Bay 12 Games Forum

Alright, circumstances have given me access to a linux machine.  Fought my way through the compile process, and stonesense seems to be working fine here, apart from the allegro timers being... completely insane (looks like they are off by a few orders of magnitude? pretty sure it wasn't taking ~32 years per frame).

In the future perhaps I can me more insightful to people experiencing troubles with stonesense on linux.

 In other news I've taken some small steps toward getting some sprites for human/dwarf children.  I think they're going to be genderless and raceless because... well I don't know how different a human boy and a dwarf girl could possibly look, and it probably isn't worth the effort.  Maybe they will get different hair or something.  There's also no way for children to wield weapons, so I don't have to worry about a secondary pose, and armour probably isn't an issue.  It will take time, but significantly less time than humans or dwarves took. 

There seem to be a number of things sitting around waiting for a pathfinding rewrite.  Most notably flyer/swimmer pathfinding being sort of crazy, but with the upcoming new release there is climbing and jumping, and on the horizon there is potential digging and construction.  Gonna be one hell of a rewrite once it comes, which by the sounds of things will most likely be along with "improved sieges", since that's the one item that simply doesn't work at all until the pathfinding is working (at least not as it's been described). 

Though when that might be is completely unknown

It's going to be interesting to see how all that eventually works it's way to fort mode.  I can imagine strange bugs with dwarves scaling cavern walls and swimming through underground lakes to fetch wads of silk on the cave floor and all kinds of craziness.  What's going to be hard is representing these abilities without having them used all the time.  Maybe someone would scramble over a wall if faced with an imminent threat, but it's much less likely for anyone but some kind of parkour gymnastics ninja to do so while carrying a baby and a load of lumber.  There are many strange cases that need considering.  Stuff to look forward to though. 

Short hairstyles are done.  I keep generating worlds where nobody styles their hair at all so screenshots aren't too good.  Just about everything has two variants based on length now.  I'm considering a length of 500 200 or less to be "short" since that seems to divide things pretty evenly.  That might change depending on how stuff ends up looking. 

Also I fixed turbans. 


I think that's going to be the state of dwarves for a while.  Overall they are looking very good.  The different-length hair makes enogh variation that you can start recognizing the male dwarves by their beards. 

Not sure what I want to focus on next.  Leaning towards getting a set of child sprites drawn, since those could be reused easily for pretty much every race, and there don't need to be significant gender differences.  I might in stead work on hair styles for humans.  Another possibility is getting some animal-people sprited up (only need to do heads - they can use the human sprite sheet).  Then again, maybe elves and/or goblins should get attention, or maybe I should just try to get the domestic animals done with large sprites before anything else.  Damn there's a lot to do. 

edit: fixed some problems, now have many stylish dwarves:

Hmm, well, it's possible that the files are different enough that the comparison software is having trouble aligning them.  That might be fixed by doing a hierarchical sort, but there are some cases where changing that order might lead to different meaning for the loaded files, so it wouldn't be a comparison anymore. 

I'll put some thought towards some kind of "mod comparison" tool. 

Hmm, well that would be pretty straightforward to do for a graphics set, however the toggleable code I have just redirects equipment coloring, so there isn't a straightforward way to select who to apply it to. 

If you want that particular setup, you can go into dwarves.xml, find the male and female civilian entries, and find-replace color="equipment" with color="profession".  It wouldn't be toggleable, but the existing sprite drawing framework has a lot of power to do extremely specific draw operations like that in a straightforward manner. 

hmm... that actually gives me an idea...

Considering this as another alternative to profession display:


thoughts?

The idle dwarves - check their labors and see if perhaps hauling is turned off.  Idle dwarves are not necessarily bad, unless you're waiting a long time for things to get done.  10% idle is pretty normal.  If hauling is enabled for everybody, then there probably just aren't enough hauling jobs to go around. 

"Farmer" is just a description of a broad set of skills the dwarf currently has.  Each of those individual skills are of varying degrees of usefulness, so many "farmers" can mean a lot of things.  Also, you can assign any labors to any dwarf, and as they work those skills will improve, and their displayed profession will change to reflect that. 

As for security - wall off any outdoor sections you plan on using regularly, with only entrances/exits in predefined locations.  Guard those locations somehow (traps and doors are the simplest way to go).  Set things up so that dwarves spend most of their time indoors if at all possible.  Avoid fighting directly with anything until your military is relatively well trained (doing this is complicated and fairly involved - read the wiki).  Never send your dwarves to fight against archers - try to lure archers into traps if you can. 

Be aware that the thing that eventually gets you will not be what you expect.  You will be working on making some kind of megaproject, and some minor thing you forgot about will come back and wreak havoc on the whole setup.  As the game currently stands, it is actually pretty difficult to actually outright "lose", however it is easy for a small event to cripple a fortress badly enough you can't really do anything with it, so be prepared for that eventuality.