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Author Topic: The NEW Future of the Fortress  (Read 334728 times)

LordNagash

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Re: The NEW Future of the Fortress
« Reply #1245 on: December 23, 2008, 04:16:47 am »

The other problem with an ant queen is that people seem to be limited to having 10 children, max. At least from what I have seen.

That's true. We'll need some way to specify litter size beyond the current system of MULTIPLE_RARE and the implied MULTIPLE_COMMON.

There's already a tag that does this - LITTERSIZE
« Last Edit: December 23, 2008, 04:51:04 am by LordNagash »
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Toady One

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Re: The NEW Future of the Fortress
« Reply #1246 on: December 23, 2008, 04:43:23 am »

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will a dissolution be implemented in any way?

Nothing this time around.  Any creature where something like that would either require some kind of reaction, or it would be a walking liquid/powder, in which case who's to say if water would actually dissolves it, once you have some sort of magic going on?  It's a raws thing for later I suppose.  Same for various behaviors for liquid/gas creatures vs. weapons -- this time around, I'm just going to do whatever works for magmamen.

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So we'll also have armor acting like a pseudo tissue layer for purposes of transmitting bludgeoning damage and so forth?
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If an iron sword strikes some steel plate armour and fails to penetrate it, and the damage is converted to bludgeoning (AKA the force of the blow is spread out over the plate), will bludgeoning damage be inflicted to the creature beneath the armour?
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Additionally, if we're talking about a steel-skinned creature (Giant Magma Ants?) instead of a steel-armoured creature, is the force transfer handled differently?

Yeah, that's basically how it works.  The armor is all checked in order from outer to inner, then it gets at the tissue layers, altering the character of the attack as it goes.  There's a little left to do there, so it's not completely clear to me which way it'll go as far as how much force is transferred (or if it matters if it's skin or armor -- it doesn't currently, though yeah, there is a difference in real life).  It has to be enough that skin doesn't stop bones from being broken, but not so much that armor is useless against impacts, depending on the mats and nature of the armor/clothing.

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but how will all the layers of tissue for each bodypart be presented? Will there be a gigantic/massive list of "2th outer tissue layer for right finger #2", "Flesh layer #1 for right knee" and so on listed like the parts are currently done, or will there be some kind of damage indicator next to the body parts?

Not there yet, but I could keep the current system pretty much, with parts colored by severity of the wound...  you can't select on the wound list if I remember, so maybe you could get further details by pressing enter on a selected part.

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Because having blood that is of a temperature higher than it's boiling point but kept liquid by the pressure in the veins would be cool- ish.

I'm not sure what the effect would be here.  It could be abstract blood until it's released, and when it's released, it wouldn't be under pressure, he he he.

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Obviously, from what you've said, it will be difficult to cut through, say, steel with iron. But HOW difficult?

I've only whacked the poor dwarf with the hammer.  Haven't tested armor yet, and all of this is very number dependent.  Ideally, there would be a point to upgrading equipment without making the prior equipment worthless.  A softer material can break a harder one with impact force currently if it's swung hard enough, but it would suffer itself in the process (though not so much if it is against something that just isn't as massive as it is).  There's a sort of mid-range spot I'm missing right now with wedge effects (like a dull axe), but I'll get at that at some point -- I have a contact area variable in the attack definitions that should make the pressure increase, but there are many things to balance.  There's a sweet spot we'll find eventually as long as everything is placed correctly.  Skill is probably still going to be the most important thing, unless you've got really really tragic atts or something (you can't be strength 0 unless you wait for your atts to rust for a long, long time, but if you theoretically did get down there, you wouldn't be able to cause any damage at all).

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will that mean that armor will start to act like a layer of metal around your character that needs to be breached and torn to do damage to the soft creature inside

armor damage won't be specified this time around, so there will still be some weirdness to it.  It should be better than before anyway.

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this post reminds me, are you ever going to include magnetism in DF ?

Admittedly it hasn't been on the top of the list, but I imagine there's some amusement to be had there.

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More generally, the next version will have all the things that are wrote in the dev_next page, or only the yellow ones?

Yeah, it's just the yellow ones, but when I do new yellow ones after this release, there shouldn't be as much other stuff as I'm doing this time.  I've had this save compatibility problem building up for some time that got totally valved this time around.

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"release the Berzerker!" debug-button is going to stay in for the final release.  And that hopefully what generates can be edited.

Yeah, I guess I can make, what, some kind of param option to enable debug commands for the universe at the time it is generated?

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Do Siege weapons actually damage enemies or do they simply die if struck?

If I remember correctly it's just a very vicious attack, so yeah, it should change a bit for megabeasts.  Like the giant crossbow in that sinbad movie or something.  I'm not 100% sure though.

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Wouldn't it be as simple as having a [BLOOD] token to be placed on some layer?  Or even [BLOOD:_material_] to simplify if we're going to have many layers of blood.

Yeah, it's going to be something like the latter, with VASCULAR meaning that the part bleeds when struck, and ARTERIES meaning it has a chance to really cause trouble.  The only part that causes any irritation, and not that much, is deciding what you get when it spurts out and controlling that so that it is reasonable.  It might suck to drop a ton of powder objects for example and start stacking them all over the place.  It's not that bad to handle though.  I think I might have mentioned blood events somewhere.  It'll sort itself out in any case, though in the case where you want the blood to be a useful powder, you kind of have to pick one or the other, and there aren't as many good solutions until stacking is sorted, which I don't have time to handle for this release.

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Oh, and if we have fluid layers that do not fill the requirements of blood, can those be sprayed around when the creature is wounded enough to pierce that layer also, despite that it will do very little to adversely affect the creatures health?

Yeah, exploding gas-ball creature thingies are quite popular.  There's a small bit of trickiness to handling connectivity there or what an inner and outer layer with a fluid middle layer would imply for severs.  It could be thoroughly whiffed this time around.

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Armour quality and material strength:  Will they work as they currently do, as a multiplier of x1 to x2 (or whatever) to the strength?  Maybe there could be something more interesting

Right now, armor skill gives an increase to a deflection roll, and armor quality boosts the deflection roll, and a good deflection roll lowers the effective force of the strike.  Until armor damage goes in, there probably won't be anything more complicated.  The toughness attribute, which used to decrease damage directly, now does a similar deflection roll for strikes to tissues.

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Where presumably the numbers following the ARGs are the relative thicknesses.  How does this interact with RELATIVE_THICKNESS in the tissue definitions?

It overrides.  It's sort of clumsy.  The tissue is the last ditch defense for the default value (I think 1), but the body detail plans override that, and explicit values you give to the creature with RELATIVE_THICKNESS override that.

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Does any of this work regarding bodies effect vermin?  What do you have planned for them?

There are a few countdown things here and there that touch on that, but it's mostly an undecided issue.  They'll need materials for things like milking and so on, as well as probably at least one 'structural' material at the minimum like plants to give them properties, but ideally they'd have full bodies (that don't get added to individual vermin, but just something to refer to as needed).

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How do the strength values for metals interact with their effectiveness as weapons and armor?

Currently shear yield/fracture is used to determine edge effectiveness and the effectiveness of a material against a cut.  Impact yield/fracture is used to determine resistance against impacts.  Solid density will increase weight and therefore the impact of attacks.

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So, we are just wondering about the possible differences between the castes.  Is it possible that a caste has totally different creature tokes than other castes?

Yeah, most of the tokens work that way.  A few that interact with populations (like biome tokens and frequency) are still creature tokens.

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Ok then, the hybrid thing from earlier must've confused me

Yeah, nothing like that yet.  We're slowly opening up possibilities of course, but as usual they are all just sort of sitting out there in need of a little code.

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Hmmm, how does all of this translate as far as weapon and armor quality goes? Will they still have the same effects as before?

I think I did armor quality somewhere in this post.  For weapons, it currently increases the chance to score a hit at all as usual, and it'll also make edged weapons start sharper.

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Also, how is this going to effect things like training bolts? How is the game going to decide what is good for training with and what isn't?

Many things were kept the same as I updated flags to save time.  If it says wood or bone, it'll likely just use the [WOOD] or [BONE] flag on the material.  A lot of things are like that.  Those flags in part sort of represent a transition state in the game as I add things, and also in some cases an actual thing that will be kept.

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With all of the new material properties, will it be possible for the bones and leather of different creatures to have different properties when used as items?

Yeah, each of the materials can be assigned whatever properties, and those will generally be reflected in the game.  There are going to be many outlandish cases that the game can't handle, and we'll slowly handle some of them, especially those that come up in expanding the vanilla game or have some particular applicability to mods or whatever.

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In the ant colony, the queen would mate with one ant male, then the male would die and that's how it'd be until a new queen was born.

For long-term colony health, monogamy isn't the problem so much as sperm storage.  After the "nuptial flight", queens can store the initial contribution for a long time (can be years) and I'm not sure any species ever mate after founding a colony, though there are all sorts of ants.  I'm very very not likely to have nuptial flights at this stage in ant-person society (just going for castes as a starting point and having some tunnels and stuff, maybe a bit more -- lots to do in the underground).  Termites on the other hand...  they have kings and queens, yeah?  Maybe they mate more continuously in general.

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If it works we could even see them being allowed for different uses. Dragon fang/walrus tusk spears, anyone?

I guess this is an ideal time to strike a cautious note -- depending on what I have time for, workshops possibilities might not be expanded in certain ways initially.  For instance, bone is generally the realm of the craftsdwarf, but the craftshop doesn't do weapons aside from the sharpenable stone ones.  There are lots of different things to handle, so I could miss quite a bit (or not even attempt lots of them as I'm pressed for time for this release).  We can patch things up after that, but it's something to be aware of.  This goes for knocking out some gigantic tooth or horn and making floodgate out of it or whatever as well.  The new corpse piece would make it one step away from being the floodgate through an appropriate job, but those need to be added to the interface for you to get at them.  It probably is best done with some sort of complete reworking of how shops function and which jobs are available, which sticks me between instant and delayed gratification yet again.

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Would it be possible if struck hard enough for a hard inner layer to pass through a soft outer layer?

Without getting to the point of the chicken example, even the stalwart buddy of violence, the humble Compound Fracture, comes up here.  These sorts of things are in the countdown, though it's under the heading "sick wounds" and offers me some discretion, so I'm not sure what's going in this time, as usual.
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Neoskel

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Re: The NEW Future of the Fortress
« Reply #1247 on: December 23, 2008, 08:47:33 am »

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Does any of this work regarding bodies effect vermin?  What do you have planned for them?

There are a few countdown things here and there that touch on that, but it's mostly an undecided issue.  They'll need materials for things like milking and so on, as well as probably at least one 'structural' material at the minimum like plants to give them properties, but ideally they'd have full bodies (that don't get added to individual vermin, but just something to refer to as needed).

Right, like if a roach is magically increased in size it will have an appropriate body. Not sure what that would mean for the current 'large rat' and 'giant rat' though. It could mean large and giant becoming templates not unlike zombie and skeleton, or they could be handled like different creatures with the same name. Or call magically enlarged rats 'enlarged rats' instead. Which does kinda imply only one size of enlargement...

Thanks for all the answers Toady, your game just keeps getting more awesome.  :D
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Tormy

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Re: The NEW Future of the Fortress
« Reply #1248 on: December 23, 2008, 09:19:02 am »

Yeah indeed, thanks for the answers Toady!  8)

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So, we are just wondering about the possible differences between the castes.  Is it possible that a caste has totally different creature tokes than other castes?

Yeah, most of the tokens work that way.  A few that interact with populations (like biome tokens and frequency) are still creature tokens.

Pure awesomeness!  8)
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Mephansteras

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Re: The NEW Future of the Fortress
« Reply #1249 on: December 23, 2008, 11:04:32 am »

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Armour quality and material strength:  Will they work as they currently do, as a multiplier of x1 to x2 (or whatever) to the strength?  Maybe there could be something more interesting

Right now, armor skill gives an increase to a deflection roll, and armor quality boosts the deflection roll, and a good deflection roll lowers the effective force of the strike.  Until armor damage goes in, there probably won't be anything more complicated.  The toughness attribute, which used to decrease damage directly, now does a similar deflection roll for strikes to tissues.

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Hmmm, how does all of this translate as far as weapon and armor quality goes? Will they still have the same effects as before?

I think I did armor quality somewhere in this post.  For weapons, it currently increases the chance to score a hit at all as usual, and it'll also make edged weapons start sharper.


Ok, cool. Any idea at this point how much of an effect this is going to have on combat? For example, will Masterwork armor suddenly become more important then the metal? Obviously Masterwork Steel will be better then Masterwork Copper,  but would Masterwork Copper suddenly be deflecting so much of the blows that it's actually better then base steel armor? Or are you going to try to keep things more or less how they currently are, balance-wise?

For weapons, does this mean that a Masterwork sword gets a bigger boost then a Masterwork Hammer? I guess that makes sense, really, since the most of the hammer's damage is it's weight, whereas a sword needs to penetrate to really do damage.
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Random832

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Re: The NEW Future of the Fortress
« Reply #1250 on: December 23, 2008, 11:24:27 am »

Will we see more preview creature raws as you get creatures other than dwarves implemented?
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Neonivek

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Re: The NEW Future of the Fortress
« Reply #1251 on: December 23, 2008, 11:34:55 am »

Thanks for the response Toady... I feel kinda guilty for asking so many questions after you answered so many
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Pure_W

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Re: The NEW Future of the Fortress
« Reply #1252 on: December 23, 2008, 12:07:15 pm »

Quick Question!

Willl there be castes in Entities?
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Tormy

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Re: The NEW Future of the Fortress
« Reply #1253 on: December 23, 2008, 12:30:13 pm »

Quick Question!

Willl there be castes in Entities?

Erm...entities = races, right? So the answer is yes in that case.  :)
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Thndr

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Re: The NEW Future of the Fortress
« Reply #1254 on: December 23, 2008, 12:33:22 pm »

A few questions about item quality.

If items become damaged and less effective, would there be:

Settings to make military squads prefer a certain quality? (To make sure some squads have the best, and if you want to make a grunt squad//punishment squad, having them equip the damage and worst)

A new profession//metalworking option for Item Repair? (To make damaged weapons back to original quality, and for poorly skilled workers, maybe a chance to make the weapon's quality go down as well *making people think twice who they have repair enabled.*)

A refuse option to include broken metal items, along with an auto-melt tag on broken metal items?
« Last Edit: December 23, 2008, 01:09:31 pm by Thndr »
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Mephansteras

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Re: The NEW Future of the Fortress
« Reply #1255 on: December 23, 2008, 12:42:59 pm »

Quick Question!

Willl there be castes in Entities?

Erm...entities = races, right? So the answer is yes in that case.  :)

I think he's talking about the Civilization entries, not the creature entries. I may have missed something from Toady, but has there been any information on how Castes are going to work with Civs? Do all castes for a species automatically show up for that civ? Are there ways to restrict jobs to a particular caste?
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Pure_W

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Re: The NEW Future of the Fortress
« Reply #1256 on: December 23, 2008, 01:17:57 pm »

Quick Question!

Willl there be castes in Entities?

Erm...entities = races, right? So the answer is yes in that case.  :)

I think he's talking about the Civilization entries, not the creature entries. I may have missed something from Toady, but has there been any information on how Castes are going to work with Civs? Do all castes for a species automatically show up for that civ? Are there ways to restrict jobs to a particular caste?

Yup!
Say one civ of dwarfs has a human born into it, there would be lots of prejudice or the like.  It could be brought up as a dwarf, albeit a rather large one.  Or it could be taken to another civ.
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Warlord255

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Re: The NEW Future of the Fortress
« Reply #1257 on: December 23, 2008, 01:24:45 pm »

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If it works we could even see them being allowed for different uses. Dragon fang/walrus tusk spears, anyone?

I guess this is an ideal time to strike a cautious note -- depending on what I have time for, workshops possibilities might not be expanded in certain ways initially.  For instance, bone is generally the realm of the craftsdwarf, but the craftshop doesn't do weapons aside from the sharpenable stone ones.  There are lots of different things to handle, so I could miss quite a bit (or not even attempt lots of them as I'm pressed for time for this release).  We can patch things up after that, but it's something to be aware of.  This goes for knocking out some gigantic tooth or horn and making floodgate out of it or whatever as well.  The new corpse piece would make it one step away from being the floodgate through an appropriate job, but those need to be added to the interface for you to get at them.  It probably is best done with some sort of complete reworking of how shops function and which jobs are available, which sticks me between instant and delayed gratification yet again.

Ah, bummer. Oh well. With what I've heard so far (alchemy shop, milling, farmer's workshop, other basics) opened up for smelter-style reactions, and the expansion of the material systyem, there's still tons of fun to be had. If absolutely nothing else, opening the alchemy shop means that certain more "outlandish" smelter reactions can be made sensible. I'll take what I can get. :D

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Silverionmox

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Re: The NEW Future of the Fortress
« Reply #1258 on: December 23, 2008, 02:14:15 pm »

Toady, a question for the longer term: what are the plans concerning distances, weight, etc. Now a square holds anything from a butterfly to a tree or colossus - how far do you intend to go in sticking to a specific size for squares, with all the implications for large creatures, mass conservation etc. ?
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jarathor

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Re: The NEW Future of the Fortress
« Reply #1259 on: December 23, 2008, 04:22:40 pm »

I've searched around, and this has been referred to a few times in other topics, but I'll ask it here: Will clothing help protect creatures from cold and/or heat? If it acts kind of like a tissue layer like you said armor would, would that do it? But then there's the whole deal of having poorly-dressed dwarves on embark and making more coats, jackets, and so on... And then there would have to be a way to assign clothes...
Also, will extra clothing help a dwarf cope with inclement weather? Maybe even say, a good oiled leather raincoat can make a dwarf not mind being caught in the rain as much... But then we get to umbrellas, and everything gets complicated from there. So we can't take this too far.
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