Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Uristocrat on January 22, 2011, 06:24:43 pm

Quote from: Jacob/Lee on January 22, 2011, 04:43:52 pm

I embarked as living trees that ate wagon meat before..

'Twas fun.

It was this that made me realize that duplicating raws is roughly equivalent to feeding your computer LSD.

I hope you allow me to sig' this

Haha, of course

I love the Orbital Magma Cannon, but it takes ages to build one due to the difficulty in getting magma up there.

But I thought of one other crazy thing you can do:  you can build floors, connected to a causeway above by a support that you can use to cause a controlled cave-in on any part of the map.  Initially, they'll have to be supported by another section of floor, but you can remove that once you have the support ready.  Just don't drop them on your fort.

Now I just have to build this....

I wonder what would happen if you dropped one that was as big as the entire map?  "A section of the cavern sky has collapsed."

I don't know that I support forcing it to dump into the "all cancellations" bucket. For the most part it does belong there, but I'm generally in favour of customisability.

Thus, have a section in announcements.txt relating to job cancellations, setting a threshold for each, and have the "misplaced" option be moved to a more all-inclusive threshold.

Would be useful, so long as we had some way of making priority conditional:  either half of this message is okay to show all the time, it's only when we have both halves together that it becomes totally worthless spam, so I could certainly support that idea.

An alternate fix, of course, would be to figure out what weird thing the dwarves are doing that makes them spam this message in a mature fortress and getting them to stop.

I embarked as living trees that ate wagon meat before..

'Twas fun.

It was this that made me realize that duplicating raws is roughly equivalent to feeding your computer LSD.

For mass production jobs like masonry, why not just use a bunch of tasks set to repeat?  If you have more than one task set to repeat, they'll cycle through all of them and it's not like you're going to run out of stone any time soon.  I generally end up with doors and stone blocks on repeat for most of my fortress's life.

That won't fix the problem you have with render fat, but it will fix the rest, mostly.  For example, queue up 10x"collect sand" on repeat for your normal glass furnaces and the manager won't be able to assign anything to that workshop.  And if you're trying to do thousands of glass blocks 30 at a time in the manager, I think it would be *much* easier to set the magma glass furnace to make them on repeat....

Have you seen some of those African gourds? They get past 20L of volume and possibly larger.

Yes, it works well for elves, since they wouldn't be making jugs from wood, they wouldn't be burning wood to make clay ones, and they wouldn't be mining coal to smelt metal with.

I can just imagine some elven warlord yelling, "We must not allow a portable jug gap!"

Definitely strikes me as an item for the hippies, err, elves, but it's still an interesting idea.

> Full global mouse UI control (create a global ui control set with mouse wheel scroll)

Learn to type and you'll wonder why people even consider using the mouse.

> Improved hauling (at the very basic be able to carry a stack of say 12 arrows/handful of 25 seeds, forget about wheelbarrows and stuff until DF is more feature complete)

Wheelbarrows and such might be the easier way to implement that, but I agree that it's badly needed.

> Resizable stockpiles and copy stockpile settings feature

I see little reason to resize them (just make another of the same type), but copying stockpiles would be great.  Either have some way to set, say, 10 custom stockpiles via some config file (so that we could save them between forts), or a way to "copy this stockpiles settings to my custom stockpile setting" or both.

> Farm irrigation (watering with buckets once every season to be precise, nothing else, currently creating a farmable field is ridiculous)

Find a pond, build a floodgate, a lever and some doors.  If you can divide by 7, you can make a farm.  But yeah, you should be able to more directly irrigate with buckets.  And just for the record, you *can* make holes in the floor one z-level up and turn them into pond zones.  It's slow as heck, but I've done it and it works.  Rather than hoping for the water to spread perfectly, I suggest digging out and patching over the holes as you go.

> Standing production orders (convert manager screen to this with a "production request" and "fortress automation" screens)

Definitely.  Could be very simple:  take a task, then look at the inputs and outputs for it.  So for brewing:
Barrels > 10
Brewable plants > 0
Booze < 1000
Brew drink

That would let you keep at least 10 free barrels and only brew until you have 1000 units of booze, with all the numbers being user-configurable.

> Better GUI based labor control, "Integrated Dwarf Therapist", (replace current labor screen, integrate job priorities?)

Yeah, something like the z-health screen for labors would be nice (though it still wouldn't quite replace DT).  Job priorities could definitely use a bit of work so that "trade at depot" and "diagnose patient" and the like didn't get neglected so much.

> Make Clothing in Sets (eg. left and right glove produced simultaneously)

I thought it already did that?  They don't *wear* them with respect to sets, but...

Anyhow, I wouldn't underestimate the time required.  Even though I think some of the changes "ought" to be easy, there's a lot behind the scenes that we might not know about.

Can the specific message X Cancels Store Item in Y:  Job item misplaced. be moved so that it's only displayed when dwarves announce all job cancellations?  There are reasons why people would want to see some 'store item' cancellations, but they have more to do with being attacked/not able to find a path/etc.  Similarly, there some jobs that we might want to know about the cancellation of, even if its due to a misplaced item.

But I can't think of any situation, ever, where people actually care that the hauler can't find the piece of food that someone just ate, which I suspect to be what generates all that spam.  So it would be lovely if that specific message could have its priority dropped way down so that people would only see that cancel spam if they really wanted to.

Seriously, most of the time it's about 2/3rds of my list of announcements and I have it set to announce the least amount of job cancellations you can, except for none, just to catch important things like someone running out of coal or logs.