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Messages - Cub

Pages: [1] 2
1
DF Suggestions / Re: Block Height/Level
« on: August 05, 2016, 12:51:37 pm »
being able to cut out fractions of a wall would have benefits, yes. but i see more benefits if it would be realized a bit different. i would prefer walls having a byte, 8 bit, which tell which fractions of the wall was mined out. so it's a compact data structure and lets you dig out every second level, given that at least on one side is a wall which can hold that remaining levels. besides, fortifications could be walls with small shafts missing, like just 3 or 4 is missing. did someone say fortifications would be built-in furniture then?
i remember another idea, http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=158609.0, which could be merged. since a wall has just 7 levels while a byte has 8 bit, the 8th bit can be used to indicate if it is used/usable as such furniture, with another following byte telling what it is in detail. when 2,4,5,7 is missing it could be used as shelf, when just 1,2 are left it could be used as throne or pedestal for statues, increasing the value, at a height of 3 as table, ... with some new items even more could be done, with thin windows at the wall showcase cabinets for artifacts or such could be built, there could be doors with locks to build theft-safe wardrobes. with mini-floodgates and pressure plates showers could be built to enforce a more strict hygiene standard. just... there should be an option to allow/forbid the usage as furniture... i wouldn't like my fortifications being blocked by books or such. you know, they are dwarfs :D

2
DF Suggestions / Re: Change of main Webpage text and background color.
« on: July 25, 2016, 08:42:24 pm »
guess that is what i meant. just the dev console can be deactivated. i have seen some badly crippled browsers out there. in case the dev console works, putting three lines on the bottom of dwstyle.css could help until the website has some barrier free version:

Code: [Select]
* {
background: #000000;
color: #ffffff;
}

li {
background: #000000;
color: #ffffff;
}

li.dev_progress {
background: #000000;
}
Chrome



to find it, open the dev console, in chrome, the easiest way for non-techies might just right click somewhere on the website and click on inspect. then click on source (blue), click the |> triangles  (red) and double click dwstyle.css. scroll all the way down (green) and at the bottom, insert the above code.

if you want black on white, switch the #000000 into #ffffff and the #ffffff into #000000. more about colore you find at http://www.w3schools.com/colors/colors_picker.asp choose a color on the on the left and copy the #foo code on the right.

to increase the font size, add "font-size: x% to the li.dev_progress, so it looks like that:

li.dev_progress {
   background: #000000;
   font-size: 200%;
}

200% means its twice the size, guess you know math.

Firefox


right click, inspect element, then click "style editor" (blue), the file is already opened, just scroll down (green) and add the lines above.

3
DF Suggestions / Re: Procedural Music
« on: July 25, 2016, 05:24:10 am »
i even forgot to mention... look at the demo scene, i. e. fr-043 rove by farbrausch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H38QPZiu-9k). in demo scene memory and disk space are really tight bottlenecks, sometimes even each cpu cycle counts, so many use (procedural) generated stuff, since a rule is way smaller than the code/models/textures/mp3s to create similar results. there are many compos for hardware which is older than many, maybe most DF players and that sophisticated and optimized are the algorithms. AAA* games aren't useful to get an idea about what is possible. they show the least required to trick the most players into paying as much as possible. 60 bucks for a game... when i was young a full price game was at 40 which would be 20 today. AND THE GAMES WERE AWESOME![/nostalgia] :D

4
DF Suggestions / Re: Procedural Music
« on: July 25, 2016, 05:02:05 am »
Quote from: Roofless on July 25, 2016, 02:28:43 am
Np Man's Sky does procedurally generated music and it took a band of professional musicians (65daysofstatic) and a musician/programmer with years of experience in procedurally generated music. So, I'd say it is kind of like graphics - it's coming, just not in our lifetime.

check out the references on the bottom of the tutorial i linked. there are already promising approaches, also ask youtube. a band of professional musicians for that doesn't sound real. there is a lot of stuff made by one man bands, not even professional musicians, who made great stuff. i developed my tool far beyond the tutorial, it understands music theory now. it just needs to sound more like dwarf fortress (and gotta be rewritten in c/c++).
No Man's Sky sounds like genetic algorithms/a trained AI. such is much more sophisticated and obfuscated and can hardly be controlled. i don't like the results of that approach. i am rather thinking about one or two key or plucked string instruments, randomly/procedural generated. a dev who knows what he is doing can make, given that he has enough coffee, something to start with on a single weekend.
and besides... yes, i am playing with randomly generated graphics as well :D my giant nemesis beast project creates images, another smaller project generates maps for UT4. fully random. well, all blocky, shallow and dull yet since i need some <technical stuff> features which aren't supported yet but some people like it already. bonus: it is just one not all that complex blueprint and generates a new map in the blink of an eye, ingame, during gameplay.
in doubt, just look at the complexity of the generated stuff in DF. it is astonishing. and also shows that quite sophisticated results are already possible. we aren't as far away as you might think. DF creates a whole world. also we are talking about computer algorithms, not physics or fusion power plants. those are promised to be ready in twenty years. they just gotta fix that one tiny problem and it will all work. and they were promised to be available in twenty years about 50 years ago. but by solving that one tiny problem two other tiny problems popped up. computer science made significant progress, even in the past decade alone and in comparision it is lightning fast.

Quote from: Putnam on July 24, 2016, 03:08:11 am
The game already has procedural music, uh, sort of. There's no specifics, just a description of the artform. The data structures regarding them aren't mapped out yet, either, so I can't do anything with them.
gave me an idea to make it easier and produce better results with less effort.
instead of *fully* random music, doing something like the Musical Dice Game developed by Mozart, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikalisches_W%C3%BCrfelspiel. Guess he counts as "Professional Musician" :D Using hand crafted samples or very tight defined patterns/bars and put them together by some rules. like that quite complex patterns can be created which are granted to fit together and sound awesome. and larger chains of several patterns created that way can be refined and reused as well. these rules could be created out of the descriptions. Properly elaborated descriptions in natural language can be transformed into music. the algorithm just picks keywords and translates them to partially or fully predefined scores. "fast" means higher tempo at higher pitch and rather demisemiquavers, breves, maybe at lower pitch for slower parts, larger intervals and faster sections for playful, medium intervals for joyful, smaller intervals for thoughtful, and so on, as sophisticated as the developer likes.

Quote from: Putnam on July 25, 2016, 03:51:20 am
Spore has professional music, too. It's not exactly mindblowing.
i guess what makes procedural music that awesome is that it doesn't sound like the stuff in the radio or played by orchestras. it is rather simplicity and to some degree that it is played like a child would play, free of all that complex thoughts and demands people have against musicians labeled as such. it is about making something nice, now and here, without remembering the cruel past and without worries about the scary future. it is not about politics, about culture just to some degree, it is not about knowing other songs, patterns or theories but a computer knows to play the instrument perfectly well. like a prodigy in kindergarten. at least that is a part of what i like about it.
uh... am i too gassy? too excited? like a kid? xD

5
DF Modding / Re: List of all Tokens? [0.43.05]
« on: July 24, 2016, 07:15:31 pm »
Quote from: Quietust on July 24, 2016, 06:27:20 pm
Just having a plain list of tokens like that is fairly useless[...]

thank you for your concern but how is your interjection related to the question at all? if you don't mind i would prefer answers to questions i actually ask, neither to questions you think i might encounter while doing whatever you presume nor in such a patronizing manner.

thank you very much.

6
DF Suggestions / Re: Change of main Webpage text and background color.
« on: July 24, 2016, 05:34:30 pm »
when you hit f12 in the browser, does some weird complicated looking tab appear? which browser do you use? and did i understand right that you'd prefer black background with white text? what about the font size?

7
DF Modding / List of all Tokens? [0.43.05]
« on: July 24, 2016, 04:24:25 pm »
hello,

is there somewhere a list of all tokens, maybe with some markup about the number and type of arguments it takes? i don't mean lists as in the wiki, i rather mean flat text files, maybe csv which are easy to parse, something like "TOKEN,int,temperature,string", without comments and such

i wrote a lil tool to list all tokens used in the raws, found 1073. does anyone know how many are in the game, did i find them all? some are listed twice, since they are used with a different number of arguments (i hope that's the reason...) but some have a insanely high number of arguments, like TL_COLOR_MODIFIER with 54 arguments. is that possibly right? in case you want to check them one by one, here they are, at first the name of the token, then with how many arguments it was encountered

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

8
DF Suggestions / Re: Change of main Webpage text and background color.
« on: July 24, 2016, 03:58:03 pm »
sounds like a problem i had. since i got glasses reading is much easier[/offtopic]

but maybe you'd rather ask the devs (of such apps) to improve/port their apps to other devices. many devices have built in functionality to improve readability. in my naive mind there's not much to do. just remove background images and all colors from html/css and replace them with the colors users likes or needs... but i don't know much about such things.
asking a couple those devs seems imo a better approach than asking a zillion website providers ;) even if it's just df now, in some point in the future you might appreciate another website and gotta ask them again, and i doubt it will just be two websites... asking the devs is asking (in best case) once and get a solution which works for all and even those websites which don't exist yet :D
which devices do not support such functionality?

9
DF Suggestions / Re: Procedural Music
« on: July 24, 2016, 12:21:58 pm »
Quote from: Putnam on July 24, 2016, 03:08:11 am
The game already has procedural music[...]

uh can you tell me more about that? how do you know that?

10
DF Suggestions / Re: Randomly Generated Minerals
« on: July 24, 2016, 10:24:29 am »
it seems that many are worried that this might replace the current ores. well, keep in mind, every feature you can't turn off is a bug.
i started to work on a tool to generate raws. maybe an external tool which generates raws on demand might be a well option for those who want it and leave the raws as they are for the others. i'd also appreciate if there'd be native mod support, like that i can create a subfolders in the raw folder and set ingame which of these to use.

i just finished a system which takes rules in BNF format and substitutes non-terminals with random terminals. that also works for names. just numbers might be either tricky to do in bnf or require some tool to generate them, which would make it easier to control the actual range. well, the approach seems promising so far, not sure how far i will make it. i guess other stuff than just stones and ores, as i have now, wouldn't be much more work either. at least reactions and items seem to be as simple.

one way to learn about the stuff ingame would be adding prospecting or such. but well, at the moment living just ingame without the wiki is hard. so the tool could generate documentation for the stuff it generates as well.

just keep in mind, procedural generation isn't a final solution. it just randomizes names and properties of items but after some time you get used to it and it wont be that exciting anymore since the core gameplay mechanics will remain the same. borderlands did show that well.

11
DF Suggestions / Re: The Law - the ultimate suggestion
« on: July 22, 2016, 02:31:43 pm »
Your Fortress crumbles to dust in flood of bureaucracy :D

the sheer enormity of this post is impressive and i acknowledge the work involved in the thought and writing. just, if i may mention...
these ideas seem to be heavily influenced by US legal system and thoughts. it is mostly focused on pure law, letting culture and politics out of sight. if laws su..."aren't appreciated" france and russia are examples for ways how people change that themselves. egypt is an example that people grow tired of overthrowing the government if the successors don't get better after too many tries. maybe ideas from the not-so-ideal actual implementation of legal systems and ideas from other parts of the world might make it even more interesting.
to make a legal system sane it requires the implementation of more sophisticated culture and politics and influences between them. considering that DF aims to simulate existence that seems to be an imperative.

i can't see a real democracy or (military, economic or religious) dictatorship possible. such would not just require laws but also politics and culture.
also the leader might be split apart into chancellor, maybe chained by some parliament and a neutered president, i. e. making a hereditary monarchy president by law and let the chancellor be elected - which way ever. for that you could take a look at the UK or netherlands.
also citizen should be - at least influenced - in decision making by their intelligence. not-so-intelligent beings should rather listen to loud, short and simple worded market criers politicians and rather support the ideas the most people dislike to show that they are generally unsatisfied with their life circumstances in the fortress or their civilization or even to damage their fellow men, dwarfs, elves, whatever. a school system might be a good idea, not just for politics/laws but also to train kids to start adulthood with a higher skill in a certain profession... but that should be subject of another thread... still, in a democracy not-so-intelligent beings will be breaking - at least influencing laws and will turn it into a dictatorship if their kind outweighs and will increase crime which again is a matter of law. then there will be dictatorship or some tiny government making laws and things citizen just don't care about. maybe they might even have a second government of their own. how would you handle this by laws and punishment?

slavery isn't just (limited) legal or illegal. it can be fully illegal by law but people can still be legally forced to work for just a slice of bread a day, some by economic pressure ("work or starve"), some by cultural pressure ("you are worthless without a job"), some by emotional pressure ("love is shown by value of presents" or "i love you. you love me, right? so go prostitue yourself for me"), some by legal loopholes. that brings in the suggestion of begging and gifting (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=159491.0) and prostitution (not linking that discussion, it has a funny smell sometimes). begging might also be a matter of law. but laws alone don't feed one so beings without a job, for reasons of health, laziness or simply because there is not enough work for all citizen, need social benefits, friends, help of some NGO or a mix of that. same for prostitution, which can be forced by needs or lust, though it might be tricky to implement that in a proper decent way. that would be a matter of laws as well.

i also can't find the possibility of "monetary incentives" by lobbies for the rulers, laws about such is a heavily discussed subject in several countries. "i know, selling this stuff is illegal... but maybe we could discuss it further and you could overthink this again at a good dinner, ok? i pay for it. it doesn't have to be allowed by law, just secretly by justice, just for me would be enough. they don't have to actually allow it, they just gotta be blind..." or just "i pay for the dinner and you listen to my idea, ok?! i know a fine expensive restaurant..." social skills required for that already are in the game. besides it could be merged with the suggestion of persuasive magic and minions (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=159440.0).

not every tribe, city or civilization requires laws. some have laws no one cares about. some fully lack of them. some follow those with the biggest clubs, others those with the biggest words and some are just a free for all deathmatch.

citizenship is not less controversial than sexuality. a fully separated fortress should have some drawbacks, like it might die off after some generations since a gene pool of 200 is just too tiny to keep the peoples alive and healthy. laws for incest and such would be useful as well.

well, these are just some hints that a legal system might benefit if there is more than just laws, like laws and revolution don't fit well together. these thoughts can be improved a lot and there is a lot more which could be taken into account. i suggest to be very careful with hard coded enforcement of laws since that might cripple the possibilities of the game.

sometimes my writing is a bit mistakable, i am not saying the idea of sophisticated laws is bad, rather the opposite, i just believe that it needs to be extended and opened, a lot.

12
DF Suggestions / Procedural Music
« on: July 22, 2016, 03:16:36 am »
hey there,

how do you think about giving DF procedural music? some time ago i hacked a lil demo in java and made a tutorial for that which you can find at http://cubs.urbancub.org/tut/jmidi.html and an example at http://cubs.urbancub.org/tut/miditest.mid. well, this piece would rather fit to zelda and isn't that sophisticated anyway. this tutorial rather aims to give interested beings an easy start so they can start playing around with it. at the end of the tutorial you find links to several other approaches.

with other instruments it might be much more dwarf like and some kind of grammar could make the result much more convincing. considering Toady One uses procedural creation a lot i see no reason why it shouldn't be applied to the music as well.
besides that, this could also give instruments crafted by the dwarfs actually some sound, they could give concerts which you actually could hear and such...

13
DF Suggestions / Re: Falling + Heavy armor = Armor NOT deflecting gravity
« on: July 21, 2016, 04:59:51 pm »
if wear cloth and don't land all flat so the movement is all stopped by just decreasing the z acceleration you slide in your panties which leads to skid marks because cloth, especially cotton has a high friction which heats up quite badly. ...what means... silk underwear... might make fall damage less bad. uh huh, yup that sounds like dwarf fortress :D

i look forward to see the first dwarf proud about his pink silk panties which saved his life. imagine the engravings! engraved is an image of Urist Deepfall in the air, slowly gliding using his pink silk panties as parachute. A parakeet is in front of him. it is laughing about Urist.

14
DF Suggestions / Re: Falling + Heavy armor = Armor NOT deflecting gravity
« on: July 21, 2016, 04:18:51 pm »
correct me if i am wrong, i appreciate to learn :)

Quote from: Fleeting Frames on July 21, 2016, 03:13:06 pm
Not at all. DF doesn't model air resistance.
my knowledge in physics is limited... but that means... terminal velocity is infinite? so if i let a plump helmet fall from high enough it might crush even through adamantine floors?

Quote from: Fleeting Frames on July 21, 2016, 03:13:06 pm
Heavier creatures do take more fall damage right now, though that doesn't mean armor shouldn't protect them from being hit by earth.
i guess the question is which kind of wounds should be prevented. keep in mind that metal might bend and make things even worse. and landing on grass might dampen the body which hits it. if i wear a metal armor... it dampens the armor. but my body is stopped by the armor then, which is equal to land on a metal floor?

15
DF Suggestions / Re: Falling + Heavy armor = Armor NOT deflecting gravity
« on: July 21, 2016, 12:10:23 pm »
Quote from: Neonivek on July 21, 2016, 12:08:24 am
Well blunt damage is caused by your body suddenly accelerating.

While falling damage is caused by your body suddenly decelerating. :P

blunt damage is when a giant ogre hits your head with a concrete sledge hammer and falling damage is when you hit the hammer with your head? well, i don't think that this is the problem. the real problem is the sound. if a sledge hammer and a dwarf approach but there is no sound which can be heard, was the dwarf hit? you see. the higher the volume of the sound, the higher the damage :D i can't help but imagine a dwarf who lost both arms and a leg, no problem, just a flesh wound, jumping on one leg toward the ogre trying to bite it to death but hitting the hammer instead :D

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

well, falling damage is caused by the organs ripping apart, snatching off from arteries and stuff since they would prefer to keep falling even when the body already hit the ground. Muscles, Bones and stuff keep softer tissue in place, organs keep falling, compressing the softer tissue and at some point stuff rips apart from the top. the heavier you are, the faster you fall, the higher the energy of your organs pushing down when your body already stopped. that means... that heavy armor should rather increase the damage? it might make broken bones less likely but increase the chance that organs splatter and joints snatch, so loosing limbs is realistic? where am i wrong?

i can't see that leather cloathing helps much against fall damage. it helps to make scratches from rolling over the road and such less likely. the additional weight of the helmet is a problem. some helmets with heads inside are found at some distance to the rest of the body. additional weight increases the energy so if the body hits a pole the helmet helps the head to free itself from the necks chains. and if the head hits some obstacle... a modern helmet keeps the brain inside, that's not the problem... ...the skull crushes anyway.

well, is it implemented that - for humans - 0.5 metres are more dangerous than 2-5 metres? insurances often are afraid of smaller accidents at home, falls from 0.5 metres are more dangerous and are rather deadly, lead to severe disability and higher costs for nursery and stuff... since in such a short distance the body hasn't the time to bring itself in a proper position to compensate the impact. when falling from higher heights there is more time for that. when it is even higher it is just useless anyway.

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