I wish there was a more technical explanation on how the various Dwarf Fortress algorithms work. The major thing I still can't wrap my head around yet is how the dwarves/NPCs schedule tasks and balance that with their needs.
Somewhere I saw a blog post about Prison Architect, a game inspired by and with similar mechanics to Dwarf Fortress, that described one aspect of the task system:
Instead of giving NPCs task lists, tasks are assigned to objects - say, a door that is not installed yet. The door would contain the instructions: "(1) move me to location [x,y] (2) install me at my current location", and idle NPCs would lookup objects with fitting tasks to their abilities/priorities and then execute the instructions.
But how to combine this with needs is unclear to me, I would love to see a good explanation of this. Here is the insane list of needs a Prison Architect NPC has: https://github.com/originalfoo/Prison-Architect-API/blob/mas..., and Prison Architect, while already displaying emergent behavior, seems to still only have a fraction of the detail and complexity and emergence that Dwarf Fortress has.
All the hype is about neural networks now, but these don't display this kind of emergent, social and constructive behavior, resource awareness and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeostasis that these NPCs can.
Somewhere I saw a blog post about Prison Architect, a game inspired by and with similar mechanics to Dwarf Fortress, that described one aspect of the task system:
Instead of giving NPCs task lists, tasks are assigned to objects - say, a door that is not installed yet. The door would contain the instructions: "(1) move me to location [x,y] (2) install me at my current location", and idle NPCs would lookup objects with fitting tasks to their abilities/priorities and then execute the instructions.
But how to combine this with needs is unclear to me, I would love to see a good explanation of this. Here is the insane list of needs a Prison Architect NPC has: https://github.com/originalfoo/Prison-Architect-API/blob/mas..., and Prison Architect, while already displaying emergent behavior, seems to still only have a fraction of the detail and complexity and emergence that Dwarf Fortress has.
All the hype is about neural networks now, but these don't display this kind of emergent, social and constructive behavior, resource awareness and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeostasis that these NPCs can.