Dwarf Fortress Talk #13, with Rainseeker, Capntastic and Toady One, transcribed by mallocks
| Capntastic: | How will cities respond to attacks by either goblin hordes or megabeasts, will there be battle damage? |
| Toady: | That's army arc stuff, so this is ... we're talking about further down the line after the nine releases that have been scheduled, then we're jumping into the army arc, and yeah, these cities are sitting here waiting to be destroyed, basically, by people willing to go through and do the hard work, so ... There are a couple of scenarios that will have to be handled in the army arc. There's the player attacking with a dwarven army, attacking a city like this ... so you'd have essentially those maps I've posted ... it can't have the whole thing loaded at once because the maps I've posted are generally seventeen by seventeen embarks and that would be a memory problem just by itself before you even think about the speed ... but you'd have the embark level map or a slightly zoomed in version of that and you'd be able to tactically order your guys around. You can basically imagine those maps you're looking at ASCIIfied, and then having your soldiers laid out and then do a Ken Burns The Civil War thing with them, where you've got your armies moving around, the bars of armies and they would be somewhere and you'd be somewhere else, and then your guys would move and their guys would do whatever and eventually you'd be into the buildings and the buildings would possibly suffer for it. In the biggest cities I think there are around twenty five hundred buildings and just tallying ... there's only going to be a few cities that size in the whole world, and when it comes to tallying damage on twenty five hundred structures that's just a drop in the memory bucket. If you were going to do four bytes per building that's ten thousand bytes, and I think a dwarf is bigger than that, so it's not a big deal to tally the complete destruction specifically of each building as it's razed, if you're going through doing that kind of thing to the town.
So there's the dwarf version and then there's the abstract version which in the end is probably going to be the one that looks the least satisfying, when just some town across the world where you haven't been yet has been attacked and fifty percent of it has been destroyed by some goblin rampaging army or a megabeast, and then you go to that city and it has to sort of simulate fifty percent damage on the city. So it'll just pick out buildings, maybe choose a direction of attack and choose how the fire spread or whatever and blow up a bunch of buildings, and then rebuild on top of that. And then there's the other type of thing that it'll need to handle, which is if you're an adventurer in a city at the time that it's being attacked. Then it's going to need to be able to deal with your moving frame of reference versus where the attacking armies are and also what are all the civilians doing. It's quite similar to how the dwarf mode version would work though, if you're not just on a tactical map but if you're zooming into specific battles that you want to watch in dwarf mode; like if you want to zoom in on the gate when it's being attacked, or zoom in on one quarter of the city when it's being attacked and actually watch what's happening. Then you have to deal with the same stuff which is, you know, you've got maybe two or three hundred civilians loaded in addition to whatever armies are in that area. The civilians are going to have to be pretty brain-dead to have that continue to run at a proper speed but they would be able to follow mass paths out of there. It's way easier to do fast pathing on a city with roads and so on, and if there are blockages then they might just get stuck in dead ends and burned to death or whatever, and that's just going to be part of ... |
| Rainseeker: | Part of the fun. |
| Toady: | If you want to call it that, that's what it is. I'm basically always going to be extra mindful of the speed concerns that come with having cities with large populations, and there's basically going to be a lot of people hanging out in their houses, and a lot of people walking along roads, and that's not bad, because that's what happens in cities, so I think we'll end up in good shape. The vast majority of the people aren't going to be loaded at a given time so it's pretty easy to keep it under control, I think, as long as the cities don't get larger than they are now. But even if they do ... you could have a world spanning city, it just doesn't have all the people loaded. |
| Rainseeker: | That would be actually kind of spooky. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it could be kind of like a Trantor thing where you pave the whole thing with steel and have people wandering around on it ... |
| Capntastic: | Alright, so, we have cities, and we have adventurers. What happens when you mix them? Let's say you're an adventurer, you've got some weapons, you're a tough dude, you're in the middle of a functioning city and you want some cash. What do you do? |
| Toady: | That's right. So, you come in there and - let's say you're not completely incompetent, and you maybe have a bit of a reputation or not - so what can you do? Well at first we don't have taverns, we don't have inns, we just have these people, right? There's just people hanging out in the city, and basically we'll have to go with the most clichéd garbage at first, probably. You know, things to kill, that kind of thing. Bandits have analogues in cities, just things like are there criminals hanging out in a location, are there sewers, are there catacombs, that kind of thing. I can tell you there are going to be sewers and catacombs, of course, and you just have to look up Roman sewers or Parisian sewers to see that it's not all modern fantasy cliché stuff, although throwing monsters down there is ... Zach and I were talking about this, if you have your sewer system connected to the river and you have hippos in your river then you can have hippos in your sewer. |
| Rainseeker: | Unless you have grates ... |
| Toady: | Well, if you don't invest in the grates then you've got hippos. |
| Rainseeker: | 'Yes, small adventurer who's barely done anything with his life. Go down in the sewers and kill whatever's down there.' You'd be like 'No problem, I can kill rats', and then you're confronted by hippos. That's really a bad ending. |
| Toady: | It should be exciting. |
| Capntastic: | Leave your preconceptions behind. |
| Toady: | That's right, you never know, never know what you're going to find down in the sewers. Carp even ... Carp aren't as dangerous, but there might be ... They get right through the rivers, anything you find in the rivers, if they don't grate off the sewer entrances then you've got trouble. So sewers are fun little places to place all kinds of outlaw peoples and that kind of thing ... This is the kind of typical farming of fantasy garbage you should have come to expect by now, so just to have something to do we're going to start there and you can already look at the release schedule for the actual interesting stuff like taverns and so on that will open adventure mode a bit, and adventure mode trading which is one of the giant points about the arc.
But just at first your adventurer is just going to be able to do typical adventurer things there, and of course there's no non-lethal force action yet so if you're helping people bring criminals to justice based on the strength of your prior reputation as a dragon and night creature killer - and they're like 'Can you help us out?' - then you'll just be murdering people, until the tavern release. The tavern release will have non-lethal fighting because there'll be bar fights and we don't want bar fights to be like 'You punch him in the face, jamming the skull into the brain, killing him instantly' or whatever. We're going to have to change combat a bit to make fist fights work because right now fist fights are way too dangerous, but it should work out in the end. If you have the reputation for it ... It would be strange if you just wandered into the town, no-one knew who you were, you weren't famous for anything and you were like 'I want to go on the night patrol and look out for criminals for you'. It'd be like 'Yes, we trust you to patrol our streets' ... That'd be kind of silly. |
| Rainseeker: | Unless you were raised in that town. |
| Toady: | Exactly. If it was your home town then just like you have people warning you around the bogeymen outside when you're in your home town they say 'Nice to see you' and they know who you are ... If they know who you are then they can trust you with that kind of thing. That's another thing that can happen, we were thinking - depending on time - before the tavern release we can extent night creatures to make some city varieties; things that could be in houses and in the underground, all kinds of things. Once you've got a house you can start haunting it with things but once you've got catacombs of course you can go nuts with that. We were thinking of getting some basic sewers and catacombs in even in this first release, just to give you something to do in the new cities aside from wander around and purchase things from the many many many many stores and markets. |
| Rainseeker: | I want to get a job as a hat merchant. Make hats, and sell them. |
| Toady: | This will happen. Your dreams are going to come true, isn't it great? |
| Rainseeker: | I can't wait. I want to put flowers on them ... and also feathers ... I want fancy hats. |
| Toady: | Let's see, when is that ... release, release, release ... Release 9 is when you're going to be guaranteed to be able to trade and sell things and so on. However release 8 lets you buy cottages and other properties, so we're getting into that whole ... you know, is the game going to be like one of those things more like Patrician, where you can be in multiple towns and have properties and move your caravans around, that sort of thinking ... we're been reading a lot about how those things are structured. The things that might be difficult for you to get into as an adventurer is that kind of production and retail thing where if there's a guild structure that gets put on top of this, which is very likely, then you might have a lot of trouble breaking in if you don't choose that as a character generation option because you weren't apprenticed early on ... |
| Rainseeker: | Yes, I was in the hat guild early on in my characters development. |
| Toady: | Yeah, so then you might have a chance at that kind of thing. But guilds aren't a foregone conclusion for every city either, and then you can just be the guy who makes necklaces and sits out on the street and sells them to people that walk buy on a little mat until you get chased off by the guards ... |
| Rainseeker: | 'Do you have a permit for those necklaces?' |
| Toady: | So we're hoping to give you some opportunities there. The big thing is going to be the trade orientated thing, like you'd be able to buy up certain goods from one town and then set up a warehouse in another town perhaps and sell to local vendors, for them to sell further if you don't want to set up a store yourself or are not able to. We'll be exploring that stuff in releases 8 and 9 and hopefully ... We haven't thought quite as much about how the economies would go in a village, because there were peddlers that kind of move from village to village, like 'I'll sell you a hammer and I'll buy your ... whatever, buy some vegetables or buy a cow you don't need and move it to the next town and sell it there' - I'm not sure they took livestock per se, but you know what I mean - and just being one of the local peddlers would be a lower status version of the larger caravan operations that you could engage in. But when it comes to actually making stuff and then selling it you'll just need to find an avenue for doing that, but hopefully we'll be getting into stuff beyond the trade, but the trade is going to be the main focus in those late releases. What else can you do as an adventurer ... |
| Capntastic: | Friends! |
| Toady: | Yeah, you'll have friends. That's the taverns, I guess taverns are all about making friends, no matter how it's done. |
| Rainseeker: | Friends and connections, hey? |
| Toady: | I don't think the tavern thing will be done until you can get into a fist fight with somebody and then just laugh it off with them afterward and then get drunk and then you both pass out missing half your teeth. |
| Capntastic: | There you go, the classic scenario. |
| Toady: | Then they could go out and kill a dragon with you, or you could die trying to do that anyway when you're still drunk. |
| Rainseeker: | You can't earn a dwarf's respect until you punch his teeth out. |
| Toady: | We'd have to start adding thing in like 'Dwarves grow their teeth back every two weeks' or something; the necessary things or they'll all end up looking like Tank Abbott or something, just toothless ... |
| Rainseeker: | They're well adapted to bar fights. Part of their evolution. |
| Toady: | That's right, they'll have redundant livers in their knees and stuff. |
| Rainseeker: | Alcohol is not toxic to them at all, actually. |
| Toady: | It'd be too bad if ... They have to get drunk, but maybe they ... We'll see. Because you want to have the dwarves be distinguished and yet recognizable. I guess their teeth just might be rooted a little more deeply than the average tooth so they don't get busted out quite as often, because they're going to be boxing each other in the face all the time. |
| Rainseeker: | Maybe they only slap in the bars, they don't punch. |
| Toady: | Dwarven slap fights ... it'll be too much, too much. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | Hey, welcome back to the third half of the show. We're going to be addressing our questions from Dwarf Fortress Talk listeners, and if you want to ask a question, Tarn, where do they go to ask? |
| Toady: | They go to the Dwarf Fortress General Discussion section of the forums and there's a stickied thread there and it will give you the exact format. |
| Rainseeker: | And feel free to ask as many questions as you like but please make them succinct, we get a lot of long rambling questions that are hard to ask. With that in mind, I will take the first one from Argembarger, I'm sorry if I slaughtered your forum name: 'What kinds of government types would be included in Dwarf Fortress, and will they have any effect on how the entity as a whole is managed?' |
| Toady: | Right now the different entities have different positions that have different responsibilities, and so right now we haven't really explored anything interesting, everything is more or less dictatorial now, to the extent that decisions are being made at all, and they aren't really, but when we start getting into the army arc stuff and maybe a bit with this caravan stuff it'll start to matter. At that point we're really open for any division of responsibilities that could possible come up. What we're starting with is just this whole warlord/king thing, but the elves already have distinctions in their government between the druids and queens and warrior princess type situation they have there, and each of those types of people would have different types of responsibilities. So you'd have conflicts at times between what each of those three people want to do, but they're essentially coequal branches of government there; that's the intention, I'm not saying any of this is happening now because we haven't got to anything relevant yet. If later on the humans start to branch out - because right now there's only one human entity, so it doesn't have any diversity at all - but when you start getting diversity there we start divvying up the responsibilities for both the sites and for the larger government, and if there ends up being, like we have know, those mayoral elections in dwarf mode, if you end up with a number of elected representatives and have several people that each have their own personalities weighing in or voting on actions that can be taken then we're all for that. It's not much more difficult to do than individuals making decisions, which like I say haven't been done much either, but when a single warlord can make a decision to do an attack or not then if you have to weigh the votes of five people and have a majority rule type situation then it wouldn't be that much more difficulty, you'd just have to watch out for the processor intensiveness of it; if you want a senate of a hundred different people then it starts to become a processor problem. But we don't really have the populations to support very large bodies, very large legislatures, but hopefully we'll start to have things like codified laws; whoever's making the laws having them written down, in a lot of the different societies. We're starting with the simple ones and hoping to spread out from there, no timelines of course on this, but it should start to come to a head in the army arc because that's when decision making is going to become very pressing, because they'll have very specific decisions they have to make. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Capntastic: | 'Does grass growth change in different biomes and circumstances? Is there any chance of us developing a precise formula for the pasture area needed, factoring in the chance of grass regrowing, trample, and grazing?' |
| Toady: | Right now there's no difference, it just comes in kind of randomly. It's more or less like when you see the raindrops falling; you also get a regrowth pattern that runs a little slower than that but more or less at random. You could calculate what's the average growth of a given block of grass, so theoretically you would be able to come up with a precise formula, however making grass growth rates change is certainly the kind of thing that sounds fair, especially if you want bamboo to grow very quickly, for instance, then it would and that would change all of the formulas. To the larger issue, if the larger issue is 'My animals are starving and I don't know how big to make my pasture' then I think that's probably the issue that should be addressed. We added without a lot of help for the player and for the starving animals you kind of have to manage ... you know 'Oh I see a starving animal, I'm going to place a new pasture/enlarge the existing pasture, move the animal if they have to be moved and then they can continue eating'. Having that be handled more automatically, or giving you some more notifications, that'd certainly be a reasonable thing ... making farmers able to do things without your absolute hand holding all the time is certainly a legitimate point if that's the one being made. Definitely, we'll need to do that. |
| Capntastic: | Just to be certain though: soil type and similar has no bearing on grass growth? |
| Toady: | No, no. Well, I mean it has to support grass growth at all, and then basically when it hits the square, when the regrowth hits the square it just adds twenty five percent to the grass length, and then when the animals are sitting on top of it they kind of mow off one percent as a time, it just goes 'one percent, one percent, one percent, one percent' down to zero, and then they move to a different square and start nibbling there. But then the old square could be hit and suddenly it's got twenty five percent ... and twenty five percent you can't tell, it just says 'sparse grass' again. So sparse grass will appear, and then it will become regular grass, and then dense grass, maybe with one doubling in there and it just drops these twenty fives all over the place. Then the people can go eat them, and the twenty fives become fifties and then seventy fives and one hundreds over time as the square is hit multiple times. It's kind of random and just grows back ... you know, over time. |
| Capntastic: | It's one of those things that isn't quite as complex as one might assume it to be at first glance ... for now. |
| Toady: | Yeah there are a whole lot of things like that. We have the dev page of course, where there's a whole farming improvement section where it's like 'Will we get into soil pH and the eight hundred other things that come up with farming?' and then at that point grass is obviously going to be a different little beastie there, but not right now, it's just dumping grass on you from the sky or whatever ... it's raining grass, little grass packets. |
| Rainseeker: | 'It rains grass here!' |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Capntastic: | And that should conclude this month's Dwarf Fortress Talk. |
| Rainseeker: | Bye! |
| Capntastic: | See ya! Thank you for sending in your questions, thank you for listening, thank you for being you. |
| Toady: | That's right, and thank mallocks ... |
| Capntastic: | Do we have any other thanks? |
| Toady: | Yeah, yeah, we're going to thank mallocks for being mallocks, for doing the transcript, and we're going to thank Ollieh for being Ollieh for doing the music, and we're going to thank Emily Menendez for being Emily Menendez for doing some other music. And we're going to thank Rainseeker and Capntastic and Toady One for being themselves as well, and the question and answer people and ... |
| Capntastic: | You're welcome. |
| Toady: | ... we're going to ... in my credits list I think I hit everybody. There's a new thing in the credits list that says 'Tell people to donate'. |
| Rainseeker: | 'Och, don't forget to donate!' |
| Toady: | There you go. |
| Capntastic: | I'd like to thank Dwarf Fortress fan Jeremy for being a fan and being named Jeremy. |
| Rainseeker: | And I'd like to thank everyone who donated this past month. Good job! |
| Capntastic: | Keep it up. |
| Toady: | Yeah it reminds me of this flower place that's in town here where it has this little billboard that says, you know 'If your name is John come in today for a free rose', so I guess we'll just pick a name every episode and thank them. So all the Dwarf Fortress fans named Jeremy, this time around, thanks. |
| Capntastic: | I was thinking about just having it be Jeremy every month, but your idea actually might be more productive. |
| Rainseeker: | I'd also like to thank Scamps for personally hurting Tarn. Someone's got to do it. |
| Toady: | I think Scamps was ... He's sitting on the floor there being remarkably calm and just chilling out, I've been happy with Scamps's performance this time around. |
| Rainseeker: | Good job Scamps. |
| Capntastic: | Go Scamps! |
| Ollieh: | (musical postlude) |