The obstacle isn't the multi-species fort stuff so much as the number of people for that one, which is more of a hill-dwarf problem. If I remember, the refugees can already choose your fort as a destination for camping next to, but they don't actually enter the fort. It'll probably be best to put that one off until we have the broader infrastructure in place for hill-dwarves (which are just a group of numerous associated critters living near the fort).
First... wow, I just now realized "hill-dwarves=the folks in the hillocks, deep dwarves=the fortress folks we usually play with"... the things you can more fully appreciate after playing both adventurer and fortress mode shouldn't be ignored, I wish I had tried out adventurer mode long before I finally did.
As for the quoted bit there, yeah, you mostly see refugees show up sitting just outside of fortresses, often just on the edges of mountain tiles, sometimes you can find them along rivers near stinky-treehumper sites, I've found some just outside of dark pits and fortress as well. They all sleep constantly though, I think they got missed in the army bugfix. I've encountered tent sleeping army groups but only at night, refugees tend to always be sleeping sadly, as it seems like it would be interesting to find out what happened, help out, take advantage of opportunities, and so forth.
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Regarding multi-racial forts, I recently began my initial steps into modding my game here and there, mostly just a few tweaks and stuff, my biggest step so far has been getting a race incorporated into the world, producing gear and wearing it correctly, surviving world-gen, and not taking over the map in the process. Though part of that was finding that non-dwarf fortresses can be really interesting, and that removing the [TOLERATES_SITE:CAVE_DETAILED] tag and just leaving the [LIKES_SITE] one intact means they actually stick around in the forts for the most part where before I had to struggle to avoid them sprawling across the map taking over everything.
Where was I going, oh yeah, multi-racial forts. I learned to my surprise (though it seems obvious enough now since you can reclaim from other dorf civs) that I was able to move my dorfs into an entirely non-dwarf fort and set up shop. That works normally until I was trying to get the angels (modded race is steel angels, mini-bronze colossus but steel, etc) to trade with their neighbors and made a new world after fixing it so they would, I found one of the reclaim options wasn't lost from a beast or dragon or whatnot, it was taken over by goblins apparently.
So I set out, start to explore the fort and get spammed with ambush notifications, angels are dangerous as hell when hostile so I said heck with it and spammed dfhack's tweak makeown on them until they were all part of my civ and I didn't have to risk being killed. Now, they show up as tame instead of no job or whatnot, so it isn't ideal, but it is kinda a type of multi-race fort as is, right?
Well, I was still expecting the angels to make trade depots so I decided to add [CIV_CONTROLLABLE] to see that they performed all the reactions, could build the right stuff, and so forth. Well, during world gen I found another case of a fort being taken over (angels don't avoid evil areas like dorfs do) so I moved in expecting to have to dfhack convert some residents.
Well, boy did I get a surprise:
Yeaaaahhhhh, finally tally after getting every nook and cranny visible wound up being 234 angels and dorfs, I think it is like ~90 angels, ~150 dorfs, unfortunately the dorfs won't do jobs since the civ I'm playing with is an angel one but yeah... oh, did I mention said angel civ is at war with the gobs?
Honestly I was expecting there to be gobs in there, or at least a goblin law-giver or something... not over a hundred dorfs.
Still, I assume the only problem with multi-race forts is said issue of the second race being listed as "tame" instead of being able to do jobs and such normally.
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Now for a question:
I could swear I remember seeing you say you wish there were an easier way to switch between fort and adventure modes. Do you have any ideas on how you would be going about this, or when you would be shooting for pushing it out?Right now you can do it with dfhack mode set > 2 (arena mode) > loo(k) and (a)ssume control of a creature > mode set > 1 (adventurer mode), then dfusion > 2 (adventurer tools) > 2 (change adventurer) and you should be able to travel, save, retire at locations, and so forth normally. You can do it the other way but I think you need to toss in the mode set > 4 (unretire fortress) step or it won't display the interface right, but I haven't tried that way in a while as it is easier to just retire the adventurer nearby and then unretire the fortress again normally.
With the addition of advfort letting me do things like start in a fortress, dismantle some forges with steel anvils, melt them down into bars, dismantle a magma smelter downstairs to make a magma furnace, and bit by bit forge myself a set of exceptional to masterwork gear, it's clear that there are a lot of areas of overlap that already work surprisingly well, but being able to more readily step into a dorf and explore the world or lead a battle or do some risky construction (normal dorfs won't climb a sheer wall to build a floor 10 z off the ground too happily) and then hop back into fortress mode would be amazing.
I saw something about wanting to be able to add a way to take part in the games directly, sounds like that might be just a couple steps away from what I mentioned.