Bay 12 Games Forum

I think the best way to say it is that the elements of a story, should be there to be entertaining, not be there because it's expected of the story.
So if a detective story contains a femme fatale because it's expected, it's bad, if a detective story contains a killer's motive, it will enhance the suspention of disbelive of the reader and therefore increasing the entertainment.

So DF is detailed in the manner that the special metal actually has a reason for being special(super light, super though), which does not come without it's flaws(hammers of this stuff aren't usefull).
This is important when recounting the story of how your young recruit was able to kill a dragon valiently while using a silver hammer that had originally been made to slay the ghost of the fortress broker who started running amok a year ago.(assuming undead slaying silver-weapons will be implemented one of these days)

DF is cliched in the manner that only goblins/kobolds/demons will siege you without reason.

Ofcourse, that will go away over time, but it's still in for now.

That said, the best fantasy(and pretty much the only fantasy I still read) I've read is children's fantasy. I really like Diane Jones's work for example.
And she too has these incredibly detailed worlds, but she writes characters and prose well, so I don't feel annoyed as with other fantasy writers. Last 'adult' fantasy I read was the Magician's guild, which seemed too interested in what the heroine thought but couldn't bother telling me what the city looked like.
So I think it's both a matter of lack of unneeded elements as well as just honest good writing that shapes a good fantasy novel.
For DF this is the gameplay. Once the races get defined more in the gameplay, the game will feel better.

</rambling>

according to his profile he's been last active in january...

Sorry, thundercraft. I just checked my 31.18 fort with stonesense (both an old copy with the new xml and the svn copy) and they both don't show critters...

Perhaps with the new algorithm work being done on DFhack, we might be able to create a xml for 31.18 later?

Hence why there's no elven cities ofcourse!

Nah, the Elves are anti-wood cutting. Because they do have wooden items, it's assumed they grow their furniture somehow. (And they can always make hammocks, what with all their pig-tail cloth)
Aside from that, it's reasonable that they can gain a lot from trade as well.

Hell, you could even go as far as to assume that the elves have some magical source of warmth that they could use to heat forges, or perhaps they only use dead trees and driftwood for charcoal.
And hopefully, perhaps the elves will have a specialisation that allows them to have intresting export. Like, perhaps all elves can tame any kind of animal, no matter the exoticness.

I agree that the mockup-tree needs more leaves...

EDIT: also, don't forget, the current culture/race system will become much more fluent, as silverionmox noted. This means that perhaps we'll have both your vision of the elves as well as the current stock elves in the same world. However, you do need to understand that when you start suggesting, most people will consider the stock races as they are now.

Awesome. I already was walking through adventure mode to check stuff.(Didn't get far though, I still suck at adventure mode)

Though, perhaps the unsee-able area's might be a wee bit too dark? You really get a splash of bright-lighted stuff on the screen this way.

The development page states that the next release is going to focus on the towns. Are you planning to do the non-human civ dwellings as well?

Question was already awnsered.

next time, to stop your dissapointment, pay attention to the names of the dwarves

I can imagine it would take quite some time.

Trees are bigger==more work.

Also, the new multitile tree system is a bit difficult to handle. As far as I know from experimenting with it, flat pictures like Markus's Alder won't do, as the multitile tree system is defined asif the tree was actually an object within DF. So it's a threedimensional setup.

On top of that, when you change the viewpoint, the tree tiles will stay in their original place. So if you have a tile that has a branch going downleft to the trunk, and you change the viewpoint, the branch will still be going downleft... even though it should be going down-right. It's an expected situation, and would require you to make 4(or less) viewpoints of a tree and to write the xml so that it knows what sprite to pick. However I don't know whether the border_open and border_closed work on a construct that only exists within stonesense as opossed to the game.