Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: smjjames on April 20, 2014, 10:01:19 pm

Ooh, just about to get to the bug fixing phase, or the bug pile as Toady called it.

Pray to Armok, because it is only chance in few years your "favourite" bug could be actually fixed.

That bugfixing phase is still a bit off. First it'll just be the most obvious and critical new bugs, then post-release we'll get more newer bugs as they're discovered, then we'll start seeing older bugs get mixed in, possibly along with the job priorization rewrite.

The problem isn't that there's something inherently wrong with those foods. It just that they're the ones we happen to mass produce, and thus get the blame for the problems mass farming causes.

So much this. It annoys me soooo much when people seem to put the blame on the cows and sheep etc, as if they're somehow bad for the environment on their own, when it's actually the practices used in industrial agriculture that is to blame. Take a cow and stick it in a pasture without adding any fodder produced with artificial fertilizers, pesticides and the impact of transporting it halfway across the globe (and all the other negative industrial practices involved) and it'll actually have a positive impact on the environment and CO2 levels.

There are answers to this question here and there. This reddit IAmA for instance has a few noteworthy bits:

Quote from: Kalkamesh

What is your biggest motivation on programming Dwarf Fortress?

It was going to be to play the game myself, but that never seems to happen now, he he he. I really like to see how things play out, and how the new features mesh with the old.

Quote from: Psydra

Although I'm not a programmer by any means, what I've read of you has been really inspiring. Dedicating your life to anything requires a lot of effort. I'm just curious what its like to be essentially "living your dream."
As a side question to the one above, what has been the biggest obstacle in doing what you want to do for the rest of your life? Is it ever hard to keep going? Do you ever lose faith in what you're doing?

I wasn't very happy as a mathematician, in a job that wasn't right for me. This is definitely a different feeling than that. I'm not happy all of the time by any stretch of the imagination, but it's really satisfying to be able to work on something I care about and see it all come to life slowly (very slowly) as I go.
I guess math was the biggest obstacle. Making the choice there was tough in the end, though I was never going to choose math over games. It's sometimes hard to work when I didn't sleep much the night before, simple stuff like that, but nothing like despair or a loss of faith. I don't know... it's really natural to me, maybe because I've been doing it for so long. It wasn't the same with math at all.

Quote from: thesuperbob

do you ever feel like you've worked too much or not enough? How do you manage to set the pace for yourself after so many years of development?

I think the split of my day into three periods has helped keep things focused (pre-Zach's place, Zach, post-Zach), but adding interesting features to the project is the main motivation. It's cool to see how things turn out. I never end up feeling like I've worked too much, and I think that's caused some other portions of my life to atrophy. I'm certainly not an example of a balanced person who has figured things out.

Might've been more in there, just skimmed through for what I vaguely remembered was in there. I'm sure there's answers in other interview and Q&A's etc as well, just need to find the right ones ^^

Quote from: thvaz on April 16, 2014, 06:45:57 pm

Dwarf Fortress IS easy to play. Fortress and Adventure Mode. I first played it when I was 25 yo, while studying and working, and I only needed the "How to Survive your First Winter" tutorial in the wiki. I am far from being a genius, I have no Asperger's, and I hadn't (and still haven't) a lot of free time. What is needed to learn Dwarf Fortress? You have to want. It is certainly not a game that will play itself for you.

I'm not sure whether that's supposed to be a positive stereotype or negative stereotype. Anyway, please don't.

I was thinking of asking how he meant that as well at first, but decided not to (especially since in my case that stereotype is definitely true). But yeah, people do seem to easily get all emotional when it comes to stereotypes regardless of what kind, so it's probably best to not go there.

somewhere in dfstories.com is a story of a bronze colossus getting its head knocked off by a thrown rabbit in adventure mode.

It was actually a Fluffy Wambler, at least the original well-known story of it (it might very well have been done with rabbits as well).

It's cubic centimeters, so 10,000,000 cube root = 215cm = 2.15 meters to a side of a cube.

In reality, with lots of airspace between the legs and limbs etc., things usually not being cube shaped, it would be roughly the size of an especially large real life elephant.

Dwarves being about the size of a human in volume (presumably shorter but fatter)

Going by the raws it'd be the size of 2 full grown DF elephants. Not sure how accurate those are though ofc.

While this quote doesn't say all that much one way or the other it might be interesting anyhow

Quote from: Kyphis

With the new climbing being implimented, what are the odds of seeing/constructing fences that block most animals, but only cost extra movement (take longer) for things with climbing or sentience?

Same as any other reasonable feature, I suppose.  I haven't added anything like that for next time.

The fictional plants just need a little love, IMHO.

The above quote is mostly about the "McNugget" like feel they have, which is mostly caused by their not having been refined and purified as ideas.

Natural plants have this refinement built in-- Things like the mythological silliness behind mandrake roots, et al.

Toady is busy bashing his brains in on logic problems, loop execution optimisations, bug hunting, etc. All too often, this precludes taking time to sit and daydream about fantastical components of his game.

I suspect that it is this time constraint issue in regard to spending the time to refine the fantastical elements into beautifully complex abstractions on which "cultural" things can hang that is the real motivator for him to scrap them.

Personally, I think things like plump helmets, sunberries, and such already HAVE cultural significance--- They have significance here in our forum community. We have each tried to envision these plants as best we could from the limited information available, and a wealth of community stories have been crafted, (of various levels of quality, which I wont elaborate on) which when taken together, could be used to flesh out these crops, if one were to take the time to do so.

At the end of the day though, it is toady at the wheel. If toady decides to axe sunberries and pals, I fully expect the mod community to do the fleshing, just because of this community cultural growth those crops have produced.

There aren't that many of these "original plants", after all.  The new raw structure has been (mostly) finalized for herbaceous plants. Some real-world biome evaluation for plant morphology and some inventiveness, and we can have a new-raws compliant "original plants" mod. Probably a great many to pick from.

Who knows, if the community distilled versions are of good enough quality, toady might decide to incorporate them.  Again, I think the real issue is the time and energy needed for that distillation and refinement.

I don't think time constraints have much to do with it really. It's fairly obvious looking at Toady's approach to much of the game as well as his answers in the DFtalks etc that he has a really big thing for procedurally generated content and much prefer that over premade stock fantasy. While there has to be some stock features to help ground the whole thing and not make it all a big confusing random mess I'd say a good balance has been struck so far at least.

The underground plants at least seems to sit fairly safe, as they should, and they're really the ones with most of any cultural value so far. Sun berries might be attributed some sure, but the rest? They really don't add much more than an unfamiliar name. Setting up a simple system to throw in a reasonable amount of random plants to take their place, possibly with a few minor magical effects to spice them up definitely sounds like a better idea to me.