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[Spriggans]

Why do I only notice this thread today ?
PTW

[kitfoxgames]

Steam Community Update 17 June 2021: "Floodgates and Updated Trade Screen"

https://steamcommunity.com/games/975370/announcements/detail/2989808708279045151

Full text:

Hello again!



Here's a little setup I've carved out at the underground level where the water flows in a brook. Near the bottom of the image, a stone floodgate holds the water back. The channel to the north of it has a ramp for access from above, coming down from the grassy field by the brook. We also have vertical bars forming a few large cells in the upper right. The shape shown in the individual bar tiles adjusts according to what is nearby. Patrick drew the new bar and floodgate pictures.

The lever in the top left has been connected to the floodgate. I've used a hasty and risky method! As you can see in the animation below, a dwarf can run down and pull the lever, escaping upward just in time before the water comes rushing in.



You can see in the image how water blockages works. Water can rush through vertical bars, but it is blocked by floodgates and doors. Floodgates are safer since dwarves can open doors by default and it's a bit dangerous to rely on them. Players make drowning chambers in a variety of designs for various reasons.



I've also more or less completed the trade screen, where you actually exchange items with the merchants that arrive periodically throughout the year. This is reasonably similar to the old trade screen, aside from all the mouse support, as well as the search filters. You can also collapse both headings and container lists by clicking on them, though I should probably add a specific button for that. The dwarf merchant there up at the top is placed so low since we need to support much larger creatures, though I should get a chance to even that out for different sizes. So, a few things left to do, but it's going pretty well.

- Tarn

[Fleeting Frames]

+ I really like how the bars actually conform to wall shapes. Took me a bit to realize it's a change, that's how natural it is!

- It took me much longer to realize those are top-down walls next to the pair of doors.

I don't usually mind the different perspectives - it's even, dare I say, necessary for recognizition - but it throws me here.

Though as the purely NS pierces are not recognizably grates  (the overlap onto the wall being even little odd here though not ery noticeable), there's probably room for improvement.

o Tbh I initialy thought the channel was on level below.

o I like how water initially wets floor! But after seeing the beautiful brooks and ponds, I can assume that's only a placeholder.


Trade screen: Took me a bit to realize it, but know what'd be neat?  Icon view. At the moment, they resemble, to use a Windows OS file explorer term, detailed view.

However, the items already have concrete appearance and normally take colour from material*.

So having them zoomed out into into icons would be nice "Flexibility and Efficiency of Use" idea for people who already know the caravan contents and want to mass-select objects in it with mouse.

* not sure why the bars and blocks look the same when the gems are distinct, but I hope that probably gets fixed - I won't be able remember every stone colour off the top of my head, despite experience & even though I care about it.

[Uthimienure]

The channels by the flood gate baffle me. Can someone show it to me in ASCII so I can understand?  (I'm being honest, not sarcastic.)

[Starver]

The channels by the flood gate baffle me. Can someone show it to me in ASCII so I can understand?  (I'm being honest, not sarcastic.)

It seems to be a couple of ▲ tiles depicting a maybe slightly odd profile[1] for those not familiar with old conventions This I deduced from the in-article description, though IRL I'd be more familiar by that point which shading-convention there is (is it a /\ or a \/ profile, and I'm worried now that it's the latter, though still ▲ and not ▼in CodePage graphics) and of course entirely sure of how I built/dug it, with level up/down scrolling as second nature if I needed to check.


[1]

Code: [Select]

__.  .__ - presumed level above
##|/\|## - this level
(Two characters per tile, plus one per tile-boundary.)
...or it may not be a slit-trench at Z+1, but an end-of-corridor down-slope, but then I'd half expect a single slope to be shown, according to orientation. The implication, I presume, is that it's an either-side access from above to land down here, and vice-versa.

[Mobbstar]

The channels by the flood gate baffle me. Can someone show it to me in ASCII so I can understand?  (I'm being honest, not sarcastic.)

The way I see it:

(If they were underneath, they'd have incline towards the north and south.)

It's difficult to tell with ramps. They're something I've mulled over eversince they got shown. It may be possible to give them a bleed-over (similar to the water splashes around water tiles) to clarify when they're on the same level. Here's a (bad) mockup for what I mean.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This would mean more work of course, depending on how the ramps are drawn in the first place.

[Uthimienure]

Thanks, guys.  I'll just add this:

In the video, the ramps act like "up" ramps because the water neither takes extra time to fill up a channel in the floor, nor drains away into a level below. 

However, the shading on the ramps being darker in the middle, suggests to me that the ramps are "downward".  It definitely looks like a trough rather than a peak is formed in the center by the ramps.  Thus, the graphics mislead my eyes.  Shouldn't a peak be lighter shaded with the shading getting darker as a ramp goes deeper?

[clinodev]

This is the part where I jump in to say that it's probably better to discuss the ramps (which looked like channels to me too,) in the Premium Tileset threads, and then 5 minutes later Meph pops in and writes a complete answer with new art examples, and I look silly.

[Bumber]

It definitely looks like a trough rather than a peak is formed in the center by the ramps.  Thus, the graphics mislead my eyes.

If the dwarf in the gif can use it, doesn't that mean it must be a trough?

[Starver]

A trough down from Z+1, certainly.

Look, I think[1] I understand the physicality of the example. The graphics just take getting used to. I didn't have any problem identifying the bar-tops of the N-S stretches for what they are, although the "top down sliced view" of the (constructed?) walls sat either side of the doors then look like a stone 'portal' seen side-on, even though I've seen enough isolated rock/masonry pillars already to know they're not in oblique view.

But I'm not worried about me, more the newbugs who will undoubtedly be helped with much of the non-437 graphics. I think anybody commenting here would grasp the reality (link the new appearance to the right internal map) with just a little stumbling.

[1] In leiu of any official word otherwise, the topology is firmly settled in my mind, in the form already explained.

[DwarfStar]

Ramps are a challenge because of how unintuitively they behave in the game.

When I go to mine out a multi-z level area from below, the first thing I do is carve out the whole thing with ramps. So units can walk up and down from any level to any other level, in any direction. How will that be rendered in the Steam release? It’s hard to imagine how to communicate the full range of motion units have in a situation like that.

[Starver]

As an old hand, I dispute that they work unintuitively in the game. They work entirely logically in the game, but are completely unintuitive in Real Life™!

[kitfoxgames]

Steam Community Update 1 July 2021: New Information Hub

https://steamcommunity.com/games/975370/announcements/detail/2966165443311320630

Full text:

Hi everyone!

We've started up work on the main information display, where you'll be able to check on and manage all sorts of things about your fortress. The old version of the game had this information scattered all over the place. This time we're trying to collect it all together:



Please note that most of this is placeholder graphics as I'm still tweaking bits and pieces. I drew a little red outline for 'remove work from job', but it'll probably end up being something different, ha ha ha. Some of the categories are also likely to change a bit.

We're more or less going to implement/update these going left to right, though there are lots of relationships between all the types of data so it isn't as simple as that. For instance, even on smaller screens (like the 1366px wide laptop image displayed here), there's still room on the right side for, say, some labor, health and military information for each citizen in the fortress. I'll be adding that as I go. And 1920px screens won't need the ellipses on dwarf names for the most part. In any case, when each of the tabs are done, we'll be through a hefty chunk of the remaining menus and screens from the old game.

Also new here on the Creatures tab (the old units screen), we have sorting! Lots of sorting. There's also a stress display, which players of the old version will recognize as something we just didn't have before. Now you're one click away from finding all of the dwarves in your fortress that are closest to throwing tantrums or otherwise having a miserable time. And it's cool to see them all there in a column with their little outfits! You'll note that we don't have a dwarf baby image in yet, he he he.

- Tarn

[FantasticDorf]

Nice, pity to see there's no agents/intrigue panel, i guess we'll have to wait for the villian release to be more rounded but a page to itself just for counterintelligence will help bundle up stuff nicely.

The job icons are still a little bit vague, because the red outline of a person (absent, i think) and what i assume is the "Going to" first button are closely the same in what they are saying in my opinion. Still for new players it'd be nice to see if these have hover-over contexts or a icon-legend on "?" help/tutorial if that will still exist on the premium version. I wonder what Toady will do to sort the C screen world map, now that everything lives on tabs.

[Varjo]

Looks very nice! Great work.