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[Untelligent]

Random topic shift!


In the thief section of the devlist, there's a few bits about tracking your appearance for bounties and being wanted for your crime(s) and whatnot. If you find someone with a similar enough appearance, would it be possible for the crime(s) to be blamed on that person?

There could be like a similarity score based on each of your appearance factors relative to the other guy, and the higher it is the greater the chance of him being recognized as you, or frameable by you, or similar circumstances.

Ooh, or maybe the adventurer could be blamed for a crime an NPC committed! Hehehe...

[Mel_Vixen]

Devblog update people! And this looks sexy! Thought a little bit to modern but im am not proficient in the history of farming. Anyway Nice job toady! Now we can drive the Humans mad by stealing theyr crops!

Ooh, or maybe the adventurer could be blamed for a crime an NPC committed! Hehehe...

Tarem the crossbowman adventurer enters the dwarfen fortress.
Urist shouts to Olon: "It was a Human I asure you he did shot me!"
Olon to urist: "Humans that far from theyr land? With a crossbow?"
Olon and urist take a look to Tarem.
Tarem backs up sowly throught the door.

[Psieye]

I'd like to see underground features like rivers, and springs where underground rivers flow into the surface. Huge underground oceans and massive underground rivers. Not every place can have them, but they'd enhance the feeling of underground exploration. When you add in old tombs from lost underground dweller civilizations that sprang up and disintegrated before the beginning of time, you've got some real fun underground activities to do. Dwarf Mode doesn't benefit, but they can certainly be embarked on for flavor. That's what I've thought we were talking about when it came to underground features.

Ah, so you meant features interesting for adventure mode but only flavour in Fortress mode. So long as I get some natural water underground so plants grow down there, I don't care whether it's a river, pool or ocean in the caverns. Likewise, I care little in Fortress mode for interesting ruins and mysterious constructions.

Now we can drive the Humans mad by stealing theyr crops!

Steal? You mean BURN WITH MAGMA.

[Eduren]

So will there be a way to harvest crops from these new fields? Will taking from them make the owners hostile if you are caught?

[NW_Kohaku]

Devblog update people! And this looks sexy! Thought a little bit to modern but im am not proficient in the history of farming. Anyway Nice job toady! Now we can drive the Humans mad by stealing theyr crops!

Rows like that imply plow furrows.  Certainly not beyond ancient technology, much less middle-ages.  They look fairly widely spaced, though.

Real middle aged farms, though, had hedgerows.  (They were not as thick as they are now, though, farmers kept them trimmed so that they had a little extra farming room.) Although they did have a function stopping soil degredation through wind erosion, they were mainly there to mark off whose land was whose, and prevent roaming grazing animals from walking onto another man's farm, where he could claim it was then his - this was the single largest source of conflict among the farming/ranching classes.  Having your crops grazed upon by another man's animals could ruin you financially, and claiming their animal in compensation could ruin them financially.  This was, primarily, the purpose of the courts in those days, to settle such disputes.

[Mel_Vixen]

Hedgerows were also a secondary crop if you use Fruitbearing hedges. Some others doubled as additional food for the lifestock.

Wikipedia says that the oldest (in Germany) found plow was around 4000 years old. It was a hook-plow. That the rows look wide spaced might be a optical illusion due to the downsizing of the picture. Either that or our longland grass grows pretty huge if its longland grass at all - could be potatoes or something that needs some space. The wheat of the middle-age could reach iirc - depending on variant - heights up to tow meters.

[Kogan Loloklam]

On the new stuff coming in...
Will the new villages result in greater amounts of farmland required to feed individuals? If so, will there be "farmers caravans" that come to the fortress with food you can buy?

Will we have country bumpkins coming in from offmap needing health care or to buy items at the fortress stores?

Will the villagers sometimes detect raiding parties and warn of them coming?

Which reminds me...
Are there plans to destroy the physical attributes Strength, Toughness, and Endurence completely? The first two of those have body equivilants (muscle=strength, fat=toughness), and the other is a combination of the calorie system and Willpower. Agility, DR, and Recupration do not have equivalents that are easily programmable without the body shape rewrite, so I'm not worried by those.
If that change were made, the only negative effect strength would have is added weight. Granted, you wouldn't be able to see Supieor Strength that easily anymore, but it would allow different strength in different parts.

I don't think Toughness = fat. Just because fatness can play a role in toughness in how the game is put together doesn't mean it should be tied together.
My understanding on how toughness works is it reduces how severe an injury is. If that is true, I don't see toughness being tied to fat at all good.
It's like people who can fall down a flight of stairs and have nothing broken versus people who fall down a flight of stairs and end up breaking every bone in their body twice.

Ah, so you meant features interesting for adventure mode but only flavour in Fortress mode. So long as I get some natural water underground so plants grow down there, I don't care whether it's a river, pool or ocean in the caverns. Likewise, I care little in Fortress mode for interesting ruins and mysterious constructions.

I'm thinking that if there is rivers, there is a way that water accumulates and flows. Which means there is a equivalent of rain, which to me makes sense.

I view it as the vast majority of the caverns is like the current "dry" caverns, which are still filled with trees and stuff blocking your path. It'd be neat (a dwarf fortress kind of neat) if there were biomes underground so you'd have desert undergrounds you could embark on, with underground but desert creatures, but we'd need some way of telling underground biomes on embark mode.

Bottom line though is as long as things make sense and there is a way to tell the major things that affect everything on embark, I think people will be happy. You don't see many people complaining about not being able to embark on a tropical swamp and a glacier at once, even though it means that people can't fight skeletal tigers reinforcing Skeletal polar bears.

[Untelligent]

Something that's been bugging me for a little bit and just popped into my head.

Starting with 31.01, phantom spiders are no longer venomous. Is this due to an oversight, or because paralysis is almost certain death with the new venom system and you nerfed the spiders until the next significant venom update because you didn't want vermin to be lethal?

[Footkerchief]

Something that's been bugging me for a little bit and just popped into my head.

Starting with 31.01, phantom spiders are no longer venomous. Is this due to an oversight, or because paralysis is almost certain death with the new venom system and you nerfed the spiders until the next significant venom update because you didn't want vermin to be lethal?

This has been reported as a bug.  Most likely it's just an oversight in the creature raws, like many of these bugs.

[sneakey pete]

Will the new villages result in greater amounts of farmland required to feed individuals? If so, will there be "farmers caravans" that come to the fortress with food you can buy?

You'd hope so. As it is, a 10*10 plot can sustain a 200 dwarf fort with ease, the farms in that screenshot alone could probably sustain 2000 people with ease. I wouldn't mind fams for fort mode becoming bigger than what they are now too.

[dree12]

Which reminds me...
Are there plans to destroy the physical attributes Strength, Toughness, and Endurence completely? The first two of those have body equivilants (muscle=strength, fat=toughness), and the other is a combination of the calorie system and Willpower. Agility, DR, and Recupration do not have equivalents that are easily programmable without the body shape rewrite, so I'm not worried by those.
If that change were made, the only negative effect strength would have is added weight. Granted, you wouldn't be able to see Supieor Strength that easily anymore, but it would allow different strength in different parts.

I don't think Toughness = fat. Just because fatness can play a role in toughness in how the game is put together doesn't mean it should be tied together.
My understanding on how toughness works is it reduces how severe an injury is. If that is true, I don't see toughness being tied to fat at all good.
It's like people who can fall down a flight of stairs and have nothing broken versus people who fall down a flight of stairs and end up breaking every bone in their body twice.

It's still easy to implement. With the replacement, Strength can be different in different parts, and so can toughness. Toughness for breaks can be represented by bone elasticity and density, which we probably already track. Toughness for slashes is the fat.

[NW_Kohaku]

Will the new villages result in greater amounts of farmland required to feed individuals? If so, will there be "farmers caravans" that come to the fortress with food you can buy?

You'd hope so. As it is, a 10*10 plot can sustain a 200 dwarf fort with ease, the farms in that screenshot alone could probably sustain 2000 people with ease. I wouldn't mind fams for fort mode becoming bigger than what they are now too.

Well, it's possible. After all, the initial argument in Improved Farming was not so much the "make it more involved and interesting" but just "make it take more land".

It's been suggested in the Improved Farming thread that we may move to a system where the fortress will have to import much of its food from satellite villages, and therefore protect them in the "Army Mode", although it would also be an "out" so that you wouldn't have to care about farming, even if you could farm for all your food if you really tried, although it would take at least a decent amount of your land and population and plenty of engineering to do so.

Actually, this gets me thinking about how the whole Army Arc 2 will play out - when we are doing things like building sprawl around ourselves, laying down roads, conquering foreign cities, pushing around armies on the map and stuff, I wonder how this will be handled...

All these things happen off-screen, after all.  Worldgen events also tend to take place "by the year" rather than by the day, the way that fortress events occur. 

Our eventual goal is to have the player's role be the embodiment of positions of power within the fortress, performing actions in their official capacity, to the point that in an ideal world each command you give would be linked to some noble, official or commander.

When I try to picture it, I think of a few of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games (8, I believe, was one that did this), where you would normally be in control of just your selected historical character, but every few months, there would be a "Council Meeting" where the actions of all the other officers would be determined by the ruler/governor, and you could assign tasks like conscripting or training soldiers or sending them to war to generals, while more beurocratic officials were given jobs improving the farms or the economics of the region.  If you were not a ruler, but an officer yourself, you could try to make suggestions that could curry you favor that could translate to promotions, and would wind up with you being assigned a task that would similarly give you favor if you managed to complete it by the time of the next council.

I wonder if something like this would be in DF?  Will we have something like a "New Year's Council Meeting" where we can see a review of the previous year's events, including the outside world's happenings in reports from agents that report to the mayor or baron or king (expedition leaders will probably be too low-level to have spies in the field) before we then dispatch captains or ministers or liasons or other agents to enact our bidding (if we are high-rank enough)? Will the dwarves whose actions we are presumably deciding have a system for gaining favor and rising through the ranks, so that advancement from baron on up becomes a matter of some sort of political wrangling?  I imagine people will be slower to have their Baron get an Unfortunate Accident when "we are the Baron", and getting the Baron to climb the ranks would give them greater power and authority over the world map.  It would also give some of these nobles something to do - meeting with agents and compilating data for the next year's council so that it is more detailed and informative in the same way that we have bookkeepers now, whether it is the baron himself or some agent like a spymaster if you have risen enough to afford one.

Like that, it would be like we suddenly get to sit in the war room, controlling the outside world in broad strokes before going back to the micromanagement of your power base.  (Potentially including training up dwarves you can later promote to agents that can be sent into the world map to see your will done.)  The contrast appeals to me.

[dree12]

Doesn't worldgen go 64 "ticks" a year? I'm preety sure fortress mode could round to the nearest tick...

And, I doubt that farming would be changed. The main interaction with those humans is in adventurer mode, 72 times as slow as fort mode and forcing you to eat every day (which humans do). Fort mode farming needs to be "fixed" somehow else (like eating 72 things every eat break, to balence stuff out), so I think that's what Toady's going for eventually.

[NW_Kohaku]

Doesn't worldgen go 64 "ticks" a year? I'm preety sure fortress mode could round to the nearest tick...

And, I doubt that farming would be changed. The main interaction with those humans is in adventurer mode, 72 times as slow as fort mode and forcing you to eat every day (which humans do). Fort mode farming needs to be "fixed" somehow else (like eating 72 things every eat break, to balence stuff out), so I think that's what Toady's going for eventually.

Worldgen can do however many ticks per year it wants, but you don't need to actually calculate everything until the player can see it.  After all, no need to suddenly give the game a performance hiccup as the game loads the world data it generally doesn't need for just the fortress and starts running simulations on it at random points throughout the year, just roll it into that already long batch of calculations that get processed at the new year, or at least, at the season change.  (You'd have to make the annual save that occurs if you turn it on in the init files take place after the calculations, though, or it could be really weird, where you'd get different results for battles if you have a crash and had to reload on those automatic saves.)

As for the second part, yes, I do hope things go that way... It's been part of several arguments I've had in the Suggestions forum, like Volume and Mass or Down With Prepared Meals...

Basically, if an average, 70kg human can be expected to eat 200 kg of food in a year, and dwarves eat 8 times a year (and Toady has said he doesn't want dwarves taking more breaks than they already do), then a 70 kg dwarf should just eat 25 kg of food per sitting.  You just scale it with the size of the creature in question, or basically just downing a little less than 1/3rd their mass in food per sitting.  (Especially notable when animals have to be fed - currently, small animals are useless, while huge animals are prized because they give plenty of meat and are stronger combatants.  When you feed them 1/3 of their weight per sitting, and elephants weigh 5 metric tons...)

Of course, a system like that works better when you are not using arbitrary unit stacks, but measuring food by its mass.

[monkeyfetus]

Worldgen can do however many ticks per year it wants, but you don't need to actually calculate everything until the player can see it.

That sort of thing could matter as far as when your parent civ declares war, when an enemy army arrives to siege your fort, when you get refugees fleeing to your fortress...  If you have events from the world simulation affecting your fortress while you're playing, it may matter when the simulation occurs.