Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Felblood on July 13, 2009, 02:24:45 pm

The drawbacks are, that it makes specializing in a single material less meaningful, and the system has to allow for an arbitrarily number of different [MAT_SKILL] tags, as players mod in more and more custom materials, or separate out skills that are folded together in vanilla.

How are these drawbacks?

You would, however, need a scalar, so you could determine how important the material is to the overall product without upping the value extravagantly.

If sandstone and puddingstone share a common matskill, then being a sandstone specialist is considerably less glamorous.

Being able to handle an arbitrary number of matskills would be an awesome feature, but Toady would have to code it.

Perhaps, instead of a separate skill for each material, each material specifies it's material skill in the raws.

Yellow, blue and white diamonds could then all have [MAT_SKILL:DIAMOND].


This allows us to trim the fat that will crop up, in the enormous number of material subskills. For example, stonecrafting could be divided up into seven or eight different skills, instead of one for every kind of stone in the world.

The drawbacks are, that it makes specializing in a single material less meaningful, and the system has to allow for an arbitrarily number of different [MAT_SKILL] tags, as players mod in more and more custom materials, or separate out skills that are folded together in vanilla.

Personally, I imagine a loo as either a well like construction, that goes the opposite direction, and thus requires no bucket, or a floor grate with a designation over it.

Perhaps both could be included, with poncier dwarves demanding the fancier arrangement.

If this does go in, I recommend that the first release to feature toilets, not also feature sewage and sewers. Manure and it's farming applications would make a good forerunner to both items.

This gives the naysayers the chance to see that dwarves pooping does not cause the world to end, and gives us time to adjust to the new realities one at a time.

Plus, we'd get more freaquent releases...

The reason that I advocated making all player characters drop ghosts is that it's predictable and simple and therefore easy to code and debug. It isn't intended to reflect the place of ghosts in the world of DF, but rather provide space for the important groundwork for more lore friendly ghosts to move in and replace them.

As for the actual mechanics, I personally think it would be interesting to see ghosts that are just a SOUL with no material body parts. If speaking ever requires a mouth, things could get more complicated than that.

Using blessed weapons to harm ghosts isn't really any different than using magic weapons mechanically. They'll both have to wait for the magic arc.

Disclaimer1: This isn't an idea for the next release, or even the one after that. It's an idea I had, and then searched for, and I thought I'd point it out while it was on my mind.

Disclaimer2: I searched for this, but it's possible that i didn't use the best search string.

Now that adventurers are getting their own entity, that bundles all their exploits and achievements in one place, it would be possible(ish) for retired adventurers to regale strangers with tales of their heroic actions (or a random list of facts about their travels, whatever).

This strikes me as useful early ghost behavior. At first, only player characters will drop ghosts, and they'd do it all the time. (Once you have the ghosts and their basic behaviors worked out properly, then you can let other people have them, and dial back the haunting rates of player characters.)

The ghost of an adventurer could talk about himself and his fellow party members. Not only would this be helpful in getting the actions of your dead PCs into the legends, the information the ghost provides could be useful in other ways.

If you come upon the ghost of Lurist McRanger, in the Cave of Puppies and he informs you that, in 206, his meat shields sidekicks, Paco and Sancho were both killed by Giant Cave Spiders, in the Cave of Puppies, then you know to go on prepared to find GCS.

Toady could cut/paste some articles from the wiki into the in-game help, but if he's going to do that he'd be better off just soliciting people to write help articles, specifically for the in-game help system, instead of stuff intended to be read in a cross-linked wiki.

Pointing players to the wiki, in the first page of the Getting Started page would probably be a more effective use of the wiki.

I have to agree about the varied tiles. They're much nicer looking once you've gotten used to ASCII, but until you do they make it even harder to learn.

I learned with a graphics set, but now I use raw ASCII. It really does get easier.

I think it'd be best if it went the same way as the fortress' name currently does.

You're given a random symbol to start with, but if it's something that completely offends your sensibilities, or you want something specific, you can change it.

It wouldn't make sense to change civilization symbols every time you start a new fort though. I'd be nice to have a little description paragraph for each civ, available from the embark screen, so you can avoid the ones with weird symbols, etc.