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Author Topic: [WIP] Animal Kingdoms  (Read 1359 times)

Miclee

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[WIP] Animal Kingdoms
« on: March 17, 2023, 09:00:38 am »

Animal Kingdoms

Animal Kingdoms is a Dwarf Fortress mod that takes the game to a whole new level by introducing fully fleshed-out animal people civilizations, new creatures, intricate crafting systems, and much more.

One of the most exciting features of the mod is the addition of unique civilizations for each animal people, complete with their own values, ethics, religion, equipment, and more. We're also creating animal people for every animal in vanilla that doesn't have one yet, and each one will have layered sprites to make them have just as much depth as dwarves/elves/etc. It's a massive undertaking, but we've already made some great progress(all of these are layered sprites, working on armour/etc. now).



Animal Kingdoms also adds a plethora of new creatures, from real-world animals like the African wild dog to new fictional additions like the cactusgoat and glacielk.




To complement the new creatures, we're also adding a variety of new weapons, shields, armor, and other items to give the world some extra variety. We're also increasing the complexity of crafting to add more depth to the game. For example, crafting a sword will require creating both the handle and the blade separately before combining them to make the final product. More to share on that soon.

We are still working on the mod, but I wanted to share a bit of the progress with everyone as we go. I'll be updating this thread regularly with new information as things happen(a lot of info to move over). I'm still figuring out when the first release will be and what it will specifically include, but I'll keep you all posted. If anyone is interested in contributing to the mod, please let me know.
« Last Edit: March 17, 2023, 09:07:46 am by Miclee »
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Shonai_Dweller

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Re: [WIP] Animal Kingdoms
« Reply #1 on: March 18, 2023, 02:46:18 am »

A civ for every single animal person (bar aquatic ones presumably)?
That's gonna be a really busy world. Looking forward to it!
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Miclee

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Re: [WIP] Animal Kingdoms
« Reply #2 on: March 18, 2023, 07:27:32 am »

A civ for every single animal person (bar aquatic ones presumably)?
That's gonna be a really busy world. Looking forward to it!
Aquatic ones will be made non-aquatic(the regular "wild" animal people will still exist in the world as normal) for the sake of being playable. They evolved or something like that.

But yeah when all is said and done, every new fort or new adventure run(when it releases) should be a completely different world experience in terms of what animal people populate it.
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Working on the mod "Animal Kingdoms": http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=181516.0

Miclee

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Re: [WIP] Animal Kingdoms
« Reply #3 on: March 18, 2023, 09:40:03 am »

Little progress update:

Wolf people layers+clothing+armour are all complete. Just have to go through and pallete them all to the different materials/colours. It's a tedious process but satisfying when complete.

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Shonai_Dweller

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Re: [WIP] Animal Kingdoms
« Reply #4 on: March 18, 2023, 08:51:21 pm »

A civ for every single animal person (bar aquatic ones presumably)?
That's gonna be a really busy world. Looking forward to it!
Aquatic ones will be made non-aquatic(the regular "wild" animal people will still exist in the world as normal) for the sake of being playable. They evolved or something like that.

But yeah when all is said and done, every new fort or new adventure run(when it releases) should be a completely different world experience in terms of what animal people populate it.
Do you have a way of randomizing which animal people civs exist each time a world is created? Or is variety just reliant on them dying/thriving during worldgen?
I could only manage an all or nothing experience.
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Miclee

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Re: [WIP] Animal Kingdoms
« Reply #5 on: March 19, 2023, 06:58:46 am »

A civ for every single animal person (bar aquatic ones presumably)?
That's gonna be a really busy world. Looking forward to it!
Aquatic ones will be made non-aquatic(the regular "wild" animal people will still exist in the world as normal) for the sake of being playable. They evolved or something like that.

But yeah when all is said and done, every new fort or new adventure run(when it releases) should be a completely different world experience in terms of what animal people populate it.
Do you have a way of randomizing which animal people civs exist each time a world is created? Or is variety just reliant on them dying/thriving during worldgen?
I could only manage an all or nothing experience.

Once there are enough unique entities, there will be too many for the game to pull from for most worldgen settings. Thus, it will randomly pick from them without using all(eventually - a lot of work before that haha).

About them dying/thriving during worldgen, that's going to be something that I'll try to balance and tweak as they're added.
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Shonai_Dweller

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Re: [WIP] Animal Kingdoms
« Reply #6 on: March 19, 2023, 05:46:04 pm »

A civ for every single animal person (bar aquatic ones presumably)?
That's gonna be a really busy world. Looking forward to it!
Aquatic ones will be made non-aquatic(the regular "wild" animal people will still exist in the world as normal) for the sake of being playable. They evolved or something like that.

But yeah when all is said and done, every new fort or new adventure run(when it releases) should be a completely different world experience in terms of what animal people populate it.
Do you have a way of randomizing which animal people civs exist each time a world is created? Or is variety just reliant on them dying/thriving during worldgen?
I could only manage an all or nothing experience.

Once there are enough unique entities, there will be too many for the game to pull from for most worldgen settings. Thus, it will randomly pick from them without using all(eventually - a lot of work before that haha).

About them dying/thriving during worldgen, that's going to be something that I'll try to balance and tweak as they're added.
Ok. I would test that carefully. Pretty sure it's not actually random as that was my initial intention and I couldn't get it working properly.
« Last Edit: March 19, 2023, 05:48:33 pm by Shonai_Dweller »
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Miclee

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Re: [WIP] Animal Kingdoms
« Reply #7 on: March 20, 2023, 09:03:57 am »

A civ for every single animal person (bar aquatic ones presumably)?
That's gonna be a really busy world. Looking forward to it!
Aquatic ones will be made non-aquatic(the regular "wild" animal people will still exist in the world as normal) for the sake of being playable. They evolved or something like that.

But yeah when all is said and done, every new fort or new adventure run(when it releases) should be a completely different world experience in terms of what animal people populate it.
Do you have a way of randomizing which animal people civs exist each time a world is created? Or is variety just reliant on them dying/thriving during worldgen?
I could only manage an all or nothing experience.

Once there are enough unique entities, there will be too many for the game to pull from for most worldgen settings. Thus, it will randomly pick from them without using all(eventually - a lot of work before that haha).

About them dying/thriving during worldgen, that's going to be something that I'll try to balance and tweak as they're added.
Ok. I would test that carefully. Pretty sure it's not actually random as that was my initial intention and I couldn't get it working properly.

Ah yeah "random" isn't the right word, but moreso working within the procedural placement of the civs. Will be testing it a lot carefully as more are added, already have some idea of what should and shouldn't work.
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Eric Blank

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Re: [WIP] Animal Kingdoms
« Reply #8 on: March 20, 2023, 02:15:54 pm »

So the way civs are placed is, the game takes the seed and selects an entity as a starting point, then goes down the list of entities from there (not exactly sure how the list is ordered, but its probably as they appear in the raw files, eg starting with the first entity in the first entity file alphabetically and then going down to the last entity in the last file.) When/if it gets to the end of the list, it will start over from the beginning, and continue going through that loop until it's filled up the number of entities the world gen parameters call for. If it places the desired number of civs but hasnt placed one that's playable, then worldgen will restart with a new world and attempt it again, unless advanced parameters were used to tell it to skip playable civ checks (which only counts fortress-mode, not adventure mode playable).

So if youve got a list of 150 civs, and the game starts on the 77th, places a total of 50, then your world will include civs 77 through 126. The rest wont appear in the world because it stops when it hits the desired number. If none of them are playable in fortress mode, it will skip, so you should make maybe 1 in 10 civs playable at least and spread them evenly throughout the raws, once every ten civs, so theres a good chance that even on tiny worlds it will place at least one of them and wont skip worlds because it didnt place a playable civ.

If you want to guarantee, say, every world will include the vanilla civs, you'd have to include a duplicate of them every five or six civs in the raws, so do five animal man civs then five duplicates of the vanilla civs. That would guarantee half the world would be the vanilla races and half animal people.


Alternatively, you can reduce your number of animal man civs by merging species into the same civ by some category. It will still only pick one species for the civ (cant have multi-species civs right now) but it will reduce the total length of the list of civs. You could do, say, one tiny bug person civ, one rodent civ, one arctic civ, one temperate herbivore civ, one temperate predator civ, one temperate omnivore civ, one tropical herbivore civ, one tropical predator civ, one tropical omnivore civ. That would give a list of 9 additional civs, and the game would rendomly select which species represents that civ during worldgen. You could add each species to one or more of them, then. But, the list of civs including vanilla would only be 15 (assuming the subterrranean animal people civ is included), which is a reasonable length of civs for the average world to include most or all of them plus a few, and large worlds with high numbers of civs to go through the list two or three times.
« Last Edit: March 20, 2023, 02:18:10 pm by Eric Blank »
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Shonai_Dweller

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Re: [WIP] Animal Kingdoms
« Reply #9 on: March 20, 2023, 08:01:06 pm »

Thanks. Yeah, I thought it was something like that.

So I have mine set up to include all 19 entities, and then I restrict the number of civs they start with in each entity file. So animal tribes have just one civ each (or two in a separate set of raws for playing in large worlds), and kobolds and other cave civs are ramped up quite high to ensure their survival. Then it's up to worldgen history to make my worlds different from each other. Takes a lot of balancing, but I'm pretty happy with it right now. There's no one civ that is guaranteed to fail.

And for Adventurer and Legends fun you can tell advanced worldgen to ignore the playable civs restriction (pretty sure that option is working).
« Last Edit: March 21, 2023, 02:41:12 am by Shonai_Dweller »
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Timeless Bob

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Re: [WIP] Animal Kingdoms
« Reply #10 on: June 30, 2023, 10:06:44 pm »

Interesting.  I wonder if the "caste" system for placing different morphologies of the same "species" is still a thing? 
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AIArtificialIdiot

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Re: [WIP] Animal Kingdoms
« Reply #11 on: July 01, 2023, 10:08:19 pm »

Personally, to fix the "too many civs" issue, I'd curate a list of the most evocative and/or unique creatures and have only those creatures get their own civs. Maybe split it into two mods where one just has all your favorites and another with the full set since there certainly is something special about having ALL the animal people, but the mod that only has a few is better in terms of playability and getting worlds to generate.
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