March 6, 2024: Dwarf Fortress 50.12 has been released.
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News: February 4, 2021: Dwarf Fortress Talk #28 has been posted.
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quote:
Originally posted by Qmarx:
<STRONG>Took me quite a while to figure out this was a bug, though. I kept mining out the marked areas, thinking it meant they were near gems/veins. An early discovery of opal made it plausible...</STRONG>
Actually, I had the reverse initial reaction. I avoided those spots like the plague, until I was ready for trouble.
Sounds like a feature request for handling dwarves falling asleep in work zones and you needing a mechanism to wake them up.
quote:
Originally posted by Neonivek:
<STRONG>Alright... this is my second post in your series... Ill keep it more organised
</STRONG>
Threading
-Basically, everything in the threading section is saying 'let us watch things without stoping the action'. I'd like to be able to watch the wounds apear, or what a dwarf is thinking, or any number of logistical type stuff while the action is going on.
Stops
----I don't agree... "Danger" is a good reason to stop. It is annoying, but not as annoying as abandoning your fortress because you just flooded everything.
Erm, I'm not saying don't stop. Stop, but stop BEFORE you decide what else to do. That way, if you choose to redesignate the dig, the dwarf doesn't decide to do anything else. (Yes silly dwarf, I'm sending you to your death, dig dwarf dig!!) If you do NOT redesignate the dig, it behaves as normal.
Currently, the action will stop (good), and it will zoom to the location (also good), and it undesignates the dig in the area. (final good thing). The problem is, as the action stops, the dwarf is having to decide again what to do. Because the where he is at is no longer valid to dig, he wanders off. This happens EVEN IF YOU REDESIGNATE THE SPOT TO DIG
Flick = Click on the dwarf and say 'Hey, You!!! You're being a 'tard, stop it!' and he drops his task and reaquires. He may pick the same task, or he may not.
[ June 12, 2008: Message edited by: Granite26 ]
• Game behavior
Trading behavior
o Trapped shoutouts
The gist is; While I love that DF tracks so much stuff and that the simulation is so rich, sometimes it just takes too long to find something. Usually it's either because the menu for selecting something goes away when you select it (think unit skills from the unit menu) causing you to start over again for each unit, or it's because the list that pulls up is just too long to meaningfully sort.
• Additional information
As a philosophy, I'm a big fan of dual level information on the screen. The new player will see what he needs to see, while the more experienced player will be able to pull out additional visual cues from the information. (As in the quality levels of items... New users don't always follow quality, but you don't need to at first) Just a thought
(Also, aparently UBB doesn't support nested lists... careful diagraming replaced by dots 
)
Thought aggregation would be a list of the thoughts, and how many people have them. This falls into the 10 dwarves are easy to manage one by one, but 100's are not. Anyway, imagine a screen where you can see each thought with a number of dwarves that have it, and the 'tab' switch to get the list (similar to the stocks screen, I guess). It would be a good way to track if, for instance, you had a bunch of dwarves sleeping poorly, or not in beds, or thirsty, or any number of other problems. I imagine this screen as having the dwarves color coded by happiness levels.
quote:
Originally posted by Neonivek:
<STRONG>Alright let me look.. being my 5thWhile I do agree that Nobles should be useful... I don't want to appoint any of them in areas where I feel ordinary dwarves should be able to do the very same job. (Yes... I am against the Dungeon Master)
This makes me very biased in almost any Noble discussion
[ June 11, 2008: Message edited by: Neonivek ]</STRONG>
Fair enough. It's seemed to me that Noble in a DF context means less feudal leader and more shift foreman anyway. I like the idea of a core samples being a basic skill, but I would like to see more... officials(?) that give you extra management power over the grunt workers in their zone of control.
It's not a huge advantage, but it's enough to put up with the occasional platinum chest request.
Better Nobles
Part of the interface improvements will (hopefully) be adding new ways of accounting for your fortress information. These improvements will be extremely useful in the late game, but not so much early on. Coincidentally, this is when the nobles show up. It would make them a lot more welcome if the nobles arrival and presence corresponded to increased functionality in the logistics screens
Prospector, Surveyor, Assayer
• Ability to zoom to unmined rock of different types
o Useful if you are tracking veins, zoom to a vein of something
• Ability to track unmined rock of different types
o Obviously (Fey Mood) dwarves know what’s out there. Why can’t we see a list of what’s in the walls?
• Ability to ‘see’ through a single layer of rock to the layer behind it
o This could be an assay task similar to wall smoothing
• Ability to find major deposits by soil sample.
o Maybe get a report on a point based on the relative nearness of a few types of minerals (Adamantine and Gems should be exempt.)
Ranch Manager
• Designated ranch areas where animals want to be?
• Automated butchering options
o Kill a male animal at random every so often type stuff
Sergeant of the Artillery
• Automated Siege Weaponry commands in one place(enable a callout, battery fire, etc)
King
• Feudal Society: If the king ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy
o Having the king around should make the dwarves basically happier
o Having a happy king should make the dwarves basically happier
>Urist was complimented by the king recently
o Additional trade options (receive tribute maybe?)
o Better Immigrants?
Bard
• Adds happy thoughts to people around him
• Philosopher could do the same, or even take complaints
Guild Leaders
• Increase base pay for the job-guilds they represent
Adding a good list of potential nobles could also help differentiate the various races (elves get bards, but dwarves don't, etc). The core of this one is: Nobles should be an acheivement and a boon.
quote:
Originally posted by Normandy:
<STRONG>By jove, that sounds like a good idea.Another interesting idea would be to have multiple input piles, each carrying a specific material, which would go to a single-tile large output pile by a workshop (it would work like that, no?), and by selecting which input pile the output pile would take from, you could both pre-haul materials to the workshop and get a fairly high amount of crafting control.</STRONG>
Setting it up manually is already implemented. You can set up the system to haul from one pile to another. The improvement is abstracting that so that you don't have to say FROM this pile TO this other pile.
You have an excellant suggestion for fixing the specific materials there: Set up a pile 20ish squares from the workshop that accepts ALL materials, and a pile nearby that accepts NO materials. Then when you want to use a specific material, turn on the 'right' material for the nearby pile and set up a manual transfer to the close pile, and it all of a sudden, all the jobs will start using the desired materials. (With little extra hauling time, assuming your dwarves get to it fast)
quote:
Originally posted by Neonivek:
<STRONG>Alright last one... I said Id comment... and I kept my promiseWaitor: You made them WAY too much like a Hauler. If they served people in dining rooms (in which most dining rooms should have a food stockpile in them) that would be perfect.
Furnature Warehouse: Don't we already have a... Furnature Stockpile? I don't understand what the point of this is.
</STRONG>
Errm, maybe I didn't explain this well.. Waitors would be people with the food hauling task turned on. It's an emergant behaviour, not a new skill or job. Haulers with food hauling turned on would naturally become waitors this way.
In the same way, furniture warehouse wouldn't be a new pile, it would just be a way things would work. The warehouse I mentioned would be a simple stockpile.
Those are just quick examples of the kinds of behavior that would emerge as natural side effects of the change.
The only code change would be to make some piles want to be filled or not want to be filled. With the custom stockpiles, my understanding is that you have to set them to transfer between specific areas, which is a lot of logistics work. What I'm suggesting would allow you to just say 'this is an input pile, things can be put here, but haulers will still come and take them away', and the current job creation system would handle where it actually went.
Everytime I create a dining room (think burrows here) I don't want to have to tie it back to the kitchen, especially if I've got three kitchens, two stills, a food warehouse and 10 other dining rooms to scroll through. That's assuming the pile transfer is smart enough to cull to just food piles.
Hopefully that makes a bit more sense. I really (passionately!?) believe that this is a small change that will make playing big fortresses a lot easier.
In my experience, piles are separated into three types
Input Piles: Are designed to take the output from buildings and store it until something can be done with it. Basically you want an Input pile by every workshop so that your producer dwarf doesn't have to walk far to put it down, and the workshop doesn't become cluttered. This pile needs to be emptied regularly, because you always want free space, but you don't need anything in it.
Storage Piles: Are designed for long term storage of items like excess stone and furniture. You don't care if there is anything in it or not.
Output Piles: Are designed for distribution. They are the sources of material for workshops as well as the food bin in the corner of every dining hall. You actively want the Output pile to be filled with items in order to minimize travel times.
-----------------------------------------
That's the three kinds of piles I've built, seen on the forums, or seen on the wiki. My suggestion? Implement these pile types in code. Input piles would be used by dwarves carrying items they don't want. (items they don't have hauling turned on for, for instance) Output piles would actively fill from storage or Input piles without you having to manually set up a switchover. Input piles being filled would naturally lower their priority the closer to filled they are, aiding your hauler dwarves in prioritization. What would happen is an emergent AI system for managing your piles, based purely on telling the system what you want to do.
Here are a few behaviors that would be possible with just that switch:
Garbagemen and trashcans. Turn off refuse hauling for all but a few, and put small one unit refuse Input piles around. People will throw out the garbage, and the garbagedwarves will pick it up and haul it where it needs to be.
Waitors. The cook makes food and places it in his Input pile. The waitors will haul the food around to the various dining rooms, ensuring that each dining room always has a small stock of food and drink.
Furniture Warehouse. Masons build beds and place them in the input pile right outside the door. Haulers take them to the large warehouse. Months later, you decide to build an apartment expansion. In the hall outside, you place an output pile for beds. When the expansion is complete, the furniture is already queued up outside waiting to be moved in.
I think the beauty of this particular system is that it doesn't involve tedious tweaking of routes, or designating this pile be moved to that pile. It handles both the output of a workshop and the input in one simple step.
Thoughts?
Perhaps this could be resolved by dividing a room's value by the expected number of users (AKA a dining room's value would be divided by the number of chairs in it)
I think one of the accepted methods of dealing with this sort of thing IRL is to square the values of everything while adding it up. (I.E. a value 1 chair would only add 1, a value 10 table would add 100 and a value 100 statue would add 10,000)
Additionally, a cheap way to lower the cost of rooms that have more than one square would be airport zoning. AKA charge less for rooms subject to noise pollution.
(edit for grammer)
[ June 13, 2008: Message edited by: Granite26 ]
[ June 13, 2008: Message edited by: Granite26 ]
