Quote from: Max^TM

Finding memory structures itself isn't as fun as figuring out interesting things to do with them, assuming someone with specific ideas on which structures would be the most important/helpful, or even how to add in this export method/option from the dfhack team were to do so, would it be right to say that the main obstacle would then just be implementing the extra option to spit out an address > structure type file?



Quote from: Untrustedlife

I noticed you said there are no explicit plans for expanding the night creatures in the magic release, however you did brainstorm night creatures "for all colors of the rainbow" at one point, are those still planned, or will the "night creature hunter" arc not get any love for awhile. One obvious missing thing is more interesting vampires, all the vampires are basically the exact same right now which is very conspicuous compared to the others, like werecreatures which are extremely varied, and even necromancers have slightly different zombie stats for each "type" (and the magic release will expand potential evil magic alot more) it just seems odd that vampires haven't been given as much love as the others especially given how prolific and varied they are in fantasy worlds.



Quote from: Oran Legendstone

1. Will we ever see megabeasts recruiting lesser intelligent creatures around them into some sort of faux militia (ex. a dragon recruiting kobolds to steal things for him.)



2. Where did your design for kobolds come from? I notice a lot of other people see them as being lizard/dog-like creatures despite them being more like small hairy men since they seem to match the description of the art for the one shown in kobold quest.



Quote from: Daniel the Finlander

Is food not rotting in stockpiles just a temporary feature? I've always thought that it was just a temporary placeholder until food preservation is expanded (with smoking and salting, for example), but I'm not so sure now because I didn't see anything in the dev notes.



Quote from: wierd

Are there any plans to improve brewery? In the real world, fermented beverages benefit from aging, gaining properties from the container they age in. Scotch being such a creature, as are many kinds of wine. An interesting way to make alcohol more dynamic would be an aging mechanic, which can be offset by incorporating an "angel's share" mechanic. Do you have any plans at all for something like this?



Quote from: Souleater17

Are Night Trolls in Fortress Mode planned? Things like Night Trolls invading fortresses to kidnap someone and such. Similarly, are Bogeymen planned to appear in Fortress Mode? Would they torment children and such, as they do in folklore?



Quote from: Shonai_Dweller

Talking of ruined libraries, does this mean that libraries will actually be ruined in the next version? Generally a ruined fortress at the moment will contain a perfectly non-ruined library (and trading post) while a browse of Legends shows that scholars have continued to take up positions at the library for hundreds of years after a forgotten beast trashed the rest of the place.



Quote from: FantasticDorf

> Since you mentioned servant races being 'created to your liking' would that interpretively mean that zombies become re-classified as 'servants' rather than pure products of magical ability, and domestically around the necromancers tower would fulfill the usual duties of where the servant races would suffice? Summoning servants to all descriptions out of corpses sounds like a very convenient way of creating labour, especially since they are utmost loyal rather if rather dim than having thinking minds like intelligent beings.



and



> Would you consider slaves and servants to be within the same vein gameplay wise or differently? Abstract to magic, the slavery system would sound similar to a house-keeping wizards setup traditionally (to which in some respects wizard servants and regular slaves are the same made and obtained by different means) as to say if your civ approved it, you would have a flow of forced worker "servants" to obtain, and a warm-up to the more elaborated wizard servants in gameplay (which as you have mentioned is a little way off with all the customisation quirks to sort out yet.)



Quote

Quote from: Unknown-Figure1 With the artifact quests that are sure to appear in the next release, will our adventurers be able to simply kill the quest-giver and keep the artifact(s) they find for themselves? I want my thug characters to accumulate as much shit as possible.

Quote from: vjmdhzgr I mean you could always just not give the artifact to them in the first place which would be less likely to have negative consequences. So in addition: is there any reason to actually give artifacts to questgivers and not just keep them?



Quote from: Shonai_Dweller

If an npc on an artifact quest gets the artifact but then is unable to complete the journey (because some wandering psychopath killed the quest-giver) do they hang on to it, or deliver it to someone else (family member or something)?



If they hang on to it and then later come to visit your fortress, will irate armies turn up demanding that you hand it over? Would that depend on the visitor's status (resident, citizen, etc) or would the artifact being in your location cause your site to become the current 'owner'?



And one more:



Can multiple quest-givers assign the same quest to various npcs/player adventurers? Will this result in massive fights in towns as npcs all try to be the one to return the artifact?



Oh, and:



Following on from the previous poster's thoughts, will npcs ever decide just to keep the artifact for themselves instead of returning it?



Quote

Quote from: wierd Since magic is going to be based on spheres of influence, it can possibly make deities a more active force in the world besides just random curses for vandalism and profanination. Are there any plans for special moods for priest caste dwarves in fortress mode? It would be an obvious mechanic to get sphere aligned artifacts, where type of artifact would not be tied to the dwarf's skill base, but wholly on the alignment axis system, so that eg, a god of music worshiper would produce divinely empowered instruments, if they are completely devoted to worship. Currently, a dwarf selects an object class based on skill set, which determines which kind of workshop they claim. A new kind of mood, say "holy work", for dwarves with severe skill rust, and high experience in temple disciplines (suggesting dedicated priest position) could produce magical artifacts, without training a craft skill to legendary, (similar to " fey" mood), and allow proper object alignment and type based on deity. This could be made a little more interesting by weighing dwarf character traits, and some other features (like current emotional state) to influence and refine object type creation from the short list if sphere aligned objects and possible magical effects. The need for extensive skill rust, and high temple activity would make this a very rare mood type, which limits abuse. Do you have any plans for such a thing, and if not, what do you have in mind there?

Quote from: Infinityforce Great question! I was wondering about priestly/noble classes functions with regards to spheres myself!

Looks like you beat me to the punch!

What advantage (if any) will spheres confer to nobility or priestly castes for example? And how will that affect civilisations?

Will we see a battle between state and clergy for the minds and souls of people? High politics? Religious law? Crusades? Will nobility be affected towards charity or cruelty, and therefore loved or hated?



Quote from: Align

Will completely non-magical worlds also not have things like caverns or the magma sea?



Quote from: kontako

What's your stance on immortality / respawning ingame? -- Not as a natural ability coming straight out of the womb of course, but a power gained through a relic or a spell allowing the player character or other non-player characters to return continuously or a limited amount of times. I recall a story in which a nightcreature regrows from severed limbs which escape a pyre, but beyond this perhaps respawning trapped in another plane to be freed out of ritual



Quote from: FantasticDorf

> Do you have any thoughts following up the myth generator establishing 'planes of existance' as places, about applying the same treatment as caverns to the underworld? For example, defining areas so that in the case that a portal was cast (one way there or back / two way) you could identify where you were broadly going to turn up, instead of randomly appearing anywhere in the game world potentially in extreme danger



&



> In the myth creator with adjustments or definitions to how demons come to be (be it spontaneous or methodically created from game settings such as the death of a mortal/particularly 'evil' mortal) will this affect the localised populations of demons in the underworld to the point where after a long amount of time you might actually destroy them all or steady the flow of them in a manner you can account for, allowing dwarves to colonise at that depth with time and investement.



Quote from: Taederias

I wonder, just as a rough estimate, what amount of memory would be necessary to implement a more expansive knowledge system, even just partially? Like perhaps you can have lots of more significant historical events generally known, or at most tied to whatever civilization/culture said NPC belongs, what position they hold etc., but for some smaller, more recent events, especially those related to the player (though I kind of see how making such distinctions could be difficult) the obtaining and exchange of information would be stored & simulated on a personal basis.



I imagine this could also tie in to a future release concerning laws and create cool new gameplay mechanics, where for example you could threaten or bribe a witness of a murder or theft not to tell anyone, but depending on how much they fear you, they might incriminate you anyway, or just tell some trusted friend, and this way the information might get out eventually anyway (or you could smack them on the head and hope they forget everything... lol). Hell, you could even implement spreading false information (possibly for both the player and NPCs?), which could open up a whooole lot of new possibilities (up to maneuvering entire civilizations into war based on clever lies told to important people).



At any rate, I'm asking because I imagine with the change to 64-bit architecture, there should be quite a bit more breathing room regarding memory, with many systems nowadays having 16GB+ RAM and its average amount is obviously steadily growing (and things like these could still be opt-out feature or tied to some slider controlling the meticulousness of information management). So once again, my main question: what would be your rough guess as to the requirements of such systems being implemented, and to what degree do you see it ever happening?



Quote from: exdeath

Is the fact that you start with 7 dwarfs some inside joke?



Quote from: FantasticDorf

Question for toady - If animal people get any more kind of definition in the future law war and diplomacy releases, would you forsee using diplomats or volunteers to establish contact to foster friendly relations with future benefits, given that underground civilisations whilst having no real structure are still recognised as entities (behind the scenes in the program file logs where all the underground types are listed)



Do you hold any particular thoughts the outpost liasion being re-worked or summarily expanded in the future releases, given that the artifact update will allow dwarves to leave the map with purpose. ((!warning suggestion like content!) as to say you could literally send off a dwarf on a literal death-trip though thousands of miles of terrain to call for help of the dwarven army if your civ cares enough to even send it that far or even cares about your settlement falling in general without relying on a outpost liaison.)



Quote from: hanni79

do you have any plans to enable stills and/or kitchens to have detailed work orders, so I can make my dwarves brew/cook specific drinks or meals in the near future ?



Quote from: FantasticDorf

Though the economy will be looked at in later releases, do you have any plans to deal with interactions between traders properly simulating trade or giving nation states item exchanges from both of their inventories (dwarf fortresses for example hoard loose goblin supplies from failed/dead attackers during wars that fell on their site, while traders pick up objects from player and non player fortresses) so that in time the 'generation' of objects for trade by tokens can be reduced and eventually commented out for production centres (scenario/mini/hillocks/fortresses etc) and loot as per supply for demand



Quote from: xMAWLx

Given that cubic centimeters can be arranged in a variety of ways, are there any plans to add more descriptive tokens to creatures? I would like to know how tall things are.



Quote from: 90908

Will the sale of Artifacts become a part of either Worldgen or Fort/Adv mode? If so, how do you plan to implement this?



Quote from: Calidovi

In the devlog an expansion of the law framework and divine law were mentioned. Do you plan for the law framework of a civilization to change as time passes? If law can change, is it in the matters of the monarch or an individual site?



Quote from: FantasticDorf

i've noticed that particularly it mentions giant 'magical' eggs, hatching with relation to gods and pet ownership issues - Providing the magical effects (In a press conference a egg was described as a magic object not so long ago) are not varied would this imply that primordial beasts/forgotten beasts/resulting hatchlings could be a creation myth/magical object manifestable event and claimed (or summarily let loose/tamed) by a civilisation as a artifact object/posession?



Also across the ASCII rewards, both Japa's apemen and Gunslinger's night creature minions are based theoretical examples of transformative or using existing creatures as a seemingly literal base to create 'wizard' or magic servants, do all servants require living being to create or can they make them purely out of magic processes/inanimate reagents



Quote from: Shonai_Dweller

Do npc artifact questers follow, or actively seek out, rumours when tracing the whereabouts of an artifact? Could you carry an artifact from place to place making sure to be seen each time and then laugh about the hapless questers in Legends later as they march from town to town? Will they follow the rumours into dangerous places, so we can read about how some brave gorlak decided to attack a necromancer tower because a careless adventurer left his holy artifact there one day?

...

how well will they be able to follow the rumours? Will it be a case of giving up and going home until another rumour turns up when the artifact isn't where they thought it would be? Or will smart npcs wander over to the nearest hamlet to see if anyone saw what happened, picking up new rumours? Eventually giving up when they hear that some albatross-man adventurer dropped it into the middle of the ocean (or not...triggering a series of mysterious ocean drowning suicides scattered throughout Legends...).



Quote from: Max^TM

I feel like I've asked this before, but can't recall getting an answer or not. In legends/asking about yourself it lists rumored/known protector of the weak and being told about you challenging various bandits/killing them/etc, but I've yet to see if this exhibits progression like hero/hunter/performer. Is there a great/legendary/famous/anything progression for "Protector of the Weak" fame?



Quote from: WordsandChaos

On the subject of identification/rumours/etc for things like artefact thieves/rescuers/Indiana Jones knockoffs; will everybody know exactly who's stolen what? Or will the immediate witnesses know precisely, but everyone else who comes into contact with the rumour be more vague/malleable - eg: picking from a list of people they know want that artefact, in their immediate group of contacts if they don't directly know, but can make a guess or have heard alternate names etc (I realise that's probably incredibly dense to code). Do artefacts feature in things like life goals now, 'Urist wants to obtain a copy/the original of Classic Hamlet' or does that remain under the surface until directly asked for?



Quote from: Imic

at some point in the future, will people be able to mod on and edit sites?



Quote

Quote from: Thundercraft Q: Are there any plans to, eventually, give players a means to convert Evil regions to Neutral or Good?

Quote from: Dirst The evilness and savagery system is going to be overhauled, and Toady hinted that he'd like it to be something Sphere-based. But the question still stands... could a fort in a region of RAINBOWS and FERTILITY be strip-mined enough by player actions to turn into a region of METALS and BLIGHT?



Quote from: FantasticDorf

If worldgen adventurers are out collecting artifacts and fighting (/conflicting more regularly with) the monsters that guard them, is there a chance that a particular adventurer exalted by their rumoured heroic feats could make omnisciently super curious/same entity rumor aware dwarves be starstruck when they meet them in the future?



Quote from: Rubik

1.How much time do you spend working on DF each day?

2.I know its not something we can expect in a short (or medium)time, but we've been discussing Multi-tile creatures and I was wondering if with the fact that each body part, if big enough, ocupies several tiles, the modders could define each part (each full tile of 2x3x3) of that body part with different stuff (place certain organs in the lower part and other organs in the bigger part, or have complete tiles representing an organ, if they are proportionate), this could be very interesting as to make the game more realistic, as you could ''zoom in'' to represent parts of the body that get abstracted in the smaller version of those creatures

And yeah, this came to mind when I was thinking about making hollow creatures (yeah, as the cool-aid man) to transport small people at a greater speed, just by being inside the creature

3.How's Scamps doing?



Quote from: Max^TM

Are there going to be more fame types like Treasure Hunter and Thief, for legit and dishonest acquisition of artifacts?



Quote from: CLF3FTW

Are there any plans for you to be able to recruit adventurers in fortress mode to steal artifacts from other sites (or do other things, such as spying on other civs and assassinating people)? Would you be able to "hire" people by giving them weapons/lodgings/books of a certain quality?



Quote from: Heretic

Such as now DF has 64x bit version, will you use special optimization for this?

And other question, do you use something like PVS Studio or CppCat, Cppcheck? A lot of old bugs look like things that good static analizator can easily find.

Another incorrect question:

You are in a hurry when added to the destruction of clothing and armor? It looks as if there oceans of crashes.

And, normal question!

How will game observe gain of skills artefact-hunters? Lara Croft shouldn't be peasant, i think.



Quote from: LordBaal

Toady, will NPC be able to lie to you whenever you ask something? If I'm looking for The Golden Goblin of the Fourth Age and ask somebody that doesn't want me to have it for any reason, will they be able to lie to me. "A bear running took it to the east, far away beyond the Muckelberry River a week ago" When in reality it was a four goblin band that took it to the north two days ago.



Quote from: Dirst

Will this be at PRACTICE 2016, or someplace that mere mortals in the NYC area can actually get into?



Quote from: lobster1050

Are there any plans for bringing back old thematic demon lairs (diffirent for diffirent demon-related spheres), like the ones in old 40d version?



Thanks to Shonai_Dweller, Migrant, PatrikLundell, Putnam, LordBaal, Eric Blank, Rubik, Inarius, Vattic, vjmdhzgr, and everybody I missed! Remember that if your question doesn't appear below, it was probably answered soon after you asked it by one of the aforementioned forumgoers.Global variables can work like that, and we should have something there for next time.Well, a thing can be still planned and also not get any love for a while. That list is still the idea, and we've come close to getting in one type or another multiple times. Next chance is clearly this big myth/magic rewrite, since it's going to mess with everything, but even then it's unclear if we'll get a new type or what we'll change.1. Not sure what'll happen -- we have notes for beasts with lesser critters, but they are unformed. Just a 'would be cool' sort of thing.2. We were mostly into them D&D-wise after the dog people but before the full turn to dragon people. They had properties of both. In our raws, they don't have hair and they lay eggs, but they aren't small lizard people. They look like the Kobold Quest kobold.We have some notes about food preservation, but it's not planned out. Would probably help the farm situation as much as anything.We had a few things written down that are linked to the whole recipe thing, but it's unclear when or what.Ideally, we'd like them all to be involved, yeah, but I'm not sure when things will happen there.The continuing scholarship was a bug which I fixed (it was messing up my quest message boards, so I noticed it). I don't anticipate them being ruined in the sense of breaking or scattering anything, though we might do something if all the library raiding quests end up being too easy (since they are on the top level).It depends on the zombie spell I guess. Some zombies could remain mindless and violent. Eventually the systems should be able to naturally draw those distinctions, through soul etc. mechanics. I'm not sure I understand the second question -- slaves and servants are different things, but there are specific rights/freedoms and so on you'd have to distinguish that can create all sorts of gray areas, etc. Hopefully the law/customs framework will set us on a sufficient path there, and the magic stuff would be tangentially related and slowly become more and more integrated with it.Shonai_Dweller mentioned reputation, and that's most of what'll go on. We are going to mess a bit with artifact quest rewards -- artifact rewards for artifact quests might work in some cases, but yeah, if you want stuff, just keep it. And hopefully be hunted.If they have a plausible return target, they'll go there instead. There's a known representative for every family for quest return purposes (an easy solution for now, since families don't have property etc.), and if the family rep dies it'll calc a new one, so they can go there. If they don't have a target, they keep the item, but they don't make a specific claim on it as it stands.If the visitor is known to be at your fort, armies/diplomats'll show up (haven't coded fort stuff yet of course). The rumors of the artifact's position would have to spread out, and the visitor might not be there. Your site does not become the owner (unless the visitor drops the item). I'll have to handle the case where somebody comes to demand an item that is not at your site -- any number of ways to do that. It would be cool if an artifact-bearing visitor could ask for your protection, but it's unclear how many different scenarios we'll be able to handle this time.The adventurer density isn't super-high, but it could be that one adventurer wants an artifact another is carrying. I haven't handled many of the "person holding artifact" dialog options yet. We'll have to keep things under control.Questers don't currently form new claims on objects they see/hold yet. We have a dangling dev note concerning forming new claims based on greed, etc., and it might happen.We're all for godlike beings and their buddies doing stuff, and the point is to randomize what's possible. The myth generator currently often links effects to a sphere type, so that would happen naturally. It's unclear what we'll get to on the first pass -- political stuff is going to wait for later releases (e.g. there won't be religious law until we get to the law release, which is after the myth release).I'm not sure -- the worlds aren't going to be spherical, so there's some room for odd interpretations of molten cores and so on. Though perhaps it'd be appropriate in worlds without magical digging dwarves to just have some mines that don't go very deep.Max^TM brought up the afterlife plans, and you can already become immortal by becoming a necromancer. I don't have a problem with that continuing to expand however it continues.I don't quite understand, but yeah, the planes from the myth generator are all supposed to be real places you can visit (unless that specifically doesn't make sense), with different ways of visiting them. There are technical issues that will make this not be the case on the first release (it's a rewrite on the level of the Z coordinate).Yeah, there's no reason a creature population created by the myth generator needs to be infinite, locally or globally. This'll change in visiting underworld style locations in the first release to the extent that stuff gets changed overall. Some of the new locations might be fundamentally less survivable, some might be easier. I'm not sure at this point how it'll turn out.You could eat up all the memory quite easily, and it also becomes a speed issue at some point. And a dev time issue. It already divides events up by those older ones which are generally known and recent rumors/witness reports that are stored on a personal/etc. basis. It's just a matter of how much of that can be done. We can't track individual knowledge of each historical event, but there's already a partial system in place. You can see it in effect in the dwarf mode witness reports of crimes, and it also happens in the currently released version with knowledges of your exploits. We're slowly expanding it into things like artifact locations -- those rumors are all personal/site-based.False information is a difficult problem, since it wouldn't be subject to the normal system of cutting down on memory use by removing redundant stale information (it can currently delete an old rumor about an artifact's location if you learn a new one, because we assume they were both true). Then it becomes a question of how often false information is generated, how long it hangs around, and how widely it is spread. If all those things lean toward small numbers, then it can be done -- for instance, by having information known to be false by the game deleted after a period of time, while perhaps privileging a few lies with more staying power... but how are those chosen? So it's difficult, but not impossible.Somebody brought up Tolkien. Snow White more likely. Though I don't really remember now.The underground entities were not realized properly, but we're planning to handle it at some point...I think the first idea w/ liaisons is still to have it relate more to whatever the embark scenarios are, whether that involves sprawl around your fortress on the world map or a particular relationship with the home civ.The actual recipes we wanted to do would likely eliminate work in this direction, though I'm not sure when we'll finally tackle them now.It already works that way in world gen (numeric and specific production and trade), though it is underutilized. The items you see in markets are drawn from numeric batches, and they can call out where they are from because they know. I'm not sure exactly if that's what you mean though. Eventually, we want that process to continue after world generation. There are various stacking issues that come from player items which we've failed to tackle so far, and there's also the matter of items being saved in files on the disk for certain sites which can add complications.Yeah, this has been one of those back-burner'd for years things. It needs to know how to take the current size in cm3 and the current appearance modifiers like breadth vs. height and turn them into sensible measurements on a creature-by-creature basis. I think we have all the basic variables we need, but we don't have the equation that relates them properly, and that would be different depending on the creature, since the shape of the parts is under-defined -- our humanoids have an assumed "depth" related to the height/breadth/size, for instance, but it doesn't say what that is, and it doesn't know if the creature is overall round like a gorlak or lanky like an elf, since it just has the relative proportions.Haven't thought about how that would specifically work -- the appearance modifier itself could take a constant that the game uses internally, perhaps. So if a creature has height and breadth (and size), it uses two equations inside the game to spit out measurement units for height and breadth, and that gets multiplied by a constant linked to the modifier to give correct numeric measurements. A snake's length modifier would use a different equation (geared toward having one variable modifier), and creatures that have all three modifiers would use a three equation/three constant setup.The modifiers change the size linearly and make size zero at zero, so I don't think custom equations in the raws or more than one constant per modifier are needed. This doesn't take individual body parts into consideration though... but perhaps that's best left alone. There's also the matter of other types of modifiers -- if somebody's body is more "curly" than somebody else's, perhaps their "height" should be determined by some complex raw-defined formula that can take any kind of modifier, but at some point it's getting silly for little gain.We have some dev notes about securing buyers for artifacts and so on, and making that a non-trivial process, but we're not going into economy-related stuff yet, so we're just going with the reputation quests for the time being. Later on, transfer of an important artifact could involve multiple meetings, a negotiated trade of artifacts, property or titles or whatever else is in the system by that time.Yeah, one of the main features of the law release is to make the system changeable. We have a list of ways that can happen (our rough real-world year 1400 cut-off allows for a zillion options many of which are too complicated to implement), but clearly we're not going to get to everything on the first pass. Sites currently have their own entity definitions, so sites (definitely including your fortress and perhaps even your adv sites) will have their own laws/etc. on the first release (though I imagine many of them will also be under a broader law system from the civ).I don't think the myth generator has any pet stuff right now, but since that relationship exists in the game, it's possible it could get linked in at some point.There aren't very many default restrictions on effects. It could be that you make them by singing over a clump of earth or something.That's the "agent" behavior which we haven't done yet, and regular questers will use it as well. Yeah, you could be a jerk and lead them around -- that's what we're going for. They don't have any sense of danger at the moment.We aren't quite far enough along to evaluate how good they are at following rumors, since some of the artifact holding characters aren't tracked well enough yet (I still have to do some army stuff for people that leave in an army while carrying an artifact for instance -- the rumor thread can easily be broken). It's too bad we don't have caravans moving information around, since we need information in villages to get to cities faster (so agents can focus on cities for their initial leads). Heroes/artists carry some information around, but they don't get into villages that often. The random adventure drops/deaths are one of the larger problems -- an artifact that is totally lost during play is never really recognized as such, and I'll probably just have to have a timer or something that makes people give up and not even take certain quests if there's no fresh information and a track record of previous failures. There's a silver lining there in the sense that if in-game characters start to recognize a quest as pointless, they can talk about why they think so, hopefully. Questers that give up could leave rumors to that effect.So yeah, questers have to give up at some point, though some of the agents should probably stay on the case for a long time rather than returning home. Ideally, agents will start to work more like a spy network, so they can utilize locals/subagents to collect rumors as quickly as possible from a broad area. Some of that sort of already happen just because information is passed around and there can be multiple people out at once, but it's not set up efficiently.They are all tracked the same way, so it should be numeric with rankings. It's possible the numbers are wrong or it's otherwise bugging if nobody's ever seen it though.It depends on what the rumor is -- rumors attached to witness reports carry the identity of the taker, while rumors of artifact location just say where the artifact is. It scrunches all of a person's known rumors together by date to give them a picture of what's going on when they need to know. We haven't done anything with appearance or motivation -- that sort of detective work is hard, though they will have to formulate some sort of plan once we get the "agent" behavior in (so they'll go to a likely location to look for recent rumors, then continue, say). People only want specific artifacts when they have a claim on them (personal/family/entity), or if they are questing, and at that point they can talk about them (they can also talk about people they know that want something).We were hoping to get to something like this eventually. We thought about it a bit for the myth release, and how it might fit in to the other new structures we'll need there, but there's so much slated for that release it'd be hard to get to."Change" is one of the central themes of the myth/magic stuff, though of course, you need stuff before you can change stuff, so hopefully we'll still get to some good changey bits as the time wears on. Beyond sphere associations, regions will likely have specific structures attached that indicate what they are, which would help determine what forces and actions can cause them to become something else.The reputation effect would be there as it stands (making them less likely to jump into conflicts against the hero, say). I don't think there's a circumstance thought generated for seeing them, so it wouldn't make a little thought quote for it. That stuff is relegated to actual conversations right now. Once there are more spontanteous utteranaces based on player reputation in adv mode, it'll probably bleed over everywhere else.1. It depends, but the DF part of the day is kind of normal work hours now, sometimes a little less (6-8 hrs), seven days a week. Then there's all the other stuff (email/forums/side projects/etc.) that can take anywhere from no time to the entire rest of the day. There used to be more full-day programming sessions, but now I have to use the evenings to get caught up with admin stuff in a scheduled fashion or fall forever behind.2. The tests have all had BP specific tiles, but that's with a quadruped dragon critter. It's something that can easily get out of control -- this isn't meant to be a 3D game with models and so on, and there are huge time sinks and project killers lurking there. Still not sure what's going to happen.3. Scamps is sitting on my lap right now. Wintery temperatures are starting to set in, so he has become a lap cat. Once it gets hot again, he'll refuse to be held for more than a few seconds.Ha ha, yeah, those are the names too!We're starting with sending off your own squads, and you can have long-term visitors in squads that you send off. I don't think we'll do anything specific with short-term mercenaries for this release.I'm just doing whatever the compiler has been doing.MSVC has a static analyzer now and it caught several things.Bug reports work best on the tracker. I'm not aware of particular problems there, but there likely are. I haven't checked since I'm not doing bugs until after the release (well, I'm doing bugs, in the additive sense).Generally, the game hasn't done any skill gains during post w.g. combats/etc., if I remember. Not sure when we'll get to that.We can't handle lies like that right now, as discussed about w/ false information. They'll lie about their feelings regarding occupations and so forth, but that's not the basis for a rumor in the current system.Ha ha, yeah, the ticket prices are quite steep! The talk should be available for free online though.The myth generator will blow up the current underworld concept. I'm not sure exactly what is going to happen.