Bay 12 Games Forum

WWUD if he got to own a restaurant?

Get into a knock-down drag-out fight with the menu printer for using the wrong quality marks on the cat tallow roast.

WWUD if she could only remember her life in the level of detail in Legends mode?

Meph's Masterwork mod uses DFHack as well, but like milo's his mod is interwoven with an external tool with its own learning curve.

Zerim is right that there aren't any real tutorials, but there is documentation and a bunch of helpful folks in the DFHack thread who will help you figure out what is and is not feasible.

The first thing you need to figure out is whether you will be using "off-the-shelf" DFHack tools like reaction triggers, or if there is some essential feature of your planned mod that requires building something from scratch.  Early versions of The Earth Strikes Back! (up to v1.22) mostly used/customized existing tools.  I bumped the version number up to 1.30 when I started doing original stuff, though even that is largely piecing together what I've seen elsewhere just in smaller chunks.

You can find a link to old TESB versions at the link jecowa provided, but the point isn't about the specifics of this one mod, rather how to wade into DFHack without getting paralyzed by trying to build everything from scratch.

2.I know its not something we can expect in a short (or medium)time, but we've been discussing Multi-tile creatures and I was wondering if with the fact that each body part, if big enough, ocupies several tiles, the modders could define each part (each full tile of 2x3x3) of that body part with different stuff (place certain organs in the lower part and other organs in the bigger part, or have complete tiles representing an organ, if they are proportionate), this could be very interesting as to make the game more realistic, as you could ''zoom in'' to represent parts of the body that get abstracted in the smaller version of those creatures
And yeah, this came to mind when I was thinking about making hollow creatures (yeah, as the cool-aid man) to transport small people at a greater speed, just by being inside the creature

I'm all for more shape data in DF, but I don't think defining creatures tile-by-tile is the answer.  The reason is that creatures vary in size (not to mention yungins growing up), and along several dimensions.  A large quadruped with long limbs might be a full tile taller than the average for its kind.  And someone might slap a giant creature variation on just about anything, and it'd be nice if it just worked.  Conversely, some future version of DF might slice locations into tenths-of-tiles or whatever, and it'd be nice if the same system for ginormous beasts also applied to zoomed-in medium beasts.

Yeah, there's pretty much no way to magically get some sort of shape out of a sprite without pretty much just re-drawing the sprite.

I'm assuming that hovering the flat texture a hair above the floor looks as stupid as I'm imaging.  So you did the right thing from the start, which is why we're much better off that you're in charge of AV 

Edit: Dirst needs new glasses.

Extruding the sprites would be way too much work to get working well, and would have too high of a polycount.

I'd rather stick to what I'm doing now, where I have a least a flat sprite for everything, than a proper model for what I can manage.

Does a bump texture count as polygons?  If not, the simplest way would be to copy the alpha channel to a bump map.  Though even if it doesn't increase the official polygon count, it has to have a performance hit somewhere.

That looks awesome.  I especially like the microcline Fleur-de-lys on each bed

Turning flat tiles into 3D models is a tad too much work, but would it be possible to extrude the non-transparent tiles a bit to give the flat objects at least a bit of depth?  One sticking point would be pixelated diagonal edges that drive up the polygon count (unless there's a magical way to detect that and smooth the edge).

Q: Are there any plans to, eventually, give players a means to convert Evil regions to Neutral or Good?

The evilness and savagery system is going to be overhauled, and Toady hinted that he'd like it to be something Sphere-based.  But the question still stands... could a fort in a region of RAINBOWS and FERTILITY be strip-mined enough by player actions to turn into a region of METALS and BLIGHT?

Is there a relatively simple way to declare a tile edge as "soft" and then whenever two soft edge touch the textures fade into each other (just mirror a texture beyond the normal edge of the border).  That would make the grass types mingle more naturally, probably also including sand.   Contaminants like snow or mud would probably be a lot harder to bring into such a system.