Bay 12 Games Forum

Updated to v2.4; with the issues you mentioned fixed and also a newly cropped 5x5 set with all the updates - I'm pretty sure there's no inaccessible bits, but I haven't checked exhaustively.  Cheers, Dragor. 

Edit:  I'd also love to see someone shuffle the full map into smaller vertical sections - only six Z deep is pretty inefficient in DF, and this would allow for a smaller embark, eg 5x5 with the layout compromised but all notable sections still there.  I probably won't bother though, since I've spent so long on this already. 

Also, for clarification this is released under GPL3 so do whatever with it. 

CameraNerd - yep, that's exactly it. 

The only caveat is that I suggest copying rather than moving, and then keeping your 0.7 folder until you've been playing in the new one for a while without any problems.  Backups!  Losing is not much fun when you lose the save instead of the fort...

No idea about a way to disable announcement spam - that would be a separate project, though this would mean you don't need to worry about missing stuff after blocking the pop-ups. 


And suggestion time:  (I love it already, but always room for getting even better)
 - the colours in the settings file should match what they would be in the announcements screen in DF - I'll implement this if someone can point to a list of what announcements are which colours and post the settings. 
 - I noticed a problem when getting this:  it adds new announcements to the list without scrolling down, which makes it a lot easier to miss the important stuff again.  Changing this to stick to the bottom of the log would be great.
 - Finer control over the combat reporting - I got four pages of a Kapoko retching, vomiting, standing up, and then falling over again.  There was a lot of other stuff in there too, but being able to ditch the vomiting and retching alone would cut it by ~60% without losing valuable information.  An option to indent combat reports would also be cool, and make it obvious what type each line is. 
 - soundsense comes with two dfhack scripts that write to the gamelog, 'soundsense' and 'soundsense-season'. 

The snapshot I'm on at the moment is awesome, and close enough to version 1.0 that I've started thinking about what sort of other functions would be cool to have.  There's already the idea of a dfhack.init tab which got discussed a while ago which would be cool, but I also found this recently:  Manila Launcher - also written in java, with a focus more on mods and updates than configuration and launching.  Most of it I think is kinda dangerous for newbies - eg, accidentally breaking the setup of everything by getting an incompatible update - but two features stood out as being both neat and safe. 

1. Have a tab which just grabs Toady's RSS feed to show the current state of development.  It's not much, but it was kinda cool to open it up and have the latest new appear. 

2. Automatically check for available updates - on DFFD this can be done by the file version checker (link is for my pack), which is easier to parse and also doesn't add to the page views (and thus automatable).  Contrary to popular belief, DFFD does support direct download links:  eg this to my pack - and while you need to know the filename it will take a wildcard (this does mess up the filename and if wildcarded extension, but if it's getting decompressed anyway...). 

I have, on second thoughts, no idea how this could work well without pack maintainers having to manually change some pack ID every time - actually, maybe check the first time the LNP is opened and assume that's the version?  Only an issue then if they don't open for ages, missing an important update and then there aren't any for ages (uncommon enough to ignore).  This is essentially just adding something of a connection to the online community.  Adding a 'Support Bay12 Games' button would also be pretty cool (now that I think of it, I'll add a 'donate' item to the links tab). 

3. It can't handle graphics packs, only tilesets and colour schemes - but it actually has live previews of each of these.  It looks awesome, and could potentially help newbies choose one that they like instead of giving up; to test I have to open DF, load map, check, quit, install next set, repeat.  It's a pain, and this looks pretty interesting as a way to bypass that. 

Anyway, I just saw that there was another interesting launcher in java and thought I'd share; ignore my ramblings if inconvenient. 

Yep, now that this is a skeleton pack it belongs with the utilities, IMO.

Wow.  This just broke into the ten most downloaded files ever on DFFD. 

At the time of writing, it's also top five for newest file (heh), downloads per day, file size, file rating...

A massive thanks - again - to everyone who built one of the components or helped assemble the pack:  this is more your work than mine. 

Oh, and I also just updated with the cross-platform LNP which is both newer and better.  ;-)

I'm having issues adding a keybinding for this, any idea why?  DFhack won't recognise "getplants autochop" as a valid command, though it prints that without quotes.  It's bizzare, and annoying. 

Oh, and I was going to use Shift-A as the binding.  Any clashes or other suggestions people can think of?