As usual, I skipped questions that had been answered by others and question-suggestions.
Is it currently slated for animals of different sizes to require eating different amounts of food? If elephants and hoary marmots eat the same amount of food, but give off radically different amounts of meat when butchered, then it produces a rather silly comparison of which animals are the most effective to raise...
Grazers already work this way (in a basic way that doesn't respect age or individual differences), and as new diets are implemented, size/etc. will probably be more and more respected.
I don't have a timeline. On the one hand, I've always been interested in multi-material, multi-part items, but there are complications, especially with using metal in small portions.
What are the complications with this? We already have metal stored as units (150 iron instead of 1 bar). So I'm curious what the blocking factor is. Lingering old code?
Rather: how to handle partly used bars to avoid economy induced coin spam.
Yeah, there's that mess with using a 75 and a 50 and a 25 for a 150 unit job, which it might be able to handle now, but I'm worried about lots of smaller stacks slowly cropping up as a variety of jobs are performed/cancelled/etc. Bars are easier to restack than coins, anyway, and they are also exhausted when they are used, so it isn't quite the same nightmare as coins, but that's the basic flavor of my issue, yeah.
If you are planning on changing the sphere system, how are you planning on changing it? Are you still planning on introducing spheres as a replacement for the simpler Good/Evil Benign/Savage system of biomes, and if so, how far down are you planning on consolidating spheres (since it would be almost impossible to have different biomes and creatures for 128 different spheres)?
Some of the spheres definitely won't matter as much. A sphere is really just a hard-coded concept, something that should be a basic idea that doesn't really need to be moddable, much like "MATERIAL" or "COLOR" (though moddable extensions of spheres could end up happening). If anything, the sphere list is going to grow but the sphere list used for regions in any meaningful way will be smaller. There isn't a specific plan at this point. I'd like to include as many as possible, especially because it aligns with the deities, etc., but realistically many spheres are going to be shafted, with regions that should have a given sphere association moving over to "friend/parent/child" spheres with meaningful region interactions, etc.
what exactly is the functionality of the dwarf-mode inn?
DF Talk 12 will have more on this.
Will we get working crutches in dwarf mode soon, either in this release or the next? It's one of the biggest bugs yet to be squashed, and it seems particularly tragic that after you went to the work of implementing this cool and useful feature something continues to keep it from actually working.
I'm planning to handle medical bugs included crutch use problems in the next few days.
Toady you planned for release 2 of the current arc "Work with 3D mineral veins and mine maps" does this include 3D Stone-blobs? Like microline being more a spheric inclusion then a circle-ish sheet in the surrounding stone.
Everything will probably be changed, since I'm going to be committing a bit on mine maps and I want something a little more permanent to work with (whatever that means...). The main addition is going to be some sort of recognition of edges/z-levels below the really large scale geological layers but above the 48x48x1 tile block level, so that veins and everything else can be larger and more interesting. We haven't plotted out the specifics yet.
Ratmen mysteriously vanished in the transition from 40d to DF 2010. Since you'll now be adding new creatures such as bees, maintaining the sameness of the creature raws between versions will no longer matter as much. Assuming the removal of ratmen was an oversight, does this mean we will see ratmen reintroduced in the next version of DF?
Removal of subterranean ratmen was intentional -- however, with the new amphibian/serpent/reptile men we were also supposed to get "rodent men" underground, with rat men being moved outside with the regular outdoor rats. Since March of last year, I've had a half-finished raw file on my desktop that I always forget about that has many new animal people, but when I added panda men and capybara men I remembered it again, so we should have official subterranean rodent men in the next version, and perhaps others, as well as the next round of sponsored beasts and their allies.
With eyeball grass made out of eye tissue, and wormy grass made out of muscle tissue, how is it that cows and such are supposed to eat them? Assuming they actually can.
They do eat them, but they aren't supposed to, in the end. I remember adding the muscle tissue to worms and thinking "grazers are going to eat this..." and then just taking a note and moving on. So it'll be handled sometime, maybe extending the specific food tags to classes or something, or waiting for actual diet rewrites. Until then, gummy treats!
will the town revamp starting with the next release finally give us elf/dwarf settlements with actual elves & dwarves?
Doing those prior to the dwarf mode army arc releases is the current plan, so that you have something to attack. So in between the caravan releases and the army-related army arc releases. If it comes up, it might happen sooner, if it's forced in some way by the trading, but that might not be how it works out.
Guinea Fowl have this line for eggs:
"[CLUTCH_SIZE:4:15] should be 25 to 30"
What reason did you have for not just making it 25:30?
If they lay 30 fertilized eggs, there would be many new units, possibly by many guineafowl at a time, so I cut it down a bit. It's probably still a massive problem with egg-layers even at the 4-15 level, if you have 40 birds laying 10 fertilized eggs all at once.
Toady, what are the conditions for eggs hatching? Civ races can use nesting boxes and lay eggs, but will the eggs hatch?
Apparently they can lay them, they can hatch, but they get snatched up for eating before that? Creepy.
I see that hydras do not lay eggs. Is this intentional? Do you intend for hydras to have gooey amphibian eggs instead of shelled eggs?
And another, somewhat related question:
Do you intend on giving crocodiles, etc. proper leathery eggs at some point?
I think live birth is the current idea for the hydra, but the amphibian egg is fun and maybe more appropriate given their swamply associations. Maybe there should be tadhydras.
I vaguely remember crocodile eggs, but if people have stats for the eggs I'll move them over. I don't have any reason to keep the hard shells for critters that shouldn't have them, so moving over to realistic properties for all of them is ideal.
What is going to be the fate of the current market towns that boom and subsequently die during world gen, leaving a myriad of abandoned stores?
Ghost towns seems like a reasonable thing, but they happen too often now. We might have to wait for the treasure hunter stuff to have really satisfying ruins, but we'll see how it plays out in the next release, since there are going to be a lot of towns with higher building/infrastructure counts than their current populations that I have to work with.
DF Talk 11 mentioned that towns can get specialized in materials and/or items, which is something that can be seen if you go looking for it, but it isn't always quite out in the open. As the short-term releases come in, are there plans to make those specializations more visible to adventurers or fortresses?
When we do town maps, which is Release 1 on the dev page, it should be quite a bit more apparent what goods the town specializes in because of the sorts of workshops/units/etc. present especially when similar ones are concentrated. It's not going to just have random unit types in cottages as we have now. There might be some additional conversation information as well, but we'll have to see how that plays out -- when you can ask about supply/demand information, that'll be in, and that was Release 9 I think, but there might be some stuff earlier.
Do you see humans as the seafaring race? Will waterways and trade by ship play a central role to civilizations? Which races will participate in sailing and building ships? How large, in units of men and/or dwarfcube dimensions*, will the larger boats be in the future?
Footkerchief posted quite a bit on this one. I just wanted to add that, yeah, some humans should be seafarers to different degrees -- probably all of the civs on the coast, but not the civs that have no settlements on the water. The same goes for other races on the water or large rivers. Dwarves and kobolds are sort of the odd ones out here. I have trouble imagining seafaring dwarves, especially out on the open ocean, but there are large bodies of water underground and lakes up in the mountains, so it's hard to say what we'll end up with once all the mechanics are just sitting there waiting to be used.
I liked the option of setting a pasture for my tame Phantom Spiders (it made silk production / collection easier). Now that you've fixed the "bug" of allowing vermin assigned to pastures, is there anything I can do to restrict my phantom spiders to a particular area? (I'd been using entry-less pits, previously, but they still wander out of there if they're able.)
The pasture never actually restricted them anyway, unless you've always got a dwarf putting them back, and vermin are sort of odd the way they disappear in and out, so they aren't really ready for it in general, and there aren't any options that take care of themselves as far as I know. Having something like an actual spider pit would be neat, but there's are some limitations for vermin information since it has to support large numbers of them.
I'm wondering how much of the increase in megabeast deaths is intentional? When you fixed the comeback bug, you made no mention of the increased number of megabeast deaths itself being a bug, but it seems off to see an elf kill a slade colossus (quick mod to test this out).
There is an intentional increase there, by quite a lot, mostly to facilitate reproduction (see next question). It never completely denies a kill, so something like a slade colossus can always die, it's just less likely.
Why megabeasts doesn't reproduce yet? I thought Dragons and hydras were waiting for eggs. Do you plan to change this soon?
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Maybe they reproduce in play but not in world gen, then.
It's in, just SUPER rare.
Megabeasts only reproduce during world gen at this time (you might be able to get them to breed in nest boxes as well assuming you somehow get a mating pair tamed in your fortress, modded or whatever). The reason it doesn't happen very often is that there is a hard cap now to prevent world gen from being overrun by megabeasts. It doesn't simulate dragons needing to eat etc., and maybe that would help, but even then, you'd probably just end up destroying half the world or something, or the civilizations would be engaged in more organized hunting of them that would also be strange and demegabeastifying. So it's currently just a gamey restriction.
When you were editing the raws for all the new stuff, what did you add first, the chicken or the egg?
My recollection is that I did all of the domestic raws and then added all of the egg raws in afterward.
Civilizations are starving in world gen, in part because the caravans of food aren't set up yet. Will civilizations continue to starve if they can't afford the food? Will there be cities/whatever that can't feed themselves without trade (from areas beyond their immediate zone of influence), such that sudden price changes will cause starvation? How will food be distributed?
Food is transported around during world gen. It just isn't adequate, and sometimes strong cycles can develop and then ultimately break down. There are already cities that increase in size because of trade beyond their own villages, and when they run into trouble there can be starvation. So it's all sort of sitting there, but there aren't enough systems/checks etc. for it be more than a chaotic mess, mostly because I jumped out and released the caravan arc partway through.
Do you have code to stop pregnant women from having moods, so that actually having the baby doesn't interrupt the mood? If so, why are pregnant women the LEAST moody dwarves? If so, how does that work? Urist cancels 'Make awesome artifact, seeking infant'?
I'm not 100% sure without testing, but it appears that pregnant dwarves can have moods, but they won't seek infants while they are still working on the artifact.
How soon can we expect more preexisting animals to be vocalizing?
I didn't want to go through every animal at first since I'm not sure if the format is going to be adequate, and I don't know when I'm going to get back to it. It'll definitely happen though, maybe sooner rather than later, since having capybara barks be the only barks is a bit charming for a while, I guess, but will eventually give way to having other barks as a necessity.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: The Development Page (Read 1561021 times)