DFTalk 24 transcript, WIP revision #2

DFTalk 24 transcript, WIP revision #2

SFX [0:00]

Capntastic: Welcome to another episode of Dwarf Fortress Talk. Here I have: Rainseeker!

Rainseeker: What!? I'm back!? After a five year haitus!? What? Hey guys. I've missed you!

Toady One: It's amazing. It's amazing to have the whole team back together.

Capntastic: And Tarn Adams, AKA Toady.

Toady One: Hey-o. It's Toady One, here with another episode, and all kinds of co-hosts and stuff. Amazing.

Rainseeker: Let's talk about what's happened to us, individually, in the past five years, if you guys don't mind.

Capntastic: Can we skip the last six months or so?

Rainseeker: Yeah, if you want, because everyone probably know what you guys have been up to. My wife and I started a gluten-free bakery, and we've been running that up here in northern California. It's called Measures of Joy, and you can find us on Facebook. We may have been doing it while we were still doing the podcast?

Toady One: I think so, I think so.

Rainseeker: But we're firmly established by now.

Toady One: That's awesome.

Capntastic: I know you're getting some really excellent opportunities in terms of gift baskets for some celebrity event?

Rainseeker: Oh yeah, we went to the Emmies. That was fun. I got to meet the guy from Leave It to Beaver. And I got to meet the guy from Scrubs. The janitor on Scrubs.

Capntastic: Oh! That's the good one to me.

Rainseeker: Yeah, it was fun to meet him. I also got to meet... I don't know if you guys ever watched 30 Rock, but there was a guy on their writing staff. Well, acting on their writing staff, because it was a fake show. A show about a fake show. I was so excited to meet him because that was my favorite show at the time. But anyway, our business is moving forward and I've been doing some screenwriting over the years, too. Nothing's published, but that's been my creative hobby. How about you guys?

Capntastic: Got a job at a machine shop. Not much else. Currently laid off.

Rainseeker: Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.

Capntastic: Yeah, it's a mess all over. I'm doing alright, all things considered.

Rainseeker: That's good. Oh, my son got married.

Capntastic: Fantastic!

Rainseeker: Yeah, he got married last year. How about you, Tarn? What are the big life experiences you've experienced?

Toady One: Still in the same apartment. Still dwarfin'. We traveled around for some events, which is fun. We went to Korea and Switzerland for some events, which was pretty amazing. But mostly, of course, just going to San Francisco or whatever, for the Roguelike Celebration and GDC and a bit of traveling. Just a lot of work, though. And of course, the whole Steam thing, which is probably the biggest thing that's happened in the last five years.

Rainseeker: Yay, Steam!

Capntastic: Globally, one of the biggest things that's happened in the last five years.

Rainseeker: It kind of looks like you're finally taking my persistant suggestion of having a better user interface. That looks amazing.

Toady One: It's about time. Something happened there, for sure. Can you send images over our little Discord chat?

Capntastic: Yeah, drag and drop.

Toady One: You can use drag and drop?

Rainseeker: Yes.

Toady One: Oh, 'add a comment.' I'll just add that comment.

Capntastic: There should be a game called drag 'n' drop. [dragon drop?] There is, for sure.

Toady One: I sent a little image over Discord chat. We've been testing out screens.

Rainseeker: Would you look at that?

Toady One: This is a little prototype embark screen that hasn't had any artist attention.

Rainseeker: Clearly, but that's fine.

Toady One: So those are all my terrible color schemes and stuff.

Rainseeker: [laughter] It really is very bad.

Toady One: It's kind of earthy. Earth tones. It's like Elf Fortress.

Rainseeker: [laughter]

Capntastic: I do like the little ornamentations in the corners.

Toady One: Those were the parts that were actually drawn by the artists. Just that, and of course, the items that you see there. But the very stop-sign-looking plus and minus look, that's all me. But, if you remember how the game works, you used to have to type 'n' for new item, and it would take you to a whole different screen with the typing filter and the categories and so forth. Here it is, all in one place. You can see your items on the left. You can see the typing filter and categories on the right. You can see a scroll bar with a little dwarf face on it.

Rainseeker: Oh, there it is!

Toady One: The ones on the right also get scroll bars. The middle one gets a scroll bar because, of course, there's more categories than that when you aren't filtering. There's always going to be a lot of stuff, which is going to be one of our main obstacles when we're going through all of the screens and things. I had typed 'bronze' into the typing filter and there's still pages of items.

Rainseeker: Yeah, there's bismuth bronze. All that fun stuff.

Capntastic: I'm curious... It's a me thought. I'm curious if bismuth bronze tastes like Pepto-Bismal.

Toady One: [laughter]

Capntastic: I have to filter myself.

Toady One: They could grind it into powder and put it in your breakfast cereal.

Rainseeker: There you go.

Toady One: And you see, for instance, the willow wheelbarrow on the left. We haven't done materials for wheelbarrows, so that is a distinctly not-willow wheelbarrow down there.

Capntastic: Oh, look at that.

Toady One: But yeah, it's a nice stepladder.

Rainseeker: [laughter]. Wow, that's cool. So what is a stepladder for? That's the first time I've seen that.

Toady One: Were you around for the 3D trees?

Rainseeker: Yes. Yes, I saw that.

Toady One: Some point after that, we started growing fruit on trees. You can take a stepladder over and climb and pick the fruit from the trees.

Capntastic: It's cute.

Rainseeker: That is cute.

Toady One: One of the leading causes, perhaps, of dwarves being stuck in trees.

Rainseeker: What? [laughter] Please explain!

Toady One: [laughter] So if the stepladder is removed or if the dwarf is otherwise chased up a tree or something, they'll just be up there. They have some code to help them get down now, which is useful, but you can also just chop the tree down.

Rainseeker: So what you're telling me is that someone could be climbing a tree, minding his own business, picking an apple, and Urick [Urist?] could come by and be like, 'Oh! A stepladder that's just sitting there. I better put it away!' and puts it away, and that's how they get stuck?

Toady One: I don't know. I don't if they get swiped, or if they cancel the job, or what the main vector is. This is something that should probably be investigated a little bit more.

Capntastic: I've seen the opposite, where there's just stepladders out in the trees, or where the trees are. Not up in the trees. That would be wild.

Toady One: Well, why would a dwarf ever clean up after themselves?

Rainseeker: [laughter] Right!

Toady One: I posted another one. This is a little sparser, this screen, but this is the animals tab.

Rainseeker: Are we able to post these for the people that are listening?

Toady One: I'm going to tease them currently, while we think about the plan for this. We could put them up on the dev log though. Or hide them on the top page.

Capntastic: I think the teasing's already begun.

Rainseeker: Yes!

Toady One: We're into the teasing right now. This is fun.

Rainseeker: Yeah, teeheeheehee!

Toady One: In this screen, I've responsibly bought four of each type of cavy. So that's a total of sixteen cavies.

Rainseeker: Mommas, and poppas, and the babies.

Toady One: All them babies.

Rainseeker: The whole family.

Toady One: You can see, on the right, the variety of hen and chick and rooster pictures. And the variety of goat and pig pictures. You can see a water buffalo calf. Lots of little animals and things. Another scroll bar. More pluses and minuses. You'll note that the total number of points you have to spend is not displayed yet, anywhere on the screen, so that's something that needs to be done in the list of many things that need to be done. But I think it's pretty cool! It's different than it was before, for sure.

Rainseeker: Yeah, it's coming along, buddy! Good job. Out of curiousity, where are we with Adventure Mode?

Toady One: I've got Adventure Mode showing up on the screen, which is a huge first step. People wandering around and looking like either people, or the debug creature. The thing is, we haven't finished the layering on, say, the human. Because the dwarves, currently, are built from twelve layers. Including, like, here's your left arm, here's your right arm, here's your face, here's your beard, here's your shadow underneath you, and so forth. So there's just a little bit of extra art that needs to be done. And we're hoping, to some extent, to get the animal people up and running that way as well. Although, of course, since there are 200 animal people, it's not something that we can do perfectly for every single body type.

Rainseeker: The snail men may look kind of odd, I would imagine.

Toady One: Snail men definitely look odd, and, I think, slug people are different from snail people because slug people don't have legs and snail people do.

Rainseeker: Oh!

Capntastic: Interesting.

Toady One: It just seemed appropriate. I don't know why. It's kind of a turtle thing, or something. Because a slug is kind of like a snake, morphologically, like it's long. [laughter]

Rainseeker: That's true.

Capntastic: Hmmm.

Toady One: A snake person can't have legs, right? There's some definite rule there. And so a slug person doesn't have legs, because...

Rainseeker: Well, we're talking Jabba the Hutt, here, right?

Toady One: Yeah! So if Jabba the Hutt had a shell, would he grow legs?

Rainseeker: That's a good question. I don't know. I think, possibly.

Toady One: We were probably a little torn on this.

Rainseeker: [laughter]

Capntastic: Sounds like you just came up with a Star Wars spinoff film.

Toady One: Yeah, we could use some more of those. They probably have five or six in the pipeline, right?

Rainseeker: I want my Star Wars crew to be all from the snail planet. Just the snails with legs.

Toady One: [laughter]

Rainseeker: That's what we want. Lucas, you've heard it here.

Capntastic: He's probably listening.

Rainseeker: He probably is, yeah. And he has those algorithms.

Toady One: [laughter] Does he have algorithms?

Rainseeker: Yeah, yeah yeah.

SFX [12:57]

Rainseeker: Speaking of algorithms, have you seen the game, and this is kind of a detour, but have you seen the game AI Dungeon?

Capntastic: Oh, yes.

Toady One: Have you seen the new GPT-3? The dragon model, or whatever they're calling it?

Capntastic: That's the one that's going to end the world, isn't it?

Rainseeker: I don't know what that even is. GPT-3?

Toady One: I may be getting some details mixed up, but the original AI Dungeon was based on the GPT-2 model, which came out - I don't know when, because time no longer has any meaning - but it was last year or the year before. I don't really remember, but it was the one that made the first big splash by OpenAI, or whatever the organization's called. They just released, on a limited basis, the GPT-3 model, which makes them way more coherent. So it's even scarier. There are some screenshots around on the net now of various GPT-3 stuff.

Rainseeker: Cool.

Toady One: It's pretty cool.

Rainseeker: I just had an adventure this morning, because I've been exploring it, where I was a noble and I found a candy house, going through tunnels, and then I found the wizard who made it. I asked the wizard why he made a candy house, and he said, 'Because I like candy!"

Toady One: [laughter]

Rainseeker: That was a fun AI moment, I think.

Toady One: [laughter] I mean, it's a legitimate reason, especially if you're going to move from house to house as you consume them. Unless he likes to look at candy, I mean, the candy stores look pretty cool.

Rainseeker: That's true. Maybe he just likes to look at it. I don't remember - do we have candy witch houses in your generated world?

Toady One: Do we have candy at all? We have syrup. We have the dwarven syrup, as I recall.

Rainseeker: We need some Hansel and Gretel kind of stories to come out. That'd be kind of fun.

Toady One: I guess they would be made out of minced syrup roasts and minced syrup muffins.

Rainseeker: [laughter]

Capntastic: You'd have to figure out which ones made the best windows.

Rainseeker: Exactly.

Capntastic: And construction materials. If you could make a block out of syrup roasts.

Rainseeker: [laughter] There you go.

Toady One: You make a block out of frozen syrup and then cut blocks out of it. We aren't quite there yet. It's one of those things we're considering for the map rewrite, is getting different sorts of materials and items. Being able to build different map features with them, like walls and ramps, that kind of thing. Of course, the go-to examples are always more like, you're wandering through a giant plain of skulls and there's skull hills and stuff like that, and you can pick up individual ones and slide down them, and that kind of thing, but why not candy, right?

Rainseeker: Yeah.

Toady One: We're going to have the nonviolence setting, right? So you turn it off, you don't have skull hills anymore, unless they're candy skulls.

Rainseeker: That's true. [laughter]

Toady One: And then you can eat them. And because it's nonviolent, you never get sick. No more vomiting.

Rainseeker: [laughter] 'No more vomiting.'

Toady One: Eat as much candy as you want.

Rainseeker: That's right. Candy fortress.

Toady One: No cavities. No cavities in a nonviolent setting. Certainly, if someone turns the nonviolent slider off, they don't want tooth pain, they don't want drills. They just want to eat.

Capntastic: Is this for real? There's really going to be -

Toady One: At some point I'm just talking nonsense, of course, but the violence slider is definitely part of the plans.

Capntastic: Oh, interesting. I hadn't even considered that.

Toady One: Well, let's talk, we can recap. At some point Dwarf Fortress Talk is just a series of recapitulations.

Capntastic: [laughter]

Toady One: I don't even remember what we talked about in the myth and magic episode, way back when. Over 400 years ago.

Capntastic: Yeah, yeah.

Toady One: The current idea was when you generate your setting, you'd have a series of sliders that let you - and we don't know the final form of these is. We're just spitballing what these sliders might be. One of them is, how typical is your fantasy world on a scale from 'there aren't even any dwarves, it's just different humans running around' over to the more typical setting where you have dwarves and also some more canonical animal people. Kind of like an Elder Scrolls type setting, or any of the typical fantasy setting where you pick a couple animal people to show off, and then you have the dwarves and elves and that kind of thing. Then you move the slider over a little bit more and you've got all kinds of strange five-eyed things. Still have some dwarves but maybe the dwarves have innate magic powers and other oddities to them. Then you move the slider all the way over and it removes all the raw object content completely, and leaves you in a complete soup. It'd be like one of those fantasy novels that uses too many made up words.

Rainseeker: [laughter]

Toady One: You're just trying to figure out...

Rainseeker: ...What the heck everything means?

Toady One: ...Like, what is going on here? I think it would be pretty cool to try. I don't know if it would be fun to do this regularly, but you'd try and do a setting like that and you find yourself sinking into it, and you're like, 'Oh, OK. Now I kind of understand what's going on.' Maybe it'd be cool. That's one of the sliders. That's the fantasy amount slider. Another slider is this grim-dark versus -

Rainseeker: Again, none of these are currently implemented?

Toady One: Oh, no. Oh, no no no no.

Rainseeker: Oh, ok.

Toady One: But, since we last spoke, we have a much clearer view of when this is going to happen.

Rainseeker: Ok, cool.

Toady One: We've got the Steam release coming, and then we have some things to make up some time. The release we did before the Steam release - which is out, we did it at the beginning of the year - was the villains release, which we sort of aborted because we had to get the Steam stuff started due to deadlines and so forth. The villains release, we're going to go back and finish some of that stuff up. Right now, for instance, there's artifact heists in the fortress that can be hatched.

Rainseeker: Who?

Toady One: There's insiders, and you can interrogate your own dwarves to figure out who flipped on you and so forth.

Rainseeker: Will a dwarf flip on you if they're unhappy with you, or could it be for any reason?

Toady One: It has a lot of personality facet things, but there's also grudges. Do they share a religious similarity with the person flipping them? The person flipping them has the burden of deciding what angle they're going to use. They use their intrigue skill to do it. It's still a little too easy to flip people, I think, is the verdict right now. People should be less flippable. But, the general principle is what we're going with. We used the mouse - what is it called? The mice? The mice method? Miceing people? Muh-muh-muh... I'm blanking on...

Rainseeker: Mummies?

Toady One: Is it money? The 'C' is compromising people. Blackmailing them. The 'E' is ego. The 'I' is ideology, I think. It's basicly counterintelligence stuff, where you're like, 'which people are vulnerable?' It's mice. [m.i.c.e.?] There's different acronyms people use to remember the different reasons. We went through that as an initial form of inspiration, and then came up with the seven or eight ways you can be flipped.

Rainseeker: Interesting.

Toady One: But, we aborted right when we were working on that stuff, so it's just not done. We'll fix that up, and then do some army stuff, do some Adventure Mode medical stuff that we'd been missing for a long time, like being able to put a splint on yourself and make one and not lose your games quite so easily. Although, yes, it's still a hard life out there.

Rainseeker: [laughter]

Toady One: Then, the idea is, to disappear into something we've called the big wait, because we know it's going to take some time. Yet another big wait, and if we're lucky, the big wait won't be as long as the previous biggest wait, which was 26 months, right?

Rainseeker: [whistles]

Toady One: We did have a release that lasted that long.

Rainseeker: Which one was that?

Toady One: Was that the activating the world release? Was that 2012? I totally don't remember these things that are in the distant past, anymore, without looking up the notes and cross-referencing. But, the myth and magic release... The main thing we've shown off on that was this talk I gave with Tanya at Kitfox, the publisher, back in 2016, I think. I was showing our procedural myth system that comes up with a mythological story with various dieties and forces and planes and stuff. It's meant to build a coherent and consistant magic system for each world that you generate, or each universe, so that things make more sense. So it isn't just generating another fireball spell, or whatever.

Capntastic: Real quick, aren't celestial bodies generated, still?

Toady One: Generated in the current version?

Capntastic: Yeah.

Toady One: The current version has the moon and a sun.

Capntastic: Is it always just one moon?

Toady One: Yeah. It's really boring. It's just for werewolves, right?

Capntastic: Ok. Functional.

Rainseeker: [laughs]

Toady One: And it also does the lighting in Adventure Mode. If it's foggy and the moon's out, you can see a little bit more than if it were really foggy and there is no moon. I imagine that's going to be a nightmare when we start generating the bodies. Then we'll need to figure out, like, how much light would there actually be when there's two moons but the sun is over here. I don't want to think too much about that, especially if the sun is also a chariot, or something. You never know -

Rainseeker: [laughs] This one is a giant fan in the sky. It just kind of spins there.

Toady One: That's why it's always windy on a sunny day.

Rainseeker: Exactly. [laughs]

Toady One: It's out of control. We don't really know what's going to happen. That's one of the things that's fun about this release.

Rainseeker: That brings me to another question. When I disappeared five or six years ago, you were in the position where you were basicly going to do this until you die.

Toady One: [laughs]

Rainseeker: Are you still there? Is this something you want to do the rest of your life or do you want to have a final release sometime?

Toady One: I think I'm still in the same boat I was in before. Certainly, the stuff we just talked about takes me forward another five years or something. Six years? Who knows? It's going to take a while to get that stuff done, and then I'll be 48 years old, 49 years old, you know? I'll have been working on this thing for 23 years, and that's a long time. At this point, it seems like the default option is to say, 'well, yeah, that's what I'm doing.' We'll be approaching retirement age at some point, whatever that means in the future. Who knows? If we end up focusing on a side project ten years from now that gets a little bit of traction, then we might spend some time on that. You never know what's going to materialize. But, I'm pretty excited about the magic release, obviously. I keep bringing conversations back there, and now, we have a much better plan of what that's going to look like. So, you know...

Rainseeker: Can you give me a scenario of how magic might manifest itself in the world and what that might look like to a player?

Toady One: Where do you want to start? Do you want to start in a traditional ocean setup? Or we can have a chaos full of monsters? Or we can have a -

Capntastic: Chaos.

Toady One: Ok, we've got a chaos full of monsters. That's the starting setup, a chaos full of monsters. Then you have some kind of... Well, you know what? You know what we're going to do? This is what we're going to do. Instead of hearing me just be kind of stupid about it, what we'll do is fire up the myth generator.

SFX [26:51]

[untranscribed dialogue]

SFX [48:22]

[untranscribed dialogue]

SFX [1:12:09]

[untranscribed dialogue]

SFX [1:13:26], END