Print

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

[Sowelu]

I think that volume math is a bit off since mass increases by cube while surface area increases by the square. This means that as the bird gets larger, it needs proportionally larger wings to fly. Of course, with magic, all bets are off.

If that was necessary then animals that huge couldn't exist at all.

Which, strangely enough, they don't.  It must have been a wizard!

[freeformschooler]

I approve of dragon eggs. Thank you, Threetoe, for reporting this success. For the sake of those who are dead.

[SalmonGod]

I approve of dragon eggs. Thank you, Threetoe, for reporting this success. For the sake of those who are dead.

And now there's science to be done for the people who are still alive.

Sorry.

[freeformschooler]

I approve of dragon eggs. Thank you, Threetoe, for reporting this success. For the sake of those who are dead.

And now there's science to be done for the people who are still alive.

Sorry.

We need a reputation system on these forums. +1 rep.
Anyway, will DF ever having jumping mechanics, at least for adventurers? You know, other than flying over stuff if you get a rideable dragon and/or are a flying creature? It would be a little silly to implement with the mechanics in their current state, but I was wondering if it might be a long term goal

[Footkerchief]

Friendly reminder:
There's a recent trend of people posting feature/fix requests, often unrelated to current development, in the form of questions.  Composing replies to all the questions is a lot of work.  This post took me over an hour, and it addresses only a small fraction of the questions.  So think how much time it takes for Toady!  This level of developer-community interaction is rare, and with a community this large, the only way to make it work is to limit the discussion to current development.  Asking Toady to speculate on far-off features is rarely productive, even if it makes interesting reading.  Requests that aren't related to current development are best expressed in DF Suggestions, DF Talk Topic Discussion, or the bug tracker.

Any plans for food of desperation to be available? Boiled shoes for dinner tonight, but it beats starving.

We haven't specifically thought about it for this time.  Getting to the point of acts of cannibalism is probably inevitable in the long run though.

For species that have taboos on the topic, will eating sentients of other species be more acceptable than, and thus done before, eating one's own kind?  It'd make sense to snack on goblin raiders or a bunch of elven traders who brought nothing of use before devouring one's own kind.

As he said in the post you quoted, "We haven't specifically thought about it for this time."  There isn't a more detailed answer yet.

The question about you being able to build a road in adventure mode has me wondering about the mention of the ability to pass time to grow crops in the dev blog: will we ever be able to pass years or even decades, like continuing world gen? Most likely it would be something you can only do if you don't have a fortress or active adventurer. Maybe to skip ahead a century after the HFS you tapped destroyed to see what horrors you have unleashed upon the world.

This came up before, in the context of using world gen to give adventurers a backstory:

He also mentioned (I think in that recently posted interview) wanting to do something for adventurers, like finding ways to interweave your past with history.  But it would be even cooler if, when you start a new adventurer, the history generator starts back up so that your adventurer has a "real" history instead of a retconned one.  As it's generating your life, the game could identify potentially pivotal moments and let you make a decision, which would not only change your character's goals but also shape their personality.  Kind of like LCS character generation, but more hardcore.

The issue with restarting the generator is that you might not want the world to advance by more than a decade every time you play (especially if your characters tend to die immediately), but it would be cool as an option, and it would give you the opportunity to have more impact -- however, most of the impact should be during regular play instead of through a Q&A process, I think, so maybe it's not much different from the retconning approach in retrospect.  With retconnning, you'd still be able to make decisions -- they'd just only be able to seriously affect the other new characters that have been pulled up from your abstract population.  That isn't all that bad, since the populations can have attached historical events, so it can be very thorough with respect to the existing history, and you could meet the real old historical figures, just not have an effect up to the level of, say, killing them or taking their important things.  It could insert new events back into the old histories though.  You'd just not want those to make subsequent decisions seem odd.

An exception to the lack of impact (either desired impact in the restart-generator setup or technically feasible impact in the retcon setup) might be the start scenario, as it could involve some of the main historical figures sacrificing you by dropping you into a cave or something, but that is essentially a restart-generator scenario that has run a very short period of time.

The fact that metal seems to be somewhat more uncommon than currently left me a bit concerned about picking a good site (which already is a pain!). I wonder if different metal distributions could be used for each cavern layer, so it'd get more abundant the deeper it gets, and then civs could be limited to not being able to dig too deep (duw to low engineering hability) when it is working out the economy. Also another thing I wonder is if traders will bring more significant ammounts of metal bars when you ask, lest a bad sited fortress run into lack of metal (the horror!)

The concern about picking a site is the the reason he added a metal option to the site finder:

Metal isn't as easy to find, so I've added metal/soil to the site finder [...]

Making metal more abundant in deeper layers is really game-y and against the spirit of the realistic geology that DF aims for.

3) Will adventurers be able to build and use workshops so as to interact with the economy any time soon? 

Recently addressed:

Hey, Toady, will adventurers ever be able to use workshops, or will we be restricted to the 'buildingless' reactions?

We haven't decided what the future of workshops is in adventure mode.  If the use of tools keeps up, it might be that we just keep simulating things, or that we'll throw in the workshops for things we don't get to simulating promptly.  There are lots of discussions around generalizing/extending the workshop concept in dwarf mode, instead, so that it would be somewhat more like adv mode is shaping up, but we're really not sure what's going to happen there.  So for now, the things that you do in adv mode will be tool-based actions.  That should get us quite a way, until we start getting toward metal-working and furniture making, at which point we'll have to see if we slip back to workshops or try something more ambitious.

I like the options the new "start a new world now!" thing gives you, but I don't think they're enough. For instance, I want really shallow cave systems but I don't want to fool around in the advanced settings for ten minutes to get them. Do you think we'll ever have a medium-complexity generator or something?

I don't know if it was asked, but:
Will we be able to send dwarves for a job of exploring and mapping the caverns? As in, telling the dwarves to map certain "blacked out" regions of the embark map, such as the ones in caverns?

Will random illnesses be implemented in fortress mode anytime soon? e.g dwarves can catch a cold/get pneumonia.

Reading lists of items in DF is difficult because the least important information is presented first: material then item. Could we get an init option to display the item then its' material?

eg: "gloves made of bear leather" rather than "bear leather gloves"

These are good ideas, but since they aren't part of the current dev focus, they aren't likely to get implemented anytime soon.

I recall quite a bit of fiction or history, from Morrowind, China, and The King of Dragon Pass that include kinds of ancestor worship in place of god worship, thinking of them as guardians or sources of divination. Are you planning on going in that direction when you take care of religions?

As always, they'll pay attention to historical and thematic precedent, yes.

Are you planing stuffs like independent civ evolution, being those based on their resources and knowledge, on the world gen? Something like tribals, then small cities, then nations... While others don't evolve because they have no resources(Like Colombo going to America). Each one evolving their own language... Something like prehistory to middle ages.

This raises the question of different lifestyles, architecturally and economically. Are variations of lifestyle inside a race, without regards to ethics, planned to go in, like an entire human civilisation being nomad, or building temporary cities that are destroyed every 2 years, or food/water/cattle being considered a common property and handled at the hamlet/village level instead of personnal level, or houses built in a circle instead of a square, or underground instead of aboveground ?

Yes, it's a goal to make civs more diverse and distinctive.  These comments are about nomads specifically, but in general the Adams brothers are 100% in favor of making the game less homogeneous.

With entity populations, I'm assuming that the first step would be taken for overworld nomadic civilizations, but is it likely that they'll be included?

We had roaming nomadic groups in adv mode before, and then they were removed.  It's true this would give them a new lease on life, but we're not really sure about any of the details.  It might start out with refugees from attacked cities or something, but I'm not sure.  Once we have pro-active villains, there'll also be more backing in for roving horde AI.

Can we get Overground tribes?

We used to have nomadic groups, and now we've got the underground entity pops that don't really do anything outside of making camps and staging attacks.  I'd like to diversify what's going on with humans and others up there, and it might start more with the bandit/roving baddies more than anything.

Will dwarves (and those poor goblins whose friends got roasted) learn a healthy fear of fire soon? At least improved sieges would require this, I think.

This is on the dev page:

# Allowing constructions to burn, use of kindling/hay/etc. where reasonable
# Responding properly to personal fire issues (all modes)
# Fleeing burning buildings
# Fighting fire (all modes)
# Designation to set item or tile on fire in dwarf mode

Now that the economy is being worked on, will adventure mode trading be improved?

At a minimum, it'll make use of the new supply-demand valuation systems.

Fast question: Inquisition and fantasy religions wars.

What's your question?  Religious conflicts are a recurring theme in the old dev notes:

# Core63, SUCCESSION, ASSOCIATED CONFLICTS AND SCHISMS, (Future): First of all, succession for positions needs to occur in play, so that dead liaisons are replaced, as well as dead monarchs. Then the process needs to be made messier all around. Wars over succession, schisms over religious disagreements, etc., starting from world gen and coming into regular play. In dwarf mode, you might be involved on one side or the other, directly or indirectly, relying on more involved diplomacy and army code than we currently have, and adventure mode can also gain a lot from such conflicts.

# PowerGoal146, WALKING INTO THE WRONG BAR, (Future): Wearing a pendant of Imi the Owl of Hell, you enter a mead hall frequented by worshippers of Vutu the Playful Ooze of Midnight. They tie you to a post and break your fingers one by one.

# PowerGoal160, SINCE THE BEGINNING OF TIME, (Future): The Night King calls upon his vassal nation to join forces with his great army in order to cleanse the land once and for all of the brutal filth that worship the sun god.

"Assorted animals and thinking beings?" Care to elaborate on some of those?

The assorted animals are presumably birds (e.g. giant eagles), and as Heph said, the thinking beings are the bird- and reptile-people.

Toady, do you plan to add any new values to the material raws in the very new future, if so, then what kind?

The answer is probably "yes," but did you have particular tags in mind, or a particular feature that would necessitate new tags, or what?

Anyway, will DF ever having jumping mechanics, at least for adventurers? You know, other than flying over stuff if you get a rideable dragon and/or are a flying creature? It would be a little silly to implement with the mechanics in their current state, but I was wondering if it might be a long term goal

# Bloat227, LEAPING AND PITS, (Future): Could add little open pits in the caves, respecting Z coord, and the ability to leap into any space with a confirmation, it might be a hassle to teach the path-finding of your opponents to leap after you though

[Glanzor]

One of the very few moddings I've ever done was to put in a Roc megabeast.
And now exactly that is going to be a new addition for the game. How odd.

[Areyar]

@Footkerchief : Appologies if I contributed to the unending flow of irrelevant questions and/or suggestions, I try to stay ontopic of the dev page. It is hard though as one also tries to think beyond the current developments and of what they may suggest for the future.

A lot of the questions posted here should rather be relegated to the DF-talk topics maybe, as their actual purpose is to get Toady to elaborate.

...I have no actual questions at thios poiint

[Hummingbird]

Now that trade routes depend on availability of roads (do they?), will fast-traveling over roads in Adventurer Mode confer reasonable bonuses to traveling speed (or penalties for moving off the road)? For both adventurers and merchants, it would make sense for walking on road to be easier, faster, and safer than hacking through wilderness.

Related: Will dwarven roads over mountains squares be accessible through fast-traveling in Adventurer Mode?

[LoSboccacc]

it would make sense for walking on road to be easier, faster, and safer than hacking through wilderness.

not strictly easier. I'd say road should get a different kind of troubles. like more bandit than trolls on road and vice versa on forests?

[Rose]

it depends.

if the road is the most important trade route in the kingdom, you should get less bandits, and more tax collectors.

[iceball3]

it would make sense for walking on road to be easier, faster, and safer than hacking through wilderness.

not strictly easier. I'd say road should get a different kind of troubles. like more bandit than trolls on road and vice versa on forests?

Well then we might need conflict lines, where certain factions are trying to push forward down a road and are up against each other in a stalemate of sorts. If you can break the roadblock through violence or other means, then you get passage along with slight praise from the side that had most benefit.

[Lovechild]

If I steal a dragon egg, will it hatch? And will the baby dragon think I'm its mom, or try to kill me?

[Neonivek]

the only way to make it work is to limit the discussion to current development

I guess it is too popular now to ask Toady anymore questions.

I usually try not to ask Toady questions about current development because he usually tells use the features or it gets answered upon release anyway.

Though I can be the worst when it comes to questions

[B0013]

According to this pic ruc's eggs are enormous. How do we steal that?!

Also do this mean that all the animals that get eggs get lairs too?

[The Merchant Of Menace]

How do we steal them? The same way we fit dozens of dragon corpses into our packs.