Bay 12 Games Forum

Chisel on a blank tablet, a rendition of how Kobolds came to be the favored creatures by the gods (with a nice background if possible). And don't forget to include the other races watching in shame and/or awe.

+1. In addition to many kitten engravings.

Wait, it's still spewing out lava? Jeez...

Also, I don't think it's possible to catch forgotten beasts with cage traps, webbing ones especially...

The Were-guinea pig Kadol Pashukavan has come! A large guinea pig twisted into humanoid form. Its eyes glow blue. Its fur is golden. Now you will know why you fear the night!


I wish humanity has developed interstellar travel.

1) Marksdwarves prefer to charge at enemies rather than stay back and shoot at them. You can rectify this by stationing them in a building with fortifications as walls.
2) There's a setting in one of the init files (data/init.txt and data/d_init.txt); I forget which, though.
3) Store your important stuff deep inside your fortress, that way keas will be caught and chased away before they manage to steal anything. Look here to find out how to build an archery tower.
4) You might just have to look deeper, but I'm not sure.
Edit: Ninja'd!

Quote from: bloop_bleep on August 31, 2017, 11:32:05 am

Quote from: overseer05-15 on August 31, 2017, 10:24:30 am

Quote

LONG LIVE THE DRAGON oh its a zombie now

I *immediately* knew which thread that was from.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Er, it's from my brother texting me about an evil biome fort he's playing. Dunno what you're talking about.

I thought it was from the Game of Thrones thread 

Quote from: Dozebôm Lolumzalìs on September 01, 2017, 02:40:26 pm

Um. That feels a bit dismissive of younger people. I mean, I picked up DF when I was 13 or so, and while I do look back at 13-year-old James and think "how in the four hells could they think that" (honestly, I do that to James-of-a-few-months-ago), it's not like all children are stupid.

I mean 7-9 year olds. They make up the bulk of internet cancer.

Though there are many adults on the Internet which one could easily mistake for 7 year olds.

Quote from: bloop_bleep on August 31, 2017, 05:37:02 pm

Don't reinvent the wheel. If you find a library that does what you want to do, use it. You're just wasting effort otherwise.

Oh? Now tell me the limitations of the implementation that your magical library has. Oh right... you don't even know how do to it yourself in the first place, let alone the problems you'll end up with in the future should you need to change libraries.

I've used ncurses and pdcurses quite a few times in the past. Don't jump so quickly to conclusions.

I am encouraging the OP to learn how to think, how to process a problem, how to read documentation (which is very easy).



Besides, there are a million odd "Rogue remakes".... why reinvent the wheel and make yet another rogue remake? It's wasted effort, right?

Diving into direct interaction with the OS is less "thinking" and more "tedious unnecessary work." By your logic it's best to write everything in assembly because it makes you "think" more. There's enough to think about when writing a program in the first place; don't make it any harder on yourself.

ncurses & pdcurses are already pretty low-level -- seriously, this is 30-year old technology. There's no reason to go any deeper.

Quote from: bloop_bleep on August 31, 2017, 05:37:02 pm

Besides, doing what you suggest would involve interacting with the terminal/OS directly at a very low level,

Uhh... making threads is "low level" now? Directly calling win32_threads or p_threads is hardly "low level" programming. This is how people program.

Again, I think you underestimate how low-level ncurses & pdcurses are. I suggest you at least look up what they even are before you continue this discussion.

Quote from: bloop_bleep on August 31, 2017, 05:37:02 pm

making your program unportable and probably requiring special knowledge that I doubt the OP has.

"Portable code" is often misused in the same manner you just misused it.

To show you how badly you misused code portability, I'll challenge you to tell me that win32 software is not platform independent. WINE brings many windows libraries over to *NIX systems. They're imperfect libraries, but still libraries none the less.

There is no guarantee that the system you're targeting supports threads, for instance. std::thread is just an abstraction that calls the system level threading service. The use of abstractions, rather than their implementation, is what portable code envelopes. Even if it is as simple as a macro that changes to win_threads instead of p_threads.

The cost of abstraction is the same cost that WINE pays for attempting to translate direct x routines into opengl equivalents. Performance. DirectX is used very differently when compared to opengl, an engine designed around one or the other depends on their individual ways of doing things. You could do further abstraction and make it easy to change between the two of them via header files... but as always, that way of doing things has a performance hit. Since the abstraction gets compiled in you can get some benefits over wrapping around the calls.

First of all, using WINE is damaging to performance and can sometimes be buggy. Best not to rely on it.

Second of all, by "portable" I mean being able to port to another machine without changing much (or any) of the code.
For example, if you wrote a program with ncurses on Linux you can port it to Windows by simply changing the header include and relinking with pdcurses. Nothing else has to change. ncurses and pdcurses *are* the abstractions you describe -- they envelop the differing system calls and replace them with a single, common set of functions.

If you're using the OS utilities directly, you have to either use the slow, buggy WINE or have to replace every single instance of a system call to the old OS with the equivalent in the new OS. (Or if the equivalent doesn't exist, you have to write completely new code.) Basically, you yourself are doing the abstraction which existing libraries already provide.