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Total Members Voted: 69

[mastahcheese]

It would appear that Halflings don't use currency. It's not like we have gold or silver though is it?

And none of the merchants even want to barter.

I think it's more a bug with vanilla DF, but it amuses me that the merchants don't care if I just stuff my face with the pumpkins I was just trying to buy.

I don't think they have the proper currency tokens, so they won't have them when you see them in adventure mode (they'll never have it in fortress mode.)
I made sure that my travelers had coins, though, 5 kinds if I remember right.

[WillowLuman]

Half hour's up.

If it's alright with everyone, I'm going to classify treelords as ORGANIC, PLANT, and SPIRIT_CORPOREAL.

[WillowLuman]

ALRIGHT! BUGFIX COMPLETE: http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=7984

I'll write up a diagram of the new system and a guide to syndromes tomorrow.

Enjoy, Putnam! And everyone else, too...

[Halfling]

Your upload is featured on the front page as the new recommended pack for modding/playtesting. I also added a "bugfix" point to the turns. These should be welcome anytime.

[Poldon]

I'm still getting radioactive purple square bushes everywhere with the new download. Gonna change it myself for now. SHRUB_COLOR needs to have a 0 for its second value.

Also I noticed a minor worldgen problem, when using a medium world the game really struggles to place even a medium number of civilizations. I did manage to get one that worked within a few minutes, but it had a lot of rejections. I suppose this isn't really something you can fix, but it may be worth noting now. I would guess that the biome-specific races make things harder on it, but I don't really know.

Edit: While playing as the Formics I had a repeatable crash to desktop when attempting to access the "supplies" part of th military menu. This only happened after I had created a squad, and I could access it fine while there was no military. There is nothing in the error log. I'm not really sure what to guess might be the cause. It's not a very important screen, admittedly, but a hard crash is still annoying if accidentally triggered.

Edit2: Actually, do we have any flask items? If not, might that be the cause?

[Halfling]

Confirming that it's still [SHRUB_COLOR:5:13:0] corresponding to a bright magenta background and a dark magenta foreground. Strange choice of colors.

Strange on the worldgen too. I've not experienced worldgen problems generating worlds of any size before. Could it be the psionics or something else that has changed now? Did you use default settings?

Flasks etc. are hard-coded and we have them, so that can't be the issue. But it's something that should be looked into and if it's due to a missing item that should go into items_default.txt - items that are there to keep DF from crashing.


On another note, do people feel humans should be in the mod? I'm not going to make them. But I'm going to pitch a few ideas.

First of all, they should be rare and interesting somehow. Humans should probably not be the majority race, it's more interesting that way. Maybe limit civs to one or two and the number of people to a thousand or so? Here's two ideas based on the idea that the world has undergone a terrible change, with poisonous, rapidly breeding creatures, unfeeling again rapidly breeding humanoid insects, lizardmen with their paralyzing blood and various bear-sized eight-limbed rampaging aberrations and so on ruling the world now and humans simply not being able to keep up.

Second, writing lines for human armies is just so much fun. By subdividing them into noble, warrior and peasant castes you could write in cowardly, decadent, bossy nobles, zealot warriors and timid, uneducated peasants. So they could be another race to talk.

Spoiler: Idea 1. Grimdark failing human empire. (click to show/hide)

• Under the rule of an oppressive and bloated upper class and as a reaction to the terrifying new world, humanity has embraced a totalitarian and militaristic philosophy. Men still have high achievements of military technology and chivalry. They see themselves as the rightful rulers of the world, in what is a completely megalomaniac assessment of the situation. In reality the kingdom remnant with its crusading, unreasonable maladjustment to the changing world and complete disregard for efficiency, compromise and value of human life is marginalized, dying and insignificant in the world, more a curiosity that you may visit (at your own risk).
• Heavy, possibly hard-coded ornate plate armor (if plate armor comes as body parts, then things like "golden lion ornament" can be equipped on it). Swords, primitive gunpowder weapons, fire arrows, catapults, ballistas, any technology. Knights and more knights.
• Bloated, confusing system of cowardly/mad/oppressive nobles and bureaucrats. Kings, princes, princesses, barons, counts, viziers, advisers, censors, judges, senators, augurs, vice-counts, knights commanders, knights companions, knights errants... If they are enabled in fortress mode these should be some of your main opposition to survival.
• Should be at war with everything. Adding [CRAZED] to the entire race may help simulate this.
• Extremely overblown, ridiculous speech like only human crusaders can have. Sample taunt lines:
  Dame: "Another monster approaches! Draw swords, brothers! Fire catapults! Purge this taint with steel and fire!"
  Knight commander: "While the enemies of the king still draw breath, before the blood of witches and aberrations is spilled on the ground, may I die sooner than think of laying down my sword. Onward to victory and death! CHARGE!"
  

Spoiler: Idea 2. The last human survivors. (click to show/hide)

• The days of humanity have long since passed and the last kingdoms are gone. They have gone to live underground in caverns, occasionally sneaking out to forage, hunt and steal for subsistence, clinging on to some old relics such as ancient swords for protection. They wish to be left alone, are afraid of nearly everything and will attack you if you find them.
• Layer-linked/cave-dwelling, underground civilization. Skulking vermin that attempt to steal your food and valuables.
• The men will attempt to defend the family while the women and children try to run to live another day
• Random pieces of high-tech equipment like gunpowder weapons mixed with rags and bandages for equipment, could have toys like "rotten puzzlebox" or "piece of an ancient masterpiece"
• Sample taunts:
  Knight: "I am not a violent man, but you leave me no choice. Let it be known - if you persist in intruding upon our home, if you take one more step - I will cut you down even if it takes the life of me!"
  Maiden (taunts while fleeing): "Cruel murderer! What have we done to deserve this fate?" "You monster! Take my life, but at least spare my children"

[Poldon]

Strange on the worldgen too. I've not experienced worldgen problems generating worlds of any size before. Could it be the psionics or something else that has changed now? Did you use default settings?

Yes, I used the simple world Gen. Everything was on default except history, which was on short, and minerals, which were set to frequent. This may have been in previous versions, I only just now noticed it however. It certainly gets a number of rejections, but it's not unusable by any means either. It seems to only have issues on large and medium maps. *testing right now*

Edit: Golden Mamaphints strangely appear as a dark red "h", much like hounds do. I brought both on an embark and am unable to tell them apart. I would suggest having them be a gold or yellow "M", as that might make more sense.

Edit2: On the subject of humans, those suggestions sound pretty cool. I do feel like they should also be unplayable in fortress mode, though.

Also I feel very limited on clothing and armor production in general, and I think perhaps a few various items being common to multiple entities might help alleviate that. Currently much of what can be made is still very minimalistic, and often there's no armor available of certain types. There's only one type of handwear even though we have several playable races for instance, and it's not even armor. I think this area needs some attention for a bit.

[WillowLuman]

Actually, I had an idea for humans as megabeasts:

Eternal Knights, human Knights who survived the end of the previous Universe through sheer tenacity, roam the world searching for feats of valor and bravery. Such feats range from slaying the mighty and strange monsters of this continuum, to raiding an entire settlement single-handedly (they're somewhat deranged). As well as their legendary skills as great Knights, changing universes has altered their nature (as the Shades were), and they have become near-demigods.

EDIT: I've updated the Bugfix package so that tea shrubs are actually fixed now. I swear, I did it before, but I must have edited the txt in the wrong folder...

[kero42]

make them. But I'm going to pitch a few ideas.

First of all, they should be rare and interesting somehow. Humans should probably not be the majority race, it's more interesting that way. Maybe limit civs to one or two and the number of people to a thousand or so? Here's two ideas based on the idea that the world has undergone a terrible change, with poisonous, rapidly breeding creatures, unfeeling again rapidly breeding humanoid insects, lizardmen with their paralyzing blood and various bear-sized eight-limbed rampaging aberrations and so on ruling the world now and humans simply not being able to keep up.

Spoiler: Idea 1. Grimdark failing human empire. (click to show/hide)

• Under the rule of an oppressive and bloated upper class and as a reaction to the terrifying new world, humanity has embraced a totalitarian and militaristic philosophy. Men still have high achievements of military technology and chivalry. They see themselves as the rightful rulers of the world, in what is a completely megalomaniac assessment of the situation. In reality the kingdom remnant with its crusading, unreasonable maladjustment to the changing world and complete disregard for efficiency, compromise and value of human life is marginalized, dying and insignificant in the world, more a curiosity that you may visit (at your own risk).
• Heavy, possibly hard-coded ornate plate armor (if plate armor comes as body parts, then things like "golden lion ornament" can be equipped on it). Swords, primitive gunpowder weapons, fire arrows, catapults, ballistas, any technology. Knights and more knights.
• Bloated, confusing system of cowardly/mad/oppressive nobles and bureaucrats. Kings, princes, princesses, barons, counts, viziers, advisers, censors, judges, senators, augurs, vice-counts, knights commanders, knights companions, knights errants... If they are enabled in fortress mode these should be some of your main opposition to survival.
• Should be at war with everything. Adding [CRAZED] to the entire race may help simulate this.
• Extremely overblown, ridiculous speech like only human crusaders can have. Sample taunt lines:
  Dame: "Another monster approaches! Draw swords, brothers! Fire catapults! Purge this taint with steel and fire!"
  Knight commander: "While the enemies of the king still draw breath, before the blood of witches and aberrations is spilled on the ground, may I die sooner than think of laying down my sword. Onward to victory and death! CHARGE!"
  

Spoiler: Idea 2. The last human survivors. (click to show/hide)

• The days of humanity have long since passed and the last kingdoms are gone. They have gone to live underground in caverns, occasionally sneaking out to forage, hunt and steal for subsistence, clinging on to some old relics such as ancient swords for protection. They wish to be left alone, are afraid of nearly everything and will attack you if you find them.
• Layer-linked/cave-dwelling, underground civilization. Skulking vermin that attempt to steal your food and valuables.
• The men will attempt to defend the family while the women and children try to run to live another day
• Random pieces of high-tech equipment like gunpowder weapons mixed with rags and bandages for equipment, could have toys like "rotten puzzlebox" or "piece of an ancient masterpiece"
• Sample taunts:
  Knight: "I am not a violent man, but you leave me no choice. Let it be known - if you persist in intruding upon our home, if you take one more step - I will cut you down even if it takes the life of me!"
  Maiden (taunts while fleeing): "Cruel murderer! What have we done to deserve this fate?" "You monster! Take my life, but at least spare my children"

I actually feel quite conflicted on this point. On one hand, I am somewhat reluctant to have the humans back in any form other than shades. On the other, I think these are interesting enough to be included anyway and are suitably different from their original.

I think I prefer the second one, but I have issues with both. It would seem rather weird for the humans to be a falling empire with memories of a better time even from the beginning of each world at its very conception. But I'm sure that could be explained or otherwise handwaved away with a little work. So, other than that small bit, I have no complaints/problems.

[WillowLuman]

We've already got Elves, and someone wants to bring back Dwarves. I don't think we should have any kind of human civ. Also, major problem with the idea, is why can't humans survive in this world if halflings can?

Even if the human civ is somewhat different, bringing back 3/4 vanilla races makes it less from scratch and more heavily modded vanilla

[Halfling]

Halflings can survive because nobody cares very much about them and they aren't very much involved in the world. They don't stand out or go on great campaigns of war like the tall ones. That's the specialty of both these halflings and their inspiration.

Anyway... I think we discussed the issue of what "from scratch" means earlier. Although having different opinions of it is fine... well, it is a fantasy setting as is. Or at least mostly one. Didn't we sort of agree earlier that therefore you would very likely want to have such as gold, silver and steel? Diamonds too? "Draw iridium, villain" not sounding cool and all that. I think the same applies and we will eventually want to have the staples... or get them anyway, alternatively, done with less consideration, difference and imagination, when someone decides to "just do it" (allowing which is a staple of this project).

Hell, the original idea was to make something which resembles Dwarf Fortress but is made entirely by the players and works differently. Not e.g. a Starcraft-inspired space-themed total conversion which could have been the outcome if we had had enough fanatic Starcraft and sci-fi fans at the start. Not saying that that couldn't still be an acceptable outcome but... my original idea was to make a different fantasy setting to play in, with different mechanics.

Now, there exist fantasy settings where all is alien and nothing is recognizable. But those seem to me to always be much less popular for a story and for players. And I do sometimes get the feeling that while different is cool, the tagline shouldn't be "DF from scratch - weird for the sake of weird".

I should think that creating things with the same name but different role in the story is fine. Such as you would make wolves or bears. Remaking the same stuff as is in vanilla is pointless, exactly as you said. Here I feel that those concepts of humans as a minority, mostly insignificant and either dark and dangerous or sad are sufficiently different to propose; they force the player to relate differently to humans; the latter concept even has your species auto-killing them as scum in fort mode. Their body mechanics wouldn't be the same made from these templates either. Definitely not vanilla. I also think that being able to play as a "human outsider" which a human civilization brings can make for amusing stories with that perspective.

So that's my point of view, but I want to distance myself from saying that as any sort of administrator here. Rather as one of the modders as my opinion of what kind of content we can make.

But the last word is of course that if the people who enjoy this setting largely feel that humans would detract from the setting then they probably shouldn't be made.

[WillowLuman]

You could make "Shadow civs" that don't actually exist in game but enable outsider play. Then you could have "The last human", or make a human community entirely out of adventurers. I support outsider player for humans, I just don't think we should allow them to form cities.

Another take would be to have them as some kind of mysterious "precursor" race, long since vanished but perhaps existing in small pockets. Possibly as underground "madmen" or something. Or just make them part of the roving creature population, appearing in groups sometimes in the 3rd cavern layer, and describe them as "The legendary big-folk, ancestors of the halflings. They ruled the world once long ago but have since declined such that some doubt they ever existed."

I still like my idea of megabeast human Knights from the last universe, though...
Also, another Megabeast idea:

It's out for a purpose. It shall take revenge for every merchant robbed by an adventurer, every Caravan destroyed and looted, every Elven trader blown off or offered wood. It is... THE CABBAGE MAN!

[Poldon]

I think it's okay to have them. Just because they're "humans" doesn't mean they're vanilla humans. We could make the cave-humans idea and change the name and tweak them a tiny bit and they wouldn't necessarily be recognizable as such. Really I don't mind, since they'll be a completely different thing from vanilla "humans" and built by a modder anyway. There's more to them than the name.

Speaking of which, I really like the cave-humans idea, though I'm more hesitant on the gunpowder part. I like things with little side touches, and humans being mysterious and deep in the caves is kinda cool. In fact I may like the mystery of it more than the backstory Halfling provided, but either way.

I don't really think we need another type of civilization on the surface at the moment though.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

I think it's okay to have them. Just because they're "humans" doesn't mean they're vanilla humans. We could make the cave-humans idea and change the name and tweak them a tiny bit and they wouldn't necessarily be recognizable as such. Really I don't mind, since they'll be a completely different thing from vanilla "humans" and built by a modder anyway. There's more to them than the name.

Speaking of which, I really like the cave-humans idea, though I'm more hesitant on the gunpowder part. I like things with little side touches, and humans being mysterious and deep in the caves is kinda cool. In fact I may like the mystery of it more than the backstory Halfling provided, but either way.

I don't really think we need another type of civilization on the surface at the moment though.

I'd prefer to keep humans out of this.  As it was said, this is a player-made, from-scratch universe.  If we add too much, we could wind up getting the feel of a modded DF, and I am pretty sure there will be quite a few whom do not like that.

Here's a better idea: rather than humans, why don't we use Neanderthals?

[Halfling]

No, I didn't by my first proposal mean for them to be noticeable on the surface either but specifically to exist in small pockets you can go visit. Maybe the rather random suggestion of 1000 pop got you the wrong idea (but even trolls tend to have limited worldgen success with such a low pop and they're much more fearsome in worldgen combat). In the first proposal they could be limited to say a population of 200 and form something like three sites, such as a few villages and one fortress if you want to be secure. That would be the idea.

Most probably think "fortress mode" only. But in adventurer mode, specifically, having a large number of races you can meet with small geographical boundaries is a huge boon. Hence the adherents were a great addition too. It gives you places to go and things to do where normally the adventure wears pretty thin pretty fast. That's why I prefer suggestion #1 or both, they would be cool to meet and greet.

Megabeast knights are cool too. You could have both. You could have all three. You could also have the last surviving humans use the night creature mechanic to go on rampages and capture humanoid beings to breed with... if you're like that.

It's out for a purpose. It shall take revenge for every merchant robbed by an adventurer, every Caravan destroyed and looted, every Elven trader blown off or offered wood. It is... THE CABBAGE MAN!

wat