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Author Topic: Future of the Fortress  (Read 2850815 times)

FantasticDorf

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3015 on: March 01, 2020, 05:00:27 am »

Shonai offered me some good advice recently to move my question out of the subforum based on my thread over here. So here's a question for you Toady  :D

"If your dispatched Militia dwarves from fortress mode are searching for artifacts in a non-hostile way asking for directions & locations town to town like a adventuring group, and are eventually privy to the known location of it, is it currently implemented into the game to have them use their own intrigue/schemer skill (and related social skills) to corrupt a local into giving it to them without a fight?"

Without the dungeon keeper doing much to actually train schemer skill its one of those things you can get at embark but not do very much with. I had actually entertained retiring criminally/villanous adventuerers on my site to fufill the role if one of the starting seven eventually shuffled the mortal coil with their skillset or set off on a endless quest never to be seen again; in order to keep my fortress well connected.
« Last Edit: March 01, 2020, 01:16:55 pm by FantasticDorf »
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Prismatic

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3016 on: March 01, 2020, 11:37:34 am »

Do you think you could provide a full list of valid creature and caste flags for use with the new summoning interaction tokens ([IE_FORBIDDEN_CREATURE_FLAG], [IE_FORBIDDEN_CREATURE_CASTE_FLAG], etc)? It looks like a number of them (SMALL_RACE, etc) do not correspond to the typical creature tokens documented on the wiki.
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Toady One

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3017 on: March 02, 2020, 01:10:09 am »

Quote
Quote from: ZM5
Hate to ask another question so soon after the last one, but is there a token for summoning a creature onto a specific tile rather than randomly? Been trying with CONTEXT_LOCATION and CONTEXT_CREATURE_OR_LOCATION but it always seems to pop the summon onto the caster's tile - not sure if I'm setting things up correctly or if thats a current limitation.

EDIT: Before I forget - whats the token that marks a creature as a necromancer experiment? I don't think I've seen it in extracted raws yet.
Quote from: pikachu17
I_EFFECT:CREATE_ITEM can't be used on CONTEXT_LOCATION, just CONTEXT_CREATURE, and even on creatures, it only creates the item at their feet, not in their hands. Is there a reason for this beyond you just didn't around to doing it?
Quote from: ZM5
Got a question myself - what defines a creature as an experiment? By that I mean, the mutants created from the "horrible experiments" event type, with names like "Hand of Dastot" or "Eye of Urist". I've noticed [NIGHT_CREATURE_NIGHTMARE] is a token, but I didn't see something like [NIGHT_CREATURE_EXPERIMENT] or [NIGHT_CREATURE_MUTANT].

Targeting is in a dire state and will have to wait for the magic release to be more than a taped-together mess.  Experiments just use NIGHT_CREATURE, as a way of keeping them alive but still immune to mindless undead attack and hopefully further experiment if I remembered that part.

Quote from: Molay
for a long time marksdwarves (I only know fort mode) behave in an, admittedly darven, stupid manner. Even while still having bolts, they actively seek to engage enemies in melee rather than firing from a distance. This can lead to stunning acrobatics at time to even reach the enemy.

Any chance we could see a fix to that behavior? Even if in an open field, I'd expect marksdwarves to first fire all their bolts before running up to the enemy,  unless they're being attacked in melee.

Bumber: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8083982#msg8083982
Schmaven: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8084307#msg8084307
Shonai_Dweller: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8084311#msg8084311

Yeah, we're mostly not going to get a chance to get to any of this before the army/siege changes at the earliest.  There is some small chance of the most annoying parts making the Steam/itch tweak list, but that is a very large plate.

Quote from: Warlord255
Summoning and conjuration are insane godsends, but will we see any adjustments before the Big Wait?

We might see something, but most of the magic stuff will indeed have to wait for the magic release.  I can't easily change the targeting system, as mentioned above, for instance.  But easier stuff like e.g. adding classes to creature summons is possible.

Quote from: JesterHell696
Do you think Battlefield friendships fit adventure mode party dynamics or is the relationship between the members of a long term adventurer party its own unique thing?

I personally haven't found a case in legends yet but do people seek revenge on the behalf of family, friends and lovers or do they only avenge themselves?

I think for certain parties, it would make sense to further specify the party dynamic that way.  Obviously for things like a traveling musician group it might be less common.  As with the rep stuff in general, giving the relationship multiple variables is good.

I don't think you'll see that in legends mode - without some difficult extra work, it'll be hard on the CPU to have them graph crawling too much.  They do in some limited ways, but I don't think it comes up in the legends plot.  Once you are out in play with fewer thoughts being had, they can suddenly think out a few steps (hence some of the weird cascade issues.)

Quote from: FAA
Item materials - as there are seemingly no restrictions on item materials, the game creates immersion-breaking gold, silver or tetrahedrite barrels in taverns, and every table/chair is made of different material. Even kobold forts have golden tables, even though there is no other loot to speak of - they lack weapons and are semi-naked. Do you plan to restrict materials used for things like chairs or tables to materials that are appropriate, and make them more uniform?

Bumber: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8084489#msg8084489
Shonai_Dweller: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8084588#msg8084588

Quote from: Untrustedlife
The new necromancer towers are awesome looking.Thank you.
Any plans to make mummies build different looking towers?

They live in the tombs built by the parent civ, and I'm not sure in general when we'll get to an architecture rewrite, other than that being part of what the map rewrite is supposed to support more easily.

Quote from: pikachu17
Why don't statues in temples seem to curse me when I topple them anymore? Have you removed that for some reasom?

FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8084901#msg8084901
therahedwig: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8084913#msg8084913
FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8084914#msg8084914

Quote from: IncompetentFortressMaker
I've noticed that, at least on my end, "yawn" and "baby" are both the same word in Dwarven: åm. Is this intended?

Ha ha, I don't recall setting it up that way.  That word generator I used has a collision detector as well, so additional, it is kind of baffling!

Quote from: Fatace
Will we get a more better representation on how the Dark Fortress Civs Position system works? Modding wise, it seems to have become close to being unplayable as an idea for a "All Civs playable" type mods. With either Custom Offical positions, or newly created ones, causing crashes half the time, or every time. It seems that the new custom positions act like divine metals... They are either made during world gen or not.. and if they are, they seem to stop certain responsibilities being used with player custom positions, causing a further crash.

Will this be looked into with a better way of managing these positions for modders?

Knight Otu: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8085543#msg8085543
FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8085551#msg8085551
Fatace (op): http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8085669#msg8085669

Ah, weirdness related to true-name demon vaults (whether you had them or not.)  And chat-worthy filled the positions in prehistory, causing the issue during the check.  I'll have to roll it out with the first parallel fix patch.

Quote from: Flying Teasets
I'm guessing FIRE_SAFETY nobles will be more building inspector than firefighter; am I correct?

Will adding any of the new tokens to SITE and AS_NEEDED positions be a bad idea?

Yeah, that's right.  I don't think there will be problems if you add them to mods, but I'm also not sure if the game checks for redundancies in these cases...  it does in others, so I hope so.

Quote from: pikachu17
Is there a way to make summoning not summon or only summon creatures of a specific creature class? If not, why not?

Knight Otu: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8086568#msg8086568

Quote from: boxxu
I've been generating a lot of worlds in the new version, and I've been noticing that Dwarven civilizations are having a really hard time at sticking around,especially in longer histories. The new digging too deep and greedily events, Powerful necromancers and other civs having infinite lifespans seems to be really taking a toll. Are there any plans to buff dwarfs during world gen? Perhaps unique dwarven events that are positive?

FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8086557#msg8086557

I think that catastrophes were reduced significantly since this question was asked, which hopefully helps a bit.  Necromancers are hard on everybody, and probably eventually 'win' every world in which they exist in the fullness of time.  That'll require a supernatural fix most likely - even if the first failed necromancer causes a huge cultural change making it harder for them to rise (doesn't yet), they'll still eventually win.

Quote from: AliceRed
The new necromancer minions with magic abilities had me wondering - do you think in the future you might add a more magical alternative to the FBs, with crazier/more unnatural appearances like, say, a wheel covered in eyes like some accounts of biblical angels, with more magic based instead of biology based powers? Likewise, do you think depending on how magic is generated per world, that Demons could become even more of a threat - like, say, the classic wall strategies becoming useless due to Demons sometimes having the ability to teleport or become intangible? Just this small taste of magic is making me so giddy for the future!

FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8086671#msg8086671

We started from animals since it is easier to handle both technical body definitions and to have people's imagination piggyback on real-world animals, but we're hoping to go beyond this.  And yeah, I think magic will lead to new terrors, ha ha.  Although, really, we're likely get to some antidote to walls before we even start magic, with the improved sieges.

Quote from: pikachu17
Is USAGE_HINT:MAJOR_BLESSING a thing, and if so, how can you make one happen to your adventurer?

FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8086805#msg8086805
Putnam: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8087134#msg8087134
Knight Otu: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8087208#msg8087208

Ha ha, MAJOR_CURSE occurs 13 times in the code, and was the first usage hint added.  MAJOR_BLESSING does not occur.  Poor dwarves.

Quote from: Inarius
Now that people can open the circus, will wee see adamantine artifacts during w.g ?

Shonai_Dweller: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8087521#msg8087521
Inarius (op): http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8087802#msg8087802
Shonai_Dweller: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8088068#msg8088068
Inarius (op): http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8088472#msg8088472
FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8088527#msg8088527
Miuramir: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8092545#msg8092545

It's certainly more reasonable now to give them a little adamantine as a treat before hitting them with the end of civilization, but people are correct that I did not get there.  Dwarves are the only entity with strand extractor, so I wouldn't worry about the goblins getting it on a first pass, though the musings in the comments are all valid.  With our current situation, it's hard to say that we'll get there rather than to the overall splorting of everything with varied adamantine and non-adamantine myths.  We're not tied to the idea of keeping it, but a traditional setting should also be easy to concoct - even in that situation, adamantine would likely have different setups, and likely be more interesting all around as a top candidate for magical properties.  And that would get us naturally to the comments aligning with scholar dwarves and a thousand years of adamantine forge-labs and so forth.  Or dwarves just holding it and meditating or something.  Hopefully the computer is properly respectful.

Quote from: iceball3
I just checked out the ingame manual again for once in a long while, and just noticed again the cool symbols you've got set and unused for magical items.
Will you still be using these particular symbols once magical items are properly introduced?

FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8087682#msg8087682
PatrikLundell: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8087717#msg8087717

Ha ha, yeah, we're going to be pretty far gone into graphics world by that point, so it's impossible to say what item modifiers will end up being.  It was cool when we had it!  There was a brief moment in DF history where armor had hair, swords whistled and elf arrows exploded wooden spikes inside of people.  Someday we'll get back there.  It's scheduled!

Quote from: IndigoFenix
The new interaction options offer up many fun possibilities for magical secrets and modding in "high fantasy" worlds, but as far as I can tell, they still seem to be heavily tied to necromancer towers.  I've tried adding teachable, researchable secrets that can be bestowed with minor/medium blessings in the hope that this would result in creatures being taught the secrets during worldgen and then spread them around by writing books or taking apprentices, but this doesn't seem to work; in the rare instance that someone acquires a non-necromancy secret from a slab, they rarely if ever write books or take apprentices, so the secret dies with them.  Is there any way of "seeding" the world with modded secrets in such a way that they will be spread around reliably in worldgen, without making them variants of necromancy?  And if not, are there any plans of making one before the next Big Wait?

I'm not sure - the one angle I can think of is creatures with spheres.  They should get the secret, but I'm not sure how you can sufficiently civilize them other than them being demons, and people don't seem to seek out death demons to be necromantic masters for some reason.  So it might not work.  No plans before the Big Wait.  The Big Wait is magic.

Quote
Quote from: Immortal-D
Little while back, ThreeToe posted *We need your help with game ending stress*.  Has the feedback there been helpful at all?  Have you been able to investigate, if not actually work on, the root problems in the code of Dwarven psyche?
Quote from: feelotraveller
Will the poor ability of dwarfs in making friends be tweaked before moving onto the Steam release?
Quote from: Shonai_Dweller
Are we likely to see an interim release with fixes for stress/friendship and so on during Steam development, or are we going to have to wait until everything is done?

Yeah, the thread has been great.  We have about twenty angles to work with there, and some of them are straightforward enough that they should come up in the parallel releases rather than with the Steam/itch release.  I haven't run any numeric tests yet, so I'm not going to pin it on anything, but between siege bodies and rain and food and cave adaptation etc. there is a lot to check and change.  The needs discourse is fascinating since it doesn't seem(?) to be a numeric stress problem, but it is a presentation problem, so we'll still need to address it.  The changes made to friendship forming and vulnerable dwarves in the recent 47s is just the start.

Quote from: therahedwig
Looking through legends, I see a lot of histfigs failing at getting assets and eventually succeeding. How do histfigs gain the relevant skills in worldgen? Is it abstracted by them just gaining a lot more experience for each relevant action they take compared to the equivalent an adventurer or dwarf would need to do? Or do histfigs actually have to indicate they're practicing this skill?

I don't understand 'indicate' here.  Do you mean the exact die rolls and bonuses and such?  That part depends on the roll.  For the intrigue stuff, if I recall, some of the actions could be done in parallel and some couldn't.  The interrogations for instance, work very differently, while the asset gaining is very similar.  It definitely isn't all piped through the same function - the situations are just too different to do that cleanly, as the historical figures don't have bodies or minds in the same way as loaded on-screen critters do.

Quote from: AliceRed
I noticed while obsessively pouring over your old Mythgen pictures that there's a few "secret" and "destroyed" cities as separate pips on the mythgen. If it's not too much of a problem, do you think you could explain how you envision these pips ideally manifesting via worldgen - could we say, find the lost ruins of an ancient mythgen era civilization, or could the hidden cities lead to hidden underground or jungle-bound societies? I'm curious how you envision such things!

Yeah, exactly.  We haven't planned it through in detail at this point, so I don't have much to add, but broadly speaking, a site could be destroyed, but findable (not unlike current ruins, but more mythic and sometimes more hidden), or it can be alive but separated and require exploration or one of the new forms of travel/magic to locate, and would likely be closely related to whatever its mythologically circumstances are.  As the world generator moves from myths to location-based year-by-year history, it would need to decide which places need locations and which can still be mushy.  So some ruins might be uncovered historically, and others might still be waiting.  Presumably uncovering the wrong ruin could lead to additional ruins being formed.  The still-living secret cities are probably more interesting here - are they in stasis or not?  If they move beyond their mythical state, there would ideally be some surfaced history for that.  It wouldn't surprise me though, running with the releases theme of change, if a hidden city could return somehow in the middle of history and change its course in whatever way.  Not that we know what we are getting to first, ha ha ha.

Quote from: Atkana
Will SUMMON_UNIT interaction effects be getting special support for applying syndromes to the summoned creatures, like how the ANIMATE effect has? The new feature is really cool for modding, but the lack of that limits its potential

By the time we get through to the magic changes, I'm not sure if it'll work the same way in general - improvements to targeting could allow, for instance, the summoned unit to be a new target and then the syndrome or anything else could be applied without it having to be a specific element of the unit effect.

Quote from: FantasticDorf
Since necromancers/mummies are active conquerers with their own living ensemble of people-things whether they're intentional or failed, have you effectively surpassed your old development log targets around 'haunted hamlet' type abodes populated by peoples of some description or are they still on hold for a better time to address?

I ask just on account it threw me how often ruins are left behind rather than refilled up by experiments, though i imagine the villian themselves might be more single-minded about the end-goal to worry about the needs of the people they've made.

Ah, we definitely haven't gotten there yet.  A more folk tale/horror movie aspect is what we are going for there, rather than world-conquering armies of the dead.  Yeah, the necros are definitely very sloppy about site maintenance and don't really care about holding any gains they've made.  They'd be better if they sometimes focused on their new sites and appropriately creepified them on an ongoing basis.

Quote from: Nopenope
Could you clarify whether there are going to be intermittent bugfix releases during the Big Wait (or even the Steam Wait)?

Shonai_Dweller: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8092789#msg8092789

Quote from: sly
are we ever going to see the option to generate more history *after* a game has been played in a world?

Shonai_Dweller: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8093052#msg8093052
PatrikLundell: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8093055#msg8093055
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The Toad, a Natural Resource:  Preserve yours today!

Toady One

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3018 on: March 02, 2020, 01:10:26 am »

Quote from: rian ashes
I have a question about Steam release.
As you, maybe, know, russian comminuty managed to localise Dwarf Fortress into russian languge.
May be you can inpliment other localisations as official? DF is great, but some time it's too hard to understand it, if you don't know English.

Shonai_Dweller: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8093536#msg8093536
PatrikLundell: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8093826#msg8093826
IndigoFenix: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8093875#msg8093875

It's not possible for me to do in our current situation, and not having open source makes it hard for anybody to do well (I haven't seen and wouldn't understand the Russian translation, so I'm not sure how well it works.)  It's something that would definitely be cool if we could ever figure out a way to do it.  I've never localized a project, so have no idea what any of the standards are -- certainly menus are doable in some sense, though I wouldn't personally know how to get the right glyphs mapped onto the screen or what the right format is there.  Our fonts have never worked well, but even without that, manually setting up the right unicode subsets maybe.  As people point out, the procedural aspect is the hardest part, and likely can't be done perfectly while retaining the data structures since grammar works differently for everybody.  Probably couldn't get that right enough for the official Steam/itch version, but maybe leaving out the procedure stuff would be satisfactory for people that just want to try.

Quote from: TheFlame52
Does beekeeping make more trees and plants grow in your fortress, because of pollination? If not, then why do the deserts around fortresses bloom vigorously?

How do the new alliances work in worldgen? Leader personalities? Ethics? Civ values? The old factions of snatcher civ vs. thief civ vs. civ with both vs. civ with neither? Evil races vs. non-evil races?

Shonai_Dweller: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8094195#msg8094195
FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8094409#msg8094409
Shonai_Dweller: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8094411#msg8094411
FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8094418#msg8094418

Nothing happens with the beekeeping.  If the plants look different near a fort, it's likely just because time has been passing there and the local tiles have gotten out of whack with the rest of the world.

There wasn't much time to do anything interesting with alliances.  I think the comments have everything relevant.

Quote from: PatrikLundell
Suggestiony: Have you considered increasing the minimum DF screen size (or possibly a "recommended" one, with a minimum one still functioning, but being awkward) for the Premium version in order to get more room for commands (and possibly info/labels) as part of the UI rework?
If the answer is yes, I guess it would give some people who are opposed to that a chance to speak up against it and explain why...

I've found the size to be very restrictive when making DFHack scripts with a UI (which isn't a good argument for increasing the size in itself), and assume that would apply to Toady and Threetoe as well (which obviously would be relevant).

Ah, for the new version we are definitely not going with the traditional 80x25 ha ha ha.  People seem to like fullscreen games, and almost all the Steam games I've played default that way without even asking (options of course), but no decisions have been made.  But given the 32x32 size of the tiles, 80x25 probably is both too large and too small, depending on monitor.  It'll likely have to be dynamic.  And the interface will have a different resolution than the play area (if it ends up with a tile grid at all), further complicating matters.

Quote from: iceball3
Considering the profession skill "geographer", will access to map data (except for legends) be transitioned from "basic UI function" to "item based, and dependent on available/memorized maps", or will geography only have abstract implications ingame (such as enabling site/civ level capabilities for entities in a "not involving and thusly not lowering player map UI access." sort of way?

For the various profession skills, IE chemist, mathematician, etc, are there considerations for targeting the whole bodies of knowledge in a larger update arc, or is the plan to give them functions going to be "as we go along" for the most part?

Will magic discovery, research, acquisition, et cetera utilize the topics and skills system, or will magic and it's knowledge be largely segregated from worldly knowledge and study as of the myth-magic arc plans, or will any considerations surrounding that come much later?

therahedwig: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8095885#msg8095885

Yeah, it's just too far away for us to have concrete plans.  The potential is obviously there for all sorts of things, which is part of why all that stuff is in there.  We don't have any arcs planned past the Big Wait and the following laws/embark/etc. arc (which needs a better name.)  So hard to say whether it'll be piece meal or part of a larger push.

The magic angle has been on my mind a bit, regarding the existing scholar stuff, but I don't know yet whether we'll really try to pull some of the existing stuff in.  It's definitely doable.  Even the mathematical discoveries could lead to correspondending advances in magic, without a huge burden in real-world research.  Dusting off my chemistry is more of a burden, ha ha.

Quote from: FantasticDorf
Given the kind of workloads you experience during your Arc workloads (and interim projects like getting army arc prepped before steam release) is it likely if you're looking at fortifications, you'll be putting some time aside to make sure other constructions are also coherent?

Special mention to glass aquariums which can't hold large roaming fish like caught whales & sharks that's been on the bug tracker for ages. Though water projects have been a erm... controversial; fishing for whales using cage traps & using pit zones to artificially air-drown and beach them is very profitable for dwarf fortresses who can engineer it and miscallenously very visually appealing and accomplishing to hold exotic sea creatures for dwarves to gawk at as trophies within aquariums, or deployed to moats & ponds in defence.

We're going to do what we can, in the time we have.  Both of those things are mushy, so it's really hard to say.  People falling to their deaths are worse than dead fish, but dead fish are also bad.  The categories don't really overlap though.

Quote from: Strik3r
With the Steam release on the way i've got some questions regarding the modding capabilities and also that one question i missed getting into the last FotF.

First that.
The new relationship stuff added in .47(divorces, affairs, etc.) are influenced by personality/civ values right? If so, what personality/civ values significantly affect that stuff happening or not happening? Also i assume that the ORIENTATION token is taken into account, so for example if an intelligent creature has it with values such as 0:0:1, the creature can never have an affair, since the creature would have no interest in a non-committed relationship?

Now for the steam stuff (i feel like this stuff probably has been answered before):
Since i presume you want to have Steam Workshop integration, does that mean we'll be getting something like mod-loading from folders? Since i can't imagine Workshop would work well with the current mod installation method of "Drop stuff into the raw/objects folder and hope it works".

In terms of the graphics stuff, can you give a rough outline of what new graphical features tileset authors can expect from the version coinciding with the Steam release?

ZM5: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8096377#msg8096377

Sure, it does an orientation check, in terms of whether a pairing is desired.  Should anyway!  This doesn't increase pairing frequency aside from the existence of matches.  Lust propensity does all of that.  For the rest, I think it just checks everything to see how closely aligned they are, and significant personality changes can disrupt a pairing which is working.  But I don't think there are facets that affect it otherwise.  Ah, gregarious does, in a sense, since that affects the chance that people chat at all.

Mod-loaded: Something, yeah.  I need to look at their specs, as that'll determine a lot.  But the current situation where mods ride along with saves will almost certainly not be feasible.

Rough outline of graphical features:  Nope!  I really need to get some code up first and see what initial walls we hit.  We want to have a ton of new stuff, but if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, on a case-by-case basis.  Can't really predict how it'll shake out for a given feature sometimes.

Quote from: jecowa
Rumor is that the first ARM MacBook is coming out first half of 2021. Do you think ARM Macs will ever get builds of Dwarf Fortress?

We haven't done anything up to this point - maintaining our current ports, such as we have, has obviously been about as much as we can do.  I'm not sure what the future holds in terms of circumstances being more favorable.  I certainly don't have the time or expertise to manage it myself, but there could be options.  And choosing between other ports or managing basic localizations, say, would be something that needs to be thought about, if we have more resources.  But who knows what'll happen.

Quote from: squamous
1. Is it possible to create a custom experimental creature using non-procedurally generated interactions? The living night-creature type, not the ghoul type. I've looked into the raw examples but unless it's BOGEYMAN_POLYMORPH and I just don't understand how it works I'm not sure how I'd go about doing that.

2. How exactly is fear calculated? I've been running around in adventure mode and it seems that even hearthpeople and mercenaries will run away from larger monsters even if they're something my party could defeat? I guess it's not that important given I can control them manually now but I'm curious what factors go into threat assessment if there's any besides size and the discipline skill.

1. NIGHT_CREATURE is a tag now that should hopefully work without being too strange.

2. Yeah, you are definitely noticing a defect.  Everybody relevant in a fight feels terror (ie, not a ghost, not berserk, etc.), but the amount of terror is moderated by fearlessness and by the opposed strength of the sides.  But the strength calculation isn't great, and larger beings do get a bit of an advantage there.  It looks like the equipment/skill calc here is especially bad or even not happening at all - even the off-screen fights during raids do better equipment checks (which is good in a way, since it actually impacts the outcome there.)  Should certainly be improved to better account for party equipment/skill/rep, and enemy equipment/rep at least, if not skill once you test it.

Quote from: PatrikLundell
The new aquifers are still confusing. The pre embark info displays Light (new trickle ones), Heavy (old, open pipe ones), and the odd "Varied" description, which, if I understand it correctly doesn't exist as an actual discreet aquifer variant. I've seen increasing the embark rectangle from one to two tiles covering one Light and one Heavy tile has resulted in "Varied", which makes sense, but there's also areas where single tile embarks are displayed as "Varied", which I guess could result from one Light layer and one Heavy layer, or from two biomes being present on the same single tile embark, with different kinds of aquifers on each part.
1. What is DF's definition of a "Varied" aquifer?
2. How does DF determine what type of aquifer(s) a tile will have (of interest to tool makers and world designers)?

1. It means both the conditions for a heavy and light aquifer are met at different subtiles in the selected area.
2. The reason this has led to so many inconsistencies and hidden aquifers and etc. is that the soil depth is something of a mess, since they peel off by elevation level, but it is tricky to get the exact elevation level needed for the display.  But regardless of all that, the important new part is that the heavy aquifers occur when drainage%20 is 7.  That's odd, but we didn't have an additional field to add and it makes it feel random enough and nominally gives us our 5% figure in enough of the different drainage biomes.  Perhaps not the sort of thing to survive the map rewrite, ha ha.

Quote from: Beag
With the switch to graphics coming up in the steam release I have some questions regarding the graphical representation of creatures:
1. Will scars appear on creatures graphically and if so in the proper places? On a similar note will dismembered creature's sprites properly represent their lack of certain limbs?
2. With the main races at least(dwarves, humans, goblins and elves) there is a lot of physical description detail generated- how much of that will be represented on the sprite?
3. When it comes to generated races like escaped necromancer experiments will each generated combination have it's own sprite or will you generalize a sprite for escaped necromancer experiments in general?
4. When the myth and magic update finally comes around will magical corruption be represented on a creature's sprite? If so how detailed would the visual representation of the progression of this corruption be(referencing an old threetoe's story the dwarf who was cursed by elves slowly turned into a tree person starting with her hair)?

1. Not currently planned, no, especially the scars.  It's feasible, but we have to prioritize other things first.  We did pixelwise scars on 64x64 faces in a platoon vs. robots game twenty years ago, so hopefully we can arrive there someday.
2. I'm not prepared to commit currently.  The artists have drawn a ton of cool variations involving skin and hair and clothes etc., but we still need to get it coded and tested.
3. A mixture most likely to start.  It depends on how well the dwarf pictures go, in part, since they are also made from pieces.
4. No idea yet.  Zombies are a form of magical corruption, in the sense of being a creature with a syndrome, and there are varying ways of representing that which take more and more resources.

Quote from: FrankVill
Whereas, within the animal kingdom, a dwarf is a mammal and a bird is an oviparous being ...
1) How does DF interpret the species "eagle man"?
2) At the time of having children, would they lay eggs or become pregnant?
3) Could there be different combinations (60% human, 40% eagle) for each created world? (I have mentioned the eagle man so far only as an example).
4) Are mythological creatures (such as dragons, forgotten beasts ...) somehow included in the animal hierarchy?

Bumber: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8097965#msg8097965
Strik3r: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8097980#msg8097980
voliol: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8098473#msg8098473
FantasticDorf: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8098478#msg8098478

Ah, yeah, the descriptions leave a lot to be desired.  I know some people think the animal people are all forms of minotaur, with completely human bodies, since the descriptions read that way sometimes.  But they are mostly like the animal they come from, just more human-shaped and more thinkery.  So an eagle person would definitely still be avian, and lay eggs, and (hopefully) the object files reflect this.  As for what's possible later, this depends on what happens, for instance, with the "centaur problem", where we'd like to take bits and pieces of different creature definitions and mix and match and blend them.  The more successful we are with this, the more fucked up the future becomes, in a wholesome way.

Re: mythical beasts, as people point out, they are intentionally removed from the mundane currently, and with their odd properties, they don't really fit into any e.g. evolutionary framework.  At the same time, they do have flesh that works in a fleshy way, oftentimes, so even if they don't fit in a hierarchy, a dragon could be considered reptile-adjacent in some sense, and whatever metaphysical or mundane effects take those things into consideration might work out.  For instance, a spell that required 'scales' would work with dragon scales, although really it should probably consider itself very lucky to have them and would be justified in overloading in some sense.  Hopefully that sort of thing will happen, somehow.

Quote from: iceball3
I've been plumbing the depths of the material templates definitions and found these tokens in THREAD_PLANT_TEMPLATE: [/color]
Code: [Select]
[SHEAR_YIELD:600000] used cotton
[SHEAR_FRACTURE:600000] used cotton
Do you remember where you sourced these numbers? The only other materials defined in the raws that match these characteristics at first pale are things like steel and adamantine, and plant thread has precipitously low attributes in every other characteristic.
Is it a typo in the form of an extra 0, perhaps? I can imagine it might be due to the fact that every [SOFT] armor present in the game also has [STRUCTURAL_ELASTICITY_WOVEN_THREAD] attached, which reduces both the values to a much more sane (if a bit meager) cap, which lends me to believe that those values were the intended ones for cloth materials.
I've mainly been mulling over this because I've had a hard time finding good sources concerning fabric resistance on the internet myself, and I've been trying to make a neat little mod to add in "gambesons" as armor types, but noticed that they were seriously over performing against all edged weapons if they were allowed to use the thread templates' default values.

I do not have the slightest idea where they are from.  There is a ton of information online, and it's quite possible I just copied it out of a table without thinking very hard about it, and possibly screwed up a conversion if I had to make one.  There was a ton of haphazard data entry on the initial pass there.  Certainly up for using better number from reputable data sets.  May also have to do some additional worrying about what woven means -- it has been a problem overall with the combat system.  A single cotten thread, and cloth woven in any number of ways, might be significantly different, even accounting for size?  I'm not an materials engineer, like at all.

Quote from: FantasticDorf
"If your dispatched Militia dwarves from fortress mode are searching for artifacts in a non-hostile way asking for directions & locations town to town like a adventuring group, and are eventually privy to the known location of it, is it currently implemented into the game to have them use their own intrigue/schemer skill (and related social skills) to corrupt a local into giving it to them without a fight?"

Without the dungeon keeper doing much to actually train schemer skill its one of those things you can get at embark but not do very much with. I had actually entertained retiring criminally/villanous adventuerers on my site to fufill the role if one of the starting seven eventually shuffled the mortal coil with their skillset or set off on a endless quest never to be seen again; in order to keep my fortress well connected.

They don't have a way to enact their own "infiltrate society" subgoal from their "recover artifact" army goal.  It's not far off, which is why we were poised to get there, but it'll have to wait until after Steam/itch now.

Quote from: Prismatic
Do you think you could provide a full list of valid creature and caste flags for use with the new summoning interaction tokens ([IE_FORBIDDEN_CREATURE_FLAG], [IE_FORBIDDEN_CREATURE_CASTE_FLAG], etc)? It looks like a number of them (SMALL_RACE, etc) do not correspond to the typical creature tokens documented on the wiki.

Creature (notably, MUNDANE and HAS_ANY_CAN_SWIM are missing due to a bug):
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Caste:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
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clinodev

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3019 on: March 02, 2020, 03:51:39 am »

Cheers as always for the answers!

Definitely looking forward to parallel release stress and other bug fixes!
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FantasticDorf

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3020 on: March 02, 2020, 04:06:05 am »

Thanks for the insightful replies Toady, very much appreciated  ;D

Cheers as always for the answers!

Definitely looking forward to parallel release stress and other bug fixes!
Yes id noticed some movement on the bug tracker before i logged on this morning.
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JesterHell696

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3021 on: March 02, 2020, 09:05:52 am »

Thanks for the answers Toady.
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iceball3

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3022 on: March 02, 2020, 03:05:21 pm »

Oh man, i kinda lost track and ended up asking three questions, my bad! Thank you for the answers, Toady!
The answer about the plant-fiber material stats is extremely helpful, knowing that it's kind of "lost to time" makes things such as suggestions involving material values a bit more easier to dip into. Might start a suggestion discussion thread about it once i've wrapped my head around all the material definitions and combat physics.
« Last Edit: March 02, 2020, 05:53:58 pm by iceball3 »
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Immortal-D

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3023 on: March 02, 2020, 06:44:30 pm »

Excellent as always.  Something that's been on my mind for a while now; Can you say how difficult it would be to add new world sizes?  I find 'Small' (65x65) is too small to support a high number of civs & interesting events, while Medium (129x129) gets super laggy after a mere ~200 years.  Maybe a 90x or 95x?

Shonai_Dweller

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3024 on: March 02, 2020, 07:12:04 pm »

Excellent as always.  Something that's been on my mind for a while now; Can you say how difficult it would be to add new world sizes?  I find 'Small' (65x65) is too small to support a high number of civs & interesting events, while Medium (129x129) gets super laggy after a mere ~200 years.  Maybe a 90x or 95x?
Can't you define these as you like in Advanced worldgen?
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ArmokGoB

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3025 on: March 02, 2020, 08:12:03 pm »

How long do you think it would take to remake the current build (at the time of answering) of DF from scratch if you knew everything you know now?
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Shonai_Dweller

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3026 on: March 02, 2020, 10:00:12 pm »

How long do you think it would take to remake the current build (at the time of answering) of DF from scratch if you knew everything you know now?
To replicate or to make a more streamlined, modern, multi-cored DF monster that fixes every bit of code Toady ever planned to fix? There's quite a difference, and I doubt there's much point in doing the former. Whereas the latter is "how long does it take to make a game?". A near-impossible question. I mean, Toady knows what he knows now because he's spent the past 20 years making Dwarf Fortress and interacting with fans about it.
« Last Edit: March 02, 2020, 10:03:05 pm by Shonai_Dweller »
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DG

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3027 on: March 03, 2020, 12:22:55 am »

Excellent as always.  Something that's been on my mind for a while now; Can you say how difficult it would be to add new world sizes?  I find 'Small' (65x65) is too small to support a high number of civs & interesting events, while Medium (129x129) gets super laggy after a mere ~200 years.  Maybe a 90x or 95x?
Can't you define these as you like in Advanced worldgen?

You can choose a mixture of the following dimensions on either axis:
17 -> 33 -> 65 -> 129 -> 257

Imm wants more options between those numbers but I'm not sure if he's tried something like 65x129 (which is almost the exact number of tiles as the 95x suggestion) to address his specific problem. I assume more dimension options will wait for the map rewrite. Even if it isn't strictly related it doesn't seem to me like the type of thing you'd make time for outside of that arc.
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Shonai_Dweller

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3028 on: March 03, 2020, 01:56:01 am »

Excellent as always.  Something that's been on my mind for a while now; Can you say how difficult it would be to add new world sizes?  I find 'Small' (65x65) is too small to support a high number of civs & interesting events, while Medium (129x129) gets super laggy after a mere ~200 years.  Maybe a 90x or 95x?
Can't you define these as you like in Advanced worldgen?

You can choose a mixture of the following dimensions on either axis:
17 -> 33 -> 65 -> 129 -> 257

Imm wants more options between those numbers but I'm not sure if he's tried something like 65x129 (which is almost the exact number of tiles as the 95x suggestion) to address his specific problem. I assume more dimension options will wait for the map rewrite. Even if it isn't strictly related it doesn't seem to me like the type of thing you'd make time for outside of that arc.
Is there anything especially technically difficult about it? Or is it something the UI revamp could just throw in?
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PatrikLundell

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3029 on: March 03, 2020, 02:31:40 am »

Excellent as always.  Something that's been on my mind for a while now; Can you say how difficult it would be to add new world sizes?  I find 'Small' (65x65) is too small to support a high number of civs & interesting events, while Medium (129x129) gets super laggy after a mere ~200 years.  Maybe a 90x or 95x?
Can't you define these as you like in Advanced worldgen?

You can choose a mixture of the following dimensions on either axis:
17 -> 33 -> 65 -> 129 -> 257

Imm wants more options between those numbers but I'm not sure if he's tried something like 65x129 (which is almost the exact number of tiles as the 95x suggestion) to address his specific problem. I assume more dimension options will wait for the map rewrite. Even if it isn't strictly related it doesn't seem to me like the type of thing you'd make time for outside of that arc.
Is there anything especially technically difficult about it? Or is it something the UI revamp could just throw in?
The temperature calculations seem to be based on a world size of 2**x + 1 for the latitudes, and probably would break a little. While those calculations are a poor fit with the real world (real world poles do not have a zero temperature variation between summer and winter), reworking them probably takes some effort.

The tropicality calculations used for temperate/tropical biome determination are also based on the standard formula dimensions, plus some other factors.

Thus, there are some dependencies at least in the Y/latitude dimension.

As indicated by DG, having different numbers on the latitude and longitude works well. Personally I go for 33 * 129, because 129 is the smallest standard size that allows for the elusive dry broadleaf biome, and 33 to keep the world size under control.
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