Bay 12 Games Forum

Heh. It should probably say somewhere on the screen.

I ended up with very similar "Job item lost or destroyed. x539" spam when trying to sort out some animal overpopulation problems. Might be of help if the cause of the problem is similar? Here's what happened:

1) I channelled out a hole in the ground to chuck animals into.

2) I created an staircase down into the hole, seperated by a door set to "tightly closed" to prevent animals from escaping.

3) I created a pit/pond zone over the edge of the pit (1x2 zone, one grid over ground,  one over empty space)

4) I assigned every single horse, cow and bull to be pitted (lots of animals). Dwarves started hauling animals and chucking them into the pit.

5) I figured (inspired by the wiki) that the process would be faster if I had more than one pit/pond zone giving out jobs, so I created a second pit/pond zone next to the first one.

6) I assigned every single horse, cow and bull to be pitted in the second zone as well. Here's where the problem started; I should of course have realized that the different zones couldn't know that they shared a physical pit.

7) Dwarves started running down into the pit to fetch animals that had already been pitted from zone #1 in order to pit them from zone #2. While silly and inefficient, this wouldn't really have been a problem.

The door to the pit started "leaking" when dwarves ran in and out, and animals started escaping.

7) To prevent dwarves from re-pitting animals, I forbid the door into the pit. My thinking was that this would lead to dwarves not accepting jobs to pit animals already in the hole, leading to a potentially frustrated zone but no major inconveniences and eventually all animals would be in the pit. This is when I started to get the same kind of "Urist cancels Pit Animal: Job item lost or destroyed. x12074" spam that the OP seems to experience. Also, my framerate got REAL crappy, probably not very surprising.

The reason I didn't report this before was that I had to act so stupid in order to get it to happen that I wasn't sure it was worth addressing. But if similar stuff happens in other situations it might help hearing what I did to cause it..

Some further reflects on my experience above:

A) Animals probably shouldn't be allowed to pass through "tightly closed" doors even if they're temporarily opened by dwarves. This to simulate dwarves acknowledging the "keep closed!" sign on the door and not letting animals through. Critters seem way to likely to sneak out of pits otherwise.

B) It ought to be possible to see whether an animal is currently pitted in the "assign animal to be pitted" screen for the pit/pond zone. The reason for this is that if a single horse escapes somehow, or a new one appears outside of the pit, it's hard to figure out which animals needs to be re-assigned to the pit/pond zone. Of course, since none of my animals in the example above was actually in the pit/pond zone, there may be no easy way to check this currently. Perhaps check if they're enclosed in a small area with no path out?

Anyway, hope this helps somehow.

Annoying is when I accidentally press a mystery key somewhere on this annoying keyboard and it switches from EN-US to EN-UK layout, many special symbols are switched...such as the " key becomes @.

The mystery key combination is Alt+Shift, at least on my version of Windows. It's pretty annoying indeed.

Quote from: MMad on July 20, 2008, 07:05:36 pm

Ramps are really frickin' weird.

No, not really.  They make sense.  From the wiki:

The lower ramp is valid; the upper ramp is not

The problem I have with ramps is that they're really weird to visualize, and doesn't seem to make physical sense. The way I've understood them - and I acknowledge this may be incorrect, please educate me if so - a ramp doesn't have a direction, but allows access up to *any* empty tile above a wall that may appear next to it.

So if you have a flat area with a lone ramp sitting in the middle, you can walk across it. I'd visualize that as a pyramid-shaped small hill or something. But if you go and build walls and floors around that ramp, suddenly you can walk from any of these walls down to the ramp and back again. Now I'd visualize this ramp tile as a hole in the ground, sloping upwards to all sides.

So assuming I haven't gotten them entirely wrong this entire time.. ramps are terrain objects that morph and change shape depending on their surroundings. I think that's pretty weird. Just smack a ramp down any old where and it will remold itself after your needs..

I love these stories. I think Besmar is my new favorite dwarven name.

I have never seen anyone kill a demon before this, and the interesting thing is that even after the demon died, goblins still continued to start worshipping him.

Not so strange, really. Obviously they think his death was just a part of his cunning plan, and he's going to return one day and destroy all his enemies.

erm...I accidentally sent 52 Euros instead of dollars.
ow.
*Areyars finaces were struck down*
I was gonna need that to rebuild my system. :p

Heh, I very nearly did something similar. According to this thread it's customary to include the 2.9% +30 cent in the donations, so I did the math and ended up with $26.025. Feeling lazy, I just copied the sum from my calculator program to the paypal browser window and went through the motions. Looking at it now I don't see why I should have bothered with 0.25 cent, but I guess that didn't occur at the time.

Anyway, the problem was that my Windows version is Swedish, and in Sweden we use commas (,) instead of full stops (.) to seperate decimals, something most calculating programs recognize and respect. So if paypal hadn't disallowed donations past $10,000, I would have sent $26,025.

Ramps are really frickin' weird.

I believe this was possible in older versions as well, and that the traders get angry at you just as if you siezed their goods.