Bay 12 Games: Dwarf Fortress Talk

Dwarf Fortress Talk #9 Extra Hour, with Capntastic and Toady One, transcribed by mallocks

Toady:	Alright, supposedly being recorded ... there it goes. So, what are your favourite parts of the new dev pages.
Capntastic:	I like the colour scheme. I know it took some doing to work that out, what with the lighter colours and darker colours.
Toady:	Yeah I don't know what I'm going to do with partially ... I like colours on there. The old one had a bunch of colours in the end, and this one ... I'm not sure how much use partially done is going to get or if there are going to be different stages of partially done.
Capntastic:	On the list there were different shades of blue for how close to being done it was.
Toady:	Yeah, I don't know how accurate those ever were ... There's always a problem with colours for being done, because there are two metrics for something being finished: there's how finished is it in parts - how many pieces of it have you done - and what's the estimated time of arrival. Estimated time of arrival is something I don't do very well obviously ... really bad with that. So the partially done, it's like ... it seems like for everything that's partially done it should more be broken into having a new subsection with finished things and unfinished things or something. But I guess partially done will suffice, if I'm just like 'well I pretty much did logs to do constructions, but I'm not quite done' so I just made it purple. Hopefully I won't have to use it for a while, there are some vague things on the list though, that will probably always be partially done. Well the whole game's always like that, I'm sure we're not done with ... anything I made blue probably actually should be purple or something. Well maybe not, 'ability to butcher...' well, no 'ability to butcher corpses with an appropriate tool' is obviously not done yet, because there's not a lot of skill interaction with that and there's a lot of things you can do with it. But you have the ability to do it in a basic way. That'll be cool ... This whole crafting thing, it's in dwarf mode but adventure mode has been lacking there forever. There are going to be a lot of things we don't end up doing, like ... Well, it's just that your equipment doesn't matter nearly as much as how skilled you are with things in the end, whereas generally in those RPG games the equipment has these massive bonuses that get more and more massive until you're working with tenths of a percent so you can go from 99.7 to 99.8 effectiveness, or something. We're just not going to have anything comparable to that, but it should be cool. (aside to Scamps) What are you doing? What are you doing you little fat kid, little fat baby Scamps rolling on the ground, scratching the keyboard. Maybe your finger should not be on F8, I don't know what F8 does in this program. What does F8 ... (end aside)
Capntastic:	I've got to say I'm really excited about the ... things you would think to be excited about, like the ground debris, sticks and underbrush ... you're like 'oh man, you find a rats nest under a tree and then kick it and rats come out'.
Toady:	The main thing there is up here in a lot of the parts of the Pacific north west where there's been logging recently and the trees ... there's not a whole lot of old growth forest left where I'm at, so there's a bunch of small trees, and when there are small trees there's a crapload of underbrush, and it's hard to go places; a lot of places you have to go around giant bushes and all kind of blackberries and that kind of stuff, you just walk through ... I don't want that to be super annoying, but right now in adventure mode there's a few scattered trees in the forest and they're little teeny trees but they somehow prevented everything but a few strawberry bushes from growing. And there are certain points where you should be walking through this brush and getting scratches all over your body, and mosquitoes ...
Capntastic:	Mosquitoes and malaria. This is going to be so fun. 'You feel sweat trickle on your forehead' ...
Toady:	We don't have sweat in the game. I think IVAN sweat, we're missing it. Sweat was a dev goal at one point, and it would be easy to do with the secretion now that we've got secretions, but it would need to be an energy linked secretion which we don't have. It's pretty quick to add sweat though, just got to make sure it's not too annoying.
Capntastic:	I like the idea of making stuff out of stones and sticks, you can sharpen a stick, you can sharpen a rock, you can tie them together with a piece of rope you make, then you've got a stick on a rock and use that to chop down a tree, then you have a really big stick ...
Toady:	Yeah. I guess one of the things we're going to have to add to butchery products is the sinews you get when you take out tendons, because I guess a lot of the typing of spearheads and stuff you do with sinews or some of those things. I guess plants can be involved, and hide, like raw hide strips, leather strips as well, but sinew seems quite popular. Because you've always got sinew and what are you going to do with ... I've never heard of ... it's possible someone has taken a bunch of sinew and made it into a cloth, but it seems like it's mostly just for bow strings and tying stuff on. I think that would be good when you butcher a deer that you can also tack on a few extra spearheads and stuff because you take the deer sinew and tie things ...
Capntastic:	If the deer has antlers can you use those things as well?
Toady:	It uses the exact same functions as dwarf mode, so you'd have whatever horns and stuff you get there, and then when you make one of those stone chisels then you should be able to carve horns shortly; in a development connects to other developments sense, not necessarily in an ETA sense. But it's on the list because it's under ... in dwarf mode when you'll be able to specify specific jobs like 'I want to take the horn and I don't want to just make horn crafts, I want you to make a little statue of the king'. So when you're in adventure mode you should be able to pull up the exact same screen and say 'I want to take this horn, and I want to carve pictures of my pet horse' and then you can leave it in your little hut, and have little carvings that you make of the animals that you've met. Maybe you could make it a carving of the deer you just killed.
Capntastic:	Then you've got the whole Shawshank Redemption thing going on where you're making chess sets and digging holes.
Toady:	That's right. Well it's going to be awesome ... we were thinking with the board games, when there's board games with pieces that they play ... In dwarf mode it would probably be like a craft, that's not every single piece, just because in dwarf mode you don't want a lot of pieces. But in adventure mode you could have the pieces and then it'd be cool to have your own Tacticus set or whatever.
Capntastic:	Yeah! With the hats and everything.
Toady:	That's right. Then you'd go to the tournament with your Tacticus set, move your little pieces around on the board, it'd be awesome. So starting with the basics, just being able to carve crafts, and then being able to carve specific ones, and being able to make the functional objects as well, rather than just the decorative ones. So it should be a lot of fun, and I think because we've put some time into it in dwarf mode and will continue to do that, adventure mode should pretty quickly have a passable object creation system or crafting system or however you want to say it. It should be passable pretty rapidly because we've got a framework already, although in adventure mode there's just a lot more tools that you're going to end up working. Probably going to have backpack full of crap.
Capntastic:	I just want to make a caveman world. A world full of cavemen and I'm the only one that knows how to make torches.
Toady:	Yeah it would be cool to go in and just remove everything from the entities, remove all their swords and all that stuff, then you'd just have these little huts everywhere and people with no objects, and then you could go and tell them the secret of making sharp stone.
Capntastic:	And you'll be able to make huts, won't you.
Toady:	Yeah ... It's one of those things where ultimately I'm not really satisfied with using the dwarf mode system in adventure mode for making a cabin or whatever, because you build it tile by tile and it's kind of weird ... if you imagine a Lincoln Log cabin, building that wall or whatever. But it isn't the end of the world to do it that way, it's really fine to start that way and maybe keep it that way forever. If we're eventually laying down entire long logs and building up walls three tiles at a time by stacking logs then that's fine, but its functional to do it the other way. And then yeah, you'll be able to make little walls and I guess doors will have to wait until we know how carpentry is going to work in adventure mode ... which probably won't involve a workshop but will just involve having tools and then if you have a table accessible then you would have skill bonuses to making better stuff. I'm not sure in the end what kind of tools are going to be involved, mainly because I'm massively ignorant on all of this stuff.
Capntastic:	You'll have to get some carpenters on retainer to help you fill these parts in.
Toady:	Yeah, I just use the internet which is iffy as hell ... and I use suggestion threads of course, I'm sure there are some good suggestion threads with actual carpenters, because there's lots of people that do woodworking. My father's heavily into that stuff, it's just he never managed to pass a thing on to me about practical matters. I remember, I've probably said it before, but I remember he got me this AM radio kit once, you're supposed to build an AM radio, and I was like eleven years old and I never even opened it, and it was a present too ... it's just how much I'm not that kind of person. It was really rude in retrospect, kind of insanely rude. But we did build computers, but we didn't build AM radios. We saw the computer, my brother and I, as a valuable thing, because you could play games on it, but the AM radio ... we didn't listen to a lot of radio, and so it just was completely uninteresting, and he got us all these circuit boards and stuff, trying to get us into anything practical. The reason he started us up on computers was so we'd know how to use computers, but he never expected us to actually do games later in life. It's not a disappointment necessarily, I wouldn't say he's disappointed with how we're doing but it was not ... if he had a plan, it wasn't that. So I don't know a damn thing, that's what I'm trying to say, I don't know a damn thing about carpentry or masonry or any of that stuff. I'm just going to wing it and take suggestions, and then you should end up with that stuff. The main reason I bring that up is not for tables but for doors, because you're not going to have a door until we've got doors, and so when you make your little cabin it's going to be open to the environment which is not the ideal situation I'm sure.
Capntastic:	What if you put a curtain there, like you put a rug ... some beads, get a little gypsy camp going on ...
Toady:	It's perfectly valid. In fact one of the things that the game is sorely lacking is a tent, or any kind of high building, there's just nothing like that, and it's because they're all square, so you won't be able to build a tent ... I guess just pitching it you'd need it to suddenly make a three by three structure, with walls and a little room inside, it's kind of the limitations of the tiles that make them a little weird, and then there are larger structures like that. And there are kind of weird tools - when I say weird it's not like a knife or something - where you've got to take sticks and make a frame to stretch skins on ... that should be interesting, figuring that stuff out, it would give you more fun things to do when you're tanning hides or scraping hides ... could stretch them out and they can dry for periods of time ... wet and dry and all that stuff.
Capntastic:	It does seem that there's going to be ... I think you mentioned some sort of time skip ability with growing crops, the ability to make time pass quickly which wouldn't be like the sleep command.
Toady:	Yeah, it's one of those things ... it's not quite like a holy grail of time travel that's impossible, but it's one of those tricky things we've avoided. One of the reasons the sleep command works in the ridiculous way it does is because you don't have to abstract time if it's just pressing period for you eight thousand times. So it's going to be a little tricky, but you have to have it, you have to be able to skip a season and let the world deal with itself. That's one of those things; there are a few things on the dev pages that are like little walls that we're going to crash into. Entity populations is one of the ones that'll take a while, abstracting time is another one, so I kind of want to plan my development around those, and not start them so soon that we don't have a lot of the serious bug fixes out of the way, so that I can work for a couple of weeks on entity populations and people aren't going to be - I'm not sure it'll take a couple of weeks, but just theoretically working a few weeks on entity populations - and then not have people being like 'well I wish you would have made it so that when my dwarves make turtle crafts they don't turn into fireballs and destroy my military' or whatever bugs are still there.
Capntastic:	Yeah, you've got to fix that one.
Toady:	There are a ton of serious problems, so for the next while still we're going to be doing it like we're doing it here, where we take out a few things like butchering corpses, just blue out a few things and then go back to the bugs. The bug list is getting shorter at least - not overall maybe, I'm not sure about that - but in terms of serious bugs; there are fewer. So we will eventually catch up, and when we catch up then we can start massive amounts of work on the development list and it'll be really cool because things will happen quickly. A lot of these things are not hard, this is just going to happen. I feel pretty good about everything on the list, there are some vague things at the bottom about mechanisms where we haven't made decisions and I can't say how long that kind of stuff will take or where that's going to go, but we're going to whip a lot of the stuff out too, so it should be cool.
Capntastic:	So you'll be able to plant grain and then it'll grow, and then you can crush it into flower and make bread.
Toady:	Yeah, I think all that's there. We were thinking about what plants we wanted to be able to use, and you can start with growing strawberries or digging in the soil underground and growing plump helmets if you get seeds from the dwarves. Then you don't have to worry about anything but harvesting the plants after you pass time quickly, but if you're going to make a millstone or a quern then you'd be able to grind your plants, and that would give you flowers, sugar, dye ... I don't know what other grindables we have in Dwarf Fortress but there's plenty of grindables. Then being able to cook with that ... hopefully eventually being able to cook is going to open a lot of doors for making the Dwarf Fortress kitchen more interesting too. Then there are other crops like cotton style crops where you actually end up making clothes eventually, we haven't accounted for that yet. When we get the entity populations if you don't want to make your own quern or whatever and grind your own stuff you should just be able to take your grain to a mill that's in one of the entity populations and then you'd probably have to pay some kind of millage fee or however that stuff works ...
Capntastic:	That's where the term millionaire comes from actually.
Toady:	I guess billionaire comes from the town bill ... then there's the town trill, the town quadrill ... That's where you can start getting into tyranny too, where it's like 'you must use the town mill, if you're in this county you have to use the town mill, you can't use your own grindstone and you have to pay the fee' and so on, and the peasants can get angry when the fees get too high and you can have peasant rebellions and all that kind of stuff. I guess the whole system can thrive on crazy ass taxes, like things that end with '-age', like millage, and ...
Capntastic:	Harbourage ...
Toady:	I don't know ... if you're renting there's rentals, but I don't know if people call it rentage. It seems like it should be called rentage. After all these '-age' things ... I've been bumping into all this mass of '-age' terms when I've been looking some of this stuff up ... So it's hard to say exactly, the grey area that I don't think has too too much up on the dev pages is as we do the entity populations and sites sprawl it's like, what does site sprawl actually consist of? We know there are going to be markets, we know there are going to be inns, we know there are going to be farms ... but there should be a lot of other crap out there, what is it going to be, what is the frequency of it going to be. We're just going to play that by ear, as what we need. With the entity populations we're in a position now where we can make decisions like do we want a realistic number of farmers? Because previously when the world was just historical figures the number of farmers could not be something like ninety percent because that is not interesting at all, you would look at the history and you'd be like 'he farmed, and his farmer farmed, and his mother farmed, and his brother farmed, and all of his children farmed' and you just read the legend of farming ... and it's just not effective use of your historical figure budget when you can have up to twenty thousand if eighteen thousand of them are farmers, that's a memory sink. But now if you have entity populations you can have large numbers of farmers - if you retain something like ten thousand historical figures and you want to make ninety thousand people in the world - then you can do that. The question is is that the right decision now or is it still the wrong decision? And I'm not sure. When you're wondering through land that's being worked, like you're in the plainsy part of the world and there's the human capital and a bunch of human sprawl, if you're walking by farm after farm ... it's not necessarily a bad thing because you know you can go somewhere interesting if you want to, just don't be here, and it would be cool to see people working the fields and so on. And it would give you soldiers and give you peasant revolt people, having those numbers sitting around idly so that they can be levied and brought out to fight or they can raise up and attack credibly. So it might be that the guiding ... we have this guiding principle that we use in Dwarf Fortress: if we don't have compelling reasons not to make it realistic then using realism in the scenario tends to drive all the emergent behaviour the right way, so that using proper physical numbers and using proper personality systems just tends to push things in the right way. So using proper numbers of farmers probably is a good idea, unless there's a compelling reason not to do it, and the one that existed before of historical figures being used up does not exist anymore. There is the problem though that the people that you meet should be kind of interesting in a way and if you're talking to farmers who have fake generated history through the world generations events associated to entity populations instead of their own family histories then it is a less interesting world to be in. But that's if you're talking to those people, and it might be that they would just funnel you towards the interesting people in their neighbourhood. Because it's not like all the historical figures are just going to live in the capital now, they'll be spread around, there'll be important people in most villages, they just won't be everybody. But it is a cost to pay, and you can only hide it so much with fake historical events. We'll see, it's kind of a necessary change overall just to get army battles working right, because you need people or else it's just the tribal headhunting warfare like ten on ten the whole time and that's not good enough. I hope people aren't too disappointed with that change, but I figure it would be more me than anybody else, because I'm quite interested in - Ow! - getting the correct ... That was Scamps, I guess I should describe. Scamps is up on the desk, he's lying down and he's been slowly moving his body forward and pushing the keyboard off the desk, and now I'm holding the keyboard in my left hand and then he reached out and started clawing my knuckle. So Mister Cat just needs to be moved a little bit and maybe he won't be so troubled. (aside to Scamps) You are a troubled boy. Spirits of your dark past haunt you and cause you to do bad bad things. Don't move my things, my things are not for throwing off the table. What are you gnawing on that CD case for? That's not for gnawing, no sir. (end aside)
Capntastic:	What CD is it?
Toady:	Backup Dwarf Fortress, thrown in a CD case and transport CD cases. They're all over the place, some of them get transported, some of them stick around, and he's gnawing on one of them. (aside of Scamps) What are you gnawing for? Maybe a little less gnawing, how about that, how about that strategy? That's a good strategy. You've got little strategies in your life that you follow, and most of the ones you pick are quite poor. That's right Mister. (end aside) Of course he gets all the attention that he wants, because he does bad things all the time. Bad things all the time and he doesn't really get any punishment. What kind of punishment can you give a baby cat? You can lock him out of the room but then he's just going to scratch the door for ten minutes.
Capntastic:	So I noticed fishing isn't on the list.
Toady:	It's true, it's true.
Capntastic:	That's a grave oversight.
Toady:	It is a grave oversight. How many oversights were there in adventure mode? There were three really bad ones I think, there's no medical skills on the list, there's no gathering of plants on the list and the one you just brought up which I didn't even remember until you said it: fishing. It's atrocious. I'm not sure they'll appear there, but they could happen, you know.
Capntastic:	Well if you can harvest plants that's similar to gathering ...
Toady:	Yeah, it's quite similar. It might even use the same mechanism, and then it would just magically happen, people would suddenly magically be able to do something that I forgot to put in. But we could do it earlier, when we do the underbrush and stuff. We might need to add a crapload of poison berries when we do that too. 'Here's a bright red berry!' or even worse 'there's a little white mushroom on the ground ... are you going to eat the little white mushroom?'
Capntastic:	That's like all you need, just make the whole game out of that. Mushroom Avoider.
Toady:	Mushroom Avoider ... that's a good game. Someone needs to make a Flash game.
Capntastic:	Plus that would fit into the whole gathering exotic plants ...
Toady:	Yeah because there's a whole thing of adding random plants, random metals, random vermin, random wilderness creatures, random entity creatures and being able to pick up a mushroom and it's just like 'you don't know what the hell that is ... you might know about it if you picked some herbalism type skill from your embark, then you would have your entity's knowledge and you might start with some basic knowledge, but if you get far afield and go off into the savage wilderness and there are new things then experimenting with your mouth as you normally do in a roguelike if they don't provide you with some identification mechanism, experimenting with your mouth might just end up badly for you. We have all kinds of poison effects now so you could just end up having your nerves blasted and unable to breathe. There are a lot of nasty mushrooms out there, I know there are mushrooms around here that will just kill you. You're not supposed to eat them.
Capntastic:	Make the descriptions as fun as possible, though.
Toady:	Yeah we can add more poison effects. I'm sure people will look forward to having positive and negative effects in syndromes added.
Capntastic:	Can you not even just mix them? So like 'yeah you broke out in hives but you can run really fast'.
Toady:	'You see visions ...' It'd be interesting to improve on the whole ... I don't know if it was originally Nethack or one of the other games that had that whole hallucinatory effect when you eat certain things, it changed your entire screen into gobbledegook and you'd use the look command and they'd all be nonsense. It would be interesting to take that mechanism half way and just create more persistent but fake illusions, so there could be a person that you're talking to who isn't there, who then just turns into a snake and slithers away, and you're like 'what's going on here?' and it would all be fake, because you're just kind of stoned. But when we get magic in the game, artifacts or whatever, I don't know, it's one of those things where you want to do it sooner rather than later but later is the default setting right now for that. But it any case when things like that can actually happen to you then you wouldn't know. And it would be good to be confused, it would be good to have a game when you're confused about reality, because then that makes magic seem more real. Eating the mushrooms, we could start that. I remember when we were kids Zach and I had a D&D adventure where he had a thing all planned out, just some standard thing with some goblins or whatever - I'm not really sure though because we never got to see the actual plan he had made - because in the beginning of the thing where I was out in the woods in something, I just decided to eat a mushroom, and he took advantage of that, and just made the game get more and more strange as we went along, and totally tossed his script and was just messing with me the whole time and didn't tell me why until the end. So hopefully we can do the same thing. Make it all come apart at the seams, but not in a completely random way but just sometimes you're seeing things or understanding them in a different way, and hopefully you'll have a parchment so that you can write down your experiences and become famous.
Capntastic:	Will character generation be changed up a bit?
Toady:	We had that one we were talking about before with the whole heroes and demigods and starting scenarios and that kind of thing, that came up in a Dwarf Fortress Talk previously, and it's a matter of when to start that because the more meat we put on the bone in adventure mode the more credible start scenarios we can have, right? So once you're able to farm then you'd be able to start in that kind of situation, and once there are more magical effects starting as a demigod would be easier. But that doesn't mean we should wait too too long, because character generation isn't compelling at all right now, so it's possible ... there's a thing on the dev page about fortress starting scenarios, like starting scenarios giving a back story for your fortress, often related to current world situations, and that might be a time when I start thinking about the adventure scenarios, just because it would be the exact same type of thinking; 'what's going on in the world, how does it relate to coming into a narrative?' I'm not sure because we had all those ideas about adventure mode character generation should work, but you want to have stuff to work with. But if it just came down to skills or something, like how many skill selections you get, that could be more formalised than it is now. Like right now when you do 'Play Now' I think you still start at a city, but you start naked still, but now you start with a spear and a knife. That kind of thing, you want to turn that into a scenario, you want to turn into a 'What is going on here? Why are you this person? Why are you naked outside a town with a spear and a knife and how long is that going to work?' It should definitely start to take off at some point but right now I still feel like I need to work on this other stuff. Once villains are done, once treasure hunter is done, once thief is done it seems like starting scenarios will just become a really natural thing at that point. You'll have situations readymade sitting there for you, like 'I would like to start as a bandit under Blah' and then you could be that person, and there would be something to work with instead of creating a whole new set of circumstances for you. It's too hot for me to remember right now all the things we said previously about character generation, but I'm sure there were some good ideas in there that are not coming to mind right now, I don't know if you remember any of them. If it weren't ninety billion degrees maybe this would be a different conversation, but ... that's my thinking right now. How hot is it here? Not that hot is it? I've become a temperature wuss though. Yeah it's only eighty eight outside, but I don't have any windows open and I don't have my fan on because I can't have my fan on when we're recording, so that's why it sucks. I'll be fine when I turn my fan on. I can't have windows open because even though I have screens, first of all it's a little noisy outside and that would interfere with the recording again, but also baby Scamps will not just be content to sit and look out the third storey window, but he will jump up on the screen with all four feet. It's a pretty crappy screen, this apartment is a pretty old apartment complex and the screen ... it's not rectangular like it used to be, there's bending, all kinds of warping and stuff. So the screen doesn't really feel secure and it seems like baby Scamps will just drop out of the window if I leave it open. I don't trust that process. The most I could do is open it a crack but then we wouldn't really get much of a temperature benefit and we'd get the noise, so that is the current situation. There's lots of other stuff on here, this is going to be an exciting thing. Got villains, followers, capturing people, breaking into fortified locations ...
Capntastic:	Sharp rocks and twigs ... I'm super psyched and I don't know why, I'm going to make bread.
Toady:	We won't need to do more, we can change the name of the game to Making Bread. Unless there's already a game called Making Bread, there's probably already a game called Making Bread because it is the most exciting development going on in games this day.
Capntastic:	It is in Cooking Mama, I'm pretty sure.
Toady:	Yeah, Cooking Mama must have making bread. I play Cooking Mama now, so I've made all ...
Capntastic:	I'm loading a Flash game right now, it's called Bread Making Game.
Toady:	Yeah, so it could already be fully explored, and when we retread old territory like this we're kind of making a mockery of ourselves. It'll be alright, we'll have to think of a way to break out of the mould, so to speak, when we are making our bread. I have a feeling we're going to fall short on that and it's just going to be like 'You are making bread ... You have made the bread'. You'll probably select ... because you can go really hard with the cooking, it's like 'Do you want to take the flour ...' because there's going to be flour, and then you mix the flour with water in some kind of pot or something, and then you stir it a bit, and you might end up kneading and kneading and kneading and kneading and kneading, and then you stick it over a fire and that could be the process. It's a question of what it is when you've got that wettened flour and how much water do you add and all that kind of stuff ... how much is that going to work with the reaction framework I've currently got, how much rewriting would need to be done ... because you can definitely whiff the whole thing, you could just be like flour plus any container with water makes bread. I don't even know ... there's not even really a bread object now, there's a food object, so it would need to use the food object subtype; I don't know if that works with reactions right now. There's going to need to be significant reaction rewrites probably to get that happy, but it's just a question of whether you want it all to work with reactions or whether you want some of it to work with game mechanics, like the cooking process. Because we've got temperature and everything, but do you actually want to go down that road, so that if you've got a cook making something in the kitchen and then a dragon comes by and flames out your fortress it's like 'well that bread is cooked now' and that wouldn't happen if there's a reaction for it, like a specified reaction, but it would happen if it works through game mechanics. But that's a can of worms. We'll have to think about it ... We've got thief stuff, treasure hunter stuff, ability to climb and jump in adventure mode and swimming around ... traps and lighting, all the night creature stuff ... All kinds of exciting stuff coming here. There will be adventures in adventure mode. It's been a long time since we had adventures in adventure mode. It used to be a little bit more fun I think, maybe there were some adventures in adventure mode way back in the beginning, but it doesn't feel like there's adventures in adventure mode now.
Capntastic:	No. You can walk around and light fires ...
Toady:	So we'll slowly be working back to making it better than it's ever been, but it'll take a while. Unless you like butchering things with rocks in which case we're doing pretty well.
Capntastic:	That's fun, yeah. See how much meat you can collect, leave it in a pile ... Hey, does the meat rot in adventure mode? And then there's like miasma and stuff?
Toady:	I don't remember ... I figure it would but it's possible that rotting is disabled in adventure mode just so the magic barrels would work right, but it could be that the magic barrels are magic and are the thing disabling the rot mechanic. Because if things are left alone they'll rot because that's what happens, but I don't remember how strongly I fought rot when I went to do the towns, so it's possible that you could have eternal meat and in that case that's kind of strange, because we should get to salting stuff, and making cooked stuff last a little bit longer, what other weird things people do ... use sugar to preserve fruit or something, is that right? We've got a lot to do there, should be intriguing to add the salt based industries, and mine your salt and then I guess you grind it down or something. That's what the internet is for, it's so I don't have to know anything. It'll be alright.
Capntastic:	Digging holes is going to be fun.
Toady:	Yeah. Digging holes, digging in the soil.
Capntastic:	Make a little hole to live in.
Toady:	Yeah, it'll be great, it'll be great. Until we add some kind of digging which will probably require passing time - some kind of digging the rock mechanism - you won't have amazing underground fortresses, but within short order - we'll need to get the entity site stuff first which is the main problem with the entity populations - but once that's in, which we're going to try and do as soon as we can, but we have bugs to fix first, but as soon as that's in then adventurer sites are going in right after that. We'll want to put them in, because it's going to be too exciting. Then you'll be able to make giant towers and things.
Capntastic:	Out of mud! Collect mud and make adobe bricks and then make a house and then a wolf will come, and, well, you know how that ends.
Toady:	Clay is abused in this game. There's clay in the game, but it's not used for anything. I think adventure mode is going to see a kind of renaissance in the overlooked primitive industries - if you want to call them primitive industries compared to metalworking stuff versus clay and mud and all that kind of thing ...
Capntastic:	Yeah, make clay pots and collect water in them and have a jug ...
Toady:	Yeah, adventure mode is probably going to be the way that that stuff comes on, and some of it will make dwarf mode after that because we've got the framework for it, and dwarf mode will just do it with less time and tools and so on ... and we'll finally have that stuff, because that's been neglected for way too long. But there's a lot of plans up here, so it's hard to say what kind of side excursions we're going to take, because we're obviously going to need a side excursion into medical skills to some extent, so that you don't totally lose even when you win. Like you kill some bandit but you've got a little scratch on your arm and then it gets infected and you die ... that's how it would play out right now. That'd suck, your immune system should be fighting for you, but ... It'll be a little taxing until you get to that point. Scamps is not running around of anything, he's just laying on the floor, temperature's getting everybody. Especially since my computer's on and my windows are closed, that's probably going to increase the temperature by a little bit.
Capntastic:	Adventurers ...
Toady:	Adventurers and stuff, that's right ... We apologise ... We thanked the listeners and now we should apologise to the listeners.
Capntastic:	Yeah. I'm sorry listeners.
Toady:	Zach and I were talking about how the dynamic is with three hosts. It's important to have a third host in a sense. Because if Rainseeker were here ...
Capntastic:	He'd have cool things to say.
Toady:	Yeah. In case this part stays in he stepped out for a period because he has his important business to deal with and so Capntastic and I are having a discussion. It's going alright but ...
Capntastic:	We're trying to emulate the primal, primitive forces that will be included in adventure mode.
Toady:	That's right, there's going to be adventures and stuff. But yeah, I'm excited about all of the little crafting things, and being able to do that kind of thing. I'm sure some people aren't, but that's what we have lots of things to work on. But I'm also excited about all the hero stuff, that's going to be really cool, giving the game something to do, giving you something to fight for ... if you want to be a goody two shoes then you will have opportunities because there's going to be a lot of scummy people in the world.
Capntastic:	It's up to you to set things right and bring justice ... or, outdo them. Make it a competition, have a game.
Toady:	Yeah, you're going to be troubled. We have the thief thing which is an adventurer doing bad things. Now the adventurer as villain, I naturally end up speaking in those terms and I wonder how naturally that's going to fit in with the mechanics. The villains as described are kind of like thieves, they do these raids on the sites ... in a way it's essentially the same thing but there's this intimidation factor that you don't have in the thief mechanics as described, you don't ever just come up and strong arm anybody or anything, and that ... I'm not sure quite how that's going to work. Because the villains will be doing that stuff first and at that point if you're able to do that it wouldn't shock me, because there would be mechanisms for it, but it's one of those things where every dev item has a hundred paths that lead out from it, so it's a question of making those decisions. But it would be cool, it's always fun to be able to play the bad guys, especially in the situation where you're not just going down the same plot and answering 'answer B' each time ... the bad answer. It should be good, should be good ... and your little followers who go with you, and if you just go around killing random citizens with your followers they'll just be like 'what the hell are you doing?' and then they'll leave or they'll try and kill you or something. Unless they're bad people, which means you'll be surrounded by scummy people, if you're trying to be a villain. That's one of the important things when we add villains, is making scummy people. The personality thing is so late twentieth century, it's like 'people are open or not', 'they have different ways of living their lives' and that's how the thirty facet personality thing works, but we're going to have to go way back in time to get the villains to act properly. 'Some people are just scummy liars who like to hurt people', and that's who these people are. Not all of them, it's not like we're going all in on the chaotic evil front, so there'll be some desperate villains, people who are hungry, that kind of thing. But you know, some people have bad natures, and there's no-one with a bad nature right now in Dwarf Fortress. Except for people who get angry, I guess in Dwarf Fortress that's the only thing that I can think of off the top of my head that qualifies as a bad personality is if their anger management is really low and they throw tantrums all the time in fort mode, because that's a personality directed thing right now. But it'll be a lot better. When you put the vices/virtues ... that's a way of saying it, I don't really know what we're going to end up calling them, I don't want to get too too hardcore there ... but when those goes in then everyone will have them, and then they'll be in dwarf mode. So I've got to use a pretty good normal distribution or you're going to have a totally dysfunctional fort, all of these really shady individuals in your fort, you could start a fort and have all seven of your dwarves just be total pieces of filth, all stealing from each other and all that kind of thing. And they wouldn't actually do anything because you need to put the effects in, and you need to make them think about that stuff in dwarf mode; dwarf mode's a different mode from adventure mode so it wouldn't all carry over instantly. So I probably shouldn't even show those in the personality descriptions until they're used. Wouldn't want to call a dwarf a liar until they're actually lying. 'He has a propensity to be a total piece of crap' ... that's not fair. Then there's the whole thief mechanics, I haven't played a lot of those Thief games so I'm not up on the technology there ... a lot of it is about which way are they looking, like vision arcs, and that's something that I'm not comfortable with as a concept in general, I don't like it when you're walking around and you can only see half the screen, because that's not how it works, or at least if you were paranoid enough in a fantasy game you have to worry about getting attacked you'd be like 'step forward, look over my shoulder, step forward, look over my shoulder, step forward, look over my shoulder, step forward, look over my shoulder' so it should just show you everything. But when you're sneaking you shouldn't be able to ... when someone's sneaking at least if it's you or if the target of the sneaking is not the player, then there should be things like vision arcs so that you can have a guard walking down a hallway and then you can run down the hallway behind him ... There are going to be visions arcs then, but they just don't apply to you, I don't want to put them in for you ... Someone should be able to do that to you too theoretically, like you're walking down a hallway and then they can run up behind and either attack you or run down the hallway, but if we put in vision arcs strictly then you'll constantly have to stop and be paranoid about looking over your shoulder, and as realistic as that might be it would not be fun.
Capntastic:	Just have it tied to the perception ability or whatever ...
Toady:	Yeah, it'll just end up having to be something like that where its non directional for the adventurer only. For everybody else the guard might stop and look over his shoulder, but he's not going to be doing it all the time and you can sneak by, and then you'd be able to sneak into places, and it should be super entertaining. That's just another one of those weird little conflicts, the same way adventurers having emotions and stuff is one of those weird little flicks ... It should be pretty fun, and being hunted down should be fun. I don't know what else is going on here ...
Capntastic:	Neither do I.
Toady:	If you don't have any other ... do you have any other things you were thinking about?
Capntastic:	No, I think we've covered all the best parts ...
Toady:	Yeah, we didn't talk about dwarf mode much but there's been a lot of threads on these ... I think most of the stuff, because it's been at the top of eternal suggestions for a long time it's pretty well covered. And I'll always be answering specific questions over in the Future of the Fortress thread if people have specific questions about any of this stuff I've been answering them over there. So that'd be cool.