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[Mel_Vixen]

Iirc atleast treetoes story "Root" goes into detail somewhat about the outside appereance of the Animal people i think there was another one with a rhino person?

Anyway i think the representation so far are good but the prefstrings could be a bit clearer ... not that it changes much.

Btw. one of the oldest Animal people depictions is the so called "Löwenmensch" carved from mamoth-ivory and estimated to be 35 to 40 Thousand years old.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 

One could also argue that many middleeuropean Fables are "furry" for depicting humans in human like behaviour and posses. Sadly "puss in boots" is the only one most northamericans seem to know.

[Mel_Vixen]

It would still be better to have some engravings and the ability to ask directions.

I wonder how easy that would be. You could always look up the mapdata and plot routes but would that be the shortest route or the intended route? Would the engravings have to be created on the fly when you enter a fortress / deep-fort or can they be precreated? (which i guess they could be if forts safe layouts like cities)
 
Markerstones around streetcorners would be nice or painted signs but that would need new decorations code right?

[FantasticDorf]

Markerstones around streetcorners would be nice or painted signs but that would need new decorations code right?

Interesting, you (or somebody) should really make a suggestion for that niche, you could use it for hauling/traffic in which to designate particular corridors to go through or stops for tracks to run parallel (thinking of waypoints in Open TTD as seen on trains in that game). Infact just some kind of marking that can be read to instantly learn the immediate area/content detailed (such as uploading a map in fortress mode mode, having that printed onto paper/carved into stone reading it then having it stored to memory in adventure mode knowing the local area.) would be immensely useful, given that carving a crude image of objects outside storerooms using the image designer isn't always practical

Question for toady

Given that now kobolds are now recieving attention, will their methods of acquiring goods/or domestic production lines be looked into? Given that all cave born kobolds become theives, whilst all town settling (abandoned/loosely overtaken abandoned towns) acquire unnatural town roles, as before, their entity were equipped spontaneously with weapons derived from ores for daggers etc, more domestic roles would also improve local kobold cave population upkeep if they could produce food on site and make it harder to penetrate with all the spare populace milling around, collectively stronger for skulking sieges also with more population.

Even goblins make weapons and stockpile them in towers (i've seen on my goblin entity modded adventure runs it gets filled up fast), but even by RAW notes, the new museum update and a grand focus on site stockpiles might break the habit of non-mining kobolds (because the picks are too big, and ores nationwise don't have reliance on miner roles to generate, basically out of thin air) turning up with daggers they can't make without a tad more elaboration assuming they didn't just steal them.

[Asin]

Toady, you said that in the magic update, one of your big goals was to allow wizards to end up being able to make a new servant race with magic. My question is will we be able to control what exactly our servant race will look like?

[Asin]

The myth generator screens actually seemed to leave room for that sort of thing, over on the right side it had adjectives like "lost" "doubted" "destroyed" and whatnot as I recall, I've got some of the shots I took from the video somewhere.

Is that the video of Tarn showing the prototype off? I had to stop watching because I was busy. Yeah, I'm pretty sure he mentioned somewhere that myths could become lost so that's a definite one, but I'm mainly concerned about the fact that he showed off a block of creation myth - feels like it'd imply there's only one creation myth per world, which is just not cricket.

It'd be great in Adventure mode to be faced with a bunch of different religions, each with codexes that contradict one another, making you unsure as to which is the truth, if any. Also that sense of suspicion if the god you worship even exists - or could just be asleep for a thousand years. It'd be Fun if you got fed up and renounced your god, only to be struck down for your impudence and disbelief. 

Maybe, if there was a Prime Myth that every other religion took bits of and added their own nonsense, you'd have the option to try and collate all the historical and religious information you can to decipher common Myths and Events. New Adventurer Job: Historian. It'd certainly give you a reason to visit libraries and collect books. Maybe you keep finding this mention of a Dark Tower in different cultures, so you venture out to it and see what information could be stored there.

EDIT: Watching the video now. It does seem to imply different cultures will interpret the creation myth differently (depending on what they were associated with), but they do seem to share gods. My question was about whether they'd believe entirely unique creation myths, but this might work better. I could see this as a Zeus/Jupiter situation, where they just call things differently but have a similar root, so that's very interesting and plays more into the historian idea. One issue I have is that it doesn't seem to generate unique religions - just race-wide ones. It'd be cool to see sects and offshoots from big religions that interpret the creation myth and its gods differently. Like if some necromancers believe one god was actually a death deity and rewrite history to fit their view.

EDIT2: Finished it. Now I feel silly, so I edited my question a bit. Basically I just want to know if we can expect lies to be possible.

Can someone link me to the video?

[Dustin]

i got a quick question, why cant we implement a multiplayer and not have to use mods which sometimes dont work?

[Putnam]

i got a quick question, why cant we implement a multiplayer and not have to use mods which sometimes dont work?

Because the multiplayer done in mods are hacky as hell and multiplayer is ludicrously difficult to implement into a project as deep into development as this one.

[downwithgdi]

How varied will the different magical effects be that the myth generator can churn out? Standard stuff like healing, levitation, resizing, teleportation, or maybe something more outlandish?

[FantasticDorf]

i got a quick question, why cant we implement a multiplayer and not have to use mods which sometimes dont work?

Because the multiplayer done in mods are hacky as hell and multiplayer is ludicrously difficult to implement into a project as deep into development as this one.

My best guess would be it would have to be a new mode (wizard mode?) or a shared adventurer mode world acting like a MMO that multiple people scurry around in, which doesn't sound as hard as it probably is if people just host a world on their own computers rather than zach and tarn having dedicated servers, and eventually the game gets most of its optimisation bugs out of the way to make it playable and people having to download the world raws first before playing online etc. etc.

Bring on the troll forts as overly complex traps for killing MMO adventurers looking to steal ready made artifact items, in some bizarre way raiding a fortress might end up more like a dungeon raid.

Question - Because of the complexity of the magic arc and more specifically functions of the wizard towers being personal to a wizard's behaviour and objectives Site with appropriate chambers (laboratory, library, ritual, summoning, etc, Quests and tasks and duties (as seen in the development subsection "Wizards"), could we expect to see them involved into a seperate mode putting the player in charge (a adventurer scenario?) if they are not immediately a adventurer feature with overlapping fortress mode implications?

[Putnam]

i got a quick question, why cant we implement a multiplayer and not have to use mods which sometimes dont work?

Because the multiplayer done in mods are hacky as hell and multiplayer is ludicrously difficult to implement into a project as deep into development as this one.

a shared adventurer mode world acting like a MMO that multiple people scurry around in, which doesn't sound as hard as it probably is if people just host a world on their own computers rather than zach and tarn having dedicated servers

I really don't think you understand why multiplayer is difficult. Logistics is difficult and important for MMOs or matchmaking games, but for something like Dwarf Fortress it's all in the programming, which is stupidly hard when you're over a decade into development, since most things need to be written with some sort of multiplayer model in mind.

[wierd]

Issues with concurrency, people who use memory cheats, et al.

EG, what happens when the two simulated worlds stop agreeing on what the world's data is, because somebody used DFHack?  Which game instance gets to claim to be right?

Hold that thought----

Now, what happens when the two simulated worlds stop agreeing-- because of a slightly different outcome from the randomizer, due to a processor bug, or other glitch?

Dealing with these kinds of problems, and doing it sensibly is one of the hurdles of a proper multiplayer mode. For a good example of why clients talking to each other is not a good approach, see the original diablo, and the item hacking tools for multiplayer games.

In addition to this obvious one, there is also simply the issue of how DF handles offloaded sites.  Instead of being properly offloaded, sites that have players running around in them will be fully simulated. Look at the memory footprint of DF with just one active site being simulated for one user-- Compound that many times for as many users as are running around in that world.  Now-- keep all the many gigabytes of data synchronized between all player's machines, while having all clients agree on the data.

Multiplayer is not a trivial thing to add to this game.

[PatrikLundell]

Let alone that DF is NOT an FPS with a "real time" clock running, but a step wise simulation that's subjected to both pauses and FPS lag. There's a reason MMOs are "real time" shooter/R*TS type things, rather than turn based, 'cause others don't want to wait for the slowpoke with the FPS-killed machine (PBEM type play can work for turn based, but then the turns are vastly LONGER than those of DF).
If you want MMO functionality you'll have to build it in from the beginning, and sacrifice all single player features that would have benefited from pausing. I'd say it's a lot easier to retrofit DF for multi threading than redesigning it as an MMO.

* "R" stands for real time, but it's generally hugely accelerated time (training soldiers, even the greenest of grunts, takes a lot more time than 30 seconds).

[Evans]

That depend on how you look at it and what you expect from the final product.

- dfhack might be disabled save for admin account server side
- cheating might not be a problem if this is buddy game over ip
- fortress mode is not possible to simulate reliably without rebuild the game from the scratch

This leaves us with adventure mode with real time (set speed) probably for a team adventure (team leader can switch to/from world map and other players follow, they regain control once out of fast travel).

Team leader(game host) would also be the only to have tactical pause (think of Baldur's gate).

This might work, but still it would need redesigning many game elements.

[Eric Blank]

We had a game client that allowed us to remotely play the game on someone elses' computer. That was pretty damn fun. When we werent all fighting for control at the same time

[wierd]

ahhh, good old DFTerm.

I remember trying to host such a server. My adsl had too crappy of an upload pipe to service reliably, despite having the game itself running lickedy split.

But this does make me wonder about something today, which I think I might try out.
(this thread is inappropriate, if it works I will take it to a new thread in general.)