Bay 12 Games Forum

Alright. I played a crossbowman in adventure mode a while back and discovered that  I could not find any bolts to replenish his ammo with when I ran out. What must I do to to get more ammo for crossbows/bows? I checked multiple stores, but maybe I was unlucky and the town simply didn't have any? Do I have to buy a new quiver to get ammo (I don't know if you get arrows along with the quiver because I wasn't able to find any of those either)?

And while I'm at it, is it possible to refill your water skins? If so, where/how

That would be much more acceptable to me than that blasted copper arrow stuck in my face. X|

Also, I just had a random thought; antmen could double-wield bows. Now THAT is scary.

Imagine a "panic Button" setting that would automatically send all civilians to allocated safe areas, and put all of your squads/guard at key defense locations that you had plotted out from the Zones menu.

This whole idea is making me excited. Go dwarves.

Music should be governed by skill, just like everything else. If a dwarf (or even an adventurer) has low playing skill, they should not make as much money, and the happy thoughts they create should not be nearly as strong as if they are skilled. Also, why not allow musicians and/or bards to compose "songs", which like artworks and engravings might tell about an event. Also, musicians should be able to have strange moods. When that happens, they will go off somewhere and compose either a "masterwork" or "artifact" composition, which they will inscribe onto an object of their choice (most likely some sort of worked material, or they might inscribe it on an object such as a cup, etc.). Any object with an artifact song inscribed on it should gain magical properties, and the song itself might be limited to only be played by someone holding the object it is inscribed on (because the song is divine or mystical in nature, and impossible to hold in one's memory). While a musician might not claim a workshop to do their inscribing, they might request a quiet area to concentrate and receive their inspiration. If that is the case, you will have to make sure that workshops close to their chosen place are not causing noise to distract them.

Those are simply ideas, however. I have little doubt that music will make an entry into the game eventually; the only question is how much detail it will be given.

Off-topic:
 

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...you can stand next to a magma river with no reprocussions.  

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The soon-to-be new version will probably change this.

[ October 03, 2007: Message edited by: Sylverone ]

It's really cool that there is a recording/ viewing tool built into the game, but as it is I can't do much with it (at least without boring to death anyone who watches the movies). There might be some tricks I don't know about, but from what I've seen it does all of it's recording in realtime, meaning that if it takes you a long time to do something, regardless of how awesome what you did was, the movie will be boring because it will be just as slow as the original happening.

I suggest that movie playback be detached from actual time, and instead be made navigable by the user; a recording. The user navigating the recording would have access to different time-steps (i.e. one in-game step, five, ten, one hundred, and maybe a setting that does steps according to an adventurer's speed in adventure mode so you can follow the events exactly as the player saw them). This way the user would be able to see action in detail, read the event windows when relevant, and skip over boring parts like uneventful traveling or the player shopping.

This is mostly written concerning use in adventure mode, but it could help to allow a viewer to skip through the micromanaging parts and focus on watching the actual siege take place, without having to wait for the movie to get to it.

Since everything in DF takes place in steps, I think it would make sense to focus the movie recorder around those, and not the actual real-world time that something takes. A relatively short period of DF time can take a while to carry out, especially if you're playing carefully or viewing things in detail. So by having the recorder center around the in-game time rather than realistic time, I believe the movie tool could become more useful and less boring to watch, especially if one could navigate past the uninteresting parts.

What is the future of the movie tool?

The way I see it, realism should be kept as long as the problem can be dealt with by improving gameplay. In this particular instance I believe that improving gameplay could fix the problem, so I'm going to side with Drunken. With some better tools, it won't be such a hassle that it detracts from the fun factor of DF (every game should have obstacles, they just need to be manageable to a certain extent).

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I am vehemently opposed to asking a computer to be creative. Unless Toady is a genius programmer, randomly generated riddles will be awful.

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Only as awful as having randomly/contextually generated art pieces and giving almost everything in the game a randomized name. Oops, we already have those? Adding a system that could generate riddles--especially the "I am ____,I have____, I do ____; what/who/where am I?" type--isn't such a terrible idea. To generate those kind of riddles, however, it would be required that objects and creatures in the game be given descriptions in the code that could be used to grab the information for the riddles. For instance, gold would be golden and shiny, a spear would be long and tipped with a blade made of some material. A handy side effect of this would be to allow other possibilities besides riddles, such as giving vague descriptions of objects when your vision is obscured/blurred and such.

As far as the use of riddles? What is it with this obsession with riddle doors? There are also other uses. Riddles could act as a password. Maybe to enter the halls of the thieves guild you must answer a riddle given by the guard, and you can only learn the answer by getting it from a thief in the guild (a sort of test; stealing knowledge). Also, in many stories there are sentient artifacts; there could be some in DF, and occasionally one might ask you to answer a riddle.
"I am long. I am golden. I am tipped with silver. What am I?"
"A golden spear."
"Rightly you speak; now take hold of me and face your enemies."
-There is a flash of light and a gold spear appears an your hands-
-It pulses with a great power-

THAT would be cool.

A great Wizard might give you a riddle before agreeing to teach you a powerful spell, since he would be most concerned about your intellect and wisdom.

As a side note, I'm not against also having history questions be thrown into the game, but I wouldn't call them riddles. Riddles are generally meant to test more than memorization.

I personally like the idea. It would add to the game, as long as riddle events were relatively sparse. The idea is to keep them from being commonplace, so that being faced with a riddle is a special event.

So don't argue about whether they should be in the game or not just because you disagree about riddled doors. Another possibility is purely to make characters more interesting;
-A very old lady walks up to you and speaks-
"What is taller than a man, shorter than a giant, and sees only once?"
"A cyclops?"
"Mmhmm. Yes..."
-The very old lady walks away, grinning-

I apologize for my terrible examples, but I think a good system could be built to create these. Just like the current name generation uses a grammar system, one could be used to generate riddles. It would work slightly differently, but I don't think it would need to be too different.

[ October 01, 2007: Message edited by: Sylverone ]

I agree with the others. As long as Dwarf Fortress has such a tough learning curve AND a difficult interface, we should probably limit our "advertisement" to personal recommendations, random hits, and certain gaming blogs.

I feel this way partially because a sudden influx of new members tends to wreak havoc on a forum, and I don't want want to see this place become irreparably disrupted. We don't need 50 new members spamming "Dis G4m3 R 2 H4RD!1!!!", especially not when the game isn't even claiming to be near completion.

I think our publicity level is perfect for now; People interested in a game like this tend to find out about it on their own. Otherwise the game is allowed room to grow.