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There are 79 more tasks left until the dwarf game is complete. Some of them are rather large.
While I'm working on that, I set up a Dwarf Page with a movie player on it and some movies you can download. The movie files are fairly large, but the player itself comes with one of a river through the woods, and I've put the movie files in different bundles so you don't need to download the ones you aren't interested in.
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Eh.. what exactly is going on in "humancamps"?
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That dragon... DAAAAAMN! Is it even possible to win against something wiping out so many troops so quickly? What would happen if say, 2 or maybe even 3 (oh the humanity!) were to attack at the same time?
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79 tasks ey? Say, how many tasks do you make per day, since I am like "damn I want to play this"
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In human camps, the humans have entered the map and are sieging the dwarf fortress (offscreen to the right). The first thing they do is chop down trees and make camp fires.
Dragons are hard to kill, but it is possible to kill them with one shot from a crossbow, or one weapon strike, if you are lucky. It's a bit easier inside where you can subject them to traps and their fire can be stopped by winding corridors.
How many days per task, really...
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Oooooh traps... that word always makes my day a bit brighter when it comes to strategy games. *curses at those damned trapimmune units in the WC3 map called Minotaurs Maze*
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This game looks great. It's probably also the first ever ASCII game to get FMV previews.
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He he he. Yeah, it almost looks done... alas... those who are in your teens, hold on until your twenties... those in your twenties, your thirties... others, cling to life as you are able...
It should be pretty fun though.
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Oh, I should also say that the movies might be displaying the wrong ascii characters for some people, since I use the higher order ones from 128-255. I still haven't found a Windows fix for this (although Kevin has for linux). I'm not sure, but ever since Angband added tile support, it seems they just use their own fonts and render the ascii characters themselves, graphically. I might end up doing the same thing with Open GL. It would be a sad day...
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That movie with the dragon was pretty nifty. Kinda neat to see it slowly approach the army and poof! Bye-bye army.
What's it gonna be like inside the mountain fortress?
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Two Questions:
1. What is a Jackalope? I remember planet black and white mentioning them in their mailbag.2. I'm in my teens (19) so does that mean that the game will be realesed when I hit 20 (in less than 10 months)
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Behold! Mortal!
(http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/day/dayimages/jackalope.jpg)
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*Averts his eyes from the glory*
Hell, I think 10 months might be possible. Who knows anymore...
You mean what's the game gonna be like inside the mountain fortress? Or what's the dragon gonna be like? I could make an inside movie.
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So does this game play out at the speed of those movies?? Can you alter the speed? Or is it actually turn based?
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The game looks exactly like the movies (assuming they ran at the proper speed -- about 10 seconds long). You can pause the game at any time, but most of the time you'll just want to keep it running. I've still got to tweak battle options, and things like that -- setting the speed is straight-forward to code (at least making it slower), and it will probably be part of commanding battles if you don't just pause the game outright.
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quote:
Originally posted by Toady One:
<STRONG>You mean what's the game gonna be like inside the mountain fortress? Or what's the dragon gonna be like? I could make an inside movie.</STRONG>
Well, both! I meant actually the mountain fortress but I kinda wanna see the dragon destroy the rest of the army. :P Sure, make some inside movies if it takes like only 4 seconds but don't if it takes lots of coding or whatever. You need your time to work on the actual game. :P
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Okay, I'll be relaxed about it. Next time I'm working with a larger city in testing, I'll try to remember press the movie capture button :) Might be a while before I'm at that point again -- doing microlevel stuff now that doesn't need the big city complications.
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Will players be able to record movies of their mighty dwarves laying the smackdown on dragons or is it just something for testing?
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I don't see any reason why not -- it would be good for debugging! I should probably get the file format to be smaller though. There's a ton of redundant info in those files.
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zlib
X
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Cool. On top of that, I just saved each frame for expediency -- it would be easy to switch over to changing cell changes if the cell changelist is smaller than a frame would be. That would probably take most of these movies down to 10%-20% of the size.
Edit: looks like compression should do even better -- I'm getting 8megs down to 70KB now. We'll see if it lasts through the implementation.
[ September 04, 2004: Message edited by: Toady One ]
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8 megs to 70kb? Sweet... Best feature evar!
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Thank master X for that. Like I said, this was only a test and I'm not sure what the real ratio will be from zlib, but it should be something very close to that.
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Is this using deflate() or just the WinRar guestimate? Anyway...
X
(gets back to writing essay)
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This was only the rarstimate.
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Now with deflate we are averaging 75-80KB for 13 sec, so not bad... and that's saving every single frame (1000/13 secs).
[ September 14, 2004: Message edited by: Toady One ]
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But when will the game be done!? :p
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Eight years.
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Human or dog years? :D
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Giant tortoise. But seriously, the Toad makes good progress. I, by contrast, have done nothing of note for the past 2 weeks.
Zip
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yes, toad is good...
*lick*
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I... am very confused. I have not posted for several days since I was logged out, why I don't know, and I tried logging back on and the forum said there was no account by that name, and now when I finally decide "Heck, I'm gonna make yet another new account and THIS time write the name and pw down" and I click register and I'm logged in... The cloud of confusement attacked me!
Anyways, how is everything going? Any new movies? A demo? Is the online shop for Dwarf Fortress Mousepads online yet? And why do I have so many questions? And will you be able to go to war outside your fortress?
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Here is a few more!
How many resources will there be?
There was quite a building list in the Carpenter movie if one bothered to slow down and check, how many builds are there?
How does the game handle inside buildings, will it be strict room sizes or kinda like dungeon keeper placement?
How large can the fortress/population become?
And here is the question everyone wants to answer for, will Kurtulmak be in the game with a horde of kobolds?
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Fine thanks; nope, but zlib support is in, so smaller in future; not for quite a while yet I'm afraid; ehehe, nice idea; becuase you're over eager; yes 'outside', but not very far.
Lots, but this isn't some kinda warcraft have them all displayed at the top of the screen thing; also lots, but again, this ain't rts as such; moar dungeon keeper styley, I had a feeling one of the movies showed this; pretty big, but each dwarf is rather detailed; and yes, kobolds are in. Tolk will be crying.X
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And now, before my sugar high completely vanishes and rational thinking prevents me from asking this question. Can we get a serious (as in, not joking or completely fake) and fairly accurate (like, this month, next month, month after next month) release date? I understand that any eventual release date you say can and probably will be changed, but just so I have something in the future to look forward to instead of work, work, work, work and some more work, with a hint of work.
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I think they're serious about the 8 years thing.
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He he he.
Since I started this thread, the task number has dropped from 79 to 77, but the planning file size has dropped from ~1520 lines to 1415 lines.
The planning file has the format:
Task A
*thing
**subthing
**subthing
*thing
*thing
Task B
*thing
*thing
Both of these indicators have their problems. I might do some things from one task and then some things from another, which doesn't decrease the task number at all. On the other hand, the number of lines in the planning file is only a rough estimate -- there are whole paragraphs that are easy to do, and a few lines that will take a week by themselves.
Anyway, it has been like 23 days since the thread started, so by the indicators:
Task Number -- 2 complete in 23 days, 77 left -> 77*11.5 days left = 885 or something days left. So say, 2 1/2 years.
Planning Lines -- 105 complete in 23 days, 1415 left -> 1415*~.22 = ~310 days left.
On the other hand, I think the last ~900 or so lines will go quite a bit faster than the next 500, but who knows. It depends on a lot of things.
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My poor heart... I'm getting an heart attack... *dies from the shock of the thought of waiting 310 days for DF*
Btw do ya need a beta tester? *signs up for beta testing*
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Bah. You plan too much. I'd just toss my body at the compiler with no plan whatsoever, get ripped to shreds by the evil thing (bad experiences here), and use the holodeck in heaven if I wanted to program. :D
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quote:
Originally posted by The_Ancient_Sleeping_Dude:
<STRONG>Btw do ya need a beta tester? *signs up for beta testing*</STRONG>
These games get beta tested? I thought we were, er, all beta testers. Sort of.
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Well it's more like alpha testing then, I try it out first to see if it's ready for beta testing :P
Although I have to convince toadyone of the wisdom of my words... Maybe a glass of hot chocolate and a chocolate chip cookie will help?
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Hey, if you guys are handing out alphas, sign me up. Grenny wanna burn some Elves.
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While we wait, how about sending out some more movies, or some extensive info, or something like that? Please?
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Ok, since I am back from the mental hospital (no joke, I've really been there) now, I have a few new questions, and none of them is release date related (wink wink nudge hint):
As seen in dig and carpenter, digging is done by selecting an area in a fairly dunger keeperish manner, and the carpenter seems to be a fix size rts building, is there any buildings like that that have the ability to be varied sizes like in dungeon keeper (build a circle shaped lair or just a long line etc etc)?
As seen in the carpenter movie, there are armor stand and weapon racks, does this mean that your dwarves have to run to get equipment before they are able to defend the fortress?
Will dwarves have their own equipment such as 'this dwarf has an axe +4 +4 and this one has an crossbow of accuracy', or are they dependant on the equipment racks/stands?
Will the dwarves get older? Would seem kinda bad if 20 of your most elite dwarves died from old age just before one of those Dragons attacked... *shudder*
Are what attacks the dwarf fortress completely random or can you trigger invasions somehow? Having that Dragon attacking just in the beginning when you have just managed to build a carpenter seems kinda overkill.
Will there be a King Dwarf that is a considerably more experienced and powerful dwarf or are the leader sitting on a cloud above the fortress commanding his troops like it was a game of some kind... *cough*
Gold. Loot. Booty. Call it what you will, but will you be able to loot say, the human invaders for equipment and valuebles, and will there be some sort of treasure vault containing all your gold/gems/etc? And will dwarves have their own gold, or do they all stash at said vault?
Will the dwarves all sleep in large barracks (lairs from dungeon keeper style) or will they each want their own bed in maybe even their own room? And what options for food is there? Can one farm indoors perhaps?
Will there be diplomacy and trading with other civilazations? I'm sure those humans would be nicer and not invade if the dwarves traded some of their nice equipment for gold or other stuff.
Will there be mages laying waste to the enemy troops in fireballs, caveins, etc?
Will you have the ability to make a dugged up area be filled with rock like before you digged it?
Will the enemy have diggers?
Will there be several levels that one can build on, and will there be enemies present inside the mountain, such as those goblins and balrog in LotR?
Resources, trees are gotten from chopping that I can understand, but will they regrow? And iron and other resources, are there veins of these resources or are there like, neverending rock filled with iron that one can mine forever?
That's all I can think of now. Please give a tad more extensive answers with preferably more than 3 words.
Here are a few extras I came to think of, and that is what the various symbols is. In the carpenter movie, you start with 1 bright white dwarf, 3 gray and 1 yellow, what kind of dwarves are those?
And how many kinds are there? What are those small c that seems to be running around the yellow dwarf (builder dwarf?)?
There also seems to be some sort of resource cache north of the dwarves, consisting of 6 % (iron?), an u with an ´over, and a spade thingie. What are the different kinds of resources?
There also seems to be a great deal of , and ´ inside the mountain itself, what are those?
[ October 15, 2004: Message edited by: The_Ancient_Sleeping_Dude ]
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There are currently four types of rooms (bedroom, dining room, throne room, tomb) that you can size variably, in addition to roads and bridges. The fixed size rooms are built from parts -- the four variable rooms are just designations that you make from say, a bed, but you don't build anything additional.
Soldiers can carry equipment, but yeah, units don't just have some kind of default weapon attack. Everybody has an inventory. There is lots of puttering around.
Dwarves get older, but the time scale is not likely to be an issue. At most, you might have a child reach adulthood once during your game. Old age probably won't be an issue, though it does happen.
It isn't finished yet, but attacks are controlled by plot events and diplomacy and gandalfy-type-world-event-stuff. You shouldn't have to worry about being randomly wasted without warning, though it might happen very occasionally.
The king will live with you if you deserve it. You do command which buildings are built and a few other details. You are something like a mayor or manager, though you don't have a unit specifically. There are some units that represent those functions, and if they die you lose the menus until you get replacements.
You build chests/bags/boxes and can store things you make in them. Attackers can be looted, and you can trade with other groups.
Each dwarf can be assigned a room. Non-soldiers get pissed a bit if they don't have one. Once you start making coins, they are compensated for their work and can trade them for treasures that they like. There are all kinds of food. You can make alcohol from lots of plants, and farm some things by the cave river. I haven't worked out livestock yet, if it'll be there.
Yes, there is trading, and there will be diplomacy. I haven't done much diplomacy yet, but it is one of the tasks.
You can currently be on the receiving end of some magic. This is one of those things that gets bloated up near the end. Dwarves can currently make special items, but the rest of their details I'm still working on.
You can't fill in tunnels exactly as they were before, but you can put up stone supports to block in previously tunneled areas.
The enemy does not have diggers now, since this would essentially ruin the game -- too much depends on the fortress layout, I can't allow it to be altered flippantly. However, since you can't fill in tunnels, enemies always have access to your fortress by breaking down doors/supports etc. They don't build bridges yet, but on the other hand, sieges would be quite effective at most stages of the game.
There are some enemies in the mountain. There is only one "level" since it makes the interface easier on the player, but there are different flavors as you dig more to the right.
Trees regrow somewhat each season. Once a resource in the mountain is mined, it is gone. However, you won't run out -- if you dig out most of the map, the game is set up to have naturally run its course by that time.
Currently, bright white = mason, gray = miner, yellow = carpenter.
The c is the carpenter's pet cat.
There are something like 45 kinds of dwarves (using three symbols and fifteen colors), but many more professions and tasks -- the color of a dwarf reflects its best skill, but they do whatever jobs you want them to do and can change types as their skills improve.
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First of all, thanks for all the detailed answers :)
Naturally run its course? Well, since there aint nothing left to mine I guess it makes your economy get shot to kingdom come.
I had some suggestions on special gameplay modes, well actually only two. One where you trigger invasions yourself, and no other invasions take place, and the other has unlimited gametime with having sort of special rooms way deep inside the mountain where miners can enter to mine a particular resource type, such as a mine shaft but there is no complicated switching between levels. They enter, stay inside based on their needs and mining skill, and then they come out with resources.
Maybe some sort of extra difficult mode, starting with maybe less resources, maybe a more hostile political climate or something like that.
By the way, how long are each game, say start from scratch til a mapcovering fortress have been achieved?
Now let's mourn the loss of our dear Alizgöhlaliz (the dwarven fisherman in the BigD movie).
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quote:
Originally posted by The_Ancient_Sleeping_Dude:
<STRONG>Naturally run its course? Well, since there aint nothing left to mine I guess it makes your economy get shot to kingdom come.</STRONG>
I suspect, given the way that he's described it until now, that what really happens is more like a sort of diminishing returns. The "deeper" (i.e. further right) you go, the nastier the monsters you fight. Thus, beyond a certain point you'll be worrying less about reaching the last few bits of mithril than you will about the gigantic Balrog-types you're unleashing every time you try to mine for one.Think of it like Moria from Tolkien's LoTR. It doesn't really matter whether there's a finite amount of ore or not when trying to mine too deeply invariably kills you.
(That said, I must confess that an infinitely deep mine has a certain attractiveness to it; but I don't see how it could be easily worked into what has been described so far.)
Anyway, maybe we should wait until version 1.0 comes out and we get a chance to play it before we make any more suggestions. It sounds like he has quite enough on his plate with regards to this game as it is.
[ October 16, 2004: Message edited by: Aquillion ]
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Yeah, just like the dwarves in Moria, you're going to have to learn to embrace inevitable death. I have enough little bits planned to make this a not-bad thing though.
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Well, Ive been up for more than a day now, and now comes the part where I ask for a release date, with a semi-joke threath considering whips and what not... but what the heck, I'll skip it for this time, and that's cause I've got coca cola to drink. You dodged a bullet man :P
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Actually what I meant by infinite mine can be compared to the gem blocks in DK2, you mine it, and it doesn't run out. But you're right probably, let's wait for release before we start pestering toady with ides on how to change it.
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quote:
(That said, I must confess that an infinitely deep mine has a certain attractiveness to it; but I don't see how it could be easily worked into what has been described so far.)
Sounds like a good mod to me.
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Hmm. Maybe instead of having one infinitely deep mine, you could somehow be able to take a few survivors and supplies from the abandoned ruins of your mined-out first mine, and go set up a second one--in other words, sort of like what happened with regards to Moria in LoTR.
But I'm already going against what I said before, which is that I ought to wait until the game is out before I make suggestions for it. Oh well. Throwing out random ideas is fun.
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Let's start a betting pool for a release date. I put 50 neopoints on between 20th of January and 20th of February.
Btw waiting for this game has become alot easier for one big reason. I have finally accepted the fact that it might take a while.
[ October 20, 2004: Message edited by: The_Ancient_Sleeping_Dude ]
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20th of January would sound good.
It's my birthday, I turn 19 on that day. What a great possibility to give me a kind of birthday present, eh Toady? *wink wink*
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19 I already be, but even my famous patience will bend and break under the pressure if it would have to wait til my birthday, which I wont reveal which date it might be.
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quote:
Originally posted by Toady One:
<STRONG>There is lots of puttering around.</STRONG>
...you said puttering. Nya!
quote:
Originally posted by The Same Guy:
<STRONG>Each dwarf can be assigned a room. Non-soldiers get pissed a bit if they don't have one.</STRONG>
Even lowly dwarves complain about barracking?
quote:
Originally posted by Still The Same Idiot:
<STRONG>You can't fill in tunnels exactly as they were before, but you can put up stone supports to block in previously tunneled areas.The enemy does not have diggers now, since this would essentially ruin the game -- too much depends on the fortress layout, I can't allow it to be altered flippantly.</STRONG>
I'm sure this can be elegantly handled.
quote:
Originally posted by The_Ancient_Sleeping_Dude:
<STRONG>I had some suggestions on special gameplay modes, well actually only two.</STRONG>
I've discussed different modes with the Toad before, and I'm sure we will come to some... arrangement. Much of the rest is covered by this.
quote:
Originally posted by Aquillion:
<STRONG>But I'm already going against what I said before, which is that I ought to wait until the game is out before I make suggestions for it. Oh well. Throwing out random ideas is fun.</STRONG>
You're a dangerous man.
quote:
Originally posted by Aristharus:
<STRONG>It's my birthday, I turn 19 on that day. What a great possibility to give me a kind of birthday present, eh Toady? *wink wink*</STRONG>
Ehehe. At any rate guys, we need to peel Toad away from his dooks before we can make good guesses on release dates.
X
[Edit: Formating is fun]
[ October 20, 2004: Message edited by: X ]
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dooks? if you mean books, I got an excellent way to peel him away from em. I simply threathen to burn all his books up! MWAHAHAHAHAHA! What? No pyromancy allowed? Fine, I threathen to throw them into my room :)
I'm sure the bugs and whatnot under my bed would be enlightened by some books to eat. That dog they ate last only made them bark all night, I'd rather have em discuss philosophy or maths.
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me too.
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Keep this in mind, guys. Even through we can implore, beg and threaten Toady to tell us an (early) release date and obey it, he's still the one with all the power here.
We don't want to get The Great One angry, do we?
Imagine what horrible things would happen then! No Armok 0.05 or any updates to LCS EVER! No Dwarf Fortress!!1 :eek:
So, let's just wait patiently and hope for the best. And okay, maybe beg him a little not to forget us completely, but...
[ October 22, 2004: Message edited by: Aristharus ]
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I already got one god pissed off at me, I don't think another one will do much difference. I can see a new goal in my life. Piss of as many gods as possible before getting hit by lightning!
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quote:
From the Pratchett Quote File<STRONG>"Let's just say that if complete and utter chaos was lightning, he'd be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting 'All gods are bastards'."</STRONG>
X
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(http://www.bay12games.com/imgs/dooks.PNG)
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I knew he's a god. He's created a new race..
Oh lo and behold, dooks![Edit: Cool, Terry Pratchett's at least a demi-god too]
[ October 23, 2004: Message edited by: Aristharus ]
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They're scary, but subtly awesome in a stoner-like way. O.O
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It's just plain scary to me.
Ewugh....
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They make me want to get some serious firepower... Bet those scary little thingies are bulletproof though :(
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So... what's happening? Complete and utter silence it has been on the dwarf side for quite some time.
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Maybe Toady tried to delve too deep into his code and got eaten by a Balrog.
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I should get down to 1326 or so today. The process continues.
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Ok, was just wondering. Thanks for the quick reply :)
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Can you add one thing to the todo list? A special attack for all axedwarves called Skull Splitter, cause my head is killing me atm with an headache, and this is the most funny joke I can relate to it :(
That's how bad it is...
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1274... might be stalled for a few days due to the post-doc application process...
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post what? But wow, making nice progress.
about 50 in 4 days... thats 12.5 in 1 day. Around 100 days then we can all play dwarves! YaY!
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So you got your PhD then??
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I'm scheduled to get it at the end of the academic year (MayJune-ish), so I've got to apply for jobs now. It'll be a long time before I actually know where I'll end up.
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oh so that was what post doc something was.
Cool, now you'll make tons of money so that you can not only give us games, but cash as well :P
Anyways, congrats on the PhD (in advance)
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Congratz!! What's your thesis on?
I'm taking a 400 level course on differential equations next semester, it promises to be extra special fun!
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Yeah, that stuff is fun. What does 400 translate too? PDE stuff? Advanced ODE?
The thesis is on... flat chains in banach spaces! Great fun. The main thing was to prove the existence of minimal surfaces in non-euclidean vector spaces. Now I just need a job!
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400 level stuff means that it's an advanced course for an undergrad. Basically, you take them for your major and minor. I'm still going for a minor in math, despite hating things like vector spaces! :p
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400 level? Jesus, anything to sound big. Would take me YEARS to get to level 400 in Progress Quest
X
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That game is hard.
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I just made level 16! Woo! But you have to consider, it took me 20 years to get to 400 level courses. That's a lot of progress!
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Funny, I'm at 16 too now :P
Damn addictive automated game!
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Bwah, Level 54.
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Sent out 38 apps today. A few more to go, but I'm back to dwarfing. 1270.
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Hi ho
Hi ho
More coding to go
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If I know toady one as well as I do, he has already coded those 1270 lines in a coding spree started by to much caffeine and sugar.
Also, during said coding spree he managed to think up 15,000 new issues, bringing the line count well over the 100,000 mark... Dwarf fortress comes out next millenia boys and girls :)
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1251, dum de dum... there were some coding sprees, but it's slow moving all the way to the end. Caffeine and sugar were still involved.
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at a rate of 19 on 2 days, thats 9.5 a day... *does some math*
131 Days :)
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But if we assigned four dwarves to help him, it would go five times as fast... 27 days!
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but are there a Coder Dwarf class in dwarf fortress? And why assign 4 when we can assign 20?
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Coder dwarves have poor combat values vs software bugs. The value gets lower with each additional dwarf and hour worked.
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ummmm... throw in some red dragons to team up with the dwarves? I'd like to see any software bugs survive that, low combat rolls for the dwarves or not...
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The dragons have that flame weapon from Corin's Mystery Massacre. That makes for some very interesting friendly fire.
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Perhaps the Toad will do best without their dubious assistance...
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1207... doobedo dum de doobedo... slow... drip... sroppy drip drop...
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160ish days... my god it's worse than emule!
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1184. A good little run there!
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wow, 51 days! Just like emule :)
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1157... dumdedumdeumdmmdm...
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It's amazing what achivements can be made with Ozanari Dungeon being dangled in front of your nose.
X (Level 57 btw peeps)
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What the Hell is "Ozanari Dungeon"?
(So help me, if you tell me it is some console styled romp to help some farm boy rescue some princess named "Miyoko" or something, I am going to videotape myself and four friends beheading one of those Final Fantasy Characters and post it to YOUR web site!)
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It's a degenerate 80s fantasy cartoon. Although it was really Azumanga Daioh that pulled me to 1137... too much anime lately...
So, 1137. The continuing effort, etc. On December 21st I'm leaving for Christmas for ~12 days. I'd like to get to the mid 900s by then.
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care to give an estimate on how many lines of code the finished game may have?
it'd be interesting to see how far you are from your estimate when it's finished.
[ November 30, 2004: Message edited by: Silleh Boy ]
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Only the mid 900's? By tASD's last estimate it should be half done by then! :p
The first post mentioned that there were just 79 tasks. Would you mind posting the tasks that are remaining?
Demon (Level 41)
[ November 30, 2004: Message edited by: Demon ]
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There are 69 tasks left now, but it would be massively spoily to post any of them.
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How about posting just the topics?
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Plot stuff, bugs, bugs, better army fights, interface, improved combat mechanics, interface, saving/loading, title screen stuff, easter egg, easter egg, easter egg, easter egg, easter egg, stuff, easter egg, things, stuff, easter egg, stuff, things, stuff, topics, easter egg, stuff, stuff, easter egg, things, stuff, easter egg, various, things, stuff, easter egg, things, stuff, title screen stuff, stuff, easter egg, easter egg, things, stuff, various, easter egg, things, things, stuff, easter egg, things, stuff, easter egg, stuff, things, easter egg, things, things, things, stuff, easter egg, stuff, various, topics, things, high score related, high score related, high score related, high score related, music/sound, tutorials and instructions
Or something. The easter eggs, various, stuff, topics and things are related and required, but I'm not going into it. There will probably be more bug sessions as well.
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Actually, I can flesh out the first four a bit, since I've been doing it on #bay12games:
Plot stuff -- relations between the different civs that neighbor you and diplomats involving you in their civ's nonsense, gandalfy-type people getting you into world changing stuff, smaller random plot effects
Bugs 1 -- crash bug, fix to flowing water, change the rock layout on the map, easter egg, fix melting down of metal items, fix bug w/ bridge destruction, implement some items I missed, larger gates, easter egg, display bug, a dwarf can keep mining if it loses its pick mid-job, some pet effects, container bug, chained animal bug, pond filling bug, more cat antics, arrow slit bug, item stacking bug, livestock change
Bugs 2 -- caring for sick dwarves, improved soldier weapon choice, make alcoholic dwarves carry liquor, weapon penalties while working, speed optimization, personalities customization, equipment bugs, a few new item jobs, some purchasing bugs, preferences for foreign materials, improved kobold code, memleak
Army Fights -- improve how enemies mill around, break buildings and steal things, customize special forces and powers of leaders, bug with leader item choice, improve morale and running away, some invasion bugs, fix some ambush bugs, improve squad tactics, training options, army and cave easter eggs
That gets me to something like 970, roughly.
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will we be able to thow these gandalfy-type people out of the mountain, to save ourselves from getting into even more trouble than we wish?
will we be able to banish people from our mountain at will, and then either have to deal with their refusal, or possible alienate the civilisation they're associated with?
will we occasionally get 'urgent messages' from the drunkard dwarves who have run out of their favoured ambrosia, and decide that replacing it is a priority?
will we be able to petrify some of the hostile foes with a special magic weapon and use them as items for decoration or trade?
will we be able to order dwarves to strip down and run past enemy lines to lower their moral?
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This game is starting to sound complicated beyond reason! Are you sure your ... dubious interfaces and ... creative manuals are up to the task? :p
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Nope, not sure. Perhaps I should structure the whole game like corin...
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Right now you can tell the gandalfy person to leave in a threatening fashion and refuse his demands. I'm not sure how I'm change this.
Other diplomacy is being worked out right now. I hope not to ever force the player down a path (force in the sense that you are compelled mechanically to do it, even if not doing it kills you).
Right now the alcoholic dwarves work slower, become depressed, then either beat up their friends or jump in the river.
Magic item effects are all very up in the
air right now.
Also:
I missed a number of things in Bugs 2 -- improve tantrums, finish families, set up social events, bloat up the natural world (trees, animals, etc.)
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If you give it an corin interface, I will KILL you! And your dog! And the cat! And then totally own the game even though it is in corin interface then sell it to aliens as sexual aid toys!
Point being: No corin interface!
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Sounds like the dwarves seriously suck when exposed to booze. I suppose they will be even worse off if no booze is supplied at all? :roll:
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Oh, sorry. The effects above were for a dwarf that gets no booze. Although I imagine a drunken dwarf might act much the same way... except the dwarf might not be depressed... I need a random drinking song generator...
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So I imagine the first thing that gets built will be a brewery regardless of your orders?
I hope you can find one of those rings for the dwarf lords in the game! They're supposed to make you insanely rich!
So, this Gandalfy person is not called Gandalf?
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Last I herd the name will be rodneY.
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The wizard names will be random. After all, a wizard might not be Gandalfy, but Sarumany. Then the decisions you make would be different, at least eventually, but you could be fooled at first.
Artifact-type items are an important part of the game.
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You should so name enemy rulers, enemy generals and plot characters after forum members :P
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quote:
Originally posted by Toady One:
<STRONG>*Averts his eyes from the glory*Hell, I think 10 months might be possible. Who knows anymore...
You mean what's the game gonna be like inside the mountain fortress? Or what's the dragon gonna be like? I could make an inside movie.</STRONG>
Can we get one of those though?
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Inside the dragon or the fortress?
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The dragon can latch on if it bites and tear off chunks and hurl them, but I don't think it ever actually swallows. If you move the look cursor over to that spot where it lands, and it isn't a whole limb, it says "Dwarf chunks".
I'm still hanging out around 1135. I'm going to try to blast through that today.
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We so need dwarf swallowing dragons. If anything it will cut down the need for tombs...
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Grading exams tomorrow. The quarter is drawing to a close. 1127 now. It's all pretty slowing going down through the mid-low 900s. Then it might speed up a bit for a while, until it grinds to a halt near the end. 90/10 rule?
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Sewage systems? Will we be forced to deal with it?
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There are no plans to add "night soil". Dwarves poop little pebbles which seemlessly disappear into the cavern floor, or they collect them and cherish them or something.
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It's definately sand! :D
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Dwarves can use sand and potash to make clear glass, or just sand to make green class (they can also use rock crystal to make crystal glass I think).
I guess dwarf poop sand would make brown glass.
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Will there be greater evils in the game? No puny ones such as "orcs" or "goblins" or "imps" or small stuff like that, I'm talking maybe a Greater Balrog leading an army of maybe 30-40 lesser ones?
Is there some sort of extra evil faction? Sure, Sauron was evil and wanted to conquer it all, but I'm talking pure evil that will turn the entire world (starting with the dwarf fortress so they wont have time to build to a great demon army) into a black ashfilled place of eternal misery for the few things left alive?
And will there alignment of some kind? Can you perhaps be dark dwarves whom occasionally let's the weaker or greater evils pass through your lands or maybe even help them with warriors/supplies?
Will there be any "good" invaders? Maybe a dozen or two ents? Maybe an army of High Elves? (btw, does LotR have that distiction between elves, or is it just good or dark elves?)
And here are 3 mini questions for you. Out of the 79 tasks, which did you finish last, which are you working on now, and which will be the next one? Not asking for the number, more like the topic.
And will there be cookies?
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Yeah.
Different things, anyway.
Not as a default.
If you mess up. Tolkien had many distinct elves, based on which leader they followed and whether they saw some special shiny trees in the west.
I just finished trade agreements, am working on human diplomacy and some diplomacy bugs, and will be moving on to world events gandalfy diplomacy.
Probably cookies -- right now there are meat, fish, cheese, biscuits, stew, mushrooms, sugar, syrup... and lots of other things. Things like biscuits that are made from the other things are just names on top of the food item that is made by the cook, so cookies and whatever else can be thrown in rapidly as pointless game bloating.
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are there llama's implimented into the game, and if not, will there be?
i just want to have llama riding, dwarven knights.
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So, this game is sounding really detailed. Does one instruct each dwarf on matters? make a list of things you want done? Very abstract like "60% focused on making money, 20% military training, 20% digging?"
I think in a movie it showed the placement of a building site. Will the dwarves do things like make sleeping quarters out of empty rooms for themselves?
Can we get a new movie or two? :D
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I was thinking of having pandas. Some of the humans could bring them. Panda Papanda Kopanda! Panda Papanda Kopanda!
I've been too lazy working on the game to record more movies, since X wants me to make the new compression format first and that'll take a few hours to finalize. What else is there to see? All the stuff I'm doing now is so dry, and none of the interfaces are final.
It's very micromanagey right now -- you give the dwarves professions and make buildings, and give the buildings jobs (or assign general jobs which the game assigns to free buildings). The buildings then grab dwarves that are free to do work. It seems to work out, but it'll probably undergo significant changing before it sees the light of day. If dwarves are left to their own devices, they just eat, drink and chat in the meeting halls, or mill around by the gate. I don't have them working on their own because resources are scarce and you'll want to probably allocate them in your own way. Nothing final though.
Dwarves prefer to sleep in beds in rooms of their own, but they don't require it (unless they are nobles, etc.). You can make a barracks-type room with a bunch of beds, then they'll go for those. Otherwise they'll just crash on the floor, and get angry about it. They also hate to be rudely awakened by other dwarves working nearby. I don't remember what else. They prefer to eat in chairs at tables, they don't like sharing tables but they will, and they really hate having to eat without furniture. If both of their arms are broken and they can't pick up the food and they eat it off the ground they get really pissed, but that shouldn't happen so much once I put the care-for-the-wounded code in.
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So add female nurse dwarves for those dwarves who got both their arms broken... I blame the kobolds, who else would rob the dwarves off their ability to drink straight out of the coca cola bottle? Oh wait, thats me that drinks that way, I mean. I blame the kobolds, who else would rob the dwarves off their ability to drink straight out of the coca cola bottle? Oh wait, that's WAIT A MINUTE! Ok, last try! Who else would rob the dwarves of their ability to drink straight out of the wine bottle? Now there better be wine in the game, cause I'm out of talking attempts!
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The dwarves can ferment almost all of the plant life you can find. So far there are 12 different types of alcohol (3 or 4 wines), and there will doubtless be more.
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will particularly irate dwarves be possible to convert into berserkers?
of course, it'd be dangerous to have such dwarves around, as someone looks at them funny or sits at their table and you'd have a bloodbath.
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It already happens... but the bloodbath happens regardless of what anyone else does. They throw tantrums first, so there's time to help them out. Sometimes they become depressed and drown themselves or thrown off their clothes and run around randomly instead.
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So can you have psychologist dwarves wandering around, saying inspirational words?
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You help them by making more things for them to acquire, giving them rooms and letting them work more. Stuff like that.
Although there are philosopher dwarves. Their role hasn't been fleshed out yet, but that's kind of like real life.
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can the two happen at the same time, so we get violent, naked dwarves running about?
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I don't think the berserk people take off their clothes, actually. Oh well.
I'm going for 1104 tonight. Let's see if I can make it.
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Ummmm... I think ya kinda went overboard with the booze... I mean, the max types of booze I've seen in any other game is 3 kinds, and that was covering 3 entire teams.
12 kinds ey? Is there any Bjork Booze? Bush Booze? Grass Booze? Actually, come to think of it, does the dwarves also make tobacco for their pipes? or other stuff for the pipes? Oh! I got an idea for the most powerful (and expensive) drug the dwarves can make. The main ingridient is the fungus harvested from between the toes of the Elder Black Dragons! You do have several types/sizes of dragons?
The Rabid Lunatic Non Naked Berserker Rabid Ale Donkey Has Spoken.
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I just got to 1087. Woot.
Tolk was heavy into having his critters smoking, so I've thought about it a bit. I think it should probably be a trade good that the dwarves get from hobbits via humans. Then, like alcohol, you'll need to keep your supplies up to support the vices of your community. Dwarves might make their own pipes, or import them too perhaps.
Dragons are fairly boring now, but they are slated to be improved ~1000, and also in the lower numbers.
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When you said 'hobbits' there, you meant "short hairy-toed humanoids whose name happens to begin with an 'h' but has no direct literary source whatsoever," right? Because I've heard the Tolkien estate is pretty touchy about that.
Balrogs, too.
[ December 11, 2004: Message edited by: Aquillion ]
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Yeah, gnomes and Satan.
Thanks for bringing that up by the way, I wasn't being appropriately mindful.
[ December 11, 2004: Message edited by: Toady One ]
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Copyrights... PFFFT! Just go sue them for using paranormal abilities to predict the future and the game you are coding atm, then choose the names of the creatures you was gonna use, all in an attempt to both sue you and to make your product less valuable, meaning you wont get hired by blizzard which in turn will make sure that you don't help code Warcraft V, which in turn removes strategic lessons for all the youngsters out there making the AI's plan for world domination MUCH easier to pull off... Or the pizza I just ate was past the expiration date...
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Will dwarves be able to plant any type of grass, bush, tree, fungi?
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The dwarves grow cave-y plants inside by the river when it floods (kind of a weird indoors flood-plain set up). Growing outdoors seemed out of character. They can still forage for food outside if they are starving, but it's not likely to please them. They can trade for above ground plant products.
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You said the dwarves could ferment almost any type of plant life. What plant could the dwarves possibly not ferment!?
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A gnarly bush that grows nuts, a small herb and a poisonous bulb. I have vague plans for these things, but they didn't come up in fermentation.
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I so know what those 3 plants do. The nuts are explosive, giving the dwarves bazookas when they use the nuts as ammo for slings. The herb is part of the Potion of Omnipotence, and the bulb thingie is the one thing Balrog hates... gives them the hiccups. Do you know how annoying it is for firebreathing (not to mention semi-made out of fire) creatures to have the hiccups?
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is there any chance for dwarves to spill their chosen intoxicating beverage, fly into a berserk rage, kill everybody in the immediate vicinity and then mourn for the loss of their drink?
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I dont think dwarves are *THAT* alcoholic. After all, is there yet to be a dwarf that hasn't spilled a drink in his or her life? And what effects would that have on the gameplay? Just think of one of your most skilled battle-dwarves spilling his drinks and going on said berserker rampage killing spree... No more dwarf fortress for sure!
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I didn't make any individual accidents like that. Drunkeness isn't done. I'm not sure how it will manifest itself.
Remember, no Balrog. Just "Demon" or... some other name. Like Snuggypoo. Or Tubbubbubble Sunshine. It'll be good.
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It should definately be "Demon" in honor of this guy. :D
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It's fine, just release a safe version with green blood and all the rest of the PC shit, and I'll release and unofficial patch that makes 'em Balrogs again etc.
X
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just use suitable hebrew-ish names and you've got Demons all sorted, name wise. i could probably PM you a site or two that would have names to give you ideas from, if you wanted.
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Nah, Blizzard is prolly using em... Remember seeing both Mephisto and Baal on such a list, so instead of tolkien suing you'd get blizzard instead... which is worse!
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You're safe with the Bible, no one has tried to copyright that yet. However, I'd be quite offended if Toad did use biblical demons, as the are mostly just the gods of rival tribes, or earlier civilisations. The winners write history, after all.
Ba'al - early Semitic origins, see also Berith, Beelzebub etcetc.
Lucifer - mistranslation of the bible!
Mephistopheles - made up by germans.
Diablo, of course, is just spanish.X
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Or do what dungeon crawldoes.
Make random names for the various demonic lords.
[ December 14, 2004: Message edited by: Captain_Action ]
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Crawl used to have a lot of DND/Dante type names. Maybe they changed it around.
My general policy before has been to use random names for things. All the individual creatures have them (except for deer, etc.), in 4 different languages (humans, elves, dwarves and goblins). Pets of a creature are named in that creatures language. Rather than the weird names from Armok, I'm using syllables that mean things and gluing them together, then I display the name with the translation. Sort of Tolkie again, but I'm not using his languages.
Edit: I think the point is not to come up with individual names, unless that serves as a replacement for all things you'd call "Balrogs" (ie you'd only meet a few, so we don't need a creature name). A Balrog is a class of creatures, hence the suggestion Demon. It's not that important though, as long as it isn't Balrog, or anything that can be construed to be a sufficiently Balrog-like within the legal framework.
[ December 14, 2004: Message edited by: Toady One ]
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For the 4 hells Crawl does have traditional names for the Major Devils.
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Ah, that's what I was remembering.
1074. The next 10 or so are actually more like 30... just lists within lists of tweaking to do.
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I'm curious Toady. What is the ratio of bugs/code do you write? I'm at about 33%
[ December 14, 2004: Message edited by: Captain_Action ]
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It's hard to quantify that, because it's hard to say what how much a typo detracts from the ratio, etc. X and others would say my B:C is N:0 = infinity, because they consider my code to be one large conceptual mistake.
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I have looked at the code... If I understood correctly, it said: You have smelly socks... Last time I look at my code again. Maybe I'll look at toady's next :P
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While searching for a random name generator, I came across this page, which has this--a random spell-name generator for Tales of the Dying Earth. If you've never heard of that, just click the link and read the random list of spells, you'll get the idea.
Some of my favorites:
Unasseber's concurring toady,
Zuren's mutual malaria,
Hurtandi's aerial millstone,
Larasajan's prime annihilator,
and, when all else fails, Majnu's inadequate proverb.
...but anyway, that page has lots of other random-name-generation things that might be useful for ideas, and it has links to random generators for all kinds of other wierd stuff.
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He he he... mutual malaria... jesus... prime annihilator sounds like math.
1070. Three Toe has been playing around with it and reported lots of bugs to fix, which I've mostly handled, but it has slowed the list countdown a bit. The effort continues...
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Awwww... why does he get to play and not me? I can report bugs as well as the next guy, I am only an unserious semi-spammer when I have nothing to do :(
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There are some things only a brother can do. I've not got the demo, and indeed I was promptly kicked from the channel the other night to avoid spoiling the sekrit plans. Be patient, sonny.
X
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I deny the fact that I have any parents, so I am nobody's son. What is an parentless called?
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A Bastard? Or was it Orphan?
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'Bastard' is a child with no father.
'Orphan' is a child with no parents.besides, i'm all for someone who can be trusted play testing it, if it'll mean that it has fewer bugs.
i'd rather wait a little longer for something that is finished as intended and has less bugs, than have it spoiled for me by being told more than the basics of how it'll function, or rushed and as such, not quite what it should have been.
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It's not like the version he has is playable anyway. It's like a pre-alpha, and we've caught lots of bugs. It's more like work than play. Well, that might be a lie.
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Knowing the mechanics of something is what I live for, just ask Amnon (main admin on assault: high tech war) since I am usually pestering him about the exact math stuff for various random things, same thing on other muds. Anyways, enough of my ranting
*doh! I was going to stay away from page 8 unless the talk on in stopped. My new random goal is failed before it even started... :(*
[ December 19, 2004: Message edited by: The_Ancient_Sleeping_Dude ]
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*gaspe* There are other MUDers here?
.... Why am I suprised? O.o
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I've been watching this thread from the very begging and i have a few questions of my own.
How are you planning to make that river you mentioned? Will there only be one per game?
Will fishing be a nessesity or just an option? Will you be able to affect the river
by digging moats or building dams?
Also, will the wheather affect the rest of the world? Rains putting out fires maybe?
Random thunderstrikes?
Cheers and a joly new year
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also, it has been very quiet here lately? did toady get murdered by a pack of rabid gandalfies?
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The Yellow Order of Librarians, actually. Alas, their powers of numerology were too much for the poor guy. =(
May he rest in peace, without books shoved in places.
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Damn. I'm just off visiting my family right now.
Currently one river indoors and one river outside. There are floods and some weather effects. You can dig channels and make aqueducts and floodgates operated by levers or pressure plates. No dams currently.
I should be back on task on January 2nd, although during the last six months of grad school things could get hectic of course.
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You going to make your dissertation public? In theory I'll be able to understand some of it! :p
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http://arxiv.org/abs/math.CA/0411309
That's what I've written up so far.
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quote:
Originally posted by The_Ancient_Sleeping_Dude:
<STRONG>also, it has been very quiet here lately? did toady get murdered by a pack of rabid gandalfies?</STRONG>
Dude, it's called Christmas. I hope everyone that was out of there hole enough to notice it had a nice one. That is all.
X
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Rofl. The funny part about that is that I -didn't- realise it was Christmas, the day it was. :p Slept till like 1:00, and everyone was annoyed with me.
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1034... not exactly fast or anything, but I managed to do a little work over the break.
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1022...
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Toady, what will you do if the dwarven fortress game becomes as well known as some of the rogue likes out there such as ADOM or Angband?
i'm curious as to your hopes for what this project may achive in the way of recognition in such communities.
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What do you mean? I'll do the same things I've been doing, I guess. I imagine it will play all right with some of those people.
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Two months after releasing Dwarf Fortress, Toady One will be dead of carbon-monoxide poisoning in Johannesburg, a suicide at 33. His red pickup truck will be parked near a small river where he used to play as a child; a green garden hose attached to the vehicle's exhaust funneling the fumes inside. "I'm really, really sorry," he'll explain in a note left on the passenger seat beneath a knapsack. "The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist."
X
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998. But since I have a little over 6 years to finish now, according to my obituary, I can sit back and do one every couple of days. The living's easy...
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986...
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At that rate you'll be finished on April fools day.
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973. It will probably take longer. The end always takes longer.
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And here I was under the impression that this was a minor side project like WWI medic... :roll:
This does sound like a kickass game though, I can't wait!
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It should be fun. The number is going to be stuck for a few days while I set up support for open gl text, 256 characters curses and 128 character curses. That way, if things like ww1 medic run fine on your computer, you'll be able to see the upper 128 ascii characters (because there are lots of fonts, they don't display the way I see them on some computers, so it looks like unintended crap). On the other hand, if for whatever video card/etc. reason, my open gl version doesn't work, you can use curses. And if neither the 256 character or open gl version works, you can use the 128 character 1970s ass mode, which should work almost everywhere. It might be harder to play, because of some ambiguous characters, although you can probably get used to it.
So, that'll be 3 or 4 days. Then more interface/file/text type things. That should take me to ~941. Once I hit 941, well, back to business as usual. Combat improvements, etc.
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will there be any easter eggs that give things such as 'silly' weapons?
and i mean silly like, the dwarven battle bread that a certain mr pratchett created?
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I guess there are lots of silly bits to the game... and some stuff that's just kinda stupid.
Still getting game ready for OGLage...
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humour is good, though. it's little touches that make something stand.
i'm sure you'll be glad to get the current stage out of the way, however. it sounds like it's an annoyance.
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I've finally finished all the grunt work leading up to OGLage. I should be able to get that running tomorrow. I've spent the last few days loading up scripts and interpreting them and getting nested ifs to work and things like that.
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OpenGL is on the top:
(http://www.bay12games.com/imgs/oglage.PNG)
I've since matched up the grays properly.
[ January 17, 2005: Message edited by: Toady One ]
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Speed?
X
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They go the same speed... the timer is still doing work slowing it down, although the OGL one can't be sped up beyond game speed like the curses one can because screen refreshes are way more expensive. I can get around that by not refreshing every phase in the OGL one if it is accelerated I guess, but at least in normal mode it is pretty much indistinguishable (except for the border with my XP settings).
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Hiya, haven't said much lately. Stupid internet problems. Although being offline for 2 days helped me win LCS, it gave me Dwarf-Info-Update-Withdrawals (DIUW). It's a really serious condition. Please, each of you donate 5$ to pay for my medical bills.
Btw, how's everything going with the Dwarves, I'd like a 10 page essay on how it's going, and the font must be no less than 72 in size. Or aboutish 2 rows in the normal font size :)
[ January 19, 2005: Message edited by: Ancient_Sleeping_Dude_Reinc ]
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Should still be at 941 by Monday. There are a few more slow bits coming up, since 938 is something like "combat changes" and has ~80 subgoals. After that it really starts to thin out again. I just added an interface file and screen that lets you set up the key bindings for anything however you want -- tomorrow will be spent making the other interface screens use them. This should alleviate most of the paging/etc. problems that arose in LCS.
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Got to 941. That marks 62 assignments left in 15 sections, rather than 63 assignments left in 16 sections.
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I've made a list like that myself for an rpg im making with rpgmaker... Im like at, 5 various main parts with 50 or so subsections... I deem the list 10% done...
The game itself is well... I've made a room, then japanese/standard font issues kicked in and you cant select a name :(
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Still chugging along on 927... I've been there for a while. This involves putting a lot of things from the code into files, so I can extend them easier. Most of my projects get popped off too quickly and in too much of a haze for me to bother with pretty or even ethical programming. I've been making up for it a bit with this one, but it takes time to make the changes... especially to the bits of the code that were written 3 years ago.
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Go Coder, Code Like You've Never Coded Before!
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quote:
Originally posted by Ancient_Sleeping_Dude_Reinc:
<STRONG>Go Coder, Code Like You've Never Coded Before!</STRONG>
How about 'code like you have decades and decades of long, painful experience at it?' That sounds better to me.
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Cruising along with files... might finish them off tomorrow. Then it's on to fixing the bugs that I made when I put them in: dwarves lie around unable to pick things up, some creatures suffocate at random, and a few of the deer that entered the map were called "hunting deer" like the dwarves' hunting dogs. It allows them to sneak better but... who trained the deer... Then it's back into the regular flow of decreasing numbers.
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It's the druids you fool! the druids trained em! It's like those horses you read about in the Belgarid, the ones with claws and fangs! RUN DWARVES RUN! THE DEER ARE COMING!
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All right, 926. It doesn't sound like much, but the file stuff is done. It's not going to be 10 a day again for a while yet, but I shouldn't be stuck on the same number for 2 weeks either. Lessee... 926*2=1852.. 1852/52 = some large number of years. So I'd better not do that.
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911. Working on basic save/load, etc.
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911 tasks / 15 tasks/day= 2 months.
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Hurry! We're running out of dwarf jokes!
...just kidding. I don't think it's possible to run out of dwarf jokes.
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Well I'm all out, now I have to start with the midget ones, then it's the shorty ones, and then I can always go into the blonde, brunette and redhead jokes... and after that the preacher jokes, the bar jokes, the animal related jokes, the heaven jokes, the hell jokes, and by then I can go back to the dwarves :)
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Has it been 2 months yet?
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Nope, only 2 weeks since Demon made his bold estimate. Not that I'm very far along. 887. This is because there was a lot of hectic things on the job front these past several days, although I managed to get a position, which is good news.
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Oh well, patience is a virtue, and being virtous makes you go to heaven.
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Yeah, we're wating patiently.
I'm just a lurker i guess, but i'm really looking forward to this game and i know there's no reason to be overly hasty.
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(28 days - 12 days)/(911 tasks-887 tasks)*887 tasks = 591 days to go... :eek:
By position, you mean you are a Princeton math prof now?
[ February 28, 2005: Message edited by: Demon ]
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Texas, Princeton, same thing.
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Here's a texan joke.
What size box do you need to bury a texan after you've kicked the shit out of him?
A matchbox.
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Here's another joke: Well actually I don't have a joke about texas, or maybe it is, not sure. Let's try...
This guy was in texas, and he was visiting a bar, and it was really large. So he goes to the barkeep and asks "hey, do you sell cigarrs here?" and the barkeep gives him one, and the guy says "wow this cigarr is HUGE" and the barkeep says "it's because we're in texas, everything is big here". "Can I have something to drink?" and the barkeep puts up a HUGE glass on the table with beer "wow! texas style drink?" he asks. "yeah the barkeep responds, everything is big here." After a few hours of drinking and smoking cigarrs, the now smashed out of his mind customer asks "Where'sh the bathroom?" and the barkeep responds "down that hall, last door on the left". But the guy takes the right door and accidently falls into the pool outside of it. Panicking, he shouts "DONT FLUSH!!!"
Yeah you can resume throwing stones at me now :(
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862... it continues to work slowly...
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310 days to go... :(
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Do not despair Demon, for when the game is released, all the waiting will have been worth it... And if it's not, then we can atleast hold it dear in our hearts that we became better people by learning the valuable lesson of patience. AFTER we have hunted toady down as one big wellformed mob with torches and uzi's that is :D
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822... calculate that! he he he...
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13 days and 6 hours to go! :D
Although if I include everything since September 22 (1415 tasks) until now, I believe we have 227 days to go. That means the origional estimate of about 10 months is looking more like 13 months at this rate. I imagine when you get to the 300 lines of easter eggs it'll go faster though...
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300 lines of easter eggs? HOT DAMN! I can see it in front of me now. Enemy wizard generals named Kauron, Bauron Fnauron, Saorun, Blauron, etc etc etc... 300 different close-but-not-quite variations of the name Sauron :P
And yes, the only type of easter egg avaible is making fun of Sauron, he had a kickass armor in the movie, but his name and act is silly...
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No, don't forget the Balrugs and Zalrogs.
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Weren't Balrugs in Ultima III?
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Balrug, the only known predator that goes after flying carpets and standard rugs.
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Hey Captain Action! I just put 2 and 2 together and realised you're also in the IVAN forum. I'm ighalli over there. Any other similar games you're powergaming at the moment? :p
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I just red through the entire thread, just for giggles. Now, with all due respect: PLEASE make some new movies! I would beg on my knees if they weren't busted to hell and back.
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IVAN? that games evil. though any game that allows you to eat your own severed bodyparts is good.
or blows you up when it turns out the pineapple you charged toward to avoid starving was on a mine.. and you had three fireball wands in your backpack.
anyway, wrong forum AND topic for that.
when it comes to the easter eggs, are there little things here and there that you add to them, based upon things that catch your attention, or any room for us to name a few 'special' enemies or some such?
i should check here more often, but i've been playing a certain MMORPG and getting immersed in the entire "i am a paladin in the future, and i have a HEALING aura!" kind of thing.
oh, and if there's any room for such suggestions, mine are:
Bob.
and
A Large Chicken.
just be careful not to spell Bob backwards.
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Not sure easter egg is a good word. Giant hidden features that comprise half of the game? Something like that. Should be fun, if I ever finish.
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quote:
Originally posted by Toady One:
Plot stuff, bugs, bugs, better army fights, interface, improved combat mechanics, interface, saving/loading, title screen stuff, easter egg, easter egg, easter egg, easter egg, easter egg, stuff, easter egg, things, stuff, easter egg, stuff, things, stuff, topics, easter egg, stuff, stuff, easter egg, things, stuff, easter egg, various, things, stuff, easter egg, things, stuff, title screen stuff, stuff, easter egg, easter egg, things, stuff, various, easter egg, things, things, stuff, easter egg, things, stuff, easter egg, stuff, things, easter egg, things, things, things, stuff, easter egg, stuff, various, topics, things, high score related, high score related, high score related, high score related, music/sound, tutorials and instructionsOr something. The easter eggs, various, stuff, topics and things are related and required, but I'm not going into it. There will probably be more bug sessions as well.
That's all I'm saying... :roll:
[ March 12, 2005: Message edited by: Demon ]
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oh, I know, my word. but did you have to go and bold them all?
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I guess I didn't. I had to edit it to keep the whole quote from being bold. So of those 79 or whatever things, how many remain?
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57, but most of the hard ones have been dispatched.
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Not much powergaming lately. Perhaps, I should get back to my necromutated troll archmage in CRAWL.
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Speaking of power-gaming, a new sub game has been posted, dedicated to the memory of my rats who have died recently. It is about feeding and protecting helpless creatures.
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was this (Squiggles.) games style influenced by any other games, possibly?
it reminds me of a game from my childhood that i can't quite place my finger on.though, it must be said that rats scare me somewhat.
[ March 13, 2005: Message edited by: Silleh Boy ]
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I didn't have anything in mind, but I played lots of games growing up, so it might be the case... The squiggles bouncing around make it look kind of like that sink game, whatever it was.
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I know what it is! I'm on to your evil plans toadyone! The squiggles game was clearly an alpha-alpha test for Dwarf Fortress 2: Digitally Remixed!!! The digging for food was really for metals, the moving things are really dwarves in mech suits, and the lavas are balrogs that got crushed into the earth and just kept burning but are now unable to move! I'm on to you... *is watching you* :eek:
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i think Ancient's a genius!
not only did he miss the mark, but he missed the mark by several miles!
the moving things are the balrogs, and they're being eaten by the dwarves in the glowing red pits of course!
and the digging thing was a bug, but toady calls it a integral game feature because we're none the wiser!maybe i shouldn't encourage him like this..
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Clearly I wouldn't have balrogs in any game, for copyright reasons. Although I noticed that diablo 2 has a weapon called a "balrog spear". Maybe the tolkien heirs should sueify them.
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Persistent bugs and things have kept it back, but it is at 783 and continuing to slog.
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I think it's kinda safe to use Balrogs actually... just look at the 100s of muds and rouge games that have em... I don't think any lawyers would bother suing just you if they haven't sued all those others yet... just slap a "balrogs is a copyright of blablablawhoever" at the bottom of the readme or something...
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I don't think it's worth the risk, though.
I know that ADOM got in trouble over something like that (hobbits, I think), so they do keep an eye on many roguelike-style freeware games and such.
[ March 21, 2005: Message edited by: Aquillion ]
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Well, if people have preferences about what they want things to be called, I can just stick many of the common words in a file. Human, elf, whatever. I don't want to use the words balrog or mithril myself, although this game is certainly Tolkien inspired.
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yeah, ADOM had to rename them migits or something.
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you don't have to give the metal they mine an exact name, you could use some kind of general reference to it, such as mercury is sometimes reffered to as quick silver, iron pyrites as fools gold and so forth.
i believe they also reffered to mithril as true silver in something. not certain if it's LoTR or one of the games inspired by it, but, you could always say that the metal they're mining is high quality iron that they turn into their own blend of steel. thus you have dwarven steel, that's always known to be 'higher quality' than other races in every other game it's in.
as for the demons, you could always use existing demon names from whatever folk lore - celtic or norse ones maybe, to be slightly different from the vast arrays of hebrew esque names that you get in some games, from random name generators.
as for ADOM though, i believe they called them hurthlings, and you could get hurthling cakes. a typical one was sweet. a blessed one was sickly sweet and a cursed one was real hurthling (what the trolls loved.)
i used to like ADOM, but i seem to suck at rogue likes, as the only ones i've ever completed are ToME, using a possessor deathmold in the watcher of the waters body or some such, and some other random ones that are less note worthy.
oh, one thought that i did have though is, golems. would the dwaves be able to make some such thing as them, and give you some kind of parts customisation option so you could have say, a number of custom made golems guarding your miners to take the brunt of any unleashed horrors while you bring your guards to take them down?
eh. maybe not, i just like the idea of being able to craft additional support when you can spare the resources.
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Golems = good idea
Golems going bad during creation and go berserk = even better
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I had written some stuff regarding automatons in my "bloating" section, which is not part of the countdown. I don't know if I'll get to it or not... I'm not sure I want automatons to be commonplace or really anything other than unique. Dwarves as they stand aren't very magical right now, and making automated things that are better than the current japanese robots is kind of silly.
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It's not armour, it's bindings.
X
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But dwarves are alchemists or whatever, their knowledge and power with metals is unmatched. I don't think golems actually have gears or whatever inside, they are just a solid straigth through of whatever material they are made from, enchanted with life and obeying the creator... Til it turns on em and kill em that is :P
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My personal preference would be that a single golem would be very hard and expensive to make.
Also, every single golem would have to be maintained(oiled, etc.) by a high skill level mage, so they would be few.
Such a golem could indeed guard some strategic passage somewhere.
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I think they should be very easy to make, and they should still kick arse. They could guard the pink fleshy dwarves hiding in their caves, but....
The wizards could make them revolt. >:)
Edit: Damn smilies.
[ March 24, 2005: Message edited by: Eagleon ]
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755... tick tumby tick tom tumby tick tock...
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in a kind of, easy to make, hard to animate, even harder to maintain manner?
trolls. this game better have trolls. and hordes of harry potter fan boys/girls to slaughter. and the obligatory cyclops.
on a more serious note, will the dwarven brews be possible to turn into a makeshift weapon in dire times?
i mean, dwarven ale must be quite potent, and make a mean molotov. and of course send the dwarf assigned the grim task of sacrificing this most sacred of fluids into a deep depression.
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quote:
Originally posted by Toady One:
<STRONG>Well, if people have preferences about what they want things to be called, I can just stick many of the common words in a file. Human, elf, whatever. I don't want to use the words balrog or mithril myself, although this game is certainly Tolkien inspired.</STRONG>
I've seen 'mithril' used almost everywhere, in quite a lot of non-Tolkien-related (and commerical) games. I'm not sure it's a word Tolkien invented.But, in any case, giving people the option to customize names and terms using a text file seems to be the best way to go.
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Wikipedia knows everything:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithril In any case, yeah, text files. The effort continues... continuing...
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<Edit> Erk. Always with the posting before I do. I'm too slow. =/ O.o It is a simultanious post, isn't it? Spooky.
I'd ask for the option to change 'dwarves' to things, but that'd be silly since the entire game is based around them... Then again, there are a few other things/people which might fit the role. Meheheh.
[ March 27, 2005: Message edited by: Eagleon ]
[ March 27, 2005: Message edited by: Eagleon ]
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Wow! Simultaneous post!
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Hey, I just finished my version of Dwarves Fortress!
If you wish to try it, it can be downloaded at Link
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Vey funneh.
On this day, 26 years ago, my parents got married. How's that for an April Fools joke? :D
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It depends on how old you are. He he he...
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lol... I think one would either be the class clown or the class bullied if one was born on april fools day :P
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657 same old thing...
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Hail and well met!
I, The (not so) great ASDR, is (not quite) quietly and (very much) arrogantly inquiring about the progress since it has been (VERY) quiet on all the forums.
Thank you.
-ASDR
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He's averaged about 3.9 per day overall. So, from that, I would estimate that there are 614 left.
That's probably not correct, of course, since task difficulties vary and it's not like this would go at a constant rate.
Incidently, my estimate would also suggest that there are 156 days, 10 hours, and 57 minutes left until Dwarf Fortress is completed. Again, that's probably not a very accurate estimate.
Going by just the last two reports, we get the much better number of 6.53333333 per day. From that, we would get 586 tasks left at the moment, and 88 days, 17 hours, 9 minutes and just over 11 seconds until Dwarf Fortress is completed.
But I could be off by a second or two, possibly.
[ April 15, 2005: Message edited by: Aquillion ]
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"Off by a second or two"? Such carelessness cannot be allowed! GUARDS! Take this fool and throw him in the dungeon! Maybe a few weeks on the rack will teach him to be more exact!
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Actually, time is tight since I should be graduating in June, and there's a lot of paperwork and examinations and other things...
So the number stands at 657 and will for some time.
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Hmm. If we take the last two reports at this point, we get 0.000000 per day. From that, we of course get 657 tasks left at the moment, and NAN days, NAN hours, NAN minutes, and just over NAN seconds until Dwarf Fortress is completed. In fact, by extension, this means that if Toady is ever not working on Dwarf Fortress, even for a second, then it will never be completed.
On the other hand, if we go back and measure the number of tasks completed per second by only taking a second in which he completed a task, then we get a rate of 1 task per second, and Dwarf Fortress will be complete in 10 minutes and 57 seconds.
Maybe I should give up on the statistical analysis now.
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I guess if we average 10 minutes and NAN, we get... NAN. Stat is both useful and comforting.
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I think I'll settle with the 10 minutes and 57 seconds theory, mixed with a huge denial of it's not-completed status based on the "Toady just forgot to update the site" arguement.
Would you please be so kind to update the site so I can dl DF already?
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has it been ten minutes and fiftey seven seconds yet?
how about now?
now?
what about now?
are these minutes and seconds defined in the traditional sense or are we working by Toady Seconds™ here?
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hmmm...
dum-de-dum...
Tralala...
Now?
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All right. I passed my test. I'm a little burned out, and I have some talks coming up, but I can probably do some things again over the next few weeks.
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You passed it?
Congratulations, Toady.
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The big one is on the 31st... that should be it though, dammit. Then I'll be Dr. Toad, and I can start plotting to destroy the world in earnest.
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Well Congratulations. Once you set up your evil lair in some location, feel free to send me an mail and and airplane ticket, and you got yourself a minion.
Dibs on the top 31st bunk in the barracks!
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The Toady One plot to take over the world must be interesting, involving, as it does, the following:
* Liberalism,
* Dwarves,
* Spells that take the fleshy bits out of monsters and convert them into other fleshy bits,
* Evil extended ascii symbols,
* Detailed knowledge of WWI battle medicine,
And, of course: * More Dwarves.
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I must warn you, those extended ascii symbols are truly evil...
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So, Almost-Dr-Toad, any dwarvy business lately or just mathy stuff?
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Fixed some bugs, but mostly mathy stuff. On the upside, defense is in a week. Then that should be that. Unless they... want me to revise it or something. Or they find a critical flaw.
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Wish you best of luck then, hope it will go smoothly. I'm stil checking the forums every few days.
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I imagine congratulations are in order! Are you a proud new Ph.D. holder yet, Toad?
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Well, I passed! I still have a pile of paperwork, but that will be over with by Friday. The degree is technically conferred on the 12th, assuming I get the paperwork in, but it might as well be official.
Dr. Toad
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Allow me to be the first (in my demented little world) to congratulate you! Also, on friday, it is my birthday :)
Making me a unofficial I-won't-tell-anyone tester for dwarves would be the perfect gift :P
Congrats again
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i'm calling the lead henchman position, as Dr. Toad sounds like the name of a person bent on world domination.
that, or a specialist in amphibians.
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That's right, Dr. Toad can start a radio call-in program now. About toads and bugs and stuff.
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Toads and bugs and stuff with fricking lasers attached?
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And octagonal-shaped bodies. With blood-sucking atomic fangs.
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Would they speak the bestial cries of the damned?
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Have you noticed how this forum goes up and down? Toady says something, then everyone says something, then it goes quiet til Toady speaks again. Toady must truly be powerful :P
Anyways, how are things going?
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Getting ready for the drive to Texas. Leaving Monday, arriving the next Monday. Internet should be waiting for me there. Then we'll see if it is too hot to work.
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W00t! 300th Post! Anyway, I finally got around to reading all 12 pages of this thread and I must say I am really excited about Dwarf Fortress. I support being able to name monsters and stuff in a .txt file. Yep.
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Isn't the txt file technology that enables third parties to do bad things? The Supreme Court is all over that.
Anyway, I'm stable in Texas now. Programming commences tomorrow. If I don't die.
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Die of the heat or just a good old Texas lynch mob?
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Heat for now... It was 100 and humid yesterday. People have been friendly, and they'll probably remain that way as long as I remain quiet.
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Yes, stay quiet. Texas is probably not the place to announce that you are the author of Liberal Crime Squad.
I hear those Texans are pretty big fans, after all. We wouldn't want you trampled to death by a mob eager for version 4.
[ July 03, 2005: Message edited by: Aquillion ]
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It's humidity that's the real pain with any climate. Heat alone's never quite as nasty as hot, sticky humidity. I hate humid summers here, personally.
At least you have a good supply of water/some other suitable fluid in the fridge to keep it cool, along with plenty of ice, right?
Oh, and to keep this on topic. This game needs more giant dwarves.
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656. Woot. Things are still a bit slow, but I have some time again.
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Dwarf! Dwarf! Dwarf! Dwarf! Dwarf!
[ July 16, 2005: Message edited by: Aquillion ]
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*joins in on the chanting* Dwarf! Dwarf! Dwarf! Dwarf!
Why is it that a word sounds so strange when repeated?
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You mean like the word 'punch'?
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Sounds more like 'Fwort, Fwort' if i chant, yes, i was chanting before my computer:P
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Dwarf Fwortress?
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Fwarf Dwartress!
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That's it, if it is possible to name one's city when the game comes out, I'll name it Fwarf Dwartress!
EdIt: When do you plan to send out any new demo movies of DF? All we have now is a number that is steadily(?) sinking to measure how done it is. Please send out some more movies!
[ July 20, 2005: Message edited by: Ancient_Sleeping_Dude_Reinc ]
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But taking the time to make and upload movies would take away from time working on Dwarf Fortress. In fact, the time he's taking to read this post is taking away from time working on Dwarf Fortress! Ack, I'd better stop talking now.
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The 314th post was made on the anniversary of pi. Coincidence? I think not. Especially when you consider that this, the 25th post was made on the 27th Anniversary of the birth of the first test tube baby.
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My god you remind me of the thing I read on boreme.com about weird 9/11 coincidences... let me see if I can dig it up...
http://www.boreme.com/boreme/funny-2002/eleven-p1.php Be sure to read the response in the link under it, really funny :)
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More than 20 years ago, 9/11, Pinochet slaughtered the democratically elected goverment in Chile, a sad event indeed, oh you mean WTC? Well yes, that's sad too.
Anyway, the response is right.
Also, Svirfneblim= 11 letters.
So the deep gnomes are problematic.
edit:sorry that the above could sound offensive to US people, that wasn't my intent.[ July 26, 2005: Message edited by: Svirfneblim ]
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No... I think that's a much sadder event, to be brutally honest. We still have our government, at least for now. =/
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Hmm. Someone mentioned the idea of Dwarf Fortress allowing players to rename things via data files, right?
Well, then! Prepare to play Dwarf Fortress meets LCS: Congressional Fortress! Order your drunken, gold-greedy Senators as they mine Capitol Hill for lucrative veins of government contracts! Construct vast, utterly useless projects! Funnel money into the creation of a bloated and yet still underequipped military, then use it to fight off infiltration by halfling radicals! For an endgame, re-enact the Scouring of the Shire as your forces unilaterally 'reconstruct' Shiraq into a beacon of global Dwarfocracy!
[ July 27, 2005: Message edited by: Aquillion ]
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Ooooooh, does that include useless space programs that won't result in the colonization of mars until the year 2215?
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So, with some modding you could have 'fallout fortress' where your brave survivors carve into a mountain, tap into pre-nukewar artifacts and fight mutants?
Or a goblin fortress with the dwarfs as enemies...
Hmm, and morlocks... and talibs...
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Wow! Toady is still working on this! I thought hew would've commited ritual suicide by now. :eek:
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ASCII games rule. is it going to run in real time, or turn-based?
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It is real time, but slow paced. It is paused whenever you are giving orders.
My brother's birthday is August 5th, and I'm working on a present for him (it won't be out quite by then). Then more and more dwarves. Teaching starts at the end of August I think.
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That's my birthday too. o.o; Going to be 18. A new moon. *freaks out*
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Zonk is 3 days after that too. THE WHEEL KEEPS TURNIN', BABY!
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I still breathe. 17 years is quite old, you know...but still something keeps me alive in my ripe old age: knowing that SOMEDAY we will have a REALLY playable and enjoyable Slaves to Armok. Because we WILL HAVE IT, right Toady? :-
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Is the :- a blank-check sort of smiley, or something else? xD
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[After 15 days spent thinking to an answer]
It's a sort of smile. It's not anything rude...Believe me. Only now I realize that ":-"could actually be mistaken for..umh...a fertility symbol :-)
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Stop it! Now I see all of the smileys as something obscene! :-<
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Even this smiley? 8^)>(artist wearing glasses and goatee)
What about this one? 8==D(John Kerry or George Bush)
/ | / y |
( B==D ( ( _ |
| | \ | |
| | \|
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Yes, quite.
I guess we missed the one year anniversary of this thread by a bit... note how I properly hedged and waffled when I said it might be done in 10 months. The eight year thing looks closer. My teaching job is settling down. The birthday game ended up taking longer than I thought, so I'm only doing that one on the weekends now. Dwarves is about where it was, but it should start moving now. Or I'll have to quit work.
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10 minutes and 57 seconds, Toady. I did the math, remember? Statistics don't lie, so you'd better get crackin'.
...on, second thought, if statistics don't lie, that would mean that the game will be finished in 10 minutes and 57 seconds no matter what, indeed, regardless of whether or not you work on it! So I guess you don't have to get crackin' after all.
[ September 14, 2005: Message edited by: Aquillion ]
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I have to teach some statistics later in the semester. I'll let you write the lesson plan. Should be bad-ass.
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All right, so after a phone conversation with the brother, aka ThreeToe, we have the following pared-down count remaining of the 656 that were left.
96/150/114.
So, what is this new system? It's on the same scale as the original, which would mean something like the new count is 360. However, these numbers, of course, have their own INTRINSIC MEANINGS, and the 150 and 114 weren't included in the 656. Meaning the phone call trimmed/put off 560 things. Your loss, yo. A lot of them can be put in later -- they just won't be in the first release, which will now be a bit sooner.
96 = the number of core things left to do... not that I can talk about them because most of them are still easter eggy
150 = the number of bugs, requests and other technical things that really need to be handled
114 = the number of shameless bloats that weren't trimmed but might still be
Fortunately, unlike, say, Armok, these numbers are all going down instead of up. When the first two numbers reach zero, I'll release it.
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Nice! Dare I possibly say that this could mean a pre-Christmas release? =)
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It will certainly be released alot sooner than it would have otherwize. And even when the extra complications were stripped away: you will understand the magnitude. you will see that you were missing nothing.
and the 5000 years you would have been waiting for the game?
you can soon spend playing it.
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Yeah, some of those extra things were really excessive. Those early planning phone calls were incredibly enthusiastic.
Christmas is in 13 or 14 weeks? With my new 40 hour work week, and holiday travel, that might be cutting it close. Let's see, I am now officially promising it will be released before August 31st, 2006. I'll try to improve on that as much as I can, and I'll keep posting the countdowns here as I finish things.
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Awesome. After the first release, do you think you'll keep working on it, or take a break from it and work on something else for a while?
(Thanks for posting the countdowns and answering all our questions, by the way. I really appreciate it, tantalizing though it is...)
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There are some other things I definitely want to put in (and I suspect certain people will be angry if I don't do it, since we enthusiastically discussed it on IRC). So the idea now is to get the core game out, then do enhancements occasionally, much like a regular old roguelike. It's like having another Armok, LCS, etc. but that's fine.
That said, I have about 10 other smaller scale projects waiting to be written, or sitting around half-written. I'd also like to put some of these out. Like a lot of my other games, even if the implementation is crappy, there are lots of interesting ideas.
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Ooh! Ooh! Release it on my Birthday (August 28th). It will make everyone else very sad and me very happy and so it's a great idea.
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Ten smaller-scale projects? Any chance you could reveal a bit about some of them, or are they all going to be surprises?
By the way, based on some stuff Toady has said, I think I may have figured out what one of the big core feature easter eggs is. I could be completely wrong, but I'm not going to share my guess here. If I'm right, it's insanely awesome and I can definitely see why he wants it to be a surprise. We'll see when it comes out, I guess...
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Well, I say "about 10" because they merge in and out of each other... some stuff in space, the one with the random 80s song generator (Toady One sings!)... a kind of forest spirit thingy... and some really really trashy stuff. If you've played the Sub Games, you know how trashy it can be.
It would be funny if we collected everybody's guesses somewhere and compared them to what the actual eggs are at the end. Maybe you can use the forum's private message option, if it still works.
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Your dwarves are actually humans trapped in an advanced simulation, their bodies used to power their robot overlords and fed to themselves in a gross violation of the laws of thermodynamics!
Your dwarves were actually dead since the beginning of the game, and were ghosts all along!
Plump Helmet seeds are made of dwarves!
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I haven't been posting those kinds of dwarf movies!
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I finally found a memory leak detection program that works well for me. When I quit dwarves, it highlights all of the memory allocations that went bad. For instance, we had one:
if(pointer==NULL)delete pointer;
this should be
if(pointer!=NULL)delete pointer;
I have a few more of those to clean up, and then it'll be going by the numbers again.
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About the smaller projects- I think any game that involves a random 80s song generator is likely to be a work of pure genius, so I vote you do that one. Or the forest spirit one. That's an idea I don't think I've seen before in a game, and it appeals to me, tree-hugging bleeding-heart environmentalist wacko that I am...
Anyway, Toady, I just sent you a private message with my easter egg guess.
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I have responded to your message.
If it helps, the working titles for the 80s game and the forest game, respectively, are:
Star Team: Turbo Fleet Nation
and
Little Lord Animals: Child Forest Apocalypse
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Toady, i'm dabbling(amateurish) in c++ and would be grateful for your advice.
What exactly is a way that the new and delete functions should be used?
I know that they assign memory, but when i should assign that memory to something?
I just declare all the variables i need in the code, map is loaded from a .txt file and that's it.
Summing it up: i don't use new and delete, but should i?
Can allocating memory speed up something?
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In a larger project, you'd want to allocate things as they are needed, and free them as they aren't needed -- even though there is a lot of memory on computers these days, people also run a lot of applications, so you shouldn't go overboard.
It's also convenient to use new/delete if you want to get rid of something when it is dead, and not have to worry about "is_dead" flags and things like that.
In addition, if you are really doing C++ as opposed to C, the new operator lets you allocate a derived class object, use the base class for it in very general functions, and then delete it when you are done (possibly using a base class pointer again and "new" to create a different derived class object). Having pre-declared variables around won't let you do that, unless you actually declare the derived class objects everywhere in advance, which sort of defeats the purpose of OO programming.
[ September 22, 2005: Message edited by: Toady One ]
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All mem leaks that the program found have been cleaned.
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I replied to your reply, but I'm not quite sure it went through...
Say, Toady, am I right in remembering that you're in Texas? I assume you're out of the way of the hurricane, as I doubt you'd be spending time today working on the game if you were in its path- but I was just wondering. Stay safe...
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Actually, I'm in Bryan, which is not too far north of Houston, right in the projected path. Dead toads. I see them on the road. Now they'll be in my home. Classes are cancelled tomorrow. It should weaken a bit before it gets here, but people are stocking up. What else am I going to do though? Programming is fun. I'll get some water together in case the power goes out I guess.
Reply came through. I'll read it after this -- the private message system is kind of weird. It sort of seems like everything is erased when you send.
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Well, I figured that if you were in too much danger from it you would be leaving. Though from what I heard about that traffic jam, staying put might actually be the wiser course of action...
Sounds like you aren't in the most dangerous part, but... man. Be careful. I'm hoping everything turns out OK.Yeah, the message erasing thing is why I wasn't sure if it had gone through...
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TOAD IS HERE
Rita has been veering east a bit, so as it stands, I'll be catching more of the western part of it rather than the eye wall, hopefully.
Edit: We've been advised that power will probably go out, so if I'm away for a few days, well... I won't be programming then either.
[ September 23, 2005: Message edited by: Toady One ]
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Just remember: You need a line of floodgates to stop a flood, not just one. Don't share poor Norndarnòrn's fate.
...hrm, are there hurricanes and similar dangerous weather conditions in Dwarf Fortress?
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Right now, bad weather just makes people bitter if they have to work outside (unless they have the right personality for it). Well... thin river ice is to be avoided, and that's seasonal at least. They'll avoid it on their own, but if you station soldiers there, I think they might go for it.
You know, thinking about frost-bite, even though they are shorter, I kind of imagine dwarves having larger toes. Would that mean they wouldn't suffer from it as quickly?
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Dwarves are way too tough for wussy frostbite! Weather in general probably shouldn't be of much concern to them, with the exception of tunnel flooding. (If that can even be counted...)
Remember taking your GREs Toad? I took the general exam already (perfect math score, w00t) but I have the nasty subject exam next month.
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I vaguely remember -- there was a englishy section, and quantitative, and something else. It was disconcerting how it just spit the score out on the computer right when you finish. Then there's the subject test. I got something like 45/66 on mine (screw all that probability!), but I got a perfect 990. Must have been a hard year? Dunno. What are you planning to do with yourself anyway? Applications going on now or next year?
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I plan on getting a PhD in physics. The applications will be going out as soon as I take the subject test. I think that the physics subject test is still taken on paper and graded forever. I wish they'd just spit out the socre at the end! Then I wouldn't have to be worried abuot how bad I did for a few weeks...
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Yeah, math took forever too -- they eventually mailed my result, and it said what I said it was. Then I went in to the department to see if they had received it, and all they see is the 990. He he he. I would have benefited in math by going over old random first year stuff I had forgotten, rather than the advanced stuff. If physics is known to be the same way, it's something to pay attention to.
I might see a little more from Rita, but it veered far enough east that it's been kind of a non-event in my area so far. Winds are gusting up around 40 right now, that's all. Hardly any rain. Power has held up fine.
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It's weakened further now, I hear. Everything still in order in your area?
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Yeah, winds are 35 with gusts of 50 now, but this should be the peak for me. Utilities are still in order.
I'm being very thorough with the dwarf plan now -- making a new file for it and cleaning up some references in the code. I expect the number of core things left to drop and the other two numbers (required stuff and shameless bloats) to go up. Then we'll have the final countdown in place.
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All right, finally. Done revising, and no more hurricane.
40/204/133.
40 core elements, 204 bugs and other required tweaks, 133 shameless bloats that won't all go in. And hundreds of others like that that I'm not considering for this release.
Example core things left:
- Giant beasts attack from outside
- Evil civilization leaders detailed
- Fire
- Init file
- Tutorials
- In-game advisors
- Help (what's this?)
- Sound (HAH A HH AHA!)
Example bugs and required things:
- Some missing haul code, better piles
- Way to customize job priorities
- People don't sleep when they are chained up
- Orphaned babies are currently left to starve
- Told the hunter not to hunt and he stripped off his armor and complained about being naked, eventually going insane
- Capturing an enemy leader in a cage and then selling it to a caravan might cause a save bug
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quote:
Originally posted by Toady One:
<STRONG></STRONG>
Ooo, tutorials are good. I was worried about how complex the game looked.
quote:
<STRONG>- Orphaned babies are currently left to starve
- Told the hunter not to hunt and he stripped off his armor and complained about being naked, eventually going insane
</STRONG>
But really, are those two things necessarily bugs? They could be seen as hidden features! I mean, hunters spend a lot of time outdoors alone... it stands to reason that they wouldn't be that stable to begin with. And, I mean, dwarf babies. Come on, imagine what they must look like. It's a wonder dwarves take care of their own babies, much less anyone else's.
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Come on, they are like spongy micro santas.
I am grading exams right now. 2000 problems to grade... it's going to take all day. I'll start knocking off some easy bugs during the week while I'm working, and I'll go for a core feature or 2 during the weekend.
[ September 25, 2005: Message edited by: Toady One ]
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"Spongy Micro Santas" would be a good name for a band. Or a toy line, a la Cabbage Patch Kids.
A way to customize job priorities was something I felt the game needed from watching the movies, so I'm glad that's going in, though I imagine some of the odd behavior there was due to bugs and the missing haul code you mentioned....
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Yeah, all of that... one of the big problems is that items can accumulate all over the dungeon if people are busy working, but hauling items is a high priority when it is on, so then nobody will work sometimes... being able to customize this will go a long way. There are some ideas like using wheelbarrows and mules to aggregate items before hauling, but that's harder to code, since it has to determine that 2 items want to go vaguely to the same place. You might have noticed in the movies that a few times I just shut everything down to have "hauling breaks", so that the fortress would be clean. Job priorities will relieve some of the need for this, and once you get more people, you can just have some peasants that go around hauling stuff... if mules go in, they'll be the teamster dwarves... to help with transport, was even thinking of having sections of the fortress called "burrows", like the five boroughs of new york city... he he heh e....
It is 1AM here. I have been grading all day and am 80% done. 2 or 3 more hours should do it... man, during the true/false grading, I felt like the knight at the end of indiana jones 3... "you have chosen... poorly"... then they shrivel up and blow away...
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Can pets haul on their own? It seems to me that a trained Musk Ox or Wolf could probably grab a dwarfload of goods in their mouth and drag them around. Certainly they could take care of corpses and such.
I like the image of a craftsman Dwarf making things, and their pet wolf dragging in new materials and dragging the finished goods where they're supposed to go.
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Pets don't haul on their own. Except for cats, when they catch vermin and bring them to their masters. It would be fun to extend animal training though. Right now all you can do is train dogs to hunt or be war dogs, which is clearly insufficient. Shameless bloats? That counter can just keep going up, it doesn't effect the release date... grading does though. I didn't do anything today.
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will you be able to set the speed that the world runs at, or, will everything run at one constant speed, apart from when you're paused and interacting with menu's?
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It depends on which direction you mean. It might be text, but this game is processor intensive. I can't make it go much faster. I can make it go as slow as you like.
Edit: That said, some processors are better than others. Both ways is fine with me.
[ September 27, 2005: Message edited by: Toady One ]
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40/201. No point in listing the bloats... there are just more and more... I was working at the university all day again today. The time around an exam is pretty intense. It should quiet down now until the next one, although I suppose I'd ought to learn the simplex method before I teach it Friday. I hope to knock out a core thing or two during the weekend. At worst, it will go like that, and I'll be done around the deadline.
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i mean like, will there be some setting that allows you to customise the speed that the world itself runs at, for example say, an option that defines the game speed that by default would be 100%, but when you just want things to hurry by after setting lots of projects (and your computer being able to handle it.) you could set it to say, 150%, or when you wish to oversee several things that're happening at roughly the same time, and change them as they occur, you set it down to say 25%.
so what's this going to be classed as, though?
a rogue like sim?
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Okay, yeah, there isn't such an option now, but I'd just need to put a new variable in and fiddle with how the timer is used.
As far as classifying it, if you saw the movies, you can come up with a name for it. I'd call it a dwarf fortress simulator, named Dwarf Fortress.
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From my viewing of the movies, I'd call it a real time strategy game with ASCII graphics, though it focuses on building a fortress rather than an army as most RTS games do. It's sort of in the tradition of things like Dungeon Keeper and Tecmo's Deception, except you're playing the good guys in Dwarf Fortress. I don't know if there's a name for this particular sub-genre...
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so, we have a real time game, with rogue esque graphics that's a strategy simulation of a dwarven fortress.
too long, need something more catchy.
like, uh...
ideas, anybody?
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If I wanted to give people an idea of what it looked like, I would definately compare it to Dungeon Keeper based on the movies.
It's a Dwarven Keeper Roguelike Fortress Simulation Game! With extra purring maggots.
[ September 28, 2005: Message edited by: Aquillion ]
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Are purring maggots the baby dwarves? Life is so complicated sometimes.
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so, we have a roguelike dungeon keeper with extra purring maggots.
that's somehow less catchy than i expected.
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I guess the catchiest way I can think of to put it is that it's an ASCII RTS game. That leaves out a lot, but that's the briefest description I can come up with. You could then add that it's the Dungeon Keeper/Deception category of RTS, but with more life simulation aspects. And purring maggots.
Really, it's looking like a pretty unique game, all around. Rogue was something unique when it came out, and now all the games that follow in its footsteps are called roguelikes. Maybe we'll speak of Dwarf Fortress-likes in the future...
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I'm actually kicking around the idea of making a dwarf fortress-like sci-fi game... Although I might end up using graphics, so maybe it won't count.
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Demon must post games!
40/200... champion-like progress... maybe the number 40 will die on the weekend though. And become a 39 or something.
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this could very well be the game that Toady is remembered best for.
this could be a game so complex and detailed, it makes games such as nethack look simple.
or maybe i've just had too much to drink.
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can't you put an amethyst in your drink to cure that problem? I think you can do that in nethack. you can't do that in dwarves, but then again, it's kind of strange (a traditional greek belief according to wikipedia, or something). I'll have less of that, and more purring maggots.
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I thought of purring maggots as really large ropey ones with waxy skin. When there are a lot of them on a big carcass, they rub against each other and "pur". I can understand hating them if that's what they are. *shudder*
Either that or cute furry ones that pounce and chew curtains.
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You know, when a dwarf has a small tame pet (as opposed to a musk ox), then when you look at it in the inventory, it says something like "Dar the Squirrel (On Head)" or "Dar the Squirrel (On Shoulder)".
Purring maggots are small. Purring maggots can be tamed.
AND YET, this is only the beginning of the purring maggot story... it really is an epic mystery of Aquillion-movie-guess proportions.
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cute, furry maggots that pounce and chew on curtains. cat's, without the entire 'scratching your face off because you gave them the wrong type of fish for dinner'?
i wonder if there's going to be purring maggots in game...
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Sorry to detract from your maggot discussion, but what's 'nethack'. Does anyone have a link?
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nethack
Nethack is one of the "Big 5" roguelike games, along with Rogue, ADOM, Moria and Angband (I think). Dungeon Crawl is probably played more than Rogue, though, these days, but Rogue was first.
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This weekend I plan to get through, or most of the way through, the 40th core item, which is handling all combat revisions and bugs. For instance, a dwarf crossbowman that gets shot by a goblin crossbowman will fire back the stuck-in bolt first rather than bolts from the quiver. This is odd. Hardcore, but odd.
[ September 30, 2005: Message edited by: Toady One ]
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The necessary bugs are sorted, which takes us to 40/192. Now for the stuff stuff...
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i noticed there seemed to be 'wrestlers' in the menu's at one point in the movies.
are they fighters?
if so, how viable are they as fighters?
if not, are they there to entertain?
or, do they indefinately tie up their foe with choreagraphed moves, that hurt neither of them in the slightest?
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Wrestling is most of what I'm working on now. For a while now, creatures have been able to grab onto other creatures with their mouths, and shake until a chunk or limb comes off. Now I'm adding joint-locks, chokes, gouging, take-downs, those cross-swords power struggle thingies and a few more. You'll probably be able to see it on the inventory or health menu, while it is happening, but right now all you can see is a magenta background around anybody who is tangled up.
Combatants without weapons just traded punches, and that takes too long. In general, I've found that by adding these complications, the flow of the army battles ends up looking a lot better, instead of people just trading shots. It was certainly true when I added dodging away to other squares and charging into the opponents square (makes fighting on bridges a lot of fun to watch...). You'll still want your dwarves to have a weapon though... even if one of them is a great wrestler, going for that first grab will be dangerous against a reasonably competent armed opponent.
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so basically, if we distract an enemy with one dwarf, a wrestler could run up and disable them while dwarf number one stabs them to death?
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yeah! that's the spirit!
I went ahead and added spines as well... now you can have permanently paralyzed dwarves to care for forever.
It'll take an hour or two more of programming to finish the 40th core thingy (a few more wrestling moves). The next 9 or so core things are a bit faster, and I should be able to do 2 or 3 a weekend. At that point I'll be able to say how long the next 10 of the remaining 30 would take, and so on. I'll always be knocking off a few of the requests/bugs/required changes as I go along.
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Not to get all eugenic (eugeninisitc?), but in game terms, is there any reason why the player would want to keep a paralyzed dwarf alive? Can they still do some things, or are they completely helpless?
And also, can dwarves build dwarven wheelchairs for them, like in LCS? Or could they just wheel themselves around in a wheelbarrow?
[ October 03, 2005: Message edited by: Aquillion ]
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There is currently a bloat concerning prosthetic limbs. Now that I've added spines, it might have to be extended along the lines you describe, but I don't think it will delay the first release having a few of these guys around. In part, you'd want to keep them alive because their friends and family will become stricken by grief if they don't make it. Incidentally, relatives and friends also get angry if the body rots while not in a tomb, so you'll want to arrange for the proper arrangements. Also, the number of deaths influences the amount of migration you have. So if the dwarf merchant reports back home that your fortress is a total death trap it would be worse than saying you have some permanent guests in the hospital.
But yeah, according to the current code, they will always seek to be placed in bed and demand food and water, since they consider not being able to walk a "major injury", even if they can't heal. Prior to this system, there were some horrible horrible happenings where dwarves crawled around trying to feed and water themselves, but they'd keep passing out and dropping food. One such dwarf starved to death next to a well because he kept dropping his food to drink and passing out again. It's kind of unfortunately that most of the altruistic behavior has to be explicit in the code.
[ October 03, 2005: Message edited by: Toady One ]
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You mentioned something before about selling captured enemy leaders to caravans. I imagine certain traps can capture enemies alive, but can the wrestling skill also be used for that? And what can you do with captured enemies once you've got them? I'm picturing lots of possibilities, some of them rather evil...
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It'd be like having your own little Sims! Muahaha.
How about some battlerager armor for the wrestlers? It'd make them a bit more deadly if there are bladed ridges and spikes to rub against the enemy with. >:)
[ October 03, 2005: Message edited by: Eagleon ]
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Yeah, there is a cage trap you can make. When I added them, I had mainly envisioned them as a way of capturing animals to train. This is the current functionality. Certain unintelligent enemies can be trained. Any captured enemies can be sold or offered to your own or allied leaders, just as an artifact of the trading code.
The rest of it is contigent upon the addition of the livestock bloat, which might be stretching it. If there are large animals being milked, egged, shaved and butchered, then captured enemies might also... be... well, that doesn't sound all that dwarven. It's funny -- goblins get wasted a lot, but Tolk didn't really have them captured all that often, as far as I remember. Yet the good guys were captured all the time. What happens in other fantasy stories is either successful or unsuccessful attempts to get the creature to understand "the error of its ways". Or if it is a troll or something it might be changed into a big fluffy and good dog by fairies or something.
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You can add spikes to armor right now, as a decorative improvement... strange that they don't actually come up in fighting... maybe I should jot that down somewhere...
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The possibilities I thought of for captured enemies were interrogating them, letting them go with promises not to return, ransoming them back to wherever they came from, imprisoning them, enslaving them, or executing them, the last two of course being on the evil side of things. Possibly the interrogation as well, depending on how it's done. Sounds like this would be bloat stuff though...
I would favor treating them as a different category from livestock, though. I think even evil dwarves would probably draw the line at milking, shaving, and butchering goblins...
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Don't forget the eggs! Mmmm....
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I'd figured that you wouldn't be able to get eggs from something you could milk, but then again, goblins could be monotremes.
Way back in this thread you said that there were dwarven philosophers, but that you didn't really know what they did. There wasn't any trace of them in the movies and I assumed they'd been dropped because of that. It occurs to me that this might actually be a useful role for them, getting captured, intelligent enemies to see the error of their ways. Then again, making it possible to convince goblins to become productive citizens of the fortress might strain credibility almost as much as raising them for their tasty, nutritious milk and eggs...
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Does a platypus quack? Probably not.
The philosophers don't come right now until you have 100+ people. Then they just hang around. I have a list of things that they'd do. Like complaining about living arrangements for people and stuff... I'll look for my full list... complaining anger and death levels... not enough satisfying jobs... people without homes... too much punishment... not digging deep enough...
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Couldn't the philosophers do something useful, like try to cheer the other dwarves up?? It sounds like all the do is make your other dwarves angry...
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Well, they are more like activists now -- they complain to the mayor, and the mayor can then make mandates regarding these conditions, which the player can then follow (or not). In that way, they make the player aware of general problems that they might not have noticed. Perhaps they could play a more direct role though... on the other hand, dwarves develop friendships with people, and I could make the friends do more. They do a bit now, but it is a marginal effect.
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The philosopher dwarves should also be able to babble enemies to sleep. It would be cool if they were really sarcastic too. Say that you make severe tactical errors in battle. A philosopher dwarf could say, "Sometimes even God makes mistakes." If a lot of dwarves die in construction or manufacture related accidents, a philosopher dwarf could say, "Any leader can achieve his vision so long as he has ambition, fortitude, and an endless supply of expendable labor."
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maybe we could capture, shave, milk and butcher the philosophers, and feed them to the enslaved goblins. maybe not.
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philosopher's stone... or EGG?
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You just blew my mind.
Umm.... <insert>
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quote:
Originally posted by Gezol:
<STRONG>The possibilities I thought of for captured enemies were interrogating them, letting them go with promises not to return, ransoming them back to wherever they came from, imprisoning them, enslaving them, or executing them, the last two of course being on the evil side of things. Possibly the interrogation as well, depending on how it's done. Sounds like this would be bloat stuff though...</STRONG>
Hmm, good vs. evil, philosophers... Here's an idea for a bloat! Keep track of the trends in 'society' somehow--whether the Dwarves, as a whole, are bloodthirsty or peaceful, whether they're nasty or nice, good or evil, etc. Philosophers could play a role in changing your civilization. If the dwarves were bloodthirsty and nationalistic, they might demand that prisoners be executed... hippy dwarves might object to it. A player who wanted to could try to socially engineer their dwarves to match a specific philosophy.I can see dwarves' philosophical outlook being tracked by a handful of variables... "Nationalism", for instance, would measure their loyalty/devotion to the fortress, while "humanism" (or dwarfism) could measure their feelings of goodwill towards fellow sentients. These things would all start pretty low, but developing them (and deciding how far to take them) would be an important part of building a lasting civilization. The fortress could gain more complex reputations based on them as, say, a place with strict justice or a place with social equality... Those reputations would affect relations and so forth.
And you know what this means, don't you? Liberal Dwarf Squad!
[ October 05, 2005: Message edited by: Aquillion ]
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I just spent hours watching all the Dwarf Fortress movies. All I can say is that given how compelling it was to watch, playing it will probably be a transcendent joy.
OK, I can say more than that:
Events in the game seem to lend themselves to the player mentally filling in bits of the story; like the tragic tale of that hunter who went crazy and starved to death. That sort of thing adds a lot to a game of this sort. Well, that wasn't very well said but I think you know what I mean.
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Harlander! It has been a year or so. You are still a level 2 programmer? I want games!
Yeah, I think it's addictive and immersive -- even if I've never properly played into the mid-game because it still crashes occasionally.
I remember you asked something about Armok statistics a long time ago. Dwarf Fortress lends itself well to that sort of thing, even if it doesn't have teleporting body parts. Right now, for purposes of migration and merchants, it tracks every job and item completed over the history of your fortress, and all of the major events, as well as your principle artisans and their masterworks. The idea is to kind of share this information at the end in a nice synopsis (or "legend"), so that you can read an account of your fortress whenever you want. You'll also have any movies you recorded. I don't know how "cookie-cuttery" it'll end up sounding, but they might be fun to share with people.
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Well, I think I've got a bit more XP since then. I've dabbled in a couple of projects since then, but my staying power isn't very good and I tend to get distracted by other things, other projects, real-world happenings and shiny things.
I had an idea for a top-down Elite-esque multiplayer game where you could design your own ships. I only got as far as the polygon editor for that (which I coded in a weekend of frenzied work) before somehow losing impetus.
I started work on what I hoped to develop into essentially a roguelike version of Neverwinter Nights, but I couldn't even get a decent LoS algorithm to work, and fiddling with that was ultra-frustrating.
I did finish one 'game-esque' thing, a networked collaborative writing program (in glorious Java) with a mode where everyone submitted a line to continue the story, then voted for the one they preferred (they couldn't vote for their own) and were assigned a score based on how many votes they got.
All this isn't taking into account the projects I had to do for my degree course, of course.
I've been under a bit of malaise project-wise of late. I'm figuring I might be able to pull myself together once I've started my new job (sonar programming, woo!) but right now the empty days leave me feeling a little drained.
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Ooh, and thinking of it: decorated items. At the moment, you have things like images of humans, dwarves, crops, animals and whatnot on your decorated things. Would it be possible to have stuff like scenes, like 'this is carved with a scene of celebrating dwarves, surrounded by food' and whatnot? Maybe with details, like 'this cup is decorated with a bone carving of a fox, with the eyes picked out in tiny ruby quartz crystals'. It's not a big thing, but, I dunno, it might be cool.
[ October 05, 2005: Message edited by: Harlander ]
[ October 05, 2005: Message edited by: Harlander ]
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Yeah, it's easy to get distracted. I'm like a level 2 programmer, but I'm finally persistent after years of letting projects die. And there are no shiny things here in my room... where I am all the time.
The item improvement ideas sound good. I had some notes along those lines for the decorations, at least regarding using specific details for certain objects. Like instead of saying "the cup is studded with iron", it could stud the handle or some particular part, and I could do different ones for each item -- you could use jeweled eyes for your statues then, etc. But I hadn't thought about "improving the improvements", which is more what you suggested with the bone fox with ruby quartz eyes on the cup, and that would be cool and open up a lot of new avenues. As far as scenes go, up to this point I had planned to do that for masterpiece engravings -- if you saw the dwarf detailing the fortress, occasionally they'll bust out a masterpiece, which will be fleshed out -- it could commemmorate a battle you had previous won, or the psycho hunter that died, or whatever. I don't see any harm in moving a portion of that, or things like you suggest, over to items... it's all one big happy bloat.
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The most annoying thing about the failure of my Elite-clone project was that some people stole the project's name and used it for their own thing! *grr* I mean, it's not like they'd think of calling a 2D space game "Flatspace" independently, is it?
Right now I've been turning the idea of a Princess Maker-esque thingy in my mind. I haven't fleshed it out at all but I think I can use Python for some rapid prototyping once I turn vague ideas into less-vague ones.
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Ooh, the masterpiece idea sounds really cool. Also certain decorations could occur more often depending on what happens in the fortress. So for example, if the dwarves hunt a lot, then the decorations often have themes of animals and wilderness. If they have lots of farms, then it's things like plants and dwarves working in the fields, weapons and battle scenes if they fight a lot, etc.
Also, certain decorations might be more common on certain things. So, you might get things like dwarves standing over the bodies of their fallen foes on weapons, maybe, but peaceful plant designs on storage bins. There was this one spike-covered cabinet in the movies, which seemed a little unlikely to me, but then again, maybe that's a standard dwarven design...
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From the stuff they made in the movies, the dwarves did seem to like their spikes.
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Regarding the detailing, that all sounds good. There are only 5 or 6 ways to improve an item right now, and spikes is one of them. Dwarves apply them evenly, but it'll really change once I get back to that. Right now, the animals and images a dwarf makes are based on the artist's own favorites 80% of time. Other races put image of known creatures, so a human civilization will have a lot of hippos and elk and elephants (animals you currently can't see), and elves don't use spikes... I think...
Now we are at 39/192. I left a few wrestling moves behind, but that's bound to happen, since plans get bloated beyond recognition if I work on their topic for more than a few hours. I can't talk about the next 9 core things, but on the plus side, they shouldn't take too long. Then it'll be on to fire and extending magic... of course, as dwarves, you are mostly on the receiving end, but that's your lot.
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Mostly implies not entirely- what sort of magic can the dwarves use? I'm picturing alchemical type stuff, or some way to enchant weapons. Or is it just that they can get magic items through trading?
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Yeah, that's pretty much it -- occasionally a master artisan can produce a special item, and an alchemist can come by to handle things like antidotes and things. I had planned a few things you could get from the elves too.
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Ooh! Do they use rune magic with giant magic phrases carved in an ancient runic alphabet in man-high letters on their walls, which flare with a cryptic light as foes draw near?
Or is it something else?
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I might be going too far here, but if a dwarf has a fondness towards a particular object, will he be slightly more happy if he will have his belongings decorated with this stuff?
For example a dwarf who likes wine would like his belongings to have grapes and leaves as ornaments, while a hunter might want hunting scenes...
How about the phrases that the philosophers think up to be engraved on items?"This broad, mithril axe with oaken handle is decorated with three big rubies of average quality and engraved with a design of two dwarfs fighting a dragon. There is "Never say defeat, fight with all your strength" inscribed on the blade. The item is in good condition and slightly rusty."
How about that?
Any dwarf who ever defeated a dragon might like such a design i guess...
But i'm so being capricious now...
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I had some note somewhere about runes, because of the gates of Moria (although the elves made those runes? or did they work together... all so complicated). More bloats. Bloat bloat bloat. This would include those writing bloats as well.
A lot of those dwarf preference things are already in. You might have seen the list of things they like in their thoughts -- this directly influences what items they prefer to own. Since I don't have the scenes finished, I hadn't thought about that as much.
Hrm, I have items becoming worn, but I don't have rust. I guess I should do rust, since people go out in the rain all the time.
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some materials would have to have flags to prevent them rusting, however. i believe mithril was supposed to never rust, corrode or tarnish, or something like that. where as, Iron/steel rusts with water contact, aluminium oxidises with air contact, zinc rusts in place of iron/steel in some way (or something like that.)
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Now it's time for a bit of science talk in which I'll affect an air of much greater authoritiveness than I actually possess.
Although aluminium is highly reactive and corrodes quickly, it is this corrosion which leads to its corrosion resistance in use, as the oxide forms a thin layer on the surface of the metal, rendering it highly resistant to further decay.
Because of this, as well as its other properties, aluminium has been considered as a possible real-world analogue to mithril. Another real-world candidate is platinum.
Who says you never learn anything on web forums? :D :p
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I've read a bit about aluminum in the past, and I know it takes a lot of electricity to refine it in general. So where did the pre-commercial sources of aluminum come from (Napoleon III had some plates supposedly, etc., and it was considered more precious than gold at that time, according to one source)? Did they luck out and find a big lump that had once the oxidation film only on the outside? And then they made it into plates, instead of soda cans. IDIOTS.
Anyway, it was the electrical issue (and the fact that we have Dookstar, the precious metal) that made me exclude aluminum from the game. It also sounds too futuristic to me, but if there were a number of rare ancient examples, I could stick in very sporadic and very valuable lumps for the dwarves to use. I'm leaning against it right now.
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Aluminum doesn't occur in its pure form in nature.
I did some research. There was another (highly inefficient and extremely complicated) process which used potassium amalgam (an alloy of potassium and mercury) heated with aluminum chloride under reduced pressure, which caused the mercury to boil away and leave aluminum. It doesn't sound -too- complicated until you get into the production of each of these materials, most of which are dangerous in some way or another. Unless you want to add an entire alchemy system (which could give other neat things, like acids and glass additives), I don't see how they could develop it, really.
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Right now I'm using galena for silver, since it often contains a lot of silver impurities, but galena is a lead ore, and you can't make lead now. Maybe we can get lead poisoning in somehow.
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i was going to say how at least we're sfe from the dwarves using electrolisis to coat things such as iron with gold and sell them off as 'expensive' items, but then i recalled that they apparently found what resembled ancient batteries from one civilisation. as well as models that resembled aeroplanes somewhat, in their form.
the solution to this is we blow up all the ruins we find and smugly continue to think we did it first. err. i mean...
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Yes, it's true. The dwarves will build Mayan televisions.
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But the question is, can they build satellite dishes as well? I bet they'd start grumbling about not having enough channels and missing out on the hit shows over on the elven channels if you didn't build one.
Anyway... Dookstar? Is that the game's equivalent of mithril? And is there any connection to the whole dook thing way back in this thread? That would be pretty funny if there was...
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Nah, I was just working on the dook "game" at the time that we were talking about copyright infringement. So mithril became Dookstar. On the other hand -- Angband has mithril AND "scruffy looking hobbits", though I think they changed out the balrog. I thought the H word was particularly bad, and I know ADOM got nailed for it. Was that only after Thomas Biskup started selling the ADOM deluxe for actual money?
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ADOM Deluxe was never finished. I don't know what the whole story was with ADOM changing the name of the hobbits, but it actually still has mithril. As does Angband, which still has Balrogs, along with Sauron, Morgoth, the One Ring, etc. There's actually a huge number of games out there which use mithril, as the list in this article shows:
Mithril
My opinion is that you're probably safe using mithril, if you want to. Considering that games as high profile as Final Fantasy, Everquest, and World of Warcraft use it, I very seriously doubt anyone would come after you. Hobbits might be another matter, but then Angband and Nethack get away with it... it all seems to be pretty arbitrary.
(and then of course, there's the option of spelling it "mythril" and/or giving it a different color, as a couple games on that list did.)
What was the whole dook thing about, anyway? Reading the thread I'd thought it was just a joke based on a typo, but it sounds like you were working on some project involving them?
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Liberal Crime Squad also has mithril in it, at the Oubliette shop! I think aluminum would be an awesome thing to add. Aluminum was more precious than gold back in the day. there should be all sorts of different metals in the game. certain metals could have a thematic element too. For example, silver weapons could do severe damage to undead and were-creatures.
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Those ancient batteries are pretty cool, though some of the ideas for what they were used for seem a little off-the-wall... Using them for electroplating, sure, that's a great idea, but another hypothesis was that they were used in temples as a kind of theological joybuzzer...
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I have to say that Dookstar sounds like a kind of silly name for a metal...
There was a mention at some point of letting players customize names like that via config files, so people who want to violate established properties can do so on their own initiative. Is that going to be included, or is it in the 'shameless bloats' section at this point?
[ October 09, 2005: Message edited by: Aquillion ]
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It is in the last core thing I'm going to do, the init file. Dookstar, of course, a silly name... but, well, if mithril isn't being enforced or is unenforceable, then I might just do it that way. Does somebody have an email for the Tolkien estate? I could just ask them which words they are claiming.
That said, I can change it to adamant/adamantine, which has way older roots. For instance, "In Greek mythology, Cronus uses an adamantine sickle to castrate his father, the Titan Uranus."
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Well, according to this page, the Tolkien Estate doesn't seem to have an e-mail address.
I agree with Aquillion on the Dookstar thing. Silliness isn't a bad thing, but this doesn't feel like the best part of the game to put it. I would go with adamant or maybe orichalcum if you were going to change it entirely, but as I said, I think mithril's safe. I mean, if something as big and well-known as World of Warcraft has it, and Thomas Biskup decided that it was okay to keep in ADOM even after he changed the hobbits... Personally, I would go ahead and use it, but it's up to you.
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To clarify, the use of Dookstar was a joke directed at this copyright issue. It wasn't something to worry about.
I'll decide what to call things later. I still have a lot of basic programming to do...
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Also, as I understand it, they send out cease and detest letters before they do anything else... so you could just go with mithril, and change it to something else if they object.
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Hrm, so on the weekend, I've gotten halfway through two of the core things. I might not have time to finish them off until Thursday. The continuing mission.
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38/192 -- going for 37 tomorrow. Then more on the weekend hopefully.
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37/192. Woot. Shooting for 35 by the end of the weekend.
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Cor, I think I can see Toady's keyboard smoking from where I am! :D
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Did... you miss me?
Hehehehe, I'm back to torture you all :)
Anyways, keep up the good work, cyall in another ?unkown period of time?
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test grading and grant writing and talk preparing and makeup exam writing and paper writing are intruding on the free time at the moment... I should get back on track a bit over the weekend.
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So are you a post doc or a professor? How long do you expect to be in Texas? And what's the last bloat you added?
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I'm a post doc, but also a "Visiting Assistant Professor", so technically I can be called Prof. ToadyOne. I'm here for 3 years unless they let me go. I've forgotten the last bloat... I'm away from my laptop... I'll let you know.
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Looking back over my log, it's been a long time since I've added a bloat. Mostly core stuff and bug fixes recently. I should get a chance to work this weekend, if I finish grading exams tonight.
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Hrm, the site seems un-dead now. Undead even.
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At last.. I was starting to panic already.
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You haven't made the connection yet, have you?
I return, all goes quiet. I think some wizard or witch cursed me with an anti-forum-attendence curse.
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*Weeks later, after Ancient Sleeping Dude's post, someone actually replies.*
:D
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Apparently that downtime of the site over the last few days was caused by my hosting company's facilities being damaged by Hurricane Wilma (and their backup generators didn't work.)
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See what happens when the Ancient Sleeping Dude posts here? The curse works in strange ways.
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*insert Jason music here*
Scene: A dark server room. A tech is sitting at the computer, typing frantically to make sure the backup generators work. He hears something, and looks around, camera pans to show what he looks at, nothing. He turns back the monitor and starts typing again, camera pans to show monitor. You see in the reflection of it a man in a hockeymask appear. The techie turns around but to late, the masked man attacks...
End Scene
And that is what happened :)
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It just keeps going -- the router for my apartment complex died, so I'm stuck without the net (except for work) for a while.
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All right, so the countdown has been a little thin lately because I've decided to convert a lot of the 2002ish code to 2005ish code. This will slow things down in the short term and speed them up in the long term, which will probably result in no change in the release date of the first version, but should make future additions quite a bit easier to write.
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Do you have any estimate now? btw, Im on movie 22 now, and I have to ask... WHY do you ignore so many of those neat £ signs, and what do their colors represent? and what does % mean?
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No estimate, though the official release date is still August some big number, 2006. Who knows how long whatever will take... lots of time has been going in to the job since I have 200 students to take care of.
The pound signs, which I have no idea how to reproduce on this forum, are metal veins, and the colors are whatever the ore color is that I found in my geology book. Malachite is a green copper ore for instance. I think I ignored them because I already had enough metal for my small number of works. Later on, when you have more people, or if you allocate more people in that direction, you can mine out the veins, and make more metal bars and more metal objects.
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I was kinda hoping for a colorcoded list of the various metals :)
August? aaargh, but after watching the movies I so want to play this now :(
If only you had some bug hunter ppl that included me on the list...
Another question? What on earth does potash do?
[ November 06, 2005: Message edited by: Ancient_Sleeping_Dude_Reinc ]
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potash
It's used to make clear glass (rather than green glass, which sand alone produces). It isn't used as a fertilizer right now, but I'm looking into that, since you have too much of it as it stands -- having it available as a fertilizer would help a lot, and make farming more interesting. Then there's the mention of soap. That's on the table -- coal from the mountain could be used not only to get coal fuel, but coal tar as a biproduct, and the dwarves could use that and some kind of animal product to make medicinal Dwarven Dandruff Shampoo or some such crap. I think it might cause cancer, like everything else.
[ November 06, 2005: Message edited by: Toady One ]
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I was watching the movies yet again, I noticed at one point you had a trench dug and then filled with water. What was that for?
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I was getting the floodgates set up so that I could put fertile mud from the river in a room of my choice, but somebody probably died.
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Now that begs another question. Do dwarves do pottery?
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Clay is a bloat. They do glass work, but there are no pots right now. And nothing to smoke.
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Awww man, why you have to harsh my dreams of a rastafarian colony of dwarves.
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Well, smoking is a bloat. I think we talked about this a bit before, when we were trying not to say the h word.
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Okay, so I've gotten things past where they were when my computer died. I'm still moving things over to C++, and then we'll be back on track, or something.
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Hi, I finished watching the movies, and, like so many others, I can't wait for the game to be released. It's looking awsome!
While watching the movies I wondered how one controls the camera and cursor... is the mouse envolved or is it just done with the keyboard?
The movies play VERY fast for me... is this normal? Did you include some kind of fps-limit? I ended up pausing the movie every other second...
[ November 27, 2005: Message edited by: DungeonHunter ]
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Everything is done with the keyboard. It will also compile in PDCurses without OpenGL being involved. For some reason I wanted it to be compatible with regular RLs (you can even set it to 128-char ASCII mode, although this is... not recommended). Having the mouse available would definitely be handy -- as would breaking the 80x25 text tile system, but I'm not going to do that until after the first release. Then I might rush to do it...
I think the timer limits it to 100 FPS. It's easy to adjust if it ends up being a problem in the actual game. I'm not sure if you are seeing the regular game speed or not. I have it set pretty fast because it gets boring to watch them haul if it moves slowly. It would probably be best just to have some kind of speed setting option that you can change easily in the game.
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Your screenshots rule by the way. "Wooden Shield From Hell".
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Thanks! The names are just for testing purposes... ("You enter testcave level 1"). There even are some german names like "Rather shimering amulet of dei mudda ( =your mother)".
Concerning mouse-control: I love non-mouse controlled games, I don't know why, though... So don't add this feature, will you!?!? :p
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Hehe, Blitz rules, look forward to playing your roguelike ;)
Which reminds me, I really should do some work on my RPG project... (goes off to make cunning sig link :P)
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Those item names are great.
I think you should leave the scroll of *TEST* in the final game, if only to come up with the message "You read the scroll. Yup, that seems to be working."
Also: pestulance? Is that a portmanteau of pestilence and petulance? All foes struck with the weapon become peevish and febrile..
Seems to be coming on very well, much better than any project I've started recently.
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"pestulance" is one of the 1284638456 spelling errors. I'm german and i never had english lessons at school :( .
It's ongoing very well, but I won't be finished before Toady (which means that he's got to finish soon), and I need to find a native speaker who is willing to overread every english line in source and mod...
PS: Your Mordor remake looks awsome Prosperus!
[ November 29, 2005: Message edited by: DungeonHunter ]
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I like the "rather shimmering" item names. Usually in fantasy settings everything's big, glorious and extreme. "The mighty, blessed bastard sword of doom!" etc. But that amulet's merely "rather shimmering"..
Genius.
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Sig test... hopefully got the sloppy code sorted.
The graphics in your roguelike seem quite detailed as well. Having played Angband with graphics I must say yours look a lot clearer :)
If you need a hand with proofreading any spelling/grammar, I could try to give you a hand with that. I'm English (though some would say my native language is gibberish :P)
[ November 29, 2005: Message edited by: Prospero ]
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Wow this would be great, I'll contact you (over email? just send it to me per PM).
What makes the graphics clearer is that chars are represented as heads. That's a mixture between symbols (eg ASCII) and Angbandish graphics.
Back to the dwarf game: Toady, you said, you accelerated the speed of the movies, how long did you play then up to movie 25? And how long will one game take in general (well, probably infinite...)?
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Are they accelerated? I don't remember if I cut frames or not. I probably played for... I dunno, five hours? Assuming you don't get wiped out, a game can last a long time. But as your fortress grows, you are pressured to dig deeper. For instance, your nobles will want objects made of gold, and if you haven't found gold you'll need to start looking harder. And we all know what happens to dwarves that go to deep into the mountain... You can keep it going for a long time though. Many weeks probably. Then you can start another game and continue the history where it left off.
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What would happen if a section of the dwarf fortress became sealed from the rest. Would the air go bad? Cannibalism?
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Right now if a section becomes sealed off, nothing particular happens -- in general, if dwarves are starving to death, a number of things happen, some quite compromising, morally. I had thought a bit about bad air, but had dismissed it as difficult... come to think of it, it is probably easy. I already have the connected components numbers, and it would just need to assign an air number to each one, and make the units slowly decrease that. If the connected component borders the inside features (river, etc.) or the outside, then it would get air. He he h ehe.. . yet more ways for the dwarves to suffocate.
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Good! I'm glad the air "system" won't be such a bloat. Fires deplete fresh air quite rapidly, perhaps forges need to have vents?
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Damn, I'm just full questions....
Do dwarves get sick?(flu,colds,plauge)
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There were some bloats about that, but they shold probably be very hearty with regard to that kind of thing.
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Here's a request for some future date.
After the dwarf fortress falls, could the map be saved in a printer friendly format. That way my pen & paper gamers can have fresh maps to hack and slash through.
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Using the functions I wrote for doing all those world map screenshots, I can export whatever to BMP. I imagine that would work.
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I don't suppose you could post how many tasks are left on the List?
Or possibly give us a hint for a release date?
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Yeah, I've been doing that regularly in this thread. Right now I'm at 35 core things left to do (and have been for a while...) and 191 bugs/required alterations. I said I'd put something out at the end of August, regardless of where it is at.
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Will there be saunas made from channels where dwarves can go to relax in the steam?
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What, where the water and lava join, a sauna is made?
X
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August? Which one? :roll:
*ducks*
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EIGHT YEARS FROM NOW.
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Is that in dog years? ;)
[ December 10, 2005: Message edited by: Captain_Action ]
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Lunar years?
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Lunar years is pretty close isn't it? Demon is physics-ass.
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28 days. I guess some astronomers would call 28 pretty close to 365 though... :roll:
Edit: Woot! 1337th post!
[ December 13, 2005: Message edited by: Demon ]
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Earth day, Jupiter day, or Venus day? xD
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29.5 Earth days, 0.122 Venus days, 72.1 equitorial Jupiter days, 71.4 polar Jupiter days.
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I had something important to say, but then I switched windows quickly to check something, now I forgot what I wanted to say!
Hey, is that a yeti?
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Did you change the movie player (the design changed, so I guess yes)? It doesn't really work for me anymore: most movies don't play at all and some just play for a few seconds...
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Yeah, there was a movie player posted September 2005 that will play the many new long movies. It is one of the first links on the dwarf fortress page. The old player will only play the old 10 second movies.
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Wow! This was fast!
Okay... I had to be blind... Thanks
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Merry Christmas, Fortress followers... :)
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Hrm. Do dwarves celebrate Christmas, or some dwarven equivilant?
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Probably not... that would be a short cross too, although Jesus did have a beard in the depictions I'm aware of. There was a bloat about holidays... there's a calendar right now, sort of...
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So would today be Axing Day?
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But a fat dwarf bringing gifts would be so appropriate!
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i think the ten minutes and fifty seven seconds estimate was off, as much as i've clung onto it through sheer denial.
err. i mean...
would the holidays be randomly generated for the dwarves, so that you get the risk of several holidays running back to back and everybody complaining that all the food's ran out, but they won't GATHER any because it's a holiday so they all starve?
would dwarves LIKE getting lumps of coal?
would they potentially train their young to carry out some play against their will on 'special' holidays, despite the children clearly not consenting to being forced into it?
would dwarves drink to excess on these holidays and have hangovers the next day?
is there any chance that you can add a special event where a kobold pirate with two peg-legs and two eye patches tries to sneak into the fortress and steal supplies?
can i get any more unhelpful?
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Perhaps you could create your own holidays...
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quote:
Originally posted by Silleh Boy:
<STRONG>i think the ten minutes and fifty seven seconds estimate was off, as much as i've clung onto it through sheer denial.</STRONG>
Nonsense. My math was flawless.
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I am back from the holidays now. I'm not sure what that means. Dwarves is still on for August.
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Still alive! Even if it's months that I don't see anyone on our beloved channel..Anyway, If you are going to release Dwarves to the World on August...that would be a very nice gift for my 18th birthday :-)
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That's because you always come in early-morning Italian time zonk, which is the middle of night in Texas. Try the evening instead. Though... looking at the logs for what they were talking about last night, it seems most of the time was spent discussing picture.exe brought in by one hot_girl.
X
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She could have spelled girl with a u. Or put two t's on hot. TT would have liked that.
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A question (maybe answered allready.. but there are so many pages to read)
How do the dwarfs deal with each other ? Let me explain : I had planned a while ago to write a city simulation, with plenty of people who could give you missions...
Every people did behave according to what they know from the world :
-This guy is bad, this one is a friend, this one is an ennemy of my friend, this guy is part of this group. I like that group...
-If I do this, I will earn money, I'have that guy do this, and that guy is rich...
-If I go to that place I can do that
Decisions would have been made according to a rate of the different option :
-If I do that, I will get that much, but on the other hand, I will make this guy angry, he is very agressive and has many close friends thta I know are dangerous. On the other hand, myself I good too, And I really hate him. SO I would'nt bother do something bad to him.
-I can do this, it is less money, but less trouble
The option with the best rate is executed.
So, all behaviour is ruled according to these basic items of knowledge, that are mixed together, evaluated.
When character meet, they exchange knwoledge (according to their relation ship and trust they have toward each other)
What is interesting, is that they don't necessaringly behave according to what IS, but what they BELIEVE is. So there is room for lies, rumors.
The relationships between groups can evolve (I don't touch that man, because he as plenty of friends. Hey wait a minute ! This group is not any more so god friend with him. Hmm Maybe it is time for me to slap him !!)
Is there anything like this in the dwarf forteress ?
Are these thought of any interess to you ?
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There isn't that much power-playing going on in dwarves. That's more along the lines of how I was going to handle people in Armok, or something with more of an RPG feel. The new Elder Scrolls claims to have something like this, although I don't know how in-depth it is. The dwarves do have a lot of petty crap they worry about, like whose room is better and so on, but they don't think out complicated plans of action for how to change their status. Your enemies do think about what they are doing and so on, but it isn't so elaborate.
You should write your game.
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Yep.
In the one hand, I designed it a few years ago, and I have much more experience now.
On the other hand, I was uneployed, which is not true anymore...
But, re-writing something about it made revive it a bit...
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Now something I would *really* like to see is an dwarves rpg game. Give the building task to an AI and then play a dwarf who is allowed to do any job in exchange for some money :)
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An other interesting (?) stuff from an other game I have never done.
For background : There a big city, made of caves and buildings. You play a group of people living as parasites in the city (you steal, and try not to be discovered. If you grow too big, you must not destabilize to much your host city. If it is threatened you must also try to protect it).
The interesting stuff : I have wondered how we should deal with the group. I wanted to emphasize on the fact that your people did NEED the group to survive.
Basicaly, when you decide to control one character (or a group of character which are close one to the other), if this character is cut from the rest of the group, you can't go back to control the other. Imagine this character is capturer and sent to a jail very far away, you can't take control of the other character to come and save him. You'll have to escape yourself, and find your wau to come back home.
The rest of you characters would have keeped leaving by themselves. If the kidnapped character was important, maybe a party would have been made to bring him back.
Eventually, if you want to extend your area of control of character (Which means, area from which you can switch from one character to the other) you can build a tower outised (your sight is much further so you keep seeing that hunter who is far away, a semaphore up a hill to control character who are much further away, or build a system of mirrors in the cave)
To make it even more subtile you can go further :
A semaphore is big, and can be seen all around (except some deep valley, or behind a montain). You can take control of any character seing that sempahore.
But once you control that character, your character who might be lost in the forest can not be seen by the sempahore : You can not go back to control the city around the semaphore. If you want to go back to the city, the character far in the forest must either come back, or for exemple make a fire to be seen from the semaphore.
So to extent you empire, a good network is important, but you can still send parties far away wondering how would your home have evolved when you come back.
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What is going on, anything new, anything old? anything not meant for mortal men!
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Oh well. Not much. Apparently, I just bored everybody to death with my looong posts of suggestions.
Corpses of bored souls are lying all over the ground. It is terrible. And very unexiting.
Best thing is to have nap
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I hope not sending a message to this forum is a sign that toady is busied working on the game :p
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Whatever I've got will be up six months from today. I haven't been working on it much lately. I've been working on various other projects, but I should be back on it as soon as I post one of them.
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No rush, for I have found a dwarf fortress game that is like the one you are making.
It's called Diggles, and its actually quite like the dwarf fortress, since you control dwarves and you are to dig into a mountain and gain resources and build "buildings" and wage war on other clans and creatures.
Granted, its alot more simplified than dwarves, but it should give us dwarf fanatics something to do while waiting.
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Been working steadily on the item code for a while now. I guess it might actually be done at some point. I put up a list of what's going on that I'll try to keep updated regularly. You can access IT from the Dwarves page.
[ March 03, 2006: Message edited by: Toady One ]
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Thanks for putting that page up. It's nice to be able to keep track of what's happening...
~200 things left to do with the item code? Yikes. How much progress has been made on Core10 so far?
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Actually, quite a lot. I already did creatures, map events, civ leaders and important items, as well as wilderness populations and mandates from the nobles and so on. Doing items is the most tedious part, but I've done around 200 of the things I have to do. If everything goes smoothly I should log in another 150 or so over the next few days, leaving 50 tougher ones, which might take another week. Jobs is easy, buildings is really annoying (though faster than items), and projectiles is super easy. Then I have to do some bug cleaning, since I haven't been able to run the game for a long time. Most of the other core elements after that are more fun to work on, like fire and armies and things like that.
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Nice List, but two questions:
Does the re-walling thingy mean you can mine out veins and then put walls back up to form rooms?What are all the Nuthins?
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Yeah, sometimes you make mistakes, and with a few stones you'll be able to rewall a square or squares. You can't do it indefinitely, since you'd run out of stone, but you won't (shouldn't) need to do it that often. I'm sure it will introduce all kinds of connectivity bugs, but it is a necessary feature.
The nuthins aren't anything.
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...and looking at the list again, I see a significant amount of progress has been made. Cool.
Are any of the core things afterwards as big a job as this one has been, or do they get less formidable from here?
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None of them should take this long. I started this crap in the beginning of November. There have been a number of detours along the way of course, but still, nothing else should take even a month (although with school and all that, who knows). The thing I put out on August 8 should be most of the way through the core stuff. There will be a number of outstanding issues, but I'll keep listing the ones I know about and keep working on them after that until it is clean. Then we'll see what's on the menu.
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Keep up the good work Toad.
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It really is nice being able to follow your progress. I just checked the page and saw the item code is finished. Kickass.
You don't have to reveal anything if it's too spoily, but what's involved with Core11 and Core40? They sound particularly intriguing. As do Bloat4 and Bloat61, but I'm guessing that information will not be forthcoming on those...
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Those core things were mostly about mounts, monsters, pets and shit-talking like Assyrians. There are some technical Reqs somewhere about making invading armies able to break through your defenses slowly -- right now certain configurations can stop them cold (although you won't be able to trade, so sieges still mess you up).
Those two bloats are special.
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I maintain that infill and tunnelling enemies will be an inevitability...
X
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What effect does does building a road has on the merchants that come to trade.
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The humans and their wagons won't even come without a road. It's a bit strange maybe, but what it signifies is that you made some effort to connect yourself to the outside world. I might end up having smaller human caravans come if you don't have a road, but for now, you don't get any.
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A question: Roughly how many kingdoms, chiefdoms, empires, rouge nations and holy domains will appear in a standard game?
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I don't really know yet. It seems like the world generator usually makes 2 or 3 elf type places, 2 or 3 really evil places, and about 15 or so human civs, though that number can decline. But it isn't fixed at all. That will be more resolved when I get to those world map core entries I think.
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I finally finished the code updates. Now I'm working on some technical crap related to civilization items and a save bug before I move on to the rest of the game. There are probably a lot of bugs with the code updates as well that we'll all enjoy finding for the next several years.
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It's all steps in the right direction :)
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I just realized that August 8 is exactly the day when I'll be finished with school! Well it's just the day of my last exam but though, lots and lots of time to test and post bugs and rewrite my game on another language :cool:
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So, what's been happening lately? It's been a few weeks since the Dwarf Fortress update page was, well, updated...
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I've been working out some combat issues, but nothing that really rose to the level of mentioning. My birthday is on the 17th, after which I'm going to start the sprint to the finish in a update-page-noticeable way. Not that I'll finish, but it should be playable with more features (it doesn't even compile right now). We might need a greek letter somewhere between alpha and beta for what we'll all be doing after that. Bepha is not dwarfly enough. Alta sounds too cerebral or something, although romance dwarves rather than Scottish dwarves might be refreshing, or something.
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Good to hear programming hasn't stopped.
Alpha, beta... alpha-beta... There's a joke in there about the origins of the word "alphabet." I just know there is, but I can't come up with it right now. Of course, it probably would only be funny to hardcore history and/or language nerds anyway...
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I'm alpha betting there's some stupid-ass jokes unrelated to the alphabet in there too, but I can't figure out what they are.
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Until his birthday on the 17th he's feeling cold on hookers and gin.
X
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It really is a coming-of-age party more than anything, in that manner.
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And after the 17th... can't anybody see? He's got a war to fight.
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There we are. I think I can go for an unadulterated Dwarves run from now until August 8th (and beyond). There are three more weeks of school and then the summer trimester runs up through the deadline. I don't have any official duties during the summer.
I won't have any summer income at all, in fact. So, happy birthday to me! For my present, I get YOUR money! Well, I put up one of those Paypal buttons, anyway, to spread around the modest costs of running the site, and for food. The button is on the main page. I even wrote a blurb.
He he he. Right at the peak of the site's popularity too. He he he he...
Anyway, Dwarves. I'll update that progress page tomorrow (today, whatever) and eventually get through this C++ stuff. Then it looks like about half-fun, half-slog until the 8th, which is about as good a mix as you can ask for out of programming.
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I'd love to donate, but I haven't really got any means to do so. I don't have a credit card, a paypal-account or anything else that would help.
What if you'd put some subtle ads on the page? A similarly colored google ad on the bottom of the main page? I don't think that would bother anyone, and this way we who can't send our money to you could click them once a visit or so. I don't know how popular the site is, but I'm sure that would get you some money anyway.
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I'd rather stay away from the ads and all that if possible. The support link isn't a matter of desperation at this point, but just a means for people to contribute to something I think is interesting, rather than paying fifty bucks for the right to own some rehashed crap. For people that don't have credit cards or anything like that, just keep playing the games as they come out and let me know what you think.
The dwarves plan page has been updated. Got through two Reqs today, and I should be getting on to fire soon. That will keep me entertained.
I baked a pizza today for my birthday cake. My brother gave me a bunch of Ray Harryhausen DVDs, and my parents gave me an animal book. Righteous.
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I guessed that. I'll definitely continue playing the games, but I would've loved to help you financially, too, even a little bit.
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I can't think of anything I want to advertise... the Art Bell show maybe...
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I'd also want to see what Google Ads would choose to advertise on for example the Dwarf Fortress page or the LCS page. They often provide comical results.
But otherwise I don't know if it matters what the ads are. It's not like anyone's really gonna read them, be they about the Art Bell show or Liberal Dwarves or anything..
I wouldn't care what the ads were about, but I do see your point, too.
[ April 18, 2006: Message edited by: Aristharus ]
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I think the subgames preclude me from signing up for ad services anyway. Something about... "mature" content...
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Might be one day late, but anyway HAPPY BIRTHDAY! I've got no credit card or even some left-over money, but I'll try to be supportive though.
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He he he, we can all be broke together!
After all this code rewriting, the building interfaces are trashed, not that they weren't already trashy. So I'm going to work on them a bit. Then there are a few save/load issues. After that I get to compile it and run it and see... what I see. There will probably be some time spent fixing bugs and getting it to work smoothly again. Once the dwarves are happy, I'll set them on fire in various ways.
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I'm a day late also, but yeah, happy birthday! I just sent you a little something through Paypal.
On the birthday subject, I've decided that since my birthday is only like eight days after when Dwarf Fortress is released, I'm going to refrain from downloading it until then. Assuming I can stand it, anyway...
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He he he. The release date is Zonk's birthday, and my brother's birthday is three days before. Maybe we should declare a party month or something. I guess it will be a party month by default anyway, since I've been working on this thing on and off for 4 years.
Thanks for the birthday present! Thanks also to the other Bay 12 regulars who have contributed. I checked my account, and Paypal seems to be working. It isn't taking much of a cut, which is good... I guess all credit card transactions usually have some small fee associated to them that is passed along to the "vendor" (me in this case).
I have to leave to hold office hours (the Spring final exams are in three weeks or so). Then I'll try to get all this building interface code sorted out. If I can finish that tonight, I'll be happy, but it might take a few more days. The save bugs are kind of mind-bending, since it has to keep a lot of things straight, but there aren't many of them (that I've found), so that'll just be a few days as well. I'm looking forward to the burnings... maybe dwarves burn faster, because of the beards, or something. Like Santa.
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"Bloat75: Minor punishments like fines and beard shaving."
MINOR punishments? You'd think shaving the beard would be the harshest and most barbaric punishment ever imaginable for a dwarf...
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Of course it's a minor punishment. Now cutting off the hair on your toes and feet. That's a major punishment!!!
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No. That's a halfling or something...
I think for a dwarf, cutting off the toes and feet itself would be minor compared to shaving the beard...
[ April 19, 2006: Message edited by: Aristharus ]
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Maybe the word "minor" is off... but the only current punishments are imprisonment and being chained up and beaten with a hammer.
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Maybe if the hammerer picked the place to be smashed more... intelligently... it'd work as a minor punishment too.
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quote:
Originally posted by Demon:
<STRONG>Maybe if the hammerer picked the place to be smashed more... intelligently...</STRONG>
This sounds painful...
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ops...Sorry for being late...happy birthday the same, though :-|
I'm very happy to know things are happening, and I'm somewhat ashamed I don't have a credit card or something to give some economic support :-( Still, I can give plenty of moral and intellectual support!
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All of the people who don't have credit cards can just let me crash at their places as I hitchhike around Europe, once I'm broke. You can let me upload B12 files from your internet connections too.
I fixed a bunch of crash bugs related to the code changes I've been doing, and it seems to be running smoothly again, somewhat. Since the August 8th date is drawing near, I'm going to SOMEHOW not do fire, and focus instead on things I think definitely have to go in before I release. The rest can go in afterward once everybody has seen the basic shape of the game.
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Me, I'm just hoping the Assyrian shit-talking makes it in before August. Also the two mysterious and special bloats, if possible...
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I already wrote some Assyrian shit-talking for a side-project, so I think there's a chance it could make it (though it depends on a lot of things, and I think my brother might have the books for that... or maybe I have some of them). Both of the mysterious things are quite easy, so... yes... yes... perhaps they will go in...
Is 109 days right? 7 in August, 31 in July, 30 in June, 31 in May, and 10 in April (counting this one). And it's all building up for a buggy crap-thing which will improve over time!
[ April 22, 2006: Message edited by: Toady One ]
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It's a good thing I have aligned my inner planets with my external chi, combined with a living in hamburger/cocacola stricken poverty while working for aliens on supressing the USA's effort to create the war hamster to conquer antarticta.
This, as a side effect, has given me unlimited patience.
Now if you excuse me, I'm gonna go get this *picks up a big steel club* Bat of Motivation and get people to send B12 money :)
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YES! First post on new page! BAH P(specialcharacter that looks like an O with a line through)WNED
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I don't know if there has been talk about it before (I didn't find anything while searching) but I'm wondering to which OSs Dwarf Fortress will be compatible with.
I'm currently planning a rewrite of my game to another language which can compile to other OSs ... it's like 2 years of hard work again, but no I think it won't be to hard. I should have started with C++ in the first place.
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Initially it'll just run in Windows. After that, there is somebody possibly working on a port to Linux (via another game I've mostly finished), although mostly animated gifs lately.
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Okay, so April 30th begins the 100 day countdown I guess, in terms of "100 days left", with August 7th as "1 day left". Gezol's 100 day countdown begins on May 7th.
That's kind of a long time, but it's never enough to finish everything. I've been fixing a lot of bugs, and it has started running more smoothly again. I have 5 or 6 major issues left to handle there. Afterward, I'll try to balance my time between making large fortresses easier to play and doing interesting things on the world map. The interface hasn't quite settled down yet, but I can begin work on documentation as well. Right now, I let you press "?" any time to get help (or a user-defineable key, which will hopefully let us get passed some of the interface issues that have been troubling LCS users). The "?" key pops up a manual section that is relevant to the screen you are looking at, and there are little hyperlinks that let you navigate other manual pages (with the keyboard). There's no mouse support now since I wanted this thing to run in curses, but we can discuss mouse support later (it would be easy to add to the OpenGL version).
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Keep up the good work, Toady!
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Rather than make some sort of speech on how you should keep up the good work, involving the doom of our enemies, and probably qouting Warcraft3 alot, I will just say:
Keep up the good work, Toady.And yes, I was original, I didn't qoute Zonk :)
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Is it 94 days now? It's much nicer counting down days than tasks left, since days decrease in a uniform way, whereas my task lists tend to grow. Of course, after 94 days, I'll be much older.
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I just wanted to note that my hundred day countdown begins today.
One thing you could do that might shrink the task list down some is to just work on all the easiest stuff on there for a week or so. Things like Req39, Req59, Req113, Req152...(I could be wrong about those particular ones being easy, but they look like they probably are.)
Seems like you've been pretty productive lately, though. New industries?
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It's basically been like that, but with a bunch of bugs that came out of playtesting that I didn't bother to Req-up since I've been doing them as they come up.
Yeah... I've split up the furnace into 4 different kinds of furnace... basically, potash was being used for too many things, so now I've got ash, lye, potash and pearlash (with the associated wood furnace and kiln), and I've separated smelting and glass-making into two furnaces. Since you can slaughter animals now, you'll also get fat and be able to do things with it (with lye for instance), after the rendering process (which I'm handling in the kitchen rather than a new building). Potash will also be used as a fertilizer. I *think* the evaporated lye stage is when you start fertilizing with it... I couldn't find (and didn't look very hard) for any sources. It's easy to change if I'm wrong.
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If lye is in, then that means the dwarves will be able to make that beloved delicacy- lutefisk! Er, or maybe not.
From the bit of research I just did, it seems like you're right about the evaporated lye stage being when potash was used as fertilizer.(It's a lot more refined now, of course.) See here, for instance.
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I have to eat lutefisk every year during the holidays. I was actually thinking of having dwarves do something similar with the cave fish from the river, but... well... it's hard to put in... yeah, that's it... hard to program...
Is there a significant difference between using different kinds of fats in soap making? Not from an ethical perspective, but just in terms of the texture, odor, etc. Right now I'm mixing lye with rendered fats to make "Soap", rather than "Musk Ox Soap", which is kind of a strange name -- although I can also give each animal a soap gloss (like "venison" will be a meat gloss). Rendered fats should also have glosses (suet->tallow, pork fat->lard, etc.)
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hmm, does this slaughtering of livestock mean we get fat from the various prey that our hunters bring in, or are they completely seperate processes?
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I've never actually had the pleasure(if that's the word) of tasting lutefisk, but hell, I have enough Norwegian ancestry that maybe I should, someday, if only so I can make jokes about it from personal experience. I really draw the line at surströmming, though. Anyway, I guess that's more Swedish.
On the soap question- reading about that, it all gets very complicated. There are so many different possibilities in soapmaking... The kind of fat used does seem to have a significant effect, but a lot probably depends on how detailed you want to get with it. There's some information on the differences between different animal fats here- like, tallow makes harder soap than lard and chicken fat. And of course that's not even getting into soap made with vegetable oil, which I think it mostly is these days... I didn't really find anything about odor, but I suspect that any animal-fat soap doesn't really smell all that great unless fragrances are added to it. I don't know if you're going to get into that aspect, but you could make it possible to extract essential oils from the various plants, and then you could add those in the soapmaking process and get various scented soaps which would be substantially more valuable and popular than unscented. For how to describe it, I'd go with the format of first the scent status, and then what it's made from. So, for example, "unscented musk ox tallow soap", "plump helmet scented lard soap", etc.
Well, that was a long-ass paragraph. Like I say, it's a complicated subject...
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*shudder* Lutefisk. I still think it's a joke on visiting foreigners.
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IT'S REAL.
ussdefiant, yeah, you get fat from the bodies now, along with the skin, meat, bones, skulls and completely worthless chunks. The amount of fat depends on the creature, although I didn't really research the numbers.
[ May 08, 2006: Message edited by: Toady One ]
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Well, it's safe to assume that large slow creatures are fat, and small fast creatures are thin :)
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What about small, slow creatures and large, fast creatures?
We should also be sure what to compare the slow and fast to... Pretty large tortoises should yield less fat than a smaller than average cheetah... probably.
[ May 10, 2006: Message edited by: Aristharus ]
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Damn I'm having visions of Fight Club here.
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Tortoises are fast. And good at hiding, the bastards.
X
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quote:
Originally posted by X:
<STRONG>Tortoises are fast.</STRONG>
Yeah, especially the flying ones..
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I heard that if you do enough shrooms you think you can kill them with fireballs too.
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All right, I have the Core things left down to 30. I got rid of the Current section of the plan since it always seems to be in flux anyway, but this doesn't mean I'm not working.
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DOUBLEPOST!!!1!½1one
Shame on thee!
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Ancient Sleeping Dude double-posts all the time, so it must be okay!
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Lies! I only do that when there is a new page involved!
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Like now! :D :D :D
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quote:
Originally posted by Toady One:
<STRONG>Ancient Sleeping Dude double-posts all the time, so it must be okay!</STRONG>
Oh..
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...Okay then.
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Finally got round to registering to say how excited I am about this game (and to tell you to watch out for that Aristharus bloke, he's a wily one...) :P
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Once again I've managed to corrupt a forum to the art of double posting... Now there is only one thing left to do before all of yalls mind snaps...
*brings out the Micheal Jackson and various boybands CDs*
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Hello Beef. Finland as well? It is my impression that people from Finland can appreciate text games, unlike many people from my own country.
ASD... so... you're into that kind of music? It's good to have interests.
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Beef! Good to see you here! Come and join the worshipping of The Great Toady One! Let me hand you today's sacrifice...
Actually he isn't Finnish, we just know each other from another forum, where there's lots of people who appreciate text games, too.
Just noticed that I regulate three forums in addition to that one and now on every one of them there's someone I know from the Abandonian forums... Hmm.. Are you guys spying on me?
[ May 14, 2006: Message edited by: Aristharus ]
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Of course we are.
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Hey, one of the mysterious bloats I was hoping for went in. Neat.
When the game comes out, how easy will it be to figure out what that bloat is? Is it pretty obvious, or is it something we'll have to guess at?
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I think it'll be fairly common, and pretty easy to run into, especially in the mid-game, though you might have to follow the signs a little to understand fully.
I just revised the list a bit, including all of the new reqs and bloats to come out of the post OO-testing. Many of them are blank, of course.
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quote:
Hmm.. Are you guys spying on me?
Of course - how else would we make sure you're worthy of having around?
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84 days left? That's 12 weeks... time is flying for me. I've written up many chunks of the manual and am writing up more today. I'm also going to try to chase down every stray key press so that if you reeeally need to, you can just use letters and numerals. Right now, the game uses 1-9 to scroll around (and the numberpad is mapped to 1-9), but if for some reason that doesn't work, then you could pick 9 conveniently placed letters to do the scrolling and cursor controls, and map those letters over to the digits 1-9. This would be easy to do from the interface text file with find-replace, or you can slog through it from the in-game interface. There's an additional problem in that sometimes two scroll bars are active, and you use the /*-+ keys (convenient on numberpads) to use the secondary scroll bar. If you don't have these keys, you'll have to map them over to something else, depending on your keyboard. I might need to do some more work with virtual keys and all that to get windows to pick up every combination you can throw at it, and I don't know how to do some of that right now. Sticking with letters and numbers will be best for now, but on some screens there are a lot of options. We'll just deal with the exceptions as they arise after some point.
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i presume this dictionary code you just finished is a in-game glossary of some sort, listing all the stuff you've discovered?
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The civilization knowledge base is more like what you described, but there isn't an associated interface for it right now.
By dictionary, I meant the list of english words with their translations into dwarvish, elvish, goblin and whatever the human language is. Before I had something like 100 words, but I took a list I had sitting around from another half-finished game, and now I have 1017 words (not counting noun/verb/adj permutations), and a little program that I can use to add new words in quickly. There are also "symbol" lists that say which words relate to 'violent', 'flowery', 'death' and so on, so when it chooses the names of prominent good and evil figures and locations the names won't be too jarring. The words that don't fit can be removed in advance. Some of those words have the 'ugly' and 'untoward' symbols. You are now warned.
The translations were generated at random. Aside from using the right letters for the language (which is done by the computer), most of them have not been checked for the right feeling. I hope I'll get a chance to do that, but who knows when.
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We're roughly at the 80 day mark now. That's 20% of the time since the 100 day count down started. Slightly less than 20% for Gezol.
I think I'm going to try to finish off most of the remaining "nuthin" core items, and then sit back and do more cleaning and bug fixes for a while. The manual is about 1/4th written, but it's easy. There are still about 400 hotkeys to stick in the interface file as well, but that's also routine.
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Triple post?
Here's some of the weather stuff, with and without front markers:
w/ fronts
w/out fronts
These were taken in the morning, so the fog from the valley breeze is still on the hills and mountain slopes, as well as the side effect cumulus clouds (those are the alphas). There are also a few frontal systems moving around, with associated clouds (the bars are leading cirrus from the warm fronts and occlusion, the betas are more developed cumulus clouds and the paragraph symbols are the anvil shaped thunderstorm clouds). There are also lots of stratus clouds settled over the ocean on the lower right since some warm air was over the ocean, although the cold front is pushing it off. There are also a bunch of dry areas from rain shadows if you look around for them.
[ May 23, 2006: Message edited by: Toady One ]
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Do you realize how much useless work you do? :p No-one's going to realize the mist or rain they're seeing is because of some mountains causing some weird weather effect I don't know the English name for.
Just kidding, very nice work! You're the man, man.. you're the man..
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He he he... all I wanted to do was make the weather match up with the more extreme start sites, but I got carried away. Today is the more important stuff, like making a desert start site look like a desert start site. Only the most hardcore dwarves do this by the way, since you'll have to import wood. I dunno if it will be possible or not, but it's all about crashing and burning in glory, even if you don't have much fuel to burn.
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Sweet, weather simulation. Every game should have weather simulation, even Tetris!
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I thought tetris waaaas a weather simulation. Like, precipitation in legoland or something.
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So the overworld stuff is already this far? Is it already linked to the game or are you planning to implement it? Looks very nice BTW, didn't know mist would look like that from above by now... I thought it were... kinda seperated balls flying around having fun and stuff maybe. :confused:
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Out of curiosity, just what kind of area was all the movies based in?
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There are some tenuous links between the world and your fortress, but nothing major like moving armies. I'm not even sure I'll make it there by release, but it'll be on the menu around then. Today I'm planning to link the overland map to the starting location of your fortress, so if you start in the mountains by a desert or a glacier, you'll have to work much harder for fuel.
The movie area was... I dunno. The summer was based on the part of California where I grew up, but it only snowed once in ten years, and I'm not sure the grass turns yellow in the parts of California where it snows more. When I get the fortress location to reflect the overland map, I'm not sure places like that will exist anymore, though from my snow simulations it seems like there might still be places like that -- it depends on how extreme I make the summer/winter variations in the temperate zone.
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My web hosting company is going to migrate everything to a new server starting around May 30th. It's possible there will be a service interruption, so if we go down at the beginning of June for a few days, don't worry about it. They told me I might have to fiddle with DNS stuff after the 30th when I get my new IP, and I'm rusty.
Start Summer
Midsummer
Start Autumn
Midautumn
Start Winter
Midwinter
They are a bit horizontal because it's enforcing the cells very strongly. Rivers should also have a loop-erase algorithm run on them at some point.
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I hope that there is some sort of option to select starting location? Im not speaking tile by tile, but just like: Start in temperate forest, Start in Desert, Start next to grasslands, etc etc...
Wouldn't be nice for a first time player to just start in a desert and have it so much more difficult to play.
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Yeah, you can choose your start location from among 50 preselected, and there's always a mix of different types. It also always chooses a relatively friendly start location as the default. If there aren't any such locations it rejects the map.
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I couldn't resist doing loop erasure on the rivers... and it took a long time. There are still little teeny squares in the final picture, but those look fine.
before
after
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*hopes he gets to start in a thick forest*
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Toad is wrong and bad, you shouldn't be picking starting location and fiddling other parameters first play...
X
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And when you get to the 6th scenario, you can access the knight's training center! I find too much of that sort of thing very frustrating, but we could just talk now about how much people want to be hand-held. You've seen the movies.
For startup, there could be "warning: no trees!" in big red letters if you happen to tab over to the start location screen and fiddle with it. It's on a different menu, so somebody blazing through the startup wouldn't even see it. If they don't spend their skill points, I could warn them with a popup window. The default starting equipment and location are friendly.
X also wants to get rid of the build menu completely. I'm not sure what he wanted to put in its place, or if it's possible to program it in 30 years.
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But X is a lunatic! Don't listen to the X, listen to the Y!!!
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Toad's really been trucking along lately. Four Reqs, two bugs, and a Core thing yesterday. I'm impressed.
Now that the manual and the init file are done, is there anything else left that absolutely has to go in before the release?
(Personally, I hope Req39 gets done before then. Dwarves being able to cut trees without axes is a little thing, but in a game as deep as this, it's a suspension-of-disbelief shattering little thing. And Req87 would be nice also. Poor Norndarnòrn... And also I want Bloat61, and Bloat128, and Core11, and Req129, and, and... uh, yeah. I'll stop now. Sorry about that.)
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The last two days were mega-days.
As far as what absolutely has to go in, TT and I have basically worked out the proper path up to the release, and of course, it goes through Core31, Core38 and Core32. Nuthin, nuthin and nuthin. The other definite thing is Req292. "Get names to associate properly with connotations." For example, one of my masons had a name that translated to "Gutterpants". No matter how elusive dwarven women are, the mother could not escape the child's wrath. The connotation lists are already done, they just need to be applied. That's coming soon. Then dwarves can be called "Orrin
Stoutboulder" and so on. Dwarfly names.
That said, there will be time left over. I'll probably do Core36 (burrows) if I get a chance, since large fortresses are hard to manage. Req129 (the cooking stuff) was slated somewhere in there, since I hate having seeds as the main substrate for a meal.
I could do Req39 sometime. I just have to do it the same way I require picks for mining, and wood-chopping and mining are both designation jobs, so it's easy.
Drowning was toned down a bit. When I looked at Req87 it turned out to be more related to drowning vs. suffocation kill cause notifications, although it also had a note about allowing them to spit out some water and survive easier.
Bloat128 is totally a bloat, so it's not up on the list, although it'll be amusing no doubt.
Core11 is high on my list, but with the amount of time left I might not get there, and I should probably do magic before I flesh the leaders out. And magic requires fire... Fire was after burrows, if I get there.
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"Gutterpants." Oh god... ah ha hah ha. Yeah, I think I see why Req292 is such a high priority. It would be a perfect name for a low-level goblin, though.
Thanks for filling me in on all that stuff. By the way, wasn't the burrow thing a Req and Core36 something else not that long ago?
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Yeah, when I was looking through it, I discovered that Core36 was moot/duplicated and after playtesting, burrows was elevated to the slot.
This was partially because it is then easier conceptually to center a number of Reqs around its completion, like all of the pile/hauling ones. So when I do Core36... Req1, Req18, Req22, Req24, Req28, Req47, Req67, Req128, Req146, and Bloat32 are slated for consideration as well.
I guess tabbed browsing is handy for these discussions.
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So... I see that the manual is done. Can I have it? Please?
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It's currently an in-game manual. We've been discussing the best way to convert it to html. It's also very unclear when that will happen.
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Looks like yesterday was another mega-day. I think eight Reqs in one day is a record, at least since the progress page went up. And you did Req39! Thanks.
What does Bloat93 involve? I had sort of thought amorous relationships were already in- at least I think I remember two dwarves of the opposite sex in the movies who shared a bed and eventually the female dwarf had a child. Is it courtship-type stuff? And what is dwarven courtship like, anyway? I suspect this could be a pretty amusing part of the game...
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Yeah, it's more the courtship portion leading to couples. Couples can arrive at the fortress, but dwarves that don't know each other can only become friends and invite each other to parties currently. I want them to either be able to pair off if it works out, or to start to dislike each other possibly.
I haven't really thought about what dwarves courtship involves, but it could be entertaining, like you say...
Nothing but names today. We've moved beyond gutterpants. A bit more dignified now. Though a squad of dwarves did just name itself "days of fat". Another was "the awe-inspiring prowler-hooves of rampage". And "the swift sick sisters"...
[ May 30, 2006: Message edited by: Toady One ]
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The swift-kick sisters sound rather scary :)
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Was Treason the scifi book where "he kicked the soldier hard enough to castrate a bull" or something to that effect? It's like that.
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If it does become possible, I will name a squad "Please guild mates, send me more copper ore" or maybe "I sure wish that silver vein has some nice gems in it"... :)
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Check out the Excellent progress!!!
Knocking out reqs like my Legendary miner hunts for gold deposits!Of course I have been playing lots of WoW too. Dangerous! fun!
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Might we have a hint regarding an aspect of this Req that is taking so long?
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I had to change how creatures are saved and loaded on the world map in order for more of them to be active at one time. It's sort of a tie in to caravans and armies which will be up on the menu shortly after the alpha is out. The req itself was just a little perk related to all of that... it's the reorganization that's been annoying. Should be several more days still, but I'm on about the schedule I expected.
[ June 05, 2006: Message edited by: Toady One ]
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It seems that Req 248 is causing some serious eye strain.
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Yes, it's quite irritating. It should be gone in three or four days. I wonder if I can think of enough pictures for that.
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That one is now out of the way, though there are still some areas where it needs testing. In any case, now I'm moving on to Core31, another nuthin. I'll also be finishing up some of those map-related tasks that I began before, like making your fortress start locations look like they do on the world map. I haven't finished certain aspects of that yet, although it's mostly correct now.
60 days until August 8th, at which point the alpha thingy will sort of appear and continue to be worked on.
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quote:
Originally posted by Toady One:
<STRONG>like making your fortress start locations look like they do on the world map. </STRONG>
Does this mean no more straight north-south rock walls?
Hi, btw, just stumbled across this from the UnRealWorld forums, and it looks simply scrumptious :) One question though, I appreciate the fact that it's pure ASCII at this point, but with the code you're using, WILL it be possible to add tile graphics at some point?
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It would take a little bit of work to add graphics, but it wouldn't be the end of the world or anything -- I think people might want the mouse first though. Either way, we'll figure out what kind of priorities these are once everybody has played a bit. I don't want to rush into it or commit to anything at this point.
Anyway, there are lots of people that would say this isn't pure ASCII since I'm using the IBM extended characters. I did put in a little hack to support the 128 character people, but... well, there's a limit on the information you can convey with lower ASCII! It's almost impossible to play (although I haven't tried to select the 128 characters carefully). TT suggested as a joke having a chair in 128 mode be displayed as C-H-A-I-R cycling through the letters one by one. I'm not sure what else the purists could want... there are too many important distinctions to make with the furniture, especially if I want to reserve letters for creatures. If you don't reserve letters for creatures, people that are used to these text games would get heart attacks whenever they build an emerald door.
Right now, the cliffs are still straight, although that wasn't supposed to be north-south, since the perspective is relative. What I'm working on now is making swamp sites look like swamp sites, and making glacial sites look like glacial sites, deserts like deserts etc. At first, everything was just a temperate forest. Most of the changes are done, but there are a few outstanding issues mainly with trees and wildlife.
Later on, I'd like to allow different cliff shapes, for a variety of reasons -- right now, it would be a bit of a hassle, since the dwarves can think about things like "inside" and "outside" really easily the way it is now (they just look at the x coordinate). On the other hand, I've also got these other map bits that let them tell inside from outside in a different way, so it's easy to change... but there are lots of things to work on...
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Tiles would be a great addition, though of course not completely necessary.
I'll happily play without graphics, but I'm not a purist by any stretch of the imagination*, and if they were added I'd probably take them over ASCII any day. I never was able to go back to vanilla Nethack after I discovered Slash'Em, for instance.
*except when in comes to interactive fiction, in which case keep your filthy pictures away from my game! Ahem...
[ June 10, 2006: Message edited by: Solara ]
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I'm exactly the opposite to Solara. I'm pretty sure I'd stick with the ASCII version if there'd be the option to choose tiles.
I've never been able to play Slash'Em, or any other modification of Nethack which introduced graphics..
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I could only play tile games that started with tiles, like early Ultima or old SSI types games, etc. If it started in ASCII, making the adjustment is too hard for me. That said, it depends on demand... there aren't thaaat many pictures, and I've done a lot with graphics. The ASCII is rendered as OpenGL quads from a bitmap image as it stands -- the main obstacle (aside from the artwork) is having the terrain/units render themselves to a non-curses style buffer. Right now there's a 80x25x(character + color) buffer. It would have to be extended to allow abstract tiles, possibly with color variations etc etc. Like I said, before I'd touch it, we'd need to be very clear on where it's headed and what the limitations are. Or we'd end up with another Armok-style game...
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Well I'd be happy to do some pixel art for the game if you'd like. It might be cool to do tiles that are monochromatic (per tile), just like the current Ascii(ish) graphics are, to keep the old-school aesthetic, but be a lot more distinguishable/accessable to players apprehensive of character graphics.
Pixel art is one of my obsessions, though I haven't done any in a while.. I have a thing where I can't seem to produce any art unless it's FOR something, and this would be a good opportunity, and would be fun to try out a new style (very low-bit, monochromatic).
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I guess I'm in the middle on tiles. I think you can never really go wrong with ASCII, and that's generally what I prefer with these things... but on the other hand, I pretty much exclusively play the tile version of Dungeon Crawl now. That's probably because it's an unusually good tileset- I like the art style, you can customize the look of your character, there's little bits of attention to detail like different things having different blood colors when they die, etc.
Nethack, on the other hand... The tiles there were kind of ugly and simple, as I recall. I went back to ASCII pretty quickly. (The weird thing is that I think the same people did both sets.)
So, when it comes to what this means for Dwarf Fortress- I get the feeling I'll prefer ASCII with it, but we'll see. It seems like it would be a huge amount of work to make it a good tileset- there's just so much stuff in the game. I do kind of like the idea of monochromatic tiles, though. If they could capture that really old school Ultima/Phantasie feel, I definitely think I might use them...
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Of course, if we went to CGA tiles, we'd be using fewer colors than I'm using now. We could even have an RGB/CYM mode switching button. It would be like Adventure Construction Set or something... was ACS CGA? I don't even remember. Or Temple of Apshaii, however you spell that. I think Bug's Bunny Cartoon workshop was EGA... we did so many horrible things with that. If you take the balloon that pops after 8 frames and color it monochrome red, then move it off screen, you can bring it back on screen right when the pop frame shows up. Then superimpose that over Bugs Bunny and it looks like Elmer Fudd shoots him in the face. Special stuff.
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Wow, I haven't thought of Adventure Construction Set in a long time. I had it on the Apple ||c, where it was one of my favorite games. (Temple of Apshai, too. That one was almost a roguelike.) I don't know about the PC version, but it was four colors on the Apple, like most things on there. The Apple || color set was green, pink, blue, and orange. Back then, of course, that was all you needed as far as we were concerned. I'm not sure I would go for CGA tiles, but that's mostly because my nostalgia is triggered by the Apple II's four colors, as opposed to the CGA ones. By the time I got my first PC, things were in EGA.
It probably wouldn't kill the old-school look to keep the color range, though. I think that look is more created by the graphical style than anything else. The game already has way more detail than anything that was made back then... still, I kind of like the idea of a mode-switching button. Options are good.
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Man, you guys were deprived as children. My atari 800 could render the monsters in Apshai in many colours, animate them even!
Seriously, if you are iffy on graphical tiles then you should play IVAN for few hundred games. The tile system they used is great.
For me I don't care which way the Dwarf Fortress goes.
[ June 12, 2006: Message edited by: Captain_Action ]
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I love IVAN's graphics. The tiles are very well made and the way you see your equipment on your character is cool. So are the blood spatters and other liquids (sweat, vomit etc). It's strangely satisfying to hit a zombie with an axe only to see the zombie's arm flying off and your clothes and all the adjacent tiles covered in blood.
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The process continues. 14 various bugs went away today... I'll be on that for a few more cycles, and then... stuff. There will probably be a lack of specific information for the last stretch here, since there are particular things that I wanted to put in the game that are going in now. Things with names that can't be shared. In any case, everything is still on schedule. Speaking of which, 54 days.
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quote:
Originally posted by Aristharus:
<STRONG>I love IVAN's graphics. The tiles are very well made and the way you see your equipment on your character is cool. So are the blood spatters and other liquids (sweat, vomit etc). It's strangely satisfying to hit a zombie with an axe only to see the zombie's arm flying off and your clothes and all the adjacent tiles covered in blood.</STRONG>
It's never quite as satisfying when your own arm however, is what you see going flying when you thought you could take that zombie, only to find out that he just struck you with a meteoric steel mace. or worse, an artifact.
quote:
Originally posted by Toady One:
<STRONG>Things with names that can't be shared.</STRONG>
I take it that these are things we'll be pleasently (or in some cases, not so pleasently.) suprised to see, then?
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Yeah, the last several weeks here will be full of surprises, so that your dwarves can have a bit more fun than what you all saw in the movies. Poor dwarves.
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I'm starting to realize just how complex this game is going to be. I hope it's a very good manual you're writing...
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It's better than the manuals for my other games, which isn't saying anything.
I can post the manual when X finishes the html converter thingy, but he's a busy guy working for free.
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[dings the little six week bell]
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[dances the little six week (minus one day?) jig]
2nd EDIT: Damn, I removed my signature from the post so it would look like the previous one, but now there's the edited by line, so that didn't really work...
And now there's this edit, too.
[ June 28, 2006: Message edited by: Aristharus ]
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quote:
Originally posted by Toady One:
<STRONG>[dings the little six week bell]</STRONG>
Did you notice that this post was the 666th post of the thread, by the way? Coincidence?
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I didn't notice that. I guess the countdown to Judgement has begun. Were there dwarves in the Book of Revelation? I wonder which side they'll be on.
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The side of EVIL for sure.
I mean, just look at them. They are short. They are angry, and easily irritated. They kill the poor Tauren Hunters that accidently wander into their capital while said hunter is armed to the teeth with guns and explosives...
Eeeeeeeeevil!
And don't get me started on gnomes!!! ... Hmmmm, Gnome Fortress anyone?
Edit: I just realized, this game has been in the making for quite some time. I just looked at the first page, and there is me! Back in 2004!
[ June 28, 2006: Message edited by: Ancient_Sleeping_Dude_Reinc ]
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He he he. I actually started it in October 2002, but I thought it would be out in a few months so I didn't say much about it. As usual, it became bloated and lost among the rest of them. Then I went back to it in the second half of 2004 and it has been the main focus since then.
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It is a tremendous effort T! There have been so many good projects that caught the bloat-disease. Remember Space? Damn! That was quite good. Such a classic. Runner too. Its been a long time!
Do you realize that we 'in theory' have a high school reunion this year?Perhaps the next project should be an "ASCII Movie generator" to reminisce the Adventures of Chun Kin Chu!!
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Is "dwarven art" all that stuff about engravings into walls or something more like adjustment of ASCII characters?
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Man, I'm an ag-ed creature... Runner ruled. The first vga flying limbs game we did... what was it? 50 each of knights, ottomans, zulus, samurai, goblins and skeletons hacking each other to pieces in vga? You controlled one of them. Then we tried to add a world map and it all fell apart. Space was also triumphant. It had pieces too... burning chunks. It's always about pieces.
Yeah, right now I'm fleshing out the engravings and item art work in terms of what the dwarves are actually making. ASCII is going to be ASCII for the time being.
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Okay, what was "The Adventures of Chun Kin Chu"? I think I saw it mentioned somewhere else on the boards, and now my curiosity is piqued. It sounds like it was an ASCII game? And that old flying limbs game sounds like it's ripe for a remake...
Anyway, I'm glad to hear the item art is getting fleshed out. I remember you posted some of your plans for that earlier in the thread, and it all sounded really cool.
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The Adventures of Chun King Chu was a "game" that went through a series of ASCII movies randomly, mostly involving our martial arts using hero getting killed by chipmunks and revealing his hidden machine gun. You didn't actually enter any input, but there were many branches and so on... sort of like reading a which-way book and rolling dice to select the outcome. I think there were... around 100 sequences? It wasn't that that huge, but they were all entered by hand in basic, so it was a lot of work. TT did all the coloration... that's especially annoying in basic. I vaguely remember some rule about colons and semicolons differing when you want to maintain the same color on one line of output.
Runner would be a fun re-do, but I wouldn't want to spend more than a week on it. I think it would take about that long, too. The original probably was a month or so, but things were harder back then. Plate's full right now though... dwarves dwarves dwarves. I've been doing some volunteer work for local junior high peoples for the last few weeks, but that's ending tomorrow, so the productivity levels should go back up for the last stretch again.
[ June 30, 2006: Message edited by: Toady One ]
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Actually I remember Chun Kin Chu had choices. Every scene or two you would get a 'choose your own adventure'-esque choice. (Jump in the water, Dive in the water, Stay on the shore) pretty much each of these had two ways to die, and one to move on through the movie sequence. (jump in water = boat runs you over, stay on shore = get shot by guys in boat, dive in water = your below the prop when the boat goes by and then you hop up and kill everyone.....
There were something like 100 laborous scenes in it. DAMN. I remember how the final scene was completed and the last two or three scenes still didnt have color. That was nuts.Runner would be a fun little game down the road. Have to bound things well ahead of time otherwise it would get dwarf-bloat worthy.
Of course the ultimate solution would be to finish dwarves... come up wtih a Runner front end... and then make Dwarf-Fortress-Runner. The chaos!
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Runner sounds VERY interesting, do you still have a copy of this game anywhere? I shure remember some games I made back then and some I couldn't find anymore... that sucked
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Unfortunately (or fortunately) I lost everything from my high school days. I don't know if Alanor ever had a copy on his computer. That said, after August and Dwarves settles down a bit, I'm going to get the robot game tidied up and posted, since it is alllmost done. I could think of whipping Runner out again during that time, since it would be fun -- WWI Medic was a similar sort of re-release from the old days. It depends on how many issues there are with DF... there are the slow computers, and the non-video-card computers, and the non-US-keyboard computers, and the computers that play sound strangely. And others.
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Didn't know that about WWI Medic. I definitely want to see the Runner remake now. Out of curiosity, why was it called "Runner"? The first thing I thought of was that it was a "Running Man" reference...
Going back to the dwarf game, I noticed Bloat2 and Bloat116 are about item artwork. Are those basically what you've been doing recently, or are they different?
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Those bloats are natural continuations of what I'm doing now. They'd increase the range of available images and how you can modify them. What I did recently was to make sure you can even see what's there and to improve them somewhat.
It was called Runner because it was the first graphics game (ie non-ascii) we did with people running around. I might have to think of some way to make it more interesting or addictive without bloating it, since we originally made it back in the day before the war craft and rome total war type games took off, so having lots of people butchering each other was new and fresh. That said, it would still be fun... the limbing and lack of value of life are hi-lighted properly.
Dwarves dwarves dwarves.
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[rings the little five week bell]
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Out of curiosity, have you ever had performance issues? Did you need to rewrite things because the game went to slow when there were certain things going (wr)on(g)?
I'm asking because I'm currently heavily fighting against such issues. The game needs about a second to calculate the next turn when there are more than 50 persons lurking in the same dungeon level. I was close to a rewrite in a higher language where such things wouldn't happen so easily but I am so close to finish the engine it would be a real pain in the ass to rewrite it now ...
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Yeah, that happens a lot. In dwarves the main issue is path finding, since there are lots of dwarves thinking about where to go, although that is working fairly well now. Another slow-issue was the calculation of health states -- that got to be such a problem that all of those things are stored now and only recalculated when needed (like the paths). Over time, you pick up more and more tricks to handle things like that, although I'm not an expert by any means. That said, maybe you are doing all that optimally and the language really is the problem -- I don't know/remember which one you are using (I can only look at the screen shots). Have you identified what part of having many people is causing the lag? Is it AI, or something else about how they are processed on the turn?
Are you on the roguelike development newsgroup? I haven't been there for a long time, but I remember people would post fairly specific algorithms concerning different issues in RPGs.
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I just watched Dawn of The Dead (the remake), and just thought that SOMEONE MAKE THE ZOMBIE-ROGUELIKE that had a thread in the Various Nonsense forum, goddamnit!
Man, that could make a sweet game, if done right. And maybe even if made slightly wrong.
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Oh man. I've been planning to make a zombie rogue-like too for a while. I got started maybe a year ago, then got distracted by other things, and due to laziness I've kept procrastinating!
I intend to go graphical though. The IVAN look is pretty much what I had in mind. Something like this: http://www.achtungfranz.com/z-los2.png
Please excuse the programmer art (and the ninja (and the crude LOS)), it is temporary. Everything is very temporary. I know a pixel artist who I'm sure won't be able to resist replacing my feeble attempts at serviceable tiles once the game is done.
I should get back on track! Why haven't I gotten back on track!
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Have you read the said forum thread? It had some killer ideas for the game. I don't know what you are planning to do, but I'm sure reading the thread won't make your game worse..
Here's the thread.
EDIT: Hmm... "read the said forum thread".. Probably the ugliest (unintended) rhyming ever.
[ July 05, 2006: Message edited by: Aristharus ]
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quote:
Originally posted by Toady One:
<STRONG>Yeah, that happens a lot. In dwarves the main issue is path finding, since there are lots of dwarves thinking about where to go, although that is working fairly well now. Another slow-issue was the calculation of health states -- that got to be such a problem that all of those things are stored now and only recalculated when needed (like the paths). Over time, you pick up more and more tricks to handle things like that, although I'm not an expert by any means. That said, maybe you are doing all that optimally and the language really is the problem -- I don't know/remember which one you are using (I can only look at the screen shots). Have you identified what part of having many people is causing the lag? Is it AI, or something else about how they are processed on the turn?</STRONG>
It's BlitzBasic I'm using. The biggest problem is definitely AI but not the pathfinding part but scrolling a lot through every single person and checking relations between them. The NPCs aren't looking for the player but for someone hostile or for friends needing help, which needs much more time than just making everyone move in the direction of the PC... Another problem is stat-calculation. With all that stuff equipment can do to a char it's a lot of scrolling through the players equipment and calculating all boni/mali (percental or additive) and so on. And every NPC may carry the same equipment as you. I managed to reduce the number of times the stats are recalculated but one slight change of the chars attributes enforces another check.
Have you explicit stat calculation which needs to be recalculated often? Does equipment modify more stats than just defense/attack?
quote:
<STRONG>
Are you on the roguelike development newsgroup? I haven't been there for a long time, but I remember people would post fairly specific algorithms concerning different issues in RPGs.</STRONG>
Yeah I'm Christopher Brandt in that newsgroup, those are really helpful people but from time to time it's a bit desillusioning (I guess that's the wrong spelling XD) when people keep saying that's impossible to create a good roguelike. I would be glad if you announce your first release there, it would make people realize that it's possible to release games of such complexity!
P.S.: Sadly I guess I'm going to miss the release because I'm on vacation by that time. Please save one copy for me XD
P.S2.: If you want to, you can have a look at the game creation manual, it's in unreadable english and a bit pointless to, but you may have an idea what the gmae will be like... http://home.arcor.de/dungeonhunter/DH%20Game%20Creation.txt
[ July 05, 2006: Message edited by: DungeonHunter ]
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So every turn, each of your ~50 people check against ~50 other people and it goes slow? If the "hostile" or "need aid" detection isn't complicated, that points to a problem with the language supporting this kind of thing. Dwarves has these unit to unit checks all the time, and there isn't a noticeable lag. On the other hand, if the hostility/need aid check is complex (involving sight lines, etc.), maybe that should be the focus. If you can get away with checking some of this only once every 5 turns for example (but a different turn for each guy maybe), that's also a good way to smear out the processor load.
For the equipment, all I can suggest is to flag each creature's stats as "usable" and if their inventory or internal numbers change, remove the flag from the dependent stats and recalc those stat when you next use them, placing the "usable" flag on them again. The dwarves nervous/bp system has things like this. It keeps track of which body parts the dwarf can used, based on how its body is damaged. It only calculates it once, then flags it as "okay". If a bodypart is ever injured or healed, the flag is removed, and next time it checks a body part for use, it recalculates all of the parts and flags again. So you aren't asking very much of the game most of the time, unless there's a huge combat going on, in which case a lag wouldn't bother the user as much so much, since there's a lot to see anyway.
Yeah, although there are some good specific algorithm ideas from the newsgroup, there are also wild ideas that the person isn't trying to implement seriously, and then people shooting them down without attempting to tackle the problems. I think that's fairly normal for computer game discussions. People shouldn't talk ideas down so quickly, but it's also good to keep in mind that it takes a lot of effort to make the ideas practical.
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The hostile/need aid routines are pretty complicated, there's line of sight and other stuff (shouting, listening, irritated npcs, npcs trying to keep in formations ...) involved. I did some runs with the language recently though and it showed up that some things take way too much time (e.g. scrolling through types).
The 'usable' flag is a nice approach, I think and I'm going to try out something like that. The dungeonHunter system won't support bodyparts though, and the dependance of nearly each stat to each other is another problem.
Anyway, how far is the dwarf game manual, I'm really looking forward to understand some more things that happen in the movies XD
[ July 05, 2006: Message edited by: DungeonHunter ]
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The in-game manual is "done" and usable, although it will benefit from input and I will keep improving it. The html version awaits some scripty stuff that could be done sooner or later depending on the schedule of X. I think he's on a boat or something. A quant is involved.
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See, this board is educational. I had never heard the word "quant" before, and having looked it up, I am now totally ready if it ever comes up in conversation. Mind you, I'm not sure when I'll be having a conversation about barges, but when it does happen, I'm totally ready.
In any case, "quant" is a fun word to say. Quant quant quant quant.
So, uh, yeah, dwarves. Boats might be a fun bloat, though I imagine they would take a fair amount of work to implement.
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TT taught Eagleon a word on the irc channel a few days ago. I won't repeat it.
We'd thought about making large underground lakes and you could build platforms on them or something. Rafts would be fun, but I'd hate to code moving goods around on ferries, since there'd be a lot to think about...
Bug fixing today. Traumatic, but I managed to get the ones I was working on.
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Do you have sometimes trouble to fix bugs because it's so hard to reproduce the circumstances under which the bugs appear? One time I didn't want to change the code (boosting player stats etc.) just to get to a point in the early game where a bug was. I didn't really realize it by that time, but it took me two hours to get to the point without dieing just to see that the problem has been fixed...
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Yeah, bugs that occur in rare circumstances or only intermittently have been the most frustrating kind. Often you'll have to concede and change the code to create the circumstances you want -- but sometimes that makes the bug go away, until you change it back... or when you change the code, you introduce another bug without knowing it... bug-fixing is an arduous process, although it becomes faster with time. It's easier if your compiler has some tools that can help you, or if there are tools available (free, hopefully) that you can use in conjunction with the compiler. To me, programming itself is quite annoying, but it's nice when something is finally up and working.
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I was wondering Toady, have you played any of the following games?
Sims (1 or 2)
Dungeon Keeper (1 or 2)
Evil genius
Majesty
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I've never played the Sims, although I think I saw TT play the first one once. I played Dungeon
Keeper 1 a bit. I haven't heard of Evil Genius. I'll probably look it up tomorrow now that you've mentioned it (it's 4am now!).X suggested Majesty a while back, and I went through some of it, though I got stuck on some of the scenarios. It was a neat idea though.
Are you asking in this thread because of the overlaps with the Dwarf stuff?
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How many lines of code does your sourcecode have? I guess pretty damn much for it doesn't seem to me that there are any external flatfiles or sth. (I might be wrong though).
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Well, those 4 games can really be good for explaining DF, xept the sims one. Now I shall activate the dreaded Point-By-Point-Explanation!
Sims 1-2: Having to care for the moods of your sims (dwarves), building them a home (fortress) and furnishing it (with only a bed and a cabinet)!
Dungeon Keeper 1-2: REALLY fits in, since you are doing pretty much the exact same thing. Deep below the earth you are digging out a dungeon (fortress) which your evil creatures (dwarves) inhabit. They range from imps (miners) to more offensive ones like warlocks (marksmen), mistresses (axedwarf) and those fancy dark angels (Elite Swordsman), can't remember their names. Also all the creatures have some sort of job in the dungeon, for example the warlocks go to the library to research while trolls (blacksmiths) go to the smithy to create doors and traps. And hey, even the color of the tiles you've marked for digging is the same as in DF!
Evil Genius: Well, I think they made a game about being a supervillain (with minions) loosely based on Dungeon Keeper, since it's the same, dig into a mountain, build a stronghold of evil, destroy the invading forces of good. But the trap system is SO much cooler :)
Majesty: You build a city (not underground though) and you recruit heroes to inhabit it. However your control of the heroes are VERY limited, since you can basically only place an exploration flag (first hero to reach this place gets gold!) and bounty flags on monsters. That's it. No more control. They just wander your city when they aren't to interested in the flags, spending their money in inns or buying better gear, and you collect taxes from all the stuff that goes on. The forces of evil are always walking the wilderness though... or invading! Ever been invaded by 30 goblins of various types that all have an immunity to magic spells of mass goblinoid destruction?
And this concludes the PBPE. Hope you didn't suffer too much.
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I'm not sure what a flatfile or sth is, but I have lots of external data files. There could stand to be some more, but creatures, subtypes of items, language, gems, etc. are all in txt files (which are processed and compressed). Right now the source itself is hovering around 235000 lines.
Of course, the Dungeon Keeper parallel only goes so far, so I wouldn't say "exactly the same thing", since DF doesn't follow either a "campaign", "scenario" or "sandbox" format. The units don't have fixed types, there isn't any personal influence (you can't pick things up) etc, the goals are different, and on and on. The dig color is interesting though. Something about brown is diggish. Must be the earthiness of it. I only had 16 colors to choose from, and they had millions, yet brown it was. I wasn't thinking of DK at all when I started, although I was reminded of it after a while. Dwarves was originally like Mutant Miner, which I didn't release, which itself could be called... an ASCII cross of Digdug and VGA Miner, if you wanna force games to have predecessors. I can see why people think that way, since many commercial games are purely derived from prior offerings (and movies, and music...). Dwarves was more like "okay, so mutant miner was fine, but when I added more miners it was too slow... but I'll try again, since I really like the image of digging away at a cliff face... what else mines... dwarves mine... yeah, it's another fantasy game, but so what... so we'll have them go into a mountain and like, find $ symbols and pockets of monsters like in the miner game... yeah, that sounds fun... real-time this time... but how do you get more dwarves... do they eat?... and dwarves like to make things..." I thought like that for a few days, trying to flesh it out, then I had another idea, called up TT, and we talked for another 2 days almost uninterrupted seeing if it would all work... we're still working from those plans more or less. As far as other game inspirations are concerned, when you are working with a spatial text game like this, there are so many roguelike examples floating around that it's hard to avoid them, so a lot of my lazier display decisions have fallen back on what has been done previously, and I've used D's for some things and &'s for others as a kind of tribute. I think you probably have to go back to the early 90s and before to find the games that actually influenced my outlook. As it stands, I already have more game ideas written down than I can do in my life.
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Well of course it's different from Dungeon Keeper, but still, there ARE alot of similarities. Seriously though, the first of the new (well, newish) sets of the dwarven movies, when you dug into the mountain the first time, instantly I thought "dungeon keeper", "dungeon keeper 2", "evil genius" and finally "I wish there were more games like those I could play".
And let's congratulate me for another first post on the page award :)
Also, about the format about campaign, scenario etc etc. I guess the whole game is a mix between campaign and sandbox from what I've heard. Also, I looked up that VGA Miner on google, and from the top link I checked the game (if I saw the right one) looks alot like a newer game by xgenstudios called Motherload. Same thing, you dig down, find minerals, fly up to the surface and sell said minerals.
Hmmmm, more games than you can do in your life, ey? We need... Toady Clones!
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Yeah, I saw some overlaps. But I'm glad that you've haven't played most of the games on the list. It shows that you are innovating, not merely copying (as I would've :roll: )
I've notice you are starting up with civs on your to do list.
You might want to read this : http://www.mu.ranter.net/theory/printversion.html
It's VERY LONG, but is has alot good info. There in the Food Basis section (about 1/3 down) is the good stuff.
[ July 07, 2006: Message edited by: Captain_Action ]
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Hrm. I'm not sure what the end result would be. Reading that, it seems that while having a high concentration of essentially pointless characters might be realistic and believable, it dilutes an RPG, unless interacting with them is as interesting as interacting with nobles, merchants, soldiers, etc. Ultima 4 would have been boring if most of the world were a farm and 9/10 NPCs were a farmer. Once you've decided to have "too many" non-farmers, trying to cater to believability by adding magical farming or jungle living to explain everything etc is a similar problem, since it restricts the setting. The issue doesn't stem simply from designers being unimaginative as the author states, though I understand why someone would say that in general. Thinking about the dwarf fortress system, the dwarves themselves fall into a category the author didn't discuss (maybe I missed it), which is "the farmers only eat once every few weeks, so low food output is fine". This isn't realistic, but it makes the game fun, rather than being a strict farming sim. Time passes quickly, and you'd get a flash-induced seizure if they had to eat every day, and if you slowed down time, then nothing would happen in the larger world while you played. I like making games complicated, but there's still escapism and suspension of disbelief there. In a way, if somebody likes reality that much, they probably wouldn't play games at all, so it seems like a contradictory philosophy, unless they are specifically interested in medieval times as a historical setting.
As I add in farms and so on in the larger world, I'll probably have too few farmers, not out of ignorance, but as a design choice. That's still a long way off though -- I'm currently doing very simple things. Once the game is posted (in a month!), we can look at everything and discuss it again. I don't think I'm closing very many options the way I'm currently setting things up.
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I wrote something about reality in games once... As I was like 14 at the time, it might be best not dug-up.
I promise a picture of a quant pole and the manual-online soonishish though.
X
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Nope, you didn't miss anything. The food portion was completely about humans and maybe kobolds. If kobolds fit into the hunter-gatherer type.
As for the dwarves, the plant/fungi planted seemed to be very low maintaince. Further more, the dwarves seem to understand the concept of irragation. Which would make sense in an underground envoirment.
I recall there was a bloat about storing too much food, roach infestations perhaps? Will they only go for stored/rotting food. Or will the bugs go after the planted crops too?
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Right now, rats, roaches and lizards can go after your food supply, including the planted crops. I think the bloat was about having huge food stockpiles occasionally attract swarms of vermin. I suppose there are a lot of different angles on things like this.
31 days is it? I guess that's a pretty small number. I think I'm going to keep adding stuff until around the 17th, then play through it some myself to make sure it's still reasonably stable. Then August 1-7 will be some finalization steps.
After that, there are a lot of goals, in a somewhat ordered list, but it'll all have to be clarified. I have a notion of what I'd want a "version 1" to be like, and we aren't there yet and won't be for some time. Most of it involves armies and other ties of the dwarf fortress to the outside world, as well as finishing every req. It could be another year, but there shouldn't be any long waits from now on. For this release, I needed to get enough pulled together to have something like the game I wanted before I shared... hmm... I'd rather wait for it to be done, but I'm not going to do that to you.
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So you have flatfiles ( because that's exactly what they are. I didn't know the word either until I was asked about flatfiles in an interview for a job :D ) and though you have that many codelines?
It's so strange, people writing on OOP languages always have so much more code involved and I don't know why... you may laugh but I'm just passing the 25000 lines mark and the engine (it's not a content filled game, maybe that's the difference) is in a near-to-version-1-state (well maybe not but at least there won't be more than 10000 lines of code more).
Anyways, I like the kind of way you started the plans for this game, many games a friend and I created (more wanted to create) were invented like that. I love it when it comes to the part that you talk about real bloated features, because then you always think "Dammit when will I be able to include them, we have to start programming right now!!!"
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I'm not sure why I'd laugh -- lots of code is nothing to brag about. There are plenty of places, especially the older parts from 2002, where I'd love to have things set up a different way. 5000 here, 5000 there... there are many places where I could do some serious shaving and make the game more versatile at the same time. The OO stuff does tend to be longer, at least for me, because there's extra layers that come from making the happy little objects appear and go away, and deriving them properly, and keeping their private parts private and so on. At the same time, the debugging time has dropped significantly and my memleak detector doesn't find problems very often any more.
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29? The number of days left starts with a 2? Who thought of that?
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Wow! The last time it started with a 2 was 171 days ago! Maybe there's some kind of pattern?
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[rings the little four week bell]
I guess the next one starts with 2 as well... and the next...
[ July 11, 2006: Message edited by: Toady One ]
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and hey, the 2 week bell will also start with a 2! But if you ask me I think I prefer the bells with odd numbers... Go ring the 5 week bell :)
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Gezol is ringing the 5 week bell right now.
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It still hasn't been Ten Minutes and Fifty Seven seconds?
Man... someone's "Flawless" math was way off.
I had some question about controlling single dwarves or units and playing as them, but i forgot what the details of it where beyond that.
I need to stop drinking like a dwarf.
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Was that Demon's fault? It's probably that... physics math.
Oh whiskey, you're the devil! You're leading me astray!
[wanders away]
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Toad codes wrong. My predictions are right! :roll:
Dwarves dwarves dwarves...
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I would also like a control-single-dwarf-in-the-fortress RPG, but I fear the coding involved to make an AI for the fortress building might take a year, even for the great toady.
Of course, I bet most people would just find some booze, drink, and then go on a rampage.
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That's what most peole from my high school have done, at any rate...
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Drinking like a dwarf? Whiskey, booze, drunken rampages?
We're finally getting on topic here..
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I think drunken behavior is still a bloat or something floating around... right now, it just makes them level-headed and able to work at their regular speed. Not exactly the message to be sending to the livers of tomorrow...
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You're worried about messages? ;)
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Only the constant and annoying "this job has been cancelled" messages the dwarves send out...
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Okay, so now that I finished Core32, I'm not going to add anything else major for the last stretch here so as to avoid introducing additional instability prior to the first release. There are a bazillion smaller issues to deal with, so I'll be working those out instead.
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Gosh! Only 25 days left, which is 3.571 weeks! If you multiply those numbers together you get 89.275, which - startlingly enough - is in fact 12.3% of the number of posts in this thread (including this one)!
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If you hadn't included your own post, it would have exposed you as a charlatan. But I believe in your power now. What does the future hold?
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Come on, give me the winning lottery tickeet numbers :)
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I predict... hold on, it's just coming to me now... yes... I predict Italy will win the FIFA World Cup! :eek:
Sorry but I'm completely drained after that. I need to play DF a bit to recharge :P
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It's good that DF'll recharge you, because, you know, you're going to have to rewrite parts of your synopsis afterward. The trials of maintenance...
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[rings the little three week bell]
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Too bad, I'm going to greek for more then 3 weeks now, won't have internet there... A good start for your game, though, but I have no doubt that the game will be liked. Don't forget to leave a post in rgr.announce.
For the lucky bastards who will be able to play the game, have fun!
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Toady should sell all those little bells on eBay after the game's out.. I'm sure there are lots of people ready to pay dozens of dollars for the little Dwarf Fortress three week bell.
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I fear that the game will suffer the fate of Battlecruiser 3000 AD [and I don't mean the bugs]. I know people that don't like it simply because of it's level of complexity. And Dwarf Fortress sounds overwhelming to say the least. I'm not complaining. I simply love games with lots of numbers, variables and whatnot. It's just hard to find people who are into this sort of thing.
Just my 0.160465221 Zloty.
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I could understand why some might be trepidatious, but I myself am jonesing for Dwarf Fortress. My dwarves have already sketched a crude architectural diagram of their planned dig (complete with the traps necessary to flood the outer tunnels) and are looking forward to being eaten by whatever horrors await them in the Deeps... ;)
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Speaking of the Deeps, and since no one has bothered you for information for a while, almighty Toad...
It's clear that the deeper you get, the more dangerous things become (as evidenced by repeated references to Balrogs in old posts, plus the giant frogs that leap out from under rocks and attack in some of the later movies.) I'm wondering, apart from the riverine cave, are there any other naturally occurring chambers deep in the mountain? These could have advantages (being basically free space the dwarves don't have to mine out, and perhaps more notably, don't have to haul all the rock away from) and disadvantages (swarming with terrors from below.) ;)
Also, is there any provision for taking your dwarves out of the fortress to raid or destroy goblin/kobold/orc settlements? I'm given to understand from previous posts that successive games all transpire within the same world, so I was thinking it'd be pretty awesome to pay a visit to your previous fortresses once they're overrun by demons or goblins or what have you. Probably good for a little loot, too.
Finally, my own thought for a bloat -- books and libraries. (Probably inspired by recently playing Dungeon Keeper again.) Lots of options for creation -- papyrus (from reeds or similar plants), paper (from wood), or parchment (from animal skins) for writing surfaces, glue for binding (probably from bones), maybe some leather for a cover. Then you'll need ink, and quills. Why go to all the trouble? Well, I can think of lots of reasons. Bookkeepers and brokers might be less effective without ledgers to keep track of their dealings, laws could be recorded, there could be some proto-educational system for children or the unlearned, whereby skilled dwarves could write books on topics they know something about ("Fer on Carpentry") and others can pick up their skills.
The most interesting possibility might be histories... the system probably stores enough info already for a dwarf to write a good history of a fortress. "In 1021, in the reign of King So-and-So, Turråshemer didst establish a colony at Bèrnòrn. Their leader was Ghükghük..." -- you get the idea. These would probably be popular trade items, and might attract scholars (to learn) and scribes (to copy). Plus, if, say, the history of Bèrnòrn was traded to merchants, it might be preserved even if the fortress falls; later fortresses might be able to trade for the histories of earlier ones, heightening the sense of continuity.
But these are merely idle thoughts, so feel free to ignore them. You already have quite a bit on your plate, I can see... ;)
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I don't know how popular Dwarf Fortress will get, but I think the main reason people didn't like Battlecruiser 3000 AD, as I understand it(I haven't played it), was that it was just boring. (well, that and Derek Smart's personality.) It was the sort of thing where there was much more focus on making the most realistic, in-depth space simulator imaginable than actually making it fun.
Dwarf Fortress is also incredibly complex, but from the movies it looks like it'll also be fun and addictive and all that good stuff. And that's pretty much my gaming ideal, at least. I think there's a chance it'll get a cult following- I mean, Nethack is an extremely complex game in its own right, and it's pretty popular.
In any case, we'll all get to play it and find out in three weeks, or in my case about a month.
Oh, and The_Hawk- I'll let Toad decide how much he wants to reveal, but I know that at least some of your ideas are going to be in the game. I'm not sure how much will be in by the first release, though...
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I guess since the release is like, only 20ish days away, I probably shouldn't talk too too much about it... but yeah, I've created large pages detailing almost all of the reqs and bloats we've come up with, and some of those things are there in varying degrees (and some aren't!)
As for the first release, I think I can say that while a lot of the best things won't be there for months, there will be a certain sense in which that potential is highlighted in such a way as to create a sense of optimism about the future, beyond what was in the movies... he he he... vague! I'm definitely into the idea of continuity and so on, and it's really the reason I started this project. Just writing another RTS DK thing would be a waste of time.
Anyway, keep in mind this is an alpha pretty much. There will be problems and frustrations, and all of you will grow to hate me and life. But I'll keep trying to fix it and hopefully it will be good at some point.
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No worries, I already hate life. It can only be improved by the addition of a little Dwarf Fortress. ;)
*sits back on haunches and returns to quietly rubbing his hands together with anticipatory glee*
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I think the addiction factor of Dwarves is similar to that of games like SIMs or Fish for that matter. You have your dwarves and you can tell them what needs to be done. They may or may not do it depending on their mood (good thing dwarves are generally orderly... Elf fortress could be annoying that way). I find myself wanting to protect my dwarves and help them to be more productive in thier little tasks. It gives joy the first time you can flood an area so that crops will be made from here on out... and your dwarves will always have food!
Its a good feeling to put traps down so that evil monsters will be destroyed if they attempt to attack your peaceful little creatures. Axes and crossbows can be made for hunting and dealing with the enemy that would attack you. (racoons included!)Each of the dwarves has character.. you can learn what they like... and put a crystal studded marble statue in thier room to make them happy.. if they are good little dwarves!
Its great!
New ideas are also great! I love the books/scholars idea. That will definetly play in for magic and alchemy in the long run. I love the idea of books teaching skills to new dwarves too!
That means that some dwarves could spend time in the library learning thier skills better so that they can make more money.. afford more stuff... and eventually better appartments and such!
Woot!
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It's a wonderful game, but Toad will never admit it.
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I always figured that the dwarves would write/engrave the one thing they understand the most. STONE! Think clay tablets.
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Or metal sheets. There's already galena, for instance - you could choose to smelt it for the lead first to create plates, and then obtain the remaining silver through further refining. I'd imagine dwarves are already toughened against the toxic conditions found in mines; most ores have at least some potentially nasty impurities, and you don't want to breathe -any - kind of rock dust if you can help it.
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Or just dig out a large chamber and cover the walls with the secrets of being a great mason. That would probably be the easiest.
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Come on guys! You know how this works...
Good ideas!! They will probably ALL get put on the list!! hehe.. When they will be come a priority is hard to say. Writing is really tied into esoteric knowledge in fantasy worlds.. I figure it comes with magic or advanced religion... of course advanced religion then disposes of all other types of writing........ Think NOT ye little dwarves! For in thinking lies the root of evil, the route to the infernal pits! Bless the mighty Armok for his benevolent hand, for your home is wrought of blood and stone!
[ July 20, 2006: Message edited by: Alanor ]
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You know, a friend of mine, who I was describing DF to, inquired at some length about Dwarven religion. Specifically, he wanted to know if they could create a cult worshipping the terrors from below, perhaps feeding them sacrifices to prevent them from boiling into the fortress. Yet another use for kobold captives... ;)
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Maybe then I'd look forward to elf visits...
I'm planning on writing a strategy guide, but as Toad learns the strategies he often ruins them. Maybe you guys should just learn the tricks yourselves and Toad can work on other things...
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[is a gentle, warty pond-dwelling creature no more than six inches long]
How could I possibly ruin anything? I'm not a cane toad.
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Toad just wants propper consequences to exist... "oh.. think you can get away with hoarding tons of food? What about the rats??"
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quote:
Originally posted on the daily progress page:
<STRONG>...fixed a crash bug involving people going insane during meetings.</STRONG>
*chuckles to self*
Surely that's not a bug, merely a natural effect of all meetings, everywhere?
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quote:
Originally posted by Prospero:
<STRONG>Surely that's not a bug, merely a natural effect of all meetings, everywhere?</STRONG>
My thoughts exactly... ;)
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He he he... so, what actually happened was if they were at a meeting, and they were already having a crappy day and had been throwing tantrums, and they finally snapped during the meeting... then due to the bug, instead of leaving the meeting, they forgot who they were and sat in their rooms crying, and because the world thought that all dwarves should know who they are, it exploded when it tried to clean their information.
Cleaned up a big lag today, and have one more in my sights... now you'll only need 8 gigahertz to play it.
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I have ordered a new computer from dell, just to be able to play. And yet another first post on the page goes to me, GLEE!
It's a shame really when most of the post goes "I got first comment, yay" or such things, or pointing out what a shame it is to do so.
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*groans* Don't joke about that. :P
I had an idea for miners. You could have a tool to mark an unknown area for surveying, with walls that connect to the area marked as a clue. A miner would then spend a moment per known wall to consider what might be behind where you're planning to dig next, with his experience level and the range from the wall determining its accuracy per section.
The disadvantage, of course, being that they might decide that something you don't want to dig into is there, but it actually isn't. Useful for digging out areas that have a good chance of intersecting rivers, and such.
You could also have a small chance when a skilled miner passes a wall that he figures out what's behind it, one section adjacent.
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Is there any effects on the fortress that comes from these meetings, or is it just stuff like those parties in the demos?
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These were all meaningful, at least somewhat meaningful... people can complain to the mayor, or to their guild, and this can lead to new work orders and regulations from the mayor. You can also meet with a few diplomats from outside, but that part is very weak and will be until world map armies are in.
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Dwarves have guilds? Are they anything like unions? Can they go on strike for benefits?
*begins composing the Internationale for Dwarvern Miner's Guild Local 351*
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They can organize work slow downs, but it usual just involves prison time...
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Clearly, we need goblin and kobold slaves. They're not going to organize on you. (Well, maybe for a slave revolt. But you don't need jails to deal with that problem. ;))
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Why have the dwarves become so evil... whistle while they work.... dum dee dum dum dum dee dum... whistle while the kobolds work...
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Let's not forget, these are the same dwarves that locked poor Daralez in his room to starve to death rather than to allow him to disrupt the good function of the fortress. They are, above all, pragmatists. :D
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I do wonder, can a dwarf that has gone crazy be brought back?
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You can't fix them right now, though I think there's a req/bloat to make the states of mind more fluid. For the time being, you just have to be mindful of the warning signs and try to keep everybody happy if you don't want them to be lost.
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Bloat: Frontal lobotomy, dwarven style (ie. including a pick-axe?)
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Wow. That's quite a lot of stuff you knocked out there, Toad.
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He he he, that's what you get when you throw away your career for art. 16 hours of bug fixing.
We had something written down about brain damage effects, though that might have been for Armok. You really need to have better personalities coded before you can start having lots of fun with it.
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fixed an erroneous prison freedom thought from being carried to a bed
Um... did a couple things get jumbled together there, or is that an actual bug description?
Anyway, impressive list. About the lag thing you mentioned before, I've been a little worried about how well it will run on my antiquated laptop, so that was good to hear. Do you have an idea of what the general system requirements are?
(The antiquated laptop is running Windows 98, has 256MB of RAM, and I can't remember the exact speed of it off hand but it's in the 500-700 GHz range.)
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Yeah, that's all one bug -- when a guy picked another wounded guy, it would call the stuff that frees them from bondage in case they were stuck to a chain or in a cage. Inside there, it checked if they were in a cage (but not a chain) when deciding to make them happy or not, so everybody was made happy. Not that you shouldn't be happy when you are rescued, but it's the wrong thought for it. I think Demon noticed the thought sitting in the rescued guy's head, so it was pretty easy to find after that.
It should work on Windows 98, though I haven't tested it there. That should be enough memory, as long as you aren't running a ton of other programs. The speed issue is of course the main problem, and I haven't had access to anybody with a computer running at less than 1GHz, so far as I know. I think the early game should be fine and any lag should creep in over time slowly. There are a couple of exceptions maybe -- world generation will probably be torture, but you only have to do it once in a long while, and you can read a book or something since it's not active play. Also, if you don't have some kind of graphicsy stuff inside your machine, the OpenGL rendering might bog things down a lot. I think the curses version of dwarves still runs -- however, curses has serious problems of its own, regarding input in real time games, and I'm not sure of the way around this, though we can fiddle with it if it comes to that.
So, you can try it, and I can try to fix it, and we can continue that process indefinitely until it works. There are certain parts of the game that are always going to be intensive (e.g. world gen, opengl), but the rest is tweakafixable, even if I have to add an option to make the dwarves (even) less intelligent, etc. The best we can do is be persistent and not get discouraged, anyway. Work work work.. . work work work... wrok wrko........
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[rings the little two week bell]
Still fixing things up. Still some evil evil bugs floating around...
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So what time is the release aiming for? 00:01? 10:00? 14:00? 23:59? Wow, if you add the first time, to the last time, and the middle times to eachother, you get 24 hours! Twice! 48!
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I'll release it sometime on August 8th, according to the official forum timer thingy. Now, since Zonk was somehow related to this, and he's at... forumish +8 or +9 or so, I suppose it'll have to be earlier on August 8th rather than some kind of August-9th-In-Zonkland time.
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added new shit talking
Excellent.
On the computer issue, I may end up getting a new one before(or for) my birthday anyway, so all that might be a moot point. We'll see how things transpire...
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It's not nearly up to standards, but we can only work toward the future. We haven't hit up the source texts enough... in fact, we've mostly been making dumb jokes...
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The edit of this post will reveal where I am at according to the forum!
Edit:
It said 11:20ish while it's 17:20ish! Boy is the forum clock on backwards.
[ July 28, 2006: Message edited by: Ancient_Sleeping_Dude_Reinc ]
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One thing I've never quite been able to pick up on just from skimming some of the thirty pages here, is will you be able to give direct orders to your dwarves? Or will you focus more on building your fortress and settlement? (ie: order a building to be made, or a monster killed, and any nearby dwarves with the appropriate skill and with no more pressing problems will do it?
Or I guess a more simplistic way to phrase this question would be, is it going to be more like Age of Empires or Majesty? (And yes, I realize those are very, very simplistic in comparison, but they get my point across in terms of how the units are controlled...)
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I guess it's really in between... maybe closer to Majesty? They won't just stand around motionless (or do that creepy breathing animation a lot of games have for idle units) like in an RTS game. You prepare a list of orders, and anybody who can do it will get to it when they get to it. If you activate a squad, you can tell them where they should patrol and station, and they'll do that... as long as they don't need to sleep or eat or find their missing child or something like that. More will probably be done with military control, such as creature-kill designations and so on. Right now they just attack nearby threats, and you tell them where you want them to be. You are sort of like the site manager, and they are your workers. You control what furniture is in their rooms, but they decide on their personal possessions. For combat, you're something like a general, but they handle all of the particulars. Sometimes they don't make good choices, but the overall arc of the game depends on what you decide, more or less. It's almost a random mix of what they handle and what you handle, based on what I thought would be fun (and what I had time for!). I definitely want the individual dwarves to have character outside of your plans for them, but I don't want you to feel powerless either.
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Do crazed dwarves fight well? Because I was think of making an areana or the dwarven version of fight club.
Ooo! Is drunken brawling in? Or would that be a bloat too?
[ July 31, 2006: Message edited by: Captain_Action ]
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The first rule of Dwarf Fortress is that you do not speak about Dwarf Fortress... Sadly, I fail miserable at that keeping the first rule. :P
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Dwarves don't currently get drunk. It helps them work better...
When they get upset though, they can throw tantrums. Then they can start fights... last time this happened to me, a dwarf picked a fight with a cat, broke its leg and was happier and stopped the tantrum. It's really quite a disgusting little game.
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One word: WTF?! I've tested *all* the games on the site, and nothing... NOOOOTHING!!! Compares to the cruel act of harming a poor innocent cat just to cheer oneself up. Screw this! I'm going home! *slams door*
Well actually I'm still gonna play DF, but I won't let any poor cats near the dwarves :P
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Whoo, a week to go. Give or take a few hours. ETA's get so difficult when you live in futureland.
I'm so jazzed about this, and my girlfriend is finally getting her own damn computer so my computer will be all mine again! Mine! BWAHAHAHA. Soon it shall taste delicious dwarf fortressness?
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[rings the little one week bell]
Now, you know, all that energy being spent on enthusiasm would probably be best used lowering your expectations. It'll be fun to play test though. Then I can finish the game in 2 years.
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yay! 2 years of beta testing for all! Finally my dreams will come true.
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You know, the last time I was this psyched up about a game being released was way back in the Amiga days when a rolling demo of Frontier: Elite 2 appeared on a coverdisk. I must've watched that through dozens of times before the game eventually came out :)
Out of curiosity, how often will the game releases come after the 8th? I can understand you're not going to want to do new versions daily, but... once a fortnight?... month?... 2 months?... as and when we complain enough? :D ...
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I've been sending new copies to my brother and the others every few days. That might be a bit extreme, but depending on what I'm working on at the time anywhere from, I dunno, 1 to 2 weeks, especially if I've fixed some naughty naughty bugs, because I hate having them up on the web. It's an OCD thing or something. It makes my skin itch. Unless they are LCS and Armok bugs, apparently those can be on the web for a long time. If rapid releases end up causing too much confusion with save file versions and so on it might be stretched.
That's something to consider anyway... there are world files which can accommodate many successive fortresses. Ideally, these files could last a long time. But it's still a bit early in the development process, so both bugs and the rapid addition of new features are working against world longevity. People probably shouldn't become too attached to particular worlds at the moment. It's also good to back up frequently, since a bug can corrupt one of the many files and then slowly cause the degeneration of your universe. Now, you'll be able to load old worlds with the new versions (with rare exceptions), but since world generation often incorporates new features your old world will be missing some things, especially new creatures and objects and so on. It'll be up to the individual how often they want to re-gen.
I imagine the process will work itself out a bit once we've tried it.
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Personally, I'm hoping there will be a new version out on August 16, for obvious reasons. Ideally including Req129, or Bloat128, or Bloat42, or... yeah, okay, I'll stop reading the progress page and daydreaming now. I imagine it'll mostly be just bug fixes early on.
It's hard to believe it's so close. I've been eagerly anticipating it since I first found out about it. I know I was lurking here for a while before I started posting- I can't remember exactly, but I think I might have been reading when this thread was first posted. So, nearly two years of waiting. Wow.
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There will be longer and color coded development pages for you to read in a week or so. Not to mention Threetoe's collection of literature.
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I actually agree with Prospero. Although of course the game differed for me. I know it won't be polished, but I'm still psyched more about this game than anything else coming out in the near future. Or even the next couple years.
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*hands the 6 day bell to Toady*
Ring it, my good sir.
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I've got a week off work next week, and just realisde that it coincides with the release of DF. Dang. I was meant to be using it to find a proper career and I can see you distracting me Toady :)
Incidentally, I posted about this over at the DROD forums (you guys should check out drod.net - it's probably the best puzzle game ever made) expecting some interest, and all I got was "Man, that website's ugly!" (or words to that effect) - perhaps a bit of sprucing up will be in order before too long...
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There's going to be a new web site at release time, but perhaps text games won't be for them if they like the flashier things.
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Go Toady, go! Only another 4 days!
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That's right! For every 3 crash bugs fixed, 2 1/2 are introduced! It will stop somewhere!
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If fixing 3 bugs introduces 2.5, then the net effect is -0.5 actual bugs every 3 so-called bug-fixes. So you'll just have to work six times as hard as you do now to remove the current number of bugs. I mean, It's only six times, you know.
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Happy birthday to Threetoe and Eagleon! And other people, since August 5th seems popular.
back to cleaning...
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We're having serious thunder storms now... lightning strikes every 2 seconds or so. Power's out. Fortunately, the game is pretty much ready to go, so as long as I have net access it should be up on time. My laptop is running on batteries now, so I'm gonna let it rest for a while in case the power is still out later... hopefully it'll be fixed in a few hours thoug. The forecast has thunderstorms through tomorrow night...
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best back it up to a cd lest a bolt decide to fry the laptop.
*resumes stockpiling survival supplies for a week or two of dwarfing*
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Yeah, I've been doing a CD a night for months. I have power back now, and it seems like they fix it fast even if it goes out again. Should be okay... should be...
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Thunder! It's the prophecy, the end of times is drawing nigh! I knew the world would end before Dwarves would be released!
Be thankful it's just thunder, Toady, for the stars are right. Soon it'll rain fire..
Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!
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Here it rained for 3-4 hours, and some of the thunderbolts were really nasty. However, it's much cooler now. These signs...it's almost the time...9 hours and I will be no-longer 17...And Dwarves will be released to the world, making the videogame industry go bankrupt as people stop playing all other games.
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As the deadline fast approached for the release of thousands of dwarves upon an unsuspecting world, Toady wondered if the tension was affecting his debug session...
(http://www.firestormproductions.co.uk/misc/df6hours.gif)
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Damned, I am scarred that toady's suckers might get stuck on A or B indefinitally...
What might happend if a lightning strikes toady's house right at the release time ? Would dwarfs invade the world while toady would sadistically scream "it's alive, alive !!!" ?
[ August 07, 2006: Message edited by: flap ]
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Of course, since Demon won his math competition like 5 years ago and forced me to change it, Bay 12 is on Eastern US time, which means you'll have to turn the 6 upside down. Such a long long time...
Edit: thunder seems to have died down, but is supposed to come back tonight. I will make sure to scream if it strikes me, before I fall over.
[ August 07, 2006: Message edited by: Toady One ]
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suppose i should ask what time this forum is running on?
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If you around my time 9pm say around 9 hours left, that means... *counts* midnight... 6 o clock in dah morning? Or am I completely stupid as I normally am? Cause dang, I go to bed around 2-3 in the morning, and to think I could play if I sat up an extra 3 hours!!! Omigoshness!
Scratch that, I shall go to bed now, and wake up at 9am tomorrow! Or not... choices... And Toady. Damn you for stealing the first post on a new page. You will rue the day!!! *is dragged away by Evil Inc. for using outdated villainous speeches*
Das Evil Inc. Comic. In english!
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This forum is running on borrowed time, since I'm going to make a new section once I post dwarves.
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But... But I love this thread. For ages it has been my friend. My soulmate. I think that I cannot part with it. Run away with me Back to the dwarf game... (page 33) Thread! Let's get married in Vegas!
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You could continue posting on the thread, I mean, if you want.
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Maybe I will.
Would have replied sooner, but I was looking at the moon. For some odd reason, it's yellowish tinted tonight, and almost full.
*glances left, and glances right, and hopes nobody realizes he is actually a Were-Hamster*
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*has completed stockpiling and is now bored*
What's the size of the download's going to be, approximately?
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The download is 5 MB, though you'll need more space on your machine for the various files it generates. My folder is something like 30 megs after a few games.
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Woo Woo Woo! D-Day! Woo Woo Woo! :D :D
*begins frothing at the mouth, awaiting the long awaited download*
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You can grab it HERE.
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...OMG, that opening movie...
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Maybe it's me, but I can't a link to download anything other the movies files.
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Does pressing refresh help?
DIRECT LINK TO DOWNLOAD
[ August 08, 2006: Message edited by: Toady One ]
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DUh! :roll:
Refresh for the win!
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I just can't believe it... After all these years.. It's finally out.
And I'm at work and thus can't download it.. And I'm pretty busy for the whole day, so I won't be downloading it today.
And I'm pretty busy for tomorrow, too, so... Damn... I'll be at home sometime around 10 pm tomorrow. I have a feeling I won't be sleeping too well that night.
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You can think about Gezol's 8 day fast and draw strength from it. Of course, that was self-imposed...
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First confirmed run under Linux! (well, under cedega/wine)
Good stuff!
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Wait, it actually runs under wine? I thought even my most simple games break there... maybe that guy was just complaining...
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Wine has come a long way.
I play WoW under cedega (a wine fork) without any problems.
A direct port would be preferable, of course. Check out SDL, many games have been ported to linux using that (easier if it's OpenGL). Then again, I'd rather you stick more Bloat in and maybe fix some bugs, first.
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First thought: Holy crap! The intro!
Second thought: Zzzzzz... World generation...Oh yeah, and the game icon rocks too.
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Fortunately you only have to do it once, assuming it works.
Actually, once the world gen is all done and the units are offloaded, it's good to back up the data/save folder. Then you won't have to do it again until you actually want to, even if your world is corrupted. Backups are good.
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Losing is fun! Everything is going fine and dandy and then wham, a named grizzly bear kills a dwarf, a mule, and breaks another dwarf's arm and leg. We'll see how long can we survive.
So I took 15 units of dwarven wine with me to a new fortress ... and they brought it in 15 barrels. That can be considered cheating since one barrel costs more points than one unit of wine.
[ August 08, 2006: Message edited by: Beleghoul ]
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Ah, that's right. Demon was bugging me about that earlier. Maybe that is even a numbered req (checks)... Req305 "Cheap Barrels"... it's impossible to keep all these straight, but at least they are written down somewhere.
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The game, wow... It didn't fail to meet the oh so inflated expectations!
It's ruining my virtual social life right now. I'd post in the specific forum, but i have no specific topic to discuss, i'm still getting the hang of everything.
It was a long wait, all right.
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Well, I'm a couple of days late, but downloading right now! In the meantime I'll have to check out some more of the new forum...seems like there's a few bugs, but that's to be expected with a game this size.
I think my real problem for the upcoming couple of weeks will be balancing out work plus Dwarf Fortress plus the new game of Morrowind I just started. (Bad timing on that one I guess, but I had to wash out the bad taste of Oblivion...)
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Hit us with your questions when you have some. Also, since you have a literary streak, you might read some stories that Threetoe decided to share. He writes several in a day, and we use them for planning.
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I didn't really get one thing for I missed the release for more than a weak (since I was in greece): did people know about adventure mode before the release? Was it clear that the game will be Slaves To Armok II before people would see the title screen of the release version? I was very confused when I saw all this (and of course happy).
Anyway, having only played Fortress mode for now I've got to say it might be the greatest sim game I've ever played!
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Nah, only the playtesters knew. I thought it would be fun to keep a secret. Gezol managed to figure it out though.
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I had no idea there'd be an Adventure mode, but it was definitely a pleasant surprise. Nice way to relieve stress after my ineptitude dooms a forterss full of dwarves. :)
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They are doomed anyway, poor things.
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They are doomed anyway, poor things.
Dooming Dwarves for over 8 years. Glad to see some things don't change!
Hey, there are necromancers in game now!
Don't look at me like that, it's only been 8 years - I didn't link the thread on the front page :D
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Damn, 2006 was 8 years ago?
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Well it seems Farmerbob is now the Master Thread Necromancer. All hail the Lord Of The Dead Posts.
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Ooh, the 10th anniversary of Dwarf Fortress will be this year. Nice.
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Ooh, the 10th anniversary of Dwarf Fortress will be this year. Nice.
The tenth anniversary of what exactly? Afaik work began in 2002, and the first release was in 2006 :P
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Ooh, the 10th anniversary of Dwarf Fortress will be this year. Nice.
The tenth anniversary of what exactly? Afaik work began in 2002, and the first release was in 2006 :P
The tenth anniversary of the half-way point between 2002 and 2006.
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There are 79 more tasks left until the dwarf game is complete. Some of them are rather large.<P>
Just looking at you saying this almost 10 years ago amazes me, Toady.
I must admit that other than the perverse satisfaction I had necroing this thread after you referenced it in an update post, I'm curious about how you feel, looking back at your thoughts ten years ago, on the original thread post.
Was this what you wanted? Were you in any way prepared for what DF became?
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Ooh, the 10th anniversary of Dwarf Fortress will be this year. Nice.
the first release was in 2006 :P
...*reads wiki*
I never was good at remembering numbers. Or names. Or anything that wasn't a vague concept.
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The madness of this thread is amusing. Actually, the madness of this forum, Toady and everyone inside and outside of Bay12 is amusing, but that's besides the point.
Anyway, isn't it the 10th anniversary if counted in base 8? Or, depending if you consider the start of work on it to be the starting point of DF, in bay base 12?
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Well it seems Farmerbob is now the Master Thread Necromancer. All hail the Lord Of The Dead Posts.
But has he turned his Necro into a succession game? :P
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There are 79 more tasks left until the dwarf game is complete. Some of them are rather large.<P>While I'm working on that, I set up a Dwarf Page (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves) with a movie player on it and some movies you can download. The movie files are fairly large, but the player itself comes with one of a river through the woods, and I've put the movie files in different bundles so you don't need to download the ones you aren't interested in.
Obviously, the ten year anniversary refers to the Dwarf Page. Certainly a milestone worth noting!
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EIGHT YEARS FROM NOW.
I think we can take this as conclusive proof the next version will be out by August. Toady has prophecised!
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EIGHT YEARS FROM NOW.
I think we can take this as conclusive proof the next version will be out by August. Toady has prophecised!
Excellent.
Bring out the cheap cava and tiny cakes, it's time for a pre-emptive party!
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Ooh, the 10th anniversary of Dwarf Fortress will be this year. Nice.
The tenth anniversary of what exactly? Afaik work began in 2002, and the first release was in 2006 :P
The tenth anniversary of the half-way point between 2002 and 2006.
Half-point 3 confirmed
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When I first necro'd this thread after Toady referenced it, I expected to get shouted down or complained at. While I'm absolutely certain that some folks had the urge to do so, it's flipping amazing that the only responses that directly reference my necroing of this thread are both polite and humorous.
I swear that this forum community is both funny and mature on levels that are simply "win". I haven't loaded up DF in six months, and I still come here several times a week just to see what you folks have to say. I don't come here to see if Toady has put out an update (I DO watch for that, but that's not why I have been visiting here recently. I WILL play the next release.)
I mean, look at all the violence in DF, and look at how we treat one another in these forums, with rare exceptions. This forum could be thrown straight into the faces of all those crackpot psychogabblers who try to say that exposure to violence in media unbalances people. (I'll give them some credit about it being inappropriate for young children.) There really are very few places on the internet where violence that is NOT real is discussed with as much depth as we go into here. I'd go off on a limb and say that there are no other places where plans for violence that is NOT real are discussed in such incredible detail. There are thousands of pages of descriptions of exactly how to make creatures fall into or get trapped inside various types of traps where they will then be killed in terrible ways.
Here we are, discussing all of these things in an polite and considerate manner, in a forum that might possibly be the largest collection of tips and tricks of how to kill things in a virtual world.
Thank you all for being so awesome. You'll probably even forgive me for not putting this in a new thread, which I *did* consider, briefly, but then realized that it does sort of fit here, because not only has the game grown, so has the community.
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That was beautiful
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There are 79 more tasks left until the dwarf game is complete. Some of them are rather large.<P>While I'm working on that, I set up a Dwarf Page (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves) with a movie player on it and some movies you can download. The movie files are fairly large, but the player itself comes with one of a river through the woods, and I've put the movie files in different bundles so you don't need to download the ones you aren't interested in.
I'm not sure if this has been asked, but what videos were these..? I wasn't lurking that early in DF time, and I don't even know what he's referring to here. Preliminary intro-like videos made in ascii? They sound awesome, heh.
But I also agree with your sentiment Farmerbob. The curses forum is especially chill.
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There are 79 more tasks left until the dwarf game is complete. Some of them are rather large.<P>While I'm working on that, I set up a Dwarf Page (http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves) with a movie player on it and some movies you can download. The movie files are fairly large, but the player itself comes with one of a river through the woods, and I've put the movie files in different bundles so you don't need to download the ones you aren't interested in.
I'm not sure if this has been asked, but what videos were these..? I wasn't lurking that early in DF time, and I don't even know what he's referring to here. Preliminary intro-like videos made in ascii? They sound awesome, heh.
But I also agree with your sentiment Farmerbob. The curses forum is especially chill.
They were just videos of gameplay, but they also served as a kind of a tutorial, at least for me.
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The movies are here (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=83812.msg2622523#msg2622523) now for anyone who wants a look at what Dwarf Fortress was like shortly before its first official release.
