Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Makbeth]

I've decided that I would waste a lot less time finding good embarks with curious structures under them if I could see them on the embark screen.  Finder doesn't point them out anymore, so I've been looking elsewhere.  Legends doesn't seem to be helpful, nor does the xml dump.  Zilpin's world tinker tool doesn't seem to export the locations of the structures either.  I tried looking for identifiable strings that might be in world.sav or world.dat, but that didn't lead anywhere either.  I then made a pocket world, found a structure, embarked there, and used dfliquids to make a few obsidian walls inside the structure, and then windiffed the save folders for the region and the backup copy I made just after embark.  There were differences, but I wasn't able to find out which ones related to the demon fortress. 

The file features 8-7.dat sounded like it might be useful, but I couldn't make sense of it.  My last idea was to load it into xcel and try to make a histogram of the occurrence of each symbol in that file and see which ones exactly matched the number of region tiles on the map, and whether I could use that to construct an overlay for the detail map exported from legends mode.

Nothing but dead-ends yet.

From what I've seen, it seems that DFhack doesn't have anything that would extract the coordinates of fortresses either.

Does anyone know what, exactly, the underground regions section of legends does?  The portion of the xml dump referring to that lists site ID, type (cavern, magma, or underworld) and depth (1,2,and 3 for caverns, 4 for magma, and 5 for underworld).  There is never anything more specific than that.  No coordinates, names, or anything. 

Has anybody ever deciphered what the .dat files in the save directories do?

[Makbeth]

I guess no one knows.

Tried worldviewer for the first time today just in case the data is in there somewhere, but with no results.

There's just got to be a way to find the coordinates in the save files.  From there it shouldn't be hard to map it.  Notepad++ isn't very accommodating with the save files unfortunately.  It fills the display with NUL and other markers, and Notepad is, for some reason, very reluctant to load files at a rate faster than 100 KB per second.  I guess MS has a thing against performance or something.

Any other text editors that will show the contents in plaintext?

[D_E]

Not an idea but a comment:  the save files are probably binary, rather than text, so I think you should be using a hex-editor.

[Makbeth]

Thanks, I'll look into it after work today.

[Quietust]

Also, you should make sure your save files have been decompressed.

[Sphalerite]

Even if your save files are decompressed, the DF save files are binary and in a complex format that only Toady actually knows how to decode.  They aren't something that you're going to be able to get much useful out of opening with a text editor.

[Rumrusher]

Well you could use Runesmith and go Metal detecting in adventure mode. Then boot up the travel map and see where you are.
If there more than 400 creatures in the Creature tab or that you hit Zombie Animalmen then dump the adventure some where close as a reminder (or kill him).

[Makbeth]

lol, I actually tried looking for a demon fortress as an adventurer once.  Took me a while just to get to the third cavern, and then finding a demon fortress became a huge, fruitless, mind-numbingly boring search for... I don't even want to think about how many hours.  Finally, I embarked on a 16x16 just to see the scale of the task, and looking at it in dfreveal showed just how unlikely it was that I would find a demon fortress in any reasonable amount of time, whether on the surface or not.  For every 1 region tile with a fortress there are 255 tiles that are empty cavern, magma, water, or rock, and there are no guarantees that you'll even be able to see the demon fortress should you, by some miracle, get within range of one, as they are often encased in rock but for some small entrance somewhere.  Sometimes there isn't even a way to get inside without digging.

That's why I always embark on demon fortresses now, because it's the only practical way to find them as an adventurer.

It's looking more and more like the only way I'll be able to find information about where they are in the world is by searching the world file for character strings that occur exactly x*y times, where x and y are the world's dimensions, and then looking for some correlation between the adjacent data and world coordinates.  Does a tool that finds the number of instances of a given character string exist?

Of course, if I find that, I may just be able to splice demon fortresses into the world wherever I want.  Or, perhaps, other, more slender and bluish features.

That idea makes me salivate.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

following this

[Makbeth]

What's a good GPL hex editor that can do the kind of search I need? 

This topic may be a little stale now, so maybe I'll open a new one for this question.

[Andux]

I've been working on some tools to help with save research; they're far from polished, and I'm not sure how much help they'll be in this case, but... yeah.

http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=3895

[SocietalEclipse]

Older versions of Notepad++ included a hex editor plugin by default.  You now have to download it separately.  It doesn't show up in the plugin manager but is still available from the website.