raw edits. However, I have returned with truth.

In my work to create a mod of my own, I have come upon the question of how, precisely, castes and their sizes impact the size of armor a civilization may wear.

There are three methods I know which may be used to change the size of a caste in a creature: The use of, CHANGE_BODY_SIZE_PERC, BODY_APPEARANCE_MODIFIER, and BODY_SIZE, all of which must be placed into each caste via SELECT_CASTE.

TEST STRUCTURE:
These tokens are placed instead of the Xs in the following edited tokens of the human creature:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
The goal of the test is for the armor sizing of humans to remain the same, as is verified by whether they may still, upon the following changes, equip wild boar men and hyena men armor, the two animal men which are close enough to human size for them to wear human armor, and vice versa. This is because they are within about seventh of their size. How precisely this range is determined is unknown.

For this test, each caste has been changed to the following degrees: FEMALEs to 35,000, MALEs staying at 70,000, and BIGMALEs being size 350,000. Theoretically, if armor size is determined by the average of the species, determined by each caste size multiplied by its frequency in birth, then this should result in the average of the species remaining 70,000.

BODY_SIZE for the base creature, for all but test four, remains in adulthood at 70,000

TEST ONE:
If BODY_APPEARANCE_MODIFIER is used, with the values assigned as follows:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
The result is no change to the armor sizing of the civilization, and all humans being able to wear their own human-sized armor. FEMALEs, however, as expected, have a hard time wielding anything with one hand. It is unknown if they are completely unable to wield anything with a one-handed size beyond 35,000, as I have found no examples of it in my tests.

TEST TWO:
If BODY_APPEARANCE_MODIFIER is used differently, with the values assigned as follows:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
The result is no change to the armor sizing of the civilization, and all humans being able to wear their own human-sized armor, despite the actual average of the species being higher than should allow the equippage of hyena men helmets, which are sized for 65,000.

TEST THREE:
If CHANGE_BODY_SIZE_PERC is used, with the values assigned as follows (with males being excluded as nothing new is being declared in the raw):
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
The result is that the armor sizing of the humans becomes ~that of a tiger man, with all humans still being able to wear human-sized armor. This can be inferred by the production of various animal men armor until a size either smaller or larger than allowed is reached, and finding the average of these boundaries. This method is not precise, but it does not need to be, as explained later.

More interestingly is that the weight of armor is halved. This too will be explored later.

TEST FOUR:
If BODY_SIZE is used, with the values assigned as follows:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
The result is the precise same all respects to test three, though this method does allow for more precise control over the body size of each caste, as it allows for the precise body size to be chosen, instead of being multiplied from the body size of the base creature.


From these tests, four primary conclusions are to be drawn:

Firstly, the modifying of BODY_APPEARANCE_MODIFIER results in no changes to the average size of a species, nor to the weight of armor. This allows a method to changing the size of a creature's castes without affecting an entire civilization's armor sizes or weights, while still affecting individual caste's size, as is apparent with their ability to wield various weapons with or without both hands.

Secondly, that CHANGE_BODY_SIZE_PERC and the final BODY_SIZE effect the same value, or rather that CHANGE_BODY_SIZE_PERC changes the value of BODY_SIZE with no apparent effect other than a straightforward change to the value of it.

Thirdly, that the armor sizing of an creature is determined by the average of its caste's size, that is to say, the size of each caste at adulthood, divided by the number of castes a creature manifests.

And fourthly, that the weight of armor is determined by the size of the smallest caste of the creature it is sized for. This is made evident also when the armor of ant men is observed weighing only two kilograms, yet being very close to the same sizing as humans'.

There are many interesting uses for these conclusions, as well as yet more interesting tests which may be done using this knowledge. One which would require more knowledge and confidence in the mechanics than I possess is to test whether ant men armor, being lighter than human armor, but of the same sizing and therefore equippable by humans, allows a human soldier to move quicker while wearing it than when wearing regular human armor, and whether the weight of the armor has any influence on its defensive properties.

I will be using these conclusions myself for the creation of a mod involving a civilization of goblins of varying sizes, which are unable to produce any armor of their own, but should hopefully steal some during worldgen from either humans or dwarves to wear themselves. I will likely be utilizing BODY_APPEARANCE_MODIFIER for this, as the larger castes of my goblins will be very large, and so the creation of redundant classes would be necessary in order to balance the size of the species as a whole.

14
DF Modding / Castes, body appearance modifiers, armor and weapons.
« on: July 18, 2023, 04:51:26 pm »
What is the value checked when the game needs to know if a creature may equip a piece of armor or weapon?

I know that it is not the actual size of the creature in question, that is why no dwarves may equip some weapons, even though they may be able to equip them two or even on handed if the minimum size requirements applied to individual creature. I also know that armor is sized to a particular size, and that outside of a small range from that size, other species may not equip it.

However, what I need to know is what value specifically is checked.

For instance, if I have a species of civilized creatures, which are exactly like humans, with the designated creature size being 70,000, but with one of the two castes for each gender being changed to the size of a dwarf using [CHANGE_BODY_SIZE_PERC], what would be the result? Could the smaller caste still equip the "human sized armor"? Could they equip all weapons?

Additionally, may the average size of a creature be made to be smaller than their indicated size should dictate, if [BODY_APPEARANCE_MODIFIER:HEIGHT:90:95:98:100:102:105:110] is changed to
[BODY_APPEARANCE_MODIFIER:HEIGHT:10:25:50:75:90:105:110]? And would such changes prevent any of the smaller creatures from wearing armor or equipping weapons they rightfully ought to be able to given their [BODY_SIZE]?

This is very important for a mod I am working on, which includes castes ranging from half the size of a human, to three times their size. I would greatly appreciate any help.

15
DF Modding / Siegers with less armor?
« on: July 16, 2023, 11:56:30 pm »
Is there any way to make it less likely that siegers/visitors of any kind will not always have the armor available to their civ? Say so that it's somewhat rarer for any individual human to have a breastplate, but for breastplates to still often be available to human civs?

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