Bay 12 Games Forum

Quietust's branch is compiling again (Following Japa's instructions) and works with .09, in case anybody hasn't been watching religiously
Very fast work, thanks!

Quote from: Putnam on February 19, 2012, 12:00:36 am

It's not so; I tried making AGILITY 2:0, and it cut my test creature's agility by 1/50th. It's percentage based.

Well, nuts, now I have to double-check my methodology on the MATERIAL_WEAKNESS. Did you check to see if altering the second variable induced a delay, or do we still not know exactly what that does?

I just tested a bunch of stat changes in dwarf mode.  The first number is a percentage, and the second is a fixed boost.  I put EMPATHY:0:1000 and it reset everybody's empathy to no adjective, WILLPOWER:0:1500 set everybody to "a lot of willpower".  100:0 leaves their stats as is, 100:250 bumps it up by one adjective level, 100:500 by two.

Has anybody got [IE_INTERMITTENT] working with anything other then :WEEKLY?  I've tried DAILY and MONTHLY, and in either case it just disables the effect completely.  Looking like regional interactions are hard coded to be near constant.

Been wanting to try modding DF for a while, and now that the new release is here with the new powers, decided to jump in
So, question time,
Has anyone played around with new books, such as replacing things like [IS_SPHERE:DEATH], or [IS_SECRET_GOAL:IMMORTALITY]?
And also adding new powers that can be gained by reading?
These are my main questions, however, is it possible to add new skills in adventure mode to base off what can be used for powers (ie something like mana as an example, just as a limiting quantity)
Hope that all makes sense, as this is new to me.

You can change the sphere to any of the spheres, which (as far as I know) just controls what god creates the slab engraved with the secret (or grants it directly).  You cannot use other secret goals, IMMORTALITY is the only secret goal in the latest string dump.  As Toady adds to the interaction system, he will be adding new goals to go with the new secrets. 

People have added other secrets that give different interactions (powers/syndromes), but the default worldgens make dozens of identical necromancy secrets, so you have to turn the parameters way down, or make many duplicates of your new secret, otherwise necromancy will dominate and you won't really stumble across it without a lot of luck.  You can follow the sample secret interaction Toady included in the "raw\sample interactions" directory.  Learning the secret lets you add a syndrome to the creature that learns it. 

You cannot add new skills, mana, or anything like that.  Interactions can have a cooldown (for example, necromancy's animate power has [CDI:WAIT_PERIOD:10]) .

Well, in the mean time you can do it yourself.  Not editing world.sav, that's very not recommended.  Plus I'm not sure it would work.  But, if you set the number of regional interactions that are generated to 0, you won't get any random ones.  Then you can roll your own, by making a bunch of variations of Toady's example.
Then you can have it raise them on a new moon, or even less often, if there is such a parameter.

But you don't want to lose the random rains and fogs?  Well, I didn't say to set those to 0.  But they're only assigned by regional interactions?  So make some. 

[OBJECT:INTERACTION]
[INTERACTION:EXAMPLE EVIL RAIN REGION]
[I_SOURCE:REGION]
[IS_REGION:EVIL_ONLY]
[IS_REGION:SAVAGE_ALLOWED]
[IS_REGION:ANY_TERRAIN]
[IS_FREQUENCY:100]
[I_TARGET:C:MATERIAL]
[IT_MATERIAL:MATERIAL:INORGANIC:EVIL_RAIN_1:WEATHER_FALLING_MATERIAL]
[I_EFFECT:MATERIAL_EMISSION]
[IE_TARGET:C]
[IE_INTERMITTENT:WEEKLY]
Yup, that actually works.  You can have your hard-coded raw reference generated raws.  Rains are EVIL_RAIN_#, and fogs are EVIL_CLOUD_#.  Just make sure you don't create raws for more rains/clouds than your worldgen parameters make, or, unpredictable madness may ensue?

This will complain about missing materials every time you gen a world, load a save from that world, etc.  But it works.

Also, please consider what you're saying. "Basically, the better metal will win" is the common design in every other RPG and no one ever complains about it. Here it wins because its mechanical properties are more suitable for the weapon used. I don't see why you're complaining.

"The better metal wins" doesn't mean if you put 50 dwarfs in iron, and 50 in steel, the steel dwarfs will edge out the iron dwarfs.  It means if you do that it will be 50 to 0 in favor of steel, since they are completely invincible (ok, not entirely, occasionally a shield bash might shatter a skull).  The iron battle axes will hit the steel armor and they will deflect harmlessly, while the steel battle axe will be hacking limbs off like no tomorrow.  Of course, give them blunt weapons instead of axes and now iron wins with its heavier weaponry that ignores armor. 

This is, of course, pretty much how it actually works.  But RPGs never do it that way, as opposed to always doing it that way.  Because it's not fun, and it's not what's in books and on TV.  Unarmored dude chops anonymous knights in full plate armor into ribbons, sword slicing through solid steel as though it were butter.  It's never "knights bonk each other around a bit until one is too tired and bruised to keep up his guard, and the other stabs him in the armpit with a dagger". 

While yes, he said that it only would take that long if each animal got that much attention, there are still a number of potential animal behaviors coming up that could at least rival squid ink in complexity if he wants to do them. I can think of at least three, with two of them being reasonably near the current batch of animals.

Beaver dams, certainly.  That involves critters building structures during play.  Sounds difficult.

The mongoose would require their anti-snake behavior.  More generally, it would mean animals fighting each other.  A short step from animals eating each other, so that carnivores need to eat too, not just grazers. 

Leeches (and later ticks and mosquitos) would require parasite tags, or at least the latching-on and blood sucking bit.  And spreading disease, at least for the last two.  Proper mosquito control involves draining stagnant pools, or making sure the water stays flowing.  So I think that by mosquito time, insects (and amphibians) should have proper lifecycles in place.  I mostly want this because it would be cool for fisherdwarfs to be catching "giant damselfly nymph" and "giant toad tadpole". 

Next version, any dwarf that starts to alternately display a plumphelmet symbol or have tendrils of fungus emerging from his/her beard after visiting the underland caverns, will be locked outside -or better yet- incinerated in magma!
This sounds like too tempting a surprise feature for Toady to pass up. 

I do hope so!  We really only need two tokens.  (one of which we might already be getting).  First, we need the ability for syndromes to alter behavior.  It appears we'll at least be able to make creatures to berserk/aggressive.  Perhaps it will be low-hanging fruit to also be able to have them go melancholy or into gibbering insanity.  That lets us add insanity syndromes to heavy metals, too  

And then, obviously, we need the "give birth to nightmare inducing abomination" token as suggested by darkflagrance   A syndrome token that causes the infected creature to give birth to a specified race would be super cool for more than just this one thing.  Xenomorphs from the Alien movies, for example.  Bonus points if it allows for the specification of a different caste distribution than the default for the target race.  So that you could have a race with a few casts, but one of them has 0 probability of being born.  But the ones that can be born can infect other creatures, and those creatures give birth to the third caste.  That would need a lot of work to function in world-gen, though.  Or perhaps not, since night creatures already do something similar in world-gen.

Along those lines, a curse that causes a person to give birth to assorted random monsters (forgotten beast generator style) is a very mythological sort of curse to be meted out by vengeful gods.  (OK, I think the Greek monsters like Hydra, the Nemean Lion etc were birthed by a titan, not a mortal woman, but still!)  It may even be a way to keep a world's forgotten beast/titan populations up, rather than allowing forgotten beasts to reproduce directly, which has been suggested.  An epic-level quest might be to find and kill a women cursed by the gods to give birth to monsters for all eternity.  Sounds easy until you remember that she'll be surrounded by a menagerie of forgotten beasts!