Dwarf Fortress: The child punches the cave spider in the thorax, bruising the brain!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Dwarf Fortress: The child punches the cave spider in the thorax, bruising the brain!

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FreudianSlippers: Apr 12, 2010; Shooting and Fucking
are the same thing!

Anyone growing up in any DF World should be completely desanitised to death and corpses by age six. Ergo seeing corpses should have maybe 0,03% of the effect it currently has.

# ? May 16, 2020 22:12

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# ? Apr 27, 2024 03:11

Veryslightlymad: Jun 3, 2007; I fight with
my brain
and with an
underlying
hatred of the
Erebonian
Noble Faction

I just assume that the dwarf fortress world is written by Steven Erikson, so everything is always violent and insane, but everyone is also deeply emotionally impacted by it, (and by random things, like a nice mist or good engraving) as well.

# ? May 16, 2020 22:33

Casey Finnigan: Apr 30, 2009; Dumb ✔
So goddamn crazy ✔

I'm trying to play my first game of DF using the Lazy Newb Pack, and I gotta ask, is Stonesense notoriously, uselessly buggy or something?

I keep trying to load it up, and every single time it crashes itself and Dwarf Fortress.exe. It always crashes at Grei_items.xml, which looks to me to be a perfectly normal .xml file.

e: well looking on the github page it looks like they figured it might be this about two weeks ago:

github guy posted:

I think it crashes because of this :

In stonesense/items/greiger_items/greiger_items.xml, The XML loader successfully loads the attributes of item "BIN" and identifies that it's main_type 31.
But then somehow when the game tries to access contentLoader->itemConfigs[main_type] , itemConfigs has a capacity of 0. You can't access cell 31 in an array or vector that has zero cells.

I guess the issue still exists.

Do serious DF players even use Stonesense?

Casey Finnigan fucked around with this message at 02:25 on May 17, 2020

# ? May 17, 2020 02:07

Tarezax: Sep 12, 2009; MORT cancels dance: interrupted by MORT

I only ever fired up Stonesense to take fun screenshots. It's a visualizer, not really any use for gameplay.

# ? May 17, 2020 02:29

Zesty: Jan 17, 2012; The Great Twist

It's kind of neat but it's more of a novelty than something I need to have.

# ? May 17, 2020 02:29

Zurai: Feb 13, 2012; Wait -- I haven't even voted in this game yet!

Yeah, Stonesense is for either taking neat screenshots or helping to visualize large-scale construction projects. It's not something that anyone who is genuinely new to Dwarf Fortress is likely to have any real use for. Unless, of course, you're trying to recreate Moria on your first fortress, in which case, yeah.

# ? May 17, 2020 03:55

Tuxedo Catfish: Mar 17, 2007; You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

FreudianSlippers posted:

Anyone growing up in any DF World should be completely desanitised to death and corpses by age six. Ergo seeing corpses should have maybe 0,03% of the effect it currently has.

I think the magnitude of the response is fine, the problem is that in DF's current framework becoming totally desensitized isn't actually a thing (even when the description says it is). There's always at least a small chance of a bad thought being generated, and it's checked for every single corpse, not for the aggregate experience of seeing a battlefield or a garbage dump, so that small chance is basically never small enough.

# ? May 21, 2020 12:56

Zesty: Jan 17, 2012; The Great Twist

Looks like Tarn has been putting out Steam unique status updates. I'm following the steam page but I didn't get a notification for them. Not sure how to make that happen.

quote:

Hi!

The main part of the game we've been updating for the last while is the tree display.

Way back when the classic game was first released in 2006, and for some years after, trees were simply a single text tile, an up arrow for a pine tree, say, and you'd chop them down and get a piece of wood. As the game progressed and got a third dimension of terrain, this became insufficient, and we moved over to multi-tile trees.

Even using text, growing and display these was a bit of a challenge. Here are our tree trunks from the text version:

Don't strain too hard if you don't see them, but spot the brown and white O's? Those are tree trunks down on the ground level. The first part we tackled was getting these displayed, and making sure they were distinguishable from the trunks of trees that had been chopped down. The artists accomplished this with foliage shadows and lively roots:

Now, once you go upward, the situation gets more complex. In Dwarf Fortress, there are thick trunks that can be climbed, heavy branches that can be walked across, light branches that can't be walked upon, and even groups of leafy twigs out at the very edges. Jumble all of that together in text, and you have the old display:

This is one altitude level up from the previous text picture. All of those tile types are there, but it's difficult to parse, to say the least. We wanted to make that easier to understand.

So let's take a look at one of our new trees:

We are going up and down the tree with the camera - the trunk branches north and south immediately, and then thins out as we move vertically, until only leafy twigs remain at the top.

When we put it all together in a forest, and move the camera up one level, we obtain the following:

There's still a lot to take in, but the trees can be distinguished from each other (the leaves of different trees don't touch each other. This is called crown shyness.) The 'trunk' tiles which cannot be traveled through all have a pillar to distinguish them.

So if one of your dwarves is scared up a tree by a wild predator, you'll expect to see them clinging next to a trunk or sitting on one of the heavy branches. On the other hand, if they are using a stepladder to pick fruit, you'll find them in the leafier sections without heavy branches where the fruit grows.

- Tarn

# ? May 21, 2020 21:45

girl dick energy: Sep 30, 2009; You think you have the wherewithal to figure out my puzzle vagina?

This is going to be so loving cool.

# ? May 21, 2020 21:53

Fat_Cow: Dec 12, 2009; Every time I yank a jawbone from a skull and ram it into an eyesocket, I know I'm building a better future.

I am making a cheaty Embark file to screw around with, giving my Dwarfs a "10" in all their starting stats so they have a level 5 skill in all their slots. However when I load up that profile I am greeted to this. Is there a RAW File I need to edit somewhere? I already screwed with World_Gen.txt to give myself 999,999 embark points but that didn't seem to work.

# ? May 24, 2020 17:12

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

Zesty posted:

Looks like Tarn has been putting out Steam unique status updates. I'm following the steam page but I didn't get a notification for them. Not sure how to make that happen.

all it took was having a use for calculating obscure tree statistics to get toady really on board with better graphics

# ? May 24, 2020 18:08

Comrade Koba: Jul 2, 2007

it's not going to be real Dwarf Fortress until it has glorious full-HD visualizations of the fluid mechanics of wereaardvark fecal matter. :colbert:

# ? May 25, 2020 08:33

Zesty: Jan 17, 2012; The Great Twist

# ? May 25, 2020 08:41

Gnoman: Feb 12, 2014; Come, all you fair and tender maids
Who flourish in your pri-ime
Beware, take care, keep your garden fair
Let Gnoman steal your thy-y-me
Le-et Gnoman steal your thyme

Fat_Cow posted:

I am making a cheaty Embark file to screw around with, giving my Dwarfs a "10" in all their starting stats so they have a level 5 skill in all their slots. However when I load up that profile I am greeted to this. Is there a RAW File I need to edit somewhere? I already screwed with World_Gen.txt to give myself 999,999 embark points but that didn't seem to work.

Did you gen the world before making the changes? RAWs are stored with the save, so any changes to the main RAWs won't do anything in existing games.

# ? May 25, 2020 09:00

scamtank: Feb 24, 2011; my desire to just be a FUCKING IDIOT all day long is rapidly overtaking my ability to FUNCTION

i suspect that means i'm MENTALLY ILL

I'm not sure if there's even a DFHack path to removing the "investment cap" on dwarf skills at embark

maybe just give dwarves [NATURAL_SKILL:xyz:very lots] at everything

# ? May 25, 2020 12:43

Happy Litterbox: Jan 2, 2010

Man I really wish the performance of the game wouldn't be so horrific. Even if I limit my fort to 60 dwarfs, throw out all visitors, reduce the amount of caverns and select a hilariously small embark site it only takes about ten years of a fort to slow down to a grinding halt.

It's kinda discouraging having to stop whenever a fort becomes interesting due to fps death. Especially if you have a modern system.

I'm not even sure what slows the game down. Too many trash entities? Pathfinding? Is there any way to figure out what is causing most of the slowdown?

# ? May 26, 2020 15:32

Angry Diplomat: Nov 7, 2009; Winner of the TSR Memorial Award for Excellence In Grogging

Pathfinding is a really fuckin big offender. The DF wiki offers some insights into that. If you have lots of trees, cutting a bunch of them down can also help a little.

DFHack has some very good utilities for this as well - cleans up clutter, spatter, and other sources of gradual slowdown.

# ? May 26, 2020 16:06

Tuxedo Catfish: Mar 17, 2007; You've got guts! Come to my village, I'll buy you lunch.

Temperature is also a really big factor in slowdown.

Also DF is primarily limited by single-core CPU speed so if you skimped on that when you bought / built your computer, a "modern system" doesn't mean much.

# ? May 26, 2020 18:31

a few DRUNK BONERS: Mar 25, 2016

Happy Litterbox posted:

Man I really wish the performance of the game wouldn't be so horrific. Even if I limit my fort to 60 dwarfs, throw out all visitors, reduce the amount of caverns and select a hilariously small embark site it only takes about ten years of a fort to slow down to a grinding halt.

It's kinda discouraging having to stop whenever a fort becomes interesting due to fps death. Especially if you have a modern system.

I'm not even sure what slows the game down. Too many trash entities? Pathfinding? Is there any way to figure out what is causing most of the slowdown?

Dfhack has the fastdwarf option if you don't mind cheating

It does trivialize all of the hauling and route optimization aspects of the game

# ? May 26, 2020 19:46

Shady Amish Terror: Oct 11, 2007; I'm not Amish by choice. 8(

Weather is traditionally considered a tertiary concern, but pathfinding and temperature are two of the largest offenders, and liquid flow can also be problematic.

In theory, the things you can do to curb FPS death somewhat:

-One of the biggest ones is to never build one-tile passageways. This can result in the pathfinding algorithm butting its head against walls frequently, especially when entities try to get around each other, resulting in lots of unnecessary slowness.

-Turn off temperature for sure, and weather maybe.

-Avoid embarks with lots of flowing water or magma. Surface ponds can also be a problem from the water sloshing around in them every time it rains, if you have that going.

-Lock animals in cages where possible, avoid having free-roaming animals, don't have too many animals, and don't lock animals in rooms unpastured. This used to be a singular point of failure where, amusingly, cats would in fact slow fortresses to a halt by constantly trying to path through/demanding to be let out of every closed door in the fort. If memory serves this has been partially corrected but is still a potential source of slowdown.

-As an addendum to the above, try to avoid having lots of uncovered walls, especially at surface level and in high-ceilinged caverns, to reduce climbing checks.

-Clean up clutter, avoid having too much unnecessary 'stuff' lying around, especially splatters and filth which can be spread across hundreds of entities and surfaces and body parts. I believe DFHack provides a tool command for this, as mentioned above, but you can manually reduce the issue somewhat by placing grates on the ground to serve as welcome mats in high-traffic areas and avoiding the creation of lots of mud, blood, and vomit. Yes, I know this doesn't sound as fun.

-Avoid playing with the traffic designations too much if you can avoid it. It's cool making high-traffic and low-traffic lanes, but the more complicated the traffic designations (and especially the more restricted zones there are) the more time is going to be spent on pathing around.

-Sensible fort layout helps; keeping things close to a central pathway reduces pathfinding time and mitigates FPS being slower by reducing the time each task takes in real time.

Things that probably don't help:

-Setting all traffic designation to the lowest setting (this shouldn't alter the 0(n) completion time of pathfinding, the math difference should be trivial; having lots of complicated zoning the algorithm spends extra time checking around or which dwarves spend extra time walking is potentially a problem however)

-Destroy items using lava instead of atom smashers (There was(?) maybe(???) a bug where some entities crushed by bridges were not being properly deleted and so were contributing to the sprawl, which in theory doesn't happen with lava, this may be erroneous and DFHack's cleanup scripts probably handle this either way)

# ? May 26, 2020 19:52

Comrade Koba: Jul 2, 2007

Shady Amish Terror posted:

This used to be a singular point of failure where, amusingly, cats would in fact slow fortresses to a halt by constantly trying to path through/demanding to be let out of every closed door in the fort.

This is a 100% realistic simulation of actual cat behavior.

# ? May 27, 2020 06:31

Lpzie: Nov 20, 2006

Is it really tricky to figure out how to stop an object from continuously trying to path through a locked door? Even a zero-order solution like giving the animal a new Hanging Out job after checking if the object has stopped moving due to a locked door might be fine. Or give it a new task that's basically "Get to the Other Side of This Door" and the behavior can be attempting it at a lower frequency, or looking for people who are going to path by and following them. Then after getting through, give it back it's original task or something. I dunno, I only messed around with path finding on an elementary level before.

# ? May 27, 2020 23:47

So Math: Jan 8, 2013; Ghostly Clothier

ToadyOne posted:

Ah, sorry for the gap there. I didn't have a scene to show, so I was just pottering away on code bits in a sleep-deprived pandemic haze and lost track (I've remained healthy, but the sleep schedule has become unmoored.) The main project for the artists is the rivers and brooks, and that's going well. In the meantime, I've been handling various bits, like support for pet/vermin display and getting adventure mode showing the basic tile view (still quite rough). We do have a few things we can show this week:

Large workshops

Here are the larger workshops, the siege workshop and the kennels.

Minecart tracks

And here are the minecart tracks. There are carved tracks from the top, transitioning into some wooden ones, and finally some stone ones heading up from the southwest. We also have images for track stops and rollers that aren't coded up yet. I'm always several identifiers behind, ha ha, and the work continues!

# ? May 28, 2020 22:33

Demiurge4: Aug 10, 2011

Gonna take a year for this update but it'll be so good.

# ? May 29, 2020 10:07

SubNat: Nov 27, 2008

So Math posted:

DF Update

I've mentioned this before, but I really wish there was an accompanying forced perspective to the walls, like there is for the furniture and such.

Quick, ugly mockup:

But that would require an extra set of tile expressions + work for the 'top' row of wall tiles, and a decent chunk more work for them, so I can understand not going for it.

# ? May 29, 2020 19:13

Zesty: Jan 17, 2012; The Great Twist

Suggest it anyway.

Zesty fucked around with this message at 20:49 on May 29, 2020

# ? May 29, 2020 20:08

Pharnakes: Aug 14, 2009

I think they must have worked on the shadows at the bases of the walls or something, I find these latest shots much easier to parse than the ones from a few weeks ago.

# ? May 29, 2020 20:42

SubNat: Nov 27, 2008

Zesty posted:

Suggest it anyway.

Sure, just gotta wait for admin approval for my new account registration.

# ? May 29, 2020 22:39

Zesty: Jan 17, 2012; The Great Twist

Steam-specific progress update.

quote:

Noble-drowning facilities (AKA water)

Hey.

The main project we've been focusing on recently is the depiction of bodies of water. In Dwarf Fortress, that can mean a lot of things: still pools, rocky brooks, wide rivers, oceans, lakes, underground lakes, city sewers, and channel and cistern and noble-drowning facilities you produce in your own fortresses.

This is the current status of the rocky brooks.

We're using sixteen frames of animation, which is a first for DF, ha ha, and we might touch this up with some flow direction indications and variants. Dwarves can walk across these, so it's important that they don't look very deep.

This is a deeper, more opaque pool of water that the dwarves prefer not to drink from, but which can have turtles and moghoppers for the dwarves to catch, to add to their food variety and allow for shell crafts. Or to keep as pets. Or for your zoo terrariums and aquariums.

Here are the larger workshops - the kennels and the siege workshop. Many animals can be brought from a wild to a semi-domesticated to a tame state.

This is not entirely safe! But it is good to have mostly friendly critters running about the fortress.

Here are some minecart tracks! Build them with wood, stone or metal, or carve grooves into cavern floors or glaciers.

With the availability of wheelbarrows, it's not always practical to produce a lot of infrastructure just to cart off stone, but you can always use them to do routine hauls of finished goods, or let your dwarves take a fun ride. Take a ride yourself in adventure mode. Or fill a cart with rocks and crash it against an obstacle as an improvised boulder shotgun. Or use serrated discs. People always find a way to turn DF features into weapons!

- Tarn

# ? Jun 4, 2020 21:12

mercenarynuker: Sep 10, 2008

Fuckin lol at that last line

# ? Jun 4, 2020 21:47

Telsa Cola: Aug 19, 2011; No... this is all wrong... this whole operation has just gone completely sidewaysface

Jesus the water tiles look nice.

# ? Jun 5, 2020 00:12

Maugrim: Feb 16, 2011; I eat your face

They are lovely. I hope Tarn is getting a kick out of making DF look pretty now that he's finally bitten that bullet.

# ? Jun 5, 2020 02:15

Mokotow: Apr 16, 2012

I hope stuff like DT and Dfhack are available ASAP for the Steam release.

# ? Jun 5, 2020 18:20

Telsa Cola: Aug 19, 2011; No... this is all wrong... this whole operation has just gone completely sidewaysface

The june 1st dev log generated less drama then I thought. Good to see.

# ? Jun 6, 2020 17:10

scamtank: Feb 24, 2011; my desire to just be a FUCKING IDIOT all day long is rapidly overtaking my ability to FUNCTION

i suspect that means i'm MENTALLY ILL

Telsa Cola posted:

The june 1st dev log generated less drama then I thought. Good to see.

oh, you'd better believe the unofficial discord has some real fuckin tight takes why defunding the cops' military budgets is actually bad

# ? Jun 6, 2020 17:55

Telsa Cola: Aug 19, 2011; No... this is all wrong... this whole operation has just gone completely sidewaysface

scamtank posted:

oh, you'd better believe the unofficial discord has some real fuckin tight takes why defunding the cops' military budgets is actually bad

The forums seem mostly dominated by people who agree with the stance from the few threads I read.

But yeah discord apparently is a whole nother ball game I guess.

# ? Jun 6, 2020 18:03

married but discreet: May 7, 2005; Taco Defender

Wait what happened?

# ? Jun 7, 2020 01:35

scamtank: Feb 24, 2011; my desire to just be a FUCKING IDIOT all day long is rapidly overtaking my ability to FUNCTION

i suspect that means i'm MENTALLY ILL

Toady took a stand too

Toady & Threetoe posted:

While the protests against the murder of George Floyd and police brutality, and the ensuing police riot, continue in this country, we don't want to be silent, nor do we want to make a generic brand statement. So, specifically, we support efforts to defund the police, as well as those to minimize and abolish incarceration. No amount of protection afforded to white people is worth the horror we continue to perpetuate in this country against millions in marginalized communities. Black lives matter.

It's likely those of you that want to contribute to relevant funds have located some already. We've given to Rebuild Lake Street, the BLM Seattle Freedom Fund, and Reclaim the Block. Minnesota Freedom Fund will be linking additional organizations as well.

the discord is just lousy with chuds

# ? Jun 7, 2020 01:38