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Dwarf Fortress Development Log

Development in 2015 (RSS Feed)

  • 12/29/2015 Toady One There's going to be a server migration soon -- though I'm not sure if it's strictly necessary, I've turned the bug tracker off until the move is complete. Hopefully there won't be any problems!

    As I was trying to recreate various problems with the undead, I ended up adding save/load to the arena. I also fixed a bug that was causing reanimated undead to end up on two sides of conflicts (which caused further issues).
  • 12/27/2015 Toady One A zombie nerf has arrived. The animated critters no longer block, dodge, parry, wrestle or sprint, and they do charging attacks whenever possible. Zombies no longer receive positive defense adjustments for body part types, and they don't seek or prevent combat opportunities. Their strength bonus has been reduced. Severing all non-smashed heads on a zombie kills it (smashing already worked), and severing or smashing any working grasp on a headless zombie kills it. Zombies can still be reanimated if they have a working grasp. So it's a bit confusing there with the overall grasp situation on headless zombies (it's better to target their arms than their bodies if you can't smash them entirely), and they still have some undue benefits they share with wild animals (you should be able to strike or stop many unarmed attacks with weapons), but it is much better than it was. I still sometimes get those invincible unsmashable zombie heads. I'll try to figure that out.

    In an arena test, my competent sword+shield human was able to defeat ten zombies at once, receiving only minor injuries. It took some judicious selections, and some dodging to other squares, but it isn't hard if you stay away from multiple opponents. I also set six sword humans against twenty zombies, and they won without any losing anybody. On the other hand, I set ten unarmed unskilled humans against ten zombies, and the zombies won without losses. That sounds about right to me -- the zombies have many advantages in unarmed combat. So you'll have to keep your squishy civilians safe. Incidentally, one unarmed unskilled elephant person was able to kill ten human zombies without any trouble, since they have smashing power. Then an elephant person zombie was able to kill the elephant person...

    I fixed sparring as well. The cautiousness personality check got flipped around with the new facets, which wouldn't normally be a problem (just a strike frequency shift), but the new drunken dwarves were 100 percent not-cautious (which made them all 100 percent cautious in the flipped check). The roll failed every time for them, so drunken sparring partners just sat there without throwing shots. That's normally reserved for super rare pathologically deliberate dwarves absolutely on one end of the curve, and that's not even much of an issue if their partner isn't the same way.
  • 12/26/2015 Toady One Various fixes and various giant and peopled animals. I held off on common domestic animal people for now, but there are plenty of canine and feline critters that got the treatment.

    New stuff
    • Giant and person versions of many of the older creatures, including the elephant
    • Vampire purges in world generation to control their overfeeding which was stopping cities from growing

    Major bug fixes
    • Allowed dwarves praying at temple dedicated to no particular god to choose prayer target according to need
    • Stopped adv mode goblin animals from fighting gobs and each other
    • Fixed error causing underground sewer dwellers to copy town stockpile, lag-killing certain towns
    • Stopped crash with goblet trading
    • Made retire store away merchants and diplomats and not mark visitors and residents as hostile
    • Made non-military visitors do citizenship petitions properly
    • Fixed broken merchant-elevated-to-liaison that sits at trade depot for entire life

    Other bug fixes/tweaks
    • Fixed error with building profiles causing underground bandit leaders to roam streets
    • Vampire guests of various kinds give themselves cover identities (those on-site will still be revealed in old saves)
    • Stopped some position elevation announcements from giving away vampires
    • Removed trade goods from retired sites if living merchant is still present
    • Made animals less afraid of casual relationships
    • Various animal tweaks that came up during the peopling (see file changes.txt)
    • Marked visitors correctly in site text export
    • Fixed a cause of string entry key conflicts
    • Made it list proper subregion when talking about certain adventurer rumor sites instead of subregion where speaker is standing
  • 12/26/2015 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.42.04
  • 12/24/2015 Toady One Lutefisk was consumed waaaaay back on the 20th. I have only now regained the ability to speak. It was more like fish cartilage than fish jello this time. We all survived. As part of the holiday maelstrom, I found myself working on something I could do in fits and starts, rather than any concentrated period of time, so now we've got giant and person versions for most of the original animals. The newer animals from the sponsorship drive came with those forms, but we never did have giant elephants and various large bears and all the great cat people and so forth.

    I also fixed some of the problems with visitors vs. retired sites, and various minor typos and issues.
  • 12/19/2015 Toady One I fixed citizenship petitions (the non-soldier long-term residents weren't doing them properly -- mercenaries and monster slayers remain too absorbed in work to care). There was a problem with merchants that come back later elevated as fortress liaisons hanging out at the trade depot forever and ever, and that's fixed. A few more give-aways for vampires have been fixed, along with a string entry problem.
  • 12/18/2015 Toady One Let's see... I cleaned up some long-standing problems with cities. In world generation, vampires would prey on cities and eventually stop them from getting beyond the smallest size. So we've got some cheery vampire purges now. I fixed some problems with sewer bandits causing them to have way too many stolen items or to be placed aboveground.

    New bug-wise, I stopped the animal fights slowing down goblin towers and fixed a crash from trading goblets in saves loaded into 0.42.03 from older versions. And some other minor stuff.
  • 12/12/2015 Toady One Here's another release which cleans up various outstanding issues.

    Major bug fixes
    • Fixed world generation crash from wandering artist writing a book
    • Fixed crash from retiring locations in certain circumstances
    • Fixed crash associated to adventurer sleeping in inn rooms
    • Fixed issue with militia not picking up armor
    • Fixed error causing some instruments in chests to not be played
    • Fixed error causing instruments and drink service to fail in dining rooms
    • Fixed error causing scribes not to use some blank writing materials
    • Fixed error causing overall scribe operation to be stalled by a bad target codex
    • Made training marksdwarves want both combat and training ammunition and fetch stacks appropriately (thanks to ag for analyzing this one)
    • Fixed issue with starting instrument causing it to duplicate
    • Fixed one way for horses to become playable (not sure about dogs/donkeys)
    • Stopped dead/caged commanders from stopping invaders from moving (thanks to vjek for preparing a very useful and funny save)
    • Stopped cats from dying of alcohol poisoning after walking over damp tavern floors and cleaning themselves (reduced effect)
    • Put new caps in place on animals in towns during world generation
    • Stopped bookbinders and string makers from trying to use loose spider webs (thanks to Knight Otu for reminded me about raw tag)

    Other bug fixes/tweaks
    • Made the add new task list remember where it was again
    • Tweaked how distance is calculated for certain jobs
    • Stopped certain ramp/channel digging jobs from temporarily disturbing pathing and distance calculations (thanks to Loci for reproducible procedure)
    • Made edible seed-type growths gatherable
    • Stopped wander history spam for adventurer
    • Stopped nobles from other civilizations from making mandates and demands
    • Stopped weapon slayer list from giving away fort vampires
    • Handled some basic shaped conflicts with clothing vs. armor
    • Changed how owned objects are managed with clothing -- might be some trinket drops in old saves
    • Allowed goblets on embark
    • Made modded wood furnace reactions list properly
    • Fixed typo with untitled written content
    • Fixed typo in haunting conversation
    • Fixed several typos in personality/value strings
    • Fixed instrument values in old saves
  • 12/12/2015 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.42.03
  • 12/11/2015 Toady One We went back to fix a few older bugs -- the death/caging of invasion commanders no longer stalls their squads, one of the main causes of negative distances for building materials is fixed, training markdwarves should grab ammunition properly even if they already have combat ammunition, and seed/nut-type growths are pickable. The "add new task" button remembers menu position like it did before. There'll probably be a release tomorrow.
  • 12/08/2015 Toady One For next time, people should use the instruments in taverns properly -- there were problems with zones and dining rooms, but the dining rooms had it worse. Hopefully that'll fix the broken scribes too, but I'm not 100% sure on that yet. I fixed up the horse etc. population caps, and one variation of playable horses, though since there are still playable donkeys and dogs, I haven't found all of the variations yet. I reduced the severity of syndromes from ingested spatter (which should stop self-cleaning cats spattered with alcohol from getting sick all the time). I stopped outside nobles from making mandates and demands and allowed goblets on embark. I also stopped the weapon slayer list from giving away fort vampires.
  • 12/07/2015 Toady One Over the last few days, I fixed another world gen crash, the crash from retiring certain locations and the crash from sleeping in inns. I've cleaned up the issue with the dwarf militia not using armor correctly, and a weird instrument duplication error in adventure mode. I also stopped bookbinders from trying to use webs (thank Knight Otu for that one -- you can add NOT_WEB below the thread reagent in your saves now if you want). Modded wood furnace reactions are listed properly now.
  • 12/05/2015 Toady One Here's a quick follow-up for some of the worst bugs. There are still some strange things going on (horses all over, duplicate companions, etc.), but hopefully this version will work much better than the last one.

    Major bug fixes
    • Fixed world generation freeze caused by error in poetry refrains
    • Fixed crash from building constructions on tree leaves etc.
    • Fixed calendar crash from bandit bar hoppers
    • Fixed crash with children joining socialize activities (most common with migrant waves)
    • Made worship activity branch properly (so prayer needs can be satisfied)
    • Fixed world gen seed not repeating after abort

    Other bug fixes/tweaks
    • Can see deity for temple in location screen
    • Cannot spot vampires from occupation list anymore
    • Fixed a few typos
  • 12/05/2015 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.42.02
  • 12/03/2015 Toady One I fixed a calendar crash, and a crash with children socializing that typically happened when children arrived with immigrant waves. I patched out an adventure corruption crash, but I haven't gotten to the heart of it yet. I've fixed the problem with the "Worship!" activity not branching into specific activities that satisfy needs (so people will actually use your temples properly now). Temples in the location list show their deity now. Vampires are not outed on the occupation list.
  • 12/02/2015 Toady One With the release come the bugs, and with the bugs come the fixes! I've corrected what is hopefully the cause of all the world generation freezes (an uninitialized poetry refrain index...), and I fixed a problem causing worlds not to reproduce correctly with the same seed. I also fixed the older bug causing constructions to crash when placed over tree tiles. There are still more crashes to check, so I'm going to continue to work on 42.02 for a few more days, and then I'll put it up. Then I'll continue on with bug fixes.
  • 12/01/2015 Toady One Here is the new version we've been working on all year! The flow of fortress life is quite a bit different now -- specific breaks and parties have been replaced by taverns and performances and needs and inebriation. You can designate a tavern, temple or library from a meeting area zone, bedroom or dining room using the new Assign Location option. The location list ('l') will let you know what sort of furniture and items you need, and you can set tavern keepers, scribes and other occupations there as well. You'll need to set up a drink stockpile and a chest for goblets in taverns for drink service to work properly, but dwarves can still drink without a tavern as before. You can assign multiple rooms/zones to a single location. There's a lot more -- see the feature list below.

    The bug fix list below is partial. Large chunks of the game were changed, which has a way of making old bugs go away while bringing in new ones to take their place. We'll be focusing on bugs old and new in subsequent releases, starting with crashing saves and moving down the list. The next set of bug-fix releases will be measured on a scale of days and weeks rather than months, as usual.

    New stuff
    • Ability to designate taverns, temples and libraries in the fortress
    • Taverns and libraries also exist in adventure mode and world generation
    • Tavern keepers can serve drinks in both modes, goblets can be used by dwarves to drink (in taverns or otherwise)
    • Performances include stories, poetry, music and dance (you can view activity descriptions from the unit/job list)
    • Art forms are randomly generated for each civilization
    • Instruments are now all generated, instruments can be used in both modes
    • Most instruments are constructed from multiple pieces using different materials
    • Personalities and values lead to needs which can be met by various actions in both modes
    • The fort has visitors, residency petitions and eventual citizenship, including non-dwarves
    • Tavern visitors include mercenaries, monster slayers, bandits, diplomats and performers
    • Can set details for clothing/armor jobs to make them for other races that can equip items
    • Monster slayers can petition your fortress to go down and fight monsters once you discover the underground
    • Performance troupes are active in world generation and into play, visiting the fort, can be formed in adventure mode
    • New knowledge system divided into nine branches (though it has very few practical effects so far)
    • Fortress scholars can advance knowledge, form master-apprentice relationships and write down their findings
    • Fortress scribes can copy works in your library
    • Scholars can visit your fortress libraries, bringing knowledge from around the world
    • Devoted historical figures can visit your fortress temples
    • Three forms of writing material: papyrus sheets, paper sheets and parchment sheets
    • Papyrus sheets are made directly from the plant at the farmer's workshop
    • Paper is made from pressed slurries (start at the quern/mill, then go to a screw press)
    • Parchment is made from hide and milk of lime at the tanner's (bake quicklime at a kiln, then make milk of lime at an ashery)
    • Sheets are used to make quires or with rollers to make scrolls -- these are then used for writing
    • Quires can be bound into codices with bindings after they contain writing
    • Dwarves read books in the library (they don't need to be scholars)
    • Values can be passed in writing (both modes) and through adventure mode arguments (uses some conversation skills)
    • Animal people are playable as adventurers, arrive as fort visitors and sometimes live in towns in (playable) populations
    • Children play with toys now, and they can also play make believe, in both modes
    • Personality can be customized/randomized in adventure mode, appearance can be randomized as well
    • Temples can be defiled in both modes, dwarf temples can be assigned to particular gods
    • Adventurer can rent rooms in inns
    • Adventurers can compose new poems, music and dances
    • Adventurers can write material down on empty quires or scrolls
    • Alcohol causes inebriation, erratic behavior, unconsciousness, death
    • Festivals occur in world generation, though we haven't gotten them out of there yet
    • Dwarves will wear trinkets again

    Major bug fixes
    • Fixed some army pathing issues
    • Goblins have mounts again
    • Fixed long-standing flow bug with unit occupancy
    • Stopped some issues with brawls escalating to non-lethal

    Other bug fixes/tweaks
    • Looking at reaction screen for redded-out reactions in workshop will indicate missing reagents now
    • Fixed inversion problem with half of the child/parent conversation thoughts
    • Lots of historical figures that weren't around from the beginning didn't have deities when they were supposed to
    • Allowed site finder to look for 1x1 sites
    • Human civilizations now have randomized values
    • Added ability to set invasion wave cap size
  • 12/01/2015 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.42.01
  • 11/29/2015 Toady One There's always more to do, but we're pretty much done with what we've found we need to do before the first release, so we'll go ahead with that release in a few days! Then we'll continue to work on bugs new and old for some time, as usual, peppered with work on smaller suggestions and other life improvements.
  • 11/23/2015 Toady One We're done with the list -- I'm going to have to push off rumor display changes for a bit, since I spent the day I set aside for that chasing crash bugs instead. The crash bugs were squished though, so I'm happy enough with the outcome. We're doing release mode tests now and going through the churn of tweaks that happens before it's ready enough to go. There will still be plenty of issues left for you to enjoy, along with all the new stuff. Fix fix fix, fix fix fix.
  • 11/17/2015 Toady One Various tweaks with grumpy ignored residents, music descriptions vs. harmony, spectator text, and written content. With an impressive enough performance/reputation, your adventurer can petition to be an official performer for a town (the same as the dwarf mode occupation), which doesn't mean much but gives you permission to sleep in villages and a merchant discount in market locations (also extended to hearthpeople). Along with the tavern discounts for various reputations, it'll have to do for now in the absence of a meaningful economy. Four more things to go.
  • 11/10/2015 Toady One I finished up the various non-dwarf item code. The "foreign" weapon stockpiles are a bit odd now (shrinking as you add resident races), and mercenaries will mostly ignore you if you try to fiddle with their equipment in ways that would make them drop their owned equipment, but hopefully it works well enough for a first release pass. Diplomats will hang out in taverns for a bit after their official duties, and bandits will also occasionally arrive to relax as well.
  • 11/05/2015 Toady One I finished up the adventure mode side of personality needs -- partially by adding an avenue for the "argue"/"cause trouble" need. You can argue over differing values (or if you want, put forth an argument you don't agree with just to start trouble), and there are a few options, including ones that can make people angry. You can change people's values (or change your own if you choose to acquiesce yourself), and it uses some of the conversation skills. I fixed an old issue where brawls would automatically elevate to "non-lethal" status. I also cleaned up some of the performance text.
  • 11/01/2015 Toady One Here's the report to start the month. Here is a Future of the Fortress reply. And here's a list of remaining items if you missed it. Now we just need to settle in and get some final work done.
  • 10/28/2015 Toady One I finished handling the last personality needs in dwarf mode -- dwarves can swipe and own and wear trinkets again somewhat like they did before, for instance, with the avaricious and extravagant dwarves doing it more than others. The quarrelsome ones can argue during chats, which'll satisfy both parties need to argue if they have it, or make them a little grumpy if they don't, though it's infrequent enough that it shouldn't be a new cause of fort collapse. Various other needs (seeing animals, learning, practicing martial arts, etc.).

    I also made dwarves somewhat more resistant to the effects of alcohol -- creature castes can now be given an extra dilution factor vs. syndromes with a given identifier.
  • 10/24/2015 Toady One Here's an interview with Software Engineering Daily.

    Bookcases, handling some issues with long-term residents staying in your inn's rooms properly, more location interface stuff... it's a process. I managed to get a skeletal 64 bit DF program running, finally, and I'll continue to work out problems with that once this release is out (this release will still be 32).
  • 10/21/2015 Toady One Additional work was completed -- cleaned up some problems with partner dance display, got the mercenary and monster hunting resident occupations working a bit better, handled petitions that are ignored, did a bit with phrase length and registers in musical form descriptions, a little more child decision-making... I also added a numbered tag to reactions so that they won't use up entire bone stacks making multiple products if you don't want them to (the dwarves were making giant piles of bone plectrums out of a single yak skeleton all at once). I don't remember if this was already possible in some way, but there's a new tag anyway.
  • 10/17/2015 Toady One Let's see... you can write prose as an adventurer now. I grabbed a blank scroll from the library with my first test character and ended up writing a (bad) essay about the historical event of me leaving my home town on an adventure... I guess that's something. I left it in the library for posterity. You can copy down any poems, music or choreography you know. I also added support for more of the new needs in more circumstances -- there are still a few that don't have enough situations, especially in adventure mode. We might just leave a few of those as positive-effect-only needs if we can't get enough satisfaction for them for this time. Various other tweaks.
  • 10/12/2015 Toady One More stuffs done. Tested out a dwarf reading a necromancer's book in a fort mode library. Fun was had. Some more prompts for adv mode dancers. Allowed invading soldier/monster caps to be set in the init. Old bug fixed with occupancy for units pushed by flows. Etc. Should clarify that we haven't done animal barding-type armor yet -- just the clothing and armor for non-dwarves that can potentially join the fort or be traded with.
  • 10/08/2015 Toady One I'm going on down the list. You can make clothing and armor for non-dwarfy critters now. A few promises managed: I've got goblins back on beak dogs (there were multiple problems there -- one was that they were very rare, and one was that the goblins kept butchering them), and people that aren't actively spectating (including invaders/ambushers) can still experience music around them. Cleaned up dancing patterns -- cats and other critters were already getting in the way, and then I made the patterns a little more dynamic, so the interruptions became worse. Now animals get pushed aside, which is pretty amusing when kitty cats keep reintroducing themselves into the dance. And so on.
  • 10/01/2015 Toady One October's report is up. Toys have joined instruments and goblets with items that can be used by dwarves in the game for the next release. Children can also play make believe and do little performances anywhere, no building required.
  • 09/29/2015 Toady One Here is a Future of the Fortress reply. The work goes on, mostly cleaning up taverns, visitors and the new occupations.
  • 09/22/2015 Toady One We've just been continuing along, getting the game fit for wider testing by all of you. I've been working a lot with art form selection and construction to give the different sorts of places, civilizations and performances a bit more character, and I stress-tested the tavern keeper. It was messy, but the drinks got delivered. I also added more ways for a single composition to become well-known in a civilization, and various other little tweaks.
  • 09/16/2015 Toady One Tanya X. Short of Kitfox Games had the foresight to get somebody to film the procedural generation panel we were on at PAX (normally they don't film them), and it is now up on YouTube. Thanks also to Kepa Auwae from Rocketcat Games, Ryan Clark from Brace Yourself Games, and Tyler Sigman from Red Hook Games for the entertaining event!

    We've been continuing to work on bugs and tweaking everything... the overall list has been halved so far this month, which is a nice feeling.
  • 09/11/2015 Toady One Still working through performance stuff, mostly, though I've been ranging all over the place. Better summaries in the menus, more opportunities for people standing around to jump into performances and pick up slack if there's room for them and they are interested, fixed some broken milling code, fixed another world gen crash, and so on and so on. We had a dwarven dancer become so talented a century into one world gen that he invented his own complete dance form, and the bold inventor decided to pattern the motions of the dance on a troglodyte attack he suffered in his youth. This important knowledge was then passed down to several students and then out into the world via a performance troupe.
  • 09/06/2015 Toady One The latest project has been to improve performance feedback -- where exactly you are in the composition/form, what other performers you walk in on mid-act are doing, mistakes made by performers, and some more information about dwarf mode performers so you have an idea of where they are in their activities. It'll tell you more about what you've learned by observation. Before that I was messing around with non-player fortress tavern maps, as well as instrument timbre adjectives and their changes over registers.
  • 09/01/2015 Toady One Here is September's report and a Future of the Fortress reply.
  • 08/25/2015 Toady One Just whittling away the list -- fixed issues with full citizenship petitions and how the game tracks the state of visitors, fixed minor issues with occupation assignments in the new multi-zone locations, stopped a problem causing some scholars to not show up in city libraries, stopped the adventurer from starting with a stone-stringed instruments, fixed a long-standing world gen crash where I lucked out and got a repeatable seed... and so on! It feels like we're entering a period of posts along these lines where there will sometimes be interesting logs like the last log, and often logs that are just lists of now-unbroken known features, he he he. The collection of problems is growing smaller, anyway!
  • 08/20/2015 Toady One I mentioned back in May that I'd probably get to master-apprentice relationships for fortress mode scholars. That's been done now. During research discussions, if somebody is better at skills associated to the topic and has broader knowledge, the dwarves (or permanent residents) can decide to strike up an arrangement. This will allow scholars to teach their students directly, and they can teach all of their present apprentices at once to speed things up. We don't have general teaching yet and we don't have generalized apprenticeships, which'll take more work at a later time. During my first test, a human doctor arrived at my library and I accepted her petition to study at the fort. After a discussion on bandages, three of my dwarves decided to sign up and were soon learning all about pulmonary medicine from their new master.
  • 08/15/2015 Toady One I've been working on additional issues related to dwarf mode libraries. For instance, the written works of scholars are treated as sort of semi-artifacts, like named weapons, and this was leading to trouble when somebody would write on a quire and then a bookbinder went to make it into a codex. The ingredients would be gobbled up, and the resulting object wouldn't be an artifact. So reactions now have the ability to transfer artifact status, and there's a new historical event for artifact transformation. There was also the issue of getting scroll rollers on to scrolls that the traders bring -- the game doesn't really understand item components at all, so I just had to add default improvements in the tool raws that civs can tack on to their items.
  • 08/10/2015 Toady One The finalization has shifted from dwarf temples to dwarf libraries over the last few days. Watching and fiddling with a churn of scholars, scribes, scrolls, book bindings, quires, scroll rollers and sheets. You can watch them set out their writing materials on their little tables or sit in a chair to read. The current problem is to get scribes to make the right number of copies of each written text so they don't use up all the paper, which gets a bit headache-ish to code when libraries are spread over several linked rooms and filled with different kinds of items which hold the same written content.
  • 08/04/2015 Toady One I filled my fortress's temple with statues and tantruming dwarves to test out the desecration code. After fixing up a bug with tantrums that stopped them from toppling the statues, it worked out pretty much as hoped... one werepanda, one weretortoise, one wereskink, and two vampires. It wasn't a full moon, so I had to wait to see the werebeasts, but the new vampires didn't have secret identities, so they showed up immediately as red monsters. One of my miners killed one with a pick axe, though I'm not really sure if it was over the vampireness or not. There are obviously a lot of ways this could go, and right now the game is just using the unsubtle easy one. We'll see if there's some hiding of details in some cases, but we might not get to it for this time.

    I also ensured that the player can be cursed in the default town temples as well as retired player temples.
  • 08/01/2015 Toady One Here's the August 2015 report and a Future of the Fortress reply.
  • 07/30/2015 Toady One You can create your own performance troupes now and get people to travel around with you as entertainers. Potential troupe-mates need to be into the arts or partying, though the magnitudes of those interests don't need to be as high if you have an artistic reputation (and you can get some of that reputation immediately by performing for them). You can kick people out of the band, of course -- I suppose it might come up in practice if a member ends up being predisposed to bar fighting. I was able to collect some peasants from my first village as a demi-god poet by impressing people from house to house with my recitals. The RNG came up with "the Ace Bees" for my first troupe name (you can also pick it yourself), but it was a short and sad tale, unfortunately, since I had to kick everybody out of the troupe to test it.
  • 07/25/2015 Toady One The work on adventurer composition led into finalizing the new written content generally and making sure I had handled all of the promises I'd made to various people over the last few months. Philosophical study opens up different avenues of discussion that allow people to pass their values to both individual readers and to a lesser extent through the underlying civilization when there's a library with a copy. This doesn't impact specific ethics yet, so you won't have to worry that an elf-written book will make all your dwarves start eating dead bodies, but such a thing is now threatened for a later date by these changes. Poetry written in certain poetic forms can currently spread values before philosophers come up with specific language that can be used in prose, though not all civilizations will have such traditions.

    Generally, there's more information in all of the written content now, and there are more sorts. For instance, after the difficult concept of an alternate history is tackled by historians, they can write books pivoting around the negation of particular events. Mostly it hasn't been earth-shaking... dwarves wondering what life would be like if an antelope man hadn't attacked their town or if a competition had turned out a different way. One historian wrote a book considering how things would have been if the author had remained an architect instead of becoming a historian a decade before. It would be possible to weight the event selected with an importance check, but there are complications as usual. There are also cultural histories, genealogies, atlases, chronicles, the various biographies I mentioned before, etc., which have their proper topics and sometimes some historical events selected, and they occasionally push a value agenda when the author and form is capable of it.
  • 07/18/2015 Toady One As promised, there's now a very basic ability to compose poems, music and choreography. There isn't a lot of user input, but you can pick the form and it'll cook something up for you. Since this should take some time for the player to do, it goes into the sleep/wait view and has some hours pass before it shares what sort of monstrosity you've cooked up. Since everything is considered "written content" as with the necromancer (and newer) books, the titles are currently in that format. For my first attempt, I had a novice poet write in a short poetic form that could take any subject... much like the necromancers, he chose to write a poem about himself called the Birth of the Human. I went ahead and shared that with everybody in the import market. The dwarves appreciated the practice I put into it, and the humans didn't mind passing the time, but the goblins were mean and wouldn't shut up. Jerks.
  • 07/11/2015 Toady One Personal reputation as an artist (of the various kinds) is in now. Due to the way reputation has been handled, it's currently based on live performance incident reports (making it based on what people have read will take more work). People can speak about performances they have seen (or taken part in or just heard about), and then offer their opinion according to the skill of the performers (if they saw it), their general beliefs about the arts, etc. You can also talk about your own performances if you want -- I told the story of the founding of the city to one shopkeeper, and then went to the next shop and told that shopkeeper about how great my oration was, and she told me how much she appreciates eloquence. I'm sure it was a pleasure talking to me. In any case, we should get to a few practical artistic reputation effects before the release.
  • 07/06/2015 Toady One Adventurer performances are underway. Right now, the option is grouped with starting conversations, but instead of shouting or praying, you can begin a performance. Then you can choose between stories, poems, music and dancing. Your character begins knowing the basic art forms of their culture (more depending on skill selections as well), and they can also tell stories about any historical event that they know (there are groupings and filters to help a bit with the number of choices). You can be anywhere when you decide to begin a performance (it'll warn you if there isn't room to perform a dance). Once you start a performance, an activity is created which will allow other people to join in either as another performer (for certain dances and music) or a spectator. It's subject to change based on how it feels, but right now, it breaks into your performance every 10 moves or so to give you a chance to do something. As we get more reactions and options, we'll hopefully move to a stage where you just maintain control the whole time and do meaningful things as you perform. It's an interesting problem but we won't get to explore it much this time.
  • 07/01/2015 Toady One Here is the July 2015 report and here is a Future of the Fortress reply. Here's to a cool July!
  • 06/26/2015 Toady One The last major thing I need to do in adventure mode is handle how the player interacts with all the art stuff. All of the adventure tavern-goers do fort-mode dancing and storytelling and music and so on, and we need a few indicators there so you know more about what's going on. We need the adventurer to be able to do all of these things themselves, and if you start an activity, other people need to join in or otherwise appreciate what's going on. We're also going to do a little bit with composition, though as we've said before, we're not doing much with it for this time. It would also be good for the sun to diminish and go into the west, for a few months at least... it'll be slow-going while records continue being set.
  • 06/20/2015 Toady One I started the game as a hearthperson in a larger town so that there'd be a place to test out making orders at inns. In the keep where I began, there were a few dwarven soldiers... and a 'K'! Killer beetle! No, wait, that's Angband... the Lady ruling the town was a kangaroo woman, and she wanted me to beat some people up for her. You bet, just let me go to the tavern first. Right around the corner we had an establishment. It was called "The Cinnamon Fruit of Mouths" or something. Let's see who thought that name up. Through the doors, we have the tables and barrels... and an 'h'! Homunculus! Do I have sleep resistance? Oh, that's Hack 1.0.3... then I was like, oh, a newer 'h', humanoid... no wait... So I looked at it. "Hare man tavern keeper." Well, good, all the roguelike flashbacks made me thirsty. Barley beer in a mug! I just need to settle up, and I can't do that until it is programmed.

    I think the summer sun has made me lose sleep, but the light-blocking apparatus is back in place, so hopefully I'll recover soon.

    Say hello to the new laptop. The last one died of some hinge-related illness... I opened it and something caught, which peeled up the front face and made the power cord stop working. This one has sturdy-looking hinges.
  • 06/15/2015 Toady One The syndrome changes are mostly done. We had our first barfights and our first alcohol-related death (aside from whatever fiery shenanigans and so forth you all have been up to for years). There were a lot of things that needed to be altered or improved or fixed to get it to work. Effects are more smeared out and syndromes can be set to add concentration up to a maximum so that multiple drinks matter, for instance. Syndrome effects used to abruptly start and abruptly end (the peak was mostly meaningless), but now you can explicitly set abrupt starts and endings, or have the syndrome gradually grow to the peak and gradually fade. There were issues with impaired function being permanent and with the wound display that I've fixed. Syndromes can now be linked so that all of the alcohols go together (without this, you could drink one mug of each alcohol in the world without having serious trouble).
  • 06/10/2015 Toady One Adv-mode taverns are separated into four different areas in the game now, generally -- a place to store drink barrels and goblets, a place with tables and chairs, an empty activity area, and a floor/hallway with rentable rooms. If a large stationary instrument is available, one can be installed at the border of the activity area (the first two places I visited had a metal frame with four hanging wooden triangles and a clay-and-leather drum on a stone stand, respectively).

    I'm currently working on the new syndrome effects for inebriation -- hopefully I can do the entire process justice, from euphoria to altered personality traits (both lowered social inhibitions through the shamelessness trait, as well as a general erratic behavior alteration) to ataxia (might just use dizziness) and nausea and unconsciousness and death. The new emotion/personality effects should be usable for a wide variety of stuff for the future and mods, like terror/rage enchantments and so on. I'm also going to need to add some more control to how syndrome severity levels work (right now the unconsciousness effect hits any of your dwarves that dares to use the drink stockpile, and all of that clearly needs to be ironed out before release).
  • 06/03/2015 Toady One I finished a simple library map maker, so we can move on from that. Managed to find both the original books and copies made during world gen. It's interesting to see how different some of the scholar setups can be -- the second library I visited had nothing but human and elf naturalists writing about migration patterns and animal reproduction. Next up, hard drinking in adv mode taverns.
  • 06/01/2015 Toady One Here is the June 2015 report and also a Future of the Fortress reply to start out the month.
  • 05/26/2015 Toady One I decided it was time to shift gears to adventure mode so that the last remaining dwarfy bits can grow up with the adventure bits that need to be finished, and so adventure mode doesn't creep up badly on us as we try to get this release completed. The main push in adventure mode is going to be toward making taverns and inns lively, though I'm starting with some work on character generation to accommodate artistic knowledge and the new needs system. This involves allowing you to select your personality, with the resulting needs being clearly shown -- there aren't that many yet, especially as it applies to adventure mode, but it'll continue to become more interesting. You'll also be able to see and reroll your physical appearance before you start playing. As in dwarf mode, keeping your needs satisfied gives you modest overall benefits, and it takes them a while to drain, so it's fun for roleplaying without being too onerous a burden.
  • 05/23/2015 Toady One I've been doing the particulars of the scholar occupation in the fort over the last few days, mostly making sure it plays nice with world generation and that everything advances at roughly the same rate. This means that having one random dwarf assigned to the library with no skills might not advance the state of the world's knowledge even after years of confused research (as I did with my miner, who immediately started pondering whether probing would make a good surgical technique). You can make quite a bit of progress if you attract some dedicated scholars and support them with your own scholars and scribes, probably more than any world generation site over the same number of years since you can expend all your effort toward the work, but it still takes time. Depending on how gregarious they are, scholars will tend toward discussing their topic with other researchers or working by themselves. Scholars will read books that you have on hand to avoid duplicating results, though I haven't yet duplicated the master-apprentice model from world gen (I'll probably have time to do something simple there), and they can commit their results to writing (which the scribes will then copy).
  • 05/18/2015 Toady One After these many years, the mugs and goblets created by the dwarves are now used for their proper dwarfy purpose -- containing alcohol just before its journey to the dwarven stomach. I'm setting up the occupation assignment for the new taverns, temples and libraries. They work kind of like position appointments. This time I think we're going with tavern keepers, performers, scribes and scholars. Priests are off the table for this release since they are currently handled by a separate entity and we'll have to tackle that later, but temple performers should still be able to do sacred dances and so forth. Tavern performers are special artists like those from the traveling troupes -- dwarves will still sing, dance and tell stories without needing to be given an occupation. Scribes will focus on copying existing codices and scrolls while scholars will mostly just think and talk to each other. There'll need to be some controls for that, since you don't want scribes to waste materials on extra copies while scholars need them to write down new results, but different forts will have differing priorities.
  • 05/15/2015 Toady One I mentioned in some Future of the Fortress or other that ethics and values don't instantly assimilate when you grant resident or citizen status to a visitor that petitions to stay at your fortress, and that we'd make sure to have some definite evidence of that fact. I started by diversifying the "work satisfaction" thought by feeding in the job type and filtering it through the individual. In particular, any elves that have the misfortune of signing up for dwarven life can now emotionally process the experiences of tree felling, butchery and animal caging. We trust you'll respect this new situation in your labor settings.
  • 05/11/2015 Toady One Right now, the visitors fall into three groups, the artists, scholars and adventurers, and those can be further divided into those that are just dropping by and those that want a longer term place in the fortress. The current working idea is to have the long-term people petition the mayor or expedition leader for permission to stay and work in the fort, and you'll be the one in control of who gets to stay (since the decision is an official act of the fortress and not the whim of the mayor). There'll be a little petition notification that we can use for all sorts of decisions as we go.

    If you have rooms in your inn, people you approve can stay there (there might be room in the inn for the short-term people, but that's uncertain), otherwise they'll stay in a fortress room. If things are working out and they want to stay, you can grant them full citizenship. That distinction doesn't mean much now (it'll acquire more meaning after our first pass on the embark scenarios), but it'll affect which locations they can use (so you can have taverns, temples and libraries for locals, for example, if you want) and it'll give them regular bedroom/property/pet claiming permissions.

    Among the adventurers, as you might have seen from world generation, there are various roles -- mercenaries will join your fortress military (for room and board at the current time, until the economy returns), where wandering monster hunters will simply be petitioning for permission to enter the caves to kill beasts, more likely.
  • 05/06/2015 Toady One If the sparrow man bard visiting the fortress wrote a ballad about his experiences, would he set a lighter mood and sing about how all of the guests took their clothes off and held them in bundles while the dwarven fish cleaner recounted the tale of how the first dwarven queen came to power? Or would he travel the darker road and sing about the human swordsman that attacked the goblin dancer outside the gates, cutting him down without regard for dwarven law?

    I think the clothing bug is caused by equipment code. Once I plugged the visitors into the new activities, they thought they needed to have citizen clothing sets defined and found they did not, so they prepared all of their clothes for storage. The murder of the goblin dancer is more likely the sort of thing you should expect. Visitors to the fortress ask themselves if they would be welcome before they come, but they can't account for other potential guests that might consider themselves at war or have a personal problem with them. It's possible we'll have some "neutral territory" behavior in place to curb the fighting if it is too common, but there's also room for the sheriff for crimes that are committed. It'll be lend a little spirit to the fortress, in any case.
  • 05/04/2015 Toady One Some time ago, I mentioned that as part of adding visitors to your fortress inn and tavern, we'd have more animal people running around. I put that in today -- there are now reasonably rare instances of animal people leaving the wilderness and becoming involved with civilizations. Our first was a red panda man that became an herbalist in a human village for some years before taking up a wandering life as a musician. In adventure mode, you can now play as animal people if they are close to a civilization. You can also play an adventurer from any population that has established itself as a regular part of life in a civilized site where you can normally play, so you could play an elf or even a goblin if some already live in a human city, say, but you can't currently select an amphibian person from the sewers. Next up we should have some dev log on fortress visitors!
  • 05/01/2015 Toady One Here is the May 2015 report. And here is a Future of the Fortress reply.
  • 04/28/2015 Toady One Admittedly we spent a bit of time today just kinda staring at the Patreon page and being impressed with all of you, but there was also time for work! And buckets... and buckets in barrels. I guess I broke lye storage sometime back when I messed with the container jobs, since they place the lye bucket in the barrel instead of just the lye. That's fixed now. Tweaked paper slurries and paper pressing -- I tried to set up the materials for that so it understands they are made out of the same fiber materials used for plant-based clothing, using paste and pressed states. That should make the process of turning damaged clothing into paper easier for a later release.
  • 04/27/2015 Toady One While my dwarves were creating a horse parchment scroll with finely crafted apricot wood rollers, I set up this Patreon page. Over the last months, some people have been asking for additional support options, and this is our first try at that! Just let us know if there are any issues.
  • 04/25/2015 Toady One Floated back to dwarven instruments for a bit, finishing up various bugs and text. Now that's done. Today I got to work on some dwarfy library stuff -- like heating limestone and related minerals in the kiln for the quicklime, and then making "milk of lime" with that, so that the animal hides can be soaked and turned into parchment. The extra steps are there because both sorts of lime can be used for many other purposes which we will get to in later releases. It'll be nice to build up a list of terrifying chemicals that could be sitting on a dwarven lab shelf some day, especially since we're now building up the chemistry knowledge branch to go with it, slowly.

    In any case, once you have your parchment sheets (or papyrus strip sheets, or various paper sheets made from milled then pressed pulp), then you have a choice between making scroll rollers from some hard material and then making a scroll, or you can make the sheet into a quire. Scrolls and quires will be able to accept writing. As a final step with quires, a dwarf can make book bindings, then use the bindings, written-on quires and thread to make codices. There's a new basic hard-coded "sheet" item, kind of like cloth, but everything else about the process is in the various raws, getting some use out of the new ability to place improvements on products (so the scroll rollers' general properties can be maintained on the final scroll, for example).
  • 04/19/2015 Toady One Fortress visitors are coming up, so amid the pure dwarfy work, I thought I'd take a stab today at the looming problem of opening up the fortress to more permanent non-dwarf residents (to complement the ones you can already get, like the odd elf monarch and all that). There were some hundreds of code snippets that needed to be slogged through, but everything was pretty straightforward except for military equipment/clothing. So that's looking good. We should have our first sense of how all that's going to work pretty soon as we open up the inns! I'll be back and forth between that and finishing dwarfy art stuff and libraries.
  • 04/15/2015 Toady One The dance activities will separate out dance areas, music areas and spectator areas now from the room of the tavern where they decide to hold the activity, and the people move off to their spots and dance/play/etc. For this sort of spontaneous tavern activity, the area divisions are made fresh every time, so you don't need to designate anything. They'll find the space if you leave an area without tables and chairs. If the tavern is crowded with furniture, people will still play music and tell stories and so on. The unit occupancy setup of one-dwarf-standing per tile has made moving multiple dancers along their patterns a trickier problem than it would be in a higher resolution setup, so I'm probably going to pass on some but not all of that.
  • 04/12/2015 Toady One I've been playing around with the dwarves and their taverns and am now digging into the proper activities vs. the art forms. Dwarves that go to a room in a tavern first group together in a general "socialize" activity (one for each occupied room). They then organize subactivities, much like the current military training. The poetry recitals and storytelling were pretty straightforward -- I'm doing music now. Activities haven't done much with items until now, so there'll be a few headaches I suspect in getting the instruments to work while playing nice with the storage code and so on.

    I also added some more information for the status of needs and in what way the relevant dwarf is being affected (either positively or negatively). Aside from the stress a needy dwarf can get from really being locked away and neglected, they also become distracted and less proficient at every task they perform when they have unmet needs. On the other side, a dwarf that has the balance of their needs satisfied will perform tasks more successfully (in addition to the positive emotions and stress reduction they get the moment a need is satisfied). Theoretically, the dwarf can go up to 150% and down as low as 50% in their effective skills, but in reality it'll be a much smaller effect either way -- it is difficult to fully satisfy every need at once (or impossible, if there are enough needs), and at the same time, needs don't become unsatisfied quickly and some are easily met. Multiple needs can also be satisifed with a single action (like "keep myself occupied" and "do someting creative").
  • 04/09/2015 Toady One I'd have hoped to finish up dwarfy prayer by now, but a few days ago I instead received an interesting cold that has settled in my chest for the time being. In any case, I was able to get back to meaningful work today and dwarves are praying to gods and meditating on fate and fortresses and so forth, satisfying their new spiritual needs (the intensities of spiritual needs are tied to the amount of devotion in the worship sentences you are already familiar with from their personality paragraphs). You can read about their topic of contemplation in their job entry as they go about their business in the temple.

    Over the next few days I should finally be getting all of the new entertainment stuff working in fortress mode, including dancing and instrument-playing dwarves, instruments which have been waiting to be played for like... eight years or something.
  • 04/04/2015 Toady One Some humans organized a festival to celebrate the ascension of their new law-giver. After the poetry recital and the foot race, there was a throwing competition. Instead of spears or hammers or something, they decided to compete by throwing the strings of one of their musical instruments... so there are still a few things to iron out, but we're almost done with this part.
  • 04/02/2015 Toady One We're well into the world gen festivals. Their main purpose at this point is to provide something interesting and interconnecting for the new artists to do before we move on to dwarf mode. The festivals that rise to the level of importance required for legends mode tracking are established as part of a fair in large markets with multiple trade partners, for religious purposes in temple cities, or to commemorate specific events such as the slaying of a dragon. The game looks at the values and ethics of the civilization and the overall purpose of the occasion to come up with the schedule of events -- performances, competitions (from art to various races to wrestling to etc. etc.), processions and ceremonies, with various little details. We're still on track to finish this part in a day or two.

    We'd also like to have smaller festivals in the smaller sites, but for space/speed purposes in world generation every village can't have things like harvest festivals every year that rise to a tracked historical level. It's possible to get the smaller places to have as-needed incidental historical festivals in world generation (respecting a regular schedule that carries into play) to provide context for invasions and monster attacks and so on, but we'll tackle that later. It's also possible to make the game understand what small-scale events should be going on in dwarf/adv-mode without difficulties, but we're going to limit our work on dwarf/adv-mode festivals to get this release completed. There might be something outside of the legend descriptions, but don't expect to see a great procession with elephants and criers and flowers and banners and candles and acrobats and so on... not yet, anyway.
  • 04/01/2015 Toady One And here is the April 2015 report.
  • 03/30/2015 Toady One Here is a somewhat lengthy Future of the Fortress reply: Part 1, Part 2.

    I'm getting started on festivals now -- world generation libraries are done, busy storing knowledge, hosting scholars and copying books. In the last world I checked, the Bastion of Reason and the Insightful House were sharing copies of books, classics like Injuries for Everyone, The Secret Of The Path Of The Moon, Do We Understand The Year?, Dissection: Before And After, Life With The Lever, Foraging Behavior For Students, In Pursuit Of The Negation (about proof by contradiction) and Unusual Adhesives.
  • 03/23/2015 Toady One I've entered the remaining knowledge outlines, and we're sitting at just over 300 simple innovations that can be abstractly discovered. Many of them have requirements, and many don't, so it's kind of a tech forest/grassland rather than a tree. Notably missing are innovations related to practical labors in the game (though there are some appearances) -- when the system is inevitably expanded and merged with the playing of the game, we'll deal with that, at least to the extent we can dig up reliable information.

    For fields like philosophy, I've tried not to make judgments about which ideas are "right" or anything like that, but rather which subjects can be thought about at all. The specific view that a philosopher takes on, say, the nature of beauty or methods of education will depend on their individual/cultural values, where they apply, and a philosopher that encounters a philosophy book on beauty can then provide their own take (having acquired the innovation). Similarly, innovations for historians are, in part, writing forms like biography, and then any historian that reads a biography can start writing them as well -- the "tech tree" for that is stuff like comparative biographies describing multiple people, with a side tree about matters of sourcing, etc. And so on through the other seven branches -- there are innovations in naturalist writings, for example, and then they can investigate specific critters with those in mind when they get down to work observing foraging behavior or performing dissections.

    Several innovations require innovations from other branches, and since all knowledge is individually tracked, that implies some investigators will need to be at least well-read if not skilled in various topics (there aren't currently joint research projects). There are some old and new mechanisms in place to ensure this happens.
  • 03/20/2015 Toady One So you knew you were getting libraries, right? I mean, there are all these books being carried around by traveling artists with no easy way to read them, and we can't have that. Also, it was a little odd to imagine a library packed with art books and the occasional rambling necromantic tract -- we're in the process of solving that problem in the usual way: I just got through with engineering and chemistry, such as they are. The outlines are ready for mathematicians, philosophers, historians, geographers, doctors, naturalists, and astronomers. I'm using the same master-student framework for them as they work on research projects, and they'll also consult existing books at their home libraries, of course -- a good thing, since the early tests without books led to the expected and repeated tragic loss of knowledge and the constant rediscovery of previously known facts without much progress toward advanced techniques. It has been entertaining building up the different knowledge branches, interacting with our year 1400 cut-off, and no doubt screwing up various simple ideas and so forth.

    As it stands, the state of your civilization's collected knowledge does not impact what buildings, jobs, etc. you can use in your fort -- that's a tricky issue I don't want to get sucked into at this point. Figuring that out for a later release is certainly on the table. It's an interesting problem -- smaller worlds with fewer scholars don't advance as fast, and the future myth generation stuff will doubtless shake up the progression. We're not worrying about any of that now! All we want are wholesome libraries.

    Dwarves practice all forms of scholarship (while still preferring craftsdwarfship to books), elves do elfy stuff, and humans are variable (human values are randomized for each instance of civilization now, and there's a raw tag that sets scholar types based on the particular civ's values and jobs).

    This shouldn't be too lengthy a side-track, given that we aren't tackling any of the difficult questions where game and knowledge intersect. Festivals soon! Then we can move to fortress mode. Though the focus with your dwarves this time is on taverns and leisure, there is a possibility of a fort library being a minor topic (as temples are currently).
  • 03/16/2015 Toady One While toying around with the art book code and poem/etc. composition, I thought I'd see what happens to an entire form created by an artist mid-world-generation when the only way the form can be passed around is between teachers, students and troupe members. Most of these non-civ forms tend to stay within a single troupe, but sometimes they break out. For instance, in a 200 year small world, we had a human from a hamlet named Usmen decide to run away from home and study goblin poetry. I guess he was troubled by their society, because it wasn't too many years before he introduced a new form of poetry in the year 106: a poetic narrative intended to teach a moral lesson. He and his master Zom Frothhate joined up with a few more goblins and founded the Tan Flies, and Usmen taught the whole group the new poetic form. A hundred years later, forty years after Usmen died of old age, the eight current members of the Tan Flies are still teaching moral lessons to their goblin buddies.

    They aren't the only ones though -- back in 113, not long after moral poetry was introduced, one of the founding Tan Flies named Stasost Tongsdemons left the group to go study elven poetry under Narena Packedman, a renowned poet who had over twenty-five students and several major works over a century of activity. After a brief apprenticeship, Stasost went on to have five students of her own before becoming a noble ruling over some goblin pits in 131. Two of these students, Aslot Hatedtangle and Stasost Profaneace, were taught the moral lesson poetic form around the year 120. Stasost Profaneace is still alive, now traveling with the venerable Blockaded Horns troupe (founded in 35), though she has not yet successfully passed on the moral lesson form (her only apprentice to date was murdered).

    The other student of Tongsdemons, Aslot, was a one-armed murderous goblin farmer in the pits before becoming a poet at age one hundred eleven, studying under the future Lady for twelve years until she assumed rulership. Aslot was murdered in 162, but he had many students of his own and one of them, a human named Atek Housetactics was deemed worthy of the moral lesson form. Atek was born in 130, 24 years after the invention of moral lesson poetry, and learned the form in the year 150. After losing several apprentices to the perils of goblin living, Atek managed to keep the goblin Osta Wererock alive long enough to pass along the knowledge. They founded a troupe together called the Holy Points and are still performing. Several new members have joined up, so there's hope that moral lesson poetry will continue to spread.
  • 03/13/2015 Toady One I've finished up the teacher-student links and decided to augment that with the formation of performance troupes that can gallivant about. You'll also see them in your forts when we get to that part. A group of goblin poets had the honor of making the very first one, and they decided to call themselves the Fungi of Hell. After fourty years, five of the original eight founding members had met violent ends (including one that ended up in an elf belly), and another had left to become a baron at a dwarf fort, but they were still going strong with new members, including some bards and dancers and poets-turned-bard and so on.

    After a typo, I managed to screw things up badly enough that my first large world test had hundreds of artists split into just three gigantic world-wide societies based on their art form, but I've put some controls on size and made them mix together properly again. It would have been bad to suddenly have two hundred dancers show up at the fort and ask for drinks after a performance.

    Next up, the books! Then the festivals.
  • 03/11/2015 Toady One There are poets, bards and dancers running around in world gen now, all potential fort visitors. Next up they'll be producing little books, forming teacher-student links, and there'll be world gen festivals and competitions when appropriate for the entity. Perhaps a bit more, but I'll try to move on to fort mode promptly without getting mired down in world generation antics.
  • 03/08/2015 Toady One Here are some of the dance forms from a medium world: over here. We'll be moving on to the use of all of these generated art forms and instruments now, starting with the various newly-supported artists in world generation and then going into fortress mode taverns/artists/visitors, before handling adventure mode taverns/artists and the release.
  • 03/04/2015 Toady One The dance stuff is underway -- the procedure has been the same as the last three. First the reading, then the definitions, then the generator, then the text. I've finished the dance definitions and will try to finish the generator tomorrow.

    Here's an interview I did for IncGamers. There's an audio recording of it below the introductory paragraphs.
  • 03/01/2015 Toady One And here is the March 2015 report.
  • 02/27/2015 Toady One And here is a Future of the Fortress reply. And here is a reasonably intense-looking DF guide in French.
  • 02/26/2015 Toady One And here are some of the musical forms from a medium world: over here.
  • 02/19/2015 Toady One I've been reading about and am now working on the musical aspect of the new art forms. There'll be a few more days of messing around and then we should have more generated fun posted here. This one has a few more layers than the poems -- there's the scale/note choice side of it with its own generator, the rhythm side with its own generator, and then that's combined with a choice of generated instruments (including singing) and other information in varying degrees to say what's performed/composed and how all that works.
  • 02/15/2015 Toady One Here are some of the forms generated for a single large world: right here. They can be repetitive, but there's also a lot in the game that didn't appear on that page, so it should be okay overall. There are several problems to work out (sometimes it demanded some specific hundreds of thousands of stanzas). I need to name them. Then we'll be on to the next stuff!
  • 02/14/2015 Toady One The generator for poetic forms is done... I still need to have it write paragraphs describing the forms, so I'm not really sure what it is generating yet or how well it is doing it. I should have that together soon. I should also reiterate that we're not generating actual words for poems, and we don't have definitions for the languages up to the point where we can make certain meaningful distinctions about tone and stress, etc. (in fact, it just cooks up certain of those details on a per-world basis now to make the generators work). That said, it does put together quite a bit of information regarding structure, content, intent and so forth. If I'm lucky, I'll have some example descriptions tomorrow.

    From there, I can either define musical/dance forms, or get world gen poets up and writing specific poems (again, without the actual words, just what they did, why and how well -- it should be entertaining later in this release to see the game describe poems written by your skill zero dwarves and adventurers).
  • 02/11/2015 Toady One Was hoping to have an update on poetry and so on by now, but we'll have to be content with continuing to iron out problems with pieces of musical instruments and their jobs and so on. Hopefully things will be settled soon!
  • 02/05/2015 Toady One First pass on the instrument generator is done, finally. Lots of variables, components made of various materials (though they work like item improvements on the final product), some large instruments placed as little buildings, generated reactions to build them and their parts... reactions can now be categorized within shop menus and they can provide information during job selection to stop it all from being overwhelming. This is another of our experiments with just how much generated content can be used and what sorts of problems arise as you try to become immersed in your dwarves' culture.
  • 02/01/2015 Toady One And here is the February 2015 report. Let's see what we can get done this time!
  • 01/30/2015 Toady One Things have been moving along, though not much interesting to note in addition to what has been said. On the other hand, here is a Future of the Fortress reply that is full of various tidbits.
  • 01/24/2015 Toady One The new entertainment stuff is coming into focus... been reading a lot to try and make a good first attempt, though categorization is difficult in many cases. As usual, everything that follows is subject to change. There'll be seven new generic skills governing the new stuff (dancing as well as music which sits over singing and 4 instrument skills), and the poetry skill that has been sitting in the code will also come to use. We're using "poet", "bard" and "dancer" as professional names for the moment. I'd prefer to generate those roles, but I won't have the framework for it until later, so the relevant visitors'll be more or less like the world gen hero roles for now.

    Poetic, musical and dance forms will be generated by culture. There will be both knowledge and skill-based components to this -- so you can't compose a poem of a variety you aren't familiar with, no matter how good you are, but once you learn the rules, the quality will depend on your skills/atts. It'll start with the poet's general skill, and they'll also develop specific skill with the form, in a way that's probably most analogous to what we were planning with combat styles. I didn't expect this to come before those, but it did. The quality of the outcome should depend on broader cultural familiarity or varying qualities/depths of knowledge, but I'm not going to get into any of that yet: just a knowledge check box to get started and then a few related skills.

    I've come up with a list of stats for instruments for the raws and for the generator... we're not going to go deep into the nightmare of equal vs. just temperament and multiple materials and so on, but there might be hints of that. There'll be skill-like stats for specific instruments as well, so you might be a wind instrumentalist, but that'll only help so much if you pick up a new instrument type in that family.
  • 01/21/2015 Toady One Continuing to go through stuff -- breaks and generic parties are gone, needs are in, and people go to hang out at taverns and temples according to their needs. There are simple activities set up, and the next project is to flesh those out with randomized stuffs so that we can move on to visitors.
  • 01/14/2015 Toady One Just been mulling things over and setting up the framework. You can assign rooms and zones to larger locations now. Of course, there aren't many examples of such locations yet. Right now you can just select "inn/tavern" and (to make the list larger than one) "temple". You can name the locations in the language of your civ and they also appear in the legends in the same list with the world gen temples.

    We're not doing much with temples until later, but for this release devout dwarves will be able to pray in them (fulfilling their spiritual needs). You select a deity from your civ's list when you create the temple. We can probably use the same location system for groups of rooms attached to positions later on (so you don't have to reassign the mayor's rooms with every change), and anything else that needs multiple associated areas/etc.

    Next up we'll need to get the dwarves to use the new locations in new ways.
  • 01/10/2015 Toady One We're going to start in on inns and taverns now. As we said in the report, we'll hold off on recipes and generated games/gambling until the second tavern release to avoid an unseemly delay. So what'll be in the first release? You'll be able to define taverns for use by your dwarves and by visitors (who will know about the presence of the taverns automatically until we get to start scenarios). The main tavern associated area will likely be a meeting hall or dining room, at your discretion -- activities will include instrument use (finally!), singing, dancing, storytelling, drinking and eating. We're also strongly considering doing something with standing orders, at least to the point where the booze supply can be maintained.

    There'll be experiments with emotional/intellectual needs in both modes. Socializing in taverns will satisfy some of these needs. We'll probably get rid of "breaks" and just incorporate that time into the eat/drink/party activities according to the needs of the dwarf. Hopefully the amount of labor time available will remain about the same, while the off-time will be more interesting.

    We'll have more information about visitor interactions as we get closer to that. There will be an economic aspect but it won't yet be emphasized. We're going to deal with any remaining issues with multi-species forts for this release, and there'll be opportunities to incorporate some visiting critters into your fort on a more permanent basis (most likely mercenaries/adventurers).
  • 01/07/2015 Toady One Here is another release with fixes. Old saves are compatible, but there will be some error logs due to minor issues with the old raws. These logs can be ignored, but old saves will still experience problems like blank seed names.

    Major bug fixes
    • Fixed problem causing dwarves to sometimes fail to attack monsters/invaders
    • Stopped active blocks/parries from rarely freezing adv mode
    • Stopped certain situations where you could be stuck in the air above certain tiles
    • Fixed a few problems with necromancers attacking (and generally being killed by) their zombies
    • Stopped crash from moving/centering squad menu going out of bounds
    • Fixed crash involving squads and minimap
    • Fixed unretire crash that generally triggered when caravan arrived
    • Stopped dwarf from stressing out over the same wound forever
    • Stopped certain inaccessible jobs from blocking lower priority ones

    Other bug fixes/tweaks
    • Allowed embarks with x/y dim 1
    • Made removal of trees check building/bridge/machine stability
    • Stopped worker chaining to next construction job from choosing suspended one
    • Tentatively fixed text mode error on OSX (lethosor)
    • Tentatively fixed broken sound on some linuxes (Baughn)
    • Fixed problem with water disappearing when it crosses the z=0 boundary
    • Made certain old civilian weapon assignments clear over time
    • Made t/q building selector respect stockpile shapes when looking for closest one
    • Fixed error with underground pops in small forts not appearing
    • Stopped mood jobs from going outside of burrows
    • Capped various combat skill gains per action (Urist Da Vinci)
    • Stopped "fighting" skill from increasing from trap/projectile attacks
    • Stopped random creature proboscis from sometimes messing up poison attacks
    • Fixed key display issue in bindings screen (lethosor)
    • Fixed problem with display of kill order status
    • Made geld indicator appear for pets on animal screen properly
    • Fixed display problem with agreement conclusion dates
    • Added error logs for missing materials set to defaults, fixed various raws
    • Stopped announcement screen date from overrunning title depending on window size
    • Differentiated two pain readouts on health screen
    • Fixed a few empty announcement errors
  • 01/07/2015 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.40.24
  • 01/06/2015 Toady One Another few days:
    • Stopped certain situations where you could be stuck in the air above certain tiles
    • Stopped active blocks/parries from rarely freezing adv mode
    • Stopped worker chaining to next construction job from choosing suspended one
    • Made certain old civilian weapon assignments clear over time
    • Fixed problem with water disappearing when it crosses the z=0 boundary
    • Stopped random creature proboscis from sometimes messing up poison attacks
    • Added error logs for missing materials set to defaults, fixed various raws
    • Stopped announcement screen date from overrunning title depending on window size
    • Differentiated two pain readouts on health screen
  • 01/04/2015 Toady One I fixed a problem today which sometimes caused dwarves not to fight monsters/invaders, especially if there were lots of other dwarves in line-of-sight. I also stopped necromancers from oftentimes attacking (and usually being killed by) their zombies -- they were doing it for multiple reasons, and I patched up the ones I could find. Fixed a display problem with agreement conclusion dates in the adventure log.
  • 01/03/2015 Toady One The last few days:
    • Stopped crash from moving/centering squad menu going out of bounds
    • Fixed crash involving squads and minimap
    • Stopped dwarves from stressing out over the same wound forever
    • Capped various combat skill gains per action (Urist Da Vinci)
    • Stopped "fighting" skill from increasing from trap/projectile attacks
    • Made removal of trees check building/bridge/machine stability
    • Stopped mood jobs from going outside burrows
    • Made t/q building selector respect stockpile shapes when looking for closest one
    • Fixed key display issue in bindings screen (lethosor)
    • Made geld indicator appear for pets on animal screen properly
  • 01/01/2015 Toady One Here is the January 2015 report to begin the new year.

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Dwarf Fortress started October 2002, this log was started around the same time as the "back to the dwarf game" thread.