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Author Topic: Future of the Fortress  (Read 1154371 times)

Areyar

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3255 on: December 09, 2011, 05:23:43 pm »

Anyway, this is a good time for donations!

I got a nice donation from Sinterklaas 5th the latest and I'm giving half of it to Toady. :P
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PTTG??

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3256 on: December 09, 2011, 05:39:58 pm »

Indeed. We should prepare for a great Blood Festival this year. Come, let's sing!

Deck the halls with goblin entrails,
Fa la la la la, la la la la
'Tis the season for... um... what rhymes with entrails?
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Dsarker

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3257 on: December 09, 2011, 06:03:11 pm »

Battle tales?
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Jimlad11

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3258 on: December 09, 2011, 06:08:28 pm »

Iron Nails?
Badger Tails?
Rather large snails?

I am really looking forward to adventure mode on the next release! Starving, cities, new beasties, basic interaction framework stuff in place! "I'm pumped!" as I believe the kids say nowadays.
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Cruxador

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3259 on: December 09, 2011, 06:25:18 pm »

This forum does have an ignore function.
Bah, that's for fools without the stones to ignore manually.
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DS

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3260 on: December 09, 2011, 06:27:54 pm »

Jiri, I just think that a thread titled "Future of the Fortress" ought to be more than just a place to put all of your "OMG, I'm so excited for new releases!" posts.  Also, I'm sorry that this post is so brief and not well thought-out.  I'll endeavor to make future posts more comprehensive.

Actually, this thread really isn't the place to have such spirited debates - and it is more than just a place to post about how excited one is about the next update, although people do that too.

The purpose of the thread is to discuss current developments.  Specific bugs should be reported on the bug tracker, and specific suggestions belong for the most part in the suggestion forum.  Questions and comments about the development page or DF development somewhat more broadly work here, though any contentious topics that lead to derails are discouraged -- there are threads for those too.

Emphasis mine - the fact that at least one person has made a heated comment towards you places discussion of your points squarely under the purview of a "contentious topic." That said, I'm sure that, if you were to start a new thread concerning the topics you've mentioned (or were to offer a direct link to a thread, if you've already started one), people would be happy to discuss the issue with you. I, for one, have restrained from replying to your posts precisely because this isn't the place for it.

On another topic... Toady, you mention that placing designations over multiple z-levels is now possible, and you give the example of long up/down staircases. It seems logical that this would extend to designating 3d areas for digging and channeling as well, but will designations over multiple z-levels also be possible concerning the setting of traffic areas and/or building item properties?
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Eктωρ

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3261 on: December 09, 2011, 06:41:34 pm »

And will the dwarfs dig the multi-z designations without needing to be babysat so they won't cause collapses?
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Rockphed

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3262 on: December 09, 2011, 06:53:57 pm »

And will the dwarfs dig the multi-z designations without needing to be babysat so they won't cause collapses?

Toady hasn't mentioned rewriting the digging ai, so I doubt it.  You will still need to designate channeling from the top down.
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Footkerchief

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3263 on: December 09, 2011, 10:59:32 pm »

Quote from: devlog
12/09/2011: I finished trading partial amounts in both modes. You can also type in amounts of currency to trade in adventure mode. Most people carry around little pouches with money stuffed into some article of clothing or another, and the market vendors will use those. The shops that have multiple traders working with the same objects still have a money chest, but you don't have to fuss around with picking up the money from it. Money and goods will teleport to you for the time being, until something better comes up, but you are still allowed to grab the objects you want to buy first and bring them to the merchant if you want to do it that way. Next up comes people in the market hollering at you on the street. Then hunger/thirst, which is probably going to involve a lot of messing with river ramps etc.

Whoa.  Does this mean the end of (or at least a sharp reduction in) pointless drownings in both modes?
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monk12

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3264 on: December 09, 2011, 11:08:13 pm »

I certainly hope so! I doubt it, but I can still hope.


Being able to manipulate partial stacks is pretty sweet though, as is having your money teleport to you. I don't know how many times I've walked out of a shop without getting my change. And vendors yelling at you is pretty entertaining- I'll be interested to see how that's implemented. In fact,

How do the vendors yell? Is it a specific/new application of the Vocalization tag? AFAIK that tag doesn't work on a profession level, but hey, what do I know?

EmeraldWind

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3265 on: December 10, 2011, 01:21:03 am »

I certainly hope so! I doubt it, but I can still hope.


Being able to manipulate partial stacks is pretty sweet though, as is having your money teleport to you. I don't know how many times I've walked out of a shop without getting my change. And vendors yelling at you is pretty entertaining- I'll be interested to see how that's implemented. In fact,

How do the vendors yell? Is it a specific/new application of the Vocalization tag? AFAIK that tag doesn't work on a profession level, but hey, what do I know?

He mentioned having vendors shout at you being similar to a random encounter during travel in one of the DF Talks (I think).
It's something to grab your attention while in city travel. I think city bandits were mentioned in the same breath as this. But it might entail more than that though...

A Vendor draws near! He want to sell you cheese at a low price! Command?
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Osmosis Jones

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3266 on: December 10, 2011, 02:04:51 am »

If it drags you out of travel view everytime, that could get annoying fast. Surely it'd be better as a notification when you're walking in normal view;

-The Tame Horse strikes the Child in the left arm-
-The flesh is torn-
-The bone is broken-
*HO FINE SIR! May I interest you in my wares?*
-The Child bites the Tame Horse on the front right hoof-
etc
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scriver

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3267 on: December 10, 2011, 04:48:59 am »

Yup. Just like animal sounds.
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Toady One

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3268 on: December 10, 2011, 06:52:21 am »

Footkerchief and Knight Otu and abadidea (and probably others!) answered some questions that didn't appear below.  There's a lot this time (in two posts!), so I apologize if anything below sounds short or is a mess.

Quote from: Neonivek
I should have been more specific in that I am refering to where the Mummy is stored. The types of objects within (Funeral rites). and yeah even the clothes and objects the mummy is dressed in. With respect to different cultures such as not egyptian.

I'm all for whatever, as usual, but right now I'm just mixing random cliched-ish customs as they come up.  I imagine some diversity will be added in over time, and eventually cross the boundaries of what I currently know anything about (a line we just crossed with gem faceting for instance, with all the new cuts).  But for now it is fairly boring and generally unrawified.  Once I feel more comfortable with how things are going, it'll come out into text and get spread out.

Quote from: Knight Otu
You've talked quite a bit about what you feel you need to do for releases 3, 4, and 5 (games, music, storytelling, fistfights, multiracial forts etc) that isn't explicitly mentioned on the dev page, but there's very little about what you want for the upcoming release 2 aside the explicit mentions of schedules/activities and mines. I think you mentioned village maps if you don't get to extending the town map generation to that, workshops, and geological structures, but is there more than that?

The idea for that release is to get the town and villages up to a baseline of people moving around, working, and having all of their raw material industries in place, although the lack of trade or otherwise moving goods would preclude finishing this.  Right now, you can't find any raw materials in the towns and villages (stone, bone stockpiles, etc.), and despite the time spent on mining in world gen, you can't find any miners aside from people that incidentally get the skills.  People also just sit in their houses all day, so there is no sense of bustle.  There's a problem with not being able to consume resources because they aren't renewed or brought in, but something has to give or happen first -- I imagine there'll be various reprioritization and movements of dev goals to keep the game playable and somewhat sensible as it goes, but what I've written above is the overall feel, anyway.  This Release 2 is now subject to some of the things being moved up, which I'll mention below.  I think it might be more 5-ey and 8-ey than 2-ey for a bit, but nothing has been formalized.  We still have to think about it.

Quote
Quote from: NakedFury
What future feature are you most "exited/Proud" about?
Quote from: monk12
My personal bet is Release 5, as I recall in one of the DF Talks he mentions that it will "test the premise of the entire game, that you could have all these systems running simultaneously" [paraphrased]

Yeah, as much as I can comfortably answer a "favorite"-type question, that works.  To the point where it is very likely being moved up.

Quote from: Kogut
Attributes are supposed to impact performance at various tasks, but according to my testing impact of attributes on quality of products is completely unimportant compared to skill. There is no noticeable difference between "legendary carpenter with a boundless creative imagination" and "legendary carpenter (with average creativity)". Is it intended?

It's not intended, but that is how it is, for all attributes and all skills (with some combat related exceptions probably).  In response to the discussion, creativity is an attribute for carpentry and it does effect the roll, but skill outpaces it.  To check, just ran a test - an unskilled, meager creativity dwarf with no other notable atts made 10 lowest quality items, where an unskilled, great creativity dwarf with no other notable atts had 5 come out well-crafted.  Once they are legendary and churning out exceptional goods and masterpieces, it doesn't matter anymore.  I don't want attributes to dominate the game, but I think they should be important even at the highest levels.  It kind of makes me want to split quality into different categories though.

Quote from: Di
1. Will being a vampire be separate crime (killing by drinking blood)? Current murder doesn't bring death sentence.
2. What are benefits from having hammerer? I mean, we have guards already and by adjusting their weapons we can alter the punishment degree, while hammering offers death and heavy crippling.
3. How vampires can reproduce in fortress mode? Can they have children?
4. If a child is turned into vampire, will it grow into adulthood?

Vampirism etc. aren't separate crimes, but the point of view is a reasonable thing and it makes sense that it would move beyond the justice system and into the that's-horrifying-let's-kill-it-to-save-ourselves realm.  I'm not sure if the punishments were being reduced for lenience, but all my murderers were getting the dwarven death sentence of 50 strokes of the hammer.  You don't need to have a hammerer if you aren't interested in justice.  If I recollect, vampires are sterile as it stands.  If it works, child vampires won't grow up, though I haven't specifically tested that so there's a chance it doesn't work properly.  I think it all looks at the same age value, which is controlled by vampirism...  so I hope it works.

Quote from: Ganthan
Will it ever be possible for your fortress to fight for independence from your home civilization?  Will the king ever start taxing you, claiming some of your soldiers or issuing some new kind of mandates of his own like "You need to export at least 30 battle axes, 20 mining picks and 500 prepared meals by next year," and thus start getting rebel sentiment in your fortress?  It would be neat to have a Colonization style revolutionary war against other steel clad dwarves, although unless they were trap immune or something it would still be too easy to win.

There isn't war with the home civ right now, but you do have the ability to refuse the barony, which is going to amount to something similar (respecting whatever changes).  There's a whole section in some of the old notes about obligations to the king, and that all stands in theory.  I really have no idea when we'll be getting to that sort of thing though.

Quote from: Rystic
Do you think it's possible that we'll see prisoner executions in the future? IE, if we have a caged Goblin in a stockpile, would we be able to 'mark it' for execution? This would make life a lot easier than it is now, where we have to disarm prisoners in sort of a hacky-way, then build the cage/mechanisms. It would also give the Hammerer a useful purpose in between punishing dwarves for crimes.

Overall respecting the status of a civilized prisoner beyond that of a caged beast is a reasonable goal.

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Quote from: O11O1
With these new upgrades to the city systems, how close are we to having a 'Retire' option, where instead of abandoning the fort, you give it to the gameworld to control, allowing you to, say, start a new fort and trade with the old one?
Quote from: King_of_the_weasels
Probably not until after we have actual dwarf towns being generated, and then some.

Yeah, since the new city system moves us closer to re-enabling dwarf towns, we are at least descending in our orbit around this one.

Quote from: caknuck
Will pottery and waxworking be moodable skills in the upcoming version?

I haven't changed anything with these.  If I remember (and I'm not sure I do), the impediment is getting tools and moods to play nice.  Moods are old and creaky, so it takes a bit of work.

Quote from: Cruxador
What happens if all of your dwarves are vampires? Do they feed off each other?

They only feed on sleeping people, and the vampires don't sleep.  So they'd have to wait for dinner to move in.  Then they'd probably go a bit piranha on it when it decides to sleep.

Quote from: Shinotsa
Can dwarfs fight back while being fed on and do vampires avoid military/strong dwarfs? I'd hate to lose my militia commander to the weird guy nobody likes. If they can fight back what skills dictate whether they'll wake up? Will it be an awareness thing, or just a struggle when they are bitten?

The victims are sleeping so nothing dramatic happens.  I originally wanted to have a wider range of feeding encounters, but we've inhabited a time-squeezed process for a while and this was less fussy.

Quote from: Dsarker
If the blood thing isn't changing, and a well gets contaminated by vampire blood (say by the sheriff after he executes him, or by a survivor of a fight when the vampire did not), will that make vampires, or does the blood need to be pure?

It hits all of the contaminants during the ingestion check, so a polluted well would lead to a vampire-ridden fortress, provided the contaminant actually gets into the bucket water and maintains its historical figure status through the entire event.  I'm not sure if that's the case, but if you've seen named blood in a well bucket before, then you've got trouble for the next release.

Quote from: Fieari
Toady, while you aren't making varieties of vampires and other undead monsters NOW, have you included the framework for expanding them in the future?  Can we mod in additional types of vampirism ourselves?  If so, are they "whole package" or did you make the framework for random parts in the curse/secrets system?

I don't quite understand the random parts part, but you can add your own interactions that have a series of tags to play with, and if you add in many kinds of curses, the gods will pick and choose randomly, so all of your kinds could show up in one world and some of them in another, etc.

Here are the interactions as they stand untested and possibly type-o-ey from the example folder (the game uses slightly randomized versions of these).  They will be cleared before release.  Even at this stage I'd hesitate to call anything final, but it's close enough, and it should show some of the strengths and limitations of the current setup.  I think the main issue is the conflict between info in the interaction and in the "can do interaction" for targeting and so on.  It's a bit redundant at times, but there are a number of tricky issues so it's just going to stand for now.

Mummy
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Necromancer
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Regional Zombies
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Werewolf
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Vampire
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The werewolf in this case would have the material weakness on the beast definition, but you could also add it to the syndrome if you want the non-transformed to suffer from it (I don't remember convention there).

Quote from: Dsarker
Do vampires, when disguised, still transform others? Say, would Vampire X, who claims to be C, and gets a cut, when D drinks X's blood, would it track it as if it belonged to X or C? Would you be able to tell a vampire if it bleeds by the name on the blood?

I think somebody mentioned this, but the C identity is treated as an identity rather than a full creature, so it doesn't impact the properties of the blood.  At the same time (I think) it still manages to obscure the true identity of the blood since it intercepts the historical figure name attached to the blood.  I don't recall if I tested that case specifically though.  There are going to be a lot of bugs that make vampires easily findable, especially at first.

Quote from: Dae
if a disguise is just another "displayed name", is the disguise name also an historical figure ? Can a disguise be culled while the vampire name stays known ? In other words, what happens if a vampire in disguise bleeds in worldgen, will the blood be called by the disguise name ? If so, what happens if the disguise name gets lost ?

It doesn't get the same status as a historical figure, and identities are few enough that they are never culled, even if historical figures are.  I'm not sure what you mean by the worldgen blood -- like if a night troll captured the vampire and butchered it, and you found it afterward?  There isn't any blood tracked in world gen as far as I remember.
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Toady One

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3269 on: December 10, 2011, 06:53:11 am »

Quote from: monk12
Are all bridges the same right now, or do they vary? Covered bridges, open bridges, so on and so forth.

They vary in length and also width!  He he he.  It is boring.

Quote from: rex mortis
Will we have to discover a bridge or be able to swim across a river to cross one in the next version? Or is it still possible to ignore rivers completely by using fast travel?

Currently in towns you have to use bridges on the zoomed-in map.  Away from the map it is still a to-do to change anything.  In the next few days, I'm going to be changing rivers quite a bit, and if they are all crossable by swimmers, I think it might help the expedition feel to force you to cross manually by a road or by swimming.  I'm leaning that way anyway.  You wouldn't have to zoom in for the walkable brooks.

Quote from: Knight Otu
And in world 1, there don't seem to be any, presumably due to a lack of death gods. Are the necromancy secrets generated regardless of the presence of death gods?

They can also be held by death demons, though I don't think they share or use them, so effectively they don't come up.  I'm not sure the lack of towers is due to the lack of death gods though.  It depends on the length of the generation, and I don't remember how long it was.  The towers tend to come up a little later, once there are significant graves to raid (enough to get zombies to build a tower).  It could be that there were no death gods though.  That happens sometimes.

Quote from: EmeraldWind
Will town maps like the one you posted be available to export through Legends Mode (once an adventure visits a town) or will they remain a dev only visual?

Basically, I'm asking if a city/town site map will be exportable in the format shown in the dev log or not.

I guess that would just take a button from the site list in legends.  It would be reasonable to add the button.

Quote from: Cruxador
Are we going to get more specific in-period names for businesses that are used within the game?

I'm more or less for it, in general, if we have something that fits.  I don't know quite how esoteric it gets though, and what we're going to have that matches up.  I've seen lists of names but I don't know a lot of the specifics.  What did you have in mind?

Quote from: MiniMacker
So if a Were-dwarf dashes for the closest target during a full moon to attack. Will it be any target, including other Were-dwarves?

And I'm curious about the disguises.

If a disguised vampire gains a title through the military, will said title stay if the disguise is busted? Or maybe that isn't not how the disguise system works.

Weredwarves respect each other, as long as they are the same beast form.

Hmmm...  titles...  I think it probably would never show you the way it is.  It should probably put the title on the identity name, although ideally the titles they get would be an extra identity for even regular people, so that people can have more than one from different places.

Quote from: GreatWyrmGold
Why did you choose to only let body parts with a head or grasp be animatable by necromancers, and not all body parts or those with a stance (e.g. feet and legs)? It seems sensible to be able to raise someone's lower half.

I don't remember now if there was a reason any more compelling than thinking a foot twitching around was unscary.  Or a lower/upper body with nothing else attached.  A lower body with two legs is probably okay, but you might as well allow everything at some point.  It might be revisited when there's pulping.

Quote from: Cruxador
Do the wooded areas have free-roaming swine, or are all pigs penned up as things are now?

There are various animals out in the wastes.  It's all very simple though.  Pigs aren't treated as special -- it distinguishes only grazers and non-grazers at this point.

Quote from: Shinotsa
Are there any pictures of the new cities/towns in the zoomed in city fast travel screen? Perhaps we could see one of the maps already shown compared to the in game city travel screen if it's not too much trouble.

I'm actually fairly excited to see how they compare since I find the maps that are being put up now to have a strange kind of beauty and I hope at least some of that's carried over.

I haven't made pictures because I'm not happy how they fade out into the surroundings, and even when I get to it, it'll still be a bit blocky, but I guess that's okay.  I'll probably remember to put one up when I work that out -- you can recognize the intersections from the graphical maps, more or less, but they lose the distinction of the individual buildings, and they aren't as colorful.

Quote from: Heph
Do the "Breeds" only apply to actual breeded animals or do they extend wild animal-populations? Say all wildhorses in a certain region looking similiar?

It doesn't extend to wild animal populations, but I think that's a reasonable way to do subspecies stuff and it would be cool to throw in variations that way.  The raws themselves would need to have more variations in the wild animals first before it would matter.  Some of the domestic ones too for that matter...

Quote
Quote from: Cruxador
When you get such things done, how much interbreeding between different breeds/populations do you anticipate their being? How much variance is there in a cat (or any other domestic animal) population at the moment, and how much would you see as ideal? I know such things would be influenced heavily by the size and age of the population, but I'd appreciate some general thoughts on the situation.
Quote from: Heph
What would interest me is if and how the pet keeping species decide which traits they favour and want in a animal? I could see Humans for example keep atleast 3 kinds of horses 1 each for light and heavy cavalery and one as work-horse.
Quote from: Anatoli
Are there going to be any gene variances (in cats) from inside a town, or is it going to be mostly one kind per town? Are there going to be any ways for animals to travel between towns besides trade? What are (will be) the triggers for a trade in these animals?

The breed allows for some variation now, so it's a bit more (too?) flexible than the word would suggest I suppose.  The breed definition restricts the available genes, but doesn't specify them entirely.  I think ideally there'd be animals bred toward specific purposes, as well as perhaps a stray population of some of the animals that takes traits from both the breeds as well as at random (or perhaps all the way back toward being random -- or further, specialized for stray living, since a lot of the breed characteristics wouldn't be adapted to that environment).  I think animal trade is quite limited now in world gen.  It doesn't worry about mixing populations or anything either.  Overall, it's very simple, but it's a start.

Quote from: Draco18s
Toady, you ever going to take a look at odd river intersections, eg. the triangle as seen in world 1, near lake?

They look terribly funny and not very realistic when encountered when playing, and a 4-intersections have disastrous results.

I'm not sure if it'll be addressed with the upcoming river changes for adv thirst.  They do look strange and can be buggy.

Quote from: Sizik
Are there any plans for zoomed-in travel maps for player-made forts?

I haven't done anything with it, but I suppose it could use something like the dwarf mode minimap at the very least.  I still have some travel map issues to work through.  I'm not sure if I'll get to that.  I also wanted to changed the dwarf mode embark town blocks to something with a little more detail (even if you can't embark on the towns).

Quote from: Rafal99
Any plans on making the rivers look more natural? Like less straight segments with sharp edges?

Any chance to have the paved roads look different (not brown) from dirt roads in the map?

The ones away from towns look a little better (away from intersections).  I haven't thrown in the curviness in towns as a matter of expedience, but I assume this will change at some point.

Roads look different on the in-game travel map.  It hasn't been important for me on the graphical map, which I've been using to debug.  It could be changed by the time it gets added to legends export, but I'm not sure.

Quote from: hermes
I don't know if adventure mode uses the same pathfinding system as fortress mode but, does this mean that adventure mode will incorporate the fortress mode path-designation mechanic - say by auto assigning roads and paths a lower (or is that higher?) pathfinding weight?  Could/would this be extended to all terrain in general?

It isn't currently doing anything interesting in the towns.  I'm not going to address anything there until it's necessary, when people move around during the day again.  It would make sense to use the traffic designations, since they are in place in dwarf mode, especially to stop them from running up on the bridges walls to cut corners.

Quote from: Shinotsa
will there be farming related disaster in worldgen like locust swarms or salt buildup that cause an area to produce little to no food for a period of time or, in the case of salt buildup, become unfarmable due to improper/unsustainable farming habits?

There's nothing like that now.  There are vague plans, but I dunno when it's going to happen.  It's a handy way to change the world and get people to move around, but there's enough difficulty as it stands just keeping the towns happy in the first place, until we get industries and trade settled a bit more.

Quote from: Dwarfu
Are the animals in the villages/pastures owned by particular people or are they considered a part of the village entity - who gets angered when livestock is killed by an adventurer?

I think it's probably an entity issue at this point.  I assume it'll be sorted out when I do the first adventurer livestock, since you'll have to buy something from somebody (if you are polite).

Quote from: Cruxador
Now that we have both trolls and bridges represented pretty well, will there be trolls under some of the bridges? Maybe not in this update, but will traditional fairytale notions like that get a nod eventually?

There's that whole "Age of Fairytales" thing to worry about, and our current spouse-converting trolls are derived from the darker variety of those stories.  It'd be almost legit if those trolls could talk a little more than their kill list rants.  Having them live under bridges as an option would be cool, and I think spreading out to give an ogre or beast here and there some extra character would be good.  Thinking realistically about when stuff like this might start getting looked at, I'd say there's a chance when megabeast AI kicks in as the sort of proto-army arc.  One model of getting the army arc started up is to get the megabeasts and bandits running around properly, to get moving groups in play, and then growing and coordinating the groups, and it could still turn out that way.  The personality stuff that'll be in place before then should give them a proper character, even if it doesn't align with fairytales for many of them...  then we just need to have them accost goats and lost children.

Quote from: peskyninja
What's the average population of a city? Each new family that settles in one determined city will build a house or we will end with filthy childrens living in the sewers?

People that aren't specifically sewer dwellers (all adult criminals or beasts or mans or kobs at this point) get to live in houses.  I don't know when poverty will be explored -- the manor stuff on dev leads to distinctions, but I'm not sure if they are between rich and not rich or if poor goes in somewhere around there as well.

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Quote from: Jiri Petru
The new town maps are looking increasingly better, but I still dislike them for one thing: the circularity. Each settlement is a perfectly circular web of roads. And no matter the size of the village/town/city, they all take up the same space. It gets repetitive and boring very soon. Unfortunately, it looks that it's such a fundamental part of Toady's design that it's impossible to change. I suppose the circular web is the very building block of the new towns that can't be replaced.

Also I really hate all the random roads - there's way too many of them in the village parts of the map. But I've already rambled a lot about it here so I won't repeat myself.
(EDIT: But looking at the older town pictures it seems Toady has reduces the number of roads a bit, so there's that.)


Oh and I miss the old villages. Those were great!
Quote from: thvaz
Most of what you think as roads in the pictures aren't roads, they are there just to divide the fields. It is obvious though that the same process to decide where the building will be constructed is used to divide the fields, but the end result  is very good.
Quote from: Jiri Petru
I'm pretty sure they are all roads. I guess you could say "nah, they're hedges" on maps like this one, but when you look at, say, this town it's apparent those lines need to be roads so the farms can get to their homes. But so far we've only seen town maps. I'd love to see a proper village.

Toady, could we see a map of a village? I don't know if there's any strong distinction between towns and villages now, so take "village" as a settlement of ~100 people with no market.

And what happened to the old village maps we've had a couple of versions ago? I suppose the code was scrapped?


Thanks.

The old village image is actually as circular as the current versions and, unlike the new ones, it was made explicitly as a circular web -- parts of the web aren't realized because they are waste etc., as with the current maps, so neither the new nor old map ends up completely circular.  The current villages are blobbish just because they occupy site rectangles and a circular blob is a more natural shape to fill out a rectangle, but the algorithm works on the square grid required by the moving load area, with a 3x3 subgrid for each square, and can be adapted without too much effort to various shapes (basically by setting yes/no flags through the grid -- it'll fill out whatever shape it is given, and it already does this at with respect to the river/ocean/lake blocks).  It takes on a bit of a rounded character locally on the edges because corners and three way intersections are down toward the square boundary to degridify the picture.  The main problem is more that the sites can't merge with each other and all have to occupy rectangles.  They'd have different shapes and merge more naturally if that weren't the case (having a diagonal boundary with a neighbor for instance), but that will take more work to change.  If it happens that sites stop occupying rectangles and can begin to come closer to each other along different boundaries, the site growing algorithm can adapt to that just as it adapts to rivers and other boundaries.

Within one town, my principle concern was dividing up the plots in a way I could use them for both towns and villages while at the same time respecting the square load areas (which the previous village code was a total flop for).  The roads have been a secondary concern up to this point, but the divisions you see on the map can be defined as paved roads, or dirt roads, or as hedges or whatever else when it comes time for it.  Any division below a paved road is currently realized as a dirt road.  My starting point for merging my town and village maps were web-searched maps along these lines:

http://historic-cities.huji.ac.il/germany/aachen/maps/braun_hogenberg_I_12_b.jpg
http://historic-cities.huji.ac.il/british_isles/london/maps/braun_hogenberg_I_A_b.jpg
http://historic-cities.huji.ac.il/belgium/bruges/maps/braun_hogenberg_I_16_b.jpg

which can have some outlying structures which aren't even on roads but instead within the plot divisions of whatever kind, but overall I think I probably agree with your sentiments on roads, and I don't intend to simply emulate pieces of pictures without respecting the underlying structure.

For villages, the plot model is still the manor picture that came up before, minus the manor and church etc.

http://www.bownet.org/jvulgamore/Charlemagne%20and%20Franks/Manors/Plan_Mediaeval_Manor.jpg

Here is the current village output: schematic, tiles

I'm aware that there are various other possible setups for villages, but only so much can happen at a time.  I'd like to set up these sorts at some point, and I was hoping to have them already, which associate fields more to individual families without respect to a central manor, since I don't want manors everywhere -- the long strip fields should even be able to lean away from the two major axes with some careful treatment of the vertices.  It will be ultimately stuck to 48x48 tile grid sections though.  Otherwise the AI will be impossible later.  There are a zillion different things to do though, so you'll have to continue to suffer through these limited similar maps a while.

Quote from: Weaselcake
Assuming that the patch is closing in on the release date, what are the immediate development plans after the post-patch celebration? Is the Caravan arc going to still be the primary focus in development, will there be other planned features from the Development Page which might have an unexpected priority jump? I know these are broad questions, but I'm just wondering what what Toady has in mind, even if it's just a tiny speck of a planned idea for the next update.

The post-patch celebration being the bug-fixing releases, of course.  This release obviously took a long time, and that time has clarified some things about that release list that is going to switch up the order a bit, I'm pretty sure.  Currently what's been decided is that the birth/death/succession stuff and the personality stuff will be moved up.  That'll crystallize into something definitive sometime during the bugfixing.

Quote from: Vertigon
I really enjoyed the monthly report containing the actual numbers of issues left to work out. Any chance of that happening more often in the devlog?

I decided against having a running countdown during the last long release, when it became more of an annoyance to manage than a motivator for development.  So probably not.  I've never really found a good way of communicating release timing, because there isn't a good estimate of the release time.  The list of issues I greened out before doesn't really work, since there's always a mass of crap to cleanup after it's all greened out.  I'm ostensibly doing that cleaning list now, but it's always a three steps forward two steps back kind of thing.  I'm just trying to log as much as I can, as boring as lot of it is, with the vague idea more or less that I'm moving down the issue list from the report, even if I expect a few big bumps up ahead there, where one optimization issue or another might eat a few days or more all by itself.

Quote from: penguify
Can working gloves and gauntlets be created by adventurer reactions yet? Will that be in this release?

I haven't changed it.  If it isn't changed I can throw it in with the bug fixes if I'm reminded.

Quote from: Greendogo
Toady, you mentioned that you had an abundance of bone materials in cities that builds up making the number of bone crafts unreasonable.  I think one problem with this viewpoint is that in the real world bone material often has many more uses than are present in the game and in large industry and small industry alike the bones get used for all sorts of things.  For instance, there is a small amount of bone ash present in many pet food brands (for cats and dogs) even though the higher quality companies try to limit that amount for health reasons.  Many early cultures used bones for needles or knitting needles (Dwarf Fortress lacks knitting, btw).  Also, bones were often used as jewelry, something that already occurs in the game.  I think if you wanted to increase the usability of bones and thereby decrease their build-up in city stockpiles you would need to make the market for bone larger by increasing the demand for bone crafts or bone decoration, or other uses such as bone meal for fertilizer.  I think this would be much more realistic than trying to limit the production and accumulation of bone. If you don't want the stores to be full of the stuff, why not make it more prevalent as something that is actually more useful for the townspeople?

I was looking for a short-term fix, which was rebalancing the number of bone crafts made and just letting the rest of the bones sit.  I'm all for adding more industries, but I'm trying to arrive at a release now.  Hopefully there will be more bone industries in the future.  There certainly are a lot of bones!

Quote from: Fieari
When modeling demand for objects, is it done by a hard-coded object class (ie, all food has this demand, weapons have that demand, art has the other demand, and so forth), flat aspect (everything is equally in demand, and supply is the only concern), or is there an element in the raws that determines how it much it will be used during worldgen (set plump helmets to low demand and sun berries to high demand, modifiable to the other way around if we want)?

The raws don't interact with it right now.  Towns just want a certain number of each thing on hand based on population, and the differences in specialization lead to differences in supply, so things have places they want to go, in each of the general categories.  I believe it also quibbles a bit with how much of each specific type in a category is on hand, to simulate rarity costs, but I don't remember how much.  It gets to be very number crunchy but there's still some room to move for customization, and I imagine it'll get more complicated over time, but there's not a whole lot going on right now.  There are those weird trade valuation things it uses in fortress mode, for instance for pictures containing animals with ART_IMAGE_ELEMENT_MODIFIER etc., and that should probably be expanded into something that respects all of the objects in a more uniform way.

Quote from: hermes
Will the economy be "grounded" in the world-gen scale, where gross supply/demand is balanced and then individual producers take their cues from those global values, or will you try to balance it from the bottom up, where producers make as much as they want/can per their situation and personality, and let them react to market forces as they emerge?

The villages are sort of mindless producers right now, and that lets their associated town use more of a bottom up approach where it can afford to screw up without worrying as much about basic survival -- at least at a minimum population level.  It doesn't mandate anything at the world level -- the world could end up devoid of certain types of goods if nobody has occasion to make them.  Food is reliable enough now that the system isn't completely disasterous, but I'm sure there's already all sorts of silliness, and I don't have a problem slapping some weird global behavior on there to fix things (the unnaturally clunky supply/demand stuff counts perhaps in some way, though it isn't the same as a forced global agreement).

Quote from: Rockphed
I don't suppose you got pictures of the hole to the underworld.  Or at least a better description.  Was it a hole to the first cavern layer, or were we in danger of having hordes of hidden fun stuff all up in our faces?  Or was it both, and you are hiding some sort of new thing in the caverns from us because it brings you mirth when you see our outraged reactions to unexpected things.

It went all the way down, and because I was embarking dwarf mode, the breach detector was triggered and it even gave me a helpful announcement telling me I was going to die.

Quote from: Chthonic
You are re-enabling thirst with dungeon and sewer exploration in mind.  Does this mean that we should be packing full waterskins--i.e., are there going to be hazards (contaminants, diseases, etc.) inherent in drinking sewer water as we find it on the floor or in channels?

It would make sense not to drink that water, but it doesn't currently penalize you.  There isn't water in most of the dungeon, so it won't help you everywhere, even if it does remain clean for a while.

Quote from: Serrational
Will drinking vomit and blood as a staple be subject to horrific illnesses?
Could an adventurer drink forever by making himself ill to drink his vomit to get ill etc. ad infinitum?

It seems like a reasonable enough thing, but I haven't done anything with it.

Quote from: DS
Toady, you mention that placing designations over multiple z-levels is now possible, and you give the example of long up/down staircases. It seems logical that this would extend to designating 3d areas for digging and channeling as well, but will designations over multiple z-levels also be possible concerning the setting of traffic areas and/or building item properties?

Yeah, anything in the 'd' menu.

And will the dwarfs dig the multi-z designations without needing to be babysat so they won't cause collapses?

Nothing has changed with how they select which designations they dig.  Whatever happened before when you designated them manually will happen now.

Quote from: monk12
How do the vendors yell? Is it a specific/new application of the Vocalization tag? AFAIK that tag doesn't work on a profession level, but hey, what do I know?

I'm pretty sure it's gonna end up entirely creature independent.  The civilized critters don't keep a lot of speech down below yet, since it's more of an entity thing, and there isn't a lot of speech there either.  I'm not even sure the extent to which travel mode is going to be involved, since there's not a good deal of data to work with at that level (though there is some).  Just a little fun aside.  Eat/drink/river/etc. is the next big push.
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