Bay 12 Games Forum

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?

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?

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...

Yes, I made sure to enable WOOD at the first stop and made sure that the
second stop did *not* have it enabled. (As my understanding is that if that
were the case they would never unload... not sure why that would affect
loading but in DF, you never know.)

I also tried deleting all the rules and even the stockpiles and then resett
them as I sometimes find that this can trigger a dwarf to take action but
to no avail. I looked at burrows just in case I had accidentally
somehow made the cart off-limits. I hadn't. I looked at the o menu to see if
set something there was weird. It wasn't. What else? Basically, I checked all
the usual suspects for DwarfsActingBadly Syndrome.

But i definitely don't know everything that can go wrong...not to mention that
I'm new to minecarts so I feel like i am probably making a so obvious
it's inscrutable mistake.

I just wanted to second a recommendation for DasTactics DF for newbies videos. They're well organized.
Fairly succinct (by youTube standards) and comprehensive. I watched them when was making them and
I still go back to them from time to time to remember some detail.

If one was going to embark on a new set of videos I think taking a look at these is a good idea. If you
have value to add over what he's done then definitely go for it.

1) As a linguist, I do not believe that it would be very hard to simulate language, especially in the context that I have seen in my Dwarf Fortress years. There is a file in your game which acts as an index, which can be seen here ^{[DF wiki]}. You can go ahead and edit the languages as you see fit.

2) What you are witnessing here is called emergent game play ^wikipedia.

Hmm, yes, I guess I didn't qualify my questtion/comment correctly. I'm a TV writer but once upon a time I got a CS PhD -- I'm no linguist but i have some experience in NLP and related fields. Which is to say that I've seen a lot of machine constructed language. I was remarking that there's something special about what DF does that I can't quite put my finger on... it's better than anything else I can think of except some of the very new cutting edge stuff coming out of Fei Fei Liu's lab.  I would imagine that as a linguist maybe you could see what it is... it's some kind of expertise that the designers have encoded... some intuition they have about which words to include and what kind of grammar to use.

Like it's not even remotely close to the only procedurally generasted naming system but the names it generates. They're so rich that they beg you to start building a story around them. The magic here isn't technicasl (I don't think).. it's poetry. It's some kind of understanding about what words do what things when...

It's weird, I remember listening to one of the podcasts they used to dp and someone was commenting on how well his pathing system worked and they wanted to know what his trick was..and i had noticed it myself... it does work well... and he was like "iuhhhh, it's just A*... and I think.I put in a tweak or two that I can't remember.. but really it's A* and I remember thinking that those tweaks might be more impressive than he realizes. I have a feeling he just cobbled together a straight-forward grammar and didn't realize that there's something about his touch that makes it different.

@PatrikLundell Thanks. I know about the thread. I guess I was more interested in what has been said in the past but even more interested in what thoughts other players had about these aspects of the game.

I used to think "potash" was some weirdly named food product made of potatoes so I considered Potash Makers useless.

Up until now I was pronouncing it "puhtash."

And... uh... .what's the truth? (Asking for a friend.)