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Topics - mscottveach

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Forum Games and Roleplaying / Trying to Remember Old Game

« on: October 24, 2021, 01:57:41 pm »

There was a forum game I stumbled onto once a long, long time ago. Maybe 10 years ago. All I can remember about it is that it was a kind of battle royale in side a fairly contained space - maybe a building - and the fun of the game was that there were these magic books strewn around with magical phrases in them - and you'd have to get one, say the phrase to find out what it did...

...and as the game went on - i think - once you started learning what did what, you could start trying to combine them to create stronger/more interesting effects.

That's all I can remember about it. Does this a ring a bell for anyone? Does anyone remember what it was called?

DF Gameplay Questions / Detailed Fight Logs

« on: June 28, 2017, 12:14:33 am »

I may be going crazy. But I swear at one point years ago, I had turned on some kind of
verbosity setting and was getting way more detail in my fight reports. But now for the life
of me I can't find any mention of such a thing and am now wondering if maybe it was some
other game?

Basically: is there a way for me to see more detail of the blow-by-blow of a fight than is
displayed by default in the reports menu?

DF General Discussion / Weird Mouse Issue

« on: June 21, 2017, 11:34:55 pm »

I'm back to playing after about a year off and I can't figure out how to fix this weird UI bug I have now.
I'm using the most recent PErrant's pack for windows.

The issue is that I have a green X that trails the mouse pointer around at an offset. If I put my mouse
pointer in the upper left, the X and the mouse pointer was colocated but as i move the mouse to the
right or down the X doesn't move as quickly so by the time I put my pointer in the bottom right hand
corner, the X is offset by some significant amount.

Anyone seen that before? Any idea how I can fix it? If I disable mousequery entirely it goes away but
of course so does my ability to use the mouse for anything.

DF Gameplay Questions / Disappearing Migrants? Show up in Therapist but not in game!

« on: August 12, 2016, 03:34:16 am »

Twice now, I've had migrants arrive. And you know how they do that hang out on the edge for a few seconds before streaming in thing? Well, twice they've just sort of disappeared instead of streaming in.. but the really weird thing is that therapist thinks they arrived. But they're nowhere. My total pop count says one thing in therapist and nother in the game. Anyone else seen this? Any advice on how to fix it?

PS. I have also noticed a few times that a Necromancer and his army would show up, hang out on the edge fro a second and disappear. I thought thtis was a feature.. like the army considered attacking and then decided against it... but now I wonder if it's not the same bug that I'm seeing with migrants...

DF Gameplay Questions / Minecarts hate me.

« on: August 10, 2016, 08:24:02 pm »

So, I'm tearing my hair out trying to get minecarts to work. Here's what
I've done:
- made a track (covers about 100 tiles and 6 z-levels and takes a good 6 or 7 turns);
- put a stop at both ends and programmed them correctly;
- namely the first stop has "Push when cart is full of item" and I've enabled
the item I want (wood) and I have tried both linking a "take" from a nearby wood
stockpile and also tried not doing that.
- the second stop has "guide when minecart is empty"and nothing is enabled as "keep this"
- I've assigned the minecart to the route.

So, all of that puts me in the situation where I have a minecart siitting on the
track and I have a route that doesn't have any warning symbols on it.

MY problem is that I can't get teh dwarves to fill the minecart. They just ignore it.
In fact, they go to the stockpile that is supposed to feed it and will grab wood and
then walk right past the minecart on their way to deliver the wood where the minecart
would have anyway.

I've even stripped some dwarves down to just having the wood hauling skill and
they too join the "hauling wood past the tool that will help" weirdnes..

Any ideas on what i'm doing wrong?

DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / The Secret Sauce?

« on: July 06, 2016, 02:11:00 am »

I've been thinking a bit lately about makes DF more compelling than one might expect. And it's led me to be
curious about two things:

1. Has Tarn talked much about the algorithms he uses for language construction? I can't quite put my finger on
it but the number of delightful language constructions that occur in this game is shockingly high. How did he brew that? Is
that his and his brother's language taste just getting packaged for us.. or did he stumble on to a grammar that
works surprisingly well. How often does he tweak it?

2. And that leads into my second question. It seems like a huge amount of what makes DF fun is that it's just
complex enough and that entities collide in unpredictable collisions. And while we know how some of the systems
work, we're in the dark enough to be surprised and/or potentially delighted when some novel behavior explodes
out of a unexpected collision. The key to this working is that we can't just check a wiki and know how every system
is designed. My question is: do the developers explicitly keep the system mechanics secret? Or do they offer them ad
hoc if asked? If the former, have they ever talked about how they decided what to reveal and what to keep secret?
Curilous if they've ever regretted revealing something.

DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / At a crossroads....

« on: January 20, 2015, 03:17:53 am »

So, I've dabbled with DF over the years, never really lasting longer than a single migration wave before getting distracted and moving on
from the game. But recently, I finally sat down and got a lot of things to click. And have my first fortress that is more or less self-sustatining
with 70 or so dwarves.

I have two questions: one simple/shallow and two deeper questions.

1. I am having trouble getting dwarves to make iron. I have a stockpile with charcoal that is giving to the smelter and I have a stockpile
full of hematite giving to the smelter but for some reason I'll intermittently get the message that a refined coal source isn't available. A lot
of times it will work but a lot of times it won't. The charcoal is usually in bins in case that matters. Any idea on what I'm doing wrong?

2. My deeper question is that I've hit a wall on what to do and I'm really torn about about how to proceed. I know there are a lot of things
that I don't know about... things to discover and that if I started readnig online, I would see all kinds of stuff that would make me go "Ohhh,
I can do that?" But I'm afraid of doing that when it's something that might be much more satisfying to discover on my own. But since I don't
know what kinds of things they might be, I have no idea if that's the case or not. But it's like right now I have a bunch of dwarves churning
out metal crafts and weaponsa nd armor. I have squads of highly trained soldiers that more less chew through any beasts I find below. And
I'm left wondering what the point is now... traders come, I sell goods, everyone had nice quarters and it's all feeling like, so, what's next?

In other words, I think I'm in the throes of a mid-dwarflife criss. Any thoughts on hwo to snap out of it?

3. My other deep question is that there are so many dwarves running around that I find it hard to really have a sense of what's happening
in real time. I tend to find out about the cool stuff a little late. A dwarf is found dead and when I go there, I see a giant spider has crawled
to the surface and webbed my wel and caught a dwarf and killed it. By the time I got there, some soldiers had already killed the spider. And
it's cool... but it felt like I was a late to the party.Is that just the nature of the beast (no pun intended) in this game? Or is there a way to
be miore on top of cool moments as they happen?

DF General Discussion / What's the secret sauce to DF?

« on: November 26, 2013, 07:33:42 am »

I have a feeling this has been discussed somewhere so this thread might just be someone pointing me in the right direction. I searched without much luck.

But I'm curious if there's ever been any detailed discussion as to what makes DF succeeds. I don't mean from the perspective of playing the game -- I mean that's obviously been discussed a lot and anyone who plays the game could talk about why it works for them...

...I'm asking more from the perspective of a designer or a coder or even a play tester. Or maybe I'm asking "How did they pull off creating a simulator with such deepness?"

Did they just get incredibly lucky?

Or did they have a unique approach to the design/implementation that helped create the depth?

I've played a lot of the clones and none of them quite capture lightning in a bottle like DF does; does anyone have
any theories as to why?

DF Gameplay Questions / how much should i experiment!?

« on: March 04, 2012, 10:16:13 pm »

so i have just discovered DF -- honestly, i don't know how this wasn't on my radar for so long.
and i'm super excited about it.

but i have a question.

do people have any advice as to how much i should or should not look at tutorials? i've read
a tutorial that taught me how to dig, make beds, make bedrooms, piles and early workshops
and that's about it...

...my instinct is to just play around with it. but it's hard to know whether that's a waste of
time... like will i be able to figure out how to do things or is it basically impossible without
reading guides...?

like for example... i started a new game and can't seem to farm in my fortress b/c there is
no soil... but there's water nearby... so i was taking what little i know about irrigation and
trying to build a rudimentary irrigation system that will allow me to farm... i haven't gotten
it to work yet, but i'm not sure that i won't...

...but therein lies the question... if i go look at a tutorial, i might discover very quickly how
to do it and feel robbed of the fun of figuring it out... but on the other hand, it might be
just impossible for me to know that because of some quirk of the system, i have to do xyz
to get irrigation to work...

...and i am only using that as an example.. i am not actually asking anyone to talk about
irrigation... i am only exemplifying how i am torn between looking online and experimenting...

...so my question is: in general, does anyone have a good "this is what you should read
and then not read any more until you've really explored and experimented?'