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Messages - Aquillion

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616
DF General Discussion / Re: What turns you off about DF?
« on: April 20, 2009, 09:23:07 pm »
Let's stop talking about placeholders.  Yes, yes, we know some people want it and others don't.  Toady is equipped to know exactly how much of a bother it would be.  Comparatively speaking, we aren't.  Therefore, there's nothing else for us to discuss there.  That discussion is totally useless to Toady and Threetoe; it doesn't answer their question at all, because Toady is going to already know the instant he looks at the suggestion what the issues are (or, at least, after thinking about it for a bit, he'll know better than we could.)  Some people saying that they want it is good, but beyond that nothing you people are saying at this point is any real use to them.

Quote from: PMantix on April 20, 2009, 09:19:06 pm
1. A quick help. She was completely overwhelmed by the massive amount of things that can be done. What she would have liked to see was the ability to click a word or object and have some kind of helpful hint pop up to briefly explain the word. For example, she was making her starting 7 and wasn't familiar with what a thresher was or did. I wasn't around to explain it or show her the wiki, so she just skipped it..   what would have made the difference was a quick pop up text bubble stating what the job is, inputs/outputs, and associated buildings/areas. Same goes for objects..  "this is a throne. It is needed as seating adjacent to tables in dining rooms. It can be designated as an office for administrative purposes or as a throne room for nobles." That way you can be quickly informed about what something is, instead of the default "what the hell is that" or "how the hell do I make this"
This is a good idea.  The '?' help would be much more useful if it was context-sensitive and brought up information about whatever your cursor is over at the moment.  It would especially be nice to be able to get information about workshop tasks, too, learning what each task requires and produces.

617
DF Suggestions / Re: For next or post-next versions, Open Wound + Miasma = Infection
« on: April 20, 2009, 09:13:04 pm »
Quote from: Volfram on April 20, 2009, 08:27:48 pm
wouldn't(theoretically) add much to the game.  Miasma is already simulated, and dwarves already check when they walk through it.  Adding an extra step which sees if the dwarf has any currently open wounds would be fairly minor.
But the objection is that it's wrong.  Clouds of stench and miasma do not actually spread infection in the real world.  Dwarf Fortress has 14th century technology, yes, but the world is generated and run on realistic principals; and some stinky rotten milk on the other side of a hallway will not actually infect your wounds in reality, no matter how annoying it is.

618
DF General Discussion / Re: What turns you off about DF?
« on: April 20, 2009, 08:13:48 pm »
Quote from: ThreeToe on April 19, 2009, 04:15:42 am
You all have many valid complaints, as should be expected.  It seems like the thing that would keep the most players from giving up is a good tutorial, in addition to other fixes.  I’d be interested in hearing how you think that should look.  For instance, one long tutorial, or several guides aimed at different aspects of the game.  What subjects are the most confusing?  Should the tutorial map fit in the world itself as a mission from the Mountainhomes for example?
I think a tutorial fit into the world itself would be the most fun for players -- basically a scripted "campaign mode" that is really a tutorial.  Give the players sequential requests to build and use certain structures (a farm with farming instructions, a dining hall, some bedrooms, and so forth.)

Oh, also.  The "Start now" setup should probably be improved; it's pretty un-optimal, I think.  Give players some of every seed, say, which is just common sense when starting out.  No animals aside from dogs -- they're not useful enough to a starting fort, and players get them automatically from immigrants anyway.  A good common-sense skill-assignment with one or two miners, one or two farmers, a chef, a fisherdwarf, a brewer, someone with decent social skills and so on -- players shouldn't have to read the wiki to determine what a good starting setup is; when they hit "start now" the game should provide something decent for them.

Oh, also!  Another option would be to make a 'scenario builder' that players could use to make their own scripted scenarios -- where they could set certain events to happen at certain times, or require that the player produce / do certain things first.  This could be used for all sorts of things, but it could also be used to let users create and update their own in-game tutorials.  You could then link to the best of those on the download page.

619
DF Suggestions / Re: On Underground Lakes And The Navigation Thereof
« on: April 20, 2009, 04:14:00 am »
Quote from: Vattic on April 19, 2009, 05:20:13 pm
Having a method to fairly reliably train your dwarves to swim seems like a nice solution to me. I'm hoping to fill those underground lakes with bridges and walkways but dread dwarves falling in :P.
That's not the problem.  Even if you train your dwarves to swim, currently my understanding is that they still won't realize they can swim -- they will path around water, rather than swim through it.

620
DF Suggestions / Re: New kinds of beds
« on: April 20, 2009, 04:12:28 am »
Hmm.  The Bed in History.  The History of Your Bed.

Quote
The earliest beds were little more than piles of straw or other natural materials to ease the discomfort of lying on a bare, cold floor. An important change occurred when beds were first raised off the ground to protect the sleeper from draughts, dirt, and pests.
We don't have straw or reeds in the game yet, but this could be a possible use.

Quote
More than 3,600 years ago, the Persians filled goatskins with water to create the first water beds. In ancient Egypt, beds were made from wood and reed matting, and the bed functioned as a place to eat and entertain socially as well as to sleep.
Aha!  We do have waterskins.  Still, a bed made of waterskins?  Hard to picture.

Quote
In Homer's Odyssey, the bed of Odysseus is described as being made of woven rope, while the ancient Romans had a variety of beds for different purposes. These included the lectus cubicularis, or chamber bed for sleeping, the lectus discubitorius, or table bed, on which up to three people would lie to eat, and the lectus funebris, on which the dead were carried to the pyre. In most ancient societies, however, only the rich would have enjoyed the luxury of sleeping in a bed.
We certainly have a lot of rope.

Quote
In Saxon England, a bed typically consisted of a mattress on wooden boards, covered with quilts and fur rugs. In the later Saxon period, some beds were raised wooden platforms. Again, it was only the rich who slept in beds; everyone else spent the night on the floor huddled around the fire in the great hall.
Our beds, only without the mattresses or quilts or fur rugs, so it's really more of a "log you sleep on."

The second part is important, though.  Technically, it is anachronistic for Dwarf Fortress to have individual beds for each dwarf -- perhaps what we really need is the ability to create 'fire-halls' or whatever, where non-noble dwarves will sleep without much of a bad thought.  Wealthier dwarves should get more annoyed than poor ones at having to do this.

621
DF Suggestions / Re: For next or post-next versions, Open Wound + Miasma = Infection
« on: April 20, 2009, 04:01:16 am »
One dead roach on the other side of the room should not cause an injured dwarf to get gangrene.

622
DF Suggestions / Re: Ability to Refill mined out areas
« on: April 16, 2009, 11:02:36 pm »
Quote from: Footkerchief on April 16, 2009, 10:52:39 pm
Quote from: G-Flex on April 16, 2009, 10:30:49 pm
In other words, you want the ability to build walls, which you can already do.

The only problem with them is that you can't engrave them. Which IS irritating.
That gets into complicated issues, though.  I mean, right now the player sees things that the dwarves couldn't possibly see themselves -- this is necessary, because a "true" fog of war would be horribly annoying in a game where you don't control your dwarves individually.

The real use for this would be re-hiding areas that are totally blocked off from the sight of any of the player's dwarves.  I.e. rewalling HFS would keep you from seeing what's moving around in there, although a fortification would still allow it.

623
DF Suggestions / Re: Acid?
« on: April 11, 2009, 01:55:15 am »
Quote from: FoboslC on April 06, 2009, 06:39:23 am
Right. And how would they produce it.
From Wikipedia:

Quote
Hydrochloric acid was first discovered around 800 AD by the alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan (Geber), by mixing common salt with sulfuric acid ("vitriol"). Jabir discovered many important chemicals, and recorded his findings in over 20 books, which carried his chemical knowledge of hydrochloric acid and other basic chemicals for hundreds of years. Jabir's invention of the gold-dissolving aqua regia, consisting of hydrochloric acid and nitric acid, was of great interest to alchemists searching for the philosopher's stone.

Quote from: FoboslC on April 06, 2009, 06:47:39 am
Out of rock. Right. What kind of rock would it be? An acid rock?
Regarding Sulfuric Acid (aka Vitriol):
Quote
The discovery of sulfuric acid is credited to the 8th century Muslim chemist and alchemist, Jabir ibn Hayyan (Geber). The acid was later studied by 9th century Persian physician and alchemist Ibn Zakariya al-Razi (Rhazes), who obtained the substance by dry distillation of minerals including iron(II) sulfate heptahydrate, FeSO4 • 7H2O, and copper(II) sulfate pentahydrate, CuSO4 • 5H2O. When heated, these compounds decompose to iron(II) oxide and copper(II) oxide, respectively, giving off water and sulfur trioxide, which combine to produce a dilute solution of sulfuric acid. This method was popularized in Europe through translations of Arabic and Persian treatises, as well as books by European alchemists, such as the 13th-century German Albertus Magnus.
So, yes, from stones.  Sort of.  And note that the compounds involved have more period-appropriate names, and other uses that could make them worth adding to Dwarf Fortress:

Iron(II) sulfate, aka Ferrous Sulfate, Green vitriol, or Iron vitriol.
Copper(II) sulfate, aka Cupric Sulfate, Blue vitriol, or Copper vitriol.

Most notably, they are used to color glass, and as dyes (in China, as early as the Song Dynasty -- ~1100 AD.)  They were obtained when water would accumulate in the appropriate sorts of mines.

Hmm, this page looks useful...

624
DF Suggestions / Re: Some degree of intelligence
« on: April 10, 2009, 01:22:16 am »
Quote from: ¿ on April 07, 2009, 04:52:15 pm
If you think the pathfinding eats up CPU now, just wait until they're calculating future projections before they actually happen in game.
To be fair, it won't be quite that bad, since in theory they only have to do a check when finishing one of a small number of jobs -- not things that come up often enough to have a major CPU impact.  But it's still decidedly nontrivial (it isn't even always obvious what side they should want to be on.)

One important thing that is handled already:  Dwarves assigned to remove or channel out a staircase will always do it from below.  No exceptions.  This can be useful for cutting an area off with the dwarf on the correct side, if you keep it in mind.

625
DF Suggestions / Re: Catapults: take from elven skulls stockpile
« on: April 09, 2009, 03:48:41 pm »
Mmm.  If I could do that, I'd use catapult systems for item transport.  Which would be awesome.

626
DF Suggestions / Re: Illustrated weapon trap suggestion
« on: April 09, 2009, 03:47:59 pm »
...but it would be trivial for a player to build a ceiling over a large area, then build whatever else you want to require (walls, probably, for thickness) on top of that.  And I really doubt the AI can be made smart enough to realize that that's an obvious trap (especially since sometimes it will be and sometimes it won't be.)

I mean, maybe as a logical thing it could be done, but it's not going to make traps any less powerful.

627
DF Community Games & Stories / Getting the human guild-liaison inside, the easy way.
« on: April 09, 2009, 03:06:11 am »
So a human guild-liaison arrived in my fortress just as I was closing my big gate.  I realized belatedly that there was now no way for him to get in, but I didn't want to open the gate (the Elven diplomat might sneak in, and my dwarves were giving her the usual runaround.  We told her the drawbridge was malfunctioning.)

So...  how to sneak the human guild-liaison in without that sneaky Elf cottoning on that we'd opened the gates?  Why, the Dwarven way, of course!  Noticing that he had wandered near a spot my miners were mining out beneath the surface before he stopped, I ordered a miner to dig to directly beneath him, dig a staircase up, then hollow out the ground from below...  causing the rather surprised human to suddenly fall into my tunnel beside the dwarven miner, where he sits stunned for a few moments until he catches his senses and dashes off to his meeting.

(Actually, he didn't snap out of it until I dug a bit of dirt next to him, which seems to have forced him to start pathing again -- was that a bug?  Of course, the path already existed.)

So anyway, I thought that this was a slightly funny story just to imagine the reaction of the human involved...  but it also gave me an idea.  When I dug the tunnel to drop this guy into my fort, I carefully remembered that he would fall through the stairs, and set it up so there was only one level to fall.

But I didn't have to do that.  I could have had a dwarf set up a fifteen-foot staircase, and drop anyone I wanted in.  I am planning on trying this on the leader of the next siege to arrive -- will it work?  Will he hit the miner as he falls, killing them?  Obviously, there will be cage traps set up right next to the stairs in case anything goes wrong, so only the miner will be in danger.

Can you use this method to capture any creature, though, by digging beneath them, and dropping them into a two-story drop into a cage trap?  (Make a double-staircase, with the area beneath it hollowed out with the trap; upwards is the channel that breaks the surface.)

PS.  As for the Elven diplomat, she refused to believe that the front gate was broken...  which is somewhat ironic, given that she was eventually killed in a tragic drawbridge accident.

628
DF Suggestions / Re: Illustrated weapon trap suggestion
« on: April 09, 2009, 02:52:44 am »
None of these solutions will actually solve the problem.  Now instead of building a big row of traps, I build an even bigger row of windmills + traps.  If you raise the chance of them failing / jamming, I just add more traps.

I am not sure what the ultimate solution is, but nothing in this thread does it.  These would make traps more annoying to lay out -- especially placing windmills for every damn trap -- but they wouldn't make a whisker's difference for the end result.

And as far as that goes, I don't think that trying to limit things by making the interface for them painful is a good idea.  In fact, I'd say it's an absolutely terrible idea.  Players should be encouraged to plan clever and interesting trap-setups to deal with various enemies.  They shouldn't be forced to go through massive mindless repetitive actions (windmill, trap, windmill, trap, repeat forever) just to do something that otherwise works and is logical.

Give the enemy trap-scouts, who slowly search areas where traps have been encountered, and have an exceedingly high chance of finding + disarming traps (of course, players could use 'manual' traps with levers to get those -- that's intentional and part of the fun.  Or they could use crossbowdwarves or whatever.)  The point is it makes things more interesting, rather than just more tedious.

(Disarmed traps would be like 'jammed' ones -- don't force players to re-place them, that's tedious again.  Dwarves have to go and re-arm them instead.  Maybe forbid them automatically when they're disarmed -- or make that an option the player can set.)

629
DF General Discussion / Re: Happy Birthday, dear Toady!
« on: April 06, 2009, 06:51:34 pm »
Oh great!  Now the kitten's constant attempts to path to its food bowl are going to kill the framerate in Toady's apartment, and the next version is going to take forever!

630
DF Suggestions / Re: Automoton warriors
« on: April 06, 2009, 06:45:36 pm »
Quote from: Karadan on April 06, 2009, 03:53:41 pm
So, if dwarves could build automatons (Which we can't do) they should also be able to build machine guns, and tanks, and bombers, and nukes, and lasers, and lightsabers and......

Much as I love robots, especially the old steampunk kind, I just really can't see them in a world like DF.  I mean traps have been around for milenia, and screw pumps have likewise been around for ages, as have windmills and waterwheels.  Going from 'dwarves have screw pumps' to 'dwarves have tech vastly more sophisticated then we do in 2009' is a massive jump.

If magic becomes a large part of the game though, I can imagine golems existing.  Would make for an awesome thing to trade for.
As I already pointed out, automata have a long history in myth and legend.

They're the sort of thing that gods produce, or that legendary craftsmen forge in a fit of divinely-inspired genius, not things you mass-produce.  But they belong there just as much as dragons and titans, or enchanted swords and magic carpets.

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