Thanks to Quietust, Pidgeot, Putnam, MrWiggles, Sizik, Dirst, Footkerchief, therahedwig, Vattic, smirk, Deus Asmoth, Knight Otu, smjjames and anybody I missed for helping to answer questions! I removed scheduling questions/complaints about this bug-fix period, since I have nothing specific to offer.
With the addition of fruits, nuts, legumes, and vegetables, what's the current planned roadmap of processed foodstuffs and meals?
The plan is pretty much to play around with it during the recipes section of the upcoming tavern stuff. That carves out some unspecified chunk depending on what can be done in a reasonable timeframe. I'm probably going to focus on the ingredients we have -- adjacent are yawning chasms of food production and preservation which are dangerous to timely releases, and I'm not sure how far I want to get into things like drink production rewrites and stuff like vinegar. I want a few more ingredients for recipes and so on, if they look time-safe when I get there. We should be seeing stuff like local recipes and specialties as part of this, though the scarcity of ingredients opens up the question of which substitutions are valid.
Is the current development plan to prolong this small-update development cycle as long as possible and see how far we can get with the minor patches and single-feature upgrades, rather than diving back deep into coding and coming back up for air in another year?
Putnam mentioned my reply to a previous question along these lines, and all I really have to add is that we've set up the upcoming four dev sections to at the very least be released independent of each other. I'm hopeful that those aren't the only release breaks we'll be able to have, but it's not known without having something to play with at which point in, say, the tavern section we'll have the first playable release. Just having the inn zones adds nothing and doesn't constitute a release, but finishing the randomized games shouldn't be required to have an enjoyable dwarf-mode tavern release. The latter two sections have similar issues. With Job Priorities, it's really a matter of how long it takes. I can release after the main job selection is rewritten if it ends up taking a while, but if it goes smoothly, I might be able to knock off the other bits as well and just release it all, which would save some time in that dig designation rewrites will tweak the selection loop. Hard to say until we're in it.
I'm wondering what internally is the difference between world generation and the activated world? Why can't they both implement the same ways of simulating things?
The activated world has a great deal of additional information. The individual critters are more fleshed out, there's more information tracked for each site population, and there's more information to do with location. In world generation, we can take all the people generally in the same part of world and throw them into an army battle. After world generation, they need to be moved to the specific place where the battle takes place, and they leave tracking information as they move, etc., and when the battle actually happens, there's more data to be respected.
So once taverns/inns are implemented, we'll be up to two types of special rooms that are designated by placing furniture and then setting a zone (hospitals being the other one). I know you commented about this a bit in the new DF Talk episode, but do you think that now there's a good chance that all rooms and workshops will end up being defined this way?
I think we're leaning that way -- one of the open questions is how it ties into adventure mode work and where dwarf mode will end up in terms of tools and so on. The dwarf mode workshops are convenient to avoid a (further) proliferation of scatterable garbage that needs to be hauled around. I'd prefer for everything to converge toward something zone-ish so that we have one umbrella for the interface, but I still can't guarantee it'll work out that way. In the end, the workshop question can probably be punted in any case, if workshops are simply present in the zones but the zones handle all the action.
At what point during the development timeline will trading with civilizations in Fortress Mode be finalized so that trade exports affect the demands and exports of those civilizations? To clarify, right now you could trade a civilization hundreds of crafts or food every year and the value of those items do not adjust for the proceeding year. My question is when will this be adjusted/coded so that it matters what you trade and the amounts due to demands by other sites taking into account what you export.
It would be foolish for me to guess -- we had supply/demand as a release with that earlier 9-release caravan/economy plan that didn't work out, and now all I know is that we'll have a more-than-sufficient framework in place once start scenarios are complete (with the corresponding property/law/etc. additions). It seems prudent to do sensible valuation before we get into theft and justice, but it wouldn't be strictly required. We'll have to see which way the game is heading when we set up the next ordered list of dev sections. The competition for the coveted fifth ordered dev section spot is intense, but we can't order too far ahead or we'll just end up changing it later (as with the caravan releases). I can almost never answer timeline questions with specificity.
I know that sooner or later every fortress falls and you can reclaim it afterwards with a group of brand new dwarfs. But will we ever have scenarios where we actually get a chance to continue the history of the original group as something like refugees or slaves who break free?
As part of starting scenarios, will starting dwarves be existing historical figures instead of being generated out of thin air? What about adventurers?
We've talked quite a bit previously about assuming individual previous historical critters. We don't really have a mechanism for playing a full group outside of fortress mode at this time, though we have dev items about single adventurers better able to lead groups and also playing as a "party". It would be funny to assume the role of your failed dwarves as an adventure mode party, assuming they were a small enough group. I expect start scenarios will be the first time we start to see historical options for dwarf mode, though I'm not sure which permutations we'll be trying. There's also the other sentiment we're mindful of that some people want to see fewer historical migrants so they can play certain kinds of forts. Hopefully a diversity of scenario options will address all of this.
And on a kind of similar note, do you ever plan on making civilizations go through some sort of progression so perhaps we see tiny groups of nomads who eventually become either a horde or settle as a tribe and then turn into a proper kingdom?
We had nomads badly done briefly somewhere back there, and it's still a constant in the code, but we're not sure when we'll do that properly. We have the refugee groups now that can resettle, but that's neither satisfying nor quite the same thing. Our subterranean animal peoples were another aborted experiment with camps. We would like to represent other civilization types, certainly, but it'll probably take a concerted push rather than whatever we've been doing.
Are standard yearly player artifacts generally going to end up a little different from the full on god stolen paranoia breeding civilization symbolizing artifacts? Speaking of paranoia, will we be able to control the spread of information on our treasures?
Yeah, there will be significant differences in artifact standing. Some of the initial world gen ones will probably be beyond your capacity to create, at least for a while. The way the rumor system works now, we'd have to manually add the rumor for your artifacts, so the initial state is world ignorance of your achievement. We do want the information to get out -- it could end up working in a similar way as diplomats vs. your traps, unless you can brag about it or dwarves can have loose tongues (the invisible dwarf-mode conversations between dwarves and outsiders don't currently go deeply into rumors due to CPU constraints, aside from the giant news dump). It's hard to say what control you'll have -- it'll be ease of programming vs. fun, as with many things.
Will there be any other types of games than dices ? I would be very interested if you could talk more about these (if you have already thought enough about it !)
So far I've categorized the dice, board, and card/tile games I've found on wikipedia and elsewhere, decided which ones are more-or-less period (though that doesn't matter so much), made lists, done some code experiments and thought a bit. The idea is to randomize games starting from those templates, and then to get a little more adventurous over time once the code supports many almost-traditional games. The cut-off for the first random games release will probably be AI based -- we don't really mind if the opponents are terrible players, but utterly random moves are annoying (if unavoidable sometimes). Hopefully we can get at least one board game in without it being a total disaster.
How much do we have to donate to have you do a guitar piece per season?
It's hard to set aside enough time to feel like I can do a decent job with any of that these days.
We all love the nonsensical epithets that are generated for notable figures, but is there a chance of getting some more sensible ones intermingled in soon, such as "X the Swordsman", "X the Rock", "X the Wise", or "X One-eye" based on equipment, encounters, or physical/mental characteristics? I can imagine that, for instance, it would make it a little more engaging and easier to remember a journey to kill Bax the Pillager instead of Bax Cryptsquarreled the Foresty Glaive of Wandering
I know a more intensive linguistics rewrite is a later power goal, but I think especially with the world being activated it would make it a little easier to keep track of the hundreds of historical guys running around if some of them had slightly more "familiar" names / epithets.
When will places have names related to their particular features (naming a forest full of apple trees the Forest of Apple Trees, for example)?
It'll probably all have to wait for the language rewrite, since the current name storage is very restrictive. I can only refer to things in one specific way with a list of words that aren't linked tightly enough to the raws to refer to them directly as things stand.
On that note, are there any plans to be able to mark characters as "interesting" and/or be able add some brief notes to them that would persist through the modes?
Perhaps marking a character as interesting makes their name show up in light blue instead of white when their name comes up (similar to how PCs show up in Legends), so it's a little easier to track throughout the adventure mode screens. And when browsing Legends mode and you see him highlighted, you can add a note that he killed your character, and later you see these when he shows up in Fortress Mode.
I don't have specific plans about this. Suggestions up in the suggestion section are welcome and read. It'd be interesting to see what sort of highlight systems would be most useful for people. I think I remember more suggestions about sorting.
Can a random lower body wound inflicted through combat or other cause, cause sterility now?
That is, is it possible via random chance to induce sterility outside of the gelding interaction (since it works via a wound) or is it only possible to achieve the sterility via the gelding interaction?
There are specific rare combat wounds complete with announcement. Perhaps too rare if nobody has seen them.
If we add a geldable tag to female critters, will this in turn allow specific females to be sterilized?
Yeah, it should work. I don't think I singled out males anywhere in the process (aside from the vanilla raws), but it can be reported as a bug if it isn't consistent.
Will castrating cows affect meat production......eventually
Will gelding potentially change animal behaviour, making them less likely to fight for the pasture, for example?
Those doors are certainly more open now that the deed has been done. I haven't done anything with it yet aside from the actual reproductive effects.
Toady, would you consider allowing those tissue flags to be modified the same way at some point, or would it be too complicated on the programming end to bother with?
Tissues are harder than tissue layers, since the tissue definitions aren't stored within the castes, so you can't apply changes to them for one and not the other. If you meant the tissue layers, that is pretty easy and is in my simple suggestions list. It's also reasonably straightforward though a bit harder to move variables from tissues to tissue layers so that they could be changed through a tissue layer method, at least for some of them.
When will items have their own descriptions and prefstrings (analogous to the creature ones)? I'd love to see a dwarf that "likes mugs for their roundness" or something silly like that.
I have no idea -- item descriptions have lagged behind many other things in general... that screen has been nearly blank for many years. I'm not sure why that is. I think it might be because I'm waiting for adventure mode skills to bring forth item components or something, so it seems like a waste, but that only goes so far.
we all know about the way you go on tangents when something you want to implement requires a framework that doesn't exist yet so you add it, and then it turns out this framework requires another addition that you add in too and so on (such as world activation requiring full-fledged sites requiring elf orchards requiring fruit etc.) so my question is, what circumstances led you to add the ability to geld? What more "tangential" features do you think will be added along the way?
Gelding was a common suggestion and was pulled off of the simple suggestions list. It wasn't really a tangent in the same way as many other additions. The suggestions board is filled with stuff along those lines, and the lists have all grown very long, so it's hard to say what'll be next.
About multiplication of skills, I think someday Toady will simplify it and it will be much better after that, like for all things he did before. (first steps, densification, complexification, complete mess, then rationalisation and new system)
Why not creating, for example, a "Creating" skill, which will include potery,metalsmith,wax worker, leather, cloth, etc...and could be coupled with a material preference ? I know it's not the place to make suggestion, but here is my question related to profession anyway :
Do you plan one day of simplifying the profession tree, and if yes, could you tell us more about it ?
I don't think it's an improvement to collapse everything down to one skill, though I think the current system suffers from a lack of overlap. At the same time, I'd like to separate experience/practice from knowledge (which could lead to some collapse of practiced skills, maybe). We had a kind of disastrous thing prepared for the Armok game, where the materials and different methods were taken into consideration, and I'm not really sure where we'll end up here. The new gelding stuff is a stark notice that things need to be adjusted, but a rewrite at the time would have been too time-consuming (since jobs/skills/professions/buildings are too closely linked), and the issue of bizarrely-specialized migrants is only tangentially related to the overall skill system -- there needs to be some sort of "life path" sim for non-historical critters, and the work histories of historical critters need to make sense. Even if somebody be trained as just a skilled gelder, it wouldn't have been a viable career for the average person.
The messiness of the skill system wouldn't matter so much if it weren't for the profession setting stuff, I suspect. We'll have to see how experiments play out with the start scenarios that remove/curtail v-p-l profession setting. Start scenarios would be strengthened by a knowledge system, but it's unclear what we'll get to. It'd be interesting to see how forts work if certain jobs can only be done in a tragically shoddy fashion if relevant knowledge is not possessed by any current citizens. It's the sort of thing that can be reverse-engineered into invention/knowledge advancement as well, though we have to be careful about that.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1839930 times)