Bay 12 Games Forum

I was interested for the sake of blah-blah what human civilization you think our beloved (?) dorfs most resemble. I lean towards the Aztecs as they:
- Were aggro people setting out to a foreign land and laying waste to their neighbors.
- Created an improbable city in the middle of a lake and festooned it with mega-projects.
- Gave rise to craftsmen of legendary skill and interesting taste (flayed human skin suits, for instance).
- Embodied the Armokian spirit of spilling industrial quantities of blood.
- Inevitably overrun by an incursion of neighbors led by several uninvited guests with metal skin. Beware their pestilential breath.

Dear Urist Mc*,

 When you find yourself outside the monstrously deep cheese-grater of death trap that you worked so diligently to create at the entrance of your fort and the goblins arrive, could you please maintain the self-control necessary to return to the fort via said cheese-grater of death trap instead of throwing your stubby wee arms into the air and running around outside of the forts protective walls in a thinly veiled attempt to schuck off this mortal coil? Suicide is maximally un-Dwarvenly, unless you have failed to build the hatch cover of your dreams or are pining for your recently murdered kitten, then it falls well within the limits of culturally acceptable practices. Thank you.

Again, Geology. Seems a common reaction to this game. I was fairly adept at geomorphology prior to playing (enough to be amused at building any kind of complex structure in Loam), but it fired me up about the hard-rock end of things. Can't help but look at all those formations and wonder at the geohistoric background of the region.
Beyond that the game hasn't made me worry too much about my sanity like Carmaggedon did ("Zoom-Zoom, run pedestrian scum!"). Though I do describe myself as falling into fey or fell moods and the boarding students at the school I work at are immensely confused by my constant references to the greasy bone-and-coagulated-flesh slop served at the kitchen as "Kittenhack". I also have an inexplicable desire to build something out of stone. Hmm...

Awesome work from all involved, much stabler for me now. I know that sound in linux is not exactly the foremost issue, but I've had a failure on 31.05 to use the sound system on my rig. To make things complex, Kubuntu 10.04 64 bit. Terminal output looks like:

Sound devices available:
PulseAudio Software
ALSA Software
OSS Software
Picking PulseAudio Software. If your desired device was missing, make sure you have the appropriate 32-bit libraries installed. If you wanted a different device, configure ~/.openalrc appropriately.
Initializing OpenAL failed, no sound will be played

I've created an .openalrc file and configured for alsa but the program fails to read the file resulting in the above message and no sound. Also tried writing an .alsoftrc file which DF seemed to read as it was upset at me because of a typo, but did not parse in regards to my audio choice. My .openalrc is simply:

(define devices '(alsa))

Not sure if this is a configuration issue or a missing 32-bit library thing, though all libs seem to be installed. Any help would be appreciated, thank you.

Dolomite for no other reason than I spent a summer recording and hauling hundred pound slabs of the stuff out of Bronze Age graves in Jordan. It endeared itself to me and to my spine, which has never forgotten. I feel my Dwarves pain...

Extra bonus fun fact, when the Romans were knocking tar out of the area for copper, they'd cut the Achilles tendon on one of the legs of the slaves that they sent down into the mines in order to prevent them from running off, not that they'd get very far in a 130 degree desert but what the hell, you can't be too safe. I fully expect such details to make it into DF Version 1.0.

I don't know anymore. I need inspiration or something to drive me into building something. I need something which I can not explain. With all that's new in the game, I have no idea what to take with me anymore. Might start hitting Play Now for a while until I can work out what I lack...

I hear you. After a major version boost I get into a listless phase, constantly starting and abandoning fortresses until I've come to understand the dynamics better. I had no clue about the utility and horror of the caverns until I breached one and watched as a string of Legendary Creatures sent my fortress into a catastrophic emo-death cycle straight out of Black Plague Europe. Shudder. At any rate, the caverns certainly guarantee that it's more difficult to look at the underground as nothing more than a quarry.

Me again. Ubuntu 9.10 on a Dell E6500 laptop with 40d18, audio goes completely fritzy. Worked perfectly in 40d17, but now there is mostly garbled crackling followed by silence, though randomly the sound sometimes works. Log files show:

Mar  2 21:08:20 heathen-earth pulseaudio[2318]: ratelimit.c: 404 events suppressed

Anything else I can do to help, let me know.