Editing Consolidated development

This is an (extended) transcript of the old "Consolidated Development Page" as it was before the redesign of the ''Dwarf Fortress'' webpage. It includes all long-and short-term arcs, core-items, Reqs, Bloats and Powergoals. The page itself may be found [http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev_single.html here].

 

Note that, due to the page's age, many of the specific goals here may no longer be directly applicable; however, they provide a general overview of the original thought-process behind Dwarf Fortress' development, and the broader arcs are still frequently referred to in reference to current development.

An arc is a number of features that add to one theme-field. Many of an arc's features can, but don't need to, be done simultaneously - as such, the status of completeness can't be determined that easily.  

Short-term arcs are the arcs that are likely to be done in the near future. Long-term arcs, on the other hand, will be added much later or even after version 1.0 is done.  

|  Yeah, dwarves has a steep learning curve. Tutorials and advisors could help with this, as well as decent in-game help.

|  Right now, there are no births and no aging in the towns and other populations. From the founding of a town, it should instead simulate and track these things during world creation. This makes the world much more interesting and also more resilient to changes inflicted by the player. At the same time, it creates instability unrelated to the actions of the player, so it has to be done carefully.  

| It's nice to have all those jobs and professions sitting around in the dwarf mode. The adventurer should be able to do these things, especially those skills related to survival in the wilderness. Eventually you'll be able to place constructions, create a home and have your own site on the map.  

| As an adventurer with followers, you should be able to make your own entity definition. If you have enough people, you might be able to delegate orders and control them more strategically. You should also be able to control each member in a party of adventurers you make yourself. You could lead one and the others follow (as it is currently) or control them all, particularly during tense situations where you don't want to count on the AI.  

| Improve kobold and goblin areas and civilizations with eyes on expanding entity definitions and future random generation. Includes adding entity definitions and tags for more primitive humanoids like lizardmen. Make mega-beasts fit in better with the world.

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| Use resource tracking and the adventurer travel infrastructure to set up groups of traders that go between sites. Make sure to respect the current flow of the dwarf game, though caravans will no longer be 'generated' when needed. Related to entity knowledge transfer if we are there by this time. The trading done by caravans would interface with the resource tracking system and thus be immediately available to adventurers. This includes items traded away by your dwarf fortress, although it's possible they could be abstracted a bit if they are too numerous.

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| Enemy leaders play an important part in creating a story around otherwise by-the-numbers conflicts that can occur, so the leaders can afford to be presented in such a way that you as the player can learn something about their background, motivations and appearance without digging around in the legends screen. There can be a variety of mechanisms for this. Diplomats and others that visit your fortress could afford the same treatment, as well as the people you talk to and about in adventure mode conversations, etc.

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| Introduce the legends screen, historical events and historical figures.

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| The dwarf mode used to have some fixed plot events, like an attack by an undead army and so on. These were excised, but there's a lot of associated cleanup needed. Once this is established, the game will be ready for armies.

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| The invasions by various creatures should no longer generate soldiers, but should use overland armies instead. There should be some AI limits in place to stop early dwarven outposts from being overwhelmed (at least as a default).

| You should be able to send patrols (and, as you get more dwarves, armies) out over the world map. They could attack smaller nearby threats, such as a kobold cave, or let you know about incoming invasions.

| World map roads, bridges, walls and tunnels shouldn't just be products of world generation. You should be able to dispatch dwarves and materials to accomplish these tasks (though the amount of material used in a typical world generation road would virtually prohibit doing this as it currently stands, so something has to change).

| If you manage to get the monarch of the dwarves to arrive, you should obtain at least indirect control over the entire corresponding dwarven civilization. This includes the movement of all dwarven armies on the map and the ability to make the most important diplomatic decisions.

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| Set up asking about surroundings, basic quests and town defense.

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| Once you have an outside village (or even before), you could receive orders from the dwarven leader to serve up some of your population as troops. If the soldier is one of your familiar fortress units, you could control them in any future army fights later in that game, or you might control an entire squad if more of your soldiers were drafted.

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| If you send one of your patrols to attack a site, and it is small enough, you should be able to control the units individually, as in adventure mode. If your group is large, then you could either control one squad as a party, and have the others on AI, or you could let the whole thing run real-time as in dwarf mode.

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| You should be able to associate buildings and dwarves to areas called burrows. A dwarf would only work on jobs at its burrow, and could not haul between burrows unless specifically designated to do so. Miners, outside workers, engravers and so on would be exempt while doing those jobs. Burrows could have general goals for the amount of objects, such as bins, that they need to have, and you could order transfers between burrows with the manager. Manager work orders could specify burrows. Once your fortress is large, having such a system to reduce the amount of hauling is very important. Coupled with some of the other ideas, large fortresses should become easier to manage.

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| Dragon attacks need to be more righteous. Their flying needs to be more of a benefit. Snatching and dropping people should be possible. Would also be good to get the wizards and undead armies from the old fixed-plot stuff back into the mix. There was a time when the dead dwarves and pets would suddenly rise in your fortress, due to a plot event. That might have to wait for magic.

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| People in towns should have families and they should live in locations together. People should have a rough idea of where they should be over the course of the day. The peasants should need to eat and sleep, but for now they'll be well provided for. Many of the armed people in the town should be guards that won't join you.

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| Basic items all around the town, including differentiations between the homes of various people. Keys. Clothes, outfits, uniforms and symbols. Workshops/etc. in towns related to professions, trade and resources.

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| Civilizations (for example, goblins or expansionist humans) should be able to declare war on each other and raise armies. They can send messengers to outlying towns or gather soldiers as they march from town to town toward their destinations.

| Hostile armies that meet each other should be able to fight and take losses. Armies should be able to attack towns, take captive historical figures, and switch towns to new allegiances over time. Does not include protracted sieges, tactics or strategy -- just the basics. An adventurer at the site of an army battle can observe it.

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| Allow the resizing of the game windows, and possibly the support of variable width fonts to allow more text to be displayed.

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| Everything should be moved out of the code and into the raw folders, insofar as the processor will allow it. There needs to be a generalized framework for things like plant and animal related materials and products. Not all of the building types will make it out, but workshop and furnace types are certainly good candidates.

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| Announcements and other interface text needs to come out of the game and be placed in an editable format to support any potential translators, though current font implementations restrict this process at the moment if non-ASCII characters are to be involved.

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| This is essentially the old lighting dev item, upgraded, since it's important that proper lighting, vision, torches, etc. are recognized. The most necessary parts are making vision depending on the lighting of the location in question rather than where you are standing and adding some means of producing light (torches, candles, etc).

| Though there's always going to be room for improvement here, some basics are needed the first version. Work animals, carts or wheelbarrows, perhaps some more mechanical options, and the ability to organize stockpiles, workshops and other elements of the fortress so that transport of items can be done with less pain.

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| Having playable heirs in adventure mode would be fun. Dwarves should also do a bit more for their children than sometimes running to pick them up when they are crawling toward the magma vent as infants, and the notion of the family in general could afford to have more impact on the game.

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| Your adventuring group deserves entity status, as it's quite possibly one of the most important groups in all of history. This will activate all of the entity vs. entity and individual vs. entity mechanics in the game and allow you to establish your place in the world as army/entity changes allow you to delegate orders to subordinates and so on. It would be possible for the group to persist between games and adventurers, perhaps even harassing a new fortress when bandits are put in.

| Diplomacy in dwarf mode could afford a lot of changes. Aside from trade agreements that are more interesting, fun to uphold and related to the state of the world, all sorts of relationships could be established with both neighboring civilizations and the parent civilization. Though we'll leave quite a bit of work for later versions, the system should be satisfying for version 1 as it merges with the caravan arc, wars, tribute and succession conflicts described in other v1 dev items.

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| First of all, succession for positions needs to occur in play, so that dead liaisons are replaced, as well as dead monarchs. Then the process needs to be made messier all around. Wars over succession, schisms over religious disagreements, etc., starting from world gen and coming into regular play. In dwarf mode, you might be involved on one side or the other, directly or indirectly, relying on more involved diplomacy and army code than we currently have, and adventure mode can also gain a lot from such conflicts.

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| People in towns should be more distinct, and almost all of them should have goals that the player can help them out with. These might be based on likes and dislikes, relationships with other people in town or farther away, etc., and though they'll start in world gen it's imperative that new goals, etc. be formed as well, especially as the Life Cycles Arc comes in. Individual goals are vital to break up the AI brain-death caused by homogeneous entity affiliations and to create tension within entities that can serve to spontaneously create complicated situations. These provide useful material for adventure mode (possibly the bulk of it), and any changes beyond what already exists in dwarf mode can be adopted for your dwarves as well.

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| When you perform a task for an entity, you currently can an affiliation with it, but that's all. This needs to be expanded greatly. Not only should you be given various positions of responsibility, but you should also become accepted by the group in question and given some way of obtaining living space, equipment, pay, etc. as appropriate. It would also be good for tasks to be appropriate for the goals of the entity, and where possible, to soften the notion of a task -- if you do something that benefits a group, even if the group didn't explicitly ask for it, this should raise your standing with them in general (to the extent that the action/benefit is detectable from a technical standpoint), and a person at an appropriate position within a group should in some circumstances be able to act under their own power with entity subordinates. The primary target entities/positions here for version 1 are soldiers (either proper ones or loosely defined mead hall groups), caravan guards, bandits and religious groups.

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| There used to be ruins with skeletons and zombies with architecture not found elsewhere in the world. This can be recovered in various ways, the most prominent of which is just having civilizations with different architectures bury their dead and those they die out can have proper ruins. Lost and buried ruins, as in those found at dig sites, are possible with some work. Whether or not the dead rise or there are just traps or nothing at all can also depend on all sorts of things, mainly the civilization in question and what happened to ruin it in the first place.

| Battlefields are currently referenced by their general coordinates on the world map during legends, but they don't actually exist as places. Though not all battles would leave traces, especially after a long time has passed, others would, and since this is a fantasy game, it's important to take this in various directions. The first target would be world gen battlefields, but battlefields that occur once armies are fighting need to be handled as well, whether you are present as an adventurer or dwarven army or not.

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| FORTRESS RUINS, PRODUCTION TRACKING AND HISTORY TRIGGERS

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| The adventurer is quite a nebulous object at this point. There are a variety of angles that can be taken here, from weaving the adventurer fully into their starting location's history, actually playing an existing creature in the world, creating starting scenarios that at least make sense of the adventurer's existence and/or mysterious arrival, etc.

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| Wilderness population is quite limited, and worse in a few ways than it was back before the Z coordinate. This should be fixed in world gen and in regular play in all modes for all categories of wilderness or subterranean creature.

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| As an extension of the dwarf mode system of likes and dislikes, you should be able to find people that are collecting objects, starting with simple objects like coins and bugs. It should also be an adventure unto itself to find a buyer for many valuable objects, if you want to get more than a local merchant would be able to provide, and news of your acquisition should keep your life interesting.

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| Aside from the issues dealt with in the next dev item, a thief in adventure mode can only sell their items all the way over at the next civilization and is immediately considered a criminal throughout the original civilization, causing subsequent thefts there to be more the acts of a crazed bandit than a thief. There are lots of ways in which this should be fixed. Crimes should not immediately be tied to the adventurer, and in large enough cities, there should be enough of an underbelly to be a successful criminal without even leaving town, at least for a while. None of the existing cities are really large enough for this right now, though the most populous cities of large empires should be after the relevant dev items are complete. Whether general criminal behavior will be extended to dwarf mode, beyond what's there now, is an open question.

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| You need to be able to obtain food from the wilderness and perform other tasks related to processing a hunted creature's body, trading with a town perhaps but able to survive in the wilds. More abstract hunting on the travel view needs to be roughly equivalent to hunting only on the local view. You should be able to find signs of animals to help you out, and you should be able to gather any plants you find.

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| The current good/evil regions should be scrapped and replaced by a system that aligns a region to varying degrees with a set of spheres. In this way you could end up with a desert where the stones sing or a forest where the trees bleed, with all sorts of randomly generated creatures and plants that are appropriate to the sphere settings. It's important that randomly generated objects be introduced to the player carefully during play rather than just being thrown one after another to allow for immersion, though there's also something to be said for cold dumping the player in a world with completely random settings, provided they can access enough information by looking/listening and having conversations, etc.

| [[#Core92|Core92]]

| As a further project of random generation, an entire entity definition complete with creature definitions, items, etc. could be generated and introduced into the world. As with other random settings, the degree to which this process is used would depend on world generation parameters, and the generation procedures would be accessible through raw objects.

| "Zombie" and "Skeleton" modified creatures aren't really satisfying right now, since zombies, ghosts, and so on gain some of their interest from the details surrounding the transformation and the particulars of the creature so transformed. Generalized curses and sphere-based alterations could vary from world to world and involve all sorts of changes to creatures (and other objects).

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| The abstract phrases can be realized by each of the in-game languages in vastly different ways, and a framework for this needs to be realized in the raw files.

| Existing objects (such as wall engravings and blades) need to be able to support writing in any of the in-game languages, and there can be associated skills/professions for this.

| Parchment, vellum and their buddies then books, songs, poems... all for your entertainment (and horror, if there are random poems).

| Coastal biome designations, crabs, gulls, washed up jelly fish, ability to skillfully build sand castles in wet sand which can be worn down by waves, shells, washed up objects from distance civilizations that are on the body of water, seaweed, tidepools with anenomes, driftwood interactions.