Bay 12 Games Forum

I've found myself getting back into DF recently due to the Steam release, and I am tickled downright pink to see that a direct descendant of my original Modest Mod is still going strong after all these years. It's really incredible to see all the improvements that you—and Button, LargeSnail, Warlord255, Sver, and all the other contributors—have put into it since I retired from the scene.

Keep up the great work!

Kind of embarrassing that this is one of the last messages in the thread...but I'm happily "retired", unfortunately. It was going strong, at least. For a few years.

Hi Taffer,

If you ever see this I have ported all of your creature descriptions and some of your edits   I plan on porting more of the features as modular mods.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3143767330

If you ever want to take over just let me know. Also anyone else feel free to work off this base. Porting to steam workshop is a huge pain.

I like the cut of your jib. Keep it up. I once took a week's vacation just to focus full-time on the descriptions, and that represented only a tiny fraction of the amount of time I spent on it. Mostly editing, over and over.

Glad to see it's being carried forward. The descriptions in particular I was proud of.

From your reddit announcement: "They provided blanket permission for this on their thread on bay12 here" -- I'm he/him.

I like the cut of your jib.

A new graphics set to represent the sentient races!

• Dwarves:
         
  Elves:
         
  Humans:
         
  Goblins:
         
  Kobolds:
         

Especially this. I look forward to seeing what you make of the capabilities in the Steam release. Keep it up!

Taffer, I'm not sure if you'll read this, but I love your tilesets. They're my absolute favourite. Since you've retired I've taken your tileset and kitbashed it for my own use to learn how things work.
But I've hit a wall. I wanted to make the tileset TWBT compatible, nbut failed. I also wanted to know how did you make your ramps so sexy on that one screenshot from two pages prior.
As I was saying, not sure if you'll ever read it, but thank you for your work for us.

It was a mock-up, unfortunately. I’ve never been interested in using TWBT. Not because I don’t like it’s features, but because I don’t like relying on memory-editing third party utilities.

I haven’t been following development, but I was creating mock-ups because whatever new system I’d need to “port” my graphics to and work in, I’m confident I’ll have way more trouble drawing than “coding”. By that logic I never needed to wait for the big steam release to start development, I figured I’d get some of the design work done early.

As far as graphics for the current version go, what’s in the OP is the best I got.

EDIT: I feel like I started rambling and got cranky as I wrote this. I didn’t want to delete it though as it might help explain why I left, lol. I’ll just hide the complaining in a spoiler tag instead.

Worldgen experiments for the next release. I like the badland tiles.





Embiggened.

I put together a new version to fix the most egregious things. Joints are large again, facial features are internal, and elves have some skills they're naturally good at learning.

I expect the big new release to make or break me, I'll probably either start a new graphics overhaul and get excited or I'll give up on DF. Revised already does pretty much everything I set out to do as it is. If nothing else it'll perhaps be useful for modders as a starting point when the next release comes and DF has users flooding in.

I don't think I'm allowed to post the spritesheet, but the new UI is all done using a single image file. If you, or anyone else, were to draw ascii-style borders, scroll bars, etc on it, the game would import everything. I'm not sure about changing the tile size, since it varies a lot. The game is no longer on a single grid; some of the UI tiles are 36x32 or 16x6, it's a pretty wild mix. Toady came up with the entire setup, Mike and me are just doing sprites.

If you want to update your tileset, you might want to add two sheets: One for the worldmap and one for the UI.

I'm sure that Tarn will add a pure ASCII solution, but I'm not sure how that UI would look.

The minimap should just be in ASCII and the graphical version both. It's essentially a 1px tileset, it just redraws the entire game map.

Quote

The more Toady posts the more work it looks like a proper update will be for me.

True. I'm already dreading updating MasterworkDF or my own tileset... which might be obsolete.

On the flip side, it does allow you a lot more fine control over how your tileset looks, including designations, cursors, etc. Caste-specific creatures, items per subtype, etc.

Great news about the single image file. Thank you for the quick, detailed reply and for the advice. It's appreciated.

First, may I say this is a seriously excellent mod. It stays true to the vanilla design, but the collection of improvements gives a much better experience. Thank you very much Taffer for putting it together, and to everyone who contributed.

I have noticed one minor weird thing while testing in the arena, which is facial features being protected by mail shirts:

...

This seems like it might be similar to the vanilla issue with cloaks protecting toes. Please forgive me if this is actually a known problem-- I found references to it happening with UBSTEP:MAX, but I see that the mod specifically has it at 2 for the neck and shoulders.

The wiki has conflicting information. The graphical armor chart does have the face coloured in for chain mail, but the text says ...

I tried to reproduce without revised with a fresh install from the starter pack, but that does seem to work as expected:

...

Anyway, it doesn't affect my enjoyment at all-- actually I prefer it over all facial features being completely unprotected, since I just pretend it's being partially protected by the helm instead of the shirt-- but thought the report might be helpful.

Edit: I found a relevant bug report describing the vanilla behaviour with UBSTEP: https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=1821
I really don't understand the description of the algorithm, but sounds to me like this bug is probably causing the issue:

Thank you for the compliment and thank you for the report. This is expected behaviour and there's not much I can do about it, unfortunately. Revised works around that bug already by capping UBSTEP so that toes are never protected by upper body armor. It also sets shoulders and hips as "internal limbs" to separate limbs from the body by one extra step. This lets me protect necks, tails, and (if added) "anatomically correct bodyparts" by default. I bumped UBSTEP and LBSTEP everywhere to compensate. One of the side effects is that more tops protect facial features now.

It isn't perfect, which is why I'd also planned on including Sver's internal facial features. I didn't want to delay this release further so that todo item is on the agenda for the next release. If it works out as well as I hope it will solve this issue, for the most part, with (I hope) a minimal amount of weirdness. (Weirdness in combat logs, setting mouths, noses, etc as internal will be intrisincially weird either way).

Related but IMO cool, I added several such internal limbs for bird people specifically so that their winged arms would never be protected by armor. It makes sense to me that armored wings can't flap particularly well and can be seen as a balancing nerf against flying humanoids (not that they tend to wear anything anyways).

Taffer 10 minutes ago: "I haven't been working on Revised that long, really.."

on: December 10, 2016, 12:44:23

"...well at least I started that fairly soon after I released my tilesets..."
know I

on: April 21, 2012, 22:43:59

Anyways. I'm thinking of revisiting the descriptions for the next release but I don't want to take forever again, and I spent years on the descriptions already.

I've also collected a motley little collection of to-do list items over the past year or whatever. I don't usually do this but I thought I'd share a few of them, make of them what you will. Posted as-written other than the bit about the elephants, which might have deserved a little context. (Actually let me know what you think of this, I often have ideas to improve the giant variations but I always convince myself to stick closely to vanilla. Maybe I'm wrong).

• aquatic egg layers (sea serpents) shouldn't lay eggs
• maybe give elves ambusher
• elf SKILL_LEARN_RATE skills
• elf beards?
• maybe take inspiration from kingdom rush origins..bearded, strong, horned elf castes?
• troll analog for elves, maybe with feathers?
• giant elephants could have 4 eyes, 4 tusks?
• test internal facial features
• mastodons?
• reconsider dried gut thread
• consider the bird vermin problem
• fix throats always getting attacked from behind somehow (no earthly clue how I intend to pull it off though)
• unnaturally thin bird people in generated descriptions

Of course like half the remaining list is just to look over some of the other mods I've had my eyes on.

Taffer, you're a godsend! By far my favorite release of your mod until now, and I can finally play Dwarf Fortress again!

It's a shame about throats, though, hopefully one day Toady will take care of that, just like you said.

Thank you so much for including the expanded dictionary and woolly-limbed dwarves as optional addons, by the way, I really appreciate it.

Cheers!

Glad you enjoy it! Let me know if any issues come up. I'm still pretty bad at actually playing Dwarf Fortress, so you might notice something I've missed.

Great! As always, thank you for the hard work.

A question and a comment.

Is it still safe to overwrite revised with Sver's if we want his combat balance? (or more specifically my brand of Sver's balance )

RE: the joint resizing, IIRC and to my understanding making the joints larger primarily did two things:

1) Changed the dynamic of force transfer - I understand the mechanics here less, but as far as I understand relative size differences between parts affects how much force is transferred, making smaller joints much more easily damaged. Perhaps the material changes are enough to fix this.

2) Made joints significantly harder to sever. Smaller joints can be shot off by arrows, and are easier to tear off with bite attacks.

Thank you! It should be safe, yes, but then things will be inconsistent, especially in regards to unarmed combat. But I care far more about inconsistencies than sane people.

I'll happily bring back the larger joints for the next release. Thank you for helping to clarify. Sometimes I revert things because I don't understand them, and that was definitely the case here.

I can't say for certain when I'll be able to return to active modding and incorporate the Revised update, but for now they should be working mostly fine together.

I'm looking forward to your next update, whenever it comes!

They are enough, technically, but that is much wonkier. To keep it short, larger joint size makes them much more resilient, because DF considers tiny bodyparts to be extremely fragile - in quadratic progression, I dare say. You need over the top material strengths to compensate for that with vanilla joint sizes; larger sizes, on the other hand, allow for some fine tuning to get the result I desire (so that certain weapons still could break joints without getting too much raw power yet).

Joints are also impossible to target manually, and they don't seem to come up in the combat logs that much more often (not that I would mind) from the size increase.

Thank you for helping to clarify. I should have just messaged you. I'll bring back larger joints. As always, feel free to let me know your thoughts, it's great to have people pushing back sometimes.