Bay 12 Games Forum

It's been a while since I posted here. I hope I have the right forum for this. I've run head long into a wall that I can't seem to pull myself over. I've been working on my mod talking closely with the original creators of the series to make it far more accurate then my "fill in the blank" ideas were.

However while trying to add in stonesense support I've run into an issue with subsprite colored creatures. I'm likely mangling the XML but I've tried several different variations of it to no avail. I'm wondering it it may be my image file instead.



the image file can be found here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30579921/color_talyxians_dl92.png



edit: forgot to provide an image of the problem. Either the first layer or the second layer is drawn, but never all of the layers and their own colors: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30579921/Screenshot%202015-04-30%2005.39.16.png

The main announcement log is usually filled, often quite quickly, with new announcements. This leads to mandates being missed simply because the player decided to set a large manager order such as process plants(30), and the log has been spammed heavily. The combat and hunting logs do a good job of reducing message spam from the important announcements. However seeing a separate "M" for mandate notification appear under the combat and hunting log indicators would be a great help. Even if the symbol is merely there to show a mandate is active or has changed.

So this is a lovely new screen! It's fast most of the time, so this feature idea really only applies to worlds with a huge population where it can take up to several minutes to go through a week.

Why not show some basic legends mode style text of current events? It lets us get a sense of what is going on in the world as we wait for it to reach the starting date!

I've noticed alot of times in updates that each side of the game needs to be tweaked between fort time and adventure time. However i see this as becoming a major issue when it ultimately comes to having dwarfs running your fortresses after retirement. There is an absolutely massive gap between fortress and adventure mode time, a dwarf mode time unity is about 72 times that of a adventure mode unit.


Proposed solution:
Remove fortress time all together, Dwarf fortress is ultimately a simulation game aiming for realism( though sometimes allowing stuff to break so it can be more fun of course ) , fort time is compressing that simulation in an un-needed way. dwarf mode can be tweaked in several ways to run in adventure time. some of the changes to include and their possible impacts on dwarf mode as a whole are listed:


crop growth - This is probably one of the largest issues with changing from fort time to a global adventure time. However it has an easy solution. allow some crops to take longer than others and allow short easy to harvest crops( such as raspberries or prickle berries ) to be harvested within a short time. and leave more bountiful but longer growing time crops to take seasons as per normal.

movement - as far as i can see dwarf time mainly controls day and night cycles as well as some other things possibly seiges as well as caravans. but as far as the actual ticks used to calculate the distance a creature moves, it can remain unchanged, adventure mode is a turn based simulation of the df world where as fort mode is simply running those 1 second frames at a set frame rate. so movement is largly unaffected by a move to adventure time.

traps and machines - machines are already planning a rewrite and would probably not require much tweaking if this is considered to be implemented. It would merely take 100 ticks for something to activate, or 100 in game seconds. to the player this would be sped up as with movement. but to creatures and adventurers it would be 100 turns.

day and night - one of the major things lacking in dwarf mode is a true night time, currently df goes from day to day instantly with things like werewolf interactions occurring weekly. instead with the new time weekly interactions would take place daily at night( however it would still be the exact same reallife time gap as it is now in fort mode)


- if there are any issues you all feel i missed feel free to tell me



conclusion:
the ultimate plan of this proposal is to change fort time into adventure time while still leaving many of fort modes elements including movement to remain unaffected

creatures will move at the same speed they do now as that is the games frames per second, so if a dwarf now takes 3 seconds to move down a 10 tile hallway, when moved to adventure time the frame speed would allow the dwarf to travel the same distance in the same time. however the actual ingame fundamentals would be different because in fort mode currently going 10 tiles is about 12 ingame minutes. where as in adventure time it would take 10 ingame seconds.


day and night will take the place of weekly interactions such as were beasts, as the game is already moving at the speed of the old fort mode it would take 86400 ingame seconds to rotate 24 hours, as such weekly interactions would take 43200 ingame seconds to toggle on and off day and night.

((Yes this bug will be go into into the bug reporter soon))

I believe i have found the process of which DF worlds are created. Obsidian a rock created by MAGMA itself Coliding with another wall of obsidian. HARDENED MAGMA + HARDENED MAGMA = ALL ELEMENTS

Collapsing obsidian on top of obsidian in arena mode causes a plethora of other stones to spray out as a mist

this is both interesting and really dwarfy, anyone got ideas for it?

Seeing as goblin sites are fast approaching in the new release of df. The possibility of raiding a dark tower and than "retiring as a peasant/claim site" is becoming increasingly tempting. The ability to take over sites like demons and megabeasts, or other civilizations during world gen would add a lasting legacy to player characters. Player characters becoming permanent leaders of goblin or human(etc) sites by a bloody palace coup

Posting for discussion and science not rage.

world tiles: 16x16=256 tiles²
region tiles 16x16=256 tiles²
local tiles 16x16=256 tiles²
embark tiles: 48x48=2304 tiles²


2304*256=589824
589824*256=150994944
150994944*256=38,654,705,664 tiles²


Assuming each tile during a game is 3ft by 3ft by 7 ft tall

38,654,705,664*6= 115,964,116,992 ft²

which converts to

35,345,862.859 km²

The diameter of a sphere with 35,345,862.859 km² of surface area is 3354.2417300660018 km from one side to the other.

in comparison:

Other fun facts about the df world:

the atmosphere of a df world is approximately 0.64 km high, (300 tiles *7feet each to the max height<presumed as survivable altitude>) earths is 100-120km


The depth of a dwarf fortress world is ~700(from core to end of breathable atmosphere) tiles meaning there is 4900 ft or 1.49352 km.


the complete surface of a dwarf fortress world (cubed counting air and solids from core to end of breathable atmosphere) would be 173,194,728,009.892 km^3      Earth's is approximately:  3,314,447,856,000km³   (diameter km/2 +120 km(max breathable atmosphere)*surface area km²so: 6498*510072000)


the earth is 3.803005575 times larger than a df world. (earth diameter / df diameter )


take in mind it is still very large: if you could fill a df world with human sized cubes ( ~0.07m³) you could fit 54,328,679,102,474,210,400,140 people in it. 

I'm doing a "vault" sealing my dwarfs below the surface in a haunted region, so far the plan worked however migrants from above are still coming even after over 195 deaths above ground.  back in 31.16 40 or so deaths gave me " no migrants were attracted to your deathtrap of a fortress"  . Now I'm getting " migrants have shown up despite knowing this fort may be there tomb"