Woohoo! It's always good to see another FotF post...
We apparently generated enough speculation for Toady to come and answer the questions in person.
Chalk me up for another person who think the cities would likely be a bear to navigate, by the current standards of navigation in Adventure Mode.
When towns have various important buildings in them and other stuff to do, will there be any plans to prevent intra-city walks from being too long and monotonous?
Will there be any kind of navigational tools like signposts or slabposts, or perhaps even a system where villages guide adventurers in place so that the player doesn't easily get lost in these cities?
The things we are looking at now are letting people move along roads on the travel map (they already appear there), and where internal walls make that have too small a resolution, to provide a new zoomed-in-3x map splitting the travel map that a resolution appropriate for all city travel. Then there's asking directions. You should not end up having to take 800 steps to get straight across town -- if there is a road without obstacles, it should just be the 15-17 steps on the travel map, and if there's an intervening wall or river, you might have to take ~50 steps on the 3x map. We'll see how these maps interfere with a sense of exploration in new cities, and then uncover them as you move around, perhaps, or limit their use in extreme cases perhaps. In any case, I'm going to try to remain mindful of the annoyances.
So, basically, you have a zoomed-out mode of travel? That sounds like an interesting and reasonable system...
Although I wonder if there will be any "ambushes" when walking around town where hucksters try to sell you some snake oil or some pickpockets bump into you or the like...
It would be kind of boring to be able to walk all over town and nothing really happened. Sandbox games like inFamous were pretty fun just because you'd be walking along, see an injured civilian, hop down from the telephone poles, whap them with the healing lightning, then *boom* suddenly the ambush springs on you, and you're fighting a bunch of thugs out in the streets, and you have to go diving for cover as the bullets start flying overhead.
How does the building process in world-gen work? Are the large buildings like walls or castles built gradually, segment after segment, or do they just pop into existence overnight? Is there some resource gathering going on? Basically, I'm just wondering if it is possible to encounter a city with unfinished walls, or a castle where just the keep has been finished.
You can't see anything happen gradually yet. There are stone resource stockpiles, but it doesn't tie into giant constructions yet. Eventually it should work out -- the walls and towers are pretty modular, so having half-constructed buildings that get finished during play outside of view is certainly feasible, though making it happen if you are sitting there staring might not be quite so easy.
This is something I will really look forward to - seeing a city that is cramped because it's long since outgrown its city walls, with an old town surrounded by stout walls, a mid-town only half-covered by half-built walls, and then the new town that keeps sprining forth, outgrowing even the new walls. The city has gone too long without a seige and forgets how to protect its citizens.
The mid-town citizens, well-off traders with some clout demand the protection of their homes and property, while new-town citizens, the poor stragglers are left out in the cold to die when the war comes, and the old-town citizens, who have traditional clout, say that the money would be better spent on guards than on extending a wall that probably wouldn't protect the mid-towners in time, anyway.
Having the marks of old walls that have since been torn down (or old walls that still remain in some parts, as walls of some buildings) built into the geography of a city would add some extra historical flavor to the cities.
What models are there governing population growth and decline? Where do you want it to go - a simple and streamlined abstract model of growth and decline based upon a tally of upward population growth forces and downward pressures on populations, or a very gritty and detailed model where every wave of disease is tracked, so that there will be history events of the great city fire of 231?
The problem with that is that starvation doesn't seem to be modelled very well at all - people just keep eating normally right up until there's only food for 30% of them left, and so 70% of the population just sits there and waits to die.
Starvation doesn't work quite that blindly in world gen, but even when they try to save up for hard times and go as far as infanticide (cutting pop growth rate), they can't really forage or disperse right now -- they don't know how to move -- which is when they start to die off. It has all of the food and population tracked numerically, so they just need more methods to deal with unexpected crop failures or missing caravans or overall food shortages. Since it is tracking everything, historical citations of specific instances of famine etc. is just a matter of detecting/adding historical events now when something bad happens over a period of weeks. The new slowness in world gen comes from pushing all of this info around. When we get to disease, I'm sure that'll be tracked site by site, pop by pop, over the years as well.
Hmm... that sounds like a somewhat mixed answer, actually.
"Infanticide" by just dropping the population growth rate is the abstract style, while still having gritty detail on plagues and famines. (Not that the frequency Hansel and Gretle-ing children would necessarily be something you want to see in statistical detail in a game...)
Still, it has no details on breakdowns on civil order due to food shortages (I.E. food riots or stealing food) and instead, people are simply talked about just trying to move to a place that does have food.
I guess cultural unrest modelling is still something on the back-burner.
How do Grazing, Hunger, and grass growth work alongside each other?
To be more specific, I can see that the GRAZER:X token allows X hunger to be removed for every unit of grass eaten.
What determines the rate at which hunger increases? Is creature size a factor?
Is a 'unit' of grass simply 1/4 the maximum amount that is growing on a space?
If creature size is a factor in determining rate of hunger, why is there such an enormous difference in how much hunger is removed?
The average creature gets 1 turn every 10 frames, and one of those turns has to be used moving, so any creature with Grazer:19 or less cannot feed itself. An elephant, which only removes 12 hunger per eating of grass, is on a countdown to starvation the instant that hunger is in place.
Hunger increases 1 each frame, but they don't have to move to eat, so elephants can technically survive (they gain 2 per 10 frames for 1000 frames then have to move once, net positive), but in practice they won't likely survive long since they have to do their movement very effectively to keep it up. It'll be better when they can browse. I haven't revisited the overall system at this point, but I doubt the hunger variable would survive it.[/quote]
Oh? Always good to be corrected if I was making a false assumption. I guess they don't have to stand on top of the grass to eat it.
Hmm... how do you remain still for 1000 frames/100 turns? Over time, if you move diagonal, you would have access to 5 new tiles, so that means that an elephant would be able to eat from the same tile 20 times without moving in order to make that work. (And that still requires pristine dense fields of grass.)
... The hunger variable is going to be changed, hmm? I could probably go into a thread on that...
It sounds like there are some geology changes anticipated in Release 2. Is there anything that players could research that would be helpful?
Hard to say... I'm going to try to add some new overall structures to it, and if people have favorites it might speed things up a bit.
Now there's a lead if I ever saw one...
Are you happy with the way Vermin have turned out? Recent updates have brought in very small non-vermin creatures such as rabbits, guinea pigs, chickens, etc. Where does the line fall?
It's certainly an uncomfortable line. I didn't really want to make chickens vermin though, since it complicates pasturing/nest boxes, and that bumped the line down to something odd, and there are some bugs to be fixed. I'm not sure what the future holds.
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Technically, AFAIK, rabbits are the smallest (500 mL) - and smaller than fluffy wamblers (2000 mL), which are vermin. (So the line curves.)
Perhaps, though, the line should be behavioral more than size-based, anyway.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: The Development Page (Read 1561154 times)