Bay 12 Games Forum

So, I saw that during the UCSC talk that there was still some questions on what kind of font to use for the premium version. I have dyslexia, so I figured I could give some nice suggestions on this front.

My recommendation for large swathes of text is Google's Noto, specifically the regular serif one:

https://www.google.com/get/noto/

Serif fonts are most commonly used for large texts, supposedly because they're more legible. However, the prime reason to use it for DF is that it is just closer to the fantasy aesthetic, as well, CP437 is semi-serif as well. The Noto font because it is free to use as well as having a wide language support so it should be a little bit future proof if the future sees translation of the game.

For display (that's headers and big text), if you wanted to make it fancy, there's of course Noto Serif Display, but for a bit more time-appropriateness there's Unifraktur Maguntia and Unifraktur Cook and the much more readable (but still invoking the old-timey feeling) Berkshire Swash. Do not use these for the large swathes of text. Funnily enough I, dyslexic person, can actually read blackletter and textura scripts just as easily as everything else, but most people cannot.

Some people with dyslexia really benefit from being able to choose open dyslexic, so being able to configure font would be great:

https://www.opendyslexic.org/

In my case, opendyslexic is not all that useful, but rather I really benefit from larger (or configurable) font-sizes (14 to 18px) and higher (or configurable) line-spacing (I am pretty happy with a comfortable academic 1.5). On top of that, I really benefit from paragraphs.

Before we continue on, I'd also highly recommend limiting the total line width. Elements of typographic style has some good guides regarding this.

Text Suggestions.

So, as stated before, I would really benefit if there's more paragraphs. I know for a fact there's someone on the development team that understands paragraphs. Generally, if the paragraphs feel too short (because they're one sentence long, for example) it is because the topic of the paragraph cannot have said more about it. In real-world writing we try to merge together paragraphs in that case, but that might be really hard to do programmatically. In DF's case I don't think you should be ashamed of single-sentence paragraphs for that reason.

My Friend The Dwarf

My Friend The Dwarf was a legendary pig tail quire.

This is a pig tail quire. 
Written on the item is a biography entitled My Friend the Dwarf, authored by Tobul Flaxenquakes.  It concerns the dwarf Tosid Windpicks.  The overall text emphasizes the value of knowledge.  The writing is reasonably serious yet it is somewhat self-indulgent.  Overall, the prose is not awful, but not very good either.  The work has two chapters.  The first chapter covers the creation of Uncanny Cycles in Paperposts by the dwarf Tosid Windpicks in the early autumn of 252.  The second chapter covers the creation of Book Of Biography in Paperposts by the dwarf Tosid Windpicks in the late autumn of 252. 

In the early summer of 253, My Friend The Dwarf was created in Skinbasement by the dwarf Tobul Flaxenquakes.
In the early summer of 253, My Friend The Dwarf was stored in Skinbasement.
In the early summer of 253, My Friend The Dwarf was stolen from Skinbasement by the dwarf Tobul Flaxenquakes.
In the early summer of 253, My Friend The Dwarf was offered to the dwarf Tosid Windpicks by the dwarf Tobul Flaxenquakes.
 

This could probably be split up a little, here splitting up where there ought to be paragraphs:

My Friend The Dwarf

My Friend The Dwarf was a legendary pig tail quire.

This is a pig tail quire. 

Written on the item is a biography entitled My Friend the Dwarf, authored by Tobul Flaxenquakes.  It concerns the dwarf Tosid Windpicks.

The overall text emphasizes the value of knowledge.  The writing is reasonably serious yet it is somewhat self-indulgent.  Overall, the prose is not awful, but not very good either.

The work has two chapters.

The first chapter covers the creation of Uncanny Cycles in Paperposts by the dwarf Tosid Windpicks in the early autumn of 252. 

The second chapter covers the creation of Book Of Biography in Paperposts by the dwarf Tosid Windpicks in the late autumn of 252. 

In the early summer of 253, My Friend The Dwarf was created in Skinbasement by the dwarf Tobul Flaxenquakes.
In the early summer of 253, My Friend The Dwarf was stored in Skinbasement.
In the early summer of 253, My Friend The Dwarf was stolen from Skinbasement by the dwarf Tobul Flaxenquakes.
In the early summer of 253, My Friend The Dwarf was offered to the dwarf Tosid Windpicks by the dwarf Tobul Flaxenquakes.
 

Now, this doesn't look terribly pretty on this forum, so let's put it into a bit of context, and then format it.

First section is what I see right now with the mono spaced square font in my df window. The second is a version with Noto Serif as the font and 1.5 line-spacing. The final is me trying to format it as nicely as I can.

Image URL

So the changes for the latter are...

• Smaller total line-width.
• No justification of the text, this is typically only done for texts with columns, or for DF's case, the instrument tooltips, where justification does help readability.
• A smaller space between subsequent paragraphs (which is higher than the line spacing, not sure how possible this is), and also a first-line indent. This is how books tend to have their paragraphs set up and it is really nice for large swathes of text.
• A fancy font+bigger size for the header
• Turning the events at the bottom into a list.
• Italicizing the title of the books. In academic texts the title of the book tends to be italicized or underlined to emphasize that it is a formal title, which makes it easier to read over when said title is quite long. You could use colors for this as well, I suposse. I did not do this consistently; it ought to be done consistently. 
• When starting to list the chapters, I changed the period in "The work has two chapters." into a column.
• I tried to avoid things like drop-caps, which, while fancy, are also a pain to position programatically.

On the really big legends entries (any given dragon), the list of events gets really intimidating. It'd be great if they could somehow be compacted a bit more. As far as I understand there has already been work done for this (because the linking changes made each histfig page totally intimidating), but if there's more to be done I guess I'll make another post

Anyway, it'd be great if the description pages just became a tad bit more formatted than just having a variable width font. Right now I have to focus really really hard to be able to digest them.

Also they can get exp in up to 3 different skills in case of observer/tracker/record keeper trifecta, afaik.

Yeah, I am slowly starting to get the feeling that it is both topics are what decides a scholar is a type of scholar, and that an assortment of skills are used for a given topic.

So, I decided to set up a fort for just paper making, so I have a place with a ton of quires. The idea being that I could then make an adventurer who'd go around making books and deliver them back to the fort so the fort would have a nice assortment of books in it's library.

I ended up getting super lucky, as it turned out one of my migrants was a historian who knew 16 out of the 20 history topics, including all the forms. Now here's the thing, when you have a library and assign a scholar who already knows topics that aren't in your library, they'll go and write manuals to put them in the library. I am wondering if this is also the case for bards and art forms... hm...

More surprisingly, if you have a master-apprentice relationship between your scholars, one will teach the other their topics directly. The books are more useful, certainly, but this was quite a surprise to me!



Anyway, I guess this further emphasizes that taking an immigrant or visiting scholar will help far far more than trying to setup a library with a starting dwarf as scholar.

Just putting this here for putting it in the wiki later, whenever I get my password recovered...

Technological treatise: The method of examining artifacts to determine how methods have changed over time.

Enxyclopedia: The compilation of many summaries into a single text.

EDIT: Of course topics teaching was in the wiki already, on a completely different page.

Scholars can also form master/apprentice relationships. The master will teach his apprentices about topics. A high teaching skill for the master and a high student skill for the apprentice leads to faster skill growth.

Giving counsel to the sick sounds like it would be sensible, yes. From the last fotf, it was said priests should take up some stress-relieving functions, so I suspect consolation will be going in too.

Thanks for the answers! I guess I'll be eagle eying the priests from now on. ò_ó

Good luck with getting done what you want to have done this month! I myself am neutral towards adventure mode villains, but that's also because I just suck at role playing evil, but I can totally understand you'd want to have players to be able to push as well as pull in the same release.

yes, setup the manager in the nobles screen, get them a meager office(a throne in the middle of nowhere is sufficient), then (U)nits->(M)anager, there set up 10 drinks to brew brewn from plants, then press (C)onditions, and press (P)roducts to get a premade condition for it, the game will try to give a good default. You should probably also setup (R)eagents, and I'd also recommend setting up an order for rock pots or barrels if there's no empty drink bearing containers.

i am not even sure what to say to that. maybe something like, 'i think df's data parallelism issue is far too big for that to have any meaningful effect'. yeah, i think that will do.

Yeah, I updated it, the old one was looking at the wrong list(artifacts instead of written contents). There's still some tweaking to do there, as it is being really messy and bad code in places. I'll take a look at Patrick's thread, thanks!

I looked at my two worlds, and it seems that form unlocks are pretty rare. Writing chronicles in adventure mode is pretty fun though. I guess the idea is you collect knowledge of historical events of an entity and then proceed to write a chronicle about it. Pity you can't select which entity you'll write about.

So, I had been looking into libraries past week, and I realize now this thread isn't so old, so I'll just post what I have learned.

While a lot of info is from the old Halnoth thread, most of it actually comes from looking at the DFHack data structures, so kudos to them.

The way knowledge works is that you have that knowledge tech-grassland, with it's topics. Each histfig keeps track of which topics they do and don't know, as well as which books they've read. It also keeps track of a knowledge goal for the histfig and how many times they've performed a research action(in the DFHack api reffered to as times pondered, but it also goes up when they participate in a discussion regarding their research goal). After a certain amount of research actions (DFhack comment suggests between 40-60, I myself suspect this is tied to academic skill) the scholar gains research points in said topic(the amount of research points is definitely tied to skill level, with dabbling giving in the thousands, and competent/skilled three times as much, but there's no set numbers). According to the DF hack comments, 100K research points is necessary for a topic to be researched, and the histfig will then write a book about it.

There's still a lot I don't understand, for example, there is a certain amount of variance in how much pondering is necessary to get research points, and the research points themselves also vary for a single scholar. One time a skilled (lvl 4) geographer got 4700 research points, and the subsequent time 3700 research points.

As for skill gain...

• From my own experiments, pondering gives 0 to 5 xp in a given academic skill. Weirdly enough I have had dwarves who gained record keeper from pondering as well, but also dwarves who have not gained any. I am still trying to figure out what is up here. From my tests a scholar will gain about 700xp in their academic field a year if they only ponder. Have not tested the effect of skill yet.
• From Halnoth's thread, discussions give 10-30 xp in a given academic skill. Halnoth also notes this trains speaker, I have not seen this, might be related to my recordkeeper weirdness above.
• Writing a book gave Halnoth 12 xp writer and 6 xp wordsmith, my one scholar got 50 xp writer and 12 xp wordsmith. Maybe the values changed between releases of DF, maybe there's another factor. Writing doesn't go up for scribes, it seems to be about composing a text, much like how I am composing this post.
• Books that aren't academic aren't tied to knowledge, your Dwarves will just occasionally write them. No idea what does affect it.
• Dwarves that get started upon embark with academic skills will not know any topics when play starts. Only histfig immigrants and visitors might know topics without reading.

From this, I can say the following:

• More important to buy/raid books than to write them yourself. Because of the bug 10231 scholars won't rediscover discovered topics (though I have not verified this yet), meaning that writing books might prove tricky, and more importantly, buying/raiding just takes far less time.
• Trying to attract wandering scholars might be a better option than to make a starting dwarf a scholar. Wandering scholars often come with a research goal half-completed, so it takes less time for them to start writing. They also know much more topics and have read far more books than any starting dwarf would. Immigrant scholars are also more useful.
• Research takes a long, long, long time. I haven't ever seen the research progress on a legendary something-or-the-other, so no idea how much effect this has. However, as long as the scholar doesn't die, they keep their research progress, suggesting that you could expel a scholar if you think a siege will end your fort, and then start a new one elsewhere and hope the scholar comes to your new fort.
• While discussions may not increase the research progress for the dwarf who doesn't deal with that topic, it does give both far more xp than pondering does. So while discussions are not useful for a hypothetical legendary scholar to research more quickly, they will speed up lower skilled dwarves much more.

With that said, I'll leave you with my DFHack script to get information about the current academic knowledge of a given dwarf:


It might need some tweaking the next DFHack release as I am seeing from the github some names got changed... It's also the first time I've ever written lua, so my apologies if I commited lua-crimes or something.