Bay 12 Games Forum

I touched up the creature abilities tab a bit. I think I'll actually be able to fit all of the "Megabeast/Night Creature/Undead + Lair" in there as well but not today.

EDIT: I've fused the "world" with the "population" tab.
EDIT: I've fused the "name/look/age" and the "sound/death" tabs.

I think you'll need some way to check what other files there are for a lot of things.  Like, the program should either check that the bodypart you're trying to add actually exists or only show you which ones exist through a dropdown menu.  The first one might be slightly better, because it could allow a way to add bodyparts first, and then see which bodyparts need definitions when you start working on the appropriate raws there.  things like this would also apply to entities(checking that the creature and the items they can use also exist), and materials.

It really depends on how you choose to add those things though.  If the user types in a list of all the parts they want, it could be in the order they want, and the program could highlight the ones that don't exist yet, and add them to a display in the appropriate raw tab.  I think this way is more powerful, but it also requires at least some knowledge of the format.  And it's probably not necessary for things like equipment.  Maybe selecting a creature for a civ will allow you to pick one from a list, picking equipment is checking boxes based on what raws are loaded into the mod, and . . . ok, I can't really think of a smooth way to do body parts.  That sort of thing is vast and messy, and I don't know how you would do things like only allowing people to modify the material of body parts the creature has and things like that.

We will make everything as easy on the modder as possible. The goal is to allow even someone without any knowledge of dwarf fortress to mod a creature (at least.)
Multiple selection lists with all available pre-made body parts, tissues, materials, etc will be included but people will also be able to create these parts themselves in other sections of the program aided by tool tips and other hints we can throw in once we ourselves have working knowledge of this.
It's even possible to trade such lists between users (modding the modding tool yay!)
Anyway, you'll always know what already exists due to the way the program is set up, the lists of all existing stuff you happen to be modding is right there on you left, this is true for creatures as well as everything else.

It is possible to have the program check all other creature files once you safe your new creature to see if a duplicate exists, but thats not really a priority right now.

I'll keep your idea's in mind.

There are basically two steps towards creating this program.

The first is the design of the GUI. The other is the coding that makes the GUI actually do what it's supposed to do.

How wxglade works is that it allows very easy editing and once your done designing you can push a button and out comes the python code you can directly copy/paste into your program code. Just connect the buttons and your done. Designing the GUI is the easy part. Connecting buttons, also easy. Figuring out what the buttons have to do is a little harder because we will need to have full working knowledge of dwarf fortress but that's provided by it's wiki. The harder part comes from writing to the txt files, an easy enough function in python but it's going to be the hell to figure out where to put everything and in what order. But that really depends on wither DF is going to bitch about order placement in it's creature files.

That last part is something I'd like to know and it's a job thats going to take some time, either to figure out or to design. If somebody could handle that I would be rather happy.

The job: Figure out the proper placement of all creature tokens until dwarf fortress no longer gives any errors. (have fun  )

(after all that we would still be in the apha stage without any 'special' stuff like adding item permissions across all civilization of an entire mod but those will come with time. as long as we can get a creature creator working I'll be happy. AAAAAND everything will of course be completely open source or whatever the right terminology is.)

I'd love to hear some feedback on this, especially considering my initial idea was to make a less uh.. feature heavy version of the ponymod

Well if you want to keep with the show you can always add "Research" fashion, to add lots of different new clothes to the game using lots of different materials. That could add an enormous amount of flavor to the game. Same can be done with alcoholic drinks (Nidokoenig will love you forever if you get this to work) or building materials, new plant species, anything really. (if that's how this "Research" thing can work that is) That could really add to the long term gameplay as your civilization slowly becomes more modern as their knowledge and trade increases.

That's going to cost you many a sleepless night of work though.  Good luck with that.

Ok, I'll try to explain a little bit of how I see this thing working in my mind at the moment. With the help of the picture ^above^.

Already!

• On your leftmost side is a list of tabs. The top tab is a placeholder for general options that belong to the program. (still empty) I don't know if that's the best idea because I could also just add genuine menus like the [file : edit : view : history : bookmarks : tools : help] you see in firefox and generally every windows/linux program. (this would be preferable right?) The rest of the list is made up of all the possible types of "raw/objects" files that you can mod in dwarf fortress. (although I just noticed that I missed 3 located in "raw/object/text") Selecting any of these options takes you to it's tab (ALL the stuff that's right-side of it)
• Right now the tab "creature" is selected. Right-side of it (^top^) you can see two buttons saying "add creature" and "remove", underneath them is a creature list (empty right now, sorry.) This is where you select which creature you want to work on.
• Below the first list is another with it's own 2 buttons. By selecting a creature on the top list and using the new two buttons you can add and remove creatures that you want to add to your mod which will be displayed in the lower list. And I just see that I forgot a button, one that will save your collection of creatures to a place of your choice (choice box needs replacing with a proper directory selecting box, couldn't find one yet, don't think wxglade has one BUT my friend showed something made in python that will do the trick.) I realize that this may not be optimal since needing to select many, many creatures to add to a mod with such a small window/list is rather wearisome to work with, but right now thats all I got, alto I could probably just make it a pop-up window.
• With that out of the way, lets move another step to the right. At the top you see an box and two buttons, with these you can add castes tabs to the tab list directly below it. The cast tab here is just for show right now (and building necessity), normally you start without one since not every creature needs castes.
• You select the tab that says "creature" and you'll see... More tabs on it's right-side, lots of tabs! And this is finally where you start to freaking mod. Everything you can possibly add to a creature will be listed under those tabs (I hope, at least that's the idea of it.) The "creature" tab and "castes" tabs are there so you can edit your creature on both levels by choosing where you put certain abilities. Abilities put into the creature tab will work for all casts of that creature whereas those put under a certain caste will only apply to that caste of that creature. (you don't have to name those tabs "caste" by the way, choose something useful like "male" or "female", you get the idea.)
• I've only explained the modding of creatures so far but all the other stuff you can mod works exactly the same way (as long as we are talking about .txt files that is, I can't help you with the rest such as graphic mods or sound mods, at least not yet but that's a whole different card game.)
• I hope this was all understandable.

GAH! Forgot something again. Tooltips! I forgot to say that in the eventual final version tooltips will be added to every function and button. The tooltips will have all the info I can find on the wiki.

Little update.

I think it's starting to look better. Tabs help. All the previous screens will be added under the tabs on the left.

I probably have to clarify that the earlier picture is just for looks, NOTHING ON IT WORKS YET!

The buttons and such do nothing, there is no wiring behind it, it doesn't work at all yet, it cannot read,write or proccess any data, in fact it's not a program at all, I haven't touched or written a single line of code yet.

This is just how menu's assembled in wxglade look.

You could fiddle with it yourself if you want, just download it (and python), it's really easy (fun even). I could even upload the stuff in the picture if you people want to import it to see just how crappy it still is. 

PS: yes I will be using tabs eventually but even with tabs it's so much stuff that needs to be displayed. In an earlier version I had tabs going from one end of the screen to the other, and those were just for the types of .txt files I needed. 

I really hope you can get this going without losing steam, which is usually what seems to happen with projects like this. If possible (and it may not be), try to get a GROUP going so that you won't be the only one slowly going crazy in the night.

What's this group thing you speak of? How do I start one? I'm not savy at all about network tech, never use the stuff.

Quote from: Vandala on February 29, 2012, 04:04:30 pm

Quote from: claer_runway on February 29, 2012, 03:12:37 pm

they'd probably name them after flowers or something. but iirc they just use normal human months

Or after Equestrian species?

"And so it came to pass in the month of mother mustang..."

iirc the Gala was in december

  You've bin missing out I see.
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