Bay 12 Games Forum

The idea is to make the universe as girly as possible. Obsessive use of magenta and pink, along with replacing wildlife and trees with obscenely cuddly and cute critters such as doves, winged piggies, cherubs, sweet-tooth tigers, lim-lims and pookums, is a must. Most of these creatures are extremely vulnerable, and could be diced into pink fluffy bits with ridiculous ease. The exceptions, such as Boogiemen, Devourers and Candymen, are ruthlessly carnivorous. Deities pertain to such spheres as Candy, Sweetness, Fuzz and Presents, but also Spoiling, Gluttony and Bitterness.

Instead of humans, there are hobbits, and instead of kobolds, poppets. Yes, poppets. Stitched-together, ugly poppets that want nothing more than to steal all your candy. This will probably be fun in Adventure Mode, especially the part about clubbing sugar plum faeries to death with your lollipop.

I've searched around this forum, and it seems someone tried (way back) to design some candy-based tiles. I want to go further than that, though.

What I need right now is a place to get information about candy melting points and boiling points, in order to realistically portray them, and in order to figure out whether any organic, edible substance could realistically stay solid above 180 degrees celsius (or even above the temperature of magma in DF).

Hey, if I'm crazy enough to start work on a candy mod, I'm at least crazy enough to give it realistic physics, too.

I've managed to build a pair of copper cages for my mules and horses, who had given birth to foals prior to being caged. Do they still breed in captivity, or do I have to free them and design an indoor stable for their use? I really want to keep them far, far from the wilderness, as massive herds of elephants tend to prowl just beyond the river.

I'm also planning to create a military once I hit 30 people. Preferably marksdwarves, so they'll later have a small chance of taking down elephants. Do they only train with wooden bolts? And how exactly would I need to set up the barracks? I notice I can give both weapon racks and armor stands "barracks/armory" status, so I'm not sure whether all racks in the same enclosed space ought to be assigned as rooms, or whether I should just assign one of them... Or none at all.

For that matter, how does the game react to multiple rooms overlapping, assuming they're of different kinds (i.e. a dining room, study and bedroom)?

Finally, I'm curious how siege engines work. What do I stand to gain from building them? Do they work indoors? Could they, for instance, fire straight into a herd of elephants?

Blueprints can be used to lay down messages/reminders and to mark down locations that will later be used for building (especially useful above-ground). Extremely useful in succession games. Unlike traffic designations, they don't flash, don't affect gameplay, and can be made permanently visible.

2.labels: a label, which is just a string of text with no gameplay relevance, can be assigned to any building/object (including levers and pressure plates). Useful for describing what a lever does.

4.Job assignment cutoff ranges: set in the manager menu, globally or for every specific job type; a "cutoff range" is the maximum distance a job will look for potential dwarves to do it.

This keeps dwarves from travelling halfway around a 6x6 map just to complete a single task, and makes sure that, if you set up a few stockpiles around a shop, the resident craftsmen won't waste time looking for materials when these stockpiles are depleted. Job assignment cutoff ranges are useful even in conjunction with the upcoming addition of burrows, as the burrows affect individual dwarves, rather than individual job types.

It seems that, if you don't have the materials they need right when they go insane, they'll never bother to collect them on their own, even if the materials are stashed in your stockpiles.

I'd like to suggest a more algorythmic approach to DF's name generation. As it is right now, the names sound neither poetic nor logical: no rhythm seems to be used when putting the words together, and every terrain type seems to draw upon the same list of words. I got the "Hairy Spine of Secrets", "Quick towers of proliferating" and "The livid hills of dye" on the latest world I generated. Granted, I realize much can be lost in the translation, and that these names do have symbollic meaning, but still... It would be nicer to have the names spring out immediately.

I use rhythm constantly, almost unknowingly, whenever I write real prose, and it shows. The text simply has a more cursive feel, as the reader never needs to switch from one rhythm to another while going through it; there's also the added bonus of suggesting a certain pace or attitude to the reader. To obtain the right rhythm, simply assign two integer value to each word - one for the number of syllables, and 1 for the rhythm itself, where the bits set to "1" represent stressed syllables. When hunting for an iambic foot or dimeter, the program would still (presumably) pick a word randomly from the list assigned to the relevant terrain/city class, but have a greater tendency to exclude words which did not fit into the rhythm. This way, long and convoluted names can be included without fear of them sounding particularly awkward.

Granted, the idea of using rhythm might appear unrealistic. Dwarven/elven/kobold names on a completely different world would certainly not match the rhythmical requirements of English phrases. And it seems   the newest version has cut down on overly long names, making rhythm somewhat unnecessary. Still, I get some "clean stormy prairies" and the like that could make use of it.

What is necessary, though, is a way of keeping names thematically cohesive; I don't simply mean that swamps should carry nasty names (indeed, it could be argued that some swamps ought to receive nice names, just like  the great icy mass of Greeland in the real world), but that the game should establish how poetic, abstract, erudite and "alive" the words ought to sound ("alive" words include personifications, such as "wise" and "stealthy"); each word might also alter these requirements slightly. Of course, the requirements would simply offer a greater percentile chance for certain words to be rejected. Take "grainy", which has an "alive" rating of 2 on a scale of 1-10 and an "abstract" rating of 3 (compared to harsh, which can very well have 5 in each rating) - if the word only demands an abstract rating of 7 and alive rating of 10, "grainy" might have an extra (7 - 3) * 10 / 2 + (10 - 2) * 10 / 2 chance of being rejected.

Note that some words can describe abstract concepts (like persistent) that may nonetheless apply to people.

Apart from these, there could be ratings such as "desirable", "dark" and "powerful". "Hairy" isn't particularly imposing or powerful, so "Hairy Spine of Secrets" doesn't make much of a name. Not to mention the fact that secrets are abstract, whereas hair isn't. "Morbid spine of secrets" or "Hairy spine of muttons" both seem somewhat more feasible. Note that I consider even words like "vanquished" powerful, not because of their actual meaning, but because of their feel.

Names would also be made realistic if they drew upon actual weather conditions, landmarks or historic figures / events ("plain of the collosus" or "valley of blood") .

Oh, and it would also help to catalog adjectives based on whether they involve the object's size, shape, age, color, origin and material, or are simply related to how an observer would feel about them (beautiful, grandiose, frightening, scary etc). This way, you can sort out multiple adjectives in the same name more effectively.

The whole point of this algorythmic approach would be to avoid ridiculous names like the "hairy" thing above (I got a lot worse, though, such as jungles of lacy love and whatnot)... I can think of many ways of implementing all these features that wouldn't honestly slow the game down. By using something of this sort, names like "Facebringer" or "Prophet" would have a far smaller chance of emerging.