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[Toady One]

Ah, sorry, yeah.  I was thinking of nobles with their separate dining rooms.  Adding a chair to a bedroom will make them eat there, though peasants would be happier owning their own dining room (which is excessive).  Adding the adjacent table is even better.  All in a snug little bedroom.

Bins can't be placed -- liking bins is like liking axes, and that sort of thing.  I don't think engravings/improvements can be images of items right now, or you'd have a very binish looking fortress.  If this dwarf goes moody, you might end up with an artifact bin.

[ August 13, 2006: Message edited by: Toady One ]

[Beowulf]

quote:Don't forget eating worms. You can also eat worms. And beetles, too.

Not to forget fairies. I love eating fairies.  

[Janne Joensuu]

Onward!

Further comments:

All animals can't be butchered. What's worse, some wild animals that can't be tamed can't be butchered either, and thus they end up eternally existing in your traps and/or cages. If and when most of even small animals can yield something useful, trapping would also become a food source.
-bug: There's some kind of a bug with the traps. Some of my animals (blue jay, small lizard, red squirrel IIRC) are shown as "ready for butcher" before I move the selector closer to them, but change to "not tame" once the selector is next to them. The change happens before those spesific animals are selected, and all of them change at once. Also, I sold one of them - I sold a trap, and the squirrel was shown as "being traded", and vanished with the trap.

It'd help a lot if the "XYZ needed" message that is given when a task is canceled would read "x, y, z and å needed". It is confusing when I e.g. try to make a copper chest, have just two copper bars and am only given "copper bar needed" as a message.

My dwarves have trouble with beer and barrels. Spesifically, they put things on barrels quicker than I can make new empty ones, and thus my brewer is unable to brew anything before he is interrupted by another dwarf stealing his barrel. Similarly, meat next to traps is left there when a dwarf goes to eat, then brought back to the food storage, etc. Not that important, but it's one of the reasons slowing things down. Most of my dwarves just move things around instead of doing imoprtant stuff.

Hunter just outside his mountain home, and his own room inside, sleeps in the ground. He was returning from a hunting trip. If it isn't already implemented, it'd be very nice if there was "want" and "need" spesifications for things like drink and food. When a dwarf "wants" food, he'll do that after finishing his job. He only stops his current job when he "needs" food.

Single ammo that is outdoors should just disappear. I don't want my dwarves going all the way to the west side of the wilderness to get a lone crossbow bolt back, especially when they don't even get the deer corpse the merceless huntress left there when he spotted new prey.

Filling a waterskin should probably take less time. It seems that all my dwarves with a waterskin have to stop filling them to get a drink, then start again, then stop to eat, then start again...

- bug: Sometimes the dwarves suspend construction when e.g. an architect is not available. However, either before the suspension, or after it, I changed the orders so that there ARE architect dwarves. The suspension was never removed, and I couldn't remove it myself. I canceled the build order, then re-issued it, and the building was completed without further hassle.

- bug? : For my Finnish keyboard mapping, help doesn't come up from ? , but from *. That isn't numpad multiplier, but a button next to the enter/newline, lower of the two buttons right to the left of it, with lowercase ' and uppercase *.

I'd like to comment on something Master Toady the First said earlier:
 

quote:The grab-multiple-items stuff is reasonable annoying to program, but, yeah, the hunter could keep track of items they brought into the woods, and try not to leave without them -- since they don't have to scan open ground for these that's easier.

Couldn't the hunter just collect and ammo, (throwable weapons?) and eatable corpses he sees, and bring them home with him? Missiles can be lost in the wild, and aren't that important - but it'd be nice if the hunters seemed to care a bit about their equipment.

The graphics are untolerable, but uniquely endearing. I just glimpsed at what the world of dwarves would look like with VARIED_GROUND_TILES off, and it's just too common, too ADOM, too normal roguelike that's more simplistic and doesn't need to care about grass because the ground is just for walking. At the same time, after that brief glimpse to a world where I could see the trees, where I could see the plant bushes, where I could make out the items on the cavern floor because the ground wasn't so confusing itself... I'm not sure I can bare to play the game with the VGT on! Esthetics is one of the hardest parts you'll have to overcome as a game developer, and it's thrice as hard when you're trying to make an ASCII game where the ground is sometimes rocky, sometimes green, sometimes lush, sometimes barren, sometimes stone, sometimes mud... I'm no expert either, but I quess it'd be better to start from simple. If you can tell me how I can change the tiles used for spesific ground types, I can test this out myself, but here's what I think would be fine until you have time to flesh it out:

generally:

all non-important plants are _´_ or _´`_ of two different greens
unworked stone floors would be: _,._ or just _._ of the color of the stone
mud would be: _~,_ or just _,_ of brown

bush: fine as-is
trees: fine as-is, because long symbols are rare elsewhere! Great idea!
sapling: probably fine as-is
water and murky water: fine as-is
rock walls: they are VERY, very good even now! No need to change them! I especially like the fact that I can see mining process!

[ August 14, 2006: Message edited by: Janne Joensuu ]

EDIT:
Second-level interior decorating already needs work. I'm pretty sure walls and floor of one room share some of the symbols - that's very, very confusing. With just few detailed tiles here and there, it looks awesome though! I mean, a dwarven head, a £ and few other random symbols on the four squares next to a well - it was beautiful! Also, when talking about detailing - it should be possible to detail Supports. Their graphics should change into O, the same as for Pillars. Pillars look better than supports.

[ August 14, 2006: Message edited by: Janne Joensuu ]

[Aquillion]

quote:Originally posted by Janne Joensuu:
<STRONG>Onward!
-bug: There's some kind of a bug with the traps. Some of my animals (blue jay, small lizard, red squirrel IIRC) are shown as "ready for butcher" before I move the selector closer to them, but change to "not tame" once the selector is next to them. The change happens before those spesific animals are selected, and all of them change at once.</STRONG>

Oh, I meant to report this bug.  The issue seems to be that those creatues are showing the butcherability of whatever your cursor is currently over, rather than themselves.

[Toady One]

For cancellation messages -- it could get very messy for the more involved jobs.  Just having a lengthy manual would alleviate some of this problem.

If things are happening faster than you can do them, then you need more workers on barrel making I guess, although it would be nice to tell them what to do with particular barrels -- but you'd have to do it when you order them to be made, or have some kind of general allocation numerically (burrows might handle it this way).

I have "might eat" and "will eat" levels, but they don't seem to work out so well.  I can only play with it more.

What if you get desperate and want to run out to melt metal bolts in the woods down so you can make a pick after you've lost your last one?  It could be an option anyway.

You can unsuspend construction from [t].  Unavailable architects shouldn't suspend construction, it should just say inactive.  Many construction suspensions come from not being able to clear items off of build sites.

For the keyboard issue, if you go into "init/interface.txt", you can use those "DISPLAY_STRINGS" to reconfigure what is displayed for each key.  Mine displays "?" now just because SHIFT+KEYBF or whatever it is happens to be "?".  You can make it display any string you like.  You can also create display strings for keys that aren't listed.  So if you do a keybinding in the ESC menu, and it shows as "Key ED", you can go into interface.txt and add [DISPLAY_STRING:KEYED:<your>] and it will show what you like.  The strings it can show are restricted to by curses glyphs though, so don't type unicode etc. in there.

For the hunter, when you say collect "items he sees", that requires a lot of work/processor time.  That said, a lot needs to be done with the hunter, and there will probably need to be some investments made here.

For the ground suggestions, one of the first steps of generalizing the graphics system will be allowing customization of the map ASCII.  I've tried some of these combinations before, and things like _.,,,..,.,.,_ show in horizontal lines, so it still makes me think of _......_ .  If there's enough of a mix of stone and grass it can work.  But in any case, at some point you'll be able to try things out.

We had another thread somewhere about toggling decoration images.  There could even be an option to do it with the [k] cursor or rectangles to make some of them invisible selectively.

As far as detailing supports -- it might be better to do this when re-wall comes in.  You can either build a support, which is meant as a temporary measure, then you can place another support, remove the old one, re-wall, and detail  Sounds...   simple.  Detailing supports is inconvenient though, just because of how the detail events interact with the map.  It would think of itself as floor detailing right now.

[Ancient_Sleeping_Dude_Rei]

I don't get why everybody loves supports so much, I just skip digging out a tile :/

[JT]

Supports hold things up without obstructing the tile they're in.

[karnot]

Supports use up stone !

[JT]

As if we don't have enough of that lying around. ;-)

[karnot]

My point exactly.

[Mechanoid]

Dont mine the wall, or:

Mine the wall, move the stone to a pile, designate a pillar, get someone to drag the rock back, and then finally get someone to build the pillar.

[JT]

And leave an ugly square or a stupid-looking "O" in its place, depending on detailing. =)

I wonder what kind of code-based incentive could be added to encourage players to use supports instead of unmined blocks.  It seems to me that it almost crosses into the bounds of "exploit" if singular tiles of unmined stone can support things.  I mean, technically speaking, a single column of unmined rock has no true structural integrity: a column built by an engineer, on the other hand, was specifically designed to support the ceiling.