Bay 12 Games Forum

This is not a problem unique to Dwarf Fortress, but I wondered if other DF players had encountered it and found a way to fix it.  If this is in the wrong forum, I apologize, but I wasn't sure where to put it.

Short problem description: When playing DF and other games (like Mass Effect) my keyboard keys will seem to stick (not physically - they behave as if they're still being held down) or stop responding.

Details:
This weekend I upgraded my PC from Windows Vista x64 to Windows 7 x32 (I didn't realize the Win 7 DVD was x32 until I had already installed, and it was a free gift from my employer, so I didn't look a gift horse in the mouth, I figured it was still better than Vista).  I started playing DF using a game I had started when the machine had Vista.  Seemed fine at first, but then my N key stopped responding.  I had already checked the noble screen once this session, but I just could not check the noble screen a second time.  Some other keys worked, some didn't.  I went to go look (K) at a huge stack of stone being prepped for atom smashing, and the + key stuck as I was scrolling down the list, looking for things that shouldn't be smashed.  It wouldn't stop scrolling.

I figured I'd go play something else for a while and come back to fix this issue later, so I loaded up Mass Effect, and the same sort of thing was happening.  Control keys would stick or not respond. 

This only seems to happen with games.  I'm typing up this message just fine in Chrome, for example.  This did not happen when I had Vista.  None of my hardware has changed.

I tried all of these with no effect:
* Disabling the Windows "sticky keys" feature
* Upgrading my graphics driver
* Installing latest Windows Updates (including SP1 for Win7)
* Rebooting
* Plugging in a USB keyboard (my regular keyboard is PS/2)

I have very little installed on this machine at the moment.  When I upgraded the OS I opted to do a "Custom" upgrade, meaning it moved all of my files to a new location and did a fresh install, not an upgrade.  I do have Norton 360 installed, which I've seen cause problems with other programs before, but I've never seen it cause keys to stick or not respond, so I haven't attempted disabling it yet.

Anyone have any ideas on what might be causing this?

(FYI, I work in technical support for a software company, so I'm a pro at this sort of thing, but I just can't figure this one out.)

I've seen the freezing process destroy downramps--the up-ramps will still be there, so anything that falls in can get out, but going down--or crossing a trench--becomes impossible.  My money says that's what's happening here.

This.  It happened to me as well.  The down-pointing ramps are gone, but the up-pointing ramps are still there.  I made the area passable again by building artificial ramps.  I also tried to cover it with a ceiling, but it froze again the next year.  At that point I gave up on it, floored it off, and built a new bath just inside the entrance instead.

My woodcrafter got possessed.  On her way to gather materials she stopped in a doorway and gave birth.  Barely pausing, she leaves the child on the floor in the doorway, picks up her bar of metal, and continues on.

The poor child crawls over stacks of ore to the stairway, up to the main level, down the main hallway, and out the front doors.  The dozens of dwarves coming in and out of the fortress didn't bat an eye.

The baby crawls down the hill, through the depot and the refuse pile.  I order the front maze walls closed to delay the little bugger a bit, but it's not pulled in time, and the child leaves my fortress's safe zone and starts crawling up the valley hill.  He crawls over the bodies of many a dead goblin outside the walls.

That's when the minotaur shows up.

I had a group of merchants mauled by a goblin invasion.  I was surprised and pleased when I still got the message that the merchants were unloading in my depot, thinking maybe some had miraculously survived.  I zoomed to the depot to see... no merchants.

Yet I still got the "merchants are leaving soon" and "merchants have left" messages a bit later. 

I'd love to be able to set (o)rders for mining where you tell the highly-skilled miners "just bash it into gravel guys - it's just microcline."

That's a good idea, and wasn't quite what Girlinhat mentioned.  The ability to tell miners not to save certain types of stone and just pulverize it as if they were novice miners would be great.  Has this already been requested somewhere?

I often find myself in a situation where I have a particular job I want to get done (like, say, weave thread into cloth) but I don't know if I have any dwarves with that job enabled or with ranks in that skill.  What I end up doing is finding some dwarf that has nothing to do and assigning him to that task, but if I keep doing that I might end up with a set of dwarves that have a tiny amount of skill in a bunch of different professions with nobody being particularly good at this particular skill.  This gets harder to manage the more dwarves that I have.  I end up with a fortress full of jacks-of-all-trades with nobody being particularly good at anything unless they came to my fortress that way.

It would be a lot easier if I could somehow search for dwarves with a particular skill or see all dwarves that have any ranks at all in that skill.

Anybody have any good suggestions on how to handle this sort of thing, short of looking at each dwarf individually for anyone with that particular skill?

plus item stacking is extremely awesome

What's item stacking?  That sounds useful.

Watch out for carp, though!