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DF General Discussion / PSA: Do NOT decompile the DF executable under any circumstances

« on: March 31, 2016, 06:03:17 pm »

BPFA's fans have probably been wondering where I am for the last few months. Well, I didn't want to advertise the fact but a fellow DF player I know offline roped me in as a playtester for "OpenDF". What I didn't know at the time was that their "free and open source clone" was using quite large chunks of the original source code.

There's no point breaking out the torches and pitchforks though. The code was... booby-trapped.

I'm typing this on my laptop in a cupboard in the Hackspace where we were working. The door's barricaded and the police and paramedics are on their way; I hope I can hold out long enough.

I don't know how he did it, and I don't ever want to know; I'm not good enough at maths to understand the details. But something in the code... Oh Armok help me I can't believe I'm typing this... It did things to them. One of the coders started talking in a weird language I've never heard before, and bleeding from his eyes. His eyes... There were... Things, inside them. Like little worms. The other one just... froze in place. I didn't stay long enough to see if he was breathing because the other one tried to grab me. I had to hit him with a fire extinguisher or he'd have gone for my throat! Someone else came in, a night-shift cleaner I think, and she looked at the code and it started happening to her too; I didn't feel like hanging around to see what happened next, but I could hear the screaming.

I think I know a little bit about what happened. There are lots of odd rumours out there about certain shapes and patterns that do something to the human mind. You've probably heard of Snow Crash, or a David Langford short story called BLIT. Well, apparently there's a grain of truth in it. Only catatonia, cardiac arrest or destroying your target's ability to comprehend language are not the worst thing you can do to someone's brain, it seems. And guess what Toady One has his doctorate in? Maybe that's why he quit academia to make videogames; either he was scared of what he'd realised he could do or it was drawing attention from the wrong sort of people.

I didn't think you could do it in ASCII art though. Or that he was protective enough of his intellectual property to use memetic weapons as DRM! And he got up in arms about Mermaid Farming...

Hang on, the cavalry are here. I hope I get a job with the Laundry out of this fiasco.

2

DF General Discussion / PSA To Ubuntu Users RE: "Error while loading shared libraries"

« on: September 19, 2014, 03:57:52 pm »

Getting this error when you try to run DF?

Code: [Select]

./libs/Dwarf_Fortress: error while loading shared libraries: libSDL_image-1.2.so.0:
cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

As stated at Ask Ubuntu, in order to correct this problem you need the following packages:

Code: [Select]

libsdl-image1.2:i386
libgtk2.0-0:i386
libsdl-ttf2.0-0:i386
libglu1-mesa:i386 (in 14.04 and later)

This probably applies to Mint, Lucid Puppy and any other Debian fork you may happen to be trying to run DF on if you're getting that error message, but I mentioned Ubuntu users specifically because it's the distro almost everyone has heard of.

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Creative Projects / I got Published!

« on: September 02, 2014, 02:31:53 pm »

The Gorgon's Mirror is a new e-zine by a small RPG company called Drive-Thru Productions. It's supposed to be general SF/F but we've got a lot of stories dealing with LGBT themes if that's your thing.

My story debuts in Issue #2, and it's called The Boatmen's Apocalypse. It's a stylistic tribute to John Wyndham in general and The Day Of The Triffids in particular, and is possibly the only work of post-apocalyptic fiction to be set in Norfolk.

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DF Suggestions / The Linux Readme File

« on: July 15, 2014, 09:43:59 am »

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it's not a lot of use. It gives a list of libraries you'll need in order to run the game that's either specific to one flavour of Linux or badly outdated or quite possibly both; apt-get couldn't do anything with what's written in the file the last time I tried.

Could we make a list of every library needed for DF to run on most current distros so Toady can update it? Ubuntu appears to be missing libsdl-image1.2:i386, libgtk2.0-0:i386 and libsdl-ttf2.0-0:i386 by default according to this support page.

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DF General Discussion / Donations Other Than Cash

« on: May 13, 2012, 01:46:50 pm »

So... I have some long-standing issues with Paypal after they just up and lost a thousand US dollars of my money, but cashing a cheque internationally is an insanely expensive process and Customs officials tend to take exception to envelopes full of cash arriving from overseas. So what should I send instead? Food? Extra RAM? Booze?

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DF Suggestions / Wagonways

« on: April 28, 2012, 01:45:47 am »

Wikipedia article

To summarise, they're a larger scale and longer distance version of minecart tracks. Typically, they were used for transporting quarried stone or coal and metal ores from the pithead to the nearest town, but they might also be used for logging. First known use of wooden rails of some sort comes from the 1560s but carved stone tracks are known to have existed as early as Roman times.

The way I'd implement them in DF is as a kind of road tile, but built quite rarely and late in worldgen. If you happened to have one on the map then you might see the wagons going past every so often, and if you built your trade depot directly adjacent to them you could get larger caravans from the settlements at each end. You could also build your own out to your hill-dwarves, when they're implemented.

And yes, this does leave some scope for fun modding possibilities when the mechanics wishlist and a few other things are in place.

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DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Barracks/Armoury: Size, Placement and Other Issues

« on: April 19, 2012, 09:21:05 pm »

My next fortress is going to go with a universal conscription model, with squads taking turns to guard the gatehouse and everyone spending at least one month a year training. I don't want everyone wandering around with full weapons and armour while off-duty for various reasons, but I still want everyone able to get kitted out as fast as possible in the event of an attack, so I'm considering the best method of spreading small caches across the entire fort.

I therefore have three questions:

1. Has anyone experimented to see how much can be crammed into each weapon rack, armour stand and chest?

2. Do I need to include chests to store any pieces of ordinary clothing (cloaks etc) that I add to the uniform, or will those go on the armour stands?

3. Is this actually going to be more efficient than one big central armoury near where the squads are meant to be stationed?

8

DF Suggestions / Casting

« on: April 02, 2012, 09:43:11 pm »

This started out as a vague idea for a way of manufacturing anvils without a Metalsmith's Forge but which wouldn't feel too much like cheating. Currently, the process of making metal crafts and furniture is a little... abstract, as well as being somewhat unrealistic. An anvil is required to make anything out of metal, and apparently a dwarven smith is skilled enough to hammer a goblet or a statue out of a solid metal ingot if it's heated up sufficiently. Now that we've got wax and easily available sand, why not introduce the casting process?

There's two methods of casting items that are true to the period that DF represents, lost-wax and sand moulded. Lost-wax is the oldest, and fairly self-explanatory. A wax mould is made of a figurine or similar and allowed to set, then the pattern is removed and molten metal poured in and allowed to cool. It can make very finely detailed casts but it's somewhat expensive, as the wax moulds can only be used once.

Sand casting is slightly more recent... possibly; I can't find much actual information on when it was first used. The necessary materials aren't terribly exotic, though; the two halves of the mould are shaped from sand mixed with clay, or occasionally vegetable oil, then put together and baked hard in a kiln. The advantage to this method is that the sand can be reused afterwards, which means it's the preferred method for large metal items like furniture, even if the level of detail isn't quite up there with lost-wax.

How would we fit this into the game? Simple really. Lost-wax moulds could be made of an existing craft -preferably selectable by the player- using the wax worker skill, to be used in a reaction to create exact duplicates of the item at either the metalsmith's forge or the glass furnace. Not sure what skill to use for creating sand moulds, though; possibly metalsmith or metalcrafter depending on what was being made, but the principle would be much the same.

And of course, the addition of a simple [PRESERVE_REAGENT] tag and a different material would leave modders with the option to introduce die casting.

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DF Suggestions / Stockpile "Snapshot" Logfiles

« on: February 14, 2012, 03:03:52 am »

An idea that came to me while pondering ways to simplify stockpile management. At regular intervals (monthly, quarterly or annually depending on player preference), the game could dump all the information in the Stocks screen and turn it into a .txt file. This would enable us to read it in a separate window without pausing, copy and paste inventory information to brief the next overseer in a succession game rather than messing about with multiple screenshots, and open up the possibility of a less hacky alternative to Dwarf Foreman.

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DF Suggestions / Missing Dwarf Reports And The Map Edge

« on: February 06, 2012, 10:39:56 pm »

As things stand the edge of the map acts like there's an invisible wall around your territory through which only merchants, invaders, migrants and wild animals can pass. But since it's going to be possible for dwarves to go missing through accidents, or "accidents", why not add some more mundane sorts of disappearance?

Instead of coming to a halt as if their quarry had disappeared into thin air, hunter stalking an animal or a militiadwarf pursuing a thief or snatcher would follow their quarry off the map edge, possibly generating a notification. After that, a series of probability rolls would be made. For one of three outcomes: Return with animal corpse/item that was stolen, return empty-handed (with or without injuries) or fail to return. Relative skill levels, quality of equipment and so forth would modify these rolls one way or another, as would how many other dwarves were accompanying them; squads should bring the bodies of fallen comrades back with them, for example, and assigned work animals would at lreast have their fates known. Whether it was day or night, and eventually weather conditions like fog, could also influence the chances of getting back.

If the latter outcome occurred, the dwarf would be listed as missing. Ideally this would generate some kind of Search for Missing Dwarf job, its priority depending on how many friends the missing dwarf had, and with the searchers potentially meeting with some misfortune themselves. As for what happens to dwarves who fail to return, well, there could be several outcomes if they or their body aren't found. They could turn up again on their own after a random amount of time, end up as the spouse of a night creature, or even settle down in another site and turn up as a migrant years later. Sometimes, their fate would simply remain unknown unless the player subsequently stumbled upon the body as an adventurer.

11

DF Modding / Useful Wooden Weapons For Fortress Mode

« on: January 14, 2012, 03:24:07 pm »

Developed from the Wooden Clubs mini-mod I threw together in an hour or so. Just embarked on a hostile map and need to arm everyone with something in a hurry? Need a consistently less-than-lethal weapon for crowd control? Look no further. And now with stakes for all your vampire hunting needs!

Spoiler: the weapons (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: the reactions (click to show/hide)

12

DF Suggestions / Disease and Other Natural Causes of Death

« on: January 04, 2012, 10:28:14 pm »

Something said in Fortress Mode set me to thinking about how currently, the only way to die that isn't a direct result of enemy action, bad luck or player intervention is generic "old age" that happens more or less at random.

Disease has come up a time or two before, and would seem to be the easiest one to implement. Just give miasma and tainted water various appropriate syndromes, preferably with a disease-resistance attribute check, and some sort of mechanism for the effects to be communicable: Coating every afflicted dwarf in some sort of invisible syndrome-causing substance, perhaps? You could even be really hardcore and give mud a weak syndrome effect with various minor symptoms, to represent the minor ailments caused by inadequate hygeine facilities, or give snow a syndrome to correspond with pneumonia; I got the impresion from that comment about setting the wagon on fire and melting all the badgers that the rains of various unpleasant substances are going to have syndromes of some kind, so this should be a simple enough extension of that concept.

Stuff like heart attacks or strokes would be a bit more difficult, but the easiest way would probably be to add a variety of prone-to-failure stat for each major organ that decreases by age and genetics. The main use for this would be to keep fortress populations at a sufficiently high turnover that FPS and food, booze and living-space requirements never get totally out of hand no matter how long your fortress lasts. Of course, it would be vitally important to modify the thought system so that the death of a dwarf from natural causes at a great age didn't cause as severe an unhappy thought in all their friends and family as from contaminated drinking water or a Hammering for not fulfilling a mandate.

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Other Games / The Arch Rival Offers To Settle Trademark Dispute... With Trial By Quake III

« on: August 17, 2011, 05:41:48 pm »

Didn't really seem to fit anywhere else on the board, including the Minecraft thread.

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/9038258448/hey-bethesda-lets-settle-this

I can't honestly say I'm a fan of Notch, as there is something quite staggeringly unfair about a rather blatant follow-the-leader affair like Minecraft making millions while DF is paying just barely enough to keep Toady One in Diet Pepsi, but I have to admit he's got style.

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DF Modding / Mini-Mod: Wooden Clubs

« on: August 02, 2011, 04:13:51 pm »

Spoiler: Reaction (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Weapon (click to show/hide)

Playing a difficult embark and need to arm everyone with something in a hurry? Want to equip your fortress guard with something that won't sever limbs or break skulls? Problem solved.

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DF Suggestions / Customisable Job Priorities

« on: June 19, 2011, 01:06:56 pm »

We've all been frustrated at this or that dwarf being more interested in making stone crafts than meeting with the outpost liaison or bandage someone's gaping wound, but beyond that there must surely be as many opinions of what task takes top priority as there are players. So why not enable us to set our own? I can't imagine it would be difficult to move the necessary information to an init file, and once the game is feature-complete enough to start overhauling the interface Toady could look into making it configurable in-game.

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