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Topics - JT

Pages: [1] 2
1
DF Adventure Mode Discussion / Whoops!
« on: October 30, 2007, 02:13:00 am »
After spending the better part of an hour exploring the world in Adventure Mode, I noticed a big migrant group on the world map.  Wanting to make some new friends, I walked right into the middle of the group and discovered that they were goblins.

Now, if you're a goblin, you've been bred with one fundamental fact: a human with a big-assed mace is not your friend.

They all scatter to the wind, and I give pursuit to one, shouting, "I only want to be your friend!" while swinging my goblin-blood-splattered mace in a frenzy.  Eventually the goblin gets away from me, so I zoom back out and look at the world map, to discover that there are now dozens of individual migrants all over the place: attacking the migrant group broke up all of the migrants into individuals!

I scouted after one of the migrants on the world map, and attacked again.  He fled, only to fall into a dried-out murky pool, so I leisurely started throwing rocks at him (I didn't score a single hit, which leads me to believe that it's much harder to hit someone when attacking from a higher elevation in this version).  Eventually I got tired of this and hopped into the depression after him, and greeted him with Mr. Mace.  I broke his arms and legs with the mace, then as he passed out I took off -- he stayed on the map in one place.

Finally, I chased down another migrant who had scattered to the southeast.  When I caught up to him, he ran like the wind and I merrily pursued him for quite some time.  Unfortunately, I was so caught up in the thrill of the chase that I failed to notice the alligator who was running perpendicular to us and who intercepted me.  In just three bites I was a goner.

I guess I deserved it for privateering against goblin civilians. ;-)


2
DF Bug Reports / 33c -- Embarkation screen doesn't clear search complete
« on: November 24, 2007, 06:57:00 pm »
I'll post a movie.
http://mkv25.net/dfma/movie-185-embarkationscreenbug

1) Type [n] to add a new item.
2) Type in random characters into the screen to narrow the search.
3) Backspace those characters. You'll notice the screen hasn't fully restored the list.
4) Hit spacebar to get the list back, but only of those items that have spaces in their name.

[ November 24, 2007: Message edited by: JT ]


3
DF Bug Reports / Steel Bolts -- Way too valuable
« on: October 31, 2007, 05:24:00 pm »
(This is a suggestion in a bug report's clothing.)

At present, each individual bolt is priced at 1¤.  Seems reasonable.  However, steel has a value of 30.  A single low-quality steel bolt is thus worth 30¤ -- 25 steel bolts are thus worth an unbelievable 750¤!

I propose that all ITEM_AMMO (or perhaps even all items) have a special flag which indicates the standard "lot": [LOTSIZE:20]

Under the default game, this is a score (20).  Thus, the value of any stack of bolts or arrows is equal to:

(quantity) * (value) * (material) * (quality) / (lotsize)

For instance, a stack of 25 mundane steel bolts will be worth {25 * 1 * 30 * 1.0 / 20 = 37.5} 38¤.

This is a simple enough change that it could probably be applied to all of the ITEM_ classes, with the Prepare for the Journey screen modified to consider all of the items of the same type as a single stack.


Along the lines of the Prepare for the Journey screen, it would have to display (somehow) the actual lot size of the items being purchased when adding a [n]ew item.  I suggest "(value)¤/(lotsize)" -- e.g., "30¤/20".  I also suggest replacing all of the " P" on the [n]ew item screen with "¤", so it's more obvious that commodities are listed by actual value; there's no need to distinguish points and monetary value since they're directly equivalent when purchasing equipment, though obviously they're not directly equivalent when purchasing skills.

[ October 31, 2007: Message edited by: JT ]


4
DF Bug Reports / [Minor] If you can't do it, don't
« on: March 20, 2007, 05:22:00 pm »
One issue that cropped up in one of my fortresses is that while building up a complicated front entrance, I made the mistake of building a channel linked directly to the river while the dwarves were still mining in a completely enclosed area.  When the channel flooded, those dwarves became trapped in their enclosed area, as the only exit to the enclosed area now had a filled channel of water across it.

I tried to build a bridge across the channel, but the problem was that because this was a miner wolfing run, all of my trapped miners had the architecture task enabled.  So, a trapped miner would look at the bridge and try to build it, then complain that the materials weren't accessible and suspend the construction.

The problem, of course, is that there were still two people that were not trapped in that enclosed area, who had ready access to the materials and who had the architecture task enabled.  But before they could have a chance to build the bridge to rescue their compatriots, the job was claimed and suspended by one of the trapped miners.  I had to explicitly disable architecture on the trapped miners to get the bridge built.

My suggestion is to have a "round robin" style of job claiming, where a job tracks who can attempt the job and who can't.  If a job is checked by someone and they can't perform that job at the moment, they simply ignore that job and the next available dwarf checks that job.  This process repeats itself until one of the following conditions is met:

1) A dwarf successfully accepts the task, or
2) All dwarfs with the required labour task are unable to perform the job, whereupon the job becomes suspended.

[ March 20, 2007: Message edited by: JT ]


5
DF Bug Reports / 10 worlds not scrollable
« on: August 23, 2006, 09:40:00 pm »
When you have 10 worlds ready to play on the Start Playing menu, only nine are visible.  Moving the cursor to select the tenth does not reveal the current selection at all.

My guess is that it's a fence-post error, but I honestly have no idea. ;-)


6
DF Suggestions / Squad settings
« on: November 02, 2007, 06:53:00 pm »
Existing squad settings:

[f]: Food carried - None, 1 Ration, 2 Rations

[w]: Water is carried/Water is not carried

: Sleep - Sleep in barracks/Sleep in room

[c]: Squad stays close to station/Squad chases opponents
[a]: Squad harasses dangerous wild animals/Squad ignores wild animals if possible

[t]: Squad is on duty/Squad is standing down


New proposals:

[l]: Always follow leader/Subordinates remain on station
If a leader goes off to sleep or have a drink, all of his subordinates follow him.  However, if this setting was toggled, the subordinates would remain on site.  This would serve to make soldiers much more likely to remain on station.

[e]: Dwarves eat as needed/Dwarves remain on duty until starving
[d]: Dwarves drink as needed/Dwarves remain on duty until dehydrated
[r]: Dwarves sleep as needed/Dwarves remain on duty until exhausted
A dwarf in the middle of a charge against a cloister of enemy troops will suddenly abandon the attack to go get a drink.  In advance of most attacks, players would want to disable these features to make the soldiers remain on duty even if a little thirsty, to make sure the job gets done.


These two features combined, I figure, would serve to make military units more cohesive.  As it is, carrying rations and water into battle requires a very expensive clothing industry to be set up (1 piece of leather per waterskin, 1 piece of leather per backpack), which limits or outright eliminates its usefulness for creating cohesive squads.

I propose all of this because instead of rushing headlong at a group of wolves that had killed one of my patrolling wrestlers, the dwarves in my reinforcements all attacked one by one, with leaders abandoning the battle to go get drinks and leaving their fellow (lesser-skilled) soldiers to fend for themselves, just like the really irritating group members you get in MMORPGs.

What should have been a relatively easy search-and-destroy operation turned out to cause five dwarven casualties at the loss of only two wolves... because the wolves actually stuck together and the dwarves didn't.

(Then the game crashed.  I had no idea what caused it, and my most recent save is about three weeks of game time back so it'd be tough to reproduce...)

[ November 02, 2007: Message edited by: JT ]


7
DF Suggestions / Gender-specific names
« on: April 08, 2008, 06:05:00 pm »
This is related, somewhat, to Bloat307.  If people in the world had female-sounding names, it might be easier to determine their gender at a glance.

The names of females in Dwarf Fortress could be run through a filter in order to produce a female-sound equivalent, if a civilisation had an appropriate entity tag.  For instance, "Rakust" might turn into "Rachuste", while "Urist" might turn into "Urissia".

To do this, I would suggest taking the original male name and hashing it to produce a seed for a standard 32-bit number generator.  Then, for each hard consonant phoneme, it can be replaced by a randomly-selected softer variation which sounds similar.

Because this would work directly with the phonemes instead of with the words, there would be no need to include masculine-versus-feminine language within the language raws.  However, if you wanted to go that road, I'm sure that would work fine as well: Earth tends to have strong notions of gender in its words (and languages like French tend to insist upon it).


8
DF Suggestions / Zero rejects seed saving
« on: November 01, 2007, 05:16:00 pm »
If I'm interpreting things correctly, Dwarf Fortress currently uses the following algorithm during world generation.

code:
1. If player has specified a seed, the seed is written into the random
   generator state.
2. Random generator saves the current random generator state to be written to
   the info file.
3. Random generator reads seed value.
4. Random generator generates an altitude layer.
5. Random generator generates a wetness layer.
6. Random generator generates a temperature layer.
7. Other layers (wildlife, culture, etc.)...
8. Random generator evaluates the layers to determine if world is rejectable.
   If so, generator rejects world and goes to step 3.  Otherwise generation
   continues with history and civilisation generation.

Every time it goes to step 3, it should go to step 2 instead.  If the exact state of the seed was preserved every time the PRNG went to step 2 -- iff Dwarf Fortress uses a standard 32-bit PRNG instead of a Mersenne Twister -- then I believe this would result in zero rejects for a saved seed, since the random generator always has a certain completely-deterministic state before attempting each world to generate.

I proposed this in #bay12games but most of the people seemed to think this wouldn't work.  I can't fathom why, since I'm intimately familiar with how PRNG seeds are stored. =P

[ November 01, 2007: Message edited by: JT ]


9
DF Suggestions / Simple farming
« on: October 24, 2007, 11:12:00 am »
Most farmers don't rely on flood-farming.  Rather, they simply run irrigation channels up and down the length of their farms, allowing the water in the channels to soak the soil adjacent to the channels; simple capillary action is all that's required to wet the soil near the irrigation channels, thereby soaking the farmland and rendering it suitable for farming.

To that end, will it be possible to implement simple farms that don't rely on complicated flood chambers?  The way I see it, building the following set-up:

code:

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
. ~ . . . . ~ . . . . ~ . . .
. ~ . . . . ~ . . . . ~ . . .
. ~ . . . . ~ . . . . ~ . . .
. ~ . . . . ~ . . . . ~ . . .
. ~ . . . . ~ . . . . ~ . . .
. ~ . . . . ~ . . . . ~ . . .
. ~ . . . . ~ . . . . ~ . . .
. ~ . . . . ~ . . . . ~ . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

...should be more than sufficient to allow planting in any of the tiles between the two irrigation channels.  I suggest a 2 to 3 tile capillary action from all filled channels of water.


10
DF Suggestions / New Workshop: Roller Coaster
« on: April 01, 2007, 02:55:00 pm »
I think it would be very cool to get a roller coaster type of workshop which gives dwarves happy thoughts whenever they ride it.  However, it has a small chance of causing them to become nauseated, based on how "Tough" they are.

When building the roller coaster, you would place the workshop, then designate "tracks" leading out one side of the workshop.  The more turns there are in the track, the better the happy thought the dwarf will get when riding it!

If someone steps onto the roller coaster track, they will suffer a heavy crushing injury if the train collides with them, so it is prudent to ensure that the roller coaster track is away from all of your paths -- preferably it should be dug into solid stone well away from your mining areas.

Having a roller coaster boosts immigration.  You can create 5 roller coaster tickets from one stone at a craftsdwarf's workshop.  Dwarves will purchase these tickets for 10¤ apiece from shops, or you can trade them to merchants.  Merchants who are traded roller coaster tickets will then ride the roller coaster once they are done trading.

[ April 01, 2007: Message edited by: JT ]


11
DF Suggestions / Bed settings
« on: November 18, 2007, 04:35:00 am »
[w] Allow wounded dwarves (Yes/No)
[h] Allow homeless dwarves (Yes/No)

I'd really like for them to stop sticking my hospital patients into the jail cells, and also dislike having the homeless sleep in there as well (although at least that one is supported by reality...).


12
DF Suggestions / Our city has no place for you
« on: March 25, 2007, 08:05:00 pm »
In this day and age, free really is free.  People can travel anywhere in the country and buy a house there, and will do whatever they please.

But in the day and age of Dwarf Fortress, free isn't free.  Dwarves are subject to the whims and laws of their superiors -- they eke out a living and travel if they think they can get a better life somewhere else.  Sometimes these people aren't actually wanted.

Enter the ability to turn away immigrants.  By this, I don't mean a population cap, but rather an explicit instruction which you activate within the game while reviewing a new immigrant (anyone with a flashing X).  Don't like the skill set of an immigrant?  Move to the [p]rofile screen and hit "[D]eny immigration" (shift+d, for safety), and boom, the new immigrant is flagged for being deported.

Turning an immigrant away can be useful in those cases where you have decided you have a comfortable population but still might consider accepting a skilled (or even unskilled) immigrant here or there.  For instance, I tend to find that I'm getting as many as four, five, or even six mechanics, and can put at most two mechanics to good use.  The others get reassigned as farmers instead.  I would rather turn away these mechanics than have to bother with reassigning them.  It'd be much faster, and even though I'd have to use a Shift+D every time, it's still faster than going into their labour preferences and changing every one of them into something they're not.


There are some rules surrounding denying immigrants:

1) Turning away an immigrant creates a bad reputation, which reduces immigrants in subsequent immigrations.  It also damages trade relations with your parent civilisation.

2) You require a soldier to turn away immigrants.  The soldier receives a "Deny Immigration" task and approaches the immigrant.  Upon reaching the immigrant, both stand adjacent to one another for a few seconds, inversely proportional to the soldier's best weapon skill -- a dabbling soldier requires about 600 frames to turn away an immigrant, while a legendary soldier requires just 10 frames.  After this time has passed, the dwarf in question becomes a migrant again and leaves the fortress by the best route.

3) Immigrants who see an immigrant get turned away get strong unhappy thoughts.  Immigrants whose spouses are turned away become Very Unhappy right away and stand a good chance of becoming melancholic or berserk on fairly short order if they're not also deported.

4) Nobles can mandate that all immigrants must be accepted, thereby imprisoning any soldier who attempts a Deny Immigrant task.


13
DF Suggestions / Desert water
« on: October 10, 2007, 05:23:00 pm »
quote:
Toady One wrote:
<STRONG>Water is still an issue on desert and glacial sites. Dwarves don't know how to drink frozen alcohol for instance, though you can dig down into the rock below the glacier where the subterranean temperatures are just high enough to melt the booze, and store it there. Brewing plants works on desert maps (you don't need water for brewing at this time). Still, it's not quite enough. More fixes and helpful additions tomorrow.</STRONG>

Have you given any thought to allowing plants to be water-bearing?  Draining the sap of most cacti is a bad idea, (especially barrel cacti, since they contain a laxative extract -- EXTRACT_DIARRHEA?), but when eaten directly a cactus is over 90% water, even above that of fresh meat.  Each such cactus eaten could thus provide most of the water that a person requires, though they would still have to supplant it somehow, most likely with groundwater from a well.

In programmatical terms, this would work simply: if a plant had EXTRACT_WATER of sufficient quantity for the creature's SIZE, then eating that plant would provide a large negative amount of thirst to the creature (you might not using a signed variable for thirst, but it might be good to do that).  Since creatures in Dwarf Fortress drink approximately twice as often as they eat (at present, anyway), the ideal figure would be to provide a negative amount sufficient enough to allow a creature to ignore its next scheduled Drink task and drink normally at its second scheduled Drink task, effectively skipping every odd drink task.


Urist Bertorish cancels Attend Party: explosive diarrhea.


14
DF Suggestions / Adventure Mode - Walk off ledge
« on: October 01, 2007, 11:53:00 pm »
I'm not sure if the new version does this already, but if it doesn't, I would really like it if we could voluntarily step off a ledge (for instance, jumping from the top floor of a tavern into the middle of the tavern in a swashbuckling duel, or deciding to hop off a diving board into a deep lake).

How will landing in water be handled in the new version?  For instance, if I jump down three levels, will I need more than 7 units of water (per tile) to avoid smashing against the bottom?  If I jump down 20 levels, will I hit the surface of the water with enough velocity to seriously injure myself even without hitting the bottom?


15
DF Suggestions / Adventure Mode: Unjoin
« on: August 25, 2006, 11:01:00 pm »
I'd like a conversation option to tell an NPC I'm adventuring with that I'd prefer to go my own way now.  I now have an axeman and swordsman in my party who lost their weapons in combat (I have no idea when), and I'd like to tell them to go home before they get themselves killed.  (Unlike at least three quarters of the players here, I actually have a heart. ;-))

Eventually, of course, I'd like to be able to give them equipment, or better yet I'd like them to be smart enough to retrieve their property after it gets stuck in a Zombie's corpse. ;-)

[ August 26, 2006: Message edited by: JT ]


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