I finally got around to making a (somewhat crappy) player tonight. The files are compressed, so if you want to watch frame by frame and skip around, the interface is somewhat inconvenient right now until I index everything better. On the upside, the movies are WAY longer. I put up 4 movies showing me testing the game up until the first summer. I found one bug (shown at the end of the first movie), fixed it, and kept on going. You'll notice some of the interfaces have overflows and so on. That's because the game isn't done!
There are lots of little things to notice as it goes along...
This looks awesome. Haha, I really want to know what purring maggots are, though. xD
In any case, the 2 new movies have more interesting stuff. The first ends with a fishing bug that I've figured out, and the second ends with the crash.
(http://img330.imageshack.us/img330/5602/dwarffortressthemovie7wy.jpg)
[ September 17, 2005: Message edited by: Aquillion ]
Norndarnòrn was my favorate character, too.
X
Since you'll be suffering the hours of basic debugging along with me, want any more buttons on of the player? Certain things can be done easily now, certain things can't.
Switch between play modes.
Fast-forward/rewind in frame-by-frame mode.
Help toggle in frame-by-frame mode.
Going to the end of a section will go to the next section instead of going to the beginning of the same section.
It should only take a few seconds to get to the parts you want to see now and then go through them frame by frame.
Also, what was the point of using all those levers and gates to flood that first room? I got that the second one was to use the mud and silt for cave-farming, but was the first one just a mistake? What did Norndarnòrn die for, Toady? What did Norndarnòrn die for?
Could the player dam a river entirely, and use gates to control it? Could they set up an elaborate system of gates to flood their entrance hall at the flip of a switch, drowning any invaders as they step into the caves?
...oh, yeah, one other thing. The road-creation interface looked a little awkward. Do players have to build roads one segment at a time all the way to the edge of the map in order to attract merchants? Can they just extend it to order one big long road segment to be built at once, or order the dwarves to make a road from point X to point X?
[ September 18, 2005: Message edited by: Aquillion ]
Okay, the weird squiggly things were probably the water fall. The cave river has side rivers that either flow out and down a water fall, or down a waterfall and in -- the kind you haven't seen are more interesting, since you can see the waterfall mist, and build a meetinghall so dwarves can get the happiness bonus from the mist.
The bear burial was intentional, since it was tame. This one might seem strange, since they obvious didn't care about the bear that much -- however, the new movies have a charming sequence with a new pet, and a burial will be more appropriate. I might have tame animals that aren't owned by a dwarf thrown in the refuse heap instead. Also, the reason I think the bear was left to die was because I never set the "Animal Care" profession flag on my dwarves. My mistake, he he he.
Hrm... full game... well, it takes an hour a two a year, and that slows down as you have more to do and have to pause a little more. Things start getting more interesting around year 5, and you could have a full game that then winds its way down around year 15 or 20 maybe. So you might spend a week on it, or a lot longer, or die in your first winter. It isn't balanced out yet though, so this is all provisional.
Yes, the first levers/gates thing was just a mistake. I forgot that if the channel runs into an open room, and specifically if the water can get out on to the floor and back into the channel, then the floodgate no longer matters to its flow. I fixed that in the next room. I'm planning to make some tutorial things to make the rules more clear. If you aren't careful, you can drown your whole cave. The miner died for you. So you could see.
I haven't thought about damming the river. Certainly feasible -- it could start overflowing its banks like you had placed an aqueduct everywhere (I haven't done aqueducts in the movies yet). This might piss off the various river dwellers that can attack you. Not that my to-do list is short of anything, he he he.
So the dam is not implemented, but the elaborate system thingy is. What you saw was kind of the tip of the iceberg -- you can set it up how you like. There's a pressure plate that you can set up like a lever -- instead of having to pull it, any bad guy triggers it. Pressure plates can be linked to floodgates, doors, chains, various things. So you could have the pressure plate linked to a door that hides a tame chained bear (they feed them). Or to a floodgate that fills the room with water. You can link a lever to the same gate to close the door back up, so your dwarves can haul the bodies out. You just have to be careful with this stuff -- make sure to place channels near the door they walk in or it will drown your whole cave.
Yeah, the road creation is lame, and time consuming. I just used the standard interface for simplicity, but something else is certainly in order.
...free, you don't even need to register, sort of like http://www.imageshack.us/ . Files can be up to 250 mb (!), there's a 45-second delay to download, and of course there are ads, though they're not too obnoxious. Files are stored until they've gone untouched for 30 days. Download speeds are a little on the slow side, but fine for small archives like these. It could be a good place to put movies when you initially release them, so your server doesn't take the hit of dozens of people rushing to get the latest Dwarf film.
...plus, even if you don't use it, us players can use it to share Dwarf movies with each other after the game is released. So it can't hurt to mention it.
Yeah, possibly because I posted it on rgra, my bandwidth use last night was half of the month's total so far. I've still got a lot left though. Just need to keep my eye on it.
I might use something like this for that birthday game I'm writing. It'll be over 10MB, and it has graphics and sound, so it'll probably be downloaded more.
I can't stand all that mess of
'.,`.'
`,.'.`
''.`',
,`',.'
so I changed all those into periods. Why did you need so many ways of depicting ground? Is there really any significance?
[ September 19, 2005: Message edited by: Demon ]
I haven't posted before, but I've been following the progress of Dwarf Fortress for a while, and this is looking like it's going to be the best game I've played in a long time...
So, now that I've watched all the movies, a few questions:
That whole thing with Darålez the trapper... man. Was the fact that no one tried to rescue him when he was knocked out a bug? And when he starved to death in his room- was that supposed to happen? It seems like they should find a faster way to commit suicide, if they're that depressed...
Can enemies poison wells? When you built the four stone-fall traps around the well, I was wondering if that was why.
Was there anything specific which caused the miasma in the refuse dump, or is that just what happens when you have a lot of garbage in one room?
And finally, from the movies, the game looks a lot more complete than I thought it would. Is it mostly lots of little features and bug fixes that are left, or are there still some big core features that haven't been added? How different should the final game be from what's in the movies?
Well, that's all I can think of. I can't wait... (though judging by that mention of 2033, it sounds like that's what I'm going to be doing for quite a while...)
Melancholy is a kind of wasting mental illness in this game. They can also go insane and tear off their clothes and jump in the river. Or go berserk.
The four stone traps were to prevent intruders crawling up from the well.
When I first noticed the miasma, I tried to highlight the cause -- a rotten large roach. Anything that rots underground causes the miasma.
There are a number of sort of... core easter egg things that need to go in. The final game will have more stuff that you can see when you get a little farther along. Also lots of little features and bug fixes. But it is moving along...
On another possibly rude note, that megauploads site is pretty annoying... would you mind if I mirrored the movies? I don't know exactly how many downloaders you tend to get at once, but experience shows that my server could probably handle them. Traffic's not a problem (not under a few hundred GB anyway), I get far more free than I need anyway.
[ September 21, 2005: Message edited by: Fuzzpilz ]
I didn't notice until I made the movie that there were baby alcoholics...
For now, the files are here.
Edit: Sent - I hope it doesn't get spamtrapped or something.
[ September 21, 2005: Message edited by: Fuzzpilz ]
I noticed that you spent alot of time getting bags, barrels, and beds made. Why can't the dwarves ask the makers for these objects?
Daralez could've gone to the leatherworker/tailoer ask for some shoes made from his favorite materials decorated with his(her?) favorite animals. The tailor depending on skill and materials availible try to make something as close as possible.
The toad jumping out of the river was injured to make it easier. The first few large animals that attack will be of that variety... kind of cornered injured beasts on their last legs. If the toad had been healthy, it might have killed 5 or 6 dwarves. I think it is about as big as a bear, though I don't remember what I set the size at.
And I will forever loathe you for killing Norndarnòrn... *sniffle* I loved that dwarf. Oh well, Aloraliz or whatever the name was replaced Norny. The names could use some work though, half of the time I wondered "is it a female or a male?".
Also, when digging at that speed... damn... And just at the end you got that extreme pile of Malachite(?), wasn't that ore for silver?
Since when can you tell a dwarves gender?
Damn. I was worried about something like this happening. I remember the premise of Corin's Mystery Massacre... Was any progress lost?
If you can't figure out how to fix it, it might be worth describing exactly what the problem seems to be on the boards before you buy a new computer. Someone here might have some ideas. Probably not me, alas, as I'm far from a PC expert...
If you have to get a new computer, I assume you don't need a fancy new screamer of a laptop, so you probably could get an old one fairly cheap. Or if you want to go the desktop route, you can go even cheaper, though then again you'd probably have to buy a monitor(I assume you don't have one) so it might actually end up being more expensive.
I suppose you could set up a Paypal fund or something, too. I'd certainly chip in. I mean, if Dwarf Fortress were a commercial game available in stores, I'd pay top retail price for it, so I'd definitely be willing to pay at least that much to help get it done...
That'd most likely be significantly cheaper than buying a new laptop.
I had a HD die on my desktop PC once, just when I was trying to finish a long assignment. So I feel your pain.