Bay 12 Games Forum

Forgive me if this has been brought up, but I'm getting an error when I try to run DC:
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EDIT: I just tried using version 0.16 (the standalone) and it worked for me. Huzzah! Consider this a bug report...

If you're playing with 40d, then yes, you need to use 0.16, not 0.17*. That's not so much a bug as it is a system requirement.

d-o-{r,h} settings appear to be reversed.  I designated a huge area as restricted so I could pull out the support column underneath it, and my dwarves not only continued to enter the area, they made a specific point to go through that area, even though it was highlighted in red.  Opposite effect with high-traffic.

Check your init.txt settings regarding traffic zones and make sure they're appropriate(and check them in game, for that matter); I haven't noticed this problem.

Another reason people don't like the nobles is that their continued existence doesn't add much. They demand fancy rooms, they refuse to do work, they grab their choice of the fortress's finest possessions, and from time to time they make demands. If you can't make them those bismuth items because you haven't a single tile of bismuthinite, some luckless metalsmith gets punished for it.

If nobles added something to the fortress - improved efficiency of everyone they interacted with, for instance - people might be a bit more willing to deal with their caprice.

Once they stop making mandates for items you don't have the raw materials for, their expected lifespan will probably skyrocket.

The Wiki, if I'm not mistaken, is not, though. Unless it's also one of the mirrors, it SHOULD be available - if perhaps sluggish from people with nothing better to do(with Bay 12 flash-flooded) hitting it.

What's water up to your knees when you've fought off hordes of groundhogs and carp?

Fixed.

Seriously, though... a lot of this is going to be in wait-and-see territory; but if it isn't all perfect on the first go(and Toady may be awesome, but let's not expect Godly feats of him TOO often), these will all be useful thoughts to keep in mind.

Not a problem.

I'd poke at the elves - shouldn't be that hard - but for the time being I'm working on a mod project of my own. Once I've got a draft release, maybe I'll knock together something for the elves - though it'd need work on the end-user's part to fit in with the Mayday tileset.

What I have in mind here is something to regulate fluid pathfinding.

Essentially, a tile's floor could be sloped toward one of its neighbours - ideally all eight directions, but four might do. What this would mean in practical terms is that a fluid could not flow against the slope unless there was a great excess - at least two units, rather than the usual one-unit difference - or perhaps only if under pressure; I'm not too sure of how the pressure math works to begin with. Fluids would try to go straight downhill; if that's not an option, then on the "downward" diagonals; and if THAT'S not an option, to either side. But they wouldn't go against the slope unless there was a very good reason to. Also, 1-tile fluids would still flow along them.

This would allow for watercourses of less than full height which wouldn't be constantly eddying. And if engravers or miners could themselves slope a floor, it would also allow for more efficient aqueducts/drains for the towercap farm/etc; as soon as the inflow is cut off, water flows in an orderly fashion through the drains and whatever is supposed to happen with it, happens.

If floors are sloped toward each other, that would yield a puddle, such as the bottom of a pool now.

This could be viewed and laid out in a submenu of [d]esignations, sort of like how traffic areas are now. There's room in the [d]-> submenu but this doesn't really fit there... Anyway, just like how damp/warm stone show up when designating for digging, and traffic areas appear when designating those, when in this submenu, any slopes on the ground would appear. If it's four-directional, the characters to represent it are already in the tileset anyway.

In practice, level ground would be relatively rare outside of plains and the like, and even there, one would likely find depressions or knolls here and there - places water would collect in and run off of, respectively. The former might even fill up slightly during rainfall, sort of like how pools do now, except that they don't hold nearly as much water - one or two deep before they spill over.

Again, I don't know how the math behind it works, but this might simplify fluid flows somewhat and reduce the CPU drain associated with them.

I'm not too keen on elves, and haven't touched that particular tileset yet. But I did get the ratmen working.

Tip: If you take a screenshot with PrintScreen, paste it into Paint(or your photo-editing tool of choice), and crop down to just the 176x80 magenta portion, that seems to clear whatever funky metadata was causing a rendering problem. I've got it working fine under PNG; I imagine it'd work similarly well converted to a 24-bit bitmap for 40d, but since I'm using 40d16, I haven't done so myself.

Here's a functional graphics file for it.


With that file saved as raw/graphics/graphics_ratman.txt and the tile page as raw/graphics/ratman/ratman.png and graphics turned on in data/init/init.txt, it should work. If you already have a graphics set installed, you'll want to go into its own .txt and remove any entry it has for [CREATURE_GRAPHICS:RATMAN](and until the next CREATURE_GRAPHICS token), but other than that it can install alongside existing graphics.

My playable ratman civ is as yet horribly unbalanced and not all that distinct from dwarves; I'm also playing with some other things as I go. But the .txt file includes every entry in the example .txt, so there shouldn't be any outright missing professions - only peasants should look like peasants(and, perhaps, regular ratmen on the map if playing without a ratman civ).

Anyway, so far so good, finally!

I haven't had major nobles arrive yet. One oddity so far, though: the expidition leader will show up with the "king/queen" graphics. This is not the case for the mayor; I don't know if the king is defined as the "site leader" or not. If not, then [LEADER:RATS:10:0:AS_IS:DEFAULT] could be replaced by [LEADER:RATS:5:0:AS_IS:DEFAULT] to use the standard "noble" graphic, or whatever else.

And here's the working .PNG file. Why this works when one with the same colours in the same place doesn't is beyond me, but anyway: