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Yes. Text gets cut off too often.

No. I dont care/like the names as they are.

Dont you have anything better to do then making such tiny adjustements?

[smakemupagus]

Meph took a poll at least once, in which players overwhelmingly voted for the current "release new features ASAP" development cycle.

[Panopticon]

Myself I love new features, and the bugs usually don't make the game unplayable. Illithids crashing worldgen comes to mind, but you could usually work around them. I mean, if vanilla DF releases with new features and bugs all the time why should Masterwork be any different?

[Meph]

Well, fasquardon, you might be in luck, because if I do a release within the next weeks it will be bugfix only.

[fasquardon]

Meph took a poll at least once, in which players overwhelmingly voted for the current "release new features ASAP" development cycle.

Hyup.  And more important - what way of working is more fun for the modder himself?

Another reason for the standard Linux development cycle is a standard way of working helps people cooperate - Masterwork doesn't need to worry about that, being a one-man mod and related plugins...

fasquardon

[thistleknot]

I think I'm going to try my hand at mwmod again.  I never really played v2 at all.  I hope to jump right into 3.  Would you say 3 is just a built from the groundup v of 2?  Or were there direction changes that would make the two feel completely different from each other?  I mean, does 3 add to 2 as in just having more features and being more streamlined?  Anyways, I'm done for now with my mix of a mod and want to play some mw again.

[thistleknot]

I know I said it before, but I'd love to see Xelic's from Civilization Forge put into this game.  I know how to do it (now), but even if I did, it's not the right way to do it.  I mean they have chittin that could be turned into armor.

I remember Meph taking a poll on it (at least he told me about it) and it would have replaced antmen... I just read the entry on antmen... wtf?  Man, xelic's are armor wearing 4 arm'ed insect beasts the size of humanoids that run entire civilizations, not some kobold sized underground creatures that die off early on.

[Meph]

@thistleknot: I dont see a difference between a armor-wearing 4-armed insect beast the size of humanoids that run a civilization, and the Antmen that are in the mod atm. Because you describe them perfectly. It is the very reason why I dont think it makes sense to replace them with xelics, because they are almost identical.

MDF3 is a newer, stabler, bugfree-er version of MDF2. But I usually make 1 big feature per release, this one had 4.

@ALL: I managed to find some time for more balancing and fixing all bugs that have been reported. The next release, which will be a small one, will focus on GUI, utilities, bugfixing and balancing. No new features, I just want to clean up the content we already have. Here is what I have done so far. Please have a look, see whats missing, what could be added and so forth... I have one more week in which I can do stuff.

GUI
 - Added button: Less gem shapes, reduces all to: [STONE_SHAPE:OVAL_CABOCHON] [GEM_SHAPE:OVAL_CABOCHON]
 - Added button: Fear the Night, toggles extra nightcreatures, vampires, necromancers, werebeasts and curses.
 - Added dfinit and nanofortress buttons to the bottom menu bar, to the other utilities.
 - Added button: Simple Wood. You can now toggle standardized wood/wood names. *
 - *This also changes your timberyard and sawmill reactions to accept any wood. Be careful, you can waste ironbark, steeloak, fungiwood or netherwood by cutting it into wooden planks/smooth wood.

Utilities
 - Added NanoFortress, allows you to embark on a 1x1 tile fortress.

Balancing & Bugfixes
 - Fear the Night now optional
 - Standardized Wood types now optional
 - Gem shapes now optional.
 - Added brazier and candelabra tile to ironhand tileset.
 - Renamed book to empty book and textbooks to notebooks. That might clear up some confusion in the library system.
 - Basic idea: You take an empty book and write stuff from essays into it => You get a tome.
 - You take your tome to read and a notebook to make notes in => You study a topic. This gives Exp.
 - Reduced amount of seeds from ironbark/steeloak you get in the Timberyard.
 - Added specific reactions for brazier and candelabra to the craftsdwarf.
 - Changelings die now from one hit. (they were unkillable in the last version)
 - Removed orchid and treant seeds, since they dont have a reaction anymore.
 - Removed "design bifrost forge blueprint", since the building does no longer exist.
 - Added missing topic "Farming" to the library system. People can now study farming.
 - Added worker_only to guild transformation, to avoid babies being transformed into guild members when the mother runs the reaction.
 - Fixed tanning for sheared materials, like leatherwing bat skin or drakescales. The sheared amounts now always give 1 leather/scaleplate.
 - The Sawmill can now break down 34 different wooden objects into scrap logs. Have a wooden bed or cage too much? Break it down, get a scrap log.

I have also been working a bit for fun on my own tileset. Still have 4-5 tiles to do, but thats how it looks so far, it uses Phoebus as base. Feedback on that tileset would be most welcome, because it would be the very first one I'd ever release. I dont want to force this on users as new default Masterwork tileset if people dont like it.

[smakemupagus]

Maybe the Dwarves Butcher Sapients ethics toggle?

I like the water in your tileset!  The walls, I don't particularly like or dislike, it's probably just that I'm not used to it yet.  As long as it's pretty easy to tell the difference between smooth/engrave/fortifications.  I'll load it up in a fort so I can look   What kind of walls are those in the hallway on the left?

[sayke]

@meph - the water and magma are awesome!! but the walls... i don't see the rationale. for one thing, they look really weird with doors. for two, they seem too thin - it's like, is that a wall or a fence? and how are dwarves supposed to walk on top of one-wide walls, anyway?? i dunno man =D

also, i like the levels of gems - having six is great, because that way we can identify the different values of gems at a glance. i do appreciate your focus on simplifying things, but why remove useful visual information from the user? that's a whole different thing from the kind of optimizations that speed up the game and otherwise simplify management, no?

[Meph]

Well, the visualization for gems only works while they are not dug... the rough gem always looks the same, the cut gem and large gem always looks the same. I figured that you mine gems anyway, no matter how valuable they are. I never looked, saw a "tier 1" gem and though: Meh, lets ignore it. So if I merge these three "onrmanteal, semi-precious and precious" gems into one "gem", I have 2 tiles free for more new stuff. But thats why I ask publicly, maybe not everyone thinks so. But then again, it would be optional, people can still play with Phoebus or Ironhand or any other tileset

I personally would keep rough gems, cut gems, large gems and undug gems as tiles.

The coal tile is exactly the same as the small bush, with very minor shading difference. I can easily use both for the same.

The flux "cloud" thingy is not even used by masterwork if I am not entirely mistaken.

The thin walls make perfect sense for me. Why build a 6 feet thick wall, to seperate a bedroom from another? ... I can see the problem with the outdoor fortification style, and I guess it will be quite strange to think that dwarves can run on top of it... honestly, I havent checked how it looks from one zlvl down/up.

You can see the difference between engraved and non-engraved very clearly, it gets whiter. I havent checked fortifications yet, but I guess they would need some work. Maybe. I dont know.

I also added this to the changelog:
 - The Sawmill can now break down 34 different wooden objects into scrap logs. Have a wooden bed or cage too much? Break it down, get a scrap log.

And now I am off on my bike, I'll get my international driving licence from the government office today.

EDIT: I lied, stay 5mins longer because I had a good idea. HOW ABOUT THIS? Double walls. Both thin walls that make sense architectural-wise, but also wide enough for people to walk on. And bonus points for realism, because thats how they are done in RL.

[Billy Jack]

The double wall look is definitely better than the single version.

One thing I've always disliked about your implementation of the Phoebes (sp?) is that the flux stone, such as Schist, shows as a solid color block when unmined.

It would be great if the Phoebes/Ironhand/MW tilesets would all change the appropriate RAWs to use the intended tile for each one.  This could mostly be a community effort with you only needing to change out the RAW files depending on the tileset chosen.

Another way you could probably do it, is to have the launcher make the changes in your RAWs.  You could do a search and replace for something like "MWxxx[TILE:", where xxx is the tile number that you would use in the MW tileset. Then grab the next four characters and determine where the closing ] is and then replace the existing number in-between with the one for the desired tileset.  Allow an external data file (thereby allowing user modding) for the launcher that maps MW142=134,etc. which is broken into sections for supported tilesets.  This type of system would allow you to only have to modify the properties of the affected material in one location instead of having to do it for the tileset based RAWs as well.

Since I see that you've posted the source code for the settings.exe file, I may take a crack at it this weekend.

[Meph]

One thing I've always disliked about your implementation of the Phoebes (sp?) is that the flux stone, such as Schist, shows as a solid color block when unmined.

A: I made a poll about it, B: You are the first to mention it in a year, and C: I have flux layers in the mod. They would look righteously silly with those clouds. Ironhand and Ascii should be one-for-one as far as I know/am concerned, I cant tell the difference with those.

Your idea for the launcher is one I had a long time ago, but never really approached. It would reduce the filesize a tiny bit, and would reduce the sets of raws to one, which helps me with modding, but it is more work to set it up then I would ever safe with it. Personally I think it is a really bad idea to give the average user (sorry guys) direct control over the tile numbers, because 99% have no clue what is what, and they just end up breaking everything, then asking for a "fix it" and set it back to default button. Which is something I could build in, now that I think of it.

[Zeebie]

Meph, the manual says that the apothecary can be used to train medical skills (and I see those reactions in the manager menu), but the workshop itself doesn't seem to allow those tasks to be selected - it just has the old "make splints," etc. options.

[Meph]

Ups... forgot to change the building Id there... it says anatomical theater instead of apothecarius. Thats why they dont show up. I fixed it now, but wow, that is a noob mistake of me. You can fix it in a running fort by opening reaction_masterwork in your data/save/region/raw/objects and replace all ANATOMICAL_THEATER with APOTHECARIUS

[Billy Jack]

One thing I've always disliked about your implementation of the Phoebes (sp?) is that the flux stone, such as Schist, shows as a solid color block when unmined.

A: I made a poll about it, B: You are the first to mention it in a year, and C: I have flux layers in the mod. They would look righteously silly with those clouds. Ironhand and Ascii should be one-for-one as far as I know/am concerned, I cant tell the difference with those.

Your idea for the launcher is one I had a long time ago, but never really approached. It would reduce the filesize a tiny bit, and would reduce the sets of raws to one, which helps me with modding, but it is more work to set it up then I would ever safe with it. Personally I think it is a really bad idea to give the average user (sorry guys) direct control over the tile numbers, because 99% have no clue what is what, and they just end up breaking everything, then asking for a "fix it" and set it back to default button. Which is something I could build in, now that I think of it.

Looking at the RAWs, only Schist would actually need a [Tile] tag that points to a tileset value instead of the current [TILE:'`']. I was original thinking of Marble when I mentioned flux stone, but then went back and zoomed in on it and saw that it actually does have a tile assigned, but due to the bright white, the texture doesn't really show up with my color set (set to the MW default). From what I've seen, all the other economic stone types do use a different tile then the standard non-economic stones do, but if the community didn't want you to change it for flux, then so be it.

Related to this, checking the other stones that you leave in without your !NOSTONE! tag, when a stone uses the same [DISPLAY_COLOR] as another (such as Diorite, Gabbro, and Basalt), they have different [TILE] tags associated to them. I think the same should be applied to Gneiss and Dolomite.

And finally, I did have to chuckle when you mention how you "think it is a really bad idea to give the average user (sorry guys) direct control over the tile numbers" and then provide a RAW edit bug fix in your next post which the average user would need to apply.