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[Putnam]

Will the products of trees have any quality levels, either visible or invisible?

Not a significant question for fruit and such, but it could matter for bracelet tress and such if those were added/modded in.

I think this is unlikely, given the state of the game now. Quality levels are for dwarf products. The closest thing is Gems having different cuts.

Not necessarily. You can specify the quality level of creatures' itemcorpses, which is at least similar.

Yeah, but that's primarily for bronze colossi, which are very, very magical.

[hermes]

It has been a long time since I've tested it, but there's an init option to make the Z windows trigger when a creature is there, rather than all the time.

Thanks for the answers, Toady.  Didn't know about this feature, man this game is huge.  Very excited for the new release now.  I'm predicting forum wide mass burnings of elven settlements just "to check" the new fire AI and tree flammability.   

[Mr S]

The truest form of !!Science!!

[Valtam]

I have a question here (or several questions). Will you be able to, for example, join the milatary of a town/civilisation and be part of their army as they invade places? Because that seems badass. Also, will civs fight for "land" (army vs. army in open battle) or will battles only take place in city's (attack/defend)?

Another question, how will this "scared" thing work with archers? If its based of skill level and armour, then archers will just be overwelmed with sieges and run for the hills when they see them rather then shooting from the battlements. How do you plan on fixing this? Also, what attribute will be tied with bravery in battle?

Edit; Oh, and another thing. How will we be able to tell who is on our side and who isnt if 2 of the same races are at war? Will there be some kind of marking that members of a civ wear, or a different color, or it could just be in their name. Also, on the subject of armour, could you kill a member of a civ then wear their armour as a discuise and infiltrate into the other civ?

I'll take a license to answer some of these questions, at least what I think about them; maybe I could be corrected by someone more knowledgeable than me.

The army joining stuff is certainly planned, but I don't think it will happen on this release (as Toady has stated a few times from now, that would be overreaching). A few devlogs ago, Toady told us that with site claiming there would be small groups pursuing basic goals, and that you could be more free than before to be on either site of the equation, now that allegiances are getting pretty diverse. "Land" fighting, as far as I know, was pretty scarce even in medieval times; sure, media shows us the impressive charges of cavarly on the open battlefield and it fills our lungs with awe, but things were rarely like that. When huge armies stop being too abstract and their paths collide, that could ensue a match of forces, or even in a arbitrary place if it entails some relevance for any of the involved entities. Again, something for a future release.

I don't think being scared or not relates to an attribute, more than it does to personality (which already has a decent framework) and maybe to survival chances, represented on being well armored. Fleeing from combat, as I've read, will be related more often with escalating levels of violence and the threat of death, but someone asked Toady if the Fortress Mode would present something related. Surprising stuff it was to know that even armed soldiers could flee from combat, as that tends to happen every now and then in real life. So your battlements won't be empty at the arrival of peril, after all we're dealing with dwarves.

Right know, you already know who's your enemy and who's your friend given the decent knowledge you have about the latter, before entering combat. When you look around and peek over your companions, their names and status are already granted, while the hostile forces are only known by what they're supposed to be or which kind of deadly tool are they carrying around. On a larger and more colourful battlefield, surely you're not supposed to know the name of each and every allied soldier that fights for a vaguely similar cause than yours, an hectic mess is to be expected with all the blood, limbs and ‼dwarves‼ running around; but without a doubt, Toady has something planned for the UI to help us, without conceding something too gamey that wash out the inherent fun of such a situation. As with the former questions, we'll know when he gets there.

The new stealth mechanics look pretty great, and it has been already stated that disguises and other means of subterfuge are to be expected to flesh out the art of being incognito.

Here's what I found out at the Development page (that still needs to be updated, you'll notice that some of these have been accomplished)

Breaking into fortified locations
Having locations alerted, being able to yell for help
Disguises and impersonation through use of entity uniforms
Closed doors and passwords
Sneaking mechanics
     Making hiding impossible in wide open areas (at least in adv mode)
     Vision arcs for patrolling guards
Gagging people and tying them up
Allowing constructions to burn, use of kindling/hay/etc. where reasonable
Responding properly to personal fire issues (all modes)
Fleeing burning buildings
Fighting fire (all modes)
Designation to set item or tile on fire in dwarf mode

Sorry for the long answer. If it wasn't me, maybe someone else would have gladly helped.

[AutomataKittay]

Yeah, big endian is effectively dead on anywhere but supercomputers (zSeries). MIPS is making a push into the mobile market though and I frankly think that we will see DF on mobile devices too in a few years, if Toady is up to the task.

Does endianness actually affect if a program will compile under a given architecture, then? This stuff is far too low-level for poor scripter me to properly comprehend and I was looking for an real computer scientist's opinion.

You're joking about mobile devices, right? Those things don't have enough memory to run DF, unless I'm so behind the time that they have over a gigabyte of RAM within it free. And that's not to mention processing capacity without killing the battery or cooking itself. There are a program to play DF remotely, but that's entirely different thing.

OS' capacity is more the limit than endianness, not to mention that things won't run or break down badly if you tries to run a program built for entirely different machine instruction set. It's not noticible on interpreted scripts because the interpreters tend to be built to the system/processor set, while compiled codes are machine instruction for a specific subset of processor.

It'd break down before it could run

[Osmosis Jones]

You're joking about mobile devices, right? Those things don't have enough memory to run DF, unless I'm so behind the time that they have over a gigabyte of RAM within it free. And that's not to mention processing capacity without killing the battery or cooking itself. There are a program to play DF remotely, but that's entirely different thing.

OS' capacity is more the limit than endianness, not to mention that things won't run or break down badly if you tries to run a program built for entirely different machine instruction set. It's not noticible on interpreted scripts because the interpreters tend to be built to the system/processor set, while compiled codes are machine instruction for a specific subset of processor.

It'd break down before it could run

Someone did manage to sort of create a mobile version of DF. They wrote a client script that relayed commands to a seperate server computer actually running the DF exe, and returned with the graphical information. Not really relevant, but interesting IMO.


Otherwise, Toady that sounds awesome, thanks for the info! It's great to finally see dwarves get the the same treatment the humans got!

[Mr S]

I think I actually giggled a little when I got a nod for answering a question AND had one of my own questions answered in the same FotF.

Thanks Toady!!

[MaximumZero]

The new stealth mechanics look pretty great, and it has been already stated that disguises and other means of subterfuge are to be expected to flesh out the art of being incognito.

I still want to make a DF game into Metal Beard Solid.

[RedReign]

Particularly in Adventure Mode, will there be some way of dragging creatures you are in combat with?
I've always wanted to drag a bogeyman around by his feet and see how long I survive. Or drag animals and toss them off cliffs.

[Tov01]

Particularly in Adventure Mode, will there be some way of dragging creatures you are in combat with?
I've always wanted to drag a bogeyman around by his feet and see how long I survive. Or drag animals and toss them off cliffs.

Is that a question for Toady? If so, you should probably color that text green. Otherwise, he's unlikely to notice your question.

[Geen]

Keep up the great work, Toady!
EDIT:Oh, and are we going to see climbing-oriented creatures (i.e. monkeys) be using the new climbing system? Or nests in trees, allowing creatures and characters to steal eggs for sustenance?

[RedReign]

Particularly in Adventure Mode, will there be some way of dragging creatures you are in combat with?
I've always wanted to drag a bogeyman around by his feet and see how long I survive. Or drag animals and toss them off cliffs.

Is that a question for Toady? If so, you should probably color that text green. Otherwise, he's unlikely to notice your question.

Heheh, thanks!

[Edmus]

With hillocks springing up about our forts will we see civilians fleeing to our fortress when they are under attack, kind of like the villagers fleeing to the keep.

[misko27]

With hillocks springing up about our forts will we see civilians fleeing to our fortress when they are under attack, kind of like the villagers fleeing to the keep.

And on that note, how and to what extent do we communicate with the Hillocks? As of right now it sounds like they are passive, how will they interact with the fort?

[Neonivek]

Toady will we ever see Embedded sites?

Like a castle that has a city growing around it

Mostly I ask because I kinda imaginined that to be what fortress mode would be kinda like. Where you have your fortress and a town would slowly grow outside the play area.

Also Toady I should state because many people fell into the same hole you did for a tad.

Quests are simply, if put into simple words, things to do. They are a catch all term. You cannot "remove" them from the game because all you are doing is removing the term "Quest".

Anyhow if you want to remove the term Quest may I suggest a "Commit to memory" function for information (Ohh I found out where the Necromancer tower is? I better commit that to memory for easy access later) as well as something that lists favors, contracts, bounties, and stuff.

It just is sort of just easier to call them "Quests" in the end. If they are handled like steriotypical quests is another.

Though I like my "Commit to memory" idea.