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Author Topic: Xenosynthesis and magic fields  (Read 50094 times)

expwnent

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Re: Xenosynthesis and magic fields
« Reply #30 on: February 05, 2011, 05:24:36 pm »

Is the goal to soften the learning cliff, or to make a hill after the cliff? It seems that adding complexity would make a hill. (This is not a criticism. Germ theory doesn't explain why planets orbit in ellipses: it's not supposed to.)

Out of curiosity, if you were Toady, and you decided to implement this, where would you put it in the project timeline?
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Xenosynthesis and magic fields
« Reply #31 on: February 05, 2011, 06:09:52 pm »

Is the goal to soften the learning cliff, or to make a hill after the cliff? It seems that adding complexity would make a hill. (This is not a criticism. Germ theory doesn't explain why planets orbit in ellipses: it's not supposed to.)

Both. 

The problem with the game right now is that it is very, very inaccessable.  In fact, I just had this discussion a week ago, let me quote myself from then:
The reason people don't play this game is that it isn't accessable.  It's not just given a very difficult to learn interface, it's got no tutorial as part of the game itself (yes, there's fan-made ones, but you have to go looking for those), and it overloads new players with information they have no idea how to sort.

Since I'm already linking Extra Credits, I might as well link this, as well: Why there are so many easy games. 

We don't need the game dumbed down, and we don't need Skinner boxes or empty rewards, we just need the game's elements presented to the player in a manner where they can learn the individual components of the game before being asked to perform all of them at once.

Toady already has "make a tutorial" as part of his longer-term goals. That would go a long way in helping players clear the cliff by breaking it down into smaller segments.  He already mentions how it would be based upon a text file that would guide you through it, though, so I think maybe he should take a look at that clip, as well, because learning works best when you can interact with what you are learning in a manner that cuts out all the distractions. 

What players would really be helped by is a mode of the game where you can focus on just one aspect of the game at a time - For example, a mode where all your ability to build things is locked out, but you have full access to the military screen, dwarves who train at super-speed, and equipment laying out and ready with enemies on the other end of a gate that opens at the end of a timer.  The player has to set up a military, get them equipped and then trained in time for the attack.  The player can be given a written set of instructions on how to "do it right", but learning works best if you just dump them in there, point to the military screen, and let them experiment until they are capable of overcoming a basic challenge.

However, that obviously lies beyond the scope of the suggestion I already laid out.  (Crap... I'm going to have to make a tutorial suggestion to lay out how these things should be laid out for the player, aren't I?)

EDIT: Ooops, I forgot the other part of my answer to this question, the first part took so long!

Part of what I try to do in the Improved Farming thread, however, is make starting farming much simpler - there will be an interface that automates much of the micromanagement, and early farms aren't an engineering project.  It is only advanced farming that becomes progressively more complex, forcing the player to devote more time and resources and understanding to the system the more that he demands out of the system in return.

Out of curiosity, if you were Toady, and you decided to implement this, where would you put it in the project timeline?

Well, Toady has a pretty difficult problem on his hands in triaging what gets his attention.  I think this thread is a good indication of why. 

The playerbase of this game is a rather disparate one.  This game is so large and so many different things to so many different people that spending a long time working on any one aspect of the game will wind up upsetting people who aren't interested in that aspect of the game, and will demand that attention be put on their pet projects, instead.  Right now, Adventurer mode is getting a pretty big facelift, and it really needs one, but I've never really been interested in Adventurer Mode for as long as there was nothing to do but kill things until you died.  If/when you start getting abilities like being able to become a lord and raise a farm and have tenants you can demand rent from, then I'd be more interested. 

So look at what he's been doing: He did a major upgrade to Fortress Mode in the jump to 31.01, and then mostly worked on steaming out the most major bugs.  After getting rid of the worst of the bugs, he went to work on some minor things (bogeyman and such) while also adding some little things to the Fortress mode so Fortress players can get something to tide them over, too.  He then went and did a fundraiser by promising new animals in the raws, and he'll sprinkle these in for Fortress players, too.  He's going to be going on doing major work on Adventurer Mode before turning to the ESV's top ten suggestions.  Along the way to the big things, we're going to see more little things like new flavors of monkey or maybe a "bard" job thrown in to keep the people who demand weekly updates mollified as he gears up to tackle the big issues like the Army Arc, which is what the people who are long-term players are demanding, alongside fixes to the less-critical bugs like how hospitals don't work properly.

Basically, he's trying to juggle the demands of several different factions of players who all want contradictory things by handing out short-term and long-term benefits to all types of players in succession.  I don't think he's doing a bad job of it, either.

The thing about these short-term additions, like throwing in pandas or penguins or whatever, is that eventually, you just clutter the game with extras that don't have enough of a meaningful difference between one another. 

In 40d, there was basically no difference between one creature or another except size, damagable body parts, and some of the special features they had, like being able to swim.  Now, we have individual body models, syndromes, materials each creature is made from, and material properties.  (Which, unfortunately, is mainly dummied-out material.)  This gives a whole new level of depth that can be added to these creatures, but it took a major time-out in game development to produce this jump, because it meant revising the basic systems the game ran upon to accomidate a much deeper level of complexity in how creatures operate so that meaningful differences between creatures could exist.

In some of my suggestions, I call for something similar - the Improved Farming thread is a ground-up (no pun intended) overhaul of how farming works, because the current model essentially consists of "get floor wet" and "throw seeds at mud".  It needs to be given a much deeper level of differentiation between plants to become a meaningful mechanic.  Likewise, Class Warfare calls for a rebuilding of Dwarven psychology so that they aren't all automatons, and are capable of some sort of response greater than "happy" and "unhappy", with "unhappy" eventually leading to tantrums.  The (Toady Dev Page) Kingdom Mode makes player interaction with the world deeper than just "time for the annual goblin attack".  The upcoming siege mode changes on the dev page will give more depth to siege strategy.  I've even gone and written a Volume and Mass thread that talks about similar overhauls to the stacking, tile-occupancy, cave-in, and liquids systems, which is in a way an even more basic overhaul of physics that wouldn't really add anything directly to the player's enjoyment per se the way that someone will be positively thrilled they got penguins, but which I think is going to help the long-term development of DF as a game.

Toady isn't tripping over himself to impliment the things I am suggesting, and it's not necessarily because he agrees or disagrees (honestly, I can't tell which most of the time, and I really wish I could get more feedback on what he does or doesn't like, since it really helps me refocus my energies to addressing the arguments against what I have proposed), but because he has to manage his time between the more ambitious projects and the rewards to his playerbase that fund this project through their donations.

(And I once again manage to disgorge about a thousand words of text at a question of 50 words.)
« Last Edit: February 05, 2011, 06:18:52 pm by NW_Kohaku »
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therahedwig

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Re: Xenosynthesis and magic fields
« Reply #32 on: February 05, 2011, 06:24:12 pm »

Short awnser: S/he's trying to elongate the learning curve while emphasising that we shouldn't have to specialise in any of the elements and that mastering the game at it's most basic should be a simple task.
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Grimlocke

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Re: Xenosynthesis and magic fields
« Reply #33 on: February 05, 2011, 06:30:53 pm »

The concept of replacing current evil/good/savage/etc biomes with more varied ones, and making them alterable during and after world gen has been around for a while.


If I understand correctelly, the suggestion here is to tie magic system to this sphere system, or perhaps to simply call the sphere system and all the funny stuff it spawns magic. Not a bad idea I think. Spheres could be altered by evil deeds, good deeds, but also things like childbirth, industry, happyness or misery.

It could also be a good thing to link the planned religeon system into. Shrines to a god of fertility could create plant, mariage, etc spheres, and of course hedious sacrifices to a god of death could create evil, death, etc spheres. Well probably it should do that even without the god of death part, maybe just more quickly.

Multiple spheres could relate to eachother, much the way they do now. Some should negate eachother, some could combine to create a third sphere. For example, death negates longevity, and vice versa. Perhaps carefully balanced out combinations of death and fertility could generate a rebirth biome.

Linking a creature or plant to each and every biome seems like a bad idea, as funny as justice mushrooms might sound.


Fake Edit: in response to more recent posts, I think the idea here is to keep the basic game the same as it as, and add more depth for when you get further ahead. It wouldnt be hightening the initial cliff, it would be adding a slope after that cliff.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Xenosynthesis and magic fields
« Reply #34 on: February 05, 2011, 06:34:35 pm »

Short awnser: S/he's trying to elongate the learning curve while emphasising that we shouldn't have to specialise in any of the elements and that mastering the game at it's most basic should be a simple task.

You know, I've been recently thinking that I needed an editor...  :P
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Personally, I like [DF] because after climbing the damned learning cliff, I'm too elitist to consider not liking it.
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therahedwig

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Re: Xenosynthesis and magic fields
« Reply #35 on: February 05, 2011, 06:57:13 pm »

Your threads are in need of pictures too.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Xenosynthesis and magic fields
« Reply #36 on: February 05, 2011, 07:05:29 pm »

Your threads are in need of pictures too.

... I might be able to do that, if you don't mind it being a rushed pencil drawing of marginal quality that is scanned in, and maybe colored in MS Paint.
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Personally, I like [DF] because after climbing the damned learning cliff, I'm too elitist to consider not liking it.
"And no Frankenstein-esque body part stitching?"
"Not yet"

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Gatleos

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Re: Xenosynthesis and magic fields
« Reply #37 on: February 05, 2011, 07:13:02 pm »

Short awnser: S/he's trying to elongate the learning curve while emphasising that we shouldn't have to specialise in any of the elements and that mastering the game at it's most basic should be a simple task.

You know, I've been recently thinking that I needed an editor...  :P
Being about a quarter of the way through reading the novel of an OP, I'd say you need a crack team of several dozen editors collaborating in perfect harmony to keep up with you.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Xenosynthesis and magic fields
« Reply #38 on: February 05, 2011, 07:23:46 pm »

Short awnser: S/he's trying to elongate the learning curve while emphasising that we shouldn't have to specialise in any of the elements and that mastering the game at it's most basic should be a simple task.

You know, I've been recently thinking that I needed an editor...  :P
Being about a quarter of the way through reading the novel of an OP, I'd say you need a crack team of several dozen editors collaborating in perfect harmony to keep up with you.

You mean the Improved Farming one?  ... What's really sad is I'm not done writing it, I'm just working it out in sections.  I have four major sections left to write, and two minor ones.

I wrote it that way to consolidate the original Improved Farming thread's 40 pages down to a single coherent argument without having to resort to reading through all the bickering and incomplete ideas, but also the idea expanded as I did so, which is what led to this thread.  The argument as a whole has taken on a life of its own.



stuff

Sorry to not address what you said earlier, but I took some time addressing some of the other threads around before completing reading that transcript.

The problem I have with that one is that I was only trying to find more recent things Toady has said about spheres.  He hasn't talked about spheres much if at all in the past year, and ideas tend to evolve and take on a life of their own if you let them.  *cough*
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Personally, I like [DF] because after climbing the damned learning cliff, I'm too elitist to consider not liking it.
"And no Frankenstein-esque body part stitching?"
"Not yet"

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therahedwig

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Re: Xenosynthesis and magic fields
« Reply #39 on: February 05, 2011, 07:29:52 pm »

Your threads are in need of pictures too.

... I might be able to do that, if you don't mind it being a rushed pencil drawing of marginal quality that is scanned in, and maybe colored in MS Paint.
Let me introduce you to a friend of mine.

Describe stuff in flowcharts, screen cap them(or other methods) and touch up a bit in your image editing software of choice. Considering the nature of the game and the nature of your suggestions I doubt you need anything more advanced.
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Gatleos

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Re: Xenosynthesis and magic fields
« Reply #40 on: February 05, 2011, 09:45:19 pm »

Short awnser: S/he's trying to elongate the learning curve while emphasising that we shouldn't have to specialise in any of the elements and that mastering the game at it's most basic should be a simple task.

You know, I've been recently thinking that I needed an editor...  :P
Being about a quarter of the way through reading the novel of an OP, I'd say you need a crack team of several dozen editors collaborating in perfect harmony to keep up with you.

You mean the Improved Farming one?  ... What's really sad is I'm not done writing it, I'm just working it out in sections.  I have four major sections left to write, and two minor ones.

I wrote it that way to consolidate the original Improved Farming thread's 40 pages down to a single coherent argument without having to resort to reading through all the bickering and incomplete ideas, but also the idea expanded as I did so, which is what led to this thread.  The argument as a whole has taken on a life of its own.
And they're very good ideas! I was just commenting on how your average post size is in the range of a five-paragraph essay. :P

Your threads are in need of pictures too.

... I might be able to do that, if you don't mind it being a rushed pencil drawing of marginal quality that is scanned in, and maybe colored in MS Paint.
Let me introduce you to a friend of mine.

Describe stuff in flowcharts, screen cap them(or other methods) and touch up a bit in your image editing software of choice. Considering the nature of the game and the nature of your suggestions I doubt you need anything more advanced.
You meant to link here.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Xenosynthesis and magic fields
« Reply #41 on: February 05, 2011, 10:22:25 pm »

Rejoice.  I made another.  It's the thread on Kingdom Mode/Army Arc I was talking about making earlier.

I just managed to sit down and hash that one out...  It's too easy to get distracted while writing these things.
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Personally, I like [DF] because after climbing the damned learning cliff, I'm too elitist to consider not liking it.
"And no Frankenstein-esque body part stitching?"
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3

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Re: Xenosynthesis and magic fields
« Reply #42 on: February 06, 2011, 10:05:00 am »

Funny, I searched the DF Talks, FotF threads, and forums in general for anything Toady said about "sphere" before making this thread, and didn't come up with anything like that...

Forget it, it was just me misremembering things.
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Rowanas

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Re: Xenosynthesis and magic fields
« Reply #43 on: February 06, 2011, 06:40:05 pm »

Isn't this just fucking midichlorians?

I swear to the great ram-headed god of pre-teen nostalgia vengeance, I'm gonna kill George Lucas.
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NW_Kohaku

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Re: Xenosynthesis and magic fields
« Reply #44 on: February 06, 2011, 07:05:13 pm »

Isn't this just fucking midichlorians?

I swear to the great ram-headed god of pre-teen nostalgia vengeance, I'm gonna kill George Lucas.

Ah-ha-ha... I actually thought of that, too, before I made the spin-off to this thread.  (I think that technically, midi-chlorians are supposed to be magic mitochondria?  Part of all living cells, or something...)

But as I said to some of the hard-science-only peoples, Dwarf Fortress is a game that already clearly has magic that is capable of sustaining very bizzare life forms whose continued function is based upon exotic/magical energy.  No creatures adapt to being able to use any sort of energy source better than single-celled life, so it makes perfect logical sense that there would be some sort of xenosynthetic life form if there were any kind of magic energy fields capable of operating amethyst men and the like.

It would, in fact, be rather bizzare and contrary to the established methodology of biology and nature to argue anything to the contrary - why would large, complex creatures (floating guts or amethyst men) be able to adapt to magical energy sources while smaller, simpler, more adaptable life forms couldn't?

If you want to deal with it on a less technical, "more magical" level, though, consider that we already have things like nether caps that are pretty much explicitly magical plantlife that perpetually stay at freezing temperature.  (It would, in fact, make perfect sense with the way things are now to mass-produce a "dwarven freezer" with the perfectly predictable magic effect of always staying at the freezing point of water.)  Amethyst men and floating guts and magma men and the like all have perfectly predictable, mass-produced bodily functions.  It's practically science the way it works.  All this does is set some geographical boundaries and a limit to the overall amount of magical energy available for magically-based lifeforms to thrive upon, so that it can match the rest of the more advanced ecosystem-modelling functions I have been talking about in the farming thread with regards to "mundane" surface farming.

It means that, instead of having plants that spread leaves to collect sunlight for photosynthesis, plants would instead have organs for collecting magical energy for the purpose of performing xenosynthesis.  The "quarry bush leaves" we already have suggest that some of these magical lightless plants we already grow are not actually mushrooms, but plants whose leaves operate on some energy source that is not sunlight.  If they need to spread these leaves, then maybe, like sunlight, they have to cover a surface area in order to catch energy that naturally flows, and also like surface plants, weeds might try to grow their leaves to try to collect more of that flowing energy, starving the other plants of energy the way that a surface plant will starve without sunlight before they can be starved of their energy.

So, why not have caverns with different sphere-based magic sources that allow for different "cavern biomes"?  Different flavors of magic for different kinds of plants.  Different forms of energy would inspire different adaptations to capture and properly use that kind of energy.

Just because it's "magic" doesn't mean everything has to be mandated that you cannot think about or analyze anything that is going on in any way.



EDIT:

Actually, to try to cut off some misunderstanding before it happens, just in case you haven't read this all the way through...

This thing is about making a system for magical plants to have a "finite" source of energy, so that they aren't limitless the way that most farming is now, and hence more similar to the Improved Farming mundane plants, with more stringent requirements, and a need to care about replinishing the system that grows these plants. 

The basic gist of this is not to make "mass produced magic items" or "Vancian dwarven wizards".  The changes, in fact, would make farming magical plants potentially dangerous and unpredictable, since growing these plants unbalances the magical energies in the land if done haphazardly, leading to all those "Fun" aspects of magic the "no predictable magic" crowd would enjoy, while still offering a "don't touch what you don't understand" option to the people who want "no risky magic". 

The objective here is trying to give both camps something they like, and also creating a system for making a system for farming magic plants that requires a meaningful choice - unlike surface plants, where the only potential downside to excessive abuse of the land is desertification and soil degradation, overabuse of magic ecosystems leads to... Fun.  All the creative kinds of Fun you can imagine.

EDIT 2:

In a recent discussion on the FotF thread, I started talking about the difference between things becoming Fun for utterly random reasons, as opposed to reasons that players could understand and learn from.  Flood your fortress tapping a river?  That's Fun people have fun with.  First time opening the HFS and it was never spoiled for you?  Have Fun, and learn to respect that shiny blue metal - get too greedy, and you get burned.  Have your 10-year fortress die because a monarch butterfly corpse clogged the doorway, something that can happen in almost any fort, and had little to do with choices you made?  Well, that's just a cosmic wedgie, and while maybe YOU might grin and roll with it, a sizable portion, probably even a majority of the playerbase, would not take too kindly to repeatedly losing forts to things like that - and it's partially why we have things like burrows and forbidding !!XXSocksXX!! just to stop some things like that. 

This tries to make magic play in the spirit of the bluemetal - magical plants are so ready and ripe for the taking, and so valuable.  Take 1, take 2, take 10, they're great.  Take 50, and your dwarves have their beards turn into living vipers that repeatedly bite them in the face.  It's still magic to be wary of, that you don't want to go making into an "industrial magic factory", it's just got some rules to it, now, where if you respect it, magic isn't going to just crash your fort because the game randomly decided it was time for you to die.
« Last Edit: February 06, 2011, 07:39:04 pm by NW_Kohaku »
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Personally, I like [DF] because after climbing the damned learning cliff, I'm too elitist to consider not liking it.
"And no Frankenstein-esque body part stitching?"
"Not yet"

Improved Farming
Class Warfare
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