Bay 12 Games Forum

Also, how do I do a proper savescum? That is, abandon to check legends, then come back. I tried it once but ended up losing the save. I know reclaiming is an option, but I don't want to outright abandon this one right now.

I've not really done it in anger, but due to crashes (but season-saving turned on, which I decided to rename back to the non-season region name for aesthetic purposes) I suspect save-scumming is something like:

• Save
• Exit (or it might be possible to stick on the "Start"/"Continue"/"Quit" screen and not quit... not sure..).
• Go into the data/saves folder
• Copy the appropriate "regionN" directory (if scumming) or delete the current "regionN" directory and rename a copy of the "regionN" copy back to "regionN" (IYSWIM) if reverting to a prior scum
  
• Restart (if #2 was necessary)
• Continue playing "regionN"

I've never bothered to check Legends mode, but you could insert the necessary for doing that in the above list.  Or even handle the regionNcopy fortress for Legend/adventure mode purposes so as not to touch the original regionN save at all.

Other variants of that may involve exploiting crashing bugs (like the one I still occasionally get regarding "Zoom to (B)uilding" failures) or deliberately giving the program the three-fingered salute to remove the need to make fallback-copies and just restart from the last starting point (or most-recent-seasonal-save, with a quick remove and rename).  I suspect some people would be happier with that (even 'accidentally' rolling back a couple of seasons, if possible) instead of the previously mentioned deliberately reserved fallback copy.

I've a feeling I'm not making sense.  I'm also hoping that I'm not encouraging anything that shouldn't be being done.  Note that continually three-fingered saluting a memory-intensive program such as DF may cause resource problems if (if?  ha!) Windows doesn't garbage-collect things sufficiently well.


[1] I've shown people how to 'save-scum' Freecell, in the past.  Given that you can achieve your aim of having 1000+ straight games either by playing smart or by merely editing the registry to indicate whatever result you want, I find it funny that they want to do that!

So, I take it they show up in the (c)iv list?

There's something on the wiki (IIRC) about embarking on islands meaning that even with other civs just over the water, they don't show up, and yet the dwarven one always will, regardless.

That's the only thing I can think of, but then I would have thought that they wouldn't have been noted on the civ-list, either.  (Having rarely ventured to occupy really awkward places...  Or, when I have tried the likes of far-out glacial areas, not bothered noting the correlation between the info and the reality, int he midst of my other troubles in setting the place up...)

I don't know if it's possible that the first ever caravan showed up during a time of hostile activity, got scared, ran away and decided never to return (or not yet, but still 'maybe later').  Again, when I've had such major problems it's generally been the least of my worries and I've barely gotten past the next couple of seasons.

I also think a direct english programming language would be very time consuming to code in.

Code: [Select]

while (1==1){
Method();}
would look like this:

Code: [Select]

Whenever 1 is equal to 1, move to the method that is named 'Method' and give it no arguments.


It could be more simply phrased in (or from) English as "Continually run Method".

So when someone has already 'told' their computer "I want you to download the dwarf fortress main web page, at the address you already know about, and see if the latest version is newer than the one I have now.  If it is, download that package and extract to that folder" (or, "check DF home page and download any new version to here", or any other shorter version") they can then say "and that's what I mean when I say 'Method'" and then follow with the above.

(Of course, I'd suggest the user should insist it be modulated by "if you haven't checked in the last 24 hours" or some other time-limiter, if they or the developer/provider haven't already 'programmed' in a phrase such as "when I ask for a web-page check, don't bother if you did it relatively recently", and the computer understands the appropriate magnitude of "relative recentness" to apply to forums, daily lottery draw result pages and various software development pages.)

The above was not written to support the idea of easy natural language control.  As already pointed out, it isn't trivial to implement...  probably as the inverse square (or worse!) to the apparent triviality at the user-end of the process.  But like the fact that the abreviation "doubleyou doubleyou doubleyou" has more syllables than "world wide web", with a library of background knowledge a simple phrase could translate into a complicated program.  It's the library (combined from both user and developer input) that would overwhelmingly count.  And if you have no idea how to do things (like translating from Romanian to Navaho) then you need to have had someone else already let the computer know how to do that for you to say "Translate that document from Romanian to Navaho"...  And if you do, but have to input the resources into the system, you have to spend a lot of time talking about noun-subject-verb orders, tenses and plurals, actual 1:1 translations of words, mutations, symbolic and/or alphabetic equivalences, etc, before you can utter the above phrase and get something useful out.

Not that this example task is easy without the reliance upon natural language, and there may even be some advantage when a computer already 'thinks' it understands the complexities of human language, and thus has the groundings in potential ambiguities, florid phrasing and even humour, in order to recognise, deconstruct, and reinstate such occurances in an equivalent (or best-effort) manner in the destination language...  Swings...  Meet roundabouts!

2: There have been many a suggestion regarding potential ways to make traps a little more balanced, and here's my two cents: If a creature is aware of a trap in that square, they can move through it at full speed with a small chance of accidentally setting it off, or they can (and this would be the default behavior for dwarves) move while "prone" and be safe. This makes main corridors full of razor-sharp traps far less efficient. Thus, it would be wise to have a few separate entrances, or some other clever way of mitigating the slowdowns. Note that adventurers might later on be able to spot traps and choose for themselves whether to dash through the spinning blades, or just try to crawl through safely.

I tend to rank cage traps along entrances (if a force is trying to rush through, then the lead invader triggers one and the next in line triggers the next, etc), if I use them, but one could apply the same methodology to weapon traps that might jam (and of course anything where a degree of reloading is required).  Obviously cage traps are strictly one-use only (without intervention), so a creature becoming aware of its existence from its activation by another of its ilk really doesn't occur (unless you sneak reloaders to the trap from a side-door when the invaders have passed deeper into your convoluted entranceway), but I suspect that it's the "I saw my comrade killed by a big spiked ball" concept that you're talking about.

Perhaps the caution could be applied to neighbouring/nearby traps, though.  Ooops, lead goblin got trapped in a cage.  Second-in-line goblin is then cautious for an arbitrary number of further steps through the corridor while avoiding (or trying to spot, so he can avoid/point out to his compatriots) the next trap in.  Though at some point he'll have walked far enough without sign of traps (maybe over them, but in an ultra-cautious mode not matched by his ability to observe the fate he narrowly missed) to start running at full speed again.

Now, this has plusses and minuses for all.  Overtrapping could increase the cautiousness and trap-finding proficiency of the invading force to a degree where few further traps can claim the remaining bods (as long as they aren't sitting huddled in a corner of your complex, by this point, too scared to move).  On the other hand, the occasional trap could be a useful speed-limiter to a force, making them move at half or quarter speed along perfectly safe corridors and let you muster your forces.

It could be linked to trap-types, and perhaps a bit of positional randomness.  Having encountered several giant axes swinging from the ceiling, which are now being looked out for through the tell-tale ceiling openings, there's still a surprise element when the spikes pop up out of the floor through the previously unseen gaps between the cobbles and the serrated disks come out and slice down the walls along head-height slits.  And anyone who survives that suddenly discovers he has been engulfed by the cage that was laid out flat in the grassy inner exit to the settlement's compound...

Obviously it would need to be extended to enemy-activated pressue plates, though manually activated anti-invader responses would be a different matter (except, maybe, so far as to designate certain tiles as ones they should try to avoid, and maybe recognise later atom-smasher layouts, "dunking bridges" and "hot hatches" in order than safer paths might be attempted, either in continuing the near-suicidal charge inwards or in the process of escaping the Pramid of DOOOOMMMM! that has finally broken the spirit of the survivors.

Or something.

I'm quite surprised about the reported wording of the Wiki regarding speaking many languages.  Sounds like bad editing of the page.  I'll have a look at that, later, and see if I think I'm up to modifying the statement for clarity.

As for using plain English, attempts have been made to allow computers to respond to understand 'natural language', but that's really only at the User Interface level ("Please open the document that I wrote yesterday"), not for writing programs.  Even the Hollywood-style depictions of computer interface where "Search the database for all even-numbered ID codes and check the owners against the list of all blue cars" is not programming, so much as natural language being parsed for sense.  A parsing which might or might fall down on such input as "A canner can can anything that he can.  Can a canner can a can, can he?", depending on sophistication.

The closest language I've encountered (and, truly, I found it a depressing language for various reasons) to one that takes plain English is Cobol.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBOL#Syntactic_features for the kind of thing.  It was (not checking even Wiki for this, just repeating what I remember the teacher told me, 20-odd years ago) designed for "ordinary businessmen" to be able to program it.

I suspect that it wasn't so much the writing that was supposed to be 'natural' (there were so many restraints regarding line indentation, and of course the vocabulary, while very "English", was constrained almost exactly as much as any other language, if not more so), but the ability to read it without needing a "geek's eyes" for symbols and their meanings.

Compare with the likes of LISP (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)#Examples) or Forth or Fortran (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortran#Simple_Fortran_II_program).  Though my current favourite for prototyping general problems (not requiring specific language features) is Perl.

Indeed, Perl is a lot easier to write than COBOL (in my opinion) because of the multiplicity of possible methods[1], e.g. the following five (more or less) identically-functional lines:
if (@list) { print "We have a list" }
print "We have a list" if (@list);
(@list)?print "We have a list":;
print "We have a list" unless (!@list);
@list && print "We have a list";
(Doing that off the top of my head, so I've probably typoed or brainoed something.  And I've not even delved into using "$#list" or "int(@list)" variants.)

It's not really English (unless you're happy with the "if" and "unless" keywords and flexible grammar making it English, and ignore the various parenthises and other strange punctuation).  An easy language to write (when you know what you want to do, you can usually think of a way it can be done even if you don't know all the possible tricks and shortcuts that others might use) but can be hard to read (because even if you wrote it, it can be horribly obfuscated and/or untidy when you come to read it after the fact).


Truly, if you want to actually make a computer do exactly what you want, understand its internals and work at the lowest level of code that you are able to, without having to reinvent the wheel for every trick.  That could be batch file (or shell script) where you don't have to worry about much except piping file contents through a FIND/grep command and then through your favourite paging utility, or perhaps you need to peek and poke at your serial port to make your fax-modem do rather unorthodox things that were never allowed for by the deamons or drivers.

Slightly Ninjaed by Armok, here, but learn assembly-language and you can make your machine (and all compatible ones) spin on a dime.  Nevertheless, if you just want to regularly display the number of lines in a file containing the word "Mother", you might as well put FIND /C "Mother" FILENAME.EXT in a batch file, rather than waste time with DiskIO and the like at a low level.  This is what I understand about "Computers speak many languages".  And English (or virtually any other human language) is going to be second-best to a suitable computer language.

As for taking an instruction such as "make an emulator, now make it dual processor compatible", look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWIM.  And I see that also links to http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/D/DWIM.html, which I was also going to suggest, to highlight the problem of a typo-correcting DWIM function.


[1] COBOL might be more flexible than I remember.  It was a couple of decades ago when I last touched it, and I've slept since.

Edit: He apparently claimed the craftsdwarf workshop, gathered some supplies and then it said he started a mysterious construction, does he need any help from me?

Not really, except for leaving him alone (not dissasembling his workshop, frexample...).

The hard part is ensuring that he had the supplies he wanted, and it looks like that went off without a hitch, for you.  Problems you may have are when they require gems, wood, shells or even stone[1] and you don't have them easily available.  Then you see if you can obtain them or hope that you can get them from the next caravan before it's too late for the moody dwarf and he goes insane.

[1] I had an aquifer-ridden map that caused me problems on that last one.  But on the plus side, I got a lot of digging done, through the soft soil that was the only non-damp ground open to me at the time, and that was the first time that I got a food surplus.  And habitually having a food non-surplus, in the bad old days, is the reason I chose this particular monicker on the forum!

What exactly is wrong with saying period?

As a right-pondian, I associate it with feminine biological functions (when not used to define other time-lengths, of course).  This might be the association that comes to mind.  Apart from giggly children, I imagine it's really not an issue for left-pondians, due to their overwhelming use of the term.

The alternative is that as "period" implies a 'length' (in time), not a termination of a length (of time), that a series of full-stops isn't five 'cycles', but a single span.


When it comes to using the {code} tag, which you have now used succesfully, your trouble arose because this text-input box (in most, but not all, browsers; due to the default font/font-class used for these textarea boxes) exclusively uses a proportional font, and so you cannot see what your {code}-output will be like without a Preview every now and then to make sure.

I tend to compose diagrams in Notepad, or whatever linux text editor I have available to me if I'm on that platform.  That's gives me the freedom to work with it as fixed-width.  Though as I don't mind sticking to fixed-width for all other text-composition I suppose I could change the browser defaults to make the fixed-width get used for the various input elements as well.

{Hmm, had to edit due to the belief that this forum, like others that I have used, would leave {code} tags (but with []s) alone and treat as literals if not partnered by a {/code} one (likewise), but it shoved on at the end to 'clean up' the tags...  Handy.  Except when you don't want it to do that. }