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Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


ColonelMuttonchops posted:

I bet the first year will go so well that we'll get 30 dwarves in the first migration wave.

31st on the list. Well, goddamnit.

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Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


Kruggsmash is awesome, but in case anyone's not mentioned it, RPS have been doing a good old-fashioned screenshot LP for DF, which is pretty good fun so far. They finished up season 1 a little while back, and it should be starting up again soon.

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


Kestral posted:

If I were going to watch one Kruggsmash fort, which should it be? I started a few minutes of Steelclutches earlier today before realizing he has a bunch of them, and also that Steelclutches apparently has four parts :monocle:

I'd personally say Honeystoker, mostly because it was the first one I watched and it hooked me. Monsterkiller is also great.

Hell, they're all worth a watch. Take your time and savor them.

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


Captain Invictus posted:

I reallt, really love the amount of thought they're putting into this. I didn't even know crown shyness was a thing, but that's fascinating and works great for distinguishing different trees ingame, too.

This game will never cease to amaze me in terms of how much attention to detail goes into such minor bits of it. I suspect trees could have been as bare as a telegraph pole with a clump of green at the end, and most players wouldn't have given a toss, but now I wouldn't be surprised if Toady includes the number of rings in the trunk's description so we know how old it was before it was cut down.

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


xylo posted:

new fort update on patch update:

no major issues with stress/tantrum spirals a couple years in. wereshit is still a huge issue so don't forget to turn that garbage off.

I think Threetoe said something very recently about they'd only recently realized werebeasts might be better showing up a little later in the game on average, and that they'd be addressing that next version. And he said that recently enough that it'd probably mean the next next version, not the one they just put out.

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


Lazy Newb Pack got updated for 0.47.05, if anyone's been waiting on it

https://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=7622

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


Waiting for that epic, 12-dwarf magma forge with legendary statues and specialist tools for forging adamantine to be blocked by a single strange mood dwarf who wants to make a lead ring artifact.

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


Evil Fluffy posted:

I've been reading the bronzestabbed LP that was linked earlier (about halfway through the thread) and goddamn it's so good.

It really is, I've just started doing the same myself. I remember gemclod from back in the day, but somehow I missed bronzestabbed, and it's fantastic.

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


The one mood debuff my dwarves always seem to get is 'missing friends and family', which I'm assuming there's not much I can do about. Should I be making them socialize more, to get new friends? I seem to remember one Kruggsmash series where he set up a burrow as like a 'festival' every year.

Do dwarves really socialize much if they're busy? I seem to remember they don't build relationships if they're working on something, so it's down to the meeting halls/taverns/etc. Mine never seem to at all, despite my last fort having a poo poo ton of temples and guilds, and a tavern crammed with entertainers.

Should I be letting my dwarves be idle more often, basically?

E: Similarly, I never seem to get dwarves marrying. Married couples show up in migrant waves, and I think one pair once became romantically involved, but otherwise they all seem to be celibate.

Wolfechu fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Sep 4, 2021

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


I always picture this as being the strange mood mindset

(Behind a URL on general principles when it comes to Oglaf) https://i.imgur.com/u0fl6Xe.jpeg

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


I mean, I don't know if other people consider it playable, but I've been playing it a lot over the past year. It's always going to have bugs, or even just things not working and you can't figure out why - my last fort I could NOT get them to make steel, despite an abundance of iron, charcoal, flux, etc.

Saying that, that fort ticked along nicely for 7 or 8 years and ended up retired rather than destroyed.

Toady definitely did something about some of the more common complaints around 47.05 - dwarves going into tantrum spirals because they got rained on six years ago doesn't happen for instance, and werebeasts seem less frequent, or at least less deadly.

The Steam update will help for sure, but it's almost entirely UX improvements from what I've seen so far. Even the stuff above about work orders is in the game right now, has been a while, it's just under a cruftier interface. Hopefully that'll make it less of a vertical learning curve for new players.

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


I like Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress. Sorry, one-game-likers, must be less fun over there for you

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


Threetoe posted:

As far as game difficulty goes, we have studied you like a hungry tiger seeking to find the weaknesses in your strategy. We are taking Memorial Day weekend and instead of menus we are taking break from the UI to give you old players the challenge you deserve for the Steam release! More on that next week.

For now, let's talk about the toggleable settings. There will be difficulty settings that adjust the wealth triggers and frequency of invasions, thieves, and beast attacks. These will be customizable just as if you have been editing the text files, but you set them when you embark.

As a side note, I've been testing the minecart tracks, sending loads of goblin equipment down to the magma forge to be melted down. If you think that's a waste of time, you can now buy them off as they will demand an artifact as a bribe before they attack, or adjust the frequency of their attacks down from once every two seasons (there was even a bug that caused them to escalate too fast).

The elves are also getting reworked to make them more of a challenge. The number of trees felled that it takes to anger them has been greatly reduced, and their attacks are more deadly. These settings can also be changed if you choose, but watch out when you start in the savage lands as you are in for a surprise, along with the rest of the horrible stuff we have planned for this weekend!

Wolfechu fucked around with this message at 01:20 on May 28, 2022

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


Appoda posted:

Now that you got me thinking about it, there must be some record for longest continuous game of dwarf fortress. How many years can you go until it bugs out? Would the record be held in a more stable version, like 40d?

There's a guy called BlindIRL on youtube and twitch, who's been doing a fort called 'Longdeath', which he intends to run for 1000 game years.

I'm not entirely sure how far along along he is, but he's up to at least 200 episodes (which are just his Twitch streams, and weigh in at like 5-6 hours apiece), and every one of his original 7 dwarves has long since died of old age

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


From what I've seen of it, the goal is 'still have any FPS by the end of 1000 years', so he's micromanaging the hell out of every dwarf and object and also keeping it relatively small.

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


M_Gargantua posted:

Hi there it's Josh and welcome back to Let's Game it Out

*8 hours later*

Now that I've got the eldritch lye demons trapped in this enclosure I can finally make unlimited soap

Not gonna lie I'd watch the whole thing to see him find ways to break stuff

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


I didn't even know there were plant gathering zones till this page

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


Toadyone posted:


After the various additions from last time, I turned back to instructing new players. It didn't take us long to decide we needed tutorials after all, ha ha ha. Now as you are entering the embark map, it asks if you'd like to do a tutorial. The game searches the world for an optimal tutorial location - forested, brook, pretty flat, shallow metals, if it can get all this - and plops you down there after a short animation. As it stands, and this is subject to change of course, there's a short four stage tutorial covering camera controls, mining a staircase, chopping trees and stockpiling wood, making a carpenter's shop and adding a task. Obviously there's a lot left to teach, and this may expand. Whatever isn't tutorialized we're trying to cover by other means - I've also added ten instructional popups so far for various menus (using the typical "don't show me this again" checkbox), and we have more stuff in the works. Hopefully by the time we're done, people will have enough of a handle on the game to continue learning on their own.

I also updated the save options and cleanup screens which had been lingering up to this point - no news here, just making them fit. Thanks to a tip from Putnam, world gen is somewhat faster now (25% or so, people were obsessing about their books a bit too much), and I did some other speed optimizations that apply everywhere. Continued tweaking item values. And Jacob and Carolyn have been sending in art which I've been incorporating. More items show their material colors now where they didn't before.

(Is it useful sharing the Dev logs on here? I don't know much everyone in the thread keeps up on these)

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


https://twitter.com/Kotaku/status/1534927803983986690

Kotaku article which kinda makes it sound like the brothers are begging for money (I don't think they are, if you read past the headline, just that donations have fallen a bit)

Amused by the guy in the comments who's not putting his money into a game until it's finished. Gonna be a long wait for you, pal

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


Oh, and a threetoe devlog:

Threetoe posted:

A game with this level of complexity can be confusing and overwhelming for the average gamer. It already has a reputation for being one of the most obtuse games every created. That ends here. As we go through the UI overhaul, we are adding short guides for the crucial mechanics on top of the tooltips that are already there. These can be dismissed and disabled in order not to annoy, but we are on a mission. There are so many aspects of this game that are hidden inside menus or info screens. We are going to shed a light on these tools and show the world the result of twenty plus years of work they have only seen a glimpse of.

These guides are only a tiny part of the time we are spending on improvements, improvements that you made possible. Your generosity is being put to use squashing some of the most important bugs that have dogged the project for years. Did we tell you that we ran worldgen on the laptop for 1000 years on a medium world and it only took 28 minutes?

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


Yeah, I mean it takes me almost as long to generate a world for 250 years right now, and all the time is in the last half of that. 1000 years would normally be a 'set it running before you go to bed and hope it doesn't crash overnight' situation

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


They could do a lot worse than having something like PeridexisErrant's walkthrough included (the guy who does the Lazy Newb Pack). I never went through it, but I know a few people who did and it helped them get into the game. There's a pregenned world and specific embark site so people can follow along the steps.

https://df-walkthrough.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


Another Toady Devlog. These aren't usually this frequent, which is encouraging. I think Threetoe has posted more in the last month than he ever has total, because he's doing the bulk of playtesting right now.

ToadyOne posted:

The continuing efforts. One side of it as we've mentioned is setting up the framework for further tutorials and instruction sheets and filling them with text. Another is fixing up bugs as they arise to keep the upcoming Stage 3 manageable.

Then there's the general approachability of the game, which is where stuff like the worldgen speed changes came in. To make sure that wasn't just reliant on necromancers killing the world, I ran a world without any of that, and a medium still only took 27 minutes! I noticed the world was infested with rocs, and people worshipped them, as they tend to do when there's enough city attacks, but there weren't any formal roc religions. Turns out megabeast prophets weren't generating properly - fixed now! Ran another world and after some hundreds of years, somebody founded a bronze colossus worshipping monastery ha ha. They are reasonably rare but it is wholesome to have them.

As for the necromancers tending to kill off most worlds in their later years, we're still pondering that - our planned solution for that was to have religions organize the destruction of the secret scrolls and the keeping of forbidden slabs, and the rise of undead-hunting orders and such, but it's probably best not to start anything ambitious or prone to breakdown at this stage. But we'll see what happens!

Also in the usability vein, I added in place and object lists, kind of analogous to the previous rooms and treasure list buttons, but with categories and more information. So far I've done zones, stockpiles, locations, workshops, and farm plots in separate subtabs, and objects are grouped as crafted artifacts, symbols (of positions), named objects, and written content. This means that if you've misplaced your dump zone or a favorite stockpile, say, you won't have to look all over for it. You can just find it in the list and recenter.

We've also extended the endgame and given it a bit of optional structure, on top of the underground rewrite we already mentioned. Getting the monarch requires a certain baseline of happiness now. Once you get your monarch situated with proper rooms, it'll give you a little congratulatory message, and then the game gives you a more ambitious goal to become a true Mountainhome, involving the underground and such. If you can do it, you're pretty good at the game! It's not like Archcrystal-ambitious, just a little taste. It doesn't kick you out for 'winning' the game (see: a much older version of DF that literally did this ha ha), but it's good to continue to have something, just as the goal of getting the monarch or deeper treasures was there already as a previous form of victory. Now they are just united somewhat. You can still get the monarch early if you know how, and go from there (get them rooms, do the ambitious thing.)

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


I only set up a patreon to donate to DF. The only other person I stuck on there is Kruggsmash.

Did I mention I love this game/I have a problem (delete as applicable)

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


You'd buy them, you know it. So would I.

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


Not exactly Dev news, but :(

Toadyone posted:

It's miserable news but some of you will want to know. On Wednesday morning, we took Scamps in to the vet after a sudden deterioration and it turned out to be widespread lymphoma. He passed away Wednesday afternoon. He was a good baby man and will be missed very much.

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


Threetoe posted:

Despite the carnage of the last sum of days we managed to make a lot of progress. There is now an interactive tutorial for the n00bs. We are also working on an encyclopedia of mini-tutorials to explain how to really survive. For the veterans we have created a series of tabs in the info screen that allows you to find all the zones, workshops, and stockpiles with a simple click!

We're getting there. The artists are working hard making the buildings and underground trees look beautiful. The music is coming along and sounds great. Meanwhile we've been adjusting the caravans and invasion triggers. But more importantly, we've been squashing bugs.

Here was an annoying one that could have fouled everything up forever: Once after embark, last month, the depth of the world suddenly stopped at 38 levels down. No underground layers. No underground caverns. No magma. Nothing. When this happened a second time, we knew we were in trouble. It happened only rarely, but more often on the tutorial embark.

It turned out that a few mid-level maps weren't generated with cavern layers for animation and speed purposes, but wouldn't always be cleaned and replaced with full versions. Now it is done properly. This disaster has been averted!

Thanks again to the outpouring of kindness and support over what has been a miserable week. You got us through! Congratulations to the generous!

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


ToadyOne posted:

Continuing along through what has been a summerly hot couple of days (not so hot as last year so far thankfully, and no tornado warnings either...) This may be a permanent state of affairs now as things draw closer to release, but there is action from all directions, whether that be art, or music, or graphics-tech stuff (monitor resolution tests in this case), or what have you, while the regular work I'm used to on the code side keeps right along. Artists have moved on to their next batch of updates - Carolyn's gone from interface stuff to vegetation, and Jacob's gone from items to buildings, and we should have some more screenshots soon.

From my end specifically, it's mostly been technical stuff I needed to catch up on. Textures get cleaned up now rather than sticking around and muddying up subsequent playthroughs, I did some playing around with FMOD (our sound library) to make sure I can handle everything that's incoming there, and I made some changes needed for displaying some fancy new gear assemblies. I think it'll be like this for a while, hopping between tech stuff I need to do, accessibility stuff I need to do, and bugs. The tutorial texts, init/settings page, and keyboard stuff are the highest priority things I'm working on now along with the tasks to keep other people unblocked.

These are all on a blog page at http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/ btw, if anyone wants to read back through them

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


Really, they deserve every penny. I've gotten way more out of this game than most full price titles.

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


I bought the paper copy of that, it's surprising how much of it is still relevant

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


steinrokkan posted:

Does it have any personal touches, or is it just the wiki before the wiki?

Just the latter, really, but it's nice to have sitting on the desk for reference sometimes. I have like 5 of the LNP apps open over two monitors, it's nice to not have to open another app

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


Toady posted:

I got started on the settings menu. Switching between windowed and fullscreen mode has always been fast with F11, but now additionally in the settings video tab you get a drop down list of available resolutions if you'd like to switch for any reason during play. I'm currently adding in the rest of the options from init and d_init to various tabs. Yesterday I handled file i/o. You'll normally leave the data/init files alone. Instead your changes would be saved over in a prefs folder. You won't need to touch these outside the game if you don't want to, but if you like messing with txts, they'd be there to fiddle with, and updates of the game you download would never overwrite your changes (it will need to overwrite the default files when new options are added etc.)

Settings are available from the title screen and afterward, but the embark difficulty options become available in their own tab once you start play (you also see them when you embark.) It's a subject of discussion whether there should be some sort of Iron Dwarf mode that prevents the player from accessing them, since I know people can go either way on that. There'll probably be a thing or two like that. I'm putting FPS-sensitive stuff like temperature and weather over in a different section you will always have available regardless of how that shakes out.

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


Not entirely accurate, but fair

https://twitter.com/lumnmch/status/1543687491819130884

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


Lemon posted:

I hope the steam version ships with some different audio tracks because I just started playing this again a couple of days ago for the first time in a few years and jfc that guitar has been haunting my brain constantly since then

Grab the lazy newb pack, it comes with Soundsense and there's a ton more music in there that really fits the game. It gets repetitive too eventually, but then anything is going to given how long games of DF can last

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


Toadyone posted:

Carolyn finished a lot of new tree art, so I switched gears to implement the code changes need for that. This means: wood colors, autumn leaves, flowers, and fruit! We'll have some more pictures ready in a few days - for now, here's a look at the midautumn leaves with different wood colors.

(edit for being fool enough to try bbcode on the phone)

Wolfechu fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Jul 12, 2022

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


Threetoe posted:

Everything is beginning to coalesce, to congeal, to coagulate. All that's left is the detritus that is required to bring us to the starting line, waiting for the crack of the pistol. What does that mean? It means that I took a creative writing class in college.

We have reached the point that squashing the last of the bugs is as much of the focus as finishing the menus and tutorials. It means that all we have left is to polish this sucker and we can finally sprint to the end. But we aren't there quite yet. Just a little longer.

In the mean time, here is an interview we did with Blind, featuring Tarn and I, plus questions from Tekkud!

(For reference, Blind is the guy who does a lot of DF streaming, the one who's running Longdeath, the fort that's supposed to last 1000 years, and Tekkud does all kinds of tutorial videos on youtube, managing stockpiles and other useful stuff)

I dunno, I'm excited. It sounds like they're reaching the beginning of the end

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


ToadyOne posted:

As we're trying to figure out the final shape of the release, we ultimately have to make some decisions about Classic, Adventure mode, and Arena mode, as we've been discussing here and elsewhere for the last months. Before doing that, I thought I'd take a good stab at Classic and get a better feeling for how long it would take to do the conversion. This required entering a semi-conscious data entry state. After days of grinding away at a 120KB txt file, I ended up just finishing a whole preliminary look.

Preliminary classic unit sheet

Preliminary classic creature list

All of the new menus are converted - the tooltips are essential for the small buttons of course, and we have those. Looking at these screens, obviously there's more that needs to be done and some of the glyph choices are Questionable (it was hard enough keeping my eyes open after doing ~2000 entries.) But on the plus side, it looks like we'll have a Classic release on the website at-or-around the initial launch, and every one of these glyphs is also easily moddable in the txt if you want to make different choices. As a bonus, in the Premium version you can flip between graphics and Classic with a simple settings option during play without having to reload.

Over in Adventure land, the community consensus was that pushing it to post-launch is acceptable, and we're going to take that route - it'll save us months (and months) of pre-launch time, which we need to do at this point. Don't worry - I'm a big adv mode fan and it's not going anywhere, we just need to get the launch together after these several years. Arena mode is still undecided - it's really important for testing and modding, but another chunk of time. Maybe I'll have another good half-conscious run on it as with Classic here, though it requires some art etc. so I can't just grind myself through it ha ha.

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


I don't think Toady 100% knew whether it'd be possible before the last 24 hours

Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


Zurai posted:

Hell yes. This is the best news I've gotten in a while.

Same, this has proper cheered me up today

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Wolfechu
May 2, 2009

All the world's a stage I'm going through


woke kaczynski posted:

I'm gonna replace my entire wardrobe with 20 copies of that shirt

Just the shirt? No pants, no socks? You gonna wear all 20 shirts at once?
Classic Dwarf Fortress

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