Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

Me

16 (22.9%)

Me!

54 (77.1%)

Total Members Voted: 69

[WillowLuman]

About Adherents: In my current playtest, I've only encountered one caravan from them so far. However, I do get one from the elves every season, so that's indicative of what could happen. The intention was that they could potentially show up at any season but only once a year; yet this is likely not the case. How about we make them Winter only?

I've never seen a siege arrive with anything but the weapons specified in their entity file, so I doubt they'd ever show up armed. And you'd have to intentionally piss them off by attacking them or seizing their goods, as local wildlife or other civs aren't likely to destroy their caravan.

Caravans don't show up during a seige, I think, but a Seige can arrive while a caravan is still present. So if they only came once a year, the chances of them saving your fort are fairly slim.

[Halfling]

Okay. Found a monastery. They don't have spears, they just take them from the enemy. So that was my bad.

Food for thought: they may (I'd say will) kill a siege (forgot about sieges blocking caravans) or a megabeast if they arrive at the same time. If they bring a gifted adherent they kill anything in the game. This is standard behavior for caravans. They may pick up equipment on the map. If they're unable to leave, or sometimes due to a bug fail to path correctly, they may go berserk as merchants sometimes do and cause a lot of trouble, more so than anything else.

Furthermore I just feel that in an open world game something being able to unavoidably instakill you, like these will an adventurer, is bad game design. It's kind of like a forced choice; an invisible wall. You're not supposed to go there. Something being massively hard is okay, literally impossible is not really.

Also halfling caravan frequency was already found annoying when it was 3x/years so 4x is just worse

So how about both a nerf to their unconsciousness abilities and a reduction of the frequency of their visits, both?

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

About iron: we've already got meteoric iron, which is far too common (and deep) than any meteor has a right to be. In it's current state it's not very meteoric. I think we should have some regular iron (with a single kind of ore), and make meteoric iron use gem behavior, so it shows up uncommonly as relatively "meteor" sized clusters within most kinds of rock.

Too common?  I prefer to see it as the gods decided to throw a f***ton of meteors at the place and see what happened.  The moon that causes syndromes is just the debris that got shot up high enough, and the gods decided to make it not look like a mistake.

Well, we apologize. We were having trouble hearing from people when we did it, so we went with "ask for forgiveness rather than permission, we need to get this done quickly."

That, honestly, is never a good policy.

Now that we do have time, and you've heard about it, we can figure something better out.

The whole blood thing worked differently in adventure mode, because something that takes months in fort mode can happen in 2 days or less in Adventure mode. A certainly fatal contact syndrome from hostiles with the potential to show up in dozens, without any provocation, seems a bit much, though. Maybe a fatal syndrome from drinking their blood, and blisters or nausea from contact?

That time dichonomy is a pain, isn't it?  I've got some ideas on how to get it balanced, don't worry.

No need to get all mad. You yourself state you were busy. It's really hard to get a hold of busy people, people even leave these forums all the time, and this needs to go forward to ever make completion, whatever that is. So we change things and then when you scream, we can change them back. These things aren't permanent and they're not finalized, nor personal.

I've calmed down.  Still, I'm on the forums a fair amount of time, and a fair amount of that time beyond the classes was running the forum games I have, so I would have noticed.

Also halfling caravan frequency was already found annoying when it was 3x/years so 4x is just worse

So how about both a nerf to their unconsciousness abilities and a reduction of the frequency of their visits, both?

Considering the amount of civilizations we have now, I think one or two should be enough for any race, maybe three if they are aggressive hostiles.

[Putnam]

I forgot to mention something with the upload: no permission is needed to modify, add to or remove from any of the things I've added. If an issue--any issue at all, even balance or minor presentation issues--come up, it can be edited freely. Creature classes being added, all of that.

Note that I was reminded by these recent posts; I'm not reacting to them. I think ZtG is perfectly reasonable in wanting permission for editing of his additions, but since my modding turn started I've wanted it to be made known that I need none and I just kinda forgot to mention it.

[Halfling]

Well, we apologize. We were having trouble hearing from people when we did it, so we went with "ask for forgiveness rather than permission, we need to get this done quickly."

That, honestly, is never a good policy.

Disagree on this one. It is the best policy. Well, what the best policy is depends on your intended result. For ours, this is the best one.

We can either get bogged down on asking everybody's permission every time, and shut down when there's more and more people and more and more have moved on to other things. Or we can see if they really care; if they don't their permission is implicit, and if they do they'll balk if we act against their intention.

It can take several days and a lot of idle discussion to formulate the exact fix pondering what the original idea was, then ask and announce someone's permission, and it's already pretty hard to get even something as silly as mamaphints being sapients or apple trees being unprocessable or tea plants making the ground below bright magenta fixed. We don't need any more challenges there. Dealing with how hard it is to get this bugfixed is the big challenge. Compare this to the expense of taking 5 minutes to fix it, another 5 to announce it and then letting it stay fixed or changing it later and you can see which is the rational solution.

The goal is not to be pleasant (edit: or rather it is to be pleasant, but to a different group: the players and followers, not the modders). It is to make working content. We don't have voters and the audience is players, not political scientists. That's why this was made the rule.

I will change it if it causes more controversy than it's worth or if most people who are active here feel, even after hearing the argument, like it's not a good idea to act fast, but I see it as the best way.

The analogy is a software project rather than a parliamentary democracy.

[StLeibowitz]

So basically, beneficial action is better than polite inaction. As an example of this, I probably would have been the first to jump on this if I hadn't worried about upsetting someone.

I am in full agreement on this matter with Halfling. If major bugs or balance issues are allowed to stick around for long periods of time, they'll accumulate and DFFS will quickly become unfun to play. Poison blood? Great idea! Wish I'd thought of it back on my turn. Implementation was overpowered thanks to the Dwarven Law of General Relativity, and it was better to remove it than spend modder time balancing it.

And on a tangentially related note (it was touched upon in Zanzetkuken's post, at least ) we should probably just have one caravan per civilization per year. There's a bunch of them now, so that should give at least one caravan per season.

[Lost in Nowhere]

How would you make a creature light stuff on fire in general, such as cloth and wood items (Equipped and not)?
Also, how do you find world populations?

[Halfling]

You put it better than I.

The psychological conflict, I think, is that one may view somebody's "code" as a sacrosanct expression of their personality. However, this is rather a work of putting many things together and building a machine than putting them side by side and making a gallery; a badly thought out part is not just like a part you might not like, it affects everything else. I would rather advocate the simple view that your code is only meaningful if it's fun to play. Therefore, any well-meant improvements should be, by default and so assumed, welcome (unless we completely missed the point of what you were trying to do).

I mean, who cares if you made something that's very cool but breaks the game? The universe is littered with pointless mods. If nobody wants to play it, it's irrelevant and it doesn't express or deliver anything to anyone. And on the contrary it's relevant if it makes people happy. Therefore, players come first. Therefore, bug and balance fixes, keeping players happy and constructive criticism come first, politics and keeping modders happy later.

That's how it must be to work efficiently... on the other hand, to paraphrase someone, who should care if the cat is a punk rocker with a safety pin in his nose so long as he catches mice. This is not principle, it's just an attempt to make things work.


In bug news, this:

   [USE_MATERIAL_TEMPLATE:RAW_APPLE_TREE:PLANT_STRUCTURE_HLG]
      [STATE_NAME:ALL_SOLID:apple tree] <--
      [STATE_ADJ:ALL_SOLID:apple tree] <--

causes you to find "apple tree bolts" in adventurer mode. Suggest change to "apple tree wood" or "apple wood" in marked lines.


@Lost in Nowhere: you would want the creature to shoot jets of fire, perhaps? Material emission is your friend. The vanilla version is included in this mod because it's so near "hard coded"; see the wiki syndrome page for usage.

[BlackFlyme]

How would you make a creature light stuff on fire in general, such as cloth and wood items (Equipped and not)?
Also, how do you find world populations?

Lighting stuff on fire by virtue of simply existing?

[IMMOLATE]

Though it will not be able to control this ability. I'm not sure if it affects worn equipment though.

You can get population data by exporting map/gen information in legends mode, according to the wiki.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

@Halfling

How about you use the middle ground?  What I mean by this is that you complete the change, but inform the modder you are doing so, in order for them to know it has actually happened, rather than the person coming back in anger of how they were never informed that something of theirs was removed/changed without contacting them.

[Halfling]

@Halfling

How about you use the middle ground?  What I mean by this is that you complete the change, but inform the modder you are doing so, in order for them to know it has actually happened, rather than the person coming back in anger of how they were never informed that something of theirs was removed/changed without contacting them.

The assumption was that if you're still present and interested, you'll see it in the thread. We did discuss it and it's listed in the changelog for HugoL's upload.

But I agree it would have been classier to fire a pm at you, did apologize earlier.

Now, in that case, it simply escaped the mind, but there's a tiny bit of logic to not actually sending that pm that you may or may not agree with. Some people do sometimes get irrationally possessive when asked about something. Like, if asked whether they can part with something that they haven't used in a decade (and that has no emotional significance), they may say "no" in strong terms, even though they would never in their lifetime have noticed if it had just been removed from their possession (and gone on to someone who actually wants/needs it). So it may actually be less trouble to not ask and just do it and let them protest if it's really significant and not just if we ask. Now I'm not sure if anyone who's modded in this mod would actually be like that but that's generally speaking an issue that's just pointless to deal with when it's a case of shared development where it's only as relevant as it is good.

I'll let everyone decide how ruthless they want to be. I basically trust the logic that if you care you'll know. But since you're active after all, and we all know it, it would have been reasonable to pm you.

[Gnorm]

I understand that this is quite a non sequitur, but does anyone know the main ingredient of cognac?

[Halfling]

Cognac is made from grapes of the Cognac region I think.

In other news, I too, as was voiced earlier, was pretty annoyed that I was barely able to tell some LKR raw stone walls from the ground. It's kazurot, I think? walls made of which look exactly like shrubs on the ground (while unilluminated tiles of the wall look like gray squares). I don't have a good screenshot now, but...

So I asked Laula about it by PM and he says it's fine to change them. Specifically to change them to anything that looks "non-ugly". How about a grey background for all stone tiles, or anyone have a better idea?

[Gnorm]

So I asked Laula about it by PM and he says it's fine to change them. Specifically to change them to anything that looks "non-ugly". How about a grey background for all stone tiles, or anyone have a better idea?

Gray backgrounds work for ores, but it would look a tad queer for a rock such azurine. By the by, has anyone made an obsidian-esque stone yet? If not, I have plans for one.

[Aseaheru]

The jaded slade.