Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: NW_Kohaku on May 02, 2016, 12:20:06 pm

Even the most magical of thinking, however, is based upon, if not real logic, at least association as a form of pseudo-logic.  Feathers are associated with flying creatures, so magic involving flight that uses material components tends to incorporate feathers. (And in earlier times, people would assume that if you wanted to make a flying machine, it would be better to at least paint some feathers on it, because that would give it the strength of birds through symbolism.  Sort of like painting something red to make it go faster...)

Even then, a magic system can have a method to it. Still, like I said, I suggested the idea of them having a logic, not being a science. Even then you can have a logic for magical functions that behaves in a scientific manner.

Though yes, when you bring soft scfi into the equation it becomes more a matter of flavor details and general themes. :V

It's an important distinction. 

Logic is based upon assumptions.  Those assumptions can be bizarre and completely outside what one would normally consider rational or realistic, but provided one abided by the consequences of those assumptions in a thoroughly consistent way, it would be logical thought.

For example, most puzzle games are based upon arbitrary rules like three of the same color disappearing or filling an entire row leading to the row disappearing, but what follows from that is a set of completely logical consequences. Tetris is totally logical, even if based upon completely arbitrary assumptions.

By contrast, what many people confuse as "logical" is really something better described as "traditional associations". People oppose "mixing fantasy with sci-fi" because they are traditionally described as somehow different, even when their underlying principles wind up often running on the same tropes. A machine is "logically" not magical only because that's not how it is traditionally presented. 

The biotic powers in Mass Effect, for example, are pretty much straight-up magic powers taken straight from BioWare's traditional crowd-control role for the wizard given the veneer of sci-fi.  There is little logical reasoning behind why having exposure to chemicals gives one the power to telekinetically paralyze and levitate another creature hiding behind cover a large distance away, even if you take the assumption that there's an "element zero" that can control its own mass. (It doesn't mean you can mentally control this element only with sinking in points from level-ups or that it can project this control onto other substances.)

It is interesting when a magical system has a specific logic to it. It doesn't have to, and indeed shouldn't, correspond to the real-world logic. But still. XP

Tell that to Star Trek's teleporters, replicators, FTL, and subspace ansibles including the ability to see enemy ships light minutes away and travelling at FTL speeds in real-time such that they can see FTL weapons traveling towards them, yet nevertheless have people treating it like it's real science.

So far as most fiction is concerned, the only difference between "magic" and "science" is whether it comes from waving a stick that trails sparkles versus some sort of "machine".

Even the most magical of thinking, however, is based upon, if not real logic, at least association as a form of pseudo-logic.  Feathers are associated with flying creatures, so magic involving flight that uses material components tends to incorporate feathers. (And in earlier times, people would assume that if you wanted to make a flying machine, it would be better to at least paint some feathers on it, because that would give it the strength of birds through symbolism.  Sort of like painting something red to make it go faster...)

So far as this argument goes, the "logic" seems to be that "it's on the ends of a plant, so that must correspond to a finger or toe".

A suitable representation of "essence loss". A loss of a finger probably doesn't have any game play effect, but losing too many on one hand at least should have an effect. If hair had any use, I could easily accept all or parts of it falling out (or growing white/grey/purple...). If we're dealing with replaceable stuff that provides a game play penalty, blood loss might have done it, but it won't cut it with the current implementation. If we're dealing with what's currently available, a finger "mangled beyond recognition" might do it. Permanent destruction of the reproductive system is too harsh on one end, as most players probably don't want to give that up, even it it actually isn't used, and too lenient on the other end (once the payment for the license has been made, any subsequent magic abuse is free).

And yes, auto repair on transformation makes things easy. However:
"Visit the Deepstubborn regenerative clinic, now using the acclaimed 'Strawberry' regenerative technique. No ailment too severe to treat*

*Death not included. Nor are...".
Crutch walking would be a useless skill, unless the magic belongs to some advanced tier requiring a lot of research to master.

The werecivet commando team begs to differ.  They've been through Hell.  [spoiler]Literally. Multiple tours of duty. Also, losing their families and ripping one of their own apart wasn't pleasant, either.[/url]

Anyway, again, a strawberry plant is not only not harmed by the plucking of a strawberry. It is, again by your own admission, what a strawberry plant is designed to do, and is only as "harmed" as the energy it takes to generate the strawberry to begin with.  You're demanding a "game play penalty" that isn't logically warranted as a "suitable replacement".

Actually, there is a good model for this particular case of transformation into a food-producer in the transformations of NetHack into female oviparous monsters - laying an egg costs you the nutrition value of that egg.  (You can eat your own eggs to regain the nutritional value - which is something real birds do with unfertilized eggs, since why let perfectly good calories go to waste?)

I also never said that auto-regen was a perfect model, I said that it was there for a reason.  As in, Toady put it there because these sorts of transformations cannot be made to have "parity" in an easily-created procedural way, and requires a giant set of case-by-case rulings such that it was easier for Toady to just say, "Screw it, they all heal to full just so I don't have to deal with this mess!"

I hate to be the guy, but there's many suggestions on guilds. This one may be different, but you have to work hard to demonstrate how it is so.

Here's a similar thread.

If you think that one's close enough to your idea, post this as a response, after checking for redundancy in what was already written.

Actually, I'll be that guy to your being that guy...

That thread won 11th place on Eternal Suggestion Voting, and is on the devpage near the bottom under "Fortress Subgroups".

That said, you could still write about what kinds of guilds they should be, or what purposes they should have.  That was part of what I wrote about in Class Warfare.  This thread at least talks about some new types of guilds.

This actually brings up an old response I think warrants revisitation...


Toady, how will players be expected to control dwarves with procedural magic, or procedurally created whatevers with magical powers that have dangerous effects?

Will their uses always be automated through usage hints, even if, say, "fading", to use the GDC example can mean that creatures will eventually kill themselves if players have no means of throttling their use outside extreme or indirect methods like forcing dwarves apart from enemies or whatever situation triggers use of magic?  Or will there be ways to script conditions under which your charges can use magic or are told to hold their fire?

Likewise, is there going to be automated "needs"-style attempt to discharge negative consequences of magic like "fading" in the same way that a dwarf automatically goes to feed themselves when huger gets too high? Is this going to be some zone like a hospital or tavern, or would it be something you handle through goods production, or some sort of social behavior you need to script through some new interface?

Likewise likewise, magic in the GDC example uses "fuel" items to power magic - is this something you expect to be some sort of extension of the military uniforms to have fortress members equip "magic ammo", even if it means all civilians have to wear military uniforms? (Something of an exploit, but one players use on anyone not a miner or woodcutter, regardless...) Is this, alternately, something that you see occupying a different interface, like a unified magic-instruction interface?

Finally, if we're talking about libraries being places of magic research that blow up your fortress, will that mean there are methods of controlling what research actually takes place?  To use the HFS example, one can always not dig, and one can have a good sense of how far you are digging to get a sense of what risks you are taking. Procedural tech trees, meanwhile, cannot so easily physically convey the concept of that danger, and is there even a way to stop such fortress-destroying research without outright shutting the library down or resorting to de facto demanding savescumming from players to prevent arbitrary fortress death?

(Also, for the record, I'd rather have player-editable usage hints, since that, at least, means the playerbase has the power to fix some exploits and problems, even if it also means the playerbase can create them, as well.  Button's Modest Mod in particular comes to mind.)

You are putting words in my mouth and that isnt cool, I said I'm fine with the AI not being able to exploit magic like players can, I didn't ever say I'm fine with them not knowing how to use it, nor did I say i'm fine with them running around killing themselves with it, obviously its not a good thing if they don't know how to use it.

It's not putting words in your mouth, it's an examination of the likely logical consequences of what is being talked about.

I didn't make up the notion of a spell to turn yourself into a plant being put into the game, I simply listed off the many, many ways such a spell could do more harm than good in an AI that, almost definitionally, cannot make the kinds of judgements that would be required to make such an extremely situational spell do more good than harm. 

Getting excited to the point where you lose your critical thought as to the consequences is exactly what I'm chiding against.  You're expecting the moon, and then waving your hand and saying Toady will somehow find a way to deliver the impossible in record time.  (And you're so excited for what it does in Adventurer Mode, for that matter, you don't seem to stop to consider the consequences in Fortress Mode important.)

And yes, Toady will break the game with major updates.  He does it every time. Again, I'll just point back to the unstoppable werecritter epidemics that eradicated all civilizations the first update they were added in.  Or, you know, the giant flaming mess that was the new Military screen in 0.31.01.

Sure, it might be broken at first, yes toady needs to consider these things, but no, i'm not worried that it will destroy the game and the game will die because toady is too ambitious. Yes he needs to make them really smart if he wants it to not break the game, which is why he mentioned he probably will rewrite the whole usage hints system to prevent these kinds of idiotic things I am not denying that.

Yes you have a good point, but no I don't think toady will destroy his game.

If the argument is about "DESTROYING DWARF FORTRESS FOREVAR!!!1", then you're putting words in my mouth.   

However, again, if we're talking about needing to rewrite the AI to actually sanely handle these things, then history has proven that time spent gaming out how, exactly, these sorts of interactions are likely to be broken, and demonstrating how to pre-emptively fix those problems would be time decently well-spent, and it would also help keep people down on the ground with realistic expectations. 

Just looking at how vampires have worked has been a good example of Toady needing to have all the sundry consequences pointed out before he can actually clamp down all the major edge cases: Vampires first came in with thousands of dwarf skull necklaces, which was totally not obvious or anything, including somehow juggling hundreds in their hands because their necks were obviously full up on skulls. Vampires at first would brag to adventurers about their thousands of humanoid kills they got while spending exactly "5 years" in every job.  He only recently set up "vampire hunts" to stop the depopulation that could occur from a large vampire population in the sewers.

You construe things I say to mean things that I dont actually mean, when I say "partially sane" I meant that they won't kill themselves with it. I didnt mean, "oh yeah its totally okay if they kill themselves with it.", I want them to be smart enough to use it sanely, however I am totally fine with them not being able to exploit it like players can, you cannot write an AI that can exploit things the way a player can in almost any situation, there is a reason the AI in the game "civilization" cheats. ANd why the AI in df will probably need to have some sort of advantage.

You talk as though DF doesn't already "cheat". DF cheats when Toady has to give up on sieges being a challenge, and instead has to create 50-ton flying webbers backed up by fire-breathing T-rexes made of bronze just to keep players from steamrolling everything in the game with steel, training, and numbers that the AI can't hope to match, much less all the sundry automated traps players can throw at it.  He adds amphibiousness, heat immunity, the ability to just plain make traps and pressure plates not apply to creatures, adds NO_STUN, and all sorts of other tokens that exist explicitly to counter common, easy methods of beating the AI.  These are all cheats already, that all exist solely to prevent the trivialization of what few threats remain...  And even that doesn't work, so the HFS has to rely upon literally infinite numbers of giant flying syndrome-spitters to keep players from trivializing colonizing the HFS.

You trivialize letting DF cheat more than it already does, but what that does is ultimately make the game impossible to play without exploits. (At least, more than DF already does demand exploits...) Further, I have to ask how this could possibly be balanced when the game randomly will or won't have magic, or what magic is available is utterly random.  Maybe some magic exists as a "hard counter" to another otherwise powerful magic... but just doesn't exist in this one world, so that powerful magic is now unstoppable.  (To make an example using extant game mechanics, imagine if dwarves had the power to web, and no other webbing creature existed. Wouldn't that just slightly wreck game balance?)

You also are trivializing what it takes to make the AI not kill itself with its new powers... because, once again, DF has a really bad track record of introducing new AI routines that don't involve repeatedly killing anyone who has them until at least a few months of updates.  (Again, let's see a show of hands of how many people lost dwarves to climbing a tree and then starving!) You're simply stating Toady can do it without putting any real effort into considering what it takes to actually make such things happen.

The AI rewrites are easily the most difficult thing to balance in any game, and Toady has a tendency to leave things with see-sawing game balance pretty wildly before he tunes things in quite right. Things like trying to find the set of circumstances where turning yourself into a plant wouldn't be rendering yourself defenseless but a clever camouflage are so incredibly nuanced that they basically do not exist in computer games that have people dedicated solely to improving the AI; Again, that's why I had that side-rant about why most computer games just rely upon absolute invisibility instead of worry about sight cones, since it's simply easier to handle.

This isn't hyperbole. This isn't pessimism. This is pattern recognition.  The AI for the new magic will be broken.  It's just a question of how absurdly self-destructive it will be.

What I'm saying is that even "merely" asking for the AI not to kill itself with the new magic powers is still asking too much. The best we can even hope to do is find the most unavoidably self-destructive things and shout to Toady that he remember to forestall those cases and edge cases.

This is an issue I never thought about, currently the only AI in the game that actually eats is the dwarf mode AI. Creatures in adventure mode dont actually eat (except the player). But letting them always know their powers does seem reasonable enough and is probably the only way to do it without a massive amount of work.

Again, "thinking about it" is what I'm trying to push...

Anyway, creatures in Fortress Mode DO eat, and I'm more worried about Fortress Mode because the interface for controlling Fortress Mode is necessarily going to be more indirect, and therefore difficult to keep sane. 

Dwarves don't even meet their own needs, even if they will complain about not meeting their own needs right now.  (That is, dwarves that complain about a lack of socialization will still go to the library to read instead of the tavern to socialize.  Dwarves will want to get married when they are asexual or have "commitment issues" that mean they refuse to marry. Dwarves will want to claim items that are in your fortress, but have no AI routine to actually just grab them.) Just because dwarves "know" what is bad for their magic, doesn't mean they will actually avoid what is bad for them, nor will there necessarily be anything you could do to help them avoid those actions.  Meat, obviously, would be easy to avoid with fortress-wide bans if it were your primary race, although if you had multi-cultural forts, then things become more and more complex. Also, if the taboo is not food, but no dancing on Tuesdays, what are you going to do, flood the tavern to interrupt tavern-goers every Tuesday? Some players can handle that, but most will need a real interface overhaul to even keep playing the game.

It's honestly these interface overhauls I'd find more interesting than anything. Maybe not as flashy as gaining a new magic spell, but having some real, actual control to direct behaviors with dwarves could yield some extremely useful behaviors for modders or those who are simply inclined towards more elaborately micromanaged dwarven behaviors... although I'll need to put that in the next post.

Unless you modded it or something, clay loam is basically the same thing as silty loam so far as the game goes - it is too "impure" to count as clay, so it is treated just the same as any other type of non-clay, non-sand soil.  If it's being treated as a boulder, then it's behaving as a stone, not as clay. Again, unless modded, it's probably a bug that it's being imported at all.

The FB shouldn't be able to kill off a whole underground area, unless you did something in worldgen to also kill off most of the population.  I know LoudWhispers was still getting wildlife with a half-dozen undead FBs slaughtering everything even 50 years into his game.  The populations are generally in the thousands, and only half a dozen come onto the map every few months.  It may just be that there is still a flag for some sort of underground wildlife from another layer or something blocking the appearance of the next season's wildlife. 

Also, at least in the last few versions, underground wildlife appearance rates are tied to fortress wealth.  Generate more wealth (by making masterwork roasts, for example,) and you generate more underground wildlife diversity.

I, frankly, was interested in getting a better understanding by which someone can be gelded with bare hands and why in Armok's name something so horrifying can even happen.

Then I got to wonder if the gelding skill (It is a profession, Gelder, so is there a skill related to it?) increases chances of getting debilitating gelding blows in combat and whether or not this is a viable strategy for an Adventurer.

I basically want to know if it's possible to make an Adventurer built solely around making lowblows.

Yes, but gelder has nothing to do with it.  Just master a weapon skill or unarmed combat skill, and aim all your kicks for the lower body, and you'll become a legendary ball-kicker in no time.