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Author Topic: Future of the Fortress  (Read 3128846 times)

voliol

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5250 on: February 06, 2023, 08:57:20 am »

Any chance we could have pressure occasionally equalize the top of a standing body of liquid once it fills the contain it's in? I'm talking about having that annoying one remaining 4/7 tile magically combine with the 2/7 tile at the other end of the 200 tile long tunnel so that we don't have to wait in-game months for RNGesus to allow the tiles to find eachother with the current random fluid wandering, distracting dwarves the entire time with "dangerous terrain" warnings. Might even significantly speed up the current pathfinding recalculations caused by large standing bodies of flowing mixed 3/7-4/7 water.

Perhaps even a more granular fluid model with 255 levels instead of 7? The dwarves at a dry end of long corridor filled with 7/7 water at the other end wouldn't have to wait years for any water to get to them, and we would be able to have much more interesting and/or reasonable evaporation and flow mechanics with what looks a pretty small change.

To quote Toady, "specific suggestions belong for the most part in the suggestion forum".

Urist McSadist

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5251 on: February 07, 2023, 09:42:39 am »


How does trap finding by enemies work? I know diplomats and spies can find them, but I'm not sure on the specifics, and the wiki doesn't have anything on it. May I get some in depth explanation?
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PatrikLundell

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5252 on: February 08, 2023, 03:58:25 am »


How does trap finding by enemies work? I know diplomats and spies can find them, but I'm not sure on the specifics, and the wiki doesn't have anything on it. May I get some in depth explanation?

When anyone from a civilization passes over a trap the trap location becomes known to that individual and the information is immediately passed on to the civilization the moment that individual leaves the fortress map. Notably, this includes members of performance troupes, who are usually members both of the troupe and a civilization, and troupe membership seems to trump civilization membership when it comes to enemy identification (until fighting breaks out), so members of the goblin civ you're at war with can come and go as part of performance troupes without any problem. I've never been able to identify an actual spy (not to be confused with villain agents, which come in never ending streams even as legitimate visitors die of old age), despite having looked quite intensively for them. Either they're quite rare, or they're too cunning for me to detect (using DFHack scripts).

Once a trap is known by a civ, its invaders can pass over the trap without incident. If the detection was made by a spying civilian, the invaders just pass over the trap when invading, and if it was detected during an invasion its location is known during the next invasion. Dismantling and reconstruction of a trap wipes the knowledge of the trap from the knowledge base of civs.
As far as I know, necro towers aren't civs from this perspective, and don't gain knowledge of trap locations, but that doesn't mean they might not eventually.
« Last Edit: February 08, 2023, 04:01:11 am by PatrikLundell »
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Miuramir

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5253 on: February 08, 2023, 03:56:50 pm »

...
2. I remember seeing transgender/non-binary pops being mentioned a few years back somewhere as something that was planned. Is this still somewhere in the development pipeline perchance? I would absolutely love to see this included at some point :)
3. Is there a chance that (perhaps as part of the map rewrite update) eventually the map will be an actual projection of a planet instead of a rectangle suspended in space? I imagine that once boats become a thing then being able to circumnavigate the globe would be a nice feature.
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2. Currently cross dressing is rendered impossible by the fact that clothes aren't gendered and there aren't any other gender specific customs either, and I don't think the state surgery is in (based on the general reference timeline of 1400) would result in many individual want to try that route (I don't think the gelders would get many "unusual" requests from willing customers). Homosexual leanings already exist, and is currently the limit of what can be displayed.
3. No. This has been asked before, and the answer is that there is no reasonably way to make a rectangular grid out of a sphere. A cylinder (were moving off one side causes you to end up on the other) would be possible, as would the arcade variant where moving off to one side causes you to end up at the other side as well as moving off the top causes you to end up at the bottom. The latter is topologically identical to a torus, but it's not a possible shape if you bring in reality and demand that each tile should be a square of the same size. Of course, the "torus" might eventually be possible in a weird magical realm that's not supposed to make full real world sense, should Toady elect to create such a realm.
...

2.  In the default DF raws and setting, approximately the only easily visible gender-specific difference is beards.  And that's toggleable.  Clothes and accessories are gender-neutral; cultural items like poetry, dance, and song are gender-neutral; jobs and roles are gender-neutral... "cross dressing" would be pretty much shaving vs. wearing a false beard in the default raws, and not even that if you've toggled beards for everyone. 

Additionally, the attraction system is somewhat more expansive than simple labels; dwarves are generated with a value of disinterested in relationships, interested in casual relationships only, or willing to form permanent partnerships as separate scores for each gender.  So, there are officially six sexualities possible in stock DF, including what would probably be described in current terms as aro/ace, and as bi, and a couple we don't have good names for in English.  Note also that DF doesn't think of it as "homo" vs. "hetero", but as "attracted to male" score and "attracted to female" score, somewhat irrespective of whether the dwarf in question is male or female themselves. 

Also, Male and Female are "just" castes of dwarves.  It should be possible with fairly easy modding to create additional castes; whether setting up the additional relationship matrix can be done practically or at all is a more complicated question. 

3. My take on things is that what we currently know in-game about the DF setting doesn't make sense for it to be on a sphere.  There is no evidence that it should be; and a fair amount of evidence that either it isn't on a sphere, or it is a small enough patch of a sphere that the spherical nature of it can be ignored for practical purposes. 
  • The extremely thin crust over a world-wide cavern network over magma over spoilers over really dense spoilers is certainly not any sort of traditional planet. 
  • As far as I understand it is the same solar and lunar time everywhere on the world map at once. 
  • The area covered is really quite small in real terms; the largest possible DF world is usually quoted as "a bit smaller than the UK"; depending on which value you use based on which internal numbers, it would be somewhere between about 400 km / 245 miles on a side and about 475 km / 295 miles on a side.  (And given that many worlds are smaller than that, assuming approximately the same solar / lunar time across an area a few hundred miles across is a reasonable approximation.) 
  • There is no evidence of survey distortion from true squares or rectangles.
  • Despite all of the above, it's possible to have a "polar" region on the top, bottom, or both; but not on the sides.

Given all this, I have two competing thoughts; one is that it's a tiny patch on a large shape, such that assuming local flatness and simultaneousness of noon are reasonable approximations; and the other is that quite frankly it makes more sense if the patch is on an Alderson disk or some similar deity-created gigastructure.   See, for instance, the Charles Stross novella "Missile Gap", with a huge number of "unwrapped" copies of Earth on an Alderson disk, with elaborate cooling systems in a grid creating the artificial "arctic regions".  Note in particular that constructing an Alderson disk requires one or more materials of un-physical strength and (probably) density, like the scrith required for a simple ringworld, but more so... much like the two spoiler materials featured in DF, a lightweight extremely tensile material that can be formed into strands and enormous cables (which might be mistaken for pillars), and a heavy substrate material found in bulk. 

Related to that, I will quote Charles Stross himself in a reddit post from about a decade ago talking about the technical side of an Alderson disk:
Quote
... Surface escape velocity, if you try to lift straight off, is a low double-digit percentage of light speed. It is, in other words, "sticky" -- a flytrap for non-supertech civilizations. You can run experiments on its surface with reasonable confidence that they can't escape. If they try, you can sterilize them by torching off a supernova a couple of light years above the disk (if you can build an Alderson disk you can for sure engineer a supernova) and if things really go to hell in a hand-basket you can kick the props out from under it and suck everything into a medium-huge black hole (a convenient side-effect of which will be a hypernova that exterminates any escapees within several light years, however well shielded (think in terms of the neutrino pulse from a ~50,000 solar mass core collapse)).

Think of it as the ultimate petri dish for examining dangerous life forms.

Think about what we know about the DF cosmology and world for a bit with that in mind...
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13wham

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5254 on: February 09, 2023, 09:46:38 pm »

Right now zooming in/out or scaling the UI in the premium version results in textures being blurry and it's especially visible on higher resolutions.
Do you plan to add nearest neighbor scaling in the future?


Yeah, I'm doing that. Different scale modes are part of the plans for the SDL2 update I'm doing.
Please include 4:3 support too! I sometimes play on a 1024x768 CRT for that good ole glow and have noticed UI scaling issues.
It also seems like on startup the game only uses the last remembered resolution, even if that resolution isn't the resolution of the current display (the one you set as "use as my main display" in windows settings). I'm not sure if this is intended behavior or not, but I've had windows freak out and sometimes crash explorer when it sets my 20 year old CRT to 16:9 1920x1080 display mode on DF startup.
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Shonai_Dweller

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5255 on: February 10, 2023, 07:44:53 am »

Was a bit disappointed to note that Legends Mode no longer refers to "A Time before Time" (such as when a demon thrusts a spire up from the underworld). Was it all changed to the comparitively boring "Year 1" to make way for updates when Mythgen comes along?
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Putnam

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5256 on: February 10, 2023, 05:53:15 pm »

Also, Male and Female are "just" castes of dwarves.  It should be possible with fairly easy modding to create additional castes; whether setting up the additional relationship matrix can be done practically or at all is a more complicated question. 

For the ORIENTATION token, it refers to the MALE and FEMALE tokens, which are indeed atomic (and mutually exclusive). No way to make the matrix more complex there, it's just a set of 5 flags (the extra one comes from the 1 flag, "undetermined", which is the default, but it's set to something else for everyone that isn't the adventurer)

Kat

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5257 on: February 11, 2023, 04:58:12 am »

Clothes and accessories are gender-neutral
cross dressing is rendered impossible by the fact that clothes aren't gendered

If cross-dressing is ever going to be a thing, then it's likely to be a fair bit in the future. Based on this reply from June last year.

Quote from: Kat
I have a question, mostly to do with things that would be beneficial for creating mods, not entirely sure how useful they'd be for normal gameplay though.
Are user-definable clothing items something that might be implemented ?
What I mean by this is... I have a modded beastman race, they have horns. I'd like to be able to create clothing (and/or jewellery) that they could wear on their horns. So, being able to define new bits of clothing with a token like[WORN_ON_BODY_PART:HORN], would be ideal for me.
It would be cool.  It's complicated to make things more details though, and the clothing generally feels sort of silly sometimes, because of the amount of calculation that has to go on just to get people to choose their clothing properly.  I'd like to do something sometime though.  I just noted while playing around the other day that amulets are worn on the head even though we have necks now, and I thought about a simple version of your suggestion, looked at the clothing code and was like, "well, some other time..."  We'll have to see.

The clothing system seems to be somewhat complex, and something that would take a while to unravel and rework.
But if gendered clothing was to be a thing, then it might work depending on how and if clothing items were reworked to be moddable. Tokens on clothing items like [worn_on_body_part:upper_body], or [worn_by_caste:all], and personality traits and thoughts related to willingness to wear clothing from a different caste might be interesting - citizens already have thoughts related to wearing high quality clothing or ragged clothing or being nude (some like being nude), so "Urist McFluid felt proud wearing unusual clothing" or "Urist McPrude felt ashamed being forced to wear strange clothing" might be possible. Could factor in foreign clothes as well, like if for some reason you have no trousers, but get a bunch of them from goblins, then those might cause thoughts too.

But if the code is complex enough, and the benefits to reworking it minimal (it mostly helps modding but not regular gameplay), then it'd be a long way off.
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trxn

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5258 on: February 12, 2023, 06:09:52 am »

Quote
if you've toggled beards for everyone

Is there an option to do that? Have every dwarf, male as well as female, sport beards? In my view all dwarves wear facial hair so it's a feature I would use, but couldn't find in the options.
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Shonai_Dweller

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5259 on: February 12, 2023, 07:30:21 am »

Quote
if you've toggled beards for everyone

Is there an option to do that? Have every dwarf, male as well as female, sport beards? In my view all dwarves wear facial hair so it's a feature I would use, but couldn't find in the options.
All creatures have data stored in text files that can be easily edited (called "raws" as -amongst other reasons- they used to be in a folder called "raws").
The Dwarf files (first creature in the file creature_standard.txt) include a lot of notes on what each piece means. In the female caste you'll find a comment line that adds beards. You just have to put it in square brackets and female dwarves will have beards.

That's as close to "just toggle it on" as modding can really get. Playing with the Dwarf raws to make a variation on them can show you just how easy it is to mod the game.

« Last Edit: February 12, 2023, 08:16:37 am by Shonai_Dweller »
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Schmaven

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5260 on: February 12, 2023, 07:38:37 am »

That's as close to "just toggle it on" as modding can really get. Playing with the Dwarf raws to make a variation on them can show you just how easy it is to mod the game.

That creature_standard.txt file has a lot of comments throughout it as well that basically walk you through what it all means and how to change it.
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dikbutdagrate

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5261 on: February 14, 2023, 07:55:27 pm »

Is it intentional that historical artifacts produced during world-gen do not simulate macabre moods? If this is intentional, what are the reasons for wanting to avoid historical artifacts made from vermin remains?

World-gen simulates fey and fell just fine, although you will occasionally get a chains made out of sand, which I don't think are possible items in actual fort-mode. While any number of historical artifacts can be evidently made out of dwarf/elf/goblin bones, you will not however see any historical artifacts made out of "vermin remains", as the only mood which has any probability of producing an artifact whose base reagent is a vermin remains is the macabre mood. Hence, we assume that the macabre mood is not being simulated during world-gen, which is something of a curiosity.
« Last Edit: February 16, 2023, 07:14:52 pm by dikbutdagrate »
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Pembroke

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5262 on: February 15, 2023, 04:32:53 pm »

Is it intentional that historical artifacts produced during world-gen do not simulate macabre moods? If this is intentional, what are there reasons for wanting to avoid historical artifacts made from vermin remains?

World-gen simulates fey and fell just fine, although you will occasionally get a chains made out of sand, which I don't think are possible items in actual fort-mode. Certainly, any number of historical artifacts can be evidently made out of dwarf/elf/goblin bones, you will not see any historical artifacts made out of "vermin remains", as the only mood which has any probability of producing an artifact whose base reagent is a vermin remains is the macabre mood. Hence, we assume that the macabre mood is not being simulated during world-gen, which is something of a curiosity.


Since it's possible for worldgen moods to fail: could it be that artifact materials are sourced from what resources a civ has access to, and since vermin remains aren't an option, macabre moods always fail? That, or they could be omitted for that reason. Either makes equal amounts of sense to me.
« Last Edit: February 15, 2023, 05:42:23 pm by Pembroke »
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SamBucher

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5263 on: February 15, 2023, 05:07:15 pm »

I have noticed that there are a whole lot of mods whose only purpose is to edit one or a few lines in the raws to fix a minor bug, like pools not spawning creatures that can only spawn in pools, dwarves not being able to wield big weapons, etc. Wouldn't it be wise to make a list of these small bugs and squish them all at once? If some randos on the Internet can do it, then surely the game's developer(s) can too, right?
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Criperum

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #5264 on: February 15, 2023, 05:34:39 pm »

[ If some randos on the Internet can do it, then surely the game's developer(s) can too, right?
Right. But randos on the internet have collectively MUCH more time. And they cannot fix save corruptions and crashes so they focus on small fixes.
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