Bay 12 Games Forum

My proposals:

• Adding aether
• Making ecosystem resembling the real life once

---

Aether

Why not add just third basic element to the game. In vanilla DF there are already two basic elements - namely water and magma.
Adding something like Aether would make finding energy source for every magic creature just easier.
It would function just like real-life water veins. Flowing around, stopped only by for example Iron Ores. Make magnetic fields work with aether and you can easily create nice rivers and pools of energy.
More aether - bigger probability of small or even major mutations. Necromancer Tower would grow around the Aether filled spots.
The same elves. Some real world objects should let the aether to concentrate. From visual point of view player most of the time would see just effects of the Aether. Building something like Shrine/Pyramid or other Religion/Magic oriented building enable one more screen.
One keypress and you see just the half transparent violet and pink glow. More shrines and field of observation grows.
Building some special massive objects like for example rooms filled with silver statues should concentrate aether.
Aether would become major source of otherwise magic energy. The source of aether - core of planet / small StarWars like bacteria /
Glowing Pits. Deeper you go, closer to aether you are.
When enought of this stuff would be stored in one place it could alter the nature of reality or just mutate some poor dwarf that stand too close to our machines.
Elves would use their big trees (I mean Yggdrassil like trees, far bigger than anything else with roots reaching deeply)
Dwarves would have Stonehenge like objects/ Altars / Rooms filled with sets of columns.
Humans got piles of stones / big menhirs.
Necromances got towers.

There is (I don't know if translated to english) Polish SF/Fantasy book with similar concept - 'Lord of Ice Garden (Pan Lodowego Ogrodu)'
by Grzędowicz.

Aether would have on some creatures mutagenic effects. Changing their appearance.
Good biomes have filtered/light aether field and exist in spots without iron (remember iron change flow of aether).
Bad biomes are iron reach, but the aether there is chaotic and in vastly less stable form.

In my proposal mages are just units attuned to seeing and after practice (Alchemy skill) controling flow of third elements.
 

Food chains

As far as my biologic knowledge goes chemosyntesis are not the best source of energy for any kind of bigger creatures.
The oxygen is must-have and deep in caverns the air isn't the most clean thing. Secondly cavers are lacking in another basic source of energy - sunlight.

That's way if you want well-sounding caverns biome you need to find basic source of food down there.
Muchrooms you need some kind of humus.
That mean we need much smaller and fragile life down there. Something closely resembling normal plants. I mean the lowest level of
food chain.

Now I think there is a time to come back to Aether. Plants down there can grow using aether as energy source.
Some of theme may even learn how to cumulate Aether. That's the reason for stuff like faster evolution, Plump Helmet men.

The DCSS ( for not aknowledged Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup ) have nice mutation system that involve magic contamination.

If we really want to create new biology using some kind of magic as the source, we should work on this bottom-up.

 
TL: DR:

 

Sorry I don't inform you guys, still my code need (probably need) flattened raws.
I will post my script with everything in.

BTW the ./text/*.txt files should be treated different. Because they are completely different than standard raws.
In those files the tokens work as variables.
In rest of the raws, they create visible structure.
My approach work only on the normal raws, and remove the comments

I am dumb...

Yep, this was easy.
For anyone interested

BSTART = '['
BEND = ']'
STR = ASCII+
TYPE = STR
TILE = "'" STR "'"
ARG = SEP STR|TILE
TOKEN = BSTART TYPE ARG* BEND


Button: sound great. I thought myself about something like that.
It may be really much better way.
Storing object is not much problem.

But you remember about tag order and the whole [CASTE] thing.
What kind of data structure you use? List with tuple for each token or ordereddict with tuples or ordereddicts as values?

We have still problems with diff. Maybe use something like little extension to diff format, in that way the script can find correct line numbers and fill them. That way we can easily generate correct diff file without much additional work.
I think using git for mod management is overkill. KISS rule win ;P.

My idea is use something like that:

Standart diff format look like this

@@ -4,6 +4,6 @@
- something
+ something else
...

We can use something like that

@@ =[CREATURE:WOLVERINE]>[CASTE:MALE], 6 =[CREATURE:WOLVERINE]>[CASTE:MALE],6
-something
+something else
...


The stuff after equality sign describe where the mod will be placed.
The whole expression can be read as:
First [CASTE:MALE] token after [CREATURE:WOLVERINE] token.
And what is important modder don't need to even see them.
The script can find those marks and fill them with correct line numbers.

PROS:

• This just work
• Portable
• Don't need any external app. Just tiny (<100 LOC) script.

CONS:

• Still not solve problems with merging two or more raws. Only make merging much simpler
• I don't know if this is big problem, but my approach need special case when mod add raws at the end of file. Something like =END should sove this.

This short script should extract every single token in file. Maybe someone find it useful.
import re
import sys

if len(sys.argv) < 2:
    filepath = str(input("FILEPATH> "))
else:
    filepath = sys.argv[1]


def reader(filepath):
    tokens = []
    name = ""
    with open("test.txt", 'r') as file:
        for line in file:
            if name == "":
                name = line
            for i in re.findall("\[[A-Za-z0-9:]*?\]", line):
                tokens.append(i)
    return (name, tokens)


def main():
    name, tokens = reader(filepath)
    for i in tokens:
        print(i)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()


BTW why not use something like robocopy \mir or cp -rvu for major mods.
Or just add small manifest file with information about compatibility. Number of major mods is not that big after all.
They are maybe 10 really big mods and no one will try to merge Masterwork with MLP 

  {
     "name":<name of the mod>,
     "version":<version of the mod>,
     "compatible-major":{
         "name-of-major-mod":"version-of-major-mod"
  }
}

Something like this. Where * is wildcard.

{
  "name":"Mycrazymod",
  "version":"0.0.1",
  "compatible-major": {
     "MasterworkDF":"5.*"
   }
}


For smaller mods you insist on merging raws itself. Why not merge diffs first?

It is usable. Just create new dfhack.init file.
Please, this pack don't have `lazy` in name anymore. Copying single file is not that hard. 

Pastebin with fix is in the dfhack thread

@PE What do you think about replacing batch save script with powershell?
PS give you a lot more power and make writing scripts much easier.
I wrote quick&dirty program for making backups & copying saves & copying configs (for now only colors.txt, but it can be adjusted)

Just click the raw file display and save file with ps1 extension. If you use windows Vista or newer it should display nice blue console with file picker. Of course if you have your DF copy somewhere else just change $MAIN_DIR path to something better.

Link: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/aad0254801c71ae79e71