Cool additions but ripping bodies and creatures from vanilla, or a mod that's already out, kind of breaks the "from scratch" thing that's supposed to be going on and breaks the rules. Sorry to rain on your parade. The goal ITT is to make something new entirely.
I'm only doing that to save time, because I am working at my neighbors house a few hours out of the day, learning java, and having to read a book over the summer for a class at my school. I could type up everything, but it would wind up exactly the same. If you still want me to type it in manually, then I will, but I would rather perform a rip and modify to save time.
I understand how that is and what you're saying. Prepare for a rant.
I'm feeling two ways about this issue. Here's the thing: if we allow ripping vanilla stuff, we could just as well do a succession game where we trash vanilla creatures only. Keep the vanilla body templates and keep the vanilla materials, their templates and vanilla tissue templates, and use those to define all-new creatures that fill the empty world. Could let people import anything they've modded themselves. And that's not a bad idea. It would go faster and it would result in more content since it requires less skill and time. It might be more balanced. It could make a very good modding succession game and I would not be offended if someone does that and it wins over and kills this one, I would possibly contribute.
However, there is something to be said about doing it the hard way and working without Toady's pre-defined, already working stuff, and here it is. I personally originally figured my halflings would be just smaller vanilla humans with different equipment, and I could have just copied their raws, maybe adjusting the names and obfuscating it a little. But I didn't, and once I got to working with the materials and body plans, I realized I could make them do whatever I want. I started making differently behaving bones, gave creatures knees and wrists that can be severed and their cartilage destroyed, faces, necks that contain major arteries, bony spines concealing nervous tissue. And it only got better when it came time to make a working creature. They caught on fire a lot, didn't work a lot, but I ended up creating a whole different creature organization with reusable appearance varying, attack and interaction modules that takes half the space on paper, and it was so worth it. I've learned so much more about how the game works than I ever did working with established conventions, and even done a little "science" by accident.
It's really not a competitive advantage, I think. The first mentioned type of thread would be the more popular one. However, I am 100% sure that the creative rush that you get from doing things without convention - and I only had two days to get this started and did very little - will lead to much more unique results over time, all new creatures and mechanics and worlds. It's so much more interesting to know and build rather than copy and adjust that I'm actually not interested in the latter here.
So that said, for this thread, I'm going to stick to the no copying from vanilla or established mods rule, and sorry. Copypasting or rewriting by hand is irrelevant. If they're the exact same raws as vanilla for either the body or creature, they're going to be denied. They must be new.
Anyone get what I'm saying here?
Just read the new posts. I guess I was mistaken so as to your intent. If what you're going to do is start by copypasting the vanilla/mod raws and then edit and mutilate them until they're nothing like the vanilla, that is fine. The result counts, not the method. If you create something unique, it's welcome, and if not, then not.
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Topic: DF from scratch: The entirely player-made universe succession. (Read 490112 times)