Toady Tracker 10/03/09

Toady had another in-depth Q&A session on the forums today, shedding lots of light on… a lot of things! Beware: There be potential spoilers in some of these answers. [Link]

It depends on what you mean. The world all advances at once, so the current adventurer retirement might be the closest you get to having an adventurer and then moving over to a fort. There have been threads discussion the issues with temporarily suspending a fort. It’s something that would be nice to do, but it’s hard to get it working right when an adventurer comes to visit and you then want to restart it later. There are other things planned for the shorter term like being able to send out groups from your fortress which you might then be able to control during battles in a kind of time-stopped mode, but having something like that for a broader adventure wouldn’t work very well (the closest we might get to anything like a player controlled adventurer during dwarf mode would be following a group on a longer campaign or something)

Right now I’m passing on dealing with this one since it would be annoying to manage all of the different clothing. I think critters will be able to wear whatever, though it might not work across races of different sizes. There’s also the matter of children growing up with a single caste to further complicate this.

I’d really rather not get into this when the proper implementation of combat styles and so on might not be that far away, and that shouldn’t be governed by specific creatures, though they’d likely have helper tags.

There are several different ways to designate body part groups for an attack. You can pick an entire body part, you can pick a tissue layer within a body part, you can pick all of a certain kind of child body part to a designated part (teeth as child BP of the head, grouped together if you want even if different kinds of teeth are defined), and also tissues in child bps of a designated part (using nails/claws on all the fingers/toes which are the child of a hand/foot in a single attack).

A human’s scratch and bite look like this for instance

[ATTACK:SCRATCH:CHILD_TISSUE_LAYER_GROUP:BY_TYPE:GRASP:BY_CATEGORY:FINGER:NAIL]
[ATTACK_SKILL:GRASP_STRIKE]
[ATTACK_VERB:scratch:scratches]
[ATTACK_CONTACT_PERC:100]
[ATTACK_PENETRATION_PERC:100]
[ATTACK_FLAG_EDGE]
[ATTACK_PRIORITY:SECOND]
[ATTACK:BITE:CHILD_BODYPART_GROUP:BY_CATEGORY:HEAD:BY_CATEGORY:TOOTH]
[ATTACK_SKILL:BITE]
[ATTACK_VERB:bite:bites]
[ATTACK_CONTACT_PERC:100]
[ATTACK_PENETRATION_PERC:100]
[ATTACK_FLAG_EDGE]
[ATTACK_PRIORITY:SECOND]
[ATTACK_FLAG_CANLATCH]

This already happens in world generation. In-game succession is a slightly harder problem that is up on dev_next. It might get a placeholder sooner than that but I can’t guarantee anything.

The titans in good regions are benign right now, but there are still some outstanding issues there and they might be of two minds about their status until the kinks are worked out.

[DESCRIPTION:With Text] – Are these able to hook into the colours and variables of the creature?
[BODY_SIZE:0:0:10000000] – clearly related to body size, but what do the numbers do?
[HAS_NERVES] – Is this to create a central nervous system?
[FEATURE_BEAST] – What exactly does this do, how does it relate to biomes?
[GENERATED] – what does this do?
[TITAN] – is this for random body parts?
The function of these attack flags would be good to know as well:
[ATTACK_CONTACT_PERC:100]
[ATTACK_PENETRATION_PERC:100]
[ATTACK_FLAG_EDGE]

The descriptions there were generated from within the game, so they were able to use whatever was around. For the regular raws, that description is just a string that is supposed to be general helper text (to answer questions like “what is a foul blendec?”). Body/bp/tissue appearance modifiers are what was used in the appearance paragraphs I posted earlier, and that’s a separate thing. I didn’t want to muck around with appearance modifiers for the unique generated creatures, so I included some color etc. text in the descriptions. If/when the random creature profiles get out to the raws, that will probably change.

And yeah, the description text is being used to give a bit more info on things like fluffy wamblers and whatever new stock underground critters are going in (there will be a bunch to more reliably test out various features or just to mess around).

Footkerchief

I was surprised that the newt had the [NATURAL] tag. I figured the forgotten beasts would be too creepy even for the elves. Also I’m still trying to figure out what SCALE refers to in [PLUS_TISSUE_LAYER:SCALE:BY_CATEGORY:THROAT].

Hummingbird

Will elves be able to talk to or tame these beasts, then use them in wars and sieges like goblins use trolls?

Elves don’t automatically get along with natural creatures that aren’t taken from wilderness populations, so it won’t affect that. That natural flag is still a little weird, but I’m not all that sure where or what these things are. These are the unique, mostly evilish, creatures. Once we move slowly over to having random creatures in wilderness populations, the elves will be able to go all nuts with them… or whatever random elf-like critters there are, as things progress.

Neonivek

Though what about stacking effects? That would be interesting. Imagine a poison that gives immediate intense pain… then mild pain for months later.

Leafsnail

And yeah, it would be interesting to know if you can have total disorientation when bitten, followed by semi permanent moderate dizzyness afterwards.

Stacking of the same effect type on a single syndrome doesn’t play nice right now. You have a few options though. You could add a second syndrome with the semi-permanent (or actually permanent if you don’t include an “END” parameter) effects, or you could stretch the END time out way after the PEAK for a more linear decay.

Morberis

If “having, like, six legs and breathe poisonous gas that makes your skin rot off and stuff” isn’t intereasting, what would you say IS interesting?

Having looked over hundreds of them now, I think the main thing that is missing is more the animal behavior type stuff, which would be neat even for individuals. I’m just not set to get that kind of thing started yet though. After the job priority rewrite, we’ll probably be in a better spot.

Neonivek

I would have thought Toady would have included Bleeding in that caused by Blood Thinning.

Some types of Snake bites cause internal bleeding from the viens bleeding blood into the soft tissues.

The most important part of the list that Footkerchief quoted is probably “as a starter set”. These were all easy effects to do, and we’re going to do more in later releases (as with everything else, I guess). You can do “internal bleeding” as a general thing by making the internal tissues bleed, though, so you have some power there. Another note — “impaired vision” has been expanded to “impaired function”, so you can for instance make the lungs or heart shut down, and some of the random poisons do this. I had to delay the other body systems and brain death and so on in the venom section, so things like shutting down the kidneys don’t matter at all if I remember.