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Author Topic: Better Testing Area  (Read 455 times)

sal880612m

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Better Testing Area
« on: July 23, 2014, 02:33:31 pm »

I was thinking about modding some stuff, and realized I was highly dissatisfied with the current ability to test such modifications. For creature tweaks and new creatures and combat stuff the current arena is fine but if you want to test a new reaction or custom building or new item you need to generate a new world. So it would be nice if there could be a testing field for things like that as well.
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GavJ

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Re: Better Testing Area
« Reply #1 on: July 23, 2014, 07:51:39 pm »

Agreed.

And/or a simple cheat menu in game would help a lot. Offering a few convenient options like insta-buildings, insta-item generation at cursor, genning or drying water, teleporting dwarves and stuff, etc.

Make it an .ini option off by default, and flag the save game files with [CHEAT] or whatever to discourage people from feeling tempted and being frustrated by that. But would help a lot with modding as well as bugfinding, especially for complicated bugs requiring weird minecart setups or stuff like that that might be really annoying to set up to test.
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Scruiser

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Re: Better Testing Area
« Reply #2 on: July 23, 2014, 10:08:36 pm »

A "fortress mode" arena with a configuration file would not only allow quick testing of custom modded reactions and buildings, it could also serve as the backbone of a community supported tutorial.  The vanilla buildings and reactions could be demonstrated with an arena file setup.
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