Bay 12 Games Forum

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3. in the 'a' screen, there should be a way to flip to the place where the event took place.

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A related pet peeve of mine is that you can't find the creature that interrupted your worker if there are a whole bunch of that type on the map.

Well, you can, but it's like having a molar extracted without painkiller.

First you hit "U" for "Units", then scroll down to the "Wild Animals" section, then find whatever species caused the interruption -- let's say a batman -- then go to the first batman and hit "c" for "zoom to Creature".

Now here's where the UI gets really masochistic: instead of letting you walk the list of batmen centering the map to each one as you go until you find one that might possibly be close enough to your people to be the culprit, YOU HAVE TO START ALL OVER AGAIN AFTER YOU SELECT ONE.

This means you have to MEMORIZE AN ENUMERATOR in order to find the right creature.  So when I repeat, FROM THE BEGINNING, the units menu and the scroll down, I have to remember "second batman", "third batman", and so on, until I scroll through all dozen and find the one that actually caused the problem.

As a final twist of the dental drill into the raw nerve ending, the more dwarves you have, the more difficult this process gets, as the number of keystrokes required to select hostile creatures increases.  Bonus points if you memorize the number of times you have to hit "PgDn" to get to the species you're attempting to find.

This awful torture ignores the one thing that could make all this pain disappear: THE COMPUTER KNOWS WHODUNNIT!  I could jump right to the part where Velma yanks the wig if the freaking computer would just TELL ME WHERE THE PROBLEM IS!  I don't mean the dwarf who got interrupted, that's not the problem.  THE CREATURE CAUSING THE PROBLEM IS THE PROBLEM!  Would it kill you to actually show it to me?  Put the cursor on it so I don't have to spot the lowercase letter "b" in unhelpful white-on-black text?

Ironically the graphics otherwise work for me, for the most part, the one exception being dangerous creatures in white-on-black text.  Really dangerous creatures are red -- okay, great, I can spot those -- but wolves and batmen, dangerous enough to interrupt work and kill your people but not dangerous enough to warrant some color on the map, are almost impossible to spot.

Next begins the exciting adventure of navigating the snarled UI again to rally the troops to go kill the thing, but that's a rant for another post.

And I second the dude who said Dwarf Fort rocks.  There's nothing else like it, and once you start playing you can't seem to put it away.

I posted an idea for a hard-wired computer-like clockwork task (scrolling message via floodgate pixels) but it was done as a joke.

Too much of the data you need for diagnostics is either unobtainable once put in place or very hard to get at.  You'll need to take notes and take great care that you keep your notes synchronized with what you actually build.  (Documentation of things that aren't so can be a source of terrible frustration when debugging.)

You probably already know "The Rules", but here they are for review:

1.  Switches signal when and only when they change states.
2.  Devices respond to switches when and only when they are "listening" and in a state different from the new state of the switch.
3.  Devices responding to a signal ignore subsequent signals for some period of time.  Even spikes have a signal response latency.

These rules taken together make for some serious design hurdles.  I solved my latency and synchronization issues by setting my pressure plates to "0/0".  This takes advantage of the natural latency of water evaporation -- and of my profligate water usage (if I didn't use enough water the valve control plate might get wet right after it dries, and there goes the fort.  Instead my water usage guarantees that when the VCP dries its adjacent tile will be safely at level 0-1 as well.  In fact the VCP is at the end of a corridor -- very safe indeed.  The VCP buffering corridor drains well before the VCP dries.  The length of the corridor is actually a means of controlling how much water is added to the system per VCP drying event -- the longer the corridor, the more water goes in.)

You can't use evaporation to prevent signal overruns in your computer because it would be horrendously slow.

Good luck.

Ever had to mist a bunch of dwarves whose pets died and decayed?

"Come on, guys, you don't have to be sad.  I built you a waterfall.  We can be happy!"

Oh, wait, that's Gnomes.

Phase 1: Collect plants
Phase 2: ??
Phase 3: Liquor!