My problem stems from my impatience with the user interface. I had played through countless fortresses, none of which lasting more than 3 game-years, before finding Auto-Hotkey, which has saved me an unspeakable amount of grief where repetitive keystrokes come into play.
Discovering that 3d modeling tools such as blender can greatly aid the development planning of a fortress -Also- aided me a great deal. I'm now planning out the transportation and utilities layout for my next fortress with Blender, and while I'm spending less time staring at the game, I'm having a great deal of fun playing it without it even running.
I'd like to hear what other tools or methods have been adapted by the community to assist in the playing of Dwarf Fortress!
Its just a free 3d modeling suite. This is how I use it to make designing fortresses easier on me. I start dwarf fortress, create a world, embark on a journey, then hit pause and then find a section of space in the x/y/z frames which I want to sculpt into a city. At present I'm working with a 70 by 40 area that is 15 z levels deep. Then I choose the minimum allocatable unit of city-space, which I'm affectionately calling a "chunk", and which also evenly divides into the space I'm sculpting. My current chunk size for my 70x40x15 city is 5x5x3, so I have 560 chunks in total to be allocated.
A chunk just happens to be the exact amount of space I need for a highway and included utilities (One layer for people, one layer for water, one layer for magma), conveniently.
Once I've decided on those things, space and chunk size, and transport/utilities specifications, I try to get an idea of my housing, storage, workspace, recreational, and governing space requirements, and once I have a rough idea of building layouts and requirements, I lay out my transportation system with included utilities in neat little connected chunks in a model 3d space in Blender. Then I create the buildings as individual chunks or chunk conglomerates, and fill those in, moving them around sometimes to get a layout thats more to my liking.
I'm still working on the layout bit, its rather a great deal of pain planning a city when you build it by excavating rather than by actually creating the buildings out of materials you have laying about. Planning for growth and future needs is absolutely beyond me. I can say though, having models to work with takes alot of the stress out.
Once I get done modelling it with blender, I plan on creating blueprints for my building modules in AutoHotkey to facilitate the implementation of my city. I have a feeling if someone was sufficiently motivated and talented, they could design a Blender export script which could take your 3d city model and turn it into an AutoHotKey script to deisgn the city at a keypress.
I'm just planning on using a custom brush in GIMP with a one-pixel grid turned on.
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For fortress concepts google's sketch-up might prove a more approachable and user-friendly route (to those who aren't already comfortable with blender, as you likely are, which might make my point moot... I just wanted to cram my fun little simile in edgewise).
quote:
Originally posted by MuonDecay:
<STRONG>IME Blender is a pretty perfect example of how focusing on having lots of features can lead to having an unwieldy hellspawn of a user interface and the associated angry-slavering-bitchbeast-from-hell learning curve that comes with it. It's like playing a theremin by waving angry cats at it while riding a unicycle... sure that can lead to some pretty awesome results if you do it right, but god help you when you start out and try to learn how to do it right.For fortress concepts google's sketch-up might prove a more approachable and user-friendly route (to those who aren't already comfortable with blender, as you likely are, which might make my point moot... I just wanted to cram my fun little simile in edgewise).</STRONG>
You do realize that this would make it perfectly a tune to the mind of the average Df-player. DF being cramped with awesome features, and the steepest learning curve known to man.