The Gamer's Quarter

[Scratchmonkey]

Nah. I've never built a drowning room and I don't use hunters anymore.

The canonical method of dealing with those dwarves is to lock their door and let them starve to death. I prefer to nurse them back to health over a long period of time, with dwarves bringing them food and water, etc. They'll probably still go nuts eventually; it's always so much more satisfying to get them back to a productive level though.

[Scratchmonkey]

It should be noted that there is kind of a forced suicide -- when mining for the magma river, there's a 50/50 chance that when the wall is breached, a magma flood will pour out, incinerating your poor miner. Given that miners come in short supply, it is fairly common to disable mining for all your regulars, hand a pick to a poor jeweler and have him do the deed (you can tell when you're getting close to the magma river because it's bordered by obsidian).

Admittedly, this is subverting the imagined reality of the game for the practicality of playing it; still, miners are really really useful and there's often a surplus of dwarves who are really only useful for hauling things, so I don't feel too bad about it.

Now, many people would use peasants, which are the "base" dwarf; however, I have come to really appreciate them recently, mainly because they can "evolve" into the dwarves with professions. Currently all of my peasants have Masonry, Stone Detailing, Architecture and Mechanics turned on, since I have all of 1 actual Mason (the other was drowned in a cave river flood when he decided to get a drink off the edge of a bridge) and 0 actual Mechanics (that is, aside from Torsoless McUnconcious). So the Mechanic and Mason jobs are actually getting done relatively quickly because I have a swarm of peasants running about filling gaps and picking up where others have left off. My hope is that they will eventually turn into Mechanics and Masons. I've had success getting Peasants to turn into Farmers before, so this hopefully should work out.

I also had a problem with a door over the chasm being repeatedly destroyed. After the second one, I decided to send my lone swordsdwarf to be stationed where the door was originally placed. He walked over to the bridge and was immediately ambushed by a troll that had been lurking in the shadows. The swordsdwarf acquitted himself nicely, first cutting off the troll's leg before severing it cleanly across the midsection, leaving a hallway splattered with blood and troll parts. An auspicious beginning for my fledgling military.

[Malons]

Bleh, a recent crash destroyed my newest Fortress that was one of my finest. Mind you, my good Fortress' are still incredibly bad as I still haven't done much as far as making my Dwarves happy or even crossing the river. Bleh.

I'll start another one soon enough, but for now I'm going to put the game on the back burner for a few days.

Also, I'm assuming that the more time I put into this the easier changing individual Dwarf jobs will become easier/second naturish, because as it stands I get a little confused without being able to line them up and tell them all what to do.

[Scratchmonkey]

It can take a while to get used to the interface and how it controls what dwarves do. I spent a lot of time in [v]iewing a dwarf, checking the [p]references for that dwarf and adjusting the [l]abor for the dwarf, since that's the only way to micro-manage in DF.

However, in my new work fort, I managed to get everything up and running without ever turning off hauling for my dwarves, meaning that I've had to do very little [l]abor tweaking. The key to this seems to be never setting up a stone stockpile. This means that there's boulders everywhere cluttering up your fort; it also means that no dwarves are spending time hauling stone across the fort to chuck it into a stockpile. If you want to build where there's stone on the ground, the dwarf will just move the stone during the process of building. It really speeds things up and makes the beginning of the game more efficient. I've just hit the second winter and I'm contemplating alcohol/cloth/metal production, which is about 3-5 years ahead of where I've been with previous forts. I even have a couple catapults sitting at the front of the fort firing my excess rock into the wilderness.

The only thing I don't really have set up is defense. I'd like to try something like the ideal steam defense as shown in the DF wiki, even if my layout isn't as brutally perfect for it as the example there is.

Although I am a little leery of playing while the bug where dwarves get stuck in "blocked" parts of buildings is still in the game, mainly because my dwarves have a tendency to get stuck in the square of my magma smelters that are over the magma, which means that I can't destroy the smelter to rescue them because then they'll drop into the magma and getting them out through other means is kind of tricky.

[Bulkor]

I want to vouch for the no-stockpile approach, too, even for non-mining stuff. If you have furniture or finished goods stockpiles, the game won't consider anything that's not on a stockpile available unless every single spot is already occupied. You can have an endless supply of stuff stashed in workshops, though.

About sacrificing dwarves to the magma: be really really careful with that stuff. I've had it flood everything all the way back to the chasm before, and there was a lot of open space there. Therefore, if you're going to send in a sacrificial lamb to open up the magma, send everybody else far away, or put a door behind him and lock it or something.

Also, as valuable as miners are, I think they're the easiest to replace. There's never a shortage of work, there's only one skill involved and the stat gains are good. Not that I don't always send a fisherdwarf or a jeweler off to die instead of a miner.

[Scratchmonkey]

The drawback to storing stuff in your workshops is that the more stuff that's piled in there, the slower the work goes on whatever's being made at the time, as the dwarf has to balance piles of stuff, etc.

It's a bit of a tradeoff. If you don't have much stuff, you can live with having less than 10 items or so piled up in your workshops, which is pretty good for the beginning of the game; however, as you get more and more dwarves and more and more goods, you need to make the move to stockpiles to get your workshops working at peak efficiency. And at this point, the drawback of not being able to access items outside of stockpiles becomes less urgent because since you have so much of everything, you're more likely to have stuff alreadly in a stockpile even if other items are lost in transit.

[Hyfrydle]

Zasitrurast "Knifeguise" 7th of Felsite 1059 Late Spring

Continued my fortress over the last couple of days and this game still keeps amazing me. I now have 7 Nobles to keep happy and a population of 78 dwarves. Haven't ventured as far as the chasm yet making sure my military is fully trained first and also training lots of war dogs. Had a few Kobold thieves but ran them out of town with no problems. Got the hang of manufacturing food and drink there's plenty of dwarven wine to go round and most people are happy.

One query I have is the Workshop profile screen which seems to allow you to set a min and max skill so you have some control over who works there. Has this feature been implemented? Selecting differing skill levels seems to make no differene to the list. Any ideas?

Last night I got the Book Keeper not sure what changes this will bring about. Will hopefully post again soon.

Here is my fortress so far:



Would be nice to know how other people are getting on the more stories and info the better in my opinion.

[Scratchmonkey]

I haven't been playing for a while, mainly because work has been extremely busy lately so I haven't had any down time to check out my fort that I run there and with the recent change to have steam not do any damage, I'm scared to open up my home fort because I'm constantly being besieged there and having my primary defense mechanism be useless is a little scary.

I have been reading the DF forums and I have to say that the amount of jerks there is really surprising, even though it probably shouldn't be. There's something about the hardcore geek community (which seems to be most of the people who play DF) and hardcore fan communities in general that commutes a sense of entitlement. The forums are full of people talking about certain additions as necessary, speculating on when things are going to be implemented, talking about access to the source code and arguing about "balance" issues in regards to a game which is in early alpha and without any concept of their role, which is basically a loose group of play-testers.

It gives me a great deal of respect for Tarn Adams, I doubt I would be so gracious and good-natured about a bunch of emotionally retarded sysadmins arguing about what's best for something that's not theirs.

(To draw an analogy, the issue of graphics to DF is as the issue of PDF is to TGQ. The idea that people are assuming that the game will eventually transition into realtime 3D because they think that's "best" (and that the developer of the game should allow other people to do it if he won't do it himself) is mind-boggling.)

It's also an excellent example of how being a huge game player doesn't mean squat in terms of knowing how game development actually works.

[Scratchmonkey]

A great quote from the offiicial DF forums:

"I've had a Red (Mangled) brain dwarf who actually became a pretty good engraver, could smooth a large room in a jiffy, though he couldn't make anything except pictures of shoes oddly enough."

[Shapermc]

I tried to play this game today. I can't run it full screen because it gets stretched vertically. It also eats up something like 90%+ of my cpu at all times.

I can't really play the game though because I'm on a laptop and my + and - keys don't get recognised.

Keep the posts coming, but I guess I can't play along.
_________________
“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[Scratchmonkey]

Yeah, you pretty much have to play it in the set resolutions and it can be a bit of a resource hog, although I can run it on my shitty-to-medium computers and not have any trouble doing something at the same time. How fast is your computer? I know I'm running it on a sub-2 ghz machine just fine.

And while a USB mousepad is really useful for playing DF (and roguelikes) on your laptop, you can still play it -- all you need to do is go into the game and re-map the keys, so if you map [+] and [-] to equivalent keys on the main keyboard, you shouldn't have a problem at all.

Right now I'm not playing either of my forts because there's a bug where dwarves will get stuck in magma smelters and then starve to death. I'm hoping this is an issue that gets fixed soon because even if it is fairly minor, I'm tired of having wandering dwarves (usually soldiers or children) getting stuck and then spamming the announcements with Failed Path error messages.

[Shapermc]

I've been think about getting one of those USB numpads for crawl... it would probably work with this too.

That said, this is a 3.2ghz vaio laptop. It's pretty much a desktop that I can close and take with me. It hogs rescourses worse than skype did!
_________________
“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[Scratchmonkey]

You aren't running Vista, are you? If you are, there's an easy fix for this.

If you're not, I have no idea what could be causing this to happen. As previously noted, I frequently run DF on a laptop with a 1.7 ghz processor with no problems.

[Shapermc]

[dessgeega]

[Redeye]

[Scratchmonkey]

So there hasn't been a new release lately because Toady is basically rejiggering the entire world system in order to have units move around the world map, which should eventually result in army-based interactions between the various civilizations affecting both dwarf mode and adventure mode.

This changes dwarf mode because now the "sites" that you're building on are going to be generated pieces of terrain taken out of the pre-generated world, meaning that the uniformity of the straight cliff with the evenly-spaced geographical markers inside (and out, for that matter) is going to completely change.

Here's a large image of what the new cliffs are going to look like. There's no wagon because he still hasn't fixed that part of the code.

A smaller cliff picture. I'm not sure exactly how the outside river, inside river, chasm, magma, the demons and the adamantium are going to work out with this new system; I'm excited to find out though, even if Toady says that we're a long way from a workable version.

[Scratchmonkey]

Another picture of a new map. (And yes, the dwarven starting group overlaps with the mountain as their new starting position is hard-coded. Not sure if that mule immediately implodes or what.)

Two neat things about this map -- the "secret valley" area of open ground surrounded entirely by the mountain in the lower left and the separated portions of the mountain, that would be good "pocket fortress" spots for when you're starting out, that could possibly change into something like guard towers as the fort becomes more developed.

The lack of an outside river is somewhat worrying, as it makes you wonder exactly how farming would be handled, especially if there's no uniform inside river. Although plant gathering can garner you a fair amount of usable food, I would be very worried about basing an entire fort on that sort of resource-gathering.

This new version will supposedly allow you to start a fort on a "special" area, meaning that you could try and start a fort on top of a kobold encampment or a dragon's cave, increasing the utility of taking military dwarves at the outset and making area selection even more of a crapshoot.

[Shapermc]

You know, it was actaully really easy to insert the really nice font and graphics for things. The game looked really gorgeous too. Still impossible to play, but just thought I would throw that out there.
_________________
“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[D-A-I-S]

I randomly clicked on my DF wiki bookmark, read this:

[Scratchmonkey]

Well, if you look at the update page, the game hasn't been updated since January 18th. This is because Toady has decided to rewrite a whole slew of code, with the general upshot of majorly changing how fortress mode will function, adding armies to the equation and for the first time, making an update that's so different that save file compatibility will be lost.

You can read the "latest developments" here:

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev_now.html

Just reading through the various changes can be pretty staggering and is a good insight into his design philosophy. The big change that he's building up to is how to handle the internal features of the mountain, since the mountain will no longer be a straight cliff face with a river, chasm and magma at regular intervals in-between. With the new fractal-based cliff faces and the chance that you may not have any of the internal features on any given site, as well as the chance of trying to build on a site that's already been claimed (another thing he still has to work on is getting the computer-controlled settlements to build correctly in the new cliff faces), should make the game experience a lot more varying from player to player.

Originally he was hopeful that there would be a new release this month; right now I think it's more likely that it will come out in April sometime, given the amount of stuff left on his plate that will be necessary to make the game even playable.

(So, to answer the original question, I haven't been playing because I'll have to create a new world for the new version.)

[Scratchmonkey]

Toady just posted a couple movies to the forum, which I will cross-post here. These have to do with his reworking of the outside world and more specifically, the coastlines.

To view the movies: Right-click and "Save As" such that "ocean.cmv" is saved to your DF\data\movies folder. Load up DF and press [;] at the main screen. Select [l] to load the "moving record" then select [p] to play the movie. When it's done, it'll bump you back to the movie screen.

Movie No. 1

This movie takes place in adventurer mode and involves a character walking along a beach as waves roll in from the sea. The character is capable of walking on the beach squares that are temporarily covered with water. Toady has talked about implementing the sea pulling back to allow the character to walk on squares that are normally completely underwater, with the danger being that the character would run the risk of drowning when the waves came back in. There's also been some talk of implementing tides.

Another neat part is that you can see that each beach square has its own elevation, so that when the waves come in, they sometimes fill in land, creating temporary sand bars and pools. When the waves go far enough to hit rock, they are immediately stopped and generate a cloud of water vapor.

Movie No. 2

This movie was recorded from dwarf mode and also takes place on a beach, which is pretty odd, since you're watching dwarves run around with no mountain to speak of. The blocks of horizontal lines littering the beach are driftwood, which is generated by a formula based on how many trees grow on the local coastline.

You can now also see the waves coming in toward the beach, and the waves will sometimes leave persistent foam after they've receded.

Toady's next step is re-working the innards of the mountain and after that hopefully there'll be a release, although I'm honestly not expecting anything until well into next month.

[Scratchmonkey]

Latest Development News: Toady has rewritten the fluid flow and therefore flood mechanics for the inside of the mountain, including implementing a rudimentary z-axis, which means that water in pools and channels will now exist 1 unit below the regular ground, which fixes a lot of problems, especially with bridges.

Now there'll be ramps and stairs, although I'm not entirely sure how that's going to work. Perhaps in order to farm, you'll have to dig out a series of channels that you can flood and when they dry out, dwarves will have to use a ramp/stairs to access the areas where you'll need to plant seeds.

My favorite part of this update is that Toady notes that you will then need to use a pump to "get water to useful heights"* or to remove water from a flooded area. He feels that since the dwarves already can build corkscrews, that a screw pump would be the logical pump for the dwarves to use.

* - Which makes me think that you might need a pump to get water out of the cave river or if there is no cave river, that you'll need to somehow find "lower" water such as when you build a well, only you'll need a pump to bring up enough water for farming and such.

[dizzyjosh]

great. just when i can handle basic 2-d inventory management, toady decides to bring in fluid dynamics. there goes my summer.


(zomg i cannot wait till i'm 60 years old and i load up dwarf fortress and building a new world requires simulating various big bangs until a universe is generated that will eventually stabilize into a world capable of evolving small bipedal bearded alcoholics who are good with their hands)

[Scratchmonkey]

That's really not too far off the way world generation currently works, although you don't have to simulate it. I actually find it kind of soothing to watch the game generate worlds/regions.

[Scratchmonkey]

New movie:

movie no. 3

This one shows off the latest addition: the z-axis. Yes, now the dwarves can dig up and down as well as from side to side. It basically seems to work by allowing the view to "jump" up or down from "slices" taken horizontally out of the mountain. Dwarves can now build ramps and staircases to traverse up or down.

The movie indicates how powerful this can be, with underpasses, overpasses and most impressively, he digs in, up, then out again to the cliff face and builds a bridge between two crags, above the entrance to the fort. Later, he abandons the fort and checks it out in adventurer mode and it seems to demonstrate that units on the bridge can "see" units on the ground one z-unit below, which would mean all sorts of madness like archery towers and such if this is the case.

I imagine that there are going to be some incredibly complex and weird forts made with this.

[Scratchmonkey]

Z-axis 3D render.

Views the higher you go. The second window in that picture is one level up with abstracted ground stuff and the third window is two levels up, with just sky (and a monarch butterfly flying around in the sky).

You can tell how deep or high you are along the z-axis by checking out the colored bands on the right on the window.

Toady says that he's still not on the home stretch; he's 'bottomed out' in terms of how difficult it's going to get, so I think that means that it's just a lot of cleanup and tweaking before the next release.

[Scratchmonkey]

Now you can designate areas with "Traffic" values, which is a weight for use with pathfinding, such that you can semi-force dwarves to take certain routes, using the following values, in order of priority:

High Traffic
Normal Traffic
Low Traffic
Restricted

Here's a screenshot indicating how it's going to work:



So, the miner at the right end of the block will traverse the dug-out space by following the 'H' path. I think if you had enough dwarves in one area, some of them might deviate out into the 'L' areas, with most of them staying in the 'H' area. I have no actual information on that; however, that seems consistent with the kind of behavior that Toady is going for.

Combined with the addition of the z-axis and the non-regular mountains, this is going to make fortress planning far more complex (and rewarding, and difficult). I think there's going to be a lot of pocket fortresses while people try and map out their main halls.

[Scratchmonkey]

Toady has continued to work on inner-mountain features, with water, magma and chasms now showing up. He's done some work on flows and on pressure, which means you can now drain discrete pools of fluid and equalize flows across the z-axis. He had a couple movies demonstrating how this is going to work, I'm not cross-posting them because I can't find the links right now and I'm not sure if anybody watches the things besides me.

If he adds pressure plates that are triggered from going underwater or implements a float switch, this means that the dwarves will be able to build fully-functional logic gates on the same basic principles that old water-based medieval machinery used to run on. This could be used for especially complex traps/entrance control and for less-practical purposes, like having your dwarves mine out a gigantic binary calculator inside the mountain.

I'm starting to get pretty antsy as it seems like we're on the home stretch towards another release, which I'm sure will be buggy as all get out; however, with the sheer amounts of change that will take place from the January version, it will be almost a different game.

Although, I may try and "finish" one of my existing forts from the January release just to say I did it, especially since save files won't carry over with all these changes. If I decide to do so, I'll try and post a description and a mess of screenshots here.

[Scratchmonkey]

Looks like we're looking at probably another month, maybe more, before there's another DF release. In good/bad news, Toady is leaving his current job in 3 weeks, so traditional unemployment should mean an extended period of production.

With that being the situation, I should probably try and "finish" one of my existing forts.

[Scratchmonkey]

Toady's Updated the list of things that he needs to do before the next update:

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev_next.html

There's links to the various images and movies that he's been working on at the bottom of the page.

Here's the list!

Placing and using wells

Misc. flow issues

Associate populations to inside features

Handle inside feature clean-up

Change how river and pool squares are handled in pathing

Fix a problem with drowning

Swimming AI updates

Handle creature/tile effects from magma flows

Designating ponds and other open areas

Handle aqueducts

Consider inside and outside features

Handle doors in the new building occupancy system

Track changes to populations associated to features between games

Check and finish up the seashore, possibly

Handle animal traps vs. the new map features

Handle cobwebs vs. the new map features

Handle triggered vermin events vs. the new map features

Handle chasming with the new chasms and new designation areas

Handle proper stone placement around magma pipes etc.

Handle the use of creatures associated to map features by entities

Handle the AI for outdoor animals now that the outdoor river is gone

Attempt to recover some of the AI for fleeing flood events

Handle fishing unavailability notices on map feature populations

Handle announcements when map features are found

Handle irritation of map feature populations

Handle depth AI for thieves

Handle some vermin spawning issues from map features

Handle some text associated to animals from map features

Handle the lethality of map features located at the main z level

Need to change dungeon master arrival condition

Need to change condition for drawing fisherdwarf migrants

Handle attacks by map feature populations

Handle pattern flying cave pops

Handle some issues with the display of off-screen squares

Handle fishing associated to map features

Handle some issues with vegetation density calculations

Try to recover river overflows

Handle map features with good/evil associations

Handle generation of sites like towns and dark fortresses vs. the new cliff/wilderness layouts

Handle the infestation of sites by map-feature-based creatures

Handle some issues of overland travel vs. local travel in adventure mode

Handle an issue with item placement in sites

Must handle some regional effect issues from slain wilderness creatures

Handle a save/load issue with hotkey location jumps

Handle the issue of windows through the top of dwarf fortress in adventure mode

Handle flight AI for broken siegers

Handle issues with idle behavior vs. new cliff faces

Handle issue with migrant default location

Handle an issue with bridge-as-road valuation

Handle placement of corpses on spears vs. new cliff faces

Handle various issues with freezing water and other frozen tiles

Handle an initialization issue with vein notices

Handle a few issues with river flows and tiles

Handle cave-ins

Handle rainfall and snow vs. new cliff faces

Handle/remove mining mandates

Handle some salinity issues vs. drinking water

Finish up some issues with newly-forbidden items

Need to handle wooden screw pumps that try to pump lava

Patch up migrant groups to where they used to be before seamless maps were added

Random bugs, tests and minor changes that have come up

Future save compat. issues that might be handled now, but probably not: handling z variations outdoors, pushing metals to the raws and making the rock/mineral/ore/gem framework cohesive and more realistic, handling other world maps within one saved world file

----

Needless to say, it'll take a while.

[Shapermc]

Old news?
_________________
“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[Scratchmonkey]

Yeah, he's been saying that for a while. I guess his current job ends on May 10th and he plans to take around six months off at least (he has savings to last that long) and see how only working on the game/trying to live off of donations goes before he decides whether he needs to get another job or not.

I'm pretty sure one of the comments on TIG is wrong in that I think he intends DF to be freeware even in the final version.

[Scratchmonkey]

So I guess Tarn's out of a job and now pretty much only working on the game. He said that he doesn't expect that the new version will be finished by early June, so that probably means that it won't be up until July.

There's a new (fairly short) movie at the bottom of the linked page that shows off how elevation changes are going to work. Mountains now have slopes and flora and fauna that appear further up (and down) the slopes. I'm not entirely sure how this will affect, well, lots of things. I'm starting to think that the conceptual jump from playing the previous version to playing this version will be about as big as the inital learning curve itself.

[a_plus]

at some point this is just going to have to be TOO MUCH. eg today's entry:

Added about 70 new minerals today

... i mean, i like how fully fleshed out it is now. will it continue to be playable?

[Shapermc]

[dessgeega]

fucking roguelike mentality!

just because it's easy to implement things because you don't have to draw graphics and record sound effects for them doesn't mean you should implement everything you think of!
_________________

[Scratchmonkey]

I don't know, a lot of these changes are actually ones that don't impact the player, i.e. he's rewritten a lot of the code from the ground up in certain areas, such as adding the z-axis and handling how the map is generated. And having minerals being generated in their correct geographical strata is admittedly pretty wonky, I can't see it having much of an affect on gameplay though.

We'll have to see when he eventually gets to the new release. I understand some of the concerns that have been brought up in the last three posts, that said, there's still the possibility that DF will be just as playable as the previous iteration (which to most people is probably not very playable, to be fair).

ETA: It's worth noting that in the most recent update, he's adding all these minerals to .raw files because he might want to use them later and editing the .raws breaks save compatibility, so he's doing it on this release, which already breaks compatibility, rather than introduce another break later on in the project.

[Intentionally Wrong]

That, at least, I can understand. This thread has been a joy to read. I don't know if I want to try tackling the game when so much is just about to change, though.

[Scratchmonkey]

I anticipate that when the new version comes out, I'll be off of my current work project and will have time, time that I'm planning to use to make lots of screenshots and write tutorials that I'll post here so that it's easier for people to pick up -- or at least more entertaining for the folks that read this thread.

I haven't made any headway into my project of documenting the endgame of the old DF version because work's been way too crazy. I'm going out of town this weekend and I'm debating on taking my laptop so that I can do this during the downtime at my mom's house.

[Shapermc]

[dessgeega]

expand laterally, not vertically!
_________________

[Scratchmonkey]

Well, mainly because DF isn't even in beta yet. It's in alpha. And yeah, he's certainly set himself a full plate in terms of developing what he wants to, on the other hand, he's produced the most intricate and interesting indie game that I've ever played and one of the best games period I've ever played so I'm inclined mainly to give him the benefit of the doubt and cluck my tongue like a bemused auntie at the amount of work that he's willing to put into it.

I mean, if I had a labor of love, I'd probably do the same thing, whether it turned into the Winchester Mystery House of gaming or not.

He's got a new next release task list up. It's still pretty beefy.

[Scratchmonkey]

Today's crazy DF Update: lots and lots of world maps!

Standard

Temperature

Rainfall

Evil

Volcanic Activity

Geological Regions

Basically, picking a region in DF is equivalent to setting difficulty in other games -- a high-temperature, low-rainfall, evil area with limited mineral resources is going to be extremely difficult to play succesfully, while a medium-temperature, high-rainfall, "calm" area with multiple or plentiful resources is recommended for people just starting out, since it's hard enough to figure out how to make a self-sustaining fort without worrying about undead elephants, dwarves freezing to death if they go outside or nothing that you can turn into valuable trade goods (which will become more important now that you might not get particular resources in every location).

In fact, you could concievably get a fort without obsidian or hematite or any number of extremely useful materials. This is why it's pretty important that the trade system be especially robust, which hopefully should be the case with Tarn working on the new "caravan" system of determining goods from other civilizations.

[Scratchmonkey]

Another crazy DF update!

Firstly, you can now choose your fort name!



There's still a random name generator so that you can have your fort named The Glowing Orb of Boatmurders, if you prefer.

Secondly, the choose location screen has been updated:



It now has three scales - Local, Region and World. This matters more now that trading will be a bigger part of the game -- you'll want to place your fort according to the access it will have to other civilizations. In other words, you want those trade caravans to actually be able to reach you.

You can also resize the region for your fort, which will increase the size of the site. The original forts were 480x480. The new limits are 144x144 to 768x768 and have been added so that people with older/better computers can take advantage/disadvantage of their hardware to run the game. (For those who were wondering, the entire world map is 197376x197376 and a single z-axis slice (of which there are 30 to a local fort region) would take up a terabyte of RAM.)

Other additions include a note on the geological makeup of the site, which is important since you'll use that to determine what resources are available in that area and a note for special features, in this case a volcano, since Tarn doesn't want that sort of thing to be a nasty surprise.

And finally, some nicely-notated pictures of the dwarves arriving at their new location on a mountaintop:

New home

New home?

Oh noes!

[Scratchmonkey]

More pictures!



This is a white sand desert scattered with obsidian boulders, near a volcano. I have no idea if you can build a fort here, since I think Tarn has actually made pseudo-fluid physics for sand. In theory, there's rock below it, I'm not sure the dwarves would actually be capable of digging through it to get there and then whether the entrance would be sealed off or what.

This whole being able to dig down/up is going to be extremely different.



And this is a handily-notated series of images showing a fort that has been dug through a glacier into the granite below it. If the temperatures are the same, you're going to have to make sure all the dwarves are wearing warm clothes and don't spend much time in the icy parts of the fort or they'll get frostbite (which is simulated in-game by having damage dealt to the extremities).

I'm reasonably sure that even Tarn isn't crazy enough to simulate the slow drift of the glacier across the rock. Reasonably.

[Scratchmonkey]

Great quote from today's development notes:

[Scratchmonkey]

Now, the three basic intermal features of the old DF mountain were the inner river, the chasm and the magma river, all of which ran roughly north-south and were varying distances apart from each other. Although you never really had to cross any of them, the better metals were deeper in the mountain and magma smelters were necessary for efficient metal-working.

Now, for the old DF ENDGAME.

***SPOILARZ OMG IF YOU WANT TO PLAY DF AND BE SURPRISED, DON'T READ PAST THIS POINT***

The inner core of each mountain in DF, which is on the other side of the magma river, contains a band of highly valuable and useful minerals. All the good metals and gems are here in abundance. So, of course you would send dwarves to collect the goodness and then you would break through a wall into...

the firey pits of hell!

Or at least some firey pits where some demons were chillin' out. The demons then generally go on to eat the heck out of your dwarves, laying the entire fort to waste (usually). Since I'd already read about the demons on the wiki and the DF forums (they're a badly-kept secret over there), I had planned my crossing of the magma river ahead of time.

Part of this involves building a bridge out of steel bars. Using any other kind of material will lead to a melted bridge and incinerated dwarves. This takes a large amount of steel, which you really also want to be using for armor and weapons, so I mined up and down the magma river until I found a relatively narrow spot to build the bridge.

Now, access points from the magma river are dangerous because fire imps and magma men will come out of the river and set your dwarves on fire (not to mention destroying parts of your fort). Some of this can be observed in the screenshot below, where the tunnels filled with magma to the south were actually access tunnels used originally to flood my outside moat. What happened was magma men coming out of the river and destroying my floodgates, causing the access tunnels to flood. Thankfully, all it did was made those tunnels unusable, as opposed to flooding my entire fort (which is what happened to my very first fort).

So, there's a bunch of traps in the corridor leading to the bridge, which should keep fire imps and magma men out. There's also a channel dug behind the door just in case, as channels stop floods (channels have been removed entirely from the new DF, since you can now dig down). Just down this corridor is a large room with several interesting features. One is the support in the middle of the room, which prevents it from collapsing (remember, rooms over 7x7 in size cave-in) and a floodgate to the south of the room with a tunnel full of water behind it.

After a corridor full of doors and some channels, we have a lever. This lever has been connected with dwarven mechanisms to both the support and the floodgate. When it's pulled, the support will collapse and the floodgate will open, meaning that the roof will cave in and what bits of the room aren't filled with rock will be filled with water.

Diabolical!



There's one problem though and probably some of you have probably spotted it already. I've gone and designed this as though the demons were constrained in their movement as dwarves are. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that considering that they live in the firey pits of Possibly Hell, they're not going to be bothered using my bridge to cross the magma, instead happily wandering north up the river to where the smelters are and wreaking havoc there.

The next step is to try and build some sort of demon defense on the other side of the river. There are three possible strategies, as I see it:

1. Make a room, station all my military there. Free the demons and watch the carnage.
2. The cheese method, which would be to build a room full of drawbridges, all connected to a single lever. Unleash the demons and set one dwarf to repeatedly pull that lever, smooshing the demons as they try and cross the room. Yes, this works.

I'm thinking that I'll try both and document them, assuming that the first method isn't going to work (and I don't really expect it to, as demons are really tough). I was going to try and do this tonight; except the wife wanted to play Dark Alliance II, so this is pretty much all I got around to.

[beige]

I recently heard of this game and started to play. I haven't stopped for days.

http://x0r.us/images/df_ver1.jpg

This is how I currently roll! Got a lot of good tips from the wiki and boards. I keep restarting my fortress though, because of the fact that I can't rewall or get rid of channels, meaning one little mistake can screw up my whole design.

[Scratchmonkey]

Beige, that fort is beautiful. I love the bedroom design. Not to mention the efficiency of using your main corridor for workshop/stockpile space.

Looks like you've had some cave-ins in your entrance?