Bay 12 Games Forum

Tents need fabric for two different things: the walls - which VERY quickly eat up material - and the roof, for which it goes farther. The walls might be one unit per square, but I think the roof should only consume fabric as roads and bridges do their building material - one unit covering several tiles, exact ratio to be determined.

Resizable tents are what I had in mind, apologies for not saying so outright.

Also: Even for dwarves, tents might actually wind up being worth more than a similar size room cut into soil. You can use high-quality cloth with fine decorations on it - but soil can't be modified. If you have an aquifer, this might be the way to go.

Another possibility might be to have tents be a class of special buildings. For example, sleeping tent(requires a bed - or maybe a mattress if such gets implemented); dining tent(requires tables and chairs depending on size).

This would give an alternative for the things that currently must be placed indoors.

The dining tent is tricky, because it basically needs to contain an even number of tiles. The sleeping tent, however, could just suck in up to one bed per tile. In any case, this selection should be done as weapon traps are now - you select up to n objects to go in the tent, as well as the necessary building materials. Thus, big tents could be made using good furniture and rare hides/cloth for people who want some sort of good accommodation. Hard to make it as good as a proper room underground, and anything that CAVE_ADAPTs might get an inherent unhappy thought from sleeping above ground, but less of one than sleeping without a bed - and it still DOES count as a room.

That said, I do think a general-purpose constructed tent would be better. It just assembles the lining and structural materials into a rectangular, covered room with a single door, and you can then do with it as you will.

Once built, the tents would function as normally-built and -designated rooms of that sort

Right, so... I'm going to issue an apology.

I wasn't aware that there was a portable version of .NET(which, after all, is very visibly branded as Microsoft .NET), thus my frustration with it being invoked.

So... sorry.

As it is, if you do go ahead and work with .NET, so long as it works under the Mono build of it I'll be happy.

In that case, it'd be helpful to provide a link to their download page here so other people who are unaware of it don't only see the MS .NET download and give up.

The more I think of it, the more I think that making brewing require some thought would be a good thing. As it stands, so long as you have spare barrels and a few farms it's a no-brainer.

This is partly tied to farming in general being overpowered now, but it's a separate concern on its own, too.

I do think basic brewing should be fairly straightforward. There should be some liquor which is simple to prepare - I suggest beer or ale, which in its simplest form might only need wheat(longland grass or cave wheat) and water.

From there, though, you can get into the intricacies. Wine takes longer to mature(I think? Might work for game terms); spirits need to be distilled, possibly requiring fuel or magma. Perhaps there will be different grades of alcohol, depending on what you add to it, like there are grades of prepared food now. Basic booze varies largely in how much time it takes to prepare. But if you want good beer, you grow and add hops. If you want good wine, perhaps you get a more exclusive crop that doesn't work so well as food(Civilization Forge's glow caps come to mind). Liquers and spirits might have other things added to them - other spices, say, extending that category beyond its current extent of 'quarry bush leaves'.

Another possibility is that just-prepared booze might actually not be drinkable until a few days have passed. This would bring brewing closer in line to how it is in reality; each individual barrel takes a while to be ready, but nothing keeps the brewer from preparing several in a row. A still could become something like a farm, with spots in it for a number of brews to be worked on; as they become ready, they get "harvested" by the brewer and released for the stockpiles. Clutter limitations would put a cap on how many dwarves a single still could care for. Want to cover a big fortress? You'll need a bigger distillation operation - i.e. more stills built.

Along with this, though, I do think it'd make sense for crops to be tagged with their season of maturation. If drinks have exactly the same ingredients, right down to the season of harvest of everything involved, they can be "stacked" in barrels of up to... whatever the maximum capacity of a barrel should be. This wouldn't exactly hamper the effect of skilled growers, but it would make them less essential for brewing, because the dwarves wouldn't magically be able to shove more booze into a barrel solely because the plants all came from the same square of soil. Barrels hold, let's say, twenty-five units of booze, and that's the same whether you fill them up with five one-high harvests, or use a massive pile of ten to fill two barrels' worth at once.

But item stacking is a separate issue anyway.

Let me get this straight.

You lash out at me for maligning the way you wish to play. For arguing that maybe, just maybe, Toady has the mechanical difficulty of the game at more or less the level he wants it for the target demographic. For daring to suggest that what has become an ever more involved practise, and has always been a major part of the game - finding and exploiting buried wealth in whatever form - ought not to perform a sudden and drastic reversal for no better argument than "I want an easier game".

And then you turn around and spout this:

Changing the sitewide radar to something short ranged and varying per dwarf ... ruins the whole point of the idea.

Put the hypocrisy down, and maybe I'll take you seriously. Until you're willing to follow your own conditions, any discussion is pointless.

I am trying to be civil and say what I don't like about this suggestion - and what, on the other hand, I think has merit and could add to the game. It is, in fact, easier than we have it now - and I(and, I think, others, though I won't name names; people can speak up, for or against, for themselves) have backed this up with in-world justification to go with the gameplay concerns. Most of what I'm seeing from you is denunciation. It's not exactly what you asked for, therefore it sucks.

I am willing to compromise. Until you are as well, there is really no point in carrying on.

With that - barring a shift to a more civil tone - I withdraw.

The "{year} vintage" is all I've been referring to - what year was the booze made? Since DF doesn't handle crops the same way the real world does, that and the quality of the brew are about all that would set most drinks apart.

True, vintage year doesn't automatically tie to quality. In game terms, though, as discussed earlier in the thread it's probably an acceptable simplification to say that age has an effect on quality that's consistent for any given type of booze. Use of different tags could affect the shape of that curve - maybe it slopes downward, or upward; maybe it starts going up, gets to a certain age, then [plateaus and] drops, or maybe it starts going down, hits the nadir, and then goes steadily up.

In reality it'd be more complex than that, of course; the growing conditions would affect the crop. But that degree of complexity might be a little much to ask for in-game.

Any word on the next Linux build? Been looking forward to crashing my computer some more seeing if I can get it running stable for a while now.