Patch 250 is coming and here are the changes made:
- Units are now voxelmodels, but there is the option to switch to textured units
- Textured units use proper UV unwrapped textures now
I did not make textures for this mode yet though, so it's very plain-looking.
The textured models use minecraft's uv-unwrap though, so if you add an alpha channel and extend the bottom so that the upper part is the skin texture used and is 64x32 in size and the bottom is 64x32 and empty, so that the whole texture is 64x64, you could basically put any minecraft skin ever made onto those units.
- Ores will now be better the deeper you go
Since I felt like the better ores we're basically never spawning, I made them have a better chance to do so the deeper you go. As a result, 1560 tiles down (or deeper) ore veins will now always spawn the best ore (which currently is adamant).
- Slightly lowered unit's torso movement while moving
- The unit's job configuration now has building on by default
Since you need a hammer anyway, I thought it'd be less confusing this way.
- Stopped humans from spawning goblin body parts
- Fog of war: If enabled, units only see whats in front of them
- Implemented unexplored terrain: If enabled, terrain has to be seen once in order to become visible
This includes items and trees that are on those tiles.
- Implemented raycasting for visibility: If enabled, units will only see things they are in line of sight
of.Fog of war will also cause enemy units to only become visible if they are seen by units, just like the terrain.
- The game will now MessageBox you if you lost, instead of *just* closing
- Added new gamemode and related things
This is actually quite the major thing. I call it "communicationsmode". If you have a better name, write it down somewhere : ) The basic idea is that one of your starting units is your avatar - if he dies, so do you. This was just a requirement for the following however: Every unit that is not your avatar has so called "control", also refered to as "command buff". If this runs out, you won't be able to control that unit. [If the new unitvision option is on, you won't see through this unit either.] They will carry on with queued up orders and will defend themselves though. (Anything you don't directly order them to.) Any unit close to your avatar will instantly refill on that control. The maximum for this buff is currently 15 minutes. Any unit close to another unit with this buff will gain the remaining maximum time from those two units. (i.e. unit one with 5 minutes remaining arrives at unit two with no control left, and both units will have 5 minutes remaining control.) The "giving"-units' charisma and the "receiving"-units' perception will increase the range of this linearly. There also is a new talent-ability that doubles range of this for 10 seconds. Additionally, there is paper, which can be written on by the avatar and read by any non-avatar. The paper will say "Orders from ". By doing so the reader gains a full 15 minutes command buff. Units that have about 10 seconds left on their control will also automatically read any orders in their inventory. Also there is a "signal fire" you can craft, which gives all units within 6 chunks radius (again modified by perceivers perception) to gain the buff. The auto-job menu has an option to have a given unit automatically build such a signal fire if it spots an enemy. For this they require the materials to be in their inventory, which are 2 logs of wood and a torch. (You can manually build one with the torch's context.)
You can differentiate the avatar by him having a bigger selection circle and the string " 's Avatar" in it's description.
I thought this whole concept was pretty cool to have, because it is the closest I could think of (while being reasonably playable), of coming to simulating the idea of you actually giving those orders to your units, as opposed to just clicking away.
This gamemode needs to be activated in the server_config.txt file since I feel it can get quite hardcore sometimes.
In the future I want to experiment with the idea of intercepting those control giving items.
For example one might kill the courier who has a bunch of order filled papers in his inventory, heading to an outpost far away. One might then use those orders (which have the players name on them) and use it to gain control over someone else's units. Also you could maybe have signal fires take time to set up and then if anyone other than the player who owns the signal fire lights it, the player who lights it will get control over any units without the command buff, who actually belong to the player who build the signal fire in the first place.
- Constitution no longer affects combat damage
I removed this because it seemed unecessary and it cluttered up the description of this attribute.
- New Torch recipe now requires grass in addition to the other ingredients
Grass can be aquired by digging grass tiles.
- You no longer get notified of enemy spawns
I mainly changed this due to the unit vision thing.
- Changed unit's take all and drop all button graphics
- Light now affects items
- The selection circle thing is no longer affected by light but always stays bright
- Can now craft paper by putting a log of wood and a flower in the couldron
The flower is mainly in there to make the paper relatively expensive, since I added a spell with which you can grow trees, and trees being so abundant anyway.
- Improved sun lighting to be sky-bound
Note: This can cause nasty black spots. The sampling amount will reduce that.
Also as it happens caves, or sheltered areas are pretty dark without a torch.
- Abilities now have their own submenu (ran out of space on the unit's menu)
- You can now manually turn units without moving
As you might think, this is mainly due to the vision thing.
- Scrolling lists no longer reset if you click a button
- Increased spelltome spawn chance from 0.5% to 1.0%
- Increased "Pickup all" range to 64 from 17
This is in preperation for the upcoming automation change. It would be hard to properly automate things otherwise.
- Units now have longer range for ranged attacks based on how much lower the target is compared to the unit shooting
I.e. you have more range from a elevated position. This is something that always disturbed me about dwarf fortress' ranged combat, so here it is. The range increases by 1x per two tiles of vertical difference.
- Added Flux mechanic
This mechanic will cause your spells to corrupt chunks where spells were cast with magic. Higher level spells will generally cause more damage. If you fizzle any spell, it will cause five times the flux damage to the chunk. If overdone, it will cause nasty things happen to that paticular area, which I think is pretty cool, considering, that it means that big magic battles might cause whole battlefields to be made completely inhabitable. Damage to units from this will be decreased by the unit's intellect.
Flux slowly levels off if the chunk is left alone.
- Added arcane elemental
- New Dying units decrease the player's immigration rating (less likely to have units immigrate)
This is mainly to disencourage spamming beds if you can not support those units, since this decrease will be permanent. (At least for now.)
- Added 5 new spells, including a counter-spell and a blinding spell.
The blinding spell, as it happens, reduces the unit's perception to 1 for 30 seconds. Since the vision range is based on perception, this means units will actually not provide you with any vision for that time. (You can still issue orders though.) And they can not see any hostile's approaching them either.
- New Increased all spells' cooldown time by a factor of 8, however, the mage's skill level will now accelerate cooldown-decrease by a factor of 1 per skill level in spellcasting
- Doubled spell cast time, but now intellect, wisdom, and the unit's spellcasting skill will lower the cast time
This turns out to actually be really slow of a casting speed. But I think it's fine this way.
- Changed the magic particle effect's texture to the flux texture
Additionally I want to mention that spells do not have any description of what they do, and a rather cryptic latin name for a reason. Most of the spells have different effects on different things, only some have a very specific use. (Like the counterspell or blinding spell, though I want to add more for those, too.)
I think that this way, you can have fun with experimenting with the spells you find, just casting it on different things to see if they do something. If they do, it will usually emit particles from related positions.
NOTE: All added options are off by default. Because they can be quite straining on the CPU. (Especially if you do not have >= 2 CPU cores.)
