Dark Subject - What happens to dead people?

I don’t like the idea of ageing. It will feel like you can’t relax as much because before you know you’re carpenter or blacksmith is on his deathbed. Plus if you have an awesome soldier that has been in a lot of battles, you will be comes really attached to him. Especially how each guy has a unique name and not all men are clones of one another. It would be a shame if your favourite guy died of old age. It will be interesting to see how they deal with corpses. Disappearing seems like the best idea. Maybe they could hang around for 10 minutes and then maybe some animation of the body disappearing. That way you still have a field of corpses after a battle for a while but it doesn’t get in the way half hour later on. But I do like the idea if ceremonial burials and funeral pyres.

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As much as I would love age to factor into the game, so you can watch settlers develop, have families etc, with skills and traits passed down through the generations, I do feel that the time pressure that you mention is what would make it too damn hard.

Oh well,someone get modding!

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Yeah, aging and babies aren’t gonna happen according to one of the livestreams. I guess technically nothing about aging was talked about, so there’s still a possibility, but I doubt it for reasons @Glisern said.

There was also talk of the baby mammoth growing and getting larger, but it was during the mod livestream, hinting that if we wanted things like that to take place, it was up to us to mod it in.

Aging, babies, families, etc. would all be very easy to mod in if you had the talent in Lua. I, myself, think that it takes the cutesy out of the game and would definitely add the time sensitive feeling and rush gameplay. RTS gameplay is usually rushed enough with the threat of enemy factions. I think adding aging would just give you more things to worry about in the long run and would hinder the fun factor.

And as for the original question, upon death I’m sure there’s going to be some sort of death animation, possibly a little gravestone spawning where the event occurred and then you’ll feel super sad inside and want to avenge your fallen comrade. I doubt they’ll turn into zombies unless their death was caused by some sort of afflicting magic or otherwise. Ghosts might also be a possibility. It’d be interesting to see ghosts of your former civ’s wandering around at night randomly. At least you wouldn’t have a total disconnect from that civ.

my money is on some lovely particle effects when both enemies and units “expire”…

im curious to know about looting though… i posed the question for the twonk interview, so perhaps it will come up…

I want a mass explosion of red to completely cover the ground, faces, walls, sky, everything. To remind my disgusting settlers what they have done.

I hope it haunts them.

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lol. I can see a family gathered around an old man laying in his bed. He smiles and drifts softly into death. Then he explodes painting the entire room and all the people in a pool of red.

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Haha, ah man, that made me laugh, the thing is you’re just playing zoomed out, the doors shut on the house, and you just see a load of red explode from under the door and into the street - zooming into the house and it’s just plastered in red.

there are some seriously distur… interesting… yes, interesting folks on the forums… :smiley:

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Headstones. Headstones EVERYWHERE.

I’ve been thinking about this as well. I think it would be the most fun if there was an aging process, since having multiple age groups would ad some diversity to the town management and ascetic feel.
For example, the town’s children would run around the village playing games and exploring; and old villagers, while not as strong as younger ones, have much more experience and can apprentice villagers to learn jobs faster.

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It’s been a very very long day alright?!

[size=6] You’re on my list [/size]

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I was thinking… you COULD add the ageing portion, as well as keep farming at a stable level…

If you mod this in of course. If the farm level tells the game how many families can be there, you add in that each family can ONLY have two babies. if that is the level, then the population will not sink or increase.

Thus, increasing population would be in two’s instead in order to make a new family.

The worst part of that would be coding the idea of incest and hereditary skills (profession to maybe/not)

This is the type of thing that makes aging appealing to me. You can twist around the lengths and attributes of the life stages to provide whatever level of challenge you want, even make the game easier if you feel like it; that part isn’t what I care about. It’s the possibilities for new behaviors and new interactions that makes aging interesting.

Social skills, accumulated scarring/injury, attitudes towards risk and work, craftsmanship, needs and wants, role in the community… so many things can change with age. I feel there’s a lot of potential in there.

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Making an awesome legacy for a warrior who had a son who became an even better warrior (:
inheriting traits and so forth would give this game great depth and instead of you going like “ok villager one, two and three are going to be farmers all the rest do whatever” you would pick a profession for each villager depending on his traits (you can choose not to also) thus making him good at the profession that fits him or average at another profession the might not suit him but he still does

It wouldn’t seem right seeing the Magma Smith die of old age. But I do love the ideas of this diversity. So the carpenter can train his son to be a carpenter and things like that. And we can have a legendary soldier training the young bloods at the barracks but he’s too old to go on raids and all.

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Completely new set of professions.
Stone carver makes headstones, Scavenger collects bodies, Embalmer preserves the corpses (and stuffs animals) grave digger digs the hole, Priest makes the funeral, Mourners, etc…
You can script it.

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note to self, be careful when downloading mods from @Ondaderthad:smiley:

but honestly, that does add an interesting, if twisted dimension to the game… but thats what’s great about the modding community!

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Look at games where it’s been pulled off then, as an example take the virtual villagers series. You manage a group of people that have to learn skills to survive, not the same as this but there is certainly some big similarities. Anyway though the ageing in that case helps add to the survival aspects and stops characters from eventually becoming ultimate masters at everything, it’s still possible to do it but it requires working at and it’s not too easy, combine that with the children getting a minor boost to skills the adults were good at and the system works.

I’d have no problems having something like that in stonehearth, just treat the dead bodies as resources to go to a graveyard site and that’s an easy fix. Of course there would need to be some bodies as things like dragons, cows, or sheep would presumably have be useful for harvesting for things like leather or meat at least and while doing the same thing to things like humans or orcs could be unsettling to some, someone might want their people to perform cannibalism and make clothes out of the skins of their enemies.

EDIT: From reddit
Q: What about the family model? Two people have a kid and that childs traits is based on the parents and the father passively trains him/her on his.trade at home etc… also I hope you mange to.answer one of my questions today

A: We want your settlers to have relationships: to fall in love, mourn each other when they die, etc. Kids are tough. We’re not sure how to model kids moving from infant through childhood to adulthood. Maybe we can do something simple like have an infant to pow instantly “levels up” to a little kid then bam later becomes a full grown adult. We’ll keep thinking about it.

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I’m not worried about what happens when my civs die. I just need a taxidermist profession so I can stuff Cthulhu’s head when I kill him and mount it in the local pub. It will hang next to every other titan who has the misfortune of spawning in my neck of the woods :stuck_out_tongue:

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If there are game mechanics for corpses (raising them as zombies etc) then they may need to linger for a bit.
Otherwise they can sink into the ground and be removed.