Bay 12 Games Forum

It'd be better to have a random element involved. I quite like generating a world with an extinct dwarven civ that's at war with another civ and reviving it.

Perhaps there could just be a placeholder system where each civ gets a strength value from, say 1 to 10, which determines how likely it is to win an invasion.

Quote from: Chaia on October 29, 2014, 02:42:34 pm

Did you receive the first two migrant waves?
 
These are hard-coded, afaik you even get them when your civ is dead. I'm not sure if these get freshly generated (no historic person) when they enter your map, like the starting 7

I did receive the first 2, however the winter did not bring any migrants. Of course during the winter my metal industry rose, and I badly needed more farmers, miners, and possibly hunters. I also needed more militia candidates. In other words, lots of fresh meat.

Migrants never come in winter, wait for spring and see if you get any then.

Quote from: ShadeJS on September 26, 2014, 03:59:54 pm

The world simulation SEEMS pretty segregated from fort / adventure mode, and you may be able to offload that to a thread.

This assumption will become increasingly unrealistic as Toady adds more ability for the fortress to interact with the world.

I don't think so, because it wouldn't make sense for the fortress to be able to interact with the world at any given time and at random intervals. If a single day is the basic "frame" of world calculations, then it could absolutely be done in a different thread and communications between the world and the fortress would only happen at the start of each day. Since it's pretty much a given that world calculations for one day on core 1 would finish before fortress calculations for one day on core 2, you should only have a negligible amount of "lag" when the two threads touch bases.

I don't think world simulation is contributing a lot to FPS drops though, the way it is right now. It's definitely a good idea to do it in a separate thread, because it's going to get a whole lot more complex before actually making a meaningful impact on the fortress mode.

Perhaps you could send a breeding pair back with the instructions to the caravans of "These are for the Mountainhomes for breeding. Not eating."

Urist McVisionary, king has mandated the construction of cave dragon steaks.

Regarding selecting items for trading, are you referring to the "trade at depot" screen or the "bring items to depot" screen?

In both menus you have to deal with long lists, so whatever improvements are applied to one should show up in the other too. My current workaround involves building a dumping area above the depot to move all the junk I want traded away and using macros to mass select stuff for moving to depot and for trading. There should be a better way to do this though.

They've made a huge evolutionary leap and decided to skip the whole nonsense of building a civilization or inventing the wheel and proceeded directly to philosophy and existential dilemmas.

I realize stuff like this has probably been suggested many times, but we're in the bug fix territory now and these things seem fairly easy to squeeze in.

1. Ability to select multiple items in depot interface

Trading probably accounts for at least 10% of my total keystrokes, most of them are completely unnecessary. I want to be able to highlight items A and Z and have to UI mark the rest of the alphabet in between for trade as well. Many items don't fit in bins and my fingers start hurting after manually highlighting 500 units of assorted junk furniture that my fortress has produced in the last two years. No, I can't just throw them out when there are thousands of sad and red-eyed insomniac human children in need of +plum beds+ and leftover -wooden grates-.

Also, it'd be great if we could mark stuff for trade through designations or the stocks menu. In fact, area designations could whittle 2000 key presses down to just 5.

2. Cleaning

Cleaning seems like something that should be a designation job rather than stuff for idle dwarves to do on their own. There are some contaminants you want taken care of right away (-foo'
s forgotten beast extract) and some that you don't want touched at all (your meticulously arranged puddles of blood on the steps of The Grand Temple of Armok).

Speaking of cleaning, while veterinary care is not on the horizon, it'd be great if Animal Caretakers could at least remove various contaminants from my dogs who love wallowing in puddles of blood and spread it throughout the fortress. Doctors can already carry buckets of water and clean patients so it seems that 90% of that functionality is already in game.

EDIT

I've just found out about built-in macros and shed a tear of joy. Still, although coupling them with the depot search command goes a long way towards delaying the onset of video-game arthritis, it'd be nice to have a more efficient and less obtuse way for dealing with mass trades.