Bay 12 Games Forum

This raises an interesting issue though, would walking skins be effective? I don't think they would weigh much without their innards, and they don't have muscles....

I assume they can be just as powerful as skeletons, who are fueled solely by magic or somethign as they have no muscles either.

As for combat...

Urist McAdventurer woke up, irritated by faint noises from the nearby thicket and raised his axe. "Damn bogeymen", he grumbled. However, something seemed odd. Bogeymen didn't usually bother to sneak, instead swarming their target while cackling loudly. Feeling nervous, Urist approached the thicket with his axe ready to smite down any fiend that might lurk there.


Then, suddenly, a human-sized figure stepped out of the shadows. It did not speak, nor seem to notice Urist in any way. It was very dark - a surface Dwarf like Urist couldn't recognize the figure's face.

"Hail to thee, stranger! Be ye a foe of the Gears of Men?" Urist asked the stranger. Getting no response, he continued: "Surely I may rest my weary bones here?" Again, Urist got no response. Urist thought the man was just behaving strange like those silly humans always did. "Thou hast my gratitude, human", he said, and returned to his campsite.

At his campsite, Urist laid himself down again and closed his eyes. The soothing sounds of the nature made him sleepy - water flowing nearby, a bird singing far away, the sound of wind blowing inside a hollow bag of skin -

Urist opened his eyes but couldn't do a thing anymore. The strange creature he had seen earlier had come and stretched itself across Urist so tightly Urist couldn't move. He could hardly breath anymore, and the stench was horrible. Urist spent his last minutes dying in a horrible, horrible way.

Kids, always have companions when camping outdoors.

Can't say that I exactly understand what you've done, but you don't have to worry about anything destroying bridges.  Building destroyers don't do that.

(temperature does, and activation when occupied by big things....)

Tantrumers do, though. I lost dwarves because they were standing on my safety bridge - the one suspended over a pit of spikes.

Good sirs, while your views seem perfectly acceptable for street rabble, any gentlemen is a true conciser of steampunk!

My favorite Angband variant is Steamband, a Steampunk version. Extremely cool. It hasn't been updated since 2008 - I was thinking of picking it up myself and continuing development if the original dev doesn't show up...

So many hotkeys... and they are more numerous than DF.

"Hotkeys" is technically incorrect, because there's no real alternative (except in some interfaces, maybe).

Once you learn them, you won't believe how easy it is. Faster than mouse interfaces...

I don't watch a lot of movies, but I think fantasy movies annd games are generally better than fantasy books. A book is written by a single person, with typically no professionals there to tell him/her how stale some of the stuff may be. Movies and games are written and designed by teams of professionals, who typically know their stuff and know which ideas have been overdone lately.

Yeah, clarification: when I say that movies were big, I didn't mean the effort put into them but rather their role in entertainment world. Makes sense, of course - what could've competed with them before television became the King?

A class House is the concept of house. It's not a house itself, but it tells us what's common between all houses. In this case, each house has windows (integer), people (integer), and a name. In Java, a class is defined like <protection> class <name> { //code }. You'll end up using public protection level in most cases.

An object House is what you get when you use the constructor of the class House. The object House is a specific House, and thus you can define the amount of windows, amount of people and the name this particular House has. From the example below, you can create a House with the statement House h = new House(x, y, name); where you replace x, y, and name with the actual values you want. Now, h is a House, and you can poke it with methods.

A method is... well, it's pretty much the same as a function. They usually apply to just one House object - let's use h, the House we created. Method definitions are in the form <protection> <returntype> <methodname>(<parameters>) { //code } and calls are in the form <instance>.<methodname>(<parameters, if any>). Using the methods from the example above, you would query the amount of windows from h with the statement h.getWindows(); - because the return type is int (meaning integer), you can assign the returned value to an integer variable: int windows = h.getWindows(); would result in the variable 'windows' containing the amount of windows in the House h.



.......


But on the other hand, that's already more theory than you need to get started with Java. A lot more. Start working on something small, like Fibonacci numbers or a simple calculator, just ignore the OOP stuff and write it in a single class like you do with most Hello World programs, so you'll get a touch on writing Java code. Since you'll want to read user inputs eventually, I'll give you a short bit that should help you...

Scanner input = new Scanner(System.in);    //input is a Scanner - it allows you to read console inputs
String s = input.nextLine();    //Assigns the next text line typed by the user to the variable s
int number = input.nextInt();    //Assigns the next integer typed by the user to the variable number
double floatingPoint = input.nextDouble();    //Assigns the next double-precision floating point number (usually this means real numbers) to the variable floatingPoint
Example on using inputs:
public class HelloName {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        Scanner input = new Scanner(System.in);
        System.out.println("Hello, what's your name?");
        String name = input.nextLine();
        System.out.println("Hello, " + name + "!");
       
        System.out.println("How old are you?");
        int age = input.nextInt();
        if(age < 18) {
            System.out.println("You're a minor in most countries.");
        }
        else {
            System.out.println("You're no longer a minor in most countries.");
        }
    }
}