Dwarf Fortress Talk #1, with Rainseeker, Capntastic and Toady One, transcribed by mallocks
| Capntastic: | Welcome to the Bay 12 podcast. I have Nathan Miller here - Rainseeker - also Tarn Adams - Toady - from Bay 12, you know him from Dwarf Fortress. |
| Toady: | Hi guys. |
| Rainseeker: | Hey. |
| Capntastic: | Also I'm Capntastic. |
| Rainseeker: | Welcome Capntastic. It's fantastic to have you here. |
| Capntastic: | I'm glad to be here. In my room. |
| Rainseeker: | And I'm in my room, wow! |
| Toady: | Same here; this is fantastic. |
| Rainseeker: | Internet conversation here. The reason why we sound a little bit canned here guys is that we recently lost half an hour of our conversation. |
| Toady: | Yeah. And we're not going to talk about the software we're using because I wouldn't recommend it to anybody. |
| Capntastic: | Should we run through the questions we've already been through? |
| Toady: | Oh sure yeah. I can go through them again. |
| Capntastic: | Alright, then I'll ask my three real quick. Armok from the forums asks 'How is dialogue going to work; will it pass the Turing Test?' |
| Toady: | Yeah so, lots of people have tried to get little robots in chat rooms and so on to pass the Turing Test with various degrees of success and I'm not going to be one to even try, but we do hope to improve the dialogue from what we've got now because basically what we have is sort of a substandard model of what you see in a lot of games where you basically select a topic and the guy'll say something back to you that's canned or whatever; and we can move away from that in steps. There are a lot of different things we'd like to try out in terms of being able to construct sentences from pieces, like 'I want to ask where this is' or so on and say what tone you'd be asking it in; have multiple people involved in the conversation, so that you can be sitting there talking and as you talk in adventure mode time passes as you're talking and someone else could come by and engage in the conversation as well. The main power goal we had for that originally was this one where you'd slay some creature and then come into the town and be like 'Hey I just killed the dragon guys; here's the head' and you hold it up or whatever, and you're like 'Gather round' and you get a bunch of people to hang out and then you could tell the story of how you killed the dragon; you could drop historical events one at a time and select them and so on; people could make little interjections. It's a lot of work but like everything it'll proceed in steps most likely, but you see it's not really heading toward anything like the Turing Test. |
| Rainseeker: | And then you could demand the mayor's hand in marriage. |
| Toady: | Yeah. |
| Rainseeker: | His daughter's hand. |
| Toady: | Well, either one. We've got all kinds of different futures laid out for you and it's up to your decision making. |
| Capntastic: | In reality you could be marrying the dragon and it could all be a ruse. |
| Rainseeker: | A paper mache dragon head that you brought into town. |
| Toady: | That's right. |
| Rainseeker: | So what I wanted to ask you Tarn is, let's have a summary of what happened this month, and what's going to happen next month. |
| Toady: | So this month was mostly squads. Mostly squads happened this month, and mostly squads happened last month too, and I didn't even finish. But I made some progress, we've got training up for squad members now; they do a lot more with their equipment and scheduling, so you have a lot of control now over what you can do with the squads. |
| Rainseeker: | What's your favourite new feature? |
| Toady: | Well I like, probably the hidden fun stuff I've been working on more than anything ... I took a little break to work on the underground again, putting some new critters down there which I've spoiled with more particulars up in the little choose your own adventure I put up on the devlog. I guess I don't want to spoil that here because people should go play the little game that's up there. I like watching [the squads] go off to their little classes and watch them sparring, that was probably more fun. Because the rest of everything else was really dry: just make sure they get the right equipment, make sure that they're following their orders without just wandering off to some room or just sitting there ... it was pretty dry. But next month I haven't quite decided, I'm still sitting here thinking about it because the stuff that remains in the list of remaining items ... basically all of the categories have a few things that need to be done. I was thinking of just going back to the top and just knocking some of those off and turning them green rather than having every category as kind of languishing in a state of almost being done. I'm still planning to get the game out by the end of the year, even if I have to cut features. Of course any feature cut is just going to be put off for a few weeks or something, it's not like I'm cutting features and getting it out of the door so I can go and work on some new game or whatever. So no worries there: if I say something's out it's only out for a little while. We're in pretty good shape here, I should be able to make the little deadline I've set for myself. |
| Capntastic: | Danarca asks, 'will we get more pictures of Scamps?' |
| Toady: | Definitely going to get more pictures of Scamps over time. We've taken some and haven't put them up yet, and we're still trying to capture video or a good picture of him playing with his new toys. He's a spoiled cat; he gets lots of new toys. His favourite one now is this ball of feathers that's attacked to a fishing rod - not a real fishing rod - but a big stick with a string hanging down from it with a ball of feathers on, and he goes nuts. We have this other one that has a mouse on it, a pole that goes out and has a string with a mouse on, and he'll chase that around and so on, but the feathers he goes nuts. I guess he just finds flying feathers more believable than a flying mouse, but he'll tip over small potted plants and chairs, and whatever's small enough for him to tip over chasing this ball of feathers around. He has this little cardboard tube he likes to run through ... we'd really like to get some better pictures of him now. It's one of those things I've been remiss about doing, obviously people want their Scamps pictures but I've failed so far to put any up for a few weeks but I'll get on it, I'll get some Scamps pictures, because he's grown and people should see what kind of monster we're dealing with now. |
| Capntastic: | Danarca also asks 'will the 2D nobles make a comeback?' |
| Toady: | 2D nobles ... since some of them are there and some of them aren't there, and there are some new ones ... the ones I can think of that aren't there are the guild nobles; like there used to be mining guilds, crafts guilds, guilds for the farmers, and some creepy ones like the ones that came when you had a lot of dead dwarves, or there was the philosopher who would come and do nothing. Those dwarves are going to be back, and the main reason they're coming back is because we want to see what happens when you see different groups in the dwarven society, because right now everything is pretty harmonious until people have individual problems, and then individual problems ... |
| Rainseeker: | Tantrum spiral! |
| Toady: | That's right, the whole fortress just falls apart. But there should also be this kind of intermediate problems that involve larger groups; this also ties back into religions and so on, so you can have a religious group in the fortress and a philosophical group started by some dwarf, and then the miner's could organise and then you have people caring about their families a little bit more than they care about them now which is basically 'oh, my brother or my wife died in a fight recently' or something, but they don't really care about their families other than that. And you can have one dwarf that's affiliated in some way with all of those movements I just mentioned - or groups - and that dwarf then has a lot more individuality and opportunities for dramatic things to happen; this is true in adventure mode too. A lot of the story and just general dynamics and movement of the characters and so on should be determined by these kinds of conflicts like if the miner's guild wants to do something that directly conflicts with what one of the religions wants to do: say there's a gold vein they want to mine out and some of the mineral deity guys get all uppity about it and start talking about how the gold is sacred or something like that ... |
| Rainseeker: | And what happens if one guys belongs to both ... |
| Toady: | Exactly; that's the question, what happens if a guy belongs to both movements, and then that's where you can get some really interesting things happening. Or what if a guy belongs to one movement and his brother belongs to another, then you have a tension between ... I mean you basically can just draw a bunch of Venn diagrams and see how kind of weird configurations can lead to things splitting apart and tensions, but also peaceful resolutions could be mitigated between the two parties by those two brothers for instance. So there's all kinds of interesting things that could come up just by putting more structure on top of things and having those influence people's behaviours. So 2D nobles are definitely coming back but we'd like to do it in a way that's not completely hard coded; we're doing some experiments now with the goblins to get them to have the structure arise out of their civilisation more based on their ethics than on the hard coding. It's not something where I'm promising the world on this, but it's something I'd like to experiment with to see what we're going to get. This also turned out, as far as the timing of 'when are we going to see this kind of thing', there's the return of the guilds, or I don't remember exactly what it's called, up in the eternal suggestions voting up on the suggestions list and it's doing pretty well. I said I'd take a look at the top ones there for next time - now by next time I mean the next series of releases because I really hope I never have a release this long again, it's going to be over a year - so in the short term we're going to be looking at this stuff, it's not like it's just something I'm talking about; we're going to look at this along with the adventurer's skills stuff and the improved sieges; job priorities; improved hauling; I don't remember if improved farming is up there; increased tile support for graphics ... whatever things were up there that people wanted we're going to be looking at. |
| Rainseeker: | All these kind of inter-fortress politics is really interesting; is there a way for you to track that or explain why things are happening or why dwarves are angry with each other? |
| Toady: | Yeah; obviously a lot of what happens in the game now doesn't get significant exposition, and sometimes you have to sort of plod through their thoughts to even get a hint of what was going on, so hopefully the major events that happen can happen at these sorts of activities that I've been working with the past week or couple of weeks - whatever it was - where you might have ... when a group organises they could have a meeting and it could announce that, and so it just suddenly says 'the miner's guild has been formed and is having a meeting', and you go watch what they do. It might be interesting to get - the same way we just did combat reports for this report, how when people are fighting you can just go and read what happened as if you were in adventure mode - it might be interesting to have the conversation engine, and this kind of goes back to what Armok was asking originally, it might be interesting for the conversation to be used in meetings so that you can see exactly what people are saying and be able to see a recording of their conversations; I don't think there's any problem with that. |
| Rainseeker: | M'kay, capn you want to ... |
| Capntastic: | Hey I think we're on to actually new questions now. |
| Rainseeker: | Actually if you want to do some older ones I can grab some more old ones I've asked. Here's one [Kilo24]; 'can souls be applied to inanimate objects and/or as part of artifacts?' |
| Toady: | So, for the current release - the one that's coming up - there aren't going to be souls beyond what I just added for the creatures. Right now the creatures can hold a number of souls but in practice they only hold one; that was to support possessions and so on in the future. But really all the soul is in the game is, it's got a name, it's got some historical information, the main thing it's got is skills and the personality, and the idea behind that kind of separation was to allow them to be put almost anywhere. They can be floating around in some kind of ghost or they could be stuck in an item, some of the framework's not there for that but they were created with that in mind, so that if you wanted to have some kind of artifact singing sword that hollered things as you walked down the dungeon corridors, and then you could stop and talk to it and ask it if you want to go left or right, and it'd be like 'I'm scared and I want to leave' or something, you could do that, and it wouldn't be that hard to set up, actually. It's in the future, certainly way in the future perhaps, but the framework is building up for that. |
| Rainseeker: | Well that's really cool. Here's another one from Kilo24 that was previously asked; 'do you have plans to leave constructed walls unengravable?' |
| Toady: | The idea there is that the way constructions currently work ... it's a bit of a hastle to have something both be a construction and an engraving. It's not really a super large roadblock but it was just enough of a roadblock for me to be like, 'alright, I'm leaving this'. Now that it is a little bit of a project to get something like that in it makes me sit and think, what does it mean to engrave a construction if the construction's like a brick wall or something? Does it mean that you put a smiley face on every brick, or does it mean that you kind of remove the top inch of the bricks and engrave something in there or would you want to bring up a pre-carved panel and insert it into a slot or something. There's a lot of different options and I just haven't moved on that because I haven't really thought about what I want to do particularly. I'm not against it, I don't think there's a huge balance problem or anything allowing it, so we'll probably see something like that sometime. |
| Rainseeker: | Okay, and one more - I kinda like this one [Kilo24] - 'One of the arcs is focused on artifacts. What are some examples of quirks that you've thought to apply to them, and will artifacts be able to be created in more ways than a dwarf commandeering a workshop?' |
| Toady: | We haven't thought that much about what the artifacts are going to do. We've thought about it a little bit and in fact they used to have powers, but their powers were pretty simple; it's like one of them might have more storage space than they're normally allowed to or a weapon might just be better, change it's damage type, something like that. It wasn't really that inventive, back when we had that system. So, it's not something we've thought that deeply about. We certainly want to make magic seem magical, that's part of what we want to do. So we don't want tp just have a weapon that just says 'oh this is +3 fire sword' or something, we don't want to do any of that; not that we wouldn't want a weapon that can burn things or something like that. The other part of the question you'll have to remind me, because I'm having a heat stroke. |
| Rainseeker: | Are you going to allow artifacts ... |
| Toady: | Oh yeah, other ways to make them. There's a first step that's related to what we're doing now which was individual weapon familiarity and a dwarf maybe naming his or her weapon after the dwarf kills a certain number of creatures or a big creature or something, they'd be like 'I call this "Dragonslayer"' or whatever, that kind of thing. That in a sense shares all of the relevant things with artifacts right now because it would be a named object that gets saved in the histories and that's really all artifacts are right now, they have better quality I guess but they don't have any magical powers right now, and in that way I think that an artifact shouldn't be restricted to dwarves completely. I think the dwarven artifacts ... there should be something special about them, but I also think there should be older objects that are maybe even created during the beginning of world generation and other things that come up during world generation so that the world isn't completely devoid or interesting objects if you want to start with adventure mode or something, but at the same time ... |
| Interlocutor: | |
| Toady: | Yeah, things like that, everything that you've read has stuff like this. At the same time the things that your dwarves do shouldn't just be drops in the bucket or something like that, it'd be kind of irritating too. There's a certain balance that needs to be struck probably, but we're definitely branching out. |
| Rainseeker: | Alright, I have a question from ArkDelgato, and he says 'After jumping is implemented how will the dwarves in fortress mode decide when to jump?' and also '[will it be] if the only way to path it there is to jump; any time it would help; or in danger?' |
| Toady: | Yeah, it seems like jumping isn't something you should normally do right? It's kind of dangerous. This is assuming that the path finding can be made to do this; I've been in some discussions and so on about to improve finding and jumping is one of the issues there because it doesn't work that well under the current system. But jumping for dwarves ... it seems like it shouldn't be something they do unless they are in danger, that would have to be a parameter there. In adventure mode I guess it would be something that only happens - I mean you'd be doing it all the time because adventurers are kind of crazy like that - [but] creatures that can't access you unless they jump should have to do it too, or else you'd be able to separate space between them too easily so they'd have to take risks like that. I think it'd be kind of weird wouldn't it if you had some pillars in dwarf mode that happened to allow you to get to your bedroom if you didn't want to walk down a hallway but just having the dwarves constantly hopping between them. It'd be kind of cute or something but it seems like it'd be really dangerous and some of the dwarves wouldn't really ... I don't see dwarves being big jumpers. Did I answer the question? |
| Rainseeker: | Yep, that was good. [Qloos] 'How will player created mod packs and graphical sets be affected by the upcoming major update?' |
| Toady: | I posted some of the raws online and if you've looked at those there are sort of massive changes, especially to creatures. So all of the creature raws that you've got - all the mods - won't work in the next version without modification. It's almost impossible to do a version supporting old mods because so many things have changes; it just wouldn't know what to do, it wouldn't know what you wanted, so those will have to be updated. Even things like items and plants - anything that you've added - will require some updates. Now there's some instructions in the new raw files that are provided with the game to tell you what the new tags are and so on and you can follow the examples of the creatures pretty much like people have been doing already to update. I don't think it would be an impossible task or even a really hard task to get mods working again. Graphics mods are basically unchanged. There's a bit that you'll have to do with the creature castes probably; for instance we support, say, ant men that have queens, drones, soldiers, workers if you want to add them in as four different subsets of an ant man, and so that kind of thing you'd have to go back and support it with graphics and there might be a format change there. Pretty much everything will be broken when I release but it'll be pretty easy to fix too. |
| Rainseeker: | Good. |
| Capntastic: | From Aqizzar; 'How large do you think the community is; what kind of feedback tells you about how widespread your work is and where do you think you're getting the most press these days?' |
| Toady: | Hmm, it's hard to tell how many people are out
there. I mean you can tell from initial downloads, there are some
thousands of those; the forum usually has a couple hundred people on it
at any given time; press-wise it seems like we get a lot of press in
Australia and a lot of donations have been coming from there recently so
things seem to be going well there. Of course we're doing well in
Finland, but it's not just there, pretty much every European country has
representation. But I don't have any hard numbers, I just have to kind
of go by what the breakdown is of donations and people sending me emails
and things that I've seen. It seems like a lot of people that write
video games have heard about Dwarf Fortress and tried it, |
| Capntastic: | Weren't the Warhammer Online or Sims 3 guys, there was a video and like one of the other guys was playing it in the background? |
| Toady: | Yeah, yeah. I think that was the Warhammer guys. Was there even some kind of weird contest like 'hey what game is this'? |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, 'hey if you know what this game is, email us and we'll send you a free tshirt'. |
| Toady: | Yeah that was funny. It's funny to see that happening. Generally people have been supportive from the computer game industry, that have talked to me anyway. I really don't know how widespread it is though; you always get new people with new blogs saying that they introduced it to their friends and none of their friends had heard of it; so there's still tons of people that might like the game but haven't heard of it at all. It's still spreading out, it hasn't saturated the possible people that have been interested by any means, so, it's good to still spread the word around. |
| Rainseeker: | I have a question here from dorf and this kind of goes along with the email kind of ... 'what is the oddest email you've gotten since the success of Dwarf Fortress?' |
| Toady: | Very oddest one ... Well I guess there was the ... There was a person that ... I wouldn't want to reveal too many details ... basically a person who had Dwarf Fortress help them realise certain truths about their existence and basically about how life is meaningless or something and that caused them to convert their religion. It was a long and serious email - I don't want to make light of it - people asked what the oddest email was and that's the hands down winner. But the person supports the game so I'm not sitting here making fun of anybody; but that's definitely the oddest email that I received and I thought that was kind of cool that the game could definitely have an effect on somebody who was ready for it. It kind of comes back to this point; people say that ... there was someone who was criticising the game because when you have random content, because it makes things up it can't contain an artist's vision, but I don't think that's accurate because I think a lot of certain things, certain cynicisms I have, do come across in the game and I think the person was picking up on that. So certainly you can still convey things even in a procedurally generated environment, or whatever they call it these days. |
| Rainseeker: | Right. Well, I have a technical question here; 'How exactly long, wide and tall is a tile in Dwarf Fortress? Are they cubes?'; this is from Lonewolf. |
| Toady: | What the traditional answer is [is] that they're not so big that a dwarf doesn't have to crawl under another dwarf to get through a corridor but at the same time they're big enough to hold a thousand dragons as long as nine hundred and ninety nine of them are lying down. On the other hand it's a serious question because so much would ride on giving an answer; that's why I haven't so far. Because the second that you give an answer the game becomes constricted and you need things to make more sense; suddenly everything needs to make sense. I'm not ready to do that; I think there's something to be said for it - something to be said for nailing that down - but it would really kind of invite things like multi-tile creatures and stuff that I'm just not ready to do. There are some good things about multi-tile creatures; I think they'd be kind of cool. But path finding would need to be changed heavily, and there'd be other issues with them. Would they be too easy to kill for example by hiding off somewhere that they can't get to and shooting at them or whatever; so they'd need to be smart enough to avoid situations like that which might be difficult. So that's kind of one of the main problems - the large creatures - why I haven't established a number yet. |
| Capntastic: | This one's from nagual678; 'So, why is the Bay 12 Dwarf Fortress site still terrible?' |
| Toady: | Is he the same guy that started that topic in General Discussion about the ... |
| Capntastic: | Yeah this wasn't actually a post in the thread; I'm just asking his question. Because I think a direct answer from you would be best. |
| Toady: | Yeah ... it's horrible because I haven't worked on it. And I agree with him by the way. I don't think the Dwarf Fortress site is as bad as the main bay12games.com site. I think the Dwarf Fortress site is okay. It could be better but I think it's ok. I think the bay12games.com site looks like it was made by a junior high kid in 1995 or something; before there was an internet. It was made ten years ago or whatever; we haven't updated it at all. There had been an offer - someone was going to update it for me - but that didn't work out and I really didn't like the way that went so someone else offered to update it and I was like 'I don't really feel like doing it' or whatever ... so nothing's happened with it, and I'm not sure what I want to do with it. I mean it should definitely be changed - it looks horrible - but it's just not my number one priority. |
| Capntastic: | I looked at it like every other ... like Nethack and ADOM, Dungeon Crawl and IVAN, and those sites are all just as bad if not worse, so ... |
| Toady: | Yeah ... at the same time it's fair to compare us not to other hobbyists but to the larger ... everybody, right? Because we're trying to compete with everybody and it could be better. Even not looking at other sites, just looking at it as it's own creature ... it's definitely ... it is ratty. I mean why do we have all the games listed on the left and then all the games listed at the bottom too with four links to the forum that all go to the same place. That question I can answer, it's because the links to the forum used to go to subsections and now they don't, but when I updated it of course I just changed them all to the new forum link without subsections and so ... I guess it's tragicness has actually built up over time; it's not that it's static, it's that it's worse than static. |
| Capntastic: | I like the little yellow pointy guy. |
| Toady: | Well now see going back to the Dwarf site I don't have as many objections about the Dwarf site. Some people don't like the fact that it's centre justified or whatever; I don't care that much about that ... I don't know why that bothers people or why everyone wants stuff on the left or what other things people have with it ... I wasn't reading that carefully there might have been specific objections in the thread but a lot of it wasn't specific. But no I love the little pointy guy; I don't think [he] needs to go anywhere; [he]'s fine. |
| Capntastic: | So, let's see, about a month ago me and my friend starting brewing beer. So I have a bottle here from my first batch and I just opened it. It's actually really easy to make. |
| Toady: | Does it have dwarven ingredients in it? |
| Capntastic: | Uh no. |
| Rainseeker: | Cat tallow ... |
| Toady: | Can't tell? It's proprietary ... |
| Capntastic: | Yea. I'm pouring it right now ... and there it is. It's carbonated, and it's fizzing; so everything looks cool. It's a porter so it's nice and dark. |
| Toady: | So you're going to try it now, is that the idea? |
| Capntastic: | Yes I just had a sip and it's delicious. |
| Toady: | Well that's awesome, does that make you a micro-brewer? |
| Capntastic: | Yes it does. |
| Rainseeker: | And Tarn you're a microgamer. |
| Toady: | I'm a microgamer. That's right, a microgamer. |
| Rainseeker: | So Capn what are you calling your beer? |
| Capntastic: | We don't really have a name yet, but it was ... |
| Rainseeker: | Perhaps |
| Capntastic: | The process itself ... it only costs like two hundred bucks to get this stuff you need. You know, it's a big kettle, and ingredients and a bucket and a big glass bottle to put everything in. It's just really easy to do, it's like you boil this for half an hour, and then you put this in and stir it ... the hard part's just keeping track of temperature and everything and making sure you wash your hands. A little bit undwarvenly, but ... |
| Toady: | So how long did it have to sit there? |
| Capntastic: | Um ... we put it in the bottles ... it's been bottled for about three weeks, and I guess that's like two or three weeks, so I guess that's the minimum, but then anything after that is like bonus aging, you know, concentrated deliciousness. |
| Toady: | But it was still good now? Just the sip that you took now? |
| Capntastic: | Oh it's really good now. |
| Toady: | That's right, so the bonus is going to send you up to the stratosphere. |
| Capntastic: | Oh yea, and um ... |
| Rainseeker: | Ok so this brings me to a question Tarn, do you drink? |
| Toady: | Do I drink? I don't have anything against drinking, I just haven't had an occasion to drink for a while. I used to drink more in grad school when there were parties and stuff; that didn't always turn out well. I don't know if I can go into any of that. |
| Rainseeker: | So are we going to have dwarven drunkenness? |
| Toady: | Oh yeah ... you have to have that. Now I don't know quite how that's going to work in the game when they pretty much have to have alcohol all the time; I don't know if that means they're going to be drunk all the time. There might be differences in physiology with the dwarf where they only get drunk when they're seriously drinking or something, like if they're at a party ... when they're like doubling up a party or something and having several drinks instead of just one to get through the day. Whereas with the humans, the humans I try to model as closely as possible to real life rather than doing whatever weird system's going to happen with the dwarves, and with the other ones we haven't thought about so much ... what happens when an elf drinks? |
| Rainseeker: | I think that elves are going to have more vodka-esque things. |
| Capntastic: | More like ... wine spritzers. |
| Toady: | Of course they just drink blood anyway ... |
| Capntastic: | They have no qualms about just like biting some guy's neck off and drinking it. |
| Toady: | Yeah that's called uncorking. But there are a lot of interesting questions like that ... it happens any time we have a new mechanic that's related to one of the main creatures we have to go through and ask ourselves five different times what does it do, and we aren't interested, really, in building up our stock universe, but we figure we have five different groups ... they're not incredibly diverse, they're somewhat diverse ... and then as we start adding in things like ant-men, like all the animal peoples are starting to get their own civilizations now. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah I've noticed that. |
| Toady: | Especially in this version that's coming up; they're actually going to have them. Because back in 2D you had bat-men riding giant bats and they had blowguns made out of cave spider legs that they shot cave spider chitin - or whatever it's called, darts - through that were poisoned with cave spider venom and so on. So they had a civilization up to the point where they were building objects and they'll have that again for the next release. Then that leads to the question, what are the ethics of a bat-man. We know a lot about Batman's ethics I guess from reading the comic books and stuff but then there's ant-men; what are their ethics? What are the ethics of lizard-men? Are they all the same? And so on. We have all these non-inventive animal peoples races but it should allow us to explore some new ground anyway, especially in terms of geographic determinism, in terms of the different environments they have should change their civilizations a lot. So it's going to be interesting to go through; I don't know what happens when a lizard-man starts drinking. |
| Rainseeker: | Is it going to be possible for us to get civilizations like goblin civilizations that go in unexpected directions like maybe they get a leader somehow from an elven civilization who enforces their beliefs on the goblins or something? |
| Toady: | I only put in little teeny baby steps in that direction back when I set up those ethics; looking in that direction I made it so that the ethics sit inside the civilization so that they're mutable; it doesn't just look at the definition that you put in the raw files, but within each civilization they're mutable; but they don't actually change yet. But that kind of thing is what will allow certain individuals and even sub movements ... this is the kind of thing where say in dwarf mode if you have a philosophical movement spring up and enough of your dwarves adhere to it it should start changing the actual fortress civilization in terms of how it thinks, and whether that's happening because the actual fortress ethics are changing or just because a majority of the people follow the ethics of this movement ... it's kind of one leads to the other, or it should anyway. So we're thinking about those things, we're definitely not ignoring that kind of stuff, but it's just a matter of getting it done and that always takes a long time. |
| Rainseeker: | I have a question from Xanares; 'Having read your the future section of the old Slaves to Armok site where you mention orcs along with the dwarves, I was wondering why they didn't make it into the game?' |
| Toady: | I don't even remember. I don't know if any of you have played Armok I, because we had a number of stock creatures, and I don't remember if orcs were one of them or if we called them goblins; I really don't remember. To me those terms are basically interchangeable; one is more Tolkien and one is much older. |
| Capntastic: | More general? |
| Toady: | Yeah. Goblin is an old old word, and orc I think is an invention of Tolkien. So we just went with goblin for that reason, and because we didn't want to cleave ... even though the game obviously is related to Tolkien heavily we didn't want to cleave ourselves too closely with it in terms of terminology because we're always going to moving away from that stuff just because we're adding more and more things. I don't think of orcs as something that needs to be added with goblins; goblins can be thought of as orcs to the extent that that comparison makes sense. People have already modded in orcs for their orc mod, although I guess those are more like evil monsters that can kill you easily ... I don't know how big they are, and they certainly seem to be more powerful than a Tolkien goblin. I've just kind of been wondering, I don't actually remember if I've answered the question or not. |
| Rainseeker: | I think that worked pretty good. I have a question from Strife26 that says 'with the work on bodies and stuff will modding in completely unreasonable creatures still work?' and his example is 'could my civilization made entirely of fuzz whose only organ is a pair of eyes function?' |
| Toady: | Well, function in dwarf mode ... they'd already have trouble if they didn't have hands and stuff. But no, there's no requirement in a creature that says it needs to have a circulatory system or nerves or anything like that; if a creature doesn't have those things then they function as if they have them all the time, it just assumes that it works. That's how, for instance, the only creature I know that is like that right now is the Fluffy Wombler, because they're just made out of fluff and then under the fluff there's pudge, and I think their eyes is made out of some kind of eye material, because they have little eyes ; but they've got fluff and pudge. So they don't have nerves, or blood, or anything like that and they should work fine. The game doesn't try and impose real world constraints on things unless you tell it; you can say 'this creature has blood, this is the materiel I want to use', then the game's like 'well if it doesn't have this material it's going to die, and it will bleed out this materiel'. So it imposes those constraints but I think it's mostly reasonable about that stuff. Of course there are going to be bugs, and people should tell me about those, but that's the intention. |
| Rainseeker: | Capn? |
| Capntastic: | I don't really have any more questions but what sort of books do you read, Toady? |
| Toady: | The last book I finished was the Water Margin, or Outlaws of the Marsh or whatever you want to call it, there have been a bunch of names for it because it's translated from Chinese; but it's one of the big ... I guess there are four main Chinese classics, like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and I had just finished Romance of the Three Kingdoms before that so I wanted to move on and read another one of those while I was still able to sort out the names and stuff, because it's hard to read because there are so many ... there are a hundred and eight good guys in that book ... they're not good guys but they're the protagonists, and there's also a cast of other characters as well, it's difficult to read, it's like two thousand pages long. I wanted to read that for inspiration for adventure mode, and it was fun, it was a good book. I haven't read a lot recently, mostly if I want to know something about something I just go online and I don't end up reading a lot of novels and non-fiction anymore that isn't just articles; I read a lot but it's all on the computer. But whenever someone recommends a novel I usually end up getting it and then sort of fiending through it for however many hours it takes to finish it; I want to read, I guess, but I don't actually end up reading ... I mean I want to read physical books but I don't actually end up doing it a lot. |
| Rainseeker: | I have a question here from roundedge, as opposed to square I suppose; 'When starting a game what is your software architecture approach? How do you keep your code organised with such an enormous project which appears to develop rather organically?' |
| Toady: | It's something that's developed over time so I guess it's a million little habits, but I always have an idea of what I want to do, you need to have a vision, a design. People are going to disagree with me a lot on this kind of thing because there are professional approaches now for this kind of thing and I don't really follow any of them as far as I know unless it's by accident; just because I'm not studied. But in general ... so you don't need a design document per se or whatever they call them - white papers and things - but if you have a strong idea of what you want your game to do and you've got a lot of the details down then it will start to organise itself a bit better and a lot of it you just need practical experience writing projects and failing to complete them to know what pitfalls you can fall into, because there are hundreds of them. I've practically fallen into one now for this release, right? I'm way behind, and I certainly bit off more than I could chew easily. I can get through it and I'm not going to lose the project, but I probably would have lost the project if I had less experience because you can tend to flounder when you don't have clear objectives that are small that you can do. It's just ... write things down in advance, keep your thoughts organised and write a lot of games. If you want to write a lot of projects you'll figure out a system that works for you. The documents that I have online, like the reqs and bloats and things; I wouldn't look too hard at those because I don't use them that much anymore. They keep some of my older thoughts and they're sort of organised into categories and so on, but I've been working on squad stuff for two months so far and reqs and things have hardly come up. There are a few of them that are going to get checked off but that's kind of an accident compared to just getting done what I wanted to get done. It's more important to have a vision of what you want to do and stick to it, keep in mind what you want your project to feel like and what you want it to accomplish. I'd probably be better off answering more specific questions about this kind of thing ... |
| Rainseeker: | Well, do you use a lot of comments? So if someone who knew how to program were to look at your code could they figure out what's going on? |
| Toady: | I guess the people who have looked at a lot of the code now for the graphics thing would be better off answering that question than me ... I don't use a huge amount of comments. Some people put a comment after every single line, and that's kind of self-defeating for me. I leave enough comments that I can come back in six months and know what I've done. I don't use perfect variable names but I use pretty good variable names. I remember reading some forum somewhere where people were like 'well he probably just names his variables 'a', 'b', 'c', 'd' and 'foo fah foo flam blum blum blum' like he's an idiot or something' but you give things meaningful names and you need fewer comments, right? I can pretty much read through my code, it reads pretty straightforward to me, because things have sensible names. There are things like that that come up, for the things like reqs and bloats I'll leave comment tags that say 'req 1.22' throughout my code so that when I get to req 1.22 I can search for it and locate the places where it's relevant. Like I was saying the whole game isn't organised into reqs and bloats but they do come up and when they come up I'm pretty prepared to put them in. So there are things like that that come up and other little habits that you just start to pick up. |
| Capntastic: | Let me check the thread and see if anyone has anything really cool to say ... randomly click page five; 'Is magnetite armour ...', wait no this is something Rainseeker asked! |
| Rainseeker: | You can ask it, go ahead. |
| Capntastic: | Okay, Rainseeker asks; 'Is magnetite armour going to be picking up silverware in the dining room?' Hold on, because silver isn't magnetic ... |
| Toady: | Yeah, I was wondering about that. |
| Capntastic: | What are you doing, Rainseeker? |
| Toady: | If it's silver plated and has an iron core it would still work, right? I don't know much about nothing. |
| Rainseeker: | Everyone knows silverware isn't really silver. |
| Capntastic: | So 'Is magnetite armour going to be picking up stuff?' |
| Toady: | Yeah I don't know ... It's one of those things where it's basically like magic, right? You've got a material that can attract certain classes of other materials. It's one of those things where you wonder how you're ever going to code stuff like that, even with magic, because you have to check all the time whether or not something like this is happening and then you have to throw in specific shortcuts and flags and things to make sure it isn't actually checking all the time. So the more general and vague a system is - and we're going to make magic very general and vague - the more you have to scratch your head and wonder how you're ever going to get it to work. I think there's quite a bit of hope for it but I haven't thought about the specifics that well yet so I can't promise you that you're going to have magnetite that does weird things when you walk into a room and all the silverware sticks to you and stuff. |
| Rainseeker: | I said, is this going to happen during the restaurant arc and somebody said 'Well there isn't going to be a restaurant arc' and I said 'yes, yes I know.' |
| Toady: | Yeah it's disappointing. We need restaurants. It would be cool to have those inns though; people talk about it all the time, and I like the idea of having inns and stuff, and being able to create one either in your fortress - although dwarves never really struck me as that hospitable at least when it came to their own place, but I'm not against the idea - and then with adventure mode you could create your own little inn. |
| Rainseeker: | It would be cool to have traffic coming through your site, if you have roads going up [and] have elves and human adventurers coming through ... |
| Toady: | I'm always sitting here waiting for the game to take off in that kind of way. It's not quite there yet where there's people all over the world in adventure mode, you can wonder and talk to them, but they never go anyplace and when you're in dwarf mode of course they never come to see you unless they're leading an army to kill you or whatever. It'd be cool to have people drop by and come and talk to you about things and hang out ... |
| Capntastic: | Tourists. |
| Toady: | Yeah. People want to come and see what the dwarves are doing; want to see how short they are and stuff. It'd be cool. |
| Rainseeker: | Have a class visit with a bunch of kids and teacher. Field trip! |
| Toady: | Yeah, that'd be horrible on some of those wildernesses; having a little string of human children walking toward your fortress through all the skeletal hippos and skeletal giant eagles coming down to snatch them up and carry them off to their nest and feed their little skeletal eaglets. |
| Rainseeker: | I'm sorry, but people are going to start demanding that now. |
| Toady: | It's alright, people ask for a lot of stuff. |
| Capntastic: | There's going to be like two threads about it |
| Rainseeker: | Field trips! ... Ok, here's a question from Im_Sparks; 'Is there going to be an arena an arena room at any point, where you can organise fights and make the dwarves get a happy thought for watching or winning?' |
| Toady: | Yeah ... Arenas are definitely up on development. Zach wrote a whole story; 'Passion in the Arena' I believe it was called. We're all for arenas. Now as for dwarves ... I haven't really thought about how into blood sports and things dwarves would be; they obviously don't mind bloody justice. It's those kind of questions where in a sense I don't like answering them for the player and forcing them to do things ... like there's this discussion about poisoned weapons; should you be able to poison your weapons and it's really not a dwarven thing, pretty much from any perspective you're coming from, but at the same time it'd be cool to allow that kind of thing with certain penalties. Whatever we say for dwarves; once the humans have arenas the dwarves will then potentially be able to have arenas, just like humans have religions and dwarves can potentially have them. The question is just what sort of restrictions there would be; I'm for it, and I think arenas are very important in fantasy and stuff, they certainly give you something to do if you're an adventurer and you're just bored out of your mind and want to die, then you can do that without having to kill a village or something. |
| Rainseeker: | There you go. I think that it'd be kind of fun to talk about where you see the long distance goal of Dwarf Fortress. I know you've kind of talked about this in some of the other interviews but let's talk about it again. |
| Toady: | Yeah ... We want to have a game ... it's completely far flung but you need to have some kind of goal ... we want to have a game where you could basically start up the game and it makes a world that's essentially some kind of novel - meaning new not a book, but you might as well say book too - setup with things that you haven't seen before and all kinds of different historical stuff about how everyone's doing this and that and it's got creatures and magic things going on and everything that's really compelling, and then you can just insert yourself into that; into some role, whether or not it's a dwarf fortress or an adventure of some kind or something else, some other settlement or an entire civilization, or some kind of deity or a big monster or something. You can assume some role in there, mess around for a while and then go assume some other role and have it advance the world along with you as you do things; react to the things you do and everything that you do can have real consequences that have the plot move forward and so on. Like if someone dies there's an actual vacuum that can be filled by other things and so on; we're slowly working towards that, we can kind of see how it can work; it's not an unachievable goal, it's not impossible by any stretch of the imagination, it's just a lot of work and just piece by piece working towards that kind of thing. That's all up on that dev future, whatever it's called, where it's post version 1. Like version 1 is in sixteen years and then after that ... |
| Rainseeker: | Your grandchildren will be programming for you. |
| Toady: | Yeah ... can have a little sweatshop here where we all work on Dwarf Fortress together. And some of those things, I don't know if they'll be slipped in earlier. You can already mod in yourself playing a dragon or whatever, so it's not like it's impossible to do already. Ideally ... you know, ideally means ideally ... you'd be able to play anything; any creature or group, like right now you can play the dwarf fortress civilization site entity of a fortress, or you can play an adventurer that is from say three different races; and that's pretty restrictive, but there's no reason why you wouldn't be able to play the whole civilization of the dwarves, and that's actually one of the goals that's pre version 1, is being able to get up to that level; where you have the king or queen and you can make decisions that are broader over a series of settlements; and be able to send your armies and diplomats and things around. Once you've got that then if you want to expand to something like elf settlements, you just want to make sure the game isn't too dwarven when you play the elves, because right now everything would be restricted in the same way that the dwarves are restricted but I think by adding some of the mod support that I've been putting in it actually won't be super hard, it'll just be very hard to extend it because some of those things are already being accounted for: some of the differences. So that's the really general long term goal, every type of feature in the game has more detailed or less detailed visions as well, like how we want it to work - my brother and I - and we're just going to keep working on it and arrive at some point by the time we're done. When we're ready to keel over or whatever, something will be there, something pretty good, by that time. After that, after I say that kind of broad vision really the only things I can talk about are whatever specifics people are curious about at that point, I think. |
| Capntastic: | I know a lot of people make comparisons to Spore and how 'oh [in] Spore, you'll be able to do everything', and then everyone's like 'well Dwarf Fortress is better because you can actually see that he's working towards this', and I kind of agree that everything Today's doing is a lot more genuine that what Spore kind of did, where they promised all this stuff and kind of didn't actually have any of it. |
| Toady: | I like making creatures, that's kind of fun for a little while; just putting on the parts and stuff. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah it was fun; I played the game and I beat it, but it took five hours and then I was completely done with everything the game had to offer. |
| Rainseeker: | The space mode is actually pretty fun but the first four modes are basically tutorials for space mode. |
| Toady: | I guess I wasn't gung ho about it so I didn't feel that disappointed, but it was kind of tragic in a way, how it turned out. I know a lot of people enjoy it though, some people on our forums enjoy it. It just kind of depends on what you're in for, I guess. If you were looking for a Dwarf Fortress 1.0 or 2.0 which is kind of the thing that was coming across from the press presentations or whatever, where they were like 'it's going to be like Master of Orion II when you get to space mode' and ... it wasn't. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah you had like one ship, and you could fly around; and you had to do everything on your own, you couldn't organise anything. |
| Toady: | Yeah ... it was a different kind of thing. |
| Rainseeker: | It fell prey to the fear that people aren't smart enough to play that kind of game, I think. They just simplified and simplified. |
| Toady: | Yeah, well it get really extreme with the creature mode. It was like playing a one-sequence version of Simon Says, or a version of Whack-a-Mole where there's no timing to be worried about; you know that it's going to come up in a second and you have ten seconds to hit it ... you feel really bad for the mole at that point, it just pops up and it's like 'Hi! Hit me!', 'Alright, Bam!'. Just strange ... but I guess it's something anyway; you can make critters and they can run around, you can make little spaceships and buildings and stuff. It was alright, in that way. |
| Rainseeker: | Here's more of a specific question; Is magic in [...] Dwarf Fortress ... what are you planning on doing with it? Are you planning on letting people fly with it ... or create trees, or grow things more quickly or maybe create gems in the side of a mountain; generate your own kind of stuff. |
| Toady: | It's hard to say, because you want magic to feel magical in a way, and if it starts to become this thing where you have 'these are my magic runemaster dwarves and they get a series of powers and I use the powers to make mining easier and I use the powers to make wood' or something, then it's kind of industrial and it doesn't feel like a fantasy world ... it feels more like a sci-fi thing in a way, like how it's become kind of a technological thing that's used that way rather than something that has hidden consequences and stuff like that, or something that seems somehow intangible. I know people have really really varied feelings about magic, it's one of those things where I've avoided the controversy because I haven't started it yet. I know people are going to want to do all kinds of things and they want their dwarves to be more magical in a sense ... some people don't want any magic with their dwarves at all, and other people don't want any magic period. We're just going to go with our original thing there for the stock universe and then whatever support ends up being possible we can start to put in for people that want to do something that's more standardised magical for the dwarves. Our own idea is pretty much to restrict dwarven magic to artifacts and to have the artifacts be magical in ways that you don't really know at first, and that you might have to discover over time as you mess with them. Now, there's a problem with that in the sense that your control is so indirect that it's a little difficult to get at things like that; it's not like you can be an adventurer and just mess around with stuff directly. The reason that the vision on that is a bit unformed is because we aren't there yet, we haven't really thought about the specifics. |
| Rainseeker: | I can just see it now, a dwarf is erecting his door artifact and the door actually transports people across the map which is really bad because it's in your front entrance. |
| Toady: | There's all kinds of things, right? You could have a cabinet [such that] when you put something into it and take it out it becomes an improved item, and you might notice that when the guy's doing that with his clothes but you wouldn't really notice because who has time to go 'v, enter' on all of the dude's clothes. So it should be something that's more along the lines of those advisor things we were talking about where the dwarf has something to say to you - like the guy I mentioned having conversations with his dwarves - the dwarf should be like 'hey I just took my shirt out of my cabinet and now it's gold-studded and that's pretty cool and I think I should tell you about that', and it should be a huge thing that the guy can tell you instead of something you'd have to piss around with, and in that way magic can kind of remain magical and it doesn't always have to be little things like that there could be larger effects that are related to it or, if some guy makes a fell mood object and then all of a sudden all the dead bodies in your fortress start to rise up and you have to try [to] dump the thing down to a chasm before you all get eaten alive ... that'd be pretty cool. So there's options |
| Rainseeker: | Very shocking ... |
| Toady: | Well it should be kind of shocking, it's supposed to be magic. I'm hoping that that's how it works, I'm hoping that magic would be introduced through artifacts like that and also through the demons and other adversaries that are unique and rare and you'd get this thing where weird things happen or the whole sun is blotted out and the plants start to die or whatever, things get colder, and that could happen and then you'd have to figure out why it's happened; it doesn't tell you. There's all kinds of things that it can do and then the issue becomes ... the other mode of the game is adventure mode and a lot of people probably look forward to being able to use a spell caster, and the thing I've just outlined doesn't really fit very well with the notion of levelled spells and treating it like that where you work at it for long enough and then you can do fireball. But at the same time it's not as if that's a wholly unwholesome way of thinking and it shouldn't be supportable and I don't think it's impossible to have everything work out either way with parameters because it's not ... |
| Rainseeker: | You could have it even more story based, as people get their powers more in a story-based ways. |
| Toady: | Yeah, thinking of things like the deals witches make and other ways where people source their magic or how they got it, and they get it from the fairies or blah blah blah, stuff like that. Then you just need to have a starting scenario set up ... is it possible to make your magic still feel magical even though you're the one that knows how to do it, that comes up and how well do you know how to do it? How well do you even understand the things that you're doing? I think there are a lot of interesting questions there that you can explore in this type of setup that have really only been explored properly before in a plot setup, where you might have had magic seem magical but it was going through a game on rails, or you have magic that doesn't seem particularly magical[;] it can be randomised, but it's still just like 'Book One', 'Book Two', 'Book Three' or whatever. I'm not sure what I'm going to be able to do, it'll be interesting to give it a shot. Magic is kind of officially post version 1 material but the artifact arc is pre version 1 material so those are going to have a little tug-of-war I think when we get to working on artifacts to see how much magic actually makes it into version 1. |
| Rainseeker: | Do you have any plans to make the dwarves have the ability to more easily discover minerals and gems and such? |
| Toady: | There was originally ... this could have even been up on the dev pages, I don't really remember ... there's this idea for people doing surveyors and stuff like that and then there's ... |
| Capntastic: | Geologists and geomancers ... |
| Toady: | Yeah that whole branch of suggestions that are either purely magic based or purely science based or anywhere in between and I'm still not sure what I want to do with that, because it seems like a cop out in a way or something [...] but what problem does [the request] point to? I guess the problem it points to is that people are just having trouble finding stuff, and if that's the problem then maybe more the issue is that the mineral layout ... if you've seen an unhidden screenshot you've seen that the mineral layout is kind of asstacular right? It's like these little ovals and these restricted veins that run all in one z-layer, and I think improving the mineral layout could go a long way to alleviating some percentage of the concerns there. I think the other concerns are people that want to know where features are in advance, features like big open areas and so on, so that they can design their fortress without hitting those places and that's another thing that I'm ambivalent about because I know that some people are really into having a place that looks exactly how they want and then there's the whole idea of the game being about adapting to your circumstances so again it's a completely ambivalent thing there where you'd really want to set that down almost to world generation parameters or something, so that people can have their cake and eat it too. The reason I haven't really moved that quickly on these kind of suggestions is I'd like to find a way to do it that is the best, that addresses all the concerns and can make everybody happy without really compromising what the game feels like. And I think it's possible, I just haven't really hit upon the best way yet. |
| Rainseeker: | Great. Well Capn you want to ask anything else? I'm tired. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, I'm tired too ... I don't know ... do you have any questions, Tarn? |
| Toady: | Uh yeah ... what questions do I have? |
| Rainseeker: | What question would you ask the community? |
| Toady: | Well we had that thread that we started up asking what turned people off and I think, aside from ... the thread gets a little nasty sometimes, not to us but just people yelling at each other and stuff, but we get a lot out of that thread and I think that was the main thing we wanted to ask because when you know what's wrong with the game you can fix it. We kind of had an idea, so the main thing we got out of that is some kind of tutorials or something are the best thing to do, although we don't quite remember what the exact breakdown was of the responses, and also there were a lot of specific interface suggestions that are all good. The other main thing that we ask is that people go and vote on the eternal suggestions so we can get a layout of what people like. I don't know if I have any specific questions ... |
| Capntastic: | Are votes on that cleared automatically, when stuff is taken care of? |
| Toady: | No, but we haven't really had a release for a year so we don't really know what happens when something's taken care of. |
| Interlocutor: | |
| Toady: | Yeah ... when we release it we're probably going to clear a lot of votes and also highly publicise the fact that people should go back and check things out because at that point I'm going to take note of what the top ones were and like I was saying kind of look at the top ten but look at everything, see what the breakdown is, and start structuring the next releases based in part on that. There was nothing up there ... people were wondering a bit about how much that compromises the vision of the game; there was nothing up there in the top ten that's really that controversial. It was pretty solid, everything up there. A lot of it was pretty like - job priorities, hauling, improved pathfinding and stuff - there's a huge kind of pragmatic streak in the community when it comes to voting and I think a lot of that just comes from how frustrating the game can be right now, so it's not like it's a bad thing. I'm hoping that when I address a lot of those things that the voting will start to become more interesting in that sense so I can see what directions people really want to go, once the game's not broken. |
| Rainseeker: | I can't wait to get some wheelbarrows going, or some donkeys that haul my rocks for me or something. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's such a pain right now, I can see why that one's number one. |
| Rainseeker: | Well Capn are we ready to close? |
| Capntastic: | I suppose, yeah. |
| Toady: | So I guess people should let us know what they want us to do with this thing, something we needed to ask right? We've got this first one recorded and we're going to put it together and hopefully people like having something like this every month or so. Hopefully it went well, if we sounded a little under the weather that's because that's exactly what we are, right? |
| Capntastic: | We'll be much better next time. |
| Toady: | It is really hot ... |
| Rainseeker: | What I want to ask the community is ... I think we're going to - if it's ok with you Tarn - [...] create a new podcast forum for questions just because it's difficult for us who are asking questions to wade through a forty page thread so we'll create a new one, we'll backlog this old one and if you guys [let us know] what you guys liked about this and what you guys didn't, that'd be fine to share. Just don't be too cruel, okay? We're sensitive. |
| Toady: | Well I'm half dead, that's my problem right now. Sitting here drooling ... It's been trying, but this weather's supposed to be gone tomorrow, that'd be a good thing. So cool, I think this went well, I think this went well. |
| Rainseeker: | Great, well, everybody in Never Never Land ... |
| Capntastic: | See you next month! |
| Rainseeker: | See you next month. |
| Capntastic: | See you next month! |
| Toady: | Yeah, bye bye. |
Dwarf Fortress Talk #2, with Rainseeker, Capntastic, Ampersand and Toady One, transcribed by mallocks
1. The siege.
1a. How long have sieges been in Dwarf Fortress and what is their purpose?
1b. Sieges versus traps.
1c. Do invaders actually have goals when they invade?
1d. Is there ever going to be a time when goblins demand tribute?
1e. Is there a possibility through the siege mechanisms to start eliminating entire populations?
1f. Will sieges tie into wars?
1g. Possible triggers for war.
2. Megabeasts.
3. Spheres and the undead.
4. Are tree nerds going to get any love?
5. Will the new cavern system exist in every biome?
6. Will animals be eating soon?
7. Will dwarves ever be able to figure out an order for digging on their own?
8. Arena mode.
9. Do you ever play any of the mods for Dwarf Fortress in your spare time?
10. Do you ever plan on having some HFS that isn't immediately out to kill you?
11. What will you be able to do to exposed guts?
12. Plans for gods.
13. What do you think about the 3D utilities
for Dwarf Fortress? Would you ever consider using such a system in the
main Dwarf Fortress program?
14. What does your day look like?
15. How do you pronounce Urist?
| Toady: | Let's watch the ... numbers, (singing) let's watch them go up and up and up ... or not. (singing concludes) Come on! Come on little numbers. 53 (scat singing). Come on now. Come on little numbers! Come on little numbers! Now it's recording the speakers but not the mic this time. Come on mic! Oh mic! (singing)Mikey mic mic mic mikey mic, mic, gonna get my numbers going up above 54 where they're stuck.(singing concludes) |
| Rainseeker: | So basically right then is where I cut it. |
| Capntastic: | Oh okay, so we're not ... are we going to listen to it now? |
| Toady: | Nah nah, it's post ... |
| Capntastic: | See you got me all psyched up, I'm all like, in my listening stance. |
| Rainseeker: | I'm going to ... cleansing music, it'll cleanse your karma, your soul. |
| Capntastic: | What song is it? |
| Rainseeker: | It's a ... |
| Toady: | (Guitar) There, that's kind of cleansing, it's one of those major 9th chords. |
| Rainseeker: | Sitar. |
| Toady: | Of course my guitar's out of tune, I haven't tuned it for a while, and I've got my headphones cord [...] is going over the strings and making them all tinny. |
| Capntastic: | Oh, that was actually Toady playing? |
| Rainseeker: | That was him playing, yeah. |
| Capntastic: | Oh, but is that [the] song that's going to be in the ... |
| Toady: | No no, I was just trying to cleanse you because you seemed disappointed. |
| Capntastic: | You're playing with my heart here. |
| Toady: | (un-transcribable noise) |
| Rainseeker: | You need to record that as a sound effect for your game. |
| Capntastic: | He has something like that in Kobald Quest. |
| Toady: | (another, different un-transcribable noise) |
| Rainseeker: | What are the voices for Kobald Quest? |
| Toady: | That's just me, being weird. (second one again, extended) 'There's three more for every one you kill but you gotta start somewhere!' Yeah it's still not recording ... oh bam, there it goes it just dropped two megs into the file. Come on little numbers! Come on little numbers! |
| Capntastic: | You're playing with my heart here. |
| Rainseeker: | Hey guys this is Rainseeker. I'm frankly quite surprised you've made it this far. I really appreciate you listening but man I've got nothing left to give. Just go play Dwarf Fortress or something. |
Dwarf Fortress Talk #3, with Rainseeker, Capntastic and Toady One, transcribed by mallocks
1. Animal peoples.
1a. Are the animal people going to be like animals?
1b. Aggressive goals of underground animal peoples.
1c. Do you enjoy it when people lose tragically?
1d. Dwarven detection skills. (spoilers within)
1e. Underground titans.
1e.1. Personal histories.
1e.2. Habitats.
1e.3. Population sizes.
1e.4. Material limits.
1f. Realism of cave entrances.
2. The underground.
2a. Aquifers versus the underground.
2b. What do you think is the most exciting thing about the new underground stuff?
2c. Will an adventurer be able to go into the underground realms?
2d. Accessibility of the underground.
2e. Layers of the underground.
3. What are the specs of your own computer? How well does the game perform?
4. Relations between the underground animal men and the aboveground animal men.
5. How do you see the balance of simulation versus game play playing out in adventure mode?
6. Will the environment a dwarf is raised in affect what they like/dislike?
7. Will creatures aging affect their abilities?
7a. Longevity of elves.
8. Dwarven stronghold tunnels in fortress mode.
9. How do you motivate yourself to get working?
10. Managing interactions between different religious, family, and guild factions.
11. What board games do you like?
| Rainseeker: | I just know someone on the forum's going to take that seriously. The Ritalin thing. |
| Toady: | I'm not going to drug my cat! Well ... no, we drugged him when he got de-nad-ified, we gave him oral pain medicine, so I guess I have a history ... |
| Rainseeker: | Was there any feedback about that? |
| Toady: | No one seemed to think it was a negative thing, the de-nad-ification. Of course people were like 'are you getting your cat declawed?', I'm like 'no, I'm not getting my cat declawed.' So, he still has his claws, I can tell. |
| Rainseeker: | Oooh yeah. |
| Toady: | There's much violence going on in this house, I got wounds on my hands and so on. But no, people don't mind the ... there wasn't negative feedback as far as the de-nad-ification goes, even though it was a kind of selfish procedure on my part because I didn't want him spraying all over the house and starting fights with me and trying to roam outside and so on when he's trapped inside here, he's an indoor cat. |
| Toady: | (sings) Duh-d-d-duh-duh! |
| Capntastic: | What? Who said that? |
| Toady: | (sings) Me-me-me-me-me! Me-me-d-d-duh! |
| Capntastic: | Hello? |
| Toady: | I'm here! Who else is here? |
| Capntastic: | Am I here? |
| Toady: | Captain Tastic ... Captain ... Capntastic is here. |
| Rainseeker: | I just want to warn you guys I will be stepping up soon to put some spaghetti in my pot. |
| Toady: | As long as its not your pocket, yeah. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah I thought you were going to say pocket too. I envisioned the whole standing up and it's like 'oh I'm going to put spaghetti in my pockets' |
| Toady: | Like, 'let me warn you guys, I'm about to lose my damn mind' |
| Rainseeker: | Then following with root beer in my eardrum. |
| Rainseeker: | That's the wind going through the ... |
| Toady: | Unfortunately there's no such real thing as dead air on a podcast, but. |
| Rainseeker: | This will be gone in a flash. |
| Toady: | That reminds me of sound effects from the Dragslay game when we had sound effects when you were running through the entire battle. It would be text like from adventure mode except it'd just kind of scroll up the screen when you're fighting because there's no spatial component and so it just had the text scroll up the screen [and] you'd just press enter while you're fighting and whenever you hit something with like a sword and chopped a limb off it was like (sfx vox: whoosh, splat [rough transliteration]) |
| Capntastic: | Tactical nukes. |
| Toady: | That's right. There's always little things going on, especially when you have seven thousand animals in your house. I've only got one and he's majorly messed up one of the recordings already so I can only imagine what having a bunch of parrots and rats and things running around your house ... |
| Toady: | (to Scamps) What are you doing Mr.? Mr. Cat. Mr. Cat has no tail, Mr. Cat's got little ears. What you doing Mr. Cat? (sfx vox: trumpet) (end aside) Alright, I'll try and keep the interruptions to a minimum. |
| Rainseeker: | That's going in, at the end. |
| Toady: | I might have to sing to the cat occasionally, you never know. He's just sitting here, inviting song! |
Dwarf Fortress Talk #4, with Rainseeker and Toady One, transcribed by mallocks
| Rainseeker: | Hey everybody, welcome to our next podcast. I'm Rainseeker and this is Toady One. |
| Toady: | Hello, this is Dwarf Fortress Talk. |
| Rainseeker: | Number four! |
| Toady: | Number four, that's right. Four is longer than just an accident, right? |
| Rainseeker: | That's right. |
| Toady: | So we're there; we've arrived. We're no longer a trilogy, we're a show. |
| Rainseeker: | That's right, we are a show, officially! |
| Toady: | I guess we're still a miniseries but we're going to take the world by storm. |
| Rainseeker: | I'm going to be very happy if we get past twelve. |
| Toady: | Yeah, that requires quite a bit of life stability and stuff, when you've got a monthly show that goes up to twelve, that's like a whole year. |
| Rainseeker: | It does. And guys unfortunately we are minus one host tonight. |
| Toady: | That's right, Mr. Capn ... Capntastic. |
| Rainseeker: | Occasionally Capntastic is called out for duty. He is a superhero you see, and he had to fight Dr. Doom and Venom at the same time. |
| Toady: | Yeah. Usually he's fighting one when we're on the show but two? Two is way too many. |
| Rainseeker: | He couldn't do it. Usually you can kind of hear punching noises in the background but ... |
| Toady: | It's either him fighting the super[villain] or me fighting the cat. |
| Rainseeker: | Right, right. So he's going to have to be at work doing things tonight. He was called away unexpectedly at the last moment and rescheduling was out of the question, so ... |
| Toady: | Well you can't really expect a supervillain attack, you know. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, I know, it's really hard to anticipate those. |
| Toady: | So here we are. Hopefully we won't get too in ... what would that be called when you get wrapped up in your own little universe and you don't have the staying hand of Capntastic to ... |
| Rainseeker: | Um ... inbred? |
| Toady: | Inbred ... Well that's one way of saying it! I'm sure there's a better word, but ... so it's already getting there. |
| Rainseeker: | I know, I am a little concerned for our safety. |
| Toady: | We're totally going to stave off degeneracy though; we're going to be able to fight degeneracy for at least another ten minutes before it gets horrible. |
| Rainseeker: | I don't know, I'm already feeling that two minute itch right now. I don't know what that means, but ... |
| Toady: | It looks like our third ... that'd be our fourth host I guess ... the little cat, he's not in the room right now, which means he's probably staring at me from someplace where I can't see him; ready to attack. But for now we have peace! |
| Rainseeker: | So as you guys know our topic today is world generation and history generation. What I'd like to talk about first Tarn is; what exactly happens when you hit that button that says 'Generate World'? |
| Toady: | It goes through several steps which it lists out as you go; at least up to a certain point. First it just needs a world to play with at all so you need to know ... it loads up your parameters and it allocates a certain amount of space for your world; did you want a large one? Did you want a small one? Then it needs to come up with ... just basic passes on elevation and the rainfall, temperature, that kind of thing. So it'll lay down an elevation field, lay down a temperature field, and adjust the temperature field based on whether it wants a north or a south pole because right now it only has one or the other; and then adjust the temperatures based on elevations, drop some rainfall and other things. Just the basic building blocks there. Then it'll move on to further stages; smoothing out those values sometimes, adding things like rivers - we'll start carving them, because once it knows the elevation and where the oceans are then it can start placing rivers - it goes through several phases getting rivers to eventually look decent, and then it fills up some lakes where it thinks they should be. After that it looks at the rainfall, [the] temperature, the drainage level it came up with and the elevation and decides where the different biomes are and will actually locate regions and name them; like 'this is this forest, this is this, this is that'. Then it looks at your raws and populates those with creatures. At that point it's got a world with no intelligent creatures in it - at least no intelligent creatures that can form civilizations - and says 'we've got a place now where we can actually start these civilizations up where they have enough things to play with'. [It needs] to know for instance what rocks are in an area before [it knows] what type of dwarven civilization's going to pop up there, so it's kind of a geographical determinism thing; you need the geography first. It's at that point that the civilizations begin, and I think it lays out caves at that point - where are the megabeasts, and dragons and titans and so on - and then it seeds the different civilizations everywhere. There's no creation stories yet or anything like that, so there isn't a lot of consistency right now, so there's more uniformity right now. It's like 'pick a bunch of spots that are kind of good for say a goblin or a human and then pop twenty of them down and then just let them breed and build cities and spread at that point'. There are a few other things that come up during that process that I'm sure we'll get to, but that's the ... once a certain number of years run by, again according to the parameters, it stops the process and you've got a world sitting there. |
| Rainseeker: | Very good. So as far as races are concerned, everyone doesn't come from two people. |
| Toady: | That's how it works right now. We wanted a little bit of ... at first it was just because we didn't want a lot of inbreeding because if everyone comes from two people then the first step is fine, but then the second step you're like 'well ...'. |
| Rainseeker: | Well that's okay, I mean you have to right? For the first like, what, ten generations, or maybe just three generations? |
| Toady: | People would have to do things with their brothers and sisters. And so to avoid that we've got ten pairs, and ten pairs is enough so that ... the game avoids certain inbreeding; you should never have brothers with brothers - I'm sorry, that's not even going to lead to a long line - I meant brothers and sisters, and half-brothers and half-sisters. It should avoid those, it should avoid parents and children, but I think certain things ... the farther out on the graph you search the longer it takes to find things ... but I haven't really made my best effort there, because I think uncles and aunts are still okay, and cousins it doesn't check for. Cousins, they have a lot more historical basis, so they're actually fine, essentially, but aunts and uncles I don't think have quite as much ... |
| Rainseeker: | So a niece could marry an uncle? |
| Toady: | This is the current setup, yeah. So you don't really need ten pairs, you just need, what, two or something. But in any case I'm even more happy with the ten pairs now because another thing that you've got in the coming version is the genetics for things like hair and eye colour and so on; and so if you started with two people you don't have a lot of variability. If you start with ten pairs and twenty people you're going to have a pretty good selection of the available appearances and there's no mutation right now so you are just going to be losing variation over time; but you'll have enough after however many generations it runs now - I guess if you have a thousand years it could run a little under a hundred generations or something - and that's quite a bit of time but it's probably not enough to wipe out all of the hair colours but one, say. So you should have a good variability in appearance at the end of generation. Now there's things that might be fun to toy with later like if you know that you're going to have two dwarven civilizations then maybe give all of them darker hair in one and all of them lighter hair in another or something; just so you can have these different subgroups that pop up for that reason. There's always things that come out of that kind of thing, just ... |
| Rainseeker: | That's actual racial differences. |
| Toady: | Yeah. [It's] kind of arguable whether you'd want it to be that way or not, but certainly when you're wandering around looking at people, being able to tell where they're from by their hair or something is a cool thing to be able to tell. So it's cool to have ten - I'm glad I have ten pairs now - especially since I did the appearance bit. |
| Rainseeker: | Now how many different ... are you creating unique eye colours [for] the human race, or skin tones? I assume that goblins are going to be green, but ... |
| Toady: | Everyone's got their own thing right now. The humans - I went through my list of colours and I picked everything that I thought was reasonable - so there's no green humans but just the wide variety from pale whites to darker browns and everything in between and ranging out a little bit into different ... not specifically olive because I think when people say someone has olive coloured skin ... olive is really green. But it just means it's not just a line from peach to brown but there's a bit of variation in there. So I picked anything that kind of works and I'm sure people will have suggestions for colours that are missing and so on. I wouldn't mind if my colour library - I think it's got like a hundred colours now - I wouldn't mind having you know two thousand colours in there; they really don't take a lot of memory and I think it's good to use your words [and] have all kinds of different colours. |
| Rainseeker: | What about eye colours? |
| Toady: | For eye colours I did the same thing for humans. For humans I just went and picked the different eyes that I've seen and different eyes that I can think people have. It's really a wide variety and I probably cut a few too many out. With the dwarves I just decided to be silly there and I just left all of the colour names that came from minerals, so like emerald coloured eyes or copper coloured eyes or bronze coloured eyes ... amethyst coloured eyes. I just wanted to give it a little bit of flavour that way. |
| Rainseeker: | So you could have ruby eyes? |
| Toady: | Yeah, I think so, I think you could have sinister ruby eyes ... if ruby is a colour. That's the thing where there's going to be some weird holes because I don't remember if my colour list has ruby or not, I'm pretty sure it had emerald but I don't remember if it has ruby or not. But if it just said red then I didn't keep it, because you don't want to read that description, it's like 'the dwarf has red eyes'; but 'the dwarf has ruby eyes' would be fine. So that's how I thought of it. I believe hair and skin for humans and dwarves is the same set of colours. Most depictions I've seen of dwarves they're light skinned but that's just true of fantasy in general - fantasy meaning European fantasy or whatever, obviously non-European fantasy is not going to have everybody with lightly white skin - so I just decided to let all the skin colours fly for those two races and I think elves as well. But with the elf hair I think the elf hair is all kind of silveries and blondes and stuff regardless of the skin colour, although I should go check; you can always just pull things up and check, let's go call up an elf right now. Whoops! Instead of typing the word 'elf' into the file maybe I should search for it. Okay, so, body appearance, we're down below here, what have we got? It looks like every colour for skins and the eye colours are not set yet. |
| Rainseeker: | I want to see an elf with violet eyes. |
| Toady: | Yeah right now I think they're just copies of the human but there's this note here that says 'need elf eye colours' so I'm sure I'll get to that. And then the hair ... (singing) hair hairity hair hair hair, where's your hair colours ... huh, where'd they go? Where where where oh where is my hair, my hair's gone away (end singing) ... I'll have to look at the dwarf to see where I hide hair colour because it looks like right now the elves ... I'm going to look up the word 'brown' how about that. Brown ... It looks like for hair colours there's just a general ... No, no, gold and silver - here they are, they're just hard to find - gold and silver for the elves right now ... I believe that's the case; is that an elf? I'm kind of wandering around these giant ... the text files have gotten so large now that just popping up a piece of information isn't something that's an immediate thing. Right now hair colours for dwarves and humans still need to be fleshed out as well; right now I think they're just black and brown but that's going to increase. But I did their eyes and skin and the elf seems to be done except for the eyes, so there's just these things. I'm sure there are notes lying around saying 'please come up with this', so we got a vote for violet elf eyes. |
| Rainseeker: | There you go! |
| Toady: | Violet elf eyes, yes sir. |
| Rainseeker: | Okay so let's move on and talk about the stories that get generated by these people. Is the plan to give them all different life plans and motivations or are they just going to all have pretty much the same goals? |
| Toady: | So right now we have this personality model, so when you're in world generation whenever someone rises to a level where they hold some kind of responsibility - so it doesn't do this for the fisherdwarves at first because it can't run it for ten thousand people - but whenever someone rises to a position of authority it then generates more information about their personalities. Right now that does very little, it just decides when they'll go to war or something like that, but that's really because that's all they can do right now in world generation. But the idea is to take that model and also to come up with a few things - like right now the dwarves have preferences, like they like plump helmets - to flesh out a character you don't just need personality and preferences and things like that that are just describing a static sort of state of their head - I'm losing my words for how to describe that - but you want something that's more dynamic about their future, like what do they want out of life. Knowing your personality and preferences doesn't really answer that question, because that [answer] isn't something that came really out of a personality profile but also out of experiences and so on. So there's more of a history required to get to a point where that gives a coherent answer, but at first we're not going to need a coherent answer, we're just going to need an answer [to] 'what do you want out of life?' So if someone's ambitious and wants to control the situations they're in or maybe get to the point where they want to control the world, that's obviously an easy thing for leadership to throw in goals like that. Or maybe they just like to collect things, or maybe they want peace and harmony in life, or they just want to have a family. So certain things are going to lead to certain ... Do they want more stability? Do they want to acquire resources? Do they want to protect their town that they grew up in? For instance if a leader really has a love for the town they grew up in then if they become the leader of the entire civilization then what that should do is tweak numbers in their decisions making processes so that that town receives more protection or favour for instance. There are a bunch of different examples for that and you don't need to hit them all; you just need to throw enough in that it's interesting enough. Eventually the whole thing needs to arise at a point where you have different leaders and different people under the leaders: they all want things, but there has to be conflict in those wants, not just between two people but within a person as well; their responsibilities might conflict with the things that they want. Then you need to be able to resolve those conflicts. Now at first it's all just numbers, like how it adds up the numbers for the thoughts to produce a single happiness number for a dwarf right now, so if it's adding up all those numbers - which it currently does right now when they're deciding to go to war or not - all it needs to do to really lend conflict to the story I think is just tell you what's going on when that stuff happens. So if they're weighing the safety of their family versus whether or not to pull an army out of their home time to a more strategic location on the front or something like that, when they weigh that choice and it's just 'plus twenty here, minus thirty here; go do it'; what really happened there story wise needs to be shown somewhere. This should be an agonising decision sometimes and if it just tells you about that then it's going to make those characters jump off the page a lot more than they currently do I think. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | So I see how conflict could arise between two nations that are radically different, for instance goblins and humans. But could there ever be a time where we get to dwarven civilizations fighting each other in world generation, over like ... insults, or maybe jealousy or something? |
| Toady: | There's a lot of different ways that that could happen. To look down at the basics, a lot of things ... say a resource struggle; but that's not a personality conflict so much. Then getting up to ... Right now they bump into each other to do a peace agreement or whatever, but it doesn't really simulate what happened there. So of course if there's an argument at a meeting that would certainly be an avenue to explore. Like having these trade agreements that they enter into every five years or something ... they have some kind of big council to decide something, then you could simulate that event and of course it's more interesting when things go all wrong. I prefer to keep running it as a simulation where it just randomly decides based on if those two people really disagree on what kind of cheese they like, or really disagree on just ethical notions to the point where they'd have a lot of arguments; then just having it occur at that point would be good, rather than having it say 'there hasn't been a fight in this world for ten years so let's just start something'. Because the game could do that too. I'd like to lean away from that stuff but if a guiding hand is needed ... well I should probably just improve the simulation then because people fight all the time; but I'll do what's necessary to keep the game interesting. So yeah, that's certainly there and there's other things; like families should be a huge part of this, so if someone marries into another civilization at one of these meetings as a diplomatic marriage then you could have all kinds of interesting push and pull on the numbers as to what's going to happen. |
| Rainseeker: | Could it even be where you combine the two civilizations? |
| Toady: | Yeah. All of that's fair game. It's always easier to break things than to join them together, but those things are fair. Right now we just have the conquering of civilizations but it doesn't always have to be such a violent matter. It's one of those things where you can add to it in increments and every little bit that you add just improves everything so much because it interacts with every other thing that's already there. Some people are already compelled enough by the world gen lists of events to pick through them for hours just looking through to follow the history of one hero or another; so every little thing like this is going to be great and we're really enthusiastic about getting to this stuff which should happen pretty soon because after this release - which is, you know, who knows? But it's going to happen - we're going to do the three things I always talk about: adventure skills, improved sieges and the top ten voting. So for improved sieges you need to have armies moving around the map, that was one of our requirements; it's not a strict requirement, you could just improve the sieges, but in order for them to make sense they need to be coming from someplace, and we're going to want them to come from real historical figures, more so than they already do if they're commanders. For that to work out the civilization needs to know where to pull them from, and also just to increase the overall interest in our world we're going to do that motivation stuff right there, at least enough pieces of it to make some sense out of things; to have the armies moving on the world map, having them come from places and so on. So when they decide to attack you we're going to step that up from just being a random event that occurs: right now it's just like 'It's Spring, and ... flip the coin? Did you get it? Oh, well, too bad; goblin attack'. There's nothing going on there, nothing at all. So the more we put in there ... you put it into dwarf mode, you put it into world generation, and eventually adventure mode starts to see some of this as well; and it'll just get better and better. Hopefully now that I've done so much of it there'll be less fussing around with 'what tissues make up the toe?' [and more] sweeping world generation changes. |
| Rainseeker: | I'm very excited to see some kind of generation of story, where it might just arbitrarily pick what characters to follow, but maybe it picks a group of characters that has a particularly violent or interesting story, that involves marriage and betrayal, and war; and [...] might just stick it all together and give you stories from the histories. |
| Toady: | The easy ones to pick are leaders; so you could do [things] like those old Roman or Greek histories, who was it, Suetonius [who wrote] The Twelve Caesars? I really don't remember - it's more of my brother's thing - I don't know if it was Suetonius or not; but it's basically just a history of each Roman empire before that guy's time. So those kinds of thing, these are the pie in the sky end goals of the game would be for you to generate a world, and then you're just walking around in adventure mode and you can go to some kind of library, or something like a monastery, and pick up a book and it just would say 'the history of the whatever empire' for the past two hundred years, and it would just be like The Twelve Caesars; you could just read about this guy and what happened, and the prose would be decent and all this kind of stuff. That would just be awesome, we're just pointing toward that; getting there seems like a difficult thing, but we're pointing toward that. So what you're saying though is really interesting because when you've got those ten thousand people - what people have to do now is fish around for the interesting ones - so you could have the computer just look at a guy and be 'these are the fifty associated historical events' and some of those are more interesting than others. And when you've got the really dramatic ones, when it's some great chance in the person's life or something that has something to do with other important people, then you could just increase some kind of value number for that and then at the end when you're in Legends mode - before we get to writing books even - when you're just in Legends mode, which is kind of our not-having-books mode ... Legends mode might not even to exist so much if you've got robust histories to look at of the world; you'd probably still want something like that around but in any case you could just tell the computer 'show me the top ten most interesting people that weren't a noble' or whatever, and it'd just be 'bam!' 'Well what about this guy?' 'He was a trapper until bears came and destroyed his apartment...' his log cabin rather, not his apartment, that'd be like this place getting destroyed by bears '...and then he had to wander the woods subsisting on berries until he stumbled into a dragon's cave and then they became best friends and he started riding the dragon and they took to the skies and went north and he started fighting all the arctic hare men up there and led an army of animal people against the dwarves' or something like that. Of course he'd be a noble at that point if he's leading things but let's say that last part didn't happen; it'd still be an interesting story, riding the dragon around. The detection shouldn't be that hard to do; the actual production of the stories is hard but just going through a list of events and assigning importance is something it already does [...] it mainly does that just so your dwarves know what to engrave. We're slowly getting there but I think it'd be awesome ... |
| Rainseeker: | That's why you don't have an engraving of Urist McDwarf eating a mushroom. |
| Toady: | I guess you do when they really like ... you get those guys that carve cheese in everyone's room or whatever, but that's just because that dwarf has problems himself. It should be cool, and that's what we're shooting for. Ideally everyone would have a kind of interesting life - that's what you hope out of real life, right? - but you can't always guarantee that when you've got memory constraints and so on. Some guys are just going to sit there for sixty years and it's going to be like 'This was a fisherdwarf, and he got married and then that was it'. The marriage is really more to keep world generation going than to give the dwarf anything particular to be happy about. |
| Rainseeker: | Well first you could do this process of generating a false history for him once you look closely at him. |
| Toady: | There have been discussions about that [and] the difficulties that can arise. I don't remember if we have discussed this before because I just yammer on about things, but one of the ideas is to have the civilizations remember important historical events to give the people that live there that are completely unimportant a place to hang their hat when you talk to them. Then the more your player interacts with somebody - maybe even through legends mode - then the more it can flesh them out. But you've got to watch out for generating events in the past that didn't happen in the world generation or else you're just going to tie yourself in knots and have inconsistencies all through. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | [A NCHOR]So world generation is really fascinating; it's really captured the imagination of the entire community and me as well. What is the most exciting thing to you about world generation? |
| Toady: | It's really the things we've been talking about. I think it would just be great to have the people actually thinking about stuff, that's really way up there for me, because that shoots the replayability, immersion, all that kind of thing, through the roof [and] that'll actually allow me to play my own game; which is one of those things I was always shooting for. To actually be able to jump in there and see people thinking about things, or when you're an adventurer going and talking to someone and they've got some place in the world that isn't like 'I'm sitting in this chair and you're going to go kill a dragon for me'. That's how they are right now and then when the threats around their town are eliminated they're like 'Oh no, it's great here. We're fine, I've got nothing else I need to do'. Even though as an adventurer who's this psychotic thrill seeker or whatever you're throwing yourself as this guy's feet to do whatever he wants to do and he's just like '(sfx vox: apathy) We just sit here and eat food out of our magic barrels, it's a very nice place our masters have set up for us, and we're going to continue eating out of our magic barrels.' |
| Rainseeker: | Well what they should be saying is 'Hey, well I've got a number of weeds in my garden; do you mind taking care of that?' |
| Toady: | Yeah and then you could elsewhere I guess, but they should have ... if you're the guy who killed the dragons around there then an ambitious one might say 'We could go places together, and there's this next community over there, and we've been kind of friendly with them for a while but I'd much rather have them be my subjects' or something. Then you can make decisions, you can make decisions about whether or not that's the kind of guy that you want to associate with. It'd be great if we got some grey areas in there which are going to develop, and when you've got conflicts in the world where people all want stuff that all steps on each other's toes and there's no 'these are the bad demons that want to destroy the world and these are the people that were otherwise just going to be sitting farming but then the bad demons came and now there're not anymore; what side do you want to be on?' Instead of that, just having that kind of thing where you've got a bunch of actors that want their own thing. That's one of the things we've been shooting for for a very very long time. Among world generation topics that's the most exciting to me; especially when you get down to sub-groups, we didn't talk about things like guilds and religions and all that kind of thing. I talked about how a guy might have a conflict with another guy; a guy might have a conflict with a subordinate; and a guy might have internal conflicts about his family or his hometown or whatever. But really one of the big things here is when a single person has [internal] conflicts not just with their family but also their professional organisation, their religion, their town and their civilization. When you get all those things acting together; when you've got a leader who's also a member of a secret cult, but their loyalty to the cult isn't absolute, then you've got some real tearing inside of that person, especially when things start going haywire in the world at large. It should be extremely fascinating to let that stuff play out, I'm really really looking to that. |
| Rainseeker: | Also it is really interesting too, I'm sure, if you start getting some characters that are deeply flawed, and conflicted about life in general. |
| Toady: | Yeah, I'm hoping that when we put in these goals ... right now a person's character flaws ... what's the worst character flaw a person can have in Dwarf Fortress right now is like that get really angry, or they're really lazy, or something. It's these character flaws that are just sort of ... |
| Rainseeker: | A bit generic. |
| Toady: | Yeah, like seven deadly sins out of control, but not to the point ... it's just like really slothful, really lazy or whatever; or really angry, they just can't keep it in and they start throwing barrels at people when they get angry about their food being rotten or whatever. So there's nothing really insidious though, or nothing that's a flaw that's really interesting at all, it's just watching the id out of control, it's no fun. So yeah, looking forward to that. I've been going online and looking at different characterisation, interesting novel character type things, to try and figure out what traits need to be applied to a Dwarf Fortress character to make them more interesting; like what different kind of characterisations and stuff. We've got a bunch of crap written down which is like the things we've been talking about; and the more of that that could go in the game and have an actual effect the better, I think. (aside to Scamps) What are you doing up here Mr Scamps? (end aside) |
| Rainseeker: | Let's make a transition then, let's talk about - in a second - go on to talk about our loser which was ... not Scamps of course, Scamps is always a winner ... |
| Toady: | Scamps is a winner. Well I'm a winner by not getting mauled, so I'm glad that was number three. He's done good though, he's been pretty good this episode. He's in the room now standing on top of his little cave, just smelling the wall ... sometimes he just stands up on the wall and puts both of his paws on the wall and just smells the wall. Don't ask me. Right now he's smelling the camera cable because I dug that out to put the pictures of the meetup and him in his little hat on the desk. |
| Rainseeker: | Which should be online right now guys; go run and check on it. |
| Toady: | This is like going into the future, because right not is not the future. |
| Rainseeker: | So what we're going to talk about next is the trades. |
| Toady: | The trades, that's right. |
| Unattrib.: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | Hey this is Rainseeker here, I'm actually interrupting my own podcast with myself. Two things: first thing is, this next portion of the podcast is filled with clicks [non-transcribed] that are inexplicable. I've done the best to eliminate them but my software hasn't been too kind to me. On the good side, it's just for about three minutes so suffer through it, and I'm not sure but there might be more. Second thing; don't forget to get on the website and support Tarn, he puts a lot of effort into programming this game for us all and if you enjoy the game as much as I do please drop a couple of bucks in the PayPal jar. Thanks, back to the podcast. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | So we're back with more Dwarf Fortress Talk. I'm your host Rainseeker and [I'm] with Tarn Adams here. |
| Toady: | That's right, Tarn Adams, and his cat; Mr baby Scamps. |
| Rainseeker: | Super Scamps? |
| Toady: | Yeah, Super Scamps. Biting, chewing wires as usual. |
| Rainseeker: | In this section of the show we're going to address - maybe not totally attack it - but we will address to a certain degree the trades, and that means cheese making, and weapon smithing ... soap making, and all that great stuff. |
| Toady: | All the important trades. |
| Rainseeker: | The trades! Now let me ask you a historical question about Dwarf Fortress. Was this always on the agenda to have trades in Dwarf Fortress? |
| Toady: | Yeah. The original idea for the game before it became our main fantasy game; it was its own little thing, its own little project, and the idea was that you'd dig into the mountain and you'd die and then an adventurer would come in and check out the crap that you made. And so in that simple plan there the crap that you made is what led to this whole idea of 'oh, we're going to have ... they're going to make little goblets and things, and they'll need to make little swords and things, and they'll need to have all kinds of stuff'. And so the diversity of the crafts really came about from this original idea, so even before this was our main game we were going to have quite a bit of diversity in the trades and it was going to be also important to ... even trading with a caravan, like trading out your goblets and soap and so on; trading it out with the caravan was going to be a way to also ... the simple game idea had your high score list [as] the stuff that your adventurer found in your fortress after you lost, but also you were going to be able to get some small points on your high score list by trading things out. So that was another way that the different things that dwarves did ... having a diversity there was going to improve the quality of the high score list and so it really just ballooned out from there, especially once it became our main project. Now anything's allowed, anything at all that isn't the things that we generally don't give the thumbs up to, like [...] steam and nuclear power and stuff like that. |
| Rainseeker: | So I think this is one of the ways I have the most fun in this game is making things. I had a lot of fun particularly when I went to a desert and found a magma pool and decided to make glass, just tons and tons of glass, I had like ten glass refineries - or kilns I guess - just made tons of it, and then started building a glass fortress, because it's an unlimited resource. Is that ever a plan of yours, to make a sand pile limited? |
| Toady: | There's this notion of sand as a fluid I think, that's kind of intriguing. Like if you have a bunch of sand leaning up against a rock wall and you remove the rock wall, the sand doesn't retain its shape, it'll just flow into the cavern. So it would be really cool if it could be made into a fluid like that, that behaves kind of like lava does now; because lava makes more slopes, it doesn't worry about fluid pressure and all that kind of thing. And it would be cool if the sand could move like that, but at the same time you could still walk or even build on it, or whatever you need to do. And in that way it would become a limited resource because when you scoop up some it would just remove a unit of sand from the square. Snow has a similar thing. Right now though it depends not just on the fluid rewrite - which is going to allow us to support more fluid types at once - but also the notion that this is a very special fluid that can be walked on and all that. So you'd be pathfinding over it, and at the same time it would be able to flow. It's one of those things like; is this an insurmountable problem? It might be, it might be one of those things that's very very difficult to do. |
| Rainseeker: | Well [it] would make it actually very difficult to build; especially if someone decided to build on a sand dune. |
| Toady: | That should be hard, but you could still pitch a tent there or something; and then that tent should just fall over if you drain the sand into a giant sinkhole or something. |
| Rainseeker: | Well I'm thinking people build pillars to support things, so if someone built a pillar on a sand dune which then shifted that thing should fall over and that should be really interesting to do. |
| Toady: | That's one of those things that's very difficult but you'd ideally want sand to have those additional properties. |
| Rainseeker: | There's a lot of limitations right now on what you can do, how customised you can make every item. Are you planning on allowing people to maybe create a template of an item that they want to create and then tell people to keep creating that same thing. You want to for instance create a goblet that is encrusted with diamonds and has an image of an elephant slaying a dwarf on it ... |
| Toady: | Yeah, especially if that's the insignia of your group or whatever. There are a few limitations that are design based. Most of the limitations just come from how the jobs are stored right now and I'd have to rewrite quite a bit to get them to think more about things, and just writing interfaces is always irritating. But ideally I'd like you to be able to do a lot more things, if you have a dwarf pumping those things out maybe he'll get irritated; he doesn't get to realise his dreams anymore [or] do whatever the heck he wants. But just having some kind of work order where you have the goblet, then do these things to it, and make the goblet out of this material, and if the [goblet] isn't at least finely crafted then just melt it down again and just get these things built and then we're going to build ten of them, and then do whatever. It'd be great to allow people to do things like that especially because with statues now; the dwarves can carve these statues that will look like things now, but what they look like is really up to the dwarf right now. It's understandable to allow Michelangelo or whatever to make the statue they want, but even those kind of people had commission jobs, and especially if it's like 'I want the ten previous rulers of my civilization; I want statues of them so I can line the great hall with them'. That'd be awesome right? And it's not something where you're like 'Well I want to carve a big cheese today, sorry' and so you've got like ten great cheese statues for your great hall ... |
| Rainseeker: | One of them made clouds. |
| Toady: | Yeah, cloud statues or dwarves surrounded by plump helmets or whatever. It's amusing for a while but then you want to allow the additional control as well. |
| Rainseeker: | You want awesomeness. |
| Toady: | Awesomeness! Yeah, awesomeness is good. My brother and I are always anti-zany in a lot of ways, even though a lot of zaniness kind of jumps in Dwarf Fortress we're usually against throwing in a monster that has big green boots and he's call the Happy Green Monster monster and he has a laser gun or something just because it's silly, just kind of randomly silly, it's just not the direction we want to take the thing. But at the same time we're there when it comes to the statues ... |
| Rainseeker: | I know, I mean come on, a dwarf smashing a bridge that he's already walking on. |
| Toady: | That's this emergent zaniness, and then we've got things which are zaniness that you would call zaniness by design, like these statues. The statues are goofy, the engravings are goofy, but there's something good about them and allowing the dwarves - like if you don't specify what you want them to do - then of course they're going to go on their little flights of fantasy, these little goofy guys. But if you tell them what to do they shouldn't be that pissed off about it. There might be times when a particular dwarf would grumble at that kind of thing and it might pop up a little warning 'he's been making these goblets and he's made two hundred of them, and it's making him a little depressed about this life'; then you might have to do something about it. I'm all for giving the player more control there; they can already carve out the rooms they want and place the furniture where they want and stuff. Especially because it doesn't even fall under the level of micromanagement. Micromanagement is usually what people refer to when it's something that sucks about a game that you have to fiddle with, like having to place the furniture when you don't care anymore. But being able to design the sword or statue ... |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, I want twenty obsidian swords with red handles, darn it. |
| Toady: | Yeah, especially because it's gotten to the point now where you can tell your squad to carry those [kinds of thing]. So you could do that in your squad, you could be like 'I want you to have obsidian swords' but if you didn't have the control to make obsidian swords that would be a very frustrating system. There are things right now about the squad system I think where you can specify the squad uniform more than you can actually specify it in the workshop and that's where we're starting to have a breakdown/disconnect there, so obviously the specifications in the workshops have to come, and I believe ... which I'm going to go check right now on the website ... if I'm not mistaken the eternal suggestion voting has turned that up as well, I don't know if you remember off the top of your head. |
| Rainseeker: | No I haven't looked at it in a long time. |
| Toady: | Yeah I haven't looked at it for a while either, let's see how things are doing. Improved hauling still super, standing production orders, workshop material selection. So workshop material selection basically falls under this umbrella. People want to be able to make what they want to make; it's number three on the list right now, it's beating graphics, and beating pathfinding. So that stuff, that's obviously going to get dealt with sometime. I'm not saying that I'm going to do the top ten in order, I don't want to commit to something that's going to ... it may be impossible to do things in order all the time, but it's not like when four hundred people say they want something and the thing that they want is something you want to, it's like 'that's cool!' It's all good, everything aligns like the stars and stuff, so we'll be there, we'll be there, we just need to get through this horrible horrible release cycle and then this horrible release cycle will be over and everyone will be happy. |
| Rainseeker: | As a matter of fact let's move away from talking about the trades and talk about the release cycle, since you brought it up, sir. |
| Toady: | Yeah yeah yeah. Stepped right into a big steaming pile of crap. |
| Rainseeker: | How are we looking [for] the Christmas release? |
| Toady: | It's a depressing depressing thing. It's one of those things where it's possible, but it's possible in the meaning of the word, where if something is one percent likely it's still possible. It would take a lot of luck, basically, at this point, which doesn't seem to happen to me very often with bugs and things. Because if I don't get caught up and tied in a lot of things like this doesn't work and I have to fix it for a day - that kind of thing happens all the time - and so if I don't step in a lot of those traps and have a lot of trouble working things through it's still possible, but I'm thinking right now that we're just not going to be lucky people and it's not going to happen. Because there's such a bit list of things to do. I talked about this in the thread, at the time I had seventy days and I looked at the list, I'm like 'that's not really a seventy day list anymore'. Everything's taken longer than I thought, it's always that way. Especially when I start giving optimistic release dates and then I'm wrong over and over and people call me out and start yelling at me, it makes me want to not do it anymore but at the same time I'd prefer not to be somebody who also is like 'well it's ready when it's ready'. I'd like to give people the run down there, and so the run down is that caves I've spent more times on that than I thought I would - and that's not necessarily a bad thing - but it's pushed things a little bit later. I'm pretty sure I can finish off the entity position and squad stuff, especially if I cut things like formations. I'm pretty sure I can finish it in November; that's going to be the goal, [...] to finish that stuff in November. There are a few large items there that are not really put offable like guards that are just completely busted right now in bad ways, and that's going to be the trick to getting entities and squads done, [i.e. it's] going to be getting that through. So that's another thing where I can't promise I'll be done in November with that stuff, and that's going to determine a lot of the release date. But if I get through then December was just going to be a mess of clean up, like doing butchery, because right now it doesn't understand how to read through their bodies to get like the amount of fat that comes out of a particularly fat dead creature. Because there's a lot of cool things; like a big fat dwarf - if you decide to skin a dwarf - a big fat dwarf would give you more fat for more candles and stuff than a little skinny dwarf, or a walrus or whatever. So that's all going to be cool, but it all needs to be done, and there's really no other way to do it, now that I've got these bodies, unless I just stick with the hardcoded tags that I had before, but in a sense I can't really do that either. And there's things like the hydra problems, like if you chopped off a couple of hydra's heads you would not want seven skulls instead of five; people insist on the five skulls, and I insist on the five skulls so I'm probably not going to put that kind of consideration off. So getting through all that mess in December and a lot of tests ... because even though every time I've waited like a year to release the game I release the game and there's some giant bug, like the dwarves never waking up from being asleep or whatever, and the other one had the civil war bug where if your sheriff arrested somebody and beat them then the whole fortress broke out in a civil war. |
| Rainseeker: | What? |
| Toady: | Because when a sheriff hits another dwarf it didn't treat it like a law action it treated it like an attack, but since they were both part of the same civilization it recorded the sheriff as an enemy of the civilization now, but since he was also a friend of the civilization when they hit him back that records another enemy, and then anyone who attacks those guys for being enemies [is also recorded as being] an enemy and it just breaks out into this giant mess of people all hating each other or hating certain of each other. |
| Rainseeker: | How did you find out that that was happening? |
| Toady: | I released it and then - I don't remember if it was few days later - people were just like 'What is going on here? My whole fortress just erupted in violence!' Eventually someone sent me a save or something, or someone observed the problem, it's been a couple of years I think so I don't recall exactly how it was fixed, but it just takes something simple like someone finding a sheriff doing it that blows it up and then sending you a save file, or you have a hunch yourself and then you set up a situation and get it fixed. It was easy to fix, it was one of those one line fixes, but then the other release had the sleeping bug where people went to sleep and they just never woke up and starved to death. There was just another one where ... |
| Rainseeker: | Don't ... don't fall asleep! |
| Toady: | It was one of those things where you've been testing and testing and testing - because most of the features for that release didn't have big bugs, it was all working - and then I tweaked something about sleep at the end for the rest jobs, for when they're damaged or whatever, and then I didn't run a full game after that; I tweaked that thing a couple of weeks before and I was like 'I've already run a bunch of full games, I don't need to run another full game'. So I never got to the point where my dwarves needed to go to sleep and then woke up, so I'd never played for a whole two seasons or season or whatever, so I just didn't notice. And then I released it, and people were like 'What is this oversight? What is this?' It's a thing that's way easier to happen than you think, especially when I'm in the situation where I can just release the next week instead of having to worry about going through some kind of patch, [some] kind of two month process to get something up. So the release this time I've got a lot of tests I want to do, to make it at least to the point where there's only going to be a few of those giant show stoppers. I do more testing than people think, because even though those bugs appeared, what would have happened if I didn't test the amount I did would have been even worse. So there's a lot of that to do in December, I just have a list of things where it's like 'Check this out, check this out, check this out, check this out, check this out' and it's just going to take some time to get through that. That's what it comes down to now. There's finishing off the caves which is kind of hard because you always to do more with them, but that's what I'm trying to do now for the next several days in October, and it doesn't seem like I'm going to quite finish, and that means that ... I'm still going to put that out, because I want November to be the 'entities and squads get greened out' month. That means in December I go back to the caves before I get to my tests, and then you know, are we going to see January? That's what I'm thinking is getting more likely now, is that we're going to get into January. And then if we get into February it wouldn't shock me. If we get into March, well, that's just sad. |
| Rainseeker: | What do you think happened? Why did this end up taking ... what was this, when did you last release? |
| Toady: | September. |
| Rainseeker: | So why did it take over a year to release. Normally you were releasing every what, four months or so? |
| Toady: | It's been so random, there have been nine month breaks, there have been months where I released ten times. It's just, this time ... down in the under carcass of the game with the materials and tissues and combat stuff and all that, it had more ramifications; not more than I thought, but they're taking longer than I thought to get through every single ramification. And then add on top of that the underground, the squads ... and I also threw in ... I didn't need to do the entity position rewrite specifically here but I wanted to do it for squads, so I guess you could count [the] entity position rewrite with squads. So there's what, three things then and I'm of course missing some, there's healthcare too. Just looking at that list it's getting to be like ... well, there's a lot of things there, and I would have had to have cut out a great swathe of things. I kind of made a foolish promise to myself I think that I wanted to get squads done this release because I'd been saying for years that I wanted to do the army arc and hadn't done a thing, and now squads is a huge step forward on the army arc, so I've done something now. I've done something, but it took all that extra time on top of ... it's going to end up taking four months or something. And then the materials/tissue crap ended up taking six months and then you have the underground on top of that which has probably taken three months now and healthcare took a couple of months with venom and so on as well. And when you add all that up you probably get up to what we're at now, which is thirteen months. |
| Rainseeker: | I guess our message here, Tarn, is that 'Don't be discouraged; it's going to be awesome.' |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's going to be awesome. I have that way in the back of my head, that we're doing alright, this is all really cool and I'm happy with how it's going. But it's just one of those things where everyone else has to be ... well not everyone, but a great number of people have to be on board with the awesome too for such a long period of time isn't really fair to them. I shouldn't ask people to bear with the awesome for fifteen months, or bear with the lack of awesome for fifteen months which is what's going to end up happening, then have them support me all through that period is not reasonable. So I don't want to force people to support the awesome but it's going to be a few more months of void [awesomenessless]. |
| Rainseeker: | But well, I'm still going to be producing these podcasts, so that should be a little thing to tide us over in the meantime, and hear the sultry sound of your voice. |
| Toady: | I never tried to pick that one over the radio before ... No I just sound creepy. (sultry(?))Yeah, yeah yeah alright. Yeah baby. Come to Dwarf Fortress.(end sultry) |
| Rainseeker: | ... Yes. So I would like to ... let's transition! |
| Toady: | Yeah yeah, transition well away from that crap! |
| Rainseeker: | Let's talk about erm ... questions! |
| Toady: | Questions! Yeah, people have got questions and I trust there won't be any repeats. |
| Rainseeker: | I don't know, we'll see. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | In this third half of the show ... |
| Toady: | Third half? |
| Rainseeker: | That's right, the third half, for those of you who can do math. |
| Toady: | That's right, one point five. |
| Rainseeker: | We are going to be talking about your questions, and we are addressing some questions we didn't get to last time and ... gosh, here's a silly one from Goberfish, I guess this is a yes or no question; 'Are there any plans for world domination via brainwashing techniques through Dwarf Fortress?' |
| Toady: | So this is not within the game, but is that my agenda? Is that what he's talking about. |
| Rainseeker: | Yes, are there any plans for it? |
| Toady: | Well, I mean I guess if you had to step back and look at the overall goals and so on then it's underway. We've got a few fans that are quite enthusiastic and you might consider them brainwashed. I wouldn't say so; the people I've met that are enthusiastic all seem to continue to be able to work on in their lives and so on, and I don't think they take any orders from me that were not still in their best interest. So I think I've failed so far, but I want more people to like the game and to tell their friends about it and everything so once everyone in the world is playing Dwarf Fortress I guess we'd be there whether they were brainwashed or not. |
| Rainseeker: | I don't really know if that's what he actually meant but ... |
| Toady: | I have no idea, he said 'through Dwarf Fortress' though, so I think it's what we're talking about, I think it really is all about that. |
| Rainseeker: | Maybe so. |
| Toady: | So he can consider his question answered then, which is cool. |
| Rainseeker: | There you go. I've got a question from Mephansteras. |
| Toady: | That's right, well he's famous. He or she is a famous person. |
| Rainseeker: | Oh really? |
| Toady: | Yeah, well just always asking questions, been around for a while, so ... |
| Rainseeker: | Well he or she wants to know; 'Will the megabeasts use equipment or create objects?' |
| Toady: | So right now they steal crap and drop it in their caves. I'd like to think that one of the reasons ... I think the cyclops ... we have spears for them that are like artifice or something, I don't recall off the top of my head, but we were thinking of them in terms of mythology and so if they end up making things we'd be quite happy with that. They just need to have ... The problem right now is they've got no entity definition associated to themselves so they don't see items, because right now the people see items through their cultures, and that's really the only stumbling block. It was the stumbling block that made the animal peoples in the caves boring for a segment here and we had to take away their blowguns and so on because they didn't have a culture anymore, and now they've got cultures in the next version so they'll be able to have their little blowguns and riding animals again. The cyclops is the same way, and I'm sure other megabeasts as well. It goes with things like megabeast diplomacy to some extent as well. Ultimately yeah, I mean we're talking about ultimate goals here which of course is dangerous because you have so many you're never going to get to them all. But I'd like that, I'd like having the megabeasts be more interesting in a lot of ways because right now it's just like they're a target that fights back, which is kind of boring. |
| Rainseeker: | Here's one from Dasleah, who has a very interesting animated avatar. |
| Toady: | Is it the famous one that he still has from a long time ago with the ... it's just creepy looking. |
| Rainseeker: | It's talking ... |
| Toady: | Yeah, that's the same one. It's creepy. |
| Rainseeker: | What the heck is that? |
| Toady: | I don't ... there's a whole thread about it, there's a whole thread about its creepiness, and I don't remember if he revealed the source or not, I think it's got shopped eyes or something. There's quite a story behind it, but it's scary. It's scary. |
| Rainseeker: | Well here's his question, or her question: 'If you could magically and instantly add one thing to Dwarf Fortress for no other reason than you'd love to see it in there - maybe it's even too hard to get in there - what would you and Threetoe like to see in there? |
| Toady: | That's always so hard, isn't it. Because you'd want to ... because one thing never really cuts it. |
| Rainseeker: | Right, but maybe it's one thing that's really hard. |
| Toady: | Well I mean the hardest things are always time travel and stuff and that just needs a bigger disks. But I'm not sure they really care about time travel that much, it'd be cool to get the fluids in there, because I want giant lakes of blood and stuff and all the sand and that kind of thing. But as with any 'favourites' question it always just comes back to what I was just thinking about like ten minutes ago ... I'm absolutely horrible at these kinds of question, it's the worst thing in the world for me. Some people can rattle off their favourite movies and colours and things but I totally suck when it comes to that kind of thing. |
| Rainseeker: | Alright, how about I ask you something different then? |
| Toady: | Oh you can ask me all kinds of questions, yeah. |
| Rainseeker: | Alright, here we go. Here's something from Zollarr: 'Toady, what are your plans for mounts? Will you be able to ride mounts in adventure mode?' |
| Toady: | Absolutely. You have to ride mounts in adventure mode or that's just tragic and sad, because there's so many stories that go with mounts and things that I think it's imperative to have them. Now, as far as approaching the ... well, talking about dwarves too - I don't personally think of dwarves as a mounting people - but I know some people want to ... |
| Rainseeker: | But they're a mountain people. |
| Toady: | Oh no. |
| Rainseeker: | Sorry. |
| Toady: | Oh no! Oh no. I don't have a cave to hide in. Oh no ... but there's a garbage can, I could put my head in there I guess. But there are mods though, so you still want to support things, and some people are going to want to have their dwarves riding around little mountain goats and things. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah! |
| Toady: | Yeah, mountain goat dwarves. So it's something that I'd want to support there too. Now I don't know much about it in general, what's the story with the saddle, people talk about stirrups all the time as like 'did they change history?' You know, that kind of thing. I'd like to go through it methodically as usual and look at what the questions are there. Now that doesn't mean that we're going to have to answer all those questions before you can hop on a horse or something in adventure mode, but that's how I'd look at it. Then there have been games I think like Mount and Blade that have addressed horse based combat pretty well, or mounted combat pretty well, from what I remember - my brother plays that - and as far as making sure that we give it a similar respectful treatment in terms of charging and the effect of a mounted weapon, the fact that you don't even necessarily have to swing your weapon because you're hitting him in the face with something that's moving as fast as a horse. All kinds of things like that that come up. It's more difficult in a tile based environment but I think you can still convey some of the similar properties there, like velocity and the fact that you can't stop immediately. We were going to do that with running, we were thinking about being able to run but the fact that you couldn't stop on a dime then. Things like that that come up. Right now we just have that kind of hacked in with the charging system where you charge into people and then you can charge past people. You see it more in adventure mode, it's happening in dwarf mode too but you see it more in adventure mode. So in terms of mounts ... And then there's the matter of taking care of your mount, would you have to feed your horse, and all that. Currently you don't feed animals in dwarf mode but in adventure mode it seems likely that you'd want to have to take care of your horse and so on. And it'd be cool if you could also have pets, including the horse, but just pets in general, and taking care of your pets and having little pet antics and things. Of course I'm fond of pets, violent cats included. So I think ... well there must have been an answer to the question somewhere in there. |
| Rainseeker: | I think you did. Here's a question from zwei: 'Do you get hate mail?' |
| Toady: | No, not really. There have been instances where people were, say, moderated, where then that person would then tell us what they thought of the moderation, what they thought of us in general, and how it made us tyrannical and evil and so on. But I'm not sure if that counts as hate mail because hate mail's not generally over something that happened between you and that person, right? Hate mail is more like they just don't like the game, or they don't ... |
| Rainseeker: | They don't agree with your position on something. |
| Toady: | Yeah, they don't like something I said in Dwarf Fortress Talk or whatever, and they're like 'Well you know, I'm going to tell you about that, and about how much you suck' and so on. That really hasn't happened, I can't think of a single time where someone has just out of the blue ... unless you count people talking shit on IRC for no reason or whatever, you know that kind of thing. Or coming on our forums and being idiots about it. But a personal message, sent to me via email or via snail mail, there hasn't been anything like that. It's been good, it's been really good and on the flipside of that there's been a lot of positive messages that people have sent. So so far it's been very cool, I'm glad that it's been that way. I guess there have been people that say like 'I wish you'd do this with the interface' or that kind of thing, it's not hate mail, it's just constructive criticism. And so far, I guess that's the main avenue then where we might get some hate mail later on, like [if] after another year there's no graphics or something and then people might eventually snap. But so far, if hate mail gauges my ability to take a stand, or my ability to really do something interesting, then I've really failed, because this hasn't happened yet. |
| Rainseeker: | Here's a question from DG: 'Will the arrival of a merchant once per year no longer be guaranteed if or when the time it takes for them to arrive is determined by the distance and terrain between your fort and their starting point?' |
| Toady: | We're thinking about letting that one float once we got the model up to the point where it worked well enough, then we're just going to let it ride. Now right now the world is not so big that you can't walk across it in ... what does it take in adventure mode, I think you can step twelve tiles in day? I really don't remember. So if you're in adventure and you can go twelve tiles in a day then even in a large world you can go twenty or twenty two days to cross the entire world. So if you take the caravans time and up it up - up it up, up it up, that's great - if you shoot it up by like five times then it would still take a hundred days to cross the entire world, and if that's the case then there shouldn't be problems with not getting a dwarven caravan every year, even if they stop at various cities, even if they stop a city for like five days and move on. Five days is nothing in dwarf mode time, and then they'll mode to the next place and be shooting all over the world. That should work out well, especially if you can support several caravans at once and you have something that ends up looking more like a bazaar or something out in front of your fortress, people stop, there could even be local merchants from nearby villages or something like that that hang there quite a bit and your own guys and so on. It could be pretty cool out there. |
| Rainseeker: | That'd be pretty cool too if your own guys were going to buy stuff from the merchants. |
| Toady: | Yeah, right now it's just this command and control, it's like 'Send your guy over there where you're buying things for the fortress'. But then you've got these own weird shops inside ... the economy is so strangely developed in Dwarf Fortress; it really just needs to be rooted out and thrown in the gutter and then worked on again, and it's going to be, that's what the whole caravan arc is about. But really the main problem with time when we're talking about timing and so on is if you were to send out your own caravans, or even your own armies, the time it takes them to walk from the front of the fortress to the edge of the map you can probably cross the whole world or something depressing. The whole Dwarf Fortress time dilation is always going to be one of these big thorns in the side of the game. It's always going to be a huge problem to deal with. It's not a problem in adventure mode at all because adventure mode is moving at the slowest time possible in the game, so it's not a problem. [But] in dwarf mode we're always going to have to figure out a way to fudge things. If the wars are raging all over the place and, you know, over the course of month someone could sweep through an entire province or something then how does that figure in with the fact that you could maybe get your squad off the screen in a month. It's just sad, it's tragic sad, bad, and it's not going to work very well without all kinds of ... Like when you're playing a fortress it's just going to have to fake a lot of stuff. Not fake it, but just make the armies move slower on the world map too or something. So history is going to have these starts and stops, if you always play one mode you wouldn't notice but if you play between fort mode and then adventure mode and fort mode and adventure mode, there's going to be these strange dynamics going on that are caused by the fort molassesing the universe. It's okay, it's just one of those things ... because you can't go the other way and say 'I want fort mode to take as long as adventure mode' because then you'll never see summer, much less winter, because it would just take way too long for that stuff to happen. Right now [in] adventure mode if you just walk, if you're walking 'click click click'; you're going seventy two times slower than in fortress mode. So you would need to dilate the game seventy two times, which means that if you're used to a fort that lasts four years then you should get used to a fort that lasts one month for that same experience. That's crazy, that's not exactly a ... |
| Rainseeker: | This is all about fun, right? |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's all about fun. It's not fun for me, though. If we're talking about not having a good design but just having an easy to program design then it would be way easier to have everything work on the same timescale, because then I wouldn't have to worry about this stuff at all. However it's just not possible, you have to have dwarf mode be a lot faster than the other modes. I think adventure mode doesn't really suffer from the same problems because you don't care about time passing, if you want to pass to the next winter then you could just say 'sleep in this town for two months and just hang out here.' There's not a huge problem with that, you don't want the time to pass; if you walked to another town and back you don't want a year to have passed most of the time. Just the slower mode works there but with the dwarves, there are problems with that. Anyway, that's enough of that I guess. |
| Rainseeker: | I have another question from DG that I liked: 'Do you have plans to allow the first seven dwarves to be chosen from a larger pool of dwarves which are actual world gen members, like your chosen civilization?' |
| Toady: | That was going to be an option at some point. Like we've been saying with this whole populations issue; the populations just aren't big enough, in a way, to make that ultra-satisfying. So there were going to be those fake population pools and then you could pull your dwarves out of the fake population pool and then maybe have some more customisation with them and so on. And it also depends on the fate of this whole Oregon Trail style mode where you're actually doing the trapping as well; [it] has a lot to do with that. Because if you were restricting yourself to specific world generation dwarves you'd also want them all to come from the same site or you'd have to write a back story for how one moved to a different site and came to leave from that one location, or are they all just meeting up at the destination and one of them brought the wagon and the others walked. So there's a lot of issues there but we'd like to at least tie it in more closely with the given civilization that you're starting from, or if you want to choose an option that's like 'play now' from adventure mode then you'd be not linked to a civilization and just coming in just as generated dwarves from the edge of the map. But in that case you'd have no ties which would be kind of weird for the caravans and stuff, so it's generally good to be from somewhere, but whether or not that's going to be world generation dwarves is going to depend on these fake populations; how well they work and then what restrictions there are on picking their dwarves. If you pick seven dwarves that happen to be important to a different city then that's going to be really weird. Like the mayor and half the guard of the town just decide to pick up [because] they were getting tired of this giant attacking the town all the time, so the mayor and all the guards left to go found a new fortress and then a week later the giant destroys the city. That would be the kind of thing ... Of course that'd kind of a funny story, so I think there's something to be said for allowing that, like allowing you to make the mayor go wanderlust crazy and decide to found a new fortress for fun. And the same thing goes for adventure mode, like starting as a guy - being able to assume control of any character in the universe - is something that's reasonable, especially if you've got the parameters set for it. It's one of those things where you'd want to set up parameters so you wouldn't be tempted. It's like 'allow control of any historical figure as an adventurer: yes', because if you put yes there if you're losing a war or something then you might be like 'well I want to play the enemy's general as my next adventurer' and then you could just go jump into a canyon or something. So to remove that kind of temptation ... There are a lot of people, more people than I expected so it kind of surprised me, on various aspects of the game have said 'Well I really want this to be an option that I have to set in advance so that I don't feel tempted to spoil things.' So having that as a world generation parameter works the best for that, but that'd be cool as well, just being able to play whoever you wanted. It goes in with those post version one arcs about being able to play a dragon, you know that kind of thing. So you could just assume control of a megabeast that already exists in the world and so on. |
| Rainseeker: | Well guys thanks for joining us for this episode number four. Remember we're no longer a trilogy and we will be back again of course next month; that's the plan. Pretty we'll put up the new vote for new topics, we don't know what they are yet. I'd just like to thank mallocks for doing the transcription and I'd like to thank Ollieh for the music and I'd like to thank Tarn for making the game, and I'd like to thank myself for producing, editing and writing and being an awesome individual because I love myself. |
| Toady: | That's right. |
| Rainseeker: | I'd also like to thank poor Capntastic who wasn't here this week but he will be back next month. |
| Toady: | Right, well unless evil comes calling. |
| Rainseeker: | Evil comes calling, it does occasionally. |
| Toady: | Yeah, Capntastic; he can't control his schedule. If he tried to control his schedule like that you might be dead tomorrow. |
| Rainseeker: | Might be. |
| Toady: | You might be, it's a dangerous world with ... what did you say, Venom and Doctor Doom or something? |
| Rainseeker: | Yep, Venom and Doctor Doom, they were both teaming up ... |
| Toady: | They don't sound like they do good things to the world. |
| Rainseeker: | No! No they don't. They don't, they really really don't. |
| Toady: | Those are the character motivations that are easiest to get at in the game though. Although I don't know much about these people. |
| Rainseeker: | Well you know Doctor Doom; he does some humanitarian efforts occasionally. He'll try to improve people through genetic mutations. And Venom you know, in his defence, he does eat orphans. |
| Toady: | Well ... yeah ... I guess there's historical ... Was that Jonathan Swift, right? |
| Rainseeker: | You put people out of their misery, you know? So I don't know, maybe Capntastic isn't such a good guy after all. |
| Toady: | I guess not, I'm sorry. So he doesn't get any credit in this show, and I hope he doesn't come back next time. Because the work of Doctor Doom and Venom ... |
| Rainseeker: | Very important work. |
| Toady: | Very important work. What does he do to them? He just beats them up and throws them in jail. |
| Rainseeker: | Presumably yes. He hasn't really elaborated to me too much. I don't even know what his super power is. |
| Toady: | Well what's more important is his uniform, his little outfit. |
| Rainseeker: | It's fantastic, it's Capntastic. |
| Toady: | Fantastic. Spandex? Spendextastic? |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | It's Captain Tastic. |
| Toady: | It's got a big 'C' on it probably somewhere. |
| Rainseeker: | Probably a 'CT' or something. |
| Toady: | Is that Connecticut? |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, he's from Connecticut. |
| Toady: | I always thought he was in California or something, but no 'T' in California. Have we crossed the boundary from funny to stupid? |
| Rainseeker: | We totally did, and then we didn't look back. |
| Toady: | Yeah, we didn't look back at all. |
| Rainseeker: | It's way back there. |
| Toady: | That's right. Well you can't have, it's like they say, you can't have a pioneering effort without a lot of mistakes. |
| Rainseeker: | Just a lot of crap. |
| Toady: | Yeah there's a lot of garbage, we're trying our best though. But this is what happens when you record a little bit too long, trying to have three segments instead. All of our problems are coming together, we've got three segments instead of two, and we've got two hosts instead of three. So where you'd normally have Capntastic sitting here saying 'What is this crap? What are you guys doing?' Right now we're kind of blissfully ignorant. |
| Rainseeker: | There's no-one to rein us in! |
| Toady: | Yeah we're uncontrolled. This is where his superpowers really come in to like rein in people. |
| Rainseeker: | He is like a kindergarten teacher. It's like 'Okay, settle down ... okay class, sit down. Tarn! Tarn! Put down the paste.' |
| Toady: | Paste ... I was trying to remember a kindergarten thing. |
| Rainseeker: | 'Rainseeker stop running with those scissors' |
| Toady: | The only thing I remember from kindergarten is being the sleep fairy, where you have the wand ... everyone has to take nap time, everyone's nap time, except the sleep fairy gets the wand that day and wakes the people up, so you go over to the different kids and you tap their heads with the wand and when you get tapped with the wand nap time is over. And you brought a blanket to class every day for sleep time, or nap time, I forgot what it was called, and then the sleep fairy for that day would wake people up. I think I was only the sleep fairy one time. I don't think it was because of a mistake it was just because I was the sleep fairy one time. But I woke the people up and everything. It's kind of surreal though because they turn off the lights in the room and you see all these little kindergartners pretending to sleep and then you just walk among them and tap them. That's all I remember. I don't think I ever actually slept during nap time, it was only two minutes or something. It was really weird, really really strange. But that is my one memory of kindergarten, if someone said 'did you do fingerprinting in kindergarten?' I'd be like 'yeah' but I don't actually remember what we did, I have no memories of that at all. I remember what the teacher looks like. But I remember the sleep fairy quite well. There was no sleep fairy in first grade, it all goes downhill after that. |
| Rainseeker: | I would love to go to Yale and find out there was a sleep fairy at Yale. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's probably just something they do when they're on coke or something. I wouldn't speak to the different traditions at different schools, I don't really know. I never lived in a dorm. |
| Rainseeker: | I lived in a dorm. |
| Toady: | Did you have a sleep fairy? |
| Rainseeker: | I had an un-sleep fairy, I had a ... Well I guess he was a sleep fairy, if his job is to wake you up, yes. I would go to bed early, if early means like eleven o'clock, and then he would come in at 3 AM after hanging out and partying and he would turn on the lights and throw his keys down on the desk and get undressed and do stuff without any regard for my sleeping habits at all. |
| Toady: | Did you have fire alarms a lot too? |
| Rainseeker: | Um ... fire drills? I think we might have had one, I don't recall. There was this legendary story because I went to a famous bible college in 'Ortland, Poregon'. |
| Toady: | Well you've got to put the 'ay's after that, 'Ortlandpay' or something. |
| Rainseeker: | Well I was doing a spoonerism there. |
| Toady: | Ah, spoonerism! Weren't you going to have me reading the credits in spoonerisms next time. |
| Rainseeker: | That would be probably easier though. |
| Toady: | I don't even know what the heck that is though. |
| Rainseeker: | Well it's where you reverse letters, or leverse retters. |
| Toady: | Oh so they come in pairs. |
| Rainseeker: | Right, they come in pairs, they pome in cairs. |
| Toady: | They pome in cairs. Care bears, Bare cares. That's no fun. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah so when I was in school here, a couple of years before I attended there, there was a famous incident where everyone in the mens dorm set out their clothes on the floor, turned on the showers at about four in the morning, and made it look like they were sleeping in bed or taking showers or brushing their teeth, and just left everything askew as if suddenly they had been Raptured. And they all went outside in front of the dorm and someone had a big old foam horn and everyone but one person who was asleep they all blew it really really loud. |
| Toady: | Did it sound heavenly, the horn? |
| Rainseeker: | I assume so, because he woke up and he freaked out. He just screamed, running around convinced that he wasn't saved, he'd been left behind, and this was before the Left Behind book things. |
| Toady: | Yeah because some of the people in the Left Behind books, that's not necessarily a bad thing then, or something. |
| Rainseeker: | I guess there's hope for you if you do. |
| Toady: | So he didn't think there was hope, in other words. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah he thought that he'd been left behind, and he freaked out and then finally he came outside, weeping and crying and that particular prank was outlawed shortly after ... |
| Toady: | Yeah that's kind of mean, it seems like the guy was affected. |
| Rainseeker: | Oh yeah, I don't think they realised what that would do to him. |
| Toady: | At least he was fine. He still has a chance. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah that's true, he still has a chance. |
| Toady: | But now he knows he probably has more of a chance than the other guys now. |
| Rainseeker: | I guess unless they repented. |
| Toady: | Yeah, well once they saw him crying you'd hope that they did. It's not a guarantee though. |
| Rainseeker: | Well in college my dad, one of his roommates had this big big TV - I guess for the time - he would watch it rather than studying. So for finals, it was an older TV I guess at the time, and so they found one in a second hand shop and hid his in another room and put this older one where it previously was. And he was watching TV instead of studying and so my dad and his other roommate ran in and shouted 'We can't take it anymore! You're not studying!' And so they grabbed the TV and ran down the hallway with it. And there were people in on the joke so this guy's chasing after them and people are opening the doors in the hallways, blocking him from just barely reaching them; and finally they get to the end of the hall, and this is a second storey window and they chuck the TV out the window and it falls to the ground and smashes of course. They let him go on believing that his TV was destroyed until finals were over. I don't think he appreciated it too much, but maybe he got some studying done. |
| Toady: | Yeah, I hope so. He's obviously had time to produce children, fine children, parenting and so on. I guess it all turned out well in the end. I just hope they looked before they threw it, if it's like on a sidewalk or something, two stories down it'd kind of be like one of those cartoons, having this giant TV land on you or something. |
| Rainseeker: | Yes, you'd pretty much probably die. |
| Toady: | Especially because it's a second hand model too, it's not even the real TV. It's just kind of [an] indignity there. |
| Rainseeker: | Indeed. |
| Toady: | Now where is the little cat. (aside to Scamps) Where'd you go? Where's the little cat? Where are you hiding? Where's the baby cat? Hmm. (singing) He's wandered away, where is baby Scamps today. (stops singing) Not even in this room, there's no baby cat. Oh! Was that an ear! Is that an ear sticking round the door? You can't even see me if you ... Why don't you stick your head around the door just a little bit more, and maybe you could see me. What you doing mister? What you doing? I see you! I don't know what kind of game you're trying to pull here, but ... What kind of game ... What are you doing? Wow, he's not charging though, he's just sitting there. What a silly cat. What are you doing? Why don't you just come in the room [if] you're going to stand like that. (end aside) (presumed cut) Baby Scamps has brought his fetch toy in, and I threw it, threw it down the hall. |
| Rainseeker: | Uh-oh. |
| Toady: | Yeah. Well there's periodic disruptions. Oh here he's back with his baby toy. He's got his toy, he's going to bring his little rodent. He's climbing up the tree with it in his mouth. |
| Rainseeker: | He's going to work on it, huh? |
| Toady: | Yeah yeah, he's bringing it up through to the top level of the tree. (aside to Scamps) Are you going to go? Or are you just going to stay there. Oh he's going up the hole. There he goes. He's at the top of the tree now, he brought the rodent all the way up there. Good job Mister! (end aside) |
Dwarf Fortress Talk #5, with Rainseeker and Toady One, transcribed by mallocks
| Rainseeker: | Alright well, welcome back everybody to a new episode of Dwarf Fortress Talk. This is episode number five I believe! |
| Toady: | That's right, number five. |
| Capntastic: | How do you say that in Spanish? |
| Rainseeker: | Número cinco! |
| Capntastic: | Arriba! |
| Rainseeker: | Alright so we are here with Rainseeker, your host, and Capntastic, your other host ... |
| Capntastic: | That's me. We have different voices! |
| Rainseeker: | We do have different voices. This is me: Hello. This is Capntastic: |
| Capntastic: | (dramatic pause) Hello. |
| Rainseeker: | See? He pauses, that's how you can know. |
| Capntastic: | I either pause or I don't, that's how you can tell. |
| Rainseeker: | And then here's our illustrious leader, Mr. Tarn Adams. |
| Toady: | Hello! |
| Capntastic: | Pretend that the 'lust' part is in bold. |
| Rainseeker: | And our topic today is, Captain? |
| Capntastic: | Procedural cultures and how they will affect the future of Dwarf Fortress, your favourite game. |
| Toady: | That's awesome, so you can do that on cue. |
| Rainseeker: | And what we're going to do is we're not going to have a vote, we're just going to ahead and next month, because everyone loves it so much, we're going to do adventure mode and make everyone happy. We probably will be addressing to some extent battle specifics as they come up and if you guys want to continue to ask questions about specific battle or piercing spleen questions you can send them to our question email address. |
| Toady: | That's toadyone@bay12games.com and make sure you put 'Question for DF Talk' (no quotes) as the subject. |
| Capntastic: | They go to all of us ... |
| Rainseeker: | So if you have a sultry letter to tarn you probably would want to have a different subject. |
| Capntastic: | Or if you have a sultry letter that you want to get to all three of us, then that would save time. |
| Toady: | Well there were all those cosplay pictures right? |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, and a zombie groundhog and such. |
| Toady: | (aside to Scamps) Aaah! Mister, we're going battle specifics now are we? What's this, we're going to study biting and scratching, is that right? Is that right? What does the muscle in my wrist look like? (end aside) Ouch. |
| Rainseeker: | I guess we're going to talk about procedural culture now. |
| Toady: | That's right. |
| Rainseeker: | So what [was] your original vision for culture when you first started working on Dwarf Fortress? |
| Toady: | Maybe it's a culture where there's no cats ... no cats at all. Originally we ... (aside to Scamps) Little kitty's about to get evicted! You love to be evicted don't you! This is not for playing Mr Scamps! (end aside) Okay he managed to get the whole headphone cord wrapped around his body and then he jumped off the chair, so that hurt my neck. (aside to Scamps) Okay you can just stay under there, that's a good place for cats (end aside) |
| Capntastic: | I'm fine continuing like this, this is entertainment. |
| Toady: | Yeah it would be if ... |
| Capntastic: | You can't script this. |
| Toady: | Okay, so the original vision for the ... It's always evolving really. Originally we had in our earlier games these fantasy settlements and so on, with humans and a few other types of critters like dwarves and so on, and we added a few more but it wasn't in the raws or anything like that. Then we moved them out to the raws so you can put your own races in and those hard coded ethics that are in there now and a few things about what items they can use and what jobs you're going to find; people milling around the cities eating food out of magic barrels [and] having jobs that they don't do. The vision there has been changing over time, so when you say originally, back say three or four years ago, it wasn't a crucial part of the game having cultures that evolved but once you get started and have a world that is just sitting there and it's got civilizations that are sitting there and are all very similar then the need for variability arose pretty quickly, so the first thing we did was just vary their clothing and so on. But then you need ... instead of variation in space you also want to start thinking about variation over time and that's when these notions started coming up and maybe the past couple of years thinking about what kind of variations we'd like to have happen to cultures over time. |
| Capntastic: | Aside from weapons and clothing - like you going to have guys in robes and goes in pants - will there also be different perceptions of guys in robes and guys in pants? |
| Toady: | So perceptions of them like when someone walks into a town dressed in a certain way? |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, like these guys wearing a turban, that means ... I don't know what a turban is ... |
| Toady: | It's one of those things that I think came up ... when was the first time we started thinking about this kind of thing, it was back in Daggerfall or something. You can dress yourself in that game, you have your little model there - not a 3D model but just your paper doll - you see your little paper doll you can dress up with little hats and weird outfits and you can dress pretty much however you want, there are millions of choices, but when you walk into town and you're like 'Hey, where's the weapon store?' they tell you where it is instead of thinking 'Maybe we don't want this person to have more weapons, because they look really really really freaky'. This is the kind of thing, we're thinking people really need to react to that, right now the people in adventure mode just react if you type your own name; they're like 'Oh I never heard that name before' or whatever. That's just a little token to keep in mind that we want people to be able to react to things that are different, and it's easy enough to implement that kind of thing because each society has the kind of clothing that they recognise and they'd also be able to very very quickly cross reference that with any of the civilizations they know. So if you came - like if the people in the north wear masks, there's these civilizations that wear masks and so on - if you came down to a southern place wearing a mask they'd be like 'Oh it's a person from the north' and they'd try and treat you that way. There's of course a lot of work to do there with dialogue and all that kind of thing which is an additional topic but the idea is that they'd be able to do that. You can always just sit here and talk about features without promising anything and timelines and all that kind of thing, so I'm not sure when that sort of thing comes up, because we've got that level of variability already with the clothing and then there's things that don't vary right now like the ethics which should vary, and what comes first and what comes later? I think the first thing probably is just a general notion of what your reputation is when we start the adventure skills stuff and the adventure entities when you can organise your party into more of a group that's recognised as having accomplished things and so on Then people would be able to react to you differently, I mean aside from just killing if you pick up the wrong item and walk out of the store or something, or just killing random people and having them kill you right back or that kind of thing. That notion of having different reactions that are based on what you've done and have it separated entirely from any notion of something being a scripted plot or anything like that, so they just know the things that you've done and treat you how you should be treated. Then it's pretty easy to start moving on to the situation where if you walk into the town with a giant sword and you're not one of the guards in the town then having that raise some kind of flag and have people react differently is a very very very short step from just having the initial reactions depend on something beside your name. I think it's not that far away that we'll start seeing some of these things, and then it's a matter of what things should they react to and there's notions ... like wearing a sword for example. In certain places if you go to some very peaceful community far away from any kind of trouble then that might raise more of a flag than if you're out in a frontier location and there's wild beasts all over the place and you'd kind of be crazy not to have one. It can keep track of those notions, it's not really difficult it's just a matter of prioritising those things. Then when you've got an ethic associated with that - this is really going to build up those ethics lists for the civilizations - and that's again when we need ethics to be malleable for civilizations. Right now the infrastructure's there to allow them to be different but it's never used. It should be interesting to slowly start tackling stuff and like I was saying the doorway there is probably the adventure entities and your reputation through those entities. |
| Rainseeker: | And so you could potentially have prejudices crop up between different factions and nations, I assume. |
| Toady: | Yeah, because right now there's just; are you at war or not, pretty much. Those come up through ethical differences in world generation but those are never realised during the game. So if dwarves don't like elves for example for various reasons that'll start world generation wars, it'll also start dwarf mode wars in those scripted ways over tree agreements and all that kind of thing, but if you were a dwarf walking into an elven forest in adventure mode, if those civilizations weren't at war in world generation or as a result of your fortress mode game, then you could just walk in there and they would treat you like an elf, pretty much. There might be different dialogue, I don't recall if there's different dialogue if you're not part of their civilization, probably not, but if there is that would be the extent ... the greeting would be the extent of the different. So that's kind of bizarre right, it's one of these things that take you out of the moment completely because there should be problems there, you should be surrounded by guards or something, depending on how paranoid the culture is and so on. I guess these things would have to come out of a prior history. It's one of those questions you have to answer; 'How does a society react to something that's completely novel?' because if the elves and dwarves never interacted during world generation simply because they were far apart, and right now there's no notions of trade caravans or anything, when you bring your character from one to the other for the first time, that really is in all of world history kind of a first contact moment. |
| Rainseeker: | You could be surrounded by guards and children. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it'd just be bizarre. They'd put you in a little cage, and haul you off and put flowers in your hair and start worshiping you or something. Who knows, right? It's one of those things that the game doesn't respect right now. As for how to handle that, should that be an ethics thing? The ethics lists in the raws are a list of a premade culture for a group that's going to be created during world generation and then suddenly have that culture. This is so that you can have the flavour in the universe that you want to have, especially when you're modding where you have some notions of how they should behave and so on, like an elf or a dwarf when you want those to behave in certain ways in general, so you create these preconceived cultures for them. Now that doesn't respect how a culture might emerge, there's no notion of an emergent culture right now that's built up through racial traits and geography and history and so on. Those kinds of things should come up at least after the fact, like you've got these civilizations but they should be able to change a little bit once play begins at least, right? It's not really hard to give a really crappy simulation for an evolved culture, you plop the ten guys down, they have no ethics and then you just examine how crazy are the monsters in that area and what sort of resources are there and then bring up some silly model for how that would determine the ethics in some way, and then put a giant random element on it, and slap them down, and you've got a procedural starting point. But that's not necessarily compelling, it's interesting to have the variation, that certainly should be in there, but the main thing is how variation can occur through the history that occurs once the history starts. That's a step by step process, just putting in different influences and changes and what happens if you have several goblins somehow get assimilated into an elven society, and then all the elves get killed and then the goblins found a little thing up in the mountain somehow when they get chased out of the forest, then what are they? What do these goblins think? Does that lead to a whole goblin movement coming down from the mountains to reclaim the forests or something? |
| Rainseeker: | (as goblins)We are the true elves! |
| Toady: | Yeah it's all very weird, that kind of thing. Right now it's kind of strange ... Normally you'd think the hard part is getting the changes to occur, but right now there are too many changes in a way, like kidnapped dwarves and humans and elves and so on assimilate immediately and societies that are conquered by the dwarves and then get a dwarven overlord put over them, they're assimilated immediately and then they go on to spread that culture entirely without maintaining their previous one. It's kind of the opposite problem of implementing cultural diffusion and assimilation, and the interest comes when you do it half way, because the main thing that's missing from the game in terms of world generation and everything about making that interesting is the notion of conflict, not like a war but an internal conflict within one person, that drives their decision making. Having multiple cultural backgrounds for a single person is a great way to do that, and that's really the foundation of a lot of literature and so on, having those conflicting backgrounds and so on. It's one of those things that would start to be realised when you have the leaders moving around during play, which is not too far away, just getting more personal decision making in for the leaders, then there would be more of an impetus to draw on that kind of information. At least there's some challenges, because if you've got a hundred thousand people you can't keep track of every little thing about what they think and all that kind of stuff. The important decision makers are the ones that are going to be done first. It has all their background saved, it has all the historical things that led up to their present time and all of their previous entity affiliations and so on, so it can have a pretty good background but what it really needs is a snapshot sitting in their head of what their current ethical belief and value system is. Then it'll be easy to filter decisions through that and just have that vary over time as they move from place to place and various things happen to them that move them from culture to culture as they are exposed to other cultures. One of the main things we're missing is an exchange between two cultures that doesn't involve them just killing each other, there's not a notion of trade or alliance during world generation that can build up that sort of thing. Then when you get into regular play it's all just the same thing over again, when your adventurer's running around you are an agent of cultural diffusion as you go from place to place; that should have some kind of effect. It'd be cool for them not to just judge you based on the clothing that you're wearing but also to look at your clothing and then if you do something heroic for the town, there's some dev goals about them like naming their kids after you and all that kind of thing, but what if they started dressing like you but they're also dressing in the clothing of the southern culture as opposed to their own one ... whatever direction we're using this time in the example. Then it'd be cool if that started to lead to some kind of tension, we've already got the personality facet for traditionalism; traditional versus people that like to branch out and experiment, and that'd be very interesting, to have someone's kid dress up like you and then their parent would be like 'What are you doing? You've got to wear your robe'. It really all hinges on the personal goals and the personal decision making upgrades that are coming before the sieges. That's part of the excitement of the game is seeing what kind of things it comes up with that you didn't come up with yourself; when people start doing all kinds of crazy things we'll just have to revel in the horror. |
| Rainseeker: | (camp)Well the colour purple is so on right now, the adventurer that came through town was wearing purple leather armour, just amazing. |
| Toady: | That's right, you can go to the tavern and they'll all be talking about you. |
| Rainseeker: | It'd be cool if you could disguise yourself and then sneak in and listen to people's conversations about you. |
| Toady: | That'd be one of those challenges, the interface for that is kind of interesting right. If you're trying to dress like a local there should be things that give you away, but right now the only thing that would give you away is if you were wearing giant black boots instead of the traditional sandals. There should be subtle things about how your hair is styled or your belt is buckled, little things like that aren't even tracked, and accents and hand gestures, like if you count on your fingers differently from one place to another, there's all kinds of things. The main thing there is just the amount of information stored and the resolution of what information it displays. It would be annoying to have to micromanage your clothing flaps and pockets and things, like 'Oh I've got to put this one over this one this time'. There should just be some overall skill that says 'Prep for this are, you're familiar with its culture' and you set it up like an awareness or disguise type skill, and then you can screw up and it can store in the background what your screw ups are that you don't know about and then reveal them later. That would be a less cumbersome way to handle it I guess. That would be all be really exciting. |
| Capntastic: | Especially if you'd been hired to be a spy for another empire or something like that. |
| Toady: | Yeah, if you weren't just hired to go kill people. I guess it applies for that too, even then. (aside to Scamps) Mister. What are you burrowing under the keyboard for? Keyboards are not for burrowing. What is under there? I'm going to lift up the keyboard, if there's nothing there you've got a real problem. Oh there's a quarter! You've found a quarter, you's a money seeking cat. I've got a quarter, I'm going to throw the quarter across the room, are you ready? Are you ready here we go! Whee! Woah there he goes, bolting out of the room, chasing the money.(end aside) |
| Capntastic: | This month's donatathon's really taken off. |
| Toady: | Yeah it's been awesome. Scamps follows the money. |
| Capntastic: | Twenty five cents ... |
| Toady: | Maybe we should get him investigating presidents and stuff. Follow the money! Follow the money! Yeah, Aqizzar, no 'u', I have to thank him for setting up the |
| Capntastic: | He sent me an email or a message or something. |
| Toady: | It'd be funny if he sends private messages to everybody that gets it wrong, like 'This is your first warning'. |
| Capntastic: | I guess it's a problem because people just assume 'there's a 'q', I'm going to follow that up with a 'u'' |
| Toady: | Yeah, and you should get sinister warnings if you mess that up. But it's been awesome, it's been a very very good month. |
| Rainseeker: | Thanks to everyone who's been donating! |
| Toady: | Yeah, all these awesome people. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Capntastic: | So, procedural cultures and all that, that's really great for adventure mode but how will it affect fortress type modes, settlement modes, civilization modes. Will cultures prefer certainly building materials, will you get some sort of benefit if your culture likes, say, granite blocks? |
| Toady: | Fortress mode is always a difficult thing because you ... |
| Capntastic: | You want to be able to do everything. |
| Toady: | Yeah, you want to be able to do whatever you want, and so if your guys are really into granite and you build out of marble that shouldn't be the end of the world. However, I think they should - especially the traditionalists - should get warm fuzzy thoughts walking by granite statues and so on, they're like 'aah, it's old granite' and just sit there and lean up against the statue and enter a bliss world or something. |
| Capntastic: | I'm definitely thinking that your civilization as a whole would spread rumours about you if you didn't follow traditions, like 'Oh those wierdos making statues out of marble instead of granite.' |
| Toady: | It's a really tough call ... It would be cool I guess if the personality came to play in the following way. You have your outpost liaison roll up, and your outpost liaison, let's say that he's ninety nine percent traditionalist, and then he's going to meet with your king and he wanders into the front door and there's the gate and on either side there are microcline statues or something, and it's just gaudy nouveau-dwarf non-granite crap. Then right at that point it would be cool if when he rolls ... it's not like it's an additional thing because he rolls the same checks, 'admired a fine door recently, admired that' so if he sees the statue, rolls that check, and while he didn't admire the microcline statue lately, it's like 'was shocked and awed by the microcline statue' and just kind of stops. It could alert you to it or something, it could be like 'there is a diplomatic disaster pending', you have to pull up your reports and the outpost liaison is sitting there staring at the microcline statue and you'd have to send a guy out and tell him that the elves left it there and you were just about to haul it off. |
| Rainseeker: | What would do you want to do? Would you like to lie? Would you like to tell the truth? |
| Capntastic: | But you could also spread fashions and trends, like he's going to go back and say 'Those guys really have it happening over there, they have the whole ...' |
| Rainseeker: | '... microcline there' |
| Toady: | Yeah, I guess the next immigration wave would just be a bunch of dwarven runaways, all these kids come and they just want to check out the ... All the hipsters and various drug addicts and so on can come spilling into your fortress. |
| Capntastic: | So then we have Liberal Dwarf Squad, everything's a circle. |
| Toady: | Also there's the issue of ... This comes back to the internal groups within your fortress, like the religions and guilds and so on, because they all have the same cultural and ethical setups as well and each of those can come into play again as far as determining what the overall cultural makeup of your fortress is, and that's another way that cultures can change over time, by introducing new subgroups. Right now I'm not really sure how religions start during dwarf mode; it could be that pilgrims arrive and start preaching about things, or a dwarf could have a revelation, or there could just be your pioneer guys, your seven guys, all come there with their own beliefs to begin with, which is how it works now. They could then, when it comes time that your fortress is large enough for you to set up some kind of temples, or whatever the dwarves end up having for that kind of thing, then you could at that point have the religious subculture spring up around those locations. Then the aesthetics of that group can start coming into play when they interact with different objects in your fortress and other people come, and the outpost liaison again could be accosted by worshipers of a certain religion either in a peaceful way or a non-peaceful way, all that kind of thing. It's all a big mishmash and again the important part is when you have dwarves that overlap in several of those groups. It could be that the outpost liaison himself fits into one of those groups, like had been a miner during the first ten years during world generation, and so is very predisposed to your miner's guild guys and chats a few of them up when they meet in the hallway and then overall has a good disposition during the meeting with your mayor. There's all kinds of things like that just slowly get put in over time. |
| Rainseeker: | And it would be really cool if we were notified of ... |
| Toady: | Yeah, there's so many things going on now that don't have any kind of cue at all for you to know that they're happening. I tried to put some of the new personality stuff that I put in for the military ... I talk about it on the devlog but I don't think there's a lot of indication there about what's actually going on. Part of the problem is you need a good place to put it and the dwarves thoughts are one location, that giant paragraph, but stuff gets lost in the shuffle there, so there needs to be some way of putting that information across. Putting it down in an announcement would be way too spammish, shovelling that information at you, so it's a bit of a trick. |
| Rainseeker: | I wonder if you could have a single event in the announcements and then you could open up that event and have it explain the event, or something. |
| Toady: | It would just need to not take up your real estate at the bottom when other things are going on, I guess. It's things to experiment with anyway. |
| Capntastic: | So cultures start somewhere and when you mentioned the first ten years of world generation it made me think of year zero, and that's when a lot of the races pop up. Will they have origin stories and will that effect general civilization's world view, like the elves sprang from the trees themselves and that's why they like trees, and kobalds popped up out of holes in the ground or were spat out by some zombie, and then they worship that demon, and they also worship spit ... |
| Toady: | Things all start to run afoul of each other. We've talked a little bit previously about mythology during world generation and these pantheons, not having a reason for existing as such but having a reality about them that has to do with the prehistory of the world, what is it, cosmology or whatever; how the world came to be. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | Does this mean that we are going to have a strong occurrence of non-traditional fantasy races, or is that going to be a toggle. |
| Toady: | That's the tricky question. That's kind of what I was getting at; if you've got a dwarf, you've got a really strong notion of what you want a dwarf to be but you also just set the random pantheons thing for them and then it creates a world generation myth and says, you know, 'their pantheon is all about lava and dancing' and if it's not reflected then in their larger culture, if it can't go in and override things, then you've got a problem. What it would want to be then is either in the raws you say the flow of information is in one direction, so that your specifications determine what their pantheon's going to be like so you get a pretty good match, or you say 'go ahead and mess with me to some degree' and then they create ... whatever their story is, not necessary a pantheon, but whatever the world generation myth happens to be, then it can go in and it feels like 'well you guys really need to like water more because we had you spawned out of the ocean' and all that kind of thing. |
| Rainseeker: | You can only do beach fortresses. |
| Toady: | It could just flag your culture as only being beach-embarkable because of how this thing worked. You don't want it to be one of those things that you ship with the game necessarily unless it can do really good exposition because people would be very confused. But it's definitely something that I think would be really cool because it's good to get away from the overall straightjackets we've put on ourselves ... |
| Capntastic: | Where every culture is kind of the same. |
| Toady: | Yeah it's bad. |
| Capntastic: | I think that the important thing would be to - if there are limitations - maybe not make them limitations so much as guidelines, and if there are guidelines make them something that the player wants to follow. Maybe through some sort of cultural benefit or something similar, or just make it ... |
| Toady: | For dwarf mode, yeah, for that. It's the conflicts we were talking about where we let the player do what they want but there are norms that can be followed. It's kind of the same idea as putting a personality on your adventurer, it's like 'Your adventurer's a coward' ... |
| Capntastic: | 'You're a coward and you cry yourself to sleep every night' |
| Toady: | And then when you go to attack a monster there are two choices, you can either act out of character and maybe the game doesn't actually penalise you for that, or the game is like 'no you can't walk towards the monster'. That would be annoying, there's this sense in which your adventurer having a personality is a real hindrance on play and you'd have to be very confident in your system if you were going to actually force restrictions, and I don't think I'd ever be confident enough in setting something up that wasn't really annoying. So you'd want to allow the maximum freedom there. You could put in penalties, like attack penalties if it thinks your player should be freaked out or afraid or something, but even that interferes with a role playing in a sense because maybe the confluence of events that led up to that point would not really admit cowardice even in a cowardly person for whatever reason. So if it suddenly popped up 'You're feeling a little afraid' at the bottom of the screen 'minus five', then that might drop you out of whatever moment you've been building towards. It's difficult to do internal psychology that way and at the same time maintain the role playing immersion. On the other hand maybe it enhances the role playing immersion in a lot of ways because you see that the character is behaving in a predictable fashion, so like I said it's down to the quality of the system and I'm not sure how good I could do there. |
| Capntastic: | What might work there would be an Ultima style 'if you had to fight a dragon would you throw rocks at it, or sneak up behind it and hit it with a rock, or drop a rock on it from a contraption you built', maybe not with the rock theme but instilling the personality onto the character before you play it. |
| Toady: | And then at that point ... I guess the issue there is that dealing with a changing situation might be difficult and that's kind of what I was getting at with the half baked example is that you need to be able to deal with situations where the character's personality could be overcome for a moment, and if it decided that you didn't overcome it but in your mind you had that's where you start to chafe a little bit. But yeah if you write down what you think the player is like just so interactions in town are befitting your overall demeanour and that kind of thing is certainly doable, just for an overall reactions thing. Specific penalties and mechanics might still be an issue but for the overall reputation and just how people react to how you are, it could be good. Also as kind of a general ... what's it called, perks and faults and all that kind of thing, if that worked through a personality system then it would be easier to swallow mostly if you picked that you were cowardly and then you get combat minuses all the time; at least you wouldn't be surprised. |
| Rainseeker: | Perhaps you could go on a quest to rid yourself of cowardice. |
| Toady: | Well if you go on a quest it should probably rid you of cowardice. I guess that's one of those lessons from children's books. It's all about judging player intent, I don't know if it's even weird to half way through your life or anytime you want to be able to go in and tweak your personality numbers. You'd run into power gaming issues there I guess, it's a thing where you can tell the ... If you told the game 'I'm angry right now' and then it started reacting accordingly it fits back into the conversation engine; should you be able to not just say a thing but put in the tone for how you're talking to somebody and so feed your tone and your actual content of your statement - tone, gestures, all that kind of thing - to the extent that you want to feed that information in to vary the responses, so that you can behave in character. Maybe you wouldn't be able to raise your voice at somebody if you had the wrong personality for it or something, it's undetermined right now, but all very interesting anyway. |
| Capntastic: | My belief is that when Dwarf Fortress gets close to done it'll basically have everything that someone would expect, I just think that having Tarn talk about these things clarifies in what direction the game is going, and it will possibly staunch some of the weird suggestions like 'Toady, you should make it so different people wear different coloured clothes'. |
| Toady: | I guess the education of the fanbase or whatever you'd want to call it is ... That sounds sort of a never ending process in any case, there's new people coming and so on. |
| Capntastic: | I know, it's like I want to help people, I want to help them enjoy the game more, but a lot of people show up like 'I played this game for ten minutes, Toady I have the coolest idea, you need to add horses.' |
| Toady: | Yeah I do need to add horses I guess. I already have them but we need them in other places. Adventurers need their horses. |
| Capntastic: | Definitely, with saddlebags. |
| Rainseeker: | Horses need to be haulers. |
| Capntastic: | And you could get horseshoes, and bits ... |
| Rainseeker: | Play games with horseshoes. |
| Capntastic: | ... and get to braid their tail. |
| Toady: | It's important to colour them pink and put them in a plastic box and sell them. |
| Rainseeker: | It would be a plastic box, it'd be a wooden box, and it wouldn't be plastic it'd be rock. A rock pony. |
| Capntastic: | Like what you're making your character it'll ask 'If you had a limited edition pink horse in a stone box would you take it out of the box or would you leave it in there and let it accumulate value for the elven traders?' |
| Toady: | Yeah it's always interesting, the character generation through stories and questions. Some people despise that and some people like to be able to define their character in that way. |
| Capntastic: | I like the ones for Liberal Crime Squad, it's like 'when you were a kid you broke into cars, or you studied really hard, or you had a paintball gun' and you can kind of see what sort of benefits those bestow. |
| Toady: | Yeah that one had real tangible results. There's the trick of integrating it into the world which already has a history, so the more information you give it about ... Certain ones of the Ultima ones would be maybe difficult it's like 'When you were ten you went and spoke to the king and slew a dragon and you gave your friend the reward' but no dragon died that year in world generation, so it could just start you with legendary liar or something. It's one of the things that complicates it but we don't have to fret over it. We certainly need something, right now it's just like 'You are a wandered named John and here you are'. |
| Capntastic: | That's right ...You mentioned earlier about how different cultures would have different names and they'd think it's weird. I always thought it was cool how if you had a custom name in adventure mode, when you told people your name they'd say 'Oh your parents must have been interesting.' I did that once and my name was an actual dwarf name, I changed my name to ... it wasn't Urist but it was some other dwarf name, and I changed my name to that and they didn't recognise it as an actual dwarf name. |
| Toady: | That's one of those things where I thought I did that, I thought I'd fixed that but it must be just sitting in a dev note somewhere. I'd definitely thought of that case but ... |
| Capntastic: | Some weird accentuation I didn't use. |
| Toady: | Yeah it's possible because you can't type those, I thought I'd checked for that but perhaps it was a total failure. But it's definitely the kind of thing we're trying to do correctly. What is that ... what is that called here ... greeting ... goodbye ... greet. Unusual first name: 'Your parents must have been interesting' 'You know, you don't meet many people with the name [blankname]' 'So, [blankname], [blankname] was it?' '[blankname], does that mean something?' '[blankname] ... Can't say I've heard that before'. |
| Rainseeker: | How about 'You sound like a real jerk [blankname]', or 'You seem like a real [blankname]' |
| Toady: | That's nothing but trouble. Oh it does look! What's it doing here! One of us screwed up, and it's possible I did, I don't remember if I bug checked that or not, but it's in there, ostensibly. |
| Capntastic: | Will cultures progress in a Spore-like manner where you have the dwarves and they just appear from whatever creation and as it progress they move towards a gully and then they begin to accentuate their culture towards living off of the gully, like they have a fondness for the gully herbs, and they fish the gully river, and they like those fish, and then there's a branch off where some of the dwarves go to a hill and they eat the hill berries. |
| Toady: | That's kind of a geographical determinism type thing, say the year zero thing they're just typical dwarves ... Right now the way it works makes a bit of sense, but it's kind of weird, because it goes through and picks a favourite food but the favourite food is any possible food that's available, and it won't be visible if you haven't seen it yet but it could be ... maybe some dwarf's food is cheater meat but you haven't actually found cheater meat so it's not listed but when they eat cheater they're suddenly like 'Oh I just love cheater meat! This is great!' and then you go look at their profile and it tells you that he likes cheater meat and that's just because it predetermined that their taste buds were somehow aligned to cheater meat, no other meat. I think Capntastic's way of thinking about it is probably a much better way to handle that thing, looking at the geographic information and determine whether or not they like or dislike the things they've been exposed to, and then when they get exposed to new things they can either like or dislike those, and if there's some kind of more universal way of thinking about that like liking light colours or dark colours or something so that when they find a new colour they'll like it or not depending on ... |
| Capntastic: | A new colour ... |
| Toady: | Yeah yeah ... that's a great example. I thought of a wonderful example when I used colour ... |
| Rainseeker: | Gleen! |
| Toady: | Yeah it reminds me of those games where you have the black, white and grey world and you add colour to it. It's like when you add blue then the dwarves can either like blue or not. If I had chosen a better example, it would have been a better example. So if they bring cheese, cow cheese, and you don't have cows, then maybe you're a connoisseur of cheeses to begin with, you already like dwarven cheese and cat cheese and carp cheese ... made from carp milk from the carp mammary gland. If the dwarf likes all cheeses then they should like that cheese too, but they shouldn't have some kind of preconceived notion about cow's milk if they've never had it before which is how it works now and is kind of strange. So then if they move they could start to develop a regional character and then you get things like the traditionalist thing again where at first those guys might not like the second place, the hill at first and long for the gully ... |
| Capntastic: | And have recipes from the old country. |
| Toady: | Yeah, and then five generations later a lot of dwarves might think that being 'hill' is traditional, but then there's a few people who still remember the gully who think that's traditional so you could actually have two traditionalist camps that disagree with what is traditional. That kind of thing; it gets trickier and trickier to store that sort of information but ... |
| Rainseeker: | You could get two nations that arise out of that, the 'gullies' and the 'hills'. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, you'd have a schism, then war, then violence, then fun. A progression of culture I think, which would be great because at any given point in time it would indicate that the culture was doing something and they had preferences at that point, and then basically they have an actual history at different points. |
| Toady: | It's always a storage thing, especially when you'd going over time with lots and lots of people. But you can do that with kind of a snapshot ... There's the internal snapshots inside important people where it can track their history but it can't do that for too many people, and then the other people I guess it can take the thousand or so most important bits of information and create a snapshot every ten years for the entity, so that ... |
| Capntastic: | For like what special events happen, like 'this is when we invented carp cheese during the great famine.' |
| Toady: | Yeah, you'd have the important historical events, the tricky part is reconstructing the entities ... If you tracked every change you could go back in time and reverse engineer the changes but that's slow and you couldn't track everything, like certain thoughts about copper, what the dwarves thoughts are about copper in general, so if you have snapshots it might make that a little better. Then you could track trends in copper ... it's almost like the stock market or the monetary mineral markets or whatever the heck they're called, futures, cattle futures ... So you could look at the - there's no reason you'd really want to do this - but just how people thought about various things over time, the most important bits anyway. That's the thing, when you want to meet a dwarf ... The reason to do this is if you meet a dwarf they need to have some kind of picture in their head of their likes and dislikes, but since that dwarf would likely not have that information stored in them if they're just a dwarf off the street, or out of the mine or whatever, when you walk into a new settlement, that dwarf needs to have their information placed into their head once you talk to them about these things. So it would have to do through their entities, the larger groups they're associated with, and so those need to have that information tracked, and if the dwarf has been living there for sixty years it can't just use the information sitting in the entity at that moment because that's the stuff the new kids like, the Twilight stuff and all that. Whereas sixty years ago when people were in to other things ... that dwarf ... if you took a snapshot every ten years, you take those six snapshots for that dwarf and then take their traditionalism and a few other things and cast their line back as far as it needs to go, and that's what that dwarf can believe. It's interesting to try and set that up. |
| Rainseeker: | Back in my day, blood-sucking vampires were evil! Now they're sexy hunks, I don't understand these newfangled things. |
| Capntastic: | I don't understand my feelings towards this. |
| Toady: | Yeah, or you could have people like my grandfather who was rollerblading in the eighties, an early adopter. |
| Capntastic: | Now people are going to post about rollerblading dwarves, then they're going to get into spandex and sunglasses and it's never going to end. Dayglo colours, Pepsi Clear, it's just not worth it. |
| Toady: | Is that like Sprite or whatever? |
| Rainseeker: | It was a little trend there for about two years, or one year. I don't know, it was very short. Okay so we're going to take a break. Capntastic is going to be departing for another adventure ... |
| Capntastic: | Yeah I gotta take off. |
| Rainseeker: | ... and Tarn and I are going to go over your questions, so thanks for joining us Capn. |
| Capntastic: | No problem, always a pleasure Doctor. |
| Toady: | Now watch out, if Capntastic calls you Doctor, if you put some name after that that kind of makes you a villain. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, Doctor Tarn Adams and his mind controlling device. |
| Toady: | Yeah, so now Captain's going to come over to my house and kick my ass, lock me in some kind of jail or insane asylum or something. |
| Capntastic: | Have at it you two. |
| Toady: | Bye. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Unspecified: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | Hey! We're back for more dwarf talk, here with our illustrious programmer Tarn Adams, and myself, I'm Rainseeker. We're going to be addressing some of your fine questions that you've asked, so ... |
| Toady: | Yeah, lots of questions in here. |
| Rainseeker: | We do have lots of questions here. Well, I'll start the first one with a question from one Mr Slack: 'Have you considered a barber/stylist type job where dwarves can wonder around and clean up other dwarves? In addition have you considered things like piercings, tattoos, gold teeth or other body decorations that the dwarves or the barbers could create? Are there any technical hurdles to something like that?' |
| Toady: | We have earrings, you don't need to pierce to put them in, because we didn't have the wound system before, but we have it now. So earrings ... Tattoos we've considered, that's all good ... I'm not sure about barbers creating the tattoos and stuff but I don't know ... There's the hair styles right now but right now dwarves just kind of take care of their own hair style. I guess somebody elevated to the position of being a professional that takes care of beards seems like a very reasonable profession for dwarves to have ... |
| Rainseeker: | A beardist. |
| Toady: | A beardist. Especially if you mod in the female beards, because everybody would be involved now, because having the men be the only one with stylists is unbalanced. But yeah, there's triple braided beards and all kind of things now; someone would need to set that up, I certainly couldn't triple braid my own beard even if I had one. I'm not sure when ... when or who for things like tattoos. The more little mechanics you add in the more dwarves you need hanging around and you'd hope that you don't go too overboard with it. I guess they could do it part time, because people won't be getting tattoos all the time. But then how do they get skilled at it, it'd be really horrible to have these really ugly horrible tattoos, just big blocky letters and hearts and incorrect characters from other languages and stuff pasted all over their bodies ... |
| Rainseeker: | Very popular to put elven characters on your body. |
| Toady: | Yeah all these dwarves with elven characters on their beards that say 'tree killer' and stuff like that. At least they think it does but it actually says 'I love Mother Earth' or something. Maybe they could practice on animals or something, there's a bunch of cats around ... You could shave the cat and then tattoo stuff on the side and have all the cats branded when you corral them into their corrals and stuff. |
| Rainseeker: | Cat corrals ... haven't you ever heard of herding cats? Our next one's coming from Jim DeMont: 'What are your plans to make the game more accessible to new players?' |
| Toady: | We have plans, who knows when, as usual, but the plans we have for that are ... There are a couple of things that keep people out of the game, mainly. One of the big impediments of course is the ASCII display; as we've seen from some of the utilities that have been popping up, more people would be playing the game if they had a reasonable look, tiles and all that isometric type stuff, all that kind of thing. And we're planning to support that stuff over time, there's issues there of course that we've gone over in the past about how fast development will be, how many other people need to be brought on board and what kind of trouble that can cause. But aside from that there's the issue of the interface as a larger picture, just in terms of having keys that are consistent and make sense, mouse support's a huge thing for people, and we're planning on doing that thing. The main thing there is uncoupling Dwarf Fortress from all the curses crap that has been there for years which is the ASCII stuff that ties it in so you can't have variable width fonts right now which you'd really want to have to have bigger tiles and have a smaller menu that can hide off somewhere by itself. And there's also the notion of now ... Even if you had a streamlined interface and graphical characters and so on, the game would still be very inaccessible because you still start the game and your dwarves would just be milling around and you still wouldn't know what to do. Tutorials seem like a very reasonable thing, I know a few people are against them for whatever reason but I don't see another way. There'd need to be quite a few tutorials and it would be good to explore ways to make those as fun as possible, because sometimes a tutorial can really be a hassle. So it'll take some work to get those polished but you've just got to make sure people know how to dig, they know how to make buildings, and do the other jobs that the dwarves need to do, and also get across some of those concepts about how the world works, and how it's okay to fail, and you're encouraged to let your game die and that kind of thing. |
| Rainseeker: | Because it goes on. Your game is connected to the entire world, so if you build a new ... |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's good to get that thing across and so a tutorial's actually a good platform in that sense to instil some of the overarching concepts of the game, I wouldn't say how it's meant to be played, but just how it can be played. So that's the three pronged thing we've got right now. I could have missed some of the little dev items that are there, and other items that have been floated in the 'What turns you off about Dwarf Fortress?' thread and so on. I know there are a lot of good ideas in there, but the three things that spring to mind immediately are graphics, consistent controls with mouse support and tutorials. |
| Rainseeker: | Alright. So I had a comment here that I was going to read from Xanares. He says: 'Milord, the general has been abducted; his last command was 'ga ga goo goo'. |
| Toady: | I believe that's from the dev log where we had babies rising to important positions at age one or whatever. |
| Rainseeker: | I just thought it was a funny comment on that one. From Andrew K; 'On world generation you recently noted that the world in game isn't the whole world, i.e. it only has one pole. How permeable is the edge to new things coming in?' |
| Toady: | Nothing comes in right now, there used to be migrants that were generated on the edges and they would get these foreign culture entities, which would be much like the entities that are within the world except they just have different selections of items and things. And that's the idea right now because when we hit wards there are going to be potential depopulation problems and all kinds of other trouble, and one of the possible solutions of that is just to allow things to come in from the sides. Now I know some people are going to dislike that because if things come in from the sides then the effects that you're having on the world are very local and you might not feel that you have as much control as you want to have over the situation, so certainly an init thing or a world parameter thing most likely that you can just check and be like 'nah, my edges are not permeable'. Then in that case we could even do something like have them always be water, or have them drop off into space. Doing things like having the world be a torus, meaning that the left edge and right edge wrap, or have it be ... I'm not sure what happens if you go in through the top and come out through the top on another side, like if you're actually trying to create a sphere you're probably actually creating some weird projected space, just some mess. The left and right edges wrapping is more like one face of an annulus and then having the top wrapped to the bottom would be very weird, especially if it was from the pole to the desert, that would be a torus but that's ... you know. But any kind of option it just has to be supported by the pathfinding routine, which is easy enough, you just give it a few extra rules; I mean the world pathfinding routine not the dwarf mode pathfinding routine. Although, does that mean that you'd be able to settle a site half on one edge and half on the other, and then you'd have to be able to load those blocks correctly. There are certain annoyances that you get there, like when the adventurer walks through the edge it has to know how to load the blocks correctly. It's not a huge problem but it's a little issue. That's the obstacle there, so that's why we've just gone with this local region, those are the two reasons; first it's the easiest to implement, second it allows you to repopulate regions more easily. But we're open to helping people that want to have rounder more self contained worlds. |
| Rainseeker: | Very good. I have a question here from The Catfish: 'What have been the most surprising, or inspiring, or ingenious things you've found emerging from the community?' |
| Toady: | The one that struck me in vaguely recent memory was that computer, the one that used like two thousand mechanical pieces and had a seven segment counter and stuff. That as far as a technical achievement was something that's far beyond what I was expecting, anticipated or even understand. The other things are the big stories, the big popular stories, when people get those working well, the succession games when they pass them around, that's all been really cool. I've forgotten all the different little pieces of that question, I don't know if I've said something that was inspiring or whatever the other ones were, but those are the two things that come to mind. |
| Rainseeker: | Our next one is from R A Browning, he is saying that a few of the members of the mining forum discovered that if you mess around with the raws you're able to embark with intelligent - or at least can learn and can speak pets - who are counted as members of your civilization, and can be given tasks like hunting, fishing or recruited into the military. If they aren't given any tasks they mostly stand around talking with one another and gaining experience at their little animal man parties. The question is this: 'Are there any plans to expand on this interesting phenomenon in later versions of the game, such as by allowing the intelligent pets to equip weapons and armor and fight alongside the controlling civilization, or to allow them to take up other labours on a limited basis?' |
| Toady: | The pet part, I guess, is the strange part of that. This actually ties in very very closely to the people that had the elf queen of their dwarven society show up, and then the elf queen was kind of broken. The problem is the old code, the oldest stuff, assumes that members of your civilization are all the same race, and the newer stuff just needs them to be potential participants; they need to have in most cases can learn and can speak, or in some cases just can learn, and then they can join into civilization activities. So what you're seeing with the pets is the same thing you seem with the elf queen most likely, you just wouldn't have noticed the hunting and fishing, probably because the nobles can't be recruited in general for that kind of stuff. So it's kind of a weird split, the weird part there is that they're also a pet. That I'm not sure how to deal with offhand. What does that mean, is that dwarven slavery, or is that just a really affectionate relationship or something? I don't know. But the answer about rebellions and things; anything that dwarves will be able to do later, they'll be able to do. We haven't really planned a lot for version 1 especially for massively multiracial forts with like ten goblins hanging out, but really when you get back to some of this entity stuff we were talking about, there should be a notion of them cliquing up a bit and making a sub-entity, at least for certain races. It's quite possible that goblins with all their kidnapping behaviour and so on don't really see the species of the creatures the same way and might not even clique up based on their goblin nature unless they're spurned by the rest of the dwarves or something. It's all going to depend on how that works out, I don't pretend to have the algorithms set up for making sure that stuff is going to work right, but hopefully that would be one of the main considerations when you start forming sub-groups like miners' guild is if there's multiple species in the fort. |
| Rainseeker: | I have a question from Zwei: 'Considering that leaders have motivations and goals, do civilizations as a whole have something similar; will player-made fortresses be tied to them too? Most real world purchases start as a way to tap resources of land, player fortresses however are fairly common in this regard and totally free to do whatever the heck they want; a literal sandbox. Will fortress mode have more of a historical or purposeful feel?' |
| Toady: | Right now one of the giant question marks sitting above dwarf mode is why are you doing what you're doing? Seven dwarves strike out and make a fortress for no reason ... But they come from a civilization. So I'm not sure in terms of the civilizations having goals versus the leaders having goals. Someone's making decisions, although many members of the society can understand and push those decisions and so on, so there's a civilization aspect and maybe that's what you mean. But the player fortresses then, I think it would be really cool to have a point for what you're doing, especially for people that aren't just going to go build some crazy megaproject or whatever, that don't have some kind of meta-game agenda like that. Looking at the world itself there certainly should be a reason for what you're doing ... How closely tied is your expedition to the official fortress? Right now they all seem very officially supported because there are outpost liaisons and so on, but it would be pretty trivial to have your dwarves optionally be fleeing from persecution or something, and then you wouldn't have an outpost liaison and all the merchants that come would be more freelance, like the humans and elves, and maybe dwarves from a different dwarven civilization, and you wouldn't have the benefit of the outpost liaison and you might actually run into trouble when the dwarves come and hunt you down. That would all be very cool, and it's something that's been floating around for years, I don't remember whether it was pre-release or post-release, but saying what these dwarves are doing out there, and I think that's only going to make the game better when we answer those questions, but I don't have a timeline, as usual. |
| Rainseeker: | Okay, here's one from Steb: 'For the next episode of DF Talk, I'd like to ask a question about soil. In the future will it be possible to have items buried in the soil, such as relics from world generation battles that you uncover in dwarf mode by digging?' |
| Toady: | There is a buried embedded ... an embedded flag right now, like if you do a cave in the items will be - I think it's used for cave ins, it's used somewhere - where they become embedded in the rock; the items become embedded and you can dig them out again. So that part's there, but there should be a shallow buried one for something like putting a ring under the dirt in adventure mode that stays in the same tile, so you don't have to stuff it way down in the wall, like the wall under your feet, the whole Z level down. So that mechanic's in there, but as far as relics from world generation battles and stuff, one of the core items for development for version 1 - I don't recall the number off the top of my head but it's one of the hundred things that needs to be done - is old battlefields from world generation, because right now those are unused. They're entirely unused, you have this battlefield and it knows where they are, if you use the legends screen and call up the battle it shows exactly where it was ... yeah it's core sixty nine, old battlefields ... so they have their locations but there are no traces of them whereas if you go there, especially if it's a recent battle, there should be a lot of crap. With the ruins, ruins just kind of decay over time, but there's no sediment laid down, so things don't ever become buried, and I think it's crucial to bury things, especially in a game that involves this much digging. So those are planned, if you look at core sixty seven there's ruins there, core sixty eight is graveyards and tombs which is related, core sixty nine is ole battlefields, and core seventy is fortress ruins; how that specifically relates to your own fortress and the ruins there. So those four core items are all meant to address that kind of thing. |
| Rainseeker: | I have a question from Totaku, saying: 'I was curious if in the future you will look into exploring symbiotic relationships. We may already have some basic relationships since dwarves can have pets that they can develop a bond with, but I wonder if you'll open the opportunity in the future for wild animals to develop symbiotic relationships with other wild animal species.' |
| Toady: | In terms of hard coded stuff ... I see these examples of ox peckers feeding on rhino ticks and sea anemones providing shelter and so on. I'm really interested in animal behaviour personally so that's the kind of thing that most likely would creep in on a whim along with all the other animal improvements. We don't have a specific development goal for symbiotic relationships but it's the kind of thing that would creep in. Right now we have to probably address the big elephants in the room or whatever you want to call them like a lion walking by the deer and they can sit next to each other and all the animals sat together and were at peace, and it's trouble. |
| Rainseeker: | Beautiful. |
| Toady: | It's like the peaceable kingdom or whatever. So I'm assuming that before we explore symbiotic relationships we will explore predator/prey relationships. |
| Rainseeker: | Right it's already symbiotic, I mean gosh, the lions will defend the deer after all. |
| Toady: | Yeah that's exactly what happens. Right now the lion pack is like the anemone providing shelter for the clownfish. I feel very positive about the topic at hand and once the bigger fish are fried that's certainly something that would start to creep up. |
| Rainseeker: | Now if a lion kills a deer does that mean that a dwarf is going to go fetch that deer carcass and end up standing next to the lion? |
| Toady: | What is the restriction now? I think the butchers try and grab any corpses within twenty tiles or something and the hunters return kills that they kill themselves. That's actually way too strict right now because a lot of times you'll get a corpse that bled to death or got shot by an arrow and it didn't get tagged right or something and they'll just leave it there; that happens too often. |
| Rainseeker: | Here's a quick one from Mr Slack: 'With health care revamped and ready for the next release how far away is the functionality of giving healthcare to pets?' Now here's the sob story; 'I have a dog with two broken legs trying to make its way back to my fort, and it's heartbreaking to watch it shuffle a few steps, fall unconscious, and then shuffle a few more steps over and over and over for the better part of the season.' It's very sad, poor Lassie. |
| Toady: | This is one I don't remember the answer to because there's animal healthcare in a sense in the currently released version. The animal if it can limp over to the guy that provides animal healthcare it just needs to be within a radius of it then it'll heal much faster, that's how it works right now. But when I removed that profession then I don't know what took its place if anything, that could very well be one of the items that's on the last little requests ... Yeah, there's this little thing called vets here, what is this saying, is this some last thing I just have to ... Here it is, it's under the last remaining requests section of the release is either keep that little magical healing radius thing or slap some tags on them so they can bring a dog to your hospital tables or something. So we're going to get something one way or the other, and if it doesn't go ... because I'm trying to get the game out ... if it doesn't go the direction of giving healthcare to pets in a more meaningful fashion then at least we're never going to be that far from it code-wise even if we're far away from it time-wise. So it's something that if it continues to come up it will probably be dealt with, especially as people bring more horrible stories about their dead and dying animals, and Mister Scamps has to be sitting here watching and hearing about this. (aside to Scamps) How do you feel about that Mister Scamps?(end aside) He's been sleeping most of this recording. |
| Rainseeker: | Excellent Mister Scamps. |
| Toady: | Yeah he's an excellent animal. Of course there was right at the beginning he tried to yank my head off, so I guess it all evens out. |
| Rainseeker: | Tell everybody about what Scamps does if you try to do laundry. |
| Toady: | My apartment has a little washer and dryer; they're the smallest ones I've ever seen but I have them which is something to be thankful for ... I can wash like four shirts and that's about it, they're really small. But they're in this little alcove near to the little room with the sink and the kitchen, it's a very small kitchen, and this is the one part of the house that Scamps has not been able to explore because the alcove is closed most of the time ... I'm not sure if it's an alcove, it's like a laundry closet, I'm sure some of you have seen those, and it has a little door. He's not allowed in there because a little detergent gets dropped there sometimes and I just don't want him snooping around in there, so it's closed, and whenever I do laundry he's very curious about this. Now he recently acquired the ability to jump up on the kitchen shelf, which has changed my lifestyle considerably, but he's figured that one out. So now when he comes, when I'm doing laundry, the closest he can get to investigating is jumping up on the kitchen shelf and trying to peek around to see the laundry, but he can't peek around because it's too far around the little wall that separates the laundry from the kitchen. So what he'll do instead is just meow and scratch my arm. I don't know if he's just waiting for me to pick him up and hold him and show him the machines or something. I could take him on a little tour ... I remember taking him on the tour of the sink a couple of days ago because he had been recently jumping up on the kitchen shelf so I showed him how to turn the sink on and off. |
| Rainseeker: | Has he tried to do that? |
| Toady: | He understands I think that the knob influences the water, like those pigeons that learn how to press buttons, pretty much every animal seems to be able to figure out button pressing. So he knows that the knob has to do ... He's figured out doorknobs too, so I think he understands the knob turns the water on and off. He's not sure what to think of the water itself, the water shooting down. He'll investigate it, and he likes to stand in the sink and look at the water from an inch away, we haven't completed his lessons on the sink, but we might have to bring him to laundry class, so he can learn about the laundry instead of scratching my arm. |
| Rainseeker: | I have another question here from Van, and he says, curiously enough, that you should cover vehicles in one of the upcoming DF Talks, and he wants to talk about siege vehicles, mounts, and boats. |
| Toady: | I remember I made that post. Someone wrote a thing about boats, and then I posted a giant thing about boats, and the siege vehicles were going to run into the ideas about boats. I don't remember if we've actually had that on at the DF Talk or not, talking about ... |
| Rainseeker: | Boats I'm not sure. |
| Toady: | The siege vehicles, like multi-tile things that can move around and so on. |
| Rainseeker: | Maybe talk a little bit about multi-tile stuff. |
| Toady: | A large issue there is turning; should you only be able to point in four directions, because it's kind of mathematically impossible to have more without breaking the grid system or breaking the relationships between grids and, or changing the number of grids, and you can't do any of those things really safely. Now even if the thing turns four directions it can still more in many more directions by doing kind of an up-up-over, up-up-over, up-up-over thing. So it's not like they'll be completely dissatisfying, it's just if you're trying to navigate a narrow thing that you'd normally be able to navigate, like a narrow channel that you'd normally be able to navigate a boat through but suddenly you have to corner and it's like, turn ninety degrees or whatever, then you might run into issues, or you make all the boats squares or something, I think that'd be pretty ugly though. But as far as covering it on a DF Talk we can always put it up for vote. Next month is taken by adventure mode, but after that it's up to ... |
| Rainseeker: | I don't know, I don't know. But yeah, I've waded through all the questions that I think we're going to cover tonight. |
| Toady: | You'll always have more to ask. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah. And remember if you want to ask questions there is a little thread there to point you in the right direction under the DF General Discussion forum, it's titled 'Dwarf Fortress Talk: Questions by email' with the link inside which makes it easy for you. Also I'd like to thank Capntastic for being on this week, and for fighting the forces of evil. I'd also like to thank Scamps for mauling Toady One continually. |
| Toady: | Mauling Toady One a little less than last time maybe, so for being a well behaved darling baby cat. |
| Rainseeker: | Well I'd like to thank him nonetheless for mauling you, just a little bit. Also I'd like to thank you Tarn for coming on with us this week, it was very good. |
| Toady: | Yeah, I had fun again. Fun as usual, it's fun to talk about Dwarf Fortress. |
| Rainseeker: | It is good, it's good to hear you talk about it, because everyone enjoys this game, and we appreciate your efforts. Is there anything that you would like to say before we sign off, sir? |
| Toady: | Well I guess we'll need to credit the music people, so you can go ahead and credit the music people. |
| Rainseeker: | Okay, also we want to thank Ollieh, and our transcriber ... |
| Toady: | Mallocks ... And I think that's it, and everyone who asked this questions this week, if we didn't thank them already, we'll thank them now. |
| Rainseeker: | We appreciate all your questions, and if you would like to ask more questions, even if your question isn't asked go ahead, ask another question, we like good questions. And congratulations goes to Sysice who completed the Santa's village fortress challenge. Well, I will see you guys next week I guess, or next month. I will see you guys next month. |
| Toady: | That's quite possible. |
| Ollieh: | (musical postlude) |
| Rainseeker: | Oh by the way Capntastic, I’ve been meaning to ask you this. Somewhat of a debate between Toady and I; what is your superpower? |
| Capntastic: | Umm ... Don’t put me on the spot like that. I’m not going to reveal it. |
| Rainseeker: | Can you give us a hint? |
| Capntastic: | No. |
| Toady: | Nothing but trouble. As long as it doesn’t involve hurting little cats. Little cats are safe! He can fly up to the trees, save the kitty from the tree. |
| Toady: | We’re going to have to schedule around the holidays and stuff. I mean I don’t have much to do in the holidays so I guess we’ll just go by what you do or don’t. |
| Rainseeker: | Because you don’t have little nieces or nephews running around, do you? |
| Toady: | Nah, no-one’s around here causing trouble and so on. We’re just going to have a little family thing. Although it is Scamps’ first Christmas, he’s going to be spoiled obviously. And then on February 8th it will be Scamps’ first birthday, and he’ll be spoiled again. I don’t know how he’s going to make it through January without being spoiled but he’ll have to get used to it. January’s always going to be a very dull month for Scamps; no birthday, no Christmas. (sings to Scamps) Little baby Scamps, he’s a little baby baby baby cat. He’s trying to sleep but it’s oh so hard when someone’s patting his belly. Are you having trouble sleeping when I’m patting your little belly? You’re going to scratch my face if I don’t stop. (end singing) Now he’s just glaring at me. (aside to Scamps) What? Well there has to be tummy time every day, you know that. Tummy time each day for a small baby cat. Tummy time! Tummy time! (end aside) |
| Rainseeker: | (in the manner of Scotland) Ach, for all you ladies and lassies out there that have gotten this far in the podcast, I congratulate ye, you’ve really stuck it out. And for that I’d like to issue a Dwarf Fortress challenge, I won’t you to build me a TOWER. OF. SOOOOOAP! The bigger the better, the more complicated the more points you’ll get. So, whoever wins this challenge, of having the craziest and most interesting soap tower will get a shoutout from Rainseeker on the next Dwarf Fortress Talk. You need to put your screenshots and descriptions in the General Discussion section of the forums under the sticky topic called challenge. Soap fortress! Tell them Urist sent you! Also don’t forget that Toady one makes all his money from donations, you’re free to donate on the front of his website, using the Paypal. Aye laddie don’t just sit there, go play some Dwarf Fortress! |
Dwarf Fortress Talk #6, with Rainseeker, Capntastic and Toady One, transcribed by mallocks
| Capntastic: | Welcome back friendos to another Dwarf Fortress podcast. I'm here with Tarn Adams and Rainseeker. I'm Capntastic and I have a magical new microphone. |
| Toady: | It sounds magical. |
| Capntastic: | Yes. Plus one. |
| Toady: | Plus one. Everything is awesome now. |
| Rainseeker: | Alright, so we are here to talk about ... Adventure mode! |
| Toady: | Adventure mode! |
| Capntastic: | And adventurers, and adventures. |
| Rainseeker: | Eventually adventure mode presumably will be completely engrossing and awesome. |
| Toady: | It'll have adventure. |
| Capntastic: | It'll be like a movie that you play. |
| Rainseeker: | That's right. |
| Capntastic: | Only, it's better. It'll be like a book that you read with your keyboard. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah and actually you will read books in adventure mode. |
| Capntastic: | And there won't be keyboards. |
| Toady: | I don't even know anymore, but there's going to be stuff. |
| Rainseeker: | Alright so, what we're going to talk about today is adventure mode and adventures. So what I was thinking to start with is; where did your concept for adventure mode come from, Tarn? |
| Toady: | We'd always kind of been working on a role playing game from a first person perspective, where you have a character and you go on little adventures and kill monsters and things and wander around; we've always had those kind of games as standalone games, just as standard RPG mush with a few little extra things, but basically the same as everything else. Then when we started working on Dwarf Fortress as a side project for Armok I, the idea we came up with for that pretty early on was to have the adventure part be a sort of high score mode afterward, where you go through the fortress and explore what your dwarves left behind; that was originally how it was going to be and that was going to be the whole thing. And then as Dwarf Fortress started stealing from Armok I to the point where it became Armok I or whatever, the adventure mode - ideally, if it were actually done - would just be a standard role playing game taking place in the Dwarf Fortress mode while you're switching off between fortresses and adventurers and so on; so it came out of all that. |
| Capntastic: | What are your plans to make adventure mode more accessible? |
| Toady: | There are dozens of issues standing in the way, but a lot of them are things we've discussed like graphics and tutorials and instructions and all that kind of thing. So putting those important things aside, just to get at adventure mode specific matters - rather than just problems with Dwarf Fortress in general - you really start out in adventure mode - you create a character - and you start out in the middle of a building or something and there's really no clue about what's going on. The keybindings aren't really harder to learn that any roguelike, you just pop up the screen and they're there, so the problems with accessibility are more in the line of a direction for your character; right now there's not a lot to do and you have no direction at all, for a new player especially. If you've played before you at least know what the deal is and you might just wander off to your old fortress or you might just wander around and set a goal to kill some monster or something, but without that, if you press adventurer mode before even playing fortress mode then you'd really just have no idea what to do, and when you talk to people you might find your way eventually to the people that will give you quests, but their quests are all kind of cynical, it's just like 'Oh you, you want to do something for me? Alright, go kill the dragon.' It's not really appropriate for your character, so I think the thing to do here - and we'll get to the future of adventure mode, which is the topic - a huge part of that is character generation. So there's the idea of how can you improve character generation, just in general, and also how than to make the game entirely take care of all of the accessibility problems that don't have anything to do with graphics and the general interface, that kind of thing, but just the game itself. So the idea is to have some additional options and the main one would be ... you've got a character who - currently you just create them and they're this outsider who doesn't really belong to the world at all, they might belong to the overall civilization that you've selected for them, but they don't meaningfully tie into that, they don't have a parent in that civilization, they don't have any friends in that civilization, they don't know anybody in that civilization - so one of the ideas for a mode of character generation would be a scenario-driven thing. There are downsides to that sort of stuff, like if you have a Q and A process like the Ultima games or even our own Liberal Crime Squad, the main downside to that I think is that it's a cumbersome way to create a character when you know the questions are just building stats and giving you items, so it just gets really annoying and you have to game the system just to get where you want to get, and it's the same every time. The key difference here is that it really can't be the same every time in Dwarf Fortress because the worlds are all different; it can picks two parent for you and say 'you were born to these two people and you're living in this kind of situation' and then it can have things arise based on just running world generation, just continue world gen from whatever point the game's at. So if goblins were attacking that village that would be the scenario event it throws at you, how do you deal with this? Depending on how old you are you might just be forced to run away, but there might be choices to make in any case. So it can give you a past in this way, and it will let you interact with it. Ideally you'd be presented with a situation and you'd either have some options for resolving that and then continuing to the next situation, or a little more difficult would be allowing you to jump into any situation that you wanted to, so if you were nineteen years old in some village as a farmer in the beginning and the goblins attacked, maybe you'd want to just jump in right there, and that's where you start playing. And at that point you certainly wouldn't have an accessibility problem in the sense of not knowing what to do, or at least having a situation that you'd be confronted with because there'd be something going on, and you'd also have your parents and friends and things; that's the main point, you'd have relationships to begin with, and you should be able to punch up a screen that says what's going on there, and if during the early scenarios you had a situation where your parents were killed by somebody or something then you'd have a Conan relationship screen or something, where it's like 'Thulsa Doom killed your mom' or whatever, and that can be something that drives your life if you want. That's the scenario situation, running through that, being able to break out when you want, or just finishing a number of them, and that would start from wherever your last game ended. The downside here is that if you're starting from that year and it takes a certain time to grow up, then whatever was going on in the world is going to be spent by twelve, thirteen, sixteen, twenty more years by the time you jump in. It's more difficult to retcon you into the world and start you where you want to start off but using past events. We've talked about that a bit before with the fake populations and saving their historical events and how you can use that to retcon things in, including your own character. So it's possible, but ... |
| Rainseeker: | Well presumably you could choose from two different options. |
| Toady: | Aside from the scenario stuff and the retconning and that kind of thing, there would also be, especially for people that kind of know what they're doing, but for anyone else as well - when we were talking about accessibility the scenario driven way would give you direction - but another way to do it would be a role playing mode where you can create your character on the spot as an outsider, or just say 'I'm this guy's kid' just picking off the legends screen, that would be fine too. Then you could set everything about yourself, absolutely everything about yourself, and just start playing at the year that everything left off, as if you'd just popped into existence, or had a past, or whatever you want to set up, just to get you in with minimal difficulty without worrying about the retconning problems, get you in there at the right year, if you wanted to continue right where you left off. Another way to do that would be to just say 'I want to play an existing person in the world' and you just go down the legends list and pick someone. That would require something like a world generation parameter I think, because that's one of those things where you'd be tempted to deal with certain problems ... there are people who complain about being tempted to spoil their games. So if the goblins have been attacking you, you could be 'Well I'll be the goblin king and I'll jump into that volcano!' So that would be one of those world gen options most likely, like 'only allow you to jump into people that don't have entity positions/only allow you to jump into people of the good races/allow you to do anything/disallow you to do it at all'; I think that would resolve those issues, for any of the scenario or roleplaying type modes. There's also the notion - it goes to accessibility but difficulty more - so when you have skill points that you assign, or in the scenarios in terms of how much your character's learning or what kind of background they have, there's this notion of the different kinds of heroes that there are in myths and so on, since we're trying to generate and recreate those stories it's important to get at that. Three general options would be, firstly 'Well, I want my character to be a demigod' like Hercules, it could go into the human pantheons and you'd be like 'Zeus is my dad', and then that character would be exceptional, and you wouldn't have to worry as much about a wolf killing you or something, and you might have gods giving you gifts or cursing you; you'd have an epic life no matter what, you'd have no choice in the matter. Then there's also the middle option which would be a heroic character, which is similar to what we have now where you can start out as a really talented swordsman, someone who's like Batman who's exceptional but not supernatural necessarily, so you can really jam your numbers up or have an exceptional life in terms of your parents or whatever. Then there's the third mode which would be a normal mode, or an 'unlikely hero' mode instead of a hero mode, where you start off as a person who has skills per their scenario or if you're roleplaying you wouldn't add that much stuff to yourself, and that would be suited for the games where people just want to make their own way in the world, or create their little log cabin in the woods and hunt things, or become a bandit, any of those kind of games where they don't really care how survivable their character is if they ran into a goblin tower or something. It runs a bit against all the roleplaying games I've played since Legend of Zelda, where all the numbers and things increase, and the adversaries increase, and the areas that open up increase, and it's all matching larger and larger numbers against each other, and it's becoming less of an option in Dwarf Fortress just because of how the thing is set up, so you can't really run it that way. So it might be weird to start as a powerful character and stay a powerful character but it's really more about the story than the power levelling type of increase, although there are elements of that when your skills improve, and you occasionally find better equipment, although it's nothing the loot-driven systems. There are going to be issues here to tackle, repeatedly, we can't really see everything that's going to happen when you strike out on a new mode of thinking about how an RPG might work. I'm not saying this is the first time anything like this has been done, but I certainly don't know how to handle it myself. It should be interesting to see where this leads. I think when you've got that setup where your character starts and they have as much backstory as you want them to have, then you'll have more direction. You need a little bit of a push maybe and there's more that needs to be done with social interactions and so on when you talk to people, when you talk to like those meeting hall guys that tell you to go off and kill a goblin or kill a dragon should probably not cynically toss you away, especially if you look like you're worth anything, and they should probably just send you with a guy to prove yourself against some kobolds that are out on patrol rather than sending you on suicide missions and then when you get back, they're like 'Oh that was cool'; they don't really care. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Capntastic: | Speaking of adventuring, right now you can recruit party members, but they're basically cannon fodder. In the future when you recruit party members what is the plan once you say 'Okay, I'm done with you'. Are they going to settle where you leave them, or are they going to go back home, are they going to make decisions? |
| Toady: | As autonomous as people are in general, that's how autonomous they would be. They're not special in any way. So right now no-one does anything, pretty much. They move back home sometimes if they're stuck in a cave, they know how to do that, but other than that ... that's a general problem. It's all planned to be addressed so that aside from returning home they'll have their professions and the things that they do, so if you have somebody with you who was a mercenary for instance then whatever mercenaries were doing before you hired that one, that's what that guy would continue to do. Now there's a bit of a difference here when we're getting into adventure entities and that kind of thing when you say 'I've got a band of people' and you might tell one of them to stay at the little compound you've built, then that would be a different matter. This gets to a whole other issue in general with your subordinates; it's something that we're thinking about again with regard to how adventure mode should work. You can get more people, you can get ten, or fifteen people following you around and at some point you want a hierarchy to be set up, even within your own group so that you can tell someone to do something and then that person can handle their own group. So you could tell someone to 'stay here with these five guys and defend the compound at all costs, while we go off and fight the dragon'. Now that guy should then act like people are going to act in general when they're defending an area or so on, according to their individual interests and that kind of thing, the stuff that we've been planning the whole time to slowly put into the game. So you should have that kind of subordinate system to be able to command people to do things or set up an organisation of your own. And it's not all about 'defend this location' or 'send your squad that way while we do this', it could be things like hunting or building buildings or that kind of thing. It gets to this whole ... When you reach a position of power in adventure mode, which is something that's supposed to happen for version one, if you become the king, or meeting hall warlords that's living in the adventure mode, how are you going to be controlling things? For people that have read those development items it's probably a big question, like is it just going to be dwarf mode again? And it shouldn't be, if you're still in this first person mindset anyway. Then it could work more along the lines that it started working with the subordinate system so if you want things to happen you'd have people that you talk to and they can handle stuff, or if you want to handle something directly you'd have to handle it directly. |
| Rainseeker: | You! Build that building! You! Start the fire! |
| Toady: | Hopefully it wouldn't be so much micromanaging, like 'You! Open this door for me!', but it's ... |
| Rainseeker: | Skin that cat! |
| Toady: | Yeah. But you can see how it would just be 'you, lead a group of people over to this town and ask them to submit to us and send us tribute every year' and then they could come back and tell you what happened, and it also gives you the possibility for the really interesting stories when your subordinates don't do what you tell them to do or they start lying to you or whatever. So it's going to be I think a good way to handle it, having to filter certain commands through people so that you're always interacting with people, and you're always building relationships with people, getting the whole world to act like it's supposed to act, instead of turning it into the kind of strategy mode that dwarf mode is; it should be a different creature entirely. What it would allow you to do, then, is to run your smaller operations and have them grow up into larger operations without changing fundamentally how the game works, and allowing you to maintain the personal relationships with your closest subordinates and people above you, not just subordinates, there could be equals, people who are travelling with you, you can give them suggestions rather than just ordering everyone around. It should be an interesting experiment anyway to see how that all works out. That's pretty much upcoming, after this release when we do adventure as one of the three main items, adventurer skills/adventure entities, so whatever we get started there gets started, because the adventure entities was having a group of people and trying to explore how that might work. |
| Capntastic: | I definitely think that the social aspects of adventure mode, all that sort of stuff, will be interesting, especially when you get to the point where you are the leader of a group, then you can eventually shift over to a fortress style mode. |
| Toady: | We were thinking about what the goals are of these meeting hall people, they might be accumulating treasure or something like that, like getting tribute from people and then they'd have this little treasure room ... You could start working on that kind of thing yourself, who knows what people do with their little treasure rooms, they finance armies and things somehow but I don't know what you do with a golden goblet at the end of the day ... I guess you drink from it, or something. But these accumulation type goals lead to things like ruins that are a lot of fun to run around in and fight zombies and snatch their things ... |
| Rainseeker: | It would be amusing to find your adventurer as a zombie. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's too bad that none of the zombies were never that interesting. |
| Capntastic: | Some of them talk ... wait, some of the skeleton lords or whatever talk. |
| Toady: | That's right, they yelled at you and then they started shooting at you from the top of pyramids and stuff. But they were nobodies, they were still these generated peoples, and it'll all change someday, someday in the future. |
| Capntastic: | One thing that I think will be interesting is item ownership, like you mentioned the goblet; the goblet itself will belong to a king and then the king will miss it when it's gone and other people know 'Oh, that's the king's goblet' so you'll have trouble selling it, and then eventually they'll forget it belongs to the king and then you'll become used to having the goblet and so on. |
| Toady: | We've got some of that now, which is cool, with the new dwarf squad stuff where they become used to their weapons and then name them and then they become these semi-artifacts, and that's where that stuff really gets traced. Like these goblets and things, if it's important enough for people to care about then it really gets passed around and keeps track of it in historical information. When you look at the larger picture of property ownership in general it becomes more tricky to track individual information, like how much is that the king's chair or something ... there are important items but then there are unimportant items that belong to important people and those could also be tracked to some extent I guess. Then there's the matter of a person's personal property, everyone can track their own property, so if you go in and take someone's things other people might not really recognize that it's somebody else's cloak but the owner would know. That's another thing that's massively broken in adventure mode right now, the whole criminal type of thing, stealing and all that kind of thing, it's like when you steal a psychic message is sent out to everybody that you're a thief and the guards come to kill you. You ideally should be able to be in a room with somebody, take their little cloak and lock them in a chest, and then set the chest on fire and walk out of the room, and if no-one saw you do it then you could pretend like 'Oh, there's a fire! Come on everybody, let's put it out!' ... That kind of thing would lead to a lot of questions about how justice then comes about to the player, how does that process work, which at least sets a more interesting problem than this psychic stuff, and I think the adventurer should be free to run around more than they are now anyway, where it's just kind of silly. |
| Capntastic: | I'm sure this will be changed, but I like how the punishment for any crime is like everyone in the town walking towards you trying to kill you, they become zombies ... |
| Toady: | I think if you steal something they're just like 'I don't want to talk to you' but if you kill somebody then you become an entity enemy and then even the two year olds recognise you, it's like 'it's time to come at you like a fast zombie instead of a slow zombie.' |
| Capntastic: | Once there's proper law enforcement I definitely think that the game will have some more spark to it, daring escapes and general Robin Hood type action. |
| Toady: | Really with adventure mode a lot of it just comes down to more stuff. There's a lot of stuff but it doesn't come together at all in terms of narrative right now ... Every little thing will help, even the character generation scenarios, if we started with that they'd be pretty limited right now just because there's not a lot of stuff, there's mostly just fighting and things. You could of course add a zillion of them that don't really have a basis in reality but it's better to have them have a basis in reality so that you can jump into them and it's actually going on. |
| Rainseeker: | So what is the new skill system going to look like for adventurers? Is that going to be basically the same as dwarf fortress mode or are you going to have additional adventurer skills. |
| Toady: | When we get to adventurer skills the place we're starting from is that you should be able to kill an animal and use the parts of the animal. That's a starting point because right now you starve to death wandering around. The next part would be being able to build shelters and that kind of thing. The question here is what does that look like? I don't think it would really be appropriate to, if you killed an animal and wanted to get the meat from it, I don't think you should have to chop down a tree and then build a butcher's workshop and then carry the animal to the butcher's workshop and then perform the dwarf fortress mode job without any tools. I think in adventure mode there should be more tools, there should be things that you can do with tools on the spot, and then it would be a matter of how much do you want to pump that stuff in reverse into dwarf mode. Dwarf mode has useful abstractions, because you don't want to have a lot of clutter and crap and micromanagement and all kinds of horrible things that come out of that. Some of it wouldn't be bad, but a lot of the problems that arise then, like if you had people using tools for every job ... It would be cool in a sense if you could produce those things quickly enough and if there weren't stacking problems introduced and pathing problems in general. If you needed to have all the nails and hammers and boards and things to make a chair then even if the stacking weren't a problem then you'd still need that dwarf to go get that crap and it might take a month for them to collect all the different little pieces from all over the place. You have to sacrifice at that point the more epic sweeping nature of dwarf mode because you'd want to slow down the days to allow a dwarf to build a chair before winter comes. It's a tricky question for dwarf mode and I think a lot of abstractions will ultimately stay in dwarf mode, but in adventure mode there's no reason not to go completely nuts with it. I'm sure people can come up with reasons like 'I don't want to have to use nails to build this' or whatever, and I haven't played some of those games like Stranded ... is it called Stranded? The one where you're on the island and you build things with vines and things? And there's Unreal World that I've played a little bit, I crashed the game in a cave ... and I think with Wurm Online you have to do a lot of things like this, and I think tons of MUDs have this stuff too. So this has been experimented with a lot, what it means for a character to have to use many little things to accomplish goals ... |
| Rainseeker: | It makes the item more valuable, of course. |
| Toady: | We'll have to see in adventure mode how it affects the pacing. It's going to be experimental like most everything else. You don't want to do to the point where the pacing is destroyed because you're quibbling too much with garbage. Because if you're playing it as a survival game then that stuff's all fun but if you're trying to get through a forest to go attack the dragon, but while you're in the forest you have to worry 'did I soak this in oak bark long enough to get all the hair to do whatever before I hang up a pelt and get stranded for a week trying to make patches for my boots so my toes don't die before I get to the dragon' or whatever. I don't know if that could afford a quick button or something, a quick 'fix my shoe' button. So I don't know, it's going to be something that we experiment with, of course I'm usually pro-details I think it's pretty clear, I usually add crap where I can, but this'll be a case where we'll have to think about it. My stance right now is that I want to add a bunch of that stuff. Ideally in adventure mode you'd be able to do each job from dwarf mode and there just might be extra steps in the process, extra tools in the process, and things like mining might just be slower, I don't know if you'd be able to carve out a whole dwarf fortress in a week, because that's what you'd be able to do if you were in a dwarf, it's just like 'Bam! There's a dwarf fortress for you.' So that one in particular might be changed a little bit. Then there's also the matter of if you're building log cabins and that kind of thing out in the woods, is the current method - the tile by tile building method - is that something that's going to stay, and if that changes to something more accurate then is that going to change in dwarf mode. So there's always this thing about giving the modes their own flavour, there's the thing about technically keeping the modes fun to play, and then there's the thing where on the other hand you want to minimise the use of dual systems because supporting a different system in adventure mode versus a different system in dwarf mode is always a pain. There're a number of things that are like that right now and they always come back to haunt me, just the different timing is enough of a pain, how that works now, how dwarf mode goes seventy two times faster in adventure mode through history, and so you have to do the sleeping on a different schedule, eating is on a different schedule, forest fires are on a different schedule, it's all different, and that's really irritating in a way, but you can't change it either, because if you put forest fires on the same schedule then the second a fire lights in dwarf mode it just blows out and all the trees are gone. So we'll probably have to live with some more dual systems, but that's alright. |
| Unspecified: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | So now we're in the segment of our podcast when we discuss questions from listeners. |
| Toady: | That's right, Q and A. |
| Capntastic: | This is the interactive portion. |
| Toady: | Like second hand, or something, but it's alright. |
| Capntastic: | It's very active. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's intense. We've got at least thirty three emails now that haven't been handled yet, so we're not going to be able to get to them all. |
| Rainseeker: | No, we're not. However, we will get to some. Capntastic, would you like to do the honours for the first question. |
| Capntastic: | Why yes. This one is not from an email; 'Will there be toys in adventure mode?' |
| Toady: | That's intense. If your adventurer goes into a fortress and finds a mini-forge ... what does that even mean? I didn't even think about what a mini-forge was ... but I think even more relevant would be things like puzzle boxes and stuff, is there supposed to be a puzzle box mini game where you get to play with the puzzle box in ASCII ... glorious ASCII puzzle box ... It's one of those things where in dwarf mode first little kids will be playing with their toys at parties and stuff, and then in adventure mode it would be a thing that probably gets done on a lark or whatever, when I throw it in, unless there happens to be a contingent of people that start pushing that up the suggestion voting. Ideally, I'm all for it. |
| Capntastic: | The whole of dwarf fortress is just going to turn into a pogo stick simulator, I'm just going to put that out there, that's my prediction. |
| Toady: | That's right ... and people were talking about rubber balls and rubber trees and stuff, like making little balls out of the rubber trees - before you have vulcanised rubber you can still do stuff with it, and that would be fascinating, the projectile management would be pretty crappy because it's all in tiles, so it's not like those big physics sims where things bounce around in wonderful ways and you can have fun just tossing a ball around somebody else's level. But there's nothing like playing with little toys and things. |
| Capntastic: | Brushing a doll's hair. |
| Toady: | Well we've got the hair cells now, you'd actually be able to do that now, you'd be like 'I want to give my dwarf doll a triple braided beard now' and you'd give it the triple braided beard and you'd dress it up with little clothes. |
| Rainseeker: | Your character's very effeminate ... |
| Capntastic: | Yes, it will actually change your stats. But you can collect all the different types of clothing and dye them ... |
| Toady: | Collecting is a ... You'll actually be able to have a coin collection and try and find rare coins from two hundred years before, and you'd have to go into a dwarf fortress from that old to get them. It should be fascinating. |
| Capntastic: | And then you could spend all that money on a special mint condition elf doll. |
| Toady: | That's right, it hasn't been taken out of its wooden box yet, you can't even see it. |
| Rainseeker: | Well it wouldn't be a wooden box if it's an elf doll right? |
| Toady: | It depends on what the elf doll is for. Like for poking and burning ... Those might be very popular at dwarven festivals, if someone passes out the elf doll to everybody and they all throw it on the bonfire. I just thought the elf doll might actually come with moveable mouth parts, you could make it chew things ... 'I'm eating you, I'm eating you!' |
| Capntastic: | A nutcracker. |
| Toady: | An elf doll nutcracker, that would be a great little tool for your kitchen. |
| Rainseeker: | Okay back on track here ... Is there any plan to implement experiences with particular types of enemies. |
| Toady: | The original Armok had this unimplemented knowledge system for creatures, and I was definitely thinking about doing that in dwarf mode, you could be an excellent dragon fighter, that kind of thing, and the knowledge could be about their behaviour, it could be about how to butcher them in particular, and so on. So your dwarf mode guy might be excellent at butchering all the deer and cows and things that your guys bring to him, but then you bring him some kind of giant spider and he's supposed to do something with that and he's like 'What is this? I don't even know where anything is' and would spoil the thing even if he's pretty good at butchering in general. So I'm for that kind of thing, I don't think it would be unnecessarily complicated. There are some questions about what it means to be a goblin fighter versus an elf fighter if they're humanoids or whatever; is that more learning about a culture or a species or whatever, if their anatomy is roughly the same. There are questions to answer there but in general I think the more knowledge types and things that there are for fighters and the more different skills and so on that they learn the more they could be differentiated, and that's always good. I think it's good to have particulars like that, and that one in particular is something that's planned. Not planned as in completely planned out, but something we definitely want to do. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Capntastic: | DoctorZ asks; 'Will the game be smart enough to determine that the building is shaped - like a tower or a pyramid - will it award you points for style? His example is a room with a pillar in it engraved, would it bump the quality up if you have a high ceiling with paintings and stuff on it; would that be interesting for the game, will it be able to determine those details?' |
| Toady: | I'd like to further point out that DoctorZ said that 'I'd love you forever if you asked/answered this question' so I think that that means Capntastic right now is loved forever. I still have to do my part to be loved forever, so I've got to answer the question. So the idea with this is that there have been a number of topics where people are like 'I want my tower to be recognised as the tower of something' or 'I want my pyramid to be recognised as the pyramid of something'. That pretty much would have to be user defined; you define an area, you give it a name, and you make sure that that system can't be gamed too much as far as bonuses and so on. But when it comes to smaller things like what you're talking about, a central pillar and things like that, the game can start to pick those out on its own. I don't have a lot of specific plans, but it would be worth discussing. Right now the system picks out engravings isolated, it picks out floor detailing isolated, it picks out the room size and so on, so it goes really just step by step through every tile but things like a central pillar ... it knows where the centre of a room is, it knows that a pillar doesn't have anything else touching it, so doing things like locating a central pillar would be trivial, it's just a matter of building up a list of things that dwarves care about and different groups could like different things; that would certainly be an interesting direction to explore. |
| Capntastic: | I just want to know if I'll be able to have an elf totem really tie a room together. |
| Toady: | I think anyone appreciates the skull when it's centrally placed, or a little higher up maybe, and you'd put some dye on the teeth, make them all red ... I don't know if they have sharp teeth, I haven't really thought about what an elf's teeth look like. Do they have sharp teeth, or do they just chew and chew and chew? |
| Rainseeker: | Well herbivores have got the molar action going on. |
| Toady: | Yeah, elves just use that herbivore bit every once in a while when they eat dead bodies. |
| Capntastic: | Maybe they just don't chew things because that's violent inherently. |
| Toady: | So is eating somebody! Killing them and eating them is a little bit inherently violet. |
| Capntastic: | Well you know how chickens swallow it and then they swallow rocks and kind of chew it up that way? |
| Toady: | Yeah, and some parrots eat clay and stuff? So maybe the elves just need those essential vitamins and minerals and they can't get them anywhere else and it's just a shame evolutionary speaking that they were saddled with that burden, but they try to be herbivores, they try their very best and they don't have the newest vegan manuals for how to mix your vegetables and things properly to get all your nutrients, so they just go with dwarf occasionally. |
| Capntastic: | There's not a soy bean equivalent in Dwarf Fortress is there? |
| Toady: | Maybe the dwarf is the soy bean equivalent. |
| Rainseeker: | Soylent dwarf! |
| Toady: | Nothing but trouble, nothing but trouble. |
| Rainseeker: | Speaking of elves; 'Currently the elves don't like it when you trade wood-related items to them. Is it possible then that this will also be expanded with the rest of the procedural cultural concepts? For example perhaps people you are trading with really like cats and would take offense to all the cat meat roasts, cat liver robes and cat bone omelettes you are trying to trade to them.' |
| Toady: | Yeah I think that'd be cool. It's certainly possible and even easy once they have those preferences to do that kind of thing, all the trading functions are like 'Is this an offensive item?' and then it goes in and looks, and right now it looks at the ethics for the society and if the society also had a few preferences they could easily be checked versus the items, materials and so on. It'd all be pretty straightforward, but the dialogue would probably need to be rewritten because they'd start saying elf-like things to you but it would be a cool expansion of those things. |
| Rainseeker: | You'd think that trying to trade a human skull totem to humans would be offensive. |
| Toady: | Yeah, and right now I think the elves would only care because it was once a living thing, they don't care if it's an elf's head or not. I'm not sure they'd ever care though, they're kind of weird. |
| Rainseeker: | I always thought that it would be nice in that screen if it showed you in red or something if you're about to trade something that's offensive. |
| Toady: | The one tricky matter there - why I haven't done something like that - is that you want people to run afoul of that mechanic at least once somehow, but after that they should know, but it's in the person's head rather than in the game's mind, so it's a tricky question about when they get to know. Because if you're not playing for the first time but it's the first time those dwarves have ever encountered elves then it shouldn't be red in a way but of course the player themselves would know and might complain about that. That's why I've just passed on that, because I don't really have a solution right now. I haven't thought about it that much, although I know it causes untold amounts of grief and so on. |
| Rainseeker: | Maybe it could just be where your trading character learns what is and what is not acceptable, through communication skills. |
| Toady: | It's important to have skills. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Capntastic: | Will there be traditions for naming children, will they be named ... all dwarves that are female have specifically female names, will they be named after historical figures that are not adventurers, will they be named after popular kings and queens and suchlike? Will they be named after the favoured food of a country? All that fun stuff, have a bunch of dwarves named Rummy McGin. |
| Toady: | Yeah, or Plump Helmet McWhiskey. |
| Capntastic: | Someone's going to register on the forum with that name. |
| Toady: | Yeah. So I know you mentioned the adventure mode one because that's the one we kind of harp on about right, it's like 'people will be able to name their children after you later', but the general thing is that we wouldn't implement it that way because it would be kind of weird for them to specifically single out adventurers. So once that goes in they'd use historical figures and so on. There's been a lot of discussion about passing down family names and so on, people are kind of upset sometimes when they have a fortress for a while and the dwarves have babies and the babies just have completely unrelated names, that's just something that hasn't gotten in, but it'll go in as soon as we figure out what dwarves like to do, or what procedural stuff needs to be generated there. As for male versus female names, I don't have - kind of like the passing down of names - I don't have systems there but it's certainly something that I think should be supported and people are interested in having that kind of separation as well. I'm not sure what dwarves would think about that, we know humans often do it and when it's done it's not always a strict split, there are just ones that are rarely used for certain genders; would you want specific name lists if you want to set them up yourself, or just have the game choose them, for no reason it puts half here and half here, or should it put names that are of a certain symbol type - there's the symbols like flowery, violent, ones that have to do with agriculture or whatever - it might, based on the symbol , put names in certain categories. So there's a lot of different ways to do it, and we're thinking of doing stuff with that, but I'm not sure when. I think it's something that would reflect the world a bit more, I don't know if anyone's ever offended by this stuff either, if there are things like that put in. Right now we have no sexual dimorphism for instance with dwarves or even humans, people tend to prefer that kind of thing and it's an extra step to put it in anyway so I'm just lazy about it but yeah in general we're going to do more with that, and it should turn out well. (sfx vox: trumpet voluntary) |
| Rainseeker: | I have a question here from Nathan; 'After this release, you've said something to the effect that you never want another release cycle to take this long, and that the next major release will be much shorter. After this release has been released and the bug fixing releases for the version have been wrapped up, what do you think the next release or series of releases will focus on?' |
| Toady: | I imagine from the person's list there that they already know that the three major areas of focus for the next series of releases are going to be adventurer skills and entity stuff; and the improved sieges and the stuff leading up to improved sieges like having armies moving around on the world map; and also the top ten eternal suggestions vote, looking at those and going through each of them and seeing what we can do with those. We haven't really decided of those which one is coming next, and if I made a decision now it would likely change anyway, because the release is going to take however long - I don't know, it's obviously not going to be released this year as you'll know when we release this podcast in January and there's no Dwarf Fortress out, you'll obviously be aware of that fact as well - but if we release it that month or the next month or whenever, it's going to get there ... |
| Rainseeker: | You mean it will not release in 2009. |
| Toady: | Yeah, in 2010 there will be a Dwarf Fortress out of course, but after that I'm going to be fixing bugs for a month or something and by that time it will probably be more clear what we're doing. Right now I've added a lot of things that are interesting for dwarf mode, so if I didn't add something like improved hauling immediately and did adventurer skills instead people might not mind, and it's not like that's going to take forever either, it's not like anything single thing's going to take a year. But I might do improved hauling instead, and things leading up to the sieges would be important before adventurer entities maybe, so I don't know. On the other hand I could flip a coin and it would probably be just as well, because that stuff's going to get done anyway, so this is the plan, meaning other than the general categories I'm still not sure what the next focus is. |
| Rainseeker: | I could finally get my stupid donkeys to haul rocks. |
| Toady: | Yeah, donkeys should help with all kind of things, the donkey is a useful animal. Then there's also the wheelbarrow and the cart, and the life, and the elevator, and the steam cannon and the nuclear reactor. All kinds of cool cool cool things for hauling goods. |
| Rainseeker: | Well we have atom smashers already, so. |
| Toady: | The problem with some of these internal suggestion things is that they're a bit vague, so I'll just do something, or some set of things until the hauling situation is considerably improved; not just whiff it, but do something that's drastic, and then consider that done, and if it's not done it'll crawl right back up the list, so we'll know if it's done enough. And that's the same for everything, when there's full graphical support obviously it's not going to look like Oblivion or Fallout 3 or Crysis or whatever people throw out, but it's going to look better than it is now, and if it's not better enough then it'll come back up the list; it's a continuing process. |
| Rainseeker: | So the plan is eventually to reset the eternal suggestions. |
| Toady: | Yeah, I think with the top ten suggestions when I get those written down ... It's like the top ten thing, I don't want to nail myself to that, so I'll look down below that too, just to get a sense of what people wanted at that snapshot in time. Then it might be worth it just to clear the whole thing at that point and then announce 'Eternal suggestions: we've taken these suggestions, we know what people wanted at this time, we're going to work on this stuff, and now we go again.' Now that'll depend on if we've got a new script by that time, I don't even remember if someone's working on something or not, I always have a bad memory there. But is that system going to be the same; there have been complaints about it, do we want to tweak it before we reboot and start again, because people have had complaints about specific items getting shafted versus items that are really over-broad, maybe, arguably over-broad, and also items like improved hauling; you look at the list and there aren't a lot of things at the top that are how people want the game to be expanded but how they'd rather have it polished. That means that that's where they want the priority of the effort to be spent, but if I wanted to do something that wasn't polishing - as I often do - I really don't receive a lot of direction from that list because those items don't do that well. So do we want to break the list into two sections for instance? I don't know, and I don't know if it'll be changed at all; it's not clear exactly what'll happen, but we'll continue using this system and if it is replaced ... Votes are certainly going to be cleared once we write the information down and if there's an improved system, that'd be better, so we'll see. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Capntastic: | Safekeeper would like to know, or rather he envisages a world where Dwarf Fortress, even though it is an ASCII game will have a click and drag interface for equipping your dwarves and squads, so you drag the sword onto the dwarf hand, like there'd be a paper doll in ASCII, you'd drag the pickaxe onto its hand and then it equips it there. Do you have any plans for something like that? Can you see yourself doing that in the near future? It's not really a how will this work question but more of a do you plan on doing something like this sort of thing. |
| Toady: | I don't know ... First of all we don't have a lot of graphics, so there are a couple of tricks if we try it in ASCII; one is that there aren't slots so much as right hand, left hand and other body parts that then have things stacked on them, so if you want to wear three shirts you could right now; so if you want to make that your guy's uniform in the squad screen you could just say 'I want you guys to wear three shirts, just make sure the top one is red' ... well that wouldn't bode well would it ... But you could still do that ... |
| Rainseeker: | Does that make them tougher somehow, to wear three shirts? |
| Capntastic: | Layers, man. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it would stop more stuff, it would be a way of doing it, although you might want to invest in armour at some point ... that whole thing about arrows being stopped by the silk shirt with layers, that's been an ongoing discussion. But yeah, you can do that, and a slot paper doll could still handle that, you could open new boxes when boxes are full and all that kind of thing. The other thing I'm worried about, especially when you're trying to represent something graphically, is that you run afoul of mods; right now people mod in an antman fortress and mod in whatever, and the slots would be completely different, and the silhouette would no longer be appropriate. That's also a problem with aiming system, all kinds of things where you'd like to see damage readouts and stuff, where you'd like to see some kind of doll that has colours on it and that kind of thing; the bodies are all defined in text files, and if you wanted your hydra to have fifty seven heads you could do that right now and then you'd run out of space on the screen. There are ways to try and do it where you'd be trying a Spore type thing where you try and lay out the paper doll according to its part definitions or something, but right now I haven't really thought about it. Of course you can just say 'well if it's a humanoid you could just have a tag on it that says "I'm a humanoid, I want to use the doll" and if it's not a humanoid you could be "well, I'll just use the list"'. So it's not like it's an insurmountable problem, but I haven't really thought that we definitely need to do that. We'll see when we get into the new squad screen if people feel tortured; if people feel like they need something then I'm sure I'll hear about it. |
| Capntastic: | Aside from the paper doll I could definitely see being able to click and drag things being useful in some way. |
| Toady: | I don't know if it looks a little weird with the text of course. It would just be strange feeling to drag the text, especially because it would drag along the tile, it would be like dragging blockily ... I guess we do have control of the mouse cursor display right now ... We have a few extra controls now ... Clicking and dragging, it's not like I'm not for having the mouse be supported and having all kinds of nice things you can do with the mouse - I like nice things - and I know people like their keyboard shortcuts too, and I like keyboard shortcuts but you can click on all the new screens, you can't drag anything but you can click all the new screens, it just doesn't say that anywhere, but you can do it; every new button can be clicked. But it's still one of those things - I'm not sure when that's going to be done - but it's one of those things I want to do pre version 1, getting more mouse support in. But when the underlying game is changing a lot I'm not sure what I want to use it for and then I just end up not doing it. |
| Rainseeker: | Well that just about sums it up ladies and gents, I appreciate you guys joining us here for this Dwarf Fortress Talk; I'm your host Rainseeker and I was joined by Capntastic and our illuminous leader Tarn Adams. |
| Capntastic: | He is literally emitting lights sporadically. |
| Rainseeker: | That's why cats and moths are attracted to him. |
| Toady: | Yeah, you have to rub my belly and it glows. |
| Rainseeker: | So I'd like to also thank mallocks who does the transcription and Ollieh ... |
| Capntastic: | He's a swell guy |
| Toady: | (singing)Mallocks, mallocks, Ollieh, Ollieh.(end singing) |
| Rainseeker: | Who volunteer selflessly, every month. |
| Toady: | Super peoples. And all them people that asked questions, even if they didn't get answered, or asked; it's cool when people send in questions, so please continue to send in questions. There's a stickied topic in DF General Discussion on the forum that tells you exactly how to do that and (singing)we love the questions, so we will want more questions.(end singing) |
| Capntastic: | And if your questions are a poem or a song, that will make them more interesting to read on the air. Don't actually do this ... Unless you want to do it. |
| Rainseeker: | I dare somebody to do it, for real. |
| Toady: | Of course if you're daring somebody you're daring everybody. |
| Capntastic: | Everyone, yeah. |
| Rainseeker: | No, I just dare somebody. |
| Capntastic: | Don't feel the need to exert yourself, but if the mood takes you. |
| Rainseeker: | Well thank you for joining us Tarn, and Capntastic. |
| Capntastic: | Are we joining them, or are they joining us or are we joining you? |
| Rainseeker: | You join me, and then I join you and then everyone joined us and we're all one big happy family, apparently. |
| Toady: | That's right, it's good to be happy, and a family. |
| Ollieh: | (musical postlude) |
| Rainseeker: | Hey everybody, it's Rainseeker here. I really appreciate you guys listening to this podcast, it's been really fun to do. And now that our sixth episode has just been completed and put out we just want to say thanks, thanks for listening these past six months, and I just wanted to remind you to please consider donating at this time of year, especially because Tarn's been sick, he has had the swine flu and this is going to delay the release of the game of course. However, it is discouraging to be sick and not unable to work, so let's show our support and send him a couple of dollars and maybe an email giving him some encouragement. Alright guys, see you later. |
| Toady: | Especially in the holidays. Big happy holidays, happy family family. Of course the holidays are over by the time this thing comes out, there are no holidays anymore, it's January. |
| Rainseeker: | We need to wish them Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! |
| Capntastic: | Merry Christmas, and Kwanza and Hanukah and all of those other wintry wonderland ... |
| Toady: | And all the procedural holidays yet to be generated. |
| Capntastic: | The dwarf of Christmas past, the kobald of Christmas present. |
| Toady: | We're approaching the pressing stop time, we're working on driving this into the ground, but okay. |
| Interlocutor: | (in the manner of Goofy)Gawrsh! |
| Toady: | Scamps is really meowing and scratching ... (aside to Scamps)What are you doing? |
| Rainseeker: | I haven't heard him at all. |
| Toady: | Good, it hasn't been picked up on the mic then, because he's pretty loud, pretty loud. But he'll have his time eventually. |
| McRainseeker: | Ach are they gone?! I think they're gone. Okay, all you diehards that are listening here, I'm here to announce the winners of the Soap Tower challenge. For everyone who participated in the challenge, thanks so much! My new soap tower is great! We had two categories. In modded, there were changes made to the game's core play, which is okay but we decided we needed a separate category for it. On the unmodded sound, it is just plain vanilla Dwarf Fortress, and you can turn off sieges if you want. So without further ado, here are the winners: On the modded side of things we have Hardrada - I don't know how to pronounce that, because I'm a dwarf - but in any case he made this amazing polar bear fortress, the soap he used was polar bear soap, and some grizzly bear; you should try it! It tingles! And the winner of the unmodded category was alway for his gigantic tower. There were also many other great entries you can see on bay12games.com; thanks so much for everyone who participated. Don't forget to donate, and we'll see you next month. |
Dwarf Fortress Talk #7, with Rainseeker, Capntastic and Toady One, transcribed by mallocks
| Rainseeker: | Well hey everybody. Welcome to a new Dwarf Fortress Talk. Number seven! |
| Toady: | Yay. Seven. |
| Rainseeker: | Say hello to our co-host, Capntastic. |
| Capntastic: | It's just Capntastic. People put the 't' there ... It's not there. |
| Toady: | That's right, and say hello right into your microphones everybody. |
| Rainseeker: | I apologise ... |
| Capntastic: | It's like I could never be sure if you were saying it or whatever, but ... Hello, I'm Capntastic. |
| Rainseeker: | I was saying it in a formal way. |
| Toady: | I've noticed people on the forum are spelling it out, Captaintastic. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah. |
| Rainseeker: | Say hello to Tarn, our programmer and creator and gaming god. |
| Toady: | What? ... Hey what's up. Time for fun. |
| Capntastic: | I don't think he qualifies for that until he's beaten Halo on legendary. |
| Toady: | That's right. I have to learn how to play multiplayer first. |
| Rainseeker: | So we are talking about artifacts. |
| Capntastic: | They're pretty cool. |
| Toady: | As cool as they are useless most of the time. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah! I think that for me artifacts are one of the shining moments in the game; you feel like it's all been building up to this, you get teary eyed when you see that stone trumpet with spikes on it. |
| Toady: | It's certainly a peak because it doesn't go anywhere from there, except down ... They're just fantastic and worthless things. Occasionally you get lucky, but for the most part ... they don't even know how to play instruments yet. |
| Capntastic: | It's post-modern art. It's useless, it looks weird, but it's worth a lot of money. |
| Toady: | That's right, the dwarves are known for that kind of thing. |
| Rainseeker: | I'm going to start our talk today with basics about artifacts for those who haven't really gotten an artifact. I assume everybody has at some point, but ... |
| Toady: | Some people get wiped out each time I guess, start with seven dwarves and the wolves come and they then play again a few times, and then they quit but they still listen to the talks. |
| Rainseeker: | Well, here's artifacts for those who don't know. What are artifacts in Dwarf Fortress, and what's their intended purpose in the game, and how are they supposed to affect the game? |
| Toady: | Artifacts are these objects that the dwarves make, much like all of the other objects you can make like weapons and trinkets and furniture ... and everything else. It's a particular event that happens when a dwarf is inspired or otherwise ready to go off and go to a workshop and make these things; they collect the various resources and if everything works out - sometimes it doesn't - the dwarf will produce an object that is very valuable and has a higher quality than any other object you can make in the game. These have been in the game forever, way before it was released, even when the game was imagined to be a smaller game the artifacts were there just to add a peak for the story; these would be the things that your fortress would be most remembered for when the adventurer goes in there to check it out. As the game grew and took the mantle of the big bay12games fantasy game they kept the general idea that these are the biggest things you'd be doing, but we moved on. Initially they had a story or narrative function because the dwarves would create them and then one of three things would happen; they'd either hide them, and then they'd just disappear and an adventurer would be able to go and find them later; or they'd drop them on the ground for the fortress to use; or they become possessive of them, in which case if they ever became separated from the artifact they'd seek them out - like with babies, it would be 'Cancel job: seeking artifact' - they'd have to keep it on their person at all times. Even if they were hauling around a bed or something ... it was really ridiculous. That's out now, but the intention remains that these are the objects that are going to be driving a lot of the stories and interactions with other civilizations and so on, aside from any functional purpose they may have, it's just a very common thing in myths and more modern fantasy stories to have objects be important; and to have your fortress actually create them and have them persist will really bring that to the fore I think. |
| Rainseeker: | I think one of my favourite artifacts ever was a turtle-bone door. |
| Toady: | I guess it's one of those hanging curtains that you go through, and it jingles a little bit ... |
| Rainseeker: | That would have been awesome. I did put it in my front entrance so everyone would look at it and get happy thoughts. |
| Toady: | Turtle bones too, not even the shells. The few that you can find, little skulls and hands and things ... I guess the skulls would be separate too, so it's just little fingers. |
| Rainseeker: | I think it used shells as well. |
| Toady: | Oh they used shells ... That's right, the artifact probably had all kinds of components. |
| Rainseeker: | Exactly, which is really fun. So what are the ways an artifact is made? |
| Toady: | Right now, if we're talking about presently in the game, what happens is that a dwarf will get in a mood - there are a few different kinds but it's all basically the same - and they'll run off and gather objects and put them together; the few variants are that a dwarf might become possessed in which case they're doing things without knowing it and they don't gain any skill from the enterprise, and the other rare ones are the macabre mood when they'll gather little bits of remains and bones and things to make something disgusting, or the fell mood where they'll just start cackling and run around and kill a dwarf and drag him off to the butcher's shop and make something out of him. That's also a little more rare. |
| Interlocutor: | You have to work for that one. |
| Toady: | Yeah, you have to work at making your fortress miserable anyway ... So at the end you get a dwarf in a workshop making an object. Right now are artifacts are currently done in the game all creation takes place with a dwarf and a workshop. The newer version coming up has a kind of semi-artifact process whereby objects are named because a dwarf becomes attached to them and because the object has done important things, but that's a semi-artifact status; their quality doesn't increase or anything like that. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | Now this is arguably one of the most exciting and dreaded events in the game, raising questions like; 'What if I don't have all the materials?' or 'What if he goes insane?' Are there limits on what demands a dwarf will have on materials, will they to build an artifact if they don't have a correct workshop or if there's no workshops will they try to build something? Does it consider the materials that are present on the site? |
| Toady: | It used to think a little harder about the materials on the site, but that was back when the dwarves asked for very specific stones, and that code never quite worked out the way we wanted it to, so now they only ask for very general things like stone and so on. So there's a higher chance that the artifact will be made, although I think things like glass are still problems ... and shells, glass and shells are problems that people still have that will cause the offending artifact dwarf to probably be crushed under a bridge or something. They still need a specific workshop according to the skill that they've selected; it selects a skill in the beginning and says 'this is the skill that I'm going to use to make the object' and that will determine what workshop they want to use. Of course they aren't very vocal about that, so you just have to have the right workshop around, which you'll usually have because they got that skill from somewhere, so you'll usually have it unless it's a dwarf that's immigrated in and has a skill you haven't used and so on. The fell mood is a little more versatile, they'll start with a butcher's workshop but if there aren't any they'll just pick whatever and really all they're doing is just dragging a dwarf there anyway. But they can use a jeweller's workshop if a butcher's workshop is not available ... I think it still spits out the same kind of objects though, it was just that I wanted fell moods to be successful compared to the other moods so that you'd be able to see them; they're rare enough already so you want to get some results out of them, especially because the guy murders somebody ... do they claim the workshop first? I don't recall actually, but if they do murder a dwarf first you'd certainly want the workshop not to be a problem after the deed has been done. But regular dwarves are more picky, you need to have the right workshop available and you need to have at least the general goods that they want available, including things that are overall rare like glass and shells. Whether that's going to change in the future ... At least what you should be able to do is trade for things that you can't trade for right now, like sand and that kind of thing. It might even happen in this version but it's one of those things where I've got hundreds of requests already and I don't remember if that's one of them and if it is how high on the ranking it is. |
| Rainseeker: | About how long does it take to get your first artifact? |
| Toady: | It isn't a set time so much as a population. You need to have twenty dwarves, so if you're doing one of your smaller fortresses ... I don't remember if this is an init option or not right now, I think it's hardcoded twenty dwarves ... but if you're doing one of those hermit fortresses your hermit won't make an artifact. But once you get up to twenty dwarves, now this is not any twenty dwarves, they have to be twenty healthy dwarves that are capable of making an artifact - including those that have already made them, those don't count against the total - once you get up to twenty it just starts flipping coins at that point, and eventually it'll trigger the chance, it's completely when it happens. |
| Rainseeker: | Does it roll every season? |
| Toady: | It rolls way more often than that, but it's rolling a one out of five hundred chance, but it's once every ten clicks, it's like 'Did you do it? Did you do it? Did you do it?' and then one of them gets nailed and they're off after that. |
| Rainseeker: | Now after the first one how often does that happen? |
| Toady: | After the first one it gets a little more complicated. The contributing factors after that ... It's no longer population, you have to have a dwarf available who hasn't made an artifact already ... and it looks at the items made, just how many items have you made in all of your workshops and any other way that it might happen - I think maybe even mined out stone counts - and then it takes that number and divides it by two hundred, and then it looks at your floor space, and evaluates how many unhidden squares there are, and divides that by some number - I think it's every two thousand unhidden squares, including the wilderness, so you get a starting buffer - and then it caps the items made by that so it's really the minimum of the items made and your floor space, except you need items made; floor space itself doesn't do it for you, but the items made gets compared to the floor space and it takes the smallest one, or it caps it, or whatever. In any case, it then subtracts the number of artifacts you've already made. So say you had, for instance, six hundred items made, divided by two hundred you get three, so that's three artifact credit; you've made enough items so that you can make three items. And let's say that you only had four thousand floor space, so divided by two thousand, that's two, so you actually only have two artifact credits. And say you've already made an artifact, now you have one artifact credit, so it goes ahead and lets you make an artifact. Then the next time it goes through if you haven't changed anything then you'd have no artifact credits left. Now this assumes that the artifact gets created successfully, so it's not like you're using up your chances or anything. |
| Rainseeker: | So if it fails, it tries again later. |
| Toady: | Yeah, people might have noticed, you just keep getting mood dwarves over and over, but then it stops once you have a success, assuming that your fortress is not producing a lot of wealth or is very small. So if you do notice that you've stalled out and don't understand the reason for it it might be that you need to dig a little bit, to get a little more space. It's just one of those things that doesn't make much sense really but neither does the whole artifact possession thing to begin with. |
| Rainseeker: | What happens if you suddenly have an invasion that kills everyone but one dwarf, does he still get to make an artifact if you have an artifact credit? |
| Toady: | You have to get back up to twenty dwarves. So you always need to have twenty dwarves to even get into this process, and if fifteen of them have made artifacts already that's fine, but they also need to be healthy. It's one of these quirky things where it's counting up the dwarves that are good for artefacts so one of the things that's required when it checks is that they have a grasp available because they're going to need to be hauling things to the workshop, so if you have twenty armless dwarves they don't actually have any at all for this process, so you have to keep those arms intact. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | How about, let's say you get an artifact that you want to get rid of or something, is there a way to sell it or to lose it? |
| Toady: | You can't trade them away right now, we're thinking about processes for that that we might talk about later, but the artifacts just can't be traded; that's one of their fundamental properties. But they can be lost if you drop them down a bottomless pit or a bridge can do it if you smash them. Anything that would normally destroy an object ... except I don't remember how they react with flows and so on like magma, because it might just be invincible ... but anything that would normally obliterate an object makes an artifact ... they're never truly destroyed, but they disappear, and they get the hidden flag on them, as if - like when I was talking about before - the dwarves would hide the artifacts and the adventurers could find them. That's what happens here, so if you go back and visit the fort with an adventurer afterward and possibly during reclaim as well it'll put the artifacts back, just somewhere in the fortress. If an artifact is stolen by a thief I think it goes into the list of objects that that civilization has which is probably in limbo right now, except I know that the kobolds will come back with things that they have stolen; like if they steal a steel dagger which they can't normally make their next thief might come back using that, so you might see your artifact again in that matter, but it would only be if it's something that a kobold could actually use. |
| Rainseeker: | That would be hilarious if he came back with the artifact dagger. |
| Toady: | Yeah I don't even know if dwarves can make artifact daggers, do they? Do they make bows and pikes and things that they can't use? Probably irritates people a lot so I might have cut it out, but that hasn't stopped me in the past. |
| Rainseeker: | Is there any way to increase the chances to get the artifact you want? |
| Toady: | If you've got a material you want to use I think people use all kinds of forbid tricks, forbidding objects and then the guys bring them to the workshop and then ignore them or something, because I know there are artifacts that people have made that have like two thousand parts because they do all these things with forbidding objects and so on, but when it comes down to 'do you want a weapon?' then I think the only thing you can do there is just have a lot of weapon smiths around, because you have all of your dwarves and it's going to pick one of them at random and then it's going to look at their highest skills, so if you've got a peasants around that you use for hauling but your brought them up to novice weapon smiths first, just to game the system a little bit, then that would indeed work and then you'd end up with a guy making a weapon and quite possibly end up with a legendary weapon crafter and some kind of artifact sword. So it is possible to do that, it's a little trashy, it is weird having a fortress filled with novice weapon makers so maybe it's not completely out of line. If you wanted to do it you could do it. |
| Rainseeker: | What's the most interesting artifact you've ever seen? |
| Toady: | Probably ... I don't remember the name of it ... but the one where people messed around with the forbid tags and got ... |
| Capntastic: | Planepacked? That's the largest one I know of. |
| Toady: | Yeah, that has to be the most interesting one. People have had really interesting things with really funny names, but nothing comes to me there, so I'd have to say that that crazy artifact is the one. |
| Rainseeker: | You get children that can build artifacts, do leaders and warriors build them if they're on duty? |
| Toady: | For the next version, the children still make them and recruits make them, but soldiers don't make them. With the leaders the situation may have changed because I don't recall in the currently released version if things like mayors and so on are on the exclusion list ... I don't see why they would be but they could be for all I know. But since those as unit types are all eliminated - they're just entity positions in the next version - all of those guys are fair game as far as making artifacts now, because if you're just a mayor in the next version then you're actually a peasant in terms of your unit type because you don't have any job skills; you're just the mayor by appointment or by election, it's an extra tag that lives on top of you that the artifacts don't see at all. But yeah, plenty of little children making swords and stuff and all of the irritations that come out of that; there was some kind of bug that I don't recall off the top of my head that really bothered people because when the child becomes an adult then they're a legendary weapon crafter but ... there was some problem with that, it might just be that they were called a peasant or something, but it might be that you can't use it at all, I really don't remember. But that's still a problem if it is a problem. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Capntastic: | So right now fell moods are pretty rare; is that mechanic going to change in the future, and will that be determined partly on the region where they are located or the gods they worship? |
| Toady: | Right now fell moods seem kind of rare - and they are in effect - because when you've got dwarves running around, if you just spruce up their bedrooms a little bit or give them a masterpiece or legendary dining room to dine in they're all running around just giggling and rolling with their little fat dwarf tummies, even if their families die. The problem with the fell mood is that it's driven completely by the happiness the dwarf, so if a mood hits a dwarf and their happiness is above fifty percent - which just means 'I am fine' - then they can't get fell moods or macabre moods. If their happiness is below fifty percent then there is a fifty percent chance for them to get a macabre or a fell mood. So they should actually be pretty common if everyone weren't just zipping around on anti-depressants all the time, like the anti-depressant dining rooms ... The rarity there is partly a problem with balancing out the happiness numbers again to make it a more sane place but aside from that right now the fell mood is a kind of a strange non-magical event where a dwarf just decides to go a little crazy and kill somebody and then no-one cares, it's just part of life and death in the fortress. But certainly if you were in a region with all sorts of undead hippos and things then having artifacts - I talked a bit about having an artifact that wasn't really inspired by the gods or anything but was just such a perfect object that the surrounding nature couldn't help but infuse into that, it was just magic by virtue of being a perfect object - and if you're in a bad area that kind of thing could very well not turn out well for you, even if it isn't a fell mood. But then there's also the idea of expanding it beyond just happiness and unhappiness, the dwarf might not be permanently unhappy but the dwarf was wronged by somebody, and there are grudges in the game and so on right now that don't have a lot of meat on the bone. But we had various ideas ... even if your cat killed their mouse when they got away or whatever; this person might not be capable of making a normal artifact but would instead make an artifact that was evil in some way. |
| Rainseeker: | He has invented the leash! |
| Toady: | It's just a leash, yeah ... That's more of a tech tree thing, but yeah, people who are wronged might drive the technology in the fortress because dwarves are little curmudgeons. But there's also the question - I think you might have mentioned it too - about where are the villains and criminals? Where are the people that have their issues and all that kind of stuff? All of that can be fed into artifacts; what you get can really be filtered through the history of the dwarf that's creating it and not just by virtue of the fact that they've got a love for cheese which leads to pictures of cheese on their artifacts, but instead the actual history of the dwarf; were they present during a goblin invasion, or was their child killed during a goblin invasion, would that effect the kind of artifacts they make? It really should. Or if you've got these petty criminals in the fortress that snatch other people's things and you have to keep your eye out for them why they go about their regular jobs then those kind of dwarves - whether they're happy or not - might have a propensity to make problematic artifacts or something like that. |
| Capntastic: | So will artifacts in the future have neutral effects that are mostly artistic or cultural in their value; like 'This is a painting that marks a very important time in art' and that sort of stuff, where it's not valued because it does anything but just because it looks cool. |
| Toady: | Part of it is almost like words in a sense, because what is an artifact in Dwarf Fortress when you already have the masterpieces they make? In a sense the masterpieces should become a little rarer and maybe get names themselves. Some of them have names - a lot of the engravings have names - but if you make a masterpiece painting or sword or something like that, then even if it's not through the artifact process and even if it's not through the attachment kill-the-dragon process then those things maybe should oftentimes be elevated to the semi-artifact status where they can be known. Because there are all kinds of stories about people stealing a named diamond or something; it's not magical, except for the fact that it's cursed, and anyone who has the diamond will die! But aside from that - the obvious curse that every stolen object has - then a lot of mundane objects should be able to attain that kind of elevation, and when we flesh out exactly what it is that the artifact maker is doing - whether there's a god involved or whether there's this perfection of nature idea involved, or that kind of thing - then those might not be neutral objects, but the semi-artifact status really needs to be expanded. |
| Capntastic: | Will there be multipart sets like the helmet of Deulath with the gloves of Deulath with the sword of Deulath, brought together. |
| Toady: | It's kind of a thing where after you've played Diablo II you don't want to do it, but there should be stuff like that. Especially when you come down to a guy who becomes attached to multiple objects or something, the fact that those are kept completely separate from each other is odd. If the guy has a sword and a helmet that he's given names to, and he stabbed the dragon and then drove the helmet through the dragon ... |
| Interlocutor: | Headbutt. |
| Toady: | Yeah yeah! Then those things should be linked in history and perhaps even in some magical way ... but certainly historically there should be linkages like that. Now when you're talking about actually creating an artifact I think there was some development item about artifact sets; it's not just for things like the sword and the shield that go together, but more importantly the two gloves that go together that are separate objects, and then also things like several arrows, instead of just one. So there's certainly going to be some expansions there. |
| Rainseeker: | I was wondering about possessions, I think there's an interesting idea ... I guess fey moods too are indicating that they're possessed by a fairy ... but will there ever be real spirits walking around looking to possess somebody? |
| Toady: | This was one of the intents of the new soul mechanic in the new version; you can't really see it happening but all of the mental stuff of a dwarf and other creatures has been separated into a separate object that's just called a soul right now - that's not meant to evoke anything, it's just taken as a simple concept - then that is stuck into the dwarf but right now a creature could have multiple souls, because it's just a vector, it can have many things in side of it, and a creature could have no soul and still move around, it just wouldn't have any mental attributes. So one of the natural progressions from there is to make a unit without a body that just has a soul to it, and then you can have those things wander around and then join with other things and actually possess them and then set the creature's own soul into the subordinate position; there's always a soul that's marked as the active one right now, even though in the version to be released there's always one soul and it's always the active one. We're really not using this yet, but the framework is there and this was specifically ... one of the intents was to facilitate possessions, and all kinds of other weird things right where identities get mixed and matched, and souls can get swapped between bodies and all kinds of interesting stuff. |
| Interlocutor: | So they will learn a lesson! About love and life and family! |
| Toady: | That's right, we aim to teach, that's what we write games for, pretty much. The only thing I ever think about, as having this teaching background I can never help but try to teach with my games all the time. |
| Capntastic: | I think you've done something wrong Toady, Tarn. I just found this thread and someone's writing a paper for their human sexuality class on dwarves. |
| Rainseeker: | You've taught a little too much, apparently. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, you've gone too far you madman. |
| Toady: | 'The subject of dwarven breeding in the game Slaves to Armok: God of Blood II is an interesting one encompassing a number of areas including speculative anatomy, observed behaviour, relationship patterns, child rearing and even the social hierarchy and economy.' It's not prurient or whatever, it's intense. Although human sexuality, I figure humans are humans, right? Dwarves are dwarves ... That's going to be intense. |
| Unspecified: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | Welcome back, we're going to talk more about Dwarf Fortress and address your questions, beautiful as they are. Capntastic, will you do the honours of asking the first one? |
| Capntastic: | Alright, from the top, going in reverse chronological order, this one was received a very light six hours ago. Joe asks; 'When sieges and armies start getting worked on will be getting raided by enemy forces with the primary intent of horking our shiny artifacts. I've wondered about this myself, I've put forth that there be a vault-type room where you hide all your best shinies ...' |
| Toady: | Is it hork proof? I don't know what that means but ... That was kind of what I was getting at with the different drivers for actions surrounding your fortress. It's certainly plausible that if you've got some demon leading the goblins and he gets word that you've got some kind of bright shiny that he would be interested in then you could very well get a raid or army attack on your hands precisely for that reason. It all goes back to the artificial intelligence for the leaders of these armies being able to juggle so many things, but it is the primary intent of the next push on the project towards improved sieges and all that kind of thing, that they start thinking a little bit. |
| Rainseeker: | I have a question from myself, I was just wondering about gremlins actually; 'Do gremlins pick levers randomly or if you had a ton of levers ... could you build decoy levers?' |
| Toady: | Yeah decoy levers work. I think someone diagrammed on the forum a decoy lever attached to a support where the ceiling caves in and kills the gremlin, and that'd work. You're going to have to keep thinking about little things to do to save yourself from various threats. |
| Capntastic: | To prevent being horked. |
| Toady: | Yeah, horking is the new buzzword. |
| Rainseeker: | I have a question; 'What kinds of plans do you have for megabeast worship. This question came to mind due to an actual in-game invent where the royal advisor arrived at my fortress as an ardent worshiper of a titan. The titan attacked my fortress a short time later and was captured in a cage trap. I had the cage moved to his bedroom. I also found it interesting that the queen consort worshipped a demon that died fifty years before she was even born, and the former leader of a goblin civilization subjugated by my dwarven civilization.' |
| Toady: | It's one of those things where world generation got way ahead of fortress mode, so all the superstitions that develop around the attacks, that develop into religions over fifty years or something ... you get dwarves that carry those things, but then that creature still exists and attacks and it's not really used for anything right now. It's hard to chart these things out because it's such a long road but the priests and religions and things, those aren't a million years off, that's one of those things that's going to get worked on. Then once you've got those established they have relationships with the historical figures and so on that are linked to the gods, and I imagine around that time - because the megabeasts are such a glaring instance sitting right in the middle of the religious life of everyone in the fortress - that it'll come up there, like the actual relationship to the invading megabeasts. Perhaps one of your dwarves will in fact run out toward the megabeasts, and be like 'Oh! You're finally here!' before they get smashed; the kind of typical scene you might imagine from a movie. |
| Interlocutor: | 'We love you!' |
| Toady: | Yeah, and then they might stop and be like 'Oh, I love you too, I've just never had anyone love me in my life' and then you can give the titan some trinkets and things and it'll be okay. You never know what's going to happen. When we start improving religions ... it's not next obviously, but it's something that needs to be done and it's also doing pretty well in the suggestion voting and stuff; it's not like it's never going to happen, we'll be addressing that kind of glaring strangeness. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Capntastic: | StrongAxe, as a programmer, is curious to know your strategy for maintaining speed while you add more levels of simulation. |
| Toady: | I've got a profiler now, I've been using that a little more, and we kind of know what the problems are, and this is one of the things that's going to come up as we're addressing pathfinding and some of the hauling issues and things that just come up with having a lot of items in your fort and so on ... Now when he asked about levels of simulation and so on; there are certain things like the temperature and the weather where they can be sped up but they are this lag that's hanging there. I'm not going to run the project completely into the ground just because I like adding stuff, so when we run into more serious speed problems that aren't from things that I just haven't really handled that well that are known - like pathfinding and so on - we're going to not run ourselves into the ground there. As far as my strategy for maintaining speed it's to optimise the things that we know about and not throw too many more monkey wrenches into the thing; I'm not going to suddenly start working on making the weather simulation more complicated, because that would really be shooting myself in the foot. So I'm not that worried about and I don't think other people should be either. This next release will probably be one of the slower ones because we've been working on a ton of crap and things like pathfinding and so on are just on the horizon but they're not done, and things like bodies are as complicated as they really need to be ... not that that's really slowing it down at all, there's not a lot going on there from frame to frame. |
| Rainseeker: | Okay so we've got one from Geoff the Medeo; 'Are there any plans for communal childcare? Dwarves might never do this even though carrying a baby into battle is probably unsafe, but humans might prefer to send their children to school, children might prefer to be truant or make friends at schools that they might otherwise meet etc. etc.' |
| Toady: | So right now the babies are just strapped on and then things happen; the battle will go on and the work will go on and so on. It's kind of become an image of Dwarf Fortress that this crazy stuff happens, but it's not something that needs to keep happening, even with the dwarves. We haven't planned specifically, culturally what dwarves like to do, whether they like to put all their peas in one pod and have them taught there, or whether they just mill around workshops and learn about stuff, or just play with all the mini forges and little instruments that are made. But they should do more than what they're doing now which is just kind of wander around and occasionally help with some weird jobs that they're allowed to help with. It's just very strange ... If someone were to make a movie of what the kids of Dwarf Fortress do it would just be these weird work crews ... it's very strange. So there are no specific plans but it's an issue to be dealt with, certainly. |
| Capntastic: | Right now you have these big group teaching things, it's conceivable you could create a school pretty easily I imagine. |
| Toady: | Yeah exactly. The new activities are pretty exciting to me as a technical undercurrent of the game, because I can use them for a lot of things that would have been a lot more clunky before. Things like parties that already exist and some of the conversations and meetings that you have with diplomats and stuff; I'd like to put everything under that umbrella, and it'll make things like little schools and stuff like that way more feasible, way faster to do. |
| Rainseeker: | Alright here's one from LASD; 'How much natural selection is going on in Dwarf Fortress and how much is planned? Are there already some inheritable traits that make creature likely to die younger?' |
| Toady: | There is natural selection on the genetics locally right now. It doesn't have larger population tracking, especially for wilderness creatures and stuff, but there is selection in the sense that critters die and there's some variation and so on, and some of the things would be positive as far as reproduction goes so you'd actually get evolution as well. For selection all you need is death for a reason, and that would include things like size right now; if you're a smaller creature you're pretty much more likely to die when you're fighting and so on; and that's selection against the small size because it gets passed on to the children and so on. The thing that's weird right now is that there's no downside to getting bigger and stronger and smarter and it's easier to do; having attribute variability to make a dwarf smarter, it's not like the evolutionary process has to work really hard to figure out how to make something smarter, it's just like 'Oh you're smarter. You rolled the die and you're a little smarter, you know'. So it doesn't take a long time, if you had this you could breed dogs that can write dissertations and open doors and walk around on their two legs in like two seconds, and it would be a very strange society that we'd be living in right now; because the dogs would be involved. So there's going to need to be some kind of change there, but it's in the game now although not for personalities actually, which was one of the things under question; those are all kind of random right now, but it is there for attributes, and appearance modifiers which govern size and anything else like the skin colour and hair. |
| Rainseeker: | Alright here's something from BurnedFX; 'What are your thoughts no having locks and key requirements for things such as doors, bridges or floodgates?' |
| Toady: | This has come up, it's something we've thought about because the principle obstacle to lock and key requirements is pathfinding; how does that work? Right now we simulate it in Dwarf Fortress by like forbidding a door, but that just means that all the dwarves ignore it. But to actually say 'this dwarf can go through this door' means that pathfinding can no longer work how it works, because you wouldn't have this universal connectivity map, so everything would need to be rethought. That's not to say it's not possible, generally for the past couple of years now the idea floating around for fixing pathfinding using zones and so on that's been tried by several groups of people now with varying degrees of success should work for locks and keys. Allowing an infinite number of locks and an infinite number of keys might raise issues about how that's stored and so on, but just the general principle of having locks and keys should be something that can work out ... As for more complicated mechanisms of getting through doors ... The more complicated it is, like having to stand on a pressure plate to open a door and then going through a door and so on, it becomes more and more difficult to teach dwarves how to do that; the more there is the harder that is. Things like an adventurer doing that of course is a completely different question, and it raises some difficult questions as well because if an adventurer sets up a little house for themselves where you have to place an object on a trigger plate to get through a door and then the door closes behind you and you can walk out the door but you can't go back through so you can't have anyone go into your house without actually breaking down the door ... Those kind of things raise a lot of questions about exploits and so on. I'm not sure what's going to go on there, but the lock and key issue is a pathfinding problem that's possible to solve, but that is the stumbling block. |
| Rainseeker: | Alright I'm going to ask a question from Jokermatt; 'What sort of new mechanics have you thought about adding to the game? For instance, some sort of moving wall/floor/ceiling trap that could be used for crushing; conveyor belts of some sort; timing mechanisms; etc.' |
| Toady: | I am not personally a super engineering mechanically minded person - in terms of my own skills, I like having that stuff in the game - so when it comes down to saying what kind of mechanisms have I thought about having ... I've thought about breaking up traps, I don't like having traps be just this thing that you make that does something, it would be better if they had to be made out of certain components and pieces, but I don't know enough about this kind of thing to say what those should be, but I think they should be universal things that help you make all kind of stuff, because people like having the axles and wheels and things and the different pressure plates that are currently in the game that help them make computers and whatever else they've made. I'd like to add more things like that that can be used in traps and so on, I need to sit down and read the threads from the more engineering-minded people to figure out what's feasible and what the best components are to add; I remember that this was doing pretty well in the suggestion stuff, so I'll be thinking about this in the near future where the near future is the next series of releases. Yes, number five is improved mechanics, so there's that thread over in the suggestions forum, in the Additional Mechanics/Traps Wishlist Granite26 has taken people's suggestions - I guess that's how this was built - and there's a giant list of mechanisms and the thread is pretty long itself. I'm going to be going over that and similar threads and just seeing what sort of things people want to do. As has been said there are certain things that are out; crazy steam engines and nuclear bombs and all that kind of stuff. |
| Interlocutor: | What?! |
| Toady: | Yeah, I know it's depressing, but you're just going to have to play Balance of Power or something. So I have no specific answers but I think it should be a favourable outcome. |
| Rainseeker: | Well thanks everybody for joining us on this seventh podcast for Dwarf Fortress Talk. |
| Capntastic: | The lucky one. |
| Rainseeker: | We are quickly running out of things to vote on, so keep helping us, think of things to vote on in the forum there, there's a thread for that, Tarn you remember what that's called? |
| Toady: | It is called, Dwarf Fortress Talk: Topic Discussion, and it's stickied in DF General Discussion and we're discussing various topics that we could discuss in the future. There are quite a few ideas but every time we make a talk there's one less, so it always helps to have some discussion there. |
| Rainseeker: | And Capn, thanks for joining us. |
| Capntastic: | No problem. |
| Rainseeker: | We always enjoy your frivolous presence. |
| Capntastic: | I enjoy it aswell. |
| Rainseeker: | Bringing much frivolity. |
| Toady: | That's right. And the music was by Ollieh, and the transcript will be provided by mallocks. |
| Capntastic: | He does a swell job, he is perhaps more important than me. Because talk is cheap, but letters you have to hit them on the buttons ... Think about it. |
| Rainseeker: | That is deep, very deep. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's important to be high-minded every once in a while. |
| Rainseeker: | It's kind of intense to think that right now mallocks is typing my words in. |
| Capntastic: | Yes. |
| Rainseeker: | So I'm going to say a word for him to type in: hippopotamus. |
| Toady: | Don't torture the poor guy. |
| Capntastic: | Alf Garnett. |
| Rainseeker: | Thank you mallocks. And thank you everyone who's joined us, we appreciate it. Tarn, sing us out to your kitty. |
| Toady: | (singing) Little Mr Scamps is sleeping in his bowl, he's all rolled up but he's nice and warm. He's not scratching my thumb and he's not scratching my face, because he's sleeping in one warm place; the warm little bowl, the kitty bowl. Kitty kitty bowl, kitty bowl. (end singing) That's right. |
| Rainseeker: | Bullet bowl? |
| Toady: | Bullet bowl, bullet bowl. Kitty bowl? He's not even paying attention to me because he's trying to sleep; he's in his heated bowl. |
| Capntastic: | In the future of Dwarf Fortress we'll all have heated bowls. This I foresee. |
| Rainseeker: | You could put a bowl over magma. |
| Toady: | That's what I was going to say! You could have this honeycomb pattern ... this metal honeycomb frame and line it with leather and then with cloth and so on, and then dip it down into the magma and have all your kitties herded down there so they can sleep there and kind of roost. And then you can get the honey later. |
| Ollieh: | (musical postlude) |
| Rainseeker: | I just can't wait for us to have chickens. |
| Toady: | Chickens and pigs, chickens and pigs and goats. Sheep and chicken and pigs and goats. Llamas, and sheeps and chicken pig goats and things. |
| Rainseeker: | My dwarves are going to breed large chickens and they'll ride them into battle. |
| Toady: | It's important to increase the size of the chicken. |
| Capntastic: | The goat, not so much. |
| Toady: | No the goat needs to retain the same size, whereas the chicken should be increasing in size, until it is as large as the goat, and then you breed the chicken and the goat, and then you get a chicken goat. |
| Capntastic: | Game over. |
| Rainseeker: | It's called a choak. |
| Toady: | Yeah ... yeah ... that's right. It's okay ... Everything's just fine ... |
| Rainseeker: | Until the cat sees the size of the chicken. |
| Toady: | That's just not fair. Then you'll have to breed your cats to be the size of tigers. |
| Capntastic: | A chicken eating a tin-can forever. |
| Rainseeker: | Or in this case, discarded armour. |
| Toady: | Well it'll solve all the refuse problems. |
| Rainseeker: | It'd be cool if your goat ate your refuse. If it just ate anything, ate the rocks ... |
| Toady: | Yeah you don't need miners anymore, you got a goat. |
| Capntastic: | That's it, I'm quitting, I'm programming my own game: Goat Fortress. |
| Toady: | That's right. |
| Rainseeker: | Eats the mountain, eats it away. |
| Capntastic: | You just have to be careful for bridges. |
| Rainseeker: | Because of trolls! |
| Toady: | That's right, that's why we get paid the big bucks. |
| Rainseeker: | Wait a second, I haven't gotten paid a single dime for these podcasts! |
| Capntastic: | I just wrote down your address as my address. |
| Rainseeker: | Send donations to Capntastic and Rainseeker. |
| Toady: | That's right, because it's hard to talk. People get paid to talk. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, look what happened to Conan. |
| Toady: | Yeah, he only got paid forty five million dollars to not talk or something. |
| Rainseeker: | What they gave him a settlement? |
| Capntastic: | But he can't be on TV for a while. |
| Rainseeker: | Can he write? He should go back to writing The Simpsons. |
| Toady: | Well we've entered now the pop-culture phase of this Dwarf Fortress Talk, so we're topical. |
| Rainseeker: | Topically lame. |
| Toady: | That's right. Now we can start talking about the State of the Union, and we can have a political segment. |
| Rainseeker: | Well we really haven't talked until we've talked about Britney Spears, or Christina Aguilera ... |
| Toady: | Are you trapped in the past or something, man? I thought it was all about Lady Gaga and stuff now. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, get with the times. |
| Rainseeker: | I was going to say Lady Gaga but I didn't want to seem like I was too up with the times. |
| Toady: | Yeah, you've got to be fashionably late to the party. |
| Rainseeker: | Exactly. Okay well thanks Capn ... |
| Toady: | I'm sure all of this is eminently keepable. |
| Capntastic: | At least some of this will make its way in. |
| Rainseeker: | It will be humorous. |
| Capntastic: | It's because when you're adding it in you'll pretty much just zone out and forget to cut it all. |
| Toady: | Well you've just got to cut the pauses because we were kind of sitting there with the bong talking really slow, like 'Yeah, and there was like stuff ... and other stuff ... you know? Well let's talk about goats for a while you know ...' |
| Capntastic: | What if we're all just ... atoms ... in a dwarf's beard ... |
| Rainseeker: | There you have it folks. |
| Capntastic: | This is what happens when we don't have topics to talk about. |
| Toady: | Yeah topics are cool, we like topics. We used to have topics, that's why we have topic discussion now. |
| Rainseeker: | And don't forget your EQs. |
| Toady: | Yeah EQ, EQ is important. |
| Capntastic: | Question for DF Talk, put that in the topic, and then put the name you'd like to be called by. If you do not provide one we will make one up; you will not like that. |
| Toady: | Yeah it's good to get questions, and good to get topics, and good things happen to good people, and stuff. I think that's not the name of the controversial debate is it; 'Why do good things happen to good people?' |
| Rainseeker: | I blame god! |
| Toady: | Well I guess we don't need a topic for the next talk now. |
| Capntastic: | I'm going to take off now. |
| Toady: | Alright, adventurers. Adios, adios! |
| Capntastic: | I can't wait ... to listen to this. |
| Toady: | We'll have to Alvin and Chipmunk it or something, it's going to be exciting. |
| Rainseeker: | (chipmunks from here on) I'll just Alvin and Chipmunk the whole ending, all this chatter ... we'll just make it super fast. |
| Capntastic: | Alright bye, seriously leaving now. Oh I close it and it's still open, what? Okay here we go, hang up ... bye. |
| Toady: | Alright that was intense, well intense might be the wrong word for it, it was meandering. |
| Rainseeker: | It was meandering. |
| Toady: | I have no idea what you want to do with that, if anything. |
| Rainseeker: | Well let's hang up ... |
| Toady: | Yeah let's hang up ... (chipmunks conclude) |
| Toady: | No it hurts going to read those things you know, that's why I always keep a bottle of whiskey on my desk. | |
| Rainseeker: | We all know how much you drink. | |
| Toady: | Yeah, yeah. | |
| Capntastic: | Yeah how's that working out? I can just imagine like ten years from now we're going to have to make a donation drive for your new liver. | |
| Toady: | That's right ... Well it'd be a dwarven thing to do, you can't fault me for getting into what I'm doing. |
| Cacophony: | (singing)Who's this little tummy boy, who's the little tummy guy? Sitting on my lap, scratching my crap, scratching my crap. What you doing? Thank you not for scratching, thank you not for biting, thank you not for chewing. Complete behaviour. |
| Rainseeker: | Okay just stop... |
| Capntastic: | Just stop! Shut it up now ... |
Dwarf Fortress Talk #7.2, with Rainseeker, Capntastic and Toady One, transcribed by mallocks
| Rainseeker: | Alright so now we’re going to talk about the future of the artifacts and what will happen to them. Capn, do you want to start us off with a query? |
| Capntastic: | Should I use some of your questions? I’ve got some here but they mostly build off yours. |
| Rainseeker: | Okay, yeah, that doesn’t matter. |
| Capntastic: | So what powers and what abilities will artifacts have in the future? |
| Toady: | It’s basically a magic question at the end of the day, so you have to step back and ask yourself again what have we got planned for magic and then how does it fit into fortress mode and all that kind of thing. There’s an extent to which we haven’t been able to plan this out because we’re still not sure exactly what we want to do. What we want to focus on is making it so that if there’s a magical object that’s really a rare special magical object then it should be something that you don’t really understand that well and that’s not necessarily reliable. It depends on the source; where does the magic come from? Was the dwarf inspired by all those gods that don’t actually exist in the game right now, that are just names, or did the dwarf create something so perfect that it just gets infused by magic because it’s a perfect thing, or did the dwarf really have some understanding of magical forces and create such a thing. If that’s the case you’ve got to watch out for the industrialisation of magic; why doesn’t he just do it seven or eight more times? The magical nature of these things is what separates artifacts from the masterworks that already exist. So if it is something that’s not really within the dwarf’s control then you can start to have effects that are beneficial at one time but could be unpredictable or could bring disaster down on your fortress, and that kind of thing. Just as a general question - what are the effects of the artifacts – there’s a bunch of categories they could fall into; if you have weapons and armour you can kind of see what effects might be there. You don’t want to say something like ‘it’s a +3 flaming sword’ but if in effect the sword is just on fire and burns things and stuff, that’s certainly a fair artifact to put in; just because it’s a cheesy Dungeons and Dragons thing doesn’t mean that it’s the end of the world. But it could be the end of the world if having the artifact sword is somehow drawing your fortress closer to some kind of world of fire and then suddenly it like sucks into some kind of fire plane and your whole fortress catches on fire and then everyone wonders why there’s a new volcano. |
| Rainseeker: | ‘This sword causes your organs to turn into frogs.’ |
| Toady: | It’s cool to think about how to make magic unreliable, unpredictable, all that kind of thing, but of course if you go too far in that direction so that every artifact is a death trap waiting to happen then there’s just going to be a lot of mood dwarf crushed under bridges. So you don’t want to go to nuts with it. The other kinds of magic there is where it’s not an industrial process are things like having conditions, so if one dwarf were inspired by the god of the harvest to create a chest that you can bring with your armies so that they never have to have supplies or food, then that artifact could in fact be very reliable; it would not be understood and the god might say ‘if you want to keep using this then never march during the full moon’ and if you do then we can really indulge in catastrophic horrible things because it’s your fault; the werewolves can come out of the chest and eat everybody, or whatever needs to happen. So that kind of thing where you don’t necessarily want to make – since craftsmanship is kind of the hallmark of the dwarves – I wouldn’t necessarily say that all the artifacts would be god inspired; it’s just a possible root that can be taken among many, but you want to not necessarily avoid the dwarves actually understanding and being able to construct magical things, but there should be a lot of consequences to dwarves understanding. So let’s say that we have a dwarf that understood how to apply runes of fire to a sword to make flaming swords, then assuming that process doesn’t take twenty years – and that wouldn’t be practical because games rarely last that long, or if they do it’s a very dedicated process, it’s not something you can expect a regular kind of casual or even not casual player to do, just sit there and play out a twenty year fort – then you have to wonder ‘why can’t I just make a ton of flaming swords?’ And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, to have all the dwarves that come from this fortress have these swords with these fire runes on them or something, but it’s kind of a strange magical process if that’s what you’ve got going on ... it’s kind of depressing in a way if magic isn’t mysterious. But at the same time you do have armies of magically armed creatures; it’s not an unheard of thing, so you could be the ones doing that, it’s just something that I wouldn’t necessarily indulge in, especially as a default thing. I certainly don’t have any problem if you can amp up your init options or your world parameter options more likely to be like ‘yeah my dwarves can float, and fly on carpets, and make big guns that shoot fire guns ...’ |
| Capntastic: | Tactical nukes. |
| Toady: | And steam, yeah, all that kind of stuff. But it’s one of those things where our starting point most likely – because you really have to think about your starting point because it’s not like Dwarf Fortress is ever done or anything – the starting point is artifacts that are beneficial, not that well understood and possibly have conditions on them. Something that makes the game have something interesting just happen to you; something interesting that you’re going to have to think about a little bit, but that you don’t necessarily want to crush under a bridge the second you hear about. And this is just magic we’ve been talking about, so this is ignoring the other things that come out of artifacts which I’m sure we’ll get to. |
| Capntastic: | So it seems like the important thing to keep in mind is the source of the artifact’s power and how it was created, like if you made it because you’re possessed by your great-great-granddwarf who was a master smith then it might be a bit different than if a fairy a playing a prank on you. |
| Toady: | Yeah exactly. It all comes down to the motivations and understanding, and what is magic, and those kinds of magic are very different things. |
| Rainseeker: | Exactly. I have invented the bag of infinite skunks! |
| Toady: | That’s not very nice! Open the bag and some skunks ... well the game doesn’t have skunks. We need skunks. I’ve got these material breath weapons, so they could fire liquid stuff ... It wouldn’t actually smell, but it could give you blisters or make you die or something. |
| Rainseeker: | They couldn’t generate miasma or something? |
| Toady: | Well it could make your nose rot, it could specifically target the nose and make it rot off. |
| Capntastic: | Is miasma actually in the game as a material now? |
| Toady: | No it’s still the mysterious purple ... I don’t even know what it’s going to be in the end, because what’s there is kind of this noxious semi-magical horrible stuff that comes from all death; what it should be is putrescine and cadaverine or something; chemicals that smell bad. |
| Capntastic: | There should be clouds of it moving about in tombs and you gotta avoid it. |
| Toady: | Roll under them or double jump over them or something. |
| Rainseeker: | I have invented the wand of infinite vermin. |
| Toady: | It was infinite skunks before, now it’s infinite vermin; you can actually shoot the rat out though then right? |
| Rainseeker: | Exactly. It fires flies and cockroaches. |
| Capntastic: | I like how a tiny mosquito will create a million tiles of purple death. |
| Toady: | I think butterflies have the ‘don’t smell’ flag, but I don’t know if I did more than butterflies. (high pitch)Butterflies don’t smell, they’re very pretty! (normal pitch, to Scamps) What are you doing Mister? You’re troubled you know, you’re just a little troubled boy. Rolling around the garbage because Daddy doesn’t clean very well. |
| Rainseeker: | My question is, will artifacts become known around the world when they’re created. For instance someone somewhere wanting that legendary turtle bone grate for their town’s civic project. This leads to the question; can artifact ownership be transferred between people and civilizations. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it’s like ‘You must give us the grate! We’ll send you young lads ever summer, just give us the grate!’ and then you’d have all these worthless human children wandering around your fortress, but you gave them the grate, and that was a cultural failing. This is the thing; artifacts used to be magic in one of the versions of Dwarf Fortress, I don’t remember if it was released or not, but there were like ten magical powers that they could pick one, and that was one side of it. Then the other side was this little story thing I was talking about, where it would come up with things like ‘well I’m really possessive of this artifact and I’m going to hide it away’ or whatever, and it would record it in the histories. Just as we were just talking about magic extensions and all the things that magic could be you can also talk about interactions and stories and civilizations, and all of the things that that can be. So it’s really important for artifacts to become known around the world, for them to become the prime movers of all these events and things that are going on; the catalysts for all kinds of events and things. So word would have to spread somehow; we’ve talk a bit before about knowledge of things and what information you store, but artifacts are pretty high up on the list of ‘do people know about them’ and so on. So you can have events based on jealousy, thieves coming to take them; you could have diplomatic events where you actually give one of your artifacts for a whole set of other things, or as a peace thing or something. I imagine that you couldn’t just flip your artifact off to a caravan or your whole society would be very angry with you. Unless it was an artifact that your dwarves had learned just enough that it’s sucking you away to the fire dimension, and then I’m sure you’d be very happy to trade the elves the metal whistle that they like to blow, that causes a nice little forest fire. |
| Rainseeker: | That whistle really sucks. |
| Toady: | That’s right. But just in general, like within your fortress, the creation of an artifact is just like ‘Woohoo! We have an artifact!’ and people start engraving it like crazy ... This should be something that your fortress starts to hinge around; your dwarves start to think about that. Are there jealous dwarves? Are there dwarves that are scared of things that are strangely magical? Does the creator become lauded or ostracised and eventually abscond with the thing and run off into the night with the human bandits and then they come back doing all manner of horrible infinite vermin things at you ... So within the fortress and without it the artifact should start driving huge amounts of the story, we’re going have these wargame type things with you sending off your armies to attack places in the coming versions – not too far away – and those will drive your fortress’s connections with the world, and diplomacy will drive your fortress’s connections with the world, and trade will drive your fortress’s connections with the world and make the game much more interesting; and artifacts can do the same thing and should be important that way, especially because the creation progress itself is something that’s pretty engaging, and then you finally get this artifact and right now it just drops off into mediocrity at that point as something that scores you a few extra immigrants. It’s not that important unless it’s a rare useful artifact like a weapon and even then you’re just killing a few extra creatures with it. So the artifacts are one of the important things that needs to happen; them becoming known throughout the world and so on. |
| Rainseeker: | Capn, you want to ...? |
| Capntastic: | So the semi-artifacts you mentioned earlier where they’re a non-special item that’s been used to slay a particular dragon and it becomes well known and attached to the character and has its own story going along with it – it becomes a kind of player in the world on its own – how exactly does that work? |
| Toady: | So the process that’s currently in the game – not the released version but the one that’s coming – where we’re starting to explore this whole semi-artifact idea, it looks at how much time the dwarf has been holding the object, does he like the materials it’s made out of, and eventually if you’ve got a match then the dwarf can get an attachment to it. Once an item is elevated to that state ... or actually for every single item now, it’s kind of insane the out of information that’s being tracked sometimes ... It tracks every item’s kills, and once the item gets up to the attached state with a dwarf then it can look at those kills, especially as they continue to be added as that dwarf continues to do amazing things, it can look at the historical events attached to those things in the historical figures – so if it kills a dragon that dragon has a history – and it’s already got methods for calculating the importance; like ‘what is the era importance of a dragon?’, well that’s one hundred because it can name eras after a dragon, and when you’ve got something with high numbers then the artifact’s importance level, once it reaches a certain amount the dwarf can name it, it can become an artifact. At the present time it’s about as exciting as other artifacts, but essentially what would happen at that point is that it would enter the same mechanic pool that we’re planning for artifacts; people would know about it, like if a trader arrives and talks to your other dwarves then they would know about that sword just as likely perhaps as they’d know about your magical chest that any time you put something in it you get two back, or whatever, so they would say ‘there’s also the sword that killed the dragon’ or whatever. Then if someone became jealous about that, or someone asked for that for their community civic project, like they want to use your named dragon killing axe to chop down trees ... that’s not going to happen, but that’s the spirit anyway ... then it would just enter the same pipeline as the rest of the artifacts. Now it could be that the process of naming it, killing dragons and so on, there’s nothing that says that the item might not actually become magical itself as well, but even without that it would still have access to all the same sort of code stuff. |
| Capntastic: | I think that’s interesting because maybe the sources of power ... like a nature spirit might say ‘this hammer was used to kill a dwarf that was mean to elves, so I’m going to enchant it and now it’s really good at killing dwarves’ or a demon could say ‘oh well, this sword was used to kill a king and I’m going to enchant it to become a king-killer; whenever you kill a king with it the king turns into a demon’; seems interesting. |
| Toady: | Yeah it should be really cool, because in a sense those semi-artifacts – as we’ve been calling them – that these guys have had for years and become attached to and killed dragons with, in a sense they have as much of a right, or more, to become magical than the workshop created artifacts where you just go and grab a pine log and a turtle shell and make a little hat. They’ll be treated with their proper respect once these mechanics are up that start to consider artifacts more and more. |
| Rainseeker: | That kind of segues into my question; are there going to be new ways to create artifacts aside from that, such as at the creation of the world or by gods or some other ... |
| Toady: | Originally we thought of this as kind of a tricky question; just at first when the game was smaller we were like ‘Dwarves ... they make the artifacts’ but I think dwarven artifacts in a sense are special because you made them but really you have to let go of that as being their unique properties; they might have the best artifacts among civilizations, but an artifact is just an important object, and important objects ... you’ve got to pass that around. So whether there are items that have been created by gods, items that have been created by other civilizations – maybe not as prolific as the dwarves, but I think one of Zach’s stories had an elven sword that was put in a stream for a thousand years, that certainly wouldn’t be a common artifact – but you’ve got it there, and the ones that they become attached to and so on, that’s certainly fair game for the other civilizations. And things like, if there’s some kind of evil swamp that isn’t really attached to gods at all, it’s just this evil swamp, it might have a beating heart beneath it that’s some kind of object, and you might have to dig that out to make the undead dear go away, and the undead alligators ... |
| Capntastic: | Undead skunks ... |
| Toady: | That’s right, undead skunks being shot out of a crater ... it’s all scary. But definitely we want to use artifacts in lots of places. They shouldn’t be commonplace but they should be varied. |
| Various: | (fel mood repetition from main podcast) |
| Sfx: | (door slamming) |
| Toady: | Zach has left the chat room, it’s like (Sfx vox: door slamming). Alright, so in any case, it’s ... |
| Rainseeker: | Wait, is he listening to the talk? |
| Toady: | No, we were talking on the AOL chat thing we’re using now, because we’ve used seven different ones because they crash or whatever. So we’re on one of them and we were talking and I was like ‘Okay, I’m starting the Dwarf Fortress Talk’ now, and that was an hour ago, or whatever, and he was like ‘Okay’, so I went in and turned off the sounds so that if he sent me a message – which he hasn’t – it wouldn’t make the ‘bing bing’ noise or whatever. However apparently in that list of sounds I missed – or it was in a different list or something – the sound that makes the big slamming door noise when he leaves. So he just went off to go do something or whatever, and so all of a sudden it’s like ‘SLAM!’ I don’t even know if it was audible through my microphone or not. |
| Capntastic: | Oh it was. |
| Toady: | Yeah, so bam! Bam! A failure, a complete failure to protect the podcast from environmental noise pollution. You know the cat is sleeping nice over in his heated bowl right now, so he’s ... |
| Capntastic: | He has a heated bowl? |
| Toady: | Yeah he has a heated bowl! So he has a giant cat tree, almost as tall as I am, and then he’s got a heated bowl you can plug into the wall. It’s a felt thing or something, it’s a very large short cylinder that a cat can be put in. |
| Rainseeker: | I’d imagine that would be nice for you to be able to sleep, he wouldn’t bother you at night, huh? |
| Toady: | Yeah, he likes to stay in there ... I mean he will still come in and scratch my neck if my hands aren’t showing, he will still occasionally jump over my head when I’m laying down in bed ... An important point, people were wondering when I put that on the devlog, when I said he jumped over my head; I was laying down at the time. He did not get seven feet in the air or whatever to get complete clearance and then do whatever he’s doing. He can jump pretty far, but not that far yet. Yet. We’ll see what he can do later. |
| Rainseeker: | I thought you might have been sitting when you said that. |
| Toady: | The problem is is that once I was. The thing is I was in bed reading a book, and I wasn’t sitting so that my back was bent completely flat up against the wall but I had my pillow kind of scrunched up, so my head was a good foot and a half off the bed, and he did his thing where he jumps on the bed and he then he needs to leave and he’s on the wrong side of the door or whatever and me, so he needs to jump over me; obviously he can’t go under the bed because that would too civilized and he can’t go around or anything. So he just jumps over my head, and when your head is sticking up a little bit that’s really disconcerting because he almost doesn’t make it sometimes, you can just feel him go over your hair, it’s like ‘Whoof!’ So he continues to be a little free spirit or something. But now that he’s got his heated bowl he is oftentimes out here instead of in the bedroom, which is okay with me because it’s good to sleep sometimes. |
Dwarf Fortress Talk #8, with Rainseeker, Capntastic and Toady One, transcribed by mallocks
| Rainseeker: | Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Talk where we talk about all your Dwarf Fortress related needs! |
| Capntastic: | And dreams. |
| Rainseeker: | And compulsions. And addiction! |
| Capntastic: | And desires. |
| Toady: | What number is this? |
| Capntastic: | Eight. |
| Toady: | Eight. |
| Rainseeker: | Number eight! I'm Rainseeker, here with me is Capntastic; say hello Capn. |
| Capntastic: | Hello. |
| Rainseeker: | And your illustrious leader Tarn Adams. Also known as Toady One. |
| Toady: | That's right, and we've got baby Scamps right on the desk here kicking things, trying to remove the pencil from the desk. |
| Rainseeker: | Get rid of that pencil, Scamps. |
| Toady: | We'll have to get rid of Scamps; lock him outside. |
| Rainseeker: | So our topic for this week is sciences and we decided to do that on the tail of the last vote because it came in second. We proceeded to run a little vote and most of you listening probably saw that where we asked people what they thought about what sciences we should look at. We'll probably address others as well, however we did get a winning vote and Capn, could you let me know what those winning votes were? |
| Capntastic: | Oh man ... My memory span ... Going to the thread ... Our winners are in order of top to bottom we have: Physics with four hundred and ninety seven votes; Chemistry with three hundred and sixty six; and Psychology and Sociology with three hundred and twenty six. |
| Rainseeker: | Now Tarn and I virtually looked at each other and said 'what the heck are we going to talk about with physics? Why did we even put that on the vote?' But we're going to try to do it anyway. So when is Dwarf Fortress going to be like Half-Life 2? |
| Toady: | Is that how this one's going to go? I was thinking that we're not scientists and we might have a little trouble but it could go even worse than I thought ... I mean there's like some kind of gun where you can grab a dwarf and throw them or something ... Some kind of gravity gun that dwarves will have that throws them ... And I don't remember anything else about that video game. |
| Capntastic: | We can make a lever out of a barrel and a plank and a kobold ... |
| Toady: | Oh that's right, a physics puzzle. |
| Rainseeker: | Okay, so Tarn: How does physics work in Dwarf Fortress; in that we have gravity, we have other things, how does that work right now and do you have plans to expand the laws in the future? |
| Toady: | Well there are lots of different kinds of physics and some of it's going to spill over into chemistry and everything else of course but we've got the fluid model; that's one of the things that stands out, so you have the liquids that flow around and it works tile by tile right now except you do have a little bit of pressure simulation there. But all in all there's not a lot going on with how fluids interact with things, there's nothing floating yet and they can push things but in a kind of a haphazard fashion. Then there's static things like cave-ins or your Red Faction: Guerrilla type stuff with collapsing structures and so on. Originally that worked when the game was 2D so any open subterranean area could just be assumed to have a ceiling that was willing to fall on you and as soon as you had an open seven by seven area on the 2D underground map then it would just collapse it on you eventually. In the later versions with the Z axis you've got these large connected structures that can spin and spiral all over the plan and as long as they're connected to something stable like the bottom of the map or the edge of map by a single tile then they won't fall over, because the seven by seven rule doesn't really make sense anymore, and that's something we can discuss expansions of. Then what else have we got ... We've got projectiles, currently they just fly along in straight lines and then hit their destination point or run out juice and then just fall on the ground; very bad there. We have some machines if you want to lump that in with physics in general; we have waterwheels and windmills and screw pumps and things powering a few workshops like the millstone but not a lot going on there right now. And the siege engines are just these buildings that shoot rocks, but it doesn't really think about anything there and everything still flies in straight lines. We've got temperature; everything in the game has a temperature pretty much and there are certain points that can be crossed when they change states or catch on fire. Psychology is one of those other topics we're going to discuss and the psychology of a dwarf on fire is something that really needs a bit of work; they don't care at all right now. |
| Rainseeker: | 'Ach, I'm on fire! Oh ... oh well.' |
| Toady: | It just doesn't matter at all, and they'll just walk through burning items and all that kind of stuff but that's another part of the game that we've at least touched upon, and the upcoming version goes into that a bit more; more material properties and so on. I've run through those I don't know what else there is ... So yeah, I guess I'll stop there. |
| Rainseeker: | If I could ask briefly about gravity and cave-ins. I had a dwarf once ... I had an entrance that was over some soil and then I had seven layers hollowed out beneath, just individual layers and at one point one of my dwarves fell through the soil - I'm not sure how this happened - and fell seven layers, through each floor, and they proceeded to be rock. I got a message that 'so and so had died' and I looked at the top and found a hole going seven layers deep so I was just curious, is that a random event that happens occasionally if enough people run over something? |
| Toady: | Oh no, no. That shouldn't have happened at all. There's nothing like quicksand or sinkholes or soil disappearing or anything like that. |
| Capntastic: | There should be ... |
| Toady: | Well it's quite a weird thing right now, like especially when you're in a sandy desert, you can dig out a room underneath the sand and the sand is just pretending to be sandstone or something, and it's one of those things where you have the fluid model and the cave-in model should intersect in some way. We wanted sand to be a fluid that acts like magma does but it's a difficult problem to have the path finding and building structures - or at least certain kinds of structures - and dropping items on it that stand on top of it, and then having it also interact with other fluids; it's a difficult problem. It's one we haven't completely given up on but it's tricky. Just in general if soil collapsed all the time that might be fine but one of the problems with cave-ins is if you don't have a simple model like that - like either it collapses all the time or it's a seven by seven or something like that - you can model all the complicated statics and arches and all the things that you want; you can work really hard on getting a system that's accurate but then communicating with the player about when something is going to collapse, when is it not collapsing, when is it close to collapsing, how far you can go, becomes very difficult. You want people to be able to build a statue like the Crazy Horse monument or something where the arm is outstretched and not just going to collapse, but at the same time if you took the Crazy Horse monument and then built a giant building and put giant golden status in there and stuff you might want the arm to give at some point and collapse and fall down into the plains or whatever. But how do you communicate that to the player? So right now we're stuck in this almost no cave-in system where the player is clear when things are going to collapse because they actually have to be disconnected and if we step away from that then communication becomes actually the largest problem. There's a bit of infrastructure already; it keeps track of columns up and down of solid stone and could communicate information between those columns: how they are shearing against each other and transmitting forces downward to try and find a place to anchor to, and if the forces got too high maybe something could shear off and fall. But if your model is really complicated then you're leaving the player hanging - or not hanging as the case may be - and this is a big problem I think with trying to do a really accurate model; bothering investing the time in that when it's just going to lead to a ton of confusion. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah I can definitely see how a megaproject would require a lot of knowledge if there are cave-ins; you'd need to know 'can I build this wing to this tower and then add this here' and the biggest problem would be an intuitive system, knowing 'hey, is this going to fall, is this going to break apart, what materials would be best for this?' |
| Toady: | Yeah, something that's kind of easier to tackle might be something like in the soil layers just having to have a support every other tile, if you really want to build a fortress in the soil then a rule like that would be pretty easy to understand; but when it comes to the larger structures I'm still not sure how or even ultimately if I'm going to handle that, because it is a difficult problem. |
| Capntastic: | Another thing would be towers needing to have something so it's not just a bunch of rocks stacked up; like concrete underground to keep it weighted from falling over. |
| Toady: | Yeah right now you could build it out on the mud in a swamp and just having an up-down system that can just look straight downward and say 'is this thing just going to sink into the mud?' even that you can think of cases where it's not going to be a hundred percent clear, it's going to start to be confusing; like if you start attaching it to other stone in pieces and ... It gets to be tricky; there's a lot of suggestions about cave-ins on the forum and I think the main thing they need to be considering if the 3D nature of the problem; you can have a really twisty curvy structure like an abstract modern art statue that curls around itself and so on and that needs to be addressed because the player can create that shape and just looking at 2D examples is basically useless as far as figuring out actual algorithms that can be used. |
| Capntastic: | I think it's another case of wanting to make it realistic and interesting but also easy to use, intuitive, and not limiting the player's choices. |
| Toady: | Right now we're just kind of letting people do whatever the heck they want and I think that can stand for quite a while; the thing with cave-ins is just to be kind of mean, just to have something for people to consider but I'm not sure that's the type of problem that people need to be thinking about until we get a lot of other groundwork put in. |
| Rainseeker: | How is the fluid model going to change? |
| Toady: | We have hopes there. I guess there are two things ... one of them has a couple of sections ... but two things that are important are floating objects and additional fluid types. So for floating objects right now all the material have densities and they also have sizes and whatever other physical properties you might need, so it can tell, you know 'is this object going to float?' in water or magma. There are some issues there but it's not an impossible problem, you kind of worry when people use quantum stockpiles if they take a bunch of logs and drop five thousand of them in the same square and then that square suddenly gets wet is the CPU going to die? Maybe. But it's not like there needs to be a super lot of calculation going on because if it knows the density of the object to begin with ... I don't know if we're going to have to worry about shapes as well, like if an object has a concave shape the density isn't the only variable that's important ... but getting an object to float, especially for water which is so important, is just something that can be known about the object, it could just be a flag on the object so it doesn't have to do any calculation at all except for the actual floatation. As for that it just depends how you want it to work. There's some other trickiness; if your tile is two out of seven water with a seven out of seven below it, so it's actually bone fide water, it's not just a puddle, does the item float in the two out of seven square? Does it float in the seven out of seven square? What if you have a one of seven, what if you have a zero out of seven with a seven out of seven below it? Which square does it sit in is part of the problem of having this quantized space where you have a tile here and then a tile here and then a tile here, you want to decide where your item rests. Then there's the matter of having currents - the water has a direction that it's supposed to be flowing in even if the tiles aren't actually changing - the objects then can move and that's not really a big process or problem or anything, depending on how many objects you're actually monitoring, or how many squares you're monitoring if you want to monitor it by object or tile, there's a lot of different ways you can look at the problem. Just basically it's not a super hard problem, and then it would be really cool to flood a room and have everything either - depending on how heavy it is - just to get pushed along or float up and float out and go wherever you want it to go, I'm sure there'd be a lot of applications that would come out of that, for people that are doing all kinds of strange things. |
| Rainseeker: | It would be a good reason to have all stone furniture in that case. |
| Toady: | Yeah. The other problem that I was going to mention ... well one of the sub-problems I was going to mention for liquids was boats; boats are important once you get to fluids. Then you've almost got like a cave-in problem; does this multi-tile thing that you've built, perhaps tile by tile, and in whatever shape; does it float? And if so how deep does the boat float and how much of it shows above the surface of the water. It could do that, once it understands the boat as a multi-tile object that's not so hard to calculate, because you have the total mass of the boat and how many air tiles dip down at each level, those kind of things are pretty easily calculated, it would just be a known quantity for that boat and then you could stick it in the water. If you have some giant galleon or something you'd have a couple of tiles below the surface of the water and a couple of tiles above the surface of the water, and you can just walk around on it and stuff; it'd be really cool. The other fluid problem was multiple liquids. It doesn't seem so bad at first if I want to add a couple more liquid types like oil and I mentioned sand before. Sand, you want to be able to build on it or walk on it or whatever has its own problems, but even if you just consider other liquids like actual liquids, like oil and ... I'm not sure what else people have suggested, blood ... and giant alcohol silos. |
| Rainseeker: | 'Release the alcohol upon the goblins!' |
| Toady: | That's right, those kinds of thing. Once you get those up to flow levels; not just items but an actual map flow, you can use the existing code and so on to move it around, but the problem becomes mixing. There's already quite a bit of code devoted to mixing water and magma; does it make obsidian, what happens to the objects in there, and so on. But if you had fluids that could mix, or fluids that can't mix but don't destroy each other when they touch each other, like oil and water, or alcohol and water; they do different things when they touch each other. And it just seems like that's a can of worms that needs to be handled in one way or another, it's something that I haven't thought that deeply about but it seems like it opens a lot of problems. I'd still like to do it, but those are things that would need to be addressed before I embark on that project. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Capntastic: | So with regards to gravity, will different worlds have different levels of gravity? |
| Toady: | Yeah ... The general question is the physical laws of the world being based on parameters, right? I haven't thought about that much and it's the kind of thing where it seems like you could just change the constants, assuming that they work like that. Part of the problem with the projectiles is how you've got these quantized tiles and right now they think of it that way too, but if the projectiles actually stored their location in a much more refined fashion and were just displayed by tiles and hit things by tiles but actually had their own arcs that they were travelling along, then doing things like having a flight trajectory that is something like a parabola - like you'd want - wouldn't be so bad. You'd have trouble maybe in that there's a couple of issues then for AI and when you're in adventure mode how you target, because even if you've got a parabola and you can target any square that you can get a parabola to hit by theoretically raising the angle of your crossbow or whatever, that's not so bad, especially with my math background. I've solved this problem before, I remember doing it in Armok I, and you could actually accurately hit something shooting on a parabola. So you could hit things along parabolas in that game and it would come up with the parabola, and generally there were two solutions for each equation and it would choose the one with the lowest angle so that you'd shoot straight at the rabbit instead of shooting way up in the air and having it fly and then come down on the rabbit or whatever. So there are little issues like that but you just want to make sure that once you nail it to the tiles that you don't lose your solution and get all confused. But I think it's not that difficult a problem and that people and siege engines and everything else could be flying properly and it's really not that much of a processor problem either, just because projectiles aren't that frequent. If you do something weird like stick five thousand logs on a drawbridge and then lift it up to shoot your logs everywhere ... these are kind of player created problems, but I'm sure that might slow things down a little bit then. I think once you've got a model that has more refined numbers where it's keeping things at a few decimal places then doing things like messing with the physical laws is way easier because changing the gravitational constant doesn't suddenly knock you over ten tiles to screw everything up or just get ignored because it gets rounded off. That would be something that I think would be a low hanging fruit and that point so it would be fun to do. Does it come across in the game? Not quite so much as if you were playing a first person shooter or something that had really good graphics, where the gravity can come across; if you were playing on the moon you'd notice how things were. Since there's no actual frame of reference in Dwarf Fortress - like grid size is a question, how big is a grid, how far is it from here to here? - it becomes less obvious when the physical constants have changed. But at the same time if something falls and hits you on your head harder because you have more gravity that would probably come across, at least relative to your other play experiences. Then you could have some cases where there's just no gravity at all, which would be kind of fun, just things flying off and ... |
| Rainseeker: | You'd be losing dwarves left and right, into outer space ... |
| Toady: | Yeah, those silly combat things where someone flies and hits and tree and blow apart, the parts would just kind of fly off, fly off into space. It'd be fun, I think. |
| Rainseeker: | You'd be having people bashing their heads on the ceilings too when they jump over each other in narrow hallways. |
| Toady: | The nice thing about - just considering physics again in general - the nice thing about using actual equations, getting to that point ... having discrete tiles makes that hard sometimes ... but getting to the point where you're using realistic equations or semi-realistic equations like with the combat stuff with all the new parameters that are in there ... the nice thing about having it that way is being able to change the laws and you could even consider things like local changes of the laws, like a particular area of the fort because of some weird artifact you've got or something is zero gravity, and if you go in there then things start to fly and float around and stuff, and that could lead to some really cool sights in the world; places where things just don't behave quite like you'd expect. That would all be a lot of fun, and because we've been modelling things it's more accessible; it's something that can be done, which is cool. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | So let's address chemistry. This kind of overlaps I guess, I'm just going to jump into something I was wondering about; will we ever find oil in the mountains or in the plains? |
| Toady: | Or under the deserts, and wherever else you find it! |
| Capntastic: | Under the sea. |
| Toady: | Yeah. (singing) Under the sea. (end singing) With the mermaids ... because there are already industries based around mermaids, so why not oil? |
| Rainseeker: | Floating fortresses over oil patches. |
| Toady: | Yeah, frozen methane under the ocean floor, all that kind of thing. I think it would be really cool ... we talked about liquid types before and the problems, but now let's talk about some fun things and just assume that you can overcome some of the issues there. It would be cool to have whole ... you know how you have the raw files with the different types of stone ... it would be cool if you could just be like 'well this one's actually a liquid' or whatever, and so there'd be an oil layer, like a big oil sea ... I don't know that much about it but I assume there's quite a lot of oil down there if you're pumping a hundred and fifty million barrels or whatever, and so you should actually be able to go down there and occasionally bump into whole seas of oil. |
| Rainseeker: | That'd be a problem. |
| Capntastic: | Pressurised. |
| Toady: | Yeah, you'd have your dwarf shoot up on a geyser, it'd be really cool; like shoot up in the air and then catch them on fire or whatever. But then actually using ... historically I imagine that petroleum or oil or whatever isn't just a modern thing; people at least poured it on people and set it on fire of course, so you'd be able to do things like that assuming there was a way to say that any liquid you've got - right now we've got water and magma, but say you'd get one of these mineral liquids that you'd define as a mineral layer or whatever - to be able to set up an activity zone or a workshop at that location and then put it into barrels or something. Then once you have barrels of it whatever custom reactions you've got designed for it in the workshop, whether that's in vanilla or modded Dwarf Fortress, you can do things with it and if there is something that sets on fire and you can pour on people you'd need a way to be able to do that. And whatever else you can use oil for would all be fair game at that point. I think it would be really cool. You have to jump over the largest hurdle there which is just getting a liquid on the map that isn't water, that can act like water. It opens up other things too, like there's tar, above ground, having tar pits ... |
| Rainseeker: | That'd be awesome. |
| Today: | Yeah, tar pits are a lot of fun. Even a more liquid version of mud that you can kind of sink and fall into ... but we're going back to the physics discussion instead of forward into the chemistry discussion, so ... |
| Rainseeker: | We also have acids of course; what are you plans for acids? |
| Toady: | I'm of two minds on this. I've got my Arab/Persian chemistry from around the year 800 or something like that, the kind of stuff I've been looking at when people were isolating sulphuric acid and making aqua regia and all these kind of ... chemistry ... glass flasks, spun and turned around for distilling things that you see in crazy mad scientist movies and stuff. All that stuff existed long before my arbitrary 1400's cut off and it would be really cool to be able to do all kinds of things with that. Of course those acids are not like fantasy acids; if you used aqua regia to etch gold instead of making someone melt into a little puddle then that would be cool, just to use it for things that it might actually have been used for. And there's things like acetic acid and citric acid and so on; there were all kinds of things that were isolated and had myriad uses, and I think it would be just great to have all that stuff go in. At the same time you can't have fantasy world generators without fantasy acid. Fantasy acid is like some kind of monster - a dragon or whatever - spits some crap on you and you just go away. However the game models that, if it's just 'yeah this does really bad things to people', if it's like a poison that way like how I've got them currently set up, or whether it just says 'this has the melting acid effect' on all kinds of stuff ... however it works it would be way more powerful than anything that you'd be able to make with your chemists shop, but then you can start working things like dragon scales and things in there and it starts to blur the lines between chemistry, alchemy and flat out witches cauldron style stuff. |
| Capntastic: | That's how it should be though. |
| Toady: | Yeah, I'm not saying that's bad at all; those are the things I want, it's just a matter of getting that stuff started. For real chemistry I think having all of that out in the raws, trying to hardcode nothing, just list out as many chemical reactions as you can think to do ... There's a few problems here and there; like if you define zillions of chemical reactions that give you all kinds of different chemicals and they have different uses and you just slowly add to that list more and more, you don't want to get to the point where any time you drop an item on the ground it has to chug away, checking to make sure ... it's like 'well these two things just touched each other; the sword blade just touched the ground, and now we have to check a list of twenty thousand reactions to see if in fact the ground is going to explode'. There are just things that you have to be conscious of when you start defining those things; one of the reasons we have contact poisons not quite on hold, but they only work through splatters and contaminants now is because there are all kinds of things touching each other all the time and you don't want to bog yourself down, like when a dwarf is walking on the ground do you have to take the boots he's wearing versus the type of the soil and make sure that there isn't some explosive catastrophic reaction or that the boots don't turn into gold or something, because of some reaction; and is the reaction exothermic and his feet catch on fire, or do they freeze ... It's the kind of thing where you could find it getting out of control. However, those problems are all surmountable, just looking things up a little more intelligently than doing it by brute force, and then you can have a very lively world where things can get splattered on you and splattered on other things and mixed together and so on, and turn into other things. We have temperatures for all the objects so if you did have a reaction that just heated things up, you pour one liquid into another liquid and it turns into other stuff but it's also very very hot, you could do that, and you could do that to do harmful things to your goblin friends and stuff. It really does have a lot of potential and just having those things in the raws ... There's a reason that the jobs in the raws are called reactions; it was originally going to be for the alchemy system for the alchemists workshop that doesn't even do anything - except for soap or whatever it does now - it's because I want to have reactions where it understands what materials ... I'll have to change the format of them a little bit, but it understands how materials react with each other and what the outcome of that process is. There's a lot that won't be done just because the real world is so rich with this kind of stuff, but we can do a lot, and we can do it eventually to the point where some people are satisfied. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Capntastic: | The next thing; explosives. What are your plans for tactical nukes? |
| Toady: | That's right, we have unrefined uranium in the game, and I hear about centrifuges all the time, and aluminum tubes ... We've got aluminum, we don't have centrigues, we have pipe sections, so you make a giant aluminum pipe section and fill it with pitchblende or whatever we've got and ... Yeah, so we're not doing that. But the kind of thing that's on the table is gunpowder, and the materials that you need for that are already in the game, I think. We've got brimstone, which is sulphur, and I don't remember if we have saltpetre, if it's there or not, but ... I guess you could do all kinds of things with manure and urine to make it, or you can find it in a crystalline form in the ground perhaps. And we've got charcoal and coal and kinds of stuff like that available, so it's there, the building blocks are there, and then it become strictly a matter of taste, and what you're going to do with it. I don't think we've had the discussion on Dwarf Fortress Talk before but I've had the discussion on the forums or in the dev notes and so on about what we think about that. Where we were on that is that we are not against coding up the code necessary to get that kind of thing to work; at the very least just blowing the crap out of things. Maybe not making a gun or something but blowing the crap out of things. That probably wouldn't be in the most vanilla vanilla Dwarf Fortress. After we see it action and see it perhaps not spoiling the mood entirely it might make it in, but certainly we'd support that kind of thing shortly after chemistry starts to take off; I've no problem with that at all. Then it's a matter of how blowing stuff up works in the game. It would just be another one of those reactions; when this point hits its ignition point it's a little different than just setting on fire. It would just need to be able to look around at the adjacent squares and apply forces to things, and it can do all that. It should be not that difficult once we have the chemistry stuff we've been talking about to have things that are explosive, and not just black powder which as far as I know is the only historical example of a real explosive. Of course people can show me whatever else there is that I don't know about there, but there can also be fantasy-type explosive things, like creatures that blow up for no reason that somehow survived after all these thousands of years, and then when you come up to them they just blow up. |
| Rainseeker: | It's because they're allergic to dwarves. |
| Toady: | Well, dwarf is a ... |
| Capntastic: | One dies so that the others may live. |
| Toady: | Yeah, unless they're all lined up or something, because those things tend to blow up in clusters. I'm not really sure where I'm at right now ... pro modded explosives and kind of ambivalent about vanilla explosives. It should be the kind of thing that is just one extra step in the chemistry raws; instead of saying that this thing heats up when the products are mixed or the products are ignited, it's like 'this does an explosion of this force per unit of black powder'; then there'd just need to be one extra function there that says what an explosion does. After that you can start to work with ideas; like what about things like cannons or mines that you want to do, and we can slowly work with that but the farther afield you go the more it would be deprioritised. |
| Capntastic: | So what about herbs and plants being turned into potions? |
| Toady: | I guess hopefully it would all fall under the same umbrella; it's not chemistry per se, you're not trying to give names to the things, but stuff turning into other stuff that has effects ... We've got the poisons now which are the only example of a material having an effect, and the effects are all over the place even know; they can make you cough blood, give you blisters, cause your body parts to swell up and get compartment syndrome, give you fevers, make you dizzy, and that's a material effect that effects a creature through contract, injection or inhaling the object and so if you start to give beneficial effects or more neutral effects, maybe give it a few more ways that cause the syndrome to trigger - it could just be something that's nearby rather than something that's inhaled or injected - and then all of a sudden what was a really practical grounded real world poison system becomes a system for doing all kinds of fantastic things. So if your herbs, if you say one plump helmet and one newt eyeball is a reaction that you can do in a workshop with an empty flask, and then you use the to container thing that we've got now for reactions to say all that stuff goes into a new liquid in that container called plump helmet newt eyeball juice or something. Then you can define a new material and that material could have whatever properties you want. So the pieces are in place now to make poisons, but you wouldn't be able to do anything with them unless you somehow found a way to get the poison out of the container ... which you could do, if you find a way to heat the thing up, like dropping it in magma and then it turns into a gas you could have creatures nearby inhale. So you could actually set up some kind of poison gas traps, even in the new version. But just in general things like a potion that makes you happy ... there are two obstacles there now in the current system. One of them is that you'd need to have the effect, you'd need to give the modder or vanilla modding control to change the happiness of a dwarf, so it's not just giving blisters or whatever but there's a new effect, and that list is just going to increase over time and hopefully cover the basis. The other problem is to get a dwarf to actually use the thing; to recognise that there's now this flask filled with this juice that when you drink it it makes your happiness one hundred and fifty percent for a week, and having the dwarf know that that's something that needs to be used is a large problem, especially for a modding situation where you make happiness juice that gives you blisters and makes you fly ... when do you drink it? I don't know, it sounds like an adventure mode thing; the adventurer would take that journey, but not necessarily a dwarf craftsman that's feeling a little bummed out. So that's another issue with modding, but it's not that far away now, you can mod in your own poisons and create them and boil them to make them work now and we just need to expand the effects and give things a few more uses. So where are we at ... we're down to soaps and things, I don't know if people would be satisfied. I guess the one glaring smelting metallurgy thing, if people are wondering about alloys and the exact manganese content of their steel. I guess that opens some interesting avenues of discussion, at least stuff where I'm totally confused about how I would do it, like if you take metals ... there are all different kinds of steel, it's like this one's two percent carbon, three percent manganese, and this one is this percent this, and this percent this, and this percent this, and they all have really different properties, but would I have to make a separate material entry for every single one? At this point I would, and you'd make stainless steel using whatever goes into that - I don't remember if its manganese or tungsten or whatever the heck else there is that they put into steel these days, or former days - and I'm just not sure if it's practical. Right now we've got a ton of alloys in the game but they're all broadly defined, like two bars of this and one bar of this makes this. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Capntastic: | I was thinking we could do a quick flyby on the senses, and how they might come into play in the future, like with scented soaps ... Where do you envision the senses coming into play in the future of Dwarf Fortress? Touch, smell, taste, hearing and eyesight. |
| Toady: | That's right, and the sixth sense, and echo location and stuff. |
| Capntastic: | Electromagnetic ... Infrared ... Psionic power ... |
| Toady: | I guess this starts as an adventure mode question, just because you experience things in the first person there. |
| Capntastic: | You caught me. |
| Toady: | Yeah. It'd be cool to hear things ... Right now you either do or don't get announcement spam depending on your setting, and bugs, and it should compact that stuff down into sound messages; 'there's sounds of battle to the west', and if you pick up soap you should be able to feel it and smell it and get information like that, although you have to think about to what end? If soap that has a certain chemical in it smells a certain way I guess it's cool to tell you about that ... I guess if you were blindfolded and ate something it should tell you what it tastes like, although you get to that whole thing of what if someone puts an orange under your nose and you eat an apple, but that's all very complicated; it would be the kind of thing that would be done on a really weird lark. Really you'd want to probably address this stuff from the perspective of actual situations in adventure mode where you'd really want the data, because those would be the first ones that would go on. I don't know if you had anything in mind. |
| Capntastic: | Sense, like 'you smell a kobold den' ... That would require flows I think. |
| Toady: | Take the miasma for instance, the visible purple you-can't-even-see-through-it miasma. Dwarf mode may be a different matter but in adventure mode that stuff should be invisible, you can't see that stuff but it's moving around as a local flow. As long as flows are kept local like that and don't have any wide ranging pressure code and they don't block path-finding, they don't do anything except wiggle around a little bit then they're not really a processor problem and so you can have these local flows. Then when you enter one of those areas it could just be like 'this place smells like death', because there's a butterfly rotting on the ground. As long as you're a bit conservative with your use of them ... if every single creature had a giant flow coming out of it that would start to be a problem, like if you wanted it to smell like a kobold den you'd want to start moving away from the local flows there and just have places that are lived in by things just smell a certain way. Then that would be really useful information; when you go to a cave for the first time, if you're a connoisseur that can tell the smell of the kobold or something then it could tell you about that, sure. It might not be a local flow that you could follow the gradient of to achieve the kobold's location, swimming upstream on the smell, but I like the idea of being able to track things and find them, and pick up little kobold scats and dig around to see what they've been eating ... after a fashion, anyway. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Capntastic: | Has this been brought up yet? The Baghdad battery that everyone always brings up all the time. |
| Toady: | Yeah I think we've discussed that on the forums quite a bit anyway. People still get into fights about this so ... As far as I know you couldn't do anything with the thing, but I saw a fight break out over that already. I'm not an expert on the Baghdad battery, what did I see, a MythBusters episode where a lemon could do more or something? But that's like nothing, so ... I don't want to strike too sharp a tone on that. I certainly don't know of any evidence of things like ancient electroplating from stuff like that. If there is stronger evidence then we could start thinking about that stuff, and it's up to people I guess to decide what their dwarves can do; because a dwarf society is not a human society, and with that stuff if you know how it works then you can do it, but it's not the type of thing that you just figure out. You could use medieval household appliances to do stuff like electroplating but you just wouldn't think to do it because it's completely non-intuitive. But who knows, dwarves are down there all the time, maybe they do stuff like that. |
| Rainseeker: | You never know about them dwarves. |
| Toady: | Especially if they have magical artifacts or something. Maybe they do have an artifact that sticks a couple of wires into a lemon or something. |
| Rainseeker: | If you give dwarves lemons, they make a Baghdad battery. |
| Toady: | Well we need lemons first. The fruit tree situation's pretty sad right now. |
| Capntastic: | So people want lemons, they want batteries, they want gunpowder, they want tactical nukes. |
| Toady: | Don't forget the steampunk. |
| Capntastic: | That's kind of along the path there. |
| Toady: | Yeah, you've got to put that in something. |
| Capntastic: | The tech tree requires a lot of this before you can get steampunk. |
| Toady: | Yeah, and bathyspheres ... you've got to go underwater and look like a space alien ... You see dwarves doing that all the time. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | Now we're going to talk about psychology; dip our toes into the ins and outs of the dwarven brain. Right now the way that dwarves think is whether they're happy or sad, and it doesn't really matter that their friend has died as they have just eaten in a legendary dining-room. |
| Toady: | That's right, it's a fantastic experience. They kind of move from thought to thought ... They store their old thoughts, but a new thought can have a huge effect on their overall happiness numbers. Basically what happens now is a number of events create thoughts in the dwarf, like whether they've just gotten sprayed by waterfall mist, whether or not they just saw someone die, whether or not they just drank some water with mud in it, and so on. It's an uneven list but there's a lot of stuff there, and if one of those things happens it generates a thought in the dwarf, and the thought goes into the dwarf's head and really all a thought does is make a dwarf happier or make a dwarf more sad. In a broad sense how it manifests itself depends on some things we'll get to, but ... So there's these thoughts, and every event adds a thought, and it keeps track of the thoughts for, say, a season and once you cross halfway through the season ... I don't remember if it's a season or a year, it's not really that important ... but once a thought becomes half-stale halfway through its shelf life then it has half the effect on the overall happiness. But basically to get the happiness of a dwarf you just add all those numbers up; take the dining room number, take the dead relative number, take the attacked by zombie relative number from the 2D version that wasn't released, take the rotten food number, take the I was promoted number, take the didn't have enough work number; add them all up and you get one number. There's some balance issues there with the dining rooms as has been pointing out, but just overall the system kind of sucks. But you get that number, if the dwarf is happy, the dwarf is happy, if the dwarf gets down low enough it starts to look at their personality facets; how do they deal with stress, how do they manifest their unhappiness, do they get angry easily for instance. So if a dwarf gets angry easily and has a low happiness number they might throw a tantrum, or if a dwarf becomes sad easily or depressed easily then when they have a low happiness number they can fall into that melancholy that's permanent. So the personality only starts being used in the extreme cases with low happiness ... It's a pretty simple system and it has a lot of problems, as we know. |
| Capntastic: | It's like a dating sim. |
| Toady: | Yeah I guess it's like a bad dating sim ... Dating sims, I guess, are really refined now, and I'm sure they're a lot of fun for the people that know about how they work. Ours is not very good yet, but yeah, you basically have to keep your dwarf happy and eventually they'll have babies. |
| Capntastic: | What is the dwarven hierarchy of needs? |
| Toady: | Yeah, the dwarf needs to find their infant if it's crawling around, and get their food on ... get their drink on then get their food on, then get their sleep on ... |
| Capntastic: | Then they can worry about the baby. |
| Toady: | Yeah ... Do they worry about the baby first until they starve to death? It's up there. Get out of the lava is one of the things on the list, but being on fire I don't think is on the list. |
| Rainseeker: | Oh, I'm on fire, whatever. |
| Toady: | So then it starts to worry about other things. But the stuff like having parties and going on break just works on these timers, there's not a lot to a dwarf's psychological makeup right now, and that's something that we really want to change, because it lets you not just control things like tantrum spirals - stuff that are side effects of the system that you need to have a different system to really control well, and control in a reasonable well - but having a better system would let you look at the dwarf and not just say 'hi, I'm happy' or 'hi, I'm sad', but it would actually tell you a little bit about what's going on in the dwarf's head. The generally idea here ... I don't have this completely hashed out ... Something happens to the dwarf and it turns into a thought right now, and the thought is just this lingering thing that effects the happiness number. So really an event that happens should create some kind of reaction in the dwarf and that should be put into motion in their head, something that lasts for however long it should last; some of them would be very short term, some of them would be very long term. And they can be in different directions, things like jealousy or anger or just overall sadness; however it works, and the personality can filter the emotional response or direct it one way or the other, and it emotions run really high they could do something like start a fist fight, but it wouldn't be because they're overall absolutely miserable and on a spiral to destruction. Overall they could have a baseline emotional state, some people are just generally happier than others, and the events could tweak that, push you slowly in one direction or another, so you could become miserable as things keep happening to you. But getting rid of that happiness number entirely and just having the emotional state of the dwarf on several axes would be a lot better way of handling it. It would also make adventure mode a lot more interesting if you start to have people that react a little bit differently and can react at all to things, it would be a lot better way to handle it. (aside, to Scamps) What are you doing Scamps? Don't play your ... get your head ... (end aside) Okay, so he got his toy and he put it inside this empty box of cereal and then he stuffed his whole head in there after it and he was just walking around with a cereal box on his head, but I've got the toy now and I'm going to throw it out of the room. There he goes. That's his favourite toy, the one he's chewed all the hair off of. So like I say, the system isn't ... I want to keep the personality facets, I like having the thirty different facets of the personalities, and just increasing the overall number of places those are used. But I think to complement the personality facets we also need stuff like different emotions that you can be feeling, and additionally some things along the lines of those likes and dislikes, but stuff that the dwarf could be into, or the dwarf's vices or something like that; some kind of more permanent characterstics, but that can be changed through exposure; just to give them more texture there. But happiness numbers are definitely going to go. |
| Rainseeker: | Are families going to be more complicated? Like family relationships? |
| Toady: | I think just as a starting point they should be respected at all. A dwarf ... they might recognise a few things about their brother, like vaguely speaking, but they really don't in general have a handle on their parents or their brother. With their spouse they know that they're sleeping in the same room and they can shoot spores at each other, but it's one of those things, maybe even part of the sociology discussion. I don't know if ... like they say 'the building block of society is the nuclear family' ... we haven't really decided what the building block of dwarven society, but the family should certainly be part of that. If you're starting to add things like a mason's guild and a cult based around the god of minerals then having the family of a dwarf be one of those units that determines what a dwarf thinks about is really important because they'd be then weighing decisions; like 'how does this decision jibe with my religion, how does it affect my relationship with the mason's guild?' but also 'how does it affect my family?' would be a huge factor I'd think, at least in a dwarven society; I'm not sure the goblins would give a crap about it, maybe some of them would. It's one of those things that's completely underutilised. Of course families are really common; every dwarf has a family and there's a lot of different families, so tracking it as an entity in and of itself might be a bad idea. Having a larger clan or something, if it's a really large group of people then it makes more sense but having ten thousand different entities, one for each family, would start to stretch what's reasonable, especially because there'd be room set aside for things like 'what is the uniform of your family?'; it's not necessary information ... 'what kind of trade goods does your family have access to, what territory do they own on the map?' It starts to get silly if you really give them full blown entity status, but at the same time they're important enough that they should get an equal role in decision making. But it's one of those things that's also easier to let slide ... I'm not really sure when we'd start thinking about that stuff, maybe we'd start thinking about it when we're doing these guild and religion overhauls, just at least leave a spot open at the table for it, not code myself out of it. It's certainly something that I have to keep in mind. Huge amounts of legends are family based, like people rescuing their children, or rescuing their significant others, or having the three heirs to a kingdom fighting over it; a lot coming back to family stuff there, and right now that's completely unrecognised ... fortunately it's recognised in world generation to the point that they don't sleep with their siblings to have more kids but that's really just a very specific case that's handled in a very specific way instead of something that's tangible by itself. (aside to Scamps) What are you doing down there? He is halfway in the cereal box now! What is it about this cereal box Mister? (end aside) |
| Capntastic: | Is it empty or full? |
| Toady: | It's empty! If there's an empty cereal box I just put on the floor because I haven't throw it out yet, which seems to be a theme of the floor of my room right now, but there's nothing in there at all except half a cat sometimes. I guess he just likes putting himself in there. |
| Rainseeker: | I don't know what it is about cats and boxes ... |
| Toady: | He's as energetic as ever, a little hero. |
| Capntastic: | My uncle slayed a dragon. |
| Toady: | You should be proud of your uncle. You should make a statue of your uncle, and then every time you walk past it you could be proud of your uncle or something. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, get proud thoughts. |
| Toady: | And I guess a proud thought would now no longer just be happiness or sadness, but it would be in the swelling pride emotion category, which would then counteract your depression and proclivity to drink. |
| Capntastic: | To an extent. |
| Toady: | To an extent, that's true. It never goes away entirely. Always recovering. |
| Rainseeker: | All dwarves are always recovering. |
| Toady: | Yeah, they don't get very far along, they're like on their three day coin before they have to go back to step one. I don't know if we're going justice to sociology here. |
| Rainseeker: | Let's close science discussion. |
| Toady: | Okay. Sorry sociology people, we didn't have that much to say; but I'm sure we could have a sociology-only Dwarf Fortress Talk in a year or two when we have more idea of what we would talk about. We're just not scientists and we don't know a lot about anything. We tried our best and hopefully we answered questions for people and stuff, or didn't and we will answer them as you continue to ask them. So my apologies, in any case. |
| Rainseeker: | Indeed! So let us get on to actual questions from actual other people. |
| Toady: | Yeah. Other people ask questions, we have a natural seque. |
| Rainseeker: | Coming right up. |
| Menendez: | (banjo interlude) |
| Capntastic: | Alrighty. Welcome to the second part of the show when we're going to ask your burning science questions. |
| Rainseeker: | And other questions. |
| Toady: | That's right. |
| Capntastic: | What is the cosmology of the dwarven world; is it heliocentric? |
| Toady: | So right now there is a sun that sets on one side and rises on the other side; I think it determines that at random, although those words depend on the sun and magnetism, so maybe that's meaningless, and there's also a moon. But we don't really have anything decided for those. What will probably end up happening further along is that you'll have the creation tale, there are several civilizations with different sets of gods, so I'm not really sure who's going to be right, or if's all going to be different sides of the same multi-sided coin, the same polyhedron or whatever, but it's probably going to be one of those things that's easily randomized and so it will be randomly decided what the deal is there. And that could also, with a little bit of work, have to do with the shape of the ... not just what is orbiting what, if anything's orbiting anything, rather than being dragged along in chariots and stuff, but also what the shape of the world is; how the edges work. Right now the edges just have this invisible barrier, but migrant groups and certain foreign materials can come in off the edges depending on the version you're playing; it's just not really well defined right now, what the world is. But it would be easy to make a torus or a cylinder, or to fudge a sphere with the proper edge behaviour, like something going off the top edge and then coming half way over on the other top edge. I don't remember if you actually get a sphere from that or some kind of weird projected space, but it's close enough. So we'll probably mess around with that later on ... the myth stuff might come sooner rather than later, just because I really want to mess around with that stuff, it's a lot of fun to do. |
| Capntastic: | Will there be hurricanes and tornados? From this will there be lightning, and crazy monsoons? |
| Toady: | To the extent that the flows don't get out of control there, it'd be really cool. Things like a hurricane would be pretty easy to do; it doesn't have to depend that much on the weather simulation, you can just have them crop up on occasion, and then the weather simulation could just start running a little cyclone or anti-cyclone or whatever the heck they end up being going along some lines; it could just define some lines either from the sea to the coast or up one of the coasts, something like that, and when you're locally in a hurricane then it could just start having driving rain and insane wind that can actually pick up items; whatever items are on the ground it could just occasionally give them a push and send them flying for a hurricane, and I guess a tornado would look like that even more insanely and locally. I think it's a dev item and it would a lot of fun to do that. Lightning strikes ... that's just kind of mean I guess, like you're playing dwarf mode and then all of a sudden it's like 'BAM!'; oh well, shouldn't have been above ground ... People are going to be milking their cows and growing aboveground crops and stuff, and maybe the dwarven god of thunder will target you a little more often; get you back under the surface when you belong, and then the dwarven god of magma can have fun with you. |
| Rainseeker: | I have a question here about religion; 'Do you see religion in fort mode being more active or more reactive? Will carpenters all worship Dessin Eiden Tossedwood, God of Carpentry, and then get angry if you don't have shrines to him, or will they be able to build a Tossedwood shrine and make converts? |
| Toady: | It's a difficult question when you're in dwarf mode, how much people should be able to utilise site resources to do their own thing. Because moods do it right now and you can see where the trouble comes from that where you're trying to get the mood dwarf to be happy, and he's asking for fairly specific things but you still have to stop what you're doing and pay attention to it to some extent. Some people track their resources fairly carefully, so ... I'm all for dwarves being proactive, especially on their free time where they might just now be sitting on break or doing parties where they don't do anything and just stand around. It would be cool to have them be proactive but if you're actually talking about going out and building a shrine for example there are a couple of things that you'd want to be careful about there. One is the resources, like the actual material resources, but there's also the matter of space and location; if the guy wants to build a shrine in his room or if you can assign people workshops or something ... if they want to put something in a place where they have some expectation that you wouldn't care that much ... but if they start putting shrines in the middle of hallways it could get irritating. So maybe they could build one in a meeting hall but they'd just have to make sure that they're not blocking anything off. If you had plans I guess it's kind of okay that they'd screw them up, because that's part of what taking care of dwarves is all about, but on the other hand you could see how you'd have to be careful. At first it'll be more about the religious group and what kind of political involvement they have, or just sort of a happiness/sadness thing in making requests of you, that kind of stuff ... proactive stuff might not come at all, or if it does we just have to be careful about it. Of course during world gen or adventure mode or anything else people can go all kinds of nuts, that would be more acceptable, with dwarf mode you always have to be a little more careful. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Capntastic: | What are the inheritable traits parents can pass on to their children. Personality, preference for certain attributes, etc. ... a curse perhaps? |
| Toady: | Currently what we've got are the attributes ... vaguely the attributes to an extent being passed down. It's not like if the parents have two specific numbers it doesn't pick one or the other, but there's a little bit going on there. Then all of the colours, like eye colours, hair colour, I think that uses a dominant/recessive thing now where you pass on two copies and then it picks probably the colour with the lowest index; maybe there's an alphabetic bias right now on which genes are dominant, or it might be the first you listed, it could be the first one you list in the raws that's the dominant gene. I think that's it right now, just attributes and colours, the idea this time around was just to get our feet wet and get something working, and after that really it's easy to add new genes, easy to add all kinds of effects for them. I mean, I have to code it up, it's not something you can just mod in, and of course we'd have to have discussions about this; what's the extent to which personality is passed on versus it being environmental factors and so on, I'm sure we can have all kinds of wonderful arguments on the forums and so on, but right now we're just doing simple things that are pretty cut and dried like colours. Attributes ... it's not quite cut and dried there what passes along and what doesn't and so on, but I think right now that all the attributes pass along, whether or not that's accurate is another question. Also stuff like the shape of the nose and the height modifiers, basically anything called a modifier in the raws - how curly is your hair, how long is your nose, how far apart are your eyes, what colour is your skin/eyes/hair - all those pass along right now, they have genes to pass them along. As far as curses and stuff or whatever ... whatever those end up being we can link it in, but there's nothing right now of course. |
| Rainseeker: | I have a question here from Calvin, he was wondering if you'd implement mining changes and how we're looking at changing how mining works. Perhaps we could also talk about if the material of the mining pick is going to make a difference, or if there's going to be other interesting things that happen while mining. |
| Toady: | Interesting things ... It's good as long as you're not just getting blasted out and dying all the time, and as far as pick material and stuff goes, as long as the miners can intelligently swap out their picks and stuff - it doesn't get really annoying - because it might be ... if you need to have, say, steel picks to get through certain rocks then the dig designation system ... there's some clunkiness that could come up there that would need to be handled, when he's referring to mining changes I'm not sure specifically what he had in mind. Oh he's not talking about mining changes, he's talking about mining charges, so he wanted explosives? |
| Capntastic: | Tactical nukes? |
| Toady: | So we talked about explosives a bit during the science discussion, and I guess I misheard the question ... mining charges ... That would depend on the future of explosives and if explosives, if things like black powder do go in, which we're thinking of as a moddable then we have to think of if we're going to actually blow out chunks of the maps, there are problems to be addressed there. It's not something I've considered that much just because I haven't thought that much about gunpowder and stuff like that. |
| Rainseeker: | I have a question here from Desmet, he asks; 'Are there any ideas or plans for improving cities, towers and fortresses in the game world? I was wondering if we could get specific, so for instance elf retreats and human towns and goblin forts, how that's going to be improved, I guess specifically for adventure mode because you don't really see that in Dwarf Fortress mode.' |
| Toady: | Yeah ... I mean they suck, right? So certainly we want to improve those. Now when it comes to specific plans for how towers and city walls and so on and are going to be implemented I don't have at my fingertips information ... I actually used to know more about the little bits and pieces that make up castles and all that kind of thing, but it would be cool to go there. When it comes to the elf ... the elf retreats rely on getting multi-tile vegetation in, once we do multi-tile vegetation those places will look awesome. |
| Capntastic: | They need Stonehenges. |
| Today: | Yeah, there's the whole mystery of Stonehenge and stuff, I remember those TV commercials where it's like ... |
| Rainseeker: | Well they can't build clocks for themselves right? They need something to tell time with. |
| Toady: | They can just ask the animals, animals know time. Yeah ... so I'd like to have ... the humans civilizations for example, it would be lame if they all had the same architecture, once I refresh my memory on what are the bits and pieces that make up the different architectures, what kind of different buildings there are and all that kind of stuff, they should make choices, then, and be able to have the towns have different characters to them when they make their walls or just their houses and various castles and little parapet things, and little spikes that stick out of the top with little flags on them, and minarets and all that kind of thing or whatever. As much diversity as you've got in the real world, as much as we can convey with a tile based format, that stuff should come across, it's one of those things where you have to engage in the project at some point and actually do it, and it's hard to time things which are superfluous in a sense, but they should be done. At first things will look vanilla, just as we get people to have walls properly and moats and tapestries and rugs and things, just making the towns look better, but as we get enough information to allow them to diversify then they should be able to do that, hopefully. |
| Capntastic: | Viking longhouses, and ... that's the only type of building I know. |
| Toady: | Yeah, because they've got those mead hall things right now, and they all look the same, they all have the stairway that goes up one side and curls around the other and there's this balcony ... that's kind of lame, that everything should look that way, it would be really cool if we could set up a way for the raws to guide a lot of what's going on. But I'm not down to drawing specific maps because that gets clunky and repetitive, but it would be good to guide the process using some kind of architectural primitives, and preferred shapes ... like right now all the houses and things are squares, and it shouldn't necessarily be that way. It's kind of funny, you mention these longhouses, even if the entities right now just said 'we prefer these dimensions versus these dimensions' it would add a degree of character to the civilizations when you arrive at them, so just a few things goes a long way and if we really jump into it it should be awesome. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah. |
| Capntastic: | Yurts. That's another building. |
| Toady: | Yeah I wanted to have tents for my animal camps this time, around the animal people camps, but we were like 'why do they have tents when they're underground? There's no wind, there's no rain, the temperature's completely the same' ... If they're in a live cave maybe they should carry out little umbrellas, if they're in a really wet cave then the umbrella's definitely a must so you don't get this limestone caked all over your body and stuff. |
| Rainseeker: | You have been struck by an umbrella ... The batman strikes you with his umbrella. |
| Capntastic: | What would they make it out of? Like a cave spider umbrella ... |
| Toady: | Yeah well they've got all kinds of leather down, and they can cut people up and tan them ... Right now the camps have these stacked leathers and they have this stacked prepared meats or preserved meats that they keep down there and they just kind of hang out with all the meat and leather. |
| Rainseeker: | Do they eat it? |
| Toady: | No, they just hang out there. If we forced them to eat it it would be one of those things that develops into a problem over time since they aren't hunting new stuff and they aren't really doing anything. It's the same problem as allowing your pets to eat or allowing anyone to eat, you have to allow them to replenish their supplies or walk off the edge of the map and so on. Eventually having that happen would be cool, of course you run into those problems with dwarf mode versus adventure mode because everything would be operating at two speeds that are seventy two times apart and you have to reconcile all of the differences there which is quite annoying. But yeah, they just sit there now, they just hang out with their meat and stuff, and they've got weapons and things and just kind of hang out and wait for you to show up and cause trouble. |
| Rainseeker: | I have a question from Nill; he or she wants to know more about combat during world generation, how it works; do you just put a bunch of armies in front of each other or do they actually travel and cause trouble for each other? |
| Toady: | It's pretty weak right now, they have their enemy, you have the civilization, it has its target that it wants to attack and then they pull all of the able bodied people they can from their civilization and lump them into a group and send them at their target which then lumps its people - generally the defenders at the site but they can pull in more people I think if they have that kind of civilization that isn't just site based - and then it ... I'm trying to remember here if it just pairs them off and fights zillions of little duels ... Like when you read the details of a duel between important historical figures, where it just says 'his right arm was wounded and then the other guy ran away', that is what's happening with every single fight, with every single person, you just don't see it. That's why when you go into their legend you can still read the details of how their arms and legs were hacked off, even if they're not the civilization leader and it doesn't show up in the era based list as an important duel. But it's not like the new adventure mode/dwarf mode combat with all of the specific tendons and materials because it would just grind to a halt if you had thousands of people fighting each other every single year in world generation, so right now I think it classifies things as wounds or killing blows and then assesses what a wound might be - what's a feasible would that could have been caused - it matches up a few things like is the thing fire resistant versus does this guy breath fire and that kind of stuff, and gives some plausible wounds to the ... mostly chopping crap off, but occasionally just saying 'this was wounded' or whatever. I don't think I've even added scars yet, that's one of the things that was on the list that I haven't gotten the chance to get to was adding scars to people that were injured in world generation without severs, just giving them cool looking scars when you meet them. So it's pretty simple and there's nothing like ... there's another thing that was written down, doing military tactics and little strategy things to spice it up before we actually get to those when we start doing the improved sieges and sending out armies, but I didn't get a chance to do any of that so it's still just throwing people at each other. There are terrain bonuses, so if you're in a cave and they send an army at you then I think it improves your combat rolls by two or three times, things like that. It's stuff that you'd see in the more traditional strategy game where people get a hundred and fifty percent defensive bonus from a fortified position, that kind of stuff. Once we add in some tactics and things it'll talk about that and you might be able to have a general with really high military skills not at the individual combat level but more up at the strategic and tactical levels being able to defeat a superior force, and it could say what happened even if it's just waving its hands a little bit about pincers and flanking manoeuvres and attacking at night, doing a ruse to lure this group of people away from their position; all that kind of stuff. You can pay lip service to that in world generation and then you can start actually working it in over in the actual gameplay modes. But right now it's very blah blah blah. |
| Capntastic: | Vince wants to know; 'Will there be cavities and toothbrushes in the future versions of Dwarf Fortress?' |
| Toady: | So I don't know much about how people learned about dental hygiene and how effective it is to just brush your teeth with water or whatever, I imagine they didn't have toothpaste ... Unless they did! They could very well have had toothpaste as far as I know, and rubbed all kinds of weird things on other stuff and then rub that weird stuff on their teeth and it made their teeth healthier or whatever. So I have a historical blank spot there; we don't have to be slaves to history but it's good to understand what happened and to see how it might fit into the game. But now that we have teeth I'm pro cavity, I'm pro having all messed up rotten teeth and dwarves with five teeth fallen out and people with bad breath, stinky teeth, and ... |
| Rainseeker: | Will they make toys and pendants out of the teeth that fall out? |
| Toady: | I guess they could, although there might be a butchery prohibition on using sentient, or sapient, whatever you want to say, teeth and so they'd bury them I guess before they die ... I guess when they die they'd put them in the tomb with them. |
| Capntastic: | Are there gums? |
| Toady: | They don't have gums right now, they just have heads. They don't even have tongues right now, I want to put in tongues before I release it, but right now they don't have gums, they just have head and the teeth fit in the head, and the gums are assumed to be part of that. But yeah if we had gums you could have gingivitis and other kinds of periodontal disease or whatever they're called. I think it would be cool to have that. But putting in cavities without any kind of preventative things? I'm not sure historically what's going on there, but it seems like a low move to put in cavities first and not have anything that can be done about them, because then every game that you play for ten years you wouldn't be able to see any of your dwarves because the miasma would be choking up the hallway; all these nasty rotted dwarves walking around ... |
| Capntastic: | He has lost a tooth lately. |
| Rainseeker: | I'm seeing a picture of teeth scattered everywhere in the fortress. |
| Toady: | Yeah, so you want to make sure it doesn't get out of control, when you remember not to let it get out of control anyway. So I'd be curious to know about what the history of dental care is and how bad it got; dwarves could just run around with platinum teeth after a few years or whatever ... gold teeth and all kinds of different jewelled teeth ... maybe every just got these massive shiny grills after a while. |
| Rainseeker: | That makes sense for a successful fortress. |
| Toady: | That's just how dwarves work. |
| Rainseeker: | That's how they roll. |
| Toady: | So it's possible that it could end up that way instead. I'm certainly not against that kind of thing, of course when I sit here and talk enthusiastically about that kind of stuff, it's obviously not a priority either. I hate to promise so many things when I'm just talking about what's possible now that we do have teeth, so I wouldn't expect it in the immediate future, but it can be done now; we have the teeth. |
| Capntastic: | Remember Dwarf Fortress fans: brush daily and use floss for a healthier smile. |
| Rainseeker: | Don't end up like Urist McDwarf. All his teeth have to be granite. |
| Capntastic: | ... early grain milling techniques where they use the stone grinder, what's the word for it? |
| Toady: | A quarn? |
| Capntastic: | Bits of the granite would break off amid the flour, and that's why peasants had bad teeth. |
| Toady: | It's bad enough to hit some weird chicken bone or something, but hitting a piece of stone when you're eating a loaf of bread kinda sucks. |
| Rainseeker: | Those peasants must have been stoned quite often. (sfx vox: rimshot) |
| Capntastic: | Same with ancient Egyptians, because they had sand in everything. Make a joke about that! |
| Rainseeker: | Well you can walk like an Egyptian and you can eat like an Egyptian. |
| Toady: | That's right. |
| Rainseeker: | Well, this is the end of another podcast and we appreciate everyone joining us. Thank you Tarn for your illuminous help. |
| Toady: | You're welcome, and thanks to the Capn. And we should thank Ollieh for the music and also Emily Menendez for our special guest music, and mallocks, the mallocks is thanked for the transcripts. Were there other people to thank? |
| Rainseeker: | Everyone who donated this month. |
| Toady: | Somebody wanted me to give a shout out to gaming Steve, there's the shout out. So I guess there's the contest as well ... Now that the new version is up we can have our first contest, we're thinking of having you guys create a giant fortress suspended over the magma sea which no doubt many of you have found down there. We'll be posting details in a forum thread which should be up as you're listening to this, so go and check it out, there should be a vanilla and modded version of the challenge, and hopefully the buginess of the release won't interfere too much, or it's just something you guys will have to take in stride as you're tormented by the various beasts in the depths. Alright, so there we go. |
| Rainseeker: | It'll be fun, it'll be good. So thanks everyone for joining us, and thank you Tarn again, and we will see you next time. |
| Ollieh: | (musical postlude) |
| Capntastic: | Do you have those little cat treats that clean the teeth? |
| Toady: | Oh are we back on cavities? I guess I'm supposed to brush his teeth every day or something, right? I can't imagine that going off very well, he'd bite the crap out of me. Although Zach's got way more scratches, I don't know what it is, Scamps is just a little bit gentler with me, so I don't have any scratches on my hands but Zach is a little torn up. I'd be afraid though to exacerbate the situation by trying to jam something in his mouth. |
| Rainseeker: | Maybe he would enjoy chewing a little bit, you never know. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's just you have to worry if he's going to see the boundary between the toothbrush and your fingers, because he is troubled. |
| Rainseeker: | It was considerably more violent than the original. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's like they were fighting for their freedom like Braveheart or something. What's up with that? |
| Rainseeker: | It was great, it was awesome, I loved it. It even had dwarves in it, albeit beardless dwarf. Tweedledee and Tweedledum. |
| Capntastic: | I could see that maybe. |
| Toady: | (aside to Scamps) Hey stop that, stop that, this isn't necessary. (end aside) |
| Capntastic: | I actually have an ace up my sleeve. What I did was I have chicken soup here to get me in the mood, because chicken soup has biological matter, you use physics to heat it up, and the other thing ... what were the three things? |
| Toady: | Well we've got psychology and sociology and chemistry and physics. |
| Capntastic: | It's all those. Chemistry? It's got minerals ... |
| Rainseeker: | I have children who are going to be making noise in the background, so we may have to redo a take or two. |
| Capntastic: | Uh-oh. I don't think we've ever had to do that before. |
| Rainseeker: | And I'm having a sandwich delivered to me in a second, which I made myself and set aside into the oven to toast, so that should be being delivered in a moment by my lovely and beautiful helper Jennifer. |
| Capntastic: | Always good. Let's just keep yawning for a couple of minutes. |
| Rainseeker: | This is generating content for the end of the podcast. |
| Toady: | (yawns) |
| Capntastic: | So at this point you've been up forty eight hours straight, just coding away. |
| Toady: | Well I slept a little bit ... I only got up at two o'clock, I slept for a while in there. But I've been working quite a lot, mostly getting around five or six hours sleep. There's been quite a bit of progress from the way it started back when I handed the thing out on valentine's day. It's been a couple of weeks ... three weeks, but there's a lot of things that have changed. I don't know if people are satisfied with what they've got, if it's just miserable ... |
| Rainseeker: | I'm not miserable. |
| Capntastic: | I think people will be happy. |
| Toady: | I know the military screen is still pretty awful, hopefully the squad view is better now. |
| Rainseeker: | One moment. |
| Capntastic: | Sandwich handoff. We're going to hear gunshots, because this deal's going to go bad. |
| Toady: | Yeah? |
| Capntastic: | Yeah. They're going to hand him the sandwich in a briefcase. |
| Toady: | It depends if the sandwich was cut. |
| Capntastic: | That is too funny, I don't know why. |
| Rainseeker: | (off mic) I did not ask for it to be cut. |
| Capntastic: | That needs to make it into the outtakes. |
| Toady: | That could even be an intake. |
| Rainseeker: | Dog gonnet, I'm going to have to shut my bird up, hang on a second. |
| Capntastic: | I need to get an animal for my room, just to make noise. |
| Toady: | You've got to get a bear, a beer drinking bear. |
| Capntastic: | What can we name him? |
| Toady: | Bearski ... or something. Beer ... Beer the bear. Beerbear the bear. (aside to Scamps) Alright baby Scamps, you're just going to relax right here, just relax, don't claw my face, just relax. |
| Capntastic: | I wrote some notes. |
| Toady: | We can talk about science. |
| Capntastic: | I have a picture of a pine tree, and a picture of a meteor on this note card. So physics is really like a meteor, because that's fire and metal, and gravity is pulling it down towards the pine tree, which would burn. Then there'd be a crater, and your dwarves would go into the crater. |
| Toady: | There goes the right speaker onto the floor. |
| Rainseeker: | Okay, timeout ... I don't think I can use the past three minutes. |
| Rainseeker: | I have an announcement to make. |
| Toady: | Yeah? |
| Capntastic: | Congratulations. |
| Rainseeker: | Thank you. |
| Toady: | That's right. |
| Rainseeker: | Today is my birthday. |
| Capntastic: | Happy birthday. |
| Toady: | So this is going to be the first podcast where we have someone age over the podcast. |
| Capntastic: | He's going to be growing a beard. |
| Rainseeker: | I was wondering what would happen if you had a goblin kidnapping a child and he came of age as he's in the bag. |
| Toady: | I'm actually not sure ... do they age when they're ... I hope they age when they're in confinement, it's quite possible they don't ... Age plus plus plus plus plus plus plus plus (yawn) I guess I won't be able to find it. Oh no they do, they do because I changed how it works. I used to increment an age counter, just like plus plus plus plus, but now I just keep track of the birthdays so you don't have to do that, so they automatically age. They might not die of old age then, when they're in the bag though. |
| Capntastic: | Immortality device. |
| Rainseeker: | It's a Bag of Immortality. |
| Toady: | (sfx vox: trumpet voluntary; She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain) |
| Capntastic: | There's this question here, I don't know if it's really relevant but I think it'd be interesting for the outtake selection, but someone asking about the flat chains in Banach spaces, which a lot of people are curious about. Did you want to give that a shot? If people want your rambling, they're going to get it. |
| Toady: | I guess so, I guess they well. |
| Capntastic: | 'Dear Dr. Adams, since the upcoming podcast is about science and mathematics is the queen of sciences perhaps you could give in laydwarfs terms a general overview of your PhD dissertation, flat chains in Banach spaces. |
| Toady: | Well let's see what I can remember, it's been a while since I've thought about this stuff, so I'm sure I'm going to forget lots of things. |
| Menendez: | (backing) |
| Toady: | (mathematics in chorus - it doesn't transcribe well) So in general if you've got ... my paper kind of, overall we're considering what are called minminal surfaces so if you take ... given a wire, you've got a minimal surface etcetera, etcetera, so what are the parameters you need? ... It's not the straight line distance between two points anymore but kind of like how far ... If you change the distance function on that, so maybe you've heard of the taxi cab distance in New York City, like how many blocks up, how many blocks over, that kind of thing ... But in any case, I've rambled a bit, but I just generally proved that these minimal surfaces exist in more complicated spaces and there's been a lot of subsequent work, and work that was going on at the same time in more general spaces, all kinds of different stuff. Fascinating, fascinating stuff ... I haven't really been keeping up the past couple of years. |
| Toady: | I guess you could take the twenty minute rambling there, let it ramble for three minutes but then take another minute and a half of the rambling and put it over my original rambling, so it's like there's two of me talking, then put a third one on it, and it'll just kind of degenerate. |
Dwarf Fortress Talk #9, with Rainseeker, Capntastic and Toady One, transcribed by mallocks
| Rainseeker: | Welcome to another episode of Dwarf Fortress Talk. This is episode number nine, I'm Rainseeker and this here is Capntastic: |
| Capntastic: | Hello! |
| Rainseeker: | And our illuminous leader, Tarn Adams, also known as Toady One. |
| Toady: | Illuminous ... Is that like shining or something? |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, you're glowing. |
| Capntastic: | Intermittently. Blinking. |
| Rainseeker: | So what we're going to talk about today, ladies and gents, is what's going on for the new release and we're also going to address a much maligned topic. |
| Toady: | Maligned ... I guess when people vote against it they're ... |
| Rainseeker: | Kobolds. We're going to talk about kobolds today, kobold society, kobold mating rituals ... All of the above. |
| Capntastic: | Kobold songs, chants and other limericks. |
| Toady: | (limerick, in kobold) |
| Capntastic: | Also all of your favourite kobold recipes. |
| Toady: | That's right, and does the kobold lay eggs? |
| Rainseeker: | This is a mystery that no man has yet solved. |
| Toady: | We don't have eggs yet, so we can never answer the question. Like 'what came first, the chicken or the kobold egg?' And it'll have to be the chicken. |
| Capntastic: | I just imagine kobolds stealing each other's kobold eggs. That's why they are all such good large families, because they don't know who belongs to who. |
| Rainseeker: | That would make sense. That would be very entertaining as a matter of fact. Steal each other's younglings before they're hatched. |
| Capntastic: | And then someone hatches a chicken and then things are just ... 'Whoa ... This is obviously ... a blessing.' |
| Toady: | I guess they have to steal other people's eggs, like steal eggs from farms and stuff to keep their own eggs warm. |
| Rainseeker: | There you go. That makes sense. |
| Toady: | Maybe they steal a chicken to sit on their eggs. |
| Capntastic: | That would make sense too. And then they have a kobold guarding the chicken. |
| Toady: | So I guess that was our discussion about kobolds. Now we can move on. |
| Rainseeker: | We were actually going to discuss battle. Battle and ... |
| Capntastic: | ... gore and guts. |
| Toady: | It lost like twenty seven times so we figured we'd do it. |
| Rainseeker: | It would continue to lose, so we're just going to give a nod to it and move on. |
| Capntastic: | That's the essence of combat, you never give up. You keep punching and punching. |
| Toady: | Unless you can surrender and survive. |
| Rainseeker: | That's true! Okay that's a good question, are they going to be able to surrender? |
| Toady: | Yeah, I think that made the new dev pages, because you're going to need to be able to get people to submit so that you can figure out where the real villains are. And if you're a thief or otherwise criminal you're going to need to be able to surrender to the guards so you can get hauled off to have your fingers chopped off and stuff. So it's going to be an important new addition, and longer life all around. |
| Rainseeker: | Now if you lose your fingers does that mean that you've pretty much lost the game? You can't really do much else then I guess. |
| Toady: | I don't know ... we're not going to go chopping off your limbs haphazardly, we want people to have fun with the game, but at some point you probably cross a line and they decide to start taking pieces away. |
| Rainseeker: | 'McGillycuddy this is your last warning. You're losing your last leg now.' |
| Toady: | I guess you could continue to try and be a thief after that, but the whole getting away part might be tough. |
| Capntastic: | No one would suspect you! |
| Toady: | I guess you'd just need a getaway horse and a getaway person to lift you on the horse and tie you to it or something. |
| Capntastic: | See but then the horse gets implicated and they start taking pieces of the horse. This never ends. |
| Toady: | Yeah I guess you'd end up with a pyramid after a while, where you'd put the horses on the horses on the horses and then you'd get lifted up on the top. Yeah ... So that didn't quite make the dev pages but we're working on it. |
| Capntastic: | Alright forums draw a picture of this. What about mounts in general, how will you be able to harness a beast to use to run around really fast and trample people. |
| Toady: | When you're able to get livestock and buy a chicken or something early on you'll also be able to buy things like a horse ... although I imagine you could try to ride a cow or something, people ride cows all the time, just not for very long before they get tossed and the clowns have to come. So you'd be able to get a horse in that way ... I'm not a horse riding person, I'm not sure I've ever ridden a horse so I don't know much about saddles and bridles and all that kind of stuff, so we haven't made any decisions, I just don't know enough about that kind of thing. But assuming you're riding a horse in the proper way then the main problem becomes how velocity works in a tile-based system, because it's easier when you've got a spacial setup where you can move in really small increments to just make the horse go the way it's going, and you can just point this angle and go in this direction and so on. With our game I don't know if we'll have to reduce the direction the horse is going to sixteen different ways ... probably the same as the boats are going to work; a boat might only point four directions but it'll be able to travel in many directions, like up-up-over, up-up-over, or something like that. So I'm not sure how many directions the horses are going to have, if it's going to be like that, or the horse could just have eight directions just like you can walk, and it can have a velocity. The velocity means that you'd be moving faster, you'd be taking more turns to other people's turns, not combat turns necessarily but movement turns - because we're going to separate combat and movement turns - and then your horse will be moving quickly, but if the horse is going at a full gallop you won't just be able to stop on a dime and turn around. You'd probably have to turn the horse and then I don't know if you'd press over and that would be like filing an intent to turn, but you press over and the horse continues forward and then in that movement forward, when it moves one tile it also changes the direction of the horse by forty five degrees: then you're moving diagonally. Then you can keep turning your horse and then you'd just kind of roll around in a circle, you'd move in an arc as you tried to change your direction by a hundred and eighty degrees. Or you could just slow down your horse, you'd take a tile or two to slow down and then you could stop and turn around, if you want to do it that way. The only problem there that makes that difficult at all is the question of path finding when you've got a velocity like that. That's mostly the same because once people build a path they'll just be able to control their animal's velocity to follow the path. The only problem is if the pathfinding algorithm says 'oh, you just need to go backwards four steps to get where you want to go' and your horse is speeding forward you can't go backward four steps to get where you'd want to go. So you'd have to have a little part right in the beginning of the pathfinding that handles the arcs and handles that stuff, but that's an easier problem because it's a really local question, like 'how do I get my animal turned around so I can start this path' or 'how can I gracefully circle so that I meet my path four steps down the line and then take my path'. So it's not like you need to think about anything four thousand tiles away; it should be an easy question. If you're in the middle of a labyrinth maybe none of the turning strategies would really work; you probably shouldn't be racing a horse full speed through a labyrinth anyway. |
| Rainseeker: | That's what great movies are made of. |
| Toady: | But in that case we'll probably have them stop the horse and then do the path so they don't have to worry about their speed or anything. So it's not a hard problem, I think we can have pretty cool velocities for the horses, and then you can do stuff like having the velocity of your animal add to the velocity of the strike - the strikes all have velocity numbers now anyway - it's just a trivial kind of one-line thing to tag that on there. Eventually when we get to the point where you can only hit giants in the legs or whatever then you can have being up on a mount provide that kind of differentiation so your head's safer ... I'm not sure what other things come up out of mounts. You probably have to take care of your horse, at the same time you have to take care of your livestock, so you have to make sure your horse is fed and watered and so on. I don't know if you had other questions about that ... |
| Rainseeker: | Would the mount have a morale check, so to speak? Like if it gets injured it might become afraid, or it might become afraid seeing a dragon in front of it and decide that 'no you're crazy, I'm not going to ride against a dragon'? |
| Toady: | Yeah that'll happen at the same time that people care about that, because they don't care either. The funny thing about when you're riding a mount is that the mount is the one making the movement decisions in the end because it's the one that does the pathfinding and it's the one that actually takes the steps. I think the way that's handled in sieges right now in dwarf mode is because it doesn't really matter if it's the rider or the horse or the beak dog or whatever thinking; the animal just thinks like a sieger; 'okay I'm going to attack the front gate' and it just goes and runs off there. But when you're riding your own horse in adventure mode it's a more complicated relationship, and if your horse freaks out then you would not be making the decisions for your horse anymore. For instance there are already morale check failures that occur in really extreme situations like if you get really wounded - you might have seen these occasionally in adventure mode but usually you don't get a chance to see them because the person dies shortly thereafter - but you see them run away. That would happen with your horse the second we put it in, it would run away in those circumstances, depending on how the control mechanism works, if whenever you press a button to turn your horse if you've got, at first at least, a wire directly into its brain to turn it or whatever then it's a different matter, and I'm not sure what's going to happen at first. You'd like to have it controlled in a multi-step scheme where you do something like pull on the reigns or however that works and that conveys a message to the creature that it should perform an action, and then you can have breakdown in that in a number of ways; like if your reigns were cut, or if your horse were freaked out then all of those things could have an effect which would be cool. So it'd be probably be best to do it correctly the first time we go through. |
| Ollieh: | (incidental music) |
| Rainseeker: | Let's talk about martial arts. So I see that you have specific skills for fighting monsters, you have a skill for hand-on-hand combat against a dragon ... |
| Toady: | I'm not sure how specific it's going to be, but once we put in things like if you're fighting a giant who's way taller than you then it would make sense that if people have been doing that for centuries then they'd have strategies. I'm not sure what those are going to be specifically, if it just gives you a knowledge against a monster and a bonus then that would be the easiest way to do it, but it would be way more fun to have particular things that you can do, to jump up on them, or attack them when they're swinging down at you, people practicing strikes to hack a dragon in the head when it comes down to bite them or whatever. There might be stereotyped ways of doing that, although I don't think enough people fight dragons and survive to really learn that stuff ... it'd be kind of weird to see the training facilities with the giant cardboard dragons, people practicing against them ... |
| Rainseeker: | Well you never know when a dragon's going to show up ... |
| Toady: | The main thing with the martial arts is just fighting against other people, and 'martial arts' used in the most general sense, so it would include fencing, wrestling, boxing type stuff. So a simple example of martial art moves would just be something like boxing where you'd have people that are unskilled using their hands just throwing these punches where they just do their attack with the punch, and it might be that you can aim your shot - if someone has no skill at all and they're just fighting they can aim at someone's head - so when we put in aimed strikes you could throw a strike at the head, but then there would also be people who have some kind of skill in a particular randomly generated skill who might learn something like a left jab, and then the left jab would be more efficient, faster, have a longer range, than someone going all wild, and it would be better to learn those things. Then there's the idea of having different guards, just in a general sense perhaps, like you're holding your hands in front of your head ... It would be a really loose concept in general, because people generally aren't holding both of their hands to the left of their head, it doesn't need to get like that. Although we were thinking of having it so that you start with a general guard and you could move it higher or lower depending on ... like if you were fighting a dog or something it's not like you should be totally covering up the top of your head ... and then we were thinking ... there's this whole change of the combat flow thing where our overall goal is that if you stick a human in the arena and another human in the arena, and given them the same equipment and the same skills ... Right now if you play one and you assume control and you have those two guys fight each other you still basically do the roguelike thing where you press arrow arrow arrow and fight and you're flipping a coin to see if you're going to live. And there's sometimes when things dodge or when you fall over and you have to decide whether you're going to stand up or throw another strike or step back so that you can wait for the guy to come in so you can get a first strike on him, that kind of thing: so there's some skill involved that isn't just flipping the coins. But it's still the case that ultimately your chances aren't very good. I'm not saying that situation's necessarily going to change that much in terms of your survivability but we should at least make it more fun. You should be more survivable, you should at least be able to be more cautious about things, but basically what we're getting at is that you shouldn't just swing and then have the other person swing back, this is where we're getting at the idea of these reaction moments. So you could be standing there and someone could swing at you, but instead of how it is now where you press the button, it does the attack and then there's a delay of ten steps where you're recovering yourself so that you can attack again, when you attack it would start swinging an attack and then that attack is going to hit after five steps, and so during that time it could bust out and be like you see this incoming swing and you have a chance to react sometimes. So your reaction could be 'I want to try and block this thing' or 'I want to jump out of the way' or 'I'm going to try my little jujitsu move I've been practicing where I grab his wrist and twist him and get him on the ground', where you'd be balancing risks, balancing your skills and being more involved in the combat even though ultimately it's going to come down to some dice rolls still. Because there's that whole thing of if you've got an action game then you've got the player's skill as the determining fact - the player, the user of the program's skill - whereas if you've got an RPG it's more the character's skills that matter in the outcome of the combat and you just make some strategic decisions. The RPG part has to be respected a lot in this game, but you're going to be able to have more decisions to make. So if you end up doing something like someone throws a kick at your head and you have a high guard you'll have a chance to block it, but if you react to it you might be able to block the side of your head that it's coming toward, like how you actually have to be proactive if you want to stop someone from kicking you in the head. And you might then up with something like your left arm guarding the left side of your head ... we don't want to make it too complicated, but if your body is broken up into three zones or something, and your guard can just be general or you might be guarding one of those zones more than others but after you do a specific block or something for a time one of your grasping limbs might be blocking a particular side of your head just briefly. It's not something where you're going to be controlling yourself like a marionette but it's just going to be for text and the situation that it describes the announcements. |
| Captnastic: | 'You raise your hand to block', 'you bring your shield down', that sort of stuff? |
| Toady: | Yeah, and it'll be talking about that in the announcements and it will also lead to situations, so if someone tries to kick you in the side of your head and you raise your arm to block it, it says that, but then if some kobold comes up with a dagger and tries to stab you in the gut then that left hand is not going to be available for your defence without a good reaction roll. So multiple opponents should be harder and you'll be strategically trying to get into situations where you're not surrounded. Even more than usual: right now they get bonuses to attack you but you're not really tied up the same way. So that should help a bit. For people who don't want to deal with that, especially if you're fighting people you know you can beat you can just have it do the thing it's going to do with them which is select the options for you, so if you get attacked it selects an option for you, so you can play it the same way if you want and it'll just have more interesting text for you to read. But you should also be able to make the decisions, and that should change things a lot. We have that advantage in a turn based environment to be able to let you interact more with what's going on and stop and think about things and so on, so we should take advantage of that. It should turn out pretty well, we just don't want to overcomplicate by having directional attacks on each part of the bodies ... but the zones thing is a little tricky too, if you're laying down you'd have your head zone and your body zone and your leg zone but they'd all be low on the ground. We're hoping that something like the zones could be used to do the thing with the giants too, where the giant's head zone is, when he's standing, is way out of reach for a typical person, and you might have attacks like a jab or some kind of sword strike that comes up that can only be used to hit the upper zones and then a person would be able to block that kind of attack by guarding their top zone from below ... not something that you have to set up in advance, you wouldn't be holding these weird guards when you're walking around, but it would be kind of a blocking event ... The things we're thinking about is like, we want to be able to do things like blocking head kicks or whatever in specific ways, so it would say what your arms are doing, but you don't want to walk around with ... When you see people fighting they're moving their arms, they might be holding their left arm near their head and their right arm near their body, but then they'll switch it up and they'll have the right arm near their head and the left arm near their body, and it would be really annoying to have to switch every turn to get that behaviour, it's like 'I want to do this and this and then step toward the guy, and we're still twenty feet away from each other, and then I want to do this and this ...' So there'd be just this general guard concept and that kind of specific blocking would be something that you'll only do when you're being attacked. Now there are exceptions to that, like if you want to hold both of your arms blocking the back of your head when you're running away or something ... you run away, you're being shot at, you hold both of your arms over the back of your head, maybe your arms will get shot instead of the back of your head ... It'd just be a funny and embarrassing way to go out, but you'd be able to say 'I want to do that'. That would be in an improved wrestling menu or something where you'd pick the limb and pick what you want to do with it, but we don't want to get too Twistery, we don't want to get too strange. It's unrealistic to have the arms act completely independent of each other, that's just not how it works; there's some independence but you don't want to have 'I want to punch him in the head with my right hand and simultaneously punch him in the gut with my left hand while I'm kicking him with both of my legs' ... It'd be kind of goofy. I guess when people are clapping ears, or whatever happens in the action movies, that would be an attack simultaneously, but it's not like those attacks are knocking anybody out, so you'd get severe minuses for your velocity if you're not putting your body into it, you're just swinging both of your arms at once and your whole body can't be used to increase the momentum in either direction so it ends up being wimpy. So we'll just account for that stuff, and we don't want it to be much more complicated to use than it is now, it's half just getting the text to be good and getting it so that multiple opponents are way more difficult: things like that. So it should be fun, it ultimately comes down to - because we've got character skill to account for - it still ultimately comes down to some coin flipping, but you can build your advantages and take advantage of things and take advantage of the AI making mistakes more than you could previously. We're not going to be satisfied with it until just creating two guys in an arena and having them fight is something that you'd want to do for fun sometimes. Right now you do it just to see them explode, or you're testing a mod, but it doesn't sell itself as a thing to do on its merits as a game. Hopefully when we're done with all the martial arts and guards that'll be a lot more fun, and you'll be able to do things like, when we get the mounts we'll probably allow mounts in the arena then too so you can test them out and have fun with that, learning how to use them. |
| Rainseeker: | How are you going to plan on improving the skills in adventure mode as far as martial arts is concerned. Are there going to be a lot of different martial arts skills or is there just one that you practice, or do you go to seek a trainer, or how are you planning ... |
| Toady: | We're thinking that you'd start with something ... they're probably going to be entity dependent to some extent. There are questions to be answered there. There are general martial art skills, and that's what we just have under skill striker, skill sword; the actual skill that there is in the game right now. And then you tack specific techniques on top of that that aren't part of becoming familiar with sword fighting necessarily but becoming familiar with the particular style of sword fighting, like fencing. The issues come up when you're like ... is a certain move in fencing the same as it would be in kendo, or are they related, are you just using different words for the same stuff, what are the actual differences ... That kind of question is basically going to be answered, that's what sword skill is, that's the commonality, and whether we break that up into more sections or not is an open question, we're probably not going to at first. That means that when you learn a combat style it would basically be an entity thing that would be a specific thing like kung fu or fencing or whatever, and that would be something that if you start as a fighter in an entity you would have some of that information, some of that skill already, some of the specific moves that you can use when you're fighting. Then it's a matter of ... there are a bunch of other skilled fighters in the entity and as you build your reputation just like people would be throwing free items and places to sleep and stuff like that at you and you'll be able to have people join up with you and go on little adventures with you if you have a good reputation because they trust you because you've been defending them against bandits and night creatures and all that kind of thing, then you can just have someone help you out, someone will want to teach you stuff, or you'll be sparring with people or whatever. It's not necessarily something that you're going to act out necessarily, it could just use the farming mechanism where you pass a season and just say 'I want to pass a season hanging out with these crazy mead hall guys and they can teach me about how to kill boars', or 'I want to hang out with these guys and learn how to box' or 'I want to hang out with these guys and learn how to fence' or 'learn how to do judo throws'. Then you'd increase your repertoire, you'd trade in your time and the years of your life for some more skills, and you could then practice them on people as well when you're actually fighting, and you could get better at them that way, but you won't learn new skills that way, unless you fight people long enough and then you suddenly realise 'I know how to do the eagle punch all of a sudden! I understand the deep mystery!' There could be things like that especially if we have universes that are move like Fist of the North Star, then that kind of thing would start to happen, but mostly we're thinking training with warriors and so on. |
| Rainseeker: | Cool. |
| Toady: | I don't remember if I put it up or not, but it would be funny if you learn enough stuff that you'd be able to create your own style and have it live on after you, you could teach it to other people and it'd be kind of cool to have your next guy, and there would be these guys that you were hanging out with in your previous game and they all know the punch that you named after yourself, it would be amusing. It should be pretty cool, and just trying to work that stuff into the fights and getting it so it all works together and isn't too annoying should be pretty cool. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | Capn, you want to add to this? |
| Capntastic: | So what about climbing? Like if you're fighting a giant and you climb up its back and stab it in the neck? |
| Toady: | Yeah, like all the old Ray Harryhausen movies had them jumping up on the back of the cyclops and hacking on it and stuff, and people bring up Shadow of the Colossus too, which is cool. All that stuff's pretty cool, the question would be how can you do that in our kind of visually impoverished environment, and would it be as fun? It's obviously not going to be as exhilarating in some sense, but it would still be entertaining. We have that thing up on the dev pages where it's like 'being able to jump up and ride on your opponents' and I guess it would just be like that. Depending on how those zones work out you can jump either onto the middle zone of a larger creature, like if you're jumping up on a troll you could try to jump and grab a hold of its back ... I don't know if you'd be doing that twin daggers climb up its back, but ... |
| Rainseeker: | That might smart. |
| Toady: | Yeah, you might get smacked by a big troll fist ... It's interesting to think of how it all works together, because there's wrestling ... because during a brief time during the throw the guy is really off balance but he might be riding you in a sense even though he's so off balance or in the process of a slow motion fall that he can't really do much with it. Although I guess there have been a few weird times where they recover and choke people with their legs when they're being picked up by them and so on, there's some weird stuff. So that's one thing where you're kind of being carried by somebody, partially, and you're kind of falling, and you're kind of riding them, and then there's riding a horse which is like a Shadow of the Colossus thing, and then there's the actual version where you're climbing up a dragon or jumping up on an oliphaunt like Legolas in the movie, climbing all over its trunk and shooting it in the brain and all that kind of thing. So there's all those different things and the question is do those play nice together, is that all one unified system, because then you can do that. But you don't want to have to go up to your horse and be like 'attack horse: jump on its back' and you're like 'you are now riding your horse', that'd be kind of silly. We haven't obviously come up with the specifics there, but it would be fun and fitting with all of the fantasy predecessors to be able to jump up on a large beast, so it's important to do that. I guess once you're on it in a simplified version it's like 'you are riding on the dragon's left lower leg' and you'd be 'move up' and you'd cry up the body part tree, it could do a path search on it or something, and you climb up the leg and then you're on the dragon's lower body, and then it's like 'do you want to try and jab your spear into the dragon's wicked spleen or do you want to go up higher?' and you could climb up and eventually be riding around on the dragon's neck. Then you'd be able to get attacks on it but it would be able to get attacks on you that you'd have more difficult dodging, or it could go to the ground and try to smash one of its zones into the ground. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah I don't want to just give him digestion problems, I want to actually kill the darned thing. |
| Toady: | By the time we're done you're not going to have access to a dragon's head all that often. When we get the thing in where a combat move takes time to execute then if a dragon tries to bite you and you're a good enough fighter that you get the reaction on that then it would say 'the dragon is coming to bite you, what do you want to do?' and that body part would now be accessible to you, it'd be like 'well I'd like to try and hack his head off', and that would be an option that you can go for. |
| Rainseeker: | Take that risk. |
| Toady: | Or 'I'd like to jump on the dragon's head when he's coming to bite me' and then you could jump up on in when he's coming, then he'll miss his attack and you'll be riding a dragon's head ... and your friends won't be able to help you because when the attack is over you'll be lifted well up into space; however high zone one is set to be off of the ground where they can't reach you, and then you'll be sitting there trying to stab a dragon's eyes out or something, and he'd be sitting there trying to wipe you off like a cat with its claws, or maybe it'd just shake ... |
| Rainseeker: | Once you get this mechanic installed you should have a contest in arena mode to see how long people can ride the dragon, before you get bucked off. |
| Toady: | I guess that's the same thing with the cows when you jump up on a bull, and I guess if you try and ride a chicken then it should just get squashed. |
| Rainseeker: | I guess you could wrestle the chicken. |
| Toady: | Their heads come right off don't they? So you'd have to account for that somehow. So it should be intriguing. Now with wrestling ... the first thing is obviously improving the wrestling interface which is garbage right now, but once you get beyond that ... just having a two step process, where you're like 'what am I using, what am I doing with it?' instead of a list - it's like 'here's a list four hundred things long' - then that would probably be enough to repair that. But there are some things with wrestling, like really basic things, that aren't really accounted for right now. So every grab is like playing Twister again, you can grab this with this, grab this with this, grab this with this, and it knows who has the advantage in each of those things, like 'my hand is grabbing his arm, and he doesn't have his arm locked around my head' then I have the advantage in that, but it doesn't have any positional information over all, like 'this guy is sitting on top of me' or 'we're tied up together on the ground' or 'he's on top of me but I'm controlling him with my arms and legs' and there are things like that that are totally not accounted for right now, and we're not quite sure how we're going to do that. It's easy when you're doing human on human, it's easier to say what you're going to do, but it has to be a general system. It's something we're just not quite sure about. And then when you are squatting on top of somebody or whatever how is that related to writing again, how is that related to climbing on somebody? All of this two people related to each other stuff ... It seems like there's a system there that wants to come out and be unified, and that would be the best way to do it, but again like I was saying with the horse, you want to have special cases too. Then you'd be able to do things that feel more like actual wrestling, like someone's on top of you but then you do a sweep and now you're on top of him, and there's different kinds of being on top of somebody so that sometimes it's easy to wrestle and sometimes it's easier to punch, or whatever ... just a notion of an overall advantage. Even standing up when you're clinched up together like the boxers when they hug each other or those muay thai guys, or even when people's swords are tangled up then there's also a notion of an advantage sometimes. It's a holistic thing, it's not like the Twister stuff again. So we'll have to work on that, I don't have specific ideas there aside from what I've said just now, so ... That should help a lot though with getting away from the Twister style wrestling and just being like 'who's got the advantage here? Who can better initiate the throws and who is able to hit who?' It should be good, overall we're just hoping to make the combat more interesting. That's the kind of thing you say when it's like ninety seven degrees in here like it is now, it's like 'we want to make the game fun! I think all the time about making the game fun!' |
| Rainseeker: | Capn do you have any other ideas or questions about combat? |
| Capntastic: | Goofy unskilled flailing attacks. |
| Toady: | It's a fun thing to think about in general when you're talking about situations like 'I've got a dwarf and he's my carpenter now, even though he's never done it in his life' and the dwarf starts spitting out like 'that's a regular table, that's a regular table, that's a regular table'. Now if you took someone like me and told me to build a table, you wouldn't quite get a regular table, I think. You'd get what might be called a shoddy, or crooked, or unbalanced, rocking table. |
| Rainseeker: | Yes I've been wondering about that. |
| Toady: | And that kind of thing ... that was up on the old dev pages, I don't remember if it was one of those reqs or bloats or whatever. It's like negative quality, and it's just like the whole thing with vices and virtues; if there's one way to be virtuous there are many ways to have a vice off of that virtue. So you can be courageous but you can also be inactive, or reckless, or you can be a coward. There's lots of different ways to screw up courage, just like there's a lot of ways to screw up a table. I don't know if we're going to go there ... I'm not sure negative quality is sufficient or if there's just like all kinds of ways to screw things up, but certainly when you're in combat if you have no skill with something then you're going to be getting off balance, or you're just going to whiff and miss entirely or trip and hit yourself ... chop off your own toe or something like that. Screwing up in all manner of ways. Your lack of expertise should be reflected in what happens ... trying to strangle someone to death and not knowing what you're doing can be a process I guess. Just like clumsily and inexpertly doing things ... There should be a use for the fighting skills in general, so that you can do that ... There's a skill for close range fighting now just called 'fighter', it's like 'I am a skilled fighter', and once you get up to there when you're a skilled fighter you should probably not really be an embarrassment no matter what you try and do: if you're fighting with an axe or if you're fighting with a mace, you should have stopped with the real garbage. It would just be an initial learning period for everybody, they get up to their skilled fighter part and then they're no longer ... |
| Rainseeker: | Unless somebody is particular bad, I suppose. |
| Toady: | Like a skilled fighter but their attributes are all garbage? |
| Rainseeker: | Well I don't know, maybe he's cowardly and so everything he does gets negatives to it when it's in battle. |
| Toady: | Oh yeah, well there's that whole other can of worms with the dwarven AI rewrite for job priorities and the whole virtue/vice thing for villains where we start thinking about instead of having happiness as a number just having more emotions to work with. Then yeah, anger, or adrenaline ... |
| Rainseeker: | I just remembered, my priority is not battle, it's thinking! I'm going to go think now! |
| Toady: | Having anger screw you up when you're fighting or having that kind of stuff, or just being totally scared, having that screw you up, that's certainly ... You'd hate to start with that sort of constitution as an adventurer probably, just always being a coward, but that runs into a whole larger conversation about whether or not adventurers should have emotion at all when they player's playing them ... There's a big question there about how much that interferes with your role playing. I think there's an ongoing discussion right now about that in one of the dev things, like whether or not it would be a good idea to have you get bored, so that you want to go off drinking and whoring or whatever you need to do, or sitting in your fancy leather couch so that you regenerate for your adventurer. It interferes with role playing ... |
| Rainseeker: | Kind of turning into The Sims at that point. |
| Toady: | Yeah. It interferes with role play to tell you what you're thinking , but at the same time it makes you act more like a real person. So it's a trick, and I don't like doing that, but it makes a lot of sense to, so it's a difficult decision. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Capntastic: | Now it's time to answer some of your favourite dwarf questions. Well, soon to be favourite questions. Urist McHippy wants to know if you'll ever be able to make soap without needing to hunt animals for tallow, and he adds 'after all the first soap was made by the Babylonians using vegetable oil in place of animal fat. |
| Toady: | Vegetable oil ... we don't have it written down specifically anywhere but it's so important and so ubiquitous in history I can't see us skipping it for too too too much longer. I don't know a thing about how to make it, whether or not you just take something and press it and squeeze it or something in some giant press, or if you use your feet like everything else, or if you do ... whatever. But yeah, you don't need fat and nasty oily melty stinky dead rotten bodies and stuff to have oil, so I'm all for olive oil and other kinds of oil. Whatever makes sense, the more education I receive on that subject, the more I will know how to do it. I'm all for it, I think it's important. |
| Rainseeker: | 'Have you read Roger Ebert's article about videogames not being art, and do you think Dwarf Fortress is art and why?' |
| Toady: | I've seen some of the things Roger Ebert's said, I don't remember if I read that article in particular but I think I knew basically where he's been coming from. I would not really call anything 'art' because it's such a difficult word, I'm not even sure it is a word ... if as a word it's meant to represent a concept in our heads that we all have a common understanding of and can be used for communication then it certainly doesn't qualify. You can ask specific questions though, it doesn't mean you dodge the question, you can ask specific questions. Like 'does Dwarf Fortress reflect something of the human condition or something that I am trying to communicate to other people so that they can become better people'. Certainly how the game is set up reflects on me in ways, reflects my world view, what I think about things; anytime I make a decision about mechanics to put in that's all coloured by my perceptions and things, and there are people that have drawn conclusions about that thing, or those kind of things and sent me emails about them. But it's not my main goal, and it's not something that ... while I'm conscious of it and make decisions being aware that that's how the process works, and sometimes you can do things like Liberal Crime Squad where you're trying to be funny about things but you're also trying to reflect on some aspect of society without making it some kind of mission ... There are elements of that, so I think videogames can certainly be approached from that perspective. I can't answer his particular comments just because I don't remember them well enough, like what he thinks a videogame can't do and what he thinks a movie can, and what he thinks books can do, and why doesn't videogaming have a Shakespeare yet, or if it can have one, or anything like that. I do think that games are different from those things by their nature, but I don't think that's simply a limitation; I think games can do things that movies and books cannot do. I think the most important thing probably is just to keep in mind the particulars of the questions that you're asking instead of just trying to put things into a category, just ask what's going on, what am I seeing here, what is it doing, and what is this person trying to do? Live your life and be happy with shit and stuff. |
| Rainseeker: | Well I mean yeah ... can art be interactive? |
| Toady: | Absolutely! The theatre. If you say theatre is art, then art can be interactive, there's all those improv theatres and stuff, and some of them try and say things about people, if that's what your criteria for art is. If you bring the audience members up on stage and interact with them and so on, and you're trying to get people to realise something or other you can do that very consciously. Whatever your criteria for art is, if it involves discussing something about what it means to be human theatre is obviously attempting to do that, and if it succeeds for certain people - and obviously different strokes for different folks - and I think theatre does succeed in doing that for people, changes people's lives, including the kind of theatre where people get the audience involved and so on ... and if you think that is artistic expression then a game should have certain stature, if you want to rate things. It's not something I care about or stay up at night thinking about, whether or not my game is artistic expression. I have a really different agenda than that, I do enjoy the games for the challenge of writing them, the escapism and that kind of thing; it's not crucial to me for the games I write if they somehow make you feel like you're a better human being or something. I know some people have said 'I think this videogame is art' and the artist's intention is not necessarily important there. If my idea is not that I'm on a mission to create artwork in a certain sense - like I say if I use the word 'art' people don't know what I'm talking about because it's not a word that has a shared meaning - so if I say I'm not going out of my way to make you a better person, let's say that. It's not my mission to go out of my way and make you a better person. But if some people report from the trenches that Dwarf Fortress has in fact made them think about something and that made them a better person then it's really just that it was a touchstone - like a lot of things are - to get you to think about things passively. It's not like ideas need to be communicated from one person to another for things to have an 'artistic effect', there just needs to be some meat there to play with. I don't know, I'm not an authority, but I imagine the guy who asked the question wanted to hear me yammer on about it, so ... |
| Capntastic: | But are movies games? |
| Toady: | All I know is that movies caught the same shit that Ebert is giving when they were young, and you have to sit back and not be a hypocrite. I think it's important to not be dismissive of things that he's saying though if he's being honest about it. Because I think it's a valid question to ask, how can a game make people think about their society or themselves or what's going on in their head the same way reading some 'important work' would do, and has a track record for doing. I don't know if games have the same track record, certainly Pacman didn't change my life. |
| Rainseeker: | Sure changed some marriages I think |
| Toady: | Videogames obviously changed my life in the sense that I'm writing them now and it's kind of all I do, but that's not the same because that happens with sports or whatever else. I'm not saying sports isn't artistry in a certain sense either but ... you know what I mean. So I think Ebert probably raises legitimate points in there but I think in part because he says he's never played videogames and then he brings up examples ... he posted something recently saying that he doesn't think they can be art but he doesn't want to talk about it anymore, and he admits he doesn't play them, and that he thought that that was good point; he doesn't play them and he should shut up about it. He said that himself if I remember, recently, after this latest shitstorm out of something he wrote. It's legitimate, people just need to sit back and think about the questions that are actually being asked, and the less the word 'art' is used, I think, the more can be gleaned from that discussion. |
| Rainseeker: | Here's a technical question; 'Recently in computer architecture the paradigm has shifted to multiple cores. I was wondering if Dwarf Fortress will support multiple threads eventually, and if so what timescale it will occur in.' |
| Toady: | It is my understanding that the SDL stuff is now multicored, with the graphics and the graphics display and so on. Now obviously people, when they're asking about it, that's one important point but people are curious like 'why can't I have seventeen dwarves pathing at once' or 'why can't you take that stupid ass weather simulation and make that go happen on some core, preferably not at all'. It's complicated, and from what I gather it would be a really difficult long project and it's probably not going to happen. That's what I gather. Now there are some things, like these micro multithreading of a smaller process just to get through one loop faster, it can break it up and then come back without it being a case of running path finding at the same time as you're running a fluid simulation, and that stuff, the more I know about that the better, probably, and maybe that's feasible. As for splitting up the path finding and stuff: some people have discussed about how that might work, but as for whether anything is actually going to come of that, I wouldn't bet on it anyway. |
| Capntastic: | Alright, that was Dwarf Fortress Talk number nine, I hope you had a fun time. |
| Rainseeker: | We sure did. |
| Capntastic: | This is Capntastic signing off. |
| Rainseeker: | Bye bye from Rainseeker. |
| Toady: | That's right, bye bye. I should say bye from Toady One. |
| Rainseeker: | And this week we're making some changes in the podcast, I hope that you didn't notice. |
| Toady: | Yeah, that's kind of wishful thinking on my editing in the future which is going to happen. |
| Rainseeker: | Okay so who do we have to thank? |
| Toady: | Ollieh and mallocks and all the people that asked questions this week, and all of our listeners. |
| Ollieh: | (musical postlude) |
| Toady: | (aside to Scamps) Mister! That's not for chewing! Mister! Mister. Speakers are not for chewing. Speakers are not for chewing, pens are not for throwing in the garbage. This is a lesson you can learn in your life. You got it? No, I didn't think so. (end aside) |
| Capntastic: | Scamp was enlightened. |
| Rainseeker: | A paradigm shift for him. |
| Rainseeker: | Wait, Capn, are you thinking of starting a barbary business? |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, this is all my adventure, I want to make bread, I want a barber, and I want to raise sheep. |
| Rainseeker: | I have five birds in the house, I have eighteen birds in the garage ... Not including the babies that are currently there ... I think I have six babies right now in the garage, and I think there's some laying on eggs right now. |
| Toady: | So twenty nine plus eggs? It's been a while since I had to do any math. |
| Rainseeker: | You can't do math! You have no background in it. |
| Toady: | Well not a lot adding, we stopped adding after a while, out of practice. People are always like 'wow you have a math degree, does that mean that you can multiply three digit numbers in your head and stuff?' I'm like 'not really ... unless they've got a bunch of zeroes in them, a hundred times two hundred, stuff like that'. |
| Rainseeker: | That's a hard one. |
| Toady: | Yeah, you have to count the zeros and stuff. Or I guess you could do those things where you have two hundred hundreds is twenty thousands ... I don't know. |
| Rainseeker: | There's a little math trick for you guys. |
| Capntastic: | Impress your friends. |
| Toady: | Impress your friends by counting on your fingers, and be just like me. Yeah, so there's stuff going on, there's multiple birds. (aside to Scamps) What are you doing back up here Mister Scamps? You want to press things on the keyboard? Is that how you work? You're just a bad boy, just leaning your lardy haunches over on the F keys, that's bad.(end aside) |
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. |
Dwarf Fortress Talk #10, with Rainseeker, Capntastic and Toady One, transcribed by mallocks
| Rainseeker: | Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Dwarf Fortress Talk. This is Rainseeker here and I'm here with our illustrious leader, Tarn Adams. |
| Toady: | Hi hi, I'm Tarn Adams. |
| Rainseeker: | Also known as Toady One. I'd like to celebrate our newest podcast because it's been a long time coming and we're finally back with our yammering. That's today's topic ... Toady yammers. |
| Toady: | That's right. I'm coming off of little sleep and that should enhance the process ... I don't remember why we didn't choose a topic this time ... |
| Rainseeker: | We were not sure what to choose, I think ... |
| Toady: | Yeah ... We read through the thread but just didn't settle on anything. We might go back to topics or not depending on which way the wind blows I guess. |
| Rainseeker: | And we are changing up our format today: we're going to be breaking up this podcast into two segments, the first one is Toady and I, the second one is Toady and the Capn. Basically we could not co-ordinate our schedules this month so we just wanted to get it done. |
| Toady: | Yeah there were enough aborted scheduling problems ... and Tarn disappearing and doing things, and then people getting sick and all this other stuff. It won't hurt to have an extra episode inserted between the times when we can actually all get together. |
| Rainseeker: | And actually we could insert Capn's voice ... and insert it right ... here. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah. |
| Rainseeker: | Okay, so that was ... |
| Toady: | That was Capn ... I almost heard it. I should pretend I did hear it. Hey Capn! (as Toady-Capn) How you doing guys? (end Toady-Capn) I'm doing alright. |
| Rainseeker: | But no really, that was magic editing. |
| Toady: | Magic editing. |
| Rainseeker: | Alright, so. You seem pretty excited about this new release, are you happy? |
| Toady: | Yeah ... It's still bumpy because we moved to a new compiler and the new compiler cut out Windows 2000 and I think Windows XP Service Packs 1 and 2 or something like that, and it seems to also cut out Mac ... not just the PowerPCs but also the 10.4 operating system, that's my understanding right now. There may or may not be ways around that and that's all kind of in a slow process ... I haven't got anything definitive at this point. So that's going to be an ongoing adventure. |
| Rainseeker: | Okay, so we got the new version up and we are looking at what new features; do you want to summarise? I know people can read it but ... |
| Toady: | The main feature this time is that adventure mode's broken because we added the new villages and we didn't want to delay another month to put adventure mode back together and that's just what we're going to do in October instead. Mainly because there's not a lot to do in adventure mode before, so we didn't feel like we were cutting people out too much to have it delayed for a month, and there were some dwarf mode bugs we wanted to fix ... I can't remember them off the top of my head, but it fixed a few annoying bugs in dwarf mode for this time around. But we have set the stage for the rest of the game now, the changes to come, by setting up these civilization populations that are much larger, and having the sites spread out so that there's now farmland surrounding cities – that don't exist yet – but they're marked with plus signs on the map right now, that's where the towns and cities are going to be for the humans. The sprawl of the civilizations for the other races isn't as well defined yet ... |
| Rainseeker: | Can you still embark on a human civilization or any civilization ... |
| Toady: | No. This was one of the main hiccups with the release. Partially because the site sprawl with all these villages is completely useless right now, people still mainly look at the map as 'where am I going to embark in dwarf mode?' It's kind of silly right now embarking on a human site, there are no consequences for doing that, no problems that they have with you doing that, just sitting there digging up their houses and collapsing them and stuff ... also because of the way the new sites are stored I wasn't sure that I wanted to get in to the overlap situation there until we actually care about supporting that properly, so it's just not allowed. But because the sites sprawl so much and lay claim to so much more territory it sections out large portions of the map that you can't embark on. So right now that just looks like a straight penalty because there's nothing to be gained by just taking away embark sites and not adding anything else to the game; so I can understand that being a downer for people. So for this week I just put in some options that are easier to get at to control how much the sites spread out and made the default map – the medium setting map that you get by doing 'Create a New World' – just not have so much sprawl as it stands. That'll probably be coming back, but we want to handle a few things, make it justify its existence and also decrease its memory footprint a bit before we bring it back. But this is the direction things are going to go. The only reason, as it stands, to have calm empty areas surrounded by civilizations that go on for a thousand years that would have exploited that area is to have new places for your dwarves to go that are calm and surrounded by other civilizations. So you might want to have some areas like that but they should be able to justify their own existence, and once there are more things going on in world generation it won't be that hard because in Europe there was resettlement going on all the time; new groups moving in over where the old ones were, fighting them off but sometimes just resettling areas that had been emptied or ravaged previously, that didn't then get resettled because of whatever was going on at the time. So there are plenty of ways that we can be respectful of keeping a simulation going, a kind of real world simulation, and all the good things that come out of trying to be respectful of that, while at the same time maintaining the integrity of the dwarf mode choices. Now that whole situation's going to change a bit when we finally get to the start scenarios where you have a reason why your fortress is doing what it's doing, but those will still be ... it'll still be the same choices of places you can go, so it's a problem that ... |
| Rainseeker: | It should be interesting too, right, during world generation, because you're going to eventually have the leaders making decisions about what to do, right? So depending on their personalities they could leave stuff alone maybe for religious reasons ... |
| Toady: | Sure. I forgot what they were called, the Urnfield culture or something ... it's one of these ancient cultures where the reason they're named the Urnfield culture is because they have all these fields that they left open, and they left behind the urns where they buried people, and I think that's all they know about them. There could be areas like that where your dwarves go 'oh, what is this nice calm peaceful river location that's completely untouched' and then you go to the river and right as you're digging down and thinking about defeating the aquifer or whatever you're thinking about, you find all kinds of interesting buried things, and then when the human's arrive it's like ... |
| Rainseeker: | You've defiled our ... |
| Toady: | I guess the human traders wouldn't arrive at all, they'd know; once you start exporting they see all these dwarven trade wagons being exported out of their burial grounds and they're like 'are you selling the bones of our ancestors?' |
| Rainseeker: | But they're very handsome trinkets, sir! |
| Toady: | Care for this skull cup? ... No. |
| Rainseeker: | No! Aunt Mary! No! |
| Toady: | Nothing but trouble, coming out of that. That points to why it feels weird to have people embarking on the human sites, although we had this conversation before and then I allowed embarking on the human sites, so part of it is really that the sprawl's a little difficult to manage; the way the sites are stored with this overlapping dwarf embark on the sprawl area. Because it used to just enlarge your embark site to encompass the three by three human site, but now the human sites can push sixteen by sixteen ... It's a little stranger to do that because your computer wouldn't work but it's not like it has to load the whole thing anymore either, it was just a little weird. It's not impossible, it's just delays and that kind of thing. |
| Rainseeker: | You've got to figure out a way to not cut buildings in half and stuff like that. |
| Toady: | That part I'm kind of handling already just because I've got small buildings now, these little cottages, I move them to dodge potential lines of cutting. The villages in the end will probably look five percent more square because of that, but it's the price you pay for having to avoid writing artificial intelligence that's like 'well, I'm in half of my house right now, and if that guy moves right then, well I'll be in the other half of my house too'. I wouldn't want to inflict that on anybody. It's going to be that way with castles probably though, or especially things like city walls ... you can't really load in the entire city ... if the very largest cities encompass that entire sixteen by sixteen area then you can't load the entire city, so it's going to need to understand what it means to run off the top of the wall or run through the inside of a wall, or run around either side of the wall. It's all doable, it's just going to be these little special cases probably, to handle that. |
| Rainseeker: | Out of curiosity, the human walls; are you going to make them be bigger than the normal one by one tile or is it going to vary, or ...? |
| Toady: | Like actual city walls? |
| Rainseeker: | Sure. And can you take them apart in dwarf mode? |
| Toady: | It's always a weird thing because if the city wall is built of pieces of stone it seems legitimate to me to have it just be one tile sections. But when you get to something like a log cabin the one tile sections become very weird, it's like you're taking out pieces of the log and you can put them back and replace them with another log. It seems very strange. I don't know if I'm ever going to deal with that ... it's low priority in a way because what we've got now kind of works and we're trying to race off toward the future for once instead of getting bogged down but that's the plan for October anyway, we'll see if that works out. But I imagine that the wall segments would be little pieces of stone that you can ... I mean the weird part is that you kind of just chip them out of there in any way without feeling that they have weight on top of them or whatever, I guess you're mining them out of there ... mining a tunnel through the walls, but getting this one boulder back. It's all very strange, but I expect it will be the same. The walls themselves are not going to be one tile thick in most cases. They'll be able to support towers ... the same kind of stuff you're going to build in dwarf mode. If you see those amazing city wall pictures, I don't remember the name ... there were like eighty seven towers surrounding the city, it was really cool. That kind of thing, and more! It's a fantasy game so if you need to go fifty or one hundred percent larger for your city walls for certain fantastic and amazing people then that's all good, right? Or make them out of glass or whatever. So it'll be cool, and we'll get to that sometime. Probably when we get to towns. Zach has really been gunning for castles, he's like 'you have these villages, but I want to have castles again, and not just those big squares that we made before but like an actual thing that looks nice.' There are so many things now that are essentially low hanging fruit, and now that we've sort of freed ourselves up so that October is like 'let's put something fun in adventure mode so that we've got a game there'. That's the cause of October. It's cool to be able to do that finally. We're still well aware that there are bugs and we'll be fixing bugs as usual, but ... we knew that the entity sprawl that needed to go in early and was going to be very annoying, so we kind of lost a month there. There might be a few other candidates, like when we do the trade rewrite, or the resources rewrite, to actually store resources on site. That part itself is not so hard, you could almost add that in a day, just tracking the numbers, but it's when you start to get to the repercussions; it's like 'they eat now, so we have world generation famines' and if you screw up the numbers there or wars screw up the numbers or it's trying to track something ... then it's going to be worse than real life for a long time, with the numbers working correctly you'll just have these massive famines and horrible ... |
| Rainseeker: | Because they're not thinking through their problem, they're just dying. |
| Toady: | Yeah. Any time in human history where someone had to think of an innovative solution to a problem, the computer's not going to be able to do that. I expect trouble when we get to that part. So that's another one. The site sprawl was one, that site resource tracking and using them is another ... but other than that I can't remember any adventure mode stuff that really seemed ... like, as a single item on the dev page, seemed like a nightmare. There are some dwarf mode things that I expect will take time. Job priorities because that involves rewriting the entire dwarf AI, but it's more than job priorities ... it's actually rewriting it to allow all kinds of things, to get them to think a little bit about whatever you might think of, so they can priorities things like parties better and their little personal life stuff along with their jobs, and make it less of a strict hierarchy that it runs through. It should be really beneficial but it's a big rewrite, that's another one down there. And of course things like moving fortresses ... we mentioned 'oh yeah we're going to have moving fortress features ... I can see how I want to implement that, vaguely, how I'd store the stuff, and how that's going to be neither a large nor a small project strictly speaking, but I imagine that the ramifications are going to be as bad as the problems that still exist from the 3D cave-ins where the ice floors don't work right, or whatever the current errors are. There's going to be all kinds of fun time there. Fortunately the code for adventure mode when you're walking around the map, how it shifts everything as it loads new areas, that's going to save me a whole ton of time ... moving a fortress section, so it's going to be easier than it might look in a way. But also it'll just be hard in general, and I'm sure there are a few other things down in the dwarf mode list on the dev pages that are tricky and time consuming ... maybe the linguistic stuff too although I don't know when that's going to happen in the first place. But the good news is there are a lot of things that can be done pretty quickly now, and we're going to focus on that so that we reclaim some enjoyment from the game. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | I have some questions here from our readers and players ... |
| Toady: | And listeners! We have listeners too. |
| Rainseeker: | Let me re-explain. I have some email questions! From people! Who probably enjoy the game ... I have one here from Elijah. He says: 'Could Tarn spend some time talking about the possibility of implementing different languages and written works. Is there any possibility of old languages, and what about books made of sheets, metal, paper, papyrus or even clay tablets. |
| Toady: | We're into that stuff and it reminds me of the Steles, the big pillars that the Syrian kings wrong all their conquests on and so on, and the translations of those were some of the inspirations for some of the world generation tortures after the towns were taken over, like stretching out skins and sticking them on walls and stuff. We like that kind of thing – not the tortures, personally, for ourselves, but the written languages – so we're all for it, especially when we get to the treasure hunter section where we've mentioned old books and things like that that we'd like to throw in there. It'd be cool to find one of those old libraries they had, I think they had an ancient library with these cuneiform tablets, they looked like little triangles pressed in different configurations on this clay tablet ... to find a library of one of those things would be really cool. The issues that come up – there's a couple of them – one is displaying the language written out. It would be cool to use different symbols for it, and it would be a time to go add some tiles. These are the kinds of tiles that we can actually draw without total failure, doing it ourselves, so it might be possible to extend some language tiles or ... I don't know if that would involve Unicode in any way since we have better font support now. It's not clear to me exactly how we'd go about doing it but we're definitely ... even if it's just adding some symbols like the graphics for creatures currently, you could just add some more symbols, then it would be cool to actually display the words that are written in the books or on the tablets or whatever, and see them there, and then be able to translate them. It might be difficult to ask the player to do that manually, but they could do it based on their characters skill, and translate pieces of the tablet and then reveal them as you translate them. The other issue is if you're having the game randomly generate a language, which is something that we've avoided up to this point, even though you can throw something together, especially with as little structure as our languages have now – we don't really have any grammar for them or anything, it's just here's a word, here's how you write it – the only reason we haven't done that is because we're afraid of getting too many words that are real life words. So for our dwarf language we didn't want the word for 'mine' to be randomly generated as 'pepsi', and have the word for 'dwarf' just be some swear word because of what it comes up with ... so if your name is 'Dwarf Mine' your name would be like 'Poop Pepsi' or something. it's just not what we imagined for the dwarf language. |
| Rainseeker: | That does become a problem unless you're using random characters. |
| Toady: | That's why there're a couple of solutions, there's using different characters for the languages, or, when the language isn't as central – it's not the dwarf language, but is just some language of some randomly generated three-armed squirrel people that live in the forest and fight with leaves, but they still use, for whatever reason, the same alphabet – then if they had something that was called pepsi, that doesn't really matter. I'm sure there'll be ... if you've got thousands of people playing, I'm sure someone out there is going to get a screenshot that's just horrifying, horrifying in the worst possible way and we'll just let it go at that point and hopefully the news doesn't pick it up. But that's basically the only obstacle. I kind of had a pet fascination with linguistics in college, I was fishing around for a double major for so long when I was doing math; I went from computer science to animal behaviour to chemistry to linguistics, and so I never actually ended up getting one. But I took like six or seven or eight classes and I got all the books from the advanced classes ... |
| Rainseeker: | Makes you a very interesting person, that's for sure. |
| Toady: | Well ... I don't know ... But I read them. I missed the coursework and I can read online ... so I don't really know where I'm at with that stuff, but it is one of my little fascinations. That's why it's always been up on the dev page even if I never get to it. |
| Rainseeker: | So how do you see that affecting adventure mode? You have your adventurer, he finds this 'leafen tablet' scrawled by the squirrel people that he just slaughtered and he's like 'hmm, what does this say?' |
| Toady: | It might be harder to learn the language now you've killed them all. |
| Rainseeker: | That's true, so you could maybe have an ability to talk and learn their language gradually? |
| Toady: | Yeah, that's what we're hoping for. The thing that's neat is in a rudimentary way – it would be impossible to pull this off, for me anyway, in a really satisfying way – but if you've got ... Right now the grammatical structure of all the languages is the same, well they can only say one phrase, like 'Johnny run/walk the dog of war', there's only one kind of phrase they have but they're all the same. So even now you could say 'you know thirty percent of the goblin vocabulary, these are the exact words you know' and then whenever you hear a phrase it could translate those words and not the others. But the thing that'll be neater, if we're storing the things that people will say in conversations ... this conflicts with other things, so I'm not really sure how this is going to work, it might just be the writing, it might not be with the conversations; I'm not quite sure ... but if you have the basic sentence trees syntax ... noun/phrase things or whatever, sitting behind the sentences then the grammatical rules can take those trees and turn them into all kinds of different stuff, shifting the word order, cramming certain things together, putting little helper words everywhere, all that kind of stuff ... and still have your knowledge of the language interpret parts of it, or let you pick out pieces of it, in a really straightforward fashion while still preserving all the diversity of the languages. It would be pretty easy to do overall, except for the part where you actually build the sentence trees for everything you want to say. So it's like, you want to say 'the sword is hidden in such-and-such a cave'; that sentence tree's not so hard to build, it involves two of those noun type phrases we already have, like the 'shiny sword' or whatever it's called and the 'cave of darkness' or whatever it would be called, those we can already do. Then you just need to say how the verb works, and once you can construct that you can translate that into all the different languages and they can apply their rules to how those things work. It's nowhere near as complicated as an actual language where you just need all these little rules that modify them, and people don't even have a complete theory; but the game can have a complete theory, because I know what sentences are allowed to be in the books. We control that information and it allows us to complete the picture, so it should be cool. I guess that's a 'yes' for that question, if it was a 'yes/no' question. Is there any possibility of old languages? Yes. It should come in with the treasure hunter stuff, that's where it's on the dev page, if I remember. |
| Rainseeker: | Let's see ... Noah wants to know if you could talk about how world gen combat works. Maybe we could briefly talk about this, because I know it's something we could go on with forever. |
| Toady: | I'll address the conversation in terms of what happens when two monsters meet, or what happens when two armies meet and just briefly run through what happens. So when two monsters meet it looks at their strengths relative to each other ... the reason this is as simple as it is is because it needs to run through hundreds of thousands of these battles or whatever; I threw that number out, it's something like that ... so there's a couple of monsters, they look at each other, relative to each other's race, so if one guy has fire immunity and one guy's only attack is to breathe fire then he's going to have really crappy numbers. Then basically they just get a number from that and then they start rolling dice at each other like a simple skill roll and whoever wins gets to either wound or kill the opponent and the wound is chosen from a list of viable wounds – like if you breathe fire then it'll try and burn the other guy – then it will continue until the battle's over. Sometimes it just adjourns the battle and the guy escapes, sometimes one of them dies or is wounded and then escapes ... |
| Rainseeker: | How does it pick the adjournment, when it adjourns? |
| Toady: | If I remember there's a number of rounds, or if you have an escape chance, you roll a die and can escape. It's really simple, there's no spatial information or anything like that. |
| Rainseeker: | So you just pit two monsters against each other, they don't find each other, the game decides these two monsters are going to have a fight, basically. |
| Toady: | Yeah, so for instance if you're a world generation hunter, you go out, it pulls something out of the world region that you're hunting in; it's like 'okay, you're fighting a cougar', and then it's like 'alright, put them in the jar, and shake it', and then they roll die at each other, and then someone makes it out, maybe both of them, and then certain duels are designated 'to the death' on one side or the other so one guy might not be able to escape, and that's why town defences are so weird right now, because the whole town defender side is designated that way. World generation battles right now are not that different. It gathers the armies up from the entities' available people, and it also skims off a portion of the entity population, I think it just uses a tenth right now, and it says 'these are the armies', and it picks the most qualified general from among those historical figures that it's chosen. Now, qualifications; there's a new tactics skill and there's the pre-existing leadership and organisation skills that are now applied in world generation, and we'll get to that in a second. Now, it doesn't always pick the best general because if the entity has an official general position, someone who handles military strategy, then it'll choose that person instead, even if they're fresh and for some reason the civilization had someone fighting battles before that had some skill developed; unless they got the general position they won't be used. Unless the general position is empty, then they'll be used. So you've got these two armies, they're both being led, and there are bonuses from terrain right now, and the type of site if there's a site being defended, and it takes the tactics, leadership and organisation ... because there's no strategic versus tactical right now, because not a lot is going on strategy wise at this point, so it's all rolled into one right now, and they just roll those skills and the outcome of those rolls heavily skews the battle. That part is going to be amplified later ... we're thinking like that Civil War documentary when you see the lines of troops and how they moved, and this arrow 'this guy is flanking', that kind of thing, that's what we're hoping to have for a little readout of each battle, but that's not how it works right now. How it works right now is very creepy and it was just because I needed to get something done. So what it does is it has all of the entity population people and it has all the historical figures. It picks one from each side and throws them at each other: so you could have two historical figures thrown at each other in which case it does one of the duels we've already discussed; or it could throw two entity squads at each other in which case it does much the same thing, but the numbers are decreased, it just kills people off; or you can have a historical figure fight a squad. Right now because we're trying to amplify the heroic nature of people they fight a duel against a single guy who might have some bonuses, I don't remember, and if they win then the entire squad dies ... or maybe some of them escape, but they beat the squad of ten ... the squads all have ten I think. So it runs through this until the attack wave is over, and then if the attackers choose to continue they can continue, and the battle is decided when the attacker gives up or the defenders are all dead which is the big flaw right now, it's to the last. Which is also why you can have one hero – because of this duels system – you can have one hero if they've got amplified skills sitting there and shred assembly-line an entire army, if the army continues to attack, they may just break it off, but they might think they don't have to break it off because 'it's just one man!' |
| Rainseeker: | Well you know there are some Biblical accounts of one man driving off entire armies. |
| Toady: | Oh we're all for heroes. |
| Rainseeker: | That is so legit. |
| Toady: | Yeah, just plug the hole in the wall and sit there and hack at them. So ... we're all for heroes and we're going to continue to have heroes, it's just right now it's always like that, and there's no bonus for 'if you have a thousand people against one on an open field' ... it doesn't matter. They still just line up like practically single file and get buzz sawed. So that's all subject to change when we start getting tactics in. Part of the thing is that I am not a well read military historian, and Zach's more well read than I am but I don't think either of us are really comfortable with describing the nuances of what happened in a battle, so we just need to read and that'll take care of itself. |
| Rainseeker: | So what you're saying, eventually, you're planning on having a graphical representation of every battle. |
| Toady: | Yeah right now over on the right it shows the world map and shows where it was during legends mode, whereas what I'd like to have over on the right is probably the local embark, the sixteen by sixteen or whatever area the battle is ranging through – when you're choosing your embark rectangle, that scale of map – and then maybe have four or five different frames from the battle. Like 'first, the soldiers were arrayed this way, and then this group moved to the right and there were many casualties and then this group moved through and then there was a frontal charge, and then they set up an ambush here and the battle was decided.' |
| Rainseeker: | And then Eric the great ... |
| Toady: | Yeah there's always going to be great people. They could take their pet dragon and this army could be eliminated ... all kinds of interesting things going on there, and hopefully that's going to be how it works. What I'm really hoping is that when that kind of display is in that that will also inform or be the same as what goes on when you're actually fighting in dwarf mode with your armies, or in adventure mode when you're with an army. You'll actually be able to move these groups around on that mid-level map when you're deciding a large engagement, and then when there's actual fighting that you're involved in it could zoom in to a small dwarf mode or adventure mode map and you could have a little fight, an actual fight, and then you pop back up and that part of the battle is over and it continues and so on. So it should be really cool, and it's not ... |
| Rainseeker: | Do you anticipate having a way for you to skip past the building of your fortress straight to controlling armies. |
| Toady: | We've talked about that a little bit ... that's start scenarios. There's sort of a question; should you be able to take over the entire dwarven civilization with the press of a button? It's a tricky question in a sense because you don't want to completely destroy the sense of progress that you feel, but at the same time if it's super fun and it's super hard to get to then you should just be given it so that everyone can have super fun. There are all kinds of compromises to explore there; it could be a world generation option, I've done that with some things ... I don't know what people think of that really, but it's a way I've been thinking about handling those things is just to say 'I want a world where I can assume all these roles' so that you never have the temptation of just taking over your whole civilization and killing the guys who were bothering you and then going back to a little fort because you can't do it, because you said when you generated that world that 'I want to be a strict iron mode' or whatever ... 'iron dwarf ... and I'm not going to do any of these wide ranging options'. Whereas another person might be like 'I want the complete sandbox, I want to control all the civilizations at once and just mess around with them', it would be like an arena in the world. I've got no problem with that, it's all super fun ... well will be, hopefully. So that's the issue and I imagine it will come to a head as soon as fighting with armies, like sending them abroad in dwarf mode, is fun; that will be when that is put in, because it would be kind of mean otherwise. |
| Rainseeker: | I want to diverge topics. You mentioned dragon pets earlier. I was playing the other day and I realised something, that my dwarfs really like the idea of the humans getting large eagle pets, because they always make engravings of this. I've never seen engravings of, like, the humans who have tamed the cow or a dragon or something else, it's always large eagles ... giant eagles. |
| Toady: | Yeah ... it's because there's such an obscene amount of villages now, and I believe they travel off to a nearby region, possibly a nearby savage region, to collect their buddies, and so every single village has a warlord, and they're always going off on these little excursions and perhaps it's that mountains or wherever the eagles live are often bordering the places, like they often form the borders of the human civilizations; perhaps that's it. Or perhaps it's just that they are one of the few savage creatures, like giant lions and giant ... whatever. There are not that many of them, it's really one of those deficits in the game. |
| Rainseeker: | 'Ach! Urist! The humans! They've tamed these giant eagles!'. 'Ah, that's great! I'm going to make a statue of that right now!' |
| Toady: | Really, if there are three hundred human villages, which might be normal, and you let history run just two hundred years then how many different warlords have you gone through? You've gone through thousands of warlords, all of them probably, like 'I need those eagles!' |
| Rainseeker: | 'Eagles, for my village!' |
| Toady: | Yeah, so they can fly around. Why would you tame a giant lion if you can tame a giant eagle and fly around. It's not like baby Scamps or something, it's not safe to play with a giant lion; even if it's playful it'll still hurt you... I need to tone that down a little bit. Well the main thing that's going to be toned down is having a warlord in every single village who's running off and taming giant eagles and bringing them back ... they'll be like 'but can we attach the plough to that?' |
| Rainseeker: | '... I hadn't thought of that' |
| Toady: | They'll be soaring over the fields, like one foot above the fields, pulling the plough ... |
| Rainseeker: | 'My lord your giant eagle just ate my donkey!' You'd have a real problem keeping livestock at that point. |
| Toady: | Yeah, those things have to be fed and there's probably more tame giant eagles than humans in these villages. This is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about when I say that site resources are going to destabilise the game, because when it starts trying to feed your eagles all of your horses or all of your cows, and then you can't plough anymore, then your food goes down, then everyone downs and the eagles just go back to the mountains ... it's like mission accomplished. |
| Rainseeker: | 'Whatever you do, don't go tame eagles when you grow up'. 'Okay mummy ... but I must have eagles!' |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's going to be grossly destabilising when we add the actual economy to the game, but it should be entertaining. If we have to we'll just put strict controls on certain things ... not the same kind of strict controls that might stagnate the economy or whatever, but just actual magical strict controls that give things where there was once nothing. Hopefully we won't need to do that, and just make the overall situation like there's enough food being farmed ... we're going to have a slightly higher ratio than what they could get away with so that there hopefully won't be quite as many artificial problems and just real famines caused by the game saying there's a drought, or the game doing this, instead of just like 'well, the numbers didn't work out that year because some random crap happened'. Random's good too, but it's going to be really kind of horrifying. |
| Rainseeker: | Is there any way to teach the leaders through these problems, like maybe they have learned that taming giant eagles is bad, and maybe we should eat some of those giant eagles, or maybe we should not do that again, or ... |
| Toady: | There are certain things you can record ... of course there are these advanced AI techniques that a) I don't know and b) might not be practical on this kind of scale, especially if you want to have them learn ... if the game's taking turns in weeks and then they learn over a period of years that something's bad then they don't have a lot of chance to correct. Mostly what it's going to be is us as programmers learning from our mistakes and teaching them coping strategies in advance, but maybe withholding some of those things from them. It would be the same way a technology kind of things works, that eventually you develop good ideas. The economy might work that way too, I've been working through economic history books in preparation for the trade and site resource stuff, and there were these things that were innovative over time, these ideas; ideas like insurance, I don't know if our game should have insurance but it certainly existed before the 1400s if that's our cut-off. |
| Rainseeker: | Really? |
| Toady: | Yeah, all kinds of stuff. They were just as concerned as we are about losing their money, so they came up with all kinds of things, and it was really complicated. I don't know if we're going to go there or not, I don't want to pin myself to having systems like the Italians had near where our cut-off is, because we kind of decide based on the flavour and the atmosphere of the game as more important. But in a sense for the biggest cities to have that kind of feeling to them, at least in some cultures, of having some things like that going on instead of it all just being Conan-esque, is not really a problem for me so much. We'll see how it turns out, we certainly want a lot of those heroes running around doing things and not having to worry about if their sword is insured. |
| Rainseeker: | Well there've got to be insurance heroes, right? And banking heroes. Heroes that are geniuses, Thomas Edison kind of people. Isaac Newton. |
| Toady: | That's right. You can invent a way to kill a dragon. |
| Rainseeker: | Let's talk about ASCII characters! |
| Toady: | Alright. |
| Rainseeker: | Because your game is ASCII, and ASCII is probably the most fun graphical representation of a game I've ever played. It's definitely old school ... but I think that the complexity of your game totally overwhelms even noticing it's ASCII after a while. Macbeth asked this interesting question; 'As the project gets more complex do you expect that these ASCII character sets won't be able to support the detail you're adding? What are your plans for displaying that information?' |
| Toady: | It's already at that point, if you've seen the elves versus elephants or goblins versus goats or whatever issues come up ... |
| Rainseeker: | 'Why are those elephants shooting arrows at me? I don't understand!' |
| Toady: | And there are methods of getting around that to some extent, but eventually you hit a wall. You saw with world generation recently the human sprawl I went with lines and whatever the letter is called (æ) when you put an 'a' and an 'e' together for the hill farms, and eventually your bag runs out of ... bag stuff ... |
| Rainseeker: | Tricks. |
| Toady: | There's no more tricks in the bags, no more little characters in the bag. And so then you hit that point where you're like 'do you just go over to a tileset at that point? Do you experiment with Unicode stuff? If you add just a new IBM codepage r256 grid characters or whatever ...' If we add another grid of characters that look promising and just stick with that, that's kind of counterproductive in a way, because once you jump up beyond 256 you're free to move about the country at that point and go up to 65'000 or millions or whatever the rewrite entails. At the same time there's something to be said for the ASCII mode of the game, which I like because I can develop it quickly and I don't have to ... Zach and I drawing is not the same as other people drawing ... or maybe the problem is it's the same as other people drawing who aren't artists. And we can't use other people's tilesets without worrying about legal business, and more so not just legal business but ongoing development; if we've got a tileset then are there release delays when we wait for new pictures, or if a person drawing a tileset bails do we try and find somebody that can draw in the same style as they do, or does it become some kind of hellish hybrid of different art styles. It's difficult when we don't have an employee that we can employ for several years, or a person who will stick with the project. People stick with the project, like Baughn's been helping us for quite a long time, but what happens? If Baughn leaves, I do have some trouble with linux and mac support and so on, and other people can help with that, and I'm not sure graphics is the same way where someone can just step in and do the exact same thing, although artists are talented and there's probably someone who can do that, but I don't know if I can count on that or not. Then there's the legal question, I don't know how to do that properly; I have to make sure I can find someone I can trust who isn't going to lift a glyph from Nintendo without me noticing. So there're a lot of questions, it's not completely ruled out, but there're a lot of questions. The other method would be just to add another 256 characters if I don't just go with some Unicode font or something. And in a sense there's a charm at least with the vanilla, of adding just another 256 characters, because it's an extension that's required, but it still sticks within the same kind of poetic form. But there's going to be like seven people that agree with that assessment and a whole crapload of people that are like 'what the hell are you thinking?' So we're kind of there in a sense ... not super pressing at least, not anymore pressing than adding graphics to the game always was with running out of characters to display the information. But it's certainly already hit that wall in several places, and it's only filling it out more as time goes on. |
| Rainseeker: | Cool. Well, let's take a break and when we come back I think that Capn will be here with Tarn and I will be gone. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Menendez: | (musical backing) |
| Rainseeker: | Do you feel like your Dwarf Fortress is too quiet? (background sfx: 'Ach what are you doing you (words)') Are you disappointed with the fact that your dwarfs aren't screaming obscenities at you? (background sfx: (dwarven words?)) Is so, SoundSense is the program for you, come find it on the mod section. (background sfx: 'Your ridiculous decisions are smelling like (words)' 'All my buddies are dead because of you!' 'Yeah, he killed them all with his poor decision making process!' 'Oh, please stop your poor decision making!' 'Ach, they're dead, they're all dead!' 'Oh no my son has died!') |
| Toady: | 'I've been lied to!' |
| Rainseeker: | Yes ... So I just played a bunch of these sounds for Tarn and he likes them. Check it out, because it's fun. I've been working with a couple of guys over in the SoundSense mod and they were gracious enough to offer me the chance to record dwarven voices, and of course my fake Scottish accent is in there, so ... |
| Menendez: | (musical backing ends) |
| Toady: | Yeah so ... big adventure mode coming up. [1:00:40] |
| Capntastic: | I'm excited. |
| Toady: | I'm excited too! Hopefully it'll be exciting. There'll be like stuff to do next time ... all kinds of plans, hopefully. |
| Capntastic: | I'm not a role-playing systems guy, but I've been reading about One Roll Engine which is by Greg Stolze who did Unknown Armies, but there's all these supplements for it. It's like a really easy to learn system, and I have the worst time trying to remember role-playing systems, like 'oh, what do I roll for this, what do I roll for this', but with One Roll Engine all you do ... it's the same roll for anything, you just roll the relevant stat and the relevant skill. But anyways one of the core settings for it is Reign, and it takes place on this crazy world where the continents are two human shaped things, and there's all this crazy stuff, and I'm just reading it and like 'oh this would be the best thing for Dwarf Fortress to have', you know, just the fact that everything is really kind of Conan the Barbarian, you've got all these guys and swords and torches and fire arrows and stuff, and then you've got mysterious magic that does all this crazy stuff, and it's very adventurey, is what I'm trying to say, and that's the sort of stuff that's fun. |
| Toady: | Yeah ... it's going to be interesting when we start bending the rules, because we've got more and more and more rules now, but they don't change that often. Like we've got all of those material properties and things now but we don't really go out of our way to change them that much. It'll be intriguing when we're using them enough that you can just change them during the game, like if you go off to some alternate parallel world trapped up in some forest or something, and everything changes about how your materials work and how the gravity projectile numbers work and that kind of thing. Right now gravity projectile numbers means 'go down one square every click' so it's not very impressive, but it's pretty easy to add, doing a little bit better physics with the projectiles isn't that hard. So that stuff can all be changed, and how the flows work ... Even simple, simple stuff like the dragon fire going twice as fast or really slow ... |
| Capntastic: | Huh ... it's just kind of dribbling out of its mouth there. |
| Toady: | It'd be entertaining to dodge through that stuff, because mostly you just get blasted. Well you have a shield and then you don't get blasted and you can kind of just walk right through the poor thing. |
| Capntastic: | Now I'm imaging like a Touhou-style bullet hell game where you're moving your adventurer around a screen full of fire. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it'll be interesting when we make the ruins and dungeons and things ... to see what kind of very interesting things that you can stick in each area ... it's a nice little world unto itself. You could have all kinds of weird things moving around, because you don't need much of an excuse. You've always got the wizard excuse, you've got deranged people doing deranged things, and you can also ... I mean if you just pull demons out of the underworld and they have enough time leading a goblin civilization to build prisons and – I'm not sure what they'd need a tomb for but they might do it – and what other little typical adventurer environments that you have. But just an excuse to do things like that, so that they have a little bit of relevance. It's like you get to the place, there's a little bit of a back-story behind it, but it doesn't need too much of an excuse to exist, but as long as it's got a little bit of an excuse to exist, then we can put it in. Then it's whatever we feel like, and that's going to have to be part of what improving adventure mode is, because going into adventure environments and getting mind boggled by weird challenges is part of the RPG tradition. |
| Capntastic: | Seeing that sort of stuff is fun, where you're like 'oh, I've got to pick the lock' but then you decide 'oh, I have an idea, I'll move this boulder up this ramp here and push it', and I can imagine that in the future Dwarf Fortress will saw 'oh, he's pushing this boulder', it'll see its speed and mass and velocity and physics and it'll count how many physics it has and see if that's enough to break the wall. |
| Toady: | That's right, you're pushing the boulder up the ramp and you have some gunk on the bottom of your shoe, and you slide and that was it for you; and you don't get all those chances, like Sisyphus gets ... constant chances, rolling the ball there, then it rolls back down, but then he gets another try! |
| Capntastic: | No no ... that's not it. I don't think he gets another try, does he? When he pushes it up, he gets to the top and it rolls back down ... |
| Toady: | Does it make it all the way to the top? I'm not familiar with the exact geometry of the situation, I always had the feeling that he was disappointed. But it would be disappointing to lose it once he get it up there too. (aside to Scamps) Hey mister, that's a mechanic pencil, you can't operate it. |
| Capntastic: | Don't be so sure. |
| Toady: | Well he can activate its gravity potential, and that's what he's been trying to do, get it on the floor. He always likes to knock things off of the desk so he can examine them on the floor, or is that just because he gets attention when he knocks things off the desk. He's troubled. |
| Capntastic: | It's interesting, because, like we've talked about the different drives people have in the game, you've got people who play it as a game, people who play it as a fantasy world novel adventure game, and then the people who play it like Legos, they open the box, put them together, make a giant crocodile that breathes magma; it's fun, it's awesome. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's good that there are different ... |
| Capntastic: | It's the sort of thing where I don't imagine that when you were creating the game originally you'd say 'ah, this is going to appeal to these people, this is what's going to get this audience', it just diverged that way where different people like it for different reasons. |
| Toady: | Certainly different play styles ... The people that stick around stick around for all kinds of different reasons; there are some people that just play legends mode. |
| Capntastic: | Can you make it so ... those people waiting for that to be more literary, so they can just print it out and have a novel to read on the bus, like 'a kobald flayed a dude, and then an elf got him', only you know, more flowery. |
| Toady: | It's one of those things where you can put time into that and you wonder where you're going to reach any kind of threshold where it's satisfying. We always wanted to make legends mode sound better but it's inevitably stayed a list so far, and we mainly just added things like battle maps and stuff like that. But I've been playing a little bit, just a little bit, with combining information into paragraphs and so on with the wounds and to a small extent with the attributes; just packing things in just a little bit and hopefully it'll be able to do that with the historical information. It's a lot easier when you have things like a battle where it knows what kind of events are going to be in there, and they're stored within the battle and then the battle contains sub events, or there's a war and the war contains just a few kind of events like site conquering events, site destructions and battles themselves. And so when it's got that kind of information and it knows what to expect than it can go ahead and write it. And then the embellishments we add can be things that we do the other way around, so that we'd write the description for a war, and then if you want to make it sound a little more literary you think of what kind of details that would imply – it's like the story planning that I do with Zach – and we'd all those kind of details in to flesh it out a bit perhaps. But so far it's just all been going the other way in the legends mode, where we just catalogue things that were already in the game, except for the tortures ... after the battles, that's kind of the first main embellishment we put in ... unfortunate things to make a little more descriptive, because you never find any evidence of that. Although, that might be changing as we get some of the ruin information in there, or being able to go to old battlefields, which is part of the plans. Then you'd be able to see some of the horrifying things that happened, like if you've got those grotesque sculptures, maybe those are still hanging together as bones on one of the sites. But then it might come alive, and kind of shamble towards you ... |
| Capntastic: | No, that's just the wind. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it just rattles like a wind chime ... No going out at night in adventure mode, hopefully. It'd be good not to go out at night, you get surrounded by spirits and eaten. |
| Capntastic: | Plus it's cold, and if it's cold it's like 'oh, you're cold, your hands start to shiver'. |
| Toady: | Yeah ... there's not a lot you can do about that now. You could cover yourself with sharp rocks and pieces of meat, with intestines to hold them all together ... |
| Capntastic: | Use sinew ... 'You make rock and sinew hat. Body heat plus one' |
| Toady: | We're working on it. It's one of those things where I want to get to making it so that you can do kill things again, because obviously the ability to do that has been degraded over a series of releases to the point now where mostly they just tell you to kill their own leader or whatever. So fixing that up's a priority, but you always want to augment the little crafting abilities we started up, because there's such a lack of things you can do right now, just like 'okay, sure, get a rock' ... 'butcher the body' ... and that's about it. At least being able to make some crappy clothes for yourself and a spear ... We're also going to – at least in the market towns – get some places to buy things back, regardless of how they aren't backed up by the whole caravan arc thing, just get them back so that you can ... In a sense it's a little bit disappointing just to have to return a little bit to the typical RPG structure of killing things and upgrading equipment, but it's a starting point, and we have to get back to that after the villages obliterated everything. But it should include some of the things like the start of night creatures and so on, to add a little bit of diversity, and also having some soft targets like simple groups of goblins and bandits and things that have been driven out of their own larger civilization so that you don't just have to stage suicide attacks on goblin towers. |
| Capntastic: | So what sort of cool stuff is going to be added to the Dwarf Fortress economy? I can't wait for the caravan arc where it's like 'oh, buy my spices, I'll trade you spices for silks'. |
| Toady: | The economy is, I think, the next major thing where we're like 'well, we don't know if this is going to take a month or not', so that's why we're not doing it in October. October is about the repair of adventure mode, the funification. It's partially just for our own enthusiasm about working on, because it's a little more fun to work on something when you can take a little bit of time out to just play it a little bit, you can't really do that with the current adventure mode. But hopefully we'll end up with something this month in October that you would at least be able to sit down and play it for a while. It's not going to be possible to make something that you'd sit down and play for as long as people play dwarf mode, just because it takes a while to add in mechanics and so on, but hopefully something that you can sit down and play with for a while. Then it'll be easier to say 'okay, we're taking some time out again to revamp the entire economy'. And of course there's going to be bug fixing and things for dwarf mode in there as well. If we make it unsafe to travel at night then we're definitely going to have to put in the fast sleep button which should be good ... the current sleep button where you press it and it just presses 'wait', the period button, for you, like eight thousand times, and you watch the z's slowly move across the screen. |
| Capntastic: | I was so confused when that first happened, I was like 'did the game break? What did I do?' |
| Toady: | It's like 'we do not want to interfere with the integrity of the simulation, so here you go, you can sit and sleep for five minutes while it finishes up keeping track of how everyone's staying in their cottages and doing nothing'. But yeah ... there are going to be problems with that eventually, even now if you set a fire and then you press the fast sleep button then the fire won't have moved after eight hours, but it's a small price to pay and we'll work on that stuff over time. Kind of the same problem as abandoning a fort and then reclaiming it while you've got water moving around, but it's not a big deal. We're just going to let you sleep quickly, and obviously going to have to put in some combat fixes, like fixing up the wrestling interface and allowing you to aim some of your shots, that kind of thing. With aimed shots we have to do those attack opportunities where it randomises the success of thing and actually displays how well you think a shot might go based on some random stuff, and as we put in more there'll be more there but just to start with it'd be a random number, just so that it's not like 'headshot, headshot, headshot, headshot, headshot, headshot, headshot, headshot, headshot' because that's the most effective use of your time; sometimes it shouldn't be. So we'll probably put that in because that'd be really fast to add, but we're not going to change the combat until we actually have you going off and fighting some things again, because there's no point. But hopefully that'll happen within a few days anyway, so we'll be able to get some more done. And if it's two weeks, two weeks is going to be a long time, so I'm hoping to get quite a bit done, hoping to make a little bit interesting, even if I'm mostly just trying to reclaim pre-existing aspects of the game at first. But we're going to do more with not having to go out and hunt down quest givers in such an annoying way. It's like if there's some creature haunting a town or some bandits harassing travellers then every peasant is going to know about it. Except maybe the one year olds and even they'll probably know at first ... So you could take a quest in that sense, loosely defined, on behalf of the town and I'm not quite sure what the standards of proof here are, if you're just going to have to bring back a bunch of ears or some stolen property that the bandits or whoever might have taken ... bringing back proof of having killed a troll is easier than for bandits, because trolls have big ears ... if they have ears at all, I don't remember, I think they have ears. But if they've got big giant double-fist sized ears then people will be like 'oh yeah, he probably killed the troll or at least he made it really angry', and as long as the troll doesn't come and destroy the town that night then you'll receive the recognition of the town which in terms of how we're going to do things now I believe it'll probably be the ability to more easily get a peasant to let you sleep in his house which might be important if you're going to get dragged into the woods if you're outside, and the ability to get more important tasks from more important people who might ignore you at first ... and perhaps a place to stay and a place to store some equipment at first. Just some simple stuff, it's not like we want to wed ourselves to anything too complicated yet ... placeholdery at this point, because we're just trying to reclaim enough of a fun experience to springboard off into what we want to do, and make adventure mode feel like it has a reason to exist. So if we can't reward you with equipment that's incrementally improving at least we can do some things. Although there's room to move with the equipment, even without worrying about having itemised lists of magical powers that you mix and match in different combinations until you're happy; I don't think we ever want it to go that way. But there is, from dwarf mode, the quality of the object's material, and the craft quality of an object, and getting something like an exceptional steel longsword should be really hard. If an item like that represents a year's income for somebody or more then it should be that hard to get, you can't just go into a shop and be like 'I will pay fifty dwarf bucks for this super sword you've just got laying around', it should be a little harder to get anyway. Slowing down the rate at which you get good equipment can make the game last longer, so we'll meter that a bit even if it's ultimately really simple right now. Of course bandits and goblins can be in possession of some stuff, and caves can have crap in them from the dawn of time ... So there'll be a bit to do, even if we spend two weeks I think we can get just up to the point where we can feel like it's okay to specialise again, improving the hero role or adding the caravan stuff; adding more crafting and building your own house and that kind of thing. Because that stuff, it's all ... A lot of what we did with the village was to allow you to have the frame work to build your own house and that kind of thing. We want to set the tone, I guess, for adventure mode with some simple things like what I was just talking about. Killing things, buying thing, making people like you, and one thing I forget if I mentioned or not, as you improve your reputation by helping out villages then you might be able to take more people with you based on your reputation. And then you could go fight larger groups of bandits, or goblins in little forts and things; we're hoping to put all that in within this timeframe. Just to set that kind of tone for the game and then go back and do some of those things that I've been laying the groundwork for, because I think if it's all about making houses and raising chickens without bringing the other stuff back then ... I don't want to establish that as the adventure mode, that should be called something else. We want you to be able to do that stuff, but not the very first thing we work on when we're making adventure mode fun. Hopefully this plan will work out ... I have the dev pages up there and in a sense I just want to work from top to bottom of them, or at least within the adventure mode and dwarf mode, working from top to bottom in either of those, but it didn't feel like it was going to work out that well. It took so long to get these villages up, it took a month or more, and it just feels like I've got to pick and choose a few things for adventure mode to justify itself more, and then go back and start filling in the other things. So it'd certainly be better to be able to have your own house when you have some goblin heads to put in it again, to decorate; right now there's just not a lot there. That's the idea, anyway ... if people are in it for the long haul it doesn't matter that much, because we're going to get to the stuff on the dev page sooner or later, but just wanted to get started, and felt like getting that kind of thing back in. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Capntastic: | You could raise the chickens and train them to fight. |
| Toady: | Yeah ... Or at least have a horse or something, sure. That's going to be the thing; as soon as you can buy your first chickens, living chickens, not dead chickens, and bring them back to your place you're not restricted to bringing them back to your place, you can bring them anywhere with you. These things will just happen naturally, the second you can buy livestock then you can go on livestock adventures, and have a livestock party, and name your chickens. I don't know what would happen if ... Because they are creatures in the game, which means depending on how mechanics like giving people equipment and stuff work, then maybe you'd be able to give your chickens things ... like put a necklace around your chicken's neck ... I don't know, that kind of thing will be happening ... I mean certainly cow bells, people put bells on cows. They don't put bells on chickens, I guess they don't care that much about the chickens. But there are lots of reasonable things and unreasonable things that are going to be going on once we can move livestock around. It will be exciting when you can get that stuff done. So ultimately I guess this October release is going to be incredibly disappointing for people that were waiting for chickens. But we're getting to chickens, we have cows and camels and we have mules and ... well there's not a whole lot more that we have ... and cats and dogs, but not too much else. So I can see why people are disappointed. The reason chickens never got added in is because I was always insisting on doing eggs right and doing feathers right. Now we can do feathers, we have feathers in the game, we have feathers for forgotten beasts and birds ... in a sense, there's no individual feather that you can get, but the material is in, the feather material. So we can do that part of chickens, and we still just need to do eggs. Of course eggs are really important, because of dragon eggs and chicken eggs, and any other egg that you might imagine, but I guess those are the most important. Fish eggs, people eat fish eggs ... not sure what other eggs, there's all kinds of important eggs in the universe but ... The egg. I still haven't really ... it's the kind of thing that I don't feel like I need to think about until the day I'm going to do it. I haven't thought about chicken eggs that much, like what are the raws going to look like for chicken eggs and the chicken egg object, like an egg object ... There are different kinds of eggs; there are eggs that are kind of jelly eggs, and eggs that have hard shells, eggs come in different sizes and colours, and eggs have different materials associated to them, there's the eggshell for the hard eggs especially and the yolk and the white of the egg, at least for the birds. The egg might as well be composed of the different materials and then you'd have an egg, but having eggs hatch, so you have an item that turns into a creature ... Then there's the further question of, in the raws, how generalisable should that be, is it like 'this creature gives birth to this item'; that's their form of reproduction, that it lays an item ... It's not going to work unless the item actually turns into a creature, so only the eggs item will likely matter here for that, if you lay a chair then it's not going to make more of the creature out of the chair after a period of time if you sit in the chair as if it were a nest. Eggs are doable, just have an item with a little timer on it that turns into a critter, maybe leaves the shell behind and then you'll end up with your chicken farm with all these annoying shells all over the place, then you'll have chickens, and eggs, and you can throw eggs, and eat eggs, and raise more chickens. |
| Capntastic: | A never-ending cycle. |
| Toady: | It is. It'll be chickenful. I don't know how you bring your chickens back, you don't herd your chickens back I imagine, you put them in little baskets ... |
| Capntastic: | You put one under each arm. |
| Toady: | You can carry your chickens, that's true. You might not to bring a chicken basket. It wouldn't be a wooden chicken cage, it'd be some kind of chicken cage, some kind of woven baskety open chicken cage. What are those, reeds, or something? What do they make those out of. |
| Capntastic: | Reeds probably. |
| Toady: | I can see it in my head but I have no idea what it's actually made out of. |
| Capntastic: | Sticks ... |
| Toady: | A chicken basket. You can bring your chickens ... because if you've got a chicken basket then you can haul your chickens around and release your chickens at any time. I imagine that would work as a diversion, if you're attacking the bandits you could bring your chickens and then release your chickens and they might have a hostile reaction toward your chickens which will allow you to sneak in and take some things. Recovering your chickens might be hard, though, so you'd want to take at least enough to buy your chickens back. We've talked about all the bandit camps and reputations and critters roaming around, you're going to have trolls, like Bad Bob the troll, we're going to give them little nicknames, and they're little monsters jumping around causing trouble for people. It'd probably take too long, with the funification procedure which I'm hoping not to get stalled on anything, it'd probably take too long to have them actually sent out to cause trouble in the towns, rather than just allowing them to do bad things in world generation and then going off to kill them in stasis. After world generation they don't have active lies anymore, just for this first one, but they can still have little names, and the guys can talk about what they did bad during world generation, and then you can go find them in their little dugout burrows with all the skulls of their world generation victims and incidental treasures, I suppose. We would like to make the caves look a little creepier, especially the places where the night creatures are living; make them somewhat horrifying. |
| Capntastic: | There needs to be glowing fungus, and bats, and all of that ... spider webs. Once you get those three things in, everything else is just icing on the cake. |
| Toady: | That's right, like skulls on sticks and spooky voices talking to you. |
| Capntastic: | And monsters with lairs: 'oh, you find a pile of rocks, it's a monster nest' |
| Toady: | Well I guess ... ever since ... I don't know if it was The Ring that started this or what, but scary little girls are popular again. We had The Exorcist before, but now we've got The Ring and now there's all these ... there was F.E.A.R., the video game, and there's a new vampire movie with another scary little girl in it. There's lots of scary little girls in movies now, so we could always just put one in the cave, it just appears. It's terrifying, terrifying. Or maybe we won't do that. It'll be alright, there'll be some things to cover for it halfway, like all kinds of bodies and cobwebs and bats and things, and howling wind ... in night time you can't see that far in Dwarf Fortress so it'll be scary. And then the thing can jump out, jump out, jump out. |
| Capntastic: | Mwahahaha. |
| Toady: | You'll be like, 'it's Bad Bob!' Then I guess you have a boxing match or something, and use the new aimed attacks and try and poke out Bad Bob's poor little face and bring it back to show people, you're like 'This is Bad Bob ...' |
| Capntastic: | He puts up his arms and blocks. |
| Toady: | That's right, defensive wounds, defensive wounds on the arms. Because you just came to his house to kill him. You just have evidence that he did something wrong in world generation but you don't actually catch him in the act or anything. But he'll get defensive wounds on his arms, and then eventually I imagine you'll get an attack in or he'll just box you in the head or something, and you'll fly against the tree and blow apart into five pieces. So it should be entertaining, again, if it ever was. And like we were saying we're going to add a few of the combat improvements to help that along. I know we have a ton plan there but we'll just get the simple ones in now, and have you fighting the night creatures. The bandits we were hoping to ... if there's just two or three then they'd probably just be living out either in one of the ruins or in just a little cottage or something, out in the woods, and people would just be able to tell you where that is for now. There's a whole tracking thing we want to do, but if I feel like tracking's going to bog me down, I'm going to just have you know where they are once you know that you're supposed to do something about it. So just a few goblins or bandits or something might either have a cottage or just be hanging out in the woods, but if there's a larger group – like as your reputation improves and you're allowed to take five or six people with you – then they might have little things like doing the sneaking stuff and the patrol patterns and being able to alert their buddies so that you have to think a little bit about what you're doing when you attack one of the larger hideouts. So hopefully we'll be able to get to that stuff without getting bogged down again, and just check off a whole bunch of things. That was one of our angles: there's the night creature angle, there's the bandit hideout angle, and then there's the cave angle; tombs and ancient prisons, large ruined castles and things for you to run around in, because doing some improvements there would be easy too. It just has to have a fun payoff now, we're looking to reach a certain threshold of fun and whatever makes the cut makes the cut. There're going to be castles, I guess castles are castles, big castles ... and not like the castle we used to have. We had the square castle, occasionally it would stand on stilts ... because you have a choice with the hilly terrain, you can either dig it in or you pile dirt beneath it. That's what I do now, but what I used to do, instead of piling dirt beneath it, was just make a big stilt come down from the corner. It's always the safest, I think, for a defensive structure like a castle to put a stilt under one of the corners to support its weight ... So we'll have to do better, we'll have to do better than that. We're making ... I think one of the generators we might afford to sink a little time into this two weeks would be a little castle generator, just to get a feel for how that stuff's going to work, and to give important people a place to be important at so you can get your important tasks, and you can get some people from there. If you have a high reputation and the king asks you to go kill a bronze colossus or something, you might pick out some people from the castle to go die with you. That's probably going to be the peak of the adventure mode release, taking a bunch of guys to go out and fight a megabeast, or to fight a really large bandit encampment. There's things like being able to fight another town, but that's the advanced stuff that we're actually hoping to get to, when you can change the political situation of the world by, for instance, conquering a neighbouring minor lord for your guy, and then replacing the person you took out and being either independent or a vassal of the previous guy you were working for. So, you can suddenly have control over a larger section of the world, and change how the world worked. But for now changing how the world works just means removing people from it. There are fewer people in the world. That's what adventurers do; depopulate areas. We're still working towards actually respecting the dreams of our forefathers; making the game world a little more dynamic. The villagers dropped a bomb on that and we'll need to repair first. It'll be good though, it'll be good. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Toady: | Now the night creatures require a lot of ... to do them properly require a lot of special framework that's half like magic, to get the creepiest parts of the night creatures in. But at the same time we might still do some of the random generation there for things – like if you wanted to have a night hag type creature that goes and kidnaps and skins your children or whatever the example was I gave before, with long iron fingernails and one eye – then that's like using the forgotten beast generator, and using that to make a kind of creature that's going to be almost exclusively humanoid and a little bit larger, and that would be a type of night creature generator, just to get started. Then you can give them the 'can only killed by iron', or 'can enslave people with its mine', or 'bites people and turns them into more of itself' or that kind of thing. That sort of stuff is a little harder to do, just because it requires some kind of framework for supernatural abilities, unless we just hardcode more; like the fire breath is hardcoded, or the material breath is hardcoded. We can either add just a few more hardcoded tags, or poison effects, or whatever, or we can just leave it with troll-type night creatures which are just big things that are bad that don't have supernatural powers necessarily, or supernatural weaknesses, like weakness to iron or dying in the sun or not liking to see a mirror or whatever it might be, that you will have to use later as we enhance night creatures. But that'll probably be the next style of randomly generated beast to go in, and it will go in immediately it's just ... it's kind of like sticking a forgotten beast on the surface and not making it look so goofy. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah ... 'it has a big feathery trunk'. |
| Toady: | Yeah ... Those work as creepy things underground, that just kind of slither up at you, but having it be the thing that comes out of the woods and kidnap your children ... Well, it'd be like Monsters, Inc. then I guess, just these weird things ... and that's not quite what we were going for with night creatures. It's not like that's not a valid way to do things, maybe there'd be a new world generation parameter, like 'the levity of your world' ... all of my night creatures are pink furry things with big feathered trunks that kidnap any children ... |
| Capntastic: | Takes the kids away to a magical fairyland where they get all the cake they can add. |
| Toady: | That's right, we can finally add in roller coasters and stuff. |
| Capntastic: | Finally. |
| Toady: | And tea parties. Tea, and tea parties. And dolls. Then all the night creatures would have to have 'Mr' or 'Mrs' in front of their name, like 'Mr Bad Bob'. Mr Bad Bob the night creature with his top hat. It's not like there isn't going to be potential, but at first it's just going to be the same old negativity. We were thinking of having – in places that are magical and dangerous, where you don't want to be out at night, if you get attacked by some creatures that come out and attack because you're walking the road at the wrong time – then you'd kill them, it's not like you can go to the peasants with pieces of their dead bodies and be like 'look what I killed!' They're like 'well you're an idiot, you were out at night. They weren't harassing us or anything, except when we're idiots and go out at night and they're just going to reform from rotten logs later, so don't waste your time'. They should probably warn you about that stuff in advance, though. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah. Freaks come out at night. |
| Toady: | That's right. So there'll be certain creatures though, like the night creature troll type things that are ... now when I saw night creature troll type things I don't mean to put down night creatures, or to say that they're going to be very limited, but our original night creatures are going to be limited and more just like trolls ... but when you have the night creature troll type things then those are the types of things where the peasants know that their threat level has gone down significantly when you kill them, where it's not just like the typical things that might be plaguing them in some particularly supernatural area; although I'm not sure those guys will care too much if you kill their troll. If they're already being dragged off by living shadows every night, it's like 'yeah, you killed our troll, so what? Why don't you stab your sword in the dark heart that lives in the center of the evil woods, that'll make us happier.' I'm not even sure if you'll be able to clear out everything, like places that are just inherently dangerous, like that. It might be that you need to ... it's more of a dwarf mode thing, or more of an advanced adventurer mode thing where you go and have that place deforested; just settle the whole place and eventually the magic dies. Then once you kill off your world you'll just be playing intriguing adventure mode human stuff instead of going off and killing night creatures. Although, night creatures are basically the only type of thing that can survive the settlement of the world, because you still have ... in completely settled areas you can still have things like ghosts and zombies and vampires and things. Those things spring up from civilization rather than existing before it got there, because they rely a lot on the dead, so ... |
| Capntastic: | Everything's connected. |
| Toady: | That's right, there's a big chain of being and undead and stuff. The circle of life ... and death ... and undeath. Where does undeath fit into the circle of life? Is it just a longer detour or something? It'll be intriguing. Bring back some of the world generation corpses and have them torment their cities and you have to deal with it. They can talk about their poor father that's been raised from the dead and has been eating chickens. It's like 'yeah, Pa's been coming out of the woods to eat our chickens, we're afraid something worse is going to happen. He's been clawing at our door every night, asking to be invited in.' |
| Capntastic: | 'It's cold!' |
| Toady: | 'It's cold and I've been out here eating your chickens. Why don't you let me in and have some real food.' But he's a zombie, so you might have to deal with that. They might want you to deal with it delicately, just give him a proper burial or something ... You have to go around naming unnamed children's ghosts that are flitting around everywhere, walk through the town shouting names at all the ghosts, then they go to bed. You never know what sort of strangeness will be upcoming. I did want to mention, because there have been like five people in the past two weeks who are like 'Wow! I didn't realise when I donated I get a reward!' I guess it's worth mentioning that Zach'll write you a little story if you want, or you can have us draw a crayon picture and send it to you. You can also get listed on the Hall of Champions with your own little picture and name and quote; you can use a nickname if you want. Those are the rewards currently available for donating, and I thought I'd mention that because so many people seem shocked! |
| Capntastic: | I have two framed images from the brothers Adams. |
| Toady: | High quality artwork. |
| Capntastic: | One of them is a dwarf trying to feed a leg of lamb to an elf, and the elf is making a plaintive gesture. I guess now is the time when we say goodbye ... |
| Toady: | That's right, so from all of us here in Dwarf Fortress Talk land to all of you out there in Dwarf Fortress Talk listener land ... |
| Ollieh: | (musical postlude) |
| Toady: | Alright I'm going to dislodge this animal ... Disloooodge ... place you here. Now I can see my taskbar. |
| Toady: | Aah! Ahaha! Blood! Witness the blood! Aha-owww. (singing) There's rivers of blood/flowing from my thumb/Little baby Scamps/is a violent one. |
| Capntastic: | Do you have chickens now man? |
| Toady: | Yeah. Chickens. And enlarged chickens. I guess it's kind of obligatory that we put giant chickens in the game, we have some other giant animals, you can have giant chickens. We need a Night of the Lepus or whatever the rabbit movie with giant rabbits ... giant chickens. And we'll have giant pigs. First we'll need regular pigs. The pig is a more shameful omission, because I have my excuse with feathers and eggs, but I'm not sure what my excuse ... Can just add a pig. We have mountain goats, but I don't know that we have regular goats, seems like we don't. |
| Capntastic: | Do you have sheep? |
| Toady: | I think my excuse there was wool, I have more of an excuse there. But the pig doesn't have an excuse. |
| Capntastic: | Gotta have it. |
| Toady: | Gotta have pigs. Doesn't every mod also just incidentally do the pig? |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, it's like 'yep, and a free pig'. |
| Toady: | Yeah, because the pig is ... To my eternal shame until I add pigs, and then my eternal shame will be over, and I will have redeemed myself somewhat, although the pain might linger, of not having pigs for all these years. I don't know if I can make that up to people, I guess it depends on their position on ... do we forgive and forget, or do we forgive but not forget that there were no pigs in the game for four years? I'm saying four years, but we're already past four years now, right? It's four years and a month that we've had no pigs, almost coming up on two months; no pigs. |
Dwarf Fortress Talk #11, with Rainseeker, Capntastic and Toady One, transcribed by mallocks
| Rainseeker: | The button has been pushed, the recording has started and now we are doing our podcast, for Dwarf Fortress Talk! This is Rainseeker and our illustrious leader Tarn Adams, also known as Toady One. |
| Toady: | Here I am, and I've got a cat on my lap, I don't know how long that's going to last. |
| Rainseeker: | He's a very violent kitty. |
| Toady: | He is a violent ... He's being so good right now, I'm rubbing his little chin and stuff, he's being so relaxed. This is very unusual ... This is more a wintertime thing because he needs to steal heat from somewhere. |
| Rainseeker: | There you go. Now I wanted to start this episode shamelessly promoting myself. I am in need of a job! So I'm looking for work and if you guys know of anything please contact me, Rainseeker, via the forums, it would be really great. Looking for podcasting work or editing work, for games, for movies, for whatever. Anybody out there ... we have an intelligent audience, it would be great if you could help me out. That being said, we are splitting the podcast into two segments today. One segment is Tarn and I and the second segment will be Capn and Tarn. We are having trouble coordinating our schedules and that is putting it mildly, so we will do our best to make an awesome podcast for you anyway. |
| Toady: | That's right. I guess we should give the Capn an opportunity to say hello again, like last time. |
| Capntastic: | And me, Capntastic. |
| Rainseeker: | That was amazing, thanks Capn. You just beamed your voice straight in there. |
| Toady: | It's always good when people can travel through time. |
| Rainseeker: | That's right, that's right. So today what we're going to talk about is dwarven personalities, and not just dwarven but personalities in Dwarf Fortress and how that's going to look. I wanted, before we get into it, to briefly ask you Tarn what you see as the mentality of the dwarves. |
| Toady: | Well ... Dwarves always seem to me like people that are ... I wouldn't say they are more flawed than people, but they're amplified in certain ways that make them seem ... They're more immoderate in a way; they're given to boozing and emotional outbursts, but they're also geniuses in their crafts, in general when they put their minds to things. So they're slightly unhinged and savants in a way. It's kind of these amplifications of these human traits, it's like they're more human than humans, like replicants and stuff. |
| Rainseeker: | We should have a danger in the fortress, that if your dwarven community gets too happy they start dancing a lot, instead of tantruming. |
| Toady: | Yeah ... their parties are so disappointing right now! It's like a tea social or something, they're just like 'Oh hello, how are you?' |
| Rainseeker: | 'Och! That's a nice Earl Grey you've got there!' |
| Toady: | It's completely out of character, I sit here talking about how they're kind of like these temperance movement rejects that should be stumbling around drunk, but how much do they drink at these parties? It's only if one of them happens to be carrying a beer barrel will there be anyone bringing alcohol to the party. They're just as likely to accidently carry a rock ... It's something that we've always wanted to work on but it never happens. |
| Rainseeker: | Beer should be spilling everywhere, with puddles of beer and booze and other things. |
| Toady: | And a bit of violence, some training accidents and so on ... and perhaps all kinds of raucous singing and so on ... maybe if you're looking at that part of the screen you'll be able to get announcements, song lyrics and stuff. |
| Rainseeker: | That's right, that's right. People writing songs referencing earlier happenings in the fortress. Okay, so our dwarves are existing in this world and right now they have a very flat personality, they're either happy or sad and they have some tags that tell us if they're lazy or greedy ... |
| Toady: | Yeah, these wishy-washy tags. It's like 'Well, he's not a liar, he just doesn't do things in a straightforward way'. The only thing that they seem to be really ... It's like 'They hate rats' or 'They really really really like the color blue.' But they've got the 'yes/no am I happy/sad' and then these strange modern personality readings. |
| Rainseeker: | I once had a mayor that went out and bought every single sceptre that was for sale, and he had them all over his room; he'd never pack them away, he just left them lying about his room. He was a junkie, I couldn't help him. |
| Toady: | I wonder if ... we could add what they like about sceptres, maybe it made the dwarf feel powerful or something to surround himself with these symbols of rulership. Who knows. Because you don't need more than a few. |
| Rainseeker: | No, you really don't. Unless they're for symbolic reasons right? 'This is the Saturday sceptre, it is the weekend.' |
| Toady: | Oh it's true, you never can have too many sceptres when it comes to fashion, it's like sunglasses. It's too bad we don't have rotating sceptre-holders and stuff for the poor guy, he just has to leave them stacked with his own personal flying system. |
| Rainseeker: | They'd need to put feathers in their caps, and leopard skin coats, and strut around and let the dwarven women hang on their arms. |
| Toady: | ... That's right. You never can have too much of that ... We can make fun of it but that really is the only thing they have going for them personality wise right now. There's their propensity to get angry, so you do get more tantrums out of certain dwarves, and some minor effects; you may notice that certain dwarves don't go to parties too often, that's due to their personalities. I remember Footkerchief bringing this up, that there are quite a few effects in there but you don't really know a lot of it's happening because it doesn't really tell you about it, so that's certainly one of the things we're going to get at. I've been hesitant to really jump in to the personalities. After I went through all the trouble of adding those thirty personality facets or whatever, I found myself hesitant to do it because they don't have the feeling of a finished system, because they don't get at the heart of what a person's like; the things that would stand out about a person where you say 'Well I like this person, this person's a good person' or 'This person's a bad person', we speak in absolute terms but there are some things that fundamentally suck or don't suck about people and we don't have any of that, and I think that's what's missing, and what we've been thinking about a lot. |
| Rainseeker: | So we're looking forward to having a more robust tag system, basically, and what also we've been talking about off-air is this idea of having events that shape a person's life, so you have the nurture side of things; maybe you can address what you're thinking about doing for that. |
| Toady: | This has come up in the suggestion forum before, that it's like you're born with every single little facet of your personality mapped out right now. |
| Rainseeker: | Right, he likes leopard meat as soon as he's born. |
| Toady: | Yeah, they haven't opened their eyes yet and they know what colours they like; it's very strange. They haven't seen animals yet and they know which animals they like, they haven't tasted anything yet and they know what they like to eat; that's quite curious. While you have things like extra tags or the preferences we currently have there's nothing like a propensity for certain skills right now and there's no idea about ... if a dwarf actually had the choice to do something with their life there's nothing that says 'What do I want to do?' It would be nice if we had those things and then it becomes a nature/nurture question there. In dwarf mode you can only do so much because the time frame is limited. There are children growing up but it takes twelve years to get a grown up child from nothing, but there are other places where we can do it. I think you brought up world generation; we certainly go through the entire person's life and for a lot of things we go on a weekly scale so there's a whole lot of time that they spend being children: a whole lot of event phases. A lot can go on there, so if we want to go away from the pre-generated approach and move to something where you have a person's preferences being based on not only what their civilization has available but also what goes on in their lives ... This goes beyond just growing up because once you're an adult this can change as well; you might experience a new thing or have something horrifying happen and it could change them a bit. We were toying with the idea of ... this is something that I think came up in the Future of the Fortress ... what about adventure mode too? You have a character right, and your character's personality is an interesting thing because you might want to role play a specific kind of person and you might want it to recognise you as that person but you also might not want to be constrained, especially when it's the computer that's trying to do the thinking for you because a computer can't judge intent very well, and it also can't judge the entire situation so that if it's perfectly rational for you to do something that it says is an immoral action ... like a perfect action that operates against greed but the computer thinks it's a greedy action - it might be taking something that you're going to give to someone else later, something like that that the computer can't judge properly - then you don't want the computer to be in the position of making those judgements because it's just going to screw up your game. At the same time there's room for things like specific needs and likes and things. It's okay to say 'Your character likes the colour blue' or something because you can fairly measure that; whether or not there are blue things, whether or not your clothes are blue, what kind of gems are set in your dagger or whatever. That could be something that it fairly measures and so you could become subject to that if you want to create a character with those kinds of likes or dislikes ... or a character that lakes certain foods, then maybe you're only operating at peak capacity if you've had some sewer brew in the last week. That's a reasonable system, I think, that might amplify role-playing quite a bit, especially when it comes to the kind of problem you get in role-playing games when you start accumulating wealth but you have no need to use it and no want to use it, the same way that you would in real life. But if a good old night of debauchery is actually something that rewards your character's constant needs and makes you operate at peak capacity and makes you feel like you're playing your character right and you get rewarded for it by having a satisfied happy character then I think that all would work out and it wouldn't really fly in anyone's face in terms of being disappointed. |
| Rainseeker: | Or at the very least letting your party members do that. |
| Toady: | Certainly. It's always good to have to corral some guy out of the bar and set him in bed. It'd be good to be able to rent a cottage then so you can stash them somewhere. It's a thing where if you don't really want to worry about that ... like right now you have to worry about drowsiness, and you're definitely going to have to worry about hunger and thirst later on in adventure mode, and if you have to worry about, like 'Did I have a plump helmet biscuit every week?' or something, and you don't want to have to worry about that crap, then certainly you wouldn't have to choose that in character generation. But if you want to choose it in character generation it would be a way to do further role-playing, and it would be a way to have the computer do the bookkeeping part of your role-playing. I don't remember exactly where I came out on this, because this was a Future of the Fortress question before, and I don't remember if I ... I was probably a little more tentative about it, but I think it can work. It'd certainly be another way to do it. |
| Rainseeker: | The adventurer growing up, of course, you have a back story. So you could create these ... he's always scared of goblins because his brother was kidnapped by a goblin, so your character has a negative two to some kind of check; maybe you freeze in fear, or something terrible like that. |
| Toady: | As long as it's in a controlled environment where you can expect it, like if you knew it happened when you saw goblins that'd be cool. It's the kind of thing, like general terror ... that kind of bugs me, it's like you're not allowed to act because the game says you're afraid. You spent all this time going to find the dragon and then it's like 'No, you're just scared. Sorry.' But you spent two years trying to find it, you'd have worked up a little nerve ... So that kind of gets to an additional part of the overall personality rewrite which would be an emotion system. In adventure mode emotions are a tricky thing because you really don't want to get too far ahead of yourself there, getting into the players head, whereas if it's just doing some helpful bookkeeping for you with your favourite hobbies and stuff, that's actually a really good thing, but if it's actually trying to force you one way or another based on what it thinks you should be feeling, that's quite strange. But once you get to the other guys then emotions are a great thing. Right now we just have this slow descent into unhappiness and despair and psychotic breaks for the poor dwarves, and that sucks. They should be able to just snap, throw a tantrum, come back and be the happiest little dwarf that they could be, having worked out their issues, but it's kind of strange now how it's only long term despair and so on being tracked, rather than short term events. This is some distance in the future so we haven't really settled on a system there, we've just been writing up lists of emotions and so on, trying to think about when they might come up or how it might affect how the dwarves work and how we can just get rid of the happiness variable overall. |
| Rainseeker: | Right. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | So we've talked about, in the past, inserting ourselves into a current, live legend person that you'll see in legends mode. I think it'd be really fun if we could, when generating our adventurer, choose from some people that are interesting and have interesting lives, and they've suddenly decided to become an adventurer. |
| Toady: | I think the limiting factor there really, the only big limiting factor there, is that the most interesting people have the mechanics that are farther away. If you were like 'I want to be the lord of the castle' or whatever, then you become a much less interesting lord of the castle in a lot of ways than the lord of the castle was before you took them over because you can't really order people to do anything or give people quests or anything like that. But I think with the coming caravan stuff there's actually some good opportunities there because we'll have these merchants moving around and they're not going to be any more complicated than you'd be if you were doing the same thing. In addition they don't really have any bizarre skills or any kind of situation that couldn't be handled in the regular character generation so they're not really out of bounds in that way either. It's just like there's a normal guy who has some property and is moving things around, but if you found that you wanted to have that person's life there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to do that, I think. It'd certainly be something that would be qualified by a world generation option I think, so you could be like 'you can do this in the world', or not, because people might be tempted to take over all the competition and jump in the river and then start playing. There's nothing wrong with that, but people have mentioned in the past that if you can set it up in advance that you don't have that temptation then as you play you know that you have to compete on fair terms. I think that's a reasonable thing and there's really no difficulty in setting that up. I think we might start getting someone that's interesting to pick ... As it is now you'd be able to pick a nameless soldier in a castle, which is more or less pointless because you kind of start as that to begin with, or you can pick a peasant in a cottage, which you could also do if you started with nothing; if you didn't assign your skill points then you could be that person. But the merchants are interesting because they have some assets, they have an interesting situation, they have a gig that they're running, but it's nothing that you couldn't already attain. So it'd be a sort of starting point if you wanted to do that. Of course I don't have a guarantee or a timetable on this because we have a lot to do, but this is the kind of time when we're starting to see some interesting things. We should start seeing that some more when we get, like, bandit leaders, like if you have a group of bandits that has a leader then the second you can order bandits to do things, or order your little hirelings to do things - which is not that far off - that would be another good starting situation. One other thing that goes with all of this is if you're starting as a pre-existing historical figure ... One of the main reasons you're doing that is because they have interesting things in their pasts, and also maybe even more importantly they have connections with people, because when you start as an adventurer that you just make out of the blue you have a connection, being a citizen of that site, but you don't actually have parents or anything like that. So being able to take over a pre-existing person has that kind of appeal to it, but one of the issues is that you'd want that to matter. It would introduce being able to talk to your own father, which you can't currently do, and once you have that ability you'd like to be able to respect that to some degree. |
| Rainseeker: | Right. 'Hey dad! Come with me and kill this dragon!' (implied paternal death) 'Dad! Nooooo! Dad! Oh no, dad! What have I done?' Anyway, that's going to happen. |
| Toady: | Yeah, then he could just tan your hide when you do something stupid. It's interesting and it opens up that whole thing about whether or not we're even going to be capable of reproducing that scenario without that. If you wanted to make an adventurer that isn't a pre-existing historical figure but give them a history and weave them into the world, that's a lot trickier than just finding a person that's good enough, and if we have a lot of interesting people in the world maybe it's good enough. It would be kind of like one of those JRPGs where you pick among the four different people starting out, 'I want to be this guy, the orphan boy with the wooden sword' or 'I want to be the magic girl' or whatever. You have choices, so I guess it would be like that, except they'd be different every time so you wouldn't burn out so much. |
| Rainseeker: | That would be kind of neat. |
| Toady: | I think it's an admirable way to have an adventurer start, as long as you can do the other stuff. |
| Rainseeker: | So we have goblins in the world too. Are we going to be able to pick them? |
| Toady: | The only reason you can't pick them now is ... fill in the blank, I don't even remember. I guess it was because ... probably just because they're the bad guys. That's not so much true anymore, so you're probably going to get that ability before long, because now in the current world generation ... because there's not really enough political information, there's this free trade commune thing going on, and there's migration ... You end up with goblins in human towns just kind of hanging out and living there. The goblins don't eat anymore, so it's funny when a human migrates to a goblin tower, they're suddenly like 'We need food!', so they start buying food, they have to support their human. |
| Rainseeker: | So goblins are nonetarians. |
| Toady: | What? Yeah, nonetarians. I thought you said nometarians, I thought it had something to do with names or something. |
| Rainseeker: | They eat your name! That'd be a strange game mechanic. |
| Toady: | That would, that'd be some kind of magical thing or something, like word eating ... But yeah, there's this weird thing now, and we're not sure how much we're going to dampen that effect. The kobolds don't get to move in but that's because they can't communicate with people, but right now the goblins don't have these kinds of trouble ... We have wars, like even when wars are on people can still migrate around and trade and stuff; it's not like there's these sorts of national boundaries and people are all gung-ho and stuff; it's a lot more fluid. But it's too fluid right now, because you'll get fifty dwarves moving into the goblin place and fifty goblins moving over to the elves' forest. It's all really happy right now, so there's going to be some dampening of those effects, but we really want it to be able to happen. Now the goblins, when you look at their raw definition they have certain personality flaws; they're all sociopaths in a sense because they don't feel any kind of altruistic feelings. The thing we wanted for goblins is that they don't get that kind of buzzy, happy feeling that you get when you do something nice for someone else, so that has a large impact on their society. Having that kind of person in town, that person could be a productive member of society for their own purposes, but they'd also be one of those questionable individuals in town, where you can't really feel like they've got your back in every way or whatever. This is one of the issues, in fact, with the old personality system or the current personality system; we wanted to judge goblins a little bit, and the only way we found to do that was by zeroing out the altruism meter, but we would love the ability to judge them more. That's why we're going to add all these more traditional virtue/vice type things, that can kind of get at the heart of what it means to be a rotten individual, and then not go full bore with it for the goblins, so that some of them could still, for instance, live in a human town and be functional and really have to worry about unjustified xenophobia more than they worry about how rotten a person they are. Or I'd call it semi-justified xenophobia because on the whole the goblins are kind of bad. But we want that kind of freedom, and we don't really have it right now and it contributes to the difficulty of ironing this out where we'll just have to put in some hand wave that's like 'Well, they don't really live there a lot in those human places, and they hardly ever ever ever live in an elf place but sometimes they do' or whatever. |
| Rainseeker: | There'd have to be conditions, probably, for that to happen. |
| Toady: | Yeah. There's going to be some placeholdery crap until we get through it, as usual. But we do like the fact that everything's become way more smudged. Mostly in the towns; the countryside doesn't really have this happen so much because there's not a lot of migration the other way, like a goblin that wants to start a farm. That's not to say that couldn't happen, in real life we just haven't really worked at that, most people are moving to the towns to increase their populations and so on. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah I've noticed most goblins are not naturalists in real life. |
| Toady: | It's true, it's true. I mean, the few I know. |
| Ollieh: | (interlude music) |
| Rainseeker: | And now it's time for our question segment, which is kind of miscellaneous, but we're going to address Argembarger: 'Will dwarves someday recognise and seek out things that give them happy thoughts?' I guess that's the gist of his question. |
| Toady: | It's overall a kind of difficult thing. If you're trying to associate some event, in the gist of the question when you go through the whole paragraph it's like 'Can you associate a specific event or location where they had happy thoughts, or a whole series of events to get them to do that again?' and that's pretty hard to do. There are minor ways, like the things they already do, like just go get their favourite food or whatever, that's the really simple stuff. It would be difficult to do that conditioned behaviour, like going through some complex series of events to get them to do something happy, but there are things like enjoying rooms and stuff they don't really do that aggressively that they could do more of. Especially when they walk by a door and they're like 'Oh that's a great door', 'he really enjoyed that door lately'; they'd never go back there, it would be cool if they had their favourite place or their favourite statue or something. That would be neat, if a dwarf for instance had a favourite statue, went to go view his favourite statue on occasion. That would make it seem a lot more likely. That's probably as far as we'd get in terms of that sort of thing. I mean there's the party stuff we've talked about before where they'll go play their instruments and do things like that, there's certainly going to be more leisure activities. But in terms of going out and specifically seeking out places ... that's probably going to be the extent of it. |
| Rainseeker: | Okay, so we have lastofthelight that wants to know about ruins. 'With the new changes to adventure mode are ruins going to happen?' basically, and 'If so, if we're still having them, can we colonise them with dwarf fortress.' |
| Toady: | Ruins have gone through a kind of degradation through the entire game. We used to have these pyramids and they'd have zombies wandering around on them, and you'd fight on the pyramid ... Or you'd go into these underground ruins that had these rooms that were kind of these random rooms and you'd fight zombies in them or whatever, and then we got rid of that, and then there were just kind of these ruined towns. And then ... you don't really see those anymore either. So, the positive side here is that the new development page has a section for treasure hunters, and that's when we're going to go back and make sure that we're getting the proper ruins from ... |
| Rainseeker: | (Indiana Jones theme) |
| Toady: | That's right, exactly. The proper ruins from older civilizations, and we're going to have to go through world generation and make sure that there are enough wars and famines and plagues and migrations and so on to make sure that there are nice isolated hidden ruins, then you'd be able to go into those. In dwarf mode, right now all you can do is reclaim your previous fortresses, so there are a couple of angles here. Once there are actual fortresses with maps, which would be another adventure mode thing, just being able to go visit a fortress, then opening up reclaim on those is a lot more legitimate. Right now we just can't do it because they don't even have maps, you'd be reclaiming a blank cliff face and there'd be nothing there. So once that's handled then we can start doing that. I like the idea of a historical reclaim, it's just kind of a start scenario; you shouldn't just be able to reclaim your old fortresses you should be able to go to old ones. The only downside is that maybe you'd be getting massive amounts of treasure you don't deserve, but then there should be proper guardian beasty type things and trouble. |
| Rainseeker: | Or else it'll already be scavenged. |
| Toady: | There's kind of a risk/reward thing going on there that should naturally come out of how adventure mode works, and if the place is so isolated and hidden that there's treasure there with no-one guarding it then you probably wouldn't be able to reclaim it because you don't know about it, until someone finds a map, or whatever. So that's the situation there. I think when it comes to other weird ruins, like the ruins of a human civilization, I don't know if there's ever going to be like a dwarf mode colonization or claiming of that. It's similar to how you can't just settle inside a human town with a dwarf fortress anymore. But I'm not sure, it's certainly not as off limits as that, it would be a kind of legitimate thing. You'll probably more likely find an adventurer making a bandit camp there or something, but if they can do that there's probably no reason why the dwarves can't go to an old human castle and set up a mine underneath it or whatever. That'd be kind of fun. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, especially if you went inside the castle before you started digging. |
| Toady: | Yeah, and you could clean it up. It'd be a fixer upper. And you could rebuild the walls, and kill the zombies and stuff. |
| Rainseeker: | All the skeletons in the closets. So I have a question here Andeers. His question is about your thesis, Tarn, which apparently he's read. His question regards your graduate thesis, in particular this part: 'Tatiana Toro has provided me with guidance for many years. While I was at Stanford, she invited me to a conference at BIRS in Banff where I learned many things and met many interesting people. I was surrounded by toads in the mountains. It was fantastic.' 'Would you care to elaborate on the story of being surrounded by toads?' I suppose this is very appropriate because your screen name is Toady One, for anyone who has been living in a cave and somehow downloaded this podcast on a lark. |
| Toady: | That's right. It seems strange to be surrounded by toads in the mountains, but Banff is this resorty type place. It's in Canada and there are lots of trees and mountains and things, it's a really really beautiful location, and during this math conference we'd go and listen to people talk about math and stuff, but there'd also be time off to go just kind of hike around in the mountains and ride around on these gondolas and stuff. On the last day I went and just walked off by myself on one of the mountain trails and hiked up this little river valley and got to the top of this ... I wouldn't call it a mountain, I guess, just a little hill - we're in the mountains but it itself is just this tree-covered hill - and I got to the top of it and the trail had been narrowing and narrowing and eventually the trail sort of disappeared, and I was just stuck in the middle of these trees and couldn't really see where the trail was, and there's all these trees surrounding me and they had these giant grizzly bear slash marks on them and they always have these grizzly bear sightings up there and so on, and have grizzly bear warnings on different trails. So I was like 'Well, crap', because now I'm stuck in the middle of the woods and the bears are scaring me. But then I look down and there are all these toads, there were all these little toads hopping around. They were everywhere, and I was just like 'This is really really weird; I'm surrounded by toads up in the mountains.' I kind of wandered around and found the ... I was trying to stick with it, I could have just turned around and gone back down the trail but I kind of thought I knew which way I was supposed to go, so I went off in the trees for a while and eventually picked up the trail, it just kind of reappeared way down the line, and then I went down the other way. But yeah, there were just these toads sitting up on top of this hill. Very strange, I don't know what they were doing up there, I didn't see any water ... It was kind of a moist location, you have these forest toads that hop around and stuff, but yeah, it was very strange. No bears. Didn't get eaten. |
| Rainseeker: | Yes, we're grateful for that. |
| Toady: | Yeah, I got out of there alive, but I got to see my toads, so I was happy. We had toads ... When I was growing up in California we had this artificial pond we put in our backyard and the toads found it and colonised it, that's how I got my name ... Zach and I used to make little BASIC programs and we would call them 'Toady One the Great Productions' because that's what we named the pond ... We wrote it in the concrete with our fingers, 'A Toady One the Great Production', in this pond where we were expecting some toads to show up, but not in the hundreds - they did show up in the hundreds though, the pond was always filled with tadpoles - but we always called the early BASIC games, this was before we called them Bay12 games, we just called them 'Toady One the Great Productions'. When I started up the webpage in 2000 Zach and I were like 'Well, you might as well call yourself Toady One' and he had a guinea pig so he called himself Three Toe, and we were happy with that, so ... But toads, always toads, yeah. |
| Rainseeker: | Well that's it for my segment. Thanks for joining me guys, I will see you next time. Tarn will be now chatting with Captaintastic ... I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Capntastic. |
| Toady: | Capn. Capn ... Crunch. |
| Rainseeker: | No no no. Tastic. Capn Crunch would be ... |
| Toady: | A special guest host. To talk about cereal and how we're going to add cereal to the game. Also, high fructose corn syrup. |
| Rainseeker: | All dwarves eat cereal with high fructose corn syrup. |
| Toady: | It's true, that's why their ... beards .... |
| Rainseeker: | That's why they have bad teeth, too. |
| Toady: | Yeah I wonder if dwarves ... Do dwarves have bad teeth? That's the question, do they have to brush the ... We just added teeth recently and no, they don't have to brush them, so ... |
| Rainseeker: | Uh-oh. |
| Toady: | Yeah. We're encouraging ... It's really the downfall of society. The kids ... we're spoiling the kids. |
| Rainseeker: | (singing) Halitosis! |
| Toady: | That's right, just stinky, stinky dwarves. |
| Rainseeker: | When I think of dwarves I think that their breath would be bad, I think they would have bad breath. |
| Toady: | Yeah ... Unless it smells like iron or something. But I don't think it would, I think it would smell like booze and rotten mushrooms. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, and rotten meat too. |
| Toady: | Yeah, lots of rotten little chickens and eggs and wool caught between their teeth. |
| Rainseeker: | Exactly. Because they're eating the sheep with the wool on still. |
| Toady: | And whatever else they ... Oil, and the clay. Just like parrots, parrots eat clay, don't they? |
| Rainseeker: | They do! |
| Toady: | Yeah, so dwarves are like that. |
| Rainseeker: | Okay. It kills the bacteria apparently and any toxins. |
| Toady: | Well there's lots of toxins in the game that we aren't dealing with, like all the coal gases or whatever, all the horrible things ... And you have forges underground, that can't be good. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, and you can make lead goblets and drink out of them and it has no ill effect. |
| Toady: | That's right, and it's because they eat the clay ... that we haven't added. So we should. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Toady: | Yeah, there are grasses. There are many many many many many grasses. I just went online and looked up some grasses, trying to get them from different places of the world. |
| Capntastic: | Aren't some of them a little bit more fantastic than your typical Kentucky Bluegrass? |
| Toady: | Yeah, there are fantastic underground grasses, and there are fantastic evil grasses, and there are fantastic good grasses, while we have the evil and good reasons. It should be entertaining. The screen gets a little busy right now, because we added alternate grass tiles so they're allowed to flip between things. So right now when you go to a really evil place there's all these wriggling worms and blinking eyeball grass and they blink and wriggle. The wriggling is a little too much, though, so I'm not sure we're going to keep it at the same speed it's going now. The good regions have like feathers and bubbles. |
| Capntastic: | Nice. It should clean you as you walk through it. |
| Toady: | That's right. It should smell nice, it should be like walking through a bunch of toilet paper or something. |
| Capntastic: | Is there more moss now, or is it still just general 'moss'? |
| Toady: | Oh, well moss could be done with this system ... it isn't right now, so we could do the mosses. Because moss ... you hardly ever see it. I think I forced it so that you see it in adventure mode when you go to the old shrines, then you get a lot more moss, but in the fortress I don't know that you get to see it that often. It still calls the code that makes moss grow in a fortress, but I think you have to somehow have hundreds of years pass. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, I remember somebody posted a screenshot saying 'Yeah, I've been playing this fort for like twenty in game years, and I have a moss tile now.' |
| Toady: | Yeah, so that definitely needs a little bit of work, because I think moss can grow faster than that. But the grass system will work for anything. The underlying structure just tells the block that the tile itself, like the trees and bushes, is linked to a vegetation type and an amount, and it's just set up so that it doesn't have to track as much information as trees do. Trees care if they're on fire, and how long they've been burning. Grass just ... it cares that it's on fire, but it just kind of randomly moves from place to place, it doesn't store as much information because it's prohibitive to store. And the age, it knows how old the trees are, but it doesn't know how old every blade of grass is. So with things like moss it could just use the same structure to say what kind of moss ... And anything else, like when we do things like water lilies and duckweed and stuff over the surfaces of lakes, or any number of things in tide pools and the shore and coral reefs and things like that; there's probably a lot of different ways we can use this. It should be handy. |
| Capntastic: | So along with the grass ... The grass is important for the animals that chew the grass, correct? |
| Toady: | That's right. It stores the grass from zero to a hundred and the grazing animals chew up the grass and ... Grass kind of regrows, every single time it gets hit with the regrow routine that would normally just change the soil tile into a grass tile, it changes the soil tile into a random grass type and adds twenty five grass to it, and if it hits an existing grass tile it adds twenty five to it up to the limit of a hundred. So you have the grass growing, and it'll say 'sparse' and then the grass type or 'dense' and then the grass type, depending on how much grass is there. So your grass would be depleted as your grazing animals are walking around eating it, but it'd also be growing back. So we just need to make sure the numbers work out vaguely right there so that you can have a reasonable sized herd of cows or other grazing critters; they'll deplete the grass, and the grass will come back and it'll balance at some reasonable number of animals. It also means that if you try and keep your animals locked up in a teeny little pasture they'll soon over graze it and starve to death. |
| Capntastic: | So they have to eat. |
| Toady: | Yeah, they're going to have to eat, at least all the ones that are feedable. I don't know what we're going to do with animals like cats and dogs, if they're going to eat vermin or if they're going to be feedable. Because you don't want them to eat the same portions of food that the dwarves do, so maybe they won't eat at first. It's just going to be animals that you can get a ton of food from for free just by having them breeding; you should have to take care of them a little bit. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, human ranch mode. |
| Toady: | That's right, so it'd just be a dwarf rancher out on the ... on the mountain tiles there's this alpine meadow area in the mountain biome at low elevations, so there's grasses up there so you can graze animals on the mountain tile, and it's all the mountain species of grasses, just the few that we could fine. There still aren't trees or large bushes, just these little grasses; it's only when you get higher up in the mountains that you just get rock. I should change the colour of the graphical map exports now, come to think of it. So, that should be sufficient to control that and then right after that we'll get to the finishing of chickens and then vegetable oil and clay, finally. Those will be the dwarf mode industry changes for this time, and then we'll flip back to worrying about getting merchants moving on the map and making the workshops and so on in the adventure mode towns, to get people linked up with their professions, what they're producing, all of the items that are now being stockpiled in world generation need to appear in the towns where they're at, and it'll have ... I don't know, but they'll just be distributed around between the backs of workshops and little storerooms, and people's houses and if the merchants have any kind of organisation they'll probably have some kind of warehouse. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Capntastic: | If you had a cow, just sort of like your normal cow, and then it eats the wriggling eyeball grass, will there be ill effects? |
| Toady: | There could be at some point. Do we even have ingested poisons yet? We don't, we have ... |
| Capntastic: | Syndromes. |
| Toady: | We have the syndromes, we have the contact poisons, we have the injected poisons ... I don't remember what there else, if we have ingested poisons ... It would be really easy to add, but I don't think it's in right now. So right now they just munch on the eyeballs, despite the ... you know, the eyeballs aren't exactly rich in plant-like materials, it's more like eyeball. They're made out of eyeball tissue right now, they're just made out of eyeballs; it has a material associated to the grass of course, and so there's the eyeball tissue, and the worms are made out of muscle tissue. So the cows shouldn't ... It should be more like grass for cats to graze on, and birds, there should be lots of little birds plucking up the worm grass. But right now it doesn't care, so you could just have your cows out there munching them. It might not be that way by the time I'm through but right now there's nothing. They should just be keeling over and dying, or the eyeball like stares and them and intimidates them or something. Of course the eyeballs are always staring ... except when they blink, so they're not always staring. Even if the grass ... it's called something like staring eyeballs, but they still blink, they blink on occasion, because you have to maintain the moisture of the eye to keep it at its peak efficiency. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, you've got to water it daily. |
| Toady: | I guess that's what the rain is for, maybe they'll look up and don't blink when it's raining. Who knows, maybe when you pluck eyeball grass out of the ground it's like attached to a little guy who runs away. |
| Capntastic: | That could happen. |
| Toady: | Yep, there's all kinds of possibilities, all kinds of possibilities. But right now it's just grazable munchable eyeballs, it's like Fear Factor or something. |
| Capntastic: | Some sort of weird food, you'd be like in some alleyway and there'd be a food stall and like 'Hey. Try this' and you get like a stick, and it's got some fried crispy stuff and an eyeball. |
| Toady: | Yeah I guess that's what dragons are for, they can wander around the evil regions shooting fire and just kind of frying a whole bunch of worms and eyeballs, then you'd just need the goblins to come around with little sticks and make little shish kebabs. |
| Capntastic: | The economy for Dwarf Fortress makes perfect sense. |
| Toady: | Yeah. Feathers ... feathers are sensible too; going to the feather grass and plucking the nice ... It's not just feathers, it's not like flight feathers because that wouldn't be a good reason, it's downy, it's called downy grass, so it's downy feathers, nice fluffy chicks, and you can roll around in the thing and it's just nice and comfortable. And then there are the little bubbles, I'm not quite sure what the bubble grass is, but it's bubbles, because bubbles are good. I don't know what you can do with bubbles, you could presumably do something with bubbles. They're called bubble bulbs, bubble bulbs and downy grass, and starting eyeballs and wormy tendrils. Nothing but fun. Those are the only ones we added, because, you know, why overdo it? It's already overdone when you see the wriggling screen, it's quite scary. You'll definitely just want to dig your fort down so you don't have to go back up there. |
| Capntastic: | Yep, then you track seeds in and ... well. I imagine it's like The Thing. |
| Toady: | Yeah, I guess you could have dwarves kind of crowd surfing over the worm grass or something. I'm not quite sure how big they are, if they're as big as fingers ... maybe they're bigger, like big snakes or something, without biting mounts. Although, you could do snake grass too, I suppose. Or leech grass, that just latches on and just sucks your blood and then you don't go there anymore. Or anywhere else. So grass is intriguing, as much of a side excursion as it was, it's fun to have grass gone, because it was one of those things that just said 'grass' and it didn't really add to the game at all, but now you can do all kinds of things. With the numeric amounts we can have things later like clipping the grass to make hay, and then you could bring your animals in for the winter or something. We're not sure what the exact prognosis of that is, just because it's not quite done yet, then we'll see if animals are starving or freezing to death outside during the winter and then you go out to pull them in, but if you need food then for then and they're just sitting inside starving then we'd need to add haymaking, which would be easy enough; we'll just have a dwarf go outside and pull up a bunch of grass tiles for you, pick up a bundle of hay and drop it in some kind of pile for the animals, and then the animals will all just hang out there and eat their hay. It would be nice for the happy animals, everyone's going to be happy, it's all kinds of happy animals ... chickens going to their nest boxes and laying eggs and things. I'm not sure about them, if they're going to eat or not. They could either have some kind of ... they pick up bugs from the ground or something, and there's a certain bug density ... We already have searching in adventure mode where you search for worms and beetles with the search carefully command. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, 'You've found worms'. |
| Toady: | That's right, you find worms and beetles, and then it doesn't let you search again, it says 'You've already searched this location' or whatever, but that's just a specific event for adventure mode, saying 'You've already searched this location recently', but the map might need an overall worm density or worm presence, meaning just any kind of small, microscopic - not microscopic, but microscopic effectively because you can't see them - vermin; then the chickens could reduce that, or other kinds of grazing insectivores. Chickens eat all kinds of crap, though, I guess, so we're thinking also of having the press cakes from when you run your rock nuts through the oil press and make some sort of dwarven vegetable oil, the after product there is a press cake, which I guess can be used for animal feed. So that could somehow be scattered in the chicken yard there with the pens/pasture thing, the zone where you store them like we store the cows. That could be another fun thing for the farmer dwarf to do, go grab his seeds if you have excess seeds and just scatter them in the yard for the chickens to eat. You have to maintain your chickens, maintain your cows and your pigs ... |
| Capntastic: | Goats. |
| Toady: | Goats. There's all kinds of new animals. |
| Capntastic: | So you're going to be able to assign an area, make like a fenced-in area and assign 'This is chicken zone one'. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's just like a meeting hall for animals, and they don't go there just because they want to go there, a dwarf needs to bring them first; but then they know it's their zone. I don't really have time right now just to do herding code, like constantly herding the animals back seems like it'd be a hassle for the poor dwarf because the animals will just wander away immediately, and then some dwarf would have to hunt each of them down, and they'd just keep coming out. So right now they just stay there, they don't need fences or whatever. That might be changed later, and maybe you could have a dog help you or something, but it'll be later. Right now the work time is spent just putting the animals there - that's the dwarf spending his abstract time as the days move quickly - that's what counts for herding right now, or accounts for collecting stray animals. Then they get put in their pasture and they stay there and then you just have to make sure that they're grazed and fed and have nest boxes available if you want to breed chickens or collect eggs. Those are the little dwarf mode things upcoming. |
| Capntastic: | Industry. |
| Toady: | That's right. New little industries and new ... Most of what I've been doing so far is just the world generation stuff with all of the numbers being tracked now, tracking every little thing that's in every little place; so now it knows, and knowing is half the battle, and the other half is actually doing something with this stuff ... which seems to take significantly longer than knowing, but it'll be underway. We might do a series of releases or something because I have a feeling that it's going to take a long time to finish all the stuff we wanted to do for the initial caravan arc, because we wanted the merchants moving on the world map, we also wanted them to go to the dwarf fortress and change all of the dwarf trading. There's quite a few things, so once we finish the dwarf mode industries and go back and set up the adventure mode towns with the workshops, we'll probably put up a release and then immediately after that go to making the merchants move around and so on. Once the merchants move around then you can have the towns eating, and once the towns are eating then that's when stuff starts to get all crazy; you have to worry about whole towns starving to death just because the computer made a mistake, so it should be entertaining. It'll be a while yet before all that's done, so we'll probably try and slip something out sooner rather than later just to see that we have a release, because people seem to appreciate releases. |
| Capntastic: | That is true, I've never really quite understood that. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Toady: | There are collections of people that get built up larger than the villages. The villages are generally sized between a hundred and a hundred and fifty people, and there's migrations to the towns. The towns also get food from the villages, so there's a large collection of food in the town which allows the population to be higher, and then there are large towns. One of the big challenges that definitely needs to be tackled is having towns that you can walk around in that have that many people. From what I could tell from the arena mode testing and so on, adventure mode can handle several hundred people already without any tweaks, but there will be several things that I can do to ... Because a person is no different from a tree - and there are already maps where you can have ten thousand trees or whatever - a person's no different from a tree if they're doing treelike things. So if they're just hanging out in their workshops and most of them are brain-dead, most of them aren't even loaded because you only load a section of the town at a time, but for the ones that are loaded if there are four or five hundred people loaded and most of them are just brain-dead and occasionally ... they'll have like a schedule where they're like 'Okay I need to stop pretending to work in my workshop now, and I need to go get some food or get some supplies or go to the market or whatever', then they can do that, and when you actually walk into their workshop - maybe not for this time but later on - then it'll be like 'Okay, now everyone in this building can turn on and go handle their business, or do things inside their house that they should have been doing this whole time, but there's no point in showing them'. You only need people to think, not just when you can see them, because you want to keep up appearances, you want the place to look as if it's bustling, and look like everyone's thinking all the time ... |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, you've got to have some excitement. |
| Toady: | That's right, so there'll be enough people walking around on the streets to make that interesting, and when you walk into a house or when you leave if people have been moving around objects when they work and so on it's going to have to do something with that. Either those people will be allowed to work, which isn't really that intensive either ... Because it's not like dwarf mode work where you end up walking quite a bit sometimes; that's the thing that you really want to keep down. You can't have like seven hundred people pathing all over the map, but they won't be pathing all over the map, they've got everything they need in their workshop to work; most of them shouldn't need to leave their workshops which double as their houses and so on, for most of the day. They'll just occasionally have to step out, but all in all it should be manageable to have towns that size, and then there'd just be towns that size, which is nice ... to have that many people be in a place. The only time where you get a little bit worried about the frames per second and so on is later on when you have dragon attacks, and suddenly everyone needs to be concerned, like 'Why am I in this town at this time?' or whatever, and 'Should I leave me house and run for the hills?'. Then we'll just have to do group pathing, or something, to get everyone running away in the proper direction. It's manageable though. That'll be good, I think, to have; everyone will have their place that they live, which will often double as the place where they work and also the place where they can sell what they're producing if they're that kind of person, and you'll be able to go to those places, so the shops in adventure mode are going to get revamped so that things make more sense. We'll have people with the proper professions working in the proper place selling the proper stuff, and there can also be market stalls in which case you'd have people coming in from the villages. There's lots of people in the villages too, so if you have a town with a thousand people there should be, I guess, theoretically there should be some eight or nine thousand people living around it; that's not how it works in Dwarf Fortress because we don't have that much real estate, or we can't have that much real estate, that many sites. So the farming ratio instead of being like nine to one is more like two to one. It's enough that you feel like there's an agricultural life, that there's stuff like that, and so what you can still have then is that on the market days when the market stalls and things are all going to be taken up by people hawking stuff, you'll have a lot of people from the villages come into the town as well, so it'll be bustling on those days especially, you'll have lots of people. Then you can ask people where they're from, and they can be like 'I'm from this village' and then you could go visit them at that village later, on a day when they're not in town. Hopefully that stuff will all be going in over a few releases. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Toady: | Yeah, so there's towns and there'll be markets and the markets will have workshops, there'll be people living in them, there'll be people coming in to work there and then we'll have to manage the merchants arriving; so it's not just people coming in from the villages to hawk things at that market, but then you've got the excess wares that people have that will need to be sold to people that are going to carry them to other towns and sell them there. That's one type of trade that'll be going on, just the people going around; those are the people who come into your fortress as well to sell you things that were produced in towns. Then there are big fairs which would happen once a year but last several weeks, and then you get people coming from all over the place to see stuff. Basically we're thinking because of the time structure in dwarf mode, where the year passes relatively quickly, that it might be more appropriate, at least when you're a little bit larger to treat your fortress trading a bit more like a fair; they come at a certain time of year and lots of people come. You can also have a trickle of people coming and then you'd be able to trade in your depot with various people and it would have more of an annual schedule, and it would fit it with the rest of the world. Because it's going to be kind of weird when a merchant arrives at your fortress they enter a sort of time bubble, because they're normally racing all over the world and they can go between two towns that are six tiles apart, they can just walk that in a day like you can in adventure mode, but when they enter your fortress suddenly it takes longer than a day to even get to your depot, walking on the map. So it's appropriate for them to be trading on a timescale where it should have taken them several weeks like it does with the fairs. It's still going to be off, they'll be staying for a whole season which is longer than they should be staying, but it doesn't really matter that much, it's like there's just a lag between when your goods are produced and how soon they should get to the market, so I guess you can never really quite capitalise the same way other people can quickly, but it shouldn't matter because you should have some mineral/gem type monopolies, and a monopoly on steel swords and all that kind of thing; it should be fine. You're not supposed to be a major agricultural player, because you're just a fortress, you're not several villages with thousands of people altogether farming big tracts of land and selling all the produce; you're more specialised than that, and you're dwarves. So those aren't the types of monopolies you should be shooting for, although as soon as you can get armies on the map then you'd be moving at a different timescale again and you would be able to create worldwide economic trouble by exerting your force in places. So it's not like you can't have that kind of influence. I'm not sure ... We haven't really thought about sending out dwarves caravans and how that might work, how that timescale might work where you'd have them do something and they'd be kind of off the map and on the map, if it works in that timescale. So it's kind of weird, there are going to be some concessions made to the timescale where it doesn't work quite the same way when you're playing dwarf mode, but overall there'll still be the flow of goods and so on and all the ... You'll actually see populations change a little: if you manage to play a five or ten year fort, then you should see changes in the world which will be good. I think it'll all still work out, and the towns themselves should also end up with places that you might be able to ... like cottages you might be able to rent as a person wandering in there, and there should be some ritzier places for you to wander into and talk to people and take their things. We're getting started now, finally, on improving that whole situation which was dire up until now. That's still going to take a while and we might split it up into a few releases, but all in all I think that's what we're looking forward to ... and the trade in dwarf mode is going to be changed as well, because it has to account for supply and demand basically now, right? So no more two thousand dollar cheeses unless it's actually a two thousand dollar cheese. That stuff's all going to get ironed out over the next few merchant releases, and we're thinking about different types of agreements that you can make with people, so instead of ... the guy comes and then you barter with him, instead you might give them something and then have a promise at a later date to receive something, or you might receive something and have a promise at a later date to produce enough goods for them to come pick up later. Hopefully that'll make trade more interesting, you'll just have more control over what kind of deals you're making. There still might be some of the shop around stuff where the guys come and just try and peddle stuff on you, just the random piles of crap they bring, but in general you'll get more out of trade if you have more control over what's being brought to you because you're essentially saying what your demand is, and people will be able to bring those things to you and you'll be able to bring them things that they need because they're going to have needs now that you'll be able to meet because you have control over a lot of finished goods and metals and gems and ... |
| Capntastic: | Pretty things. |
| Toady: | Yeah, yeah, and hopefully coinage will come into play in trade so that you could just agree to pay with coins later on, or you could agree to take coins from somebody if there isn't some kind of fortuitous ... because if they demand things and they don't want other things - unlike now where they just have a price for everything that's the same everywhere - then it's going to be harder for you to meet their demands with items necessarily, so coins might just smooth that whole thing over. It should be a lot more rewarding and a lot more useful to engage with the traders now, because I know a lot of people just find them useless after a point, they just don't have something they want to trade for. Forts are still kind of self-sufficient, that hasn't really changed. With the farming slowly moving over to you having to take care of your animals and eventually farming itself should be a little more difficult ... and there's a whole monkey wrench being thrown in there with the dwarves around your fortress, the whole dwarves living in the hills and all that kind of thing later on, but if the self-sufficiency of the fortress isn't guaranteed ... It's like, you could live self-sufficiently but then you wouldn't have as many trade goods, so you wouldn't be able to engage as much with the caravans. What I'm getting at is that it should be more fun to run a fort that isn't self-sufficient now, and you should be able to ask for certain things and be able to produce higher quality goods of a certain kind so that people will come to you for them and you can then become part of the world that way, rather than being more or less separate from it with these sort of incidental trade relationships. Hopefully that's how it'll turn out, that's what we're going for. After that we're moving on to just cleaning up, adding bugs ... adding bugs, yes, that's exactly what we'll be doing. That's what's going on now, and then we'll be fixing bugs, and I'll be doing that for a while because there's hard working bug tracker managers that need to see some progress over there, and then the army arc, which will be the second major way that you can have your fortress associated to the world; not to mention all the kind of obvious adventure mode stuff that comes out that. So, it's finally going to be interesting ... we're doing grasses right now, of course, but once we get through the dwarf mode industries then we'll get back to the caravan additions and so on. There's my ramble for you. |
| Capntastic: | There you go. So when are ... Is anything happening on like the cultural kind of ... Like these guys like to fight people, these guys don't like going outside or something ... |
| Toady: | Yeah ... I guess ... There hasn't been anything there because there hasn't been a lot to work with. In those villages you could have people saying like 'We're the people who stay inside', but they're all the people who stay inside right now. The more meat we have to work with - which hopefully the caravan arc will be giving us a lot of - then the more we have to do there. It's less excusable in dwarf mode, of course, where they've been sitting on toys and instruments for four years and not using them for anything, and that's a matter of finding a time for that, when I'm always occupied with all this other stuff. I'm not sure when we'll get to that ... I think, certainly, when we have the caravan stuff we've been talking about with the merchants, and trade all in, and then when we start getting into the army stuff, that's when you've finally got stark choices in ways of life sitting in front of you, and there can be a lot of variation there. But until then it's just the way it is now, where the cultural variation amounts to clothing, and ... that's about it with the humans, they just wear different stuff. They wear different stuff, they look different - the different cultures are drawn from different gene pools - so the people look different, and the clothing is different. That's what we've got now. As far as I can think of it there's just not enough meat on the bone to do a lot of differences. You could have people that become bandits less often, or you could have people that don't send you on quests to kill monsters, but that seems kind of like it's not that interesting. So, until we have more ... but we're getting to more. I think another thing that because of the ... Like, in world generation you had already in the current version, they have certain materials based on where they live, so it's like 'These people appear to be a culture that lives off of products from the sea' just because that's what they eat and that's what they wear, and you have 'This one that appears to be ...' 'This one and this one that appears to be ...' Even more so now, they're actually doing that, so that kind of thing leads to differences by itself and what trade goods they decide to produce ... Right now in world generation, in the version that hasn't been released, they work on building things with the raw materials that they collect ... they might work on building things, they could just be working on raw materials at a given location, and then trade them. Or you have people that work on finished goods and then they get specialisation points so they make better goods just because it's something they've been doing. So you get differentiations that pop up just because of the resources that were available, and because of the time that they've put it to developing a culture surrounding that type of item; you now get differences like you'd be able to go to one town and you would have a lot of silversmiths there, or something, and then you'd go to a different town and maybe they're just working on textiles. So that's going to be a big difference, and that should lead to additional alterations in what the towns look like and who the people are, and so on ... and just how many weapons are available and how many people are available are going to control - once we get to the army arc - how they behave, so ... I think maybe it isn't quite as depressing an outlook as I originally was saying, I think there's probably going to be some stuff that's kind of cool. |
| Capntastic: | What about the leadership: what are the first steps you're going to be taking towards making those roles more important? |
| Toady: | That's the army arc. The army arc, as its stated, might as well be called the army and political arc, or the nobles arc, or something, because there are people driving these actions, and that's what we're going to see a lot of the important changes in personality, and the changes in ... Like, right now there's like the lord and the lady in the castle, or the lady in the castle, there's usually just one or the other ... There's the lord in the castle or the lady in the castle and they're just there, during world generation it was like 'We need a person to sit in this castle and give quests', and so they assign a person to it. So they're more like a desk worker or an office worker who waits for adventurers to come so that they can send them places, and that's not how it's going to be, certainly. Each of those people should be concerned with themselves and concerned with what they want out of life, which is going to be varied, but generally they're going to try and be the most powerful person in the world, probably. Then you'd start to get things like this town and these villages are associated to this castle, and this person has an alliance with this person in this castle, who is associated with these towns and villages, and then when they try and have ... their soldiers will be coming up out of the population, and then they will have the things that they try and do to try and acquire more of those things, or to try and secure trade routes, and the types of things that the caravan arc is going to allow us to do, since we track all that information now. Then each of those people ... Those are just single people, but they will all have their associated hangers-on and other positions that become available so that more people can get pulled into that lifestyle; and then you can have marriages and all that kind of thing. So, it's really the army arc that's going to drive that kind of political information where you have aristocratic nonsense going on, and personalities like that. I don't know if the army arc is also going to lead to things like fellow adventure-type people wandering the world, and of course this all relates into dwarf mode. I usually fixate on one mode or the other when I'm talking, so that was kind of an adventure tangent but those things will all impact dwarf mode as well, especially when you kind of enter into that lifestyle yourself, where you get your fortress up to the point where you're allowed to appoint one of your dwarves as the baron, you kind of get to that. But that should imply that there's a sort of nobility there and there'd be dwarven barons and counts and dukes or whatever we've got now, and the king and/or queen or however the world generation turned out, and they'd be at those different mountainhomes. Right now it just places the king and the queen and you're the only baron or count or duke, it's sort of sad, it's like they just wanted a little buddy to be in the nobility with them. But there should be a whole slew of those things, and then you'd have the relationship with the other mountainhomes, and you might agree with this baron to do something to sort of combat the power of a different baron that just found a big gold vein ... if gold even lives in veins these days. So there should be lots of stuff like that coming in with the army arc: that's where we're starting with the army arc, pretty much; the other starting point with the army arc is just getting bandits and monsters running around in adventure mode and in dwarf mode headed towards your fortress or having them attack towns, or waylay travellers rather. Big monsters attacking towns is fine; four bandits going into a town isn't really an attack so much as just causing trouble. That's another angle ... I can't say exactly which I'm doing first, either one of those though leads to more personality ... There's the bandit leaders being fleshed out, the megabeasts finally getting some personality, but if we start with the larger army stuff then that's going to start a revamp of the political structure so that they can even make decisions; right now they can't really make decisions because there isn't enough information about who they're making decisions about, or what kind of things they want to do, and who'd they attack, and what it means to take a place over. Right now the world map just has these influence areas where all the civilizations are overlapping - that's more of a cultural map - but the political boundaries aren't really decided at all, you just have people all lumped in together and you have some random castle being built by some civilization between two towns of a different civilization, and that's the kind of thing that just wouldn't stand after they get to thinking properly about maintaining their own power and making armies and things so they can collect more power, and making crucial trade decisions and so on. That's all army arc stuff. Right now we're starting with the caravans and they don't think in the same way, they just want to make a good trade or whatever; it's not people going for a larger picture of the world with themselves at the top of it. That's army arc material, so we should actually see that when we begin that, whenever that happens. So, merchants, bugs, army, that's the plan right now. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Toady: | Part of the caravan arc is the adventurer being able to partake in these things, like being able to move from town to town buying things and selling them and that necessitated the pack mule, of course, so that you can lead mules around with your crap on them to sell in other places, and that implies having animals, having adventure mode animals, so that would go in first, and that's why we're just throwing mounts into this series of releases. And that's going to be intriguing and fun, riding around on your horsie and having your pack mule and having your trusty dog companion ... I suppose you just buy those in a village or town ... anyone who's willing to part with an animal, you'll be able to secure your animal from these people, whatever animal you should choose to secure, and they would be your little buddy, and you know, they'd have to eat now ... riding a horse I guess you'd have to stop every once in a while and let it nibble on things or feed it hay and apples and things; whatever horses are happy eating these days ... or those days, whenever it was. So that's another intriguing engagement, leading to Capntastic's great dream of having a sheep farm. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, a sheep farm. |
| Toady: | Slowly getting there, slowly getting there. You'd be able to have sheep but they'd follow you around and probably kill people for you or something, and then it's a matter of when we're going to allow you to actually farm your sheep and shear your sheep. Of course the nice thing is that once we allow shearing of sheep we're almost already there because you'd be able to buy and sell at that point commodities like that, and you'd have your animals wandering around with you and you'd just need to be able to keep them in a place, and you'd need to be able to pass time faster; those are kind of the things we're missing for your dream to come to fruition. The passage of time is the big question mark, when are we going to be like 'I want to pass a season just hanging out in my rented cottage', like you press the button and then it's like 'You owe three months rent'. |
| Capntastic: | Also being able to set up tasks like 'I want to build this fence in this area' and you designate it then hit a button and then it'd be like 'It took you three weeks to make the fence', kind of an autopilot thing. |
| Toady: | That's right, then you'd have your own little environment, and you might have to deal with the occasional night creature that comes and steals your sheep, just wanders off with your sheep. You'd have to go rescue your sheep, I guess the rescue is something we haven't done, we tried to squeeze that in with night creatures but couldn't do it because there are some times in world generation where ... So they capture a person and then they convert them into a spouse and then they make night creature children - these twisted twisted bad peoples - and sometimes during world generation it stops at a point where a person has been captured but they haven't been converted. So those people are in a limbo that we didn't really define well: there are no rescue missions and if you visit that cave ... I'm not sure, but they probably just appear in the cave and then get killed by the monster, because the monster doesn't remember what they're there for. So it'll be like that for your sheep, I guess, you'll rescue your sheep. It's good to rescue your sheep. So yeah, you'll have a victorious time trading your sheep and you'll just breed sheep and sell them to people and stuff, and you'll know where your sheep here, like 'These are my sheep, I sold them to three different communities' and so on, 'and people all over the world are wearing my clothes'. You'll have to brand your clothes, call them something ... Mines. We were going to do mines. Mines are the very beginning of adventure mode environments to wander around in, but we really need to get to the ruins and pyramids and things so that you could go to a location and kind of have a proper roguelike game there, and then leave, like 'I just had a proper roguelike game' ... Although traps are scarier than they are in ... In a roguelike game generally you'll hit a trap and be like 'Oh no I lost eleven hitpoints' or whatever, but ... |
| Capntastic: | ... Like 'Oh no you lost your leg!' |
| Toady: | Yeah, all traps kind of end your life, so we need to handle that responsibly to give you time to escape them or tell you what's going on or something, that's going to be important. So that'll be fun ... Markets, fairs, merchants ... I'm just reading through the list now ... Adding all the village furniture, making their houses look nicer, and giving them their work ... |
| Capntastic: | Forks and knives. |
| Toady: | That's right, you need silverware. And we've got that stuff now, the only people who have it are night creatures, they all attack you with carving forks and stuff, and no-one in town has a carving fork, where did they get it from? Did they make it? I guess ... I guess so. So that'll be explained properly by having that thing. And inns. Inns inns inns inns inns inns inns. Inns are good: so that you can stay in town, you won't just be able to bum in people's houses necessarily all the time; they should have a reason to have you stay in the house. Right now they're just being nice about it because staying outside at night is certain death unless you can kill bogeymen properly, which is difficult. It's kind of interesting when you add things like that to the night time, because it sort of changes the ethics that you want your people to have, because if you don't let someone stay in your house you're a murderer after a fashion, in an indirect way. So would an inn exist in a culture like that where people have to pay someplace to stay alive? I guess there'd be more stables, or there'd be these ... kind of like bus stops, just little shacks where people could stay, just shacks scattered all over the place along the road. |
| Capntastic: | ... those shacks in something like nature trails where it's a shack you go in and sign the guestbook and just stay there the night. |
| Toady: | Yeah, I guess those would be all over the place, because you don't have to worry just ... the occasional bear is going to come and eat you or something, it's like you are going to die. Have them everywhere. I guess that would spur the technological innovations leading toward collapsible shacks that you carry in your backpack, or whatever, like a tent. We don't know what the bogeymen think about tents: does it count? Does it not count? Hmm, now what's inside ... Because they disappear when you're inside, so can you just cup your hands over your head? Use an umbrella? It's hard to say what counts. We'll have to think about that, it's one of those things with having a computer game is you always have to sort crap out instead of just handwaving, so we'll have to deal with that. Other big things coming up with the mounts is the move/combat speed split, which is incredibly important. So it's like, right now cheetahs aren't fast because if they were fast then they could quickly kill you to, because they run up to you and then they get seven attacks to your one, and then it's over with. So that's the big thing that's going to come with mounts, because you don't want mounts to be able to do the same thing. So that'll be really big, and that'll allow us to do all kinds of things we wanted to do with attack speed and so on, so that different attacks can go different speeds ... that kind of thing. That'll add a much larger tactical element to when you're fighting, it'll be interesting. Then there's jogging, running and sprinting stuff, which also comes with mounts having them move at speeds. Just having the speed available to us like that will be very convenient, all kinds of cool stuff coming there. |
| Capntastic: | Jumping. |
| Toady: | Jumping's more difficult, of course. It's not difficult to do for the adventurer, what's difficult is the pathfinding for other people who want to do it. When you escape from people by jumping over a little one tile river or something - not that those exist necessarily all the time or anywhere - you want them to have the same advantages in life that you do. But if it's just like ... Instead of necessarily enemy evasion jumping, but just more exploration jumping and climbing, where you do get the enemy evasion benefits but it's more for the ruins and caves where you'd be exploring them and using a lot of jumping and climbing; then I don't feel so bad about adding jumping before others are capable of understanding how to do it. Then you can have a lot of fun jumping and failing to land properly and falling off a three tile cliff in a ruin or whatever and then having to climb up a pillar to get out again, but your leg's broken ... All that kind of thing, you know, the stuff people consider fun. So that should be ... So I don't know, of course I don't know what I'm doing now, it's on the dev page though. So yeah, I guess I don't need to tackle the pathfinding stuff necessarily, because that'd be a hassle. They'd suddenly need to look like 'Well, can I go ... I might not be able to move one tile, but can I move two tiles?' and then that becomes very inconvenient. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | Well I'm back to help do credits at this point. We thank you, thank you, we're very grateful for you listening and playing Dwarf Fortress and for contributing to the community and for donating to Tarn and his pocket book, and making sure he doesn't get bankrupt. |
| Toady: | That's right, and making sure Rainseeker has a job. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, yeah. Well, I don't have a job, but I want one, it'd be good. And you can send donations to Tarn and then he'll take the money and he'll laugh at me. |
| Toady: | That's how it works. |
| Rainseeker: | ... we want all of the money to go there. |
| Toady: | That's right, it goes straight to the belly, and then from the belly to the game. We have Ollieh to thank for the music ... |
| Rainseeker: | Yay Ollieh. |
| Toady: | ... and mallocks to thank for the transcript. |
| Rainseeker: | Thank you mallocks, I keep wondering how he's going to handle some of my sound effects. |
| Toady: | That's right. And all the people that asked questions, we can always use more questions, even though we have questions we haven't asked. |
| Rainseeker: | Thanks to my sister who did create some music too. |
| Toady: | That's right, that's right. |
| Rainseeker: | Emily Menendez. |
| Toady: | And then other people, also, I'm sure. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, there are other people to thank. I thank myself, I'm really glad that I came and that I did this. |
| Toady: | We should thank Capn too, then. |
| Rainseeker: | We thank you Capn. |
| Toady: | He's not here to thank himself. |
| Rainseeker: | He'll say 'You're welcome', we'll edit that in. |
| Toady: | Okay, we'll edit that in. I have to get him to remember to say 'You're welcome', or I'll have to search for a 'You're' and a 'welcome' and then glue them together, for (high pitch) 'You're' (low pitch) 'welcome'. |
| Rainseeker: | And then have him say something else abstract. |
| Toady: | Well it's all abstract with Capn. |
| Rainseeker: | (at various pitches) 'Tarn' 'you' 'are' 'an' 'amazing' 'person' |
| Toady: | You should only do that to people when you have their permission, so I'll also have to remember to get permission to do horrible things to Capntastic's audio. Alright ... |
| Rainseeker: | That'd be fun. So okay, well thanks everybody and make sure you give your little kitty there a pat for us. |
| Toady: | That's right, everybody everywhere pet your animals. |
| Rainseeker: | On the tummy tums. |
| Toady: | (singing, presumably to Scamps) On tummy tum, we're a big lardy boy. |
| Ollieh: | (musical postlude) |
| Rainseeker: | Alright can you hang on one second? |
| Toady: | I can. (Sfx vox: trumpet voluntary) |
| Capntastic: | One second. |
| Toady: | (Sfx vox: short trumpet voluntary) (singing) There is a boy named baby Scamps/he is the smartest cat/He's got stripes and spots and claws and fur/and whiskers and two ears (end singing) No tail. (Sfx vox: trumpet voluntary) |
| Toady: | And ... and who's this boy sitting on my keyboard? Is this what I wanted out of life Mr Scamps? Come on Mr, be a good cat. (singing) Who's a little misbehaving boy? (end singing) Woah! There goes the CDs. |
| Capntastic: | Well, there goes the source code. |
| Toady: | Yeah. Copies, anyway. Mr mr mr, this is not an appropriate behaviour, we're going to have to train you, use little doggy bells. (Sfx vox: bells) You salivate whenever you hear the bell! |
| Rainseeker: | (quasi-operatic) Be quiet in your bed or the goblins will get you! |
Dwarf Fortress Talk #12, with Rainseeker, Capntastic and Toady One, transcribed by mallocks
| Rainseeker: | Hey everybody, welcome to a new Dwarf Fortress Talk. This is Rainseeker and I have here with me the elustrious Capntastic ... |
| Capntastic: | Hey everybody. |
| Rainseeker: | Elustrious is not a word ... |
| Toady: | I thought you were going to say the elusive Capntastic. That's right, we're all here together this time. |
| Rainseeker: | Yes we are, and here's Tarn. Of course, he's talking. |
| Toady: | Yep, this is Tarn. |
| Rainseeker: | And we are here to entertain you at the sacrifice of our lives. |
| Capntastic: | I wouldn't be that dramatic. |
| Rainseeker: | Well, we are sacrificing a couple of hours to record this. |
| Capntastic: | I wasn't doing anything. |
| Rainseeker: | Oh, well ... good! |
| Toady: | That's right. I don't know what I was doing, I got up for this, so nothing's really going on. But I'm sure that this is going to color the rest of my day and make it all the more productive. |
| Rainseeker: | It's going to make it beautiful Tarn. |
| Toady: | That's right. I see the sun ... Well actually I don't see the sun, there's a cat in the way, but ... No there's a tree in the way too, there's no sun shining. I don't remember the last time I saw the sun, it's ... |
| Rainseeker: | You live in a very cloudy city. |
| Toady: | Well I live at night, mostly. |
| Rainseeker: | Vampire Tarn. Okay, well, what we're going to be talking about today in this episode of Dwarf Fortress Talk is little pink ponies and strawberry shortcake ... |
| Capntastic: | ... and Pokémon White and Black. |
| Toady: | That's right. |
| Rainseeker: | That's right. No. We're really going to be looking at inns, taverns, the ins and outs of taverns, ha ha, and what happens in those taverns and also we're going to be doing a ... Capn, will you take it? |
| Capntastic: | We're going to be a retrospective on Dwarf Fortress from the past, the present and future. |
| Toady: | That's right. |
| Rainseeker: | We're going to retrospectively look into the future. |
| Capntastic: | Yes. If you've read Dune you know all about this. |
| Toady: | Dwarf Fortress is the worm and the spice. It also makes your eyes turn red though, because you stay up at night too long playing it sometimes, instead of blue. Thank you very much, thank you very much. |
| Rainseeker: | Oh, also before we start I'd like to mention that I have a new webcomic up. It's called Rattown. Check it out! I'd love to have people comment that they came from Dwarf Fortress to check me out, so come on over! |
| Capntastic: | It gets my thumbs up! |
| Rainseeker: | Thank you Capn. And he's read it! |
| Capntastic: | It's actually got really cool art. |
| Rainseeker: | Thanks! Let's start! Let's talk about ... |
| Toady: | Taverns? Okay we'll start with taverns. |
| Rainseeker: | We'll start with taverns and end on the retrospective. |
| Toady: | And there'll be questions and answers too. |
| Capntastic: | Sort of like a pub crawl. |
| Toady: | Is that a new roguelike genre, the pub crawl? |
| Capntastic: | Uh, well ... |
| Toady: | You go through levels, and the more you drink the lower you go in the dungeon. |
| Capntastic: | There'll be pub quizzes and stuff, and ... |
| Toady: | So you're crawling under tables and finding all kinds of monsters there. |
| Capntastic: | Chavs. |
| Toady: | That's nothing but trouble. Woah, there goes the mouse! |
| Capntastic: | I apologise to any Dwarf Fortress community members that are chavs. |
| Rainseeker: | So what will be happening in these taverns? If I walk into a tavern in adventure mode what will I see, versus in dwarf fortress mode, what would happen? |
| Toady: | I think adventure mode is going to have ... it's mostly going to be locals and people visiting for market days, as well as some travellers and people hanging out that you can perhaps hire. Whereas dwarf mode it's going to be more particular for dwarf mode at first, especially when you've got diplomats and merchants showing up as they do now. If they're going to stay for a while then they might need to eat and drink so you'll have to take care of them a little bit, and if they're going to stay a while - I mean how often do dwarves sleep - if they're going to stay a whole season you might need to put them up in a room. But there will be locals there. It depends on how soon we get back to a local economy inside the fortress, but it's basically making meeting halls more interesting for your dwarves at the very start, with the dwarves going in and instead of just claiming a room for parties or going on a break and just hanging out doing absolutely nothing they can take you up on the amenities you set up for them in your meeting halls, or dining room. It's kind of like a meeting hall and a dining room, those things might all get mushed together, and you'll have your dwarves go there, they'll be able to drink and play with little games and use their musical instruments ... |
| Menendez: | (banjo backing) |
| Toady: | ... and I don't if the kids show up at the bars and use their toys ... We want to get toys and instruments in but I'm not sure the toys ... like their little mini-forges, I don't know if you go to the bar for that, maybe you do if you're a dwarf. |
| Capntastic: | What sort of things will you be able to place, like amenities wise, and how much will dwarves care if the inn is not well stocked, what penalties could that incur. |
| Toady: | I don't even know if ... Tavern-wise, it's not like your own dwarves are going to stay at your inn, that'd be kind of cruel wouldn't it, if the seven dwarves arrive and they make an inn and then they have to stay at their own inn, but for your dwarves it's basically the same as it is now, they just need to be supported drink wise, they need to have good food, and they need to chat with their friends to bolster them up a bit, and if there's specific pleasures that come out of playing music and listening to people tell stories and that kind of thing - I don't know about dwarven dancing - and then playing with different types of games, which we'll talk about in a bit I'm sure. Those kinds of things for dwarves, it's really just an extension of the current mechanics and getting them to ... Right now if they go to a party, if they're talking to people and making friends that makes them happy but the party should be really more of a release than that for the dwarves, especially if they've got a lot of their minds that they need to have cancelled out, then they should have lots of different funny specific happy things to do there. So that kind of thing for them in particular, just dwarves from your fortress coming in, it's really just going to be an activation of music and like I said story telling. I don't know if there's going to be a particular service industry, like people serving drinks to your own dwarves, if they just go to the stockpile and grab some stuff, they don't pay for it or anything, just hang out and it's just an extension of the meeting hall/dining hall concept for them. Where it gets more interesting is when you involve people that aren't economically a part of your fortress, then you've got people that you'll actually be able to charge for drinks, charge for staying, if you want to: it might not be something you want to do to a diplomat, but it might the dwarven way of doing things. I haven't quite decided about that particular one. But you've also got merchants coming in, and depending on the location of your fortress you might also have travellers showing up or bandits showing up. There's nothing that says that the bandits don't hang out at a dwarven tavern and then move on, because there's plenty of them just lingering around, and also if you build your fortress out in the wilds they're more likely to be the closest people. This might be the time when we start making adventurer type people and mercenary type people move around a little bit and in that case you'd have some additional visitors there as well. I know in the first release which is going to predate the tavern release there's going to be people moving between towns and villages, going to markets and so on, and depending on the location of your fortress you could bump into some people's associated movements like that, although jamming your fortress in between the villages and towns ... that's a little tight. It'd be kind of funny, but it's a strange location for a dwarf fortress. |
| Rainseeker: | (as Urist McRainseeker) You can't tell me where to build! |
| Toady: | There's a whole other large issue that's coming up before the army stuff which is the dwarves that live around your fortress, these sort of either hill dwarves or dwarves that live deep in the mountains that you're not specifically controlling, and they would also be really good candidates for not just your own local markets and stuff, but showing up and hanging out at your establishment. |
| Rainseeker: | Right, right. How do you feel about perhaps goblins showing up to drink and party? |
| Toady: | It's perfectly fine ... The way things work now goblins are not these slavering, evil, one hundred percent creatures, as we might have talked about before: you've got goblins integrating a bit into human towns ... it should be less so in places like elven forests and so on, but if there are goblins living in a human town, a few goblins, or there's goblins as part of a bandit group then they could show up. We had dismissed the specific idea of saying 'No goblins allowed in my inn', I don't know if it's a bit reminiscent of some stuff we don't want to drag into the game, but you should be able to eject people you don't want. We were thinking that if you've got people coming eventually to your fortress, say you have a reputation for having really good whiskey or something - we could add booze quality as one of the things we were thinking about adding - so you've got a reputation as a place that has good whiskey and you might get more travellers that way, and you might eventually have more well-to-do people showing up, and that might be involved with the gambling that we were considering adding too. Then you might ... I don't know if you have to kick all the bandits out of the tavern and then have a bouncer or something. If you've got a bunch of bandits showing up ... it might be a little more random until we get to all the personality rewrites, but we do already have the anger personality and so on, so if there's going to be more bar fights from bandits you might not want to have them around if you're trying to get some more well-to-do people to show up at your place. |
| Rainseeker: | Throw down some good tips, come on. |
| Toady: | I guess people who do bar fights, they might catch a case and go to the hammerer, you never know. So you could finally start hammering elves, just at your leisure maybe; picking them out, dragging them up on false charges and hammering them all. You want to be a little careful talking about this stuff, you're not necessarily turning Dwarf Fortress into Diner Dash or anything, because it seems a little weird, right? But when you've got merchants and diplomats coming, they don't have to eat or drink while they're there and you can't even offer them anything, it kind of fits into that. There's the option of perhaps having mercenaries stick around in your fortress, we thought about that a bit, you might be able to hire them and put them into squads ... you might not be able to change all their weapons, and you wouldn't have armor for them necessarily that fits, but it seems like a reasonable thing for people that don't want to focus on that; they just want to have some of those guys around. You'd probably just get the money right back from the drinking and gambling immediately. We were originally thinking about doing just adventure mode taverns and inns, and then we remembered ... there was this suggestion around 2008 or something on the forum for dwarf mode inns. I don't remember if we had talked about it at all before then, or if that was just a random suggestion that popped up back then ... So we saw taverns and inns on the dev page and we were like 'Okay, let's do dwarf mode inns too', so it's a little strange. It's certainly one of those things that popped out on the release list when we put that up, because we hadn't talked about it very much; that's the reason we're talking about it now. So basically you've got more interesting people visiting your fortress and you might be able to convince them to stick around. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Capntastic: | So how do you feel the interface will be for setting these places up and keeping them supplied with cool stuff? |
| Toady: | I think the hub of the inn and tavern ... whatever you want to set up, because we want it to be open-ended and have some options there ... The hub is the meeting hall/dining room, I don't know if they're going to all become one type of building now, just a place for people to meet up that may or may not have tables and chairs and ... |
| Rainseeker: | Counters! We must have counters. |
| Toady: | ... counters, that's right, and whatever other furniture decides to come up. So that's going to be the hub of it, and then even if it's just a little counter where someone goes in to check into their inn, like if you wanted to set up something that was more like just a hotel type inn rather than having a big hall with tables and games and booze ... So you'd have this hub where you'd set up your services and link up rooms, it would probably just use regular bedrooms, so we don't have to change it that much for your inn rooms, and link them up to the main meeting all, and at the meeting hall you'd also be able to set up your prices and specifically what things you want going on at your inn, and perhaps you'd also - like with the workshop profiles - be able to attach the particular people you want to hang out there. So basically we wanted to set up the hub in those buildings and not deviate too much from what we've got now. There's obviously going to have to be a new kind of screen or options menu for the new stuff but it should all come right off of that screen. When you get into this economic stuff there's also this desire to jump into, 'I want my guest list with their winnings tab and how many drinks they've bought' and if for some reason you set up two inns you could have charts saying how well they're doing. I don't know how much we want to jump into Theme Park type of stuff, but it's reasonable ... Like, if you decide to start your fortress and you just set up this giant gambling hall and you attach some stockpiles filled with all kinds of stuff that's brought in and it becomes a big part of your fortress and basically booze is your main export straight to people into their stomachs and then they export it out of their bodies when they walk off the map or whatever, and that's your main source of income, then it would be reasonable to have tracking information for that kind of thing. But if it's just a small little place you use to make your diplomats and merchants more happy and more likely to have good trade agreements and that kind of thing then it doesn't need to be something that's in your face all the time. We're certainly not planning to have it at the end of the year pop up your earnings; that's not what we're going for, I don't want to scare people into thinking we're doing something completely off base and stupid with the game. |
| Rainseeker: | I think the neat thing about what you're choosing to do here is that you're allowing it to be more grey, because there were enemies and then there were friends, but now there are people that are customers or are visiting that might be annoying that you want to kick out but are not per se trying to kill you. |
| Capntastic: | I think that the important thing will be to keep the mechanics in line with what's already there, instead of making it like it's its own minigame within a game within a game. |
| Toady: | It's all going in with ... There's going to be nothing wrong with having your tavern meeting hall, your dwarves decide to throw a party there, there happens to be a merchant there; that's actually part of the idea, to have your dwarves around those people so that one of your dwarves could challenge a visiting merchant to a Tacticus game or something and that was one of the main things we were planning to explore with that, these interrelationships and also just the games themselves. We were thinking, well, if you've got a dwarf and an outsider playing a game you should be able to pop in and control the dwarf and just pop up a little game screen and play with some games. The starting point for that was adventure mode, because of course going in a tavern and just rolling dice or playing a little game of some kind is a perfectly reasonable thing for an adventurer to do. The problem with adventure mode mechanics sometimes is that they don't make it into dwarf mode until way later, like with the combat reports where that kind of fighting was going on but you couldn't read the text of what actually happened until recently. The idea this time is to get the dice games and card games and board games - or whatever we end up adding first - into both modes at the same time, so that you'd be able to control your dwarves playing against the outsiders, and perhaps if your dwarves are playing with each other you'd be able to pick one of them to jump into. I'm not quite as certain about that but it might be required just to give you the opportunity to do this very much. If two people are playing a game at a table in a meeting hall then they're going to be playing that game for a certain amount of time, like several days in dwarf mode the way it works, or at least a couple of days ... |
| Rainseeker: | A very addictive game. |
| Toady: | So it'll probably just pop up a little notification in the top left corner, one of those little letters or something, just letting you know that you can jump into something if you want, and then you'd be able to pop in and play the game in frozen time, so no time passes while you're resolving it, and then when you leave the game would either adjourn or they'd continue sitting at that table for the same amount of time they would have, so that it doesn't feel like there's any meta-gaming going on that way. I mean jumping into someone's head and playing a game for them is already kind of meta-gaming, so it's not that big a deal. You could, if one of your gambling addict dwarves decides to gamble away your anvil or something, then maybe you can jump in there and win the game for him. |
| Rainseeker: | Oh please, oh please let that be real. |
| Toady: | It's one of the things we wrote down where we were like 'Do we want to do this? Is that too painful?' and well, you know, it might be too fun to avoid. But you don't want to totally annoy the player into quitting your game, but to some extent that stuff's funny. |
| Capntastic: | Losing is fun! |
| Toady: | That's right. Especially when ... it's all ... I don't know what I was going to say, it's alright. |
| Rainseeker: | (as Urist McRainseeker) Och, you are banned from playing cards! |
| Toady: | It should be entertaining, and it's good - even independent of all the visitors - giving the dwarves something finally to do with those instruments they've had for years just sitting there. And it's like there's all these attributes, like musicality ... |
| Capntastic: | Musicality, and kinetic sense. |
| Toady: | Yeah, all that stuff that they don't use at all, like musicality: there's zero use for it ... and also the language abilities don't get used that much and we can have people telling ... it would be cool, like the historical information sometimes it gives you on engravings, you can have a dwarf say 'Now I will tell you of the story of the time that I carved cheese pictures in my room' or something, and they'll sit there ... |
| Capntastic: | Gather round. |
| Toady: | So you have these really funny dwarf parties where ... more like the way, it'll probably use the same stuff - that was the point - of the military stuff where it says exactly what they're doing during their training exercises and that kind of thing. You know you'd have these activities that pop up at parties, like there's a storytelling activity going on, or there's a musical activity and then people can join in as participants in different ways, and just kind of hang out in the meeting hall doing this different stuff, and the same with the games that they play. |
| Rainseeker: | Could you perhaps listen to the story? Like with the game, you could just jump in and listen to it? |
| Toady: | You'd certainly be able to see what the story is about. If it's randomly generating the dude talking ... I threatened at one point to do a poetry generator, I've threatened these things, and if it comes down to it now it seems early because we haven't done the grammar rewrites and the things that I wanted to do with that stuff, so it might not happen immediately. Before I play too much with language I wanted to get through those things, but if it's just ... |
| Rainseeker: | The dwarves from Nantucket will have to wait. |
| Capntastic: | Tread lightly. |
| Toady: | It rhymes with bucket. |
| Rainseeker: | It does rhyme with bucket. |
| Toady: | And buckets are really important in Dwarf Fortress. |
| Rainseeker: | They are, you need them to build wells. |
| Toady: | That's right ... You should be able to see what they're about, even if it isn't giving you the blow-by-blow, and there are things it can do, like if he's retelling the story of a war, he can talk about ... you know we've got the different list of events that happened and the storyteller might highlight a particular duel from that war, just mention it or whatever ... So you'll get some information, I doubt we'll be jumping too far off the deep end on that one right now, and what else ... singing, and dancing ... what else do people do to entertain themselves? I don't know if they're going to be putting on plays... |
| Capntastic: | Boasting. |
| Toady: | Yeah, just talking all kinds of crap. |
| Rainseeker: | That would be kind of cool, have them lying about stuff they've done, they tell a story but it's actually a lie. |
| Toady: | Yeah we can finally use those personality traits, those lying skills, and their creativity. And they could make up fake stories, it's not boasting, it's just telling a funny story or whatever. So it should be cool; one of the main things of that release is just getting your dwarves in there and not just having these stand around and talk parties. There's a place for that, but not in a dwarf fortress ... and they don't even have drinks, they're just sitting there talking to each other, I guess they've all just really close friends talking about old times and doddering around or something. But not anymore. |
| Capntastic: | There need to be procedurally generated mixed drinks and dare drinks. |
| Toady: | We had those old recipes, then they disappeared. I don't know very much about any of that stuff, despite having spent nine years as a student in college, but certainly people get into their booze and dwarves should be the rule rather than the exception there. |
| Capntastic: | Oh yeah. |
| Toady: | So yeah, I imagine there'll be some learning about that. But certainly drink quality, like I mentioned before, with the reputation of your fortress resting on that perhaps. Even if you don't make the best swords you probably have the best whiskey in the whole world. |
| Rainseeker: | Can you allow us to craft our own microbrews, like invent a drink? |
| Toady: | I guess that's what the Capn was referring to too, right? It kind of relies on this whole recipe idea we had before that you'd be able to take not just the number of different food items you're putting in, and then it says 'this is made of minced this and minced that and minced water and minced air and whatever else you can mince in Dwarf Fortress'; just running with that but that actually having named recipes is not that difficult, it's just something that ... The structures for it in a basic way were in the game at one point and they disappeared, I still have these trade tabs for recipes that aren't used for anything, so I'm not sure quite when I'm getting to that, because it's the kind of thing you could end up throwing in, you know? But certainly drink quality is going in. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Toady: | It's kind of a weird thing, there are all kinds of avenues that come out of taverns, like can you hire people, can you hire just soldiers or if your dwarves are all busy mining can you hire a cook, or hire a human to clean up all the forgotten beast blood that's tracked around ... well, you'd be hiring a series of humans to clean up the forgotten beast blood. |
| Rainseeker: | (as Urist McRainseeker) Och, there goes another one! |
| Toady: | It's certainly up for considering. We tried to think of all the different visitors that you can expect, and there's a lot of humans just kind of wandering around when they get their towns destroyed, and they live in the hills, so they could come and be some use to you. But we're not sure, and it would rely on ... You get a lot of migrants yourself, but in those fortresses that don't get a lot of migrants, or especially when migrants start changing over to something that actually has to migrate and come to your fortress then you might find that there are more other types of critters visiting. It doesn't mean you need to keep them, it doesn't mean you need to even welcome them, and if you don't have a tavern established you might not have to worry about this stuff, because I can definitely see the side of people that just want to have their dwarves without dealing with all this riffraff. So it's something that's only going to happen if you really encourage it to happen for the most part, although there are things like refugee crises that already happen in the game, but the guys just kind of go off into the wilderness and then re-establish sites in world generation, but if world generation is over they're just hanging out, and those situations might be thrust onto your fortress. |
| Rainseeker: | You have your seven dwarves and then three hundred people show up. You're like 'Uhhh ...' |
| Capntastic: | 'Where's the food?' |
| Toady: | There have to be reasonable limits and constraints, but ... You've got to worry about, you know, if you're allowing bandits to come to your tavern and there's only seven dwarves. Maybe they stay in line just because they don't know if there are traps and levers that a dwarf could pull. Especially when you're going into a tunnel in the earth you should be on your best behaviour, maybe they just come there to drink and gamble and stuff, although I imagine there'll be people building outdoor establishments, like big green glass casinos and stuff. It'll be interesting to see what happens, it shouldn't take too much dwarf power to help out your guests; you'd probably be responsible for serving them drinks. Maybe that means that goblets will finally be used for something too, but I'm not sure. Because right now what would serving a drink look like? They go a stockpile and grab a barrel and just pour it down the guest's throat and then bring it back to the stockpile. It's a dwarf bar, that's not far off I imagine. But maybe there'll actually be a point to making all those goblets now, you just stack them in your bar. |
| Rainseeker: | I guess I assumed that the dwarf always took an actual mug with him or something; it just doesn't work that way huh? He just goes and sticks his head in the barrel and takes a drink? |
| Toady: | Chugalug right out of the barrel, yeah. I guess you can imagine that there's a tap, but ... |
| Rainseeker: | I want a barrel like that, full of beer. |
| Toady: | It should be fascinating, it should be really fascinating. Ever since we put it up on the dev page we're like 'Dwarf mode inns are fascinating', it's just weird. But we're looking forward to it. The hill dwarves is a big thing later, we're not really sure how that's going to work into it, because the hill dwarves are army arc material, but that'll probably change the character of them a lot, especially if you have a lot of hill dwarves. |
| Rainseeker: | I'm sorry, for those of us that don't know what you mean, what are hill dwarves? |
| Toady: | Hill dwarves ... The main idea is that if you want to have an army arc and you want to be able to compete at the numbers that other civilizations are putting out there, and if you want to actually go on the offensive especially - because you can lock up your fortress and trap people and do horrible siege things to them and magma and later when we have moving fortresses I don't even want to know what people are going to grind the poor attacking armies into - but if you want to go on the offensive and you hope to actually make your mark on the world then you're going to need more dwarves than fifty or sixty or seventy dwarves, and this is where hill dwarves come in. Now hill dwarves, it's not just to say that you have a bunch of dwarves living just in hills, like their copies of hobbits or something, but it's just meaning that they're outside your fortress, either in the wilderness or they've colonised the underground lairs that you've got, you could make deeper colonies of dwarves as well. And that might be related to getting extra mining, it might be related to just getting extra farming, or they could totally just be subsisting by themselves. But the idea would be that you could send out dwarves from your fortress, you can arm them, you can train them and you can send them out to cause trouble. At the same time they'd be able to come to your fortress and trade, probably mostly food and other things like that, so you can do some exports that way without having to wait a long time for a caravan; if you want to do it. Like I was saying, this is only really required for a fort that wants to be an expansionist military rather than a strictly defensive dwarf military setup. At the same time that we're adding hill dwarves we'll probably - if they're not already in - we'll be adding the fortress embark scenarios, so that you can say 'We have three hundred dwarves left to go found a fortress out in the wild' or, whatever 'to go found a fortress on the border with the goblin kingdom'; then you'd have dwarves inside your fortress and you'd have dwarves outside your fortress. It totally changes the relationship with migrants and how many dwarves you have, so it's a big deal. But that's not to say that the old gameplay system wouldn't also be preserved where you can start with a small number of dwarves and have a different sort, or a smaller kind of operation going on, rather than one where you're worried about playing more of this world strategic game. But if you want to play the world strategic game, which is part of what the army arc is about and part of what having a world map is about - it's so underused in dwarf mode - then you need more numbers, and you can't just have them all on the map, it's just not practical, as we've seen with the frames per second that we get. The alternatives are like having ever dwarf count for twenty dwarves or something, but we just didn't want to do it that way, especially with it how it has to match in with adventure mode, and how adventure mode actually has all the people all over the place. So your fortress would have more sprawl to it itself. |
| Rainseeker: | Are you thinking that you'd allow dwarves to train, or you could set up training that happens off the map, basically? |
| Toady: | Yeah, and it could be all kinds of things. You basically have representatives from your fortress sent out to the ... kind of in the way we were talking about, as the player you're in control of the official capacities of the dwarves, it would give you that position over a whole population that you have even less control over, all these hill dwarves. I don't know if you have to take care of you hill dwarves, maybe they'll leave, maybe they'll just attack, try and get new people in charge of the main fortress. We've kind of put you in the position of being a noble from the beginning in a way, and then when you become a barony you would be a baron over your barony of hill dwarves, so taxing the hill dwarves might be a big theme, going out and taxing your poor hill dwarves. We don't want to get too far off topic, I guess, not that we ever had a problem with that before, but it's just I don't want to talk about something I haven't completely ... well, that never stopped me either, but let me just say that Zach and I have not one hundred percent worked this out, but that's the idea with hill dwarves, and that's the justification for hill dwarves, and no, you're not going to have to have hill dwarves. |
| Capntastic: | They're your off-screen buddies and that's all you need to know. |
| Rainseeker: | Okay, well let's segue into our second part of the show where we will be looking at our overview of what has happened over the past couple of years in Dwarf Fortress. Be right back! |
| Unknown: | (musical interlude) |
| Capntastic: | In August 2006 Dwarf Fortress had its first public release and a lot of people fell in love with it, not just because of what it was at the time but because of the large amount of goals and promise it had, and basically, personally I myself and I know quite a few others fell in love with the game because not only was it good now, but it was going to continue getting better with more things being added in. So, where have we come since that day in August 2006? |
| Toady: | We should probably talk about where we were when we started, because a lot of people now playing ... there are more people playing the game now pretty much than there have ever been. It's not to say there are a lot of people but there's been a slow growth in the number of people playing, and a lot of people probably aren't familiar at all with what it was like in 2006. Things like you had fifty embark locations you had to cycle through on the world map, I think there were x's or something you had to cycle through, possible embark locations; dwarves could only move in four directions ... |
| Rainseeker: | Mountain to the right, river to the left. |
| Toady: | That's right, there was the mountain cliff face, the river on the left - the river often had a little island in it - you could scroll off the map infinitely in any direction and it would start telling you jokes when you got too far, and there was always a certain ... You always hit the river, then you hit the chasm, then you hit the magma, and then you hit the end and then it just set a timer and you lost the game. It was just like 'Oh, your fortress has crumbled to its end, who knows why?' and that was so that the adventurer could come back and fight the demon that had presumably destroyed your fortress, but you didn't even know. Of course the game was released with the civil war bug that caused tantruming dwarves to destroy the whole fortress, as they continued to fight each other and everyone was like 'You attacked him! Well you're against the fortress!' 'Well you're against the fortress, because you attacked him!' and then the whole thing fell apart. And there were those horrible floods where one piece of water could turn into an infinite number of pieces of water and flood the entire world, and ... Yeah, there's all kinds of interesting places we came from there. The adventurer ... there was no adventure mode travel except you'd start in a town, if I remember ... you didn't even start in a town at first, sometimes you just started in the last fortress you lost, but if you were in a town you could travel off the edge of the town and it would give you a menu of places to go. It was very ... it was intriguing how little there was back then, and I didn't actually go back and play it but I saw this thing in October - which was later, of course, because the game was released in August - it said 'specific pile types added', so perhaps there wasn't even more than one type of pile back then; I really don't remember, I'm sure people can go back and play, the version is still available if you want to go and check it out. But it was just intriguing how different it was. Of course people that played it back then ... there were things to be said about going through from the cliff face to getting better and better kinds of minerals, better and better kinds of gems, hitting different obstacles at times; you could expect to hit the river ... Sometimes when you hit the river it flooded and then it shot that flood out about forty tiles and then it receded, these were these kind of scripted events that would happen, and it was kind of gamey. But at the same time we haven't fully recaptured some of the good things about that yet. I took down some notes here just because a lot happened, so there was bug fixing, apparently through that entire year which is interesting, because there's lots of bugs and it's just like now. Just like exactly what I'm doing now, that's kind of the phase we were at then, but the thing that happened after that ... So Dwarf Fortress had been in development for years before it was first publicly released and then there many many releases really quickly right after it was released, but in the beginning of 2007 we said 'Okay, there are lots of problems with floods and bridges not working with water right' and so on, so we decided we were going to throw in a z coordinate, to make multiple levels up and down which was a huge undertaking and it ended up taking many months, I guess ten months or so. The thing though, looking back at that, it kind of reminds you of the stuff that we didn't have in the initial release, because when the z coordinates were added we also added the ability to build walls, eight directional dwarf movement, the ability to embark anywhere, the reactions went into the raws so that you could make your own jobs, we got activity zones, screw pumps, water pressure, hatches, grates ... |
| Capntastic: | Tragedy Mule. |
| Toady: | Yes, that's right, Tragedy Mule, one of the early famous videos, famous among like ten people, and we got machines with those gear assemblies and that kind of thing. So there's all kinds of stuff, the wells by necessity had to become vertical with the little ropes and buckets moving around, and many more mineral types were added at the time too I think, that was the first big geology kick that I went on. So an awful lot happened during that ten months or so and that was our first experience with how I can get too wrapped up in a release until it falls apart and then get puts back together. So we released it and obviously lots of bug fixes happened after that, that was in October 2007, and then the Mac port began around that time and it looks like we resisted the urge to fall into a big development cycle for about four months, then we dropped off the map again. So in the beginning of 2008, this is when we started saying - around that time - 'Okay, we're working on the army arc now', at the same time saying 'We really need the caravan arc to do anything in the game'. So about three years ago is when that kind of talk really started hitting its maximum levels of, you know, just being part of the culture of development, or what was said to people. So we started on that, we started on honestly what we thought was the army arc at that time, and it ended up being just a lot of world generation stuff, like all the legends and stories that you read now, that stuff really didn't exist in world generation very much when the game was released; there was a bit of information if I remember, but nothing like the wars and fights and duels and towns being captured and stuff like that. I'm not sure what exactly we had, but that's kind of when that started up. That release took five months and so that takes us into the middle of July 2008 now. We released it, there was no army arc, more bugs to fix, so we did some cleaning for a while and that process ended in around September 2008, you know, another series of releases. Then we decided that we needed to add in materials to the game, like actual material definitions, as part of the combat rewrite. We were still thinking in these army arc terms, you know 'We need to make combat better', 'We need to get rid of the phantom limb pain', there were some issues like that, and it all turned into this, 'Well, let's just rewrite the whole material system and give creatures material body parts'; that stuff didn't exist until this big release push began in September 2008, there was no ... |
| Rainseeker: | And this is actually what spawned us doing our podcast, because nothing much was happening, so we decided we should just do something and talk about it. |
| Capntastic: | Like a PSA. |
| Toady: | Yeah, because that ... it took nineteen months, that release process. It was a long time and we did a lot, and people who played the game now are probably more familiar with this stuff because a lot of people came in during this time as well ... We did the wounds in combat rewrite; we gave the creatures descriptions; added a million new attributes; put in the health care system - such as it is, I'm working on those bugs now - venom ... we started putting in all those map features, like the big underground lairs and so on, just to slowly get back into that feeling that we had in the original cliff face we were talking about, about an actual underground progression which is somewhat restored, it's not as good as it could be but it's coming back; and we added entity positions in the raws and the whole military rewrite and more came in during that really long wait, and eventually we got that released. That was in April 2010, and since then there's been the big adventure mode rewrite with the night creatures and the travel, and we just recently did the economic world generation economy rewrite that was supposed to be the whole caravan arc, and then we were like 'We're not going to disappear off the map for nineteen months', especially with all the bugs that are currently out there we didn't want to disappear for that long ago. So we've got this thing released now which was kind of like a portion of the caravan arc that caused its own problems, and now we're in the bug fixing mode and we'll be going back to the caravan arc, back to bugs, back to the caravan arc. So we're actually doing the caravan arc, and we're going the army arc, and we feel like we've got the backing that we need pretty much for that. As I said there are things like hill dwarves that are going to come in first before the army arc, but it's finally underway which is good. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah. Don't forget we now have bees! |
| Toady: | That's right. Bees, a recent addition. This is our retrospective on bees. Beehives, bee stings ... |
| Rainseeker: | Mead! |
| Capntastic: | Mead. |
| Toady: | Mead, yep. Hives, collection of hives, beekeeper dwarves and pressers that press honeycombs. We even have royal jelly, the roguelike staple royal jelly. |
| Capntastic: | You've gotta have that. |
| Rainseeker: | There you go! Makes you strong! |
| Toady: | So that's the overview. I'm sure I missed all kinds of interesting stuff and screwed things up, but that's my understanding. I kind of like half remembered things and I had to go look at the devlog ... it's good it's there. |
| Rainseeker: | We should have had Footkerchief come on and tell us exactly what happened. |
| Toady: | Yeah. |
| Capntastic: | 'On March 3rd ...' |
| Toady: | Well Footkerchief is a hero of Bay12. |
| Rainseeker: | He is, he's great. We love Footkerchief. Thank you Footkerchief for your hard work and your community service! |
| Capntastic: | Yes. |
| Rainseeker: | Because we know that the judge made you do it. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, but I mean, hey, he's paid his dues, he's a free man. |
| Toady: | Even more than that, really. |
| Capntastic: | Super free. |
| Rainseeker: | Super Free Man. |
| Toady: | Well there's that 'Get of Jail Free Card' so, next offense he can just be like 'Well look at all this stuff I've done' and he's like 'Alright, fine'. |
| Rainseeker: | All that community service, already paid. |
| Toady: | Not that Footkerchief committed a crime. |
| Rainseeker: | Maybe some kind of white collar crime. |
| Toady: | You never know, you never know what's lurking in the shadows. This small baby cat could even be thinking about things. Actually, we know that for a fact, what are you thinking about Mr Scamps? You're a troubled boy, always thinking about committing your next criminal activity. (as Scamps) 'Well I'm going to scratch you face and I'm going to rip the kidneys out of your back!' |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Capntastic: | Continuing on with an overview of Dwarf Fortress's past and present and possibly future, Toady's previously just gone over the development aspect of it but I'd like for him to take some time to talk about the publicity versus popularity of it over time. Dwarf Fortress has become a media darling, a little bit of a baby celebrity in the indie game circles ... |
| Rainseeker: | And not just that, but it influences many other people's games, such as Blizzard has put references to you in World of Warcraft multiple times, and other games. |
| Capntastic: | Any game with a dwarf. |
| Rainseeker: | Pretty much. Lord of the Rings really ripped you off dude! |
| Capntastic: | I know, that ... |
| Toady: | We've been very happy with how things are going. There's only ever been a handful of people interested, you've got to keep perspective, but it's been cool. From the beginning it was weird, like in 2006 I don't remember how long it took but it didn't take long for lots of people to come in from different places. We were totally shocked by how fast things move around on forums and so on because we had never really been actively involved with other internet communities, and seeing how that works ... Our own games that we released never caught on anyway, like Slaves to Armok and Liberal Crime Squad and the other games that we released prior to Dwarf Fortress. World War I Medic made it onto a magazine CD, that's the only thing I remember ever happening. So we didn't really expect that much out of Dwarf Fortress when we released it, and the reception was really great and then more and more people just slowly have become more interested in it, and people would ask to do interviews and stuff which is really weird. |
| Capntastic: | You've been in a few magazines. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's strange. It's weird too ... We never had done a telephone interview when we were ... Because we'd had our website for six years but nothing had happened up to 2006 and then Zach and I tried to do - it's probably one of the reasons Zach is not on this podcast - we tried to do ... our very first interview on the telephone was with Gamers with Jobs and that was the two of us, Zach and I, and Julian Murdoch there, and it was awful, because we were in the room together, the two of us on Skype or something, and we kept looking at each other, we didn't know who was going to talk, and we were both really really nervous ... that was just a mess. Zach just cut out half way through, and I just was stuttering like 'I-g-g-g-g' and then finally I managed to answer a few questions at the end, it was such a mess. But it's good to see Dwarf Fortress being appreciated by a few people ... Especially a lot of people that make games like Dwarf Fortress. You mentioned Blizzard and there are a few other people that have written just saying that they're happy that something like that is out there and it's cool to see someone just plugging away at their own little project for years, and actually being able to survive without ... So it's cool. |
| Rainseeker: | Were there any plans to ever change your model of donations to perhaps sell the game. |
| Toady: | No. |
| Rainseeker: | Okay. |
| Toady: | No. No plans, no plans at all. You really have to plan for ... You don't want to plan to fail or anything, but you have to think about 'What am I going to do if things start to dry up?' or whatever, but I really don't know, because I don't think selling Dwarf Fortress or changing Dwarf Fortress is really in the cards there. If I just go out and find a different job or start writing iPhone games or something. I don't know if I'd be any more successful there, but so far that isn't really an issue. As long as we have enough to keep going then we will, and while we're making two thousand dollars a month ... It's weird when you leave academics they're like 'Oh, well people out there make double the academic salary', and it's like we've been in general doing worse. Last year was an exception, that was the first year I did better than I was doing back when I was a baby professor, but I really don't see us having a year that good this year. Last year was strange because there was a ... the nineteen month delay ended in April last year and we had a huge, huge month, and in addition there was the animal sponsorship drive, and both of those things added up to just a little less than a regular year by themselves, and this year there's probably not going to be anything like that because we're trying to be more regular with the releases, and in a way that might be hurting us. It's strange, it's very strange. But I don't want to try and think in terms of how I should best set up the release schedule to make more money, because it seems like no releases at all is the best way to make ... |
| Rainseeker: | Did you hear that guys? Quick, send money! Quick, quick, quick! Send money! |
| Capntastic: | Do you see the signals you've sent. |
| Toady: | No I don't ... It's very strange, it's interesting how it works. It would be nice to have another sponsorship drive or whatever but I have to finish this one first and there's like a hundred and twenty animals to write up, or more. Something like that. Especially if I'm adding a -man and a giant for most of them. Giant capybaramens and giant pandamens, there are no giant capybaramen and no giant pandamen ... |
| Rainseeker: | Are there giant giraffemen. |
| Toady: | There were not. In fact the giraffe ... Because the giraffe was a weird animal, right? The giraffe wasn't put on the sponsorship list, because you were like 'Add the giraffe!' and I was like 'Okay, I'll add the giraffe', but that meant that the giraffe ended up being crappier than a sponsorship animal because the sponsorship animals I'm like 'Ten people want this animal and I really really need to try and do a good job on it' and the giraffe ... the giraffe's like a big cow, it's just really pathetic, I need to work on the giraffe some more. Once I'm happy with the giraffe then I'll put in giraffe men. |
| Capntastic: | Like a six foot tall guy with a four foot long neck. |
| Toady: | Now is he six feet tall with the four foot long neck, or in addition to the four foot long neck? |
| Capntastic: | He's just like a normal guy with a four foot long neck. |
| Toady: | 'Are you looking down on me?' Nothing but trouble with a giraffe. |
| Capntastic: | It's very hard for him to put shirts on. |
| Rainseeker: | It's a long process. |
| Toady: | Just wears a sock. |
| Rainseeker: | These jokes are a little spotty. |
| Toady: | Well, we suck in general but ... is that because the giraffe has ... |
| Rainseeker: | Come on, giraffes have spots, okay, you get it. |
| Toady: | Well they have what I think Wikipedia calls a distinctive pattern. |
| Capntastic: | I'm going to demand that you add in like ten seconds of silence after he says that. |
| Toady: | So that we can insert the laugh track? |
| Capntastic: | You can insert the cricket track. |
| Toady: | That's degenerate is what it is. |
| Capntastic: | Were crickets on the ... What do you think's going to be the hardest thing from the drive to put in? |
| Toady: | Well if we do beavers right that's going to be impossible isn't it? Doing beaver dams ... making a six hundred long beaver dam or whatever that changes the entire world, or whatever beavers do these days. Leeches and mosquitoes are going to be fun. |
| Rainseeker: | Ah, will they spread disease? |
| Toady: | Well, that's the question right? When you get to the mosquito you can be satisfied in a way just making a creature that bites you that doesn't really suck an appreciable amount of blood necessarily - unless it's a giant mosquitoman, which is disgusting - but it give you this really annoying itchy thing ... If we did all that then mosquitomen would be considered a success for the swamps and so on, probably. But really you want to get to ... you know, do you add diseases and blood borne illnesses and that kind of thing? I don't know, I don't know. It's a question with all of these, really. Bees won so I spent a lot of time on them, and I just don't have time to spend a month on every animal. |
| Rainseeker: | Please do not. |
| Toady: | Yeah, that would be five years. It would be a great animal game at that point, but it'd be a long time. It's hard to say with any given animal exactly how much time I'm going to spend on that, because diseases is something we were going to put in in the big nineteen month release - I think it was one of the few items that got redded out on that list, along with formations and brain death and a few other things - so it didn't make it in and so it's fair to say that the game is ready for it and if you want to have world generation and then after that experiencing diseases and plagues and stuff, it's a really important force in world history and if the mosquitoes are the vector for that then that'll be great for them, that addition to the game. I don't know, they're coming though, at some point. We're getting the penguin first though, penguins next. I don't know exactly what's going in with the penguin either, you have to think about it. Every single animal you get to you have to think 'what little feature do I want to try and add to the game'. |
| Rainseeker: | Well I won't be satisfied unless he's tap dancing, or surfing. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | We are back with questions from listeners. Our first question is ... |
| Capntastic: | Hi. |
| Rainseeker: | Hi. Our first question is 'How are migrants generated? I've noticed that some come in with specific skill sets that could be useful for starting up industries or military early in the game. Is there some mechanic which is supposed to help the player along, or is it supposed to be another one of those things that players have to cope with and adapt to?' |
| Toady: | So, migrants ... It looks at a list of the skills that are currently represented in your fort and there are weightings towards skills that are really important like mining and setting up your food supply and the basic craft industries and stuff, and it'll attract migrants that you are missing, on the other hand if you've used a profession a lot, you'll also get migrants that work in that profession more often. That's the basic idea, but on top of that it then creates a sort of past life for the migrants, so they get jumbles of extra little skills at different levels and sometimes those skills will overcome their current profession and then it'll change their type around, most of the time it gives them the skill that it selected for your fortress, but oftentimes they'll have quite a collection of other skills and sometimes it pushes them over the edge. That's basically what's going on, so yeah there is some mechanics in there to weight what happens, and there's a large random element. |
| Capntastic: | Random, or procedural? |
| Toady: | I usually say random, and other people say procedural. I sometimes say procedural. I don't even know, I thought procedures were used for most things at some point but I guess you've got procedures that are more procedures than other procedures. |
| Rainseeker: | You've just made my head spin, I'm going to have to lie down. |
| Toady: | I don't know, I just say random, that's what I've called it since I was a little kid, playing roguelike games and it randomly generates a level, but I guess it's also procedurally generating the level. |
| Capntastic: | I was just joking because it's always on the forums, well I say random but sometimes I actually mean random, like it should be cool if there was random ... |
| Toady: | The way I do it is probably incorrect in some circles, people probably shouldn't say random unless they're talking about something that's actually random ... and sometimes random means 'zany', I guess. |
| Rainseeker: | Yes, of course, we're going to roll up a zany world now. A zany generated world. |
| Capntastic: | The arc of clowning?! |
| Rainseeker: | The clowning arc. There you go. I'm about to go and play a game of Mimecraft. |
| Capntastic: | Ooh, snap. |
| Toady: | Nothing but trouble. |
| Rainseeker: | Alright, what's the next question here? |
| Capntastic: | 'How would an abandoned fortress look like when an adventurer finds it? Right now it just randomly scatters items around the whole map and populates the fort with some monsters. Will it be any different in the future? How do you imagine abandoned fortresses?' So basically he's saying that right now the game just moves items around willy-nilly, but will there be better and cooler forms of decay in the future? |
| Toady: | Yes, absolutely. The whole treasure hunter arc is kind of built around the idea that ruins should be treated with respect. Not necessarily respect in the sense that we won't go in and grave rob them, but respect in that they need to be like ruins and not some garbage, which is what we've got now. |
| Rainseeker: | Phew! I'm glad you clarified that. |
| Toady: | So I imagine what we've got is that the ruin occurs at some point either in world generation and in particular we'll address the abandoned fortresses, but starting with the early ones ... In world generation you have a ruin, it occurs at some point when the place is destroyed, and right now the ruins can either be reclaimed, or they might be in a state of not having been reclaimed once it starts, and that's really all it does; it might add some moss to them or something, if it even does that anymore. Those sites should instead be available for whatever is going to happen to them; if the bandits take one up as a hideout then for as long as they're there it'll keep track of the amount of time and at what point in history it was possessed by bandits and then a night creature might move in there and then some bandits might try and take over from the night creature not knowing that it's there and all get killed, and those things ... just like how a night creature's lair in some respects - in some strange respects ... how they're all preserved - but reflects who died there as victims, there can also be these incidental things. If a hundred years later the same ruin then gets reclaimed and refurbished then maybe there won't be any reference to what happened in the past, but there could be some things that are still there, like if they hung the night creature's skull over the gate of the new place they built up. That's kind of what we're hoping to do with the treasure hunter arc, make ruins not just have themes - it's not like 'the orc level' or whatever you sometimes have, that's a good step forward having themes but actually using the history that we have at our disposal now, the things we've been working on for a long time - having the ruins all make sense. The problem that comes up here then, when you have your ruins make sense is that they can somehow become less interesting, there's fewer juxtaposed challenges, you're not going from one strange thing in one room to another strange thing in the next like what you typically get with a roguelike game when you're exploring, but that doesn't mean that there can't be layered challenges, that there can't be a number of different things that have happened at the ruin. We'll be aiming toward making the ruins in general have had a couple of things happen to them. But that doesn't really hold in dwarf mode, dwarf mode's different because your ruins typically - because you just made them - don't have any history at all, except having just been there. So probably what will happen with dwarf mode during the treasure hunting arc of the game, when you go into a ruin, depending on how the fortress fell apart - if the fortress fell apart just due to starvation or wild animals or just a big cave in accident or something - then when you go to the fortress if you're the first person that has arrived there should be no scattering at all, without reason; maybe a mouse a moved something or a guinea pig, we've got them now. So it's possible to have that kind of thing, but it shouldn't just do this scatter thing. The scatter thing is really an artifact I think from the very first release, where your adventurer would visit the fortress and it would be presumably after something has happened, after a year has passed. And it does pass a year, and I think it still currently passes a year when you start adventure mode, or maybe it just passes two weeks ... I don't remember from fort to adventure mode exactly how it passes time, but basically nothing should have happened in your fort. Now, once we've got the game moving around a little bit, which is the very first goal for the army arc - before armies, before hill dwarves, before any of the things we've talked about - is making monsters and bandits and small actors move around the world as kind of a test bed for moving armies that do things. What's going to happen then is that those ruins are going to be at their disposal, just like every other ruin; if there's a two hundred year old human crypt with traps in it, maybe your recently abandoned fortress which perhaps has traps in it is going to be more appetising for the bandits to take up residence in, so the idea is to do them that way. Now this was all assuming that your fortress had been starved out or wild lifed or whatever, but if you've got a fortress that has been conquered by an attacking army then ... this was something that hung out on the dev page for a long time but the army arc kind of brings this into focus now: are they still going to be there? What did they do that for; when they attacked you was their goal conquest, was it just a punitive measure and they're just going to Elamite you out and salt your fields and leave and take off leaving no one alive? Then the fortress, it wouldn't just scatter items around, I guess, it would just have a heavy obliteration and looting procedure that it runs on it. That's probably more likely to happen before we get to the treasure hunter stuff, but the bandits are moving around before then, so just coming up with the timeline you might have bandits inhabiting your fortress and then you might have the sieging stuff and finally having strange things happen to world generation ruins that might have some pushover into dwarf mode abandoned fortresses as well. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | Got a question here from metime00, he says 'One of the things I'm most excited about on the Dwarf Fortress development page are the planned AI changes and opportunities for adventure mode. So I was wondering what sort of hurdles there are for making an AI that you could, say, interrogate, or that could try and capture you alive or do any of the other things on the dev log. Do you have any plans for how you're going to make that happen?' |
| Toady: | So we wrote down our goals on the dev log, and there aren't really a lot of specific plans, we just kind of tossed out what we want to do, but we didn't do that lightly; I think that all the things up there are possible, and not just possible but completely doable. So you really have to go on a case-by-case basis, so I'll just take the two examples that you put there. So when you say making an AI you can interrogate, that involves a couple of things. You basically want to co-opt some stuff that doesn't really exist in regular conversations that we're going to have before that happens, which will just be being able to ask people for directions, and you're essentially asking people directions and there's going to be some resistance to answering, and there's going to be some opportunity for lying when you're doing that. We're not talking about necessarily twisting the guy's arm, but you're asking him things he doesn't want to tell you, the rest is extra on top of that. When you break it down ... This is kind of my approach on all these things, every single new feature, is just break it down into its little pieces and see what each of them are and what we can do. I think the things that I said are feasible, if you ask the guy for a location of something he's going to either just give you the location - probably with different text than someone who's telling you where the local pub is or whatever, right? If you ask him where the bandit hideout is he's not going to be like 'Okay, yeah, you go here and here and you follow the road and take a right and I hope you enjoy your stay there' or whatever, there'll be different text or whatever - but it's essentially the same principle. |
| Rainseeker: | Some of them might. |
| Toady: | Yeah, I guess if he's through with it. But then if you want to interrogate them further than that, or if they have some resistance rather, to that, then it can take the location of the bandit's thing ... If you're asking for a thing like 'Where is the store?' 'Where is the bandit's hideout? 'Where is one of these things?', you basically just need to go in and say how do people lie about things; they need to come up with a plausible alternate locations, and plausible alternate locations are basically going to be the bread and butter of bandits moving around to begin with, so it should all tie in very naturally, and the dude could just lie to you and send you to a cave. Now in addition to this you can start getting sinister about it and have him send you to a cave where something dangerous is that he would know about. When you talk about AI there's this thing where you're like, 'Well, don't you want him to just be able to come up with all of this on his own, "Well it's good to send the adventurer into danger so I'll do this" and you can get into this thing where there thing's all going to happen because you've written some sort of revolutionary value-weighting judgement and the guy can just make judgements like that on his own', and I don't think that's how those features on that list are going to work, I'm not going to make some kind of miracle happen. But I'm going to try my best to keep things general and to allow as much crossover as I can so that occasionally you'll get surprised by what they're able to do, that's all I hope for. So if the guy does send you off to a dragon cave, that's fine even if it's totally hard-coded, and if I can slip away from that so that the guy's evaluating danger, the guy's evaluating the goals that he has then that's icing on the cake ... well, it becomes the cake and then the result becomes the icing afterward ... you know what I mean, maybe, or maybe I'm just not making any sense at all. But that's not to say that there's not a basic AI change that's going to happen. With the personality rewrite we're going to be shifting over to a lot more goal-oriented building up of how people conceptualise each action that they take when they're doing things in their day instead of just following a script. So there should be some satisfying things that come out of that; we've written some test software that make people run around a city and do little goals that wasn't impressive at all but it was based on the new system, so I think it'll all work out, I'm pretty happy with it. Hopefully that'll work, but I'm not going to make any big promises because those things always frustrate me when other people do it, when they offer you up the world with artificial intelligence or whatever and give you crap. So this is ... Each feature that I put up there is going to be accomplished in some way, but it's not necessarily going to be done by a miracle. As for ... I don't know if we'll go into the other example as well of people trying to capture you alive. That really feeds into this idea of the personality with goals and so on, because it's more like a military objective, if someone wants to capture you alive there's two starting points there: how did they come up with that idea in the first place, and how are they actually going to carry it out? How they actually carry it out, that's the kind of thing where I don't think it's going to be based on some sort of magic AI, but it's just going to be something that they learn how to do, how to effectively trap you, box you in, and get you ... either use some kind of trap, or surround you and drag you down, whatever they might try. |
| Capntastic: | There could be the option to surrender of course. |
| Toady: | It's true, they could just yell at you and scare you and stuff. The new capybara sounds should really lead into a glorious future of people yelling at each other and stuff, that'd be great ... But anyway, the tactics there are probably not going to be interesting. When I get to the combat arc I'm hoping to open that up a little bit, but it's not very interesting now and I'm not sure how interesting it's going to get. But when it comes to the actual goal of 'We want to capture this person this alive for a reason', that's where we're hoping that the personality rewrite, which is basic to the army arc of them coming up with 'What do I want to do with my life?' - and that's not just for military goals, it's more general - but for military goals when they decide 'I want to capture this guy alive, why would I do it?' they'd need to have a reason for that, and that would be one of their goals that pops up, like 'I want to extract information from the adventurer', 'I want to hold the adventurer for ransom', 'I want to do this', 'I want to do that'; that would come up. Hopefully that all just fits into the overall system. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Capntastic: | Ghouls asks 'Will we ever be able to receive medical care in adventure mode? I know losing is supposed to be fun, but smashing a bandit's skull with my peg leg would be even better.' |
| Toady: | That's good, it come from a positive place rather than saying that losing is supposed to be fun but I hate losing ... |
| Rainseeker: | It's not. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's not fun when I lose both my legs and can't walk around. But no, he's coming from a positive place where he wants to smash people's skull with his peg leg. The adventure more health care, I think we mentioned somewhere that it was one of those things, when we set up the new dev page and the dev page had all the stuff on it - the newest one that had a lot of adventure mode stuff and we were like 'you can be the hero' 'you can be thief' 'you can dive into ruins' 'you can kill night creatures', all this stuff - and adventure mode healthcare just wasn't on that list, even though it's important. It's definitely one of the things we're going to do and we just kind of blanked on putting it up there. We didn't talk about it that much, like exactly what you want to be able to do, but certainly the things you've got in dwarf mode like crutches and splints and being able to bandage yourself - all that kind of thing that you need to survive - you'd be able to do, especially overcoming those things like you're not dying but you are missing one of your legs. Right now the solution in dwarf mode, assuming it worked which it probably doesn't, and I'm doing healthcare bugs, is using a crutch, and so in adventure mode you'd be able to do the same thing. Now when we get to prosthetics, that's one of those things that has been up on the dev notes for a while and one of those things where it's like 'When is the right time?' Any time is the right time, but that's true of almost anything, so I don't know when that type of medical care is going in, no idea, but it's something we want to do because it's all thematically appropriate to run around with peg legs and hooks and Zach and I just saw Enter the Dragon last night, so you can have all kinds of replaceable hands I guess; a lions paw, and the big knives on your hand, and the natural iron hand that you've got that looks like your hand, and you can also keep your old skeleton of your hand there as a souvenir, apparently that's how it's done ... You will be able to see adventure care, but we're not sure when, it's one of those things that seems like a pressing issue because you die all the time in adventure mode, but that's not a new thing ... So I'm not sure when it should happen, it seems like something you want to do, but who knows when. |
| Ollieh: | (backing postlude music) |
| Rainseeker: | Well, thanks for joining us for our podcast of Dwarf Fortress Talk. I'm Rainseeker and with me has been Tarn Adams and Capntastic. |
| Capntastic: | I hope you found everything as pleasant and enlightening as I have. |
| Rainseeker: | Indeed. |
| Toady: | That's right. Pleasant, we're going for pleasant this time, that's our goal. |
| Capntastic: | Pleasant. |
| Rainseeker: | We're not trying to put you to sleep, although people have accused us of that. So we hope you got a good nap or a good listen. |
| Toady: | Yeah, and who else are we going to thank? We're going to thank all of the people that asked questions this time, and we're going to thank Ollieh for providing the music, and we're going to thanks mallocks ... |
| Rainseeker: | Mallocks ... |
| Capntastic: | Mallocks ... |
| Rainseeker: | ... for doing his wonderful transcript. |
| Toady: | That's right, we might even give him advance warning this time instead of just springing it on him. |
| Capntastic: | 'I want this on my desk by Friday!' |
| Toady: | And we'll thank Emily Menendez for having done some music before, and ... |
| Rainseeker: | Ollieh. |
| Toady: | And, and and and ... are those the people that have helped? I think those are the people ... |
| Capntastic: | I'd like to thank Rainseeker. |
| Rainseeker: | I'd like to thank Capntastic! |
| Toady: | I guess I'll thank myself. |
| Rainseeker: | I'd like to thank Tarn for making this game. |
| Toady: | Okay I'll wait for others to ... |
| Capntastic: | I'd like to thank Scamps for being Scamps. |
| Toady: | Yeah! He was pretty good, he was pretty good this time, I think he didn't cause any real distortions. He knocked over the mouse once, that's about it. |
| Rainseeker: | Thank you Scamps for not biting your master. |
| Capntastic: | Thank you for letting us do this. |
| Toady: | Scamps has no master. That's right. And thanks for listening. |
| Rainseeker: | Yes! |
| Capntastic: | That's right, all of you people out there. |
| Rainseeker: | If you like this game, please donate, go to the donations page, there's a little button that says 'Donate' and it's with PayPal and it's really easy, and you can actually enslave Tarn by doing it because he will draw you a picture. |
| Toady: | Yeah, and you don't need a PayPal account, it'll just take your credit card or whatever, doesn't need a PayPal account. Thought I'd mention it, I hardly ever do. |
| Capntastic: | Dwarf Fortress is kept alive by players like you. |
| Toady: | It's true, it's true, it's true. |
| Rainseeker: | And by the Foundation for Better Gaming. |
| Toady: | That's right. |
| Capntastic: | We apologise if there is a Foundation for Better Gaming that does not want to be associated with us. |
| Toady: | That's right ... there could be ... I mean there should be a Foundation for Better Gaming, there's so much crap. Support them, support us, it doesn't really matter as long as there are better games. |
| Toady: | Well it's my little Dwarf Fortress Talk protocol there. |
| Rainseeker: | I'd also like to, with your permission Tarn, mention my website? |
| Toady: | Yeah sure, and does Capntastic have any microbrews and things he's working on he would like to talk about? |
| Capntastic: | Nothing good. I have a peanut butter sat here but it's not very good, it didn't have a good texture. |
| Rainseeker: | Wait. Peanut butter stout that you created? |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, it tastes like a peanut butter cookie. So much potential. |
| Rainseeker: | You made that? Or ... |
| Capntastic: | Yes. |
| Rainseeker: | ... You made it, awesome. But what was wrong with the texture per se? |
| Capntastic: | It has a very watery mouth feel. |
| Rainseeker: | Okay, gotcha. |
| Toady: | It's all too sophisticated for me. |
| Rainseeker: | Well your game's way too sophisticated for me, so what are you complaining about? |
| Toady: | My game ... the last thing I saw it called was 'a convoluted wonder'. I'm not sure if that's good or bad. |
| Rainseeker: | Well I'm pretty sure you do have the most complicated game I've ever played, and probably is in existence. |
| Toady: | I don't know, it's hard to say. Chess and Go and things are more complicated in a sense if you're actually trying to have perfect place, but Dwarf Fortress has more going on. |
| Toady: | (singing) You're my angel. |
| Rainseeker: | So if they're literally on the same tile or in the same cage. |
| Toady: | Well the cage now, well maybe, that could be a bug. But if the animals are in the same tile the animals on the ground will get aggressive after a while. |
| Rainseeker: | Okay. Hey Capn! |
| Capntastic: | Hello. |
| Toady: | (Sfx vox: short trumpet voluntary) |
| Rainseeker: | I just noticed how my animals were killing each other yesterday. |
| Capntastic: | We need fences and thatched roofs and then we could just do like Peasant Fortress. |
| Toady: | That's right. That kind of fits in with the dwarf mode inns and stuff because ... |
| Rainseeker: | 'Bring out your dead!' |
| Capntastic: | Wheelbarrows. |
| Toady: | ... going to be a theme park or something. |
| Rainseeker: | 'Bring out your ...' 'I'm feeling better!' |
| Toady: | Mister! What are you doing? That's not for scratching. |
| Toady: | Five minutes! |
| Capntastic: | I've got like ... throat gunk. |
| Rainseeker: | I don't want to waste these jokes. |
| Toady: | Well they're all being recorded, they can be inserted. But yeah, we don't want to talk about ... |
| Rainseeker: | Oh you started, okay that's cool. |
| Toady: | Well this is all going to be blooper time, but only if they're bloopers. |
| Capntastic: | I've got some great material for bloopers, I was up nights just thinking. |
| Rainseeker: | I was thinking, too, of ways to make mistakes. |
| Toady: | Of course that makes editing a little harder. (aside to Scamps) Who's this little fat ... who's this little fat boy? It's baby Scamps! He's too fat to survive! |
| Rainseeker: | So I was losing livestock ... Good think I brought more than one of each, although I might have lost the only male drake, I think I only brought one. |
| Toady: | You might have a dwarf bring a pet sometime, and you can trade for them maybe, although there are so many animals now, that ... |
| Rainseeker: | A pet duck? |
| Toady: | Yeah! Yeah. You can have pet ducks, pet ducks and pet guinea pigs, and it's funny with the pet guinea pigs, they'll just follow you onto the map. |
| Rainseeker: | Are they little dots? |
| Toady: | No no no, we made all the new ones unit sized. The guinea pig ... it's really kind of salacious making it unit sized, but it is. So you can see them wander in from the sides of the maps, in certain regions you'll have cavy boar and cavy sow wandering into the side of the map in herds. |
| Rainseeker: | Are they aggressive at all, or do they run away? |
| Toady: | They're the same as other benign creatures, that means they can fight back if cornered ... I'm not sure what that means, it probably means they can do more damage than they could in real life. |
| Toady: | (Sfx vox: short trumpet voluntary) (aside to Scamps) Who's this little fat ... who's this little ... |
| Rainseeker: | Fat kitty. |
| Toady: | He's a little fat kitty who got a bit of tummy. (Sfx vox: short trumpet voluntary) |
| Rainseeker: | Huh, pipe smoking. |
| Toady: | That's right. It was a bloat and then ... I'm not sure where ... has gone. |
| Rainseeker: | Maybe that's one of those features we could put on a feature list to sponsor. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah everyone wants to be able to pay money to control Toady, it's kind of funny. |
| Rainseeker: | It's true. |
| Capntastic: | The unimaginable power. |
| Rainseeker: | Hey Tarn, I want you to brush your teeth right now here's ten bucks. |
| Toady: | I shou ... Well, I brushed my teeth last night but then I didn't do it this morning because I was running around doing laundry and stuff because I had forgotten to do laundry last night. Because you can't be all skeezy for the podcast, even if there's no one in the room. |
| Rainseeker: | We can smell it over the computer waves. |
| Capntastic: | I was going to shave but I figured it would be more in character to ... |
| Toady: | I should have shaved because my mustachey beard thing - whatever I've got - is bumping up against the microphone occasionally. It's part of the reason I moved it further away ... |
| Capntastic: | Is it trying to communicate? |
| Toady: | Trying to tell me ... 'Shave me!' I haven't shaved for a while ... |
| Rainseeker: | Does your cat like your beard? |
| Toady: | I don't know ... He doesn't really seem to register facial hair at all, but he recognises me and he recognises Zach, and he flees from most other people. Fraidy cat. If people get close to him he doesn't get curious and reach out and try and sniff them, he just hisses at them and tries to kill them. He's a funny boy. He's on the lap for perhaps the duration of the podcast, but he's being pretty mellow so hopefully he won't be any trouble. |
| Toady: | There might be, yeah I don't know ... There might be a bunch of different kinds of penguins if I can't think of something else. Little fairy penguins and big emperor penguins and big lardy stome penguins who (aside to Scamps) grab the fat tummy! (singing) Grab the fat tummy! Who's the little boy, little baby Scamps (end singing) I seize his fat stomach! Oh he get his little fat stomach seized! |
| Rainseeker: | Preach it brother, preach it! |
| Toady: | (still to Scamps) Who's got little feets? I seize his feets and make sure they is warm. Who's got little long feets ... Arr, biting his own feet, arr. (end aside) ... and the platypus, just getting the body right on that is probably enough, but they've got their venomous spurs and ... |
| Rainseeker: | And they lay eggs and they're mammalian. |
| Toady: | Yeah ... I don't know, if we had badgers we might have to add the internet ... all these internet memes related to badgers. Because badgers are after the platypus, and I guess there's the old badger video and now there's this other honey badger video going round or something. So there's all kinds of thing that people want out of that. Then there's moose, the moose, and then the red panda, ostrich ... There's all kinds of cool stuff, all kinds of cool animals. I don't know what we're going to do, because we did the bee, and then we did the panda and the capybara, maybe that means we need to do four animals and then eight animals the next time, sixteen animals the next time. |
| Rainseeker: | Spend incrementally less time on them ... |
| Toady: | Yeah, you don't want to totally ... I don't know, it's just so hard to figure out how much time to spend. We're just going to try our best. |
| Toady: | And ... what's going on here, there was typing and then the typing disappeared. |
| Capntastic: | Not supposed to talk about the typing. Shh shh shh. |
Dwarf Fortress Talk #13, with Rainseeker, Capntastic and Toady One, transcribed by mallocks
Cities
Generation
Populations
Growth
Adventurer impact
Attacks and battle damage
Resource scarcity
Adventuring potential
Adventure mode merchants
Questions
Government types
Grass growth
Fortress trading
Credits
| Rainseeker: | Hey, welcome back to another episode of Dwarf Fortress Talk! We are here with myself, Nathan Miller also known as Rainseeker, and across from me is Capntastic, he's almost like he's in the room with me ... |
| Capntastic: | How's it going? |
| Rainseeker: | ... and also our illustrious leader Tarn Adams, also known as Toady One. |
| Toady: | Toaaaady One! |
| Rainseeker: | And next to Tarn Adams is his cat ... |
| Toady: | Actually Scamps has an unknown location right now, so he's going to be prowling and clawing me at his will ... I'm kind of worried now, I don't see him. |
| Capntastic: | It's the anticipation that really makes it interesting. |
| Rainseeker: | So what we're looking at here - and if you guys have seen on the website we have some pictures of what these cities are going to look like, and that's on the dev page, correct? |
| Toady: | Yeah that's right, bay12games.com/dwarves, the main Dwarf Fortress page has the latest pictures and by the time this recording comes out there should be even more pictures. |
| Rainseeker: | So you can check them out as we're talking about it. So now what we're looking at is an overview of the city. If you're looking at you'll see there are a number of pre-made buildings and usually there's a river, possibly going through it and what is happening here Tarn, how is this thing being generated? |
| Toady: | Well, right now it places the centre of the town, it just picks out a spot and spreads out buildings from there respecting whatever wall or keep it's decided to put down, and it spreads ... It sometimes goes over the water... It fills out the entire area, the idea is that the vast majority of these cities were formerly agricultural and would have had those old manor-style maps that we had before, but they've got a market now and are now the central hub for at least the surrounding villages that get linked to them. So you've got these maps ... The oldest maps, the ones that are currently posted as of the recording don't have market squares or anything, so you don't actually get to see the market at this point but presumably those will be ready before long. Because of how it has to integrate the city grid with the cities it doesn't really have the same former-manor structure that it once did, although for the parts that are still agricultural that could return or not, depending on the timetable. But basically you have denser city buildings growing out from some central point and taking over some portion of the formerly agricultural area. So the cities are always the same basic size in terms of the overall area that's considered part of that city, it's just the percentage that's town and the percentage that's agricultural is varied based on the population, pretty much. That's why they always have the same overall shape, it's because all the villages have the same overall shape too, nothing's really changed about that. |
| 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) |
| Toady: | You know, is the world actually going to survive being alive, really? Or will it just have to be dead being dead instead of being alive being alive. If you let being dead being alive it's just chaotic mess and that's probably unacceptable. |
| Rainseeker: | This is going to be really confusing to read for our people. |
| Toady: | That's right, and I apologize to mallocks and the fans for this Rumsfeldian turn of phrase here. |
| Capntastic: | I'm sorry mallocks. |
| Toady: | 'The dead alive, and the dead dead, and the alive dead.' It's very supernatural, but ... |
| Rainseeker: | Let's pause for a second and allow for a transition. |
| Rainseeker: | So how's your little kitty there? |
| Toady: | He's looking out the window, looking out the window here. I just cleaned the apartment recently so he's been running around enjoying the new found floor and stuff. |
| Rainseeker: | You've trained him to clean the apartment? That's great. |
| Toady: | No no, I had to do work and he gets to enjoy all the benefit. He has a lot of fun when he has more clear tracks to around on and stuff. He's been trouble, my hand's all cut up and scratched, but that's par for the course. |
| Rainseeker: | Because he's really excited about it? |
| Toady: | Yeah, he'll just come up and claw me in the back and I'll turn around and look at him and he'll be already rolled and showing his belly, and he's just supposed to be sitting there getting his rubbed or whatever. |
| Rainseeker: | 'Yeah I clearly tell you with my claws in your back that you are supposed to rub my belly. How much more clear can I be?' |
| Toady: | That's his only way of getting attention really, just to come up and claw you. I don't know, it's not a good habit but it's too late now. |
Dwarf Fortress Talk #14, with Rainseeker, Capntastic and Toady One, transcribed by mallocks
Night creatures
Zombies and skeletons
How to kill night creatures
Necromancers
Curses
In-game representation
Werewolves and other shapeshifters
Vampires
Stalkers
Slayer of night creatures arc
Night creature megabeasts
Constructed undead
Necromancers in world generation
Haunted houses
Other night creatures
Werewolves
Sewers and crypts
Programming challenges
Werewolf segue
Programming challenges resumed
Traps in adventure mode
Deities and blessings
Night creature dwarves
Questions
Animal taming
City pathfinding
Credits
| Rainseeker: | Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Dwarf Fortress Talk! This is Rainseeker and I'm here with our illustrious leader Tarn Adams, also known as Toady One. Say hello! |
| Toady: | Hello Toady One. |
| Rainseeker: | Hello Gracie ... As we were saying we are having a Capn free episode today, he might appear later perhaps. |
| Toady: | At anytime, anytime he could show up. |
| Rainseeker: | Anytime, he could show up anytime. Anyways, so we're moving on with our podcast and he will be missed but it's likely he's out there saving lives somehow ... |
| Toady: | That's right. |
| Rainseeker: | ... or kittens from trees, or something like that. |
| Toady: | It's important to do your community service. |
| Rainseeker: | Exactly ... Not to say that he's a criminal, he's actually just serving the community. |
| Toady: | That's right, it's voluntary community service. Community heroism really, he is the Capn. |
| Rainseeker: | Yes, he's the Capn and he's tastic. I also wanted to, before we started, talk about our get together. So we're having a Dwarf Fortress meet up this year for 2011 and we want everyone who can come to come. It'll be on the West Coast, it's going to be in Redding, California, my home town, and Tarn's going to come, Zach's going to come, Capntastic's going to be there and I will be there of course, and it's going to be held at the local Marie Callender's ... |
| Toady: | (sfx vox: trumpet) |
| Rainseeker: | ... you guys can have pie. And basically it's going to be ... you're going to end up coming in, you're going to be paying a registration fee which covers lunch, which ends up being a buffet I guess, and look online for more details for that. But it's going to be below twenty dollars so hopefully everyone can come. There's also going to be some people who are setting up group rates for hotels and for camping - I think there's two different groups - and the nice thing about Marie Callender's; it's adjacent to three different hotels so we will be easily taken care of in that area. |
| Toady: | Yeah, so we've got a forum thread active for this where you can say that you're coming so we can get a headcount and I will link that with the Dwarf Fortress Talk. |
| Rainseeker: | I'd like to remind everybody who has not read it that I write a webcomic, it's rattownstories.com, and I'd like to invite everyone to come by and check it out. The link will be where you downloaded this podcast if you are on bay12games. So, now we're going to talk about the rest of these night creatures, I think we've got about five left? |
| Toady: | Yeah, we've covered lots of colors, we've talked about the bright cyan intelligent undead, the dark magenta stalkers and now we'll move onto light red, the kind of pinky pink/light red color and that's going to be our kind of Frankenstein's monster constructed fleshy undead ... |
| Rainseeker: | Constructed with the power of lightning! |
| Toady: | That's right ... And I guess until we get giant
lightning apparatuses we're just going to let the necromancers use their
raise the dead power. Because if you can raise an arm then if you
stitch an arm to something else and you raise it all, then as long as
each piece isn't acting its own intelligence ... It'd just be creepy if
it would just start ... It's like 'Why is the zombie beating it's
chest?' 'Well, it's trying to kill itself' or something, it's strange.
But, since that's not going to happen - they're all going to be
operating in harmony - then there'd basically be a few things we can do.
Our main restriction now, which is something that takes too much time
to overcome to throw it in this time, is partial bodies, where you've
got like a horse's head stitched onto a guy or wings or tails added onto
people or whatever, but what we can do is change the sizes of each body
part so a person could come but have an arm that's fifty percent bigger
than it should be. We can also add inventory items that are ... it's liked they're grasped, but they're actually grafted on, so that you could have something that has a hook or a sword instead of an hand, and it's been animated. And you can put sutures all over the guys to make believe that they're stitched together, so you could have this disgusted animated portions of body things, it would all be the same species, so humans with humans and so on because we can't do any type of mixing of parts, but it's enough for initial purposes. This one has a lot of potential in the future once we get that body part problem overcome, which just requires time I don't have at this juncture, although arguably all this undead stuff is time that I shouldn't have, but people will be tolerant and patient. So we'll get those constructed guys coming, and most often they'll probably be with necromancer armies, I guess there could be some sick guy that learned the secret of life and death but doesn't use it to make himself immortal but just uses it to make little sick glued together things or something, but right now we'll probably just stick with the necromancers. Those are the bright bright bright bright bright red ones ... |
| Rainseeker: | Well, thank you for joining us for our latest podcast. What number was this, by the way? |
| Toady: | This is number fourteen, I think. |
| Rainseeker: | Number fourteen! We've been doing this for fourteen times. When did we start this? |
| Toady: | Well we started it certainly more than fourteen months ago because we've some horrible horrible delays. Let's go grab the date for the first one, it would be August 6 2009, so almost two years. |
| Rainseeker: | Wow, I've been listening to you make trumpet noises since 2009. And singing ballads to your kitty. |
| Toady: | Yeah, speaking of which, speaking of which, Scamps has been remarkably well behaved. He's a remarkable boy, he didn't cause any trouble. We almost forgot he was here until he came and introduced himself during one of our unrecorded breaks. But he just came up to kind of sniff, so he's been very mellow, it's amazing. |
| Rainseeker: | Good job, Scamps! How old is that kitty cat now? |
| Toady: | He's two plus three months, so he's two and one quarters of a boy. |
| Rainseeker: | There you go. And I would like to thank Capntastic, even though he wasn't here today ... |
| Toady: | Yeah he might end up here, we don't know. |
| Rainseeker: | He might end up being spliced in later, in which case we can edit this I suppose. But thank you Capntastic! And thank you Tarn, for joining me. |
| Toady: | Thank you Rainseeker for joining yourself! |
| Rainseeker: | You're welcome, and I enjoyed myself, I'm a really likeable guy, I like myself a lot, it's fun hanging out with myself. |
| Toady: | It's good to have high self esteem. That's what they say. |
| Rainseeker: | It is good. And also I would like to thank Ollieh and Emily Menendez for music. |
| Toady: | Music. Music was provided. And I'd like to thank everyone that asked questions. I would like to thank mallocks for working very hard on the transcripts. |
| Rainseeker: | Mallocks, you're amazing! Thank you for doing fourteen episodes of rapid typing. |
| Toady: | That's crazy, crazy. Poor little fingers. We'll have to set up a fund for his carpel tunnel. |
| Rainseeker: | Well, carpe diem. |
| Toady: | And this is the part in the credits where I'm supposed to remind people that they can in fact donate to bay12games if they want us to keep going. |
| Rainseeker: | Please do! |
| Toady: | It's always fun to receive donations, and to continue writing the game. |
| Rainseeker: | And the more donations we get, the bigger it can get. Hopefully we can create a big big big big game, and not stop anytime soon. |
| Toady: | That's right. |
| Rainseeker: | Thank you everybody! We appreciate you listening, and don't forget to check out the forum where we are advertising the next Dwarf Fortress meetup. |
| Toady: | Yep, the meetup. More and more details will be coming. |
| Rainseeker: | July 16th. |
| Toady: | July 16th! |
| Rainseeker: | And if you would check out where we posted this, you will be able to find a link to the forum place where we're having the meetup on the page where you've downloaded this podcast. |
| Toady: | Yep! Good night! Bye everybody! |
| Rainseeker: | See you later alligators. See you later alligatormen. |
| Toady: | That's right. |
| Ollieh: | (musical postlude) |
| Toady: | (singing) We'll see, it's going to be fun, there are going to be little critters running all over the place, causing trouble.(sfx vox: trumpet) |
| Capntastic: | Mmhm. Snap a twig, become a ghost, walk through walls. |
| Rainseeker: | I think this game should keep going for the next fifteen or twenty years, right? |
| Toady: | That's right. I'm planning to keep myself going for about that long, until I have to start figuring out all of my things. I'll just edit that part out, I don't even know what it means! I was sitting here thinking, 'You know, I don't have health insurance, so maybe fifteen years is about the limit we have left!' I think we'll edit that out. |
| Rainseeker: | Well you can put that in the bonus ... |
| Toady: | Yeah, the bloopers where I talk about my (censored) or whatever, yes. No health insurance is great! |
| Rainseeker: | So how'd that (censored) go there, Tarn? |
| Toady: | That's right. Just get a telescope and we'll figure it out without all the complicated machinery, because we can only pay for toy binoculars. See now I don't even know if it's going to make the bloopers! |
| Rainseeker: | Oh yeah, this is getting really scary. Okay, anyway! |
| Toady: | Well I've got a beeping noise, I can bleep it out. |
Dwarf Fortress Talk #15 Mini, with Rainseeker, Capntastic and Toady One, transcribed by mallocks
Recent progress
Dungeons and catacombs
Accessibility to starting adventurers
Tombs
Defenses
Necromancers
Necromancer towers
Necromancer night creatures
Towns
Town minimap
Town hawkers
| 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 piñatas 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) |
| Rainseeker: | Hey! |
| Toady: | That's right, here we go. |
| Rainseeker: | Alright let me add Capn. |
| Toady: | Capn! Capn, where's Capn. Oh! Here we go. |
| Capntastic: | Hello! |
| Rainseeker: | There he is! |
| Capntastic: | Yay! |
| Toady: | That's right, you guys are going to be cohabitating in a couple of weeks. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, it's going to be like The Odd Couple. |
| Rainseeker: | Which one's the odd one? |
| Capntastic: | Me, I guess. |
| Rainseeker: | Well, I'm kind of odd too, so maybe we'll be like The Even Couple? I don't know. Because two odds make an even, right? |
| Capntastic: | All these reboots, they just change everything, so. |
| Rainseeker: | So! How are you guys doing? |
| Capntastic: | Doing alright. |
| Toady: | That's right, I've got bags and bags of buttons. |
| Rainseeker: | We have Dwarf Fortress 2.0 with Tarn 2.0. |
| Toady: | There's probably Scamps' DNA on there too, so it'll be like The Fly, it'll merge them, there'll be a Tarn running around who likes to play fetch and scratch people. |
| Rainseeker: | And program strange games. |
| Rainseeker: | And they'll automatically be hostile to anybody that shows up? |
| Toady: | Probably, just whatever we've got now. We're not going to delve into any nuanced things until we get the personality rewrite in, because if you wanted the bandits to be non-hostile you'd walk up to them and they'd be all new age, and stuff, and they'd be like 'Well I'm ... I'm really anxious right now, and I'm having trouble managing my anger and depression issues ... and I really like to hang out with people.' Because those are the only facets we have now. So, as soon as they have some more character, as soon as we get our old virtues and vices and things in there, then we'll be able to have the bandits not immediately kill you on sight unless they actually choose to do so. |
| Rainseeker: | There will be hippy bandits. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's scary. |
| Rainseeker: | Living out in their communes. |
| Toady: | That's right, the game will be as scary as the '60s, and you'll have to bring order to them. |
| Rainseeker: | 'Must punish hippies for their hippyish ways!' |
| Capntastic: | Everything just turns back into Liberal Crime Squad. |
| Toady: | It does! It does! I think Dwarf Fortress needs an injection of Liberal Crime Squad. |
| Menendez: | (banjo edit feat. Tarn Adams) |
Dwarf Fortress Talk #16, with Rainseeker, Capntastic and Toady One, transcribed by mallocks
Army arc and maps
Getting lost in adventure mode
Legacy modes
Adventure mode legacy
Adventure mode organizations
Organizational goals
Dwarf mode legacy
Automatic character assessment
Planes
Adventure mode planes
Dwarf mode planes
Questions
Savage biomes and deadly plants
Game difficulty
Befoulment and evil regions
| Capntastic: | Hello everyone and welcome to Dwarf Fortress Talk. Today we have me, Capntastic, Rainseeker ... |
| Rainseeker: | Hey! |
| Capntastic: | ... and the illustrious Toady One. |
| Toady: | Hello! |
| Rainseeker: | He's here ... and Scamps is there someplace, I'm sure, plotting. |
| Toady: | He's up on his tree, he's up on his tree today, he's just looking out his window ... He wasn't on his tree, for a whole period of a couple of months or something, he wouldn't go up on his tree, then we moved it closer to the window and now he's up there every day; so he's been rehabilitated. |
| Rainseeker: | Good job. |
| Capntastic: | There you go. What's outside the window? More trees? |
| Toady: | There are trees, birds, people moving dogs around, and cars ... There are all kinds of squirrels and critters and sometimes they can perch right next to the window and they'll just be there for a second and Scamps will go nuts. He makes that chittering noise ... it's weird to see a cat chirping. Our hadn't cats hadn't really been in the position to do that because they were allowed to go outside, so they just killed things instead of chirping at them, but Scamps doesn't really get to kill animals so he gets to chirp at them instead. |
| Capntastic: | Right. |
| Rainseeker: | So today we're going to talk about ... first off about what has happened since we last had a Dwarf Fortress Talk, as well as talk about a little bit of the future of adventure mode, in that ... I guess the destiny of the adventurer, maybe we should call it? |
| Toady: | Yeah, that's part of it, but I think we can broaden that to talk about dwarf mode as well. It's going to be a little stranger because it's more than one person involved, but I think there's going to be a lot to talk about in every mode today. |
| Rainseeker: | Cool! Alright, well let's start talking about what's happened. |
| Toady: | Alright, what happened ... |
| Capntastic: | Redding. |
| Toady: | Yeah, we went to Redding, that's right. We drove in our car for many hours and we went south and we went to a Wi-Fi equipped restaurant with ... |
| Rainseeker: | No Wi-Fi. |
| Toady: | ... Well they had Wi-Fi it was just password protected. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah ... they didn't know the password. |
| Rainseeker: | Exactly, they didn't know what it was. |
| Toady: | They didn't know the password ... |
| Capntastic: | I guess the manager had left without telling anyone the password, and ... the waitress was really helpful and actually tried to call them up and get the password, but we didn't end up getting it. |
| Rainseeker: | But we did make a small video after ... |
| Toady: | Yeah, I've got a livestream thingy now. I don't ... I've got to investigate if I'm violating their terms of service by having livestream talks about Dwarf Fortress because they had some condition like that, that you couldn't advertise? I don't know if it counts as advertising or not because people talk about the games that they're playing and so on, so I'll just have to run it by them or something, because if so then I can make little videos and things, but if I can't make little videos then I can't make little videos. So, yeah, if people have any advice on that, that would be useful and I'm just going to contact them as well. So we have that capability anyway with my little web camera I've got now, so that's cool. It should be something that can come of that ... And that's ... and then, yeah, after Redding which, you know, everyone had an entertaining time - I think - that went there, I haven't heard any complaints about how horrible it was or anything, then yeah ... then there was the crazy magazine article ... |
| Rainseeker: | Right. |
| Toady: | ... which brought many peoples and is continuing to bring many peoples, lots of emails and things. My inbox hasn't really gone below fifty emails since that happened. |
| Rainseeker: | Oh gosh ... |
| Toady: | That's why ... I mean the dev logs have been pretty dry lately, because I've been kind of overwhelmed, but I think we're finally coming back into non-overwhelmed territory, which will be welcome; even if it means things return more or less to normal money wise, it would be good to get back to work. So it's been cool, it's been pretty cool. Lots of peoples, lots of peoples. I got to pick up a few copies of the magazine around town and stuff, so that was fun. |
| Rainseeker: | That's very good. Have you posted a picture of that that we can see? |
| Toady: | A picture of the magazine? It's basically the same as the online version, but you mean like the cover of the magazine where it shows Yemen on fire and it says 'The Brink of Hell' or something? |
| Rainseeker: | Just the picture of the cover of your portion, or whatever, I don't know ... |
| Toady: | Well I could ... I don't know when I run into copyright problems, because people post magazines when they're not supposed to and so on ... But I don't know, I'll see what I can do. |
| Rainseeker: | Thanks for joining us for another Dwarf Fortress Talk. This was Rainseeker along with Capntastic and our illustrious leader Tarn Adams. |
| Capntastic: | Thank you for allowing us into your lives. |
| Rainseeker: | We really appreciate it. We'd also like to thank a number of people. Tarn, would you do the honors? |
| Toady: | Yes, we would like to thank everybody that asked questions, whether they were read or not, and we'll continue slowly picking some and going through them ... So thanks to everybody that asked questions, there's a forum thread that's linked from the Dwarf Fortress Talk page where you can see how to ask questions. We'd like to thank Ollieh for providing music, and we'd like to thank Emily Menendez for providing music. We'd like to thank mallocks for writing up a transcript and going through all of the rambling and faithfully rendering sound effects and so on ... all the trouble that mallocks has to go through, and ... well, we've been bringing up that you can in fact contribute and support Dwarf Fortress, there's information on the Bay 12 Games page and it's nice when people keep us going, and we give you little prizes; we can write stories ... Zach will write you a story, a unique story, your own story, you can even make requests, and we've been sending out crayon pictures to people. We just drew up forty five crayon pictures last week ... that was a project, we had extra help in the family come and judge them and arrange them in their proper order and say which ones they liked and so on ... We even had one that we ripped into little pieces and threw away. So, we did a lot of work drawing those up and we should get them sent out, and you can have you own! People make all kinds of requests and stuff, we can have ... |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, I have my own! |
| Toady: | Yeah, yeah, it's fun times. And Rainseeker is working on rattownstories.com, there'll be a link up somewhere, and that is his webcomic. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, check it out. It's hilarious! |
| Toady: | And Capntastic is at peace. |
| Capntastic: | Yes. |
| Toady: | Ommm ... |
| Rainseeker: | Ommm ... |
| Toady: | Ommm ... |
| Rainseeker: | Ommm ... We really appreciate you guys coming and listening, and it's been really fun, we had a really good time at our little Dwarf Fortress get together. Hopefully we'll do one next year, maybe, maybe ... maybe. We don't know any details but if someone wants to start thinking about it, you're more than welcome to ... I don't have to do it again. I don't have to, but ... Anyway, I guess that's it, thanks guys. |
| Capntastic: | Thank you! |
| Toady: | Okay, yep. Till next time! |
| Capntastic: | Have fun! |
| Ollieh: | (musical postlude) |
Dwarf Fortress Talk #17, with Rainseeker, Capntastic and Toady One, transcribed by mallocks
Dwarf Fortress play styles
Narrativists
Apocalypses
Scenarios
Dwarf Fortress's gamey origins
How Toady plays
Questions
In-game languages
Combustion
Melancholy art
Party member autonomy
| Rainseeker: | Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Dwarf Fortress Talk! The talk ... show ... where we show about talk ... |
| Toady: | That's right. |
| Capntastic: | It's true! |
| Rainseeker: | Where we take fortresses and we take dwarves and we put them together ... |
| Capntastic: | We shake em ... |
| Rainseeker: | ... and then out comes this amazing game called Dwarf Fortress. |
| Toady: | That's right. It's episode seventeen. |
| Rainseeker: | Holy cow! |
| Capntastic: | What season are we on? |
| Toady: | Well ... did we start in 2007, or 2008? |
| Capntastic: | 2009. |
| Toady: | Wow 2009, so that was only ... August 6th 2009, so that means I guess we're in the middle of the third season. |
| Capntastic: | This is where everything changes. |
| Rainseeker: | No no no. This is the fall season, where the new episodes begin so this is our season premiere! |
| Toady: | Oh, well I guess we have to hook new listeners. |
| Rainseeker: | That's right! Hey! This is Rainseeker, and next to me ... in a city far far away, but he's still next to me is Capntastic ... |
| Capntastic: | Hello! |
| Rainseeker: | ... and he's fantastic. And then we have our illustrious leader, Tarn Adams, also known as Toady One ... |
| Toady: | That's right, your long lost brother joining you for the third season, because the last guy had a little bit of a problem and he had to be let go. |
| Rainseeker: | Right. Yeah, he died. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, he got pushed off a bridge or something. Someone told me that's what happened. |
| Rainseeker: | ... and then he came to town in a bus with no memory, and so, here he is: |
| Toady: | Hey. What were we talking about? |
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| |
| Rainseeker: | Well let me refresh your memory. We are talking today about a topic that is near and dear to Capntastic's heart, which is styles of approaching Dwarf Fortress. You want to talk about that Capn? |
| Capntastic: | I can talk about it for a bit. |
| Rainseeker: | Cool. |
| Capntastic: | Basically in my time around the Dwarf Fortress community, seeing people play, reading threads and all that, I've noticed that there are basically three types of people that play the game, or rather three core things that people want to get out of the game. The first and foremost is basically people want the game to be a game where they can actually have goals and achieve them, maybe not necessarily explicit goals, but have a general idea of how to progress within the game, have challenges spring up so it's not always a cakewalk and not always a death-grinding skeleton coming and tearing your skin off; that's fun in its own way, but people want ways to work around that and interact with it in fun ways. There are also people who want the game to be an accurate simulation of fantasy fun stuff, you know: trudging through mud and getting stuck, having to lose your boot and then your boot fills up with mud, and then you've got to pour the mud out of the boot; and, you know, moss growing; and places freezing over when it gets cold; crops growing; peasants being peasants, you know, just kind of ... |
| Rainseeker: | Being repressed. |
| Capntastic: | Being repressed, yeah. But that stuff actually happens in some ways, that stuff makes sense, you can get into the groove of all that sort of fun things happening; they want to the game to be - when they're playing fortress mode - they want options, they want to be able to interact with things, they want surprising things to spring up and then they have to work around them, kind of like Civilization or Sim Earth where lava erupts from a volcano and then all this magma's coming around and they've got to deal with that in its own way. Then the third type of classification that I've basically made up - like all of these, please don't take them as science - are the people that want the game to be more about constructing things, more of a Real Time Strategy kind of setup where they build bases and they have elaborate towers and basically stunting where they make the cool computers in the game, and all these elaborate giant dwarves that vomit lava all over the place. You know, just all that really interesting stuff ... Mods that turn Dwarf Fortress into Warhammer 40'000 ... Kind of, tinkering with the game, rather than tinkering within the game; I think a lot of those people want the game to recognize, 'Oh, well they made a tower, this is how much dwarf fame it's going to bring in.' Basically, to them the game is more of a construction kit, like Lego ... |
| Rainseeker: | Dwarven Legos. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah! So those are basically the three categories, gamists, simulationists and constructionists. I think most people will fall basically in one of those. There's obviously going to be some overlap, but basically I haven't really seen anyone who really wants something that falls outside of those, other than people who are kind of in it for the long haul and just like the concept of the game itself, but maybe don't really play it too often. They say 'Oh, this Dwarf Fortress game, it's crazy; in the future it's going to have everything' and that's kind of true, so that appeals to all three. |
| Rainseeker: | Conceptualists. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah. |
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| |
| Toady: | Well actually ... Now that we've had a thread up on the forum where people have been talking about this for a week - I think we put that up around October 8th or something - so what have we found, in terms of what people ... you know, how they fit into these categories and what themes have emerged. A theme that I noticed coming up repeatedly was that there's this narrativist group, as they call themselves, of people that are into the game for its storytelling ability, which is kind of a subset of simulationism, but it really feeds into all three types of games ... it's not strictly a watching the simulation, but wanting to be a part of it, and wanting the things you do to matter and also wanting there to be a thread that kind of jumps up on its own that you can grab on to and continue. So that was definitely a large theme that I noticed cropping up in there. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, I feel that with a lot of people ... There's a handful of really famous stories within the community, that people enjoy and retell and show off to other people, and I feel that that definitely has a very strong pull ... |
| Toady: | Yeah, I think there's even a subgroup of people that I guess would put themselves in the observer class of people, that even if the game has a lot of goals that aren't finished yet, they don't even want to play after they're done, they just want to watch other people play and like to hear the stories that come out of it that people tell. |
| Rainseeker: | It's true, why don't we mention a couple of those more famous stories that you guys can remember. I know that there's Boatmurdered, and ... |
| Capntastic: | Tholtig Cryptbrain. |
| Toady: | People mention Cacame all the time, although I don't remember the details of a lot of these names that I hear. Even the name Urist came from a story, right? Is that the one where the person was locked, or kind of trapped underground by themselves for a while? It could be, it all flows together at some point. There's plenty of them and we have a whole forum section now, and if I remember there's a sticky where people still vote for which stories belong in The Hall of Legends. |
| Rainseeker: | We should put a link to that. |
| Toady: | Yeah, yeah. We've got Boatmurdered, SparkGear, Headshoots, Syrupleaf, Battlefailed, Gemclod and then there's a bunch of active ones as well. Then there's adventure mode threads and ... there's all kinds of ... |
| Capntastic: | Stories and adventures. |
| Toady: | ... Oilfurnace. There's ones that came up online, things like Bronzemurder. Yeah, so there's a ton of famous one - famous within the community, anyway - and then there's also ... just each time you play the game, which is what I think a lot of them were getting at, is not necessarily a story that they want to share, have glorified in this larger fashion, but just a story that they can be a part of. Something that makes the simulation have more meaning than it would if you didn't try ... I mean, it's just natural for people to attach a narrative to things, I think. The gamist people ... a big theme there was the idea of a challenge and a natural progression, I think, and the ability to set goals that comes from having a natural progression. You can kind of move through the challenges and it's not necessarily about achieving a greater state or having progress in that way, but that's part of it. As far as pure constructionists go, I don't remember if ... I mean there were some people that liked to have giant elaborate fortresses ... |
| Capntastic: | I just know that there's people who, they'll be digging out a fort and it's like 'Oh, there's a mineral vein here, argh!' You know, they've got to use tools to get rid of it because they don't want to dig it out, to them it's all very aesthetically pleasing. |
| Toady: | Yeah, that was another thread that came up. It was DG who said, you know, he was almost obsessive compulsive perfectionist ... even if you're not a constructionist there's still a group of people that need their fort ... the people that would abandon a fort at the drop of a hat if they dug something wrong, and keep a hundred saves that they can go back to so things will evolve exactly as they want them to. That, in a sense, says that the simulation is less important than the act of constructing, even if you're really interested in the simulation sometimes you can't escape from your own needs in terms of your perfectionism. So, yeah, that's definitely another thread that came up. There's the whole idea as well of 'is Dwarf Fortress even a game?' or would you consider it more of a toy, because it doesn't really give you a goal necessarily, and the thread that developed there ... you know, it has implied goals, and perhaps that's enough to make it more of a game than a toy, but a simulationist person wouldn't even necessarily care, and a constructionist person really doesn't care either; it's just something that you can play with. The whole game/toy distinction becomes very blurry, I think; if you have to go by strict definitions then it probably depends on the definition whether or not you'd consider it even a game at all. It doesn't bother me if it's not, right, I don't have anything invested in the term, but it's certainly an interesting thing, that you can play the game and come up with your own goals for it, but that does bother some people, they'd like to have more structure. Someone mentioned the colonization ... it was hermes I think, who brought up the Colonization endgame, how it's like Civilization or whatever. But in Civilization your goal is just to win in one of a number of ways, whereas Colonization is leading towards a very climactic endgame where you have to break free from Europe, and there's a giant fight at the end. So that kind of thing is something that Dwarf Fortress doesn't really have, but it would be the kind of thing that Dwarf Fortress would have if it did something, for instance, like simulating an apocalypse. |
| Capntastic: | Sure. |
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| |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, that actually is interesting, to have the concept of, maybe, scenarios where that is stated, like, you know, 'In ten years, the end of the world is coming, prepare yourself.' |
| Capntastic: | That'd be fun. |
| Toady: | Yeah. We're definitely thinking, when we said ... there was this old Armok system where, I think it was the atmosphere, plot ... what was the other word, there were three words right? There was the atmosphere and the plot and the something else ... a genre. The genre, atmosphere, plot system of Armok I, which of course ... we didn't get anywhere with that game, but the genre, atmosphere, plot system ... the idea was you'd pick your overall genre that your game is in, if you want to do horror/fantasy or if you want to have My Little Mermaid or something like that, and then you'd have the overall plot: is it an apocalyptic My Little Mermaid game which means that someone's going to come and steal all your toys at the end of the world, or is it a cyclic game, or is it a game where everything kind of fades into mundanity or whatever. Then there's the atmosphere which is kind of everything else, the little things about the game and little tweaks that you can do to it. So, even if we're not using that same system, we have those world generation parameters right, in Dwarf Fortress, where you can set up various facts about the world and that would be where this apocalypse thing fits in, you could give an overall arc to your world each time. |
|
| |
| Toady: | That's one way to think about it, and then there is the specific scenarios way of thinking about it as well. I haven't thought about that so much, the only scenarios we've talked about before are these start scenarios for a specific fort, or start scenarios for a specific adventurer, where it's like 'You are a group of pilgrim dwarves that are here to visit this shrine and set up a little community around it' or something. That would be a scenario and that kind of thing, I think even for simulationist people, that's a plus, it's not just a gamist thing, right? Saying that your dwarves had a reason for embarking is a very realistic thing to ask, it's like 'What are you doing?' and even if that does proscribe some actions and encourage others, that's good, right? That's not bad necessarily. Of course you don't want to trammel people or anything , but I think that helps everybody and that's certainly something, like I said, we considered, with dwarf mode start scenarios and getting that fleshed out. It also helps you kind of see the roles of each of your dwarves when you're starting out; why they came and all that kind of thing. I think that's all cool for everybody. Even the people that just like to build giant structures ... a theme that was there was that 'I want my structure, a, to be recognized and b - I guess it's kind of the same thing - to sort of come alive and be part of the world'. If there's a scenario geared towards certain large constructions, like building a temple or something, then you would have ... that recognition would be part of the scenario. So that kind of thing can work; of course the ideal thing would be to even go beyond that and have it somehow recognize what you're doing beyond specifically stating it ahead of time, which is of course a huge, difficult problem, the more you want it to do. I mean, you can do certain things like just drag a rectangle and say 'This is my temple!' and the game's like 'All right!' even if it's just a hill or something. I guess it could detect how much work you've done, it's like how much recognition you deserve for that. There are things you can do, but that's ... |
| Ollieh: | (interlude music) |
|
| |
| Capntastic: | So Dwarf Fortress kind of started out very gamey, didn't it? |
| Toady: | Yeah, it was a remarkably gamey idea that we
started from. Like we've said before it was just going to be, you dig
out your fortress, you make certain crafts and things, then you die
because it's really a hard game and things ramp up as you dig deeper;
they just ramp up as you'd expect playing a computer game where you can
dig down or whatever, you'd get completely wasted by some kind of
deep-dwelling creature that you unburied. Then you'd come in with the
adventurer and it would populate your fortress with some extra little
objects that you didn't make like diaries and things, and you'd also go
down there and find all the objects you did make, and the more stuff
that you brought out that builds the legend and story of the fortress
... it would just kind of give you the story as you found the different
journals and things, and you'd also get the points from getting out each
of the artifacts, and after a series of adventurers that die you get
your total score for your fortress, and that would be ... whatever
simulation and construction aspects would have existed, had we taken
that road, that would have been a game, there would have been a clear
goal, even been a score list. That was the idea for the small project
that was supposed to take a couple of months for Dwarf Fortress. So we definitely had that kind of thing in mind at first, and at the same time we were working on what you might call the simulationist nightmare of Armok I, where we were just really taking a bottom-up approach with our fantasy game, and once those got merged there were aspects of the Dwarf Fortress game that remained; not just the fact that there was an adventure mode and a legends mode, but that your fortress was supposed to dig down, die; there was a progression from river and then the big open chasm and then the magma and then the demons after that, and there was a stronger - not just because of the bugs, but just in general - a stronger feeling of progression with your population and your nobility and stuff. That kind of thing was viewed by us as kind of a bit too strict for the simulation we wanted to have running, but at the same time it provided a structure that a lot of people liked and still point back to as a high point of the game being more balanced and challenging, even if it was less featureful and more buggy ... well, I mean, the more buggy part, there were bad bugs back then that people might not remember. We've got more bugs now, because it's a larger game, but there were real game killers back then, in terms of infinite flooding and that kind of thing, that were really bad. So that is where the game structure's gone, to the point that Dwarf Fortress now is more purely a simulation with fewer clear challenges and less progression, but as things go on ... there are some people that pointed out here that they play it as a simulation now but are looking forward to the gaming aspect of it. I think that was hermes again but freeformschooler and Karlito also seconded this and expanded on this idea in the forum thread that we've been mentioning, that they like the simulation but they're really looking forward to adding the political stuff, and the warfare/religion/caravan stuff that we've kind of started, that it'll still be really faithful ... and this is kind of our overall goal as well, is that you'd have these new systems that are still really faithful to the idea that you've got a simulation that tries to be as realistic as possible within the confines of still being a game, but at the same time if you're setting goals for yourself you're going to have a much easier time doing that, looking at this, and you're also going to have a situation around your fortress that is sometimes going to force certain things to be looked at, like your defenses and that kind of thing. More so than now, because there'll be a specific situation you're interacting with, but it will kind of ramp up, because your fortress in general is a place where the population is increasing. So, if you add things like hill dwarves, it's not just going to be population increases from like seven dwarves to twenty dwarves to forty dwarves, where you still ultimately aren't a player in the world, to where you'd actually be developing hill dwarf populations up into the thousands and that would make you, within the population of the world - which has cities that don't get bigger than eight thousand or so right now - you would be able to draw a military that could have an impact on the world and you could change your goal to, like, 'I want to destroy the goblin civilization finally'. I'm not sure if the difficulty increases necessarily, but the scope of the challenges increases as you get a larger population, and that would become probably the main measure of the challenges. That seems like a gamey thing, but it's also kind of a natural result of the simulation; it is a little strange that your seven dwarves automatically attract so much attention, you know, why do they become the capital almost inevitably if you're working hard, when everyone else should be working hard too and there's a preexisting capital, right, so why does it get replaced? That's one of the big concessions to gaminess that exists in the current version, even, and it's always going to be like that, where the simulation doesn't actually control what's going on, you do have to think about it as a game, ultimately, because people have to play it. I think that the point that those guys brought up is an important one, that we are going to have a lot of the game progression mechanics things, but it should all flow naturally through the simulation, to the point where it doesn't really disturb it at all, for people who are just playing to see a story or to build something. I think that might be the last point I wanted to bring up. |
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| Rainseeker: | Great! Well I think that ... Capn, do you have anything else you want to add on this? |
| Capntastic: | Depending on how far we wanted to go on this, I was thinking we could ask Toady how he plays, people probably want to hear that. |
| Toady: | Yeah, well, when I get the chance, you mean; I mostly play the debug. |
| Capntastic: | The hidden fourth option. |
| Toady: | Yeah, the debugging option is great fun. But
yeah, when I get a chance, which has not been for a while, I think ...
It's kind of strange, when we say we wrote games we wanted to be able to
play ourselves it is centered around the idea of emergent phenomenon
that you'll be confronted with that you couldn't anticipate, even having
written the game. So it's kind of fun to play through it like that, I
just watch out for those things when I'm playing. It's hard to really
get into a narrative mode with it; it happens sometimes but I often end
up being distracted by problems or having to take notes or whatever, so
it's very hard to say what my pure playing style is because I'm always
distracted by things, by notetaking that I have to do. That is kind of
the play style I'm stuck with; as a debugger, I guess, there's no hope
for me. I'd say if I had to pick in your three categories, if I really wanted to nail it down, then I'm not really a constructionist; I'm an observer of constructions, I really like seeing what people do, seeing the computers and giant towers and giant weapons that people devise, that's always really entertaining, so I definitely like that side of it but it's not something I do myself, I wouldn't build a giant tower, just going through with the process of making that construction is not something I'd do. I like watching the dwarves run around and do their thing, and stuff, but I don't specifically get into developing a really intricate story for them, or think in advance that my fortress ... I mean, I do about as much as my brother, and basically Zach will say 'We're going to make stone toys and this is going to be a Santa Claus fortress where we just make little toys and ship them off and try to sell as many little toys as possible.' So you set little goals like that for yourself, and I find myself setting little different goals like that as I go, just kind of moving from one to one, but without an overarching narrative so much in my mind as to what the fortress is actually doing. I'm not too interested in having nobles arrive in that kind of progressing through the game type of thing, so ... just kind of playing it and checking it out; maybe that all comes back to debugging in the end , I don't know. It's kind of a mess around type of thing, I think it might change ... it's like the people were saying, that they wanted things like the army arc and stuff; I think my play style would probably change if we got to that point. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
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| Capntastic: | EggFibre asks, 'How did you create the languages for all the civilizations? Did you base them off of something in real life or did they all come from your imagination? Also, how long did the process take?' |
| Toady: | We created all the languages. They were not based
on anything in real life and the main reason for that is because we
haven't added grammar yet. What we did is we had the list the words,
which took a while to just type in all the words - the English versions
of the words - and then we had a generator that just had certain rules
about how consonants could be combine and what frequencies there were
for the vowels, and that kind of thing. It had to generate a list of
words and then we went through by hand and picked out words that were
either existing words - especially words that are profanity, because it
would generate plenty of those - and words that just sounded wrong; when
you look at the word for candy or something and when you end up with
some really harsh sounding word, and then you just roll the generator on
that again until it gets something that matches. That's really all it
was. With goblins we let more things go through regardless of their tone
because we wanted the language to sound more alien, but it was pretty
much just that. When we get to things like grammar it's going to be
harder to completely ... we'll just put in different processes there,
but I don't think it's going to be randomly generated because you either
have a rule or you don't, or you have variants of a rule or whatever,
but there's only four or five stock languages, so we're probably just
going to pick and choose which rules we think are appropriate and place
them in. Then there's the larger question or what about a randomly generated language. The computer can spit one of those out really fast with random grammar and random words and all that, but then you will have the problem where some of the words are really not something you want to have. We haven't tried that yet, and it might not be that bad of a problem in retrospect so it could be that we do the random generation and then what we'd do it just ... depending on how we store our sentence trees, when we get to that kind of thing, because computers are good at that sort of thing, so you can just throw it in ... It's obviously going to be simplified from the giant thousands of pages of, you know, even entry-level textbooks you can get on this kind of thing, it's progressively more complicated theory that they've got floating around now, but we throw some simple stuff in there and I imagine it'll all work really nicely. The only thing I'm not sure about is when you get a lot of words that are recognizable or so on, if that breaks it too badly. I mean it would be interesting to have a conlang generator and just see how it turns out. |
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| Capntastic: | 'Will there ever be materials able to explode or combust? Will coal or grain dust ever be a hazard, or alcohol burning, or do you not think players should be able to engineer explosions?' |
| Toady: | I like explosions! I mean I don't like modern explosions, but there are plenty of reasons for things to blow up that are not modern and I think all of that is something that should be considered for the game. I mean, it's a matter of, you know, going through and making it work, and you have to be respectful of the game there, and that, I'm not sure ... There's a lot of things, like working all these forges underground, which should be all smoky and nasty, it seems, and all this coal burning, all these refining processes going on underground; it seems like there should be a lot of gaseous simulations going on that aren't going on, and I'm not sure how to do the display for that kind of thing, and how to make it work without ... I mean, right now the miasma system is annoying enough, right? It's like the obscuring purple cloud that makes no sense. So if it comes to it, if we have legitimate reasons to blow things up then I'm definitely for that. As far as combustion ... I mean we've got the, well I don't even remember ... between flash points and ignition points and self ignition and all that kind of thing, we've got just one, and it probably doesn't even work how it's supposed to in real life. If the question is do I think these things should be able to happen then absolutely, whether or not we'll be able to pull it off or whatever is a different matter, but I'm certainly open to all the things that people suggest there that fit within the time frame and that kind of stuff. |
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| Capntastic: | Anatoly asks, 'Will there ever be anything positive from dwarves having negative happiness besides fun? Example: an artistic dwarf is very sad and makes a long poem about something. He then sings it at parties and the dwarves listening get more positive/less angry, or something. Example 2: a philosopher gets melancholy and finds some time to invent some new stuff.' So basically artifacts, artistic creations that channel their negative emotions into a positive outcome, is that sort of thing going in? |
| Toady: | Yeah. What I've just added with all the writing and stuff is that the personality can give a tone to the work, but there's no reason to think that a happy dwarf wouldn't be able to also produce something that your dwarves would like; there's something to be said for the variety, but there wasn't anything I saw there that came specifically from the negative emotion that couldn't also have the same game play effect from the happy emotion, right? I mean an inventor can just be energetic and running around inventing things, or an artist can be various emotions and still produce things that they'd sing at parties and so on. As to whether there's specific exclusive mechanics that come out of the negative happiness that are related to these artistic invention things then probably not, in terms of a mechanical way, but in terms of variety and atmosphere then certainly, yeah. There'd be things that would only happen when dwarves are feeling unhappy and this kind of goes back to ... right now we just have this happiness meter that we don't really treat as an emotion so much, and with the personality rewrite that we've been talking about, the emotions get added in and then with the new writing system I've put in you'd be able to take not just the personality, the longstanding personality, but also the present emotional state of the dwarf with more specificity and have that influence the writing which is something that would definitely be going in. I see variety coming from it but as for specific things, I mean having your dwarves be unhappy all the time is mostly a result of accidents and player mistakes, right? So it's not something that should strictly be rewarding all the time, or lead to that kind of thing. There could be things I'm not seeing here in terms of opportunities and so on, there probably are some other examples. |
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| Capntastic: | Neonivek asks, 'Toady, you spoke about giving characters orders and conditions under which they would possibly disobey them. What do you think about the concept of allowing characters in your party to do as they wish in town such as shore leave, to rest, relax, buy equipment, speak to others and fulfill their own personal goals.' |
| Toady: | Yeah, I like that. It reminds me of the various
RPGs you'd play where you'd go into a town and every time that you'd buy
equipment one of your little fellows ... it'd be like 'Johnny bought a
sword!' and they have their own little money and things that they do
like that. I'm all for that kind of thing, especially because it means
less micromanagement for you, because when it comes to the point where
we deal with the fact that they drop their weapons and never get them
back or get their clothing ripped off and never get it back then you
don't want it to strictly turn into a micromanagement situation,
especially when you've got, like, twenty people. You shouldn't have to
babysit all their daggers or whatever. Then that leads to a problem of
corralling, I guess, like when you leave off the edge of the map and
start travelling, or you just press the travel button, do you kind of
collect them back? Do you have to have a pre-arranged meeting point? You
don't want it to be too annoying, but you don't want to have ... just
as a technical matter, dealing with all the teleportation stuff is kind
of annoying too. It seems like a problem that's not hard to deal with,
but it's something to deal with, and that's just kind of the first thing
that occurred to me when I looked at the question. The issue is the
corralling of the people and getting them back. Once you've handled
things like their own money supplies and do you talk to them, do you
explicitly give them the chance to do that kind of thing, or do they do
it automatically ... You can't just have, like if you've got one with you who's really a forward sort of brazen happy-go-lucky person who just says 'All right, I'm going to the bar, I don't care what you guys do!' or whatever, that's good up to a point for them to go over and do that stuff, but it runs into the issue that's come up a few times I think here where the game can't judge your intent, so if you were going to a town and you felt really serious and you'd been really gearing up for it and you'd gotten your equipment just right for it, and you're like, 'I'm going to go to the vampire cultist temple and it's time for me to sneak in there during the last ten minutes of the day while the light's shining through the window and disappearing and going to burn all the vampires' or something, right, and you're feeling really tense about it and then you get to the town and the dude's like 'All right, I'm going to go get a drink' or whatever, then it spoils the mood. The game, like we always say here, has trouble detecting that sort of thing so, I mean, can you tell your party 'Hey it's serious time' so that they don't even ruin the mood by shouting crap like that ... You can't be serious all the time, you wouldn't just always have that on, I guess, or your people would get pissed off, especially that guy, he's like 'Why are we serious all the time? You guys need to lighten up. Let's go drink!' or whatever. It's the kind of thing where in a role playing game, if you get rid of the scripted moments where your companions say certain things at certain times or whatever, generally they're quiet and follow you around and do what you say, and part of that is that necessity for immersion. It's kind of weird that making the people less realistic in a sense makes it more immersive, but, yeah, that's another challenge I see. But overall I like the idea of some autonomy, being able to deal with ... and let's separate this from what might be one of the main concerns in this question, not necessarily this question, but the concerns of those problems I mentioned - people dropping weapons and not having healthcare and all that kind of stuff - all that's separate and definitely, regardless of what obstacles ... that needs to be dealt with, you can't just have a person that never has a weapon again, that's just silly and stupid, so we're going to deal with that. As for the amount of autonomy, I think I've laid out some of the concerns but I'm, in general, all for it and happy if they were far more autonomous. |
| Capntastic: | It's going to be like Pirates! and you're going to go the tavern and then you're going to get drunk and then you're going to get mutinied, and you're going to wake up, and you're going to be on an island. |
| Toady: | That's right, you'll be on an island and there won't even be a treasure chest there. |
| Capntastic: | Nope. |
| Toady: | Nope. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | Well, thank you for joining us for another Dwarf Fortress Talk, season three. I'd like to thank everybody that was involved. Tarn, who was involved? |
| Toady: | You were involved! |
| Rainseeker: | I was involved! |
| Toady: | Yep, yep, and Capn you were also involved ... |
| Capntastic: | Tangentially. |
| Toady: | I don't remember If I was involved or not. |
| Rainseeker: | No, you were never involved in this whole process. |
| Capntastic: | An illusion. |
| Toady: | I'm on the list here I had written down in advance, because I knew I was going to lose my memory. So we have the list, we've gotten through Rainseeker, Capntastic, Toady One. We want to thank everyone that asked questions whether they were answered or not, and more questions are always good, keep them coming. We have Ollieh and Emily Menendez to thank for musical talents, and we have mallocks to thank for writing up the transcripts. I think mallocks just got, in the html, if you go into the folder and you go into the combined transcribed file, the combined transcript file is over a megabyte, which means a million little characters. |
| Capntastic: | There you go! |
| Toady: | So, mallocks is a champion. It says I'm supposed to tell people to contribute to the game and thank them for doing so, so, you know, this is how I live and if you can help out and you want to see it keep coming, even if it has been slow to get out, we are going to make it out and we'll have a new version coming sometime, and we're still working, everyday, so if you want to help it's much appreciated, and Rainseeker has a website, called rattownstories.com ... |
| Rainseeker: | rattownstories.com! |
| Toady: | And Capntastic has ... |
| Capntastic: | Nothing! |
| Toady: | Nothing! |
| Capntastic: | Deal with it! |
| Toady: | That's right, that's right. If you just go to your web browser, go to the place where you type a URL and just press enter, you'll find Capn's home page right there. It might look like a lot like your home page but that's because Capn's everywhere. So, yeah! That was episode seventeen. |
| Rainseeker: | Thanks for joining us! |
| Capntastic: | We should end on a cliffhanger ... or should we?! |
| Rainseeker: | Next time on Dwarf Fortress Talk: 'Argh! Tarn don't hurt me please!' |
| Toady: | 'You're going to get what's coming to you!' |
| Ollieh: | (musical postlude) |
| Toady: | I've seen an ampersand and an at sign. These are all symbols from the game, so this is the Dwarf Fortress ASCII keyboard. |
| Rainseeker: | All you need is a special, like a dwarven key there, that selects dwarves, you just press it. |
| Toady: | That's right. We need to add happy faces to keyboards. Happy faces with beards on them. |
| Rainseeker: | That's right. |
| Toady: | And you press it and it'll zoom to your favorite dwarf. See? There you go, this is the entrepreneurial mind at work. |
| Rainseeker: | This is very productive. |
| Toady: | You can see why we've been so financially successful over the years. |
| Toady: | Well she pulled a gun on everybody and we were just quiet and waiting for her to give us instructions. |
| Capntastic: | There we go. |
| Toady: | Yeah, still kind of intimidating isn't it. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, I'm trying to think of how to get things going. |
Dwarf Fortress Talk #18, with Rainseeker, Capntastic, Threetoe and Toady One, transcribed by mallocks
The latest significant release
Vampires
Various fortress threats
Mists
City revamp
Scamps aside
Animal training
Books
Skill-giving slabs
Near-future plans
Questions
Night creature interactions
Godly interactions
Player-perceived complexity
Fortress mode emigration
Programming Dwarf Fortress
Independent animal allies
Goblin settlement
Migration
Dwarf Fortress Talk #19, with Rainseeker, Capntastic, Threetoe and Toady One, transcribed by mallocks
| Rainseeker: | Alright, well hey everybody. This is Rainseeker, here with Tarn Adams, our illustrious leader. I am also known as Nathan Miller, but that is neither here, nor there, nor in Neverland. |
| Toady: | That's right, the secret's out. |
| Rainseeker: | Exactly, I just let it slip. Capntastic is not with us, currently, he may show up later. We don't know, but we wanted to have a discussion right now. |
| Toady: | That's right. We're doing our stuff, man. It's been kind of a scattershot release, to start, because we're trying to find our footing with what we wanted to do with the world activation and the hero role. We've decided to use the adventurer hero role to basically give us a way for us to tour the world activation, so watch the armies running around and see what their doing, and give you a way to play with it immediately before we get the whole hill dwarves and dwarven armies up, which will let you run around outside, too. So it's a kind of straightforward way to let us explore. We've got our goblins running around and our bandits running around, and our tracking, and some changes to combat, non-lethal combat. |
| Rainseeker: | Which I find really exciting, because then you could just pick on people without, like, permanent, you know, repercussions, hopefully, or the whole community just runs at you like zombies. |
| Toady: | Yes, it's going to be a much more reasonable town to punch a horse in. |
| Rainseeker: | 'Punch a horse in'? |
| Toady: | Yes, because when you punch a horse in the currently released version all the livestock will descent on you and tear you to pieces before the first person even gets there. |
| Rainseeker: | 'The chickens! No, the chickens!' |
| Toady: | Yes, it becomes a horror movie immediately, the second you mess around with the animals, which might be an environmental message, but it's not really the one we wanted to send in the game. So there'll be more reasonableness all around, it'll be a lot of fun. We've just started up on our racial sites, or whatever you want to call them, the goblins and kobolds and elves and dwarves themselves getting their sites. There's obviously going to be a lot of cool stuff there for adventure mode, and also in dwarf mode. The main thing dwarf mode gets this time around is this world continuation stuff with succession happening and your civilization not just dying out while you're playing, or whatever happens now with your guys walking on the screen and dying of old age, or I think I may have put in the thing where they just don't show up at all anymore, but you'll actually have that. You'll also be getting armies that are real. So, all the things that we're talking about with evil lieutenants and villains and all this stuff in adventure mode also applies to dwarf mode in terms of who's actually going to be showing up; you'll get people showing up with a story and a reason now, instead of just, like, the yearly goblin attack or whatever. Although, you still won't be able to respond, which is the big thing with the hill dwarves and army stuff we'll get to later. |
| Rainseeker: | Now, will there sometimes be fortresses that never experience a goblin attack, for instance? |
| Toady: | That is going to be something that's a lot more common now, so if you want to be a fortress that's a fortress, then you'd have to embark on the frontier, more of a border where you'd be harassed. It'll tell you about what you're getting into so you don't have to guess, but if you want to go the other direction and place yourself right in the middle of where the dwarves currently are then you're just not going to have those kinds of problems unless you invite them on yourself by digging downward, or whatever. So it'll be possible to have more control over your starting political situation, and you'll still have people to trade with that you can mess with, so if you really want to invite fighting with the elves or something like that and you want to keep squashing their caravans under drawbridges or whatever you want to do, then that'll still invite trouble, although it could be that the trouble you invite doesn't affect you specifically. If you start a war with the elves you might not be the closest settlement to the eleven border in which case you'd start a fight with one of your poor other dwarven civilizations, or whatever; you'd get the elves to attack one of your other sites. |
| Rainseeker: | What does that do for your relationship with your home country? Probably nothing, at this point? |
| Toady: | Nothing at this point, but I imagine it's going to cause a little bit of grief later, you might get disowned. Maybe before the elves attack that site they just sell you out and have a joint elven and dwarven army march on your poor guys. |
| Rainseeker: | That would make sense. It might even make sense to have a dwarven liaison show up and demand that the leader ... |
| Toady: | Yeah, he just walks your leader off the edge of the map and then you hear about how he's been fed to the bears, or something, to fertilize the elven forest. |
| Rainseeker: | Consequences like that would be really, really interesting, actually. |
| Toady: | Yeah, I'm looking forward to that stuff. The dev logs are all adventure mode and stuff, because that's the camera that we're looking through to add this stuff, but I think even for this release there are going to be some exciting diplomacy changes and stuff for dwarf mode. |
| Rainseeker: | Cool. Digging down to the centre of the Earth and releasing these hordes, does that affect your civilization at all? |
| Toady: | It's going to be interesting to see, right, because people are thinking now, a little bit, and they're starting to move around the world a little of their own accord, which they just haven't been allowed to do for all the years the game has been out. The way the digging too deep currently works with, like, it releasing 50 or 100 demons into the fortress, I mean I'd imagine that's just going to be a nightmare for the whole world, so we're either going to have to put a little bit of a damper on that, or we're going to have to just let the world have its nightmare, because you invited it. |
| Rainseeker: | One demon rules a civilization a lot of times, are those the same demons? |
| Toady: | Yeah, and having that many of them is crazy. |
| Rainseeker: | 100 of them, they would go off and ... |
| Toady: | Take over the world. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | What will they do currently, as the game stands? |
| Toady: | As the game stands I think what they'll do is come out at night and patrol the premises of your fortress. We haven't told the dragons how to go from town to town and destroy things, so they won't have that willpower behind them, but they do know how to go round and just, kind of, poke around, like the night trolls do. |
| Rainseeker: | So if you retire your fortress after they escape that's what they're going to do? |
| Toady: | Yes. It would just be a very dangerous part of the world to go to. The whole idea of reclaiming it or something like that would be met with the same fate as Balin's poor party in Moria. You know, dead. |
| Rainseeker: | So that could be some serious questing? If that ever happened your NPCs would have to talk about that, I assume? |
| Toady: | We'll have to think about something, because 100 demons is too many for anybody, especially if the demons are the way they are now. If we downgrade them a bit then it'd be more feasible, or if we make them kill each other until one's left, or something. We'll do something about it, though, and then we'll have something land in the sweet spot of being fun and challenging, hopefully, instead of just being stupid one way or the other. |
| Rainseeker: | Have them wander off, for instance, and start looking for goblin civilizations to enslave. |
| Toady: | Yeah, I guess they could just parcel them up; if there's a big goblin civilization being run by one demon then there could be a balkanization of the area and they could start grumbling and fighting with each other. It's going to be interesting to see how it plays out, because once they get just a little more of a push, either in the dragon direction or in the ... I mean, I'm not even sure what a free-roaming demon is supposed to be doing, if it's just supposed to run around and take over civilizations, or try to ... I mean, there could be demons lining up to impersonate the gods of the human civilizations like they do. 'Just queue up. You look the most like our god of death, so you get to take over the civilization,' and the rest of them are welcome to try back in 100 years, or whatever. It's going to get strange once we put all the world gen stuff in, like the god impersonations and stuff. It's just going to be very strange. |
| Rainseeker: | An option is to have them stay at the dwarven site and establish a larger apocalyptic staging ground for ... |
| Toady: | Yeah. The hole is still there. It's something that we're having to come to terms with, with our current demons and goblins as well. In the currently released version, in world gen the demon 'escapes from the underworld'. That has certain implications, right, about existing holes and stuff. So we're messing around with that, trying to come up with some different solutions that meter the flow, so having the demon in control of a portal, for instance. In a lot of Threetoe's stories the goblins are from the underworld, so I think we're going to relate that to it, to make it have more of a goblinesque feel for the current portal that the demon's controlling, so it doesn't just pour through with demons. We already have these giant spires down in the underworld that were filled with demons, but perhaps they'll be filled with goblins, they're, kind of, bastions from the demons or something like that. We're just playing around with different stuff, we'll see what happens. |
| Rainseeker: | You could have, like, the old impermanent portal that opens up once every hundred years, lets critters through and then closes again, and you have that problem on the world every hundred years or so. |
| Toady: | Yeah. We need to find a solution that recover from the depredations of the player. It's, like, if you manage to call of them they need to come back. Of course it can just wing it and open another one, or something, if it really needs to, or you can have the peace that you've fought for and get bored to death and get to your mundane quests, right? You'd be moving pastries around until the next portal opens. |
| Rainseeker: | Exactly. I mean, for goodness' sake, you need to up that skill in delivery. Delivery skill is really important. |
| Toady: | Yes. It's one of the two fundamental skill, there's the slaying skill, and the delivery skill. |
| Rainseeker: | And the tip-gaining skill, like, you have to learn how to tip your hat just right and smile at the lady when you delivery your pastry and she gives you a good tip, you know? |
| Toady: | That's right, and then you can escort her child somewhere. Can have an escort skill. |
| Rainseeker: | That's right. 'Would you like me deliver your child to school, ma'am?' and she'd be, like, 'What a polite young man. Thank you. Have another copper.' |
| Toady: | That's right, and then your reputation will increase and you can go to other parts of the town and they'll give you other child escort quests and you can start a real business. You have employees, delivery and day care. You could assign all your companions to different neighborhoods and stuff. |
| Rainseeker: | And that's when you take all of your children that you take care of and bring them on an adventure to kill crocodiles. |
| Toady: | That's right, or at least to beat up the competition. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, you beat up the other kids. Oh, jeez. |
| Toady: | It's not good to have a freeform sandbox game in the end, is it? |
| Rainseeker: | Well, yeah, especially with children involved. |
| Toady: | That's right. Yeah, we accidentally put them in the game and now we're in trouble. We really should have gone with the adult stork, so the stork comes carrying a fully grown adult. Maybe it takes two storks to do that, so they've got this big hammock between them and they drop off the adult. |
| Rainseeker: | 'Mother!' |
| Toady: | Yeah, they'd have to have some kind of cyber-chip to educate them, or something. |
| Rainseeker: | How do you feel about mundane quests? |
| Toady: | That stuff's all cool, it's just, like ... it's about the order of operations, I guess. It's always such a hard thing with quests, because ideally I'd like to get rid of the idea of having a quest, but that doesn't mean that you don't do favors for people that aren't specific things, which is exactly like a quest as the concept exists in a computer game. |
| Rainseeker: | I guess you call in, 'Can you do me a favor?' That makes sense. |
| Toady: | I guess it's the timelessness of them that's the strangest thing in the computer games, right? That you have an infinite amount of time, generally, to go pay off the loan shark or whatever your quest is. Almost all the time, and time limits are very annoying when you have a game that doesn't react to things, because then you just get screwed over and have to restart, or you just lose out on something, right, with nothing to replace it. Since we're going for something where you have a continuation of events no matter what then having timers on quests isn't nearly as annoying and so I guess it would still be like a traditional quest system, if someone asked you to do a particular favor then they want it done and they want it done pretty much a particular way, whereas with these giant wars going on it's going to be more up to you to figure out how to deal with it, and there's not going to be just one set series of things you have to do to go finish it. We do have to throw you some bones at first in terms of things to do because a demon is just too hard to kill, so we've put in some extra stuff that just lets you surmount the demons in various ways. It's like the whole Sauron thing, right? You can't just kill him, so you have to go on a quest and so on, and that quest ... no matter how you get to Mordor, the quest always has to end the same way. You don't have infinite branching choices, but you have a lot of leeway and that's what we're hoping to accomplish eventually. It'll seem a little stilted at first, probably. It's just for the demon examples because the demon is a little too powerful, but if you've got goblins leading a civilization, for example, there's no quest like that where you depower or do whatever to the demon to make it winnable. Then you just have to deal, and if you want to go kill the guy you're going to have to go and figure it out. There are no armies, like giant armies that you're leading right now, or anything like that, so it's pretty much all assassination and flummoxing invasion plans by assassinating people. We're probably going to have you just leading some people out of harm's way, too, especially your home town that you start in. If your home town is in trouble, because it tries to put you in trouble spots now, if you want; if you select a civilization that's in trouble it'll put you in the worst spot to begin with, or whatever ... so you might be able to just save some people at first instead of just trying to fight. We'll have to see how it plays out exactly, but that's what we're shooting for right now. There are so many people in the world and there are actual armies and things that for one person to make a difference something has to give somewhere, and it's either that you're going to be leading large numbers of people, or you're super, super cool, or you're sneaking around a lot, or you're trying to gather powerful allies, or something. |
| Rainseeker: | Or gather magic powers, or something like that. |
| Toady: | Yeah. There's something there that isn't just you being a foot soldier or a dead civilian. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah. I think part of that, that would help, would be the establishment of schools or dojos where you can go and learn to become this bad-a fighter, you know? Part of the problem right now for me is that I can't just start as a peasant and hope to get anywhere because you have to ... a lot of the forums are talking about ... 'You wrestle a badger, or a mole and you release it, and then you grab it again, and then you let it go again and it increases your skill slowly ...' |
| Toady: | Yeah. The thing people used to do when we had the undead pyramids, they would go and break a zombie's limbs and then just sit there wrestling with this animated dead body. Just a little freaky, but the flipside of that is that if you've got these school things and you're supposed to have this arc of progression where you're improving and so on, the world now is a little too fast paced to give you twenty years to learn how to be a master of this or that, which means you've either got to come into the story with that, which is kind of the demigod choice, right, where you're just, like, 'I want to get started, and I'm going to go cause some trouble, and I want to be the type of person that can just face down a goblin army' or whatever, then that's the choice for you. If you make the hero selection you're probably, like, 'I want to go and do the Sauron-style thing, where I have to overcome some obstacles but I'm not going to be just fighting 50 guys at once,' or you've got the peasant option where you don't want to be that person, necessarily. |
| Rainseeker: | The way you have it now, I like. I think it would be interesting, long term, to eventually have some story options where you're telling your own story, like, 'Yeah, my character trained for twenty years at the dojo and then trained under ... to become a necromancer hunter,' or something like that. |
| Toady: | Yeah. The long-term goal is to scrap all that stuff and do something a little more in-depth with the background. I think we've talked about this before in-depth. We're just starting with that stuff now, where now we've got a starting situation in your village so it doesn't just pop up that window anymore where it's, like, 'It's time for adventure! You got your stuff together, now let's go!' |
| Rainseeker: | 'Go kill local wildlife until you get more powerful.' |
| Toady: | Yeah. You just wander around asking people, it's, like, 'I really want to kill something! How can I help?' and they're, like, 'Well, there's this guy, this guy, and this guy, and this monster, and this monster, and this monster, and this wild animal and this wild animal. Go knock yourself out.' So we're trying to change. We're trying to change and not be that way anymore. |
| Rainseeker: | In a way it's funny because every game does that. Every game does that, but I like that you're breaking that up. That's good. |
| Toady: | Yeah. It just takes a lot of extra world stuff to do that, and we're finally getting that. I think we just naturally settled into doing the racial sites next because it's like, what, 80% of the sites in the world didn't have maps? That's a pretty extreme hole that we've just been living with for a while. So now it's going to be filled in and we'll have our interesting goblin gigantic pits, and cave systems, and evil towers, and places with prisons, and all kinds of things for you to wander around in and hopefully not get too overwhelmed by goblins and so on. They should be fun to run around in, and we've got our elf sites so we'll be able to see our gigantic trees, finally. Going to go for it, go for it all the way. Gigantic trees. |
| Rainseeker: | With rope bridges or something between them? |
| Toady: | Oh, yeah. Whatever they do. It's going to be something like that. We're just going to wing it. They'll either be grown together or they'll be bridged together. Our elves have varied in their magic abilities through our different telling of them, I mean some of them can shape the wood and sometimes they've built things, so I'm really not sure how that's going to play out. It's going to be one of those things where it's just decided at the last second, to just run with something. |
| Rainseeker: | You can't randomize that choice? |
| Toady: | It can be. I mean, right now the elves are one of our stock creatures, so the choice is made for them, depending on what this whole forest spirit thing even means, right? There can be magical elves and non-magical elves through that. Right now they're all given a forest spirit they worship that does nothing, so it can either do something and that's how they access the trees, or it's some innate thing they have. We'd like to err on the side of having a bunch of choices, but the more choices you have the longer it takes to finish stuff, too. So we'll see what ends up happening. Our baseline is to have gigantic trees, many, many tiles. I don't know how tall we're going to go because we don't have dimensions of tiles, but most recently I've just been running with six feet by six feet by ten feet, or two meters by two meters by three meters, or something. It changes, but roughly like that. It's a person wide and more than a person tall, or something. I mean, I don't know how tall your average tree is, I'm not much of a knowledge-of-trees person. The biggest trees are those redwood trees that they name after Civil War generals or whatever. The Grant tree and the Sherman tree or whatever they call them. Yeah, one of the trees is General Grant in the sequoia park and Wikipedia tells me that it's 267 feet tall and 28 feet across. |
| Rainseeker: | So four tiles across and twenty or 30 tiles high? |
| Toady: | Yeah. So if I can do twenty or 30 tiles high I can allow for extra space in the biggest forests - these are, like, the really giant trees - then that'll work. Right now I think the default in the world gen settings is to have fifteen tiles, and fifteen tiles would be enough, I think, to go up, but we can do more. There's a processor thing. I think it's not that big a deal but I think some people set their levels above ground lower, and in that case you'd have some very funny looking squat trees. It's, like, there's the trunk and then above that's the giant elf city, or whatever. We'd really like to have tall trees. So you'd ... |
| Rainseeker: | Climb up into them? |
| Toady: | Yeah, and there could be a cool branching algorithm where it makes the branches come out and spread and then, you know, every season or every year, or whatever, it can go and make a branch grow out. The only thing that I have trouble with in real-time in dwarf mode is making the trunks bigger. It's, like, does the trunk suddenly, 'bam!' blow out and blast your fortress to death, or whatever, and there's also worrying about underground, like the underground becoming glutted with mushrooms and having it impossible to move around, or whatever, but it's already kind of that way, when the mushrooms grow in your hallways and that kind of stuff, so I think it would be that big a deal. That should just be a lot of fun, making the trees, and it's going to involve some probably minor changes to the dwarven lumber industry. I don't know if I want to jump to far into having, like, gigantic logs and stuff that are multiple tiles ... might be too annoying to do. |
| Rainseeker: | What would happen when you cut one down? Especially one supporting an elven village. That is something people are going to try to do. |
| Toady: | Yeah, they'll go ahead and hack it so they can embark on the elven village or whatever and, yeah, I guess it'll be timber time. I'm hoping to allow you to ... I don't know, you never want dwarves to make decisions, but if the dwarf chooses the direction the tree falls then it would just probably do a one-to-one correspondence thing where it's, like, if you're two tiles up then you fall two tiles to the southwest and if you're three tiles up then you fall three tiles to the southwest. I don't know if that means you'll get more logs per tree, I mean a simple way to do it would just be to lay down logs in the direction the thing fell, pre-cut for you, and that would mean if there's an elven village on the fourth floor then it would splash down four tiles away, or whatever. You'd get these poor elven corpses and items and things. |
| Rainseeker: | That would be pretty sad, and funny at the same time. |
| Toady: | Yeah. Well, that's always the theme of our game, sad and funny, I think. So, that should be cool, I'm looking forward to those. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | Is a minecart an effective defensive weapon against megabeasts? |
| Toady: | Yeah. You can fill it with weapons and then when it strikes the megabeast the weapons will fly out of it and impale the beast. I think people have seen that. I've seen pictures of that and I've tried it myself. You can fill a minecart with trap components and then put the minecart on a hill and then have a pressure plate that releases the minecart to have it roll down; if it smacks into somebody they're in trouble. You could also just fill it with heavy stone and then it would have more momentum. That strike sand it can break bones and shoot things through megabeasts and so on. |
| Rainseeker: | What is the toughest thing right now, a bronze colossus? |
| Toady: | Yeah. You'd probably have to use a steel minecart and fill it with lead, or something. Then you'd be able to make a dent. |
| Rainseeker: | So they could potentially stop the momentum of it, because they're strong enough, or would they still get pushed? |
| Toady: | It takes all their mass into consideration so I don't think it would do much to them. Now, if you filled it with adamantine saw blades or something then when it stopped those things would just shoot out and probably cut the bronze colossus to pieces, because adamantine goes right through the suckers. You'd have to get the largest blade you could get, so probably the giant axe blades. I don't know how many adamantine it takes to make a giant axe blade but you could use that, and you can set up projectile traps that way, too. If you put, like, a stopper on the track, way before it gets to the monster, then the item will fly out of it, so you can set up a launcher for adamantine axe blades and launch them across the field at people. |
| Rainseeker: | Would they stay on the same z-axis? |
| Toady: | It's more of a mess, now. You'd have to test out your device a few times because things actually fly in parabolas now, so you'd have to test the landing ground. If you set it up so that your minecart hits a wall the projectile's set to the z-level higher, then eventually it'll come down. So you need to set the range, you need to do a few range tests. Then you can attain victory. |
| Rainseeker: | That also reminds me, you said earlier if you set up your fortress at a calm location in your kingdom you don't have to worry about goblin invasions so much. That does not include megabeasts, I assume? |
| Toady: | Megabeasts? Right now I haven't done them in adventure mode and I'm not sure if we're going to get to them this time or not. If I get to them then they're going to have the same kind of proximity restrictions, where if there's a target before they get to you then they'll attack that, so if you really surround yourself with other civilizations and buffers then you're just going to be unattacked by pretty much everybody unless you get bandits or something; we might have something like that, if you've got a bandit camp nearby, because the bandit camps are all over the place. |
| Rainseeker: | Is the goal to have news get to you, so you can be aware that this might happen to you in the next year or two, that there's been a dragon that's being laying waste to the countryside and it might come by? |
| Toady: | It has to update you somehow, and it's got to mesh in with what we're hoping to do with your own armies eventually, which means showing you some kind of world map or of the surroundings or whatever that you're going to be able to use to order your armies. We haven't thought about it too much but if it's going to give you, like, a snapshot of the world as you currently understand it and then the next time a merchant comes you get to update your snapshot or whatever ... then it can give you the same paragraph or a related paragraph that it gives you at the beginning of adventure mode, so that it would tell you about what's going on a little bit. |
| Rainseeker: | Yep, like, 'Applemackles the dragon who's been laying waste to the countryside ...' because actually that would be fairly interesting, if your megabeast didn't stick around and just lay waste, but maybe decided to wander off if the site was not interesting enough. |
| Toady: | Yeah, if there's not a big pile of treasure to lay on I don't know why they'd bother staying. So they can just torch some of your cows and then leave. Maybe snatch a cow and leave with it. It's always the cows catching the trouble. |
| Rainseeker: | Or your domesticated elephants. One or the other. |
| Toady: | That's true, you've got big animals in the game. There are gigantic animals ... So, yes, I think it would be fun to get your merchant caravan and then ... because you get different caravans every season, sometimes, from the different civilizations, so they could share with you different parts of your map; when the humans come you get to see how the dragon has been destroying their civilization, then when the elves come you can see the different elven forests that have been burned by the goblins, and then the dwarves can come and tell you about the latest mining accidents that have unleashed demons in the various mountainhomes, and you can just wait for the first one to reach you. |
| Rainseeker: | That would be pretty great, too, if you literally had a little conversation with them and they told you what was significantly new, as opposed to just seeing a little bit of an icon change, or something. |
| Toady: | Yeah. I like the opening paragraphs. I think that should end up being pretty cool. We're slowly getting there. Our focus for this release is to finally get to some of the places that we said we were going to go for years, so it'll be a while yet but we'll get through them. I've found that the human town code has been very handy for doing things like goblins because if you want a giant evil tower with an interconnected tunnel system beneath it then that's actually quite similar to a human castle with a dungeon beneath it connecting to the sewers and catacombs. So all of the code moves over, pretty much, you just want to then take the dungeon mapmaker and sort of goblinify it so that the flavor is completely different. We're thinking about having giant pits with rooms connected to them; the pit has a ramp going down, but it also just has an actual pit that goes down and connects into the first underground layer, and then they just drop all their sludge down into the ... it's like their garbage disposal. |
| Rainseeker: | Or perhaps a pit with spikes sticking out of it, or something. |
| Toady: | If you've got spikes to hurl people into maybe that could be where they harvest their maggots; they throw all the bodies into the spike pit and they throw the rest of their waste and debris into the underground. We were figuring if the pits didn't have an opening down into the underground layer they'd just fill up with sludge in no time and the goblins would have to go find a new home, but if they go into the underground river then they just contaminate the world, or whatever. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah. You need to get your purring maggots, somehow. You need to milk those bad boys. |
| Toady: | The purring maggot is one of the great mysteries of the game, because a maggot is a larval form, right? 'What is the adult form of the purring maggot?' is a question we've been holding out on for many years, now. |
| Rainseeker: | My philosophy is that it is the adult form, the maggot. There's nothing else to compare it to, so you just call it a maggot. It probably starts as something else. It probably starts as a little fluffy bunny rabbit or something. |
| Toady: | It could start as a fly and then turn into its adult maggot form. |
| Rainseeker: | Who says we have to go with the natural order of things? |
| Toady: | It's certainly very unnatural; it's a purring maggot. It's born trouble. |
| Rainseeker: | It's sweet. It purrs. |
| Toady: | It is sweet. It's a friend. It's a friend to the world. I guess you can trade them outside the fortress, there's a market for it. They probably don't like sunlight, though. |
| Rainseeker: | They probably get burned. |
| Toady: | You could slather it with sunscreen, I guess, so you could have your maggot outside. |
| Rainseeker: | It could live inside your beard, if your beard is big enough, of course. 'Is that a purring maggot under your beard or are you just happy to see me?' |
| Toady: | Oh dear ... Who knows what they eat? |
| Rainseeker: | They probably eat dandelions and weeds and stuff like that. |
| Toady: | That's right. It's like one of those little robots that you use to vacuum your floor, except it's like a lawnmower. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, exactly, it's a Roomba. You can replace goats with purring maggots, if you want. |
| Toady: | My aunt has two goats, now. |
| Rainseeker: | I thought you were going to say your aunt has two purring maggots. |
| Toady: | It's like that, but she has goats. She has two goats. |
| Rainseeker: | Which she milks? |
| Toady: | Well, it's the opposite, she was feeding them milk out of a bottle. I got to bottle-feed a goat, and then the goats grew up and I haven't seen them since they grew up. She also got a new puppy, there's a little puppy running around causing trouble and learning how to shake hands. |
| Rainseeker: | Do the goats in Dwarf Fortress butt heads? |
| Toady: | I don't think they do anything. I think they've been left out, so far, of the ... because the cats do all kinds of crazy stuff, now. The cats are licking themselves, licking each other, and they do the head bump; they head bump everything, so you're walking through town you just get spammed with kitty head-bumping messages. |
| Rainseeker: | And if you try to kill one you are instantly slaughtered. 'Get away from me cats!' and they suddenly turn evil. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's too bad we're going to be removing that kind of true justice from the game. It's just going to turn all reasonable, and stuff, they'll be terrified and run away from you, and not be able to call their human masters with the mind control beam or whatever. |
| Rainseeker: | Psychic link. 'I'm under attack! Master, save me!' I read a number of funny stories about adventuring underneath the sewers. There was a cat in their way, he finally attacked the cat and all hell broke loose when that happened. Killed by a thousand cuts, apparently ... a massive group of cats down there. |
| Toady: | It's a dangerous life. I wouldn't mess with a sewer cat. More dangerous than an alley cat, you've got a sewer cat eating sewer rats that are, like, a foot long, or whatever. |
| Rainseeker: | Creatures you don't want to bother, there. It does provide some interesting questions. |
| Toady: | I think we've actually touched upon most of the additions for this time, I mean there's just been some stuff that we did with, like, the reaction moments where you can, like, catch people's arms when they're trying to punch you, and stuff. The whole combat thing's different now. There's the pre-attack period, the actual attack and then the post-attack period, so everything's way messier than just being a turn-based system now. |
| Rainseeker: | It takes a long time to follow through with one full combat, kind of ... |
| Toady: | It's the attacks. Each individual punch has the wind up, the hit and then the recovery, so when you attack you're not guaranteed to hit first anymore, depending on what happens, but it gives you some chances to react to what the enemy is doing and so on. Hopefully it'll feel just more alive than trading shots. |
| Rainseeker: | Is it going to be more difficult now when you're surrounded by multiple opponents? |
| Toady: | Yeah. There's a lot of trouble there, although in a sense there's the chance that you can recover from someone who attacks you from behind; it might give you a chance to roll out of the way and so on. It would be automatic before, now you get to make choices. It's about the same difficulty, actually, I think; you just get to make more choices. You have more of an advantage direction-wise now, there's the whole sneaking thing, right, with the Metal Gear-type arcs and that kind of thing. So they have a clear notion of being attacked from behind now, which was really fuzzy before where you could hit someone from behind if they had been attacking the other direction before, like if they were attacking one of your buddies and you attacked them it would just say you hit them from behind and give you a big bonus, but now the whole idea of front and back is more easy to see, especially when you're sneaking around, so you can definitely just come up behind and shiv people, or whatever, if you want. |
| Rainseeker: | So for those who haven't seen the preview, basically there's a view of every enemy's visibility, or how far they can see, create? |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's got their direct vision and their peripheral vision, in different colors, and then it also shows little exclamation points outside of your view from the general location from where you're hearing sounds, so if someone's walking you'll be able to tell that there's something there and avoid it before you get caught, because if you're sneaking around and there are a lot of buildings, and things, you can just get spotted if you're not watching out for the footsteps and things. We may delve into climbing because of the trees, and if we delve into climbing then you'll be able to rise above a lot of the arcs, in some places at least. |
| Rainseeker: | Hide in a tree, for instance. |
| Toady: | Yeah. Hide in trees, hide in rooftops. The trees will just be a lot more interesting, now. |
| Rainseeker: | Bushes, perhaps? |
| Toady: | Bushes right now are still bushes, but hiding in bushes is certainly a reasonable way of life. Hiding behind boulders when you get in one of those boulder squares, or whatever. There should be plenty of ways to hide, because it's so hard to hide now. The stealth is not like before where you could just sneak up to someone and they don't see you until you're right next to them, or whatever. Now, if you're in the direct vision arc you're in a bad position, no matter how good your skill is, because there you are. You don't get to invisible anymore with your super invisible special invisible abilities. |
| Rainseeker: | So your stealth ability, right now, the way it is in the new version is that it is about listening or moving silently, more than ... |
| Toady: | There's listening, moving silently, and there's being able to move faster silently. So if you're really good about it you can set it up on, like, the run setting, because now you can set your speed anywhere from creeping up to a sprint, so if you're very good at sneaking you'd be able to move silently faster so that you can get through the obstacles you're trying to get through faster than the guards. If you're not moving faster than the guards you're in a lot of trouble, because they're just going to come up on you, so you need to be able to move fast and silently. The other benefit is that when you get caught in the peripheral vision, which is a pretty large slice of the vision arc ... if you're sneaking it's presuming that you're crouching and so on, to reduce your profile and also you're not moving as much so that you're not noticeable, so it gives you a big bonus for avoiding detection when you're in the peripheral vision arc, but if you fall into the red part, the direct vision arc, then it doesn't matter. |
| Rainseeker: | It doesn't matter, even if you have, like, that grand master stealth. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's like the grand master is still sitting in the middle of a gravel field. All the black clothing in the world's not going to help you. I mean, there might be cases where the dude's half drunk, or something, and you don't move and that helps, it's, like, maybe we'll add, like, a very small bonus versus the inebriated, or whatever. It's supposed to count for something. I mean, it adds a bit of player skill into the game that's, I think, legitimate. I mean, people can be concerned about, like, 'I'm role playing and I don't want to have to be good at something.' You still have to make the sweeping decisions that determine how your character's life turns out. I mean, the idea is the stealth game shouldn't be hard if your character's good at it, but it's still possible to fail. |
| Rainseeker: | Especially if, like, five people are looking and you're walking through the middle of the town square, you know? |
| Toady: | Yeah, you're there. I mean, until we get to more magic stuff; if we add more magic stuff then you could not be there, you could be invisible, or whatever. |
| Rainseeker: | 'Where's that shadow coming from?' |
| Toady: | Yeah, that's right. It's getting there. I mean, it's not super-duper fun, yet, we're still working through it, but I think we're the goblin sites we're going to iron out some more of those things, because that's going to be one of those places where you're sneaking and if you screw up your sneaking you're suddenly going to have a very, very large problem. The human capitals have 10,000 people in them and they're spread out through an entire world map square, which is, like, 768 by 768; it's actually a little bigger than that because the human towns get bigger than one map square, so it's more like 800 by 800. So if you go to a goblin site then they can be the same size and also the same number of people, so you've got these giant cave networks and towers and things, and they're just loaded with goblins wandering all over the place, but most of the goblins are just going to be hanging out in living spaces and arguing with each other, and so on, and there'll only a certain number of goblins walking the hallways. I mean, we're going to let the fun of the game dictate that as much as anything. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, will all the goblins suddenly descend on you, or will it be just, like, some, the warriors? |
| Toady: | Yeah, I think the thing is that a lot of the goblins just aren't going to give a crap. I mean, if they hear a scream that's probably commonplace. They're just not going to care, sometimes, but if you're too brazen about it, there are too many screams, or you make yourself visible to too many people then you'll have to deal with it. I mean, we were thinking of running it with different groups, because the goblins don't get along, they're not supposed to get along with each other, it's supposed to be the power of the demon that keeps them under control and able to take over a bunch of civilizations instead of just descending into violence among the goblins themselves, so there are going to be different groups of goblins that don't care about the other groups of goblins and I think the only thing keeping it together is going to be the demon's secret police, set up with goblins and worse, like undead things and other kind of horrible night creatures and stuff. |
| Rainseeker: | 'Hey, you! No fighting, okay? Thank you. I will suck your blood if you don't stop fighting.' |
| Toady: | That's right, and those humans that they're kidnapping, that grow up and so on, can bring some order to the situation. |
| Rainseeker: | 'Okay, guys. Let's talk about our feelings now. Let's not raise our voices, just use healing words.' |
| Toady: | That's right. That's why we bring the elves in there, and if they don't like them, they keep mouthing off, then they'll eat them. The idea would be, then, that those guys would be people you absolutely don't want to be spotted by because they could actually marshal an organized resistance. So if you can sneak up behind the human and shank him a few times before he can alert anybody then you'll just have a bunch of goblins wandering around and then it won't be a big deal. |
| Rainseeker: | Or perhaps making friends with him? |
| Toady: | Yeah. Aren't you nice? Maybe he'll want to overthrow the demon with you. |
| Rainseeker: | Exactly. 'Hey, do you want to, like, leave the goblins? We could do this together.' |
| Toady: | Yeah, or perhaps he'll just sell you out when you get to the throne room. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, but that would be an interesting thing, if you could try. |
| Toady: | It is going to be something that we mess with sometime, maybe not this time but just the fact that the goblins might not actually attack you, with this racial enmity, or whatever, right? I mean, we had some of our silly power goals and stuff where you actually brought them a child from the village, or whatever, it's like you're being a freelance snatcher, and in that case you should be able to bargain with them, as long as they see the benefit in keeping you alive rather than killing you then, you know ... |
| Rainseeker: | Or are scared of you because you look like a powerful warrior. |
| Toady: | Yeah, you are quite scary sometimes in this game, wandering around with your adamantine plate mail that you stole from your dwarf fortress, and so on. |
| Rainseeker: | Exactly. I don't know, if you are sneaking around everywhere does that build up your skill, and does that look suspicious to human towns? |
| Toady: | That was something we've promised for this release, is that you're not supposed to do that. You keep your weapon around and, yeah, you shouldn't skulk around like some kind of shifty character. |
| Rainseeker: | How are people going to react if you do? |
| Toady: | I'm not sure. We haven't really decided if they should just be, like, 'What is that dumbass over there doing?' The problem is there are no guards, right now. We've got to bring the guards back, sometime, because then you've got real trouble, right? If you're skulking around with your dagger out then that guard will just come over and clock you in the head, or something, like, 'What are you doing?' The other people? I don't know if they would just not talk to you, or they'd ask you if the renaissance fair's in town, or what on earth you're doing. I mean, I'm not sure what I'd do if I saw someone skulking. I wouldn't necessarily call the cops, I'd just think they were being a dumbass, sometimes. Especially since you see them, right? You see them and they know that you see them and you're still sneaking. People will just ask you if you had a bad back, or something. |
| Rainseeker: | 'Does your back hurt? I could sell you some medicine for that.' Have people whisper about you as you walk past them, but I mean if that makes you better at that I think every player is going to be doing that when they walk through town. |
| Toady: | Yeah. There has to be punishment, and there has to be punishment for sitting there throwing rocks for 90 years or whatever people do to start their game. I guess you just become known for that, or something, and your heroic reputation would bleed away, they'd kind of forget that night troll that you killed. Maybe they think that it kind of touched your mind, maybe the night troll hit you in the head or something. You came back and you throw rocks and skulk around all the time. You've been touched by darkness, or whatever. |
| Rainseeker: | That would be really funny if you had someone observe you training, just the same thing over and over again. Spread rumors about you. |
| Toady: | Especially if you were wrestling with badgers, or whatever. They'd just be scratching their heads. Maybe someone would bring you a badger in a cage next time you come to town and just say, 'Here's our gift to you for all the great things that you've done.' |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, if the game kept track of the things you liked to do and then responded to that, I would die of laughter, because that's just the game's way of winking at you and saying, 'You're stupid. That's not how real people behave.' I love it. |
| Toady: | It's all about role playing. What role have you played and so on. |
| Rainseeker: | 'I'm going to the library and I'm going to stamp books all day, get my book stamping skill raised. It must have some impact on the gameplay, right?' |
| Toady: | Yeah, I mean if you're into books you'll have books in the library. We've got books. Mostly books about demons writing about their days in the tower, or whatever. |
| Rainseeker: | The demons are all very literate? |
| Toady: | Yeah, yeah. It's funny when there's a demon impersonating a god and he just hangs out in the keep writing books about the underworld, or the book about how he fooled the people into thinking he was a god, and it has his true name there, and it's, like, 'Blah fools the world,' or whatever. Yeah, they're not very bright. It's like they're really testing. It's a test for their subjects, or their worshippers. |
| Rainseeker: | 'Let's see if they notice this book. I'll put it right here on the shelf.' |
| Toady: | Yeah, they scatter them around their tower, they're just laying around, all these horrifying revelations. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Capntastic: | I like how there are a few square rooms with doors, and then there are lots of little winding passages. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's supposed to look like an organic mess, and some of the cells are big, some of them are small. When all of the goblins come back then you'll have more goblins living in the giant, giant rooms, unless it's an important goblin, or a goblin that can carve out that little space for itself, but since goblins die all the time I guess it's going to be like after the big plague, there'll just be more space for people. Sometimes when they get overcrowded I guess there'll just be more murders until everyone has their own little room. It's a nice place to live. I'm getting started on watchtowers and trenches up above, so it'll be a place for you to sneak into from up top and you'll have to occasionally negotiate an obstacle or two, and eventually make it down into a tunnel which will probably go into one of those living areas. Then the living areas will connect off, when it has the arrow that goes off to jobs and towers it'll take you off to ... if you go down one of those passageways you can stay on the main road, you can kind of see the larger passageway, so you don't have to walk into a room where 50 goblins are forging swords or something, because then you'd probably be in trouble and you'd start getting whacked with sword blanks that are on fire and so on, and be forged yourself ... everyone's going to have to get ready for troll-shearing pits. I don't know if goblins have looms. They must just walk around with a ... I forget what it's called when you have the little stick you put the yarn onto. I used to know the name of what that was. You have this little stick and you carry it around and you just kind of move it around and you start making yarn out of wool. I imagine there'll have to be some goblins that do that, unless they have some horrifying contraption. Then they get to make their little troll-fur clothing. Little dainty clothes; goblins are quite small, I guess they're 10% less than a person, or a seventh. I think they weight 60kg on average and the average human in our game is 70kg or something. Then they make their little teenage-sized clothes with their little troll fur. Then you get to the prisons with the little children in them. I guess there's occasionally an adult captive, that they grabbed and were interrogating for information, so you'll occasionally see one of those. I've seen lots of children in the goblin fortresses that I've been in, so far, so you actually should be able to rescue children for your first games after world gen, and then we have to start sending out snatchers again and making the snatchers that hit your fortress. That would probably be fun, if you had your dwarf fortress and then the goblin snatchers came, took a few kids and then you could, when you're done with your fortress you've probably still got several years before the children grow up so you could start an adventurer and rescue the old kids from your fortress. |
| Capntastic: | Yep, before they get turned. Stockholm syndromed. |
| Toady: | Yeah, that's right, sympathizing with the demons. Always dangerous to do that because there's not a lot of sympathy there. |
| Capntastic: | I know that there are traps that you can get stuck in, do those still crash the game? |
| Toady: | I think cage traps, if I'm not mistaken ... I often am about old changes like this, but I think the cage traps are just turned off in adventure mode, and the other traps are turned on. It really doesn't like having your character pulled out of the action, still. I don't know why I haven't gone ahead and just added some stupid thing like 'Pick the lock?' and then you get out, or whatever. Maybe I'm hoping that cage traps get replaced or something, because they are one of the cheesiest kinds. |
| Capntastic: | It'd be cool to have, like, 'Oh, you got put in manacles and you're in the prison,' and you wait for everyone to leave and then you use a rock to break them or something like that. |
| Toady: | It's the inevitable future of the game that you're going to get captured. |
| Capntastic: | Got to have the daring escapes. |
| Toady: | The current plan was to do that with the thief role, because a thief's whole job is to get thrown in prison, or whatever, and get lashed and hammered and all that. |
| Capntastic: | Sounds fun. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's a great masochist simulator. We haven't thought about tackling that stuff yet, of course we're constantly thinking about it now, when we've got these heroes sneaking around in places, because the only outcome of being caught right now is just, again, the crazy alarms, and people running at you and killing you and so on. That doesn't necessarily make much sense, especially because they'd want to know why you're there. Goblins probably have ways of getting that kind of information out of people, or at least encouraging people to say random people. I guess you'd have that choice, too. |
| Capntastic: | People are always psyched about how the elves are portrayed and how it's not a generic elf; these guys are crazy and probably going to eat you when you die, which is awesome. I think a lot of things are going to progress in that direction, where once you have everything put together you're going to bake it in the over and it's going to come out all nice. |
| Toady: | Yeah. We're starting to feel the fact that we were missing, like, 80% of our ingredients in the world. No goblin sites, no kobold sites, no elf sites, no dwarf sites. |
| Capntastic: | I like the elf sites because all the trees are named. |
| Toady: | I have to make sure I still do that with my big trees. Big trees are going to be fun. They can be very big and you're going to be able to fall a long way if you screw up. 'Aaaaaaaaaah!' |
| Capntastic: | Have it make a test against some of your mental stats to see how uncontrollably you scream. Like, 'Oh, you manage to not scream,' or, 'You scream.' All that stuff. There are a lot of things that could happen. |
| Toady: | That's right. You'll be like the x-men and you'll just start flying. |
| Capntastic: | I'm excited that a lot of the stealth stuff will probably be using some of those mental stats. |
| Toady: | They're all tied into that. It should tell you someplace which skills use which stats so that you can make intelligent decisions. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, like, 'I don't know what proprioception is. What the heck?' |
| Toady: | I think right now the musicality is the only one that doesn't come up. In adventure mode I don't think the linguistic ability is used either, because there's not really any skill-type rolls in conversations, yet, although that'll change sometime. I don't know when you're going to able to start walking through the town playing three-card Monte with people, and stuff. That's right, 'Miss the red nine, your money's mine.' Nothing but trouble. Overall it'll be really cool. It's one of those things where it doesn't start to work until you have a whole lot of different stuff going on. You keep adding stuff and keep adding stuff and you see little parts of the game that start working here and there. |
| Capntastic: | Little gears start touching and moving together. |
| Toady: | Yeah. It's all just going to get a lot better. We were missing these sites, so these sites are going to be just one of the things that doesn't probably gel 100% at first, but each of them is going to be put there with a few things for you to do in mind, and then we'll have them to work with from here on out. It's not like sites are like the rest of the game where as you add stuff the frontier just keeps growing and you can just keep adding stuff and you never feel like you're going back to polish things off or make more fun stuff with other stuff that's already done, because the world's in a box and the boundaries of the box are set, and we're making stuff in the box neater, so that makes the world better instead of just having the general expansion. If we were working on something like other dimensions to travel to, that would be a problem, at this point. We need to stay in our box and get all the sites done and get all the critters moving around. There are a lot of critters running around now, and we get critters running around, we give societies the ability to heal themselves so that we have succession and populations increase, and we have broken sites that have been destroyed, or so on, get rebuilt and you get sites expanding and so on. Then you're in a really good position to start actually thinking about individual needs and individual stuff that will drive all the stories, but you need those sites. |
| Capntastic: | Yep, got to have interesting places and interesting things to do. |
| Toady: | Yeah. I mean you can, of course, because the real world is this way, make a full game interesting based on human sites, and if the world were filled with human sites and just human sites, that would be true, but the way we're trying to think about, like, having the bandits move around and having the humans think about war there was always this big vacuum where, like, 'Well, the whole north region has site x in it, and site x doesn't have maps or anything so don't think about that.' Now everything's going to be think-aboutable, because it's it all visitable, and if it's all visitable and think-aboutable, then the whole game can actually work, and it'll be great. There's going to be all kinds of cool stuff going on. |
| Capntastic: | Throw in some random ancient ruins to explore and all that sort of thing, get some Stargate stuff going on. |
| Toady: | We're not going full-on treasure-hunter arc yet but there are going to be dwarf fortresses without dwarves in them because it usually ends up that way in world gen, that something has gone wrong, somewhere. A lot of my goblin sites seemed pretty empty and I was wondering where they were and I was, like, 'Oh yeah, I sent them all off to kill people.' There's an awful lot of void and emptiness in the goblin sites, but actual ruins are another critter. Also, once we've got these sites, like all the different ways that the races build things, we'll be able to start thinking about things like 'What does a place look like if it was owned by humans for the first half and then owned by dwarves for the second half?' There could be, like, the old town part and then extended past that it suddenly dips down into the earth and there are all this dwarf mining operation surrounding an old human city. Theoretically we should be able to do all that stuff; it's all pretty modular the way things glue together by necessity because in adventure mode when you're walking around you load sections of the map, right? So everything is subject to these restrictions of having to live in a certain-sized space, but that means that if you want to have the flavor of the map change it's really not so bad. I mean ideally you'd like things to intermesh in a not-square way, but for a starting point we certainly have an easy problem and then it only becomes harder when you try and make it look really organic, but it's good, it's always possible to move forward with this stuff, so we're going to have all kinds of cool things going on. Going down, talking to the kobolds and trying to steal things from them, and getting giant centipedes thrown at you or something. |
| Capntastic: | Bugs. Then Zeus can show up. I remember looking through the data for Kobold Quest and it's like, 'Yeah, just ... whatever. Zeus. Done.' |
| Toady: | Is that one of the things that the adventures kill or something? |
| Capntastic: | Yeah. Eventually you start getting just, like, ridiculous things. I don't even know if it's possible to trigger them in game, but I just know they're in there, somewhere. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it is pretty ridiculous. It's all about sacrificing kobolds to people, right, and sacrificing powerful ones, so you kill a bunch of new adventurers and then you spot that a veteran is coming and feed them a warchief or whatever they were called and then that guy leaves with, like, way more experience than he normally would, and then he gets to have a big adventure, and it looks at his total experience level and rates his adventure. Once it gets up there then, yes, they start doing crazy stuff and their level titles are all weird, too. It's an interesting little games. Dwarves are going to be hard. Making a fortress that people would accept as a dwarf fortress these days ... it'll hard to do, like, magma pump stacks and all that kind of thing, and I can't have any levers that trigger something more than twenty tiles away or you might have one part loaded and one part not loaded, so everything will have to be a little more vertical than it would probably be in a player fort when it comes to mechanisms and stuff, or just not interesting, like, 'Yeah, the lever opens the door and the door's right there.' Yeah, we're going to try and do all the main things. The main thing I'm not sure about is whether or not there'll be workshops. The workshop is something for fort mode, and I was hoping not something for adventure mode. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, it's not really fitting. It's an abstraction of other things, I think. |
| Toady: | I was hoping to just eventually do the other things, and so I don't know if I want to litter workshops around. So that part might be different, but we'll have to see how it turns out, because if it's done like the human ones they'll just scatter a bunch of items around without having the means of production at this point, which will be a thing I probably do as I let the player do stuff. At the moment you just have a little knapping factory where you can make sharp stones. It's great excitement. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | Okay, cool. Well thanks for chatting about the stuff. We're going to transition to the second half of the show when we're going to have Tarn and his brother, Threetoe, also known as Zach, come aboard. What are you guys going to talk about? |
| Toady: | We're going to be a question and answer session where we answer questions from Dwarf Fortress Talk. |
| Rainseeker: | Sounds like a good time. |
| Toady: | It's going to be nothing but entertainment. So, yeah, stay tuned for the next part of the show. |
| Rainseeker: | This is Rainseeker signing out, I'm leaving now but I will look forward to hearing you guys chat. Bye bye. |
| Toady: | Bye bye. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Threetoe: | Okay, welcome to the question and answer portion of Dwarf Fortress Talk. I'm Threetoe and I'm going to be reading your questions. The first question comes from the_game_hunt. He asks, 'When I entered a house I saw a lot of peasants, rangers, etc., all of them with knives or forks in their hands. When are we going to get civilians with proper weapons for self defense when you attack them as an adventurer, like in The Elder Scrolls? When are we going to get those guys to put their weapons in some sort of pocket that they carry?' I suppose, like, their belt or something. |
| Toady: | The second part we can answer now. We did a little work on sheathing weapons for non-lethal combat. We've got fistfights and things now in the game, at least when you get accosted on the street by ne'er-do-wells, so you can put your weapon away. There are no sheath objects right now, but you can just put it away and we'll add the actual object that's used to do that later on. Right now you can just put anything away, there's a key you press, you press it, it goes away, and you can press the same key and it takes out the items again. So that part's handled for the purposes of non-lethal combat and so on, so you can carry around weapons without being actively hostile and just chopping everyone in half when you have the first signs of argument. For the other part, I don't think we're necessarily going to have civilians that all walk around with swords, that just doesn't seem accurate to me in terms of how a peasant would have lived. So there are not going to be civilians walking around with broadswords and giant tridents strapped to their backs and stuff that they whip out when you bother them, but they shouldn't be carrying around their boning knives and carving knives like they do now - or forks, or whatever - they should keep those on the dinner table or whatever it was at the time. When we get a few guards back in towns that should have guards or at least watch people, or whatever, then you might have a little more trouble, but we just haven't gotten to the crime mark yet. |
| Threetoe: | Right, with what's coming up after the hero section we'll be getting more into the crime and punishment and civilians should be reacting to you more actively than they do now. |
| Toady: | Yeah, even if it involves running away which would be a first, instead of having three-year-olds trying to kill you. And ducks. |
| Threetoe: | Okay, so the second question comes from King Mir: 'You've stated previously how the good and evil regions are ultimately going to be replaced by sphere-aligned regions. Recently you added a lot to the evil regions; how have these changes affected your future plans? Are you going to put as much work into every sphere? Will some spheres be much more distinct than others, or will you just stick with good and evil?' |
| Toady: | We did add a lot of undead and blood rain and mists and things floating around in the evil regions because we were just on our continuing night creatures drive, to get through those. It hasn't really affected the long-term plans. We still plan to diversify what the regions look like. The spheres ... talking about them specifically, like sphere-regions, is ... when you say, 'Will some be more distinct than others?' there are spheres like 'trade', or something like that, where because that's such a civilized concept ... there are probably going to be some spheres that simply aren't appropriate for regions, and a sphere is really just an idea, or a concept, so if you want to make one region more musical, or fiery, or evil, or torture-based, or darker, these different concepts ... that's really what we're getting at, that we wanted to have a strong sense of flavoring to the regions that sets the atmosphere but doesn't just go along this linear scale of good or evil, that allows things to be more diverse. So in a sense just adding stuff to the regions moves us along the way there. We haven't really started that project yet, but I it's still something that I think we're planning to do. |
| Threetoe: | A lot of the other plans we had for portals to different dimensions where the spheres would be a lot more powerful ... that might come out, too. The next question: 'Are vampires and werebeasts going to be more fleshed out? At the moment vampires do not need to feed and werebeasts don't need to kill anything to survive.' |
| Toady: | We were working on several night creatures in a row. We had plans to do this random generation to make the vampires semi-random and diverse and we had ideas about things like maybe they'd be killed by sunlight, or not, and for werebeasts we had things about daily transformations or controlled transformations. There are all these kind of myths from different parts of the world where you'd have, like, someone turn into a serpentwoman every night or something like that. There are different ways that basically get at the same idea of a werebeast, but it's not just the moon-cycle type idea. We just didn't get to all that. It's like the rest of the night creatures; when we go on our next night creature kick we're just going to do more with it. |
| Threetoe: | Another question: 'Are werebeasts going to be more in control of their powers, like being able to manually transform instead of being naked peasants that you can just kill?' |
| Toady: | I mentioned the manual transforming, that we had some ideas about doing that, but there is the other issue there; a werebeast in the game currently means someone that will actually be a werebeast, say, one out of fifteen days because there are a couple of days where they're transformed, and the rest of the time they're just sort of huddling in their cave, waiting to die. That goes to stuff that also got put off, which is the idea of integration into society. A lot of the werebeast stories have werebeasts, like, when they're people. |
| Threetoe: | Yeah, so you have to actually go hunting for them in the city, instead of having them just hang out where they're easily hunted down and killed, like the vampires. |
| Toady: | Yeah, the vampires are currently done a little bit more properly, at least, than the werebeasts were, and that's because we didn't really handle the idea of what you do when the werebeast undergoes its transformation when you're talking to him or when he's just in the town and starts killing people. I mean, that's great in a sense, but the game doesn't really handle that well, in the long run. |
| Threetoe: | Okay, so another question speaking of vampires: 'So, are the vampires going to be semi-randomly generated?' |
| Toady: | Yeah, I think I also addressed that in the first part. That was a plan, and we put it off. |
| Threetoe: | Okay. 'Will there be a cooldown on the revival rate of the undead things coming back to life in the evil areas? I had a plan to get rid of corpses in those areas but it is impossible because they revive every few seconds.' |
| Toady: | That part did end up pretty hardcore, maybe a little harder-corer than we intended. We might modulate that a bit, I know some people have fun with it but I think probably more people don't, so at least it should be something that you have ... I don't know if 'more control over' is the right phrase, but a little more warning, or more regions are a little more sensible than others. It's not quite a traditional idea that the undead are utterly unstoppable; that's more like someone who's been cursed because they did something wrong. It just doesn't stop, it's like a revenant is coming for each of your specific dwarves, instead of just being in a bad area. |
| Threetoe: | This question is kind of involved, it says, 'Will the nature of corpses change? I know you plan to have them as containers, but will it be simpler just to make them dead with a dead tag, and have all the respective stuff on them when they die? This would allow zombies to have clothing, and weapons, allow dwarves to be buried with their belongings, and allow you to look at the wounds of the dead and allow people to target corpses. I always wanted to collect heads of my enemies, but it's hard unless you get a clean decapitation kill.' So, yeah, the nature of how it stores dead bodies. |
| Toady: | I'm sure I said I planned to have them as containers, or whatever. That's just shorthand, basically, for the same idea, I think. The corpses have gotten more and more complicated. It tracks where all the exact wounds are and all that stuff, it's already tracked on the corpses, and I'm sure when I get to the items I'm not just going to use the container code I'm going to use the inventory code; so you can pry something out of somebody's cold, dead hand. It's going to know where everything is, I don't think you have to worry about that; I can almost guarantee that would be done right the first time, when I get to that. As for collecting the heads of your enemies, which is a different question, right now I think we just have the general butchery option in adventure mode when you just turn them into a pile of guts, or whatever, it's all prepared; chopped liver and everything. For specific decapitations and things ... I think when we were talking about Armok, and we had this whole corpse-processing section for Armok, I don't remember if we were just about to start that, or if we did anything with it, but it was very specific, so I'm sure we'll eventually allow you to ... especially for things like bounties. It seems very popular to cut off ears and, you know, bring in the ear or bring in the tattoo or whatever from the guy's arm, and that kind of thing. I remember some strange power goals about that, so I think we're definitely going to have that kind of thing, no matter how disgusting it gets. |
| Threetoe: | Okay, so the next question: 'Does world gen track entity populations in a way that acknowledges creatures have been laid but not hatched? I'm thinking about a clutch of dragon eggs that could survive the death of all the adult entity members, for example. Should the entity persist after all of its population is dead except the eggs?' |
| Toady: | We definitely don't track that, right now, and it's interesting because when we get to things like antmen that would be a really big question, but even with the kobolds ... is it still an open question about eggs? We were leaning towards eggs, if I remember, but not 100% sure what our theories were, there. At the time of this recording we're working on dwarf sites, and kobold sites would be after that. I still don't know that we'd be coming to terms with the fact that there are multiple life cycles, and an egg stage, and all that kind of thing. If kobolds do have eggs there will be eggs, but I'm not sure it's really going to track carefully what's going on. I mean, I think it's cool to have, like, the last members of the society living in egg form, and you can kind of resurrect the race from the dead after you dig them up 80 years later, or whatever, but it just doesn't track that stuff right now. |
| Threetoe: | Okay, so the next question: 'Are we likely to see the old 80-dwarf reclaim teams again anytime soon? I miss being able to command a huge military of dwarves to reclaim that legendary metal from the invaders, and a starting seven kitted out with bronze weapons just doesn't do it.' |
| Toady: | I don't remember why we got rid of that, because it was cool. I think the issue was more of a technical one, and a release-time one. This is me trying to remember stuff from years ago, but I think it was when the military screen changed and the whole military structure changed, and we started having to track all this extra information about the military; it became a pain to set up the reclaim squads right. It could just be something like that. I don't think we're against that because the start scenarios that we're doing for fort mode are going to have all kinds ... there could still be a core seven dwarves, if we want to stick with that out of a sense of tradition, but there are going to be scenarios where you start with a bunch of hill dwarves outside of your civilization, and starting with a larger military group - especially to reclaim a really dangerous fort - seems as cool to me as back when we had it before. |
| Threetoe: | Yeah, especially with all the military dwarf stuff coming up pretty soon; it's going to fit in there to have the larger group. |
| Toady: | Yeah. I'd think we could see that stuff again. |
| Threetoe: | Okay, so the next question: 'With the new combat mechanics separating attacking from moving, how many presses are going to be required for one attack? Already attacking things that are not hostile and stay not hostile, probably due to a bug of unconsciousness, requires Shift-a, letter for person, Alt-y, letter for body part, letter for swing type. If moving/fighting is being taken out, will every swing at anything be some intolerably long action/reaction chain that just sucks all flow and fun out of it?' |
| Toady: | No, that's not how it's going to work. When I say that we're separating attacking from moving, that refers to the speed, so something like a cheetah could run fast but then it doesn't just get to go all ninja on you when it gets to you and hit you 27 times before you get to move. You still use the same keys, though, because if a person is standing next to you and you press toward them, the game can still reasonably interpret that as an intention to attack, rather than an intention to move, especially if you've got an enemy. So it works the same way; you initiate an attack when you press toward somebody. You can still press Shift-a if you want to get all down-and-dirty about, like ... now you can be doing even more stuff when you're attacking but, still, pressing toward them just picks the optimal attack in the exact same way that they pick an optimal attack when they try and attack you, where 'optimal' is not really optimal, but just a napkin calculation that the game does to say, like, 'Oh, should I swing at this head this time or not?' So you don't have to worry about that part getting more cumbersome. There is a little more interface, because when you get attacked now you have choices to make, but the whole point of that was to add more flow and fun, so I don't think we have to worry about the flow and fun being decreased by interface trouble this time around. |
| Threetoe: | Okay, so the next question: 'How is distance calculated between diagonal tiles? With the dragging of time you have being somewhat more accurate than in most rougelikes, a reasonable approximation of Euclidian space doesn't seem impossible.' |
| Toady: | Yeah, we do use root two for going diagonal. It has an approximation, it's the one that's, like, 363 over 256 - I don't remember the exact number - something like that, that basically comes out to 1.41... whatever. I've gotten rusty in my math, but something like that. So, for the 2D calculation that all works, it doesn't go into 3D, like if you're moving diagonal in 3 dimensions, it doesn't try to do any better approximations with different numbers, if just uses the 2D diagonal, but, yes, you really do get different move times for moving diagonally, so it's there. |
| Threetoe: | The next one: 'Will whatever your dwarf characters are wearing have an influence on the effectiveness of their striking, etc., for example a dwarf wearing slade boots having a particularly nasty kick?' |
| Toady: | I guess if he's strong enough to kick with them, or even walk ... he'd just be sitting there, shuffling along the ground. |
| Threetoe: | Yeah, that'd be kind of crazy. |
| Toady: | It's one of those things where I don't remember what's in or out, I'm assuming it's out by the question. Of course the armor effect is in, where you're protected by them, but if it doesn't use the hardness of the gauntlet it will at some point, I don't know when. It's come up before and we've thought to do, people have suggested it, to do things like gauntlets so you can box someone with your gauntlets, kick them with your boots, then that moves into, 'What about all these things adorned with spikes?' The dwarves have a habit of adorning things with menacing spikes, and then there should be ... like, when you're punching people, or when you're wrestling, all that kind of thing ... it should have an effect and it just hasn't been done yet, but it certainly stands as a hole in the combat system right now. |
| Threetoe: | Okay, so the last question: 'I was reading the suggestion thread on interspecies breeding the other day, and I was hoping that you could discuss the notion of extending the breeding system to include such things as hybrids to a greater extent, primarily half-breeds among the sapient beings like elves, humans, dwarves, etc., and all the possible fun that arises from that, aside from stuff like discrimination, ethnic cleansing and increased interracial tensions, a more diverse and less static set of races populating the world would no doubt contribute to the richness of the game.' |
| Toady: | Yeah, I mean we're for it. The snatcher story, for instance, had an elf-goblin hybrid which didn't even have a human component to it. |
| Threetoe: | Yeah, I've written a few stories about this. We definitely want to entertain these possibilities. |
| Toady: | Basically, we would have done it already, it's just a matter of overcoming some technical challenges. Do you just create new raws for all of the half forms? Then what happens if there are quarter forms and so on, or if you have one part elf, human, dwarf and goblin? Does it try and average the raws or come up with a one-to-one correspondence between the different body parts? It's kind of like the polymorph problem where you turn into another humanoid and right now your equipment just drops on the ground, even though the werewolf could theoretically hold things and wear things that were stretchy enough, or something, or just stayed on, like a little hat. It doesn't know how to do that, or transfer wounds, for that matter. Once we understand how that works, which is an easier problem than coming up with a mixture of creatures, then there's also the centaur problem, of taking pieces of creatures and gluing them onto each other; taking the top half of a person and gluing them onto most of a horse, except for the head. These are all easier problems than trying to procedurally just come up with the child of two creatures, but it's still an intriguing problem. So I'm not sure I'd just jump in and be, like, here's the half and two-halves breeding can just do a Mendelian genetics type thing, and sometimes they're a whole, sometimes it's one race or another, sometimes it produces another half, like half-elf/half-goblin. It could work that way, but it would be interesting to be able to get something more smeared, but it's difficult. That's part of the reason it hasn't happened yet; it's an intriguing and difficult problem. |
| Threetoe: | Okay, well that's the end of the questions. Is there anything you wanted to talk about? What's lately going on in development? |
| Toady: | Yeah, so, the first part of this recording took place way back in September, and now we're in the middle of November, because of my remissness. |
| Threetoe: | We've been busy. There's a lot of stuff. |
| Toady: | Yeah, there's all kinds of stuff going on. We are now into dwarf sites, and having fun making little mounds for the hill dwarves and little gardens and so on. |
| Threetoe: | I was thinking, you'll be able to reclaim your own fortresses and now the actual mountainhomes themselves that the other dwarves created. |
| Toady: | Yeah, there's going to be just a menu of interesting options right from the beginning of the world, if the dwarves had a hard time of it and their whole civilization was wiped out. |
| Threetoe: | And you get to visit these places as an adventurer, too, so you can see them. |
| Toady: | Yeah, imagine buying from a depot and going to the depot and seeing a grumpy little dwarf there selling the fortress goods, just like your trader does, your broker. |
| Threetoe: | And retiring your own sites, and visiting your own living sites. |
| Toady: | Yeah, that's going to be a whole lot of fun, because you'll get to see all your dwarves, and talk to your dwarves. It should be really cool. |
| Threetoe: | Okay, well I think it's time to wrap this up so we can finally send it out. |
| Toady: | Yeah, we can finally edit this. |
| Threetoe: | Alright, well thanks a lot for everybody who contributed, and everybody else who's enjoying the game. |
| Toady: | Yep, thanks. |
| Ollieh: | (musical postlude) |
| Toady: | Like a hamster. |
| Rainseeker: | A fantastic hamster. |
| Toady: | Fantastic hamster, that's right. Maybe it walks on four stilts. That'd be a pretty amazing skill for a hamster to have. |
| Rainseeker: | That would be fantastic. I don't know how that would aid battling evil. |
| Toady: | I'm not sure if Capntastic battles evil. Maybe he battles something more minor. |
| Rainseeker: | Capntastic battles ignorance. That's what he battles. |
| Toady: | That's right, and the hamster teaches people to read. |
| Rainseeker: | 'Stumpy, turn the page!' |
| Toady: | That's right, the exceptionally literate hamster who walks around on stilts so it can talk to the children. |
| Rainseeker: | That's right. 'Children, you must read, or you too will become a hamster with stilts!' |
| Toady: | So it's more of a negative reinforcement lesson for them. |
| Rainseeker: | It's a fear tactic, yes. |
| Capntastic: | I knew a kid in middle school who said his grandpa was the best chess player in the world and they put him up against a computer and he was playing chess as hard as he could but there was so much electricity in his brain that it exploded. |
Dwarf Fortress Talk #20, with Rainseeker, Capntastic, Threetoe and Toady One, transcribed by vjek with updates by Trif
| sfx vox: | (trumpet) |
| Toady, Capntastic and Rainseeker: | Episode 20! |
| (laughter) | |
| Rainseeker: | This is our episode 20, everybody, thanks for listening. |
| Capntastic: | Thank you. |
| Toady: | Thanks for listening. |
| Capntastic: | Just glad to be around. |
| Rainseeker: | Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Dwarf Fortress Talk, this is your host, Nathan Miller, also known as Rainseeker and I have to my left Capntastic ... |
| Capntastic: | Hello! |
| Rainseeker: | ... and to my right Tarn Adams, our illustrious leader, also known as Toady One. |
| Toady: | Yep, I'm to Capn's right. |
| Rainseeker: | And we're all sitting in a circle, holding hands. |
| Capntastic: | Wait, if I ... Okay, was that intentional? |
| Toady: | I have no idea if we're in a Möbius strip or what, it's too complicated. |
| Capntastic: | If I'm to Rainseeker's left ... and you're to my right ... there's something weird going on. |
| Toady: | That's right, no, I'm sitting on Rainseeker's lap right now. |
| Rainseeker: | Okay, alright. So ... we are going to be talking about Dwarf Fortress and today our topic is complicated economics and the theory of relativity within Dwarf Fortress. Not really, actually we're just going to be talking about what's happened lately and it's going to be very topical. So, Tarn. I hear that from reading some of the reports that you are doing reclaims. |
| Toady: | Reclaims, we've done some reclaims, we've done some retires, we've done some unretires. Yeah, so we've been working ... I guess we haven't talked for a little bit ... and since our last episode there was mostly just a lot of work on site maps. Elves had their site maps, the goblins have their site maps before that. |
| Capntastic: | The trees ... |
| Toady: | Yes, the trees, the gigantic trees with all the climbing and jumping and running-jumping, and jumping-running, and jumping and climbing and falling and then grabbing things with your hand when you fall and so on. |
| Rainseeker: | Right, Dwarf Fortress is now Assassin's Creed. |
| Toady: | It is, it is, this is parkour nation, however you say it, I didn't say that word right, it's free running nation. Yes, it is, it is exactly like Mirror's Edge, pretty much. Not that I ever played that game, but I imagine ... I heard it was parkour related, however you say that word. I don't know how to say it correctly. Oh is that how you say it? The "R" is not silent or anything weird like that? |
| Capntastic: | The thing about parkour is that there's no right way to do it. So ... |
| Toady: | So it's fine if the word is broken, and kind of goes to the ambulance. |
| Capntastic: | That's right, just do your own thing, just flow. The body's not broken, I suppose. |
| Toady: | That's right, we're doing alright with our dwarves. You can break yourself pretty badly though, if you running-jump off a cliff and hit a wall and fall and don't grab anything and just kind of hit the ground. And I guess that's common, that's sort of par for the course, for the parkour. |
| Rainseeker: | That's right. |
| Toady: | People breaking each other and so on, breaking themselves. So yeah, you can do a little bit more of that kind of self harm in the game now. But that was with the elf trees, we put that stuff in, and then we worked on dwarf sites, and dwarf sites are ... there are three kinds of dwarf sites, there were the fortresses that everybody is used to, that connect the surface to the underground. Then there's the surface sites, the hill dwarf settlements, just these ... they're either carved into the sides of existing hillside slopes, or they make their own mounds if they're in a flatter area, then they just grow some gardens, above and below and hang out and drink ... all the time and live in complete squalor. And then there's the deep dwarf sites down in the caverns which will have their vast plump helmet fields, that kind of thing ... and some industry. But the fort is still supposed to be the place with all the most skilled craftsman just to kind of align it with what goes on in the game. We want to kind of keep it the most important place. We have those three kinds of dwarf sites: the hill, and the fort, and the deep sites. We want the fort to kind of be the most important site all around because that's the one that you're going to also continue to play, so all of the central dwarfy activities take place there. And the other ones are mainly the areas for farmers and drunks and things, although the fortress is also an area for drunks ... drunks kind of everywhere in dwarf-land. Sorry, that's just a way of life. So we finished that for the most part, we have things that we're going to have to go back and touch upon in each of those sites ... this release is kind of unusual in that the ... well maybe not that unusual but it's ... we touched upon maybe eight or nine topics overall, because we started back with non-lethal combat and bandits harassing people in town, right, and then we moved on, we added tracking, and we have armies moving around and then we went over to the sites, because we needed the sites to be added in and then the original point of the thing was to get some of this birth stuff succession stuff going on, which is what I'm right in the middle of now. So we're finally touching upon that but there were points, like with the army part, I needed the sites to get that done to my satisfaction and now that I've done a lot with the sites, I can go back and do the army stuff that I didn't finish. So there's going to be a lot of, now, revisiting of the old topics that were setup for this release. I don't think we've had any really terrible feature creep this time, it's not like one of the other releases that had nothing to do with night creatures and then ended up being three or four months worth of work on night creatures, right, so this has all been very topical. But we have to go back and revisit a lot of things now because we have been kind of skipping from point to point as we need things, because none of these things, the features that we've added in could really be done in isolation. They could be done up to a certain point in isolation, then you need to work on another one, and now we need to come back and link them all together again and clean up some unfinished business. So it'll be a little while yet, it's not like when I finish succession it's like Boom! release, that's not how it's going to be, I have to go back and clean some stuff up. That's kind of normal though, I always have to go back and fix stuff up. And then I have to fix stuff up after the release as well, and we'll have a nice healthy period of bug fixing, I'm sure, after this release. |
| Rainseeker: | So let's recall what the purpose of the other dwarven sites are. The hill dwarves are supposed to supplement your kingdom, so to speak, correct? |
| Toady: | Yeah, yeah, they function ... or they will function, see there's an issue now with just how much you can do in fortress mode with hill dwarf settlements because they're not your hill dwarf settlements yet, we don't have that linkage tightly established yet, but it will be. Then that will give you a much higher number of dwarves to work with, though they can't all be on screen. Because the whole issue is if you want to have a strategic impact on the world and have a political impact on the world you just need a bunch of warm, fat, drunk bodies to get that business done, and you can't do that with two hundred dwarves. But you can't have a thousand, two thousand dwarves running around on screen or the game will ... not run. So you've got hill dwarves to supplement things, or to form like the bulk of your military for example, of your unskilled military. Your dwarves will still be like the equivalent of your, say, knights or whatever and your sergeants, your leaders.. for your military; they'll be the ones that know what they're doing. And then you'll have a bunch of drunks. |
| Capntastic: | So the hill dwarves are basically a conduit for your fortress to interact with the rest of the world? |
| Toady: | Yeah, yeah, at least in that way ... I think there will be places for your dwarves to also have direct impact, but when it comes to military stuff, and certain trade things, you're going to have to act through intermediate sites just because of the sheer numbers behind it. The deep sites are ... they act in a similar fashion for underground business, but they're also ... we haven't really planned that exactly how strange they're going to be, but they supplement your food, that kind of thing, if you don't want to farm, you can trade with them. |
| Rainseeker: | Oh, I thought you were going to say you can eat them! |
| Toady: | No, you don't eat them. You don't eat dwarves ... we're not elves. We don't eat each other and others. |
| Rainseeker: | (as Urist McRainseeker) I will not see this beard go to waste! |
| Toady: | That's right, you take the hill dwarves and you harvest their beards and use them as your shirts and togas and things. That's just how it works. |
| Rainseeker: | One hundred percent ... dwarven. |
| Toady: | That's right. Shearing. The shearing, I put that in just for this reason so that you could stack up your dwarves and shear them and send them back out to grow ... they graze out in the muck and the mushrooms. You have to feed them alcohol and their beards come out. Shave them ... |
| Capntastic: | Exactly. |
| Toady: | Chewing on the beard to get the alcohol out. You know, it's very simple. A simple, strange way of life. But I'm sure that the deep dwarves will become more exotic if anything to distinguish them from the hill dwarves, because right now they're quite similar in economy, in the sense they're kind of food-drunky type of things. Because we could make them into ... If they became just like forts and were all about mining and crafting ... you would become mediocre in all things, except for like your ability to charge tolls to people that want to go outside, something that would be kind of stupid as a sole function. So we're thinking that the deep sites could kind of be a farm league for mediocre craftsman and then you could get some better ones from there and you would be like the majors in terms of what's going on in your fortress. But we'll have to see how it plays out. I'm sure we'll come up with some good things once we've got the deep sites and hill dwarf sites actually linked to your fortress, so they're not linked right now. So right now they're pretty blah-blah sites with their plump helmet fields and little delved out living arrangements and so on, they're kind of like a village, right now, those deeper sites. |
| Rainseeker: | And you don't get population from them, necessarily, or immigration. |
| Toady: | You get historical figures, just like ... so most of your immigrants now, at least ... so in the currently released version you would get a lot of historical immigrants until your historical figure population started to suffer and then you just get regular entity population ... abstract immigrants. Now, you get historical immigrants from a far richer number of sites so you get deep site and hill dwarf immigrants and this will ... and with the birth-death, well not death, because death is kind of the opposite of getting more guys, but the birth and marriage, growing up, all that kind of stuff that happens now all over the world you'll have a kind of infinite supply of historical figures. Their histories get less and less interesting as the years go on because we don't have all of the things that were happening in world generation done yet, but as we get more of those things in there, histories will actually be more interesting because there's more detail after world generation. |
| Rainseeker: | Right. |
| Toady: | But they'll have the complete list of cousins and aunts and uncles that you might be used to now from your new immigrants in the currently released version, you can kind of look at most of your guys and they'll have full pages of family members and so on and that will still happen now with these new people because they're all having children and they're all related to other dwarves that may have come in the past and so on. So, that can continue on now, which is a really good first step for this continuation of world generation is that we have sort of meaningful migrants and there's going to be some very strange things that happen now for instance, if you retire your fortress, your fortress now just becomes a site in the world. People will continue to live the simple parts of their lives like having children and so on. Then you'll get migrants from your old fortress into your new fortress including all of your old dwarves, could possibly come from that retired fortress. |
| Rainseeker: | What's the odds that you're going to get that? Is that pretty common? |
| Toady: | It should be very common, actually, because your fortress is full of historical figures and a lot of mundane historical figures. The game doesn't keep track of too many, sort of craftsman and miners and so on. It keeps track, just for memory purposes, most of the historical ... well maybe not most, it tries to make it about half and half or whatever, I don't remember what the proportion is, but it does try to keep some mundane figures in play throughout the world, just so you can kind of meet regular people that have interesting lives. But, there are just by the burden of, especially in dwarf-land, how many little positions like bookkeeper, manager and all that kind of stuff, there are a lot of important dwarves that are tracked to the detriment of tracking regular dwarves, but, when you retire your fortress, just because you got to know the dwarves there, they're all historical figures. Every single craftsman and child that's there is a historical figure. And so, those people, when they migrate into your new fortress, you're actually quite likely to get a dwarf from your old fortress. Kind of raises the question, about like, what happened to your old retired fortress to make them want to move when they were living there? It must be because they miss your orders. |
| Rainseeker: | They miss your leadership, exactly. |
| Toady: | Yes, yes, they miss all the wonderful things you were doing for them. Drowning them in magma and sending them out to fight the undead, and so on ... they just want to do that again, a bunch of adrenaline junkies and drunks. That's what we've come to expect from our dwarves, so they'll come to visit. So, yeah, it should be pretty cool. |
| Capntastic: | So the deep down dwarves, when they come up, maybe they should just be very very allergic to the sun? |
| Toady: | Well they will be cave adapted. |
| Rainseeker: | Exactly. |
| Capntastic: | But extremely cave adapted, have another tier. |
| Toady: | Maybe blind, they'll just lose their eyes. |
| Capntastic: | They'll be blind and they'll be completely white, you know, like those cave fish. |
| Toady: | Beardless, beardless, no, they'll have flesh that replaces the beard or something like these tendrils that come out.. |
| Capntastic: | Fleshy beards? |
| Toady: | Translucent fleshy beards that generate light, but they don't have eyes, so it doesn't mean anything. And yeah, they have alcohol detectors in their stomachs and so on, they waddle around and roll in the mud. And yeah, so that's about like a dwarf. That's what we expect from a dwarf. |
| Rainseeker: | Ya, that's pretty good. |
| Toady: | A Cthulu-esque mob that comes out of the deep. |
| Capntastic: | But they're friendly and they talk with a Scottish accent. |
| Toady: | That's right. Scottish deep spawn. It's interesting being in this position, because now we've got all kinds of choices. I'm not sure those are the choices we're going to make, but got all kinds of choices, so it should be cool. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Toady: | We do want to differentiate, though. They need to be unique eventually and we always add little things over time that kind of separate things out, so it should be pretty cool in the end. |
| Rainseeker: | Would you be able to choose like a hill dwarf, when you're in adventure mode, and you're generating, a hill dwarf or a regular dwarf or deep dwarf. |
| Toady: | Yeah, you get to choose, right now, it's as before you choose the civilization you're from, and then it'll kind of settle you with the hill dwarfdom or deep dwarfdom, or fortress dwarfdom at its whim. We'll have to change the ... when you have more generation options in general, you'll have that kind of decision, so yeah, people have been asking quite a bit lately ... when is it time to allow you to just take over a historical figure as an adventurer instead of generating one, for instance? And the main problems with that all still remain because we don't have any kind of administration for powerful figures and so on, so if you took over even a manager or bookkeeper you wouldn't have anything to do with being a manager or bookkeeper, so it makes it kind of strange. But that's almost a trivial concern in the grand scheme of things, I mean if you want to take over the queen, and then it's just like, it's time for the queen to become an adventurer or whatever, and she just walks out of the throne room and goes off and has an adventure, then I mean that was her decision. |
| Rainseeker: | Well she could probably command the armies, you know. |
| Toady: | That's the thing, we're not even there yet, right? |
| Rainseeker: | Right. |
| Toady: | We don't have army command, so if you choose to take over the control of the dwarves, then you're just kind of malinger and ... |
| Capntastic: | Single handedly go and start wars, on your own. |
| Toady: | That's about all you can do, you can cause trouble. |
| Capntastic: | But you role play! You say I'm going to inspire the troops. |
| Toady: | Exactly. |
| Capntastic: | I'm going into this cave and kill everything. |
| Toady: | So in that case there are other concerns but not large ones in terms of just taking people over. There is kind of the ... it's sort of interesting, it's like legends mode, right, if you make a gigantic world, let it run for a while then you're sometimes running ... I forgot what the cap is ... I think it's like fifteen thousand, twenty thousand historical figures, that's kind of just a sheer logistics problem in terms of starting your game. You're like 'I want to be ... an adventurer' and it's like 'Okay, do you want to start in one of these civilizations? Do you want to start as a pre-existing historical figure?' And you're like 'Oh, I'll start as a pre-existing historical figure' and then it's like 'Okay! You have twenty thousand choices' and I guess you'll whittle it down initially by civilization or race concerns and then you'd still be looking at a list of, you know, fifteen hundred people or something. |
| Capntastic: | They could look at professions, possibly. |
| Toady: | That's right, and interests, hobbies ... |
| Rainseeker: | Or it's sort of situation, like, if there's someone that's currently in prison, yeah, you could be this prisoner and then it would set up a chance for you to escape ... or not. |
| Toady: | Yeah, that may be the most common thing at first, because until we get to these larger scale civilization concerns, the people you'd want to look for are ordinary people with interesting lives, like I said before. You want to find people ... maybe somebody whose town is about to be invaded or like you were saying a criminal of some kind, we've got a shortage of criminals but you could be a bandit, I guess. The bandits are the criminals of the game right now, and we've got those people living in the sewers, so you could start as a sewer criminal if you want to be with one of those sewer criminals |
| Rainseeker: | Or possibly you could be someone who's had their spouse kidnapped by a night creature. |
| Toady: | Yeah, the child of someone who has been kidnapped by a night creature, and it's like, you have 15 days to finish your mission before your mom gets turned into a spouse of the night troll or whatever. Yeah, then you'd be on some kind of horrible matricide mission, so, you'd want to succeed. These are the wonderful little interesting things that will come out of that selection. So the main thing pushing back against that is, the people who ... there's going to be an awful lot of people who are just like 'I want to play the demon king of the goblins or whatever' and it's like 'Alright!' There you are, in your giant palace in the middle of this hell-hole, and you can't do anything. I guess you could talk to the goblins and they'd be like 'Hey, what's up' and you could ask them about their family or join you on your adventures, and they'd be like 'Oh, I'd rather not'. People don't have any appreciation of your importance, with regard to your civilization position because it assumes you don't hold a civilization position. But yeah, in the spirit of sandboxiness, you could just let it all ride or whatever. There is a concern that some other people have raised that you have a large temptation to just cheat when you're in that position. Like if you had a dwarf fortress that you just retired, temporarily retired, because you can unretire them, so you temporarily retire your dwarf fortress and your kind of in this desperate war with the goblins and then you start an adventurer, and you're like 'I want to play the demon" and then you just go jump off a bridge or something and then go back and unretire your fortress and you're like 'well, problem solved!' That would be a kind of thing, we were leaning toward a world generation setting on that, you're like 'In this world, I don't want to be able to do cheap crap like that'. So you'd only be able to play regular historical figures or something like that. Like unpositioned historical figures or people you had played before.. |
| Capntastic: | Make it so that anytime you abandon something, a month passes, like a time limit like that or something so you can't just say 'Oh, guess I'm losing ... better morph into something else.' |
| Toady: | Yeah, it becomes complicated, of course, because there are times when you'd want to definitely not let time pass or whatever. Although now we've completely dodged that question, we need ... not dodged, we just haven't handled it because it still does that thing where it advances you to the next year when you unretire your fortress, but it doesn't repair the world's army situation, a lot of that stuff. So it's just not ... yeah we're not all the way there yet. We are making important strides, because the world can kind of repair itself a little bit now, people can be reborn and with the succession stuff, which is my current project right now, you can repair the upper echelons of society which were never repaired before either. Where it's like, once the rulers die, that's it, you don't have any of those anymore. Once any trivial position of any kind in the civilization became unfilled, it was never filled. So, now we can see if you have a whole civilization half wiped out by some horrifying event, it can fix itself now, or it will be when I'm through with what I'm working on right now, it'll be able to fix itself. That includes the kind of things where people had their outpost liaisons come to their fort and then they'd ... something horrible would happen and then they wouldn't get another one and then I added in a kind of stop-gap measure where a person would be generated for that particular reason but there are a lot of holes with that system and a lot of places where a position was not refilled because it didn't have that solution tacked on top of it. So now that's all going to be homogenized and fixed.. and if your outpost liaison dies, they should actually designate an actual person to be your actual new one, if you deserve it. You know, maybe it isn't something that's always going to get refilled. We'll see how it plays out. I have a feeling if people do die an awful lot, it will still have to elevate historical figures from entity populations, like if there are just no grown dwarves left, because you've been killing them all, and then it needs to find a new outpost liaison for you, then it would have to bring one up from nothing. But that's fine, that's what those entity populations are there for, to deal with the sheer numbers of people you need, and also deal with gaps in the historical record, caused by massive ... death ... problems. So, it should all start working now, which is cool, it's about time to get the game working.. |
| Rainseeker: | So when towns become wiped out by an adventurer having "fun", does it get repopulated, now, again? |
| Toady: | It depends on just how thorough the adventurer was, because there's the issue of reclaim by civilizations of sites that's not you doing it, right? And so, if a place becomes an utter ruin ... that was one of the things that's actually on the to-do for this release, is having that happen because the goblins can be so thorough sometimes, depopulating a swath of countryside and just putting everyone on the pike ... you go there and there's all kinds of heads and skins and things on sticks, and so on, and no people left. If you want the world to continue on, then sites have to be reused. Sometimes you want ruins to form because a ruin is an adventure environment, but you also want ruins to not always just be ruins, they're just a place that was razed and then it gets repopulated, or a place where, like you were saying an adventurer goes off on a little tipsy little journey there causing trouble, as people occasionally have that impulse to do that. And then they would recognize that the place is unpopulated or depopulated just like they do with the goblins and then they would deal with it. So, when I deal with one, the other one should be handled. It's something that could very well go in for this time, it depends, like I was saying, I'm kind of going through everything up to a certain point depending on what other things are needed and so on, and then I'm going to go through again. So this second run through where I'm cleaning up bugs and handling unfinished issues, that was one of the unfinished issues that came out of goblin army attacks that needs to be handled and could very well be handled. In that case, yeah, you'll have a town ... now I haven't ... people did bury people in the sewer or in the catacombs in the towns and they have those large burial structures ... They don't know how to expand those right now, so right now it would be very macabre, the way it's set up, it's a matter of getting things done right. If the humans decide to repopulate their village that the adventurer had made a complete mess of or that the goblins had decorated with various macabre artwork then they would just live alongside that right now, it would be kind of horrifying. Maybe it's so that they remember, so you'd go into someone's shop, and there'd just be the dead body on the ground or whatever, and they're like "yes, that's our memorial to your adventurers last visit" or whatever. That's something that definitely needs to be handled at some point, obviously. And then you'd just see like a gigantic mound covered with flowers on it or something, now that we've got flowers. You could have a giant mound where they'd deal with all the bodies you've produced over the years or over one day. So we'll see, it's always in steps, but the most nonsensical stuff like having dead bodies scattered everywhere, probably stuff that I could handle earlier. So, we'll see, it should be intriguing. |
| Rainseeker: | So I guess we'll do the obvious thing and talk about the Hobbit, which has dwarves in it. It has, I think, eighteen or nineteen dwarves. They all have the same name ... |
| Toady: | That's right. They've all got embarrassing facial hair. |
| Rainseeker: | There's Urist ... See, I get this Dwarf Fortress joke. |
| Toady: | Yep, and they've got Kogan, and Alis and all the other dwarf names. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, and Gandalf, and the rest. |
| Toady: | Gandalf the dwarf ... he has a better beard than half those dwarves. |
| Capntastic: | I know. |
| Toady: | It's all about quality ... too tall though. |
| Capntastic: | And hobbits have beards, they're just on their feet. |
| Toady: | That's right, twice. |
| Capntastic: | This is our A game, right here folks. |
| Toady: | You're ready for it, so we saw that ... |
| Capntastic: | I saw the movie, I saw it in the 48 frames per second, which was pretty cool, it was like getting my spine electrocuted through my eyes. |
| Rainseeker: | What? |
| Toady: | Yeah, I didn't see it that way. |
| Rainseeker: | I'm not familiar with this technology. |
| Capntastic: | It's the new 48 frames a second and it was really fast, all these very subtle movements and just details kind of pop out, but it's in a really non-stop disconcerting way. So even tiny things, like holding a sheet of paper, you see the sheet of paper vibrating. It's cool, but when you're sitting there for three hours.. |
| Toady: | It was like hyper reality? |
| Capntastic: | I enjoyed it actually, and I think it's something people will get used to ... but a lot of people hated it. |
| Toady: | Yeah, I didn't get to see it that way. I saw the non-3D, non 48 frames, just completely ... |
| Capntastic: | Was it in black and white, too? |
| Toady: | Yeah, sepia tone movie on old rotted out celluloid. |
| Capntastic: | Are you sure you weren't just reading the book? |
| (laughter) | |
| Toady: | Well, we did watch the old cartoon too, with the big fat round hobbits, and all the music. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, I liked the cartoon because Gandalf is animated, with just one frame, with the clutch cargo mouth that moves and he just slides out from behind a tree and scares Bilbo. |
| Toady: | The goblins detach their lower jaw all the time, but there's more music. I would have preferred if the scary albino goblin from the movie had been singing songs that he was supposed to sing, the trees were burning ... |
| Rainseeker: | ... there was a revenge song, or a hobbit scaring song. |
| Toady: | Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well it's all about eyes popping and stuff, it really wasn't appropriate for a children's book. But about skin cracking and stuff when they're on fire and how the dwarves have to burn to death and stuff. But it would have been a fun song for them to sing, instead they had to have their little showdown duel thing that never happened or whatever. That's alright. It's going to be different without the music. Without the important things, you know. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, well when they make a movie about my life, they're going to omit the musical part ... a shame. |
| Toady: | All the things we can sing about Rainseekers life ... |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, well I just had a musical number this morning that you guys totally missed it; when I woke up, birds were singing, the chipmunks and the squirrels were doing this little dance routine on the front yard. |
| Capntastic: | Did you paint with all the colors of the wind? |
| Rainseeker: | I did. I did, I really did. |
| Capntastic: | This is our A game, folks! |
| Toady: | Were there birds, are there still lots of birds, there? |
| Rainseeker: | Yep, there are, as a matter of fact I have a bird in my lap right now, he's pestering me, he's trying to chew my buttons right now ... aren't you buddy? He's a little jenday conure, and he makes a lot of growling noises at me while I'm trying not to let him chew on the mike. He likes to chew on the mike. Wait, here he goes.. that was little jenday noise. You can't chew on the mike, mister jenday. Although you like breaking buttons.. (bird noise) There we go. See, there we go, I got him to talk because he didn't like what I was doing. |
| Toady: | So it is a musical life. |
| Rainseeker: | Exactly. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Threetoe: | Okay, this is the ThreeToe answer section of Dwarf Fortress Talk. So, I'm ThreeToe and I'll be reading some of your questions, which there are a lot of we requested, and thankfully a lot of you guys came back with some questions. So, let's get started. ButteryMess asks, 'Have you checked out all of the DF Fan art, and what is your opinion of it?' |
| Toady: | People used to just sporadically post them in different forum threads and different forums throughout the Internet on their own blogs and stuff ... there'd be these fan art things and we'd see those when they'd get linked to us, and now there's that thread that Armok made ... |
| Threetoe: | The "moving sound". |
| Toady: | … the moving sound thread. I think it was called moving sound because someone moved the forum thread but now we think of it as a kind of avant garde modern art thing about moving sound, so it's DF Fan Art Moving Sound. We periodically go in there and look at all the pictures. As for our opinion of it, it really depends on the piece, doesn't it? |
| Threetoe: | Yeah, there's a lot of good stuff out there. It's really amazing that people have liked our game as much to make so much of it, so many people that have contributed to that stuff. That's really cool. |
Question 1 | |
| Threetoe: | Ok, so, the next question ... Zoor asks, 'On dwarven tantrums, how much of it is a placeholder to be revamped and how much of it is our vision?' |
| Toady: | The tantrums right now, it's pretty crazy how they sort of go out of control with one tragic loss of a pet or something sending the whole fortress into overdrive. I mean dwarves are supposed to be somewhat volatile and somewhat amplified imperfect people, but maybe not quite that much. It gets pretty silly, because it doesn't let you experience the lows of the game without just losing your whole fortress, so I think that there should be more of a roller-coaster ride and less of a kind of degenerate spiral down to nothing when just a few bad things happen. Especially because it encourages you not to have dwarves have friends? I mean, having friends should generally help people get through hard times rather than causing the friends of someone who died to all go off and beat people up and stuff. It's just silly. |
| Threetoe: | So yeah, just tone it down a little bit maybe. |
| Toady: | Yeah. |
Question 2 | |
| Threetoe: | So falling[unintelligible] asks, 'What is your feelings on allowing complete customization of embark dwarves, such as their personalities and preferences?' |
| Toady: | I haven't thought about it that much, but I don't have a problem with people wanting to fully customize their seven starting dwarves. We're thinking of doing that for adventure mode sometime, there's some roadblocks to doing it this time. Just like in those RPGs it can be, it's not exactly standard these days, but it's often allowed that you can fully customize your face and that kind of thing. The only issue with dwarves, I guess, is if you can customize your preferences or your attributes, it can be kind of gamey, I guess? I don't know if that would kind of mess up ... |
| Threetoe: | Oh yeah, we were also talking about the problem with genetics, too. Yeah, that was the roadblock to ... the roadblock to customizing your adventurer is getting the genes to line up because there's genetics to determine appearance and if you want to bring your person out of ... just give him an arbitrary face, it might not be able to find the genes for it, then that would harm the adventurer reproduction later. Especially now that when your retire your adventurer, they can just go off and get married when you're not looking, so it needs to have their genetic information in place. There's workarounds for it though, but with dwarves I'm more worried about ... not exactly worried about gaming the system, it's a conversation we've had a bunch of different times on a bunch of different subjects whether or not people should be able to fully customize or fully amplify themselves and whether or not that's something that should be customizable or something that should be in a worldgen parameter and whether or not people are overcome by temptation, whether the temptation ruins the game, whether or not I should care about people ruining the game, because they are tempted? All of that kind of thing. We've found solutions to those things in the past without really restricting the options, so I think eventually customizing the dwarves, once you can do it in the adventurer will probably be a test case for it, because it's a little easier there. |
Question 3 | |
| Threetoe: | Ok, so ... Dinoct asks, 'You mentioned that when people ask for information they can lie to you, will this be limited to finding information from random people or will even your group leader that you decide to join lie to you in order to get you to do things?' Can you put someone in power and they betray you, and that kind of thing? |
| Toady: | I think that's actually more interesting than the case where someone randomly lies to you when you're asking for information, that's kind of silly. I mean, I guess you could go into a town where they don't like strangers and you ask where to put your horse or something and they tell you the wrong place. |
| Threetoe: | Yeah, usually in these kind of games, they lie to you at the very end and then you find out that the whole quest has been a mistake or whatever. Yeah, I don't think that's the kind of lies we were talking about, was it? |
| Toady: | I guess it was a broader question. Oftentimes in the game you'll have someone lie to you to put them in power, like we were saying, and then you'd have a final boss battle with them, or you take like half the Bethesda quests (or maybe a little less than half) but very very often, you always kind of just keep the quest giver somewhere where you can see them because they're going to betray you half the time, and then you just have to kill them. Whereas in Dwarf Fortress if someone betrays you and we certainly would allow that to happen or if they just have a bad disposition.. I mean you might put someone into power who never intended to betray you, but they just have a bad disposition and then things go downhill from there, then either in the same game or subsequent games, in different modes or whatever, you can deal with that. So, it's something that should be pretty interesting in the end and we're not going to force someone to be a good person just because you wanted to do things for them, that would be hard to do.. I'd have to rewrite their brain, while you're talking to them, or something like that, it'd be strange. |
Question 4 | |
| Threetoe: | Ok, so, we have a couple of questions from Ironbad and Isaacflashman, asks about inheriting surnames, so 'Will the children inherit the last names of their parents?' |
| Toady: | So this is a pretty popular thing, I think probably because of fort mode where you can't tell who's related to who and that kind of thing. I don't remember what the reason we hadn't done it is, if we just haven't setup the raws for it, or we wanted to support different systems, or we wanted to wait for the names to support different systems, or whatever. Technically speaking, we're all for having that kind of thing, being able to tell what families people are from, and so on. It's not necessarily the case that there'll always be family names and surnames, that's not present in all cultures, especially the further back in time you go. A lot of people just didn't have family names, they were just like 'I'm John from this city' and that was what they called themselves, they didn't really have a surname. But, just keeping our options open and having that kind of thing at some point maybe more in fort mode, or more for dwarves, just because it seems to ... |
| Threetoe: | It's just cool ... |
| Toady: | Yeah, I think for dwarves it would be more fun to see the families join each other and ... I don't know if dwarves have clans or whatever, I mean people think of them in different ways and we haven't really thought about it too deeply, but yeah, I think it would be cool to put a system in for dwarf mode and just raw-ify it and people can turn it off if they don't like it or whatever. I think we will do that. Both of them asked if it's coming in with the new succession stuff and it's not coming in at this point. |
Question 5 | |
| Threetoe: | Okay, so the next question is for me ... it's from Marten, he asks: 'This question is for Zach, is there any features you would love to see implemented in Dwarf Fortress ASAP, but Tarn for one reason or another refuses it?' Well here's the secret, is that most of the things coming out are probably my fault. I petition things to be put in that you guys probably don't even want to be put in. Okay, moving on ... |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
Question 6 | |
| Threetoe: | Okay, this next question is from James, he asks 'Will you ever begin to include randomized main races, or will the player interactable races always be limited to token dwarves, elves, goblins and humans? And a smattering of chimera tribes' ... the animal people. |
| Toady: | Is that what he means by the smattering of ... I don't know how to say these words, is it chimera? Yeah, it must be the animal people. Unless you meant something else. |
| Threetoe: | Yeah, we could always just call the animal people something else, other than turtle man, we could make it some other name and still be a turtle man. |
| Toady: | I think it's always been in the plan to have randomized main races, it was up on the old dev pages, I don't remember if it made it anywhere on the new dev pages or not? I think it might actually be there. Maybe not. It would be the last one, because doing randomized civilizations is an extra step beyond randomized monsters. Because we've kind of been easing in, we have the forgotten beasts now, we've got the titans, those are randomized. We have some of the underworld creatures randomized and we wanted to ease in to having some of the regular kind of monsters in the woods and stuff, randomizing those with a few extra night creature entries at some point and then kind of ease in to having some randomized regular creatures and then finally adding in randomized civilization creatures. The problem with randomized civilization creatures is there needs to be a lot of exposition or you're just going to be completely confused about what's going on, but it would definitely be an option, I think there would be a slider or something for how strange you want your world to be because we definitely think having dwarves and elves and goblins is cool for a lot of people just to kind of understand what's going on without having to do a lot of extra reading. |
Question 7 | |
| Threetoe: | Okay, so the next question is from Onebedterrin, he asks, 'Will there ever be any colossus other than bronze such as a stone, adamantine, or bone colossus.' He mentions we already have titans made out of different materials ... so yeah, the stone colossus, or the bronze colossus, what's the thought? |
| Toady: | Well, the bronze colossus of course is a Jason and the Argonauts ... from Talos coming in and lifting up ships and shaking them and so on ... this is the reality ... |
| Threetoe: | Yeah they've been there from the beginning ... |
| Toady: | It's the reality we grew up with, all the Ray Harryhausen stuff. I think all of our megabeasts have appeared in a Ray Harryhausen movie somewhere, except the randomized megabeasts but every other one has been in either The Clash of the Titans or Jason and the Argonauts or one of the Sinbad movies. It's just how we roll here at Bay 12 Games. I don't think there's going to be therefore, another kind of colossus add as a raw stock creature and the randomized creatures that we currently have. You can have, as you said, a Titan made completely out of stone or something. They don't work very well right now, especially the ones made out of snow or whatever, they just die, but that would probably be how they come about. We already have the smaller magma man type things and so on and again, I think we're probably going to be moving in the direction where material creatures of different sizes are just things that randomly occur and hopefully it doesn't get too mushy or gobbledygooky but that's how it's going to happen. |
Question 8 | |
| Threetoe: | Next question is from Talvieno. He asks 'Will members of other civilizations eventually be able to join your civilization and live among your dwarves?' |
| Toady: | I guess does the person mean other civilizations or other races? You can already have people in your civilization in worldgen that are humans or elves or even goblins that have joined up with the dwarf group and once the code supports it they will be able to move to your fortress. Right now there's just bugs where it treats them like pets sometimes and lots of strange stuff like that. Well, there's many problems. The official plan is to fix all of that up for the tavern and inn arc, when you can keep an inn, because there will be people living at your fortress on a semi-permanent basis. |
| Threetoe: | Yeah, this is one of my favorite suggestions that someone had, to have dwarf mode inns. |
| Toady: | Yeah, that's definitely going to be awesome. It'll be like Diner Dash, you'll be taking care of people trying to multi-task and that will eventually lead to people staying in your fortress longer term because we'll be working out the problems with multi-racial forts at that time and we'll have full integration not long after, I suspect. |
Question 9 | |
| Threetoe: | Ok, Aaron asks, 'Considering Dwarf Fortress' long development, will animals be removed the game as their real life counterparts go extinct or will animals such as polar bears, gorillas and pandas be kept in Dwarf Fortress even after their extinction in reality? Any plans to include the moa, dodos, or pygmy mammoths that were still kicking around past 1400AD?' Yeah, that's kind of a messed-up question. We were thinking about having the animal sponsorship drive. That didn't really work out that well, well it did monetarily, but it was kind of hard to implement. At one point considering having an extinct animal sponsorship drive. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it probably wouldn't be a sponsorship drive, at least not the same way. We'd be happy to include extinct animals, and I think it would be just cold, if the polar goes extinct, to remove it from the game, that'd be cold. I'd like to keep the polar bear in there as kind of an homage to the existence of the polar bear, but it is incredibly depressing to think about that. But I'm not removing polar bears from the game. |
Question 10 | |
| Threetoe: | Okay, so the next question is from Accos, he says, 'With ownership of sites coming, will civilizations lay claim to areas as well? Will the game have countries where civilization control is not just the towns but also the uninhabited area around it? If an army of a different civ enter that area, will it cause a war?' |
| Toady: | They have areas that they sort of lay claim to now, and you can see those maps in Legends mode if you go to the maps section, but they're overlapping. They don't have treaties about who can cross what river, that kind of thing. I'm not sure if exact country boundaries are an anachronism or not, we're not in the real timeline but we always use our 1400 cut-off to determine kind of what would vaguely be called an anachronism. People do get picky about things and certainly get picky about things like who gets to cut down which trees and all that kind of stuff and when we put in ... the missing key element I think here is having things like mines and larger lumber camp places, places that are sort of industrial in scope and not just a village, that a larger authority like an empire is using, and once they've got those places there'd be kind of a claim to an area associated to those sites. Other than that, I don't know if patrols just bump into each other, they could cause trouble, it's a matter of catching people as much as anything. |
Question 11 | |
| Threetoe: | Ok, so the next one is from Charles, 'What do you realistically think DF will be capable of in five or ten years? Looking at the narrative vision we know that you'd like to be able to tell stories but Dwarf Fortress is not an RPG. Do you think it could be, what are the limits of procedural generation and at what point can you look at the narratives it produces and be proud, as a writer, of what the game is outputting?' |
| Toady: | Well as a writer, what do you say? |
| Threetoe: | I think it's already there. There's so many stories people have written from Boatmurdered all the way up to the present day, of ... what was that last one that just came out, that just finished? |
| Toady: | Bravemule just finished. |
| Threetoe: | Yeah, Bravemule just finished and they have a movie with subtitles talking about how it's progressed. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's hard to say what the limits of procedural generation are, because we continue to push them. We'll see how much of the storytelling will occur in the game and not be added on by people. It's hard to say ... If you're actually talking about reading Legends Mode or when you're talking to people, is this output the equivalent of what a writer produces, I don't think we're going to be there, ever, especially if you're talking about a good writer. |
| Threetoe: | Yeah, it would somehow have to be able to string all the legends mode stuff plus what happened in the game and try to hook it together in such a way to make it a legend or something. |
| Toady: | It's hard to even get the language produced, much less any actual skill that you learn while writing to have that come across so we'll probably always be relying on the players to some extent to make it something that they're visualizing in their head, but we will have a lot of more interesting things going on, a lot more moving parts for people to play with. |
Question 12 | |
| Threetoe: | Okay so he also has a question for Scamps, 'Do you like chewing on the wires and biting your person's ankles and are you a megabeast?' Well, where is Scamps? |
| Toady: | He came up and bothered me once during this call, but I was talking and didn't want to scream at him. While there was no claws sinking in, I do have one bloody scab on my pinky finger. |
| Threetoe: | He has this brand new toy, this fishing pole that he loves to play with and now he will not let us sit in peace. We'll be working on our computers and he'll come up and grab us by the ankle and he actually bit me one time to get me to play that stupid fishing pole. |
| Toady: | Zach is the best at the fishing pole, though, Zach's the one who gets like four feet ... |
| Threetoe: | That's why I'm bothered. |
| Toady: | Yeah, Zach is bothered, not me. He'll even ... he might bother me for a moment and then he'll remember and just go bother Zach again. But Zach can get the four foot leaps out of him. Over one meter. Over one meter for our worldwide listeners, he can get many many many centimeters out of the cat. |
Question 13 | |
| Threetoe: | Alright, so the next one is from Eric, he asks, “Have you considered creating random materials in the game so civilizations and players could perform experiments on the materials to determine their properties? Given the structure of the raws it seems like it could be pretty easy to create random metals in world creation.” |
| Toady: | So there already are random materials in the game, just not the type Eric wanted. There's the rain, can be a random material ... |
| Threetoe: | Oh that's right, yeah. |
| Toady: | When it rains some kind of ... And mists, the mists are also defined as a random material. |
| Threetoe: | We just need a a solid now ... |
| Toady: | Yeah, we just need a solid ... there can be solids if it gets cold and the mist freezes I guess, or if it snows ... I don't remember if it can snow slime or not, but it might not be able to, but if it could then that would be a random material. The important point is that these random materials are raw files, they are generated just like raw files, then it just kind of puts them in with your other text files and pretends to load them, it actually goes through and processes the text file and everything. So it is just a matter of will and time and interface, etcetera; all of the game making pieces of it but not the technical framework for getting things like random metals in the game. And avoiding the kind of gray sludge problem where it's like does your world turn into mush if everyone is walking around with like akabarite shields or whatever. You're like, 'What is that?!' |
| Threetoe: | Yeah, it's the same problem as the randomized monsters, it's like when you see the name, and every time you play the game it's a new monster with a completely different thing you never get used to it. |
| Toady: | We just have to overcome exposition and then we'll be all over that. |
Question 14 | |
| Threetoe: | Okay, so the next question is from Luke, he asks, 'To many players and indeed to the outside observers, Dwarf Fortress is less of a game than it is a living entity; after the better part of a decade of development I'm sure the decisions made a year ago or even five years ago influence the present changes made to the game in not so minuscule ways. I guess my question is: has Dwarf Fortress reached the point where it has a say in its own development?' So has its shape kind of determined what we're doing next? |
| Toady: | I guess it does when I want to get to the next part quickly? But I've also done a lot of gutting and re-writing, so when Dwarf Fortress tries to push back, I push back and gut parts of the game and destroy people's save files. So I guess the answer would be when I'm preserving save compatibility, Dwarf Fortress is having its say. Then when I get tired of it, Dwarf Fortress doesn't get to talk anymore and we just obliterate things. There are probably some elements now that are a bit entrenched but people would have to remind me what they are. Destroyed the personalities, having one world isn't even going to be a permanent thing ... it does cause inertia but not complete stasis. We would have added multi-planar worlds a long time ago if I had thought to support them ten years ago. The way it's setup now it's an annoyance ... around the level of adding the z coordinate, but the z co-ordinate got added and multi-planar worlds are going to make it in too. |
| Threetoe: | Dwarf Fortress hasn't won yet, we still have control! |
| Toady: | Yeah, we're not Skynetted out yet. It does feel that way sometimes, it's true. |
Question 15 | |
| Threetoe: | Okay, the next question … from Jeeesus, he asks, 'Have you ever regretted being so open with the development of Dwarf Fortress?' and he also asks 'How often do you and Zach get together to talk about development and brainstorm ideas and has Scamps impeded development?' Have you ever regretted being so open? I don't think so. |
| Toady: | No, no, I think being open with the development ... I mean to the extent that we're open |
| Threetoe: | In fact, if we didn't let people know what we're doing , they wouldn't be so inclined to support us, I don't think. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's true. It's just part of the whole way our community works and our ... if you want to call it our business strategy. Not really the way we think about it, but that's what it is I guess. It's not open source or anything, it's not like this is the most open development in the world, there's people more open than we are, but we're at a place where we're comfortable, we don't regret where we're at at all. How often do we get together and brainstorm ideas? Some days we talk about what I'm doing less than others, but I see Zach every day for most of the day, so ... all the time. It's just an every day thing. How often has the cat impeded development? Well, I'd say that I don't mind having the cat, I think the cat's a good addition to the family and my morale has increased so I think the cat has therefore improved development. The cat has enhanced development. I think there might be specific moments in time where the cat impedes development but those are few and far between. Or sort of ... he is a kind of violent beast, but that's alright. |
Question 16 | |
| Threetoe: | Okay, so the last question from Nate in Idaho and he asks, 'I was wondering how often you spend working on DF daily and what can other players do to help you in your quest to expand the best game in the world? Also, as from the creators, do you have any tricks or general advice to help noobs?' |
| Toady: | I spend quite a lot of time on Dwarf Fortress. There are days where I don't get as much programming in as I would like because I'm doing the forum and email and stuff like that, but it's basically what I do, during the day. That's kind of it. But that's alright. |
| Threetoe: | I can testify to that, Tarn is every single day for most of the day on Dwarf Fortress, so you guys should appreciate that. |
| Toady: | At this point, other players, there's a lot of things you can do, you can help people out on the forum ... of course you can support Dwarf Fortress, go to bay12games.com to support Dwarf Fortress. |
| Threetoe: | Click on the little yellow chick-dinosaur thing. |
| Toady: | That's right, the cautionsaurus, click on the cautionsaurus and it'll tell ya how to help there, the pointing creature ... You can do all kinds of things ... make suggestions, help people out, help out with bug reports ... |
| Threetoe: | Spread the word, tell everybody you can about Dwarf Fortress. |
| Toady: | Tips and tricks ... you guys are, even the new people are all better at this game than we are!-- |
| Threetoe: | It's true. |
| Toady: | You can go to the forum and ask people for help and tips and tricks because we don't have any good ones. |
| Threetoe: | Oh, and I hear someone wrote a book about Dwarf Fortress. |
| Toady: | That's right, there's the O'Reilly press book by Tinypirate from the famed tutorials. He has a book and for some reason I don't remember the name of the book but it's the only O'Reilly press book that says Dwarf Fortress in the title. |
| Threetoe: | ... to master the most complex game ever made, something like that. |
| Toady: | Yeah, something like that. It's "Getting Started with Dwarf Fortress" or something like that. |
| Threetoe: | Yeah, that's it, yeah. |
| Toady: | Yeah, so you can read that book, it's a wonderful book, and it has all kinds of stuff in it. It's not going to help you with multi-tile trees once we release, until it's updated, but it'll help you with everything else. As a final note here, people were very very very nice with my request to send in questions for Dwarf Fortress Talk, so even though we got up into the teens today in terms of answering questions, we scratched the surface only, there are like another eighty questions and there's always just only so much time to do these recordings, but we will get to the people that were missed, there were lots of good questions in there, we're just going to keep plugging away at them until you guys are satisfied, so don't worry about that if you weren't answered today, you will be answered at another point in all likelihood. |
| Threetoe: | So, another excellent version of Dwarf Fortress Talk, if I do say so myself. Alright, have a good one people, congratulations to the generous. |
| Threetoe: | Keep shooting ahead into the future. |
| Toady: | That's right, you're all champions in my book. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | Before we left I just wanted to mention my wife and I started a gluten free bakery this last year (conure sound) it's called measures of joy, and you can check it out at measuresofjoybakery.com we have a bunch of mixes that are gluten free so check us out and thanks for listening, this call has been a lot of fun. |
| Rainseeker: | Alright Tarn, who do we thank? |
| Toady: | We thank you, you're right on the list here. |
| Rainseeker: | You're welcome. |
| Toady: | We also thank Capn, Capn's on the list here, Capntastic. |
| Capntastic: | Hooray! You're welcome everyone. |
| Toady: | Everyone loves puppies. |
| Capntastic: | I have a new puppy, it's my niece's puppy, but it likes me more. |
| Rainseeker: | Because he's the man. |
| Toady: | I'm Toady One, I'm thanking myself, I'm on the list here. And I'll thank my cat, Scamps, who's three, he's almost four, he'll be four next month. |
| Rainseeker: | Uh oh, birthday time. |
| Toady: | Yes, an aged cat who gets toys, many toys. |
| Toady: | And we'll thank Ollieh and Emily Menendez for any music that may have played during this episode. Mallocks, a transcript producing person who will produce transcript and it will be posted at some point online. Anyone who chooses to contribute to Dwarf Fortress go to bay12games.com, there's a little button, and it's fun, it's fun to help out with Dwarf Fortress. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, please donate! |
| Toady: | ... because you get to see more Dwarf Fortress. It's fun, fun to see more Dwarf Fortress. |
| Capntastic: | And you get amazing rewards! |
| Toady: | That's right, rewards, you can get a crayon picture that we draw over at my grandma's place, those are fun, or Zach can write you little story. |
| Rainseeker: | I want a crayon picture from your grandma. |
| Toady: | We have actually not forced her to draw, it's amazing. It's been many months we've been going over there drawing the crayon pictures. Not once have we forced her to do that.. we've forced her to judge them, to see if any of them need to be tossed out. I don't think she's ever had us toss one out. We've tossed them out a few times, just like "Nah, this one doesn't make any sense" and then we throw it away. Sometimes they just don't turn out right. But, you know, accidents happen. |
| Rainseeker: | That's right. |
| Toady: | My crayons are getting very short, the black crayon in particular, the black crayon always does work, there's always little pupils or every picture usually has a little piece of black in it somewhere. The black crayons a little nub, and my blue crayons because I often give them blue shirts and blue pants at times ... good times, good fun. |
| Rainseeker: | Good job everybody, thanks for coming to listen to our podcast, thanks Capn and Tarn for meeting today. |
| Capntastic: | Thank you guys. |
| Rainseeker: | We'll see you around. |
| Toady: | Bye bye. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |
| Toady: | It is incredibly long. It is skinny and incredibly long. It is very skinny and extremely long. It is incredibly long and skinny. It is fat and incredibly long. It is extremely long and very fat. It is incredibly long, encapsulated in massive layers of lard. It is somewhat weak and extremely long. It is weak and extremely long. It is very frail and incredibly long. It's muscular and incredibly long. It is very muscular and incredibly long. It is incredibly long and muscular. It is incredibly long yet is also weak and skinny. It is frail and really skinny but also extremely long. It is extremely long with muscle and fat in equal measure. It is incredibly long with impressive muscles and great sacks of lard. |
| Rainseeker: | And sacks of lard come out of a snake. I love it! Some imagery there. |
| Toady: | It just looks like a large intestine or something. |
Dwarf Fortress Talk #21, with Rainseeker, Capntastic, Threetoe and Toady One, transcribed by DG, PeridexisErrant, PT Fort, Yazman, and others!
| sfx vox: | (guitar music) |
| Rainseeker: | Hey everybody, this is Rainseeker. I'm here with Capntastic, and Tarn Adams, our illustrious leader, also known as Toady One. And we are here to announce that there is a brand new game called Dwarf Fortress that you should all be playing. |
| Capntastic: | It's free! |
| Toady: | It's all new! |
| Rainseeker: | And it's all dwarfy! |
| Toady: | And it's not released yet. (laughing) |
| Rainseeker: | But it's still new. So anyway, welcome back to another episode of Dwarf Fortress Talk. We're going to be discussing today combat mechanics! And, what was the other thing? |
| Toady: | We have redone the conversation engine since the last DF talk and... and done a little bit more with uh insurrections against goblin occupiers. So, yeah. So we have two whole things to talk about. |
| Rainseeker: | Excellent. |
| Toady: | (Chuckles) |
| Rainseeker: | Alright. So, combat mechanics. All fun. |
| Toady: | Yeah yeah. So yeah... |
| Rainseeker: | So let's go. The... For now, let's talk about exactly what that looks like for each turn. What's the process that we go through when we start fighting somebody. |
| Toady: | Yeah the interesting thing is that it's not... It doesn't feel like turns anymore. It's really really... We had, we had... The traditional thing you get in games like this more or less is a lot of different models. But... A lot of it comes down to trading shots. And Dwarf Fortress has been like that, where you attack, they attack, there could be counterattacks, and we try to do some interesting things, like dodging out of the way or charging, so that you would... there would be a sort of kinetic element to the combat, where you'd be moving around a bit, but you were still exchanging instantaneous attacks back and forth, and it also depended on sort of your overall speed number and so on, so someone might be able to hit you twice while you're down, and that kind of thing. |
| So now, what it's like to just walk through a turn, so when it's your turn, someone's standing next to you, but they might be doing something. They could be in the middle of a process. In terms of the clicks of the world, where normally when you take a step in the game it takes about 9 to 10 ticks of the clock if you're walking. And so an attack now, it might be, depending on what you think the tile size is and so on it's a little slow, but the average attack now will take 6 ticks, but... so an attack is incoming for part of that, and then the person's recovering from the attack for part of that, so when you're standing next to, say, a goblin, there could be a little red arrow that pops up. We try not to make it flash ‘cause the flashing bugs people, and so if I wanted to add even more flashing, so the arrow kind of evolves at you, like (noise).. And little dots turn into a little arrow pointing at you. And that means that you know there's an incoming attack, and it's a red arrow for an attack and a green arrow just to see where the creatures might be moving. And there could be lots of arrows in the same spot, in which case it kind of staggers the animations and it takes longer to get through them all. | |
| So you know that the goblin is attacking you, and that means that you're going to want to change how you respond that turn, ‘cause if you initiate an attack, yours is not going to get there first even though it's your, quote, ‘turn', right? This is just sort of, you're just in your head now acting, and things could already be happening, so you don't get to control the action if the action is not yours to control. You can try to get to the point where you're the one initiating the move. In that case, you can take more options, but for instance if a goblin is swinging a sword at you, and you have a good combat observer skill, you could, you might see, sort of: | |
| ‘Imminent attack. Goblin is aiming wild attack with his wild iron shortsword slash at your right arm' or something like that. | |
| So it gives you more information the higher your skill is there. And if you see an imminent attack like that, you just want to probably parry that if you have a weapon of your own. And so you do the regular attack menu from Shift+A. If you want to be meticulous about it, you go through the Shift+A attack menu, and say okay, I'm going to choose a parry and bat the sword out of the way, in which case that really improves your rolls, for a parry, and *decreases* your dodge and block rolls, if you have a shield. So you make, you make decisions about which rolls you want to amplify and if you just wait then you get the regular sort of passive rolls but that's taking a big chance with your life. | |
| Rainseeker: | Now does that include, for instance, if... you know, there's an incoming attack. Is it going to tell you what is the highest chance to succeed in dodging or parrying? |
| Toady: | It never, never really gave that information before, and it's not really a change now. It depends on a lot of things, but mainly your skill roll. The black box is the enemy's skill roll. And, you're not privy to that information. So it's still... it's kind of a.. The chances of the rolls are usually, directly dependent on your skill. I guess it could remind you of your... what you're best at, which would probably be a nice thing to do, since you can get that from your Z screen anyway. So, it could tell you what you're best at. |
| Rainseeker: | And you increase these skills by practice obviously, so... |
| Toady: | Yeah. |
| Rainseeker: | If you're doing a lot of parrying, you going to... You're going to stay as a parrier primarily. |
| Toady: | Yeah. Then you run into the problem that still exists in the game that you can't parry punches, bites, kicks... So you either want to take up the shield or learn how to dodge. And dodging - active dodging involves jumping to another square. You can't actively dodge and just say ‘oh, I want to dodge.' The passive dodging, if you get a really good roll, still does that. But but... You will be kind of dancing around a lot. If you've... If you've got incoming natural attacks all the time, if you don't have a shield. I mean at some point we're just going to do the thing where you can slice off somebody's arm if they're trying to use it on you, or whatever, but... |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah if you're getting punched with a hand you know, you can parry it. Fairly effectively. |
| Toady: | Yeah just put the sword in the way. |
| Rainseeker: | Yes. (laughter) And there goes a hand. |
| Toady: | Yeah, we'll get there eventually, it's just not... The, the strange thing about this release is that we're just trying to do the stuff that was foisted on us by the attack/move speed split, that kind of broke everything up into actions- |
| Rainseeker: | Right. |
| Toady: | And the whole thing got junked. So this is not nearly enough of the combat stuff as we eventually wanted to do for our official combat arc. But, it's looking like the combat arc, the initial stages of the combat arc. So there's kind of a... It's sort of messy to find a stopping point where we're satisfied that we're not totally destroying the flow of combat in the game. But at the same time, there's going to be all kinds of things you can see where there's sort of missed opportunities or potential for improvement that come out of this new system that we just don't have time to grab right now. And there...
But I'm really happy with how it's all turned out. It's, it's... You feel... way more involved, and the combat feels really alive with all these kinds of things pointing at you and you're deciding exactly what you want to do. It's it's, I think it's a neat system. It's kind of a good compromise between sort of a real time game like the, the Elder Scrolls type game where you're sitting there trying to time whacks on people and so on. And running around and the sort of strategy tactical combat of a SSI-type game (Strategic Simulations, Inc.) or rogue-like game. |
| Rainseeker: | Right. |
| Toady: | But without the ‘I move six tiles and the other guy moves six tiles' part of those games. Or at least the SSI-type games. The rogue-like games are more discrete, but. This should be interesting, I'm not sure, I'm not sure what other examples exist like that, because you'll get, you know, hundreds of seven-day roguelikes produced now. So there's probably been some experiments with stuff like this. But... It's... it's... it's interesting. I think, I think it's worth a try even if it's rough now I could have definitely see that this is going to be a better system. So I like it. |
| === musical interlude by Ollieh === [9:15] | |
| Rainseeker: | Alright so you'd mentioned earlier the wild attack? What does that mean? |
| Toady: | So you've got, quite a... as usual we're dumping options on you. Fortunately, the menu isn't any deeper than it was before. You still... You say ‘Strike', you say the part, and then you get the... The old menu you had, just a list of ‘I wanna punch with my right hand or stab with my sword or slash with my sword'. And now at the bottom of that screen, you've got options. You can decide whether you want to charge. Charging is a little stranger now because it's a separate movement action, that gets Incorporated into your attack. And you can also decide if you wanna do a... an adjective, kind of, on your strike. Right now, this is again we're trying to link some things in, to get some mileage out of the system before we actually go in and go all in on the combat systems.
So right now you have four choices. You don't have to take any of them. You can just do a regular attack which in general will take three steps in and three steps out, or you can do a quick attack which will be two steps in and two steps out. Sort of like a jab or a little stab or something. But that decreases the velocity of your attack by fifty percent so you wouldn't be able to penetrate maybe even certain leather armours or whatever with your dagger or whatever. And so if you want to do a little, little jab though, and get it in quickly before the, before the person lands an attack, and you think you can get some mileage out of that then you can do that. You can also do a heavy attack which makes it four steps in and four steps out but increases the velocity by fifty percent. And then there's the wild attack which is kind of a roll of the dice, you do two steps in and then something like five steps out. So you're just kind of going in really fast, you get the velocity bonus, but you have a minus to hit. And you also become unbalanced and unsteady for some turns while you're recovering. So that people can hit you easier but if you really have a... if it's a desperate thing, you can do that. And then the final option we have was a precise attack. It's five steps in so you are really taking your time and you get an increased roll which kinda increases everything about the attack. And most often you just use that on someone who's unconscious or something. You can just end the fight when you have a clear shot or if you're being frustrated by the person's attacks and dodging. Then. it might be an option you can use to have a chance to score a hit even though you won't get as many attacks in. And then the final option in the menu is the, the option to set it as a multiple attack and then you can go in and then add another action like a moving away or climbing while you're doing this one attack. Or you can choose another attack if you want to do something like stab, stab two daggers at once. The penalties are massive so it's, it's not something you really wanna do. It's more for like, stylishly stabbing somebody a bunch of times when they're unconscious. Or when you're sneaking up behind them and you wanna jab two daggers in their ribs or whatever. |
| Rainseeker: | Or if you're fighting like a roomful of low-level, just, just guys. |
| Toady: | Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It is sort of the expression of your hero... heroism or whatever. If you comes in and there's like, a kobold on the left and the kobold on the right and you want to stick them both at the same time in your... you have, uh, you're very good at what you do. Then you can go ahead and take the massive, kinda seventy five percent cut to your roll or whatever, and still manage to hit them. So it's... yeah, it's something that has limited utility but because this is not just like switching up your swords like ‘attack with the left, attack with the right, attack with the left'. This is attacking with the left and right at the same time. There's a sort of goofiness to it which makes us really cut the rolls down. But it's something you could do. It's not... People get in fights about this and people tend to have very strong views about martial arts in general and so we're just taking a slow approach to this. |
| Rainseeker: | Post about it on the forums, guys! |
| Toady: | Yeah well they beat you to it already. There was a very hot Future of the Fortress topic for a while there. So it's, it's (laughing) We're just... we're going slow. I'm... I'm... I'm confident about the direction we're taking it. I don't think we're ruining the game or anything so... |
| Rainseeker: | So what is... How does the uh... What skills have you incorporated into this in the new stuff you do? |
| Toady: | There's no, there's no, if I remember, there's no new ones but the observer skill comes up a lot more. It used to... The observer skill used to give you... which is the sort of... it's called situational awareness in the code and it's just sort of for … for observing. And a kind of paying attention to your surroundings and especially during a fight. And it used to just help you with being hit from the side and so you wouldn't get the ‘hit you from the side' minus or whatever, and it also helped you judge when people were going to charge so you didn't get surprised by people's charges. But now it's used to give you for four or five little pieces of information about the attack, depending on how good the roll is, and that can really make a huge difference in your decision making so that skill became a lot more important. I haven't broken up parrying or anything like that, so there's not like ‘defense with a sword' versus ‘offense with a sword' - and I'm not going to do any kind of break ups of those skills until we get to the actual combat styles and techniques, in which case this is going to blossom into, you know, a hundred different things and you know, get rather out of control which is nice, for that part. |
| Rainseeker: | So what would you say is the most important skill right now for combat? |
| Toady: | Knowing how to use your weapon is still the most important thing you can have, but you will be flailing away wildly if you don't know what you're doing with observing. Fighting has always been an important skill, there's just this fighter skill, and it kinda gives you bonuses to all your rolls and also lets you pick up a weapon you don't know if you get in trouble and lose your weapon and, and if you have the fighting skill you're given a small amount of skill with that weapon, commensurate with your fighter skill divided by two or four or something like that that lets you still continue on in the fight. That'll matter more when you can lose your weapon in more ways. So, then there's dodging and armour-using. Armour using is actually a little less important now, it used to be that armour use as a skill would let you move faster, because it would count the weight less of the things that you're wearing, but now moving faster is not, it's still important to get good skill rolls which it helps you with because it makes you less ungainly, but if you are just moving now it'll cut your movement speed by a lot if you're wearing a bunch of heavy stuff, and carrying a lot of heavy stuff that you don't know how to use but your attack speed isn't affected the same way it was when before it would make you attack five times as slow and move five times as slow, now you just move five times as slow, and just get the minuses to your attack but not the ‘move in slow motion' (lethargic noise) or whatever, it was pretty silly the way it was before. But now people on the ground can attack quickly, they still get minuses but they don't attack three times as slow as their counterparts standing above them so it makes a lot more sense now and people on the ground are more dangerous. |
| Rainseeker: | Kay. You want to throw anything in there captain? |
| Captntastic: | So how does all this meld together and play, I mean have you pulled off any amazing stunts, or like fun stuff? |
| Toady: | (laughter) The use of the ground is still - I mean, you still dodge away that part feels about the same because dwarf fortress always had kind of a lot of movement in combat but, but the meshing of the attacks is fun so you can, you can catch people's, like if you target a grab attack on an incoming punch and uh.. so I did a thing in the arena where I increased my stealth quite a bit then fought against someone who didn't know what they were doing, and then using the observer skill you see they were coming in with a left handed punch and so I just waited until the punch was imminent and then shot out a catch with my left hand. Which is just grabbing their hand with my hand, and then it, it knows what that means now. So it interprets that as intercepting their attack and stops their attack. So I caught the hand with my hand, and then I caught the other hand, put him into wristlocks and broke his wrists. |
| Captntastic: | Nice! |
| Toady: | So you can do things like that now. You can intercept attacks that are coming in. If you, if someone's swinging their sword at you, you can come in and grab their hand and intercept the attack again. |
| Rainseeker: | Now, if you've broken his wrist, is he gonna stop fighting? |
| Toady: | This is, (laughter) the new part about, way early on when we were doing the bandit occupations of town we added all this stuff from non lethal combat about yielding, and all that. And that comes up even in the arena now! I think I might end up changing that so you can have a setting on the arena about, is this no quarter fighting? or is this non-lethal? ‘Cause, ‘cause right now in the arena if you set ten people on ten people and then just say three or so on one side dies, then that side will just all stop and scream ‘I yield, I yield' and the other side will stop fighting too and just stand over them with their swords and that'll be the end of the arena fight. And there are some other funny bugs happening now, like if you take three people in the arena that are all sorta on the independent side so everybody's fighting everybody they all just run away, they're all like ‘I'm not fighting two guys!'. (laughter) Everyone runs away. There are, there are issues and problems from the new yielding code right now, but I'll probably just have an option in the arena to set what level of intensity you want, so then you can set up like a bar fight in the arena or something. You can also set up mounts in the arena now, ‘cause I have, thats another thing about the move/combat speed split stuff, it counts your current momentum in the attack, as long as your momentum - your velocity vector or whatever, is pointing toward the guy and the guy is either not moving or not moving away faster from you so that there is actual motion toward the other person. And if a person is running at you, you actually get the same bonus. So as long as there's relative motion, that's at least ninety degrees. So it could be perpendicular motion, or motion toward the person, then you get a bonus to your swing speed that's in line with how fast you're moving, so, and it also takes into account the speed of anything you're riding. Now this doesn't mean I've added in adventure mode mounts yet - there's probably some bug in the arena when you control a mounted adventurer or whatever but it's something we're, I don't know how far I'm gonna get with that but it's fun to, it was fun to control the mount. I created a horse with a person riding it and then another horse with a person riding it and then took control of one of the horses and then just kind of rode around and tried to get my person the best gallop I could to dismount the other person or whatever. It'd be a fun game by itself I guess, it's like controlling the horse. So that'll all be interesting when we get that done and it is probably going to be something that causes adventure mode mounts to happen sooner rather than later, but I'm trying not to add anything else this release because it's getting long in the tooth. |
| Rainseeker: | Now if you have a spear lets say, a longer weapon, could you hit a person running at you sooner than he could hit you? |
| Toady: | This is one of the main things we haven't done in terms of the combat arc, is reach. I mean, reach is a really really really really important concept that hasn't been explored in Dwarf Fortress yet and we were almost going to jump in, and because there are so many things you wanna do when you get this new combat stuff in, you wanna add all sorts of things that make it more and more realistic or whatever and so we drew the line. We were thinking about letting you sort of guard a square in a direction, so you'd sort of set your weapon like a spear in a certain direction so someone can't even enter that square, and it's going to be interesting when we start controlling space so that all the battles don't end up with two people next to each other all the time, ‘cause people should be farther away from each other especially when fighting with weapons than they are right now, where it's, there's still no.. it's like there's all the interesting things about attacks interweaving with each other and so on but there's still no kind of calm periods or testing periods and it, it's not quite sure where that's going to fit in. And reach is a part of that, getting tired and like, losing your gas tank is part of that. Also though there's a there's a big psychological aspect of that, about seeing what the other person's gonna do and almost kinda playing poker with them to try and figure out.. do they always fall into a pattern where they jab left, jab right or whatever. And then there's a lot of things that come into fighting somebody that slows the pace down and we can only try to approximate this as best we can and we haven't really attempted that yet. But it's definitely, for for people who still think that, that, that, you know it's way too wild right now the way people just kinda go at each other like beasts, it's, that's something we acknowledge and you know, I just mentioned, you know three or so things that would definitely help and I'm sure there's more out there. So they're all do-able, the psychological one's kinda the hardest, ‘cause I mean are you supposed to kind of memorize the patterns or just have the game give you a bonus over time if you're a better fighter than they are or something like that, the longer you fight them the more you kinda figure them out and get bonuses are some of the... so there's abstract ways to do it there are non-abstract ways to do it, we haven't really thought about what angle we're gonna take. |
| Rainseeker: | Right. So now if you're, speaking of a psychological angle, if you're fighting a, say you're fighting a group of goblins or ‘evil creatures', if you kill a couple of them will they split up and run, or realise you're better than they, or.. |
| Toady: | Yes. Yeah, yeah. People are endowed with slightly more sense now. And.. |
| Rainseeker: | Are there creatures that don't? |
| Toady: | Are there creatures that don't? This is one of the easy to fix bugs that's also in the arena right now. When I was playing an aardvark, I was fighting another aardvark, and the aardvark yielded to me. So I'm sure it's something that I wrote down, 'cause there are a bunch of bugs, I'm pretty sure that that was written down way back months ago and that was just one of those things I was going to go handle during cleanup, but yeah there are going to be things that don't give up. The dead likely aren't going to yield and run away, uh, animals.. |
| Capntastic: | Zombie yield, zombie yield! |
| Toady: | (laughter) Animals will probably be able to run away but they aren't gonna talk about it too much. And then people will, there's already a personality component to this. So some people yield more easily than others. Then there's also, when people get enraged there's that whole sort of rage thing, that, there's aside from the yield effects there's also the, if you become enraged, or a dwarf or whatever becomes enraged. Or a badger as often happens becomes enraged, then it only lets them throw wild attacks. So it's not a, it's a less advantageous state than it was previously and yeah. So it's, but you don't want to be hit by one of those either. It's still better to be more talented or just to stay away. Stay away from something that's angry. |
| Capntastic: | So if you scare someone away for instance, will they go for help at this point? |
| Toady: | Oh no no, that's.. that's.. so that's basically beyond the scope of what we've done. However if you start a conflict with somebody, now this gets back to the other thing that we were working on, which is improving the goblin insurrections and the conversations and stuff.. when you get a, when you start a fight with, say, a goblin in a town now, that gets saved as an event. So not only can you talk about that now then other people, but the goblin also knows that this happened, and if the goblin manages to get away from you and get offloaded, then everybody in town will, there's a timer on it, so it kinda propagates information more slowly, then it becomes a foregone conclusion then that the goblins are gonna know about that. And so the goblins will know then that you just tried to start a fight with a goblin, or that you killed a goblin if someone else saw it, and then gets away. So you can eliminate witnesses and so on, but if someone does get away, then that information will propagate.
Now that doesn't mean that the goblin is running back to that location to bring help immediately at least at this point. There's still kind of talk about, in the notes here, the notes talking back at me that I wrote months ago that there would be organised groups coming to hunt you down, which is something we put in the tracking information for. And right now patrols can hunt you down, when you're walking around you leave tracking information and they can pin it, and snoop up the trail and follow you during wilderness travel, but it doesn't happen in the context of the insurrection and in the town guards and it may, but it may not and so it's not something I want to promise at this point, when we're kind of chopping things out, we're kind of, |
| Capntastic: | Eventually that's the plan. |
| Toady: | Yeah, that is definitely the plan. Yeah. And, so, I guess we can talk a little bit more about the conversation changes now unless you guys got more questions about the fighting and so on. |
| Rainseeker: | Uh, I have a minor kind of tangential question. |
| Toady: | Sure. |
| Rainseeker: | So, I know you said you'd kind of added like underbrush and twigs and stuff right? |
| Toady: | Yeah. |
| Rainseeker: | So is there eventually going to be, like in the near future, like throwing caltrops down, or making little traps, or putting wire across a room or tripping people, or making people step on glass or whatever. It seems like that would be kind of feasible at this point. |
| Toady: | It is, it is more feasible now. We have, ever since we added the.. the trees having all of, I don't even remember what they're called in the raws now, if they're called like plant growths or something like that. But the trees have, the trees have leaves and I used all the different kind of uh.. samaras or whatever the flying keys are called. It's the kind of thing I had some retention of the names and words when I was just copying down lists of plant parts and so on. But there are lots of new things in the game, flowers and leaves and so on. Fruit, and that kind of thing. Finally can have a fruit fight in Dwarf Fortress, although I imagine the thrown things are still a little more lethal than they should be. (laughter) |
| Capntastic: | Urist McDwarf was killed by apple! |
| Toady: | Oh, apples are definitely lethal. And uh, so what that led to though, especially during Fall, when all of the leaves fall of the trees, is it led to these, a couple things, it led to item clouds, which are, kind of like a, they're stored like a breath attack or a mist. But they're a cloud of small items, and then when they land on the ground they turn into an item spatter. So, so we can start thinking about, at least it's another way to think about a lot of small objects, like broken glass or lots of little caltrops, or coins for that matter, but lots of other stuff. And there's information lost as usual, which isn't necessarily a bad thing when it comes to, you know, not wanting to track the specific information about the little object when it comes down to that level. And yeah, stuff like that becomes more feasible because the feet interact with spatter of all kinds so you could definitely see some of that stuff happening. And yeah, of course I have no idea when, but it's all on the table with the new, the new storage system makes interesting things possible. I think you can already mod in item cloud breath or whatever, like if you wanna make a modded creature breathe little daggers at people you could add a little dagger like the carving knives from the tool raws. You could make them breathe forks at people or something. |
| Capntastic: | I wanna give somebody a honey breath. Or a bee breath, even better. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah! |
| Toady: | Yeah, you can't breathe monsters yet, but you could add an item that's analogous to a monster or something, like a little figurine of a bee that you breathe at people or something. Then add another reaction that makes them come to life. I don't know what people manage to, people manage to do a lot of things. But creatures and interacting with, and making things from scratch and stuff are still , if I remember. I'm kind of out of touch, but uh, that's still feasible. You could probably do something there. |
| === musical interlude by Ollieh === | |
| Rainseeker: | So, it seems like Dwarf Fortress is getting to the point where you can talk to NPCs, and characters, and interact with them, and coerce them into punching goblins with you! How is that going to work? |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's a party, it's a party where you have goblin-beating time with your little friends and drunks. |
| Capntastic: | And everybody's invited! (laughter) |
| Toady: | Yeah they're not friendly, so we don't feel sorry for the goblins. And we've got drunks back in little fake taverns again so you can kind of get the right people for the job. So you can talk to people, and, and people, there's, the overall situation with the town which is something you can become aware of by talking to them. And when you talk to them now, it works the same way, the same sort of clunky, K, move over the cursor thing, and press enter. But then you get a topic list which is, you can do the kind of things you did before, where you greet people. And when you greet them now it gives you, instead of popping you to a screen where it gives you a list of options and sort of the summary of what's been said, it gives you a list of options but more like you're attacking somebody. Like, like there's a list of options and you still see all of the surroundings. And you select an option, and then it gives you an action, again analogous to moving or attacking, and then when your action's time has ran out, the timer for it, you will say what you wanted to say and it pops up in the announcement queue. |
| Rainseeker: | It's because you're attacking them psychologically? |
| Toady: | Yes, this is all psychological warfare now. And they'll say something back, if they understand the context of the conversation that they're in. And so they, on their turn, if they don't have something more important to do (like running off and fighting or something), then they will look at the conversations there and decide what to say to who, and what to talk about then initiate an action of their own and it will come back to the, to the announcement log. Now, to make this not totally annoying, when you talk to somebody, you go into a kind of a waiting mode, so that you anticipate that you're going to be replied to, and then it just waits for the reply to come in. So you don't have to like, press period a bunch of times to wait for the guy to say something. |
| Rainseeker: | Especially if he's very slow-witted. |
| Toady: | Yes, yes or if he's, but it runs a timer carefully though so if the guy's off doing something else it won't wait forever and lock up the game. At least, hopefully it works right. So they'll reply for you and that creates the context for the conversation. It kind of operates in pairs for the most part where you say something and then the reply is expected, and then the conversation goes back to being neutral again, where no one's in the driver's seat and the next person to talk kind of creates another pair of things that is said. And that can change the context of the conversation. And when someone says something it assigns numbers, so that it will put a little 1 next to what they said, and then it will go, 1 will appear on them, so that you can see who said what. So if you're in a crowd and someone shouts something, it'll pop up and you can see what they said or who said it. And kind of keep control of who's saying what in the conversation that way. Also when you talk to people you can look back at the log of what's been said and it shows you automatically what's been said so that you don't get lost. And so you can bring the conversation, you can say "what's going on now?" and they'll tell you about an occupation, or if an army is coming, or other things that have happened, like they heard there was a fist fight where a bunch of goblins got beat to death or whatever. |
| Toady: | So they tell you about these things and then you, when you're in the context of talking about the insurrection, that's when you can drop a line about, well hey let's go do something about this. And right now the bar to entry, just to keep the game going, the bar to entry's pretty low, (laughter) in terms of hey let's go do something about this and then you, you can get a companion. And the companion, like before, they just travel around with you and all that kind of thing. But now it's an agreement is formed, where there's some understanding that underlies every single thing about companionship in the game now about why they're with you, and kind of how long they're going to be with you, and then they can use that information to decide whether or not you're actually furthering this common goal, you know if you just want to wander off out of town with someone who's supposed to be helping you with the insurrection that companionship isn't going to last very long and the person will probably just leave while you sleep or whatever. And that's probably all going to be in with the release. I mean, a lot of that already is in, but I haven't made the companions leave yet, but that's very likely to go in so you can't abuse your privileges. But there's also standard companionships, the bar is good for things like that. These fake bars. I just need to aggregate where to find these people so I put them in these fake taverns, this isn't the tavern release by any stretch of the imagination but there are drunks and mercenary type adventurer people. And all the scouts and monster hunter type people from world gen all hang out in these fake taverns now, just sitting there. And so you can go and talk to them. So you can have people travel with you in the standard, lead me to glory and death type way, in which case they don't have a very high standard for continuing the partnership. I mean guess I could make them get bored if you don't do anything for a week or something and then split. |
| Capntastic: | Right, come with me adventuring in the hats district! I have to get there! (laughter) |
| Toady: | I like that's the agreement, that it's like a day of shopping. That's the exact type of thing we want the system to support though is like, "let's go on a shopping trip together!" And then people would be like "Alright, let's go!" |
| Rainseeker: | And you could go identify if this hat is actually made out of troll skin. |
| Capntastic: | You, little girl, how are you at identifying troll skin? oh I'm the right person! |
| Toady: | It would be great, it would be great, and we could have, and you could split up the spoils at the end, it's like it's a divide the plunder, and then.. |
| Rainseeker: | Imagine having a hideout, you know, a little fort of operations, a little base. A sort of, camp grounds. |
| Capntastic: | Can you convince right now, like little kids and people who are inappropriate for the task to come with you? |
| Toady: | They didn't come with you before, and now you can get more people to come with you on insurrections than before, and I know for a fact written in the notes right now is, maybe kids shouldn't come with you to kill the goblins. (laughter) |
| Toady: | It was a known problem, and still is. It will be fixed before, before it's over with, so you don't have the children's crusade or whatever and everyone's well. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) That's funny. |
| Toady: | Well yeah, and we were hoping that, that so yeah and Capn mentioned the hideouts, and so on. When we get to that part of the game where you're able to set the site for yourself and can create your own little entity and so on, then people will have, they'll all have a reason for being there, and they'll all have a reason to, for how long they think they're planning to stay, and whether or not they come with you to do things, or whether they're just hanging out there to re-arrange the furniture, or whatever. It should all fit under the system, the system's very broad now about what an agreement can be about. It's just kind of sitting there as a nice abstract entity for the game to look at. It was something that was missing before, when people would join you, they would just, they became a variable, a relationship variable was set in them that you are their leader. (laughter) It's like they lost all their agency at that point, didn't understand anything about what was going on, why they're with you, and so on. That's all changed. |
| Capntastic: | So can you now go to goblins, and talk to them? Eventually bad things and have them join you? |
| Toady: | They don't have a reason to join you right now so they're all like... the goblins in the town are all on the job right? They're all occupying the town and... You can talk to them though it's a standard thing right now in the game where... This is from the older code from before, would make it so someone is in a civilization that disagrees with you but they're not outright trying to kill you then they just say don't talk to me. That's how it works with the goblins right now. They just tell you not to talk to them and that may or may not be changed depending on how this whole posses of people hunting you down and all that kind of stuff... What will we end up skipping and what we end up putting in for this time may make the goblins more interesting but when you go to the goblin sites themselves they don't particularly care right now if I remember. There's all this kind of nebulous gray areas that need to be worked out since goblins have home sites now, and aren't always at war with you. You used to only meet them through kinda ambushes or by going and killing everyone that lived in their little homes and so on. Instead of just sneaking around and getting caught and there's a troll shearing pit. It's all sort of this, this gray area now that just needs to have a yes or no decision made about it. We we're planning to put in you know more conversational options or something. A lot of times now we're just going to be ‘no' , it just turns into a violent situation immediately. |
| Toady: | That's just something that we'll have to go through as we do our final checklist of issues that need to be worked out. It's still quite a long list of issues that need to be worked out. |
| Rainseeker: | 'Cause eventually you could use bribery. |
| Toady: | Yeah, you should be able - I mean eventually you should be able to, like, grab someone's kid and bring it to the goblins. Be like, Hey, I'm a freelance snatcher, or something like that, or bring them the heads of elves or something like that. You shouldn't have to be good all the time. That's one of the things about having freedom of choice in a video game. So the goblins shouldn't kill you immediately, although if they don't have a reason not to kill you, then, you know, free stuff or whatever. So, it's not smart to go to the goblin place. It shouldn't ever be a really good decision, unless you have a really good reason to go there. But yeah, I'm not sure how that's going to work out. The main thing that's missing, actually, in all of this is the sort of crime-and-punishment type of stuff, because you can't get captured by the goblins, right? The crime-and-punishment arc is not all about, strictly, you stealing from the market stall and then being dragged off to some type of dungeon and then having your hand chopped off and then being released or something. It's about being able to lose control of your character, and to be imprisoned or to be dragged somewhere, and that's just not in the game right now, so it's really hard to do an interaction with the goblins that isn't just either friendly banter or you just getting chopped to pieces on the spot. So there's a good reason why that thief role is in there. It's a pretty expansive thing. Part of the hero role is going to be exploring you being able to sort of interrogate captured people and so on. We didn't get to that part. It was on the table for this time, but we moved toward the active world for deaths, succession, and army stuff instead, and so we'll just have to do that some other time. |
| === musical interlude by Ollieh === | |
| Capntastic: | I like the idea of, you're in the sewers and you don't notice a pile of broken glass and you accidentally step on it, it makes a bunch of noise, and you hurt your foot. Just causes a whole bunch of problems. |
| Toady: | Well, stepping on broken glass in the sewers would cause all kinds of problems. |
| Capntastic: | Yes. |
| Rainseeker: | Oh yes. Or even stepping on, like, bones hidden under trash, you know. The noise then alerts the giant frog in the room next door to you. |
| Toady: | Yeah. Yeah. We just don't want any punctures and introducing of small microbes into your foot, and stuff like that. |
| Rainseeker: | Exactly. Is that, like, here now? That's not here now, right? |
| Toady: | Broken glass isn't here, but infected wounds are here. |
| Rainseeker: | Okay. |
| Toady: | And the level of grime and filth on your body leading to a higher rate of infection is already here. |
| Rainseeker: | Oh. Wow. |
| Toady: | That's why using soap is a good thing when you wash yourself, because it reduces the grime level down to a much lower number than regular washing. But I don't even remember if the dwarves... do the dwarves seek out soap properly and use it to wash? It's one of those fringe industries that doesn't get a lot of testing. But, if they use soap when they're washing - maybe the surgeons do, I don't even remember anymore - but it reduces the grime level down and the wound is much less likely to get infected when the grime level is zero or one than when it's like, three or four or five. And you can't see the grime level on the dwarf. It's one of the invisible variables. Of course, there's also just being, like, completely mud and blood-spattered or whatever that you can see. That's a really high level of grime, but the smaller grime level of just not having cleaned yourself also causes an increased rate of infection. |
| Rainseeker: | And do we have medicine for infection to parlay infection, or... |
| Toady: | No. No. Infections are bad, in the game. |
| Rainseeker: | Those are pretty scary right now. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's kind of like getting gangrenous on the Civil War battlefield, or whatever. It's not good... |
| Rainseeker: | : You don't have any penicillin right now. |
| Toady: | Yeah, I don't remember if the surgeons hack those wounds off or if the infection just means you're dead. I don't recall. I know they excise rotten tissue to decrease the rate of infection. Well, yes, so that's one of the happy parts. |
| Rainseeker: | No kidding. Does that happen to your adventurer as well? |
| Toady: | Yes, and it's one of the more annoying things about adventure mode. It's why the adventure mode medical stuff is always sitting there, waiting to be added. It hasn't made it in yet. Yeah, your adventurer can have their wounds infected, and then you are just deciding what to do with your final moments in the game, or whatever. Your final moments could last a while, but you have to make peace. |
| Rainseeker: | What happens if you retire in a village after you're infected? |
| Toady: | I don't think there's a check for it, and I think you know, score, you just happen to cure yourself, or something. Now, I'm not a hundred percent sure. For all I know, it just saves it and then it's just Oh, you're still infected, or whatever. I haven't tried it, so it's hard to say because it applies some healing, but it doesn't get rid of your scars, so it keeps some wound information, 'cause all the scars are just wounds that have a flag on them that says it's a scar. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah. |
| Toady: | So it may or may not. So it's one of those things where it just depends on what I put when I put the 'replaced person in town' function or whatever. Yeah, I really don't remember. You know, ideally it would carry through all the effects, but I know it doesn't do that, 'cause it doesn't kill a lot of people that are waiting to die. |
| Rainseeker: | So we're still not at a place yet where we can take over historical figures, right? |
| Toady: | Yeah, that's correct. We're not at a place where we can do that. I mean, there's nothing stopping it, right? Because when you unretire an adventurer you're just taking control of a historical figure. So there's nothing technical about stopping it. There are just conceptual problems about, what happens when you take over the king of this or the king of that. It's just silly, I guess, 'cause they don't recognize your authority or anything. So it's kind of goofy that you can do that. But, yeah. It's one of those things where - I mean, I'm sure we've talked about this in the past, where it's like there's paying somewhat service to that. There's doing some kind of worldgen parameter where you can set it that it can't be done, so you don't feel tempted to sort of spoil your game by making all the bad things in the world jump off cliffs and then go hit play, or whatever. So there's some small concerns and missing swathes of content, but there aren't huge barriers to doing that. |
| Rainseeker: | I suppose an easy way out would be to suddenly, if you're the king, have your advisors declare that you're possessed and that you're no longer acting like the king and you are now dethroned, so you could leave and people would recognize you as the former king of such-and-such. |
| Toady: | I guess it would be one of those things where there's also, even if you choose to take control of a peasant there'd also have to be a thing where it's like, 'And your family doesn't recognize you and they think of you as a stranger now,' or something because you'd be possessed, because you would talk to them like strangers or whatever. Or not strangers, 'cause the people in your starting town, at least, know your name and know who you are and they greet you a little differently already, but they wouldn't recognize you as a family member, because the traditional adventurers don't have family members so I didn't have a reason to put that in. So, it stacks up, and it becomes a non-priority item until we add something, you know? Something that makes it matter, 'cause what is the point of taking over a historical figure, if all of the historical things about it don't matter yet? |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, yeah. And the interesting thing, too, I think - or I was thinking about earlier today - would be to be able to have a lineage, a succession. For adventures, you know. You get married, you have a child, and you take over his line again. Maybe you could have some training that you could give your child, and then he gets some bonuses or something. |
| Toady: | Yeah, the elements that - I think there's four or so elements that we decided broadly make that up and that's all in the development notes for the pre-version 1 stuff. So that's all going to go in sometime. We just have to get through the various hurdles of getting a spouse, and doing the time-forward motion, and stuff like that. And we've gotten quite a bit further with that now. I mean, your retired adventurers can already get married now. |
| Rainseeker: | Oh. |
| Toady: | They can go off and just act like regular people and all retired adventurers are single. (laughter) |
| Toady: | It's probably one of those times where people are going to want to put in options for how they act when they retire, or whatever. Run over to the goblins and get married or whatever. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughs) Get married to a goblin chick, yeah. |
| Toady: | Like, don't do that. |
| Rainseeker: | Goblin women. |
| Toady: | It's unclear how much control there's going to be or what's going to happen. Right now, it's all just, wing it. It's just, like, you become a historical figure. You can go move to a dwarf fortress and - if you're a dwarven adventurer, you'll move to a dwarf fortress, and next time one is played, become a citizen of your fortress, and then when you retire your fortress you'll be able to unretire your adventurer from your retired fortress and leave. And then when someone unretires the fortress, then that guy will be gone off wherever he's going and then he'll migrate back. |
| Rainseeker: | Now does he keep all the skills he might have had during play on Dwarf Fortress, or...? |
| Toady: | Yeah. Yeah, he keeps everything. He'll probably just drop a sack. I don't remember how it works, if he just drops all of his items or whatever, because dwarven citizens don't carry backpacks filled with meat or whatever. Goblin heads or whatever weird things people put in their backpacks in Adventure Mode. But the skills are the same. The name's the same, the wounds, the scars are the same. Everything that's tracked on a unit is tracked, everything that gets saved is saved, there's just no difference between adventurers and dwarves. |
| Rainseeker: | So right now it would be a good strategy - interesting strategy, at least, if not good, but if you wanted to increase your adventurer's skills, to just straight out take him to Dwarf Fortress, retire him, play Dwarf Fortress for a while. Build him, you know, have him train, and then take him back over. |
| Toady: | Yeah, throw the adventurer in the danger room, and you could pretend that was his time with the monk learning the ways of dodging spears or whatever, and then unretire him, and... yeah. Yeah. That all works. It'll be interesting to see what people come up with, and what absoulutely bizarre and stupid situations come out of it. |
| Rainseeker: | So for this release, what we want to see on the comment section about this podcast is we want to hear if anyone has done this. Strategy is taking an adventurer, retiring him to a dwarf fortress, trained him, and then used him for regular adventuring. So, someone leave us a comment and tell us if you've done this, or if you haven't, give it a try and let us know how it goes. |
| Capntastic: | I don't know if that would be more effective than just, like, holding down the throw rock button. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughs) It's more interesting, I think. |
| Toady: | Slightly more entertaining, hopefully. Yeah. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, I mean, 'cause it'd be cool at some point to get Adventure Mode to a place where you can kind of play a metagame with your adventurer. Like, just tell him, go visit the monks and train with them for a while. |
| Capntastic: | With an 80s rock montage. |
| Rainseeker: | Exactly! 80s rock montage! I like that. And then you just play some of your little guitar there, Tarn, and do a montage where you see, like, little ASCII visuals of him training. In stop-motion, you know. |
| Toady: | Oh, I'm no good at electric guitar. I never played it long enough to get the buzzing to stop, 'cause it's way more sensitive. It's like, (makes buzzing noise). Yeah, wasn't for me. I just gotta get better at my muting. |
| Capntastic: | Use that raw power. (laughter) |
| === musical interlude by Ollieh === | |
| [Q&A] | |
| Threetoe: | Welcome to the question and answer section of Dwarf Fortress Talk, this is ThreeToe and we'll begin answering your questions. Our first question comes from Ardor: what would you like to do, which you feel computers are currently too slow to do? |
| Toady: | Well, I don't have any particular features that I cut because we were looking at it like ‘well, [the] CPU is not powerful enough to handle this feature,' it's about numbers all the way through - we already have two liquids, we'd love to have more liquids, it's not that we feel that computers are too slow to handle more but that it's hard to add more, it's hard to add all kinds of things. |
| ThreeToe: | Yeah, so like making the map sizes bigger. Yeah, thats not possible right now until computers are a lot faster, |
| Toady: | More memory. Going to 64-bit is a big deal, having a thousand dwarves in your fortress - yeah, things we'd like to do; we'd love to do two thousand dwarves, ten thousand dwarves. |
| Threetoe: | Next question comes from Lizabelle: would it be possible to mod all supernatural features out of the game? |
| Toady: | So, in the original Armok we had this system - of course we didn't actually finish anything in the original Armok - but the system was going to be kinda had this atmosphere, and I think it was going to be called a plot / mood / atmosphere system, something like that we were thinking about how widely the world generation could cast its gaze, and one of the ideas there was to just completely get a super natural features and so it's going to be possible; it is possible now to get rid of quite a bit of stuff. There might be a few things you can't shut off in the parameters. |
| Threetoe: | Like how the ages were named even, so with the power that transfers division fairy tales stuff like that, was also part of that idea of magic going away towards the end of it, that was always kinda one of our ideas. |
| Toady: | And the passion for ancient history and the like. We'd love to have Hittites fighting each other... it's hard to explain- |
| Threetoe: | Alright, well the next question comes from Vincent, he asked... the Dwarf Fortress consolidated development page says that it's outdated; when was this done and in what way is it outdated? Are the arcs still current and is the new page being kept up to date? |
| Toady: | Um, so, I guess that it was a long time ago - several years ago now - that the consolidated development page was created and we moved over from the core/req/bloat /arc system over to just having a more partial recent development page. It's outdated in the sense that I mean we have the bug tracker now, the wrecks of the old development page were, a lot of those were just bugs so it's not like we've changed our direction at all, it's just that that particular system was becoming cumbersome and unwieldy and was annoying to like every little thing to keep track of it, so all of the arcs as far as I remember them it's all still the idea of what we want to do so there's really nothing we dropped, as far as I remember. I don't keep the new page up to date on a daily or weekly basis; it mostly gets updated on releases so that means it can go for a year at a time without getting changed, but it does get updated at releases. |
| Threetoe: | It's just different ways of organising it, it's not really out of date or anything - all that stuff is still there... |
| Toady: | Part of it's just a motivational thing, changing the way we organize the notes just keeps things fresh and keeps us moving forward. |
| Threetoe: | Vincent has another question: Will the town growth be simulated to the point of individuals deciding to make specific houses or open up specific shops? |
| Toady: | Not on a day-by-day basis, with every single individual. We already had to go to the sort of civilization population instead of historical figures, just to get the population numbers up to a point that we could do things like the Army Arc later on. But at the same time, the growth of the town would be - is going to be simulated. New shops are gonna open up. There are specific people in specific houses. Every single historical figure has their situation known, so those sorts of things will have to be updated on an individual basis. There's going to be a lot of it, especially for the people that you kind of come to care about, and anyone you talk to becomes a historical figure in Adventure Mode, so it does have a lot of updating to do and that'll have to be handled. |
| Threetoe: | Vincent's last question: Do you have any time frame for working on full simulation of the Dwarf Fortress world economy, would this be difficult to implement fully due to memory constraints? |
| Toady: | We never have a timeframe for anything. There's just dependencies like when we get to the Dwarf Fortress end, and taverns we'll want to have an economy up for that probably, or some kind of payment system or something. Something to make the tavern make sense. In that sense, since we wanted to kind of, I mean, we're not sure exactly when we're going to work on that, but those are on kind of a similar time frame in any case. When you ask, 'Would it be difficult to fully implement due to memory constraints, well, the idea of full implementation of anything that's sort of reality-based, you can use up as much memory as you want, and we're just gonna have to set aside as much memory as we can to the economy and get as far as we can within those constraints, and it's really not clear exactly what that's going to mean. |
| Threetoe: | Ok, the next question is from James, Do you have any future plans for liquid pressure, or will powerful pumps ever make pump stacks obsolete; and will Volcanos ever erupt? |
| Toady: | Don't have specific plans for liquid pressure. I mean, we're always hoping to, uh, people's ideas about that. We're not engineering or mechanically-minded people, so as much as anything we rely on the community to come up with ideas that within our sort of 1400s+ dwarfiness timeframe, and if there's ways besides the Archimedean screw or whatever that people have for pump ideas, and we can kind of think about how to make that work, CPU-wise, with the liquid model and water pour. Whatever is feasible there. For volcanos, it would be sad to have volcanos and not to have them erupt (chuckles) |
| Threetoe: | Yes. Very sad. The next question comes from Tom: Will the player in adventure mode ever get a spouse? |
| Toady: | There are developments for that. It's definitely going to go in at some point. We've threatened various things like poetry generators and so on, and even as it stands now I think if you take your adventurer and retire them in one of the empty fortresses that's in the currently released version, or if you take a adventurer and take them to an actual NPC or AI fortress in the new version and retire them, then they can become not just a migrant to your fortress and get married there, but they could also, in the new version, get married just hanging out at their wherever they're retiring (that they're human). So, it already happens, even in the currently released version. Maybe if you get your migrations just right, but as for actually doing it yourself, going out there and going through actual conversations, meeting people, finding someone that... |
| Threetoe: | Having someone assigned to you. |
| Toady: | (chuckles) You could be ranched, that's true. There's any number of ways this could happen. The development notes have all the things about children, possibly, or playing playable heirs, houses, all that kind of stuff. It's all in there. No timelines, as usual. |
| Threetoe: | Next question comes from Mike: Are the hauling updates complete? I was wondering is there are any plans to address the minor annoyances that still exist. |
| Toady: | Nothing's ever complete. There was the number one voted suggestion had to do with that stuff, and we did a lot of things. The minecarts, in particular, but also wheelbarrows and all sorts of little things. But if there are minor annoyances, those are, of course, on the table, especially when we roll around to the post-release cleanup period, where we always do old bugs, new bugs, little features, not-so-little features, that kind of thing. They get out of control, so it'll depend on what we notice and what community feeling is and so on. And I know that one of the big things we didn't address from the voting was the restacking, which is still a big problem. Anything that comes up, we have have a bunch of notes and of course people will continue to talk about things. |
| (guitar music) | |
| Threetoe: | Next question's from redskull: Are conveyor belt buildings anywhere in the plans? |
| Toady: | I don't specifically recall. We already have those minecart rollers, so that's practically a conveyer belt already. Anything that's feasible. We have a list of machines and devices and parts of devices that people have come up with that they think fits within the timeframe. There's a big arc for that, actually, working on that stuff, so if people come up with different feasible ideas for conveyer belts, we don't have anything against it. It's not going to be like modern or anything, but whatever fits, we're willing to put it in, assuming it's dwarfy enough. |
| Threetoe: | Ok, the next question comes from Connor: Is there a set period where the dwarfette is pregnant, how random is it? how similar is the baby to the parents? If two master blacksmiths have a child will it be born a master blacksmith or will the parents teach it the trade as it grows up? What if the baby just wants to be a dancer? |
| Toady: | (chuckles) So right now I think the pregnancy period is kind of goofy. I think it's always, and I could be wrong about the exact numbers, but it's always three seasons for a civilised critter, and less for an animal, which is of course completely goofy. It's not randomised at all, and that's just got to be put in the raws. Just one number, goes to the raws, everything's better for everybody, but it just hasn't happened yet for whatever reason. The baby does have a fake little genome thing that makes the baby similar to their parents just physically, in terms of their appearance, but there's no kind of skill proclivities or talents or anything passed down, aside from however much attributes capture that. There are some attribute numbers that are, if I remember correctly, have a genetic link to them, although I don't 100 % remember that. Until we get more stuff like that, and we do anything with child rearing or education or anything that the child is free to be a dancer and has no sort of blacksmithiness to it. That'll change over time, probably, but we haven't really planned out a course for that. |
| Threetoe: | Ok, next question comes from Marcus: What is your opinion on stills requiring water to produce certain types of booze? |
| Toady: | I think it's fair. I think water- |
| Threetoe: | It'd make it about twenty times as hard to start a fortress but... |
| Toady: | *laughs* Yeah, I mean you'd always have to start next to a river, or have to dig down to the water. But if we set up things like rain barrels I guess, was one of the ideas floating around, something like that. I think the booze making process is one of the easier ones maybe and...So it's, I mean it's not the end of the world, and I think it's probably a good idea in the end. |
| Threetoe: | Next question is from Eich: I would like to ask about fps death - it would be way more fun to start in a larger area with a constant frame rate, even in mountain ranges where you can dig from one end to another like true Moria, is this even possible? |
| Toady: | Ah...No. *laughs* Not even in a 64 bit system I don't think. You'd need to crank the CPU way up for that to be feasible. There are some things we've discussed in that context about being able to run even a sixteen by sixteen fort which would be slow. Which would be to cut out some of the lower areas, if you choose, and just have a shallow fortress. In which case you'd be able to run it without much difficulty but going beyond a world map square and selecting several world map squares and having something like a sixty four by sixty four fortress, or something like that from the embark screen, that's just completely unfeasible.
Now at the same time, there're a couple things that kind of mitigate this when we get to hill dwarves and deep dwarves in particular for this. You'll have the feeling that your fortress, and in actuality through the deep dwarves, your fortress...It's direct influence will be spreading through the mountain and that kind of gives you a Moria feeling. There's also the ability to retire fortresses and leaving them alive so you can kind of build up one mountain range over several games. And your other fortress will still be alive so you'll be able to trade with them and otherwise connect with them and get this feeling that you do have a mountain-spanning civilization but keeping the whole thing in memory and running is just not feasible at all. |
| Threetoe: | Ok, the next question comes from David: If you assign multiple of a single type of room to a single dwarf, what determines which room they will use at a given time? |
| Toady: | That one was...If I remember, I looked this up. When I saw this question I sort of looked through the code because I, you know, when it comes to real particulars like this it's impossible to remember everything. And it seemed like it was the value, it was this weird sort of...I don't even remember how old, I mean it's probably before the first release. They look at the value of the mastering piece of furniture. So if it's like a bed or a table they just look at that. They don't look at the total value of the room. So it correlates somewhat with how happy the room's gonna make them but it's not perfect and it's kinda strange. It's one of those things that when I saw that I was like Oh, I'm gonna make a little note. But of course the little notes get buried sometimes and so on. So I have no idea what the time frame is on making that all work together with how the system actually runs but that's what I think I saw when I looked at the code. *laughs* |
| Threetoe: | Yeah, it's very ancient code. OK, David's other question is: Going into the new version, will elvish druids be able to use their skills to shape trees? |
| Toady: | *laughs* Well, it's in the story, but we didn't add anything to do with that yet. It's one of the things we'd like to add for elves in the future to differentiate them a bit from people but we just haven't done anything with that kind of magic at all yet. |
| Threetoe: | Next question from Jeffrey: Will there be things like holidays or celebrations, will an adventurer be able to participate in dances or other festivals? will traditions change over the years and will there be people who act as avatars for the gods or religions? Could people become known as prophets? |
| Toady: | Yeah, so we have...If you look at the powergoals which are over on the old Consolidated Development page. All of those, as strange as some of those are...There are lots of festivals and there's one about...Called the Prophet of Aa or something about prophets, and people talking to their gods and different festivals and holy days. |
| Threetoe: | Yes, for instance the Plump Helmet Festival which has made it's way into my ascii reward stories lately. |
| Toady: | *laughs* Yeah, it'd be great to have the dwarves chill out. Like right now they just have parties. It's like Oh, we're throwing a party. Oh, we're throwing a party. Oh, we're throwing a party. If the parties had something to do with something...They do weddings, I guess, but they don't do anything else. It would be cool to have different festivals. It would be cool for them to commemorate the slaying of the dragon that came to your fort and create a whole new festival for it. All kinds of stuff is kind of in the...The activities we created that I think are mostly just used now for training, like military training, demonstrations, like they'll do a dodging demonstration or whatever. Teach the military how to dodge. That code is set up, and it was set up specifically with things like festivals and dancing and parties in mind. Just anything that involves a choreographed kind of activity with a bunch of critters is fair game there and hopefully will make it in over time. |
| Threetoe: | Next question comes from zooeyglass: How much do you struggle to ensure that the dwarves are not simply little humans, have suitably dwarven characteristics, make up their own society and so on. Do you have lore written down, or a scheme for dwarviness? |
| Toady: | We don't have too much written down along those lines. I mean, we mostly just run with what the stories say as we write them. We do want to make the non-human races non-human. But at the same time the dwarves are the hardest ones there because when you play them we don't want it to be...Like if you download the game for the first time, having something completely weird that you don't identify with at all would be I think not the way we want to go. So dwarves I think are going to be stuck being slightly human for that reason. And at the same time the human societies are going diversify a great deal. |
| Threetoe: | Yeah, I think also that the player has a lot to do with how the dwarves end up. And so it's your fault, in other words. |
| Toady: | *laughs* Yes, if you've got your vampire tower where you feed people, dwarves rather, where you feed your dwarves vampire blood and send them out to patrol your perimeter, I mean that's not quite what the traditional folk tales had in mind. *laughs* |
| Threetoe: | Yes. Yes, you're the ones that are inhuman.So the next question comes from Maddie: Regarding succession, will family have some priority such as the child of a monarch becomming the immediate successor and so on? |
| Toady: | Yeah, so that's directly reflected in the raws right now. When you have the position that says that the successor is how that entity position works. And so that's how we're going to have that. Have it work for those positions. But there aren't any really complicated family dynamics right now. I mean it's all very early on still. We're just starting that kind of thing for the larger world so it's not going to be completely interesting. But we are going to have some basic stuff. |
| Threetoe: | Jordan asked: Can your adventurer get better at jumping, is there a skill based on the creature? |
| Toady: | There's just no skills, nothing associated with that. Right now it's very simple. It might not actually last that way before we get to the release because there's a little odd...How it works right now. Right now it's just based on your speed. So the faster creatures that can sprint faster and then press the jump button can jump farther based on their speed but I don't have a skill for it. Attributes don't matter yet. There's just not a lot of...Because it's either one, two or three tiles or whatever, there's not too much resolution there. It'd be nice to think of a way if it's not...If it's based on too many things of like knowing how far you're going to be able to jump before you arrive at the cliff face going full speed and then discover that you're just not going to jump far enough. So I've made, the system right now acts in a predictable fashion and we'll work from there. But it's just good to have basic jumping in right now. |
| Threetoe: | From John: When will the dwarven economy make it's way back into the game and make the process of growing a fortress feel much more grand and important. Now this is the second question about the dwarven economy and I just wanna say that you know, going back in time, the original economy I think was so that you would make coins and the coins would be paid to dwarves that would randomly slip them around in the fortress in their rooms. Just so that the adventurer would come in and find treasure in every room kind of I think was the original idea for that. So that's how it started, anyway. |
| Toady: | *laughs* Yeah, it was just about treasure placement. We made sure that they always brought the coins back to their rooms so that when you were wandering around the fortress there'd be...It'd be a nice surprise any time, or not really a surprise if you remember your own fortress, but just opening the door and there's the treasure. Obviously we've grown a bit beyond that and then we got annoyed with the economy and had to take it out. I don't recall but I think we said earlier that the taverns and inns is our current thinking right now about when the dwarven economy is going to restart. I don't if that makes the fortress feel grand and important because you turned the fortress into an inn before the economy finds it's way back into the game. *laughs* It's sort of the opposite. |
| Threetoe: | I think the other problem with it is all the dwarves just never had enough jobs. Like the massive amounts of stragglers just, they didn't have enough money to pay for their rooms and stuff like that. The idlers. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's a difficult problem to get everything working right, but yeah, maybe your dwarves will clamour for more jobs a little more aggressively than they did before. If you start ignoring them and they start going broke. But we'll have to see how it pans out. It's one of the things where next time the economy goes into the game there's no chance for it getting turned off again. I mean if we go into it, we're gonna dedicate ourselves to fixing it. Because it's more time for it now. I think it was a little premature when we tried to have it before and didn't have the larger world, and didn't have any goods in the larger world. Now that all that stuff's in, the economy can actually make sense and we can start working it into trading with other people and so on. And make all those systems consistent based on supply and demand. All that kind of thing. So when we do it next time it'll be for keeps. |
| Threetoe: | Next question comes from Ben: Are magnetic pistons ever going to be implemented? It would be fun to move z-levels around once you get enough resources... |
| Toady: | Well...So we did promise moving fortress pieces. We don't really know what that's going to involve. If that involves taking a rope and hauling things around a shaft like an elevator. If that involves, you know, magma driven mechanized mech fortresses with particle projection cannons or whatever that shoot magma at people. Who knows what people will come up with once we put in the mechanics, Fluid, messing with fluids is always annoying. Because fluids take so much processing time and so on. So I'm not sure what exactly's going to come out of it. As I said earlier with mechanisms and machines, we don't really have a feel for that stuff so people just come up with their specs and ideas and when we get to the moving fortresses, if people have stuff for us to look at, we're gonna consider everything and there's gonna be a whole lot of stuff going in at that time. All kinds of bits and pieces. We're gonna try and think about making things as, sort of, into their little constituent elements as much as possible so that people can realize all kinds of different machines and not just go by some script that we wrote for them. So yeah, just keep throwing ideas at us on that stuff and when we get to it we're going to do some interesting things hopefully. |
| Threetoe: | Next question is Jochen who asks: Toady - since you have a math background, do you actually sit down with pen and paper and do mathematical models before starting to implement them? |
| Toady: | Well, the tablet comes out quite a bit, but it's mostly for map making. Just drawing the maps and then thinking about how to make them pop up. It's hardly ever for equations. Occasionally, I write down something like that, but math doesn't get super complicated in Dwarf Fortress. There's linear algebra and there's, of course, lot's of regular algebra. But not modern algebra, just the old type of algebra from junior high and that kind of thing. So yeah, it's just not, you know, not a whole lot of banach spaces coming into it. Or anything that I studied. *laughs* No geometric measure theory in the game at all. So, not really. I mean, I do write down equations sometimes just to kinda get the scaling right when you got a bunch of different variables, but it's nothing...I don't think that wouldn't normally be done. |
| Threetoe: | And the next question is for Zac: What is your professional background? All I have to say is that ‘Ha! I don't have one...' (laughter) Professional author, or game designer? |
| Threetoe: | Well...No, I've never really had a real job, I think. My background, I guess, is I have a Bachelors in Ancient History and I've taken a lot of computer science classes and I actually have written quite a few games that never got released. But yeah, I mean that's all I can say really. I've worked kind of manual labour type jobs once in my life so, I really...Yeah. Professional author. |
| Threetoe: | Are you planning to make skulls and brains a little more tough? every fight seems to end with the skull being crushed or jammed through the brain... |
| Toady: | Well, hopefully this is already fixed for the next release. I didn't add...I didn't go quite the direction, I guess I wanted to end up going there, by adding more geometric information to the parts and stuff to kind of explain what the part looks like. There just wasn't enough time but I made them larger. I mean, I don't remember, they were kind of a ridiculous size. So the largeness for now I think helps enough. And if we wanna get them back to a, I don't know, appropriate size and geometry and hardness, and all that, it might get tweaked later on. But I've been pretty happy with the results of sitting there and sort of boxing someone in the head over and over and not just having their skull collapse after a few hits. It takes quite a bit more in the next release. |
| Threetoe: | Could you speak about procedural methods used in Dwarf fortress, and which methods are more successful than expected, and which methods do wish you'd spent less time on. Do you have any general advice on integrating procedural content into the games? |
| Toady: | So I don't have like, kind of formal background here. So in terms of names, I mean I've mentioned in the past the kind of midpoint displacement diamond square stuff [indistinct] that you can use for map generation. Everything else is just trial and error. So I don't have specific named algorithms to recommend and ones that I wouldn't.
It's just all about iteration, getting something that you can see and then asking yourself how does this deviate from what I expected? Especially if you're doing like real world modeling or at least fantasy world modeling in the sense that you know what to expect more or less. You can always fix your deviations and, I mean, not always but it's not as bad as it might seem to think about what's going wrong, why it's going wrong, looking at your algorithm and what kind of element that actually exists in reality or what would cause the deviation. Things usually, unless you iterate over hundreds of years, for instance in world gen or whatever, you're not gonna get some kind of crazy chaos behaviour that is beyond your control. Most of the time it is in your control and you can think about those things and add to it. So I mean it's just, I mean I guess that I'm not sure if any of that actually counts as advice cos it's just like Keep trying *laughs* You'll get your result and just try and think consciously about what you're doing because all of the bugs have reasons that they happen and all the deviations have reasons that they happened. |
| Threetoe: | That's right. Never give up.OK, the next question comes from Matt. Will we ever see good wizards (ala Gandalf) come into worlds and build towers like the necromancers do. What sort of plans do you have for them and how would they interact with player fortresses? Do you have to be nice to the good wizard who visits your fortress every few years to heal you paralysed and injured dwarves? Well, this one...There was actually a good wizard in the beginning, in the first few versions of Dwarf Fortress that would come and ask for help to defeat an evil wizard... |
| Toady: | Yeah, it was an army of the dead, right? *laughs* Yeah, he'd actually...When he asked for help, he asked kind of specifically for one of the dwarves, I have to...I don't remember if he asked for any dwarf or, I think he might have asked for a dwarf by name, or something. |
| Threetoe: | Yeah. |
| Toady: | He's like, I must bring Urist with me! *laughs* And then so you kind of have this little mini Hobbit journey or whatever. |
| Threetoe: | Yeah, I can't remember if he, if the army of the dead would come anyway. And you would just pick...No, no. |
| Toady: | No, no. They could thwart it. They could thwart it. And if they failed to thwart it, like if you, they never failed to thwart it, but if you failed to send off the dwarf that the Gandalf-type wizard wanted to steal, then one of your dwarves would have a dream when they were sleeping that an army of the dead was coming. Then it was always around the sixth year of the fortress or something that an army of the dead would come and it would be a difficult fight. Especially in the 2D version where you're kind of boxed in, and have them coming at you and never leaving. So I guess to answer the question, it's certainly the type of thing we want to consider. I mean I have no idea...Building towers, I think we're gonna try and have a broader idea of what they do and how they act and what things they can do. And yeah I don't know if they'd come and heal your paralyzed and armless dwarves, or whatever. *laughs* That's wishful thinking in a hard world, right? *laughs* Sometimes dwarves are just, you know, they have to deal with the consequences of your actions. |
| Threetoe: | Ok, the next question's from Akos: Will you ever implement ports that make sieges and trading possible on isolated islands, how much do you plan to make oceans part of the gameplay, will you have navies or pirate ships that can fire on fortresses? |
| Toady: | So we love this stuff, right? We have, we played Pirates! and Ancient Art of War at Sea and stuff, and... |
| Threetoe: | And multiple submarine simulators. |
| Toady: | Right now I'm reading the whole kind of history of one of the big greek wars and there's triremes ramming everyone and doing all kinds of things and so on. So yeah, we love boats. We've talked in the past about how boats might work so we don't need to go into kind of the technical details, those'll be in the transcripts of the old talks. But it's definitely one of the things that we're planning to do. And kind of incorporate it fully into gameplay everywhere. |
| Threetoe: | Akos, second question: Are you planning to have roots on larger trees that reach down to the first cavern layer? |
| Toady: | So I guess, actually most tree roots don't actually go very deep underground at all. There are a few exceptions and we've got parameters now that let you kind of set what the roots do for your trees. I don't remember if it's oaks, one of them has a big tap root or something, but even then the tap root doesn't kind of go down through, you know, fifty tiles of granite or whatever. *laughs* At the same time it's a cool image, right? To have roots coming down into the cavern. |
| Threetoe: | Having a dragon nibble on the bottom of 'em. |
| Toady: | *laughs* The World Tree that goes down into the Land of the Dead and all that kind of thing. So I think it'll happen sometime. Maybe not with the traditional trees. Maybe with the fantasy trees. Maybe in stranger environments, but yeah, we like roots, we like trees. |
| Threetoe: | Ok, the next question comes from dhokarena56, and they ask: Do you have any plans for the expansion of farming in the near or further future? It's been noted that the farming system is one of the last system that produces free stuff with no drawback - do you have on the drawing board any plans for the expansion of the overall agricultural system? |
| Toady: | So we don't have a timeline for it. You can see the notes on the dev page and of course that's supplemented by multiple forum threads that are pretty hefty on this topic. We're all for reforming farming. We kinda took a morale hit when we got rid of our Nile flood farming from the 2D version. That's very difficult to bring back into a 3D system. And so I just haven't gotten back to farming since then and it's only kinda gotten worse and worse over time. At some point we'll come back and clean that up though. |
| Threetoe: | Yes, kind of reminds me of the water-for-booze question and it's just like, it would make the game twenty times as hard if you couldn't get mushrooms from nothing. |
| Toady: | Yeah, and at the same time you know, people want a little bit of challenge when it comes to those systems. Hopefully not too annoying. But kind of interesting maybe you know, terrain based, that kind of thing. |
| Threetoe: | It is too easy to...Yeah. |
| Toady: | Yeah. So yes, we're definitely pro...Pro stuff. Pro new farming. |
| (guitar music) | |
| Threetoe: | Will we see more dynastic or clannish behaviour, or will the dwarves remain more individualistically oriented? Can an usurper count on the support of his brethren even if his claim is weak to other people? How will vampires and bandit gangs be factored in? |
| Toady: | So this is one of the things that when we started these position claims, and we started talking about factions and so on, and we talked about having reputations with families and so on, this is one of the things we were thinking about. And one of the actual main things we were thinking about because families are one of the only things in the game right now that are links between people that could determine their behaviour. There's not a whole lot for them to work with right now other than what town they live, what civilization from, and then who their family is. I wouldn't expect too much with this next release because there's just no mechanisms through which they can act on sort of realizing their ambitions right now. So we're kind of pre-army arc and just trying to get the ball rolling on some really basic mechanics but it's definitely the intention to have the families matter a lot more. When you bring up things like bandit gangs, right now the bandit gangs exist in a vacuum but they are generally led by historical figures that have family ties nearby in the communities that they're harassing and so on. And that should have a huge impact. Whether or not it's to create conflict within the family, or to have their family aiding them in their activities and so. Of course vampires can get all strange with that kind of thing. So it's definitely the exact sort of thing we wanna milk to get great sort of emergent stories. It's one of the main elements we wanna use. At the same time, we have done nothing. *laughs* Aside from the few things in fortress mode that can happen. So yeah, but it's definitely something we're always look at and always kind of...Delaying the realization of, but it's always there. And hopefully we'll get to that. |
| Threetoe: | Next question's from Meg, and they asked: Will we be getting bug fixes to polish the existing bugs such as the AI in this version? And if so, to what extent? |
| Toady: | So after this release...So when you ask about the next version, not really. I mean there's a big kind of AI guts rewrite that's actually happened in Fortress Mode regarding their prioritization and so on and how they think about things that's gonna make things like job priorities more of a low hanging fruit in the future. But when it comes to actual bug fixing, that's not what these large releases are intended to accomplish. What happens right after the large release is a series of smaller releases. Sometimes, you know, a couple in a week. And many many many of them that will address old bugs, new bugs, clean up portions of the interface, address minor annoyances and add in features to the game that are just meant to be more helpful to people playing. Especially things like Fortress Mode which we've been neglecting a bit with our focus on Adventure Mode in the big releases. Fortress Mode sees a lot of changes in these smaller releases as well. So if you're waiting for things like that don't pin all your hopes on the next version, but that should be the time when you get excited about Fortress Mode and fixes, and bug fixes, polishing and that kind if thing. So you should be excited about the next release cos it means it'll be the beginning of the process that you want. |
| Threetoe: | Ok cool, so the next one is from... Anthony, and: In a fortress with a hundred or so dwarves, managing labor settings and military composition to keep the fortress working becomes difficult due to the of micro-management involved. Is there a way that the player can at some point no longer need to worry about which dwarves do which jobs, or who exactly is in a particular squad? |
| Toady: | So the kind of question here, it's sort of has to do with...It comes down to two different philosophies of how a large fort should be handled. There's kind of the I'd say, I don't know, Majesty method or something where the dwarves manage more of their own affairs. Could even set work for themselves and so on and kind of have less involvement from you and sort of realize their own little lives that way. And of course the problem with that method is that you lose control as a player over some of the things you wanna do.
Then there's the other branch you could take which is improving the ability to set jobs and micromanage things that utilities like Dwarf Therapist and so on do. This is sort of the spreadsheet approach or otherwise to make more management possible where it just kind of breaks down what the methods we're currently using. And we are not really for a sort of spreadsheet approach. We wanna have, we wanna try and find another solution, not saying we have even found a solution there. And we like dwarven autonomy, but we are kind of mindful of the fact that it can take control out of your hands. So without kind of committing to a specific course of action, those are the things that we're mindful of and we definitely realize that it's not a tenable position that we're holding now, that the game really does become hard to work with when you have lots of dwarves. And we'll just have to kind of work with that slowly when we get to the next set of releases and so on. |
| Threetoe: | Next question is from MrWillsauce: To what extent will invaders be able to dig? Will they only be able to dig through certain z-levels, or through certain types of stone, or will certain types of invaders be able to dig to different extents? |
| Toady: | Well, it's hard to say exactly what's gonna happen. They should be able to affect a siege upon you that can invade a fort that is, you know, where you've just shut your doors or something silly like that and that's supposed to save you from everybody. |
| Threetoe: | Or throw up a brick wall or something. |
| Toady: | Yeah. Just something like that. Just not very impressive. At the same time it'd be very silly if the invaders could come and just sort of dig out your whole map and dig down giant like, turn your whole fortress into a quarry or whatever. And I definitely think that different races would end up having different abilities. If you got invaded by dwarves I think expecting your fortress to have new tunnels would be a very fair thing to expect. And goblins too, for that matter. The way they're shaping up they have kind of a underground tunnely nature to them whereas humans should have some things they could try to do but wouldn't necessarily involve a lot of tunneling unless you've kind of restricted yourself to the soil layers. It is odd in the sense that the timeframe is so fast that you could have a siege that lasts a whole year and in that time there could be some digging done even in real life but it's...I mean, I'm mindful of people that don't want their fortresses utterly destroyed by digging, but yeah the whole brick wall thing is just silly so...Yeah, it's hard to say. I mean we're not going to have them like making a weird sort of swiss cheese pattern out of your fortress but, if they don't cheat, and they don't know where your fortress is, they are gonna have to do a kind of exploratory tunnels all around your entrance, or whatever. So yeah, we'll have to see how that turns out. |
| Threetoe: | I know that you don't have plans for a multiplayer option any time soon, do you at least have plans for shared worlds with trade between players? |
| Toady: | So, we've seen these ideas and things like this in the suggestion board and so on, so that you might be able to export a file that has a trade caravan that you sent off the side of the map or an army that you've marched off the side of your map and then you save it in the file that might be, you know, lightly encrypted in some way and you could send it off to your friend. And then your friend could load it in their fort - it might not even know if it would be an army or a trade caravan or something and then they get that marching on the map. You could kinda send those back and forth. It's a fun idea, it's not really a high priority idea and then there's difficulties with the raws. You'd have to make sure they had the same kind of raw files that you do exactly or the whole thing would break down. And even things like world history and so on can get in the way if you're not in the same world then references that you send off the map on like the artwork on an item for instance up would no longer be legal so there'd be all kinds of little bugs and things to work out and all kinds of the particulars to iron out. So it just hasn't been a high priority... I think it's a cool idea to have but it's not something that's gonna happen anytime soon |
| Threetoe: | The next question's from Eggman360, and he asks: Do you think we should be able to dip items into liquids, or wash items, or collect liquids and other contaminants? |
| Toady: | Absolutely. We love this- |
| Threetoe: | Yeah, we'd be somewhere behind Nethack if we didn't have this in there. |
| Toady: | Yeah, especially cos we have item contaminants. We have this really kind of complicated poison system. We already have dwarves that wash stuff and we can have liquid, we already have liquids that can be in containers. I mean, so it's really just very very low hanging fruit for Adventure Mode. I'm assuming that it's Adventure mode that's being talked about here because of the way the question was phrased. But even in Dwarf Mode being, I mean that's one of the things where we kind of thought it was undwarfy to kind of coat your stuff with poison or whatever. But so...Yeah definitely. You should have complete freedom to do any of those things. You should be able to dip an arrow in vampire blood and shoot it at somebody and possibly infect them or whatever. I mean any kind of, any kind of option like that. I mean you could do that once you become a vampire. Just constantly get your blood all over stuff and try and convert the whole world then we'd probably have to look at that conversion mechanic and change it to something a little more traditional. *laughs* Or something, cos it just gets out of control. Or allow it to float. |
| Threetoe: | Next question, actually the last question, is from Daniel, and he asks are there any plans for improving the interface for placing buildings or furniture? |
| Toady: | So there're never specific plans about doing something, you know, on any kind of time line or whatever and for things like interface changes when we kinda get in the mood to, like the recent change to the unit screen, it's just kinda something that's been either sitting in the notes or that people have kind of suggested at some point in the past.
I don't have specific things there. There are things you can do I guess. If I remember correctly, the full context of the question was for things like placing, if you want to place a bunch of furniture out of the same material just doing simple things with simple sort of keeping track of which material you last placed or being able to place multiple buildings without it having to pop you back out of the menu. And there are certain complications with that when it needs to know what items are available and whether or not they're accessible and all that kind of thing. So I think, I'm not sure, I haven't thought about it too deeply, but ditching the system where it earmarks a specific item, or rather leaving that system as an option, but making most things just you place it and you say a desired material and the item's not necessarily earmarked, it might work better. But then again, you'll get into more situations where the item is unavailable if it's not telling you. So, I mean it's kinda a complicated mess but definitely I can see when you're placing certain types of rooms that the repetitive stress injuries that we cause to the player are pretty unacceptable and there should definitely be options for going ahead with it even if you're not just kind of assured of having the materials available. |
| Threetoe: | Alright. Well, that brings an end to the questions. I hope everybody's satisfied with their answers. |
| Toady: | Yeah, so that was, I think that was about thirty people and we got another seventy or so to go. *laughs* |
| Threetoe: | Yeah. |
| Toady: | So we'll catch those in the future Dwarf Fortress Talks. We're moving through the questions at a good clip now and hopefully we'll get to everybody. |
| Threetoe: | Alright, thank you everybody for contributing and listening and downloading. And tell all your friends about Dwarf Fortress. |
| === musical interlude by Ollieh === | |
| Capntastic: | Alright. Thank you for listening to another amazing episode of Dwarf Fortress Podcast. I'd like to thank...Hold up. *laughs* There's like eighteen people to thank. |
| Toady: | That's right. That's right. Yeah, I've got a list written down here. You can start with the ones you remember and then I'll come up with some other ones. |
| Capntastic: | I'd like to thank Rainseeker. |
| Toady: | That's right. He's on, he's at the top of the list. |
| Rainseeker: | Thanks. You're welcome |
| Capntastic: | Toady- |
| Toady: | Yep, I'm number three. I'm number three. |
| Capntastic: | Tarn. |
| Toady: | Tarn is number three on the list. What do you think number two is, then? |
| Capntastic: | Ah...Scamps. |
| Toady: | No no no. |
| Capntastic: | Zack. |
| Rainseeker: | Capn! |
| Toady: | No, it's you! Thank yourself! |
| Capntastic: | Oh, it's me. Thank me. I'm contributing. Umm...Emily Menendez. |
| Toady: | That's right. |
| Rainseeker: | My sister. |
| Capntastic: | Ollieh. |
| Toady: | Yeah, Ollieh, these are the music peoples. |
| Rainseeker: | And then- |
| Capntastic: | All of our viewers. |
| Toady: | That's right. All of our viewers and people that view the podcast when they look at the... |
| Rainseeker: | *laughs* |
| Capntastic: | I'm flying blind here! |
| Toady: | That's right. |
| Capntastic: | It's tough. |
| Toady: | Everyone that asked questions, they get thanked. Everyone who contributed. That's definitely on the list. I don't know what the transcript situation is. Mallocks did transcripts up to a point and then he retired for a time and someone did a transcript for...We never put it up but someone did a transcript in the thread for Dwarf Fortress Talk 20 and I'm not sure if mallocks is coming back or not. And so we'll thank mallocks for the transcriptions that he did. |
| Capntastic: | He did a great job. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, thanks mallocks. |
| Toady: | Yeah. And then whatever happens we've got other transcripts in the future, they'll ever be crowd sourced transcripts like the last one, if I remember, I wanna credit the right people eventually but we'll do that when I figure out how to put it online and stuff. And the same situation holds for this episode, so... |
| Capntastic: | Yeah. |
| Rainseeker: | And any, by the way I've a little business called Measures of Joy Bakery dot com where you can order gluten free goodies if you like. And- |
| Toady: | Gluten freeeeee. |
| Capntastic: | They look really nice. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, thank you. |
| Capntastic: | Look really good. |
| Rainseeker: | Thank you, thank you. They're really good. My wife spent eight years developing gluten free recipes. So they're excellent. |
| Toady: | Yeah, yeah. We have a link, I think. Uh...A link, a link, a link... |
| Rainseeker: | Yep. |
| Toady: | And yeah. Capn's got his things going on. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah. |
| Toady: | It's always a party over there. |
| Capntastic: | Working on stuff. [indistinct] |
| Toady: | Stuff. |
| === musical postlude by Ollieh === | |
| Threetoe: | Ok, are we keeping the boy here? |
| Toady: | I don't know. I don't know what we're going to do with this recalcitrant fat kid that jumped into my lap. Causing trouble, causing grief. Argh! Ah, ya claws...Now he's on the back of your chair. *laughs* |
| Threetoe: | Yeah, ok. That's a good place for him. |
| Toady: | *laughs* |
Dwarf Fortress Talk #22, with Threetoe and Toady One, transcribed by PT_Fort, Tonjevic, smirk, and others.
New dev pages
Job Priorities
Future of VPL
Fortress-mode inns and taverns
Instruments, recipes and reputation
Adventure-mode taverns
Non-player artifacts
Fortress starting scenarios
Hill- and deep-dwarves
Questions
Directional Zones
Adventure Mode Building
Version 1.0 Possibilities
City/Dungeon-Generating Algorithms
Dwarven Economy
Multi-Dwarf Position Claims
Idle Dwarf Activities
Mode Combination/Intersection
Service Quests
Fanciful Creatures
Hiring Mercenaries
Alternate Creature Reproduction
Constructing Furniture Outside
Procedurally Generated Songs
Alternate Strange Mood Types
Chemical Interactions and Martial Law
Genetics
Scrapped Goals
Soil/Stone Layer Modelling
Mining Mechanics and Steam Power
Planar Travel
Magic Systems
Wall/Floor Destructibility
Art Specification
Battlefield Looting
Adventurer Cooking
Deity Interactions
Fortress Mode Time Dilation
Fortress Mode Function Redesigns
Raising Children
Hospital Visits and Dwarven Social Life
Noble Demands
Threetoe’s DF Habits
Development/Release Planning
Over-Randomization
AI Adventurers
Weapon Poisoning
Fortress/World Interactions
Fan Projects
Yelling at Animals
Fantasy Landscaping
Old-School Influences
Generating Landmasses
Creatures Inside Mountains
Sandalwood and Driftwood
Fortress Goods in the World
Twisting Embedded Weapons
Ending Thanks
| SFX | (Musical Prelude) |
| Threetoe: | Welcome to the twenty-second Dwarf Fortress talk. This is the emergency version. We need to get this one out here because we're coming out with some new dev pages. This is Threetoe, Zach Adams. My brother, Toady One, Tarn Adams. |
| Toady: | Yep. Tarn Adams here, Toady One. And uh yeah, we decided to, since we're putting up dev pages, you can go check them out now online, at the main website. The top part of the development pages has four new sections, and they're in order this time! Which is a shocking development. So we just threw together a quick team of Dwarf Fortress Talk hosts (meaning the two of us). And Capntastic and Rainseeker are living their pleasant, busy lives, while we just decided to answer some questions quickly and talk about these new dev pages. |
| Threetoe: | Excellent. Well let's get to work. Onto the development pages, we have a new section at the start of our dev pages that is a list of goals, in order, that are going to be completed. |
| Toady: | Yeah. We usually don't do this. We don't put up goals that are in order, but we got... The new dev pages should be posted as this talk is posted, so you can go over there now if you want, or just go check it later at the main Dwarf Fortress page, under "Development". And you'll see that there are four sections. Most of them are old sections, but they've been refurbished and moved to the top, in order. So the first thing we're going to work on (this is probably starting at the beginning of December) is job priorities. So we've been saying this for a long time now, as one of the top vote-getters on "Eternal Suggestions", and it's time to get some work done there. |
| We had to do some work to figure out what people wanted here, because the original suggestion was very general, and pointed in different directions, and had different approaches, and it wasn't really settled. So we have decided, first off, that we're not really working to change VPL [The labour list for each dwarf. Seen by pressing v-p-l near a dwarf in the game - Ed.] at this moment. We have some things that we're going to do later (we'll get to that in a moment) that will point toward big changes toward VPL. But the first push on job priorities is just going to be about the basic 'job selection' model. So right now, as people know, the jobs pick the dwarves, and that leads to bad selection sometimes. The job will just snatch up the first, nearest qualified dwarf to do the job, regardless of whatever jobs that dwarf might want to do, and that can lead to some really sub-par selections. | |
| And there's a kind of symmetric problem if dwarves pick jobs. They'll pick jobs that another dwarf might be better suited for. So you can't really have jobs picking dwarves or dwarves picking jobs; you need to have a system that merges it all together and has a delay incorporated so that things can work themselves out. Not a big delay, almost unnoticeable, but just enough to get the right dwarf to the right job. And this will allow you to do things like taking a skilled dwarf, that you'd normally be forced to turn off their hauling, so that they would do the jobs you want them to do. And now you'd be able to leave their hauling on, for instance. They do hauling when they were truly idle, but they would still be able to go do their appropriate jobs when they were available. And by the same token you wouldn't have... We noticed that a lot of people were setting up this 'peasant class' of dwarves, unskilled dwarves, that were just set up for hauling. That should be a little less necessary now. | |
| Threetoe: | Except now we're going to be working with the last of these projects will be to implement new peasant classes of dwarves. |
| Toady: | He he he. Yeah this is the kind of VPL change we were talking about. It should be exciting to see the status of your dwarves realized. And certain ones you'll be able to control more than others. Now there will be a circumstance under which you can control any dwarf to a large degree, and that's going to be the new 'Do This Now' prioritization for jobs, which will just snatch up the nearest dwarf that can do the job (like pulling a lever), and force them to do it. They'll drop what they're doing and save your fortress. Might stress them out a little bit, depending on the kind of dwarf, but you'll be able to do that finally. And furthermore we are mindful of things like the trading jobs, the harvest, and so on, and hopefully that'll be handled with the new job selection model overall. |
| We are trying to stay away from spreadsheets and numbers approaches that kind of open up every single job to be ranked, you know, according to different numbers for each dwarf or workshop because that is unmanageable when the number of dwarves get high. | |
| Threetoe: | Also, it's a hint where we're going with this, which is to get rid of VPL all together, eventually. |
| Toady: | Yeah, we would really like to restrict VPL possibly to a smaller number of dwarves that are actually the types of dwarves you would be ordering around like that. And we're also aware of kind of the 'work crew' approaches that people have, and that will also be something that is under consideration when we do understand 'fortress-citizen' status a little better. |
| But for now we're just focusing on these kind of large problems. Those two things, the 'Do It Now' prioritization and the overall job selection mechanic, should help with most of the major problems. We have some other small ideas, kind of along the lines of the little suggestions we've been doing, like workshops being able to steal from hauling jobs if the item is nearby. We're also going to look at some of the mining suggestions, like ordered mining or vein mining, that kind of thing. | |
| And so it should be an interesting set of job priority changes that'll do a lot of good. Just keep in mind that when we do get to the fourth section of the new development notes, the starting scenarios, there's going to be further changes to job priorities that should really make the whole experience more interesting and dwarfy. | |
| Threetoe: | Okay, after the first section, which is job priorities, then we move on to do dwarf fortress mode inns and taverns. Because we want to add something fun, so that we aren't just doing another giant release for the sake of everybody's sanity with their interface problems. |
| Toady: | Yeah, the two-year release was really long, he he. And there was a lot of foundational work that was done. And we're trying to break this next one up. Well we always try, he he, but we're going to succeed this time! We're breaking this one up into some smaller fun stuff. There is some foundational work we'll get to, but this is not foundational. This is just taverns for fun. So we got the Fortress Mode taverns. Now we had the... I think it was Dwarf Fortress Talk episode 12 where we really went into how this would work, so we're not going to reiterate the details too closely here, but we will go through it. |
| So you're going to have the ability in your fortress to lay out several rooms. Rooms for people to sleep, meeting-hall-type places, some storerooms, that make up an inn or tavern, for people to come. They'll come at first just because they can. Your guests will be people like merchants, diplomats, adventurers, mercenaries, other travelers, and your dwarves will also be able to go. And the thing that you'll be able to do there... You'll be able to serve them drinks, for instance, you can sell them... We're not going for... We don't have the economy stuff yet, so we're not going for sort of full tycoon mode with spreadsheets... | |
| Threetoe: | Yeah it wouldn't exactly make any financial sense to do this, but it's just for fun. |
| Toady: | Yeah, and it'll make more sense later, based on start scenarios and later when we do the economic work. Right now, we're just messing around. One of the big things that'll come out of this is... Remember back... When was that meetup? Was it like 2007/8? |
| Threetoe: | It was the second meetup, or maybe the third meetup. It was a long time ago. And Koji asked us to... 'Why don't they ever use their musical instruments?' And we had no excuse... Finally, after seven years, now we're... |
| Toady: | Hehe. Yeah it's about time. It's about time for the instruments, and... We're also going to do dancing and storytelling and some other things that people can do in taverns. And this will also carry over in general to any parties that the dwarves throw, I mean once you have a tavern it'll be more likely that dwarves will throw a party there, but they'll sometimes will still throw them in the statue gardens or other places that you set up for them. But they'll be able to use their instruments and probably also have children playing with toys, just get all the items up and running. So you have this little bustling stuff going on in your fortress. People, for a while now, have been clamoring for the return of recipes, which we had very briefly, and those will make it back. |
| And your fortress will be able to kind of get a reputation based on the services you have available, and the quality of the drinks you're selling. And we're toying with the idea of having a local dish, that kind of thing. So that's all, that's all on the table for this, and in the notes . You'll be able to rent rooms to people. Finally you'll be able to have games. We're trying to randomly generate some games. We'll do what we can with dice games, and board games. They've have all been around for thousands of years so it's all fair, and your dwarves will be able to gamble, he he he. And we'll be able to... We're thinking because we have it in adventure mode anyway, the ability to play games when we do that part, which we'll talk about in a second, that you'll also be able to play the games directly if one of your dwarves is playing, just to give you a chance to see it, and to experience the game. | |
| Threetoe: | And to stop your dwarf from gambling away all the treasure of your fortress... |
| Toady: | He he he. It's also important to understand what property means in the fortress because until we have that, perhaps the dwarves will be able to gamble away your entire crafts pile. And it'll be up to you to stop them, or to kill the guest with magma... He he, after they win your stuff. |
| So the other part of this, of course, is adventure mode. And we're going to update the taverns so that they kind of align with the new fortress mode layout, and add some inns along the road with the ability to stay in a room or buy a drink. | |
| Threetoe: | This will also be the place to get your quests. Like any good RPG, the tavern is the central spot for that. Like it has been in all the previous versions of Dwarf Fortress like DragSlay, the tavern was the beginning and end of your quest. |
| Toady: | Yeah it is kind of key. I mean, everyone meets up in a tavern and then they go on an adventure, that's how it works. And we can pull some of those... the underbelly of society out of the sewers and catacombs and get them hanging out in taverns instead. So you'll be able to- We're not promising too much in terms of like having the criminal underbelly yet, because we don't have the thief arc, and the economy, and that kind of thing. But there will be a lot of tie-ins, especially with the next section, which is 'non-player artifacts'. It's another fun thing. Might as well throw that in. We already have a lot of stuff for artifacts from fortress mode, so might as well have other fortresses making them and other ways for artifacts to be made during world generation. Then we can have them being passed around, and stolen, and offered to other civilizations. That kind of thing. |
| Threetoe: | They should actually be useful. Like, it's swords and shields instead of just cabinets that your dwarves create. |
| Toady: | He he he. |
| Threetoe: | There could be these other treasures, so now you'll finally have this fetch quest to go along with your kill quest. |
| Toady: | He he. That's right. I mean, of course we didn't want adventure mode to kind of become just another quest game but you gotta start somewhere so we've got... You can kill night creatures and so on, so now you'll be able to go hunt down objects for people. And we have - already in fortress mode - we have the thieves that come as actual armies that are moving on the map - of course you can't see any of it - but there's little armies of thieves and snatchers that move to your fortress and they go in and take things and leave. And we'd like to generalize that so we can get some thieves and snatchers running around the world, that you can meet, or even be. So they'll be hunting for artifacts, the artifacts will move around. You might attempt to liberate an artifact from a dragon, that kind of thing. You know, very normal stuff, but It's gotta start somewhere. |
| Now when we talk about non-player artifacts that doesn't necessarily mean we'll be diving into all the magic stuff we talked about from episode seven, where we were going into artifact powers and stuff. But not necessarily ruling that out either... He he he. You never know what might happen... | |
| Threetoe: | So the last phase of our dev pages is the fortress starting scenarios. Now when we first came up with the idea for Dwarf Fortress, the purpose was to create a bunch of artifacts that would be found by the adventurers later after you were inevitably destroyed, but now we've decided to add more framework to it - to spice it up a little bit. |
| Toady: | It's never really been clear what the point was, especially when we stopped the original plan to have the adventurer dive in for artifacts. Then we were just like, well are you just waiting for your monarch to come and take over your fortress and you just sit there following orders. And so, what we're going to do is allow the player to choose what their fortress is about - now you can still do something like just say, "Hey I'm a frontier settlement and I just want migrants coming and I'm building for my own purposes." and that's fine - but you could also set up... some of the ideas we had were a religious site where you're setting up a temple, say, that has to obey certain guidelines and reach a certain level of magnificence and then you'd have pilgrims coming and people to work on it. |
| Threetoe: | And you'd be getting messages from the gods to tell you exactly how they wanted their thing arranged. |
| Toady: | He he he. Yeah, so it'll add some structure to the game. It'll be interesting. The other things we were thinking about - a prison colony would be fun. You'd have prisoners come and that adds its own challenges. We have a mining company, a military citadel. Since we'd have taverns and inns already, you could just have a place that you're setting up on a road just to be an inn. And you could be setting up the future palace of the monarch, but you might have to actually have some requests that you're satisfying in order to make that a reality instead of just going by general numbers. So it'll cause sorta drastic changes to how the game is played. The migrants that come - I mean there might not be migrants that come - they might have a certain type of character to them. To really understand that, we're gonna need to add a framework to the game that lets you understand exactly what it is that the citizen's standing is in the civilisation. I mean, are these sort of serfs that are bound to your fortress, are they kind of frontier dwarves, are they almost employees of your mining operation, you know. So there's a lot of different ways to think about it, and so we'd like to set up a framework of law, customs, rights, property, and status, so that we can understand these things and we can make these scenarios very explicit. We've been toying around with ideas of how the laws would be encoded: you could have one of those giant pillars with etchings of the laws on them set up by the first ruler, or you could have - I mean our gods already love writing slabs with different secrets on them - you could ‘have a commandments type situation that would let you know where you're starting from, but then you might be able to change the laws yourself depending on the scenario. |
| I mean aside from the migrants, the caravans... you may or may not have caravans come to your fortress, the diplomacy could be very different. You wouldn't expect, for instance, a giant army to attack a roadside inn that you've set up, but you may have bandits coming there and being rowdy guests that you have to deal with. There's a lot of different directions that that'll go, but we've written them down on the development page to check out. For instance, reclaim mechanics can all be folded into the start scenario system: Why are you doing this reclaim, and what is the overall situation? Kinda bring back that situation we had before where you were allowed to take several soldiers with you, several groups of soldiers really, into the reclaim instead of just always starting with seven dwarves. The general framework here with a start scenario, it gives you information about why the site is there and that can be generalised to every site in the game. This isn't a massive rewrite like doing the sitemaps was, but just a simple categorisation that'll make the game understand where it's coming from. Finally, with start scenarios, we're bringing in the hill- and deep-dwarves that we've been talking about because some of the scenarios- | |
| Threetoe: | Yes! |
| Toady: | He he he he... some of the scenarios really require them. So, yeah, that'll be awesome. We've talked about it in previous episodes, I believe, but the basic idea is you can bring along a lot of extra dwarves with you, and they don't live in your visible site, but they live in attached sites. You can bring them in and out, trade food with them and so on. Eventually they're kind of foundational for the dwarf-mode army stuff because they give you a lot of warm little dwarf bodies to send on missions to kobold caves and stuff instead of having to essentially play a kind of adventure mode where you'd send out ten dwarves to the cave, you could send those ten dwarves but also another two hundred to make the numbers match up a little bit. It's exciting overall, I think. It's nice to have something in order with all this stuff that's coming. |
| Threetoe: | That's right, that's right, except -- the promise is made. |
| Toady: | Yeah, that's right. We try not to set up too many obligations for ourselves but an obligation is a good thing; it lets people know where we're going and here they are in order, and we're going to do them. The nice thing about this, I think, having it set up in four separate sections, clearly delineated, is that we at least know, unlike some of the previous releases, that there are going to be pauses, where we can do some bug-fixes, do some small suggestions, in between. We're going to try our best to do, when necessary, releases while we're actually working on one section. But at least we'll have that, that there's going to be some breaks, that there's not going to be another two-year release and it should be entertaining and really, when we get all this foundational stuff in with the start scenarios, we're looking at wide-open access to the, uh, we have enough framework then for the economy, we have framework for armies, we have framework for doing thief stuff, we can do all kinds of things. It'll be nice to finally understand laws and property and the status, you can start thinking about where these citizens fit into their civilisations and into the world. |
| Threetoe: | Yes, and to tie it up to the beginning again, we finally have those job priorities done. |
| Toady: | He he he he, yeah, people should be happy to see some of this stuff and, uh, yeah, we're excited, excited! |
| SFX | (Musical Interlude) |
| Threetoe: | Okay so now it's time for the question-and-answer part of the show. The first question comes from Dave, and he asks, "Would it be possible to set travel-restricted zones that indicated a direction? For example, two staircases: one that could be designated as up and the other one as down." |
| Toady: | So the problem with this kind of thing, with secret doors and one-way pathfinding, is just technical, in terms of how you calculate that. It kind of screws up the connected-component numbers that we've got, so I don't really have a good solution for it. It's one of those things that we'd like to do, but it's a hard problem. |
| Threetoe: | Okay, the next question is from Deceased Nacho, and he asks, "Will there be any possibility of chopping down trees in adventure mode to craft walls, doors and chests, so we could build houses and store items, like a safe haven?" And a related question from trekkie5249: "Will adventurers be able to do some or all of the things that can be done in dwarf mode?" |
| Toady: | Yeah, so that's the idea eventually, is that you'd be able to do that. It's been on the development pages for a long time, but it's also tricky to just throw in because we haven't quite decided what sorts of tools and processes we want to use in adventure mode. We probably want to make it a little more intricate than fort mode, but fort mode can't really support those extra tools. You can already see with kind of the cutlery that we have people just carrying around in adventure mode. That kind of thing puts a little inertia on the process to getting started on it, but it's something we want to do. |
| Threetoe: | The next question is from Luis and he asks, "What do you think version 1.0 would be like, in terms of gameplay elements, and also content features and interface, and may I add, music?" |
| Toady: | It's hard to say. I mean, I don't even know if 1.0 is a special point anymore. We had wanted to get at least some kind of tutorial thing in. We had been thinking of doing seasonal music pieces and so on, but it's one of those things where it's hard to say that we're just going to stop and do some sort of graphical thing, and the mods are so far ahead of us anyway that it's almost pointless at this point to even consider doing that. So we're thinking mainly in terms of just the features and content in the game. I'm not sure how you differentiate those from gameplay elements. |
| Threetoe: | Just more, more, more. |
| Toady: | More, more, he he he. We have ideas of what's in and what's out, at least. |
| Threetoe: | Okay, the next question is from Chris and he asks, "I was wondering if you would be willing to talk a bit about your algorithms for generating cities and dungeons." |
| Toady: | The cities and the dungeons are mainly built up respecting the 48 by 48 tile restriction that you have to respect when you're moving around, and it loads in those chunks. So even the ones that don't really look that rectangular or square like the adventurer towns with the plots that are divided up - especially the ones that are more agricultural - they still are all just based on moving the centre of a point inside of a square and then connecting it to similar neighbours. Sometimes there's some subdivision that goes on, especially in the dungeons, but it's not all that complicated, it's just built up over time. Just all kinds of things built on top of them. |
| Threetoe: | I'd like to jump in and say how good I think they look and just brag about my brother for a little while, because it is really hard to make maps look good, and it takes a lot of math and a lot of creativity. And if you just look at the modern-day ones that are mainly just hand-crafted or really poorly made, procedurally. I would just like to congratulate my brother on some excellent maps that he's drawn. |
| Toady: | He he he he he... Yeah, well, no, well we're always moving forward. Algorithm-wise I'm not really sure where to point, because it's such simple stuff. But yeah, just look at subdivisions and Voronoi diagrams, all that kind of thing. But mainly just keep working on them until they look right. |
| Threetoe: | So the next question is from Matthew, and he asks, "Is there any chance of seeing a return of the dwarven economy any time soon?" |
| Toady: | The things that we're working on with the start scenarios, as we may have mentioned before, are linked in to adding information about property and laws. That should get us positioned to really put that stuff back in. We had problems with not having the armies moving around made it impossible to do caravans properly. And we didn't really have any good information on who owned what and that kind of thing. So we've been working on it framework-wise all this time, and hopefully, once the start scenarios are complete, we'll be in a good position to make decisions about where we are with that. Whether it's going to be working straight in on trading stuff or continuing to come at it obliquely. |
| Threetoe: | Like the thief arc, say? |
| Toady: | Yeah, that kind of thing. |
| Threetoe: | The next question is from Justin, and he asks "If multiple dwarves can claim the same position, could they gain supporters and could have their rivals assassinated or such?" |
| Toady: | Hehehe. Yeah that was the idea with those claims, which haven't really been fully realized, was to approach this question of faction in the fortress. That's also going to be part of these starting scenarios, they're going to allow for faction to develop. And as we put in ideas of the extended family, and different social classes, that'll give more opportunity for faction to develop. If we pursue our mining company idea, that'll allow different kinds of factions to develop. More between kinda the 'producers' and the 'people who own things'. So it's something we really want to explore, but we haven't gotten right into. Hopefully, as we do that kind of thing, we can move from the individual tantrum, and the individual insanity stuff that we have now, that, you know, is gamey and just make people fight, or move out of the fortress, or overthrow the government. Stuff that actually happens. |
| Threetoe: | Okay the next question is from Zack, and he asks: "What mechanics are you going to have to implement before idle dwarves to start to have some personality? Say getting into fights, drinking recreationally, making art, or generally ruining the organization you have worked hard to implement." And related to that is, acaerofox asks: "Items with no functions bother me. I want to see children playing with toys, nobles wearing crowns, and I wanted to see dwarves drinking out of mugs and busting out musical instruments at parties, and cooks preparing dinners with their favourite pot and spoon. Any chance we'll see any of this?" |
| Toady: | A lot of those things came up when we were talking about taverns, right? So yeah. I think we're finally gonna start getting into moving away from these really boring parties and breaks where dwarves do even less, and giving them room to play around and to finally use some of the objects. I don't know about cooks using pots and spoons... That's a harder question. It's almost like those coins that blew out the economy the first time, by scattering all over the place. |
| Threetoe: | Right, like, the workshops would have to have tools, then, too... |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's a messy question that we haven't resolved... |
| Threetoe: | The next question is from Baffle Jack and he asked "If the two main modes are heading in a similar direction, will they be combined so that you have the option to skip to where you're the leader of the fort or will a line be drawn between the modes or what?" |
| Toady: | So it's one of those things, again, that we've been thinking about for years... lots of suggestions... The original game has this idea of being able to have your reclaim party be formed during adventure mode and that kind of thing. And that's all still on the table. The tricky parts are kind of, we don't have any real framework for adventure mode administration yet. You can take over sites in adventure mode now, at least the human ones you can form your own little entity and become the leader of a site. But it doesn't really mean anything. And when you're in fort mode, we didn't want to allow kind of cheap stuff that would allow you to take a dwarf and jump him off a cliff if they're being annoying, by controlling them directly. We want to kind of respect their autonomy. |
| And we've continued to think of ways that we could merge them together. We were talking the other day about having... when you abandon your fortress, being able to control some of the dwarves that leave by being one of them as an adventurer with the other ones following you. That kind of thing. But we haven't really decided which ways we're going to go with. We do hope to have these different merges and connections with the modes, though. | |
| Threetoe: | The next question comes from Nathan, and he asks: "Do you have any long-term goals of adding more service types to adventure mode? Like for instance, collecting a specific or unique item for someone that is possibly stolen or they heard of the item and they desire it. We just answered this question with the... |
| Toady: | Yeah yeah. We talked about those. The non-player artifacts are gonna kinda be our next step with adventure mode service types or whatever the phrasing was there. I mean I was trying to get the game away from specific quests and so on, but at this early juncture, kill things, find items, that's all very fair. And hopefully it will organically move over to serving some particular cause, or helping yourself, or some people, when you do things like that. To the point where you make up your own quest and help someone out with your own initiative. But certainly when we do the non-player artifacts this kind of things is just going to be sticking right in our face. |
| Threetoe: | Okay. So the next question comes from Sizik, and he asks: "You currently have three in-game, mythical, non-existent creatures: the centaur, the griffon, and the chimera. What are your plans for these? Did you pick these three to be fanciful? And not say, unicorns or minotaurs? What about procedurally-generated mythical creatures?" |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's interesting because the minotaur is also a mixture of two creatures, like the centaur, griffon and chimera, right? The minotaur has the bull's head and the human body, and the unicorn is like a mixture of a horse and a narwhal. Those are real creatures. |
| Threetoe: | It could be said that all the animal people are the same kind of thing. |
| Toady: | That's true, that's true, the animal people. The real trick with, like, the centaur is that it, unlike the minotaur which is practically a human with horns or something, the centaur really does have pieces from two separate creatures, and the other ones have two or more as well. So it's one of those things we hope to do procedurally, where their bodies would have splicing points and you could kind of glue them together, but it slowed down a bit when we started worrying about like, well, what about the materials and how would the hair work. It's not an impossible problem, or even particularly difficult, but it's time consuming and just annoying enough that we haven't done it yet. I expect what will happen is that we'll just start getting procedural glued-together creatures and the specific ones may become real at some point, but I'm not sure. |
| Threetoe: | [garbled] before, the owlbear or whatever. |
| Toady: | He he he... You never know... |
| Threetoe: | The next question comes from Dermal_Plating, and he asks: "Will it ever be possible to hire mercenaries in fortress or adventurer mode." |
| Toady: | Yeah, we're adding that in with taverns, and we specifically mentioned that with fortress mode, that you'd be able to hire some of the people that come to your fortress and in adventure mode, we're practically there, we just need some money to change hands or something. All of that economy stuff is always a little slower than everything else, but it's coming, pretty soon. |
| Threetoe: | Okay, the next question comes from Krasudreal Eranor Ksarth, and they ask: "When will you work on creatures that have an alternate reproductive scheme?" |
| Toady: | He he he, I don't know exactly when we're going to work on that. We have kind of been plagued by the tadpole for a while, it's a difficult question about metamorphosis. Or caterpillars to butterflies, with the chrysalis in between, that kinda thing. |
| Threetoe: | There's always the zombie that you cut off the arm and there's two of them now. |
| Toady: | He he he, at least we've got that. We've got that and we've got our animated skins. But yeah, it's intriguing to add things like that. Part of the difficulty comes from abstractly respecting their reproductive schemes in world-generation and so on. It gets to be annoying if you had a civilised race, then it would have to figure out how to deal with it in some way, so we just kinda put that stuff off. |
| Threetoe: | So the next question comes from Caz, and they ask: "Why can't dwarves build tables and other furniture constructions outside?" |
| Toady: | That's a really old restriction. I don't know that there's really a reason for it other than that it seemed kind of silly at the time. Back when there was just a river, and the cliff, and it would rain outside, and you wanna kinda get inside. It wasn't like where you have this broad expansive outdoor area now in the Z-level release or whatever - the 3D version. But before, it really made no sense to try and build a fortress outside, except maybe a wall or something. I don't know if you could ever build walls in that one, I don't remember anymore, it's been so long. So it's a restriction that doesn't make sense now, it'll probably be lifted at some point. |
| Threetoe: | The next question comes from Tim, and he asks: "Whenever you get back around to taverns, can we expect procedural/historical songs along the lines of the engravings?" |
| Toady: | He he he he. Yes, yes, because when we add songs, we've promised musical instruments, and it's not just going to say something like, "Dwarf is playing instrument." You know we'd never stop there, he he he. So it's gonna, initially, it will at least name the songs, classify the songs as different kinds of artwork. Because, remember we don't just have engravings, we have the necromancers' books, and those go very specifically into the subject matter and so on, and the songs aren't going to be any different. They'll probably be stored in the same way. I doubt we'll get to lyrics and stuff now. We had kind of threatened to do the romantic poetry generator, but I think it would be a little premature to jump right into that. But there's going to be information there, and you'll probably even be able to go into the adventure mode tavern and sing a favourite song of your culture and so on. |
| Threetoe: | Cool. The next question comes from Fred Lobster, and he asks: "Have you ever considered allowing alternative positive strange mood types?" |
| Toady: | If this means things like where you aren't just building an artifact, but the architect has a weird mood or the miner has a weird mood and produces something more appropriate for their profession, those ideas have been floating around for a long time. We haven't really decided, we don't understand the strange mood itself well enough yet to have answers for those questions, we haven't really explored it. It's kind of tied in with magic and that kind of thing, so it's possible that things like that could happen when we get much further along. |
| SFX | (Musical Interlude) |
| Threetoe: | So the next question comes from superbob, and he asks "Will we ever get some chemical interactions going on?" and his other question is: "How about a lot of the player control for austerity measures in fortress mode, or even martial law where food and booze could be rationed?" |
| Toady: | Hehe, so chemistry. Aside from the things we have like lye right now and making soap with fat, and so on, it's something we haven't done much with. I mean to the point where we have giant walls of anhydrite that just sort of sit there and get rained on and nothing happens. That's kinda the thing that makes it difficult to think about and also that I don't have a working, practical knowledge of that kind of stuff to know where to start and what they'd be useful for. And there's always the problem of fantasy acid: you want acid to be able to do horrible things to people, but that would be like magic acid, he he he. Yeah, so I'm not sure what we're going to do with that, I mean there's a lot of cool things to do, but yeah, hard to say how that's going to proceed. |
| For austerity measures, it's kind of interesting when we get to the laws and the new framework after the start scenarios go in. Will the player be able to enact laws and what kind of things will they be able to control? We've been poring over law books and so on recently to get a feel this as we're planning ahead. Even back then, you go into the minutia of things. There's a lot of possible control you could have. It's hard to say where's it's going to go, especially if you're running a prison colony or something. | |
| Threetoe: | Right, if you want to lockdown dwarves in their cells or something. |
| Toady: | He he he... |
| Threetoe: | Okay, the next question is from Antonio, and he asks "Do you plan on adding things such as genetics for selective breeding of animals? It would be nice to choose which animals reproduce so that we can raise cattle that give more milk or sheep that have better wool and such." |
| Toady: | Yeah, we only got started on that genetics stuff. Right now the little genes sitting inside the animals control their color and their overall size and other physical characteristics that are controlled by the modifiers in the raws. But we don't have any modifiers in the raws for milk amounts and there's no wool quality at all. It's just another one of those features that needs to be extended as you go, and you'd have the breeding just come along for the ride with that. At least to a certain extent, because you have the individual animals you're breeding in the fortress, and then there's the matter of recognizing a breed. We already have a breed structure set up that separates out kinds of animals in different civilizations and even uses it on the civilized people to do things like hair color and stuff so that the people look different. But going from one to the other... It's not a super hard problem, it's just a little annoying. What is the specifications for the breed. What things are in, what things are out, that kind of stuff. Just all those extra variables when you actually want to make it matter economically. I mean size in important for things like war animals. Yeah, there's a lot more that can be done there, and who knows when. |
| Threetoe: | The next question comes from Jimi12, and he asks "Have there ever been any planned features or goals that you had to scrap because it would be too impossible or time-consuming to implement? If so, what were they?" Well, the big fat example is the economy for this one. |
| Toady: | He he he he, yeah, we had that briefly, it wasn't working, we tossed it. There's really a lot of things like that, that end up getting changed or don't get done. I always throw time travel out there, but there's plenty of them that have been very difficult. The different fluids, mixing fluids, that kind of thing. We really want to have flowing oil in the game and stuff like that, but there are tricks to getting that to work in the 3D setup. Even things like thin ice we haven't done yet, and there are complications to doing it. There's really a whole lot of stuff, but the whole game is growing slowly and eventually we'll get a few of them. |
| Threetoe: | So the next question comes from Ignacio, and he asks "Are you planning to implement a better model of the different layers of soil and stone? It seems strange to find soil only on the first two levels or in underground caves and also underground rivers." |
| Toady: | We put the soil on the top because we were kind of trying to do a sedimentary model with the bedrock underneath. I mean the whole thing is strange, it's got those giant caverns, and there's a lot of things that are missing in terms of how the soil is laid down or how the stones are placed and so on. We especially are missing the alluvial stuff, like all the river stones and how the rivers spill out sediment and that kind of thing. I don't know specifically what the issue was, but there's stuff to be done. But we're probably going to get to things like canyons and cliffs and stuff before we look at any of that again. |
| Threetoe: | The next question comes from Pauli, and he asks, "Have you ever planned to make improvements to new features such as machinery, cave-ins, and collapsing aquifer-related functionality? It would be exciting to penetrate the aquifer layers and use some kind of cave-ins, pumps, or constructions. At the moment it can't reasonably be done. Also it would be awesome to create bigger constructions such as moving walls, lifters, and mine trains powered by steam." |
| Toady: | I think people do break through the aquifer somehow, I don't know how they do it, but it's probably not a reasonable solution. I don't know much about that, like how people deal with large bodies of water, especially with period stuff. We do have the sort of moving fortress pieces and elevator type stuff that is going to go in and we're going to do boats with the same machinery. That'll come. It's on the dev page, when it comes in. We're not too interested in steam power. We don't really want to get into the whole steampunk aesthetic. Even though I guess, I read online recently that someone has classified us as clockwork punk or gear punk or clock punk or something like that. I don't know why it's punk, but there are gears in the game anyway. |
| Threetoe: | Okay, the next question comes from Sotsepmet Koicei and they ask, "How's planar travel looking? How will adventurers and forts reach into the next plane? Will there be noble titles for each plane and requirements for each noble? Will they be available from the get-go via a workshop-like building? And simply contain too much danger for the unprepared fortress to breach? Will adventurers need to find special portals or magic items and train in planar skill?" |
| Toady: | Hehehe. Well, it could be anything. Planar travel is a difficult problem to add. We're hoping when we add stuff like that in that it isn't just some fixed setup, but it's different every time. Since we haven't added anything, it's going to be procedural from the beginning. As for technically how hard it's going to be to do; it's basically like adding the Z-coordinate, that took some months. So we're not eager to jump in there and do it. We have a little bit of the framework set up, but not much. It's just one of those somewhat distant features that we're excited about doing, but we don't want to get sidetracked into right now. |
| Threetoe: | Okay, the next question is, "How much magic will be available to dwarves, and what would you like to see it represented in? Will it be limited to alchemy or hedge-wizards, or will there be schools of magic available as different classes of soldiers are today?" |
| Toady: | Well, we've talked a lot about magic in the previous episodes. With dwarves, our sort of baseline idea is all artifact based, and that beyond that it would kind of be slider based, you could go to the no-magic world, or the very minimal magic world, or you could start getting into this kind of factory-based magic that we'd prefer to stay away from for the default setting. I mean it's like D&D magic often seems kind of factory based. |
| Threetoe: | Factory like your wizards are creating +5 swords every 2 hours or something like that. |
| Toady: | Yeah. It's not magical, really, it's just fantasy I guess. We're kind of hoping to thread a needle with the default, but to throw in some options. Of course, you can't just talk about throwing in all kinds of magical options in fortress mode without respecting some kind of "how would the interface work?", or "how would you choose to organize these things?" especially if they're all procedurally generated. It's a difficult problem. We'll just see what happens, but we'll probably start with artifacts. |
| Threetoe: | Okay, their next question is, "Will walls and floors remain indestructible at an ideal end of development?" |
| Toady: | No. The walls and floors were never intended to be indestructible. When you have the magma slap up against a wooden wall, that's silly. It's just that there're some difficult problems to solve speed-wise to get those things to work. If the question is more along the lines of invaders and stuff, I think we've been over digging invaders a lot, that we're pretty much for it, but we understand that some people would want to turn it off. |
| Threetoe: | Okay, and their last question is, "Will there ever be a way to specify what the subject of a statue or engraving ought to be?" |
| Toady: | Yeah, definitely. I believe that's up on the dev pages, but it's in our notes for things and what you should be allowed to do. Now we'd like the dwarves to be as autonomous as possible; we'd like dwarves to come up with their own artwork and that kind of thing. But if you want something, especially if you're doing like a temple or something and you want a statue of the particular god at the northern wall of this room, situated in just such a way so that you can satisfy the requirements of what the temple should be like, that kind of thing. Or you want to make a picture of an elf dying because you don't like them and you want to stick it out front and make it out of wood. Yeah, that's all cool. And the dwarves should enjoy working on those projects in some cases, sometimes they should be a little upset to have to work on a commission like that. But there are lots of different ways to handle that. |
| Threetoe: | The next question comes from Erich, and he asks, "When will goblins be able to take things from the battlefield, and how hard would it be to track what they take?" |
| Toady: | It's kind of a similar question to just caravans in general, army equipment, all that kind of thing. We've got moving armies now. We don't have anything about their equipment. There are not too many complications to doing that, we just haven't done it yet, so getting things like having the attackers raid the battlefield and so on. We have some little stories about that. Remember "Battlefield Lunch" was a story with scavengers on the battlefield. We had some power goals about that kind of thing too. So it's on the radar. Well, we need battlefields first. I mean there's the fortress battlefield, which is one thing, but there are lots of other things that need to be done. Mainly the issue is item equipment, which will come in around the time of the caravans most likely. |
| Threetoe: | Okay, the next question comes from Joao, and he asks, "Do you plan on having adventurers be able to cook their food? Do you plan on detailing the cooking so that things that will be made with flour are cakes or breads while others are made of honey or sugar would be called candies or something like this?" |
| Toady: | Yeah, we used to - we just had a little bit of a framework for recipes originally, and then it was removed, as typically happens when we're pushing forward on stuff. We're going to come back and do that with the taverns; it's on the list, in the ordered development list. And this is kinda what we mean by recipes; you'll make things, with stuff, that have proper kinds of names. I don't know about requiring the adventurer to cook at this point; that's not right now in the plans, but I mean it's certainly reasonable that people should have to preserve food and otherwise not get all kinds of infections and nasty stuff crawling up inside of them and so on. |
| Threetoe: | Okay, the next question comes from Red181 and he asks, "Will gods actually be implemented so that you can go and kill them with your adventurer? Or an attack by a god and his minions on your fort if your dwarves have lived in sinful ways? Maybe they could grant you a wish if you manage to find them." Okay, so this sounds like our friends, who would... We'd invite them over to play Dungeons and Dragons, and they'd want to kill Odin. |
| Toady: | He he he... |
| Threetoe: | Or Thor. |
| Toady: | Odin had to go. I don't know why. |
| Threetoe: | Yeah. We never did that; we always were stuck on level one. We were like - computer games, that was the way we ran our adventures. |
| Toady: | Yeah, we were bad, we never tried high-level characters in any of the RPGs we played. Certainly, the gods right now in the game are in world generation. They're a little bit active, and they have their angels you can kinda find now in the world, so - and some of our power goals talk about physical manifestation - so, certainly at some point that's probably gonna happen, especially for pantheons that get weaker down on the human scale of things rather than being omnipresent and so on. So it's certainly fair, and especially attacks by gods and their minions. I mean, we have the minions now running around at least in their little homes, but it'll be an on-going process. We may see a little more activity from gods in the making of laws, and the making of artifacts perhaps, coming up. |
| Threetoe: | Okay, the next question is from Andrew Montagne, and he asks, "Fort mode causes a form of time dilation to beset the world. I was wondering how ingrained into the code the time dilation in fort mode is, and whether it has any appreciable effect on the rest of the world, and whether it would be possible for the time dilation factor to be altered by the player." |
| Toady: | Time dilation is pretty hard-coded. It's all over the place. It's faster that way, to have it compiled in as a constant, and I don't see changing that. It would be bad news to do that, speed-wise I think, so - and it's kind of the, the most... sort of irritating I guess, problem between the two modes, is that they work on these different time scales. Because it changes all kinds of things, like how much alcohol is the dwarf drinking when they drink one unit, and should it be the same amount that the adventurer drinks? So there are things that get abstracted. But then if you're switching between modes, is it supposed to generate more items to represent those items, and how is it supposed to put the genie back in the bottle when you go back to another mode or whatever? So there are a lot of problems with it, but it's also kind of important that fort mode go fast, so that you can see children be born and grow older and that kind of thing. That's just one of the difficult problems with the game. |
| SFX | (WEIRD MUSICAL INTERLUDE) |
| Threetoe: | Okay, the next question is from Robbert, and he asks, "Is there any particular function you would like to redesign, refactor, or even remove from dwarf fortress mode, and if so, why?" |
| Toady: | We were thinking about this one a little bit and, uh, it seems like everything works that way, he he he. |
| Threetoe: | Yeah, I think if you had to say something general, it would just be the interface, probably, right? |
| Toady: | Yeah... I mean if we're going to the obvious things, the interface and all that is terrible. I mean, redoing the fluids, redoing the pathing, redoing everything... All of the industries, how the buildings work, I don't even know if I'd come back with workshops or just go with the zones approach that we've all been talking about for so long. There's really a lot of things that could be changed, and that's kind of just the regular process of game development, is just moving forward and gutting things, especially on a project like this. |
| Threetoe: | That's right. Next question comes from Abanoub and he asks, "I've read in the forums that you've had plans to make children learn stuff so that they aren't totally useless before they grow up. How are you going to do this? Are you going to create schools with children that come and learn specific skills and where the amount that is learned is proportional to the teacher's skill and the student's concentration skill?" |
| Toady: | Well I mean, that's how we run those training sessions now, for the military. But with children, I don't know much about any organised schools that were period, there are probably certain specific examples, but mostly it would be along the lines of the apprentice relationship is a big one. And then you could have, for instance, the child could actually be useful and move items to the workshop while the master works, for instance, and they could slowly pick up skills so that when they become an adult, they could already have a couple of skill levels that they have obtained during this process. I mean, that's not really a big deal when you consider the larger picture, since the dwarves gain skill pretty quickly. But when we do things like adding shoddy quality levels, like negative quality levels for people that don't have the skill, and we make it harder to gain the skill when you start from nothing because you don't know anything and you can't just invent thousands of years of work by yourself, it will be an interesting thing indeed, and the learning of children may actually become important if you play a fortress for any period of time. |
| Threetoe: | Okay, the next question comes from FrankyPlaysGames, and they ask, "Will you ever consider having patients in a hospital be visited by their family and friends? Could this lead to last goodbyes and happy thoughts, or even sad thoughts for both the visitor and the patient? Perhaps they could do this while they were on break." |
| Toady: | It's a good idea. We've considered similar things. I don't remember if we've considered that particular one. I mean we have things about funerals, anniversaries and wedding parties we already have in the game, kind of. I guess we are going to start making breaks a little more interesting anyway. Slowly we'll be putting things in as we're reminded about things like this, they'll start to creep into the game. Just having the dwarves be able to do some interesting things on break is going to be a good motivator to making that part of the game more interesting. It would be good if the dwarves' idle life is entertaining and interesting enough that you don't feel like you're just losing work when it happens. |
| Threetoe: | The next question is from Jacob, and he asks, "Will nobles give a better explanation why they want something?" |
| Toady: | Well, there isn't really much of a reason right now. They do have their preferences, where if they prefer a certain material, they'll ban its export and then demand that you make stuff out of it. And that's really all the reasons that we have right now. I think as the start scenarios and other things move forward, we'll probably slowly move away from arbitrary demands being one of the forces at work in your fortress and move it over toward things that actually make a little more sense. And then hopefully, by that time you won't need better explanations or we'll provide them when they're necessary. |
| Threetoe: | The next question comes from Chevil, and he asks "How often does Threetoe play Dwarf Fortress and what mods does he use?" |
| Threetoe: | Well, I don't use any mods, because I'm usually playtesting the legacy mode when it comes out, and I can't even resize my screen - that's how hardcore I am with Dwarf Fortress. |
| Toady: | He he he, yeah, we've got him playing quite a bit. |
| Threetoe: | Okay, the next question is from Jason Mel, and he asks "When you begin work on a major new Dwarf Fortress release, what process do you go through to determine the scope of its new features? How do you go about deciding what will be included in a major release and what its boundaries will be?" |
| Toady: | He he he... |
| Threetoe: | Well, this is exactly what we're doing now. We're coming out with a series of things that are coming in the next releases and we're going to try to make this kind of contract with the fans with what we're going to do next. It's all new, this is a new experience. |
| Toady: | We had that two-year release, and that was a really painful process. I'd say that, when we talk about major releases, sometimes we don't know they're going to be major releases, other times we know they are. It's been different every time; there's not some process that we've been sticking with for the last 12 years that we just do it, just "okay, it's time to do the process again". We're trying, this time, as hard as ever to keep it reined in, keep clear divisions between the things that we're going to add and make sure that we can get several releases out when we do start working on new stuff in December. And hopefully we'll be successful this time. You can see the lists, it seems like it will work. He he he. We'll have to wait and see. It's easy to overlook stuff. There's so many interconnections, so many different things going on, that it wouldn't surprise me if we had to go on some tangent and then that can get out of control. We're just trying, trying to think about it and do a good job. |
| Threetoe: | Okay, the next question comes from Nwob, and he asks, "Toady has mentioned in past episodes, in relation to putting more randomly generated things in the game, that he's worried about the 'gray sludge' problem. Essentially that's an excessive amount of randomized materials and animals that will lead to people simply not caring either way. I was wondering what plans you had, if any, to stave this off as the amount of randomized content continues to increase." |
| Toady: | Well, our main plan, and it's not really a specific plan, is just handling the whole world, basically, through exposition so that you're introduced at first to the main concepts. And now this is assuming a completely random world or one that has really important random elements, say if the map had giant, random, strange features on it and there was a whole civilization of creatures that was completely different and randomly generated and, say, half the plants were generated or something. Then we'd first want to add to world generation some extra paragraphs (because right now world generation is not too exciting, the years go forward and you just look at a map that hardly changes most of the time) so you could interact a bit more with that, or you could have a paragraph or two explaining the general, really big picture stuff that everyone who lives in the world would know, like what is the major geographic point, what's a strange civilization, and what about it. And then as you encounter things, continue to feed you that information with some paragraphs and so on. It's, I think, manageable because the default setting would be sort of at the mid-level where a few paragraphs would handle the strange points from the beginning, and then if you encounter a few weird animals later you can look at their descriptions and feel pretty well at home with what's going on. |
| Now, if you crank the slider so that you get to scrap the raw files entirely and just go with 100% random content, then, I think as the player, you would know what you're getting into when you do that and it might nudge you a little bit and tell you, "This is what you're getting into," so that you'd be prepared to read some more material and also just roll with the punches. If your dwarves suddenly die because they step into some kind of carnivorous grass or something and you're just like, "Well, ok that's part of life and death in this world.". So, I think as long as I don't just dump it right now and just go make all my generators and just throw it all over the game, I think we'll be fine. | |
| Threetoe: | Okay, the next question comes from Pooky, and they ask, "Are we going to see AI adventurers passing through the fortress, going on some weird quest, and requesting some of your guards and gear to help them, and a promise of a reward if they return and succeed, and the deaths of the followers if he doesn't?" |
| Toady: | Well, that's kind of a specific example I guess. We're starting with the dwarf inns with a kind of, say, a mercenary that comes through that you can hire. The trick with expanding AI adventure activity is the 'repair of the world' issue. If you have a bunch of monster hunters, and night creature slayers running around slaying night creatures and killing monsters, they will quickly depopulate the world if there are too many of them, or if their job is a little too easy or if the night creatures don't replenish themselves, so it's something to approach with some caution. |
| Once that's in, though, then those people will visit your fortress, because that's what they do. I don't know exactly when we'll get to this sort of specific diplomatic interaction with them that would cause them to actually involve you in a specific quest. We're starting with the mercenary stuff, and that will have a bit of that in it because that's their job. It's something to be cautious about though and not actually jump into too quickly until we, for instance, get the vampires to convert more people or... the werewolves do a pretty good job converting people actually. But the night trolls don't do any of their conversions, they only do them in world generation, they don't do them after. That would be a requirement before we got those kinds of things set up. And we'll have to see what happens with the artifacts as well. | |
| Threetoe: | The next question is from Eggman360, and he asks, "Do you think that it would be useful for object interactions to include such actions as dipping items and weapons into other containers, liquids or contaminants?" |
| Toady: | Yeah, definitely. We actually had, the veterans will remember this, the old bat-people that rode around on their giant bats and went up and down the chasms had blow-guns that were dipped in giant cave-spider venom. And it worked, it paralyzed your dwarves when they got shot. That code is still in the game: a coated item will pass along whatever syndromes to the person that is stabbed, so dipping would work immediately once you had access to a poison like that. So it's just something that's missing from the adventure mode interface. I'm not sure about dwarves---we never really thought of them as poisoners, but we'll see if that changes when we get our prison colony up. |
| Threetoe: | Okay, the next question is from Adventurer, and he asks, "I'm wondering, now that the world is slowly becoming alive, what are some ways that you imagine Fortress Mode will interact with the world in the future? Things like maybe sending help during a siege to nearby hamlets, or exchanging hostages." |
| Toady: | Yeah, so that's one of the major development goals and actually the reason we're adding hill-dwarves in with the start scenarios is to allow you to have the numbers to take part in the broad range of things that can go on in the world and we have a plan, more-or-less laid out for sending out patrols and gathering a number of hill-dwarves as well and sending them out and maybe being able to stomp out a kobold cave, for example, or to respond. There's actually a power-goal about getting a request for help from, say, the humans and sending out a squad that actually manages to help resolve the conflict in their favor and having it actually be a part of the world that you're involved in and just getting that done would have satisfied that power goal. So it's definitely something we're pointing toward, something that's been on the menu for a long time. We're continuing to make strides in that direction, and this directed development plan's going to be part of that. |
| Threetoe: | The next question comes from Christoph, and he asks "If you had to pick just one amazing thing that your fans had done in-game, what would it be? Turing computer, for example, or an overly complex trap of some sort is another. I'm not sure. What is your own personal choice?" |
| Toady: | Well, we recently looked back at that Life computer, right, that was - |
| Threetoe: | Yeah, I think that's probably the best one, but one of my favourite things that the fans have done is when they climbed to the top of the highest mountain in their world, before we had really conceived of that as a possibility, and when they did that they actually escaped the atmosphere and froze before they could make it to the end, or just in time. I always thought that was pretty cool. |
| Toady: | Yeah, in honour of those people we actually added the announcement for summiting a mountain, that wasn't there before. Yeah, there are so many different things. |
| Threetoe: | The water computers are crazy. |
| Toady: | Yeah, the water computers and we were troubled by the mermaid bones, of course. And troubled by the well filled with vampire blood that allowed people to kind of make a vampire army and stuff. |
| Threetoe: | Oh, right, yeah. The way they weaponize every little thing. |
| Toady: | And of course the stories have been amazing, the YouTube movies and stuff. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you guys are awesome. |
| Threetoe: | Okay, the next question comes from Hermes, and he asks "In one of the Conan stories he goads a monster into attacking by yelling at it from the top of a rock. In the new combat conversation systems, will such kinds of interactions be possible, even if the beasts themselves can't participate in the conversation? |
| Toady: | He he he. So yeah, you can talk to your god, that doesn't talk back, but you can't talk to beasts. I don't think it lets you, and you should be able to. And also it should kind of understand that sound is being produced and that it should give away your location. It doesn't do that yet, not a hard problem, just kind of the growing pains of the system. I expect you'll be able to do that in time. I mean, you can already see the sound indicators for conversations that are going on inside of buildings and it's just something that they'd need to be taught about, basically. |
| Threetoe: | The next question comes from Martin, and he asks "Fantasy worlds are known for their abnormal, natural or human-made landscape features, which constitute a significant anchor-point in the legends, conflicts, or just to add a bit of style to the storytelling. Dwarf Fortress world-gen tends to generate perfectly realistic and rather un-fantastical worlds. Do you consider, in the foreseeable future, some sort of modification to world-gen in order to provide a less earth-like and more fantasy-like terrain and structures?" |
| Toady: | Yeah, definitely. And not just the planar stuff, I mean that's one side of it, but that's really extreme. Before then we'll probably see one of the other dev items that was posted, I think, and it's certainly on our own dev pages as a kind of world-spanning feature. We've had these kind of evil/good regions but that's really just a very small chunk of it. I mean, we've talked in the past about sphere-designated regions and we've kind of played around with that a little bit with the vault angels. But, more than that, having features that are region sized, that can kinda twist throughout the world in different shapes like spider webs shapes and stuff, and be analogous to rivers but not be rivers, or be analogous to a forest and not be a forest, and just kinda be blobs and webs and all kinds of things. And having it understand, you know, what it means, what it does, where it came from, if anywhere. That's all part of the plan and I guess the only reason that kind of thing hasn't been done yet is that it is sort of a side note to basic frameworks, rather than leading to other things. It's just cool by itself. But we do do that kind of thing occasionally. |
| Threetoe: | The next question comes from Simon, and he asks "How much have you been influenced by the weirdness of old-school D&D and fantasy literature in your game? Things like fungi forests, randomized creatures, forgotten beasts and the low survival rate of adventurers are all characteristic of old-school RPGs, much so less in the modern era." |
| Toady: | Yeah, we were influenced by a lot of that stuff. The, uh, yeah, I don't remember where the first fungus forest was or was that just Journey to the Center of the Earth or something? I mean, that's where that kind of thing comes from. It doesn't seem like a normal thing to think about, but there it is. Randomized creatures from Starflight, pretty much, and we, yeah, we played those unforgiving games, he he he, in the past and we read a lot of those books. I think the original email that had this question referenced the appendix N of the D&D books, and that was just kind of a list of literature that influenced Dungeons and Dragons and we had certainly read many of those things. So I think it's fair to say, especially because our game has basically been, even though we didn't achieve too much,it's been the same idea from around 1993 or 1994, the same basic idea and the same kind of level of characters dying, that kind of stuff. Yeah, we just haven't been influenced so much by the modern RPGs, although we probably have a lot of similar influences. |
| Threetoe: | The next question comes from Onebadterran, and he asks "Will we be seeing an option in world-gen to select a continuous landmass or separate continents?" |
| Toady: | So I think you can kind of do that now if you use the grids and subdivide the grid and put a lot of variance for different - if you want separate little islands, but there's not a lot of control right now. And I think that's a fair thing to do, but it's kind of a hard question, like which sort of options should be brought up to the main menu and which kind of things should be left down in the detailed menu. Certainly those kinds of suggestions, just like as happened with the polls recently. Those things eventually creep in when people suggest them. |
| Threetoe: | The next question you had was, "Will we ever find dwelling creatures deep within the mountains that live in their own little room?" |
| Toady: | Hee hee hee. |
| Threetoe: | So, I would say that the night creatures already have their little rooms in the mountains. |
| Toady: | That's true, that's true, and we just kind of lack a, uh, something you can stumble across when you're mining that's analogous, he he he, like "What lives down deep in the rocks there?" We don't know the secret hidden lives of gremlins and gorlaks, he he he. |
| Threetoe: | "Will we ever see sandalwood and be able to use its fragrant oils that can be extracted from it, or driftwood?" |
| Toady: | Yeah, I guess we have driftwood on the beaches, but you can't really harvest it or do anything with it. And the oils - I mean, we expanded this game, the vegetation, greatly recently. That kind of thing... Probably not going to push on that again for a bit, but certainly that's where it's headed, just using all the different economical properties of trees and plants. |
| Threetoe: | Okay, the next question comes from Terrapin, and he asks "How will experts from the fort affect their civilization and others? If we have a fortress churning out masterwork steel armor and weapons and sending them to the mountainhomes for free, will we ever see our civs starting to cut down other civs?" |
| Toady: | We kind of addressed this earlier. Once we add equipment that the armies understand without having to load up individual historical figures' inventories, but just say, "This army has this stuff, this caravan has this stuff.", then the caravans that leave your fortress with your items will actually track those items. I mean, they already do, actually, but they don't use them for anything. But the armies themselves, the caravan armies moving on the map, will track those and then dump them in the civ's stockpile. The sites also have stockpiles of goods, but they only come up when you go to the shops. There's this kind of patchwork that's slowly building the economy with little disparate points that are all just going to kind of suddenly form into a picture. It's weird how it's been growing up, but we have some information, and just a little bit more and suddenly all of your trade goods would have some impact. Especially when we start doing things like army equipment, then it will really matter and you will see big changes with how your civilisation can respond to threats and so on. It should be interesting when we get to that. |
| Threetoe: | The next question comes from Florp Incarnate, and he asks "It seems that in Dwarf Fortress 2014, twisting wound-embedded weapons no longer exists. This is suboptimal for a true dwarven torture chamber simulator. Are there any plans to bring this feature back?" |
| Toady: | Yes. The thing that happened there, kind of like with the bows reloading and stuff, when we did the combat movement speed split, we switched everything over to a new system of unit moves, which are - it gives a little action and it has a timer and so on and units can be doing several moves at once and all that kind of thing. Twists were not moved over to the system just as a time expedient. I just commented them out and put a note somewhere and the note is sitting in the short-term development file, and it's just one of those things that's sitting there flopping around waiting to be done. We're all for twists. Twists are well within the parameters of what we want the game to be like, and we'll just get to it when we get to it. |
| SFX | (Musical Interlude) |
| Threetoe: | So that brings us to the end of another Dwarf Fortress Talk. We'd really like to thank everybody now, take some time and thank everybody who's helping us with this project. The people who contribute financially, that's very important, we wouldn't be able to do any of this without you. We'd be teaching math and working at the shipyard. |
| Toady: | Yeah, and thanks to everybody that asked questions this time, and we're going to need your help again, because we're out of questions. We did sit on these questions for quite a long time, but they've been answered now, and we'd like some more. Especially now that we have a new release to talk about, which was kind of one of the things holding up all of these DF talks, is just having such a long release process. |
| Threetoe: | Oh, thank you for listening by the way, listening to all of our babbling. |
| Toady: | Yes, it takes some patience and fortitude, but they can do it. Especially since we cut out - if you hear feedback, it was a million times worse, this is our second try at this podcast. He he he, we had to relearn how to do it, he he he. |
| Threetoe: | Let's see, who else... The wiki, everybody who works on mods to make the game more fun to play for those who can't suffer through the ASCII. |
| Toady: | That's right, people who answer Future of the Fortress questions, all of our intrepid bug-tracker managers, who always have their work cut out for them, he he he. |
| Threetoe: | That's right. So congratulations to the generous, with your time and everything else that you've done for us. Thank you, thank you, thank you. |
| Toady: | And look forward to the next Dwarf Fortress Talk... In the future some time... |
| Threetoe: | Ha ha ha. |
| Toady: | He he he. Maybe fewer than 18 months, but in the future... The not-too-distant future. |
| Threetoe: | Foreseeable future. |
| Toady: | That's right, it'll be foreseeable... |
| SFX | (Fade Out Musically) |
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| SADNESS |
Dwarf Fortress Talk #23, with Capntastic and Toady One, transcribed by voliol and Quatch
| SFX: | (Musical Prelude) |
| Capntastic: | Welcome to DF Talk. Welcome back friends. |
| Toady: | Yeah welcome, welcome. It's number 23! |
| Capntastic: | Number 23, immediately after number 22. |
| Toady: | And this time preceding number 24, which is going to be pretty amazing. |
| Capntastic: | Keep on the lookout for more amazing content. |
| Toady: | (laughter) Yes, so how have you been? |
| Capntastic: | Not a nice time to ask that. |
| Toady: | Yeah, not the nicest question, but I thought that I should just jump into it, not that we need to talk about too much that we don't want to talk about. |
| Capntastic: | I've been playing Dwarf Fortress lately. Have you heard of this game? |
| Toady: | Yeah! It's alright. It's in a bit of an in between patch right now, so playing it for me is more impossible than ever. Lots of little 'i's, little cyan box 'i's for items that don't have images yet, and the little debug creature that represents every creature that doesn't have an image. And then there's the border of the interface, like the little part that has the idlers and the 'Dwarf Fortress' at the top, moving in and out of existence. (laughter) We have a handle on it, but it's definitely an in-between process right now. |
| Capntastic: | So this is for the Steam release. |
| Toady: | Yeah. |
| Capntastic: | That's the big news. |
| Toady: | Oh right we have to ... this is going to be an exciting episode because it's been ... 6 years. |
| Capntastic: | It's been a brief period of ... catching ... breath. |
| Toady: | So what's happened in 6 years? It's been a pretty exciting ride. Going back in time, we had the villains release, and we had an artifacts release and we had a ... |
| Capntastic: | What do those mean for me as a player? |
| Toady: | It depends on what kind of player you are. Mostly, that life is slightly more annoying for you. But you can also cause trouble for people, it's basically a lot of trouble. You can send out your dwarves and pester people, and they'll pester you in return. |
| Capntastic: | With zero repercussions. |
| Toady: | Yeah, aside from the occasional save-corrupting raid bug. There's ... well I mean there's repercussions in the sense that you can start a war and actually get invaded, so there is something repercussion-y about it, which is nice. People finally looking forward to having that happen, rather than having nothing happen, which is an improvement in general in a video game probably. And the villains release we had to cut short, and delay some of the features, so it didn't really get the chance to pop like we wanted. We have the occasional artifact heist, and people will turn, a bit too many, dwarves to be compromised and steal things from you. But we didn't get to any of the Adventurer Mode stuff, really, in terms of investigations, and what we were hoping were going to be some really cool plot-hook type things that would be generated. And also in dwarf mode having the villains be larger characters that you kind of learn the names of and which you investigate their organization with you little investigator dwarf that you sent out. |
| Capntastic: | I love the idea of ... you know because you have the guilds, and stuff, and they are like 'We want x, y and z,', and I like the idea of there being vying factions and villainous schemes built right into that. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it was going to really be a chance to bring some ... more or less dreams we had about the game right into the center of it, with the whole active groups of people and individuals causing trouble, partially related to you, and you can kind of dive in and just be a part of the great mess of world politics and affairs. But, we didn't quite get to that because we have the whole Steam deadline thing and all that which was ... yeah, a whole other discussion? |
| Capntastic: | It is. It seems to be a focal point of a lot of excitement. |
| Toady: | Yeah. It's brought more hundreds of thousands of people putting their eyes on the games and talking about it, and the press sites and things like posting about things they hear about, so it's kind of out of control. |
| Capntastic: | Has your day-to-day work changed because of the Steam release, that you're working on? |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's a completely different experience, really. The setup we have now, we have a little place on the internet where the artists Mike and Patrick, this is Mike Mayday and Meph from the Masterwork mod, just get together and talk about what we're doing. Like we had trees we did: we had a whole thread thread talking about exactly how the trees should look like, how the shadows work, how the foliage works, how the branches works, which has, if you've seen the ASCII lines that make up a DF tree - like, converting that into an image that still respects all the mechanical aspects of it, it was a large project. |
| Capntastic: | What looks like a tree. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's a really large project. And we did, I mean they did a great job and then I implemented a rendering for it. And it was ... yeah, whole project over there, and that's very different from how things usually are with feature additions and so forth. I mean Zach and I talk about stuff and I spit it out, that parts about the same. |
| Capntastic: | So you've gone corporate, is what you're saying? |
| Toady: | Yeah, pretty much! There is a whole group of people. It's more than just two people, not just the three people, but there's also Tanya and Victoria. We have regular discussions about how we're going to proceed talking about the game and what the artists are up to, and what images we are working on. We have the Steam news every two weeks. In addition to the weekly devlog now there's the Steam news every two weeks, and I write up a draft statement with some images, I usually send three or four images along, and then Kitfox will add a little bit at the bottom. I notice they fix my spacing too, because I have the kind of weird two spaces after the period thing that you learn in this kind of narrow sliver of education. |
| Capntastic: | Oh. Yeah, apparently people hate that. |
| Toady: | People hate that. And so, they hated it enough that I noticed that they just take that out. That was pretty funny. It's a different kind of flow of things and what I talk about in the devlogs is by nature different now. It's not so much about spinning a story of what happened in worldgen or something like that, or what features I'm working on, but what images have been done. And it's a little ... It might just because of my inexperience in this area, but it has been harder to talk about the future just because ... if the work hasn't been done and the discussions are ongoing. We don't have a marketing department in the art. This thing where we're like talking about 'Okay now we're going to talk about, in four weeks we're going to talk about rivers'. It's like 'No, we just got brooks and now we're talking about brooks'. So there's this very day-to-day way to... |
| Capntastic: | Nose to the grindstone, kind of. A little bit less high flying adventure. |
| Toady: | (laughter) Well, it's an adventure though. And there are many birds produced recently. So we've got ... unseen, unseen so this is a big surprise: we will have an eagle. And we got a kea. Everybody loves a kea. |
| Capntastic: | I love that they love taking my stuff. |
| Toady: | (laughter) It's even got the red tail-patch, right. And then not so high flying we have the cassowary and the emu coming. |
| Capntastic: | Excellent. |
| Toady: | And it's cool just to see the animals come to life. I mean obviously I am a big animal fan because there are over 200 animals in Dwarf Fortress. Yeah, I just love seeing the little animals run around and stuff. I think, in some sense even if it's upsetting to purists, having variety to the 'g' icon, so a goose and a goat and so forth... |
| Capntastic: | Goblin. |
| Toady: | Goblin. Goblin, gooses and ... geeses, goose, geese and goats. It's cool, I like to see all critters running around. And every gibbon represented. |
| Capntastic: | There you go. That's the slogan that you put on the tin. |
| Toady: | (laughter) It is ... I think it's turning out really well. Obviously it's not done yet, which is a whole thing. Like we would like to finish, of course, but there's a lot left to draw, and there's a lot left for me to do. There's this whole kind of phase two thing, right, where we will get these images up. And there's no clear distinction, which is another thing to talk about, between phase one and phase two or whatever. But there's the whole idea of getting, okay now we are getting mouse support, like I just added some buttons and borders to the embarks screen to test things out. And there's the getting the new sound and music support in, and we will have to deal with workshop mods and 'chievos and whatever. |
| Capntastic: | Chievos. |
| Toady: | Chievos. Everyone wants. |
| Capntastic: | Chievos. That's what everyone ... what about cards? |
| Toady: | Oh, there's ... that's a discussion. I mean Steam wants chievos, Steam wants cards, this is the modern era, or at least at however many years ago they added those things... |
| Capntastic: | Excellent. |
| Toady: | And, yeah, gotta do it. |
| Capntastic: | There's got to be, oh there's got to be the little emoticons! And your going to be able to chat with your Steam buddies and do the dwarf face. |
| Toady: | Yeah. Although apparently the debug creature is the most popular emoticon that's come out of our community recently. |
| Capntastic: | Excellent, it just represents everything. |
| Toady: | Yeah, Mike drew that. I had a really terrible debug creature, because I just need to see things on the screen and I need to see it quickly so I just drew a stick figure that was terrible. Of course. And Mike was like 'Let me just draw something that isn't so, you know, awful looking'. Debugging doesn't to be a mortal pain, rather it can be a cheerful, somewhat grumpy, proud looking creature, that is still clearly a debug creature because of its sort of gumdrop shape and little feets. |
| Capntastic: | Well I'll be the contrarian, I'll ask the question the question only I care about, will the Steam release have an ASCII option? |
| Toady: | So I think that the thing is that Steam likes to have parity. If you have something somewhere else they want to have it available for their fans too. Or their player base, or customers, whatever you call them these days, it's very complicated learning a new word. So there's going to be, at the very least ... you know how you can pull up a branch or whatever, like experimental branches or other branches when you right click, and go to betas or manage whatever properties or things. There will at the very least be this sort of classic ASCII version over there to play, if you have the game in your Steam library then you'll be able to do that. In terms of like plug-and-play, like click-click-click-click between... Like ... I haven't tried it on Jupiter Hell. I remember that's something that was very important to ChaosForge, to make sure it was like an ASCII roguelike no matter how smooth the graphics were, right. |
| Capntastic: | That's something I have always appreciated. |
| Toady: | Yeah. And being able to flip back and forth on the fly is a little bit of extra work, but it's something that could be done, for sure. And we'll definitely have an ASCII option, as I was saying, with the branches. So that's a yes on that one. Oh yeah I was yammering on about phases, that was what I was yammering on about. Just finishing the graphics is the sort of basic... here are some tiles. It's the first step. And this has kind of complicated the idea of having this branch, over back in the game that has already been released, for fixing up bugs, like necromancers coming to your taverns and hanging out and raising dead bodies but still being drinking buddies with everybody, and everything else that has been going on. It's kind of like 'Okay, I'll get the artists started up drawing things and then have the time to do bug fixes'. And that's still the plan but the delineation of when that's going to happen is not quite what I thought it would be because I had, as we all know, literally no experience working with people. So we'll still sort that out, that's still something we're planning to but, yeah ... So we're going through these things figuring things out as we go but, as we can see from the images, it's working, in some baseline sense we're getting the project done. |
| SFX: | (Musical Interlude)(15:05) |
| Capntastic: | Alright, so what's on the horizon in terms of new releases and features and goodies and trinkets? |
| Toady: | So we've been working with the artists to get this Steam release together. And that's going to be the focus for X amount of time. As we say in the release date on Steam: "Time is subjective". And even more subjective now the last several months here. So it really would be foolish to say when we expect that to be ready, but... |
| Capntastic: | Everything is in a you know strange ... zone. |
| Toady: | Yes. Yes, it is definitely in a weird ... in a doom-scrolling zone, in a ... yeah, yeah, lots of zones here, lot's of zones. |
| Capntastic: | I feel like I live in a Tarkovsky film. |
| Toady: | Yeah. I mean, I'm not educated enough to know exactly what that means, but I'm certain that's what we're doing. |
| Capntastic: | Possibly. |
| Toady: | Yes, yes. (laughter) Oh, we're trying our best. But when that's up, of course there's this huge, you know, unknown area about 'Well, what life's going to be like when we release to a zillion people and it's a whole new platform and there's graphics and then on-going work with artists,' and it's ... you know, foolish to say exactly what will happen afterwards, but we have a plan. We have a plan. And it relates to where we left off in the villains release, it's sort of unfinished there. We want to resume that work and get those things done. Because it was, you know, it's a series of really cool ideas and feature that should make the game a lot better. So we're going to get to that, and the other thing that was going to happen was this lead-up to the myth&magic release, because we already know from the sort of map rewrite, which we can talk about for the myth&magic release, that there's going to be a large development delay, as Dwarf Fortress players are quite familiar with. Sort of disappearing into the feature zone where everything touches everything and you just have to work on it and can't release. But before that we wanted to kind of round out some more edges, especially with the villains stuff being added in there, and sort of improve the siege situation, improve the army situation generally in both of the modes, and also get some needed features into adventure mode like the medical care and so forth. That hasn't really been fixed much by adding the shrines where you can heal yourself because the shrine can also turn you into an animal for a week or whatever, although I guess that probably also heals you. So it's ... I mean it shouldn't easy to grow your arm back but it is a kind of dangerous place roaming around the world so some options to just have a crutch or put a splint on yourself would be nice, and being able to ensure your wounds don't get infected. Just about everything that happens over there, being able to do something about it rather than sort of crawl through the mud through the rest of your life. And then there's, sort of tangentially related to that, are things like adventurer skills and other additions that sort of just round out the experience a bit. And then... |
| Capntastic: | You might be able to be career poet. |
| Toady: | You can be a poem of sorts now. You can compose a poem as I recollect, but cannot write it down ... I don't remember. Or would you have to go to a fort, and retire there, and then start in fort mode ... then I still don't think you write it down; you could only write down your scientific discoveries, which of course over in adventure mode you can't make. It's overall sort of half-assed and disappointing, which is another possible tagline for Dwarf Fortress. It wouldn't exactly ring true but there's an essence of that. |
| Capntastic: | I mean, when I play adventure mode, I find myself putting points in the skills that I'm like 'I don't know if astronomy does anything, but it might. There might be an instance where the stars reveal something to me if I have this skill. I can't not take it.' |
| Toady: | It's like RPG 101 mistakes like people learned in the 80s or whatever. Don't say that there's a hunting skill in your game if it just doesn't do anything, right, People get angry about that. You're trying to make the game feel like its fleshed out, but you really a want a list of things with clear effects and so forth. |
| Capntastic: | Kinesthetic sense. |
| Toady: | Yeah, just... |
| Capntastic: | Spacial memory. |
| Toady: | And those things, the funny thing is those ones actually do have effects, and lots of effects, and especially those two as they relate to combat and things. But of course it doesn't tell you about this. So overall it's kind of a mess that developed as being sort of the second fiddle to Dwarf Mode, in part, although Dwarf Mode in those two instances isn't really telling you much either. It's just kind of this overall problem of the game where we've been cut a lot of slack just because of how innovative a lot the game is and how much fun people can have with it, but it really does have these ... I wouldn't even call them like 'rough edges', that's way too nice. It's just ... well, I mean, yeah, I don't know. It's a question of how hard you should be on yourself, really. |
| Capntastic: | I'm trying to think of a metaphor, and all I can think of is when I was a four-year old, like you could buy Cocoa Puffs, and the back of the box would have like these perforated things you could pop up to make this little ramp that you could roll the Cocoa Puffs down, into the bowl. |
| Toady: | Yep. |
| Capntastic: | And it's not a feature that anyone wants, and it doesn't really work that good, but the idea of it is spell-binding. |
| Toady: | Yeah, there should be like a tie-in with Hungry Hungry Hippos or something, like the Cocoa Puffs roll into the arena and the hungry hippos eat them. |
| Capntastic: | A saw a video recently of some people playing Hungry Hungry Hippos with their dog and they replaced the marbles with dog kibble. |
| Toady: | Ah, yes! That's why I was reminded of that, because I also saw that video. |
| Capntastic: | Excellent. |
| Toady: | Yes, this is excellent content, and I was happy the dog won. |
| Capntastic: | We'll have to find the link for it to share with the people. The people have to know. (23:45) |
| Toady: | Yeah. It's good to see a dog eating their food in a kind of novel and enjoyable ... It's like those animal enrichment activities at the zoo, where they like lock the food in a block of ice or something. Like that, it seems borderline cruel but it's interesting, right, the animal finds... |
| Capntastic: | I was at a wildlife preserve in Oregon, the wildlife safari in Coquille I believe, and they feed the bears a bunch of fruit chunks that are just frozen in ice, which keeps them cool, rations it out, and is also I guess fun for them. |
| Toady: | (laughter) Yeah, it would be intriguing if you put my, like if made a sandwich but it was locked in ice. I'd certainly be intrigued by that. Especially if it were done by my keeper, that I cannot fathom. |
| Capntastic: | Yes. A benevolent or malevolent being. It's impossible to tell. |
| Toady: | Yeah. So I think like ... the game is rough but it will be cool, and it will get better. Changing standard is part of the sort of Steam release, changing standard of how rough it can be, right. What that means is something we're still going to figure out as we're going forwards. |
| Capntastic: | I'm curious what people who have not played Dwarf Fortress that will get the Steam release, I'm curious what ... Will it be a car crash? Will it be a difficult journey? What do you envision for completely uninitiated folks, coming to grips with this this game? |
| Toady: | Currently as it stands, when you download the ASCII one, it is a car crash with like 95% or something, the people decide not to drive the car again. Let's torture that metaphor a bit. So we're envisioning an improvement of that. Just the very beginning part is ... bad, in a lot of ways. Like if you play Civilization, and I haven't played VI or whatever so this is dated information, but you have a world generation process. You can either have parameters for that or not but it has some kind of like pictures and it has some statements, and then you get into the game and you play it, right, and there might be some pop-up tips or whatever, but that is one experience that goes in a line and do that. Whereas currently in Dwarf Fortress you have to navigate this world creation screen and there's this tempting advanced parameters screen that would temp a lot of players that think they're, that they want to have the full experience and want to click that. Which would be a mistake, right, because it's just obtuse, like really bizarre. And then once you get through that you get to a world generation which is, if you let it go, especially if you're like 'Oh I want a long history, I heard Dwarf Fortress has great histories, let's make one a thousand years long in a large world!'. You know, that's just the natural tendency for where you want to put your sliders, and so forth. And then you would be sitting there, if you had the patience for it, looking at the thing generate for an hour or more ... and then it dumps you to the title screen, right. And that is bad, because it probably just invokes people thinking 'oh it crashed' or whatever, or 'it failed'. Especially when it says 'reject 17' at the top of the screen the whole time that you do it. |
| Capntastic: | There's no immediate lever to interact with what it has just created. |
| Toady: | And in fact if you hadn't memorized the title options, you would not see that "Start Playing" is a new option that appears there. So the whole flow there is going to be changed. And so I've just been sitting here thinking about, you know, as a new player that kind of experience, right. And we aren't even to the game, yet. And so just getting people through a faster world generation, even if that means that they're kind of initially not getting the huge history options, or they are at least sort of warned about that. |
| Capntastic: | I'm curious, I've seen this posited on the forum of just having the game ship with a default world, that has already been generated. |
| Toady: | Yeah ... I'm still leaning away from the default world idea. |
| Capntastic: | It doesn't fit to me, I don't like the idea. |
| Toady: | It doesn't ... the game is supposed to be your world that you are changing and so forth and if everyone ... it kind of creates a canon for the game. That's just not something that should exist. |
| Capntastic: | I was just thinking about people making memes of historical figures and existing forgotten beasts. |
| Toady: | Yeah, I mean you would have the same 7 pictures of forgotten beasts for the rest of the history of the game then right. It's just not something we'd like to do. And we'll see what ends up happening, because if we cannot overcome these problems, then that is one of the options that we would rather not take. But we will ... it's going to be all about just making sure that, we're trying to do the best that we can in terms of ... people play the game, people like the game, people can do what they want with the game, and enjoy themselves ... So it's: the mouse has got to work. In terms of what players expect in terms of scrolling, it's like, do we have to free up the WASD-cluster and stuff like that? I mean, even on this computer that I just use to go on the internet and record DF Talk episodes and post devlogs and so forth, not much of a gaming beast, the 'W', 'A', 'S' and 'D' keys have a bright rectangle around them, right. It's intriguing. But that's where people are at, and so we have to meet them there. And that would take away eight, or 16 depending on how you count ctrl- and alt- and stuff, options, in terms of key presses, right. But you can't assume people have number pads these days, or whatever. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, that's a big one. |
| Toady: | And then you're like 'could we make mouse scrolling though?' and it's like 'maybe, but is that the expectation?' and so forth. There's just all kinds of little things like that, we'll just cross each; we're getting to the time now where we're going to be just jumping over hurdles one at a time, and figuring out what sort of options we'd like, trying to get the entire main part of the game mouse driven but also having, of course, keyboard options for everything still. And yeah, that's the trick, whether you can just click a thing to go into numpad mode or click a thing to have WASD. There's this whole, I'm sure, schools of thoughts and experience and talent in terms of UX that we're just not privy to or excellent at, but, we will endeavor and we will try to learn and we will do an okay job, now that the bar is set up real high. |
| Capntastic: | It will not just be okay, it will be... |
| Toady: | ... |
| Capntastic: | It will be... |
| Toady: | Uh-oh. |
| Capntastic: | 'Beyond quality' |
| Toady: | It is beyond ... (laughter) That's right, tee me up, tee me up, I can remember my own motto. |
| Capntastic: | Want me to say it again? We can edit it. |
| Toady: | Oh no we don't need to edit it, because this is the reality! Part of being beyond quality is screwing up like that all the time. So it's important. |
| Capntastic: | Fantastic. |
| Toady: | Yes. I mean it's beyond quality, really ... I think there will be a better retention rate than 0%, or whatever we're currently at. |
| Capntastic: | I feel like it's going to be ... like, what would it be? Because you will be having so many people coming to the game at once. It will be a renaissance. It will be tumultuous? It will be ... interesting. It will be fun. |
| Toady: | Yeah, that's for sure. I mean, yeah. And I'm looking forward to the Day One patch. (laughter) |
| Capntastic: | Oh. |
| Toady: | Like the volume of shouting, whether it's coming from people who have like a 23-monitor setup that isn't supported appropriately, or whether it's just, you know, bad issues like we've had before, I remember the rain used to catch people on fire, right. There have been Dwarf Fortress releases. The amusing one in the villains release, as we perhaps recall, is the babies, right, with the new horse AI. (laughter) |
| Capntastic: | I don't remember this. |
| Toady: | Oh, this is, yeah yeah, whole new era of Dwarf Fortress bugs. So when we added ... in adventure mode we have the parties, right, that's a new thing. You can have multiple characters in adventure mode, switch between them. I think, obviously there is some bug reports on tactical mode and so forth. You can start with pets, you can have horses and things, you can start with horses and ride them and so forth. So I had to redo the horse AI, because when mounts were used only by people who were sieging the fortress, the game could get away with just saying 'Oh, you know, let the horse or the beak dog or whatever think for itself. It's going to just charge in like the soldier would, and it's will be biting, and the soldier is just going to be around for the ride, whacking people with their weapon, or whatever'. And it worked well enough. But when you're an adventurer, riding your horse, and then having your horse be like 'I'm going to sit and graze on the grass for a while,' and you can press whatever key you want, the only key with more relevance is 'get off the horse'. And that was a problem of course. So we made it so that you can send commands to the animal. When you press the up button, it's not just moving the horse up, it's sending a command from the rider saying 'move up' and then the horse, if they're tame, will comply with the order. Just for convenience' sake we didn't model too much in terms of disobedience and so forth, although they do disobey when they're afraid, running away and so forth. And then we had to go into fortress mode, and say 'Okay, all the siegers now have to send orders to their mounts,' and so we did that. And the issue here is that, when for instance you're doing medical care, if a creature, like a dwarf, is sitting there and is thirsty and is laying on the middle of the ground and has been wounded, their leg is broken, they can't drink, they're like 'Please help, bring me water, carry me to the hospital,' and so forth. If a dwarf comes and does the recover wounded job and goes and grabs the wounded dwarf and carries them to the hospital, this whole idea of 'carrying' someone is conveniently, for my sake, identical to the mount code, or it is the mount code. Because why would you code that two different ways? It just has a role - there has always been this role there - that says 'carry' or 'rider standard position' or 'riding on wagon in position whatever'. And so when a baby was born, the mother would pick it up, and carry it, and it would be in the 'carried' position. |
| Capntastic: | Controlled. |
| Toady: | Yes. But the problem is that it was not querying the position variable and was like 'All mounts are now controlled by their rider'. And so the baby had pathing code, the pathing code for a baby, if it's on the ground, is to crawl randomly and to ignore lava and water. The baby was passing those commands to the mother, and the mother would kind of walk around holding the baby and just jump into a lava pool if there was one nearby, and would not eat or drink because the baby wasn't concerned about that. And that was it, for the mothers of release one. (laughter) And so we're not adding a ton of features for the Steam release, we're sort of compartmentalizing. Like you don't want to just add a bunch of new features when you're also doing this graphical update, because it's going to be a nightmare, but we do have to add some features, just to clean up some bugs and get the mouse interface working and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, in the past our best hasn't been great enough to avoid some little hiccups like that, but we do fix them quickly when we can. So that's why ... Steam release should be good. And we're going to do, obviously, some extra testing when it's such a stark demarcation and there's a ton of new people. That is all an extra sort of impetus to take time, even if we're not adding features during that time, to clean up. So hopefully there's no huge problem. I mean it's going to be in a bunch of people's Steam libraries, even they're at Kitfox or whatever, the publisher, testing it out, and whatever other testing regime we have. So it's not like we're going to just go out cold and drop it on everybody. But things always happen, especially when people have exotic setups and so forth. We have been testing it on ultra-wide monitors, just because one of the artists has one of those ones that are like 5000 pixels or whatever. Works there, pretty much; we had to fix some things though. I'm not sure what other setups people have and so forth, but it will be the ongoing process. |
| SFX: | (Musical Interlude) (37:50) |
| Capntastic: | Will there be tac-nukes? |
| Toady: | (laughter) So yeah, I mean ... what do we try to do, that's the closest to a tactical nuclear weapon in Dwarf Fortress? |
| Capntastic: | You can do some fun things with minecarts. |
| Toady: | Yeah that's right there's the minecart shotgun where you put a bunch of metal or something in the shotgun and then ram it up against the wall, and it shoots stuff out. I heard people tried to do that with dwarves once, I don't know if it works. Like, put a bunch of dwarves in a minecart and bounce them and shoot them at somebody. |
| Capntastic: | That's how you do raids on the missions screen. |
| Toady: | (laughter) But then there's also miasma if you want to get that kind of ... as far as I know you can't weaponize the 'husking' gases in evil regions, because they just come in from the end of the screen and pass on. I'm you can do something with magma. The steam bombs ... I don't think they work as well as they used to. I remember someone made a steam gun before where they had this giant water channel and would shoot lava into it and then it would blast steam forward. |
| Capntastic: | Oh. That's fun. |
| Toady: | Yeah, but I think when we changed to 3D that one stopped working quite as well, or something about the burning code, the gases just didn't apply themselves quite as well any more. Yeah, so our tactical nuclear options are kind of restricted there. Of course there's this whole new thing where you can take some necromancers and drop them into a body pile and so you can have a post-apocalyptic situation for your siegers. |
| Capntastic: | Yes, necromancers are no joke. |
| Toady: | Yeah. And that was probably the strangest thing that came in with the villains release, the fact that there's procedurally generated experimental creatures now. The necromancers perform experiments and make new humanoid races of creatures that can escape from the tower and integrate into societies. It kind of fits in with the animal people and so forth, the kind of many many many different types of creatures living together in the communities. We haven't tried to model any kind of like ... 'You are a three-antennaed, one-eyed experimental creature so we don't want you living in our community'. That doesn't seem fair. Especially because they don't get an evil nature or anything like that, they are just kept in a horrible place with a bunch of zombies and then forced to fight for this necromancer, through unknown means that haven't been mechanic-sized, or whatever, and turned into an explicable part of the game. But when they escape they are just free of that, and that applies more broadly, almost sadly, to the new undead lieutenants that get raised up by the necromancer. The necromancers got various new abilities, so they can raise sort of 'intelligent undead' rather than just zombies. So they pick a historical figure and bring them back, but they are changed into some sort of ... it procedurally generates a name like 'corpse soldier' or 'hollow hunter' or something like that, just generates a name. And they have new powers: randomly, they can raise fog or shoot ice bolts or - Ouch! Scamps. - ...or cause pain or so forth. |
| Capntastic: | (laughter) |
| Toady: | And like this cat here, who is some kind of hollow hunter, (Aside to Scamps) What are you doing there? Gee! (End aside) you get these lieutenants, and they are also in this situation, not unlike the babies riding the parents really, where the civilization, when they're in this sort of necromancer's group, this sort of entity or whatever, controls their behavior. They fight the wars, and administrate the sites, and guard the towers and so forth, but when they're free of that, like when the necromancer falls or is imprisoned, when people finally get together and attack the tower, then if the undead lieutenant loses their civilization bond to the necromancer, then they can just incorporate themselves into a society. And ... I mean, they'll be immortal now, and they'll have some weird powers, but ... I had one become a poet and just go off and write for a couple hundred years, and it's not like ... I'm not even sure what the situation is with immortality and jealousy and so forth in a world where there's elves everywhere and stuff. Would they just be treated more like an elf rather than some sort of aberration? It's stuff that we haven't really tackled or thought about too much, I mean we do have them get jealous of the necromancers who don't age and I believe, although I haven't seen reports, unless I've forgotten about one I've made myself ... Do people get jealous of the undead lieutenants when they live in a town and don't age? That's possible. |
| Capntastic: | I imagine it would be based on personality and cultural traits. |
| Toady: | Yeah, there's not a lot of work there yet, so we just have this default thing where the humans all get pissy about it. It's sort of a on-going and intriguing situation with all the new critters that are running around, and of course there's lots of rough edges to that, especially when we're talking about onboarding new players. It's like when a 'hollow hunter' comes in to your bar, and just sits there. And I don't know if they order drinks or not, if they have to drink. |
| Capntastic: | There are so many things. I was streaming the game for some friends and there's so many little interactions you have to be aware of, especially when you have a tavern that's popular, and you have a million people coming to visit. What do you do when a necromancer shows up, and they just want to party? Like, you have to do something. |
| Toady: | (laughter) Yeah, and it's a legitimate thing too, I mean having them there to party, in a sense. Because in world generation, before they get outed they are just living in communities. I mean, occasionally they will dig up corpses and stuff, but until they get chased off, you know sometimes they can live in a community. Especially vampires, but necromancers occasionally will happen as well. And then what it should be doing is just not showing you their necromancer status, right. And then they're there, and then, you know, if you do have your corpse stockpile near your tavern then it can show you their necromancer status at that point. And then is that unfair to the player, so the players have screening... is it like The Thing or something, where they should be taking drops of blood and setting them on fire? You know, as part of the ... I mean I'm sure people want do that to the cheese makers anyway right, just having stricter controls on who's allowed to live in a place, which of course raises all kinds of concerns about well, shouldn't we model, then, the people that want to migrate to the fortress, what they think about that, or what these kind of modes of control as we deal with in the modern era, certainly like ... It's an issue if you want to call it that, in this country for sure. So it raises all kinds of questions that are kind of separate from the necromancer question, but related through mechanics as things happen. So it's ... yeah, like you were saying, the whole situation, even if there are no necromancers there's still plenty of people in your tavern. Right now you can't do too much with that, except if you find them in the v-g write-up it will say 'They have come to the tavern to relax' or 'They've come here because they heard your tavern was the place to party' or whatever. Or 'They've come here looking for work', or 'They've come here to sing a song', 'They've come here to read their poetry', 'They've come here to petition for residency because they are running away from the goblin invasion' or whatever. That stuff is all there, I don't know how much people find that kind of thing (laughter) but it's just more hidden stuff that can be exposed. And there's a lot to think about. |
| Capntastic: | I know that when like, a poet petitions to hang out at your fortress long-term, it doesn't immediately give you the information of who this person is, and it's like 'Sure why not'. I want to be able to ... I want to do Papers, Please every time someone wants to join my fort. |
| Toady: | (laughter) Yeah, you just can't ... And we sort of were leading to this, this was actually part of the thinking for the villains release that we, you know, pushed off, or delayed a little bit. The whole interrogation process where the sheriff can now interrogate any dwarf you want, to try and figure out if their part of this sort of artifact heist plot, it's something that could be done with people that are coming to visit the fortress, and you can have just a less hostile interrogation process in terms of like 'You want to live in the fort, where are you from? What's going on?' etc.. Because there is vampire trouble and so forth, legitimate reasons to be concerned about that kind of thing. And werewolf trouble, it's like do you have the month-long - well, it doesn't have be a month if the full moon is closer than that, so anywhere from zero to 30, 28 days, however Dwarf Fortress works - quarantine periods and all that kind of thing? I mean, people are familiar with quarantine now, and is that something we should get in there? It's just a lot to take in right, from moment to moment, but if you're focused on that rather than focused on setting up a giant magma well or something, then that's legitimate. It just can't be too overwhelming somehow. Not an uncommon problem for us. |
| Capntastic: | I disagree, I think overwhelming is what people come to the game for. |
| Toady: | (laughter) I think we've got different flavors of overwhelming, and as long as people still want to play the game that's cool. |
| Capntastic: | That is ... true. |
| Toady: | It opens the whole question about the spreadsheet stuff, like the v-p-l, that was one of the things we were considering changing for the Steam release. Because v-p-l is a mess, right. The typical fix is the Dwarf Therapist type stuff where you got a large spreadsheet of options, but then you get... |
| Capntastic: | I refuse to use those. I infuriate my friends. |
| Toady: | Another flavor of fix though was like Autolabor, have you tried that one? |
| Capntastic: | No. |
| Toady: | And I haven't tried it either, but it's along the lines of stuff that we've been talking with people about for years, but it's just a difficult problem about more dwarf autonomy, in their labor selections. And that of course raises a lot of questions about the role of the player and whether or not you can do megaprojects quite the way you want, and so forth. So you still want options that allow you to have more control over them. But what if you just set up the jobs and the dwarves were able to organize who does them fairly confidently, then that would be a whole burden taken off the player in terms of like making sure they have architecture selected on a dwarf or whatever. |
| Capntastic: | I think that would also be interesting because it would pull from personality traits and physical characteristic where, you know, the strong dwarf is going to volunteer for hauling more often than the frail dwarf, or similarly the creative dwarf is going to enjoy engraving more. |
| Toady: | Yeah, they have those dreams we haven't even very used much right? Like 'Dreams of making a master craft someday,' or whatever. The way to do that is to start crafting stuff. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah. Because you can currently, when you're embarking, look at each of your dwarves individually and see what their personalities and physical characteristics are and assign them skills and jobs based on that, but that's such a level of granularity to dive into; I don't think it's reasonable for a person to expect themselves to do that once you have 50 dwarves running around. |
| Toady: | Yeah, that's exactly what I mean by the bad kind of overwhelming right. It's just stuff like that, which is not contributing to your story, and it's not contributing to ... there's a sense in which the word overwhelming, like the good sense is like contributing to the choices you're making as a player, right, that you have a wide array of things that you can do, and you can't even do all of them and that's fine. And in fact, having to make a choice is great, not being able to do everything all the time. Although I mean there's a whole other mode of play there, it's like the cozier version of Dwarf Fortress where you turn off the hunger counter and turn off invasions. And people do that, right? And that's a completely legit way to play the game as well. It's one of those things we were actually hoping to have when we get around to the myth&magic stuff was kind of like generating entirely different universes, like if you want to play ... Dwarf Fortress is borderline grimdark, right, it doesn't lean into everything but it's not, you know, the cheeriest place all the time. |
| Capntastic: | So much of that is a veneer of who's playing it and what are they saying because like ... it often has a darkly comedic tone because it's funny to watch these little goofballs suffer misfortune. |
| Toady: | (laughter) Yes, yes. And that is the engine that drives the whole thing, the troubles, the whole 'losing is fun' aspect of it. But at the same time we were hoping, like back in our Armok days we were like 'But what if it was all happy, like happy happy happy all the time, and the worst it gets is like a bad episode of Teletubbies or something.' I'm not sure ... how much trauma did the Teletubbies experience? I don't actually remember. I shouldn't speak out of turn. Maybe there were some very special episodes of the Teletubbies that were horrible. But I remember laughing baby in the sun, I remember them doing things and playing a video and then they say 'again, again' and then they play the video again. |
| Capntastic: | Did they even say that? I have no idea. |
| Toady: | (Mimicking the Teletubbies) 'Again! Again!' (Back to normal) This is like a distant recollection. I mean I didn't really have a stoner phase, so I don't think I was ever appropriately into the Teletubbies the right way. But I've seen it, because you have to see it, it's a cultural touchstone, or whatever, so you have to watch an episode of Teletubbies, way back when, right. And ... yeah, so I remember certain things about it. So creating a universe like that where you're just caring for the rabbits in the field, and the sun has a giant baby face, and you're having tea and stuff, hanging out with your friends and that kind of thing. Part of the reason that it's harder for games to lean into that, I mean a lot of it is just stupid cultural baggage stuff, but it is more difficult to make social mechanics than it is to, like, whack people with a rock in a game. |
| Capntastic: | But one leads to the other directly. |
| Toady: | Yeah. (laughter) |
| Capntastic: | Is that the David Mamet quote, I think? |
| Toady: | Yeah, definitely biblical overtones here ... So it is harder, it is harder to pull that game off, but it can be done. Especially when there's a whole bevy of features already sitting there right. How far are we from having a kind of satisfying farming type experience, which I believe we've talked about in the past in terms of adventure mode, if you just want to raise sheep or whatever. We are not super duper duper far away from that. We have pets now. They're animals, they've got names and ages and we can't shear them yet, but that's one Dwarf Fortress job that already exists being put in adventure mode away from having that. But of course in dwarf mode you can already do that. Just sit there shearing sheep and so forth. You kind of get to the question, is that relaxing enough, and is that a mode that people would play it at? Do you still want the kind of interesting choices angle but would it be more like, you know, how you're going to accommodate a new person that arrives, or expand an animal operation? But we don't always want to expand, expand, expand when we're thinking of this, it just becomes another sort of resource allocation game. So it's more ... I mean it raises all of the questions, right? You know, are stories meant to thrive on conflict? I don't agree with that school of thought, I don't think it's necessary. Drama, conflict, that kind of thing, not necessary for a good story. But, certainly makes it easier to write one, to have choices and things when you have stakes and all that kind of stuff. There's a lot of ways things can go, and I don't even remember. |
| SFX: | (Musical Interlude) (57:10) |
| Toady: | (in interlude:) Dwarf Fortress... |
| Capntastic: | I had a story that didn't ... so much of the stories are just, again, the player collecting little constellations of data and things that happen and turn it into a narrative of their own, where it's hard to ... how much of that is intended by the game and how much of that is what the player perceives? |
| Toady: | Yeah, I mean it is the point of the game. In some broad sense of course it's the intention of the game, but in terms of like every little thing, some are certainly more geared towards that than others. When we provide information for players to investigate, the biggest one is, well there's a lot of them, but one of the big ones is the v-p-z screen where you can just punch up this huge amount of information about a dwarf, right? So if something happens to a dwarf, or the dwarf does something, the player can immediately go investigate and kind of come up with three or four more things to say about that, but they can also look up the people they just talked to, the thoughts they had, and so forth, and it's sort of a story accommodation, right? |
| Capntastic: | Yeah. |
| Toady: | And we think about that, that is one of our principal modes of operation... |
| Capntastic: | What looks like a Wikipedia page for that individual dwarf. |
| Toady: | Yeah, and that's another question about Steam players and stuff, it is just a giant brick, right, of text; should we enter like the age of the tab, the age of highlighting certain more important information? |
| Capntastic: | Hyperlinks. |
| Toady: | Hyperlinks in Legends mode especially, that's well on the table. Wouldn't it be great, to click on somebody's name in Adventure mode, instead of having to write it down on a scrap of paper, as I have done many times. |
| Capntastic: | Yes. The game bombards you with so much information, especially, I don't know if you have done this, but in Adventure mode if you want into a crowded feast hall and everyone is talking, and it's like ... Because my brain is like 'I want to know what these peasants are talking about,' but at the same time I want to talk to the person in charge. |
| Toady: | Yeah, I mean.. |
| Capntastic: | Some sort of culling would be nice. |
| Toady: | Yeah, every step you're like pressing 'space, space, space, step; space, space, space' or whatever to clear out the text. |
| Capntastic: | That could be boiled down to 'You hear numerous conversations,' or 'People are whispering in the corner'. |
| Toady: | But if you don't hear tidbits of them then you don't really pick up stuff. I'm trying to think of, in a 3d game they get this for - it's not free, obviously there's lots of effort that goes into it - but they essentially get this for free where you're walking through the space, you can see where the important person is that you want to go to and while you're walking there there's all kinds of people and you can hear the the conversations that are closest to you, and of course the barks and things are set up so that you hear important tidbits or whatever. And that's something that we can try and model, I mean this is not impossible to model at all, like you can do a distance calculation for it, so it just looks at the closest conversation, but then if like 2 or 3 things were said it just picks one of them, and then we can like stick ellipses on both sides of it, so that you're walking and you're like 'Farmer says ... the troll under whatever ...' and you're like 'Oh ok, I don't need to talk to the lord of the mead hall anymore because this peasant has exactly the shit I'm looking for,' and then just like be a pest and bug them about their troll. There might even be funny things that come out of that, like if it elides enough of the conversation so that you think they're talking about one thing, but they're actually talking about something completely different, and then you go bother them. There's all sorts of cool things that can come out of that. These are all solvable problems but that, what I just said, is not 10 minutes of work right. Just getting/arranging all of these things, it's like the bug triage thing. You have all of these things you can do to make the game more approachable; we'll just have to keep working at it. |
| Capntastic: | So many topics where it's just like 'Why haven't you done this yet?' 'Why don't you do this ...?'. That's just how it all works. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's ... it's a process. (laughter) We're certainly in a different mode of operation now, so people who are on team "don't add features, fix shit" which is, you know, an important team, they're going to get some attention. Team no new stuff, yeah that's happening now. |
| Capntastic: | (Sarcastically:) But what about team adventure mode and team tac-nuke? |
| Toady: | Well yeah, as we've talked about we've got stuff coming for team adventure mode, we've got stuff coming for stuff team army fighting, we've got stuff for whatever small continuum of team villains that's been created, all coming after the Steam stuff is posted. And that's a lot of people and then you know, Tarn's personal team, team myth&magic gets to have their day (chuckles). I've been working to try and be on that team for twenty years, and now we'll be here finally. |
| Capntastic: | Is Battle Champs going to get a steam release? |
| Toady: | Battle Champs is important work but sadly I would probably rather do Kobold Quest first. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, that's the one. |
| Toady: | It's an important game, pitchin' animals and little insects at people and so forth. |
| Capntastic: | There should be the 'Best of Bay 12' Steam compilation |
| Toady: | Yeah, I mean, you could just hide it in Dwarf Fortress. |
| Capntastic: | I don't think you could put Liberal Crime Squad on there though. |
| Toady: | It's ... it's ... |
| Capntastic: | (chuckles) |
| Toady: | I mean it's relevant enough, we could put it there. I mean, I don't know, it would fit on itch; we're going to have an itch release. |
| Capntastic: | Oooh ... good. |
| Toady: | Put LCS up on itch, and let it ride. Yeah ... it's a strange game, it's interesting too because way back in 1992,3,4, when the seeds of those games were planted and then they got released 2003-4, something like that, the word 'liberal' in 'Liberal Crime Squad' is not used the same way anymore, right? Liberal now means centrist, right? |
| Capntastic: | Yes. |
| Toady: | And of course there's the whole economic theory side of it, which is kinda related to that part of it, and now people use 'progressive' or... |
| Capntastic: | 'leftist'... |
| Toady: | ..leftist, or you know socialist and etc. |
| Capntastic: | Hrm ... I've thought about the Liberal Crime Squad agenda for quite some time and how, you know, they're against nuclear power, and similar things and they ... you know. It's just another case of 'no-one passes the purity test'. |
| Toady: | Yeah ... I mean it's not ... I mean, I was a younger person when I wrote that, but also it's just difficult to come up with... the first thing... (indecipherable) |
| Capntastic: | But also I don't think, I don't think that LCS is necessarily supposed to be 'correct' in any way. |
| Toady: | Well, I mean, it is what it is... |
| Capntastic: | Yeah... |
| Toady: | ...which is a stupid thing to say, but it's ... I mean it's supposed to .. yeeah .. it's difficult cause you're like ... I mean obviously your heart's on one side and not the other, but it's not like they weren't a kind of caricature of the SLA as well, right? so it's like... |
| Capntastic: | Yeah. |
| Toady: | Which is ... I mean, I'm not sure you can caricature the SLA cause it was already ... completely over the top. |
| Capntastic: | Has anyone contacted Patty Hearst to get her to play this? |
| Toady: | Ah that would be rude I think. |
| Capntastic: | ...I think ... yeah, but, hrm ... hrm... |
| Toady: | I mean, it was odd, like ... I actually went to the Hearst castle on one of these kind of Dwarf Fortress speaking things when we were down at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo to just give a talk about Dwarf Fortress to the academic people down there and but they're like 'Y'know we could just take a bus to Hearst castle,' and that was one of the days at this event, or whatever. And they have zebras there. The zebra herd. |
| Capntastic: | Ooohh. |
| Toady: | Yeah I guess there just, they're just all sort of descended from these William Randolph Hearst zebras. And they still have the ... it's a very kind of like thrown together place of all different sorts of art styles and things. But yeah, a lot of it was kinda cool, up there. I don't remember who administers it now, it's not a wholly private thing, it's a state park in some sense. I mean, there's all sort of weird nebulousness to it that I don't remember, but I don't remember. So yeah, it was pretty fun. Zebras and things. Yes, natural segue for the zebra. |
| Capntastic: | ...Yeah. |
| Toady: | And goats, lots of goats, like hundreds of them, in this kind of goat area. It's very cool for that kind of thing. But yes, lots of future for the Bay 12 catalog. (chuckles) Such as it is. I don't need most of those things posted places cause it was garbage, but that's okay. |
| Capntastic: | Yes. |
| Toady: | ...but, people like WW1 Medic... |
| Capntastic: | You can't find Armok anywhere, can you? |
| Toady: | You can get it on ... we just don't link to it I think, cause it was confusing for people, but you can go to bay12games/armok and it's still available. |
| Capntastic: | Alright everyone, you know what you have to do. |
| Toady: | (laughter) If you want.... |
| Capntastic: | I want to see Youtube videos, Twitch streams... |
| Toady: | I can't remember, does the magic even work ... because we had a version where you could teleport people's noses, to like different parts of the map, and you could strip people's skin off, and it would update the textures and things. I don't remember if that's in the current version you can download, it was such a ... churn of mess, you know. We only finally got Dwarf Fortress to the point where we're not too far away from being able to do that stuff. We've got tissues now, we've got some magic stuff, it's really just ... I could probably add that in a day the way that shrine stuff went, probably add body part teleportation in a day, but it'd need the right context. Like who is the body part teleporter? And is there anything you can do... |
| Capntastic: | Some sort of malevolent goblin ... wizard. |
| Toady: | (chuckles) Yeah, cause they have the whole demon thing, right, so they're tied in with bad bad bad critters. Bad critters. Even though the goblins themselves are not necessarily bad critters, there's a whole discourse on that, were should we go with that? As it stands, you know, having... |
| Capntastic: | There should be like goblins that have broken free, you know? |
| Toady: | Because they can, right? They can move in with the human towns and stuff. |
| Capntastic: | .. I always see goblin dancers, I'm like 'Wait ... Hold up, |
| Toady: | (laughter) |
| Capntastic: | ...somethings not, ... oh well, I guess we all learned a little bit about prejudice today.' |
| Toady: | Yeah, I noticed there is ... There's something we wanted to look at right? What if they were immortal, what if they couldn't get diseases and starve, what if they were not altruistic. Because that's the part that zeroed out on them, right? They don't get the warm fuzzy feeling you get when you help your neighbor or whatever. I mean, it didn't feel like leaning into a direct stereotype or whatever, but perhaps it is. I don't really know, but it's tricky in general. Of course our main sort of approach is going to be just procedurally obliterate all canon (laughter). |
| Capntastic: | Of course. |
| Toady: | That's kind of the myth&magic releases setting us on the road of, like, you know what if you generated a game without dwarves ... without goblins, or elves, or any of the Tolkien stuff. |
| Capntastic: | One of the things I want so badly is more procedural civs, like I want to play, you know, human peasants. I want to be elves and weird animal men and all of those things, I want to make a mastaba out of mud bricks, and... |
| Toady: | Lots to do. |
| Capntastic: | ...I want to play the Sumerians. |
| Toady: | Yeah, I like Sumerians. We got all sorts of things that we need to do, and we'll get to some of them. It will be great. |
| Capntastic: | I'm terrified that someone's going to correct me and say the Sumerians didn't make mastabas, I'm thinking of the Mesopotamians or ... something. So please do that, correct me. |
| Toady: | (chuckles) People are fond of pointing out how many years are we talking about there, versus how many years that we count in the current era, like 2000 is nothing right? (chuckles) There's a whole lot of little details that we don't know and that you could be mistaken about, it's not a big ... it's hard to keep track of everything ... Yeah, so we need stuff. Stuff and things. More stuff and things in the game. |
| Capntastic: | It continues always. |
| Toady: | Of course now we're back on team new features. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah. |
| Toady: | It's hard to get away from team new features, and that's part of like when we're talking about the Steam release, and what the work has been like and so forth, I mean that's ... just for myself, that's kind of the biggest ... sort of psychological change, right, is being dedicated and trying to build up the dedication and enthusiasm for something that's different than what I had been doing. And I've found that I do just still need outlets so I just work on little side projects, none of which have seen the light of day since we were talking about, you know, Kobold Quest and Battle Champs and things. We used to do more of those, and then things got more serious of course, and then we stopped having those, but we still work on them, and just can't kind of round the corner to get one posted, pretty much. We'll see if that ever changes. Yeah, it's been good, doing space, doing stuff in space. Dwarf Fortress hasn't taken space away from me yet. It will. (laughter) |
| Capntastic: | ...wha? |
| Toady: | When we get to the Planes release, yeah, you're gonna be... |
| Capntastic: | ...Oohhh, yeah.... |
| Toady: | ...spelljammin' or whatever, right? I don't know much about the Spelljammer setting, but certainly fantasy and discovery (indecipherable) |
| Capntastic: | But that's ... that's when we get the tac-nukes. |
| Toady: | Yes! Finally, we can nuke them from orbit. But it'd be like planar nuking in your crystal sailboat or whatever. But it's more or less the same thing. I'm sure some of the planes that are generated would be 'nuke from orbit' candidates. May even have weird parasitic aliens on them, and you may have colonized them by... by either accident or because you were greedy and you wanted to bring the parasites back home. Ah, you know. Typically stuff. |
| Capntastic: | That's how it goes. |
| Toady: | Well that's definitely how it goes. And, yeah, I mean, emergent economy of Xenomorphs or whatever. And you can... |
| Capntastic: | ...use every part of them, like a buffalo. |
| Toady: | Yeah, and there are some parts too. There's some parts for sure. Looks like crab legs, do people eat the face ... like the, what are they called, face huggers or whatever? Is that widely explored in fiction, the culinary options from face huggers? Because they do seem like crab legs..... |
| Capntastic: | I'm sure there's like a ... in one of the crossover comics or whatever... |
| Toady: | Yeah. |
| Capntastic: | Cause there's like.... |
| Toady: | It's like Deadliest Catch or something, right? You just have the people out there going - it's very dangerous job, of course, it's like Deadliest Catch the crab fishing show, but you go out and get face huggers. And have them in the pots and things, bring em back and get twenty-five dollars a face hugger or whatever. And then you've got happy families at Red Face Hugger restaurants (chuckles) celebrating their family events. Important work in Dwarf Fortress is headed in the right way... |
| SFX: | (Musical Interlude) |
| Capntastic: | Well it seems like every thing is chugging along nicely on team Dwarf Fortress. Everything is teams now. |
| Toady: | (laughter) That's right, that's right. Yeah, we are teams, it's like Team Fortress ... I don't know where the release dates fit in, are we like Team Fortress 1.5, or 2.5, or 0.5, I have no idea. |
| Capntastic: | I couldn't tell you... |
| Toady: | But it's all the fortresses. |
| Capntastic: | It's true. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's a good time for fortresses, always will be. Hopefully until humanity gets their shit together, then we don't need fortresses anymore. But until then, until then. |
| Capntastic: | That's a philosophical... |
| Toady: | Yeah, if you want to credit it that much, that's real generous of you, but... |
| Capntastic: | But what is a fortress? How do we, how would Socrates define a fortress? |
| Toady: | I don't know much about that, but there is room for fortresses in the future, when we're trying to protect our health and well-being against exigent circumstances, and if we're talking about the betterment of humanity they don't need to be from human source. So we've still got asteroid fortress, and hit by a comet fortress. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah and you know, practice safety, in whatever way you feel is best. |
| Toady: | That's right. Yeah, yeah, for the lumberjacks. |
| Capntastic: | It's a dangerous time out there. |
| Toady: | ...yeah yeah, if we're still cutting down trees, very dangerous job. And yeah, for the dwarves too, I assume. You still occasionally hear about people who are crushed by trees in Dwarf Fortress. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, that happened to me recently. |
| Toady: | (laughter) |
| Capntastic: | Well not me, but one of my dwarven underlings. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's another sketchy addition to the game, but you know, you make do. That's what the hospital is for. What the werecreature in the hospital is for. Good business for everybody. (chuckles) |
| Capntastic: | Anything you'd like to say before we sign off? |
| Toady: | Yeah. I think we're just going to keep chugging along, keep posting updates, you can go look at the steam news to see some shiny pictures, you can look at the devlog to see shiny pictures as well, still doing Future of the Fortress Q&A, and yeah, just keep on watching and we'll get it done, and then you can play it, and then you can play the next one too. Anything you'd like to say? |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, go ahead and follow me on Twitter, @Capntastic, I also have a Patreon set up with the same name, which helps support me and my creative hobbies during this time, this age of strife, during the world kinda being on fire, and that includes this podcast. So. Thank you very much. |
| Toady: | Alright, so good to hear you, talk to you next time, and everybody can listen next time on another exciting episode of Dwarf Fortress talk. |
| Capntastic: | Do we have emails, for the future? Can people email us still? |
| Toady: | Oh yeah! I mean, yes. That is a small embarrassment that we'll have to sort out. During our six year hiatus, occasionally we would still receive Q&A emails, and that obviously ... we haven't received one for at least a year or something and, pretty much, the few that we received, you know, it's just, the game has of course moved on so we basically don't have questions now. And so, if you send a question to toady1@bay12games.com with the subject 'Question for DF talk', then we will be able to address it, in this exciting new era of actually engaging with people, and not ignoring them, and doing the things we should be doing! |
| Capntastic: | (in affected voice) On the air...! Sending your spiciest stories. |
| Toady: | (laughter) yeah we should do dramatic readings I think ... I'm not particularly good at it, but you know... |
| Capntastic: | (in affected voice) I never thought it could happen to me... |
| Toady: | (chuckles) More than make up for it by the stories being funny. So yeah! Good to be back together talking and episodes and things. |
| Capntastic: | Back in the saddle, back in the mines. |
| Toady: | Yeah, yeah we've got mounts now, for sure. |
| Capntastic: | ... Well thank you so much for joining us today. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's going to be exciting to listen to the banter just fade out and the music comes up, right, |
| SFX: | Music fades in |
| Toady: | so it doesn't matter what we're saying now. |
| Capntastic: | We are untrained, unprofessional. |
| Toady: | (unintelligible due to music) |
| SFX: | Musical postlude(1:20:10) |
| Bonus section | |
| Toady: | Got this purring cat sitting behind me on the back of the chair now. He's taken to doing that the last year or so, just running into the room and jumping on the back of the chair and then just laying there, and either purring or howling. We're in the purring phase now. |
| Toady: | (singing) Where did Capn go? Where is the audio? Where did Capn go? Where is the audio? Nobody knows, I can't hear a thing. Where did he gooooo? (an octave lower) Nobody knows. |
| SFX: | (Discord sound for other person disconnecting) |
| Toady: | Uh-oh. |
| SFX: | (Discord you-disconnect sound) |
Dwarf Fortress Talk #24, with Rainseeker, Capntastic, and Toady One, transcribed by JCsuper and voliol
| SFX: | (Musical Prelude) |
| Capntastic: | Welcome to another episode of Dwarf Fortress Talk. Here I have: Rainseeker! |
| Rainseeker: | What!? I'm back!? After a five year hiatus!? What? Hey guys. I've missed you! |
| Toady One: | It's amazing. It's amazing to have the whole team back together. |
| Capntastic: | And Tarn Adams, AKA Toady. |
| Toady One: | Hey-o. It's Toady One, here with another episode, and all kinds of co-hosts and stuff. Amazing. |
| Rainseeker: | Let's talk about what's happened to us, individually, in the past five years, if you guys don't mind. |
| Capntastic: | Can we skip the last six months or so? |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, if you want, because everyone probably know what you guys have been up to. My wife and I started a gluten-free bakery, and we've been running that up here in northern California. It's called Measures of Joy, and you can find us on Facebook. We may have been doing it while we were still doing the podcast? |
| Toady One: | I think so, I think so. |
| Rainseeker: | But we're firmly established by now. |
| Toady One: | That's awesome. |
| Capntastic: | I know you're getting some really excellent opportunities in terms of gift baskets for some celebrity event? |
| Rainseeker: | Oh yeah, we went to the Emmies. That was fun. I got to meet the guy from Leave It to Beaver. And I got to meet the guy from Scrubs. The janitor on Scrubs. |
| Capntastic: | Oh! That's the good one to me. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, it was fun to meet him. I also got to meet ... I don't know if you guys ever watched 30 Rock, but there was a guy on their writing staff. Well, acting on their writing staff, because it was a fake show. A show about a fake show. I was so excited to meet him because that was my favorite show at the time. But anyway, our business is moving forward and I've been doing some screenwriting over the years, too. Nothing's published, but that's been my creative hobby. How about you guys? |
| Capntastic: | Got a job at a machine shop. Not much else. Currently laid off. |
| Rainseeker: | Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, it's a mess all over. I'm doing alright, all things considered. |
| Rainseeker: | That's good. Oh, my son got married. |
| Capntastic: | Fantastic! |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, he got married last year. How about you, Tarn? What are the big life experiences you've experienced? |
| Toady One: | Still in the same apartment. Still dwarfin'. We traveled around for some events, which is fun. We went to Korea and Switzerland for some events, which was pretty amazing. But mostly, of course, just going to San Francisco or whatever, for the Roguelike Celebration and GDC and a bit of traveling. Just a lot of work, though. And of course, the whole Steam thing, which is probably the biggest thing that's happened in the last five years. |
| Rainseeker: | Yay, Steam! |
| Capntastic: | Globally, one of the biggest things that's happened in the last five years. |
| Rainseeker: | It kind of looks like you're finally taking my persistent suggestion of having a better user interface. That looks amazing. |
| Toady One: | It's about time. Something happened there, for sure. Can you send images over our little Discord chat? |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, drag and drop. |
| Toady One: | You can use drag and drop? |
| Rainseeker: | Yes. |
| Toady One: | Oh, 'add a comment.' I'll just add that comment. |
| Capntastic: | Curious if there's a game called drag 'n' drop. There is, for sure. |
| Toady One: | I sent a little image over Discord chat. We've been testing out screens. |
| Rainseeker: | Would you look at that? |
| Toady One: | This is a little prototype embark screen that hasn't had any artist attention. |
| Rainseeker: | Clearly, but that's fine. |
| Toady One: | So those are all my terrible color schemes and stuff. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) It really is very bad. |
| Toady One: | It's kind of earthy. Earth tones. It's like Elf Fortress. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) |
| Capntastic: | I do like the little ornamentations in the corners. |
| Toady One: | Those were the parts that were actually drawn by the artists. Just that, and of course, the items that you see there. But the very stop-sign-looking plus and minus look, that's all me. But, if you remember how the game works, you used to have to type 'n' for new item, and it would take you to a whole different screen with the typing filter and the categories and so forth. Here it is, all in one place. You can see your items on the left. You can see the typing filter and categories on the right. You can see a scroll bar with a little dwarf face on it. Of course I put a little dwarf face on the scroll bar. |
| Rainseeker: | Oh, there it is! |
| Toady One: | The ones on the right also get scroll bars. The middle one gets a scroll bar because, of course, there's more categories than that when you aren't filtering. There's always just a lot of stuff, which is going to be one of our main obstacles when we're going through all of the screens and things. I had typed 'bronze' into the typing filter and there's still pages of items. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, I see bismuth bronze. All that fun stuff. |
| Capntastic: | I'm curious ... nevermind. It's a me thought. I'm just curious if bismuth bronze tastes like Pepto-Bismol. |
| Toady One: | (laughter) |
| Capntastic: | I have to filter myself. |
| Toady One: | They could grind it into powder and put it in your breakfast cereal for sure. |
| Rainseeker: | There you go. |
| Toady One: | And you see, for instance, the willow wheelbarrow on the left. We haven't done materials for wheelbarrows, so that is a distinctly not-willow wheelbarrow down there. |
| Capntastic: | Oh, look at that. |
| Toady One: | But yeah, it's a nice stepladder. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) Wow, that's cool. So what is a stepladder for? That's the first time I've seen that. |
| Toady One: | Were you around for the 3D trees? |
| Rainseeker: | Yes. Yes, I saw that. |
| Toady One: | Some point after that, we started growing fruit on trees. You can take a stepladder over and climb and pick the fruit from the trees. |
| Capntastic: | It's cute. |
| Rainseeker: | That is cute. |
| Toady One: | One of the leading causes, perhaps, of dwarves being stuck in trees. |
| Rainseeker: | What? (laughter) Please explain! |
| Toady One: | (laughter) So if the stepladder gets removed or if the dwarf is otherwise chased up a tree or something, they'll just be up there. They have some code to help them get down now, which is useful, but you can also just chop the tree down. |
| Rainseeker: | So what you're telling me is that someone could be climbing a tree, minding his own business, picking an apple, and Urist could come by and be like, 'Oh! A stepladder that's just sitting there. I should put it away!' and puts it away, and that's how they get stuck? |
| Toady One: | I don't know. I don't actually know if they get swiped, or if they cancel the job, or what the main vector is. This is something that should probably be investigated a little bit more. |
| Capntastic: | I've seen the opposite, where there's just stepladders out in the trees, or where the trees are. Not up in the trees. That would be wild. |
| Toady One: | Well, why would a dwarf ever clean up after themselves? |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) Right! |
| Toady One: | I posted another one. This is a little sparser, this screen, but this is the animals tab. |
| Rainseeker: | Are we able to post these for the people that are listening? |
| Toady One: | I'm going to tease them currently, while we think about the plan for this. We could put them up on the dev log though. Or hide them on the top page. |
| Capntastic: | I think the teasing's already begun. |
| Rainseeker: | Yes! |
| Toady One: | We're into the teasing right now. This is fun. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, teeheeheehee! |
| Toady One: | In this screen, I've responsibly bought four of each type of cavy. So that's a total of sixteen cavies. |
| Rainseeker: | Mommas, and poppas, and the babies. |
| Toady One: | And all them babies. |
| Rainseeker: | The whole family. |
| Toady One: | You can see, on the right, the variety of hen and rooster and chick pictures. And the variety of goat and piglet pictures. You can see a water buffalo calf. Lots of little animals and things. Another scroll bar. More pluses and minuses. You'll note that the total number of points you have to spend is not displayed yet, anywhere on the screen, which is a thing that needs to be done in the list of many things that need to be done. But I think it's pretty cool! It's different than it was before, for sure. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, it's coming along, buddy! Good job. Out of curiosity, where are we with Adventure Mode? |
| Toady One: | I've got Adventure Mode showing up on the screen, which is a huge first step. People wandering around and looking like either people, or the debug creature. The thing is, we haven't finished the layering on, say, the human. Because the dwarves, currently, are built from twelve layers. Including, like, here's your left arm, here's your right arm, here's your face, here's your beard, here's your shadow underneath you, and so forth. So there's just a little bit of extra art that needs to be done. And we're hoping, to some extent, to get the animal people done up that way as well. Although, of course, since there are 200 animal people, it's not something that we can do perfectly for every single body type. |
| Rainseeker: | The snail men may look kind of odd, I would imagine. |
| Toady One: | Snail men definitely look odd, and, I think, slug people are different from snail people because slug people don't have legs and snail people do. |
| Rainseeker: | Oh! |
| Capntastic: | Interesting. |
| Toady One: | It just seemed appropriate. I don't know why. It's kind of a turtle thing, or something. Because a slug is kind of like a snake, morphologically, like it's looong. (laughter) |
| Rainseeker: | That's true. |
| Capntastic: | Hmmm. |
| Toady One: | A snake person can't have legs, right? There's some definite rule there. And so a slug person doesn't have legs, because... |
| Rainseeker: | Well, we're talking Jabba the Hutt, here, right? |
| Toady One: | Yeah! So if Jabba the Hutt had a shell, would he grow legs? |
| Rainseeker: | That's a good question. I don't know. I think, possibly. |
| Toady One: | We were probably a little torn on this. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) |
| Capntastic: | Sounds like you just came up with a Star Wars spin-off film. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, we could use some more of those. They probably got five or six in the pipeline, right? |
| Rainseeker: | I want my Star Wars crew to be all people from the snail planet. Just the snails with legs. |
| Toady One: | (laughter) |
| Rainseeker: | That's what we want. Lucas, you've heard it here. |
| Capntastic: | He's probably listening. |
| Rainseeker: | He probably is, yeah. And he has those algorithms. |
| Toady One: | (laughter) Does he have algorithms? |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, yeah yeah. |
| SFX: | (Musical Interlude) (12:57) |
| Rainseeker: | Speaking of algorithms, have you seen the game, and this is kind of a detour, but have you seen the game AI Dungeon? |
| Capntastic: | Oh, yes. |
| Toady One: | Have you seen the new GPT-3? The dragon model, or whatever they're calling it? |
| Capntastic: | That's the one that's going to end the world, isn't it? |
| Rainseeker: | I don't know what that even is. GPT-3? |
| Toady One: | I may be getting some details mixed up, but the original AI Dungeon was based on the GPT-2 model, which came out - I don't know when, because time no longer has any meaning - but it was last year or the year before. I don't really remember, but it was the one that made the first big splash by OpenAI, or whatever the organization's called. They just released, on a limited basis, the GPT-3 model, which makes them way more coherent. So it's even scarier. There are some screenshots around on the net now of various GPT-3 stuff. |
| Rainseeker: | Cool. |
| Toady One: | It's pretty cool. |
| Rainseeker: | I just had an adventure this morning, because I've been exploring it, where I was a noble and I found a candy house, going through tunnels, and then I found the wizard who made it. And I asked him why he made a candy house, and he said, 'Because I like candy!'. |
| Toady One: | (laughter) |
| Rainseeker: | That was a fun AI moment, I think. |
| Toady One: | (laughter) I mean, it's a legitimate reason, especially if you're going to move from house to house as you consume them. Unless he likes to look at candy, I mean, the candy stores look pretty cool. |
| Rainseeker: | That's true. Maybe he just likes to look at it. I don't remember - do we have candy witch houses in your generated world? |
| Toady One: | Do we have candy at all? We have syrup. We have the dwarven syrup, as I recall. |
| Rainseeker: | Maybe we need some Hansel and Gretel kind of stories to come out. That'd be kind of fun. |
| Toady One: | I guess they would be made out of minced syrup roasts and minced syrup muffins. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) |
| Capntastic: | You'd have to figure out which ones made the best windows. |
| Rainseeker: | Exactly. |
| Capntastic: | And construction materials. If you could make a block out of syrup roasts. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) There you go. |
| Toady One: | You make a block out of frozen syrup and then cut blocks out of it. We aren't quite there yet. It's one of those things we're considering for the map rewrite, is getting different sorts of materials and items. Being able to build different map features with them, like walls and ramps, that kind of thing. Of course, the go-to examples are always more like, you're wandering through a giant plain of skulls and there's skull hills and stuff like that, and you can pick up individual ones or slide down them, and that kind of thing, but why not candy, right? |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah. |
| Toady One: | We're going to have the nonviolence setting, right? So you turn it off, you don't have skull hills anymore, unless they're candy skulls. |
| Rainseeker: | That's true. (laughter) |
| Toady One: | And then you can eat them. And because it's nonviolent, you never get sick. No more vomiting. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) 'No more vomiting.' |
| Toady One: | Eat as much candy as you want. |
| Rainseeker: | That's right. Candy fortress. |
| Toady One: | No cavities. No cavities in a nonviolent setting. Certainly, if someone turns the nonviolent slider off, they don't want tooth pain, they don't want drills. They just want to eat. |
| Capntastic: | Is this for real? There's really going to be - |
| Toady One: | At some point I'm just talking nonsense, of course, but the violence slider is definitely part of the plans. |
| Capntastic: | Oh, interesting. I hadn't even considered that. |
| Toady One: | Well, let's talk, we can recap. At some point Dwarf Fortress Talk is just a series of recapitulations. |
| Capntastic: | (laughter) |
| Toady One: | I don't even remember what we talked about in the myth and magic episode, way back when. Over 400 years ago. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, yeah. |
| Toady One: | The current idea was when you generate your setting, you'd have a series of sliders that let you - and we don't know what the final form of these is. We're just spitballing what these sliders might be. One of them is, how typical is your fantasy world on a scale from 'there aren't even any dwarves, it's just different humans running around' over to the more typical setting where you have dwarves and also some more canonical animal people. Kind of like an Elder Scrolls type setting, or any of the typical fantasy setting where you pick a couple animal people to show off, and then you have the dwarves and elves and that kind of thing. Then you move the slider over a little bit more and you've got all kinds of strange five-eyed things. Still got some dwarves but maybe the dwarves have innate magic powers and other oddities to them. Then you move the slider all the way over and it removes all the raw object content completely, and leaves you in a complete soup. It'd be like one of those fantasy novels that uses too many made up words. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) |
| Toady One: | You're just trying to figure out... |
| Rainseeker: | ...What the heck everything means? |
| Toady One: | ...Like, what is going on here? I think it would be pretty cool to try. I'm not sure how fun it would be to do this regularly, but you'd try and do a setting like that and you find yourself sinking into it, and you're like, 'Oh, OK. Now I kind of understand what's going on.' Maybe it'd be cool. That's one of the sliders. That's the fantasy amount slider. Another slider is this grim-dark versus - |
| Rainseeker: | Again, none of these are currently implemented? |
| Toady One: | Oh, no. Oh, no no no no. |
| Rainseeker: | Oh, ok. |
| Toady One: | But, since we last spoke, we have a much clearer view of when this is going to happen. |
| Rainseeker: | Ok, cool. |
| Toady One: | We've got the Steam release coming, and then we have some things to make up some time. The release we did before the Steam release - which is out, we did it at the beginning of the year - was the villains release, which we sort of aborted because we had to get the Steam stuff started due to deadlines and so forth. The villains release, we're going to go back and finish some of that stuff up. Right now, for instance, there's artifact heists in the fortress that can be hatched. |
| Rainseeker: | Who? |
| Toady One: | There's insiders, and you can interrogate your own dwarves to figure out who flipped on you and so forth. |
| Rainseeker: | Will a dwarf flip on you if they're unhappy with you, or could it be for any reason? |
| Toady One: | It has a lot of personality facet things, but there's also grudges. Do they share a religious similarity with the person flipping them? The person flipping them has the burden of deciding what angle they're going to use. They use their intrigue skill to do it. It's still a little too easy to flip people, I think, is the verdict right now. People should be less flippable. But, the general principle is what we're going with. We used the mouse - what is it called? The mice? The mice method? Miceing people? Muh-muh-muh ... I'm blanking on... |
| Rainseeker: | Mummies? |
| Toady One: | Is it money? The 'C' is compromising people. Blackmailing them. The 'E' is ego. The 'I' is ideology, I think. It's basically counterintelligence stuff, where you're like, 'which people are vulnerable?' It's MICE. There's different acronyms people use to remember the different reasons. We went through that as an initial form of inspiration, and then came up with the seven or eight ways you can be flipped. |
| Rainseeker: | Interesting. |
| Toady One: | But, we aborted right when we were working on that stuff, so it's just not done. We'll fix that up, and then do some army stuff, do some Adventure Mode medical stuff that we'd been missing for a long time, like being able to put a splint on yourself and make one and not lose your games quite so easily. Although, yes, it's still a hard life out there. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) |
| Toady One: | Then, the idea is, to disappear into something we've called the Big Wait, because we know it's going to take some time. Yet another big wait, and if we're lucky, the big wait won't be as long as the previous biggest wait, which was 26 months, right? |
| Rainseeker: | (whistles) |
| Toady One: | We did have a release that lasted that long. |
| Rainseeker: | Which one was that? |
| Toady One: | Was that the activating the world release? Was that 2012? I totally don't remember these things that are in the distant past, anymore, without looking up the notes and cross-referencing. But, the myth and magic release ... The main thing we've shown off on that was this talk I gave with Tanya at Kitfox, the publisher, back in 2016, I think. I was showing our procedural myth system that comes up with a mythological story with various deities and forces and planes and stuff. It's meant to build a coherent and consistent magic system for each world that you generate, or each universe, so that things make more sense. So it isn't just generating another fireball spell, or whatever. |
| Capntastic: | Real quick, aren't celestial bodies generated, still? |
| Toady One: | Generated in the current version? |
| Capntastic: | Yeah. |
| Toady One: | The current version has the moon and a sun. |
| Capntastic: | Is it always just one moon? |
| Toady One: | Yeah. It's really boring. It's just for werewolves, right? |
| Capntastic: | Ok. Functional. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) |
| Toady One: | And it also does the lighting in Adventure Mode. If it's foggy and the moon's out, you can see a little bit more than if it were really foggy and there is no moon. I imagine that's going to be a nightmare when we start generating the bodies. Then we'll need to figure out, like, how much light would there actually be when there's two moons but the sun is over here. I don't want to think too much about that, especially if the sun is also a chariot, or something. You never know - |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) This one is a giant fan in the sky. It just kind of spins there. |
| Toady One: | That's why it's always windy on a sunny day. |
| Rainseeker: | Exactly. (laughter) |
| Toady One: | It's out of control. We don't really know what's going to happen. That's one of the things that's fun about this release. |
| Rainseeker: | That brings me to another question. When I disappeared five or six years ago, you were in the position where you were basically going to do this until you die. |
| Toady One: | (laughter) |
| Rainseeker: | Are you still there? Is this something you want to do the rest of your life or do you want to have a final release sometime? |
| Toady One: | I think I'm still in the same boat I was in before. Certainly, the stuff we just talked about takes me forward another five years or something. Six years? Who knows? It's going to take a while to get that stuff done, and then I'll be 48 years old, 49 years old, you know? I'll have been working on this thing for 23 years, and that's a long time. At this point, it seems like the default option is to say, 'well, yeah, that's what I'm doing.' We'll be approaching retirement age at some point, whatever that means in the future. Who knows? If we end up focusing on a side project ten years from now that gets a little bit of traction, then we might spend some time on that. You never know what's going to materialize. But, I'm pretty excited about the magic stuff, obviously. I keep bringing conversations back there, and now, we have a much better plan of what that's going to look like. So, you know... |
| Rainseeker: | Can you give me a scenario of how magic might manifest itself in the world and what that might look like to a player? |
| Toady One: | Where do you want to start? Do you want to start in a traditional ocean setup? Or we can have a chaos full of monsters? Or we can have a - |
| Capntastic: | Chaos. |
| Toady One: | Ok, we've got a chaos full of monsters. That's the starting setup, a chaos full of monsters. Then you got some kind of ... Well, you know what? You know what we're going to do? This is what we're going to do. Instead of hearing me just be sort of stupid about it, what we'll do is fire up the myth generator. |
| SFX: | (Musical Interlude) (26:51) |
| Toady One: | Ok. So I've found the myth generator after digging through some folders and so forth, so let's just see what one of these magic systems might look like. Alright, Dwarf Fortress creation myth generator. 'Left click to begin.' Ha! Alright, so I click. Now, this time, it looks like we've got the void, which is a primordial void. So we ended up with just this sort of emptiness, but it has two great beings inside of it: Legadia and Fathis, and also Thetion, the raven. (laughter) |
| Rainseeker: | Oh, three. There's a raven, also. |
| Capntastic: | Who's a good bird? It's a good bird. |
| Rainseeker: | The raven's the troublemaker, clearly. Right? |
| Toady One: | Yeah. Well, we'll see. We'll see, because the game does not care right now. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) |
| Toady One: | Alright, so we got a big ol' list here. Now, the initial list - and it goes on for a few pages - is the chronological list of events in the universe. In this prototype, you can click on a thing to focus on it, and then that gives you a more reasonable story of what happened. For instance, in the chronological list, it says 'In the beginning, there was a vast emptiness in which the great Legadia and the great Fathis were coupled.' So they're just sitting there, coupled - however you want to interpret that - and 'Fathis forged the Spindle of Phopenom to guide fate.' And then, 'Fathis lost a limb, forming the ocean. Fathis forged the Phudom Glass, that all might be seen.' |
| Rainseeker: | Hey, I want to hear about the limb loss. Is there more? |
| Toady One: | Yeah, so let's read about the ocean then, right? I clicked on ocean, and now this is the entire creation myth as it relates to the ocean. 'In the beginning, there was a vast emptiness, in which Legadia and Fathis were coupled. Fathis lost a limb, forming the ocean. Fathis disturbed the ocean, forming the Sephitia demons. Libius, of the Phokethas demons' - it didn't even say where the Phokethas demons came from. We skipped that part - 'created the great Rukon using the ocean in the volcano of Kyssidus.' So there's some kind of underwater volcano that this thing came out of when these other demons did their thing. I have no idea where a Phokethas demon came from. Here it is! When Legadia and Fathis got uncoupled, then Fathis 'breathed into being' these other demons. |
| Rainseeker: | Oh. That's a bad breakup. |
| Toady One: | Yeah. (laughter) |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) That's pretty good. |
| Toady One: | So where are the dwarves in all this? It's not a bad question. There are the dwarves. So the dwarves have their version of the creation myth. 'We've got a vast -' Everyone agrees on the vast emptiness, and the coupling, and the losing of the limb, the uncoupling. Now, 'the ocean was disturbed and formed the Sephetia demons', which the dwarves care about. That means that the dwarves, in the future of this story, are going to care about the Sephitia demons. Now, Fathis lost another limb. Fathis is like a limb-shedding type of deity, right? |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) |
| Toady One: | Constantly forming stuff, constantly making oceans and - so another limb, gone! And we got the sun. |
| Rainseeker: | Oh! Ok. |
| Capntastic: | Finally. |
| Toady One: | Then Fathis ... 'shed hair, and formed the great Thobius.' And then Thobius just died! Now, that's sad, but Thobius died, and so: His hair is shed, forms this deity, and then the deity dies. |
| Rainseeker: | But what is the deity of? I mean, are there more details of him, or is that...? |
| Toady One: | See, the thing of this - there are some hidden details, right now, about that kind of thing, which we may touch upon later, but part of the idea is that the story is giving them what they are of, too. So Fathis is obviously going to be a deity of the sun and the ocean, having formed those things, right, out of limbs? Now, Thobius - since this is the dwarf-centric tale, there might be more detail on Thobius if we click on Thobius, but now Thobius was just a kind of interim character, because Thobius dies immediately after being grown out of this hair, and their blood forms a new plane of existence called 'the Different Place'. (laughter) |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) 'Different Place.' |
| Toady One: | So this place is different from the void, and the ocean, and the sun. The ocean and the sun are obviously over in the main world, because it's referring to our sun and our ocean. But then there's this Different Place that was formed. So the other deity that was coupled is Legadia, right - and we haven't been talking about Legadia much - but Legadia disturbed the sun and formed some kind of energy force called 'the Evil Test'. |
| Rainseeker: | Ok. (laughter) |
| Toady One: | So the Evil Test has been formed. Now, the dwarves care about these things, so hopefully they'll come up in the tale. Ah, yes, here we have Kobikytai of the Sephitia demons disturbed the Evil Test to form the dwarves in the Different Place. So it all comes together. We have these demons, we have this Evil Test thing that came from the sun, and then we have the Different Place, which came from the shed hair and this blood. So that's how dwarves conceive of themselves in this universe. They're formed from this kind of sun-thing. Now the name 'Evil Test' has some implicit evilness to it. 'Sephitia demons' has a bit of evilness to it. So dwarves kind of have a dark creation story in this. (laughter) |
| Rainseeker: | They kind of do. Maybe you should avoid dwarves in that world, you know? |
| Capntastic: | Yeah. |
| Toady One: | And then the dwarves 'emerged from the Different Place.' Because in this story, it has to explain why dwarves are in the regular world. And so it just says 'they emerged.' How nice of them. And then they 'rebelled against Legadia.' Rebelled against Legadia and 'destroyed the Phudom Glass,' the thing that 'all might be seen'. They destroyed it, and 'Legadia pronounced the curse of death to punish the rebellion of the dwarves'. So dwarves were initially immortal, but because they destroyed the Phudom Glass in their rebellion, they were cursed with death. So it gives you a little story about the dwarves. Now that we have the story of the dwarves it gives us a kind of rundown of dwarfdom. So dwarves 'age and eventually die, and they can perish from accidents, violence, and disease,' but they have immortal souls, and their souls are 'microcosms of the universe,' and enlightenment can be attained through self-reflection. The soul travels to the different place after the body dies, and their fates are completely determined. In the video game, it doesn't matter so much whether there's free will or predestination, right, because you just click buttons and things happen. But this probably has to do with the Spindle of Phopenom guiding fate and so forth. Now, this is were it comes up with a magic system, and the magic system relates to the Evil Test, which is where the dwarves were made from. So 'many dwarves can interact with the Evil Test after difficult research'. So the spell system it's come up with is a research-based spell system. Now, if they screw up and mis-cast, if there's a lapse in skill, 'absolutely all vegetation dies near the user of spell'. (laughter) So that's very sad for them. |
| Rainseeker: | Oh, wow. |
| Toady One: | 'The user can bruise flesh at the cost of a healthy amount of their own flesh.' I'm not sure why you'd do that. It doesn't do any balancing. I threw this thing together, right, so if you want to, like, give up your finger, you can put a bruise on somebody. And you have to use words and hand motions while meditating upon the Evil Test. You can also burn flesh for the same price using a word. Now, this is another one where you wonder why you'd do this. The user can control the physical movement of a creature at the cost of their entire body. So if you're willing to give it up and become a ghost, you can turn someone into a puppet. I can imagine there might be some vindictive reason you might do this. You can cause pain if you're willing to sacrifice just a little bit of your own flesh. That's more of a standard kind of cost. You can cause someone pain, you can cause someone's mind to go into overload. You see these are not good things, right? This Evil Test is not good. (laughter) You can move your soul into a body at the cost of a healthy amount of flesh. Now this raises questions, right? If you gave up your whole body to turn someone else into a puppet, right, and then your soul is just kind of floating there, but then it says you can give up a healthy amount of flesh to move into a body, now is that like of your body that's laying on the ground that you already paid the cost with? |
| Capntastic: | Well, I mean, if you have access to other flesh... |
| Toady One: | Yes. And that's true, it hasn't actually specified that the user's flesh is their own, so this could be a sacrifice-based system. So, yeah, very cheerful. Very cheerful. |
| Rainseeker: | Wow. So are there situations where magic would be more like Care Bear magic? |
| Toady One: | Oh yeah, yeah, yeah! You roll up a different world, you get a different set. And there are about 200 effects in the list right now and a lot of them are very cheerful. |
| Rainseeker: | That's cute. |
| Toady One: | And then the notes here say that the Evil Test source is the sun and the source of the sun is Fathis, and that the Sephitia demons that created the dwarves, their source is the ocean and their creator is Fathis. So that's where it was drawing their powers from. The Evil Test is why there were evil powers, but there's also some burning in there, and so forth, and that probably came from the sun. You should think of that like a sun-based or sun-related power. And then when it's rolling up the cultures and other things surrounding this, it will be thinking of these things. That's the idea, to make a consistent system. |
| Rainseeker: | Nice. And how do you, in the game, map out a player - maybe if they're doing Adventure Mode - engage with that magic system, and get magic powers, and stuff? |
| Toady One: | In that case - like at the top, it said that you can interact with the Evil Test after difficult research. That would point towards more of a character class type thing, or a background, or you'd be like a wizard's apprentice type thing, where you're learning. In kind of the more traditional way. In Adventure Mode right now, you can press 'plus, plus, plus,' and now I'm a proficient swordsdwarf, or whatever, right? So in this case, there'd be a new skill in the list and you'd be like 'plus, plus, plus,' and you're like, 'I'm now a proficient Evil Tester.' (laughter) Or something. |
| Capntastic: | Oh, I'm sure they'd have their own names. |
| Rainseeker: | 'The procter has arrived!' |
| Toady One: | (laughter) Yeah, one of the important things of the magic release is having procedural skills. Which we already have because of music, actually. You have knowledge of the different dances and things that people are doing in the taverns, and so forth. We got into this procedural knowledge setup. The skills themselves, I don't think, got proceduralization yet. You can be a percussionist, or whatever, but that's not procedural, that's just one of the four groupings we have. But the knowledge system, which links into the skill system, is procedural for music. So we'd just kind of be building off of that, but also having actual procedural skills as well. |
| Rainseeker: | Right. So, theoretically, you could have a magic system where it's completely overpowered and you could cause flowers to sprout from everyone's eyeballs and then win. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, well, there's no winning because the other people that can do that can do that too, right? I think the idea about balance, in this case, we have to be careful with, because a fantasy universe is inherently unbalanced by its fantasy elements. And that's the whole point, right? So I think it'd be cool to have a system like that, and then it's just like, these are very scary people who can do very scary things, but is it like guns in America where you do have some eyeball things and a lot of people not doing the eyeball thing because everyone has the eyeball thing, or it leads to that kind of thing, and that's kind of a difficult part for us. What mechanics will we have supporting this? At least some because we're not going to do a perfect job, obviously. That's never our M.O., but the idea is which things can we pick, in terms of supporting mechanics, to make the world seem like it's respecting these magic systems and respecting the outcomes of these magic systems. A thing I often consider is teleportation, right? What if everyone, just because the were born, whatever, has the ability to teleport at will? The changes in how society would work are basically unfathomable, I think. There's so much. You really have to sit down and think about it, and you think of a lot of stuff, and you aren't even scratching the surface, right, about how everything works. Everything. And so the game isn't going to be able to do all of that, but the game will be able to do some things, like just simple examples, like armies no longer have any travel costs. They just appear where they want to appear, right? That makes the game work a certain way. Now, of course, everyone in the town, including the refugees group that it creates, can also teleport to where they want to go. This would lead to a lot of empty conquests, and then can we make the game recognize that locations have less meaning now? That's a thing that comes out of teleportation. The whole notion of locations is ... But the harder part is what kind of peace comes out of this. We don't want everything to be chaos. Would a kind of peace come out of this? Who knows where we'll end up, but as long as we get something, then it'll seem kind of cool. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah. |
| Toady One: | Elves don't sound too much better in this universe, in terms of whether or not they're violent, their magic is violent, and so forth, because, in fact, the elves 'all have innate magic powers that they learn like walking'. So, everybody knows how to do this. But the magical powers also rely on something called 'the Violent Elixir'. 'It's a material used by the elven magic users, and you make it by adding a great deal of unique bile to several quality herbs, leaving it there for a day, and doing it in a rainstorm.' |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) |
| Capntastic: | Just like walking. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) That's how I learned to walk. |
| Toady One: | But once they have this nasty, bile-smelling elixir, everyone, apparently, will know how to make lightning bolts, and freeze flesh, and hurl bolts of ice. So, good for them, and let's blame Fathis again. |
| Capntastic: | Please, people listening. Humble Bay 12ers. Draw fan art of any of this. Please. Show us Fathis. Show us the Evil Test emerging from the sun. We need it. |
| Rainseeker: | Hey, what generated the elves in this world, by the way? |
| Toady One: | Oh, let's see. Let's see about that. They also came from the Different Place. Fathis formed them directly in the Different Place from Fathis's sweat. |
| Rainseeker: | Got it. They're filthy elves. |
| Toady One: | I really get the feeling that Fathis did get the tag - and it exists in the generator - of an excretor. (laughter) The limbs, the hair, the sweat. Fathis is prolific. |
| Capntastic: | That would be the Violent Elixir. |
| Toady One: | Whereas it looks like the kobolds were simply a manifestation of the Evil Test. It just kind of made kobolds. And we don't have any humans yet. How long - humans took a long time. There were, it looks like, many different named demons, and several new deities, even some named cities, hidden cities, destroyed cities. All the dwarves and elves doing their thing. And then the humans suddenly came around. Oh yeah, the humans have a much longer story here. There was the sun and the Evil Test and all that stuff, but then one of the Sephetia demons - so the land was made by disturbing the sun. That's where we got land from. One of the Sephetia demons disturbed the sun, formed the land, but then mated with it, and made the Vidate beings. |
| Rainseeker: | It's like, 'I have an art project. I'm gonna have sex with it.' (laughter) |
| Toady One: | Yeah! And now we've got Vidate beings. Now, 'beings' is a much more neutral term from 'Sephetia demons.' We have these beings - Oh! Then, suddenly, Raven swoops in, lays an egg. Good job, Raven. And then the Evil Test mingled with the beings, creating a new plane called the Highlands. And then a god named Finnukora hatched from the egg and spun a web into the humans. So these humans were spun from this web in the Highlands from this raven ... hatched an egg... |
| Rainseeker: | I told you this raven would be trouble. (laughter) |
| Toady One: | Yep. Made these humans. Oh, and - good job humans - the humans emerged from the Highlands and destroyed the Spindle of Phopenom, which was guiding fate. |
| Rainseeker: | Wait. So they helped the dwarves, then? |
| Capntastic: | 2020. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, freed them from that, and the humans had another curse pronounced upon them. Now humans have free will, but their fates are subject to the workings of the destroyed Spindle of Phopenom. (laughter) So, it's good for everybody there. |
| Rainseeker: | I don't even know what that means. (laughter) |
| Capntastic: | It's like Morrowind. You have the tools of fate, or whatever. |
| Rainseeker: | There you go. |
| Toady One: | It even has a description of the Sephetia demons. 'These beings are very large, serene humanoids with several long tentacles.' And they're immortal and have many innate powers. |
| Rainseeker: | When they're called a demon, are they inherently evil? |
| Toady One: | I think that it puts a flag on them that says they're more evil. They're serene but they've got tentacles, and they're called demons. |
| Rainseeker: | They're peaceful until they kill you. |
| Toady One: | Whereas the Vidate beings are nature spirits but they can manifest as large, fiery humanoids surrounded by rings of fire. |
| Rainseeker: | They seem a little more demonic, but okay. (laughter) |
| Toady One: | Yeah, well, maybe it's a volcano thing or something. Like a volcano's not inherently evil, they're just chaotic and dangerous. What other demons? We had Phokethas demons - 'small, reddish humanoids with feathered wings.' Happy little critters. |
| Rainseeker: | So, now, are these things you would encounter in your adventures? Like, if you wander around? |
| Toady One: | Yeah, exactly. The same way you can encounter those demons from the underworld now and the titans, minotaurs, and all that kind of stuff. The idea is that these would be part of the cosmology but also part of the world. |
| Rainseeker: | Are they inherently aggroed against the player? |
| Toady One: | Oh, not at all. I mean, I'm sure a Vidate being is a much nicer critter ... Of course, I've forgotten some of the details already, because the details are deeply silly. But ... why did we care about Vidate? Why did it even mention - Oh! Because 'they were mingled with the Evil Test to create the Highlands' - So the Vidate beings are very attached to these Highlands areas. They would be kind of like angels, in a sense, to the humans, who came from the Highlands. It's sort of like an Eden. It doesn't mention it as an Eden expulsion, but because of the destruction of the Spindle, and the curse that was placed on the humans afterward, it is very similar, right? I think of a Vidate being that way. Now, it calls them nature spirits, so they're somewhat more linked to nature than the angel concept. But, yeah, that's the thing. So, night creatures came from animal people. And Zezikon did that. Good job, Zezikon. |
| SFX: | (Musical Interlude) (48:22) |
| Toady One: | ... what are animal people? |
| Rainseeker: | Is there any way to influence this? Aside from using bars, or anything, like the story... |
| Toady One: | Yeah that's the thing right, is that the bars idea is just like 'the user wants to make a world - bam here it is' and they want it to follow these general parameters. But what we have been discussing, we've discussed this a few times in Future of the Fortress, of course everything is kind of subject to see what's actually gonna happen. There's this kind of paired concept of having editors, when we do this stuff, that allows you to make ... you want a city on this map with these people, you can do that too. But there's this mid-range concept in there where you're not creating the actual named people and so forth but you put restrictions on it. Like if you say 'I don't want any fire-type magic at all. Just turn it off'. And that in fact is in this generator now, but I don't have an interface for it, but you can turn off ... I do have an interface for it actually, I have a raw file. It's just like Dwarf Fortress, right. Dwarf Fortress has text files for everything. So I have this thing called myth parameters. It says 'general parameters: gods - yes, forces - yes, planes - yes, ancient races - yes, fantasy rating - 2'. So if I turn the fantasy rating - I'm just trying to remember what I've already done which is always amusing - if I turn the fantasy rating to 4 what are we going to get? So we have a void, and Zepokia, the great being who's asleep, and a force called 'the Vein of Fate'. But when it created the races, right, that you would play - the playable races, there's only two playable races in this universe. One is called the Brugar creatures. (laughter) |
| Capntastic: | (laughter) |
| Rainseeker: | Tell us about them. |
| Toady One: | They are 'smallish green serpents with a single grasping tentacle'. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) |
| Toady One: | So you can play the Brugar creatures. Or you can play the Swinons. 'Swinons are large shrouded arthropods with pairs of spiny tentacles'. You'll notice that tentacles are prevalent here and that's probably because I didn't spend too much time on the generator. So we've got Swinons and Brugar creatures in this world. |
| Rainseeker: | Those are great names, by the way. |
| Toady One: | It's like ... I don't even know what that name generator is from. Like the god names are all based on a Greek island names. I have a Greek island name generator. |
| Rainseeker: | Nice. |
| Toady One: | Just cause that's an easy way for me to relate to mythology, like the easy way to do it. And so things sound right so it helps me work or whatever. It's kind of stupid. |
| Rainseeker: | No, that makes sense. |
| Toady One: | But these are different. Like Brugar creatures and Swinons are not Greek at all. As far as I know, I don't speak Attic or anything. So yeah, that was intriguing, while at the same time if I set the fantasy rating to zero ... I don't even know if this is implemented or not but why not give it a shot ... I have a world and it's only got humans in it. There are no dwarves here. There's a lot of fantasy stuff, but the kind of conceit here is that all of this stuff is kind of not true. That the humans have this made up mythology but actually they don't have magic powers and everything is ... You know, nothing's going on. |
| Rainseeker: | It's just their myth. |
| Toady One: | Yeah. |
| Capntastic: | Does it highlight that? |
| Toady One: | Not in the myth generator currently. That would just be a sentence and I didn't bother writing it. They do believe they have magic powers. They believe they can use 'Chaos Beast bones' and 'Celestial Egg fragments'. So yeah, the power of Chaos Beast bones. 'These tiny remnants of creation are rare, floating over the landscape'. 'The "Origin Brew" is a material utilized by the user. They are created by adding a lot of unique milk, two common tongues, and Chaos Beast bones'. I don't know if they're just taking dinosaur bones and throwing them in milk and letting it ferment and are like 'this is the Origin Brew!' |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) But they have to be floating, to get them to work? |
| Toady One: | Yeah. So I think the person that finds them just says they are floating, or something. |
| Rainseeker: | Right, right right right. (in a voice) These were floating in the wilds. You should pay me much gold for this! |
| (laughter) | |
| Toady One: | ...wow there were like nine eggs in this universe. Who's been laying all these eggs? The cosmic turtle, of course. |
| Rainseeker: | The cosmic turtle? Oh, ok. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, there were many eggs, the cosmic turtle was just- And then there's the Celestial Egg fragments. And that was laid by the cosmic turtle, but before the land was formed. So things that happened before the land was formed are called 'celestial' in this system. And lots of egg fragments, and they're always buried. Now the Chaos Bones should always be buried too, but at least it got the egg fragments right. And they carve them, that's how they use the Celestial Egg fragments. They carve them into these ... it doesn't talk anything about runes or anything ... but they do something. I don't know if it's scrimshaw or whatever, but they got a carving system. Oh what are the... |
| Rainseeker: | [interruption] |
| Toady One: | Yeah yeah, in any case. |
| Rainseeker: | Let's do one more universe. Let's try one to be as close to the Care Bear universe as possible. Let's turn off all the violence. |
| Toady One: | Let's see if that's even possible. You would love to think that we have the violence slider implemented. I can turn off violent magic categories. 'turned off: no'. |
| Rainseeker: | There you go. |
| Toady One: | Do we want to get rid of all the elemental stuff and just keep destruction off? We'll keep creation, movement - no trickery. I mean there might be some villain in the Care Bear universe but that's... |
| Rainseeker: | No no no, no trickery. No bad things. |
| Toady One: | No darkness, no secrets, no death, sure. No suffering. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) |
| Toady One: | Let's get rid of that fire. Just get rid of earth and water to be safe. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) |
| Toady One: | Cause they like doing ice bolts and stuff, right. |
| Rainseeker: | Gotcha, gotcha. |
| Toady One: | Let's see, restoration we like, protection we like. Although what would you protect me from, maybe we'll turn off that too. But maybe you can stub your toe or something. |
| Rainseeker: | There you go, accidents. |
| Toady One: | And then there's all these cost multipliers and stuff. I'll just leave that off. I don't know if we'd want gods, forces, planes and fantasy rating, just leave all that the same. |
| Rainseeker: | It's up to you. |
| Toady One: | Yeah yeah I'll just leave that, and see if this is any better. This is not a great implementation of the violence slider yet because we haven't gotten to that. But we'll see what we got for dwarves this time. 'Dwarves'. Let's see ... 'Du-du-du-du-duu'. Yeah okay. Now there's still, because there wasn't a thing that said - now 'death' was turning off death magic, but people still die. It's called 'the gift of death' this time, that's nice. |
| (laughter) | |
| Capntastic: | Wholesome. |
| Toady One: | And the dwarves were formed from sweat on a mountain. Good job everybody. So the dwarves, their souls travel 'the Green World' if they've meditated enough, otherwise they are reincarnated. |
| Rainseeker: | Wait, if you have reincarnation turned on does that mean that your adventurer will reincarnate when you die? |
| Toady One: | That is the idea, yeah. We've been thinking ... I don't know how much it disturbs the gameflow. Like if you get your head chopped off or something - not that that would happen in the Care bear universe - if you stub your head, if you stub your head real bad. |
| (laughter) | |
| Rainseeker: | Stub your head cleaaan off - wait. You get a slight ... bump. |
| (more laughter) | |
| Toady One: | We thought it would be cool to like ... then suddenly you're in the afterlife, and I don't know if you're walking though a field or whatever the highlands are, whatever the different place is, and you're like 'Oh. Well shoot.' And I don't know if you have to go back through the announcements to figure out what happened. There's kind of a tension between seeing yourself die and leaving you confused as it would be more accurately, whatever that means. But then however the reincarnation works, like if you have to be reforged on a dwarven anvil, then you'd have to walk up and be reforged, or do you have to stare into a pool or something. But then it could just bring you back into character creation or whatever. Obviously there's the whole baby part that maybe we'll have to hand-wave a little bit to make the game playable. Or maybe you just turn into a baby, and then you're a baby adventurer and you can crawl around. |
| (laughter) | |
| Toady One: | And that would be troublesome. Or we could throw you into calendar mode for 15 years, or whatever, and you can watch the calendar go. Hopefully we can make the calendar mode run a little faster. That's another of those things that we were trying to think about, because we can't ... |
| Rainseeker: | Might be fun to be able to go 'I want this guy to be my sensei and I want to learn how to do this thing over the course of 15 years.' That would be cool. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, that's definitely something we were planning to do. We can't put the world-gen back in the bag, too many details get added to remove them. So it's difficult to just restart world-gen, but we can definitely make time pass faster than it currently does. And we'll just have to think about that. But in terms of the Care Bear magic system here we've got dwarves that can predict the weather. Now the thing is if they lose emotional control, and this is not very Care Bear at all, if they lose emotional control while they're trying to predict the weather they can get an headache. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) |
| Capntastic: | Oooooh. |
| Rainseeker: | Oh no! |
| Toady One: | They can calm the wind. They need to call upon their inner power and paint their body to do this. |
| Rainseeker: | That's how they get like the little markings on their tum-tum. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah. They paint that on. |
| Toady One: | This is Care Bear isn't it? There's a lot of calling upon their inner power and body painting in this one. Controlling the wind, calling rain, jump powerfully. I bet a care bear can jump powerfully. |
| Capntastic: | I've seen Morrowind, that does not end well. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) |
| Toady One: | They can create, fall slowly. And then there's kind of this cryptic statement at the end that I'm not sure is Care Bear. It says: 'Like other beings with access to proper materials, the dwarves can utilize the powers of primordial darkness.' |
| (laughter) | |
| Rainseeker: | But the primordial darkness is more like 'dimness' in this one. |
| Capntastic: | You have a primordial nightlight! |
| Rainseeker: | (chuckles) exactly. |
| Toady One: | So the power... |
| Rainseeker: | All right artists, let's have some art of this world. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah. Get to it! |
| Toady One: | What is the power of primordial darkness...? Oh! There is an entry for power of primordial darkness! |
| Capntastic: | Oh really? |
| Toady One: | Except it doesn't say what it does, it just says there are gigantic remnants of darkness. Everywhere. Under the earth. (chuckles) |
| Rainseeker: | O-kay. That sounds spooky! |
| (everyone talking at once, laughter) | |
| Capntastic: | Those headaches aren't good! Don't think about it too much! |
| Toady One: | This is very sinister, this is very... |
| Rainseeker: | It's all Care Bear on top, underneath it's 'Oh no, don't go down. No caving. No.' |
| Toady One: | Yeah yeah. And that's just a taste of what we should be able to do when we add some parameters and other factors that allow you to do that. And if we're like 'really, no head aches!' then we'll just have to have a thing that lets you turn off negative effects entirely or whatever. And no primordial darkness either, and then ... And that was a thing that was not in the list of parameters as well, is like 'what is the original kind of setup'? Because the game allows for a void, it allows for a darkness, it allows for a sea, for magma of course, fire, a great hurricane, ice, a vaste expanse of mud. |
| Capntastic: | And will we be able to traverse these environments? |
| Toady One: | If they still exist. That's the thing were you have the primordial fragments, but sometimes, especially when it's the ocean - I mean that's the ocean, it's the same one that's always been there, right. |
| Capntastic: | Give me my Spelljammer. |
| Toady One: | (chuckles) And that's the void I guess, is Spelljammer, right. It's the void, with things in it. |
| Capntastic: | I heard Celestial Egg. |
| Toady One: | Yeah yeah. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) |
| Capntastic: | Crystal sphere, phlogiston... |
| Toady One: | (chuckles) I think even with the ones where you have a chaos of monsters, I mean that could be what the Forgotten Beasts are, right. Just what was left of the chaos of monsters that was at the beginning of the universe. |
| Rainseeker: | Right right right right right right yeah. Just forgotten monsters. |
| Toady One: | And so it all kinds of fits together. And of course that means that you could take the Forgotten Beast, when you kill one, and that's where you get your Chaos Beast bones, but that you wanted to have them fresh this time. |
| Capntastic: | And carve them. |
| Toady One: | And then you could carve them. And then yeah, do whatever that... |
| Rainseeker: | Make books (or bugs.) |
| Toady One: | Good business, good business. Now, so that was an entertaining little foray into mythland. |
| Capntastic: | I'm assuming when you play the game there will be scriptures or other things that you can discover and read. And maybe different accounts of these events, so there will be schisms possible. |
| Toady One: | So there's a couple of things about that, maybe three or two or something. So the things I was reading when I clicked on a name, like when I click on dwarves, and it gave me the abridged version, that just goes up the tree of all the events and searches for things that are relevant to the creation of dwarves, the land, the ocean, things that just say why the world is the way it is but they don't cover kobolds at all, right. Unless dwarves were made from kobolds, which can happen. |
| Rainseeker: | (surprised yell) |
| Toady One: | Then that's a thing that happens. So that's one type of account. The elves would have one account that emphasizes things, and the dwarves would have an account that emphasizes things, and they may not share any elements except for what the beginning is like. So this is a setup where everyone's right, right. I mean that's a complicated thing, we always run into trouble when we do lies and stuff, because there's extra data to be checked ... With villains we did some work with that and got somewhere, with the secret identities we did some work with that. And it would be similar, right, having parts of the belief systems that are incorrect, parts that are partially correct, and then there's the question about emphasizing things which is the part that we can handle more easily. Then there's the ones like in the fantasy-zero system, but we can do it in all of the levels, where there's just a flat out totally wrong one. Just generated. The prophets do that to a very small extent already, they're like 'This world is being judged and will be destroyed by fire!' or whatever. That's just something they rolled up. It's not right except if it happens to be right. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) Lucky. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, good job, and then he'll get some more followers or whatever. So yeah, there's some room to do it the easy way, and then the more difficult stuff. When we talked about schismatics and stuff, of course schismatics can both be right too, one can just emphasize the High Place and one can emphasize the sweat. (chuckles) They can even have systems of magic that work, but that emphasize ... like one of them likes to get sweaty or something and the other likes to climb on top of a mountain. |
| Rainseeker: | Right right right. |
| Toady One: | And yeah, so you just feed these little details, we just try to cut up everything into small little pieces, and feed the details to the system, and then it can do all the work. And it seems promising just given what we did in that little generator there. It seems like it should be interesting, and the tricky parts are many. Like we talked about the balance issues, right, like if people have these powers to change the weather all the time, then what effects should that have? And so we could do some stuff with agriculture and other stuff you'd use rain for, and try to give some bonuses. And, you know, if we came up with a list of maybe two or three world effects that apply to each of the magic schools, or each of the magic effects, just little tweaks and things that we can sprinkle about, and then highlight them in legends and so forth, then things will start to seem very consistent. And then you bring that over to fort mode, and you can change the weather. I mean right now we're having a lot of trouble with dwarves that have their lives irreversibly changed by being caught in the rain since we added the long term - |
| Rainseeker: | (stuttering through laughter) W-w-wh-what!? |
| Toady One: | So you've been gone a little bit. We added the life arcs and long-term memories and personality changes that come from your trials and so forth, and it can happen where you remember the time when you were injured by a goblin and you become more cautious, or maybe you become more brave, or you start to believe in sacrifice, etc. There's a lot of different outcomes. And it highlights it in your thoughts, and in your personality it says 'this facet changed because of this event that happened this year' and so forth. And it's pretty cool in principle right, it's kind of remembering these things and causing game effects and causing character arcs to happen, but there's an issue right now where one of the very common character arcs is that someone just ruminates on being caught in the rain... |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) |
| Capntastic: | [indecipherable] |
| Toady One: | ...being miserable and then changes their whole life around that... |
| Rainseeker: | (more laughter) It's the magic rain. |
| Toady One: | ...and just starts to get stressed out and ... and so I'm sure people would welcome a spell that clears the weather. A weather-clearing spell you devote half of your fortress resources to making sure there's never a drop of rain. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, I mean you could also have all kinds of interesting thing with the myth generator. You could say that not everyone always get the fire powers but some people do if they were born during a full moon, or something like that. |
| Toady One: | Yeah exactly. We have just a few of those now. You have to do the kind of dodgy ones like bloodlines and all that kind of stuff. Certainly the astronomy/astrology stuff should be really cool when we're like generating those signs and things too, right. Everything comes together and then those things can have meanings that are consistent with where those things came from too. Yeah it's ... iiiit's pretty intriguing. Pretty intriguing, pretty fun. And that's why we're looking forward to it but we've got work to do first. Work to do. We've got pictures to draw and buttons, buttons to make. |
| Rainseeker: | (chuckles) ...Buttons. |
| Toady One: | Lots of buttons, lots of little... |
| Rainseeker: | Indeed. I'm looking forward to that. When you're done with that full adventure mode, that's going to be a lot of fun. Or at least when you are done with the user interface, I think I'm going to try to jump on that as soon as possible and check that out. That'll be fun. |
| Toady One: | Yeah. It'll be cool. It's like 'Do you want to move with the mouse? We've got the mouse.' People have to be able to move with the mouse. Probably also an expectation that people are going to want to move with wasd-keys too or something. |
| Capntastic: | Oh yeah. |
| Toady One: | I've got wasd-keys. 'Wazd-keys'. I don't even know how you say that, is it 'wasd'? I shouldn't say 'wazd' because - |
| Capntastic: | 'Waz-D'. |
| Toady One: | Yeah it gets voiced because the 'd' is voiced, but the 's' is not voiced, but it's adjacent to a 'd'. |
| Rainseeker: | I've never heard anyone pronounce it like that, I've always just, just 'double-u-a-ess-dee'. |
| Toady One: | 'Double-u-a-ess-dee'. Yeah, and that could very well be how regular people say it. (laughter) |
| Rainseeker: | Could be. I suppose. I've never claimed to be a regular person, so. |
| Toady One: | And I'm not an online FPS kind of person that would be like shouting 'Use your double-u-a-ess-dee appropriately!' or something. Or whatever people shout in - |
| Capntastic: | I'm going to start saying that in games. |
| Toady One: | (laughter) |
| Rainseeker: | 'Wazd! Wazd!' |
| Toady One: | Yeah yeah, literally no idea. I doubt it has made it into the dictionaries yet. Although maybe, you never know. You never know when things get in the dictionary. |
| Rainseeker: | So let's diverge a little from Dwarf Fortress. What games have you been playing, what are you looking forward to coming out? |
| Toady One: | Well. I just got through my Factorio binge. I get into that every couple years. I don't remember if I mentioned this last time just doing the space exploration mod. I kind of got through that, at least as far as I was going to make it anyway, because I wasn't going to decrypt stuff or whatever the last stage is. Just some kind of decryption puzzle. Like 'Nope, nope. Too much work'. |
| Rainseeker: | (chuckles) |
| Toady One: | So I could be screenshotting different kinds of archaeological sites and stuff. So I got a lot of time out of that, and so I've just entered the in-between zone where I'm wondering what I should do next, with nothing on my radar because I've been hunkered down. |
| Rainseeker: | You're not much into multiplayer games, are you? |
| Toady One: | Oh no. (chuckles) No, I did play on the PS, I think it was the PS4, I did have Destiny for a bit because the multiplayer is really kind of unobtrusive in that. I never did any of the - what are they called? I don't even remember. - the crucibles? What are they called? |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah the PvP yeah. |
| Toady One: | Yeah I never did any of that, but the environmental stuff it's kind of relaxing. Like people will be off there fighting some thing, and if you just want to snipe something and then wander on, maybe wave at them and then wander on, that's something I can take. |
| Rainseeker: | I've been playing a lot of Overwatch past couple of years. So that's a pretty intense game, I imagine you're not into that. |
| Toady One: | (chuckles) Yeah I hear - |
| Capntastic: | I mean, it can be pretty chill. |
| Toady One: | Do you have a main? Do people have mains? Is that how it works? |
| Capntastic: | I play D.Va. |
| Rainseeker: | Oh you do? |
| Capntastic: | Yes. |
| Rainseeker: | I play Pharah and ... Symmetra and Torbjörn and Reinhardt ... |
| Toady One: | (chuckles) |
| Rainseeker: | ... and Zarya ... and McCree. Pretty much. I would Junkrat. Those are my mains. My few mains. |
| Capntastic: | Hmm. Terminology is a wonderful thing. |
| (laughter) | |
| Rainseeker: | Indeed. Indeed. We need to play online. I didn't realize that you played. |
| Capntastic: | Ah, I don't play a lot. I have the game I should say. I haven't played it in like ... I logged in for the anniversary to like 'Oh you get a free box', and I opened the box and I didn't get anything cool and it was like 'Okay. Uninstall.' |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) |
| Capntastic: | You got to give me treats. |
| SFX: | (Music fades in) |
| Rainseeker: | There you go. I want my treats. |
| SFX: | (Musical Interlude) (1:12:09) |
| Capntastic: | All right, well that just about does it for this episode of DF Talk. |
| Rainseeker: | ...Woo! Thanks for joining us you guys. |
| Capntastic: | Thank you for joining us. |
| Toady One: | Yeah it's great to have the team back together. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah this has been a real joy. We'll do it again! |
| Capntastic: | Absolutely, and it won't be fo(u)r years. |
| Rainseeker: | There you go. |
| Capntastic: | ... I mean it will be soon, not like ... fo(u)r as in ... it will not be the number four. It won't be five years! There we go. |
| (laughter) | |
| Rainseeker: | Or six or seven. We'll do it much sooner, much sooner. |
| Toady One: | Excellent. So yeah! Everybody have fun playing video games and taking care of yourselves! |
| Rainseeker: | Indeed. Stay healthy, stay emotionally healthy. Guys, just know that we're all kind of suffering the same thing, we're all kind of cooped up and I hope that you guys keep a positive mental attitude with this season, and do your best to stay engaged with your friends and family. It's what you need! You need people around ya! |
| Capntastic: | But not too close. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, yeah, six feet! |
| SFX: | (Musical Postlude) (1:13:26) |
Dwarf Fortress Talk #25, with Rainseeker, Capntastic, and Toady One, transcribed by voliol
Animal sprites
Baking
Minotaurs and night trolls
Reddit posts
"Death is all around us... I feel pretty good"
Reproducing necromancer invaders
"Dammit, 'Safety Hat', my favourite dwarf, is dead."
Misc.
Omens, luck, and prophecies
Playing as non-dwarf civilizations
Playing as villains
Vampires and immigration protocols
Genetics
Questions
Demons not trapped in the underworld in Myth & Magic
Proactive anti-zombie measures
Werebeast fortresses
Generating "vanilla" with the myth generator
Misc.
Modding and Steam Workshop
Multiplayer (mods)
Ending Thanks
Bonus/links
| SFX: | (Musical Prelude) |
| Rainseeker: | Hello, and welcome to today's episode of Dwarf Fortress Talk. I'm Rainseeker. |
| Capntastic: | I'm Capntastic- |
| Rainseeker: | And with me is Capntastic, yep yep- Go ahead. |
| Capntastic: | Yep, yep, yep. I'm Capntastic. |
| Rainseeker: | We planned this very well, as you can tell. And with us is our illustrious programmer and game designer of the game of the century, Toady One. |
| Toady One: | (chuckles) That's right, the century started a long time ago. It feels like half of my life ago. |
| Rainseeker: | So Tarn let's look really quick, because we were just talking about this before we started recording, at our images on the website. These are really cool. I see that you've got the African gray parrot up, |
| Toady One: | (chuckles) |
| Rainseeker: | Which was my special request years ago. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, everyone loves Alex. |
| Rainseeker: | And that's really exciting. I'm really liking the way that the tiles are like merging together, and the grass overlaps the glass. That's cool. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, how many have we done, what else have we had? We had... after that we had the spider picture, the mole picture, the giant toad, the cave swallow. Various small mammals. |
| Rainseeker: | Mmm, look at that. |
| Toady One: | And then the gremlin. (laughter) |
| Capntastic: | I love that gremlin. |
| Rainseeker: | So is that mole a giant beast? Are those the giant beasts - is that a giant mole beast? Is that the point? |
| Toady One: | Oh, it's not a forgotten beast. That's actually one of the underground critters. One of the fixed critters. For some reason - it's such a haphazard selection, right; we have the giant earthworm, the giant mole, the giant rat, the toad, the giant cave swallow, the giant spider and then some oddities... But that's... I don't know why a toad. I mean I guess there's some obvious reasons why there might be a toad - I'm a toad! But the mole and- |
| Rainseeker: | The giant cave swallow though. I mean- |
| Toady One: | Yeah yeah. And there are giant bats too! Once you have a cave swallow you've got to have a giant bat or you're, you know, kind of attempting fate. |
| Rainseeker: | Unless you want to go off a different direction than every other RPG in existence. |
| Toady One: | I didn't know they were so colorful, right, it looks so fun now, it's a very fun bird. But, well it's a bright and cheerful game, Dwarf Fortress. |
| Rainseeker: | Is that swallow a dangerous creature, or does it just fly around and be giant? |
| Toady One: | Well, anything that's giant is dangerous, especially cause you're playing dwarves, right. So it can snatch you and tear off your little dwarfy parts. They used to ride them and shoot the blowgun darts at people. Still one of our great failings is to not have reclaimed the riding underground civilizations that attacked through your wells - I wonder if they ever flew the birds up though your wells? Just flew the birds back and forth in the chasm. As I recollect there being a variable called PATTERN_FLIER and you set that on and then it would set a little path that they would follow, just tracking up and down the chasm, just shooting targets of opportunity as they went by, paralyzing your dwarves with cave spider venom. |
| Rainseeker: | Ooh, delicious! |
| Capntastic: | Something about winged beak dogs. |
| Toady One: | (laughter) Yeah, it would have to be in Tremors 5, or something. |
| Rainseeker: | Speaking of spider, I was having trouble sleeping last night. Woke up about 5:30 in the morning, and I decided to take a shower. So I was looking at my iPad in the shower as I am wont to do, being careful not to get it wet. |
| Toady One: | (laughter) |
| Capntastic: | A dangerous game. |
| Rainseeker: | And I was leaning against a towel against the wall, when I suddenly felt a little prickly thing, and then I looked down in time to see a spider crawling on my arm. And it bit me. And then I slapped it, and it fell off, and I recovered it. And in a panic for the next hour and a half I searched online to try to figure out if it was a poisonous spider. It turns out it is a house spider, |
| Toady One: | Oh that's good. |
| Rainseeker: | those normal harmless things. But they are kind of aggressive when startled, apparently. So he bit me. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, I have a whole ecosystem here, we've got... Cause we had a flea blow up. I mean living in an apartment it is kind of unavoidable. So Scamps has had his flea medication, I've been vacuuming, making the eggs get scooped up and stuff. And they kind of died down, but, it lead to a spider explosion. (chuckles) And then Scamps is the apex predator. Because he will just - when he sees a spider he runs over to it and just "chomp". One chomp and it's gone. |
| Rainseeker: | Eats it! |
| Toady One: | Yeah, just eats it and continues the circle of life. There's probably something that lives inside the fleas or something that goes through the circle. And yeah, I try not to think about it too much but there are spiders everywhere. But I like to keep them because they're flea control. |
| Rainseeker: | I allow the daddy long leg spiders to live in my house. They're kind of nice, I don't mind them. Anything else though is really creepy looking so I'll kick those out if I can but otherwise they're dead. |
| Capntastic: | I have an aluminum baseball bat for gently poking any home invaders of the multi-legged kind. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, it makes sense to me. |
| Toady One: | Once the orb on the back of the spider gets sufficiently big and glossy it starts to terrify me. It's not the legs at all just the big ol' orb. More suggestive of the black widow or whatever. It's kind of scary right. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, we have quite a few black widows up here. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, that's not for me. |
| Rainseeker: | I was scared that it would be a black widow that just bit me. That was what immediately went through my head is like a hospital trip (chuckles). |
| Toady One: | Yeah, wow, yeah, that's no good. |
| Rainseeker: | Aaanyways, enough creepy crawly talk... Capn, how was your week? |
| Capntastic: | I've been making a lot of bread lately. Just baking and baking bread after bread Different methods, I got a book. I'm happy about that. I just finished baking two loaves of bread today that I started last night, feeling good about that. I think a lot of people are turning dwarves, leisure baking during this social isolation period. |
| Rainseeker: | I hear that. I professionally bake as you all know, so that's lots of fun. Speaking of baking is there baking in Dwarf Fortress? |
| Toady One: | Uh, sort of. There's the kitchen. The kitchen, the dubious, dubious kitchen. |
| Rainseeker: | I don't remember, can we make bread? |
| Toady One: | As I recollect, and people have to correct me if I'm wrong, you can mince flour and make biscuits. |
| (laughter from everyone) | |
| Toady One: | And if that's not really, it's at least that bad. |
| Rainseeker: | Chopping, just chopping and chopping at the grains. |
| Toady One: | Yeah. Obviously after going through the mill, like you have a giant water powered or wind powered mill, and you bring the wheat there and get it in a bag and you have this flour. And it's perfectly fine as a dwarf would do, right. You've got great flour. And then you put it on the table - obviously it needs to be minced more finely. |
| Rainseeker: | What the real question is: is there a giant that can mince dwarf bones and into bread? |
| Toady One: | Oh, well, we're slightly further along on that you might anticipate because of the minotaur. If you go into the labyrinth it generates this maze, right, and there's a room at the end of the maze. It's a little five by five room or something, and they have their bone mill there. And they take the bones and they mill them into bone meal. And this is why we added bone meal to the game, for the the minotaur. This is, in my not so well read recollection, this is not classical. I don't know that the minotaur had a bone mill, but it's actually from The Incredible String Band song. "Down in the dark my bone mills roll" etcetera. So that's why that is in there. |
| Capntastic: | Okay. |
| Toady One: | Goofy, goofy, goofy British folk music gives us the minotaur with the bone mill. And of course they chase you and hunt you through the labyrinth and scream things in the darkness and so forth, but the prize is to find their nasty little home. It was kind of the nasty little home series of releases really, because the the night trolls also have their habits. |
| Rainseeker: | The nasty little homework. |
| Toady One: | (chuckles) Yeah I forget if they were called habits. There is something like that, habits or antics or something like that inside the raw files, where the night trolls that are generated have little weird habits. Like one of them will collect beetles and put it in a mortar and pestle and grind the beetles into beetle paste. For no reason. |
| Rainseeker: | That's good protein. |
| Toady One: | Yeah... I mean they could be dyeing their clothes, you know, there's all kinds of- |
| Rainseeker: | [unintelligible] |
| Toady One: | -they don't wear clothes of course - but maybe they smear it on themselves or something. You know, we just wanted them to feel like they had little tasks that they were kind of obsessed with, that made them strange. |
| Capntastic: | Like X-files monsters. |
| Toady One: | (chuckles) Yeah. So they're good little critters. And some of them just eat rats and things, but they all of course kidnap people and convert them and stuff so they're very bad horrifying things, but they have like this side gig of messing with little bugs. |
| SFX: | (Musical Interlude starts) (10:50) |
| Capntastic: | That's wonderful. Little bugs are the best. |
| SFX: | (Musical Interlude) |
| Rainseeker: | We have... I wanted to do something on Reddit, and read some of these posts that people have put up on Reddit. There is one where the title is this that says: "I like this guy.". And this is the story of Aban Lektadmeng the marksdwarf. He says: "Help! Save me! Death is all around us, the horror..." And then the hunter stands up and then he says "I feel pretty good". |
| Toady One: | (laughter) |
| Rainseeker: | It's from Count_Triple. Hey Count_Triple. |
| Capntastic: | Shout-out to Count_Triple! |
| Rainseeker: | Apparently he's "Just like another day, another day". |
| Capntastic: | Whenever I read these things I can't help but view it like an action hero one-liner (in a voice) "Death is all around me. I feel pretty good." |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) |
| Toady One: | Yeah, I'm trying to remember if that's what happens when their thoughts are cleared and they have nothing to talk about, or if that's what they think when they're an optimist or something. They have personality based lines and situation based lines and they kind of mix and match them and it sometimes makes them sound very ridiculous, yeah. |
| Rainseeker: | Here's another one on Reddit, from Cabbagetroll: It says that "[t]he necromancer invaders have been hanging around outside my fortress for so long they've started reproducing." |
| Toady One: | (laughter) |
| Rainseeker: | "The kids are listed as "Friendly" in the unit menu." |
| Toady One: | (laughter) That's sorrowful. I hope they don't send out the military to take care of that, because they probably will just have there be like wilderness. orphan necromancer invaders. I assume that's not zombies - well I hope it's not zombies - that are that are reproducing. |
| Rainseeker: | Well here it says it says "Shadu, Wolf Of Frightfulbolts has given birth to a girl". So it looks like the wolves are reproducing babies. |
| Toady One: | Oh those... Yeah if it's wolf - it's not too precise with the language, but my guess is if it's a wolf then it's probably one of the quadrupeds or hexapods that they bred from the livestock. But it's also possible that wolf was just used as a name for a humanoid because it had a wolf-like aspect to it, right. |
| Capntastic: | Mhm. |
| Rainseeker: | Mm, mhm mhm. |
| Toady One: | But everyone can... well not everyone. It actually decides if they can breed or not. Some of them are, what is that called, dimorphic or whatever, and then some of them are just just one sort of body or the other, and some of them it doesn't specify. There's all sorts of ways the experiments can turn out, that's why they're experiments. |
| Rainseeker: | Can you have necromancers that aren't inherently aggressive to a fortress? |
| Toady One: | No, sadly. Sadly they're all rather messed up people. |
| Rainseeker: | I mean it might be kind of cool if you could have a necromancer show up and offer to buy the corpses off of you. You know what I mean? |
| Toady One: | Definitely one of those branching narrative type of things like- |
| Rainseeker: | That would be kind of neat. |
| Toady One: | -is this a good decision? Is this the decision I want to make for the future of my fort? But I mean if the necromancer is willing to pay and the dwarves see that like shiny metal stuff. |
| Rainseeker: | And then they turn around and attack your fort with them, yeah yeah. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, yeah. But now it might be worth it because you'd be able to kind of turn the metal around and make some weapons or something. That could be a part of a lifelong partnership as long as you're generating enough bodies. And forts often do that. |
| Rainseeker: | Yep. Here's another post from NZSloth. It says "Dammit! 'Safety Hat', my favourite dwarf, is dead.". "She's followed me for 46 years through five forts. Started as a useless forge slave in my first fort in this world and produced my first artifact: a lead cap, hence the nickname "Safety Hat". She migrated to every fort since then. She was always single and had a bad personality but was always doing useful things. And how did she die, with honor and battle defending a friend? Nope. Cleaning up after a major goblin invasion and she somehow... falls into a volcano." |
| (laughter) | |
| Toady One: | Yeah, I guess that's another argument for the fencing. It's like "could you add fences to the game, please". |
| Capntastic: | My fort has a volcano and I really hope no one falls into it. |
| Rainseeker: | Well, how do people fall? Is it slippery ground or is it just like... |
| Toady One: | No, I mean that's why I'm confused because normally it would be something like dodging or something, right? The only time I ever hear about that is dodging, but apparently there are other cases. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, apparently, yeah. And is it is it possible that it's just something they were doing messing around with bridges or something? |
| Toady One: | Oh well, I mean the player is always a wild card here. The way the person's talking about it it seems like that they weren't, you know, collapsing a whole section of floor or anything like that. But yeah, there's always other... I mean, if there were mine carts around they jump out of the way of mine carts. I doubt there was a falling tree, although it could have been outside because it was cleaning up after a invasion. If someone was doing a lumber operation they could jump out of the way of the tree. |
| Rainseeker: | Ah, and that would possibly cause you to topple off a cliff. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, right down to the center of the volcano, sadly. The lead hat's not going to help for very long. |
| Rainseeker: | It's like melting as you... |
| Toady One: | It's like Terminator 2, maybe they held their thumbs up. It's a great moment for everybody. |
| Rainseeker: | She's like "My nightmare is finally over". |
| (laughter) | |
| Toady One: | Yeah, why she decided to go to the fifth fort this person was running. |
| Rainseeker: | I know, "I'm with you, to the very end". |
| Capntastic: | What was her emotional state? This is the important thing. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, NZSloth, we want to know more. We need more information. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, cause I imagine they were sad that their fat was melting inside their skin, while their skin was unaffected or however it works. |
| Capntastic: | Or they were in rain a year ago. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) [unintelligible, covered by laughter] rain for a year. (In a voice) "It rained on me once". |
| Toady One: | Yeah, still it's like... every time I talk about like the triumphant addition of character arcs and long-term memory to Dwarf Fortress it's like, well, of course half of these character arcs involve someone getting sad in the rain and upending their whole life philosophy. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) |
| Toady One: | It needs work. It's pretty sad, but it's all right. Everything will be fine. |
| Rainseeker: | Okay. So someone mentions a good omen and that just makes me wonder, like have you ever thought about putting omens in the game? |
| Toady One: | Yeah... Everything to do with precognition and prophecy is always kind of tricky. Which is why- what we've done so far with like the shrines when you... because there's the dice now in the shrines, right, and you can roll them. And sometimes it is like "oh good luck for the week", or whatever, which is in a sense some sort of omen. Of course we could have stated it a little better. I mean the pictures on the dice sometimes are fun. But the idea is that we can produce something like that omen for you by altering your skill rolls. And that is of course just an adventure mode thing. And we do bad luck the same way that we did bad luck with the mummies by just tanking the occasional skill roll, so that a bad thing will happen periodically. |
| Rainseeker: | Really? |
| Toady One: | Yeah, we didn't want to just cut the skill rolls by 20% or something. We make it so it zeros a skill roll every once in a while, and if that happens to be a crucial dodge roll or a crucial attack roll then you will feel cursed. Not that it's like so apparent... it really should highlight it by having the mummy laugh in your head when it happens or something. But yeah, it's not signposted enough, it'll just like generally feel like bad luck which the player would have to kind of think back to what they did. Why were you robbing a tomb? Or why were you rolling the dice? |
| Rainseeker: | Well I was thinking you could do omens like having a bat land on the leader, or something, and have that be an omen of an upcoming vampire attack, you know, inside your fortress. Or bunch of swallows fly over the river and that's an omen of an attack from elves, or something. |
| Toady One: | Yeah... we did... it's funny, it was like in the pre-initial release, I'm not even sure this was in the first release. When there was an undead invasion scheduled for year four or five, one of your dwarves would have a nightmare the season before, and it would be in their thoughts that they had a nightmare about the undead invasion. So that that kind of omen is easier to do than the ones that you're talking about, when we already know that there's a scheduled event. Like once the army leaves to march, of course that's a little more difficult now because armies arrive fairly quickly at the destination. But it's still possible to just kind of seed it in the AI's head, that hey we want to attack you. And it's all the better if the omen is not sort of guaranteed to come true, which is, you know... |
| Rainseeker: | Oh that would be kind of cool, yeah. |
| Toady One: | ...fairly common and then then you can set up prophecies like that. It's like the sort of Macbeth style prophecies are harder to do, when you're like "no one's going to be able to harm you" and stuff like that. Then you have to go through all the mechanics and turn them off and make sure that you can't accidentally fall into volcano, or whatever. Or if you do you're just like magically saved by water that spilled somewhere and turned it into obsidian right before you hit the ground, and you hit the ground just right, or whatever. And that's just... it's too much work, right, but the kind of the kind of like foretelling events that the game has already decided to do is much more simple. And if we go with something like the cave-ins that are... if-when we we pull off the idea about kind of scheduling cave-ins when there's structural flaws, and so forth, then it could have omens about that kind of event scheduled. We could do crop failure. It could be an easy schedule, you just decide that a farm plot's gonna fail completely and then kind of schedule, like partially talk about that. Yeah, so I see that as definitely the sort of thing that that you can get a lot of traction on in different directions. |
| SFX: | (Musical Interlude starts) (22:15) |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah yeah, that'd be cool. |
| SFX: | (Musical Interlude) |
| Capntastic: | All right. Well I have a tiny little question, a tiny little topic that is a personal favorite of mine. When are we going to play as other civilizations? When are we going to get Goblin Pit? Necromancer Tower? Human... town? Human city? Human... (unclear) |
| Rainseeker: | Human caves? |
| Capntastic: | Yeah. So many options. And procedural civs. I'm sure it's really easy to add all of this in. Just a couple of lines of code, right? |
| Rainseeker: | Oh just, yeah, five minutes right? |
| Toady One: | Yeah... I mean we have our eyes on these things, right. It's like... and you know we say that after, you know, 14 years of not having them... although my brother's forts often involve a above-ground component. He just makes little houses for them outside, and so forth, with a wall. But yeah, there are various challenges there. We've experienced them in the new residency stuff, having humans move into an existing fortress. Like especially if you've got different types of critters then you have to worry about clothing- of course, because we, you know, stupidly made clothing different sizes or whatever, we have to worry about that. So in some sense it should be easier to do the the single critter fortresses, and then people have experienced the issues with that when they're modding, right. Flying critters have horrible path finding. With humans you're more just "we need a better construction interface", right, like to build buildings. Even if it is... I mean people are probably used to it by now, since there's so many games where you can just place things block by block, like building houses like that. I always kind of felt bad that... like when you built a big wooden wall that it's not like a house raising or something like where you bring "bshhhh" - here comes the big wall, popping into place, right? It feels like that's how it should be. But, I mean, that ship is fairly well sailed so it doesn't really matter. |
| Capntastic: | [unintelligible] |
| Toady One: | Yeah, just placing block by block and having this little... you know, that's fine. So I don't think that big deal, the big deal is just the horrible interface for it when you're like b-shift-c-w... At least you can drag rectangles now, and enter-enter-enter-enter, and select the wood. But that's one of the things that's up to be changed in the Steam release, which of course carries over to the Classic release as well, of having better ways to place constructions, and not having to like select every individual log. And like if you don't care which maple log, or even if it's maple that they use then you should be able to pop down a wall just by going, you know, click-click. |
| Capntastic: | Click-and-drag rectangle for the user. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, it's a little more difficult with the z stuff but if we if we repurpose the mouse wheel in that interface for going up and down z levels, then it'd be like click, and then mouse-wheel-twiddle-click, and then you've got a three tall,seven long north-south wall, right. |
| Rainseeker: | Beautiful, yeah. |
| Toady One: | You still need 21 logs to build it but that's your dwarves' problem, not yours. |
| Rainseeker: | Right. |
| Toady One: | And then you've kind of attained one of the big stumbling blocks for human town mode, is just getting those things nicely structured and having easy way to lay out roadways, and stuff like that. And then that would be kind of the big thing. Then there are sort of other stumbling blocks of getting... Well there are a few other things to think about. One would be just the overall framing story, like we probably don't want the mountain homes of the humans like sending you a liaison that requests that you uplift a baron, in like the same way and stuff, right? So there'd be certain restructuring and the current thinking on that had been to do that with the embark scenarios. To kind of think about why you're there and then that would be more structurable. Of course that would come after the Myth & Magic release, and this is kind of the big point on that is that with the Myth & Magic release you set those weird sliders over to have non dwarf play because you're playing a like three legged mollusk. Then, I mean, human town mode seems attainable when you've done three legged mollusk mode. Of course three legged mollusk mode comes before the embark scenarios in this timeline, so you'd still have some kind of output liaison scenario, probably, with your three-legged mollusks. So it's one of these things that we're approaching in this modular fashion. As we've noticed in the past with several features once you've done enough of the work like this and you think ahead to the sort of things you want, and we've always kind of wanted to be able to play... |
| Rainseeker: | Mollusk man fortress? |
| Toady One: | Well, more like humans, and necromancers, and wizard's assistants and things like that, right. So we're always sort of aiming at these things with the features that we add, even if we're kind of slow about it. But you just suddenly realize what you can do. Like we had with the villains release, realizing we were able to pull off more than we thought we could do initially there because of the other structures that had been put in place. And now because of what we've done there we're going to suddenly realize, and not suddenly realize because we planned for this, but realize that oh, you know, all kinds of diplomacy and stuff is open now because we've got people that can perform tasks for other people. And so you can say that all kinds of things like now have a framework in place, that will more or less work once we revisit after the Steam release and finish it up. |
| Rainseeker: | So what kind of things can you have people do, theoretically? Like have people assassinate other people, is that what you're kind of talking about, or doing trade missions or...? |
| Toady One: | (chuckles) So the people assassinating people actually falls within the villains framework itself, so it's like that part was yeah, yeah- |
| Rainseeker: | But you can hire people to do that is what you're saying? |
| Toady One: | Yeah, exactly. And in fact that was going to be part of the villain's release, is this kind of fort-as-villain or fort-as-spymaster thing where all of the plots available to the villains, including like preparing an artifact heist or doing an assassination mission, doing some kind of blackmail mission to get someone generally on your side so you can use them later, all of that would be easily available in fort mode just by going into the the "c" screen or wherever. It might be moved over to the counter, or the espionage screen, or be part of the the "c" world map screen. But we have these kind of messengers, and you'd be able to set up your agent as a kind of messenger, and send them on a mission. Because we have those squad missions that you can send dwarves out of your fortress to raid things and steal livestock, or whatever. But those missions all use this this thing, just because of how they started, it's called the army controller framework, and that's just the kind of goal that's sitting in their head that controls a group that's moving on the map. But now the army controllers can be linked to plots, and plots live inside the head of every person who is kind of in the intrigue game. We don't have them for all like 20 000 living people because it would start to be kind of a memory and processing problem, but anyone who's sort of opted into the world of intrigue, which includes all the leaders in the world but also all the villains and a few other players, have the plots and their plot actors that they can kind of say like "what is my current perceived place in the game", "what is my objectives" and "what plots can I initiate to achieve my objectives whether that's-" |
| Rainseeker: | Would- |
| Toady One: | -yeah. |
| Rainseeker: | Would you be theoretically able to, like, blackmail a leader of another nation into protecting, putting troops outside of your fortress to keep you safe? |
| Toady One: | Yeah, the theory would have to be accompanied by making the alliance system work a little better. We have an alliance system now, right, in quotes, "the alliance system" in quotes. Because necromancers still take over the world, right, so we decided to help civilization live longer by having any any civilized people that aren't, you know, undead or ruled by demons and so forth, ally against the threats that are that sort of thing. And then they will send their armies together. That has not been realized in fort mode because it involves some timing on the world map. But the good news is, of course, the army rewrite stuff that's coming before the magic release. Before that all that stuff, just after the graphics release, we have the villain finishing and the army work. And army work right now, there's going to be things that are done and things that aren't done, and as usual we don't know quite what's going to land inside the mark and what's not. But certainly on the table is that kind of thing; this sort of coordinating of forces, leading forces that are off-site, being able to direct them further than what you can do now, which is just kind of send them off on a mission, then they come back. But what would it mean to be able to kind of raise up a whole army from all of your holdings? I mean it constantly tells you about your holdings, right, it's like "oh this hillocks group is looking to your fortress for its economic security" or whatever. I don't remember what the message was, but it pops up annoyingly and you have to press enter. And sometimes it's like goblins or something, right, it just pops up and you're like "okay what does that mean?". Doesn't mean much. And I think sometimes it means you can send for people from there, you can like request more migrants anytime you want. You can also exile your dwarves. If you want to kick someone out of your fortress you can kick them out to those places. |
| Rainseeker: | Huh. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, that's all in. I'm not sure how well that that's realized right now but that's technically in. There's some weird things about it of course. |
| Rainseeker: | So what happens if you exile a vampire to a neighbor? |
| Toady One: | Yeah... they they'd be a vampire in the the neighboring village, I don't think that's... |
| Rainseeker: | Would they take over though? That's what is my question. Like would the vampires? |
| Toady One: | No no no, yeah yeah. I think vampires are one of those things that post-world gen doesn't have the same kind of AI fidelity. It'd probably just try and sneak back to your fortress basically. But assuming a new identity... (chuckle) it's so ridiculous because they'd assume a new identity. |
| Rainseeker: | "Hey wasn't that Urist! I thought that was Urist!" "No, no, no, that's Uzed." "I don't think so!" |
| Capntastic: | Different hat. |
| Rainseeker: | "He's wearing a different hat, you can tell." (laughter) |
| Toady One: | Yeah, it's like they freshly clean off all their bone trinkets or whatever. But... yeah, and the thing that's even worse about it is like, it would partially work. The player would probably be confused by it unless they like looked at the dwarf and saw the scars or saw something else that they identified, but your dwarves in the counter espionage screen where they track identities, if that dwarf had been brought in previously or otherwise talked to, like they would know that the new identity was fake. But they wouldn't bother telling anybody. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) "Oh yeah, that's the vampire we kicked out a couple months ago." |
| Capntastic: | There's no urgency to reveal a plot, it's just like "oh, yeah, I knew.". |
| Toady One: | Yeah it's like classified. "This is classified information, we've redacted the vampire's identity". But the player is not on a need to know basis here. |
| Capntastic: | I'm thinking like the witness protection program. |
| Toady One: | Oh, I'm wondering... |
| Rainseeker: | So are you planning on like setting up an automated system where you can give orders based on discovered intelligence? Like any discovered vampires for instance that show up are immediately put into holding or something? |
| Toady One: | I think the main thing we thought about was migrant kind of... like do you have a interrogation thing where you bring people in and and talk to them when you're worried about... |
| Rainseeker: | This is your interview. |
| Toady One: | ...yeah, agents and vampires and stuff. But, you know, as we've all kind of experience now when you have stricter immigration protocols there's a whole other side of that, right. So it's interesting to see where that takes the fort, and what that means about your reputation with the outside world; what that means with the reputation with the rest of your civilization. I mean, one of the main things you can have in in even in medieval times is like the king of the dwarves or whatever, the queen of the dwarves, gives a writ or something to people, or a whole group of people the right to the freedom of movement, right, and stuff like that. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah yeah. |
| Toady One: | And so you would be perhaps at odds with your civilization, because it my impression is that you know dwarves are a very kind of... you're allowed to move where you want, right, that's very much seems to be how it works. |
| Rainseeker: | They're free-loving species, yeah. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, that's like you can go here and... But when we start getting more into guilds and more into religious stuff there's going to be these sort of natural in-group out-group and exclusion practices and so forth that'll be interesting to model on a... Getting tensions with your own civilization would be pretty cool. |
| Rainseeker: | That will be interesting, yeah. Getting like the shoe guild to be at odds with the glove making guild, right. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah. |
| Rainseeker: | They want they want better prices on the leather, right, but they fight over that and so there's a this competition there. |
| Capntastic: | Just as intense as Game of Thrones. |
| Toady One: | (laughter) That's right. The Game of Shoes. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, "Urist, were you just kissing your sister?". |
| Toady One: | Oh dear. |
| Rainseeker: | "...no." |
| Toady One: | Well that's a whole topic we probably shouldn't go into. It's like how do these family trees happen in Dwarf Fortress some of the ones we see? |
| Rainseeker: | The monarchies. |
| Toady One: | (laughter) Yeah, it's like I'm not sure we have an appropriate uncle detector. Does it work? I'm not sure. |
| Capntastic: | Oh no. |
| Rainseeker: | We don't have any genetics in the game, do we? Oh my gosh, this conversation is going everywhere. But like family trees, do they have any things that get passed down? |
| Toady One: | Oh yeah, yeah. I mean you can tell when you see like the the the eye color and stuff. And the hair and other simple stuff like that just passes down, just because it's what people expect more or less, right. There are very basic in the sense that you can have... there's sort of a dominance-recessive thing but it's - if I'm not mistaken is it alphabetical right now? I don't quite remember. (chuckles) It's really not in depth the way it is now, but yeah, technically you could do things like dog breeding and stuff. It would be pretty harsh the way you have to cull to get what you want because you can't... I guess you can do gelding to kind of close off certain colors of dogs and things. And technically that should work, I'm not sure how much people have tried to do that. |
| Capntastic: | There was someone on the forums recently who tried that... Let me see... "Genetics and Selective Breeding Science" by Moeteru. "Genetics and inheritance are supposed to be a thing. This is what Toady had to say in DF Talk #8" - |
| Toady One and Rainseeker: | Oh! |
| Capntastic: | - "from ten years ago". |
| Rainseeker: | Wow. |
| Capntastic: | But they did some experiments and their conclusion is, "To put it simply, attributes don't seem to be heritable. All of the means are within roughly one standard error of 1000, which is what you'd expect if they were generated completely randomly.". |
| Toady One: | Okay, so attributes, we're talking about like the strength of the things? |
| Capntastic: | Mhm mhm. |
| Toady One: | Yeah. So that's different than colors. I mean I don't know if they talked about the colors at all. Attributes I have no memory... I thought... it's probably the same roughly, I don't know it's a long time ago, as what I said in DF Talk #8 from like 20-, whatever that was, -12 or something. My recollection was that there was a kind of link to that, but yeah, it not working would not be the most uncommon thing to hear in Dwarf Fortress terms, would it? |
| Rainseeker: | Well that would be cool if you could breed for stronger teeth, or just stronger dwarves, or whatever. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, my understanding was that you could at least for the main attributes, but yeah, sadly broken, according to the forum scientists. We try our best. Our best is rarely good enough. |
| Rainseeker: | Yep. Bugs happen. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, bugs and all kinds of other mess. |
| SFX: | (Musical Interlude) (40:30) |
| Capntastic: | All right, and now we're going to answer some questions. If you have questions you'd like answered please send them to: |
| Toady One: | toadyone@bay12games.com, and make sure that the entire subject line is "Question for DF Talk". |
| Scamps: | Meow. |
| Toady One: | Hey Scamps. |
| Capntastic: | Perfect. |
| Rainseeker: | The meow. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, so here are the questions: So we have a question from recon1o6. The question is: When we do add the Myth & Magic release, when we add demons to it, is there going to be a possibility of worlds where the demons are not trapped in the underworld, that they're actually roaming around on the the the outside? Because what we were talking about when we talked about these other races, not just demons and things but angels and forest spirits, and all that, we just kind of talked about them as if they're out there doing their thing, or they're off in some plane somewhere, or they're wherever. And indeed that's the idea. The idea is that there would be a number of situations. It wouldn't always be the underworld exactly as it is with, you know, - spoiler alert! - adamantine spires coming up from a kind of underworld place that's described as being a different place, like the sky is described as different when you go down there and do the weather description, so it is sort of a different place, but it's really just kind of under too - it's the underworld. And it always works a certain way. Yeah. And we're planning on having just different possibilities there. Although in the next question we'll address that. But first, another question from recon1o6, is whether or not it'd be possible to deal with necromancers that can raise your corpse piles and so forth, whether or not it would be possible for proactive zombie movie measures to deal with that? Which of course you could do now by dumping the bodies into a magma pit for example, but they want to be able to chop off like the heads or something right and just do sufficient chopping. Which I believe would be the heads and both hands? Like as long as you have a grasper or a head- |
| Scamps: | Meow. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, as long as you have a grasp or a head you're allowed to come back from the dead, right. So that you can be like... is it "thing"? Is that the hand? |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah. |
| Toady One: | Yes, "thing" the hand. We needed to have "thing". "Thing" was required, but also just like a head that goes like "wakwakwakwakwakwakwak". |
| (laughter) | |
| Toady One: | Okay, so these two things are important. So yeah, it'd be a kind of quirky thing to add, you know. In the general sense I'm all for it. I have no idea when I get to doing things like that but I think it's a... Certainly now in the the world that we've created I can see why people are thinking about sort of anti-zombie measures. |
| Rainseeker: | Well it's very scary out there right now. |
| Capntastic: | We already have werewolf and wereperson plagues. Those aren't fun. |
| Toady One: | Yeah that's... we made them a little bit harder, your fort has to be a little further along, you shouldn't just get them in the first season anymore. But yes... and I don't know that there's any really good counter counter measures for that, other than just quarantining everybody that was bit. |
| Rainseeker: | Has been bit, yeah. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, but you can't like press silver against their foreheads or anything like that. |
| Rainseeker: | So now what happens if your entire fortress turns into werebeasts? |
| Toady One: | My understanding is that it doesn't fall to ruin when they convert? Because the worry would be when the full moon happens they all turn into werebeasts then it would say like "Your fortress has fallen into ruin". My recollection was thinking of that, and fixing that. But you always, like after this many years what side issues and edge cases I've fixed versus which ones someone's brought to my attention and I was like "oh I really need to fix that". I'm not actually sure anymore whether that's fixed, but my understanding is that you would just have them kind of convert and then nothing bad would happen. Except the new migrants of course, any new migrants would have a very bad day that day. And then you'd have more, maybe. |
| Capntastic: | Fortress Wolfenstein. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, yeah. I think that's how it works but I may be wrong. |
| Rainseeker: | That's kind of funny. |
| Toady One: | Yeah. Next question is from Fieari, I'm not sure how to pronounce any of these obviously, but Fieari from the forum had a question for DF Talk, wondering if the myth generator can generate all of the vanilla elements, and whether in fact you could recreate the entire vanilla thing? This relates to that that previous question about, well, are demons not going to be in the underworld anymore, could you have all kinds of different demons? But then the flip side is, could you get back to Dwarf Fortress, are we really just blowing everything up? Could you get back to the... |
| Capntastic: | The default. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, the default setting. And the idea is that we'd kind of be growing out from that, right. The easiest thing to do, of course, is to change nothing. And then as you're changing things the stuff that you haven't changed, of course, is still just sitting there and as we build out the myth generator some stuff is just going to get changed immediately and other things won't be. And as we're doing that we're planning on having the ability to recreate the existing situation. Of course it's sitting right there so mostly it's easy to have that as an option. But also we understand even nostalgia reasons are completely legitimate reasons to just keep it there if it's keepable, right. And having things like - the way the myth generator works, I understand why the concern comes up, the way the myth generator works when it talks about underworlds and portals and things hasn't in any of the examples we've read recreated the the existing situation. But of course the existing situation as it stands is ambiguous, as we kind of alluded to before. The underworld is under, it sits below and you dig down to get there, but once you get there if you press the weather button in adventure mode it says that "the clouds are purple swirling spirals" and none of that is reflected in the game. I mean, our thinking was that you actually did end up in another place that was below but also different. And so the nice thing about the map rewrite that comes with the initial myth release is that it allows us to realize the default system in the way we wanted it realized, but if someone wanted to also just have a lower cave layer then that would also be possible. And it's in fact the easier way to do it. It might be described differently though. So in some limited sense then perhaps the default would not be attainable, unless there's a way to go to the same place but have it sky described differently for some reason. Which was kind of just covering for our inability to do what we wanted to do. Yeah, so that's the caveat I guess on the on the recreation of the default. |
| Capntastic: | Would there be an option, you think, to have a just baseline default DF classic, however you want to spin it? Because I think there's something to be said for having like a baseline experience. |
| Toady One: | Oh yeah, I think that's that's what's going to happen when you have the sliders on pretty low settings too as you kind of... it really will just draw from the files and maybe just give you forgotten beasts, and give you a pretty prosaic... I mean the myth is going to be there, and of course the lowest slider setting was that it's fake, which would probably be the most default setting there is. Except for the fact that the vampires and werewolves happen, and the demons are released with those vault things, and so forth. There's a few kind of default things that that that happen but at the same time- |
| Rainseeker: | Does that shut down the necromancy then too? |
| Toady One: | Well, necromancy is also very defaulty, or whatever. I think the kind of counterpoint is, I mean it's similar to the the way we stepped into 3D, right. We lost certain cool stuff that we want to recreate, and in fact the map rewrite is our way of recreating that. So we're finally returning to some of the cool stuff that's going to restructure the play experience in 3D to bring some of the 2D stuff back, have the ability to do that finally, with like better underground rivers and waterfalls, and things. But the thing here is some of the things are just so unrealized, like what it means for those deity curses to happen and why these secrets of life and death are being given to the necromancers by the deities, and things like that. Like there's something to be said for the default experience, but it would be cool to have a little more information too, and maybe we can't avoid having more information, or something. And then there's the whole other thread here about the about the editors. When you say like, people sitting down having a default Dwarf Fortress experience, there's also this one where there might be... we've talked about pack-in worlds and stuff being bad in general, but there's also this kind of like pack-in setting idea we had just for the sake of giving people, like modders especially etcetera, and also just to keep us honest about it, having every kind of thing that you can do with the editors command-wise being realized in some kind of pack-in. And then that would actually end up being a kind of defaulty setting. Just kind of reclaiming certain default elements just by showing you "well, if you want to write demons in an underworld this is how you tell the myth generator to always do that". |
| Rainseeker: | Have we talked meaningfully about the modding community? I'm just curious if we're going to have Steam support for the modding community, or if you're just going to keep it the way it's always been? |
| Toady One: | Oh no, that's a whole thing: the integration of Steam Workshop. And we're actually having the whole shebang there. |
| Rainseeker: | Whew! |
| Toady One: | The questions that remain are like mostly technical ones. It's like you turn the Steam Workshop on, people can sign in get their mods and stuff, but games also often have a interface within the game itself where you click the Steam workshop button, and it pops up a connecting window to Steam, and stuff like that, right. You click on and off, and stuff like that. That all is just a matter of like, I haven't looked at the API yet, like I haven't gone on Steam and said "what is your API? How do you integrate these libraries, and windows, and things?". And so that's why I have no specifics, right, about what exactly is going to get pulled off on the first release, versus how we can improve it over time, how like internet connection stuff works. Because in one model Steam handles all the internet stuff. You go to Workshop, you click yes-no-yes-no, and stuff. And then it knows what mods you have, it patches them into your game, but the the game doesn't connect to the internet to do that. And then in the other model the game also handles the mods. And that's better in a way because it allows you to do more collision detection and other stuff like that, right, it's like ideal to have it work that way. But we'll see what the hurdles are for that, and that's the only reason that I don't have like strict promises about the exact setup. But yeah it's all... it should be cool. Because mods are cool, people sharing mods are cool. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, I always feel like when games do it well, it provides a lot of interesting content for the game. I mean, there are some games that like just totally exploded once they they did that, like Minecraft of course. |
| Capntastic: | I'm thinking DOOM. |
| Toady One: | (chuckles) Yeah, I was a DOOM modder in my own house. I shared it with our friends, played our DOOM levels in like 1993 or whatever... over like a telephone connection, or whatever. Yeah, that was cool. |
| Rainseeker: | Speaking of multiplayer games, is there a universe where someday two people could play Dwarf Fortress and manage the fortress together? |
| Toady One: | I'm always out of date on the mods, right. I think people have done lots of experiments with that now. |
| Rainseeker: | Hmm. I wasn't aware of that. |
| Capntastic: | I think there was a version with a terminal two people could connect to. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, because there's that remote DF already that communicates with the one that's running in your home, or whatever. ...and I'm not sure why, I mean maybe... if you want everyone signing in, it'd be like a private server if you could get that to hook up twice. I mean, people would be fighting, I mean, they'd have to figure out how to - like what happens when someone presses left and someone punches right? But I'm sure that's a common concern that's always figured out. |
| Rainseeker: | I mean, it would be nice if each person had their own user interface, so they didn't interact with each other. You'd have your own cursor so you can see what each person is doing, or whatever. |
| Toady One: | Yeah yeah, that's obviously a much more involved project than... I'm not sure what people have done done along those lines in terms of mods because they've done, you know, most other things, so it seems- |
| Rainseeker: | But at its core, it's not theoretically impossible. |
| Toady One: | It's not theoretically impossible. It's generally, you know, away from the sort of things we're personally interested in working on. |
| Rainseeker: | Oh yeah. |
| Toady One: | But it's... Yeah, certainly certainly in the... and anything to do with like internet protocols is completely beyond my experience and expertise, at all. So that's one reason we haven't done it. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, that makes sense. |
| Toady One: | One among many. But yeah, nothing outside of, you know, coming up with the whole game for why it wouldn't happen. It's like how does that work? What are people doing? Who are people playing? Who can they control? Do people compete against their orders? Do they like have bidding points or something? It's kind of like playing multiplayer Majesty or something. |
| Rainseeker: | Once you start getting to that place, then each of you might have a certain amount of clout with the dwarves. Certain guilds and stuff. That could be kind of fun, I mean- |
| Toady One: | Yeah yeah, that all sounds really cool. |
| Rainseeker: | That could be an expansion, you know. Once you release, you could have the multiplayer expansion. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, yeah... It's not something I think about much. |
| [sounds of clanking] | |
| Toady One: | What is that! Here comes trouble! |
| Rainseeker: | Uh oh. Does it have a tail? |
| Toady One: | Well not much of a tail, cause Scamps is manxy- |
| Rainseeker: | Oh yeah, that's right! |
| Toady One: | -but it doesn't stop him from being trouble like a cat. Does it, does it? I mean fortunately that had a lid on it, (chuckles) but it's on the floor now. |
| SFX: | (Musical Interlude) (57:05) |
| Rainseeker: | Well thanks guys, for coming along on this wild ride with us, talking about Dwarf Fortress. You know, we're just so happy and grateful that you've been part of our community for this amount of years. You know what I'm talking about, Charlie. |
| Toady One: | (laughter) Yeah, the people- |
| Rainseeker: | Let's start thanking people. Who are we thanking, Toady? |
| Toady One: | Well, everyone who sent questions. That would be recon1o6 and Fieari, sending in questions. And everybody else out there, this is an opportunity. Dwarf Fortress Talk is back, and questions will be answered. Especially now, if yours is the only question, we're going to read it. Why I suppose that is a horrible promise to make, because we're going to get some interesting ones now. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) |
| Toady One: | But we'll go ahead and do it, we'll read them. And yeah, thanks to everybody that helped out, not just over the years, but especially last month! And the month before! People helping out now! Yeah, Quatch gave me a protocol on how to fix the episode, that was like just... step one you do this envelope, step two you look into the spectrogram and do this thing, and do the compressor, and do the this and that. |
| Rainseeker: | Oh, beautiful. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, and we should thank Sankis and Will for that as well. |
| Rainseeker: | Yay! |
| Toady One: | If people want to help out we're Bay 12 Games on Patreon, and there is also the little Paypal button on our site. All that stuff just goes into keeping us going, keeping the lights on on the web site... and feeding, feeding us, and rents and foods and things. And the little kitty cat needs his... apparently he's got an addiction to smoked deli meats. Can't give him too much deli meats though. |
| Capntastic: | That's the most natural thing in the world. |
| Toady One: | But is it natural for Scamps to not eat deli meats that aren't smoked, and to literally refuse them? |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) You know what, that's just being a discerning palate, right. |
| Capntastic: | I mean, Scamps can have little-a salami, as a treat. |
| Toady One: | Yes, it has to be smoked though. I had to eat those deli meats, the ones that were labeled as "oven roasted". Oh is oven roasted not good enough for you, is it? Just sitting right there, staring at me. |
| Rainseeker: | (laughter) You know we're talking about you, Scamps. |
| Toady One: | (laughter) |
| Capntastic: | I also have a Patreon, Patreon/Capntastic. If you'd like to throw a few dollars my way I have a special Dwarf Fortress tier, where when I play Dwarf Fortress I will pull your name out of a hat. Maybe not a literal hat, but I will make a dwarf with your name, and if any horrible fate happens I will keep you updated. |
| Rainseeker: | And there will be horrible fates. |
| Capntastic: | Of course. |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, and I'm Rainseeker, and I have a business called Measures of Joy with my wife. We exist in northern California, and you can find us on Facebook. At "Measures of Joy Gluten Free" - or "Measures of Joy Bakery Gluten Free". So, have fun finding that. |
| (laughter) | |
| Capntastic: | Choose your fate wisely. |
| Toady One: | Yeah, awesome! It was good to get back together and do another show! |
| SFX: | (Musical Outlude fades in) (1:00:50) |
| Rainseeker: | Yeah, and next week, er next time we're going to be announcing the iPad version of Dwarf Fortress! |
| Capntastic: | Oh, don't tell people that. |
| Rainseeker: | Oh sorry! Spoilers! |
| Toady One: | That will be a big surprise... |
| SFX: | (Musical Outlude) |
| Bonus: | Links to Reddit posts: "I like this guy", the reproducing necromancer invaders, "Dammit! 'Safety Hat', my favourite dwarf, is dead".
On the forums: Genetics and Selective Breeding Science. |