Bay 12 Games Forum

The coming week(s) it should also become more apparent whether pre-Premium saves will be transferable to the new versions. That is: Having worked on the save/mod restructuring, does it seem like the Premium release (and corresponding Classic release) will be compatible with old saves? If it comes down to writing some tool that transforms old saves/raws into new ones, has this already been done, is it something you might revisit later, or do you expect the community to figure it out (if possible)?

There are a number of structural changes to the game that makes that extremely unlikely- of the top of my head, at least, the way that labours will be changed to other skills as well as a change to the way stone working workshops work mean that the saves won't be compatible.

I see there have been changes to workshops, menus, and jobs, and I've seen the graphical representations of these changes, but for most of them I haven't seen corresponding ASCII versions. If I choose to use the ASCII version, will I be able to identify everything immediately or will many things be unfamiliar?

How well does all the information fit into an ASCII screen? How will it look at smaller than 1920x1080 resolution and/or resized windows?

I've seen how lower layers look in the graphical version, will there be similar effects in the ASCII version?

How wed are you to the ANSI colours, will you move to a broader colour palette in the ASCII version at any point?

Are you working in ASCII first and then moving to graphics, or are you working with graphics first and then going back to ASCII?

How do floaty menus work in ASCII? Do they snap to a grid or are they unaligned with the background graphics?

I've been up to this for a while now. Playing Dwarf Fortress, I grew envious of all the dwarfs' tasty looking wines. You can brew practically anything, after all. It's expensive and difficult to get hold of all the different fruit wines that are possible but extremely easy to do it yourself.

It was winter when I got my demijohns for Christmas so there wasn't a lot of wild fresh fruits available. However, you can easily source honey from supermarkets, which I just to make mead (currently brewing in the demijohns.) You can buy fresh fruits in the supermarket at any time of year, but it can be expensive. You can kind of cheat by brewing fruit juice, but you might need to top it up with sugar.

I decided to dilute some jams and brew them, since they're basically fruit juice and sugar to begin with. I've got some apricot wine, blueberry wine, and raspberry wine on the go here, and I can't wait to try them in a few weeks.

This summer going into autumn, I'll be able to forage wild fruits, and mash them up to make forage fruit wines and cider, just like dwarves do. I'll be able to make blackberry (bramble) wine, hawse wine, and crabapple cider- maybe even rosehip wine. I could even grow my own potatoes to make potato wine, if I wanted, or maybe even tomato wine?

I wouldn't have ever fallen into this rabbit hole without DF. It's something anyone can do.

What do gem and mineral clusters look like when the walls have been smoothed? It can have a big impact on the room value. I hope it's quite visible.

With the map rewrite, coupled with the Myth & Magic release, will there be a possibility of solid clouds that we can walk around on- that will float over the scenery beneath?

Do you have any plans to take s second pass at trees and tree growth? It occurs to me that DF vanilla elves are supposed to have tree shaping magic, so M&M would be an opportunity to look at plants. I'm not saying the way trees grow is bad- it's a world of improvement over the prior 1 tile trees- but the way they burst out of the ground suddenly fully formed, and die in a puff of logs, could use a little more granularity, and it would be nice if dwarves could plant trees or suppress tree growth. Would the map rewrite help with this, for instance, making it possible to rotate felled trees through a horizontal dimension, or to render arbitrarily large or ambulatory trees (like a World Tree or Treant?)

Sorry if this comes across suggesty, I was just wondering if it might be in the cards.

I've recently, finally, taken the opportunity to have a "deep play" and actually use almost all the gameplay features available as of 0.47.04 (except minecarts, which I've never got around to being able to usefully implement). Consequently I've been paying more attention to the UI quirks.

Currently certain screens, like the military screen, do not scale with increased window size. Will all screens be fully scaleable in the Steam release, and therefore, will all screens be fully scaleable in the legacy release?

Several screens currently lock important information away from the player. For exaple, when a liason springs the barony nomination on you, there's no way to browse dwarf personalities and such like before leaving the nomination screen. You get a similar situation on the trade good requests screen. Will these screens be rethought for the next release? Either as a pop-up, a returnable-to prompt, nested unit screen menu or nested stock screen menu? I ask because it seems like at this point, you'll be forced to rethink just to make it graphical.

There are some elements of the UI that don't seem to be working as intended. For example, I noted that it's not possible to select generic leather as a material for shields or shell as a material for leggings on the military>uniform screen (or if it is there, it's rather hard to find.) I suppose my question is, are you planning on redesigning the interface as you tart it up in order to wring out all the quirks and bugs, or just tart it up, or tart it up and fix quirks and bugs, but not going so far as a complete redesign?

I have seen that you've already added nice features to the embark screen. I wondered if the trade menu was going to get similar treatment? I was buying gemstones earlier and this involved several minutes of hitting down, enter, down, enter... it made me think, can we expect to see general GUI features like being able to drag a box around multiple items, holding control to add items to a list on top of that, and so on?

I get the feeling that every screen and menu function in DF was scratch-coded from the bottom up every time a new feature was added to the game. Are you going back and replacing each unique menu with something more like a generic abstract interface now? Do you think this will make it easier to add new features in the future?

TrevorBOB9 asked about releases for other platforms. I remembered that Steam support for Linux is pretty good. Is the Steam release going to be Linux compatible? Have you thought about an android release- with the GUI improvements, this seems more reasonable.

I believe you've stated in the podcasts that you're not particularly enjoying UI work, is that true? What of it is the most rewarding aspect to you, and what's the least rewarding?

You mentioned in the dev blog that we're now able to set designations during unpaused play. Does that accompany some control over the play speed during play? Everything happens awfully quickly at 100FPS and awfully slowly at 5 FPS, will we have some ability to set min/max FPS during play?

 I have to say that not having to pause the game to make any changes when things are running slow sounds like a great feature, I think I spend more time paused than running in older forts.