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[fortydayweekend]

Good to hear!  Good luck Peridot.

So, just an update, FurnaceClans 18 is... well, in editing mode.  I've got a rediculous amount of footage for what's actually a relatively simple series event that I'm trying to turn into a reasonable length of time.  In case anyone's curious... I usually spend about 3x as much time editing as I do playing/recording.  This one's taking a lot longer.  Just not sure where/what to trim, it's so spread out.

So, I'm going to ask those who watch/post in this thread:
Do you want to see my fumbles and foibles with the magma delivery system with a couple of false starts, or do you just want me to keep it to the crux of issues I've reviewed previously in the series without much fanfare?

Short & sweet please. Maybe the false start/more depth stuff could go at the end so it's optional to watch and not just drawing out the main update. If that makes sense!

[Merendel]

Emphasis mine. This reasoning in its entirety is a bit dated, especially with advancements in aquifer breaching techniques discussed in the thread. There are also ways that one could make the challenge more difficult, or simply impossible. I don't believe a one pick challenge over a terrifying/reanimating scorching rocky wasteland/no vegetation/multiple layer aquifer/no magma/no cavern 1 or 3 would be possible. There was challenge on a world where the base temp was 10000 (as opposed to the standard 25-75) a while back that was doable (the secret is dogs).

No magma would most definatly make things difficult although I'm not familiar with what disabeling cavern 1 and 3 would do.  Does that block all underground vegetation?  that would make things more difficult for sure as you could do no underground farming.  would you still get trees from cavern 2 or would those be gone as well?   I still think that would be doable with a bit of care.  If I remember right you can still do above ground farming in both those biome's you mentioned so if you can hold out till an elven/human caravan arives to get some seeds off of that should still be a viable, if obsurdly challanging embark.  Unless cavern 2 still existed and still gives its trees or you hapen to have a form of coal on the map metal/glass/clay industries are throttled by however much wood caravans bring in.

As to surviving till caravans arive that shouldnt be much harder than the standard challange asumeing they can reach you at all.  Work on aquifer pierce, butcher the pack animals when needed. they should provide enough food to last till dwarven caravan although you may have to lock the migrant waves in a room to starve.   trade if possible with dwarvan caravan, if they dont survive scavange the remains for food and supplies.  depending on how much food you get off that you may have to lock out future migrant waves and hope elves/humans show up with something useful.   Baring that your only hope of a food supply is that migrants or the caravans bring a breeding pair of something apropreate or better yet an egg layer and no mater what booze is going to be problematic.  A freezing biome where you have no hope of above ground farming would be harder in this case I think as you'd have no option for booze at all short of whatever arived on caravans.

[WanderingKid]

Short & sweet please. Maybe the false start/more depth stuff could go at the end so it's optional to watch and not just drawing out the main update. If that makes sense!

It does.  It doesn't fit in with the Let's Play style of consistent timelines I've been making, but it does.

This will take some heavy and judicious editing to pull off.  It's one of those things where all of it matters, but it's all spread out with a bunch of setups between point A and B.  However, I've covered most of it in my previous videos so hopefully a very brief explanation will cover the discussions.

There's a fine line between too brief: "Oh, look, another titan wrecked my trap, and I fixed it." and too much: "And I pulled this lever to dump the magma but the cart got stuck so I had to reset it and oh look that's interesting the dominos effect off an impulse ramp is shooting the cart too fast and it's track skipping."

You wouldn't think that line was that fine, until you're too close to the forest and all you see are trees and you're trying to figure out how to edit it.   I'd expected this process to be a learning experience for me in video creation, and it is.  I just didn't realize what the syllabus looked like, I'd made some bad assumptions.

[fortydayweekend]

Short & sweet please. Maybe the false start/more depth stuff could go at the end so it's optional to watch and not just drawing out the main update. If that makes sense!

It does.  It doesn't fit in with the Let's Play style of consistent timelines I've been making, but it does.

This will take some heavy and judicious editing to pull off.  It's one of those things where all of it matters, but it's all spread out with a bunch of setups between point A and B.  However, I've covered most of it in my previous videos so hopefully a very brief explanation will cover the discussions.

There's a fine line between too brief: "Oh, look, another titan wrecked my trap, and I fixed it." and too much: "And I pulled this lever to dump the magma but the cart got stuck so I had to reset it and oh look that's interesting the dominos effect off an impulse ramp is shooting the cart too fast and it's track skipping."

You wouldn't think that line was that fine, until you're too close to the forest and all you see are trees and you're trying to figure out how to edit it.   I'd expected this process to be a learning experience for me in video creation, and it is.  I just didn't realize what the syllabus looked like, I'd made some bad assumptions.

I totally get the forest/trees thing. Editing is hard work but always worth the effort. Take your time to get it how you like it.

The problem I have with the youtube format as a viewer is that if I'm watching a 15-min video, I judge the unwatched part entirely based on what I thought of the part I have watched, because I can't skim the whole thing or skip ahead and expect it to make sense. So if a video starts meandering at 1:18 like so many unedited ones do, there's no way I'm watching the rest of it.

The advantage of editing is that you can get the pace right and I think that's the most important thing - even if I'm not particularly interested in the minutiae of a trap, I'll keep the video playing to get to the next bit if it's moving along at a good rate. So putting it in chronological/logical order with more detail is ok too as long as it keeps moving quickly and doesn't give the impression of being bogged down.

[WanderingKid]

I totally get the forest/trees thing. Editing is hard work but always worth the effort. Take your time to get it how you like it.

I feel like I'm carving out all the interesting bits, but really... they're not.  Well, they are, but only if you're playing it at the time.

The problem I have with the youtube format as a viewer is that if I'm watching a 15-min video, I judge the unwatched part entirely based on what I thought of the part I have watched, because I can't skim the whole thing or skip ahead and expect it to make sense. So if a video starts meandering at 1:18 like so many unedited ones do, there's no way I'm watching the rest of it.

You make perfect sense, and I can see the very easy pitfalls in how that happens.  I need to start using a set of annotations so it's possible to skip to particular pieces of the episode, as mine tend to run a LOT longer than 15 minutes per episode.

Thanks for the comments, fortyday.  All information is good, and critiques are welcome within reason.  It sucks, yeah fine... but without a WHY all you're doing is aggravating me... because I can't fix it.    No, that's not what you did, just a general comment.

[WanderingKid]

FurnaceClans 18 is up... and incredibly heavily edited.

http://youtu.be/lnjxnRj_yrQ

Two sets of discussions for this video.

What's in it: Another damned Serpent titan gets into the system and requires me to do ANOTHER flood and drain, and removing the burning dude down in the magma paths as well.  Merchants arrive, and successfully trade with the fortress.  Some moods, and general discussion.

Improvements to video making in general:
Dorf Commentaries are back!  Pinnacle 17 is being a pain in the ass about freezing on Vista whenever I include title layovers, so I'm looking for another add-on to take over that job, but random wisecracks are included again.  Background music is included, as are navigation buttons at the beginning of and within the video to make it easier to skip to (and over) different parts.

[Hans Lemurson]

I've been watching this thread every now and then for the past few months looking for the updates to your fortress saga.  Thanks so much for making these videos!  Chapter 18 was quite well done, it seemed to flow well and avoided boredom and dead air.  Having made videos of my own in the past, I know how much editing work this involves.  Turning raw footage into something interesting and watchable is like turning lumber into furniture; cut away large amounts to shape and select the pieces you'll use, join them together into a coherent form, and then spend a bunch of time at the end polishing up the details so it looks pretty as well as being functional.

I'm pretty sure that was supposed to be inspirational somehow, but I can't remember.  I guess I'll just have to settle for assigning the "dwarven video making" job to the Carpentry labor.  Yeah, that's the ticket.

[WanderingKid]

Thanks for that Hans, always appreciated.

[enizer]

yeah, i always wonder if something interesting got cut, but then compare it to some other dwarf fortress lets play's that are uncut and:
no matter how interesting the player is, uncut dwarf fortress is just so INCREDIBLY slow.

there's always that bit where you need to correct the wall, and some guy walls himself in, and.. quite often it's not nearly as interesting to watch as it is to play through it

On fortydayweekend's youtube viewing problems, I have a similar one, my connection has problems with youtube,
I'm pretty sure I'm getting throttled to 2mb somewhere along the way, and I just cant actually watch high resolution youtube videos.
Things like Eve Online and Dwarf Fortress, need at least 720p if I want to read the text, and so the following firefox addon I have found a lifesaver.

"Download YouTube Videos as MP4"
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/download-youtube/

I hope this isn't messing up video monetization or something like that, but ever since youtube started messing with buffering, and rewind(i remember doing that a couple of years ago) the website itself just isn't reliable anymore.

[WanderingKid]

Hey guys, just an update.  FurnaceClans 19 is delayed due to the learning curve on making FB obisidianizer traps.  I've got a few hours of recordings of me arguing with the design and methodology, but none of it's really usable.  It's entertaining but it drags on as I iterate through different failures.

So, once I get things sorted out (and fun again) I'll do a full bore edit job.  I just need to save the details of a few events that happened along the way.

Edit: Also, Screw Pinnacle.  Crashy buggy piece of ... grrr.  Once I get this one packed and shipped, I'm going software shopping.  Waste of money at this point.  Once I got good with the software and started really twisting things together to make things interesting, it keeps flaking out.  Even a clean reinstall didn't help.

Edit 2: Apparently to get anything worthwhile, I need to upgrade to Windows 7/8.  ARGH.

[WanderingKid]

Okay, FurnaceClans 19 is out.  I know you all are waiting for the FB trap to be built, but as mentioned, I've ran into some hassles.

http://youtu.be/Lobx5hbXzTM

This is some of the other stuff.  I had to re-adjust the magma run with the mine carts a few times, and include some powered rollers to have better speed control.  Human Merchants arrive, so I've got two caravans that come in.  Liason drops in for a visit, and some migrants survive the trek.  Also, I illustrate one of the more baffling mistakes in the FB trap.

[WanderingKid]

Edge, what in the name of 42 virgins and a Steely Dan did you give me with this embark?

Behal Anba is the name of the human settlement... it means "The Kingdom of Girls". 

"A marmot fiend diplomat from Behal Anba has arrived." - I've never seen a human diplomat before in Vanilla so he's kind of a surprise.  He's also wickedly dangerous.

Mirding, Deity:
A gigantic feathered marmot twisted into humanoid form.  It knows and intones the names of all it encounters.  Its clear feathers and patchy.  Beware its poisonous vapors!
He has a thin body with very little fat.

Of course, this omniscient deity shows up not in the permanent trader access, but on the surface.  Psychopath.  Also, a marmot deity leading the kingdom of girls.  I don't know if I'm jealous or naseous.  I'm going to go with a little of column A, a little of column B.

[Hans Lemurson]

I'm sure everything will work out PERFECTLY FINE.  You of course have multi-layered defenses to protect yourself from murderous diplomats, right?  I mean, doesn't everybody anticipate and prepare for just such an occurrance?

[fortydayweekend]

Edge, what in the name of 42 virgins and a Steely Dan did you give me with this embark?

Wow, I can't remember the last time I heard a Burroughs reference Surprised I got that.

It could be worse than marmot demons I guess though, the aquifer could be full of candiru...

[WanderingKid]

Personal Update:

Sorry for the delay.  Due to Pinnacle finally driving me to desk-bending levels of headdesk, and all the other software I looked at that seemed functional to my requirements requiring Windows 7 or better, I've been performing an upgrade of my desktop from Vista -> Windows 8.1.  Since this is a hobby, DF and those softwares got back-burnered to the necessities, such as making sure my tunneling softwares were functional for overnight calls when servers crashed.

I'm hoping to start working on the new episode this week, and will hopefully be able to produce something this weekend.