Bay 12 Games Forum

It's true the 'languages' of DF are underdeveloped and basically just giant gloses of English, but as the OP said Simon Swerwer used this crude base to form a fully-fledged language you can form sentences from - and indeed full song lyrics. With no inflexions, articles or prepositions to work with, it would be classified as an isolating language where relations between elements of a sentences are fully determined by a very rigid word order or can be inferred from context. Also, by necessity the differences between parts of speech (verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs and such) are very blurry and porous - an adjective can be used as an adverb, a noun as a verb, etc. and it all depends on context.

In that respect Swerwer-style dwarven has a very concise, implicit and terse quality that reminds one of Classical Chinese, which is an interesting development.

I think he's saying that Toady will stop working on the game before M&M happens.

I think that's the least likely thing to happen.

If all the other stuff takes the better part of 10 years (which is looking increasingly likely) plus he has to handle a bunch of business stuff, and when you factor in the likelihood of unforeseen events that may delay or halt development as 10 years is a long time (ranging from something 'trivial' like having to switch to whatever new cpu architecture, to another pandemic with incapacitating effects), the likelihood of a release actually coming out of all this becomes quite dim indeed. It's one of those asymptotic things.

Congrats on your achievement (both the hard work and the record sales numbers). Is open-sourcing parts of the game (especially the ones that relate to the more tedious aspects of it such as rendering, interface, etc.) now in the realm of possibility?

The game has felt extremely samey for the last 8-10 years with most of the new features being bugged, invisible or hard to use. I come back to it every 2-3 years or so, play the same way I usually do (since the game more or less plays the same), find out a bunch of stuff about those new features that hasn't been on the wiki despite it being present for the same 2-3 years, update the wiki with what I know, get bored, start firing up DFHack magic to see how far I can push the game's limits, get bored again, leave. Rinse and repeat

[wrong topic, ignore]

Yeah warmist made some dfhack magic such that one instance runs fort mode and other players control units in an adventurer-like fashion. It's not adventurer mode, though, and in combat the AI behind every unit takes over just like fort mode.

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=165168.0

Just did a god ascension with an aasimar. I didn't bother with a godfight and released the Chained God from the secret room in the Zorbus, this took care of a god for me. Game keeps being great and the best roguelike I've ever played, no changes here.

A bit of additional feedback:

-Dimensional anchors seem to persist when one goes from a level to the next. Is it intentional?
-Clones and golems seem to count for your party size vs. spirit check which leads to awkwardness if you want to maximize it - you have to max out spirit and recruits before activating that golem and clone switch. Instead of doing all that it'd be simpler if they just didn't count.
-Sometimes recruitable creatures wander off their room and start fighting with denizens, taking away precious XP and getting killed in the process. This can happen in the very first turns of level exploration as well. Bit annoying if you ask me
-It'd be neat if the game told you when there are no creatures vulnerable to holy burst in your line of sight since you can't really guess intuitively (golems and mimics are evil but jellies are not?)
-When you're standing in a poison cloud or acid cloud or web and you're surrounded by allies you can't move because it'd mean swapping places with your ally who would then stand in that cloud or web. I understand the "not throwing your buddies under the bus" rationale but it shouldn't apply to golems or temporary summons.
-Sometimes there are scrolls of activate golem without a golem to go with it. Since every golem chamber goes with its scroll it just means useless scrolls of activate golem laying around. Maybe exclude it in random item generation?
-Carillo really needs better shops, right now the gold system is near useless. Instead of random junk it should really sell 10k zorbit elixirs and belts of awesomeness and stuff

I don't understand why people recommend melee characters. Try a pure spellcasting build with 18 mind that starts with two talents (Blink and Summon Animals) and keep spamming those spells. You will see the first few levels of the dungeon will be much easier. Later on you can learn Acid Cloud to take down enemies (especially wizards) from a distance and Holy Burst when you're getting swarmed.  Alternatively you can try starting with the Animal Friend talent and attempt to recruit an elephant. Few enemies can take down a pack of elephants and certainly not above level 5.

Talents are so useful I can't possibly start with Mind less than 18. Well maybe 16 if you don't intend to spellcast much beyond Blink but it's hard to justify going any lower.