Dwarf Fortress Talk #15 Mini, with Rainseeker, Capntastic and Toady One, transcribed by mallocks
| Rainseeker: | Hey everybody, welcome to Dwarf Fortress Talk. This is Rainseeker and I have with me Capntastic! |
| Capntastic: | Hello! |
| Rainseeker: | And Mr Tarn Adams, also known as ... |
| Toady: | Mr Tarn, also known as Toady One. |
| Rainseeker: | Very good. Good job, you remembered your avatar name. |
| Toady: | That's right. |
| Rainseeker: | We are doing a mini cast today. We are doing it because we have not much time and we wanted to put it out before our get together, our Dwarf Fortress meet up, which is going to be on the ... |
| Toady: | 16th, the Saturday. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, Saturday. It's going to be on Saturday the 16th. And we're encouraging people to ... |
| Capntastic: | Show up! |
| Rainseeker: | ... hang out outside of that, but that Saturday will consist of going to an actual cave, that has not been mined but is more in its natural form. It's going to be a lot of fun, after that we'll have the meet up. That'll be in the afternoon, I forget ... what time are we starting? |
| Toady: | 12:30. |
| Rainseeker: | 12:30. We'll start at 12:30. |
| Capntastic: | There's going to be food! |
| Rainseeker: | There's going to be food, yep. And check out the forum link that will be next to the posting of this podcast. There's still time to register, so register quickly. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, we need an approximate headcount. |
| Rainseeker: | Yes. We need to know if you're coming or not, I guess. Well, we don't care if you're not coming, just if you're coming. You can tell we're great planners. This is the first time we've done it and hopefully - well at least the first time I've done it, we've done it in Seattle before - but hopefully this will not be the last, so good luck, and please come. |
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| Rainseeker: | On a separate note, Tarn we just wanted to talk briefly about what's happened over the past month, I guess. |
| Toady: | I've been working on ... I posted those town pictures so people can finally see what was going on down at the tile level, so we have little shops with little humans and dwarves and elves cohabitating. There should be the occasional goblin, I haven't seen one yet, I guess they're getting sick of them stealing all their food or whatever goblins do in town. But we have shops, so we have all those items laid out and I've been slowly putting in donation animals, and I just put up a market picture and ... ow! There's a cat here as usual, causing trouble. But the markets have the little peoples in them selling food and so on, so I just need to finish up the buying and selling rewrites so that the markets don't need their chest or whatever. It used to have to have a little table and chest where money would teleport onto the table and then you'd walk over to the table and get your change ... That's all going to be gone, and we're going to move over to something that hopefully is a little less of a hassle. |
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| Toady: | That'll be the end of markets and shops for this release and that will leave us with some fairly empty dungeons and catacombs and also a few bugs with the current night creatures, and also a list of other night creatures that ... we're hoping to get to a few more of them. It's all basically just fun stuff we're adding to now to make sure that the cities don't feel like too much of a wasteland of nothing to do. I mean, there's a bunch of a shops and things but if you talk to people they would just send you out to go kill the same old bandits and so on for the most part now. So we'd like to have the dungeons under the cities be ... It's not going to be quite up to - or even perhaps close to - a standard roguelike level of fun diving down into those dungeons, but we're going to be working towards making it that fun. |
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| Rainseeker: | So are the dungeons going to be for your starting adventurer? Or are they more advanced? |
| Toady: | You can go in and because you're not in this position where you have to go down to the fortieth level and get an artifact or whatever, and you can leave, you can stay down there as long as you can survive and then you can try and leave, and then you'd have other places to go and things to do. So if you're at a dungeon and there are a few bandits and you can kill them and there's kobolds running all over the place and you can kill them, and then you find ratmen and rodentmen and you kill some of them, and you're finding things that the bandits and kobolds had stolen, and you're finding some bodies of people who tried to do what you're doing, and getting a few new objects and so on - so a very standard sort of thing going on down there, hopefully it kind of makes sense, the things that are down there - but if something like a jabberer had moved in, a jabberer's a giant underground monster, and you just wouldn't be ready to contest that then you should run away and hopefully you can make it away. So some discretion should allow you to go into those places right from the beginning and you'll get credit for killing things like the bandit leaders as usual and so on, so people should be happy ... I mean I guess right now their quest reward is just the same thing, which is just increasing your reputation so you can sleep in people's houses and so you can hire more people, but it's all just right at a starting point right now, because we haven't worked with those dungeons at all. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
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| Toady: | The tombs are their own kind of dungeon outside of the towns, and there are no quests associated to tombs at this point because if the mummy is undisturbed no-one knows that you need to kill it, and you're going to be the one disturbing the mummy so ... I mean it could happen in world generation - it doesn't happen yet - that a mummy becomes disturbed by a grave robber and we may or may not get to that. If we don't get to that then there won't be any quests associated to the tombs, but you can always just go to them and go steal things and so on, and risk traps and the undead and so on. Those are fairly large dungeons themselves, especially the biggest tombs. There are some very small tombs as well, there are even little one room tombs where you walk in and there's the central burial chamber and some items scattered around ... |
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| Rainseeker: | And if you disturb it will the guy be like 'Hey dude, could you put that back?' |
| Toady: | Not right now. Right now they don't have any tolerance for your crap and they immediately start raising bodies and cursing you with bad luck for the rest of your life. |
| Rainseeker: | So it doesn't matter, it really doesn't matter ... is there a chance that it will not raise from the dead, or does it always raise from the dead? |
| Toady: | Right now there's one type of curse and that curse is universal but that's just because I have it in my example file, where I just wanted to show people how interactions work. We're probably going to move that over to the random generator and then at that point you're not going to be sure what you're going to get and you're not always going to disturb the undead. So it's risks and chances you're taking ... that's hopefully how it should be. |
| Rainseeker: | Right, right. So maybe you could just take some stuff and leave and nothing will happen and you're like 'Phew!' and then maybe you become a goat. |
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| Toady: | It's true. Becoming a goat is always a possibility. I'm trying to remember if there were any others ... The necromancer towers which I just described in my Future of the Fortress post as zombie piņatas because they don't have interesting maps yet, you just kind of open them up and the zombies pour out of them and there's the necromancers behind them rereaising limbs at you and stuff as you have them off. It'll just sit there and churn at you until you kill him ... |
| Rainseeker: | Do you get reputation for doing that? |
| Toady: | If you kill the necromancer, if you manage to kill the necromancer himself rather than just his buddies. |
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| Rainseeker: | And can a necromancer become a night creature? |
| Toady: | So what kinds of night creature are there? If a necromancer doesn't leave and make a tower and there's a werewolf attack then the necromancer could get werewolfed ... Because the werewolf curse is very broad right now, it affects almost everything as long as it can thing, and that's kind of a bad thing right now because if you had like a thinking rock golem or something it could turn into a werewolf and that's just weird. But if you've got ... yeah, so the necromancer can become a werewolf. I don't think the necromancer can become a vampire because it doesn't really do secondary conversions that much, it just does the profaning conversions right now. What other night creatures were there ... A troll ... a troll could, before the necromancer goes and makes his tower - trolls don't attack necromancer towers - but if a troll kidnaps the necromancer leaves and makes his tower then you could have a necromancer get converted into a spouse of the night creature. |
| Rainseeker: | And then he would still have the powers. |
| Toady: | He would still have the power to raise the dead, but he'd also be reduced to a beast attacker at that point. So what I think would happen is that the necromancer having been converted into the spouse of a night troll would not creature a tower and wouldn't creature an army of the undead ... I think, I haven't tried this, they might do that. But what would certainly happen is that you would be going on a quest in adventure mode, say, and when you went to attack the troll's cave, there's all these bodies sitting around in the troll's cave, those bodies would be raised to attack you. |
| Rainseeker: | That would be hilarious. Okay everyone, community, official announcement. I want to know if this has happened to you, so let us know when you see this. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it would be very rare but you could be attacked by lunch all of a sudden, the bodies sitting around ... the thing. I don't know if ... it puts bodies in the cauldron sometimes, I don't remember what happens if you raise a body out of a cauldron or if they can do that, because it'd be funny to have them all crawl out of the cauldron at you. It's like you came just before suppertime ... Any other night creatures? I think those are the ones, and the ones that get added in the future, I don't think there'll be much of a chance for those to ... because they're mostly going to be ghosts and things they won't be conversion based, so I think that's as far as the necromancer can go, unless the necromancer comes back from the dead. So say the necromancer, if we put in the stalker type ghosts and the necromancer was captured and punished and hanged or something, then you could have the necromancer come back as a stalker type ghost when we get to those. I think the way those are going to work in general is that there's going to be punishments for things like bandits, and so I think that would certainly open up some more possibilities for multiple conversions. I don't think you can have a troll and a werewolf at the same time ... |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah if that happens enough time where you're executing people and they come back as ghosts, you'd think you'd start just putting them in stockades and then letting them live their full lives. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it should be fairly rare. The thing you have to consider I guess when you think of these countermeasures is people had countermeasures like that, they believed that this stuff happened but they still put themselves at risk, they still executed criminals and so on, it's just they might bury them upside down or whatever the superstition is to stop them coming back. But they still believed it was happening and they didn't always do it correctly so whatever countermeasures they have won't stop it from happening. So it's really hard to say what an ETA is on this thing but we're basically just going now until it's fun enough to release, and it's certainly not now; if you go down into a dungeon they're very barren. |
| Capntastic: | Like Oblivion! |
| Rainseeker: | Shh shh shh, that doesn't exist. |
| Capntastic: | I've been playing it lately. I don't know, it's got ... |
| Toady: | That's right, there's another one coming I guess, there's all sorts of games coming out, I'm sure. |
| Capntastic: | You can dual wield spells, you can have like a fire spell in your left hand and then like a healing spell in your right hand. |
| Toady: | And you can have ... |
| Rainseeker: | I want an oil spell in one hand and a fire spell in the other hand. |
| Capntastic: | Mod it in! |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
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| Capntastic: | So for the towns, I know that the minimap exists, is it going to be able to tell you if you're in a market district or residential area or whatever? |
| Toady: | Yeah, so there's the really crappy minimap that currently exists where you can hardly tell what's going in a village and in a city it would be too small to use. So, what we're planning to do, and what we should get to as part of this making the game usable, fun, etcetera, is a map that like travel mode. These cities are big in travel mode, right, if you're travelling around there can be a seventeen by seventeen blob; these would be the biggest capital cities. So if you take that seventeen by seventeen blob the problem with that is that each block can have about eight buildings in it, so you can't represent it with one character, we were thinking of blowing it up three times or so, and that would make ... each block would have a little three by three of ASCII which is not necessarily going to let you show every single building but it would let you show most of what's in a given block, but more importantly would let you show the street connections accurately. Then you can navigate on that map and it should reflect everything that's there. There might need to be ... it still would have a little bit too little space but we'll think of something, so you can see where the sewer entrances you've found and so on are. You might have to have a few different view modes or something for it, but it should be able to show almost all of the shops and the entrances of the dungeons, where the market is; that kind of thing. You should be able to walk around on it like in the travel mode, so you'll be able to ... We haven't really done the navigation, we were thinking of having - when you get quests to go down into the sewers - someone could tell you where the nearest entrance is and it would tell you that you're supposed to go down this street and then go over this way and then it's in this alleyway or whatever. |
| Capntastic: | Are there going to be street signs and stuff? |
| Toady: | I don't know if ... I think the historical precedent would be that there would be no street signs, but that doesn't mean it can't show you ... like if someone's giving you good directions it might just show you on your map the way to get there. I don't know, it could be like Google Maps where you have a list of, like 'Go south on this street, and go south on this street' and you're checking them off as you do them or something. I'm not sure, it's got to be usable more than anything, it's got to be ... So we're going to mess with that, but this zoomed in map is going to be the main component of that. If it just shows you ... the road network is connected enough that if it just shows where you are and it shows where you want to go you'll have no trouble trying to find your way there, so it should be fine. |
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| Toady: | Then you can be walking on the travel map and hopefully you'll be able to get accosted on the street and stuff as you're on your way. So it should be fun. |
| Rainseeker: | 'Copper for a poor man, milord?' |
| Toady: | Yeah, the first accosting we were going to add, and this might come in even tonight or something, is walking through the market and having people trying to hawk their wares to you. They've get all their ... |
| Capntastic: | 'Buy my prickle berries!' |
| Rainseeker: | 'Buy my mystic sword! Buy my mystic sword, it's good!' |
| Toady: | The worst part is going to be walking by the meat market, because they're going to be like 'Buy my gorilla lungs!' and all the other horrible things we have in the game that get chopped out of the bodies. |
| Rainseeker: | Yep. Chopped dragonfly lung. |
| Toady: | Dragonfly brains and stuff or whatever. Fly brains, a whole barrel full of fly brains or whatever they've got, it's awful. |
| Rainseeker: | 'Some trinkets for your lady milord?' |
| Toady: | You're like 'Yeah!' and he pours a jar of goop into your hands. It's like 'These are mussel brains, I didn't know mussels had brains', 'Well it's the ganglion or whatever'. |
| Rainseeker: | It'll be awesome. |
| Capntastic: | Are there going to be different types of, like, stalls and tents and carpets, different displays and all that? |
| Toady: | Sometime hopefully. Right now they go for bins and barrels and kind of hang out by them. We were trying to think of how to do stalls and tents and things but I just didn't have a quick way to throw those together, like some new types of wall or something like that ... |
| Rainseeker: | Posts or whatever. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's tricky, so I didn't jump in and do it. It'll possibly wait for the rugs and tapestries and things that will come with the manor rewrite which is release 3, that'll give us a lot more stuff like that to work with, throwing carpets on the ground and stuff. |
| Rainseeker: | Yes, have them be cursed. Flying carpet ... |
| Toady: | Flying carpets. I wonder if your dwarves will then have carpets ... carpeted fortress. |
| Rainseeker: | I will most certainly put carpet in my fortress, it's much warmer that way. Of course you have mold problems them I'm sure, it could be damp. That would be bad, then you'd have to have a profession for, you know, moldicide. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah it's called a chef. |
| Rainseeker: | There you go, that's right, he could have a vacuum that vacuums up the carpets, some kind of creature that does it for you perhaps. |
| Toady: | Yeah I guess they could go from zero to sci-fi pretty fast if we have creatures vacuuming your carpet for you. |
| Rainseeker: | Well somehow, like something that just lives off of mold spores I guess, like chickens or something, I don't know. Chickens eat bugs, don't they? |
| Toady: | Yeah, although I'm not sure that chickens would be good for your carpets, because everything has to go someplace. |
| Rainseeker: | That's right, and then you'd have something that ate what the chickens left behind, and then you'd have something that ate what they left behind, and pretty soon you're up to gorillas patrolling your fortress because they're important to the ecosystem of your fortress. |
| Toady: | Yeah, although the gorilla might be the end of that chain, I remember when I was ... |
| Rainseeker: | Maybe I'll just leave carpets out. |
| Toady: | ... I was doing a psychology experiment thingy when I was in college, an animal behavior class, and they had us go to the zoo and watch the animals, and let's just say the gorilla I was observing wouldn't leave anything behind on your carpet because he just went immediately and recycled it, so ... the gorilla's a good end point I think, for that chain. |
| Rainseeker: | He was like, 'Ooh, a blue recycling bin, I shall put some paper into it. That's exactly what I'm going to do!' |
| Toady: | Something a bit more crude than that, but the gorilla doesn't have all the tools that we have to work with so sometimes they just have to improvise. I had to put that in the checkbox on my little checklist too of the behaviors I saw, and I put that in the other column and wrote a little note. |
| Rainseeker: | We appreciate you guys joining us for our mini cast, we are going to try to keep this short so that we can actually put it out! Thank you to everybody who participated in this podcast, such as mallocks for transcription, and Ollieh and Emily Menendez for the music, and everyone else who participated. |
| Capntastic: | Thank you! |
| Toady: | Thank you. |
| Rainseeker: | Thanks to everyone who gave money! |
| Toady: | Yeah, thanks for everyone who's supporting the game. |
| Rainseeker: | Have a good day, and we hope to see you at the meet up, if not, see you on the flipside. |
| Toady: | Yeah, the next one. |
| Ollieh: | (musical postlude) |