Bay 12 Games Forum

Voice acting killed RPGs. :V

I liked Gordon Freeman's voice actor pretty well.

I occasionally try to do things like that.  I normally give up before I take the entire top of the mountain off.  The other thing to remember is the ramp and channel commands.  I just wish there was a good way to say "I want to take off the top 10 layers of this mountain, starting at the top".  I think you can easily lay out 3 - 4 levels worth of chopping with the priority commands, but the absolute most you can do is 7.

I should have just done it a layer at a time.  But noooo.  I would have done this underground, where I have at least learned by mostly painful experience, but I'm annoyed at myself for failing to generalize that knowledge and instead stupidly failing at it the moment I tried it outside, even though it was painfully obvious once it actually happened.

tfw you do something idiotic and now every engraving, statue, or any other thing any dwarf ever does is of that idiotic thing.

Dunno if it never got rung up or if it was paid for but somehow not activated...but when I went to a Gamestop today to use a giftcard, I found out that it had a balance of $0 despite never being used.

Now I gotta get in touch with the person who gave me the card, they'll need to go through their receipts (assuming they still have it), if the receipt is found we'll probably have to return to wherever it was bought...

or I can just give up on the dang thing and not make a big deal out of it.

That is definitely a WTF.  I recently got a Best Buy gift card that sucked and for various reasons I couldn't actually buy anything with it, so I sold it on one of those online services.  Not much to do with something with a 0 balance, though. 

Awesome gift from that bro, though.  He'd definitely have socks in his future from me.  Socks with ponies on them and shit.

I think maybe those cards have an expiration date, but if you're talking about receipts it's probably not a factor.
I hope you do find the receipt and correct the error, hopefully getting some bonus credit for their mistake.  By making money off second hand games, Gamestop hurts developers and keeps launch prices high.

I don't have a cite for this, but I believe the practice of having these gift cards just expire or charging "fees" for every month until they evaporate has been declared illegal.  Value storage cards have to be maintained.  They can't just steal the money any more.

Cite of limited value:  http://www.ncsl.org/research/financial-services-and-commerce/gift-cards-and-certificates-statutes-and-legis.aspx

There's a five year limit on pulling that trick now.

IIRC, pathing is already precached on a z-level basis (assuming I'm correctly interpreting what that is.) Doing it in 3D is much more difficult.

Pathing is one of the most ludicrously difficult problems in mathematics to solve without just exhaustively going through every possible path.

I'd love to read about some quest where Toady One encounters one of the greatest mathematicians alive on the planet, who has become an alcoholic or something and has nothing to do, and drafts him into service as a math thrall who gives him the magic to make all this FPS stuff from pathing just go away by giving him the scrolls of fast and slow in exchange for a bottle of rotgut.

The fact that it is even as good as it is is a testament to his own math genius.

Well, bloody buggery pissflappers, they have managed to suss out and break through adblockers. Well, it was a few good, relatively advert-free years. And even though adverts are finally crawling through my defences, they seem to be the short, agreeable and managable sort, not the long, loud and slowdown-making ones that caused me to flee into adblocking arms in the first place.

I miss the text-only Internet where you could filter literally everything with regexes down to a microscopic level and never see anything you didn't actually want to see.

The web literally ruined everything.

This kind of went on for a bit so if you want to skip it:
tl;dr did a weird cliff embark, my wagon disappeared into thin air, no outpost liaison, although the dwarf caravan showed up.  Also I did really dumb stuff.

Tired of FPS death on my elderly, ailing computer, I tried to start a 1x1 embark in a pocket world with a short history.  I thought it would be nice to start with cliffs, but found out, bizarrely, that it's impossible to embark on a mountain.  There needs to be at least some non-mountainous terrain.  Why would it be impossible for dwarves to embark on a mountain?

So I made it a 1x2.  Supposedly, there were no trees in either square, but there were actually some, luckily all of them 1 square trunks, since apparently those huge bushy trees are also bad FPS juju.  And the embark was actually on the edge of a steep cliff.  For some reason, no wagon came along, so I got no wagon wood nor the usual meeting place you get when there's a wagon.

I was amazed to find that the mountain itself was nearly made of lignite, bituminous coal, native platinum, limonite and magnetite.

My general plan was put the trade depot at the bottom, where I can put drawbridges in to close it from either end, so I can keep it closed except when I expect trade, use that as an airlock of sorts, and/or just trap caravans in there and starve them to death until they die and then steal everything.  I don't really plan that, but it's a nice option to have, especially if some elven "diplomat" mouths off about me cutting down all the trees while they're here.

Meanwhile, at the top, I can cut down up ramps judiciously, forcing anyone who wants to come up to climb around the mountain every level (it goes up about five), meanwhile I can have fortifications to shoot at them through on each level.  Most of my activity is currently on that top level, although I've tried to design it so I can just undesignate all that and leave the military barracks I have currently assigned to overlapping rooms with the dormitory for everyone and the dining room that I also designated as a tavern in the same big room, as well as the throwaway workshops I can deconstruct as I put their replacements on lower levels.

Also there were a few increasingly small levels on the mountain above that largely consisted of coal, so I decided to just get rid of them and mine them all out.  Isn't that what coal companies do, often?  Just knock off the top of a mountain and go in?

So I designated them all to be mined out.

Now, anyone who has done this can guess what happened next.  To say that I have limitations coping with the z-level thing would not be an exaggeration.  I have figured out about this underground, and managed to avoid doing this kind of thing much.

Yes, I dug out one of the lower layers entirely before the rest of it, crashing down every layer above directly onto the miners.  To increase the embarrassment, there had been a minor "cave-in" previously, which had only caused the dwarf in question to be "annoyed."  (There was nearly nothing above him.)  So I thought ha-ha, what an amusing mishap, and didn't correct anything, even though that would have been the time to seriously reevaluate what I was doing.  Two dwarves died, including a legendary miner who was also the manager and bookkeeper.

On the good side, I don't have to think about what to do with those otherwise pointless z-layers.  On the bad side, I'm a complete idiot who literally destroyed much of a mountain out of pure stupidity.

No harm was caused to the main layer where activity is currently ongoing (and where the main entrance to the fortress will eventually be), even though you'd think the top of a mountain collapsing onto it would cause some damage.  Dumb luck there.

Oddly, the overlapping main barracks/tavern/dormitory thing has continuously attracted human migrants, from literally seconds after I designated the dining area as a tavern.  At first, this was mildly annoying, because a string of bards showed up and then most of the fort did nothing for months but constantly listen to poetry and sing.

Also, I started out with humans/elves/dwarves/goblins as neighboring civilizations, with goblins at war.  The only ones of those that currently appear on the civilizations menu, though, are dwarves.  The only other civilization is kobolds, with no details, other than that a couple have shown up to steal stuff but run off when detected.

Also, no outpost liaison.  I have no idea what's going on with that.