Bay 12 Games Forum

In preparation for the (hopefully soon!) new build of DF, I DLed and installed 43.05 (all my current work was still on 42.06). Installed all the necessaries (DF Hack, TWBT, Rubble), copied over my Rubble mod files, hit Build, and BAM! Everything (that I've figured out how to do yet) is all ready to roll. Migration almost pain-free. Rubble rocks!

Rochndil, who still has a TON of work to do, but that's always the case...

Good evening!

I just got the few free minutes I needed to test the latest build(s) and the strange issue I posted about above did NOT happen again. I did also have the chance to de-dust my box and re-seated all the critical components, so there's no way to know if the problem was actually caused by a code issue or hardware problems on my end. BUT, seeing a bug go away is always a good thing, especially since I NEED TWBT to continue developing the mod(s) I'm currently working on. Keep up the awesome work, and if I encounter anything else worth reporting I'll post here.

Rochndil, poking and puttering away...

Good morning!

Thanks for looking into the issue. The thing that's odd is that ALL the graphics in this set have the old-school magenta background, but ONLY the Dwarf graphics are showing the background. The files (that I've been using for years) did NOT show this behavior before conversion, and all the creature graphics (that I saw in testing) worked fine. It seems fairly unlikely that the original files were different in some way, but not impossible. I suspect there's a difference in the way the race/major files are being processed, supported by the fact that their tile pages are rendered differently than the creature/mans files (horizontal instead of vertical).

A couple of small things to add.

First, a bug/issue. The GUARD/ROYALGUARD tags are deprecated now, and should instead be LAW_ENFORCE and TAX_ESCORT respectively. An easy enough thing to fix in the output, but better to have it right from the start.

Second, I'd like to suggest an enhancement. I take the output from your process, and run it through the Rubble process. The difficulty is that, first, Rubble has issues with mixed-case filenames. So I had to convert all the filenames, AND REFERENCES, to lowercase. In addition, Rubble also wants the TXT files and the PNG files in the same directory, which means updating all the PNG references in the TXT files. Exporting everything in lowercase consistently wouldn't really change anything (other than the processing inside your code), but would save a lot of modding time on the other end. Changing the references to eliminate the subdirectory is pretty trivial, so if you want to leave that off (I can see that it could introduce issues with the subdirectory structure you use).

All that said, your program has performed an amazing amount of work for me. The process took longer than it probably should have, but that's largely my fault, since I broke some stuff and had to fix it the hard way. Even with that, if I were doing the whole thing by hand I'd probably STILL be working on it, not looking at an almost-completely-perfect update/conversion.

Rochndil, fiddle-poking at stuff to see what breaks...

Not recognizing uppercase extension is a simple oversight on my part, an easy fix.

Good morning!

I look forward to testing the new version, since I JUST finished the Chariot graphics changes (not without a few bugs) and need to test them anyway.

I had a sneaking suspicion that case-insensitive filenames would be complicated to implement. In my day-job work, I've seen our programmers struggle with similar issues. NOT doing it, but documenting the NEED for case-sensitivity, is a perfectly acceptable choice.

As I work through this project, if anything else relevant crops up, I'll let you know. Thanks!

Rochndil: test...bug!...fix...test again...

Good morning!

I've (mostly) completed the conversion process, and overall your tools worked just fine. I had two small issues, which would be good to document for other users.

1. The system needs to be rebooted after installing the MATLAB program, or your tools can't find it. It's also a little tricky to know if you HAVE successfully installed MATLAB, because it doesn't leave a lot of footprints in the system.

2. In order to process properly, the graphics mod files need to be in /dirname/raw/graphics or the tool(s) won't "see" them and just go through the motions.

Both are easily corrected by documenting. Preventing user failures (and frustration) is always a good thing.

Now, once I got things actually working, your instructions were pretty much right on the money, and while I did have problems, they were on my end. It would be helpful, if possible, to have a little error-checking in your program. The main problem I had was the file-references for my PNG files were wrong in my TXT files, but the program never identified the problem, and therefore didn't LOG anything about it. If your tools could add lines to the output "icon referenced in file(x) line(n), but image not found" it would have saved me a lot of time and head-scratching.

Other than that, everything went fine. I need to try a merger next, and if I encounter anything else noteworthy I'll let you know. Thanks for the great tools, you saved me hours, if not days, of work.

Rochndil, still working on updating Chariot's classic graphics...

Well, after a lot of trial-and-error (LOT of error on my part) I've got the graphics mod working properly. I even set up a little hierarchy for all my current (one) and future (many more) mods with meta tags and stuff. There's a ton of clean-up to do on Chariot's stuff (the last time he updated was around 2010), but that's all on me to take care of.

I'm very pleased to have compiled (successfully) my first Rubble mod, knowing that it'll be the LAST time I have to do all that jiggering, and can simply apply it to future versions of DF in moments. Yay!

Future projects will get a lot more complicated, but one step at a time. I can't wait to see soil inclusions again.

Rochndil, with probably a day or two of work to finish the current clean-up...

Thanks for the reply, I think you may have nailed the behavior I was seeing. I'm still working my way through the tiles. It's been so long since I started this round that some of the tiles I added are no longer relevant! But, on the up side, that means more open spaces to do neat stuff with.

Rochndil, who got to spend Sunday covered in mud and unable to wash (digging up and repairing house water line)...just like a dwarf!

*Metals and Minerals Overhaul

This is probably the third or fourth time I've re-worked this mod, let's see if I can finish it this time!

For the moment, this is a *very* in-progress project, but I'm hoping that with some of the new tools available I'll actually manage to finish it this go-around. I'm already taking advantage of TWBT's capabilities to dramatically improve tile handling. It's not QUITE full graphics, but darned close. Once I finish rebuilding the tileset (again!!), I'll switch over to Rubble and (assuming I can figure it out) use that to apply the tileset changes as well as the rest of the mod (which also needs radical overhauling to account for game changes).

In the meantime, I'd like to offer a little side-project that turned out to be an interesting adventure. In the process of rebuilding my main tileset, I discovered that there wasn't (or at least I couldn't see) a way to do "overrides" for world-gen map tiles. Then, quite by accident, I discovered that process was using the text tileset. Since quite a few of the characters for the world map weren't used anywhere else AS TEXT, I could replace them with more appropriate ones. This is the result, and perhaps someone who has ACTUAL GRAPHICS SKILLS (unlike me) might take the idea and run with it.

16x12 text tileset, primarily the work of the awesome Lord Zorinthrox http://dffd.bay12games.com/who.php?id=703, with additional tiles bungled together by me, or stolen from various much better tilesets (I have complete records, which will be included with the actual release).
https://www.dropbox.com/s/f5d8iyy43dko5pi/MMO_12x16_text.png?dl=0

There are additional tiles I could have replaced (=nV for example), but I decided to leave them either because they WERE used in text, or were better left alone for thematic reasons. A great challenge (for me) in this project was that many of the tiles needed have never (to my knowledge) been drawn before. Since I couldn't easily borrow, I had to forge many of them myself, which isn't pretty!

Here's a map example - looks pretty good if I do say so myself.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/20w7iu220ih1qf0/twbt_world.jpg?dl=0

It'll be a couple of weeks before I finish the main tileset, but when I do I'll also post it here. In the meantime, feel free to steal any of the knowledge I've discovered through this little side-track, and keep on digging!

Rochndil, who was planning to make this post THIS MORNING, not near 2pm...

P.S. I couldn't see an easy way to get DB to drop the images inline, but if someone knows how I'll happily edit to fix it.