Bay 12 Games Forum

Wow.

It's finally here. I can hardly believe it. Congratulations, Toad. The new site looks great. I still haven't finished looking through everything... (by the way, the link to the Dwarf Fortress forum on the front page still goes to the Curses Arcade forum.)

My wait, however, has not yet ended. I'm going to refrain from downloading it until August 16, which is my birthday. Or at least,  that's what I'll do if I can stand it, anyway.

On a final note, I just wanted to engage in a little unseemly bragging and point out this page on the old Dwarf Fortress thread. That part where I thought I'd figured out one of the giant easter eggs? My guess was basically right, only it was actually on an even larger scale than I'd envisioned. It was maybe more detective work than a guess, since Toad had given a few things away in  this really old thread. Basically, the giant easter egg was the roguelike play-an-adventurer half of the game, which Toad has now revealed on the new Dwarf Fortress page.

And with that, I'll return to waiting. It's going to be one long-ass week...

Using some other characters might be fun. Are þ and ð being used for anything?

I'm kind of in the middle on this issue. There's advantages to both graphics(easier to tell what something is, less of a learning curve, more likely to attract new players) and ASCII(simplicity, easier to use one's imagination, appealing old-school effect). I think the best compromise between the advantages of ASCII and the advantages of graphics would probably be the kind of graphics the really old-school top-down RPGs had- the Ultimas up to 6, Phantasie, that kind of thing. They probably wouldn't be that hard to do, either. This guy's custom tileset isn't far off from that look, actually.

[ August 29, 2006: Message edited by: Gezol ]

Maybe what you could do is have the random name generator be able to pick a wild card on occasion. I'm not sure if this is the clearest way to express it, but say there's 150 words(ideally it would be a lot more, but that's for the sake of example) in the standard dwarven name list. When the generator rolls for a name, it could actually be rolling a d155, and if it rolled a number higher than 150, it would roll again, and this time it would be on a list different from the standard dwarven name one. The numbers here are just examples of course, and you could make the number of wild cards higher or lower depending on how often you wanted it to happen.

I don't know if I'm explaining what I'm picturing here that well, but I think something like that might get the ideal effect- mostly very dwarven sounding names, along with an occasional oddity to mix things up, as you say.

Skill seems to make all the difference when it comes to plant gathering. It's definitely worth pouring some points into Herbalism at the beginning, in my opinion. I made sure I had a Competent Herbalist last fort, used the wild plants to make booze, and ended up with about thirty units of Longland beer(along with some strawberry wine), at just the point when I really needed it, as the dwarves were starting to take ridiculously long breaks. And that way, I didn't have to use up precious plump helmets to get them to work faster.

Yeah, that fortress was going pretty well, at least until the lizardmen burst out of the well and started slaughtering everybody. Putting traps around the well will definitely be a higher priority task in the next fortress...

Man, I never expected to see a discussion of outsider art on this forum. Louis Wain(post-schizophrenia, anyway) and Adolf Wölfli are my favorites in that field. And I'd never heard of the Palais Ideal before, but I'm very impressed.

Um, making this on-topic... you could probably have dwarven outsider art. If the varieties of dwarven insanity get diversified in the future, one possible manifestation might be obsessively crafting things, which would be... different in various ways. It actually seems like something that would be in-character for dwarves. Though it sounds like possession creates a similar effect already...

(four more days...)

Wine biscuits actually are a real food item. Though, needless to say, they have more ingredients than just wine...

From what I've heard about the cooking so far, it definitely needs more words, and it should use different ones according to what stuff is made from- there seem to be a whole lot of biscuits and cookies made of meat, and it would make a lot more sense to limit those terms to foods made with flour and sugar, and have words like "roasts" and "steaks" and "kebabs" for dishes with meat as the substrate. What I'd suggest for the cooking is to have a pure meat category, a pure vegetarian category, and another for foods that mix the two, and different vocabulary for all of them. There's probably all kinds of fun possibilities there, particularly when you get to the more sophisticated food items. Actual wine biscuits could be in that category, made from flour, sugar, and dwarven wine.

I just tried the new Kobold Quest binary, and, alas, it's still not working for me. It still crashes when I try to start a new game, this time freezing for a while before it does(this time I get the message that the application has unexpectedly quit, incidentally). It's definitely getting closer, though- the text is fixed, but the cursor is invisible. And, interestingly, the kobold picture at the title screen still doesn't show up, but the bug he's holding does. I wonder if there's some display issues with the brown colors or something.

It sounds like you got it working on more than one machine, so this might be just some weird conflict with something on my computer. I might try it on a couple of other Macs later and see how it does on those...

I just downloaded the binary and tried it out. Alas, all I got was a message saying "You can not open the application 'Kobold Quest' because it may be damaged or incomplete." I don't know if it makes a difference, but I'm running OS 10.3.9 on a G4.