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Topics - FACM

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DF General Discussion / The most boring mega-project...
« on: May 06, 2010, 09:43:48 pm »
Lately, I've not had a lot of time to really focus on DF. It does also make for a very good background game, though, given that you can check every 20-30 minutes and see whats going on. This obviously isn't going to result in a fort that the OCD micro-manager players (and we're all that to some extent, given the nature of DF) wouldn't be too happy with. Lots of idlers, a bit of a food issue, etc.

Anyways, I still wanted to have my fort get somewhere despite my lack of direct attention on it. Standard 4x4 embark location: Side of a mountain, with a bit of the forest available for trees. My chosen goal was fairly direct: A stripmine, to tear the mountain into it's individual component pieces. And the land below it. Yesterday, I hit the first milestone: The mountain's peak is now even with the forest floor beside it.



That's the inner-most corner of the mountain, 15 layers below it's original peak. What you can't see is the soil and trees a few screens away, at the same Z-level as the rest of the terrain. You also can't see the mud-blob forgotton beast, locked in eternal combat with 4 dogs and a trained giant eagle.

I don't intend on stopping the fort here, though current issues, brought on by lack of dedicated attention or otherwise, may require a reclaim squad.
-The unkillable forgotten beast, as mentioned before. It's eternally fighting about 20 feet from the main staircase down, which is keeping half my fortress from doing anything but going 'I'm hungry, gonna head back downstairs and AHHHH MUDBEAST! AHHHHH! AHhhhhey, you know, I'm still hungry' eternally despite the 100pt. restriction cost I applied to going anywhere near the main steps and the far easier fact that there's a big hole with ramps not 40 steps the other way.
-Apparently somehow the 240+ dwarves living here managed to eat all of my food. Alcohol isn't in short supply, but I can hardly butcher kittens fast enough to keep the fort fed.
-My woodcutters don't seem to want to actually cut trees right now. Lazy arses. Trees are now getting in the way of clearing out more levels.
-All of the detritus left from robbing the elves blind time after time is building up, plus vermin, and the idlers have decided apparently not to dump anything the elves brought anymore for some reason.
-I'm going to have to put a little more care into plans at this point, as I don't want to collapse anything on my existing underground developments, or lose the couple of ponds I have on the forest floor.

Some stats:
-240 dwarves at population peak, 161 now. No royalty at all, just a mayor.
-200,000 stone and 4200 gems dug out of the mountain.
-2,000 barrels holding ~12,000 drinks and ~2,000 food units.
-680 remains that won't go away. Rot already, you dead shells.

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DF General Discussion / Players - What do you want out of a mod?
« on: April 14, 2010, 10:54:19 am »
I know that not everyone uses mods when they play DF, but everyone probably has an idea of what they'd like to see in a mod. What do you, as a player, want to see mods do? Fort-mode changes or adventure-mode changes? New creatures, items, stones, metals, gems, etc? Removing some of those from the game? Complete overhauls, or simple changes?

I'm asking here rather than the DF Modding forum, as I'd prefer input from players that aren't working on their own mod (yes, I am too). That might skew the answers a bit. I do want to know what people would like from a mod, to help me with ideas for mine.

3
DF Modding / Weapon material/temperature/BURN attacks help
« on: April 12, 2010, 10:45:03 am »
I'm working on trying to make a special material that does heat damage when it strikes in combat as well as the standard damage. Here's the work-in-progress raw:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I had figured the MAT_FIXED_TEMP value would be enough, but it doesn't seem to work. Dropping an item made out of this doesn't seem to radiate at all, as dropping it into water doesn't make it evaporate into steam and creatures don't seem to take any note of the heat.

Incidentally, I had made a test weapon with a BURN-type attack made out of this weapon, and it didn't seem to work at all. It looked to work very similarly to standard BLUNT attacks. Using an existing weapon, with the top EDGE attack switched to BURN, caused dwarves to favor the other attacks on the weapon.

Has anyone tried something similar to this with more success, or can someone help track down the issue?

4
DF Modding / Fantasy Flavor mod [Release 7 - Trees]
« on: April 06, 2010, 08:54:57 pm »
Fantasy Flavor - A mostly subtle mod.

Apparently, Civilization Forge 2 encompasses a lot of what I was planning, and has more or less outclassed this mod in a way that I won't likely catch up with. Go install that instead.

Release 7 now available - http://drop.io/FantasyFlavorDF/asset/fantasyflavor7-zip

Release 7 adds in 3 new colored trees. If you want your cobalt-loving noble's bed to match his cobalt room, now you can!

All cumulative changes are detailed here:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I've been playing Dwarf Fortress for a couple years now, and I sometimes wonder how much more could be done with the engine. Clearly, a lot of people feel this way too, looking at all of the other mods, especially some of the new ones for .31.01. I've tried a couple of them, and my usual feeling is that a lot of the other mods don't fit what I want to play. Some add things that I don't think fit in this type of fantasy world, and some make drastic changes to the existing game.

My goal with Fantasy Flavor is to make a mod that take the Dwarf Fortress world, and adds a bit more of the fantastic into it, without going (too) overboard. I know that there are other that would like to see this too, and I'm plenty open to suggestions on what to add or change.

I have some ideas in mind, and I'll run most suggestions through them to make sure they fit. Really awesome ideas can get exceptions, but for the most part suggestions will need to match.

My major design goals for FF are:
 * To add some variety to things that need variety. I've seen the far end of flavor mods, and while having 76 more types of trees is a lot more variety, I don't think that 76 more mundane trees makes the game more fun.
 ** That said, to not add too much variety, even if it does add a significant amount of flavor. 36 new farmable crops is a little bit more fun than trees, but it's also a pain to set up anything beyond a one-crop fortress in that scenario.
 * To bring in more fantasy to the game world. Things like flowers made of ice and self-animated swords, if they can be made to fit some sense of continuity in the game world.
 * To NOT re-balance existing objects/items/materials. There are a lot of mods already going around that are trying to fix balance issues, both real and perceived, and future releases could have those issues fixed by either raw file changes or system mechanic changes. I don't want this mod to need redone because the vanilla game got a big update. This also lets you drop this mod into an existing balance mod package.
 ** As a subset of the above note, I'd like to avoid editing the vanilla raw files as much as possible. The new tags, including caste tags, make it look like some edits can be done to existing objects without having to actually edit their tags, to a small extent.
 * To include some silly, 'Rated D for Dwarf' content that refers back to the history of Dwarf Fortress, but keep these entries in another set of separate files, so that players who want the flavor without things like Magma Elephants wandering around the deep can still obtain it without more effort than deleting 3 or 4 files.
 * To get more of the community involved with a mod, so that even people who don't have the skills/desire to mod can still take credit for making something for the game.

Planned changes:
-Implement a few more options for crafts and instruments, after double-checking to see if those are in the raw files.
-Add some fantastic plants
--Above-ground trees could use a few more colors of wood, don't you agree?
-And some fantastic creatures
--There are so many fantasy things to choose from, but which ones to add?
--Also, perhaps more 'fanciful' creatures, so that dwarves will draw more images of things that don't exist. They can write their own little fantasy world inside of the little fantasy world they live in.
--More pets, and more trainable pets. War Camels are a seriously undervalued resource.
--Despite the new forgotten beasts, there's still some room for a couple new, interesting megabeasts. 
-Materials
--There should be a couple more metals, but they'll need fantastic properties to be worth putting in.
-Items
--What items are missing from this society that they might need?
-More silly dwarfy things
--Elephants look to be kings of the beasts again in .31.01. They should be kings of the sea and air as well. And the magma seas.
--Surely, a race as industrious as the dwarves would have found ways to turn things besides plants into alcohol, right?

Again, suggestions are welcome and encouraged!

5
DF Modding / .31.01 - Various modding experiments
« on: April 04, 2010, 10:13:05 am »
Long time reader/player, first time poster. I've been waiting for the new release to start working on a mod, but it seems like there's going to be a lot of experimentation going on first. And since a lot of people want to experiment on all sorts of little things, perhaps there should be a place for notes from experiments.

This isn't meant to be the sole basis of a mod, though I would expect that several mods would end up re-creating several of the same notes, and hopefully this thread will let us get some of the not-obvious assumptions collected together in one place. Feel free to contribute your own discoveries, or suggest quick raw changes to be tested, and I'll keep an up to date list in this post.

My discoveries:

-Creatures using the default magma template have their durability almost entirely defined by the [RELATIVE_THICKNESS:#] tag on the outer 'crust' layer. Magma men have this set to 1, and most larger creatures take one down in arena mode with little issue. Set this to 2, and they become significantly harder to drop. I tested with this creature:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Using [RELATIVE_THICKNESS:1] resulted in a quick 1- or 2-shot death against similar sized attackers, but using [RELATIVE_THICKNESS:2] made it nearly unstoppable, to the point where it had every body part broken, and was rolling on the ground pushing against a dragon to try and attack it. This may be related to the same issue with bronze colossi and undead being nearly unstoppable.

-The [DEEP_SPECIAL] tag might only apply to one material at a time. I made a quick mod where 2 materials had the tag (effectively the same as adamantine with a different name and color), and only the new one showed up in a test area. This isn't enough testing to confirm this behavior, but it leans towards the idea that the last material in a file with the [DEEP_SPECIAL] tag is the only one that the game actually treats that way.

-Tested out metal trees. Swapped the [trEE:LOCAL_PLANT_MAT:WOOD] tag on the candlenut tree to say [trEE:INORGANIC:ADAMANTINE]. The tree's color did not change to match the metal. (I think the color of trees is controlled by the [USE_MATERIAL_TEMPLATE:STRUCTURAL:STRUCTURAL_PLANT_TEMPLATE] tag). Cutting down the tree did not take any extra time, so material doesn't affect that any. The tree did drop adamantine, however it was in log form. The adamantine log appeared to have all the properties of adamantine, except it was treated as a log rather than ore/bars/wafer/thread. I made an adamantine bed, which worked like a normal bed but was ridiculously heavy. I then made adamantine training weapons, which were 36kgs vs other wooden training weapons at <1kg. I did not successfully get them to test out the training weapons, and the adamantine training weapons didn't show up at all in arena mode. I didn't see any separate entries for wood-adamantine items at all, so they may be identical to bar/wafer items.

Multi-creature civilizations: I added the [CREATURE:X] tags for humans, goblins, and ant-men to the [ENTITY: MOUNTAIN] object, and generated a new world. Modifying this object (in this way, at least) on an existing world has no effect. The results were not quite was was expected: Several more mountain halls were created, but each race kept to itself. That is, there were a couple of goblin-only mountain halls, a couple dwarf-only mountain halls, a couple antmen-only mountain halls, etc. The ant-men mountain halls only appeared in the Legends up until year 3, so I suspect they're missing a couple of tags to be playable properly. All creatures used dwarven names, since the [trANSLATION:DWARF] tag wasn't changed. No race ever had the other races within the civilization settle in the same location. In adventurer mode, all of the creatures but antmen added were playable, which isn't a change at all. Overall, it doesn't seem that this change works the way it was expected to.

Suggested/upcoming experiments:
-Edible plants being made of other materials: Will dwarves eat ice? Will they freeze doing this?
-Coins: Can we mod in our own currencies and values now? Raw tags exist, but do they work?

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