Bay 12 Games Forum

@Immortal-D: Unlikely, as such adjustments aren't critical changes eligible to compete for the ever shrinking remaining development time. Such adjustments would definitely be candidates for contents in regular "current release version" updates once the Big Wait is underway, though (competing with thousands of other such changes).

@BlackAion: That sounds like one "classic" pantheon configuration that should be possible, probably with frequent twists resulting in more or less unusual sphere combinations. Note that there will probably be other possible combinations, though.

A Nature sphere ought to primarily concern the increase of "Nature", which might involve an increase in vegetation, flora and fauna diversity, suppression of unnatural influence (such as civilization), etc. Magic ought only to come into play if the influence (a god in your case) is ALSO a magic one.
Megabeasts sound like part nature, part savagery, and possibly part magic (savagery may well be an influence that gets replaced by new spheres, though).

There's a significant difference between modifying a save that the game has ported to a newer version and add new things compared to porting an old save to a new format and then add the additional stuff.

It's probably not impossible, once the new format and its relations to the old format components are known, but it would be a fair bit of work, with significant risk of screwing things up (but if done properly, the converted save shouldn't overwrite the original, making it possible to try again with an updated conversion tool).
It's possible a converter would have to do placeholder conversions of some things and leave a report of things people will have to fix up themselves (modified hospitals might be such a thing), because there is no obvious translation from the old format to the new, or there are things that manually have to be added to flesh out the new format.

I agree that Toady's time most likely is better spent on more urgent things than spending a couple of weeks to add save conversion (that would still have the normal backwards compatibility issues of the past, i.e. new stuff not appearing). Obviously the time it would take is a wild guess on my part, but I very much doubts it could be done in hours, and wouldn't be shocked if it was a month or more.

Hm, yes, I have some things in mind that would just take an hour or two to incorporate (including things already implemented in suggestions, so the time would be spent just moving the stuff over), such as a certain arachnid (which isn't on my priority list). I think there's probably a year or more of "just a few hours" things on peoples' wish lists...

Well, one hurdle has already had to be climbed, by the fact that he's aiming for being able to do new releases of the latest released version while working on the next one. I believe the latest release is, in effect, a test of that.
Obviously it doesn't mean everything has been taken care of, just that he's found a way to handle that part.

If he was going to aim for significant contributions from external parties, the first task would probably be to set up a configuration control structure capable of handling that (as well as dual "active" versions multiplied by different targets [assuming those will return]), while still not being such a pain in the ass that all joy is sucked out of the work.

Whenever you work on pre existing code you have to largely stick to the conventions used, and adapt to that usage. Sure, it can be tempting to rewrite things in a "better" way, but then you should have a valid reason for why that way is better (and "this is what I and my buddies have always been taught and used, while the current implementation is an eyesore" isn't valid, while reduced maintenance costs without sacrificing legibility (for Toady), and significant performance gains (again, while remaining readable) are valid ones).

If you zip up the exported Legends files and make them available it might be possible to determine the cause and possibly fix it.

It looks like the exported Legends info has some battle reference that isn't referencing something in a way Legends Viewer doesn't expect.

I'm feeling slightly less lazy today than yesterday, so I spent a few minutes locating an example of the command:
"dfhack.TranslateName (df.global.world.world_data.rivers [current_river].name, true)"
The first parameter is the name field of whatever you want the name of, and the second parameter is whether it should be in the "native" language (basically dwarven, elven, or goblin) or English (in this case it's the name if a river).

While trying to get to grips with gui/gm-editor was probably frustrating, I think it's probably time well spent (doesn't mean resting isn't in order). The "documentation" I was referring to was indeed the API documentation.

Temperature changes should easily fit into the sphere system, as that's currently one of the most important parameters determining the biome.
I doubt erosion and "natural" sea level change would come into play, as that's generally happening on larger time scales than that of the game (and tectonic activities are much slower still), so unless the world's rules are different from our world I don't think there would be a point to add them. You could, of course, have some kind of rather chaotic world where things happen randomly or much faster than in the real world, in which case it would make sense to add such changes (but they'd come with a CPU cost, of course).

I was curious:

1: Once a creature is parsed from the raws, How do you represent it in memory(I'm ok with technical details)?
2: On the dev page, Automatons were mentioned as a possible feature. When could we expect their first appearance(After or before Myth/Magic)?

Thanks for the answers in advance!

1. The DF structures of DFHack maps most or all of the creature info, so you can find the info there (and you won't have to wait to the end of the month).
2. Like Mr. Crabman, I see Myth & Magic as a prerequisite for automata. They'd most likely require magic, and I doubt Toady would introduce more things that would have to be reworked by Myth & Magic without a very strong reason (and I fail to see that automata would be essential for anything that absolutely has to be introduced before that arc).

Firstly, I thought the fact that DFHack is built on DF as a community project out to mean that anything in there would be not only permitted to be included into DF itself, but rather encouraged. In my view, there's no higher praise than to get your ideas incorporated into the project itself.

When it comes to the Embark Assistant, its design is based on DF's find function that's then expanded upon based on what various people may want to search for. The ideal state of affairs would be that it was made redundant as DF provided all the functionality in its finder. Thus, I'd be delighted to see all or some of the functionality incorporated in the game.

When on the train of trying to push utilities into the game, tweak_map.lua is a script that acts as an alternative to the built in (and hopelessly useless mouse only driven) World Painter. The key difference is that apart from allowing the user to set PSV values, it also allows the player to specify the biome, at which point it adjusts the affected PSV values to about the middle of the range. In addition to allowing players to select biomes (among the legal ones for the latitude), it also displays the current biome (using letter coding, but tiles would allow that to be done using biome tiles). If there's any logic in the script or ideas in it that would be useful in a brand new World Painter, feel free to use it. Scrapping a utility because it's no longer needed is good indeed.