Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Jiri Petru on July 08, 2010, 11:36:38 am

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Also, recipe should be able to create several items: For example, "full clothing" recipe with contains leather boots, socks, trousers, etc..

Brilliant!

Also, make the "full clothing" recipe a default one  By clicking "make set of leather clothing", you would get "make any leather headwear", "make any leather bodywear", "make any leather handwear", etc. All in one click! This is something I always wanted to have in the vanilla game and now it actually seems easy to do! I would set my clothier's workshop to make full sets on repeat and never care again!

EDIT:

While we are at it, i would also like ability to "clone item" - say, i have this golden breastplate with image of lion in rubies in it and decide i want several, so i let my dwarves examine it and create recipe for it.

This would, I think, be accessible from the k-z menu of an item. Amongst dump/melt/forbit there would be something like "make recipe" which would create a new recipe, name it after the item and then automatically add it to the appropriate workshop. You could later open the workshop menu to use or edit the recipe.

NO HOSPITALS, PLEASE!

Instead, you would simply visit the physician's home or he would visit yours. Easy as that!

There could be hospitals, of course, but I'd recommend making them something special and exceptional. Probably connected to temples, monasteries, courts, etc. But the standard of medical care should IMHO be visiting house doctors (at least for humans). Hospitals as a stand-alone, strictly secular commercial service didn't really exist until modern times.

I suggest not doing anything. Don't enforce any artificial limits on suggestions, let it flow naturally. Basically, the system is good as it is.

EDIT: And you can of course post small suggestion. Toady is known to read and note every single suggestion in this forum. The problem we're talking about is that small suggestions rarely get enough votes in the eternal voting system(*), which I still don't perceive as a "problem".

(*) Or do they? See "Automatic vein digging" which is a very small suggestion.


EDIT2: OK, actual small (narrow) suggestions now (defining "narrow" as something that can be explained by only a couple of words)
2. (869)   Standing production orders
4. (676)   Workshop Material Selection
5. (494)   Full graphics support
7. (403)   Auto-mining
8. (373)   Job Priorities
12. (220) Integrated Dwarf Foreman
16. (159) [Resolved] Designate Safe Area
17. (140) Yearly Status Report
18. (134) Allow engraving of constructions

That's about half of the TOP20! Where the heck is the problem? It almost sounds like you are complaining only because your small suggestions weren't those small suggestions that made it to the top.

Eh you put alot of work into the first post but doing that would be very inconvienient and time consuming to impliment and to test not to mention all the angry players who don't have time to get more food and want everything to last longer not rot in an hour as they may be too busy. This would be bad as imagine soldiers bringing cooked food in their back pack and they get trapped somehow what if the food goes off?

I'm starting to think I'm really bad at explaining, because people always seem to get me wrong and fixate on the most marginal part.  (My fault, Phreak). But Rvlion seems to understand me 

I'm not concerned about rotting rates... not in the first place... I'm concerned about storage and trade. The idea was to turn the system around 180°... no cooked food would be stored anywhere. No cooked food stockpiles, no backpacks carrying cooked food, nothing. Cooked food might even not exist as an in-game item, as far as I'm concerned. The idea was to store raw food or dried/smoked/salted/etc. food instead. Cooking would occur only right before eating, and the resulting food would be immediately eaten, not stored. Soldiers would carry dried meat or bread or apples or whatever, just not steaks, stews nor potato mashes.

In other words: I'm not proposing to make food rot quicker! I'm proposing to cook it after storing instead of before storing.

As far as players are concerned, almost nothing would change for them. No added micromanagement (perhaps aside from new workshop types like smokeries, which could be automated), nothing. The biggest change would be that dwarves would store raw/preserved food instead of cooked food. A very cosmetic thing, actually.


EDIT: I removed the mention of rotting from the first paragraph, because it seemed to lead people off the right track. It now says: Instead, dwarves would collect ingredients and cook them right before eating. Prepared meals would cease to exist as a game item, or would exist only as leftovers or refuse or something. No more cooking steaks, stews, etc., and storing them in barrels... nor selling them to caravans!

I have to be adding to the huge pile of questions, but, but... there are simply too many things I need to ask! 

The situation could change again when supply/demand goes in and that information is considered as acquirable knowledge, but at that point there could be something like a "chat with merchant" option or something that immediately illuminates all the rough pricing information, or that could just be automatic or something.

Isn't this what the Appraising skill is supposed to simulate? I mean, why have separate systems when we already have skills? The "chat with merchant" option could probably train the skill or add temporary bonuses.

Yeah, it would be a good angle on adding temple rituals etc. in a non-boring way, as well, since they'd be there for your infiltration.  Of course, then there'd need to be some kind of button to let you kneel in front of the sacred rock or whatever.

Have you considered how things like "kneeling in front of the statue" will be controlled in terms of interface, etc? I'm a bid afraid that as you keep adding more and more moves/things to do in Adventure mode, the list of commands will become so enormously long it would be unusable. I'm thinking rare things like these might be triggered through some item in environment - like the statue here. Rather than having the next-to-useless "kneel" command available at all times, the player would click "interact" or something on the statue, and the game would list all possible things to do there, including kneeling. Or something... The other issue is that the player might not know he can kneel in front of the statue and that the game would react (and kneeling everywhere just to try if it does something is a bit over the top), so a menu like this would definitely help. The question here is if you have thought about how to handle controls in adventure mode in a way that would both allow the miriad of functions and still stay user friendly at the same time?

The previous problems with cave rivers make me wary of them, but it would be cool to get the place looking nicer.  The underground is pretty dreary right now.  The treasure hunter role is the best bet there, probably, though that might focus on areas of concentrated local interest at first.  I guess enough of those makes for an exciting underground, but we'll probably need to find some middle ground stuff to avoid over-saturation.  Dwarf mode wants interesting stuff all over underground but it makes adventure mode cave exploration goofy.

How about if some features were added at embark? You could generate the word with the feature frequency optimalised for adventure mode, and then throw in some extra features when the player embarks in fortress mode. Or alternatively scan the neighbouring map squares and move the features from there to the embark idea or something. Or something... The question is whether retrospecting "cheating" like this (that could probably help even in other ideas) is something you might consider, or a thing that doesn't fit into your idea of simulating the world.

Another example might be ore veins and gems. Generate the world with realistic (low) amount of these, then throw in some extra ones to the embark area. Presumably hardcore players could turn off these extras in init, playing a realistic fortress in an area with a single metal vein, not veins of every metal possible. (Site finder would be needed to avoid completely empty areas, though)

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And a brand new question that popped in my mind when you were talking about ordering companions, having your own farm, and moving the time forward.

How about switching from adventure mode to something like fortress mode when ordering minions? You could control you farm like in dwarf mode, then switch back to your adventurer at any time and continue adventuring. Is switching game modes (or more precisely, levels of control) something you would like to explore, or again something you don't like?

The reason why I ask is that I'm almost terrified when I imagine having to command a farm from the "first person view". Imagine a farm with a couple of fields, some cows and pigs, and 7 servants. Still quite a small establishment I think. But the horror of having to find each servant, then order him using tal(k) interface, then some horribly complicated console thing for typing commands and locating them on the map...  How much easier would it be to switch to fortress mode, issue professions using the same system (v-p-l), quering a couple of jobs in workshops, drafting one guy to a military and setting him to guard the "farm burrow", then switching back to adventure mode. Now I can go kill an ettin and be sure the farm won't explode.

The game mode wouldn't have to be an exact copy of dwarf mode, nor do we want it to, I suppose. It could be heavily simplified, and could run in adventure-time instead of the faster fortress-time. I just think it would be much easier to control a farm/castle/hideout/cave/manor/etc. this way. We already have working code for stuff like this, so why not use it?

EDIT: It would be useful even for digging or building houses along with more people.

I think the issue here might be that it's too "god-like" and gives you more control than you would have if you stayed in "first person". But I disagree. Thinking about how dwarf mode works now, not only you can't control dwarves directly, but also all orders you can issue to your dwarves you could easily issue in "first person" too. For example issuing labours in v-p-l is like saying "You are responsible for handling animals and you two for fields". Quering a farmer's workshop to "make milk" and setting it to repeat is like saying "Brian, could you please milk Betty each morning?" And designated some trees to be cut is like "Guys, let's grab axes and get us some timber!" Perhaps it isn't so roleplayingish, but would be much, much more user-friendly.

EDIT: Also, this "farm mode" (for a lack of terms) could double as a way to fast forward time (if it used fortress-time) while staying in direct control.

But the problem is that then you can choose to vote for, say, the sand suggestion, or this "better family stuff" suggestion. A lot of people will think "i only have 3 votes, so i want to make them count -- i'll pick the giant suggestion!". That's what we're trying to avoid.

Why? I don't see a problem in it.

My 200 dwarves fort in 40d ran at about 15 fps which was enough for me not to complain.

My 80 dwarves fort in 2010 runs at about 5 fps(*) which is enough for me to turn me off Dwarf Fortress completely.

(*) That's after I revealed all the levels and killed all the &s, which means there shouldn't be anyone walled off and spamming pathing requests.