I know dwarf fortress is a niche game even on SDN, but I'd like to think that even a non-player can appreciate the fey insanity under which the creator, Tarn Adams ("ToadyOne") labours. In case you miss something or are just lazy, this post collects everything we know about the latest version:
DAILY DORF: Dwarf Fortress Updates.
Dec 2008:
Version 40dn: A forumgoer discovered that Toady's half-decade old rendering code for the graphics engine was completely overwrought and could be simplified. Toady gave the community an example program, called "Battle Champs"- a crappy strategy game with almost no production value made in about 9 hours, whose purpose was to display a million units running in a straight line at eachother for battles. The purpose? The source code of battle champs' graphics was the same as DF, so that Toady could get help with something without opensourcing or taking on a new dev. The revised Battle Champs by Baughn, with better rendering code, ran 10 times faster. When integrated into DF, slow computers now run DF 2x faster, while fast computers are unchanged. Versions are
very tentative, so can only be found in Dwarf Fortress->Development->
Dev_Now due to bugs, but version 40d9 seems to have sorted through most of the bugs.
As part of the dn releases, Dwarf Fortress now has a native Mac, Linux (curtosy of forum member Bernard) and Windows version.
Toady spent a long time revising the materials work of the game and adding attributes such as eye colour, beard colour, and links such as Beard Colour Grays Over Time to dwarves. This made a bunch of people annoyed as it was a long way from gameplay improvements, and was a very slow period. However, actual engineering numbers such as Young's Modulus are now used in determining the effectiveness of a weapon for attacks, as a preface to the new wounds system.
Further, as a preface to Antmen getting a better treatment, he added Castes. Now races have different 'generic forms', such as Male, Female; or Worker, Queen. Units are born as one caste and stay put, as far as I know. The caste system is rather complex and confusing, a lot of forum questions didn't resolve what we know about it, but think of it as a way to make different genders or types of a race- you could, say, mod in Elemental Men, and have Fire Men, Water Men, Earth Men, and Air Men all in the same fortress, and you can apply tags- like Fire Men might be Immune to Fire and have red eyes, while Air Men might be faster and taller, and it doesn't affect other castes.
Wounds: Units are now modeled as a system of layers- for instance, your muscle layer is below your skin layer, and your skeletal layer is below that. Further, there are joints, such as a knee cap (he mentioned connective tissue), and operators like "Skull <Surrounds> Brain".
Each section can be individually damaged, so your hand can be sliced down to the bone. Variable thickness layers, allowing for fatty or thick skinned opponents, is on the list, but unsure if implemented yet. Body parts can explicitly be bigger, so that people's hands and hearts are about the same size but their torsoes are bigger. Each section has its own info- Lungs are the respiratory tissue and will enable breathing for creatures who don't have [NOBREATHE] tag. Damaging a lung thus disrupts respiration, but damaging a foot wouldn't. Further, each tissue has a level of bleeding and a level of pain associated with damaging it- bone doesn't bleed, brain tissue has no nerves, etc. You can make things out of non-organic materials- Iron Men, Magma Men, etc. are canon. Iron Men are going to have literal iron skin, which is going to make it difficult to kill them in the new version, especially with non-bludgeoning weapons. It is implied in the dev logs that if all connective tissue is severed (for instance, hitting someone in the kneecap), a limb is lopped off. Theoretically if you slice through all layers of a body part, it would be bisected (for practical purposes, obliterated leaving behind a corpse part and a stub on the enemy), but there is no confirmation of that.
Different castes have different body parts- female dwarves explicitly do not have beards, but there is a commented out line in the new raw files of the game that you simply have to remove the comments to add it in. (about 2 seconds of modding).
Wounds are no longer additive- the old system was that each body part had 15 HP, and that weapons delt a certain amount of damage based on your stats and the weapon. If you hit for 10 damage, the wound was 'bruised' and at 5HP. Hitting again would bring it to a 10HP 'minor wound' state. So you could theoretically inflict terrible injuries on a dragon stabbing it a hundred with a dagger as long as it did 1 damage.
Overall, this looks to add a new realism to wounds, so that you can stab the dragon as many times as you want and it will only cause painful but nonfatal scratches unless you get very lucky. There is a random chance of a wound falling on an old wound, so that if you hack open someone's belly you could slip a dirk in there (called shots are not in, but it's a later item presumably, so it will be random chance). Fighting large or tough monsters, especially megabeasts, iron men, and magma men and so forth, will become much harder unless balanced.
January 2009:
More Wounds stuff:
Bruises and cosmetic info are stored for wounds, although whether it'll be visible in game or waiting for implementation is unknown.
"Simple Healing and Scars" has been added, which means that dwarves should probably mend healable (not bone or brain) tissue over time if it's wounded, leaving scar info in the game (visible in the game as played? probably)
Temperature: Individual layers can now boil or slough off, so your skin can be burned off by heat- A person with iron skin might, when immersed in magma, come out unscathed save that their eyes was burned off.
Creatures with fixed temperature or state of matter, such as magma men, are damaged by deviation from their fixed temperature- for instance, a magma man on a glacier takes freezing damage, and a magma man even in normal weather takes freezing damage (possibly). A sentient liquid would die when frozen or boiled, for now, as a state change still is instant death (probable).
Genetics: Toady has recently taken a break from wounds for 2 days to add genetic information to appearance variables. For instance, colour is handled using dominant-recessive genetics, and (non-colour?) appearance can be handled using that or a simple 'average out (and then apply random factor?)'. You can now breed dogs (or dwarves) towards certain body features like large noses or smallness or red colouration, but only what is allowed in the raws can happen (for instance, dwarves can't slowly develop a new organ, and dogs can't become purple if the raws don't allow purple as a coat colour). Microevolution is implemented!
Breeding is currently unregulated- you'll have to cull undesirables, which this is Dwarf Fortress so the evil of that is completely ignorable. Toady wants to implement unhappiness for breeding regulation for sentients, and make eugenics programs noticable by the targeted dwarves and reacted against (flee, rebellion, etc). He considers this might be in bad taste or used incorrectly (awesomely?) by players, but figures it's dwarf fortress and compared to kitten slaughtering and child maiming, eugenics and genocide is pretty much par.
Wounds again: Wounds now, when healed, stop hurting (so much?). That means that the old problem of a dwarf having a missing arm or missing eye causing him to pass out from pain every 10 minutes and be a cripple for life is now over.
Materials again: Finally, yesterday, Toady added discrete material tracking of a sort- liquid and gaseous blood, snow, slime, vomit, etc. all have invisible quantity meters. When it reaches a threshhold, it becomes a puddle, pool, etc. This is basically the same as before, but now if, say, the snow melts, it can become a certain amount of water, or if the blood is made of gold, the molten gold that flows out could become a thin gold plating on the floor or chunks of gold that can be melted down. He theorizes whether this will be used for snow/mud depth or even item tracking (10 gold bars in a pile, use 3 to make a goblet, 7 remain, as opposed to the current system of 1 Giant Gold Pile, inseparable, produces 3 goblets or 1 throne, etc.), but notes that it's a problem for later versions.
That's the Daily Dorf Backlog for this version.
Current Release Date Estimate:
Mathematical Model:
Optimistic (Exponential): Late February 2009
Middle (average of 2): Mid-Late April 2009
Pessimistic (Slowest Linear): September 2009
Toady's estimate: April-May 2009.
Planned Features for next version beyond this:
Finishing Wounds
Creating descriptions for new traits
New venom/poison system using new materials, so that poisons actually physically exist and can puddle and stuff- Toady wants, eventually (maybe not this version) contact, inhalable (checks vs current breathing status), and injectable poisons, with different effects. Ingestable poisons would require either a flag to be set on the item that is poisoned and go off later, or to completely revise how edible items work to include digestion. Finally, Dwarves coating weapons with poison has been mentioned, and Toady indicates he doesn't feel this is very Dwarfly but that he'd work on it eventually- perhaps not this version, again.
Health Care fixes
Map features- probably increasing the amount of cool stuff found underground (Underground Diversity is the biggest request on the DF Forum 'eternal voting')
Minor World Gen stuff
Military reform
Bugfixing and other randomness such as skills/attributes.
Potentially:
Smelter reform, so that things inside items (seeds in a bag, booze in a barrel) can be used in reactions. Liquid resultants like 'add spice to rum to make spiced rum' are currently going to be inoperable since they'd appear magically in thin air and splash on the floor, and programming dwarves to go get containers for resultants is off the list for this version. However, examples like 'combine seeds + magic powder = magic beans' or something is totally possible, just as 'tin + silver = pewter' is now.
Item damage- items have a sharpness rating for weapons, which could degrade over time. It would require, probably, a fix item labour, so Toady is unsure if he wants to complicate DF with it right now.
All in all? This looks to be awesome.
