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[fricy]

Are you suggesting that there are undocumented commands in Dwarf Fortress!?! I am *shocked* by the discovery.

I had no idea that you could do that with active files. I was trying to do it with "abandoned" Legends folders.

That's a very very very recent addition to dfhack, this is the first release that can do that. And it's documented in the readme.pdf file (which we know everybody reads ;DD), and the opening post. But seriously, the easiest way to learn about powerful/crazy shortcuts is to open and read the dfhack.init.
+ of course the dfhack readme is highly recommended.

[Romeofalling]

Meh. I think I'll stick with learning how to do stuff in DF by either watching Let's Play videos or whining on the forums and asking people to point me to URLs. I find that if I start studying the utilities codes, I stop shaving, talking to my friends, and eventually just start ordering pizza and chugging rum&cokes while writing angry forum posts. It's a bad place, and you don't want me to go down that road

On a more serious note, I am deeply appreciative for all the Newb help that you guys have given me. I've been playing since 2008 and I only just discovered how to use things like dfhack and ChromaFort this year. It's been.....interesting.

[Aravial]

Anything known about newest DF version MacNewbie?

[Romeofalling]

Not sure if this is the right place to make this suggestion, but I've discovered some Windows emulators for use with other computer games that are Windows-only, and I was wondering if you had thought about including one of these programs as part of the MacNewbPack instead of maintaining separate builds?

The two that I've found are Play On Mac (free), https://www.playonmac.com/en/ and CrossOver (not free, but a commercial variation of Wine, which apparently is free).

[Dozebôm Lolumzalěs]

Anything known about newest DF version MacNewbie?

No it takes quite a while to update things like DFHack, Dwarf Therapist, Stonesense, etc., and the main purpose of a starter pack is organizing these mods and utilities.

[fricy]

Anything known about newest DF version MacNewbie?

At this point I'm going to wait for 42.02, it may be a few days, but changelog is looking good. Plus there're a couple of tilesets that needs updating if I want to bundle something useful. It won't contain dfhack (or Therapist), but tilesets, launcher and standalone utilities should make it.
General advice: If you're using El Capitan, and want to try out 42.01 you need to update the SDL frameworks that come with the download. Easiest way is to copy SDL and SDL.ttf frameworks from Macnewbie/Dwarf Fortress/lib to 42.01.

Not sure if this is the right place to make this suggestion, but I've discovered some Windows emulators for use with other computer games that are Windows-only, and I was wondering if you had thought about including one of these programs as part of the MacNewbPack instead of maintaining separate builds?

Suggestions are always welcome, but please elaborate what do you have in mind. All the utilities in this pack are native osx or cross-platform java apps, and I don't understand what you mean by maintaining separate builds.
Two windows exclusive utilities that could be useful in the pack are Perfect World and Legends Viewer/World Viewer, but I never managed to get a decent Mono build, and the other problem is the size overhead of the Mono (or Wine) libraries. Imho adding 30-60mb per utility to a pack that's ~140 mb at the moment would be overkill. However Legends Viewer should be relatively easy to port if someone with the skills and time finished what rmblr started working on.

[Romeofalling]

Sorry, I just realized that I was assuming you were also maintaining the Windows Newb Starter Pack, which is what I meant by "as opposed to maintaining two builds."

PlayOnMac, which is free, is surprisingly robust simple to use (it doesn't require you to make "bottles" like wine does, it just detects windows software and auto-launches a shell) and I've had fewer crashes with it than with CrossOver, running games like Banished, Beyond Sol, and some relatively minor games. I've been on a gaming kick lately so I haven't fed my coder-monkey-brain by finding out much more about it.

I agree that including POM in the Starter Pack would be overkill, and there are probably licensing issues to consider. But maybe a text file offering directions for how to run the windows-based DF Starter Pack through POM, or some of the other PC-only utilities would be super useful to someone who, like me, doesn't quite have the bandwidth to figure it out on my own.

Legends Viewer/World Viewer might actually just work as is through POM, now that I think about it....it doesn't need to interact with a running copy of DF.....hmmm, I will have to try that and report back to you.

There are a number of 3d visualizers I've seen people play with on PC, and there doesn't seem to be any utilities like that for Apple.

[fricy]

I agree that including POM in the Starter Pack would be overkill, and there are probably licensing issues to consider. But maybe a text file offering directions for how to run the windows-based DF Starter Pack through POM, or some of the other PC-only utilities would be super useful to someone who, like me, doesn't quite have the bandwidth to figure it out on my own.

I have no idea how to run them... and I prefer to provide native apps, as emulated will always run slower. I tried a few pc games on mac, but decided to dedicate a Windows partition for games due to the performance advantage of directx vs apple's opengl implementation. DF is the only game I run on mac, and I maintain this pack (since summer 2013, wow, it's been that long ) so there's no need for emulation. FYI the first incarnation of Macnewbie by Ixen used an emulated dfhack, but we have come a long way since.

Legends Viewer/World Viewer might actually just work as is through POM, now that I think about it....it doesn't need to interact with a running copy of DF.....hmmm, I will have to try that and report back to you.

Please do. Even a guide'd be handy, but if you can manage to find a way to bottle a Legends utility that can run on 10.7-10.11 without having to install a 3rd party library I'm going to consider adding it, depending on how big the supporting windows libraries end up.

There are a number of 3d visualizers I've seen people play with on PC, and there doesn't seem to be any utilities like that for Apple.

Stonesense and Armok Vision are included since the latest pack. I managed to compile a working Isoworld, but failed making it redistributable, so that's out for now (and anyway it's obsolete and development have been abandoned, and Armok Vision is nicer and shows the world if zoomed out). There's also the Blocky Map app which has an osx version, but not included due to size considerations and lack of progress on development. Anything else I missed?

At this point I'm going to wait for 42.02

In other news dfhack is officialy being updated, which may, or may not mean that I reconsider the previous plan. Stay tuned.

[TheBloke]

fricy, thanks so much for your excellent pack.  I started playing DF a couple of months ago on Windows.  Recently I moved back to OSX (Hackintosh, 10.11.1) as I plan to get back into doing some development.  I was very pleased to see that the pack was just as full and well maintained as the Windows pack, and indeed includes a bit more as well.  I really like what you've done with the DFHack optionals in particular.

(On that note: thanks for including Designation History, which greatly surprised me. I worked on the Lua UI of that, my first (small) DFHack contribution.  I wasn't expecting it to reach anyone until the next DFHack release.  lethosor did all the hard stuff of course )

One quick request: my preferred graphics pack is Spacefox, and I was wondering if you might consider including two versions of that?  It was great to see that you have the latest version, with Leo's latest overrides, but unfortunately there's an issue that makes these a little annoying to play with.

The new overrides Leo added show up a limitation in TWBT, not unique to Spacefox: "bleeding tiles", which in Spacefox mostly affects workshops.  This has been confirmed by mifki as a fundamental issue in TWBT, I believe caused by overriding the same game ASCII with multiple different tiles.  mifki has mentioned trying a work-around whereby he refreshes all graphics every frame but is worried about the FPS impact. 

Maybe he will fix it soon, but maybe he won't be able to and/or FPS will be too big an issue. In the meantime I find playing with the latest overrides to be quite distracting, and it's possible others might find the same.

Therefore, would you consider including both versions?  By which I mean the latest version you already have, and also the previous one - the one that was in your Github up until Leo did his latest update a few weeks ago.    I seem to recall it's dated July 2015.

I quite understand if this is too much work, and I can easily continue maintaining my own local copy of older-Spacefox as I am now.  But thought I would ask in case you are interested in considering it.   

In case you're not familiar with the issue, here's an example:

Spoiler: On the left, how it should look; on the right, what happens when I arrow-down a few steps (click to show/hide)

Thanks again for your wonderful work on this great pack! 

[Montieth]

Fricy, I'm patiently waiting for the MacNewbie Pack. I highly prefer the tools you provide in it along with Dwarf Therapist.

[Romeofalling]

Legends Viewer/World Viewer might actually just work as is through POM, now that I think about it....it doesn't need to interact with a running copy of DF.....hmmm, I will have to try that and report back to you.

Please do. Even a guide'd be handy, but if you can manage to find a way to bottle a Legends utility that can run on 10.7-10.11 without having to install a 3rd party library I'm going to consider adding it, depending on how big the supporting windows libraries end up.

Update: It turns out that PlayOnMac is just another front end to Wine, and that running Legends Viewer is beyond the capacity of Wine, probably due to something called .NET Framework (I've been an Apple user for 25 years, I have no idea what that is beyond "that thing that keeps breaking my hacks"). So, at this point, I'm seriously tempted to buy a gorram junk PC to read my Legends in....

[TheBloke]

Legends Viewer/World Viewer might actually just work as is through POM, now that I think about it....it doesn't need to interact with a running copy of DF.....hmmm, I will have to try that and report back to you.

Please do. Even a guide'd be handy, but if you can manage to find a way to bottle a Legends utility that can run on 10.7-10.11 without having to install a 3rd party library I'm going to consider adding it, depending on how big the supporting windows libraries end up.

Update: It turns out that PlayOnMac is just another front end to Wine, and that running Legends Viewer is beyond the capacity of Wine, probably due to something called .NET Framework (I've been an Apple user for 25 years, I have no idea what that is beyond "that thing that keeps breaking my hacks"). So, at this point, I'm seriously tempted to buy a gorram junk PC to read my Legends in....

Firstly, you don't need to buy a PC - worst case, you need a Windows license and a copy of (free) VirtualBox or ($50-ish) VMWare Fusion.  Both of those will give you a Windows virtual machine, meaning you run a full copy of Windows on top of your existing Mac OSX. In other words, you get a window on your Mac desktop inside of which is.. Windows!  Real Windows, not emulated like with Wine.

And/or, using the same Windows DVD/USB stick you can just use Mac's Boot Camp.  That will dedicate a portion of your hard drive to Windows, and give you the option of rebooting your Mac into Windows.  You will be what's known as "dual booting" - choosing to boot into either Windows, or OSX.

Once that's done, you can then also make that Boot Camp install into a virtual machine, such that you then have the choice to either reboot into Windows or run Windows in a window.  The latter is more convenient - no need to reboot each time, keep using your Mac programs alongside Windows ones - but will be slower; how much slower depends on your spec of Mac and in particular how much RAM you have; it may be almost the same speed, or it may be drastically slower.  If you have at least 8GB RAM it should be fairly usable; 4GB and you'll probably prefer to reboot into Boot Camp, unless you're using Windows very rarely (which to be fair you might be if it's just for one program.)

But before you start considering those more drastic means, it's quite possible that this .Net-requiring Legends viewer will, or can be made to run direct on OSX.  There's a port of .Net to OSX and Linux, called Mono.   Its success with .Net software that wasn't specifically designed from the start to run on non-Windows may be mixed, but it's not impossible it will work immediately - at least to some value of 'work' (might have UI glitches for example.)  And if this Legends Viewer is open source, there's every chance it can be modified to work much better.

I'll try and take a look at it soon, although it will likely have to wait until the weekend as I'm going away from tomorrow until Friday.

[Romeofalling]

.....I mean, if you want, you can borrow a cup of sugar alongside all that trouble.

[TheBloke]

.....I mean, if you want, you can borrow a cup of sugar alongside all that trouble.

OK.. I don't really know what that means 

I definitely won't have a chance to check the Legend Viewer today, so I'll get back to you at the weekend.

[TheBloke]

OK I couldn't resist having a quick fiddle with Legends Viewer

Good news: Mono can load it on OSX!
Bad news: But it crashes immediately!
Good news: I know (vaguely) why!
Bad news: it definitely requires source code changes to fix!
Good news: it's open source!
Bad news: there's quite a lot that needs to be changed!

I was going to post a screenshot of how far it (doesn't) get and exception details but after googling a bit on the exception I realised that I am re-treading old ground.

People have looked at re-writes for Linux/OSX before as discussed in the Legend Views thread here.

Someone did a little bit of initial investigation and came up with a to-do list.  That's a start at least.  But at first glance it does seem there's a fair few things that need changing, not just a couple of quick changes as I had first hoped.

Anyway, I will continue to look into this a bit more when I'm back.