Bay 12 Games Forum

Question about chains: If I have a chained dwarf take a fall into a pit, will the chain halt their fall?
And can it be impossible to unchain them afterwards like this?
I want a flying vampire military, that trains in the air, and attacks from the air.

Dwarf Fortress is a wonder of content generalisation in gaming, so it does seem very odd that it runs on a tile based system.
Using rudimentary meshes instead would open up so many possibilities!
Obviously, the game would be confusing and unfamiliar if it abandoned the tile system together, but it's easy enough to have it so that designations are still tile based, and tiles render based on what meshes are inside them.

Here are the things that I think become better:
-Creature behaviour becomes much more realistic, as diagonal and orthagonal movement can be made perfectly identical in terms of real distance travelled, and by giving each creature a particular position with a tile it's no longer possible to have a dozen attackers standing in one tile. With animation of creature meshes, it becomes possible to make more accurate calculations of hits in combat; so it won't be so easy to kick a standing person in the face anymore, and if you aim for someone's fourth right finger and miss you might hit something else.
-Multi-tile creatures and constructions will handle their own visual appearance, they only require meshes (Which mostly exist already) and animations.
-Mechanical stress to constructions and natural structures become possibly easier to calculate as terrain shapes can be simplified; not to mention that meshes can collapse in swinging motions as well as straight down.
-Open space can be extended enormously without hitting performance.
-Adds the possibility of dropping tile rendering altogether, which modders would really like.
-Gases such as mist and miasma no longer have to be so taxing to simulate, they can be replaced with moving points that say "at distance x from me, the density of gas y is z".

The things that would become harder would be pathfinding and water flow, but if they were made to work they would be better than they were before; the currently clear-cut definition of what movements are trivial for a dwarf and which are difficult would become blurred, so the game has to be programmed so that a dwarf will consider leaping and climbing outside of combat; as for water flow, the amount of simulation required could end up decreasing for large volumes, and simulating objects in the water being pushed by the flow could become more realistic (an object no longer has to be pushed a whole tile suddenly to be pushed by water).

Adventurer mode would probably become weird and difficult though, since only AI creatures would be able to see and navigate the mesh-based world.

Thoughts? Accusations of heresy?

This'd make a good stand-in until cleaning is fixed, unless cleaning is bugged for a reason that would affect manual cleaning too.

You could always read what Toady has already said about myth generation. It's the focus of the next arc. Then suggest ways to improve it. He already has some kind of prototype myth generation engine.

I'm guessing it's buried in the giant thread that is Future of the Fortress? Nothing on the planned list, and only a mentioning in March on the devblog.

Worldgen, while enormously detailed, also seems very heterogenous; it's a bug or incredible coincidence if something special happens (see: adamantine space elevators covered in enough magma to flood a world tile).

It'd be cool if a mythology was generated detailing the history of gods, and on rare occasion (a thousand year world might only have a few notable instances) this mythology would affect the real world.
Rather than having gods just do random things based on their spheres though, a better way to create events would be to allow gods to play about like any other creature during worldgen, with the difference between a god and a creature being that a god facing a challenge will often do something overkill to achieve their ends, and their behaviour affected by their spheres.
But unfortunately, I can't narrate my idea much further than this because there are so many possible approaches to determining exactly what these gods do in worldgen.

That's weird, this thread indicates that traders need massive profit, but in 0.42.02 I think I once gave them zero profit for a large transaction, and even for the trades that were in the tens of thousands I would only give them a profit of less than 200. Not once was I denied.

Remember, the size of the caravan depends on how much profit they get. Be generous and next year's caravan will have even more useless metal tat to be melted down, and will probably bring extra migrants and !!fun!! with it too.

I never knew this.
So, if my trade goods are incredibly useless (Mussel shells + Legendary bone carver = I can buy anything I want), I should go for gigantic profit margins?
And will this encourage Elven caravans to bring their rare and special goods? I've noticed some things made of unique materials in Elven caravans (Liquid darkness, rotting fabric), that have incredibly high values. Only thing in their caravans I'm interested in.

Is that 64 bit version of Dwarf Fortress likely to have multicore too?