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Topics - Blackcat

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DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Starting Out - What skills do you choose, and why?
« on: September 09, 2006, 04:03:00 am »
So you're starting a new game, and yet again you face the decisions of who gets what skills. Whether it's an exact plan, or a rough selection of skillsets, post it up!

In an attempt to keep the signal to noise ratio as high as possible, try to present any criticisms in a constructive manner only. Saying "omg ur choice of skillz sucks" really adds absolutely nothing to the content of the thread. Posting "I'd prefer to swap one of the growers to a fisherdwarf, because..." is far more informative, useful, and friendly.


2
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / How to get War Dogs roaming free?
« on: September 08, 2006, 10:51:00 am »
Once a War Dog has been trained at a kennels, it appears to follow the dwarf who trained it. Considering that the trainer spends most of his or her time at the kennels, this isn't much help.

So, what do people do to get their war dog population more spread out? Is there a method to 'detach' them from the trainer?


3
DF Gameplay Questions / How Do You Find Good Fort Locations?
« on: December 05, 2007, 11:15:00 am »
I'm getting a bit fed up of generating world after world, trying to find a starting location that'll provide iron ore, magma, wood, sand, and so on. And having searched the forums here for help, I realised I'm probably doing something wrong.

So, I'm all ears; How do *you* go about finding a good location to site a new fortress?

I've only seen Igneous Extrusive layers as the first rock layer, which precludes a sedimentary layer. So far in my searching of maps, I've never found a spot that has both flux stones and possibly-magma-bearing stone.

And I've lost count of the number of times I've started without a single damn tree on the map, having chosen a site with mountains and forest...


4
DF Gameplay Questions / Info - Building Roads and Bridges
« on: September 07, 2006, 06:09:00 am »
I don't remember reading this anywhere, so I'll present the following. I fully expect a reply to link to another post that gives this information anyway, but it can't hurt to have this posted afresh.

When using raw stone, stone blocks, or wooden logs to build roads and bridges, the amount of material used limits the number of squares the road or bridge can cover.

The maximum number of squares covered by a road or bridge is (amount of material) x 4 - 1.

What follows is a dataset listing allowed and unallowed sizes:

code:

S/B  Yes  No
===  ===  ==
 1 -  3 -  4
 2 -  7 -  8
 3 - 10 - 12
 4 - 15 - 16
 5 - 18 - 20
 6 - 21 - 24
 7 - 27 - 28
 8 - 30 - 32
 9 - 35 - 36
10 - 36 - 40
11 - 42 - 45
12 - 45 - 48
13 - 50 - 54
14 - 54 - 56
15 - 56 - 60
16 - 63 - 64
17 - 64 - 70
S/B: number of stones or blocks
Yes: The biggest size that could be built
 No: The smallest size that could not be built.

Because of the limitation of working within a 10x10 maximum, and only being able to obtain sizes that are a multiple of two integers that are both between 1 and 10 inclusive, some sizes cannot be obtained. Obviously, primes above 10 cannot be tested directly, and also numbers who can only be factored by numbers greater than ten. An example of this is 22, which is only factored by 2 and 11.

As you'll note, the 'No' column increases linearly by 4 each time. The only time it doesn't is because of the above limitation on testing. An example of this is S/B:13, where we would expect 52 area to be disallowed. But, we cannot make a single road/bridge that covers 52 tiles. The closest is 54. However, the progression still holds, as S/B:14 returns back on track with the disallowed amount of 56.

To verify with wood, some wood was chopped and a couple of datapoints were tested. These all matched the results from using stone.

Assumption: The progression continues linearly up to 25 stones/blocks, whereupon you can place a 10x10 road/bridge. More than 25 will be a waste, as you cannot build greater than 10 tiles up/down or left/right.

Caveats: This does not apply to using metal.


5
DF Gameplay Questions / Cave River Flooding: How to Contain it?
« on: August 29, 2006, 01:52:00 pm »
So, I was wondering, is there a way to stop the cave river from flooding into my main highways across the river?

I generally build 3-wide passages, and correspondingly 3-wide bridges, but the only 'sea defences' I know of, doors, can't be built  in the middle of a 3-wide passage.


6
DF Bug Reports / Stockpiling Stone Behaviour
« on: September 06, 2006, 04:16:00 am »
Some background: In my last fortress, I worked on the plan of digging 3-wide corridors, with rooms allocated in 27x27 blocks. Overall, a plan that worked well, but due to the small distance between the river and the chasm, I could only fit one block in, with smaller rooms either side.

Now, as I dug out the corridors and the 27x27 areas, I allocated the corridors as stone storage. Of course, as the fortress got bigger, I ended up with more stone stockpiles. I continued the plan past the chasm, as the big room areas would be ideal for workshops and storage, laying down stone stockpiles as I went.

Problem 1:
I hit what appeared to be a 'critical mass'. Every three seconds or so, the game would pause, obviously processing something, for about a second. Task Manager showed a usual CPU usage of about 35%, with these pauses corresponding to a 100% usage. I began immediately to switch off various tasks going on to identify the problem.

In the end, it turned out to be the stone stockpiles. I stumbled across it when I unallocated a stockpile in a room area that I wanted to move cloth workshops and stockpiles into. Immediately after unallocating it, although it caused a massive amount of hauling jobs, the slowdowns/pauses disappeared.

In the end, I went around and unallocated every stone stockpile, thinking to hell with being neat.

Problem 2:

After building a bunch of catapults, I needed to get a lot of rock to them so that some peasants set to Siege Operating and nothing else had ammo. So, I created a stone stockpile next to them.

Instead of walking a screen or two east to grab stone (the corridors still had lots of stone in them), all the dwarves proceeded right over to the far east over the chasm, where I was in the process of mining for ore. And as I watched, I saw that the dwarves would stockpile the 'newest' stone. Not the nearest to the stockpile, or the nearest to them when they decide to haul, but the stone that had just been dug.

As a test, I unallocated my massive (and only) ore stockpile, and then dug some more ore out. I then created a new ore stockpile right where the old one was, but covering the empty space that didn't have ore on. And again, the dwarves would haul the 'newest' ore.


7
DF Suggestions / Hauling for Workshop Tasks
« on: September 02, 2006, 06:06:00 pm »
Suggestion:

- When you add a task to a workshop, jobs are created to haul the necessary resources to the workshop.

You queue up ten tasks at a workshop. The first task is issued as a job as currently done by the game. However, separate haul jobs for all ten tasks are also issued. Additionally, items sat in a workshop are flagged for a task once delivered, until used or the task is cancelled.

This would allow unskilled labour to help with the crafting process by hauling.

Additionally, it would allow multiple dwarves to move items at the same time for a single task.

As an example, making a bronze cage requires charcoal and three bronze bars. Currently, the metalsmith will fetch each of the four items separately, then craft the cage. If additional cages are queued, the smith will then repeat the four stage gathering process.

With the above, the metalsmith might make only one trip, whilst three other dwarves make one trip each to fetch the other three items. And if more cages are queued up, then whilst the smith is working away, other dwarves are stocking up the workshop ready for the next tasks.


8
DF Suggestions / Using Pause to Your Advantage
« on: August 31, 2006, 08:29:00 am »
One thing that annoys me is having the "half-mile hiking farmer" syndrome. You know, he grabs a seed, plants it, then walks a good twenty or more squares before realising he was right next to the seeds that he still needs to plant.

Now, I totally understand that processing jobs all the time will slow things down, so...

How about dwarves double check for jobs when the player pauses the game? So what if it lags... it's meant to be paused anyway.


9
DF Suggestions / Quick and Simple Graphics Support
« on: August 31, 2006, 08:26:00 am »
I don't know how flexible your curses engine is, and the rendering part, but does it support multiple fonts in/on the same window/surface?

Obviously, all the fonts would have to be the same size, but with two fonts defined, one could be defined as the normal text font, and the second defined as a symbol font.

Normal text is rendered with the normal text font (how surprising), and all the things in the actual game world are drawn with the second font.

Start with both fonts being identical. Spread out the symbol allocations, so that you can get close to "one symbol = one thing".

Result? Editing the symbol font (which you can leave to others) will result in normal text being unaffected, but allowing graphical tiles.


10
DF Suggestions / Stockpile Specialisation - Code already exists?
« on: August 31, 2006, 08:15:00 am »
Just a quick thought on the suggestion I've seen for specialising stockpiles... could they be changed to work like weapon/armour racks? If I remember correctly, racks can be configured to limit by type/material/etc...

11
DF Suggestions / Reveal Material Above A Tunnel
« on: December 07, 2007, 10:51:00 am »
Just noticed that when you are digging underground, the material above an empty space isn't revealed. Surely if you dig out a tile, you can see what's directly above that tile?

12
DF General Discussion / Revealing the River/Chasm/Lava?
« on: September 02, 2006, 03:36:00 am »
Nothing is more annoying than planning out rooms only to hit an unexpected feature, like a river/chasm/lava branch. Now I saw the following map and noticed that the river/chasm/lava are fully revealed:

http://img83.imageshack.us/img83/1254/localmap1107312067zf3.png

On my current game, I used the "Export Local BMP" option, which showed the river as it is in-game, not fully reavealed.

So, on the above map, how did the river become fully revealed? I can't see any explorations via mining or bridges that go to the ends.


13
DF General Discussion / Credit Where Credit is Due
« on: August 29, 2006, 01:48:00 pm »
It's probably been said many times already, but...

Dwarf Fortress utterly rocks. Literally!


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