Bay 12 Games Forum

Alright, zack.  Find below the output from a single season of a fortress. I've got about 50 dwarves and there is some trading and a goblin invasion happening, so all in all, a pretty normal autumn.  I've hidden it in a spoiler tag and a code tag in order to make it easy to copy-and-paste to a text file.

I noticed here that the number of identical or nearly-identical reports is huge... so if there were a parsing program, we'd probably want to teach it how to drop most of these.  As for verbosity, you can make adjustments to Announcements.txt in the INIT folder in order to determine the behavior that you see.

You can also create a custom profession called "Micromanage Me" which has zero labors enabled.  If you're using reasonable presets, then it's simple to find the dwarf who is critical for a given task.  Force-clear his labors, enable the one labor that you want, and crack the whip.  If he tries to drink or sleep, use squad orders to frog-march him to the work site.

A really simple one just involves building a vertical stack of square rooms with a staircase in the centre.

No corridors, just rooms connected in the middle. It's also practically the most efficient fortress possible for pathing.

A vertical stack of circular rooms, taking advantage of traffic designations, is slightly better for pathing and can turn into a really streamlined logistics factory.  If you use a circle of diameter 15, then a stack of 15 circular layers has a maximum internal path distance of 30 tiles.  I place my workshops one tile back from the stairs, with common workshop inputs surrounding each workshop and each floor's most common output going to a temporary stockpile on that floor before being cascade-hauled to larger stockpiles.

If you group the workshops and stockpiles together sensibly you can end up with a very dense capsule fortress.  My first few floors look like this:

• Surface pasture, refuse and corpses that could create miasma
• Plant stockpile (millable plants and quarry bushes, pull from #1 below, allow barrels), mill, farmer's workshop, high-value food ingredients, kitchen, meat-fat-and-milk stockpile -- output prepared meals, don't allow barrels
• Butcher, Leatherworker, Tanner, Craftsdwarf, bone-and-skull stockpile, leather stockpile -- output finished goods (bone)
• Plant stockpile #1, farm, still, seeds, barrels -- output Booze
• Wood stockpile, furnace, carpenter workshop -- output bins/barrels
• Storage only; holds bins and barrels for any production site that needs them
• Rope reed / pig tail (pull from #1 above), farmer's workshop, loom, dyer, powder dye stockpile -- output bags
• Gems stockpile, jeweler's workshop, masterwork furniture storage -- output figurines and gem crafts
• Ore stockpile, charcoal and bituminous coal stockpiles, smelter and wood-fired forge -- output metal armor and weapons
• Stone stockpile, mason, mechanic, and craftsdwarf shops -- output mechanisms
• Prepared meals (no barrels), Booze, high-quality tables & chairs
• Dining Hall
• Plumbing/reservoir
• Trade Depot, high-value goods
• Low-quality stone furniture, atom smasher
• Dormitory
• Barracks & danger room

Here I was hoping there was a way to convince speakup that some subportion of the screen was the interesting bit, and to read it back again while ignoring the rest.

A lot of the screen-plotters like Stonesense read DFHack info in order to populate each tile... so why not read out the DFHack info for a tile into a pseudo-TTY server?  DFVeinDig and other utilities have cursor awareness and could tell you the XYZ coordinates of your cursor. 

Your idea for autodetecting special cases is interesting... you could fairly easily scan the map and come up with regions of interest:

• Bodies of water
• Transitions from surface-to-underground
• Transitions from cavern to tunnels
• Hotkeyed points

At which point you could report proximity to each area, or you could report what's going on at each spot, like so:
"SURFACE REPORT.  Bomrek Zifoltubor went aboveground to cut wood.  Urist Hazmat is hunting a deer at 5,41, 113.  Bomrek Zifoltubor chopped wood at 15, 10, 112.  Bomrek Zifoltubor hauled wood to 22,45,101."

The first report would be triggered by Bomrek passing from the underground to the aboveground zone; the transition would check his labor to report his job, and ... not sure how it would figure out where he actually chopped the wood.  The second would be triggered by the creation of a combat report.  Urist has the Hunting Labor *and* generated a hunting report *and* the other creature in the report is a deer; read out the deer's grid location.  The third and fourth readouts would be similar to the first... which is to say I don't know exactly what you would have to read, but it's in the realm of possibility.

It almost seems like the tool we need is a Verbose Game Log dumped to a relational DB; then the TTY could connect to the DB and read out events that match the frame of reference.  This seems... extraordinarily ambitious. Megaproject-type stuff.  It may be beyond the scope of what we can accomplish. TTYing into a window that refreshes the existing gamelog.txt might be an easy hack in the short run.

So your screen-reader -- which for our purposes is your primary interface -- works best in OS X, but DF won't render as text in OS X.  Do we know yet whether your screen reader can accurately read info from DFTerm?

Also, Zack, have you listened to the sounds from SoundSense?  It plays sounds based on things being reported in the game's announcements log.  Since DF is a very interrupt-driven game, the idea of having events actually flow out to you instead of you having to mine them from the entire state of the game seems useful.  Having them flow out as words instead of sounds would require you or us to record a sound library, but it runs in Java so OS X should be able to make it work.

Inky, Pinky, Blinky and Clyde are munching on your workforce!

Engrave four slabs and put them to rest.

Someone from Hyrule has told Link that he must find the key to the next step of his quest in your fortress.

Is there a way to teach your reader some of the symbols?  For instance reading ▼ as "down ramp"? 

Also, I know you're looking for the full DF challenge, but perhaps we can pre-gen some fairly flat worlds for you that can help minimize layer switching.  Worlds with all the basics -- iron ore, flux stone, no aquifer -- so that you can concentrate on the basics of the game.