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Topics - Jeoshua

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1
DF Modding / Volcanic Sands
« on: May 21, 2012, 10:36:55 am »
The look of the deserts in this game kind of pains me.  Patches of different colored sand everywhere, seemingly with no rhyme or reason.

Is is possible to define that a certain type of sand can only exist in a certain environment, such as high vulcanism or alluvial deposits?  I know that you can add [IGNEOUS_EXTRUSIVE] to the sand and it will appear as a layer near volcanos, but is it possible to make it appear as a SOIL in that area, only?

Ideally I'd like to have this:

  • SAND_TAN - Dry areas.  Has Aquifers
  • SAND_RED - Igneous Intrusive areas, on top.  Has Aquifers
  • SAND_BLACK - Igneous Extrusive areas, high vulcanism.  No Aquifers
  • SAND_YELLOW -  Can exist anywhere.  No Aquifers
  • SAND_WHITE - Alluvial deposits.  Near oceans and river beds only.  Has Aquifers

I know not all of this is possible, but the Alluvial white sands and the Igneous Black sand are pretty crucial in what I want to do.


Tell me, is the volcanic sand possible?


Nobody knows?  I tried setting [IGNEOUS_EXTRUSIVE] on the Black sand, but I think all that did was give me underground sand layers...

2
DF Suggestions / Stop the Werebeast menace!
« on: May 20, 2012, 11:29:38 pm »
I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but the new werebeasts and vampires, while very cool, have a huge problem: They don't ever die in worldgen.  One beast infects another.  Two beasts then infect two more.  Four becomes Eight.  Eight becomes 16.  Attacking once a month on the full moon, soon there are thousands upon thousands of werebeasts, destroying the local populations and making everyone's life hell.

And they just don't die often enough.

There are three mechanics that would elegantly solve this problem, especially if used together:

  • Werebeasts and Vampires should be required to kill on their rampages.  If they do not kill and devour their prey, they will die.  A villager who is scratched then escapes does NOT count, although they can be turned if they are unlucky enough.
  • Killing the source of the curse causes the curse to end.  A vampire who turns thousands, and whose progeny turns a thousand more, can have their lineage ended by simple virtue of them being killed off.  All "children" of that cursed being are returned to their former state.
  • Werebeasts should have a definite maximum age.  Vampires might be immortal but I've never heard of an immortal werewolf, other than relatively stupid modern fiction like Twilight.

This would end the huge and unweildy numbers of vampires and werebeasts very simply, cause "stupid" werecreatures from surviving any length of time, and make the ones who remain oh-so-much-more awesome, dangerous, and special.  Cities which become depopulated due to werebeast infestation become less likely to spawn more werebeasts, and without prey the werebeasts die off, in a true predator-prey relationship.

This also leads to interesting mechanics in both Fortress mode.  No longer is a Vampire an acceptable "guard" for your fortress.  He must feed.  If he does not, he will die.  Werecreatures are not ideal "guard dogs" either, for they must kill once a month.  If you want to keep them, and their power, you must choose who to sacrifice or potentially lose everything to what basically amounts to a Tantruming Semi-Megabeast, loose in your fortress.


Thread talk seems to have come to a consensus that a very good solution would be for cities or civilizations that are aggrieved by any specific critter on a regular basis should attack that critter en-masse.  Yearly dragon raids should be met with a small army.  Werecritter infestations should be combated  by an actualy party of beast hunters, not just a single loner.

This would also severely curtail the problem of the "8129th rampage of Boatabbeys" where it comes to almost every critter out there.

3
DF Suggestions / Just delete this
« on: May 05, 2012, 07:24:25 am »
Just remove this whole damnable thread.  I already seriously offended one person unintentionally, I don't want to risk pissing anyone else off based on what I think.

4
DF Modding / Stop killing my Pegasi!!! -or- How do I stop humans from killing a creature?
« on: May 04, 2012, 01:00:12 am »
In worldgen, my human beast hunters are indiscriminately killing off any semi-interesting creature they can find.  Pegasi, Unicorns, Dragons, you name it they will kill it.  This is very annoying to me.  I want them to take out the dangerous creatures and bring about the Age of Heros, but killing everything magical is rediculous.

How do I modify a creature to do 3 things (not necessarily all at once):
1 - Stop the game from considering the creature a historical fiture
2 - Stop [BEAST_HUNTER]s from attacking it
3 - Make the creature considered totally normal and not count towards the Age of Myth/Legends/Heroes, etc.

5
DF Suggestions / Transparent Sky: Update to the rendering engine
« on: April 30, 2012, 09:31:18 am »
This game is ASCII, right?  But it uses OpenGL to render that.  So instead of just having the standard CGA colors, it actually has 16.7 million colors (256 red x 256 green x 256 blue).

What if instead of showing an "open tile" when the space per Z-level is empty, one were to show a darker version of what is one z-level below.  And if the tile below that is empty, show what's below that a little darker still, so on and so forth until the color would be fully washed out to the target color and it would just show a solid color.

Here's a mockup of what that might look like, using the current cyan "open space" color as an additive:

Zoomed out, with the lower levels faded, you can see here that it's really not too much information for a player to handle.  That there is representative of 10 Z-levels of what, formerly, was sky.

Each level is clearly defined, and you can even see the curve of the slope as it falls into the (now frozen) lake.

I really think this would be:
1) Fairly simple to do with the current engine
2) Totally within the ASCII style of the original game
3) A great use of the OpenGL rendering engine
4) Incredibly worthwhile.

Rendering this would not hurt the frame rate, either.  Basically nobody ever has any problem rendering the game due to it's Graphical FPS.  All current frame rate bottlenecks are entirely calculations based, and this rendering technique would add very few new calculations.  It would just read more squares per frame.

===

This suggestion has been brought up several times before:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=41266.0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVhsIGGg3QE
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=30114.0
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=1788.msg27962#msg27962

And is on the Eternal Suggestions list at a far lower priority than it probably ought to be, given how relatively simple the suggestion would be to complete vs how focused the suggestion is and how long it's been desired:
http://www.bay12games.com/forum/eternal_voting.php

My further suggestion is to deffinitely use the color of the Open Space tile for the fading, as that will allow both above ground "fog" and below ground "gloom" within the same system.  A user could change the behavior simply by changing the color of the Open Space/Chasm tiles in d_init.txt.

6
DF Modding / [WIP] DF WORD Project - Adding 400 words
« on: April 28, 2012, 09:25:02 pm »
I am working on extending the language files to include most everything in the Basic English Dictionary, and already have the words that A) are not in the Language Unlocked files yet and B) are thematically alright to go into the game.  IE. No "Computer" or "Helicopter", but most of the rest of the words therein.

Some of the omissions are GLARING actually, like the absense in the raw files for "month" or "industry"... words that Dwarves and Humans would have to use routinely yet are not even translated in the slightest.

Now, here comes the problem...

... It's over 400 words long.

I am going to need some help here to actually create the word definitions and symbol files.  I'd like to do them in the style of "Language Unlocked", with only english-correct grammar.  ie No Rear Adjectives or Adverbs, and no plural compounds at the front.

Who wants to help?  Who wants their forts to be able to be named "The Able-Community of Industry?"  Who wants their squads to be able to be named "The Engine of Change"?  Civilizations named "The Association of Profit"?

If we get this completed, all this and more will actually be possible!

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Note: Some of these words will not actually be necessary or wanted.  It's a long list and throwing some of them out, on the grounds that a similar word already exists, is perfectly acceptable.  Some could maybe use some adjustment as well, like "Gun" being "Cross-bow"... or "Space" being "Heaven"... then again maybe not.

Pick a word.  One, maybe two... however many you want.  And add the proper tags for it and repost.

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Language - Language tokens

7
DF Suggestions / Embark on low mountain tiles, volcanos, and mountainous rivers
« on: April 25, 2012, 11:01:32 pm »
Dwarves are Mountain creatures, right?  They live underground, underneath the mountains of the world.  That's what we're led to believe. But when setting up a fortress, one cannot embark onto mountain-only regions.  Not even if there's a water source, a volcano for free magma, or a river running through it.

I know this can be "hacked" with external tools, but the question remains why Dwarves cannot embark on their stated habitat.  It just doesn't make any sense to me.

Dwarves should be able to embark on mountain tiles if those tiles contain in whole or in part:
Low Mountain Tiles - Represented by boulders on the main map.  These should be the Dwarves' native habitat.
Volcanos - Free Magma is too hard to ignore, despite the height of the embark.
Rivers - Mountain stream? I can deffinitely see Dwarves setting up shop here.

8
DF Modding / Magical humans. [POWER]s, [SUPERNATURALS], and the recurrent Age of Myth
« on: April 22, 2012, 12:53:29 am »
So I've recently been messing around with creature and entity raws in order to try to make a better human being.  The ones that are in the game are so very [MUNDANE], so to speak.  They don't do anything interesting, they don't fight, they don't have much life at all and are basically just there to trade with fortresses.

With this I have set my aims to changing that.  Using the Wizard creature from Dwarf Chocolate, and merging it with a combination of the three human-esque races of Genesis, I have created a new human race.  I've also modified the birth rates to try to make their spread, because of the newfound female castes, a bit less hairy.  Consider the lost births "miscarriages".

And the most interesting thing here, in my opinion, is that the "evil" incarnations of the humans, the Witches and Warlocks, have the [POWER] tag.  That's right.  It's a Caste level token, so these bad boys and girls can get a wild hair up their butts and take over somewhere, becoming it's living God-King.

Sounds interesting, eh?  This will require pieces of Genesis and Dwarf Chocolate to run correctly, or at least the interactions from it.  Check your errorlog.txt file once you install this creature, then search through the raws from those mods to find out which files you need to have installed for it to run correctly.  Make sure you remove [CREATURE:HUMAN] from creatures_standard.txt, and disable the Wizard entity if you have it.

Using these (and I believe it has something to do with the [SUPERNATURAL] token), the incidence of worlds generated in which the Second/Third/Fourth Age of Myth comes up have gone up dramatically.  I believe that every Wizard counts towards the age counter like a Semi/Megabeast would.

May !!Fun!! ensue for you, too:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Edit:
Removing the [POWER] tag from the good wizards lessened the recurrent Age of Myth phenomena, so I believe it's actually related to that tag.

9
DF Suggestions / Human Culture Level Tokens
« on: April 20, 2012, 04:33:33 pm »
Quite simply, a Caste-like system for Entities.

[ENTITY:HUMAN]
[CREATURE:HUMAN]

[BLAH BLAH BLAH]

[CULTURE:GOOD]
[START_BIOME:ANY_FOREST]
[USE_GOOD_WOOD]

[CULTURE:EVIL]
[START_BIOME:ANY_DESERT]
[START_BIOME:ANY_WETLAND]
[DEFAULT_SITE_TYPE:DARK FORTRESS]
[USE_EVIL_WOOD]
[ABUSE_BODIES]

[SELECT_CULTURE:ALL]

[BLAH BLAH BLAH]

=====

This could be used to give humans a reason to fight each other, create hill dwarves, elven cities, dwarf towns... the list goes on and on.

10
DF Suggestions / Tie ins between game modes and improvements.
« on: April 19, 2012, 11:52:11 am »
My idea of the BIGGEST thing DF needs is a tighter tying together of the three "game modes" as I see them:

Fortress
Adventure
Worldgen.

"How is worldgen a game type?" you say?  Easilly, it controls the entire world in an abstracted way.  It has it's rules, it's own displays, etc.  It's not very interactive, but it's a game mode.

Now, consider this.  What would happen if, when in Adventure mode, Worldgen continued running at a much slowed rate.  People moved from place to place, megabeasts attacked, wars were fought.  It wouldn't take too much processing power to have the world right outside of where the player exists keep being generated.  It takes maybe 30 seconds per game year to calculate the events for a 256x256 large world with a population exceeding 3 million people, on my computer.  To calculate the events of a single day would take almost no time at all, and when you consider that game day usually takes about 5 minutes to play in game?  30 seconds / 365 days / 5 minutes = negligible calculation time.

And the world would be so much more lively!  It would lead to the future possibilities of being able to SEE the wars (which currently you could not really see), watch sites being placed.  Right now you could probably only leave a place, then come back after a year to see it has changed... which would actually be freaking amazing.  Just keep the same seed and roll the dice again.

===

Second tie in between the modes: Fortress Adventurers.  Put your site on hold to take an adventurer out.  A random able bodied Dwarf from your fortress would be selected and set out to pasture.  Your fortress would basically be paused besides some basic automations, you could buy/sell/steal whatever you need for your adventure from what's already at your Fortress (that your Adventurer spawns at), and could set out!  Or not!  Go down into the caverns from your 50z high staircase... Recruit your whole army as followers and set out to take out those megabeasts that KEEP coming from that cave you embarked 3 tiles away from.  Etc etc.  Then, when your adventurer dies or you retire him, you can start the fortress back up again.

===

Third tie in, but this is only really about one game mode.  Drop out of worldgen and change settings, then start it back up again.  Change the site cap, population cap.  Place more civilizations.  Place more megabeasts.  Basically put the player in control of the world generation process and make it into a TRUE game mode.  Declare, as God Almighty, and a site be placed... here.  Make it a tower.  Etc etc.  Think about it for a good solid minute and think about how f-n awesome that would be.

11
DF Suggestions / New Biome Tokens and Automata Rules for Worldgen
« on: April 19, 2012, 11:40:16 am »
In order to facilitate the placement of the new site types, it would be helpful to have a few more biome tags.  For the most part, these are already calculated by the engine, but there is no way to specify them for creatures or entities to use, support, or generate on.

RIVER_TEMPERATE_SHORES
RIVER_TROPICAL_SHORES
ANY_RIVER_SHORE

The above would be very helpful for the placements of cities in worldgen.  Right now, the humans use ANY_RIVER very heavily.  While this is good, it means that they want to place cities in the MIDDLE of the river, being able to spread either way.  Supporting only the shores should make them confined by the river, rather than dependent upon it, unless they can also [WORLD_CONSTRUCTION:BRIDGES]

HILLS_TEMPERATE
HILLS_TROPICAL
ANY_HILLS

As an intermediate step to the outlying Dwarven settlements of hill Dwarven I heard mentioned in DFTalk before.  The hills are already denoted in the world map very clearly, so obviously somewhere along the line this data is being processed.  I believe it has more to do with height and drainage than foliage tho, so the existing biome types do not have any real way to specify this as a location.

=====

Additionally, for entity worldgen there could be another cellular automata rule applied to the placement of new sites.  [SITE_PLACEMENT:chance:min:max].  This would be a number that could be specified in the raws of the entity.  If a site being generated doesn't have the minimum amount of neighbor sites directly surrounding the site being considered, or has more than the maximum, the site would not be placed and the people meant for it would go elsewhere (likely back home or to one of the neighbor sites.  It would seriously help with controlling the spread of civilizations on the world map, and lead to a much easier time of making different "feels" for the entities.

Humans would prefer to live in large groups, surrounded by their peers.  They would tolerate up to 7 neighbors and have a minumum amount of one neighbor, leading them to bunch together in large farming and township communities as a civilization.  The chance they place a new site would be relatively high.

Goblins would most likely prefer being alone and farther away from their own kind.  Having a maximum of one neighboor and a minimum of 0, they would spread out and break into new lands very simply and naturally.  They could easilly take over a large swath of land, but it would be sparsely populated by their kind.  Their chance would be somewhat lower.

Dwarves would probably only tolerate the presence of one neighbor city, to prevent too many Dwarven Halls from being placed right next to each other, crowding out possible site placements for the player in Fortress mode.  The Mountain biome they live on is fundimentally a one-dimensional transitiory line between the mountains and the foothills thereof, so they would need to be tweaked somewhat.  Their chance to expand would probably be fairly low because of this, and would not tolerate more than one neighbor.

Elves would absolutely not tolerate many neighbors, prefering the open spaces.  So maybe a maximum of 2 or 3 neighbors.  The chance of their expansion would also be fairly low, so they would not use up all available space.

===

It would be helpful, with this automata rule, to have another tag, as well.  [COLONY:chance:minDist:maxDist].  I've noticed that cities placed in worldgen sometimes fall FAR from their parent civ.  If would be helpful to make a range at the distance at which this could happen. For Dwarves, it would be fairly short to keep them from jumping over to other mountain ranges instead of using up their available space... where for elves it could be fairly large.  For humans, it would be somewhere in the middle.  Of course, a Colony placed would ignore the min/max neighbor settings, since it's INTENT is to jump outwards.

12
DF Modding / Never set [CURIOUS_BEAST_*] for Dwarves.
« on: May 05, 2011, 05:35:48 pm »
Yes this is the wrong section, but I've asked in the Gameplay Questions forum and the only suggestion that anyone has responded with is "maybe it's your burrows"... which I don't have.  I figure you guys who frequent this forum would be a bit more knowledgeable about the game as it works underneath the hood, so maybe you could tell me what is going on better than they could, anyway.

My Dwarves are currently standing around with various things in their hands, refusing to drop them except to grab a barrel of booze when they get thirsty... which they then won't drop.  The object shows on the screen as "Hauling", not in their hands or equipped or anything.  Except nobody has Hauling jobs turned on.  The offending dwarves then stand around the meeting area holding their object, reporting "no job" even tho there are many queued.  The Miner won't mine anymore, he's holding his booze.  The Hunter wanders around looking for critters, he has a crossbow and everything, but since he's hauling a beer barrel he can't shoot.

Runesmith shows nothing strange going on.  Therapist shows nothing strange.  Setting their labors to different things does nothing.  I have been able to force things out of some of the Dwarves hands by switching them back and forth between Woodcutter and Miner, but I only have so many picks/axes.  And seemingly once they get hungry they'll drop the barrel, grab some food, then once they're finished and the food disappears they have nothing in their hands...

Until they want to drink again.

This is the second fort I've tried to start, and it's still happening even after a fresh worldgen, save/reload doesn't fix it, forbidding and/or dumping the Hauled objects doesn't fix it.  The only thing that works is job related stuff.

So I'm asking you: Have I killed my dwarves somehow? I'm using Genesis for the creatures/entites of the Dwarves, and I've never heard of anything like this happening to Genesis users.

Partial retraction: They went to sleep, and dropped their barells? However, setting a stockpile and turning on the hauling abilities of a Dwarf causes the same behavior to occur again.  No stockpiles and I can't bring in the cart, and once dwarves get thirsty they're useless until they take a nap.  I am confuse.

13
DF Gameplay Questions / Never set [CURIOUS_BEAST_GUZZLER] for a creature that you want to do work.
« on: May 05, 2011, 01:39:28 pm »
Title says it all.  I started a fortress, dug underground, set a meeting place, and food and wood stockpiles.

All my Dwarves ran out and grabbed the closest object to them, namely logs.  Now they're standing around the meeting area with the logs in their hands, displaying "no job" and since their hands are full they won't do damned thing else!

 >:(

What gives? Any thoughts?

Update: They got thirsty, dropped the logs, and ran to get a drink.  But they left the logs lying around the meeting area, and when they returned they still had the barrels in their hands.  Still borked!

Also Update: Saving/Restoring doesn't do the trick.  Setting the offending items to dump or forbid doesn't either.

14
DF Suggestions / Debug options
« on: May 04, 2011, 09:37:30 pm »
Quote
Bloat283   DEBUG OPTIONS    (Future)    Various ways to fiddle with internal settings.

Mr Toady, I beg to differ.  Debug options are not bloat at all.  They should be very important.

If there were a command line option of some sort that made the engine spit out some kind of log of everything it was doing, not just failing at, it would make debugging alot easier for mod creators and probably for you as well (presuming you don't just watch the code running somehow in your Dev Environment).

I am often plagued by things causing crashes, in worldgen or other places, that do not cause any kind of output into errorlog.txt.  If there were an option to give a running tally of everything the game engine was doing, it would make these kind of crashes much easier to diagnose.

15
DF Modding / Procedural monster cleanup crew
« on: May 02, 2011, 10:15:17 pm »
I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets a bit put off by some of the rediculous, wacky stuff the procedurally generated monster creator puts out.  Feathered, flying capybara boogiemen, Snow elephant demonic hordes, impossibly dumb forgotten beasts.

So I had a thought.  Using dfworldtinker, it's possible to export the raws of these wayward beasts... it's also possible to edit them and import them back in.  But I wonder... how far could one take it?  Is it possible to take those monsters that are just too dumb to live... and make them not living anymore?  Could it be as simple as adding the [DOES_NOT_EXIST] tag to the ones that shouldn't be... and have them not be anymore?

Right now, I'm generating a series of high beast-count worlds, and exporting all the beasties out of them.  Then, I'm perusing the list for things I'd actually like to encounter, and putting them in a separate file.  I have flaming demonic serpents, dinosaurid forgotten beasts, beings of smoke and shadow to plague your nightmares.

I plan on trying to make them into regular beasts in a raw files.  I will change the names to match those that the procedural generators will spit out (like [CREATURE:DEMON_1]), then generate a world which supposedly should have 0 of these creatures.  I think I might need to drop the Forgotten Beasts, since it looks like you can't turn those off.  But especially the Demons and Boogiemen, I hope will work.  History is rarely generated for them, so there shouldn't be too much confusion in the game on them.

So this is a thread on !!SCIENCE!!, of the procedural variety.  Any thoughts would be appreciated.  Also, any really choice beasts that the game has shown you... ones that are truly gems of both some kind of weird fantastical realism, and possible challenge? Please send em my way.

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