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Messages - moki

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196
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Few questions regarding ASCII...
« on: September 14, 2011, 03:18:27 pm »
Sadly, there is now way around the minimum horizontal tiles. If you could have less than 80 horizontal tiles, the menu would take up most of the screen and that's why it's hardcoded. My screen is set to 1440x900px which would allow an 18x18 tileset. 16:10 widescreen is pretty nice for DF.

197
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: Few questions regarding ASCII...
« on: September 13, 2011, 07:00:26 pm »
I never played Nethack or similar games, so I started out with mayday's tileset and graphics. It was okay to understand stuff in the beginning, but from looking at screenshots and reading other people's stories, I soon learned to understand the ASCII. After a while, I found graphics annoying and way too big for my screen. How do people cope with 16x16 or even larger tilesets, where you only see a tiny portion of the map? I just finished my own 12x12 set and won't use anything different... unless I manage do draw a decent 10x10. Also, the the difference between g and g (which can be the difference between life and death) is much easier to see than the one between two squiggly drawings of gobbos with two pixels representing the respective weapon.

So... getting used to reading ASCII took a few weeks and actually playing with it another hour or so.
And I have no idea, why a different tileset should have any influence on DF's performance. Your CPU doesn't really care what kind of pixels it needs to calculate. Smaller tilesets may take a little more processing power, because there are more tiles on one screen but the difference shouldn't be noticeable, unless you managed to install DF on an ancient cellphone ???

198
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Why doesn't my magma trap work?
« on: September 12, 2011, 07:01:44 am »
Quote from: Quietust on September 11, 2011, 07:07:26 pm
Oh, trust me, they will. The first wave may not do it, but subsequent sieges will damage the hatches enough to eventually destroy them.
Oh, well, that sounds like too much Fun for my taste. I'll just build some kind of "street lamp" design around the current holes and call it "lava shrooms"... there aren't that many flying building destroyers that could be dangerous with this kind of construction.

I got another question for these kind of traps: What's the most reliable way to clean up the mess afterwards? The spilled lava takes weeks to evaporate and that's rather unfortunate right in the middle of my main (and only) entrance  :(

199
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Evil embark?
« on: September 11, 2011, 06:27:38 pm »
Zombie rabbits are really annoying. A horde of those just interrupted every single building order in my fort until I sent 10 macelords after them.

Skeletal Carp (I call them skarp) are the worst I've had so far. Just flopped out of the river, into my camp and ate the cook and a miner's left hand. Other undead fish are just as bad, but carp always seem to appear in large groups. Sadly, they don't respawn once they're dead...
I would try a haunted ocean embark for the whales, but all the water kills my FPS before the Fun even starts :(

200
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: blunt weapon usefullness
« on: September 11, 2011, 06:14:20 pm »
I like blunt weapons... there's just something about goblin golf that speaks to me ;)

If there's iron available, I'll make some axes too, but I tend to get maps with tetrahedrite and/or galena. What to do with a few thousand cubic Urists of silver and copper? Silver hammers and maces, copper shields and lead crafts traded for armor... the result is almost the same as with steel axes, only a little less gory.

201
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Why doesn't my magma trap work?
« on: September 11, 2011, 06:00:46 pm »
Using doors below ground may be the better solution, actually. I'm a little afraid that building destroyers will break the hatches before being burned to death. There is a shutdown bridge in the magma tunnels, so the flow can be stopped, even if the hatches are destroyed, but rebuilding and relinking everything does take some time.
Sadly, draining the whole thing (into the caverns and onto the head of some giant three-eyed thrush) takes months, so I won't do a complete rebuild, unless something really great comes up. I'll try to add little 3x3 "street lamps" to the existing holes. They should be a little safer. As I understand pressure, one more level shouldn't decrease the flow speed, as long as it's below the reservoir's highest level.

Oh, by the way, it's great fun to have some migrants arrive just at the time when half the map is covered in lava...  ::)

202
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Why doesn't my magma trap work?
« on: September 11, 2011, 04:43:13 pm »
Thanks to Urist Da Vinci... it was obviously that glitch. I just put a lever-controlled door somewhere along the tunnel and whenever the fountains don't work, I order the lever to be pulled. It somehow restarts the pressure calculations. I'll need to link the pressure plates to that door too to make it trigger every time. I want a fully automatic system - when the gobbos are at the gate, I don't want to rely on some lazy boozebeard to pull a lever.
At least the security measures always work. The bridge closes automatically as soon as the lava starts flowing and if some gets through after it opens again, there are grates with an evaporation chamber below. It's absolutely impossible for lava to flood the fort... unless the right levers are pulled in the right sequence ;D


Now I know, why my macedwarves are all smiling...

I'll also try increasing the pressure some more as the whole thing is a little slow right now. With a single pump stack, the reservoir needs weeks to be filled to the top and some enemies may be able to outrun the fountains. To be truly dwarfy, I need a magma cannon that shoots Armok's blood into the sky... and I have plans for it. The thing about several pumps feeding a single pressurizer pump sounds pretty good and is doable with the current reservoir.

203
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Why doesn't my magma trap work?
« on: September 11, 2011, 12:49:08 pm »
Well, there is the pump at the top and it is connected to the holes with the hatches via the magma tunnels. The tunnels fill nicely, but won't overflow above ground level. I understand that the pressure should stop, once the top level of the reservoir (the one with the pump) is emptied, disconnecting the pump from the magma tunnels. But why doesn't it work when the top level is filled and constantly being pumped into?
Maybe I misunderstood you, but are you saying, I need submerged pumps at the lower levels of the magma reservoir to make it work?

204
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Why doesn't my magma trap work?
« on: September 11, 2011, 11:05:02 am »
It's the first time I'm trying to pressurize magma and send it up in fountains to burn invaders. The plan is as following:
1. Have a big reservoir (several levels) that is filled with magma by pumps up to a few levels above ground. Marked as Nr. 2
2. have a tunnel from that reservoir to holes in the ground were the magma should come out. Marked as Nr. 2
3. cover those holes with hatch covers, linked to pressure plates and opening when a goblin (or heavier enemy) comes near. For testing purposes, I also linked them to a lever.
4. Burn stuff until it's no longer funny :)



Now the problem is... the magma won't raise above ground when the hatches are opened. It just sits there and is no real threat to invaders (except the clumsy ones that dive in by themselves). So far I've tried turning the pumps off and on again and closing and opening the hatches several times - nothing changed.
As you can see, the magma is pumped directly into the reservoir (small picture at the bottom) and therefore pressurized. It does rise from z-2 to z-1 without problem (the tunnel for the magma is 2z below ground) but does not go from z-1 to z0 (ground level).

What exactly could be the problem here? Does pressurized magma only rise one level or am I missing something?

205
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Designing the Killswitch
« on: September 11, 2011, 06:34:30 am »
In my fort? Either do something (completely unintended) to the magma pump stack so that farms are bathed in magma and everybody in the dining room is obsidianized, because I got confused during construction.... or nothing, because it was just a decorative lever from an artifact mechanism, built to make a noble happy. The lever never works as intended for some reason... ::)

If it ever worked, it would surely flood the whole fort (including 20z above-ground tower) with magma, leaving only the lever room with a supply of food, booze, armor and weapons. I don't want some random gremlin in there, so this room is the dwarven equivalent of a bank vault: Two opposing drawbridges over a chasm, each one secured by its own guarded lever. I wish, I knew how to build a proper combination lock that only opens if the right binary number is entered with several levers being pulled in the right order...

206
DF Gameplay Questions / Re: @Dev log 09/10/11
« on: September 11, 2011, 05:55:38 am »
@guitarxe: http://bay12games.com/dwarves/

...and now go to your doctor and say "I think, I got magma crabs..."  ;)

207
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Solo Dwarf Challenge
« on: September 04, 2011, 07:04:41 am »
I tried it once in 28..40d (though not very successfully)... I just chose the most psychologically stable dwarf (heh, nice oxymoron ;) ) to survive, let the others wall themselves in with some food over a brook. This way, they didn't die all at once but went mad one after the other. I think, having them not die all at once helped a little with keeping the survivor sane. There was the occasional tantrum, but no serious problems.

208
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: How do you guys start a fortress?
« on: September 03, 2011, 03:19:23 pm »
I plan some insane project, start digging out everything with 2 miners, make some rock crafts, dam rivers and pump magma all over the place. Food production comes around year 2, but usually the first caravan brings enough to last me another year or so. Bedrooms are nice, but unnecessary until the first tantrums start. I usually bring a lot of stuff on embark, so production is not the biggest concern for a few months.
There's the easy way and there's the dwarven way...   ;)

209
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: What's going on in your fort?
« on: September 02, 2011, 12:19:43 pm »
Quote from: Haspen on September 02, 2011, 08:19:41 am
Quote from: moki on September 02, 2011, 07:38:38 am
dwarves interrupt all their above-ground work and run around aimlessly. Above ground work includes getting any food or booze ::)

Dig ramps under that aboveground food stockpile, watch barrels fall into safety, ???, profit! ;)

I did it the hard way, after some migrants arrived: Got everybody in the militia and dug ramps under the beasts.
Regular badgers are only slightly more dangerous than other wildlife, because of their tendency to go into martial trance. The undead kind is not as bad as you'd think and was easily rendered into pulp, though some more dwarves were injured. The passage to the other side of the river got sealed up afterwards to stop other enemies from crossing over.

I also laid the foundations for the "F* the world!"-device which will, of course, involve magma. Lots of magma from a big pressurized tank, to be precise. I hope, I can get enough magma-proof materials from traders to construct the actual pump stack. It's only 18 levels high (embark with very shallow underground), but that's still a lot of pumps for the double-stack, I plan to build.
And yes, I think of flooding everything (especially the stream for giving me skarp) with magma before building bedrooms and a working military. If everything goes well, I won't need military... if not, well... that's what we call "Fun"  :P

210
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: What's going on in your fort?
« on: September 02, 2011, 07:38:38 am »
Quote from: moki on September 01, 2011, 02:52:21 pm
luckily, no Giant Skadgers
I may have spoken to early... there are skeletal and zombie badgers, though of normal size. They're on the other side of the stream, but my dwarves interrupt all their above-ground work and run around aimlessly. Above ground work includes getting any food or booze ::)

In other news, one of the miners lost his left hand to a zombie milkfish and refuses to work now. He can't pick up equipment, so I disabled the mining labor, but he's still standing around with "no job" instead of going to the makeshift hospital.

 

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