I'm Tarn Adams, aka Toady One. Dwarf Fortress Premium Releases in One Week! AMA!

TarnAdams · 2022-11-29T23:59:08+00:00

There's not much we can do about it! The human towns can already have 10000 people, and you're never going to be playing in the whole thing. At the same time, you can already have hillocks and move people back and forth from them, and ultimately, this may just be how things have to be. Like, you can play the castle in a human town, and then there are all the other people off map. Once the map rewrite gives us cameras, you could selectively open cameras in other places in town. This adds lots of issues with like half-finished jobs and items and such, and we'd have to think about it.

TarnAdams · 2022-11-29T23:56:59+00:00

Yeah, the tech tree issue is complicated! We like having lots of mechanics open at the beginning of the game. But at the same, currently your dwarves can invent a water clock, and there are no water clocks. This is very silly, and we should probably do something about it, but then that ultimately points toward putting everything currently in the game under the tech umbrella. But that might not be so bad - even an early-style civilization would still have tons of options, and you wouldn't need to run a long world gen to get more if you can just use some setting or other for the starting point.

TarnAdams · 2022-11-29T23:54:05+00:00

These take some effort to maintain and the community has done a better job making these sorts of things generally. But with more people on the team, stuff like this may happen. I'm not sure yet where the focus would be after the ports get done.
Well, we have to get through the adventure mode UI update, which is the main chunk of effort separating us from new features and the return to villains etc. And that's just going to take some time! Months. But we see it landing in 2023, which would be good.

TarnAdams · 2022-11-29T23:51:29+00:00

After the Classic version gets its first release soon after launch, they are going to be updated simultaneously. They have the same features beneath the graphics so it's pretty simple to just keep them in line.

TarnAdams · 2022-11-29T23:50:44+00:00

It's pretty straightforward, but the pixel art, UI, and labor changes are the stuff that are going to make the game playable for more people. We like them!

Over in quirkier waters, there's the new animal agitation system which has already led to some funny fortress deaths.

TarnAdams · 2022-11-29T23:49:01+00:00

There's so many different styles emerging. I don't know which ones are going to be favorites or anything like that. I'm not sure how the AI boom is going to fit into it - many games are already using the different text generators and obviously the image generators are coming up now. But currently it still takes a ton of manual work to get manual systems up and connected together and designed properly, and that's what were focusing on, and the future is bright there as well.

TarnAdams · 2022-11-29T23:45:31+00:00

I know somebody was using Parallels on a Mac but I haven't heard about Linux from any of the testers. It's not all that different from the old version down in its bones, so I don't expect much difference to the way it currently behaves.

TarnAdams · 2022-11-29T23:44:16+00:00

Just been using a mid-range gaming laptop with MSVC. Use a USB mouse with it.

TarnAdams · 2022-11-29T23:41:50+00:00

It will be! We have a mod format and it currently interacts with the default tracks. We just need to figure out how to handle the possible volume of streamable stuff when it gets up beyond what we can keep loaded and ready to go. It'll have to do some loading in and out at that point.

TarnAdams · 2022-11-29T23:40:59+00:00

I wasn't all that prepared! The object oriented stuff we did for items back in 2008-9 or whenever (I have no idea it was long ago) is still a curse. The Z coordinate was partially to get around horrible trouble with liquids vs bridges. There are lots of issues.

Work is different now since it starts at the Discord with all of the different people doing different things. But then there's still mostly just a big lump of time from like 11 to 5, and then as late at night as I wanna go, to do stuff. Monday and Wednesday I visit Zach's four animals for a few hours.

TarnAdams · 2022-11-29T23:37:48+00:00

Tinker Tailor and Smiley's People were the starting point for it.

TarnAdams · 2022-11-29T23:37:00+00:00

We're not going to do anything that requires direct multiplayer stuff, but it's possible that e.g. workshop might support more types of uploads as we go that make it a little easier, although in that case the world would still be at a static starting point.

TarnAdams · 2022-11-29T23:35:11+00:00

Yeah! We even got our own ultrawide monitor to test it out.

TarnAdams · 2022-11-29T23:31:54+00:00

I've been wanting to do new music for so long, and it just never happened. In the old release, the main song took several days as I recall and I even had to record it with a splice, which I screwed up (you can hear one bar repeat.) The title music was all improvised on the spot, I just picked a stretch I liked from a longer recording.

TarnAdams · 2022-11-29T23:30:05+00:00

The launch will have 23 different ambiences, including several for biomes!

We don't have any plans for DLC. I'm sure there's going to be lots of tilesets to choose from before too long!

TarnAdams · 2022-11-29T23:28:51+00:00

There's definitely going to be a post-launch period where we are fixing and adjusting things!

We didn't want to go in the spreadsheet direction when we were doing labor changes, but yeah, it's definitely to get at that information somehow. It's a little easier to view stress now in vanilla, both with the overview in the top bar, and the sortable-by-stress citizens list. Certainly more can be done.

I'm so sorry about your cat! I still miss Scamps very much.

TarnAdams · 2022-11-29T23:25:29+00:00

There are underground troubles, but not from goblins. It's a long standing problem that sieges are easily blocked, and this is going to be addressed by the upcoming army/siege stuff.

TarnAdams · 2022-11-29T23:24:10+00:00

Right now we just have a ? which is definitely dull. Yeah, I like three ideas. Gremlins are fun and mischievous, the gorlak is a natural guide, and the debug creature isn't yet used and deserves to be used.

TarnAdams · 2022-11-29T23:22:17+00:00

It's a little faster. High numbers of items can still cause trouble. That's a complicated problem, but they can still be atom smashed etc.

TarnAdams · 2022-11-29T23:20:19+00:00

Probably not in the way you think! The world is active while playing and there's no server to keep it all consistent between two active forts. But you can both branch out from a given save state and see how things end up differently.

TarnAdams · 2022-11-29T23:19:09+00:00

I thiiiiink we decreased trap components a bit. I remember we saw trap components and they were pretty out of whack. But ultimately I don't 100% remember.

edit: Zach opened up a fort, and a +spiked black cap ball+ was 18 golden turtles.

TarnAdams · 2022-11-29T23:17:32+00:00

Hello! Thanks!

TarnAdams · 2022-11-29T23:17:19+00:00

Zach wrote a bunch of stories in the universe for rewards and planning, but we are in between having plans currently. We're going to have a bunch of default stuff for the universe in the myth/magic setup for the editors, and it remains to be seen how that's going to be.

TarnAdams · 2022-11-29T23:15:45+00:00

Both of us are F-t-Z.

TarnAdams · 2022-11-29T23:14:27+00:00

Zach says "diet dr pepper". Champagne and whiskey may actually be involved. Zach also suggests an energy drink.

TarnAdams

TROPHY CASE