Bay 12 Games Forum

Google probably knows more about you than your own mother.

Quote from: khearn on May 10, 2012, 07:20:52 pm

I love the devlogs. But I'm not sure what he meant by "accidental".

I know, crazy right?  Deliberate booze-barrel grapeshotting of the dining hall should be goal of any self respecting fortress overseer.

I certainly wasn't thinking of anything quite that...benign.

Quote from: daftfad on April 02, 2012, 04:17:54 pm

ASCII is much more efficient for interpreting tiles. Graphical tilesets are for nonserious roguelike players, which is fine, especially for a nonserious sandboxy game like DF.

Actually, false.

I played with ASCII up until there started to be so many more animals.  Now, you have a single letter, such as "s" representing dozens of completely different kinds of creatures, from satyrs to sharks to snakes to skunks, that having a picture is actually much more efficient at simply determining what a creature is.

You can tell not just what general "class" of job a creature has, but you can immediately identify specific jobs, as well, since your beekeepers will actually be in beekeeper outfits, rather than simply being a brown generic farmer-type unit.

This is a nice idea in theory but it's still very difficult for me to discern the details on a sprite. Also, while there's a number of possible interpretations of a single character on screen, context often limits it to very few in actuality..

Besides all that I think it's a waste to use more than 16^2 pixels per tile. I like seeing more of my embark at once.

I just finished this book and while that passage does make it seem like he's inspired by DF, he's clearly riffing on World of Warcraft, given the game in the book is designed around legitimizing and monetizing gold farmers.

Was an odd book by Stephenson standards, IMO. I liked it but felt like I was reading Clancy.

Have you tried just walking around with an adventurer and finding out the 'hard' way?

I gotta say I had kinda forgotten about how awesome those cities were, I'm too busy re-learning how to run a fort. May have to pop into adventurer mode just to hang in a city.

Quote from: Scarpa on March 07, 2012, 10:17:41 pm

The DFFD download page has a last modified timestamp and a version field you could check on start. Then just throw up a little info text that a new version is up.

Yes....  Possibly.  Will consider it.  I'm not sure what the net-etiquette for accessing other people's sites automatically for information is.  I feel that since sites are providing information, provided a user explicitly requests that information there can be no qualms, but programs automatically checking stuff behind the scenes feels a bit metacrawler-esque to me, even if the bandwidth is really small.  Thus, I feel if the user has to press a button to check, that's alright, but autochecking other people's sites, I dunno.     What do you think?

Heh well I work for a company that has web crawling as a central component of our service offering so my opinion may be biased but I don't think hitting a dynamic page every once in awhile is a big deal. Also, there are already RSS feeds for DFFD in general, so one option could be just parsing the 'Utilities' feed (http://dffd.wimbli.com/rss/cat_15.xml) to see if the launcher shows up. Of course this would be less effective for those who aren't checking often as it would fall off the RSS feed eventually.

I also sent in a question to the site admin to see what their point of view was about automated checking.

Edit:
And got a response.. basically there is a page just for checking file versions: http://dffd.wimbli.com/file_version.php?id=5663
This is preferred over the main download page as that page causes statistics to be updated and will artificially inflate the view stats.

Quote from: From the devlog:

Attempts to tame/train creatures will add to your site's training knowledge of that creature, which augments future training of all creatures of that type.

Does this mean things like wardogs will actually deal more damage and/or take more damage as the site's training knowledge increases?

Seems the feature is just in context of exotic creatures, so probably won't have anything to do with war dogs. My guess is 'augments future training' applies to the chance of a successful training attempt for future animals of that type.

Thank you, Scarpa.  Was your install (the exe file) in the df dir?  I think I've fixed this, the launcher is designed to handle multiple installs so I had only accounted for each install to be in its own subdirectory of the df folder.  Thus, if you upgraded with the install in the df dir it would delete that dir and then have no place to unpack to.  Doh  .  Spotted this yesterday, will upload tonight.

Just realized there was a new version, used it to upgrade to the .05 release no problem. Working great for me now, thanks! Would like a feature to archive any world info in the df executable directory, into a folder with the world name. XML, txt, bmp stuff generated after world gen or in legends mode.