I'm retiring this thread since pulling open the thread list one click at a time per 50 pages is getting sort of annoying and I don't like the frozen-in-time OP.
Will it be possible for there to be multiple demographics in a single city?
Aside from the civ owning the city there would probably be cultural minorities, including dwarves and elves.
On the same topic, will we see any cultural/racial discrimination? I'm mainly talking about humans who are racist in nature, but as well as about dwarv-elf conflict.
Can we see sections of city dedicated to a subculture, you know, ghettos and the like. Perhaps genocides and civil wars in the future that shift balance of the city, perhaps going as far as the city changing it's owner civ?
In such cases, will there be any undead cases in which defeated defenders of the city and their ancestors raise to exact revenge on them?
Will there be in general any racial/cultural preferences among undead? (eg.: dead dwarf attacking elves rather than humans, dead human not attacking his family if there are other targets, etc.)
As Knight Otu pointed out, we have non-functional multiple demographics right now, and those will work for the next release. Not sure about any of the farther future stuff.
Since current deities occasionally use the zombie and skeleton flags when their spheres are compatible, will the deities in the upcoming release use certain or all curses in their description? Such that, if there was a "winged zombie" interaction associated with sky and death, a deity of sky and death might be depicted as a winged zombie human?
It's unclear. One of those things I have marked to handle. I think it used the word "rotting" instead of "zombie" for deities in at least one of the text portions, since it's sort of weird to associate a death deity with a soulless animated corpse rather than a rotted appearance. Or something.
Will some of the new night creature behaviors work for other creatures as well, whether civilized, wild, mega, or procedural (I could certainly see demons spreading curses, and if transformation effects were to come in, that could be very interesting for mods)?
All of the new night creature stuff is going to be in the raws (even if all the ones used in vanilla are randomly generated). So if mummy-style disturbed undead can curse people then whatever critter will be able to do it as well -- there's the one extra step of making a creature able to perform interactions in the same way somebody with a syndrome can do it, but that's way too tempting once I've got mummies done.
With night creatures, you mentioned that you might need to do some questing to find a weakness to a night creature. Will it actually be impossible to kill night creatures without exploiting their weaknesses? (As in, is there no way to simply chop them into a fine enough paste faster than they regenerate, or just drag them away from whatever magical power source they have to kill them "the hard way", so that we must rely upon finding a weakness, no matter the difference in strength or skill our characters have with our enemies?)
Likewise, if some sort of religious practice to divine weaknesses or to exorcise undead must happen to kill certain creatures, will we, as players, (at least some point in the future, perhaps having to wait on general magic system) have the ability to become one of those religious figures, capable of divining or performing exorcisms of ghosts or reversals of curses on our own, and can our fortresses train exorcists or the like to combat un-slabbable ghosts? Or do we have no power to fight these things on our own?
It might be impossible to permanently kill a creature without figuring something out. There isn't going to be anything so unstoppable that it ruins your game. My comment about non-100% effectiveness is more in reference to people that died particular deaths, for example. A slab might not be enough to stop a hammered execution victim from coming back for revenge every so often, but I don't have any specifics.
Will regeneration of any sort be possible as a syndrom of a curse/"disease"/something.
We'll see what comes up in terms of changing healing rate and so on, perhaps with some of the werewolfy/vampirey ones, but I'm not sure what's going to happen.
Will there ever be "benign" undead or cursed people who do not automatically enemies of the entity they came from? Like for example, undead from an [undeath][good] sphere land or somehting that just go back to their old life?
I think so. There are plenty of examples of non-evil ghosts and so on, like Casper. We had one in mind for this time, but who knows what we'll get to.
A question on curses: Will curses be able to just alter certain attributes or do they turn anything in the same "nightcreature"? For example could we make a curse that makes the victims skin fall off, turns the the nails/claws and teeth to iron and replaces eyes with fire so that a dog and human both affected by said curse are similiar but still different creatures? Or does the "turning" curse make anything it hits into same beasty, say a 5 meter tall head-crap? Both options would actually be neat.
I haven't gotten to any of the werewolfy/vampirey curses yet, but there's a significant time/delay issue with doing partial body modification, especially ones that add parts, but smaller modifications aren't a problem. A complete guess at this point would be that we'll be doing both, in the sense that a vampire-style curse, in addition to all the non-body stuff, could also increase teeth size for any tooth part it finds, while leaving the "race" the same (with possible choices to do a wolf/bat/cloud transform perhaps), whereas a werewolf-style curse might turn you into a werewolf creature which would have its own definition. That's as likely as anything. Not to imply that randomly generated vampire/werewolf interactions will stick so closely to the generic image. But those two kinds of body modifications are likely to be handled (small modification or total overhaul, with partial overhaul being the hard one likely to be left out this time).
Will cursed areas have physical effects on dwarves? Like randomly bursting in hives, starting to vomit from nausea, bleeding from the mouth, or something more serious like a dwarf suddenly going blind in one eye or both? These would be rare events, maybe similar in frequency as artifacts.
Yeah, it's all fair. Once we get to the mummy-style creatures (probably the ones after the necromancers), we'll be doing some cursing of live targets by the mummy-style night creature. At that point, extending any of these we like to the same intermittently targeting method the region uses for animation would be a natural thing. It might even happen before then, depending on how necromancers turn out.
Evil regions should be crappy places to live.
Player-run fortresses can potentially have a powerful impact on geography, e.g. by damming rivers and such. Will players be able to influence wider geography over time through such actions in future releases? Will damming a river starve human settlements downriver, contribute to desertification, or have similar effects?
It's not easy to do. Questions like this have been floating around since the infinite floods of the 2D days, but I don't really have a timeline or plans for addressing them.
Regarding the future bloat implementation below, and seeings that ghosts are now getting attention from you, can we expect to see some ghost based lever pulling soon?
Also are there any plans to have ghosts be active AND invisable some of the time, so then when poltergeist type activities occur, it would add some mystery to how those events actually happened? Adventure mode with ghosts could be quite creepy and cool if instead of seeing the ghost every time, you instead see a chair slide accross the floor, or get a message saying you felt a cold shiver(ghost passing through you/trying to interact with you)
I don't have a timeline for re-enactment type stuff. The detection of a little re-enactable plot for the lever example is the hard part. Yeah, I don't think night creature activity is always going to be tied to visible Ns. We're hoping to get to some of that when we do haunted houses, but we'll see what happens.
Toady will monsters (Night creatures, Megabeasts, semimegabeasts, named creatures) still get along perfectly happy with eachother for quite some time? I am only wondering because with sewers I was sort of wondering if one type of night creatures could somehow claim dominance over the sewers and beat out the others, or suppress them.
Yeah, it's going to be strange down there if there isn't some kind of something, although I don't expect much to change this time around. I'll be happy to have them all cohabitating down there without appearing in the walls or something.
But does the whole cursing thing apply to severed body parts as well? With our hypothetically decapitated elf, is there a chance of the the severed head also rising as a zombie? For that matter, if you chop the arm off the elf after it's become a zombie, will you have a severed arm that is a zombie? Or will you just get the severed arm of a zombie?
There is hope of this, though I haven't done it yet, though the parts will have to wait for their raising to occur, rather than staying animated, with the way things are set up now.
Could we get some more detail about effects of curses on bodies?
Right now it is more limited, focusing on tags instead of body parts, because it hasn't come up yet. We'll see when we get vampirey and werewolfy what ends up going on there. It is my suspicion that the addition of body parts is by far the hardest thing to do. A lot of the program was written with that in mind, but the parts that aren't are going to be a source of headaches whenever we get there, and I'm not sure I want to bite that off with everything else right now.
Will curses extend to inanimate objects such as swords, thrones and socks? If so, could they "transfer" kind of like contact poisons (eg. from sword to wielder)?
Eventually, but not yet. I imagine anything that comes of artifacts etc. will use the interaction system.
Is the current mechanic for night creatures kidnapping spouses in world gen going to be incorporated into the curse/interaction system, or will it remain separate, like fire breath is separate from material breath?
It would be ideal to move it over, but it's an extra piece of time, so it might get put off.
Will Dwarf moods be affected by the activities of souls or gods?
I don't have a timeline or specifics on this sort of thing. thvaz mentioned the possessed mood, which wants some kind of satisfactory resolution, but I dunno when that'll happen.
Would goblins accept different forms of power apart from raw strength? Say political power or someone who has a powerfull trait/abilty/knowledge/whatever?
Anything that could run a prison gang, I suppose.
has any formal modeling been done of the various new curses or other "contagious" effects? Can you present mathematical conditions under which the undead, werewolves, night creatures, and plague will (probably) not destroy the world by accident during worldgen?
Running the game itself is as formal as we're going to get.
Will adventures be able to learn these new "secrets"?
It comes down to adding an interface to it, pretty much, and supporting any special interactions that might take some care when coming from the player. Ideally if you can turn into some sort of night creature, you'd get all of its powers and get to keep playing, but the use of interactions is exactly the problem with allowing the player to do that. We'll see what the breadth of interactions ends up being. It could end up being pretty straightforward to do.
Is the raw implementation of necromancy a special case, or do we have an arbitrary interaction-effecting tag for creatures/syndromes? On that note, I take it that interactions have a fairly flexible raw framework themselves?
It is arbitrary, though I've been leaning toward tags necessary for my purposes. You could do water breathing for instance, though, by applying a NOBREATHE or whatever tag to a syndrome. I can't really comment on the flexibility -- I imagine it'll only take a moment to stretch it to capacity. It's not a formal scripting language or anything remotely that useful.
If secrets are transferred by an artifact slab, is the ownership of the slab required to use the secret?
I suppose it should work either way, but they'll probably not be required at first since that's the easier way to do it. That does it make more dangerous to control the knowledge spreading all over the place, but that's something that should be fun to deal with anyway.
Will possessed dwarfs have a chance to inscribe secrets on slabs instead of creating an artifact? Or maybe inscribe secrets whispered by the demon on the artifact itself? Also: will secrets be found only on slabs (and later, books) or will it be possible to find a secret on a sword blade, like a power word to make this sword ignite?
I don't have any specific plans at this point, since we're trying to keep things held down to our specific focus so that we can get a release up sometime. It all sounds like a fair thing to do.
Will demons and megabeasts with the death sphere be able to raise the undead? Will the undead megabeasts (Zombie Dragons for example) appear from the beggining or be raised after being killed?
The specific secret I'm using for testing makes a mortal immortal and allows them to raise the dead, and because the target is a mortal, it doesn't apply to the immortal critters that initially have the knowledge.
Haven't decided on the undead megabeasts yet -- having one there from the beginning seems to fit the character of the place fine, and the ones that are raised should be automatic. I guess world gen would need to be taught that if the dragon's head is chopped off in an evil region, the head itself might come back. It would be funny to have all these zombie megabeast limbs lingering after a long world gen, cowering in caves and occasionally running out to snatch a cow or something.
What's the time table for spheres other than Death granting transformations and secrets? I know it's a long-term dev goal, I'm just curious to know if we can expect non-necromantic secrets and alterations next release.
I don't have a time table for much. Mods could do it the way it already stands. Since we're trying to keep our focus narrow this time, I wouldn't count on much. There are some other things we want to finish before we jump full into magic.
What's the difference between Inns and Taverns in DF?
Taverns are the wider category -- any place that is boozy. The inn part refers to the staying-in-a-room part specifically. Not all taverns will have that function, and the function won't even be available until Release 4.
Will secrets make an appearance in dwarf mode any time soon?
Lets say that a demon relates a secret to a man in world gen. That man writes it down on his fancy stone tablet. A megabeast then steals that tablet and takes it back to his lair. World gen ends, and the player embarks with their dwarves on that lair. Will the tablet be there for the dwarves to find? When can we expect some kind of meaningful interaction with that kind of world-gen artifact?
Do you foresee secrets playing a role in the formation/abilities/motives of cults in world-gen?
I'm not sure what's going to happen with dwarf mode vs. the world gen artifacts. It seems like they will be available in the same space, which I guess would mean if it's a slab you could unforbid it and place it like a building... but I dunno if your dwarves will suddenly all become immortal and start raising their pets. We'll have to see what happens.
Yeah, I imagine secrets are going to be very important to many of the cults when we get there.
Is this going to become the framework for a magic system in the future, with every sphere having its own secrets, which can be used for a variety of ways, with its own risks and benefits? Like, using the secret of deformity to alter your own body, gaining extra limbs, giving yourself wings, scales, tails, increasing/decreasing your size, and doing the same to others, or using the secret of strenght and being able to wrestle a bronze colossus to the ground?
It's sort of a baby magic system for a specific purpose. There are giant missing components though that aren't being captured by this system. Hopefully whatever I end up with this time can be grown into something better.
With secrets giving the gods tangible roles in the world, will the temples or religions have an increased functionality in the near future?
Will the followers of a deity have any special relation to the secrets granted by that deity? For example, will followers of a religion seek to recover or destroy the tablets recording their god's secrets that fall into the hands of non believers?
I don't really have a timeline, but it certainly provides a source of both legitimacy and power to have this sort of thing potentially out there. I'm not sure what's going to be done with it.
Will there be different kinds of immortality? Like the plain old "You never die of old age" but also things like "Bodysurfing" or leaching "Years" from someone.
We are starting with the most boring kind as usual. We haven't done anything interesting useful with souls yet, which would be the first alternate kind. Leeching would also be fun... I guess it would just be a certain effect. So many things to do.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress: The Development Page (Read 1559032 times)