Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[bamorrow]

This game is awesome.

Entity and Civ question:  Would a civ group that predominately worships death ever do such a thing as get carried away and decide to all kill themselves?  Would a Civ group that worships undeath ever do such a thing as deliberately seek the zombie or skeleton state?  Maybe even successfully discover a sentient sort of undead state, and remain a viable (ha!) part of the Civ?

Combat question: Regarding enemy and combat IA, I've noticed that (mostly in adventure mode) goblin children often rush you, running right by the strewn weapons of their fallen guardsman, running right by the handy pile of stones, to try to wrestle and punch you.  Are we looking at an improvement in the future where an enemy without a suitable weapon will try to recover one from the battlefield, or a case where children pick up rocks to attack the full grown adventurer?

The image of the the nasty adventurer being pelted by rocks from a small mob of the town's kids strikes me as potentially having a very different outcome from the way they usually take turns throwing themselves on an adventurer's weapons.  Kids throwing rocks through a fortress's fortifications at the siegers seems like a likely scene as well.

Urist McObnoxiousness, age 4, dares Urist McMischievous, age 3, to throw stones at the goblins.  Urist McMischievous counters with the double dare.  Negotiations ensue!  An agreement is reached: "I'll do it if you do it!"

[unseenmage]

Please forgive if this has been covered and I missed it but... Given the shakeups planned for the next release and the inevitable changes to siege behaviour, are there any plans to implement a Climb skill much like the existing Swim skill? Or a Jump skill that helps survive falls?

Edges and falling are the most lethal thing in the game right now next to lava. (though with the rarity of lava, falls might actually be the DF worlds #1 killer)

The mental image of that once harmless army of goblins clambering down into my moat, climbing back out then scaling the walls of my megaproject just makes me smile. Not to mention the fun of thieves who sneak onto the rooftops to get at you.

Just curious.

[Maggarg - Eater of chicke]

This game is awesome.

Entity and Civ question:  Would a civ group that predominately worships death ever do such a thing as get carried away and decide to all kill themselves?  Would a Civ group that worships undeath ever do such a thing as deliberately seek the zombie or skeleton state?  Maybe even successfully discover a sentient sort of undead state, and remain a viable (ha!) part of the Civ?

Combat question: Regarding enemy and combat IA, I've noticed that (mostly in adventure mode) goblin children often rush you, running right by the strewn weapons of their fallen guardsman, running right by the handy pile of stones, to try to wrestle and punch you.  Are we looking at an improvement in the future where an enemy without a suitable weapon will try to recover one from the battlefield, or a case where children pick up rocks to attack the full grown adventurer?

The image of the the nasty adventurer being pelted by rocks from a small mob of the town's kids strikes me as potentially having a very different outcome from the way they usually take turns throwing themselves on an adventurer's weapons.  Kids throwing rocks through a fortress's fortifications at the siegers seems like a likely scene as well.

Urist McObnoxiousness, age 4, dares Urist McMischievous, age 3, to throw stones at the goblins.  Urist McMischievous counters with the double dare.  Negotiations ensue!  An agreement is reached: "I'll do it if you do it!"

Sounds like a good way to get rid of the little bastards. (children)

[G-Flex]

Please forgive if this has been covered and I missed it but... Are there any plans to implement a Climb skill much like the existing Swim skill? Or a Jump skill that helps survive falls?

Edges and falling are the most lethal thing in the game right now next to lava. (though with the rarity of lava, falls might actually be the DF worlds #1 killer)

I remember talk of climbing, and how Toady wants to get that in before reintroducing cliffs to the DF world as a regular part of it. I also remember talk of leaping across gaps and such. Both of these things probably would require pathfinding changes, though, perhaps complex ones, since creatures would have to make decisions about what is traversable based on their own skill level and that sort of thing.

[Lancensis]

I can't think of one game that wouldn't be better with dinosaurs.  Even DF.

What about football? Assuming you're one of the players

Riding them would make it much easier to see what roles players were specialized for. For running the ball you'd want the fastest dino but if something huge and heavy did catch up to it- well, you'd probably need pretty huge stables to get through a season without running out of them.

Well, I actually meant The Other Football Which Was Called Football First, but I suppose it's probably more entertaining to use dinosaurs in The Football In Which Feet Are Rarely Involved. I'm totally sure on the rules, of that. Would you be allowed to score a field goal from atop a Brachiosaur's head?

Please forgive if this has been covered and I missed it but... Given the shakeups planned for the next release and the inevitable changes to siege behaviour, are there any plans to implement a Climb skill much like the existing Swim skill? Or a Jump skill that helps survive falls?

Edges and falling are the most lethal thing in the game right now next to lava. (though with the rarity of lava, falls might actually be the DF worlds #1 killer)

The mental image of that once harmless army of goblins clambering down into my moat, climbing back out then scaling the walls of my megaproject just makes me smile. Not to mention the fun of thieves who sneak onto the rooftops to get at you.

Just curious.

Climbing suggestions are always being kicked about, and I think it's planned to go in eventually. The problem is that it turns the pathfinding system's existence into a living hell, since it'll have to track possible paths up sheer cliffs and walls, and it'll have to distinguish between climbers and non-climbers. Hopefully we'll get a solution eventually, in some shape or form.

[Footkerchief]

Weapon raws yay!

I don't get "proper" here.  Do you mean RGB colors?  The stuff being fed through the grid system rather than the creature tile system is still heavily constrained.  I don't expect that to be handled until item display gets decoupled from the font tiles.  If you mean using the 16 color approximation to the RGB material color, then it should use that for items.  Minerals can still be weird because when they are a wall, you can't rely on the material's color, as background colors come up.

Yeah, I meant RGB colors.  Thanks for the clarification.

It's still a project though, because it has to clean up and copy over the old raws without messing up anything that's dependent on the current instance of the raws, and those dependencies are potentially all over the place.

Could it do a, uh, automatic "partial" save-load?  It appears to have some way of adapting when the raws change during a real save-load, and that would be better than nothing even if it sucks.

Couldn't you implement a forcibly "doomed" civ just by setting one or more powers to have a personal hatred against them? Once there are Gods meddling with the world, just setting a couple of them to try to bring down a civ should do the trick over time, right? It seems to fit with the game much better than an artificial concept of bad luck or a forced apocalypse.

Apologies if you saw this above, but it was touched on pretty directly: "Ghost transformations are one of those metaphysical matters that didn't have explanations attempted in the game when they existed, just like the current undead regions.  When those have explanations, things like ruins with zombies should arise more naturally.  This could involve gods in pantheons of death/rebirth/etc., regions linked to death/etc. for whatever reason, etc., but it's all specific mechanics at that point."

Although I guess having a death god isn't the same as a god that hates you.  Anyway having gods plot against a group of people is a sufficiently pervasive trope in mythology that I think you can count on it going in.

Please forgive if this has been covered and I missed it but... Given the shakeups planned for the next release and the inevitable changes to siege behaviour, are there any plans to implement a Climb skill much like the existing Swim skill? Or a Jump skill that helps survive falls?

It came up early in this release cycle, yeah:

Actually, speaking of climbing: Is that coming up in the near future?

Probably not this release.  Kind of like flying in the sense that it causes various path troubles, so dwarves wouldn't be able to do it, anyway.

And as far as the spawning goes, yeah, the edges will be milked when available.  The 2D version did all of the river and lava spawning from the edges (generally hidden in ambush, so sometimes it wasn't easy to tell).  Although I'm not sure if spawning is the right word, since it actually takes them from the populations -- the chasm ones spawned at chasm tiles in 2D, though.

[Serefan]

Fast progress is fast. You're really working at it here Toady, congrats.

I actually added the RSS feed of the development to my IGoogle page last week, now I'm not missing a single bit.

[RantingRodent]

Apologies if you saw this above, but it was touched on pretty directly: "Ghost transformations are one of those metaphysical matters that didn't have explanations attempted in the game when they existed, just like the current undead regions.  When those have explanations, things like ruins with zombies should arise more naturally.  This could involve gods in pantheons of death/rebirth/etc., regions linked to death/etc. for whatever reason, etc., but it's all specific mechanics at that point."

Yeah I read that, but that had more of a tone of passive interaction - IF a bunch of people died or a civ was ruined, zombies could show up due to sphere influence. I'm talking more along the lines of angered powers causing volcanic eruptions, creating megabeasts, sending a plague of locusts, that kind of thing.

[ArkDelgato]

I could see climbing and jumping being tied in to personalities for calculations.
If one dwarf is a risk taker, and is proficiently agile, he could vie to jump a four square gap and grab the ledge, while another dwarf is timid and will try to find a thinner gap, if not path all the way around it.


The first thing I will do in Dwarf fortress 1 will be to get some wood, build a ramp, and jump a horse over a fortresses barricade wall.

[Sunday]

Well, I actually meant The Other Football Which Was Called Football First, but I suppose it's probably more entertaining to use dinosaurs in The Football In Which Feet Are Rarely Involved. I'm totally sure on the rules, of that. Would you be allowed to score a field goal from atop a Brachiosaur's head?

Well, I can only speak for myself, but a (non-american) football game where, say, a hand ball resulted in a flock (pack?) of raptors being loosed on the field to chase the players would be awesome.

Or, alternatively, where the various players are different types of dinosaurs - you've got an Allosaurus goalie, an Aptosaurus sweep, maybe a few of those headbutty, bald headed dinos as midfielders or defenders, a raptor as striker and you're gold.

American football would be entertaining as well.  I would foresee much player destruction - trying to score a touchdown while dodging a herd of stampeding dinosaurs.

But anyway. . .yeah, Toady's making time.  It's crazy how green the list's become in the past couple months.

[Footkerchief]

Well, I can only speak for myself, but a (non-american) football game where, say, a hand ball resulted in a flock (pack?) of raptors being loosed on the field to chase the players would be awesome.

Or, alternatively, where the various players are different types of dinosaurs - you've got an Allosaurus goalie, an Aptosaurus sweep, maybe a few of those headbutty, bald headed dinos as midfielders or defenders, a raptor as striker and you're gold.

American football would be entertaining as well.  I would foresee much player destruction - trying to score a touchdown while dodging a herd of stampeding dinosaurs.

Incidentally, the dev notes have several mentions of sports, and other fun and games:

# PowerGoal49, SCREAM BALL, (Future): Trolls take the captives and see if they can throw them all the way over the chasm to each other.
# PowerGoal50, SKULL GAMES, (Future): Trolls stack skulls to see how high the piles can get, bowl with skulls and play catch with skulls.
# PowerGoal51, BAD GOBLINS, (Future): Goblins play "who can make the prisoner scream the loudest".
# PowerGoal52, BEAST OF BURDEN, (Future): Captives are forced to pull a cart filled with goblin children. They are whipped to keep the cart running around as the children scream and yell.
# PowerGoal113, DIVINE INTERVENTION, (Future): You are playing goblin ball in the arena when your son yells "dad! dad! goal! goal!". Your son had been praying all day just so that you would win. Your kick is short, but the god Markad manifests and finishes the kick.

[Draco18s]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Are Dinosaurs going to have their modern day names or are you going to give them the names similar to Beak Dogs? (Even though I believe they are based off of the Movie version of V-Raptors which don't technically exist)

Spoiler only because you spoiled what you wrote; unsure of what's spoilery.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Jurassic Park's raptors do exist.  They're Utahraptors.

[G-Flex]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

According to Wikipedia, the Jurassic Park "velociraptors" were modeled after Deinonychus, a genus of similar but larger animals. Utahraptors are something else. They were changed a bit for the movie too, and science itself has certainly moved on a bit since then, I'm sure.

[Neonivek]

To Draco

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

No Jurasic park Raptors don't exist. They are based off of an intentional misinterpretation of V-Raptors and whatever G-Flex just said. Meaning that JP Raptors are made up and named after real creatures.

Heh, well let me lock in my next three questions. (If you ever want me to let up or stop just tell me Toady)... ugh I have more then three... I am a horrible person.

Questions in Spoiler

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Toady with the mythos/plot generator, will it be possible for it to set up Armagedon scenarios or at least situations where the mass destruction of the world is possible? Both in World Generation and when the player is involved (afterall the world ending during World Gen would be boring outside of the planes arc).
-I am mostly reminded of one person's failed attept to break into the HFS. His fortress was destroyed and the demons that poured out and proceeded to destroy much of the world due to the sheer number of powerful beings.

Will Civilisations always avoid Spherical lands like they currently do or can desperate or foolish leaders convince others to start to live there?

Will the Sphere related curse be gradual in effect over time Can Spherical lands have degrees of power? In one example you said something about learning to dance by staying in a land of joy, eventually will the energy build up to even more adverse effects possibly dependent on the degree of sphere power?
-Though that assumes that all Spherical lands will cause problems and changes for non-natives just for being around it for certain periods of times.

Spherical lands seem to have adverse effects over long periods of time on its non-native inhabitants. Though I guess I could extend this question to curses as a whole. Will there be an idea of being changed to the point of losing one's race in the eyes of others? For example will someone whos ears turn into batwings still be considered human? Will it depend on the civilisation?

[Neruz]

To Draco

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

No Jurasic park Raptors don't exist. They are based off of an intentional misinterpretation of V-Raptors and whatever G-Flex just said. Meaning that JP Raptors are made up and named after real creatures.

Heh, well let me lock in my next three questions. (If you ever want me to let up or stop just tell me Toady)... ugh I have more then three... I am a horrible person.

While the JP Raptors were indeed fictional when they were created (real Velociraptors were much smaller), the Utahraptor was later discovered, which turned out to range in size from about what was shown on JP, to substantially larger.

Basically, as it turned out, they'd accidentally created what they thought was a fictional Velociraptor variant, which turned out to be reasonably close to a then undiscovered Raptor species.


They weren't intended to be real, but they turned out to be close enough to real, basically.