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19 Nov 2009 08:02
- 11/18/2009: The DigiPen talk was fun. Of the twenty or so people, there were four left at the end when Zach took a picture. I'm not in the habit of asking names before questions, so from left to right, the best I've got is: Mr. Spontaneous, Brian the president who showed us around and got the room and so on, Jonathan S. Fox of LCS fame, Mr. Feeling, and me holding my arms in some bizarre way. We ended up driving for five hours total and the session itself was three hours. We played a health-conscious kobold wizard in Armok 1 for a bit and I showed them some early BASIC Dragslay screen shots (the 6th grade elementary school one, 1234567), and I went over world gen mechanics before doing a Q&A about most everything. I was pretty burned out by the end, but I finished an easy break item to keep things going.
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18 Nov 2009 14:01
- 11/17/2009: At the last meetup, I told a couple of guys from DigiPen that we'd swing by their game design club. Somehow that ended up involving a projector, so I spent too much time digging around for my old BASIC stuff and so on. Anyway, it's actually at 7pm tomorrow, but today was the day that got de-worked since I get up at 3pm. Tomorrow should mostly end up being a normal work day once we get back from Redmond.
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17 Nov 2009 21:24
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11/16/2009:
After I sorted out various wardrobe malfunctions, the little dwarves marched off to their training swords and went to the barracks to prepare for sparring injury rate testing. I didn't want to sit around for skill demonstrations or individual drills, so I set sparring as the only available activity, even though nobody knew how to do anything. They still stood around doing nothing, because it was still failing the personality check for the instructor, who wasn't reckless enough to send such green recruits off to spar. So I disabled that, and for experimental control purposes, I disabled the "play combat" flag associated to sparring. There were split bloody fingers and bruises, and sparring ended almost immediately due to the injuries.
Next I did the actual experiment, and they managed to fight non-stop for two game weeks with only a few minor bruises here and there. It records combat logs for sparring in a different color in the reports menu, so you can read what's going on if you like.
The final experiment was without "play combat" and without injury stoppages, to make sure the blunt wooden swords were truly dangerous. I guess maybe it took slightly longer than I expected, but by the end four of seven dwarves had been killed and two of the last partially toothed swordsdwarves battled it out while the third wheel sat by semi-conscious. Killing his sparring partner was the final straw though, a tantrum came on, and the poor guy threw teeth and training swords all over the training room. I guess they would have started the final sparring match once he calmed down.
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11/16/2009:
After I sorted out various wardrobe malfunctions, the little dwarves marched off to their training swords and went to the barracks to prepare for sparring injury rate testing. I didn't want to sit around for skill demonstrations or individual drills, so I set sparring as the only available activity, even though nobody knew how to do anything. They still stood around doing nothing, because it was still failing the personality check for the instructor, who wasn't reckless enough to send such green recruits off to spar. So I disabled that, and for experimental control purposes, I disabled the "play combat" flag associated to sparring. There were split bloody fingers and bruises, and sparring ended almost immediately due to the injuries.
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16 Nov 2009 14:13
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11/15/2009:
Training weapons are in now. As it stands, dwarves make them at the carpenter. Currently I've got wooden variants of the edged weapons that don't even try to have wooden edges, so they are anti-arterial and anti-eyepokey. You could add in wooden variants of the blunt ones if you like, but I was struck down by the odd-seemingness of that again at the last moment. We can do more with it later. You can trade for them and whatever else, and I *think* I sorted it out so that you won't have a giant human army arrive at your fortress, all armed with training weapons. Here's to hope, anyway. That's not to say that you can't arm your squads with training weapons for their actual duties, if you are so inclined or constrained. I still need to do some work with the equipment distribution for them, which I should be handling with the sparring injury testing to get that all squared away.
Some new List thread posts as well today:
November 16, Early Morning (1)November 16, Early Morning (2)November 16, Early Morning (3)
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11/15/2009:
Training weapons are in now. As it stands, dwarves make them at the carpenter. Currently I've got wooden variants of the edged weapons that don't even try to have wooden edges, so they are anti-arterial and anti-eyepokey. You could add in wooden variants of the blunt ones if you like, but I was struck down by the odd-seemingness of that again at the last moment. We can do more with it later. You can trade for them and whatever else, and I *think* I sorted it out so that you won't have a giant human army arrive at your fortress, all armed with training weapons. Here's to hope, anyway. That's not to say that you can't arm your squads with training weapons for their actual duties, if you are so inclined or constrained. I still need to do some work with the equipment distribution for them, which I should be handling with the sparring injury testing to get that all squared away.
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15 Nov 2009 07:28
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11/14/2009:
The axe/pick civilian job annoyances have been handled, so those items shouldn't end up scattered all over the place, and the squad weapon settings are stored apart from the labor professions, so any long-standing lingering bugs there are gone, or at least have been replaced by the new ones we find. A civilian that changes out of one of those jobs will seek to store their axe/pick (instead of dropping it) before doing other work, and they keep their clothes on now.
The full version of the Just Press Start interview is up at their archive.
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11/14/2009:
The axe/pick civilian job annoyances have been handled, so those items shouldn't end up scattered all over the place, and the squad weapon settings are stored apart from the labor professions, so any long-standing lingering bugs there are gone, or at least have been replaced by the new ones we find. A civilian that changes out of one of those jobs will seek to store their axe/pick (instead of dropping it) before doing other work, and they keep their clothes on now.
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14 Nov 2009 13:56
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11/13/2009:
Maybe I'm bound not to green-out a list item when I begin testing and all the dwarves around the initial wagon pitch their clothes on the ground and begin to wander around naked. The alligators didn't help either. By the end, a soldier that was changed back to civilian status went over to one of his squad's racks and stowed his battle axe properly instead of dropping it on the spot as they do in the currently released version. There are a few more things to verify before I can check that part off though. It bodes well for squad cleanliness anyway. Civilian cleanliness has a way to go...
Forum-goer Halconnen earmarked part of a donation for a toy for Scamps. Zach and I went out and grabbed one yesterday. The marvelous contraption can operate both person-assisted and on automatic.
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11/13/2009:
Maybe I'm bound not to green-out a list item when I begin testing and all the dwarves around the initial wagon pitch their clothes on the ground and begin to wander around naked. The alligators didn't help either. By the end, a soldier that was changed back to civilian status went over to one of his squad's racks and stowed his battle axe properly instead of dropping it on the spot as they do in the currently released version. There are a few more things to verify before I can check that part off though. It bodes well for squad cleanliness anyway. Civilian cleanliness has a way to go...
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13 Nov 2009 21:45
- 11/12/2009: The quartermaster-style dwarf that handles all of the squad equipment allocations in larger forts is up with a proper office job now, and I'm now working on getting the soldiers to move between their civilian, combat and training outfits and equipment with as little scattered mess of strewn clothing as possible. Hopefully this will also fix up lingering problems with axes and picks vs. soldiering for woodcutters and miners as well. Once that's done I should be able to check up on overall sparring injury rates to make sure we've settled down into something reasonable.
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12 Nov 2009 10:38
- 11/11/2009: Worked out some of the kinks in the new military interface and added the ammunition section. You can set up ammunition allotments by material (and type, so you can do unusual things like set up a squad to use the bows and arrows left by invaders or your modded ammunition or whatever -- it'll stick the entity-favored ones on the top of the list), and you can set each allotment to be used for combat and/or training. So you could, for instance, set aside your squad's metal bolts for combat and have the marksdwarves use wooden bolts for training (or do a steel/copper split in the same way). It'll probably need some tweaking, so that dwarves without combat ammo will use training or even unassigned ammo when they are really pressed, etc., but this should finally give you some control, anyway.
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11 Nov 2009 16:04
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11/10/2009:
Aqizzar requested images of the arena as well as wounds and the overall creature descriptions, so here's a run through. Everything is still subject to change of course.
Arena 1: Once you enable the option in the init, you get access to the new menu option. Haven't updated the version number or year yet!
Arena 2: Raws are stored with the worlds now, and this lets you pick which world you want to play with. Bit more to be done here (folder names aren't really helpful).
Arena 3: Here we've arrived at the arena. Some moss is thrown about to break up the monotony of the block floor. There's a lava pool on the left and a water pool on the right. If I have time, I can make it a little more interesting. In any case, you have access to a few relevant dwarf mode commands, and we can expand what goes on in here over time.
Arena 4: You can create creatures and liquids as you move around in look mode.
Arena 5: There's an alphabetical list of creatures with their castes listed (that's gender for all but the ant men). If side is set to "independent" they'll stand alone, otherwise you can put them into color-coded groups.
Arena 6: The dark gnome has been placed. If you press 'a', you can assume control of the creature adventure-mode style.
Arena 7: There's the gnome out from under the cursor. We're ready to place the next creature.
Arena 8: This time it'll be an adept hammerdwarf.
Arena 9: Here's the item selection screen.
Arena 10: Narrowing down with a string filter, we grab a weapon...
Arena 11: ... and add the hammer.
Arena 12: I've added more equipment here. The choices you make persist when you come back to the screen, so you can place several identical creatures before blanking the item and skill lists and putting in your next critter.
Arena 13: Now we have a dwarf and a dark gnome, bound for a long friendship.
Arena 14: The 'C' up on the left border means there's now a combat report active.
Arena 15: Here we're looking at the available reports.
Arena 16: Here is the first page of announcements concerning the fighting, here in arena mode the same as they would appear in a dwarf mode combat report. You can jump over to the main view with the screen re-centered on the location of the announcement.
Arena 17: The dark gnome has some injuries. The colors mean different things now, and they can be set in the init. Red limbs are broken or otherwise useless, yellow limbs are impaired and cyan organs have lost some of their function due to the injuries.
Arena 18: The fighting ends after the poor gnome has been beaten nearly to the lava pool.
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11/10/2009:
Aqizzar requested images of the arena as well as wounds and the overall creature descriptions, so here's a run through. Everything is still subject to change of course.
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10 Nov 2009 22:30
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11/09/2009:
Today I started by finishing up the activity framework, making sure that dwarves can move between their different training activities and so on without getting locked up in a weapon demonstration because the instructor dies and that kind of thing. Having this finished should also pull down the branch so that things like having a few dwarves sit around and listen to another dwarf playing an instrument at a party will be low-hanging fruit to pluck off later on (not for this release!), as well as improving diplomatic meetings, weddings and whatever other group events there are.
I also spotted and squashed a few bugs. For one, it was appointing children as young as one year to positions like "General", "Manager" and "Hammerer". It didn't stop them from being abducted by goblins, though.
If you've got a question you'd like asked on the next DF Talk, just shoot it over to toadyone@bay12games.com with "Question for DF Talk" as the entire subject. We're going to try that out as the threads were linked to episodes and ultimately became unwieldy.
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11/09/2009:
Today I started by finishing up the activity framework, making sure that dwarves can move between their different training activities and so on without getting locked up in a weapon demonstration because the instructor dies and that kind of thing. Having this finished should also pull down the branch so that things like having a few dwarves sit around and listen to another dwarf playing an instrument at a party will be low-hanging fruit to pluck off later on (not for this release!), as well as improving diplomatic meetings, weddings and whatever other group events there are.
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