Will i be able to define my guilds? Because i'd honestly like those to match up with my generalized dwarf labor plans, and not have infighting among, for instance, Crafters because they share different guilds and happened to get into a brawl.
One of the ideas was to give dwarves some freedom to associate as they like and to make more use of their friends, families and grudges so there is some push and pull. Turning off infighting would be a possibility, although hopefully it won't need to come to that. I'm not quite sure what your situation is (things like lots of miner-craftsdwarf dwarves? or just different craft combinations?), but it'll be good to go into some specific examples and see what sorts of situations will arise. We're sure the guild/religion/etc subgroup mechanism will add a lot to the game, but we haven't charted the exact path yet, and we'll be proceeding cautiously when we get there. The idea certainly isn't to add a strictly annoying burden (like a new shell mandate), but to provide emerging challenges, more atmosphere and more things to do.
Moving fortress sections (lifts, crushing traps, etc.)
I cannot wait to see the insane things that people will build with this one.
This is definitely one where you guys are going to provide me with more entertainment than I get from either playing with them or programming them, he he he.
Are you planning on making certain 'wilderness' areas a bit more defined? Currently there is hardly any difference between a hill and a forest. Having, for example, denser bushes that, maybe, obscure vision, or multi-tile trees would make the denser forests much more foresty.
Yeah, we've got three things up there that should help a bit with that:
Skills:Wood Use:Ground debris/sticks/underbrushFor some basic variety -- there's nothing like the woods around here where you can hardly walk and end up getting all scratched up. Now it's more like the older growth forests with the cleaner floors, but with really small trees and inexplicably no underbrush. Not sure about vision there -- thick underbrush should definitely obscure it, but we might wait for the lighting part to get that all under one umbrella.
Explorer:Land and bestiary:More overland map features and local variationsThis is the big one, where there should be more local bumpiness depending on the nature of the region, some larger bodies of water, features analogous to the underground like canyons, etc. Enough so that the explorer feels like an explorer and so that starting in the mountains by a conifer forest in dwarf mode can mean different things.
Treasure Hunter:Adventure sites:Existing town-style sites should be updated as possible (dwarf fortresses, etc.)This may or may not be relevant, but when we get to updating elven sites, if we don't have multi-tile trees by then, there will be a strong, strong pull for it. I don't think the major obstacles for multi-tile trees are too rough, at least to get them to a basic acceptable level. Then we'd have giant trees! Which would be awesome.
I'm just hoping things can be implemented in smaller releases that can then receive a bit of polish, before the next couple of features are dumped on top. I don't think anyone want to experience another dev cycle similar to what led to 0.31.
We've set up the lists with that basically in the forefront of our minds the whole time. Everything up there should be bite-size chunkable, without a lot of dependencies or giant system alterations like the material rewrite being required. There are a few exceptions we're going to have to plan around. The site storage rewrite for entity population sprawl has potential to get a little bumpy, and it's required pretty early on to get to the rest of the meat. The dwarven AI rewrite for job priorities is also pretty sweeping. This is mainly because they require the changing of pervasive ancient code that isn't going to like being looked at much less altered. At the same time, it shouldn't propagate nearly as nastily as the material rewrite or the entity position rewrite did, so there shouldn't be serious creeping problems or even any month-long delays.
With the digging part, does that involve digging up through the ground and popping up in the storage room? That's what i'm guessing. Also, is their a possibility that the digging could also be used to take out defensive walls?
The first is probably easier than the second to put in, even if the second is more realistic. The first priority will probably just be dealing with walled-off hallways and stuff like that though -- things that are really easy to do that kill off entire sieges. I guess it's entirely possible that they wouldn't be able to find you if you hid behind 10 meter thick walls hidden off in random places, but then it should be possible for them to live in your upper levels for years while you work away tradeless on mushrooms down below (although there are major obstacles to that that make it non-practical for the dev page). They'd probably just leave after looting all your exposed items and slaughtering anybody left outside (including any entity pop infrastructure you've got out there). Although once they can get through a single wall, they can just dig ambitious tunnels for you at random I suppose. As long as walling yourself in has reasonable results, I'll be happy with however they handle it. Right now it's too much of an exploit (of course, the whole "digging invaders" is enough of a touchy subject that it's explictly stated as optional on the dev page, and how you handle exploits is up to you at that point).
By the way... minecarts sure sound fun but I can't imagine what would they be good for 
It sounds that the shear amount of workforce required to make tracks and minecarts would be larger than having dwarves haul all the rocks from a vein individually. I guess minecarts would work for large quarries or situations where there's a huge concentration of ore in one place (which would require changing the way how veins spawn now - in almost regular distances).
We were thinking the same thing, really, but I think we managed to redeem the idea enough for ourselves when we considered using carts for things other than stone. If you had a cart attaching your crafts shops to your trade depot, the infrastruture investing might be well worth it, especially if tracks can be placed faster than one tile at a time and with fewer resources than a bar per square and carts can hold as many items as a pack animal or more and can move about as fast (faster? it would be funny to shoot a cart full of glass goblets downhill toward a depot and hope for the best). If conveyors become possible, carts might also be fun with some kind of inversion/dumping system, although I'm not quite sure how that would look or work. Then there are passenger systems on rails... a dwarf flying around on a cart or a handcar would be amusing.
The "real world" thing for minecarts with actual mines would probably be making some larger mined rocks almost impossible to haul without using something like a cart or wheelbarrow or work animal, or making some mined debris that you wouldn't be able to haul out by hand without holding it in your shirt or a bag or something, but that would depend on how nice cart systems end up being and the general fun of playing the game. In any case, we ended up happy enough with the idea of carts on tracks that they made the list.
Will adventurers be able to dig as freely as miners can in Fort mode? If so, how much easier would that ability make cave exploration?
You mention digging out soil tiles in adventure mode, but don't say anything about digging into rock. Is that a deliberate omission?
We're starting with soil digging. I'm not sure where we'll go with rock... ideally, you'd be able to mine with a pick, but my first impression is that it would be best for adventure mode if doing that took a more realistic amount of time. It would probably involve some of the time passage stuff we're going to use to scrap the annoying sleep mechanic and facilitate farming, and your tunnels would be hard-won achievements. If there are some people that are all about being able to dig stuff out really fast in adv mode for whatever reason, the speeds for these things could always just be options. My current thoughts for defaults are on really slow digging in rock though. Digging out a whole soil tile should be fairly slow too, though it's not as much of a stretch for it to happen quickly before we have better time abstraction.
I'd like it to be configurable though - at the moment I like to dig out veins with a 1-tile buffer around them, because a) it creates nicer looking exhausted mines, and b) it means a slightly increased chance of finding something else exciting!
When it comes closer, I'm going to take the notes I've got laying around, the forum threads, and whatever else, and add some configuration options for the initial implementation. We just haven't made any decisions yet, so there's just a skeletal mention of it on the dev page now.
Does this mean that travelling will no longer cure hunger, thirst and sleepiness? And in what sense appropriate, real world or fortress mode appropriate?
Appropriate in the real world sense. It should end up best for the overall game if dying of hunger takes weeks instead of a day or whatever it takes now, but stretching it out longer than a season would make things like winter less scary. If you have been starving for weeks, one meal shouldn't get you back to shape the way it does now.
Travel is going to evolve as the hunt and explorer stuff is worked on. There ultimately won't be any automatic refills, but if something like drinking ends up fairly abstracted on long journeys, I wouldn't be shocked. It'll come down to how annoying it is to hunt for things manually as you travel from square to square. Having to kill each prey animal shouldn't be too bad. Filling up your waterskin or whatever might even be fine, but it could be borderline if you have to go to the local mode too much. The mid-level maps are always an option here. As night creatures and things like that go in, the notion of night time and stopping for the night and camping are going to become more important, and however that works with sleep will determine how that goes.
In the end, the answers are going to come down to testing as we put in each of the new mechanisms. At first, there won't be any changes. Butchery and better hunting will be needed before we mess with food.
Are there any plans to clean up and reorganize the current user interface?
We haven't decided on a course of action. On the one hand, it feels like the elephant in the room, and on the other, it rated closest as #12 perhaps or #15 (maybe a side of #3) in suggestion voting. A massive overhaul seems almost too risky a project to undertake, especially if you are talking about moving over to a more graphical system, but there are some easier consistency issues that could ultimately be handled like bugs separately. It depends on what you mean, but I don't want this thread to spiral out of control in that direction.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but how do you see the stickied bugs in the bug tracker?
When I click View Issues, the top two or more browser scroll pages are set apart by a line. There are many stickied issues.
This one line is the feature I'm most interested about. Significant increases in FPS over time mean community forts wouldn't need to be abandoned after a few years, and megaprojects would be much more fun to create. Hopefully improved pathfinding will provide these increases. Very exciting announcement.
I'm going to start by knocking out the worst offenders I can find that are more in the mistakes and easy to deal with category. Then we should be down to the major projects, and pathfinding is one of those. We should have a better idea of what the picture is once I get a chance over on Linux. I'm treating the pathfinding ESV entry more or less as a strong push to speed up the game, and whatever the worst parts are will be the things getting attention.
Does taking a look at restacking is still in the scope of the "Hauling Improvements" nano-arc ?
Restacking is still the messiest thing among the ones listed there, and we decided to put it off until we see how multi-item hauling works out. If dwarves can more responsibly handle a lot of what stacking would handle just by not being idiots and having a few more tools available, then stacking can just be an interface tweak to clean up lists (collapsing like items into "stacks" when you look at them). That would be the easiest way to go.
Actual stacking is a nightmare of conflicts and lost information, but it does have framerate benefits once the item numbers start to get high.
What I am curious about is if the plan is to release a big update with adventure upgrades, or a smaller one before that with some of the bug fixes for fortress mode?
All that adventurer stuff looks amazing, but I have to wonder how long it'll be till we see all of that? Hopefully only a year or two, it'll certainly be worth it regardless.
Aside from the few exceptions I mentioned above, which are slightly hairy, everything on the list is meant to be handled pretty much like bug fixes. If you can butcher bodies within the next release or two, then it gets greened out. I'm planning to continue releasing at about the same rate I was releasing last month. There are always complications, but I'm trying to avoid them, and the new dev page is a part of that. As for all of it, like *all* of it, well, I have no idea. Could it take a few years? Sure. But you'll be getting it on a slow drip this time instead of as one big gusher, which should be cleaner and still satisfying.
I noticed "branding" says it will be dependent on tracking art objects in the wounds system. Does this mean tattooing or body painting could be in?
Tracking body painting with a wound seems odd... perhaps adding art image ids to contaminants. Then you could draw a smiley face on yourself in mud or something. Tattooing... a contaminant or a wound? Hard to say! In any case, I don't know that branding would lead directly to any of this going in at the same time, but yeah, similar systems, and certainly the others are way lower hanging fruit after one is in.
And I must know whether I can use a grappling-hook-loaded-crossbow in adventure mode.
He he he, well, having grappling hooks would get you one step closer to your ultimate goal anyway.
I'm curious what the official status of reqs, bloats, and power goals is. Are they "gone" for good and only exist as guidelines now, or just did only their tracking in the version number stop? I mean, power goals seem to be too far off for the most part to be useful, after all.
They are official categorized, loose dev notes that I couldn't keep updated and presentable, so they'll act as guidelines for features. Power goals were particularly useless as check-offable dev items, because of the way they mixed and matched features, but I think they were valuable in an illustrative sense and we haven't stepped back from aiming for them. I imagine some of them will actually be done when this dev list starts getting greener. The version number is still being tracked by core items, since those haven't really changed. I think the new lists convey some of the core items better, but many of them are there relatively unchanged. Some cores like love/romance, heirs, more raw support, translation support and tutorials, etc. aren't there, but they should all get their homes once we get our sea legs on the new page.
Do you envision the initial bestiary implementation to be adventurer mode only, or also a feature of legends/fortress mode? As more randomized objects come into play, a first look at what exists becomes more and more important, after all.
You'll still be able to embark in random places out there, at least if nothing changes, so you'd need a way to at least interact with the random critters. On the other hand, there's the idea of not being to embark in unexplored areas without having to Oregon Trail your way there first, which has probably got matter of personal preference written all over it. Having the adv mode bestiary work in fortress mode probably wouldn't be any work. There's the general question of introducing the player to random critters with some care, which is a little easier to do with the explorer, I think, than a slapped down fort where you might be inundated with unnamed weird stuff.
Are there any short-term plans to export sites and site structures into the raws?
I've been avoiding that because the maps are so crappy right now. I need to have a better idea of what sort of information should be out in the raws before I can do much with it. As the entity pop sites work themselves out and the more ritsy homes start to look nicer, we can start figuring that sort of thing out. It's kind of similar to the random beasts that way. They are ill-formed, so putting them in the raws is harder. It partially intersects scripting languages, probably.
I noticed you mentioned rock crushers. What will be the purpose of the crushed rock?
He he he, I mentioned it and fans with a question mark if I remember. They were two of the machines listed in the improved mechanics threads. It's really more a placeholder for whatever machines seem like they'd fit better with all of whatever else will be going on at that time. The picture will change as we start to get some actual implementations, along with player preference I presume. I'm guessing people would want a rock crusher because they hate rocks and would prefer the powder either never exist or just gets dispersed as with the dust in a cave-in, but I'm not sure.
Author
Topic: Future of the Fortress: The Development Page (Read 1559701 times)