Bay 12 Games Forum

Yeah, the minotaur goat caste doesn't make an abundance of sense. Pity there isn't a tag for letting megabeasts or semimegabeasts become civ leaders, like [UNIQUE_DEMON] does for demons.

You know, the minotaur guy could have just bin an adventurer who picked up some goats as followers along the way.

It's typically used for sorting tags, and add some appearance modifiers in a caste (beards on males, for example). Basically used to edit a creature after making the caste.

It's also used to return to editing the creature at creature level (via [SELECT_CASTE:ALL]), and not at caste level. For example, if you wanted to add a [SWIMS_INNATE] tag after you defined the castes, you need to put [SELECT_CASTE:ALL] to make the changes global and not caste exclusive.

FAKEDIT: And what Interus said.

Another thing you might know. Does it matter in what order I put tokens? Natural it matter wither you put them into a cast or not but does the order in which they appear matter at all? If so how?

Vandala,

Some advice / constructive criticism from someone who earns his keep as a programmer / analyst...

When going from start to finish, you're going to have to load all the mod files into some sort of memory structures and then bind them to your UI.  I think you should, before coding any UI, figure out what method you will use to store the mod data in memory and what sort of UI would best bind to that method.  Something I know you'll use, but I saw not a one of in your screenshots, are grid views (I don't know what they're called in your toolkit). 

Your form is entirely too large, with too many things crammed on it.  I'm assuming the main object on your form is some sort of tab control widget.  What you're most likely going to want to do is, within each of those tabs, add another tab control widget with the tabs at the top.  So, for your DF: Game Setting tab you could have within it a tab for d_init, a tab for init.txt, and a tab for color.txt.  Actually I'd suggest splitting the d_init and init.txt into more than one tab each, because they'd still be pretty big.

Something else I just noticed, you don't have any check-boxes.  Typically Y/N items like temperature, weather, etc would be check-boxes not buttons.  If you're not going to use check-boxes I'm wondering how you'll indicate whether those items are enabled or disabled.

Stuff will be stored in .txt files if that's what your asking, otherwise I don't understand the question.
Also don't know what a grid view is. (don't recall spotting such a thing just yet.)
You probably don't have to worry to much, as I said I'v got a friend who knows this stuff, he works as a programmer himself, he'll know what's what when I get to that stage.
The buttons themselves are on/off switches, this takes less programming work.
I'll certainly keep the tabs in tabs idea in the back of my mind while I work.

Thank you, advice / constructive criticism is always appreciated.

Amazing! I feel for you. This is crazy, thats why I am taking a rudimentary approach. I wish I could help, but I am way out of my league here.
My only recommendation is: Don't jam it all in, have the ability to collapse, scroll, and jump through the information being displayed. The user does not need to see everything at once, just what they want to see. Visibility and functionality. DF users are used to hotkeys.

Hmm, yes dwarf fortress does have a lot of hot keys doesn't it? I could add another page in my program that allows for the changing of those as well if you think that's a good idea? It would come much later on my to do list though, there's a LOT of 'em.

Some people want to see less tabs while others want to see less options thrown into their face all at once. I can understand both sides, we'll have to refine the look of the program once people actually get their hands on it.

How does your program treat castes or abilities within castes?

Is working within and without castes not a problem due to it being a text editor?

You could rename the various dwarven soldier professions to line up with the jobs in TF2 (crossbowdwarf=sniper for example), change the medieval weapons to TF2 weapons, make the main playable race human instead of dwarf, add a simular (but slightly differant to increase chance of war) human race as an opponent and find ways to have them always at war, and your quite a ways into this mod.

I don't really see the point of this though, although it might be fun to see your fortress assaulted by TF2 characters. I'll also won't be helping.

PS: to really annoy people, try to add the sounds of the characters into the game.

The new episode gives me an idea:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Minotaurs as "royal" castes of goats, maybe with an aura that buffs persuader, anger and assertiveness. Then perytons can be deer royals and I'll work something out for gazelles. Pity it wouldn't be possible to give goats utterances without breaking them as traders, AFAIK.

Me thinks you got a caste addiction nido.

Ok, I'm going to need help.

I need an clear explanation of what the following creature tokens do and how to use them. Otherwise I won't be able to add this stuff.

SELECT_ADDITIONAL_CASTE
SELECT_CASTE
SELECT_MATERIAL
SET_BP_GROUP
SET_TL_GROUP
USE_MATERIAL
USE_MATERIAL_TEMPLATE
USE_TISSUE
USE_TISSUE_TEMPLATE
CHANGE_BODY_SIZE_PERC
COPY_TAGS_FROM
CREATURE_CLASS
CV_ADD_TAG
CV_REMOVE_TAG
FEATURE_ATTACK_GROUP
GENERAL_MATERIAL_FORCE_MULTIPLIER
GO_TO_END
GO_TO_START
GO_TO_TAG
MATERIAL
MATERIAL_FORCE_MULTIPLIER
PLUS_BP_GROUP
PLUS_MATERIAL
REMAINS_UNDETERMINED
REMOVE_MATERIAL
REMOVE_TISSUE
SET_BP_GROUP
SET_TL_GROUP
TISSUE
TL_COLOR_MODIFIER
TLCM_GENETIC_MODEL
TLCM_IMPORTANCE
TLCM_NOUN
TLCM_TIMING
TSU_NOUN