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Author Topic: Future of the Fortress  (Read 2850109 times)

Lenin0Grib

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3525 on: September 30, 2020, 08:14:07 pm »

Hello. Thank you for awesome game!
Can you talk please how tiles works in steam version now? I mean render and data structure. In each Z layer it have now many tile layers or some other trick?
And if it possible make in future make open data file for community localisation in other lenguages?
Thank you.

Sorry for my english
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delphonso

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3526 on: October 01, 2020, 02:02:13 am »

Lenin, you might find more information here:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?board=28.0
Meph's threads go into some amount of detail on how it will work. Not sure if it's what you're looking for, though.

PatrikLundell

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3527 on: October 01, 2020, 03:10:37 am »


:
And if it possible make in future make open data file for community localisation in other lenguages?
:


Translation has been covered in the past. There are at least two problems:
- Text isn't located in any one location, but is spread out in many locations (including the raw files).
- Sentences are built, not looked up. This means that they're compiled from parts stored in many places, modified by the rules of the English language (e.g. "a" vs "an", and that isn't working perfectly either), with the words placed in the location in the sentences they'd be placed in when using English.

Replacing the text generation with something that's a replaceable module and restructure the raws to support all the various info arbitrary languages might need is a task that's going to have a very low priority when compared to everything that needs to be done (some of it urgently), so it's very unlikely to happen, and would probably require Toady to have a strange mood.
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Toady One

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3528 on: October 01, 2020, 06:00:21 am »

Quote from: Urist McSadist
Are powers unique to the individual on the table for the magic update?

There are various things on the admittedly vast table related to this.  The least interesting and most likely is deity powers that aren't shared by others in the universe.  There've also been ideas kicked around about inflecting powers on traits and so forth, and there are also various 'signature' type ideas.  Just all sorts of things, but I have no idea what'll actually make it in initially here vs. what you had in mind.

Quote from: Gtyx1
1. Is any more adventure mode crafting coming in the near future, Such as wood and stone weapons crafting, cooking or clothes crafting?

2. In adventure mode, the zones menu brings up a 'craft guildhall' option, does this have any purpose in adventure mode?

3.
a. Are there plans to make the other main races become Outsider controllable, and if so, will Outsiders be able to create groups to claim their camps?
b. And are there plans for giving String names to items and groups

4. I read that apparently there are plans to add the ability to romance ncps and play as an heir in adventure mode, how would this be implemented especially with the slowing of time in adventure mode?

5. Are there plans to have tavern games? And If so, would these games like chess or tic tac toe (by different in-game names of course) open up a new interface to have the player directly compete with an A.I, or would it be like how performances are done where a moment passes and its completed?

1. The near future is the Steam/itch release, and we aren't going to do anything with that there.  After that, the first chance for anything to happen is with whatever comes out of adventure mode medical.  Then I'm not sure.

2. No, they don't do anything yet, not even the NPC ones really, aside from being a place for the NPC guild members to stand around in.

3. I don't have particular plans here - I expect this will be blown apart by the myth stuff before I change it again, though some tweaks may happen beforehand.

4. The ability to pass larger chunks of time in adventure mode has been waiting in the wings for a while, and has almost happened a few times.  Even without those changes, it's certainly possible to play a fort and then revisit an adventure mode character when they are at a stage where e.g. their children are older, etc.  But we're hoping to get some method of passing some months comfortably in adventure mode - hopefully something faster than the calendar, though that would necessitate abstractions, which is a small-to-medium nightmare.

5. Yeah, procedurally generated tavern games was a near-miss from some years ago, and we are hoping of course to get to that at some point.  There were various plans of how that might play out in either mode, but they would be playable, yeah, and optionally playable in fort mode, perhaps.  The latter is a difficult question of dwarven autonomy vs. letting fort-mode players try them out -- perhaps if the game is official in some way, ha ha.

Quote
Quote from: ror6ax
What changes to adventure mode are planned for Steam release?
Quote from: falcc
Toady, do you have any loose plans for what the new adventure mode UI is going to be like, prior to the post-steam rewrites? For example:

1) Are you getting rid of the letter-based inventory?
2) Will interact with items, inventory, wear, drink/eat, etc stay in different menus or will there be all kinds of since-invented clicking interactions? If the latter what do you think you'll do with all those spare keyboard keys?
3) Will there still be roughly the same number of button presses for directed combat since the easy mode of just arrow buttoning towards an enemy is already implemented?
4) Will there be any changes to conversation filtering?
5) Any chance of a little speech bubble next to a sprite when a creature is talking?

We haven't had to make the tough decisions yet -- it's a huge question for traditional roguelike feel, maintaining letters and so forth, or just going fully over to a new system, in a situation where we can't do everything as options right now.  There's been a move against action-first inventory systems for a while now, and it's certainly more awkward with the mouse to have a ton of action buttons when you can just open up an item menu and get to everything that way after clicking an item.  If we do end up with some free keys, we might need to do something like dump the whole qweasdzxc key cluster over to movement for people that hate moving with the mouse but still associate wasd with anything to do with movement, but I haven't refreshed my memory on the modern numpad-free examples w/ diagonal movement yet.  And I'm not sure which way we'll go.

Yeah, I don't know how to reduce the number of actions below one without having an automated fight button.  Pressing toward somebody is pretty efficient, and adding clicking to that is still one action.  The detailed combat action menu will likely be easier to manage.

It seems likely that conversations will change, yeah, though there's something inherently messy and complicated with how it is under the hood, so it might not be too much of a change at first.

Speech bubbles: we're experimenting with a look like this for some of the fort-mode creature statuses (instead of flashing icons on them), so it might be well within the realm of what we end up with.

Quote from: Pancakes
Has there been any graphic work done to the intro cinematic? Are there any changes planned for the intro cinematic, either for this release or long term?

We haven't done anything with it, and I'm not sure if we'll keep some form of it for the graphics version or not.  It no longer fits, exactly, but we haven't made a decision.

Quote from: ror6ax
Following Df talk with Brian Bucklew - have you played Caves of Qud?
What do you think of it's UI?
Have you seen new UI being developed - https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/ho140h/ui_design_of_the_game_caves_of_qud_finished/ ?
Any thoughts on this top-bottom approach vs DF's apparently opposite approach - from details to the wide picture.

Shonai_Dweller: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8188732#msg8188732
ror6ax (op): http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8188831#msg8188831
Shonai_Dweller: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8188861#msg8188861
ror6ax (op): http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8188868#msg8188868
PatrikLundell: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8188875#msg8188875
ror6ax (op): http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8188879#msg8188879
PatrikLundell: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8189053#msg8189053
therahedwig: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8189108#msg8189108
Shonai_Dweller: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8189118#msg8189118
Bumber: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8189203#msg8189203

I haven't played since the UI changed, so I don't have any experience with it.  I don't know any details of the arrangement there, but it looks like they had a dedicated UI person design that for them, which is cool.  We don't have the ability to do a huge structural redesign here - especially regarding specific comments about rooms/zones, just in terms of new bugs alone it would put us way outside what's feasible.  We are trying to touch the guts of the game only when necessary - there are places we've mentioned like the labor list where it'll be worth it to take a look since player confusion there outweighs new problems that might arise, but stuff like rooms and zones aren't terrible-terrible, compared to that, just a little odd, and we have to live with what we have for now.

Quote
Quote from: TrevorBOB9
1. I know even after Steam releases Kitfox is going to be very busy with fixes, improvements, keeping up with updates, etc. But is it possible that a successful release might lead to them or a different developer porting the Steam release to the Switch or other consoles?
2. I don’t know how you feel about slightly personal questions, but is there any particular significance behind the name “Tarn”? I’ve never heard of it anywhere else.
Quote from: Buttery_Mess
-TrevorBOB9 asked about releases for other platforms. I remembered that Steam support for Linux is pretty good. Is the Steam release going to be Linux compatible? Have you thought about an android release- with the GUI improvements, this seems more reasonable.

Bumber: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8189247#msg8189247
Shonai_Dweller: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8189315#msg8189315
clinodev: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8189430#msg8189430
voliol: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8189460#msg8189460
Shonai_Dweller: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8189468#msg8189468
Manveru Taurënér: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8189469#msg8189469
Shonai_Dweller: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8189472#msg8189472
PatrikLundell: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8192358#msg8192358

1. Yeah, as stated in the responses, Kitfox isn't currently doing any coding work.  Doing ports has been impossible for me without help, even the ones that we have up currently.  I have no idea if what we've done to this point makes the game any more feasible for consoles, but it would have to be somebody aside from me doing it, and I'm not sure there's an arrangement there that would work or not, if everything else lines up.  I know too little about it.  Same goes for mobile stuff, if it is/becomes feasible.

The current Linux/Mac versions are not sellable (this is my fault, not the porting volunteers, obviously, since in the one case I never made a proper Mac bundle, and in the other, I never figured out how to do libraries/symlinks/wtvr in a wholesome way, and both these things are well beyond me), so we need to work through that before we can release on those platforms - this seems more feasible in the near-term than the rest, but it is not done yet.  That'll likely be a whole discussion with Kitfox, whether it works in the existing partially-open-source framework or something new.

2. It's just the lake version, yeah.  Like being named River, etc.  My parents found it in the dictionary, so it's just the English word, which has Norse roots.  Though I'm some portion Norwegian (to the point of lutefisk being a family tradition, as many of you have witnessed), it was just a dictionary grab, ha ha.

Quote from: falcc
If you only travel by night, sneak well, swim through sewers to avoid leaving tracks, and stay out of sight the entire time can you keep the artifacts you steal from generating rumors of their actual location indefinitely? If you manage to keep the rumors down this way could you still return the item for positive reputation or does there need to be intervening rumors about it being taken?

Shonai_Dweller: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8190535#msg8190535

If nobody sees you holding it, and nobody saw you pick it up, it doesn't change their rumor state for the artifact, as far as I can tell searching through.  Being seen picking up the artifact initially is what creates a thief reputation (or refusing to give it up when seen), and being seen afterward should only generate a "hey, give us that" encounter interaction, at which point you can choose to get a treasure hunter or thief rep based on what you decide (presuming that all works.)  So yeah, they don't try to interrogate you to create a chain of custody for the item, to get your story on why you are holding it, which they should be interested in.  It would certainly fit in with the sort of villain stuff we were working on, but even simple logic puzzles will be beyond them.  It would be ideal to be able to catch players in lies, like, ever, but I dunno what if anything we'll be able to attain there when we loop back around to finishing adv villain/investigation stuff.

Quote from: Cruxador
In the recent images, the UI for zones doesn't represent hotkeys. Is this a decision that was made for aesthetic reasons, are details of the keyboard controls being reconsidered (and meaning that hotkey representation could change a lot), or is it just not there currently for another reason? Are there any particular thoughts about how keyboard usability will change in the steam/itch version? Most everything I've seen is about the new UI stuff, but personally this is one of the screens where I haven't memorized them and find it handy to have them listed. I'm sure there will also be plenty of new players who don't know that stuff but would rather use keyboard either for general efficiency or accessibility (mouse requires far greater manual abilities), so making that stuff easy to see is handy.

PatrikLundell: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8191575#msg8191575
Cruxador (op): http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8192739#msg8192739

Yeah, we are leaning toward tooltips having info on hotkeys currently, as that seems to be standard practice these days, rather than showing the bindings everywhere all the time.  I don't think the bindings to e.g. choose zone types are going to change a lot/at all, necessarily, but map cursor navigation will have to be different, the big issue being that we have to stop pretending computers have numpads anymore, and I'm not sure where on the screen to sell that as an alternative to the mouse, since it isn't really standard at all.

Quote from: txtsd
Looks like a forum update was queued but forgotten about, will you be getting around to this soon?
EDIT: I'm primarily interested in getting us up on https.

Hmm, yeah, time has become less rather than more since I wrote the remark you quoted, when we delayed the last release and moved on to the Steam stuff.  I didn't take the chance I may have had in 2018, and now it'll be difficult to do anything before the graphics release happens, since I'll possibly have to move the whole site somewhere new.

Quote from: Shonai_Dweller
Just wondering as I don't see it on the Steam page anywhere, are you dropping the whole "Slaves to Armok, God of Blood" subtitle thing for Steam release?

Of course Dwarf Fortress is more the second subtitle, and Slaves to Armok is the title and God of Blood is the subtitle and Chapter 2 is the second title.  We may end up simplifying it to stop some headaches down the road.

Quote from: Buttery_Mess
Currently certain screens, like the military screen, do not scale with increased window size. Will all screens be fully scaleable in the Steam release, and therefore, will all screens be fully scaleable in the legacy release?

Several screens currently lock important information away from the player. For exaple, when a liason springs the barony nomination on you, there's no way to browse dwarf personalities and such like before leaving the nomination screen. You get a similar situation on the trade good requests screen. Will these screens be rethought for the next release? Either as a pop-up, a returnable-to prompt, nested unit screen menu or nested stock screen menu? I ask because it seems like at this point, you'll be forced to rethink just to make it graphical.

There are some elements of the UI that don't seem to be working as intended. For example, I noted that it's not possible to select generic leather as a material for shields or shell as a material for leggings on the military>uniform screen (or if it is there, it's rather hard to find.) I suppose my question is, are you planning on redesigning the interface as you tart it up in order to wring out all the quirks and bugs, or just tart it up, or tart it up and fix quirks and bugs, but not going so far as a complete redesign?

I have seen that you've already added nice features to the embark screen. I wondered if the trade menu was going to get similar treatment? I was buying gemstones earlier and this involved several minutes of hitting down, enter, down, enter... it made me think, can we expect to see general GUI features like being able to drag a box around multiple items, holding control to add items to a list on top of that, and so on?

I get the feeling that every screen and menu function in DF was scratch-coded from the bottom up every time a new feature was added to the game. Are you going back and replacing each unique menu with something more like a generic abstract interface now? Do you think this will make it easier to add new features in the future?

TrevorBOB9 asked about releases for other platforms. I remembered that Steam support for Linux is pretty good. Is the Steam release going to be Linux compatible? Have you thought about an android release- with the GUI improvements, this seems more reasonable.

I believe you've stated in the podcasts that you're not particularly enjoying UI work, is that true? What of it is the most rewarding aspect to you, and what's the least rewarding?

The intention is to scale all the windows, yeah, and to have as few full-screens as possible when things work along with the main display instead.  So far we've managed this.  Seems like the 'c' screen is the only one sure to be its own screen so far (due to the map, though we could probably work through that as well).  And yeah, the Classic release gets all of the sizing changes as well.

Screen rethinks:  Some of this has been happening as we go, as you've seen with zone/stockpile repaints and the lift on size restrictions, the addition of new filters, and other stuff like that.  It'll continue along like this, though I'm not sure what we'll specifically end up with for the meeting conversation bits yet -- it certainly doesn't need to be its own giant interrupting-pausing screen, though that would necessitate a small logic change over in meeting land allowing them to wait a bit for you, like a petition, which is fine.

Screen quirks/bugs:  Some existing quirks will piggyback along through existing list initializers etc., but we've been cleaning things up as we go as well, since sometimes it is just staring at you when you draw a list/etc. up.  But I'm not going to be able to systematically move over quirk-fixer suggestions and all of the bug tracker issues.  There's just too much at every step.

Trade menu:  I'd expect the trade menu to end up as good as the new embark screen, sure.  I'm not sure we'll end up with rectangle drags and any specifics there.  Of course, not getting to specific features in the first release doesn't rule it out for later - we have a lot to do now, and there'll continue to be a lot to do.  More than before, this'll be a category of thing that gets worked on as we go, and upcoming features shouldn't start out looking terrible on their first passes either.

Good programming practices:  It's not within my ability to do more than what I'm doing, which involves a lot of wholesome reuse but not, like, a proper API or anything.

UI enjoyment:  It's awesome to see things come to life!  And it is fun to, for instance, dig and draw zones and so forth.  My least favorite bit is all the data entry and structuring along those lines, and tuning input issues, like if a click or scroll or wtvr isn't working quite right or whatever.  With the overall design and practice of doing the UI, I'm not quite in my comfort zone.  It helps to have played and thought about and worked on games for many years, of course, and I think things are going okay, but it's not my area of expertise so it's not as satisfying as working on the guts of the game.

Quote from: Mim
On the Wiki, there are listed some physical equations behind penetration of layers and how that interacts with tissue damage and armor in combat; I have been told these are from DF2012. The relevant equations are under https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Weapon#Combat_formulae as:

1. M = Skill * Size * Str * Vel / (10^6 * (1 + i_Size/(w_density*w_size))
2. M >= (aSY/wSY + (A+1)*aSF/wSF) * (10 + 2*a_quality) / (Sha * w_quality)
3. 2 * w_size * wIY > A * a_density
4. M >= (2*aIF - aIY) * (2 + 0.4*a_quality) * A

Anyways, I am a physics nerd, and I would like to ask you what the true (and new) equations are and how they are used, so we can post them on the wiki and also marvel at your genius. We could use DFHack to figure it out instead of bugging you, but we might get the equations wrong (as, from what I can tell, at least one of the equations on the Wiki mixes units in rather horrifying ways).

It's pages of mess now, so it's not easy to share simple equations, and I can't really process where those came from without doing a ton of work - ever since the combat move/attack split, where actions got smeared out over time, lots of variables of spread out over structures in time, so the attack has a velocity, and it does a standard p=mv when it hits and passes that into the impact sim, but since the initial v has to be calculated against strength/skill vs item mass etc. etc, frames before the impact happens, it may work out that way shown there for all I can tell -- though there are several v modifiers like hit roll (which encompasses skill) and rage and all that, so I'm pretty sure those are simplified, anyway.  For instance, v is multiplied at the end by min(2000,500+hitroll*20)/1000, so a legendary roll can double incoming velocity, while an atrocious roll can halve velocity once everything else is accounted for, which isn't quite the 1x-2x range they have as a multiplier on the wiki.  I'm not sure what exe diving etc. these are based on.

I wouldn't expect any of the units to work out, especially since some of it just isn't yet expressed meaningfully that way (e.g. attributes and edge and mail flex and body shapes and holes) so I iterated some dubious balance cludges.  For instance, the velocity is modified by average_size/(weapon_mass+actual_size/100), but this is just to create a range of modifiers for differently sized creatures vs. different item sizes, since giants/humans/kobolds holding lead furniture/swords/daggers have to be variously satisfying and size rules everything, and we don't have a model for cross-sectional area of muscles or anything like that yet to govern large vs. small creatures.  So it's just a range of bonuses -- 100 being default velocity for a creature unencumbered by their wield and otherwise unremarkable, down to a clamp at 1 if the wield's mass overwhelms the attacker (but the late post clamp modifier means a legendary swing can get that lead furniture up to 2!)  And because there are lots of additional lines upon impact, I may be missing some important modifiers.  When it multiplies by the item mass on impact to get the momentum, maybe you get it refactored to your original equation.  So it feels more like:

v = ~hitroll * ~str * ~other_modifiers etc. * (average_creature_size / (item_mass + creature_size/100))

then frames later

p = item_mass * v

though it ends up with something like the p from the wiki if you stuff item_mass into the parenthetical expression and divide it out.  We don't pretend v has an expression as m/s, since the creature bodies aren't really amenable to that now, but in the end it's supposed to be compatible with the speed of projectiles (though we don't account for the arm/etc. continue to push through after impact, which should be an important factor), not that the speeds of projectiles are likely any better, but at least there's some hope for them down the road.

And I'm out of time to look at 2-4, ha ha.

Quote from: Bumber
Can you describe where the data to populate the military equipment screen lists comes from? We can tell when the UI list is corrupted, but we need to know where the data is stored to potentially repair it with DFHack.

I'm not sure what people have been calling things, so it's hard to describe.  When you go to choose a specific item, there are several lists sitting around from back in the arsenal dwarf days - that's an array of item ptr vectors with size item_type_number (ie, a vector of weapons, a vector of helms, etc.).  That's sitting up in the global fort information structure (legacily called 'plotinfo' but I dunno what you all call it -- it has your civ id and the number of reserved bins, tons of fort-type info, along with these item array-vectors which live in a member structure that has equipment data), and there are three arrays like this, one for 'unmanifested' items, one for 'unassigned' items, and one for 'assigned' items.

Those lists themselves seem to get corrupted, though I've never caught the raid bug actually happening, so it's hard to tell what the starting point is, just that the military UI stuff is a symptom and not a cause (though military equipment assignment could very well be the cause somewhere in the giant mess of assignment code.  I've pored over the part where raid stuff is offloaded more than once and couldn't find anything, so I suspect it's something bad about the military screen/equipping logic and how that interacts with a later raid offload, but I could be wrong there.)  But yeah, as a bandaid, those lists could probably be cleared and reassembled from the existing fort items.  There's also the specific items assigned to the equipment slot in the squad position, which are stored by id number so less likely to be the initial problem, though corruption could piggy back in there in the form of invalid (slab etc.) id numbers, and so it might ultimately be quite a task to fully rescue saves here.

Quote from: Cruxador
Regarding the UI in the new video, categorically, it looks great. Not sure the three types of food would be what I'd have put on the top bar but considering how much spare space there is, seems reasonable until the caravan arc comes to fuller fruition and other forms of wealth become available. What's the nature of the considerations for what types of resource are likely to be valuable to the player, and what resources or other elements have priority in the new UI? To what degree is it customizable, or (more likely) to what degree are possibilities of customizable UI being discussed? It would be cool if it were configurable so if, for example, you were working on a megaproject you could have stone (or even specific types of stone) on the bar.

Also, a minor question but what is the conceptual distinction between lower left, lower center, and lower right UI buttons? How might other things not yet represented be incorporated as UI work continues? Seems roughly like designations, various types of area that aren't designations, and then the escape menu and map? But that leaves a handful of things that you could get in one keypress that don't yet have a clickable button, notably everything to do with military (which I know is a much bigger topic).

voliol: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8192795#msg8192795

Ah, yeah, the top bar we were just fiddling around with the 'z' screen info and seeing what it would look like up there.  We're probably going to end up with additional health/hunger/etc. info there, in addition to some of the resources, since it all fits, especially if we go to icons+tooltips.  We've discussed making it customizable once we try some more options, but that's secondary to having something decent as a default.  But yeah, any priorities we pick aren't going to be a match for certain forts, so hopefully we can get all the way there.  The considerations for the initial defaults are mainly about preventing fort death and work blockages, etc., to the extent we can.

Yeah, the early idea while we're just sorting through stuff is that tile-level stuff is on the lower left, stuff related to buildings and activities and jobs that take structure space are on the middle, and status/management/etc. is on the lower right (most of those like the military don't have icons/buttons as placeholders yet) -- though we already have a future mockup that distinguishes stuff that pauses the screen, and places it on the right below the map instead.  It's easy to move buttons around, so I wouldn't put too much on the exact current placements.  There are a lot of potential options still to be placed up at the top level - each one we get up there comfortably saves a lot of digging around and potential confusion.  We haven't yet settled on whether we'll end up with many text-based buttons yet (like the current "Stocks" button which may come off the top bar), or just icons.  I have mixed feelings about the mockups we've tried that have buttons with text - it makes it more clear what the option is, but they takes more space and is more static/spreadsheet-feeling, or some adjective I don't have a handle on.

Quote from: jburtson
1. Will there be new types of generated playable races that come with the magic update?

2. Going forward, will Kitfox remain in the picture in order to create new artwork as new creatures/tiles may be added?

3. I'm excited about the prospect of in the post-magic update, trying to delve into worlds with a lot of magic and make sense of it all. But I'm wondering if given all the possible strange beings, realms, and magic systems, how much would the core gameplay of dwarf fortress still be usable? Would it be common for fortresses to be basically unplayably difficult, embarrassingly easy, or just there be fewer relevant gameplay features given the presence of non-dwarves? I guess what I'm trying to say is, are the more magical generated worlds going to be free to be game-breakingly strange, or will there be focus on making a game loop resistant to some of the wild aspects coming with the magic release?

Shonai_Dweller: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8194754#msg8194754
PatrikLundell: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8194822#msg8194822

1. Yeah, as reported in the comments, new playable critters are definitely a part of the magic release, especially when you crank the settings up for it.  There might not even be dwarves (or humans) in such places.

2. Yeah, we'll obviously need some additional art for e.g. magic etc. and Mike and Meph are working through the power of Kitfox, because one of the main points of the whole arrangement was that I have no idea how to do the paperwork, so Kitfox will still be in the picture as we go forward.  (of course I also speak and work with the artists directly.)

3. We'd like to enforce whatever verisimulitude we can, and the hope is that "places people have chosen to live and work for a period of time" still remain a kind of relevant thing.  Even in generated settings with e.g. free teleport, this seems possible, if people want to remain social or have infrastructure needs.  But yeah, it's quite possible when the settings are cranked to heavy degrees that things may end up very far afield.  This is also exciting to me.  But we'll see if it was a terrible idea, ha ha.  We have some vaguely conflicting notions about allowing magical consequences to go their way vs. balancing things out -- stuff like powerful enemies with a pass-wall/teleport ability in the context of a/the fort need to be considered one way or another.  Ideally, this involves both pushback against these forces throughout worldgen and in the tools available, or the result that forts aren't really forts so much, rather than hidden sanctuaries -- there's this way that magical effects and cultural developments go together that we're hoping to explore and systematize in whatever way we can.  But we have plenty of escape hatches if we don't pull certain parts of it off initially.

Quote from: voliol
1. At the top of the devlog pages of past years, e.g. http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev_2017.html, why "Development in 2015 (RSS Feed)"?
2. Could you set up redirects between "http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/index.html#year-date" and "http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev_year.html#year-date" for applicable years/dates? Lots of "old" links (2015-2019 I believe) were broken by the remodeling, and it by the look of it all links to 2020-logs i.e. "http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/index.html#2020-date" will break at the end of the year as well.

1. Just forgot to update the text.
2. I have no idea how to set up redirects (any we currently have were done by other people.)  I had to break up the page because the bandwidth gets to be too much when years of dev log are on the main page, but the structure is not good, yeah.

Quote from: Buttery_Mess
I vaguely remember the idea of introducing larger machinery to fort mode being discussed before, possibly going as far as having moving forts. Would the map rewrite make such things possible? I remember the idea being floated of being able to view squads going off map on missions in a little window. Is that possibility a planned feature for the map rewrite? Would that also make ships that come and go a possibility, or will that have to wait until trade and industry?

PatrikLundell: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8194931#msg8194931

Yeah, PatrikLundell is correct - the map rewrite enables these things, and then we'll see what we get, with most coming later.  If the map window support turns out to work smoothly, we may get some initial examples of those, and some initial examples of moving terrain the same way.

Quote from: Beag
1. How will naked creatures be handled in the steam release?(I have unfortunately run into some naked people in taverns)
2. Sometime in the next few months can we see some screenshots of animal people and escaped necromancer experiments?

Shonai_Dweller: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8195047#msg8195047

1. This is subject to change, but we're in the middle of our first real pass on dwarves, and currently they have muted skimpy undergarments when they have no clothes, whereas the clothing itself is more apparent if they actually have some.  This of course puts us at a disadvantage when it comes to thongs -- right now I don't think the bethonged are displayed differently from the naked.  There's of course a whole other set of concerns with profession colors vs. dyes vs. naked dwarves, etc. etc. and we're just going to end up with some options there and try to go with some sensible default, though I know opinions are really varied here.

2. When things are ready, we'll show them -- we have some initial animal people almost ready, but have some work to do on held items that is being done along with the first dwarf pass.  Yeah, it was night trolls before.  The other procedural critters are still underway.

Quote from: Lenin0Grib
Can you talk please how tiles works in steam version now? I mean render and data structure. In each Z layer it have now many tile layers or some other trick?
And if it possible make in future make open data file for community localisation in other lenguages?

delphonso: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8195484#msg8195484
PatrikLundell: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=169696.msg8195501#msg8195501

Yeah, I'm not sure what you mean exactly -- hopefully Meph's thread linked in the comment there helps.  There are many tile layers printed in each cell for sure now, yeah.  The background grass/etc., then maybe another bit there, then lots of edging potentially (from neighboring grass etc.), then a building layer, an item, vermin, creatures, another building layer, *another* building layer, and an interface layer.  And likely others with fluids/trees/shadows etc. I missed.  Things like ramps are often baked into single tiles from several images out in the art files.  Dwarves and procedural creatures and a few others are baked from many images, but then displayed as a single tile layer.

Yeah, I have no idea how to localize fully it without having somebody for each language come on to the project or something, since there's so much in code, which we don't have the ability to do.  There may be some partial solutions.  All the new tooltips for example would be fine just sitting out in a file.  I'm not sure if that and some other steps are enough to be useful.
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A_Curious_Cat

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3529 on: October 01, 2020, 08:12:21 am »

Concerning internationalization:

Have you heard of GNU Gettext.  From what I can tell it's included in the GNU standard C library and provides a mechanism whereby the developer (primarily by using functions that are basically extended versions of printf, sprintf, et.al.) adds support for internationalization, and then the actual work of translation can be done by someone else* (with translation packs also being able to be distributed separately).


*technically, if the developer has added support for internationalization properly, the translators don't have to coordinate with the developer (or even let the developer know what they are doing).  This leads to the possibility of community supported translation in which someone in the forums just up and decides to start a translation.  From this point translations essentially become another form of modding (and could possibly have their own sub-forum  under "DF Modding").

Anyways, that's my understanding from skimming through the Gettext section of the Glibc info file.  I could, of course, be wrong about some/all of the above.
« Last Edit: October 01, 2020, 09:51:05 am by A_Curious_Cat »
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DG

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3530 on: October 01, 2020, 08:43:22 am »

You know you're old when the idea of updates to the status quo make you anxious. I'll stay positive and hope the things I like about the current ui are retained somewhere. I had no idea numpads were disappearing.
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PatrikLundell

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3531 on: October 01, 2020, 09:07:49 am »

Thanks Toady.

As far as I can see, the description of where (buggy) equipment is drawn from is called df.global.ui.equipment in DFHack. With a bit of luck this info will allow the DFHack community to apply a band aid when damage is detected, and maybe even allow the detection of when corruption happens (which I would assume would help in finding the various causes of it).

Edit: My first identification was wrong.
« Last Edit: October 01, 2020, 10:33:28 am by PatrikLundell »
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ror6ax

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3532 on: October 01, 2020, 09:19:49 am »

Thanks, very interesting. Your answers seem to indicate Steam release will be Windows-only - I hope read it wrong...
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Egan_BW

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3533 on: October 01, 2020, 09:30:16 am »

Thanks for the answers, Toady. These are always fun to read.
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Uthimienure

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3534 on: October 01, 2020, 10:28:39 am »

You know you're old when the idea of updates to the status quo make you anxious. I'll stay positive and hope the things I like about the current ui are retained somewhere. I had no idea numpads were disappearing.
Disappearing from computers, or from the game?
I doubt Toady would leave numpad users stranded.
But if the mouse becomes *required*, I will vomit.
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voliol

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3535 on: October 01, 2020, 10:35:40 am »

Thanks for the answers, Toady!

You know you're old when the idea of updates to the status quo make you anxious. I'll stay positive and hope the things I like about the current ui are retained somewhere. I had no idea numpads were disappearing.
They are, at least on laptops. When I bought a new laptop earlier this year only one model within my price range had one... ultimately the one I bought too, but it is very wide due to the numpad so I can see why people chose to buy others, without numpads. Those attachable USB-numpads do exist as a separate purchase for that reason, but the fact that they are separate still means most people won't own one.

PatrikLundell

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3536 on: October 01, 2020, 11:45:49 am »

UI feedback (from someone who is not an expert in any way):
Note that while using icons allow you to cram more of them into a line/column than text would allow, it also allows you to violate the 7+/-2 rule of number of items people can keep track of.

Also, icons without any other explanation than mouse over tool tips are really bad for newbies, as the UI just presents a lot of incomprehensible icons that you'll have to gradually connect to the functionality you don't yet know anything about, so in addition to try to learn the functionality, you also have to learn which icon it's represented by, meaning the beginning will require a lot of mouse overing.

Then try to implement this in Classic: Just the key bindings displayed, but you'd need to activate the tool tips to find out what every single binding actually does.

Just as a thought experiment, think of the embark screen with only creature/item icons and no description of what the icons represent, just tool tips. An extreme case, but it should illustrate the problem.

Summary: Use additional text to indicate what icons/key bindings do and have tool tips provide an expansion of that, not a replacement.
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Mim

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3537 on: October 01, 2020, 10:40:58 pm »

Thanks for the explanation Toady! I'll ask about the next equation next month, and so on.
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Shonai_Dweller

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3538 on: October 01, 2020, 11:03:48 pm »

Concerning internationalization:

Have you heard of GNU Gettext.  From what I can tell it's included in the GNU standard C library and provides a mechanism whereby the developer (primarily by using functions that are basically extended versions of printf, sprintf, et.al.) adds support for internationalization, and then the actual work of translation can be done by someone else* (with translation packs also being able to be distributed separately).


*technically, if the developer has added support for internationalization properly, the translators don't have to coordinate with the developer (or even let the developer know what they are doing).  This leads to the possibility of community supported translation in which someone in the forums just up and decides to start a translation.  From this point translations essentially become another form of modding (and could possibly have their own sub-forum  under "DF Modding").

Anyways, that's my understanding from skimming through the Gettext section of the Glibc info file.  I could, of course, be wrong about some/all of the above.

The issue isn't translation.
It's procedurally generated text. Which means it needs to be coded, not translated. It literally uses the grammar rules of English to produce text. To make the game do something else requires new code, and the game isn't Open Source, so that's not happening.

As Toady said, the tooltips and fixed text can all be open. Which is nice. But that won't help you Localize the game.
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A_Curious_Cat

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Re: Future of the Fortress
« Reply #3539 on: October 02, 2020, 02:10:18 am »

Concerning internationalization:

Have you heard of GNU Gettext.  From what I can tell it's included in the GNU standard C library and provides a mechanism whereby the developer (primarily by using functions that are basically extended versions of printf, sprintf, et.al.) adds support for internationalization, and then the actual work of translation can be done by someone else* (with translation packs also being able to be distributed separately).


*technically, if the developer has added support for internationalization properly, the translators don't have to coordinate with the developer (or even let the developer know what they are doing).  This leads to the possibility of community supported translation in which someone in the forums just up and decides to start a translation.  From this point translations essentially become another form of modding (and could possibly have their own sub-forum  under "DF Modding").

Anyways, that's my understanding from skimming through the Gettext section of the Glibc info file.  I could, of course, be wrong about some/all of the above.

The issue isn't translation.
It's procedurally generated text. Which means it needs to be coded, not translated. It literally uses the grammar rules of English to produce text. To make the game do something else requires new code, and the game isn't Open Source, so that's not happening.

As Toady said, the tooltips and fixed text can all be open. Which is nice. But that won't help you Localize the game.

Looking at the matter again, wikipedia says that GNU gettext isn't the only implementation of gettext.  So perhaps he could find an implementation to his liking.  Also, there are other tools available (I suggested gettext because it was available on a wide range of systems).

As for the procedurally generated text, it depends on how it's coded.

If he uses printf (, or sprintf) with %s's for "fill-in-the-blank", e.g. something like:

std::cout << sprintf("%s, %s, cancels mood:  Insane.\n", getName(dwarfId), getProfession(dwarfID));

then it could work.

If, on the other hand, he does it by just concatenating strings together one-by-one then it probably wouldn't work.

Edit:

He's, also, already linking the linux version to glibc, which (like gettext's libintl and libasprintf  -the only gettext libraries he'd actually need to link to- ) is under the LGPL.
« Last Edit: October 02, 2020, 02:29:35 am by A_Curious_Cat »
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