Bay 12 Games Forum

Cool stuff. I remember a friend of mine had a copy of Hero Quest the boardgame but this looks more like Advanced Hero Quest. It's a pity spells don't work yet but it's not the only fantasy game I know without magic implemented. The only real problem I have with it is that I get weird graphics artefacts, in bands across the screen, as I play.

I'd love to see a DF flavoured mod for this. Instead of dungeons have it as dwarves slaughtering whole elven retreats. I have no idea how easy it is to mod though.

It's funny that you mention vassal as just yesterday I found myself reading about vassal40k, basically 40k battles through the net. Having not played any 40k I was interested but apparently GW, somewhat understandably, shut them down.

I guess I should explain my trap then. You've almost got it right Myroc. Firstly as my video shows the hallway is clear of all water when the invaders are charging up it. I release the water from a small reservoir to the west. I'm not certain but I think it's all water bellow or equal to 3/7 that turns to floors rather than icy walls, I had to make the reservoir bigger to make sure the whole lot froze. One other odd quirk I noticed is that magma that is standing still doesn't seem to stop water freezing, admittedly though this might be because I used tweak + for each tile to get some magma, I got bored looking for a site with both ice and magma.

I'm going to spoiler all the images but I'll explain in detail how my trap works, in hindsight there are things about it which could be more efficient.

On my map I dug down to the rock to build my machine in so I'll leave out pictures of the top few z-levels as its just ramps. Here is the first working floor. The big room on the left is the evaporation chamber, it deals with the excess water generated by the trap. On the right there are pumps that pump water out of the killing floor through fortifications. You'll notice there is an ice floor/roof over the killing floor, this is what is left behind when melting unsmoothed ice walls with magma.

The smooth ice floor is the killing floor where all the freezing takes place. On the left you can see the water reservoir and the floodgates that hold it's water back until necessary. There are fortifications to protect the floodgates and another load of fortifications on the right which the pumps above pump water through. They might seem unnecessary but I cant let the water freeze under the pumps without it breaking the system. On the far right there is some plumbing, the pumps above pump water down through these tiles.

The magma defrosting room. On the far left there is some plumbing which feeds the water reservoir above from bellow and on the far right some plumbing which is fed from above. In the middle you have mainly open space with two bridges and some pumps, when turned on it allows the magma to cycle through this chamber heating the one above. I used bridges because I can drop all the 1/7 magma into the chamber bellow when I'm done using it which saves on magma through stopping it evaporate.

Main magma chamber. This room is two z-levels deep as I thought 1/7 magma wouldn't evaporate when on top of 7/7 magma but was wrong. I'll only post the one z-level of this to save on space. Once again there is the plumbing on both sides of the main chamber, on the left pressure forces it up and on the right pressure forces it down.

Where the plumbing finally meets.

The most complex part is probably the water plumbing. I made it far too complex and if I ever did this again I wouldn't dig down and feed it under the magma chamber like I have. Here is a simple image explaining the water plumbing.
Warring this next image is a huge but it is my refined freeze trap blueprints.

http://www.quelsolaar.com/love_alpha.zip

Currently you can get towercaps growing on all muddy underground tiles by discovering either an underground river or pool. How, if they make any difference, will the new underground features change this?

Personally I'd like to see more natural underground plants found on all maps with a long lived underground. Strange glowing mushrooms anyone?

When Toady does start work on the graphics in DF I'd like to see more context sensitive tiles which respond to the tiles around them like you suggest. There are plenty of things already in game which might be candidates for this. The one that immediately jumps to mind are veins of ore, there could be a number of different ore tiles shared between the various ores but coloured differently for each.

I did a quick animated mock-up. Obviously others could do a better job especially with the tile used for the ore.

The scraggly edges of the vein could be stored as a greyscale mask and could be combined with the texture of the surrounding rock and the ore on the fly so you wouldn't need to make new ones for each ore / rock combination.

On a similar note someone, in another topic, mentioned transitional tiles and posted the following image:


Other places where this technique might be appropriate include the boundaries between different rock types. Also digging out a room could leave the walls slightly uneven until smoothed. Smoothed walls could be more context sensitive than they are now recognising which side has been smoothed and what direction they face, knowing they are in a corner or at a junction and what junction would give more freedom to make interesting tilesets.

I haven't really been playing DF properly lately due to a number of things but when I got some free time this last weekend I decided to test out an idea I had for a death trap. The trap is controlled by five levers and abuses how on cold maps water left to the open air freezes solid.

It works like so:

• Heat a long open air passage from bellow with magma.
• Wait for a squad to enter and lock them in.
• Flood the room with water.
• Remove the magma from bellow the passage allowing the water to flash freeze.
• Heat the passage again melting the ice.
• Drain the room.
• Open the doors then clear the bones and armour.

Ready for the next squad if they haven't fled yet.

I'm not the first to use similar methods but I've not seen one that you don't have to mine out to reset nor have I seen one 3 tiles wide. I had a number of problems and a handful of prototypes later I've got it working. I thought you might like to see an Orc squad put the trap through its paces.

Semi-automatic Orcsicle Maker

Enjoy.

Vattic requested I take some screenshots of Flarechannel with this new app, so I went ahead and pulled it off my dead laptop.

cheers! I thought this app would do your fortress justice, especially with how it uses the correct colours combined with your use of colours. An amazing sight as ever.