Bonus Teaser for Dwarf Fortress Talk #2, with Rainseeker and Toady One, transcribed by mallocks
| Toady: | (aside, to Scamps) Stop gnawing me; give me my hand back! No I'm glad that [Scamps]'s happy again; he was a lump for a day, he just sat there; poor little lump. But he was totally doped up too, they gave us these oral syringes and we just injected drugs into his mouth. |
| Rainseeker: | [1]So you don't think his personality's changed that much, so far that you can tell? |
| Toady: | No, not at all. He was getting up into people's laps and just sitting here ... he's not really a lap cat; he doesn't go into people's laps, you can pick him up and stuff but he never would just go and try and steal your lap like other cats do sometimes. But he was doing that quite a bit, but I don't know if that was just because he was kind of doped up or in pain or something; but he's not doing that anymore, he seems like he's back to normal. But we'll see, it's supposed to change things a bit, it's supposed to make him more playful ... I'm not really sure what that would mean, because he's already crazy, but we'll see. |
| Rainseeker: | [2]So are you going to have cones for the critters, and pet critters? |
| Toady: | I don't know what people did, there's all kind of stuff ... we're going to be castrating critters sometime because people did that, I guess they just tied a string around it and just cinched it so tight that everything just died in there; so there's no open wound so you don't really have to worry about the cone, because the main thing is is he going to break open his incisions; that's why we were worried about Scamps; and he would, the way he's tearing and biting and scratching and chewing, what are you doing? |
| Rainseeker: | And how about the medical thing, is that going to happen the same way as you have the dwarves set up right now? |
| Toady: | The medical for pets? |
| Rainseeker: | Medical for pets, yeah. |
| Toady: | Right now I don't know if that's actually resolved. There's that animal carer profession where it just kind of made everything better and that might still be the case. I don't think they have hospitals and bones getting set and stuff. They could, because there's really no difference in terms of the mechanics for it game-wise, but you'd want to have different skills for it and it'd be a little weird to have a traction table that works on everybody. Just putting a little kitty cat in traction is kind of strange; I'm not sure they actually did anything like that ... like a little traction bench, it's like two feet long and you put the kitty cat in it and straighten out their limbs and so on ... I've no idea. |
| Rainseeker: | Maybe you could just have a 'workshop' for pets. |
| Toady: | We'll have to see, because I don't remember what I've done because it was at least five months ago the last time I worked on healthcare. |
| Rainseeker: | Or you could assign a table to vet care or something maybe. |
| Toady: | (aside, to Scamps) What are you taking a swipe at me for, that's really rude ... Last time I worked on healthcare was March 21st ... I was hoping to be done with this wounds and combat stuff a while ago, because I've been working on it for ten days. [3]Yesterday was mostly me fixing bugs with taking a magma-man over to a human time, going up to a peasant, grabbing his head with both of my hands and just waiting for him to die, without doing any other attacks, just because his head catching on fire. But it didn't work, because his brain didn't heat up so he was just sat there and all his skin had melted off and he was just sitting there struggling in vain trying to rip my hands of his head but he didn't die, so that still has to be fixed, and there's just a million little problems like that, but I'm hoping to get through that in the next couple of days ... which I can't really promise because I don't know what else is going to go wrong, because everything's busted. I had all kind of trouble, I was a bronze colossus walking around a town and killing all [the] people, just knocking them all over the place; but then this dude came up behind me, punched me in the leg and my leg fell off, and it was because I forgot to put the structural flag on the new bronze tissue there, and once I put that in then I became basically invincible. Although there were bolts ... when they shot a bronze bolt at full speed they could dent or actually break through and stick into me a little bit, so I just had these little bolts stuck in me but they couldn't get severs with them. We're thinking of changing the bronze colossus a bit, maybe to be more like the one in 'Jason and the Argonauts', I don't know if you've seen that. |
| Rainseeker: | I don't recall. |
| Toady: | Where it has kind of a molten core, so that when it gets poked it could bleed out a little bit; just to make it killable, because [3a]right now a big solid metal statue is invincible. |
| Rainseeker: | Right. |
| Toady: | But we're not sure what we're going to do. |
| Rainseeker: | You could make it super slow I suppose. |
| Toady: | Yeah, and you just have to build a wall around it or something, if you don't have magma to direct at it, it'd still be really difficult to deal with. We're thinking of making all our metal men hollow for now, we're thinking about making the iron man hollow with a poisonous yellow gas inside of him or something, so that when you break off his limbs the gas shoots out and does who knows what to you because we have all kinds of choices now, have like twenty choices what they can do. We're thinking of all matter of critters underground now. |
| Rainseeker: | That's awesome, you should make them go numb so they can't feel anything, and terrorised too. |
| Toady: | It's unclear what's going to happen with the mental states now because I was going to make it so it's not just up/down happiness, but that people actually had some emotional stuff so then we could start making mental disorders that could be caused by venom at first and then other things, so that people could freak out or get all novacaine giggly or ... |
| Rainseeker: | My arms are snakes! My arms are snakes! |
| Toady: | We're working towards a bright future, but right now it's 'is his brain melting?' [4]The crocodile worked, I went and bit somebody's arm off, so that's happy, that's all working. That was a big test because the crocodile bites with like thirty teeth now and it adds them together. So I was happy that that was working, all the armour weights are working ... there's not that much that seems to ... People propel away too much, there's some balance problem there because people just fly all over the place now. The main worrying problem is that people are very rarely but occasionally being struck down for no reason. Like I stabbed somebody, and it's 'You stab him in his left hip! It's broken! He's been struck down!' I was like 'What? Why'd he die?' There's something really weird going on there and I'm just going to have to basically set up a save file where I hack people to pieces with a sword and have it output a ton of debug info about why the guy died or whatever. |
| Rainseeker: | So maybe it pierced his intestines or something? |
| Toady: | Yeah or something really weird like the hip has a brain flag on it or something, I have no idea ... It could be anything at all, because it could also just be that it's not reporting something really crucial like maybe major arteries being severed and it's shooting all of his blood out at once, like way too much, but it's not reporting major arteries right now or something. It could be anything, I've been surprised by every bug this time ... but that's all I really need to do to get combat finished: fix the magma guy, fix the propelling problem, fix the suddenly dead problem, fix a crash from contaminants splattering on your inventory and [5]add more relationships between body parts, like where your liver is in relation to your stomach, so that you can stab through ... it's kind of the opposite problem of the old crossbows where you could every single organ in a single body part. Now you hardly hit more than one ever; the only time you hit more than one is when it goes from a rib to the heart, or from the skull to the brain [i.e.] when there's a clear relationship. So I just need to add in more directional relationships so that you can stab down into somebody's chest and hit their liver and then hit their stomach and then hit their guts, or whatever, which would read well. So there shouldn't be any of those problems anymore like [where] you have to shape the arrow like a horseshoe for it to make sense, where it like hits one eye and one ear but not the brain and so on, weird stuff like that. Then I just need to fix a bunch of combat text. There's things like where instead of saying 'tearing it apart' it says 'tearing apart it', because 'it' is a placeholder for a tissue name but it doesn't give a tissue name when there's only one tissue in a body part but the grammar is messed up in English because you'd say 'tearing apart the skin', but you'd say 'tearing it apart'. It's very annoying, I hate English now. [6]So I'm working on that and then I'll be done, and then I move onto healthcare. My original plan was to get wounds and combat and healthcare greened out this month, but I don't think that's going to be possible ... but I'm going to be able to green out wounds and combat anyway, and then green out healthcare at the beginning of next month. It's iffy if I'm going to get it out this year, it's a close thing, I'm trying to make it. |
| Rainseeker: | You've got six months! |
| Toady: | Well I've only got what now, September, October ... |
| Rainseeker: | Five months, sorry. |
| Toady: | Yeah, I mean August is almost over too, so it's just four months and it's almost not enough time because map features are going to need another month ... I don't think people mind, right? Just working on the underground and stuff. The problem is I haven't spoiled too much there and I don't know how patient people are going to be with that, so I might have to spoil more stuff, and then I have probably another month to work on squads, and another month to work on entity positions or whatever. Then it'll be done, but there are going to be delays of course, there's going to be problems. So it's going to take a little longer than I think, but I'm almost there ... there's already a thread about how we're coming [to] the one year since release ... mostly people seem patient in that thread though, which is good. |
| Rainseeker: | Always nice to have patient fans. |
| Toady: | I think it helps to have the devlog and stuff because it's not like it's just been silence for a year, I've been trying to be really active out there, so ... |