Bay 12 Games Forum

You know that there's a DFHack plugin that fixes that exact problem?

I gave this a try last night. It wasn't exactly 100% what I'm looking for, but it definitely improves the issue back to playable levels. As such, I withdraw from this thread, Toady can keep on with simulating goblin babies spitting their pacifiers out and I'll continue to support him

@Noble Digger, UI improvements are one of those things that lots of people ask for, and Toady knows lots of people want, but he's extremely reluctant to spend time on it since the time spent improving the UI is time spent not adding content, and there's a significant probability that he'd just have to do it over again when a new content release renders it obsolete.

Or, to more directly address your specific question, no, there are not any near-future plans for an interface overhaul, whether in general or in regards to building/constructions. As LordBaal mentioned, it probably won't change until the next time he changes the way that aspect of the game works, or if he makes changes to another part of the game that would transfer over (for example, off the top of my head the earliest he might touch this would be Adventure Mode constructions, which were on the old list of near-term goals, though that list is itself obsolete.)

Fair enough, to be sure. When I first got the idea to request this feature of Toady, it was because I had recently seen certain similar improvements made, such as the ability to designate on multiple Z-levels at the same time, and the ability to paint forbid designations and dumping designations. The way I imagined the overhaul of the construction material selection menu, for example, has longevity and doesn't seem too sensitive to any impending changes: basically just a change in the sorting logic. However, Tacyn pointed out a great solution to this problem that I can use without bugging toady, and I want to thank the both of you for your informative and useful replies. If it works the way it seems like it will, I can shake the rust off a couple of my favorite forts and work on projects this inefficiency caused to take the life out of me. :]

UI improvements, for the time being are not a priority, that will come out latter if at all. UI changes are subject more to gameplay changes than anything.

Fair enough, thanks for giving a more polite response. I know Toady works in large blocks and doesn't like to get side-tracked from finishing an important milestone, and feature creep can destroy a sprint really easily. I'm certainly not impatient, so even if the change takes another year or two, that's just fine, I've played this game for quite a few years already. I just got worried that the man wouldn't even acknowledge the question for a long period of time despite answering plenty of other questions of varying relevance, and I don't know him personally so it's anyone's guess what the silence could mean. I simply keep repeating the question until I get an answer, which is my right, and nothing that justifies random crumbs showing up to give me shit for it.

I've made 20-30 mature fortresses and nowadays I find that my enjoyment tapers off when I get to the point of wanting to build a large structure of some kind; the menu is really inefficient for placing constructions and it's been difficult for me to stick with a fort long-term as a result. That makes me sad because I feel like I'm losing a battle with my own willpower to play what is definitely my favorite game. I'm looking forward to some small UI efficiency improvements for that reason. Not to say that the other things being worked on aren't important--understand that my question has just gone unanswered for ages and that fact was making me feel disengaged from the development process.

I've sent Toady the following question a couple times, but haven't received an answer.

Are there plans to improve the interface\system for placement of buildings (furniture, constructions, etc) in a near-future release?

Primarily I’m interested in information about anything that reduces the number of repetitive actions one must take in building a structure using a large number of constructions or when placing sets of furniture in 100+ bedrooms. It’d be awesome to be able to ‘paint’ with a chosen type (Selected: Larch Tables, quality = any, distance = any, quantity available = 30) instead of going b, t, selecting a location, selecting a specific object, over and over. This can get time-consuming (on the order of hours of work) when doing tasks like making a large block wall or placing floors in a room with a complicated, non-square shape.

I don't know if the man is too busy improving the game to answer, or has chosen not to reply because he disliked the question or the way I asked it, but I'm really only concerned with finding an answer; has anyone seen such an answer in this thread or another thread or devblog in recent memory?

I put a lot of time into playing and promoting DF so I'm disappointed at how conspicuously he's avoided discussing this matter after I've politely asked several times over the past 6 months.

I listened through all of this and I felt like there was very little question-answering going on; mostly bantering and outlandish joking about dwarves with flesh tentacle beards. Most of what I heard about actual Dwarf Fortress development from this recording has already been posted in the normal news posts and forum posts. I seem to recall that Tarn posted saying there was a shortage of community questions available, so I sent one in (it relates to the UI for placing buildings and constructions); though I feel like you guys did very little of answering the community's questions over the 72 minute recording, and didn't get to my question either, which makes me wonder if I somehow got a damaged or incomplete copy of the recording, as it did end abruptly.

Did I mistakenly not download the whole recording, and miss a bunch of it? Or are my observations essentially correct? (not trying to be impolite here in the slightest--it's just what I perceive; I don't normally listen to these). My copy is 72 minutes in length.

It's very fun having a historied fort with old, wounded, soldiers doddering around, and running out of space in your graveyards multiple times, then appointing the most crippled and unproductive dwarf in the fortress your Baron, and things like that. Babies and children get into so much deadly crap when you don't wall in.

My favorite forts and the ones I played for the longest are ones where I defended my fort outdoors with a military that went through a 30% per year attrition rate using crossbows, battleaxes, and warhammers. I always make the fortress guard use spears because I'm hoping they'll cause less grisly injuries when they poke lawbreakers. The fewer cage traps I build, the happier I usually end up being with the fort, and I try not to restrict the behavior of nobles or law officers.

One piece of advice I want to give though, to anyone who plays without walling off. Carefully examine Forgotten Beasts before deciding to fight them. Some of them have properties that make it absolute suicide to fight them (they will kill off your whole fort for a certainty) and the only smart way to deal with them is to either wall off or crush them in a cave-in or collapse, unless you feel like you're done playing that fort. You can direct their path using the fact that they destroy grates aggressively even if the grates are critical to their path into the fortess. Short version: only flying FBs can cross a grate path into your fortress.

Quote from: Noble Digger on June 12, 2011, 09:40:10 pm

It's pretty easy to trap a non-flying forgotten beast. Not inside a trap, but trap it as in it cannot reach any of your dwarves or escape its situation.

The basic idea is that forgotten beasts consider grates and floor hatches pathable, but upon seeing one, they will attack it and destroy it rather than crossing over.

So you create a cell for the thing somewhere, and make a path that connects from where it currently is to the cell where you want it to end up. Then, you block off all passages leading to your dwarves, except for a single path leading from the other end of the cell into the fortress\common area. Then, you channel out 3 floors in the hallway of that 2nd path and remove the ramps from the side that leads to your fortress, and build 3 grates over the path. Once it's complete, have your military retreat through this path over the grates. The cockroach will surely follow. When he reaches the grates, he will destroy them, leaving him no way into your fort. If you're lucky, he will stand still at this point, and if not, he'll quickly run back into the underground to a point where he was standing at an earlier time. Either way, as soon as he's in the room with the grates and destroys the grates, you need to break back into the underground from behind him and seal off the hallway that led into his cell. Now he's trapped in the cell.

Depending how well you engineer the cell and the paths in and out, you can end up with a FB perfectly where you want him by using this knowledge about how they look for a way into your fort and how they interact with grates, hatches, and ledges. A FB that can't fly will consider a ledge without a ramp as impassable and so once he destroys the grate he's screwed.

The problem is you cant know for sure from where the FB or any other underground creature will spawn unless you wall off most of the edges of the map, which is a challenge in itself.
Right now I had a Voracious Cave Crawler kill 3 of my dwarfs because I noticed it too late and it managed to slip through a hole in my defenses and into the main shaft in my fort. Oh the horror.
Before that, a Cave Croc managed to spawn just as the mason was placing the last stone of the wall. That didnt end pretty either.
In other news, a GCS just apeared. Not if only I could bait it into one of my cage traps FBs would be a thing of the past.

Nice, good luck. My last 2 maps I've failed to find any GCS despite seeking relevant factors in my embark. It may be I just need to go down to the third layer. My solution for keeping the underground secure is that I normally penetrate the underground (and the basic soil\rock layers) through a stair shaft in the center of the map. Since it's the only way down I can easily build a wall and\or pavillion and other structures around the staircase to channel invaders. Airlocks using doors, floodgates, or simply placing a block wall on a diagonal pathway are all effective, but FBs can smash doors and floodgates so only the latter is really secure.

The trade-off is that with only one entrance it tends to be less convenient in general, but being able to automatically process any type of forgotten beast into your chosen method of disposal seems quite dwarven to me. If it's a mundane organic creature you simply want dead you could funnel it into a hallway filled with repeatedly-triggering upright spike traps. If it's a flyer or if it's made of indestructible materials and you don't want to capture it, you could send it down a sealed 1-tile hallway with a hollow region carved out above containing a collapse trap on a lever-linked support that causes the overburden to fall and destroy the hallway's contents (you need to place the lever in a common area or lock a dwarf in a room with it to ensure accurate detonation--FBs dont set off pressure plates. Such a trap is also 100% resettable as it works with the collapse of constructed floors and loses only a few pieces each time it's used. If you want to trap the creature, send it down a path that leads it to a grate trap and block it in from behind when it destroys the grate using constructed walls. Once it's trapped like that you can move it anywhere else in the fortress using the same technique you used to trap it originally. I haven't yet thought up a good way to trap a flying FB aside from luring it into a chamber and having building materials and dwarves nearby to instantly seal up the chamber from both sides while it's inside.

As to your problem with being attacked from all over the underground, all I recommend is having a single access point with a diagonal entrance that you can easily wall off from your side, use an emergency burrow to pull your harvesters back inside, seal the entrance and engineer a way to deal with the threat before you give it access to your fort. Use guard dogs on chains in the underground to warn of threats early--when you see a dog get killed, pay attention and deal with the threat. You'll breed plenty more--stop being so sentimental! All of these methods depend on only giving the creature 1 path into your fortress, and if they ever add digging creatures my method is screwed, but dogs are always a solid investment.

Guzzle their booze, cut down their grove, set fire to their prickle berries, strip them naked and kick them down a mineshaft. Then promptly forget their secrets.

What would Urist do if life gave him LEMONS?