Bay 12 Games Forum

so, having only ever had to wait (wasn't even really waiting for them) for the small bug fix patches in the aftermath of df 2012, can anyone tell us (or just me) how long there might be between feature list completion and release?  If no estimate is possible, how long was such a period for df2012?

It looks like the 2010 pre-release bugtesting started in earnest around Jan 23, so a bit over two months [until the April 1 release].  The testing team got copies on Feb 14.

I think the more important question to ask is: Do elves hug trees now?

I think a reminder should be made that this release is not indicative of Toady's usual development cycles and is, in fact, exceptionally long by a wide margin.

Will it be possible for the player to direct the manufacture of special-material weapons based on known vulnerabilities?  For example, if weredonkeys are vulnerable to zinc, are there any plans to insert zinc into the possibilities for weapon/bolt forging?  An adventurer might even discover the zinc secret by asking a shopkeeper why in Armok's name does he have zinc bolts for sale.

Quote from: G-Flex

If weaknesses to odd materials start coming into play (weremeerkats weak to silver, evil regions populated by blistered giant rabbits weak to gold, demons weak to nothing but other demon bones, etc.), then would that open the possibility of broader material selection in fortress mode? Obviously right now there's no sense to making gold swords and hammers, but if you've got the possibility of things like an outbreak of lycanthropy where they're actually necessary due to material weakness, it starts making more sense to be able to do that.

Yeah, if it came up that we started tormenting people with esoteric stuff, we'd need to start having reasonable ways to get at counter measures.

Quote from: NW_Kohaku

Toady, where do you see the ability of players to affect AI behavior?  Will we see something that goes more towards having the ability to directly script dwarven AI to use certain items or take certain actions using some logic operations or a rudimentary scripting ability?  Or do you see this as being more a matter of dwarves having to somehow learn how and when to properly perform actions or use items from the properties they have in the raws alone?  While I'm obviously interested in the effects this can have, I'm also interested in what sort of game design philosophy you have about what level of control you want players to be exerting over their dwarves.

At the extreme end of the potion/material discussion, out beyond what maybe anybody was asking for, I'm absolutely against having to master some sort of scripting language just to get dwarves to poison their weapons.  At the same time, it'll be difficult to get dwarves to use certain exotic syndrome-causing materials in a reasonable way that satisfies a player, especially one using potion mods.  Maybe it'll end up being usage hints in the raws and classifications in-play for use in the military etc. with some sensible defaults.  Ideally they'd be able to handle it like food, water and alcohol (to the extent those aren't broken), and perhaps those would be brought into the same system.  For more exotic actions and random weirdness, maybe there are cases in the mods where you'd really want to write some kind of script down, especially for a non-dwarven mod race that does something or other, but that level of support is pretty hard to prioritize when I don't really need or want it for dwarves.

On the other hand, writing from the perspective that every command the player gives will be credited to fortress position holders, if an appropriate official were to order that a liquid, with usage hints/whatever in the raws, will now be used for something entirely outside those bounds (like coating a weapon with syrup), that action might be anything from brilliant to quirky to wasteful to tyrannical to suicidal, depending on the situation.  The dwarves aren't currently capable of judging their officials and it's a very difficult problem most of the time.  If a randomly-generated creature has a weakness to syrup, maybe coating the weapons with syrup is simply a practical strategy, and in that case syrup wouldn't have the "weapon coating" usage hint in the raws.  That coating action is entirely up to player ingenuity, much like ordering the creation of a complicated machine, and it's a reasonable thing to allow.

Manually ordering a dwarf to perform a specific series of actions that can't be presaged in the raws/code might be the only way to save your fort and might be a reasonably orderable action made by some official, but that kind of power can degrade the atmosphere we want to build.  It's going to depend on the specific cases, but for the sake of guiding discussion on a wide range of future topics, I think it's best that the player feels that a dwarf's autonomy is being respected.  The thing that makes dwarf mode not strictly a hands-off simulation is that you are allowed to compromise dwarves' autonomy if they hold fortress positions, to the extent that you are selecting actions that fall within their position's purview.  If an order typically makes it feel like the dwarves are being controlled like marionettes, forced to do things against their will, etc., the order should probably be altered or removed.  Presently, there are a ton of things that dwarves don't care about that they should care about, but this is the overall idea.

Workshop Material Use and Specific Object Construction
    Ability to specify material used in jobs

With procedurally generated creatures, having no idea what to expect is part of the fun.  But with procedurally generated plants (with which in-game civilizations have centuries or millennia of experience), will there be a way for the player to get an idea of what a plant is, its farming requirements, products, etc.?

Random minerals should be fun.  Even the current stock minerals can be a bit confusing, and random minerals might add to that further, so further exposition of what minerals can be used for and so on might be necessary there.

Threetoe:   Okay, this next question is from James, he asks 'Will you ever begin to include randomized main races, or will the player interactable races always be limited to token dwarves, elves, goblins and humans? And a smattering of chimera tribes' ... the animal people.
Toady:   Is that what he means by the smattering of ... I don't know how to say these words, is it chimera? Yeah, it must be the animal people. Unless you meant something else.
Threetoe:   Yeah, we could always just call the animal people something else, other than turtle man, we could make it some other name and still be a turtle man.
Toady:   I think it's always been in the plan to have randomized main races, it was up on the old dev pages, I don't remember if it made it anywhere on the new dev pages or not? I think it might actually be there. Maybe not. It would be the last one, because doing randomized civilizations is an extra step beyond randomized monsters. Because we've kind of been easing in, we have the forgotten beasts now, we've got the titans, those are randomized. We have some of the underworld creatures randomized and we wanted to ease in to having some of the regular kind of monsters in the woods and stuff, randomizing those with a few extra night creature entries at some point and then kind of ease in to having some randomized regular creatures and then finally adding in randomized civilization creatures. The problem with randomized civilization creatures is there needs to be a lot of exposition or you're just going to be completely confused about what's going on, but it would definitely be an option, I think there would be a slider or something for how strange you want your world to be because we definitely think having dwarves and elves and goblins is cool for a lot of people just to kind of understand what's going on without having to do a lot of extra reading.

[...]

Threetoe:   Alright, so the next one is from Eric, he asks, “Have you considered creating random materials in the game so civilizations and players could perform experiments on the materials to determine their properties? Given the structure of the raws it seems like it could be pretty easy to create random metals in world creation.”
Toady:   So there already are random materials in the game, just not the type Eric wanted. There's the rain, can be a random material ...
Threetoe:   Oh that's right, yeah.
Toady:   When it rains some kind of ... And mists, the mists are also defined as a random material.
Threetoe:   We just need a a solid now ...
Toady:   Yeah, we just need a solid ... there can be solids if it gets cold and the mist freezes I guess, or if it snows ... I don't remember if it can snow slime or not, but it might not be able to, but if it could then that would be a random material. The important point is that these random materials are raw files, they are generated just like raw files, then it just kind of puts them in with your other text files and pretends to load them, it actually goes through and processes the text file and everything. So it is just a matter of will and time and interface, etcetera; all of the game making pieces of it but not the technical framework for getting things like random metals in the game. And avoiding the kind of gray sludge problem where it's like does your world turn into mush if everyone is walking around with like akabarite shields or whatever. You're like, 'What is that?!'
Threetoe:   Yeah, it's the same problem as the randomized monsters, it's like when you see the name, and every time you play the game it's a new monster with a completely different thing you never get used to it.
Toady:   We just have to overcome exposition and then we'll be all over that.

Any chance of seeing 64-bit versions of DF in the near future?

Quote from: PTTG??

Are there currently any plans to make Dwarf Fortress large-address-aware? A mod is currently available to do so, and the response has been largely positive in that it allows history to work for a significantly greater time. It would be great to see that make its way into default DF.

I have no idea what this would do both with my stuff and with some of my libraries.  I'm not eager to introduce a bunch of strange bugs.  When we go to 64 bits I'll have to deal with it.

Toady, you implied that the new realistic plants will replace the old ones in the upcoming version. Will that include unusual plants like sun berries and silver barbs, that don't really have a real life equivalent?