Bay 12 Games Forum

will the new pet stuff also include [MOUNT] tags and mount training for fort mode? :x

mounted combat is scheduled for a rewrite in release 7 of the caravan arc

The ordering is subject to change, but mount use is planned as a semi-major rewrite so it is unlikely to be bundled with pet training fixes.

Indeed - this is equal parts exciting and terrifying.   

Exciting because of all the possibilities it allows (not to mention just plain being a convenient way to inspect equipment), and terrifying because, hot damn that's going to require a lot of art to bring to its full potential. 

Alright, large sprites are going well I think:

I think I'm going to continue trying to round out domestic creatures and underground monsters, with a preference for creatures that don't yet have any sprites (like goats and water buffaloes) and creatures that are very common to see.  I wish I'd sponsored mountain sheep last year, because I really like drawing horns, and that would have been a good excuse to go completely crazy with it.  I tried doing some interesting things with the outlines of the fire imps pulsing red, but it ended up being kinda seizure-inducing. 

I think the style is pretty successful so far - things look decent down to around 64x64.  32x32 ends up being a bit ugly, but most are still recognizable

Quote from: darkflagrance on February 29, 2012, 01:48:28 pm

Ramped bodies of water

Especially hilarious on maps with waterfalls.

Man, dem suicide fisherdorfs.  So many "missing" fisherdorfs.  So many. 

Hey Japa, just a question, would it be possible to get the variants to be applied to multiple castes?

So for instance:

Code: [Select]

<variant caste="MALE","MALE1","MALE2" sheetIndex="20" color="bodypart" bodypart="coat" >
    <subsprite sheetIndex="21" color="bodypart" bodypart="hair" />
    <subsprite sheetIndex="23" />
</variant>Instead of having X copies of the same code with just the castename difference.

If its a HUGE recoding excercise and you're limited for time don't bother with it, i don't think It'll apply to much else than the ponymod at this point.
I just know that adding all the equipment stuff for all 88 of my castes will be a beyatch

I'd reccomend grabbing notepad++ and learning the regex (regular expression) search/replace function.  If used correctly, you can search/replace based on complicated criteria in multiple files at once.  It can save an amazing amount of time. 

The real benefit DF adventure mode over another roguelike is that it links with fortress mode. 

I had a world in the previous version where I settled as goblins (one line of modding to make that possible), abandoned, came back on a dwarf adventurer to find a night creature living in the hollowed out hill, killed it, reclaimed as dwarves, and had my first artifact created from the bones of the night creature my adventurer killed.  After playing the fort for ~35 years, an unfortunate sequence of events led to the fort's end at the hands of a combination of forgotten beast blood and goblins.  I came back to the fort on the same adventurer, recruited an antwoman queen from the caverns below the fort, and together we cleaned out the goblins and went on many adventures together. 

Granted, adventure mode kinda sucked at the time, but I would say that my enjoyment of each mode was amplified by achievements I made in the other.  I was once a hard-line fort-mode player, but the narratives you can get from switching back and forth are just too awesome.  The best is if you can manage to get your fort dwarves to create engravings of your adventurer doing adventurestuff. 

Seeing as how that's how the game is intended to be played, I guess I should be a little less surprised at how much fun that is, but hey, there you go. 

I just did a little checking, and it seems like there are 619 raw-defined creatures in vanilla dwarf fortress. 

Granted, many of those are vermin/giants/animalmen which would require little to no extra work to illustrate, but my God that's a lot of creatues to draw!

I've tried a few new things with respect to large creature sprites, and I think I finally have a successful format:
There are child tiles as well, but I can't spawn those in the arena. 

After trying many things I've concluded that what lets me make these things most effectively and quickly is MSPaint.  Doing fancy vector art in corel painter or gimp or photoshop is a lot of work, and as the failed dwarf sprites I made earlier demonstrate, does not scale well once rasterized.  What really helps with the scaling is having hard edges between distinct colour regions. 

[edit] Oh, and the jabberer sprite is doubletall.  I figure that is a good way to handle really large creatures (whales elephants and the like).  It can end up looking strange in some situations, but I think the benefit outweighs the cost.