Bay 12 Games Forum

Can someone give me a brief list of the features that are included in the upcoming update? There is so much i read, and i dont really know what comes now in this update, and whats planned. Im a bit confused Would be much appreciated.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Vgy5h5tmWFZLqCJMYd1cbGG67SUCSIn30Y--DNymzdg/preview?sle=true

Do adventurers count as free agents? I don't remember reading anything that said they are treated differently when it comes to being in the guard in the dev logs.

I don't think an adventurer can join someone else's guard organization.  They can lead a squad of their own -- maybe that's what you're thinking of?

Will it (soon or eventually) be possible to give plants or plant products
either a "happy" flag or an "euphoria" flag (beyond the happiness
provided by eating something a particular dwarf likes)?
[...]
Would a syndrome be the best way to approach happiness?  Or, would it
be possible to give such foods (as opposed to drinks) the alcohol tag,
so they prevent an unhappy thought in dwarves the way alcohol does?

The effects of intoxicants, including alcohol, will be expanded later:

Quote from: penguinofhonor

TL;DR: Alcohol and drugs should be weak poisons, poison effects should be created for them should be usable by creatures, poisons should be turned into general substances and allow positive effects as well as negative.

Yeah, I alluded to this in my dev notes on the 2nd -- poison effects are already just "creature interaction syndromes" on the material.  That I don't have ingestion yet is the main barrier to doing alcohol, and as I add in positive effects, everything else would work out (of course there'd need to be AI and jobs and so on to use things for whatever purpose).  The framework is in place, it just needs to be used for more things.  It can also be extended to things that have nothing to do with materials, though for that change a bit more would have to be done to syndrome indices.  I think I mentioned "gaze" attacks there, though at some point you have to worry about a proper extension to the full "magic" framework, which is something to be more careful about.

I decided to take a detour into poison land today. The framework should be easily extended to other material effects and to some non-material effects on creatures as well later on (for instance, alcohol effects or ointments that do whatever, as well as auras around creatures, 'gaze attacks', etc etc), but for now, I'm going to go with contact/injected/inhaled poisons that cause syndromes in affected classes of creatures involving pain, swelling, oozing wounds, bruising, blisters, numbness, paralysis, fever, bleeding, coughing/vomiting blood, nausea, vomiting, unconsciousness, necrosis, impaired vision, drowsiness and dizziness as a starter set, with some possible extensions as they arise. If it makes sense, you'll be able to move those effects around from the initial site (for say contact or injection) to body parts by category/function (so you could have something cause headaches, for example, or make the gums bleed... one of the wikipedia snakes had that... not my fault).

Could we in some kind of way relabel certain combinations of ingredients
with a recipe name?

Recipes are on the dev page, but they won't be in the upcoming release:

Quote from: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev.html

Adventurer Role: Thief
    [...]
    Inns, taverns and dens
        Taverns/inns
            [...]
            Recipes/drink quality

In reference to your question about syndromes I'm afraid I don't quite know. I am unaware as to whether syndromes can effect the emotion system so I think that's a good question for Toady: Will it be possible for syndromes to cause specific emotions in creatures?

Not yet, but it's fair game for later, e.g. love potions and stuff.

Will watermelons explode on impact?

Will multi-component/multi-layer objects be able to rupture under pressure, releasing the concealed contents?

Quote from: smurfingtonthethird on March 31, 2014, 10:21:22 pm

Do vegetables and plants shmush if they are thrown at people, or walls or things?

Nope.  Projectile impacts are the same as in the current version.  Items getting damaged (in the same way that creatures do) will be a big change when it comes.

I hear that the cave-in system will undergo large improvements.
Does this mean that creatures will be able to "attack" the ground? Perhaps a change encompassing mining?

Cave-in improvements, as Toady has discussed them, have concerned what happens after a tile is removed, not the process of the tile's removal.  However, it's fair game for creatures to damage structural tiles through whatever means -- the dev page has "ability to dig" for siegers, which could end up including digging techniques other than traditional mining.

Does this mean we can smell which dwarves have not taken a bath recently?

And on that note, would a discerning nose be able to pick up the scent of blood? [...] like from an injured creature or whatever.

ODOR_LEVEL is intended as a simplistic system.  It's not going to incorporate any complex modifiers yet.

Would Chia seeds be included in garden plants?

Toady posted a list of garden plants, and chia seeds don't seem to be in it.

Is it possible to give plants attack flags?

Nope.

With the addition of many real-world plants, and plant products, will there be any way to hang a revamped cooking industry on the improved culinary palette? For instance, I noticed that you included chickpeas; many regional dishes are made with chickpea, such as humus. There's also oats, and fruits, so breakfast muesli is also a possible product. Are there any plans to revamp the food preparation reaction to include a wider variety of possible food products, based on the source ingredients?

Recipes are on the dev page, but they won't be in the upcoming release:

Adventurer Role: Thief
    [...]
    Inns, taverns and dens
        Taverns/inns
            [...]
            Recipes/drink quality

...hmm. None of these have GROWDUR tokens. And every single one has [SPRING][SUMMER][AUTUMN][WINTER]. Assuming these are finalized raws, the seasonal crops mod will need some serious updating. Are these finalized raws, or still subject to revision? It's not an important problem by any means; just wondering.

The list of new plants has more or less settled.

Do members of a race all get the same SMELL_TRIGGER, or is it individualized? Can it be improved? (Since it can in real life.)
Is it going to be affected by genetics?
[...]

What affects the ODOR_LEVEL?

ODOR_LEVEL is assigned to a creature type in the raws.  At most, you can make it caste-specific.  The only way to alter an individual's ODOR_LEVEL would be via a syndrome.  That means no genetic component (remember, this is a quick and dirty system).

The smell system allow for detection of corpses and carrion? I'm asking not with undead in mind, but with normal corpses and miasma.

The devlog's specific mention of "animated corpses" suggests that only creatures will emit smells, not items.

Are we going to see material-based mandates go back in anytime soon, or are you going to be reworking that system?

Material-based mandates may get reinstated when this is done:

Workshop Material Use and Specific Object Construction
    Ability to specify material used in jobs
    Ability to order the construction of a specific item or decoration of item in complete detail

However, mandates are still a placeholder feature in many ways -- they don't currently reflect the economic situation and the official's personality/mood as much as they should.  So it's all subject to change.

I also haven't understood a thing (i'm not english skilled ): are you talking about only of army formations? While the "4x" evolution of the game? Even here there's nothing planned?

To me, 4X implies certain fixed goals and win conditions.  DF won't have those.  It does aim to support many aspects of 4X gameplay, if that's the kind of fortress the player wants to have.

It's unclear whether the game will ever have tech trees:

It's possible to get sort of tech-treey with it, but I haven't done anything like that, and it's not set up to point to certain positions or to have positions confer any abilities on their own.  The larger questions surrounding knowledge and technology have not been resolved.

You might be interested in the dev page to see what's planned.

Can you explain hill dwarves a little more holistically? What exactly will they do and what will their relation to your fortress be? Will they actually be on site (i.e. on your fort screen) or just an invisible force that sorta matters? Will they be attacked by armies and that cause problems? Will they wander on and off screen and just be just uncontrollable dwarves? What do they do?

Rainseeker:   I'm sorry, for those of us that don't know what you mean, what are hill dwarves?
Toady:   Hill dwarves ... The main idea is that if you want to have an army arc and you want to be able to compete at the numbers that other civilizations are putting out there, and if you want to actually go on the offensive especially - because you can lock up your fortress and trap people and do horrible siege things to them and magma and later when we have moving fortresses I don't even want to know what people are going to grind the poor attacking armies into - but if you want to go on the offensive and you hope to actually make your mark on the world then you're going to need more dwarves than fifty or sixty or seventy dwarves, and this is where hill dwarves come in. Now hill dwarves, it's not just to say that you have a bunch of dwarves living just in hills, like their copies of hobbits or something, but it's just meaning that they're outside your fortress, either in the wilderness or they've colonised the underground lairs that you've got, you could make deeper colonies of dwarves as well. And that might be related to getting extra mining, it might be related to just getting extra farming, or they could totally just be subsisting by themselves. But the idea would be that you could send out dwarves from your fortress, you can arm them, you can train them and you can send them out to cause trouble. At the same time they'd be able to come to your fortress and trade, probably mostly food and other things like that, so you can do some exports that way without having to wait a long time for a caravan; if you want to do it. Like I was saying, this is only really required for a fort that wants to be an expansionist military rather than a strictly defensive dwarf military setup. At the same time that we're adding hill dwarves we'll probably - if they're not already in - we'll be adding the fortress embark scenarios, so that you can say 'We have three hundred dwarves left to go found a fortress out in the wild' or, whatever 'to go found a fortress on the border with the goblin kingdom'; then you'd have dwarves inside your fortress and you'd have dwarves outside your fortress. It totally changes the relationship with migrants and how many dwarves you have, so it's a big deal. But that's not to say that the old gameplay system wouldn't also be preserved where you can start with a small number of dwarves and have a different sort, or a smaller kind of operation going on, rather than one where you're worried about playing more of this world strategic game. But if you want to play the world strategic game, which is part of what the army arc is about and part of what having a world map is about - it's so underused in dwarf mode - then you need more numbers, and you can't just have them all on the map, it's just not practical, as we've seen with the frames per second that we get. The alternatives are like having ever dwarf count for twenty dwarves or something, but we just didn't want to do it that way, especially with it how it has to match in with adventure mode, and how adventure mode actually has all the people all over the place. So your fortress would have more sprawl to it itself.
Rainseeker:   Are you thinking that you'd allow dwarves to train, or you could set up training that happens off the map, basically?
Toady:   Yeah, and it could be all kinds of things. You basically have representatives from your fortress sent out to the ... kind of in the way we were talking about, as the player you're in control of the official capacities of the dwarves, it would give you that position over a whole population that you have even less control over, all these hill dwarves. I don't know if you have to take care of you hill dwarves, maybe they'll leave, maybe they'll just attack, try and get new people in charge of the main fortress. We've kind of put you in the position of being a noble from the beginning in a way, and then when you become a barony you would be a baron over your barony of hill dwarves, so taxing the hill dwarves might be a big theme, going out and taxing your poor hill dwarves. We don't want to get too far off topic, I guess, not that we ever had a problem with that before, but it's just I don't want to talk about something I haven't completely ... well, that never stopped me either, but let me just say that Zach and I have not one hundred percent worked this out, but that's the idea with hill dwarves, and that's the justification for hill dwarves, and no, you're not going to have to have hill dwarves.

[...]

Rainseeker:   So let's recall what the purpose of the other dwarven sites are. The hill dwarves are supposed to supplement your kingdom, so to speak, correct?
Toady:   Yeah, yeah, they function ... or they will function, see there's an issue now with just how much you can do in fortress mode with hill dwarf settlements because they're not your hill dwarf settlements yet, we don't have that linkage tightly established yet, but it will be. Then that will give you a much higher number of dwarves to work with, though they can't all be on screen. Because the whole issue is if you want to have a strategic impact on the world and have a political impact on the world you just need a bunch of warm, fat, drunk bodies to get that business done, and you can't do that with two hundred dwarves. But you can't have a thousand, two thousand dwarves running around on screen or the game will ... not run. So you've got hill dwarves to supplement things, or to form like the bulk of your military for example, of your unskilled military. Your dwarves will still be like the equivalent of your, say, knights or whatever and your sergeants, your leaders.. for your military; they'll be the ones that know what they're doing. And then you'll have a bunch of drunks.
Capntastic:   So the hill dwarves are basically a conduit for your fortress to interact with the rest of the world?
Toady:   Yeah, yeah, at least in that way ... I think there will be places for your dwarves to also have direct impact, but when it comes to military stuff, and certain trade things, you're going to have to act through intermediate sites just because of the sheer numbers behind it. The deep sites are ... they act in a similar fashion for underground business, but they're also ... we haven't really planned that exactly how strange they're going to be, but they supplement your food, that kind of thing, if you don't want to farm, you can trade with them.