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Toady, would having unpredictable and dangerous magic be discovered in fortress mode really be a bad thing? Setting up a library, and presumably letting people into it who ponder magical things, would be a player choice. If the fact that things could go horribly horribly wrong was known then it would just be another thing that could be really... !!FUN!!

I realize this could also be rather frustrating in some ways, but from my personal perspective I find the idea of engineering around the problem really entertaining. I would be tickled pink if I got to design a series of "containment protocols"

This isn't really a question. Nonetheless, ditto. Containment protocols are a blast.

[NW_Kohaku]

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!"

[Cruxador]

the "belief creates reality" model

Well when you simplify it that much, it doesn't sound very deep, does it? I think he meant more about divinity being a state of mind rather than some some "I believe it so it's true" 40k ork thing. The sort of stuff that comes up in the (currently growing in popularity) more mystic fantasy which draws heavily on Indian myth for inspiration. Like the works of Kirkbride, which I believe he was referring to, or something like Kill Six Billion Demons. From stuff you've talked about, I know most of your fantasy reading tends to be grounded in a more western paradigm, but have you kept up with other fantasy movements like this? If not, it might interest you to at least read what there is of the K6BD comic, and/or perhaps the roleplaying game. Of course there's a lot more writings to go with that, which is common to the subgenre such as it is, but that's more peripheral.

[Random_Dragon]

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

[NW_Kohaku]

Toady, would having unpredictable and dangerous magic be discovered in fortress mode really be a bad thing? Setting up a library, and presumably letting people into it who ponder magical things, would be a player choice. If the fact that things could go horribly horribly wrong was known then it would just be another thing that could be really... !!FUN!!

I realize this could also be rather frustrating in some ways, but from my personal perspective I find the idea of engineering around the problem really entertaining. I would be tickled pink if I got to design a series of "containment protocols" and I would love to have a fortress end something like,

That presumes there would be ways to engineer around the problem, and not, as most representations (including the one TOADY JUST GAVE) of the magic system would have it, simply having a text box pop up informing you that your fortress crumbled for no good reason because you were stupid enough to have a library.  Again, I point to the 2d game, where the game ended "unsatisfyingly" because you just have a percentage chance of instant game over with no chance to engineer around anything. 

The ONLY way to "engineer around" such a problem is to just not have magic or just not build a library, which is basically the same as making a gameplay feature that nobody ever wants to turn on.  (Which again brings me back to the old economy and coins that you could basically never use because it only wound up with your fortress flooded in individual coins occupying whole tiles of a fortress, while dwarves desperately ran around trying to carry enough coins to afford a single drink of dwarven wine...)  Whenever I hear of people wanting to add magic that destroys your whole fortress "because it would be Fun", I can't help but think they'd be equally happy adding new "gameplay features" that "helpfully" corrupt everyone's savegames whenever you play a certain length of time, because that would be a "Fun" way to force everyone's games to end, too!  It's merely advocating for the ruination of the games of people who want to seriously build forts for your own jollies.


The problem is that engineering exists in the "physical space" of the game.  Water and magma exist in physical space, and you as a player, have the capacity to engineer physical space. (A video I can't link enough on why being able to represent your gameplay problems and possible solutions in physical space is so important in games.) Dwarf Fortress is filled with emergent behavior specifically because so many of its mechanics occupy the same physical space, and therefore have the capacity to interact with one another in a manner that creates geometrically increasing complexity per mechanic.

Magic, meanwhile, tends to be just arbitrary stuff that happens in its own little partitioned vacuum which nothing else can affect.  It doesn't exist in physical space unless you find some way of forcing magic to be directly tied to the physical landscape or its inhabitants. (Which is why I've argued for such a system in the past.)

Magic without physical components or at least some sort of player-controlled behavior scripting is unengineerable. Magic that is random without those components is not just a Wild Magic Table, it's a Wild Magic Table that gets rolled without your permission.

[NW_Kohaku]

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.)

[Untrustedlife]

Well, down the pipe we go eh?

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. 

There is no way in hell he will be able to think of every single edge case in a game this complex no matter how hard he tries to do it.  The game is unfinished, and the community has stuck around through the craziness and the craziness is part of the experience. Toady does try to think of edge cases and he has talked about this in the past, but people will always find one he hasn't thought about. It will never be perfect right off the bat, these kinds of things never are, sure you can try to get him to push for that, but it is unreasonable to expect him to somehow think of every single edge case.


Sure the community can try to help, but there will most definitely be at least one completely crazy bug no one thought about.

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.

How am I trivializing the AI cheating?  Didn't you already say the best way to keep the game balanced is to allow them to have full access to all the spells, isnt that cheating? And isn't that exactly what I said aswell?

Either they always know how to use their powers (which would be put the player at a disadvantage until they learn the system, but be generally reasonable for gameplay balance,)

^

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.

Its like you are arguing against yourself.


In that case I guess both of us are trivializing it eh? 

But seriously.

I understand that toady needs to limit cheating but I also understand that the only way for a game to be actually challenging is to either create a genius AI or allow cheating for the AI and df will likely do the latter and does do the latter and I AM fine with that as long as the player still has a chance. And currently teh player does still have a chance (in fact the game is rather easy at this point) despite the AI cheating.

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.

Yes it will be broken and yes I think we should avoid as much brokenness as possible.
Yes the ai shouldn't be blowing itself up in thermonuclear explosion every few minutes in your library.
(well I guess it would only happen once)

I think toady needs to start with combat only spells actually and move out from there as new mechanics are added, I think its probably the only way for him to create AI this reactive.

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?)

...snip...

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.

Didnt you already say that the ai has to be "completely sane" and in your previous post?

The AI needs to be completely sane, or the game as a whole breaks down. You're not appreciating how vital it is for the AI to be able to have at least some rough parity with the player in understanding how game mechanics work to make the game world have some sense of verisimilitude rather than dropping you out of it from the suicidally stupid dwarves finding more and more ways to kill themselves through things a toddler would understand not to do.

Which is the same thing I said when I said yes the AI needs to not kill itself at least most of the time here.

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.

^

Anyway, the thing about ai not doing really crazy instant suicide things as you stated is exactly what I meant in my last 3 or more posts on the subject.  i'm not sure how you could interpret what I said any differently from that so lets move on. Yes we should limit this sort of thing, I agree about that.

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.)

I never claimed you made the whole ridiculous plant argument up. And in fact I believe I addressed that kind of thing in my previous post aswell no?

When I admitted that this would be hard to program?

And toady addressed that in the FOTF reply aswell didnt he?

Yes I believe he did....

  Players will use them more creatively than NPC magic users -- that's true of everything in the game already.  If you find that you lost an NPC you were chasing because it had turned itself into a strawberry plant near some other strawberry plants (because they have a routine that goes that far in the use of such an effect), then that's cool.  If (when hunger etc. is implemented) you find yourself feeding a starving companion by turning yourself into a strawberry plant in a way an NPC wouldn't have thought of, then that's cool.  If you end up not having a finger when you change back, then that would be cool too.

I dont see anything wrong with expecting toady to accomplish all the tasks he has set out to do. And as are outlined in numerous places on his website.

No I don't play fort mode much and no I don't really care about the balance of fort mode , ill admit that.,  yeah I prefer adventure mode, and toady even said in this FOTF reply that there are alot of things he will put in that arn't practical in fort mode and you know what, i'm fine with it. Most of the three-toe stories are adventure mode related anyway.

Yeah, I realize strawberry plant is kind of (it is,) a really dumb spell idea for a game like DF, and I have said this in previous posts.

And I agree that you have to be really careful when making AI like this (as I stated earlier) , I understand that there are problems, But I want to see toady accomplish things that seem impossible (This game wouldn't exist if toady hadn't tried achieving the impossible)  so encouraging it in my opinion isn't really that bad.


I essentially think we have reached an agreement of sorts, despite misunderstanding each others posts sometimes.


Also yes, I do tend to get overly excited about things, but thats just how I am , I get excited easily. I dont see any reason people shouldn't be excited about these new systems either if they love dwarf fortress.

[NW_Kohaku]

the "belief creates reality" model

Well when you simplify it that much, it doesn't sound very deep, does it? I think he meant more about divinity being a state of mind rather than some some "I believe it so it's true" 40k ork thing. The sort of stuff that comes up in the (currently growing in popularity) more mystic fantasy which draws heavily on Indian myth for inspiration. Like the works of Kirkbride, which I believe he was referring to, or something like Kill Six Billion Demons. From stuff you've talked about, I know most of your fantasy reading tends to be grounded in a more western paradigm, but have you kept up with other fantasy movements like this? If not, it might interest you to at least read what there is of the K6BD comic, and/or perhaps the roleplaying game. Of course there's a lot more writings to go with that, which is common to the subgenre such as it is, but that's more peripheral.

Just to further explain what I was referring to...

Spoiler: rambly stuff on another game's lore (click to show/hide)

The metaplot in Skyrim revolves around how the first emperor, Tiber Septim basically used a magic time machine to insert himself into the creation myth of the world so as to retroactively make himself a deity by forming a cult around himself as a means of changing the balance of cosmic power. 

This leads to a war between "purist" Gnostic-style elves who see physical creation as inherently evil and want to destroy creation in order to return themselves and their "pure souls" to a state of pure energy in pre-creation and potential without the "tyranny" of causality created by time and cause-and-effect, and Existentialist followers of the (human) empire that seek to evolve humanity into a Higher Plane of Existence through a systemic set of changes to the cosmos through carefully planned alterations of reality.

Because reality is subjective based upon these creation myths, Gnostic elves wage a war where they try to wipe out Tiber Septim worship as a means of undoing the changes to the cosmos that created logically progressing time and rational cause and effect. 

[NW_Kohaku]

There is no way in hell he will be able to think of every single edge case in a game this complex no matter how hard he tries to do it.  The game is unfinished, and the community has stuck around through the craziness and the craziness is part of the experience. Toady does try to think of edge cases and he has talked about this in the past, but people will always find one he hasn't thought about. It will never be perfect right off the bat, these kinds of things never are, sure you can try to get him to push for that, but it is unreasonable to expect him to somehow think of every single edge case.

Sure the community can try to help, but there will most definitely be at least one completely crazy bug no one thought about.

I never said that a release must be perfect, I merely cautioned against expecting it would be a release with hundreds of spells that don't cause absolute mayhem with game balance.

If you're trying to say that one shouldn't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, then that's by all means an endorsement of everyone coming around to list the many possible edge case failures for Toady, even if not every one can be found, rather than dismissing such things as pessimism.

How am I trivializing the AI cheating?  Didn't you already say the best way to keep the game balanced is to allow them to have full access to all the spells, isnt that cheating? And isn't that exactly what I said aswell?

[...]

I understand that toady needs to limit cheating but I also understand that the only way for a game to be actually challenging is to either create a genius AI or allow cheating for the AI and df will likely do the latter and does do the latter and I AM fine with that as long as the player still has a chance.

My point is that there is a limit to which cheating can be stretched without making the game impossible to play as anything other than an exploit-memorization game. An army of 50-ton steel blobs with full-body necrosis syndromes is essentially impossible for any military to defeat, and functionally requires obsidianization traps.

The cheating also needs to be balanced for both players that can randomly have access to virtually any type of magic, all types of magic, or no magic... which is an absurdly difficult ask.

And I agree that you have to be really careful when making AI like this (as I stated earlier) , I understand that there are problems, But I want to see toady accomplish things that seem impossible (This game wouldn't exist if toady hadn't tried achieving the impossible)  so encouraging it in my opinion isn't really that bad.

Toady doesn't accomplish the (actually) impossible.  At best, he accomplishes the unprecedented, but he has mainly just done things that nobody would put the time or effort into doing, or which people believed would not be popular enough to warrant doing. 

What I'm opposed to is simply saying "Toady can do this thing that I can't even clearly define or have thought about all the way through, even if it's impossible because Toady does impossible stuff all the time!"

It's like saying, "Hey, people said making a plane that could go through the sound barrier was 'impossible', and now they say time machines are 'impossible', so clearly, time machines are going to exist any minute, now!"  No matter what the memes say, DF isn't going to become self-aware any time soon, and DF has a nasty tendency to make memes that fans angrily stick to as though it were true.  (Like, say, female dwarves with beards...)  Magic, in particular, is a hotbed for asking for the impossible or the badly-thought-out, which is why it demands strong pushback to ask people to think through what they really want, and consider the impact it will have on people with different play styles than one's own.

[Random_Dragon]

This is still one hell of a derail. ;w;

[Untrustedlife]

This is still one hell of a derail. ;w;

I think it is perfectly on topic actually.

[Random_Dragon]

It's mostly just you two arguing over the potential details of a system we don't know every detail about yet, when there would be better threads for this discussion.

[Button]

Yeah, this has just turned into the NW_Kohaku and Untrustedlife Yells A Lot Hour.

[PatrikLundell]

My arguments regarding loss of "essence" as a damaged transformed creature is transformed back is partially based both on an opposition to free healing. If you can implement the egg model that's fine. As stated earlier I think blood might be the easiest way to indicate "general damage", but some kind of "health bar" would do fine as well. I'm also in favor of magic having a cost to keep magic spamming down, and I can easily see a two step version where usage depletes some regenerating resource (mana/blood/nutrients/fatigue...), with an "emergency" level that trades more serious harm for an immediate usage (referring back to the story of Cado). I'm fine with a system where this emergency level might be restricted to player (or possibly more or less scripted, but that's unlikely) control.

I did not deny were transformation damage repair was there for a reason, and it was a reasonable one. I AM arguing that if regenerative transformation can be done more or less at will, much of the damage system and living with its consequences goes down the drain (just like farming becomes obsolete if you just can wave your hand to get food). Thus, the transformation regen strategy might need to either be modified, or some restriction (scarce resource/side effects/magic research level[not a good option]/...) be in place to not make it the standard treatment.

When it comes to the "magic research can blow up the fortress" discussion, I think such dangerous research would be disallowed by default (so players would actively have to enable on a lab by lab basis, and be allowed to disable it again at a later point, if desired), and this research should be placed into some kind of branches, so you actually CAN provide counter measures/contingencies. Portal research might let through nasty critters, for instance, but they should obey normal critter rules (such as being restricted by walls and drawbridges) unless some specific research is performed which might let through ghost like critters (is there any way to stop such things at all?). A "Research = End of the World (or at least fortress) sooner or later" logic is rather unpalatable to anyone who doesn't actively pursue that kind of destruction. To avoid misunderstandings, I want to stress "normal" magical research should be there, only HFS level sub types should be in the "play with this at your own risk, and you ought to know what you do, and expect things to blow up regardless" category.

[Untrustedlife]

Yeah, this has just turned into the NW_Kohaku Yells A Lot Hour.

Don't be unfair, im yelling alot aswell.