Bay 12 Games Forum

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Premise

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The dwarf fortress offers an amazing system to create translations and custom words, and use any fantasy language for your entities you want.
The problem is when you try to make a modern/futuristic/space/reality-connected and less "fantasy" mod. Suddenly the names do not match the narrative.

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Solution

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I've decided to make a pure english language + make my entity name people with names that fit almost any gender and look memorable.
There are 300 unisex names taken from here: https://www.emmasdiary.co.uk/pregnancy-and-birth/unique-baby-names/our-top-300-unisex-baby-names

There is an error "impoverished word selector" spamming error log during worldgen, but otherwise everything else works perfectly.

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Code

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Language file: https://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=15898
Words: add this to your language_words file : https://pastebin.com/ygH4auKK
Symbols: add this to your language_sym file: https://pastebin.com/Q5wrLffz

And finally, setup the symbols this way for your entity, and they will name people with common Earth names, and other things properly:

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Example

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Credit and abbreviation

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I plan to use it for my total converion mods, but it is free to use for anyone without any extra approval from my side. A small credit would be nice.

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	Download: ■ R23 ASCII ■ R23 TILES
	Tags: ■ Total conversion ■ The Elder Scrolls ■ Morrowind ■ Oblivion ■ Skyrim ■ Dwemer
Description: The mod contains a custom settings file, !Modsettings.exe, which allows you to turn some features on/off. Generating a world with 0 vampires/werebeasts should allow custom ones to spawn, please consider it. For more details, visit the Mod Wiki page. Worldgen - Custom Tamriel map. - Main playable race: Dwemer - 7 neutral races: Altmer, Argonian, Bosmer, Dunmer, Imperial, Khajiit, Nord. - 1 subterranean race: Falmer. - 1 evil race: Orsimer (orcs). - 2 skulking races: Goblins, rieklings. - Slightly customized and changed equipment. More variants of swords/axes. Whips/pikes/halberds are removed. - Custom vampire types based on Elder Scrolls bloodlines. The bites pass the curse. - Custom necromancer types: elementalists, dragonpriests, blight mages. - Custom night trolls: hagravens who turn men into briarhearts. - Custom werebeast types. The bites pass the curse. - Custom Daedric Princes to lead evil civilizations. Materials framework Check !modsettings.exe for toggling some of this on/off. - TES metals and alloys added, adamantine replaced with aetherium. - Only 3 types of wood (wood, redwood, fungiwood), all trees net unnamed wood. - All animals net unnamed leather, but there are multiple types now: suede, leather, hide, scale, chitin, dragonscale. - Less types of fancy named minerals. - Removed extra vanilla alloys as the game adds more unique ones. - Dig up and turn into a dragon soul a new "dragon fossil" mineral, and use it to teach your dwarves shots in Thuum Shrine. - Evil area starts to turn into Oblivion invasion. Oblivion dimension plants, evil lesser daedra. - All plants and trees are reworked. - Many TES-lore plants added. - Drinks and food products are changed accordingly. As a side effect, more dye variants. Creatures - Butchering a dragon/cave dragon gives a dragon soul. - Dragon souls can be turned into fragments by adventure crafting/Thuum shrine in forts. - Fragments can be turned into consumable shouts (adv mode) or taught to dwarves as shouts (fort mode) - Included quite a few noteworthy animals from The Elder Scrolls. Yes, cliff racers too. - All surface animals are reworked. Their tile depictions are grouped based on their animal type (with some exceptions). - All creatures get their name and maximum size in the description.

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CREDITS:
- The mod makes use of DFHack and Dwarf Therapist.
- The graphical version is using the amazing tileset by Meph, which is 32x32 and supports all tiles for items/plants thanks to the mod Text Will Be Text.
- This mod uses two languages made by Hexatona, you can find the full language pack here: http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=10584
- Personal names idea comes from this mod: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=175792.0
- Tamriel worldgen inspired by sxtxixtxcxh

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I would like some feedback from the community. There are many people understanding what a "good game" is. I am starting a new project as a hobby, and I would like some insights and ideas from the members of my beloved Bay12.

Short introduction:
I do not develop games as a profession. I am used to making mods for various games, and gaming was always a hobby. I think that I also enjoyed modding games more than actually playing them. A while back I learned about Unity and how useful it can be when you want to pick up an engine for your game. I always had problems with graphical representation of my games, they were mostly text/ASCII based attempts before.

At first I practiced with basic games like Arcanoid, Tetris and the like. Then I immediately tried to make a complex RPG/arcade game, it took me a few attempts and I dabbled with Pathfinding, AI and inventory management. After a while I realised that without a strong game design background and experience in making games any game I develop is going to be a crap or at least inferior to thousands of games out there. That's why I decided to focus on a game with simple game mechanics and interesting feedback loop ("fun") instead. That's where the idea of the current game was born.

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====== Theme ======

What is it about:
I want it to be a single player player-versus-environment game. I also want to have a rewarding playing loop, so people actually enjoy the game pace rather than consider it grindy/overly boring. The idea: have it play like a turn-based board/card game, with story elements to make the gameplay diversified.

Theme:
Anti-utopian futuristic city where each person is suppressed by the government. A big influence: LCS (Liberal Crime Squad). I don't want to get into US politics because I am not educated enough on the topic to make a believable environment, so l decided to make it a "futuristic scifi antiutopia", like some episodes of Black Mirror.

The player would play a role of an insurgent character with actions that can influence the environment. The companions would be "cards" which you can recruit which would give you extra resource-tokens to deal with the environment.

The city would consist of multiple layers, think of a multi-story futuristic city with government/elite on top and garbage/industry/outcasts in the bottom. You start on a residental level and only have access to actions there. You have to open new safehouses on different levels, which opens access to actions there.

Win/Lose conditions:
The game would feature a "perma death" of sort, but it would be not detrimental to the play. When your character is killed, your previous actions leave an impact on the city.

When you "win" the game, you lose: there's a huge federal raid which arrests all the members of your team, and rewards you with points for your actions. You can use these points to influence the state of the next "cycle", making replayability a tool. If you win and your main founder is arrested, you can rescue him from a difficult "prison" area in the next game to get bonuses for your playthrough.

There should also be a global "win" condition between multiple playthroughs, which you would influence by multiple games, and which would have different endings based on your choices in the previous games.

Level design:
There would be the main playing field: the city. Each level would have separate difficulty/security ratings which you would want to approach to be able to operate there.
If you lose multiple challenges on one level, you lose a safehouse there. You can reopen it after, but it becomes harder.

The current city plan is the following:
City: 1st level Town hall/police/courthouse; 2nd level: Media center/hospital/Education; 3rd level: Apartments/leisure/Park; 4th level: Industrial zone/Utility/Fire station; 5th level: Machinery/power station; 6th level: Garbage dump/slums.
Outskirts: Prison, military base.

Agency:
There should also be a game system which reacts to your actions and makes the game harder to prevent a snowball mechanic, which would make the game too easy.
When you become very successful, it means that you also become a pain in the arse for the city, and a special gameplay AI element "agency" should take counter-actions and make your life harder.

====== Gameplay ======

Player loop:
   1. Event phase (random events affecting the state of the city).
   2. Opportunity phase (take actions on the city map).
   3. Feedback phase (result of your actions).
   4. Deployment phase (Try to counterweigh the result of feedback phase and prepare for the next event phase).

Hitpoints - "secrecy":
There will be a single "secrecy" meter. When you fail challenges or cause a big impact on the environment, it should lower the secrecy meter.
Establishing safehouses in different levels increases secrecy. When the secrecy drops below special thresholds you lose safehouses.
When it reaches 0, it's a game over - you are raided and are arrested.
There's another utility to secrecy: when it's lower, your are more notorious and are more likely to succeed in some challenges. That should help you to achieve goals in an "end game" scenario when you are about to lose.

When you lose your secrecy, it is due to certain factors: social disclosure/tech meddling or hacking/rogue activity/display of force. The game will remember HOW you lost your secrecy.
When the game is finished (for this character), the next game situation will be affected on how you lost your secrecy. If you were all gun blazing, the next game will make it harder for you to display force. If you hacked the agency computers, the next game will deploy increased tech security measures. If you persuaded the populace, the next city mayor will employ prominent media personalities to make influencing opinion harder. It should somewhat force you into different play tactics, or provide interesting challenge ("can you win a game three times in a row with an aggressive approach?").

City state gauges:
Like in LCS, the city is supposed to have specific min/max gauges which start on max ("controlled by state") and can be lowered through your actions.
Based on their state, you will have different options in companions/equipment/actions possible. I.e. you are unlikely to meet a journalist if the "speech" is fully state-controlled. And you will more likely meet a burglar or a gangster if the crime is not state-controlled enough.

Resources/companions:
Recruiting members into your cause will give you four resource-tokens: social, tech, force and rogue.
Based on the situation in the city, you can find different member classes to join. Each class would provide you with a certain number of "tokens"

Challenges:
The challenges would be chance-based, depending on their difficulty. To avoid frustration and total randomness in the game, you would use the resource-tokens described above to raise your chances of success in specific situations.

For example, to counter a government speaker on a public meeting, you would want to have a lot of "social" tokens. The original state of the challenge is "difficult". The game would show you 0% + your leader's skill % as a chance to succeed, and three empty green token spaces. If you allocate three "social" tokens into them, they would add 25% chance to succeed each, bringing it up to 75% + your leader's skill as a chance to succeed. Please note that the numbers are very arbitrary now.

On the other hand, allocating tokens of specific types will drop your secrecy accordingly.
As I said above, you may want to balance or pick specific secrecy loss type, to influence your next playthrough. Also the feedback phase would depend on the types of "secrecy loss" during the current turn.

Some challenges could be improved by different tokens at once: stealing an agency van could be improved by 2 force, 1 rogue and 1 tech tokens.
You could choose to spend only specific types of tokens to drop your secrecy accordingly.

It will also be a valid gameplay decision to try to reinforce your main character's skills, fail some challenges, but avoid dropping secrecy.

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TL/DR. This is a raw concept. As you can imagine, I haven't started coding anything but basic classes for the game in C# yet. For a good reason too: before I would have a fun idea, start coding it into a game, make art, but in the end realise that systems don't work together or there's not much of a gameplay. This time I want to take a careful approach and actually "design" the idea before implementation.

Hello friends, there's an amazing tool called PerfectWorldDF, but I cannot find any official repository for user-made maps. Let's make one, I am sure there are people out there which enjoy map making!

I will start with a couple of contributions of my own.

You can download an archive from the DFFD. In order to use such map, either rename the appropriate file to world_gen.txt and replace the one you have in \data\init\ folder (you will have ONLY that map for custom generation) or open the text file, copy all contents and paste them in the end of your world_gen.txt file.

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The nations of the world outgrew their cradle. Crafty alchemists, curious inventors, powerful mages, great technomancers, immortal liches - everyone tried to overcome the limits of the mortal world and obtain the unobtainable, learn everything they were not supposed to know, become bigger than they were meant to be.

Nobody knows for sure what was the last drop, was it some crazy demonologist ritual, some crazy scientist or just gods getting tired of the futile attempts of the bugs called “sentient creatures”. But the world ceased to be. Where it used to exist now there’s an empty space, and rare interplanar travellers just scratch their heads and move along.

However the world was not destroyed. It was dragged into another location, somewhere where it’s not supposed to be. Apparently the World is a tough construct, it did not explode or collapse into nothing. But the new environment is not what everyone is used to see: a dim oval-shaped sun, a huge red moon, oddly-colored sky, constant lightnings amoung the clouds… There is no way to describe the new celestial view in its full glorious and macabre look, let’s just say that the skies have changed forever.

The skies were not the only things that changed. The Fall (which is the name of the event) was followed by deadly plagues, sudden deaths and Taint. Taint touched everything it could and mutated it into terrifying creatures if it was strong enough, or just made it die. The world has changed forever along with its inhabitants. Will you manage to take on the new twisted world or will you die with the weak beings?

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Vaulters: These bearded builders and artificers have managed to predict the Fall and build shelters to avoid the influence of the event. Unfortunately only a small part of shelters survived, so now they struggle to rebuild their nation and recover the lost knowledge and strength.

Tribals: The human society barely survived the Fall. Most of humans were killed or turned into tainted creatures, and those who survived in old vaulters' fortresses and in caves are now reduced to a primitive and tribal life. Nonetheless the natural curiosity and flexibility of the human race guaranteed them a place under the new dim sun. They usually build primitive towns of dugouts around abandoned vaults or caves which they praise and call "the cradle".

Crooked men: Not all of the tainted men are twisted beyond salvation. Some of them managed to keep their humanity and organize into big communities. It’s almost like nothing has changed for them: they are still sometimes cruel, sometimes forgiving, sometimes clever, sometimes stupid humans as they used to be before the fall. Other surviving races don’t like their company though. There's a myth that they sold their soul to outworlders. Thus crooked men dwell in abandoned cities, not fearing the Taint and slowly rebuilding what they once lost.

Enclave: The Enclave is a secretive political, scientific, and militaristic elven organization that is descended directly from the last remaining high elves, who managed to stay untainted and protect a part of the untamed wilds for their living, and claims to be the legally-sanctioned continuation of the world government and the last bastion of hope. The Enclave is mostly comprised of descendants of high nobility of old elven cities, elite members of ranger squads, as well as a few remaining mages. They sworn to protect the remains of the world from Taint and cleanse the world from twisted creatures. The Enclave takes pride in being the last known concentrated bastion of pure, untainted civilization and being the most technologically advanced faction in the world. They refuse to believe in the fact that some of their mages caused coming of The Fall as well.

Raiders: After the Fall all kinds of goblinoids banded together in rather large groups led by a single instinct. They could not miss the opportunity to enslave the other races using the terrifying events happening around the world. To their surprise, most of the nations were able to band together and organize resistance, so what was supposed to be a blitzkrieg now turned into a full fledged war.

Ghouls: These wretched humanoids dwell in tainted and twisted areas of the new world. Originally called elves, they used to be very close to the nature and animals and they gathered their power and magic from a force of their forests. When the Fall happened, these creatures were one of the first to take the full impact of the Taint and the following mutations transformed them into almost mindless beasts bent on destruction of now alien civilized races.

Dregs: Small twisted humanoids with glowing eyes, the dregs hide in caves and abandoned cities and sometimes steal from civilized settlements. They can rarely be found vagabonding in dark alleys of various cities, ready to do any dirty work.

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For more detailed explanations, check the mod manual at the top of this post.

- Body and tissue rebalance.
- Weapon remake.
- Flintlock pistols and rifles.
- Short named materials (yet more types: cloth, silk, suede, leather, hide, dragonscale, chitin, carapace).
- Metal remake: iron ore needs additional processing to become wrought iron; brass is a precious metal; aluminum is gone; more medieval alloys.
- Nobles' remake.
- Custom made from scratch (all of them) creatures, with proper features, abilities, materials and sounds.
- Custom made from scratch megabeasts (right now just 6 types of dragon, with different abilities and one undead type - dracolich).
- Custom made from scratch semimegabeasts (right now 3 titans: sea, forest, mountain titans).
- Custom plants, organized with a specific logic and lots of products.
- Colored flowers for each type of dye.

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Ravenous update: Finish ghouls and dregs.
Crooked update: Make crooked men in different castes with various mutations/extra appendages; make a "crooked" caste for each race; make special interactions available to them only.
Chemistry update: Expand the existing alchemy lab to allow extraction of sulfur and arsenic from minerals; add arsenic bronze; introduce blackpowder.
Gunsmithing update: Requires chemistry update, make guns craftable and ammo made with blackpowder; make special fire arrows and explosive blocks for catapults.
Architect's update: add calcinator, make concrete and bonemold blocks in calcinator; make colored block crafting.
Poison update: Make extractable usable animal venoms; make coating vat and ability to coat weapons/ammo in poisons.
Scholarship update: Make "research tree" and make other advanced crafting paths require researching first. Vellum from leather/paper scrolls from plants; research notes and breakthrough tomes.
Misleading Good update: Make good areas contain more magical trees, plants and creatures (not so good to travellers though, since they are going to be weird and dangerous).
Eternal Evil update: Make evil areas bloom with twisted flora and expand on evil bestiary. Make special semimegabeasts and outworldish creatures.
Night Creature update: Expand on necromancer types, werewolves and vampires; custom region-styled mummies.
Deep caverns update: Make deep caverns a place to fear; make cavern layer-specific flora and fauna so each cavern would look unique.
Adventure time update: Implement adventure mode crafting, expand speech.

Every update will come with balancing changes and additions to existing overexpanding bestiary.

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New release for the version 0.43.05: http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=13104
Old download for the version 0.42.06: http://dffd.bay12games.com/file.php?id=10843

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I am going through a period of change in my life, mainly due to 2nd kid, but I wanted to update the original post with a cleaned and updated to 0.43.05 version made by Taffer:

Taffer's update to 0.43.05: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3oga3tg77hy79ma/DF%20Wanderer.zip?dl=0
Taffer's merge with Modest mod: https://www.dropbox.com/s/l9ljo6yk88rfl84/Modest%20Wanderer%200.43.05.zip?dl=0

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Adventure mode crafting:

Most of reactions (besides ammo crafting, trinket carving and a few others) require to build a carpenter's workshop first.
That's a placeholder until Toady allows us to make custom workshops. Then I will go wild with thematic crafting stations .

You can now harvest "branches" from trees for woodworking.
- Basic crafting: knap stones, assemble basic axe.
- Alchemy: turn megabeast/griffin hearts into arcane catalysts to craft attribute-boosting balms, painkillers and energy pills, make potions of extravision/indefatigability.
- Bonecarving: make bone arrows, bolts, amulets/rings/bracelets/earrings, bow, crutches, breastplate/helm, spear/dagger
- Bookmaking: turn raw skins into quires and scrolls (with sticks). Write down your stories/poems/chronicles. Bind those into books with leather.
- Decorating: decorate items with spikes/rings/bands of bone/horn/large gem/small gem/teeth
- Leatherworking: tan raw skins, craft leather+bone shields, sew backpacks/cloaks/armors/caps/boots
- Breakdown: destroy metal items to get metal chunks.
- Smelting/smithing: forge weapons and armor from metal chunks you get from "breakdown".
- Stoneworking: make stone arrows/bolts from rocks and sticks, as well as trinkets.
- Woodcrafting: make wooden training weapons, bows, figurines, earrings and bracelets.

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Body/material modifications:
- Small creatures have weaker body materials, bigger creatures have tougher body materials.
- There are different tiers of skin/chitin/scale, all of them tannable: weak skin, skin, tough skin, chitin, scale, dragonscale.
- 6 different appropriate levels of tanned leather: suede, leather, hide, chitin, scale, dragonscale.
- Scales are tannable now.
- Fat tissues feel no pain.
- Pain from broken bones is reduced.
- Added healing rates to additional tissues.
- Removed "bone" layer from fingers/toes to reduce pass outs from broken fingers.

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Creature modifications:
- Humans, elves, dwarves, goblins and kobolds receive bigger non-binocular vision arc for harder stealth.
- Megabeasts get legendary discipline, NOFEAR and NOPAIN, semimegabeasts get high discipline.
- Many animals get DISCIPLINE skill.
- A bunch of natural predators get NOFEAR.
- Animalman population is greatly reduced to give space to normal animal spawns.

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Entity modifications:
- Goblins are adventure mode playable now.
- Humans stylize and maintain their hair too.

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Weapon modifications:
- Bows and crossbows are weaker.
- Arrows are sharper but slower, bolts are faster/penetrate better.

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Downloads (DFFD):

DF 2016:
>>> DOWNLOAD ASCII version <<<
>>> DOWNLOAD Phoebus version <<<

DF 2014:
>>> DOWNLOAD ASCII version <<<
>>> DOWNLOAD Phoebus version <<<

I am not ready to release it yet since I work all month and I want to add at least basic stuff I planned. I am also talking to amazing people like Putnam which help me with scripts, so expect a lot of fun possibilities. Currently I would like people to post what they think of the idea, any feedback helps me to maintain motivation to mod, and I trust in motivation in a whole.

I have to work on mod after 2 jobs like at 2AM-4AM, so I really need this motivation to get going!

It's based on Essential DF so expect all goodness from there. Also it uses Obsidian Tileset with moving grass.

This is the IMPLEMENTED list of features

- Dwarves and goblins live in towns.
- Elves live in caves.
-- It means you can find all historical figures in adventure mode.
- Dwarves and goblins build fortresses and tombs.
-- It means you can find appropriate gear as a dwarf adventurer in forts, then go raid goblin towers.
-- It also means that you start in a proper civilization with dwarves like you which you can hire, not between tall bold-chins.

- Three types of "disturbed dead": revenant, draugr, mummy.
- Mummy curse is not permanent anymore.
- Revenant curses you with dizziness and pain instead of skill loss.
- Draugr do not curse you, but they throw ice shards at you.

- Great axes are renamed to two-handed axes (for better understanding of what they are).
- Dwarves can now wield 2h swords and axes (although barely).
- Scimitar is no longer identical to short sword. It's now between short swords and longswords.
- long swords are called "longswords".
- Large daggers are renamed to "daggers".

There's a new "magic profession" tree which is going to be expanded. You can explore other planes through Planar Gate (currently just spawns baddies from time to time and has a chance to grant knowledge pieces) and use found knowledge to learn classes. With time the classes upgrade themselves with new names and abilities.

- New workshops
-- Archives - become adept->arcanist->wizard->archmage.
-- Church of the Depths - become cultist->elder cultist->deep one.
-- Infernal altar - currently no use, in the future "high profit for high risk" reactions.
-- Planar gate - fish outer planes for mana crystals, knowledge fragments and rare baddies.
-- Temple - become priest->high priest->prophet
-- Tribunal - become inquisitor->paladin->holy champion
-- Witch cauldron - become witch->warlock->demoniac

I plan to add necromancer skill tree and berserker skill tree. Necromancers will research undead and have a small chance to start zombie plague, and berserkers are an opposite of holy warriors, with some ability to graft their flesh and go in offence (as opposite of defence/protection from paladins).

In chime with Essential DF I plan to add many new megabeasts/semimegabeast types, but only as castes of existing ones (so different types of dragons will be castes of a dragon, no multiple creature types) to try to preserve FPS and speed of the game as much as possible.
Night creatures, in the same way.


Please leave your feedback and await this! I will try to release a good working version before the New Year.

P.S. I wanted to start a thread already to keep me motivated and make me work on the mod harder. Otherwise I could stall for a long time .