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Afro

1 (0.7%)

Duerer

8 (5.4%)

GemSet

14 (9.5%)

Ironhand

29 (19.6%)

Jolly Bastion

5 (3.4%)

Mayday

15 (10.1%)

Obsidian

17 (11.5%)

Spacefox

35 (23.6%)

Wanderlust

11 (7.4%)

Other (please specify)

13 (8.8%)

Total Members Voted: 148

[TheHossofMoss]

Is this version compatible with 42.05, or should I hold off for a bit?  I'm planning to merge the accelerated mod with the phoebus/LNP setup.

It's working for me in 42.05!

[Button]

Is this version compatible with 42.05, or should I hold off for a bit?  I'm planning to merge the accelerated mod with the phoebus/LNP setup.

It should be compatible, with the exception of the new lizards.

[Button]

OK! Now that a number of graphics sets are on github, I can help get them ready instead of just waiting for them to be ready!

In honor of this, I'm going to change the thread poll to a "what graphics set should be supported next?" poll.

Here's the results of the "What module should be next" poll-to-date, for future reference.

Tame Everything- 53 (32.5%)
Expanded Plants (nee Plant Fixes)- 53 (32.5%)
Vampire Anti-Sobriety Mod- 19 (11.7%)
Basic Adventurer's Pack- 29 (17.8%)
Kazoo's Silk Eggs- 3 (1.8%)
NW_Kohaku's Expanded Glaze Options- 5 (3.1%)
Blood Pudding- 0 (0%)
Other (please post)- 1 (0.6%)

Believe it or not, I am still making progress on Expanded Plants - it just requires almost a complete rewrite of the plant files, new reactions, and some tricky hacks to get around limitations of Toady's plant system. Tame Everything was lagging behind Expanded Plants for a long time, but now that it's neck-and-neck I might prioritize it. It's not as simple as it sounds, though - I'll need to make some tough decisions about Good and Evil.

[Taverius]

Hopefully BAMM will let me switch to CLA easily when I start playing again.

I believe with CLA you would just install CLA's graphics and then use the ASCII version of the MM.

I never actually looked into it, but its a couple of minor changes, it turns out

P.S. Voted Duerer as I find it to be the most interesting full tileset currently. I like to run Jolly too but that one is also as easy as CLA to set up.

[Taffer]

I've quietly been working on something and it's still a long ways completion, but would improved creature descriptions be in the scope of the Modest Mod? Is there any interest?

I enjoy reading the descriptions of creatures around the map, and to be honest I'm usually disappointed. For a game that's often described as "relying on my imagination", most of the time these descriptions don't give my imagination much to work with.

Eagle: [DESCRIPTION:A small bird of prey.]
Damselfly Man: [DESCRIPTION:A person with the wings and head of a damselfly.]
Giant Damselfly: [DESCRIPTION:A large monster in the shape of a damselfly.]

I don't claim to be a wonderful writer, but I've been fixing things up a bit:

Damselfly Man: [DESCRIPTION:A carnivorous, diminutive creature with large compound eyes and a gaunt body.  Its colorful wings are veined and translucent.]
Giant Damselfly: [DESCRIPTION:A large, colorful, long-bodied monster in the shape of a damselfly.  Beware its size!]

I would consider this "french vanilla", but perhaps this might be disputed. It's a shame that the vanilla descriptions don't even indicate the relative size of the animal men or giant animals, for example. I've been calling size 35,000 to 45,000 "diminutive". Are giant ticks giant "as far as ticks go", or are they bigger than a dwarf? The answer is the latter, of course, by quite a bit. That's creepy, but I had to look it up on the wiki to decide how unnerved I should be.

I'm surprised that I can't find a mod remedying this. Good descriptions are--in my opinion--the difference between dismissing that brown recluse spider man as a "poorly described furry" and being unnerved by something portrayed as resembling this (bottom left). "Their large, cruel mandibles inject venom into their prey".

If there's an available mod that helps with this I'd love to hear about it. Apologies if I'm off base here, and I really am a ways from being done, but I've been working from the Modest Mod. I should probably find out now whether I'll be able to submit upstream--and should limit my own, diverging edits to save work--or whether I'll need to release separately. If it's the latter, might I please have permission to distribute with credit given?

[Button]

That sounds great Taffer! I especially like the idea of including "how big is this critter" info in the fantasy creature descriptions.

I think it would work better if instead of using standardized but ultimately arbitrary size-words, creature size was compared to certain reference species."About the size of a wolf" is much more descriptive to me than "diminutive" is.

My tentative suggestions for size reference species:

• Rabbit (500)
• Duck (1k)
• Chicken (3k)
• Human infant (5k)
• Raccoon (7k)
• Koala/Swan (10k)
• Coyote (15k)
• Beaver (20k)
• Dog (30k)
• Wolf (40k)
• Sheep (50k)
• Dwarf (60k)
• Human (70k)
• Orangutan (80k)
• Ostrich (90k)
• Black bear (120k)
• Gorilla (150k)
• Lion/Grizzly bear (200k)
• Donkey (300k)
• Polar bear (400k)
• Horse (500k)
• Cow (600k)
• Yak (700k)
• Giraffe/water buffalo (1mil)
• Hippopotamus (1.5mil)
• Rhinoceros (3mil)
• Elephant (5mil)
• Giant (9mil)

Though looking at the list of creatures by adult size on the wiki more closely, I think some of these numbers are out of whack. For example, anacondas and pythons appear to be reversed - anacondas are the heaviest snakes on earth, max confirmed weight 360 lbs, and have a DF size of 100k (slightly bigger than a warthog); while the largest python species, the reticulated python, has a max confirmed weight of ~160 lbs but a DF size of 200k (the size of a grizzly bear). So, I/you/we may want to recalculate the sizes of the various real-life animals before making size comparisons final.

tl;dr I'd love to incorporate your more-descriptive descriptions into the MM - probably the base, but if not, as a module.


The Modest Mod is available as a base for anyone's work, so long as it obeys Toady's standards of mod-appropriateness (e.g. no rape mods). Attribution should be to the Modest Mod, not to Button. (I'm neither the originator nor the primary contributor - I'm just looking after it.)

[Taffer]

That sounds great Taffer! I especially like the idea of including "how big is this critter" info in the fantasy creature descriptions.

I think it would work better if instead of using standardized but ultimately arbitrary size-words, creature size was compared to certain reference species."About the size of a wolf" is much more descriptive to me than "diminutive" is.

Thank you! Sounds good, although there's no good descriptor there for the 35,000 to 45,000 range (dogs, wolves, and sheep are inappropriate comparisons for hominids), so that's why I standardized on diminutive so far: there's an awful lot of animal men in that size range due to the way the calculations work.

A few notes on my writing style so far, so that I can get objections in early (and can fix them easier).

• I'm standardizing on "hominid". A little scientific, but I prefer it to humanoid. Find and replace should make it easy to change this if necessary.
• I prefer "they" to "it" for animal men. It sounds nicer, humanizes them a little, can be interpreted as referring to a group of enemies, and is already used in a few places.
• I interpret animal men as being not particularly friendly--they appear in savage biomes and underground, after all--so my descriptions have been leaning in that direction. Not to the point of comedy, and some animal men are hopelessly innocent sounding (looking at you, penguin men and sloth men).
• All sentences are spaced apart using two spaces--not because I like the practice or anything--but simply because it looks nicer when DF stretches the description.
• I've been appending "Beware its size!" to all giant variations, because it sounds thematically like "Dwarf Fortress" and hopefully makes even giant kakapos sound at least a little menacing. I'd rather not make up nonsense about giant kakapos to make them sound evil, so this is lazy shorthand. I'm also sticking with the "monster shaped like x" theme that vanilla has to make it ambiguous as to their origins. I want to avoid making giant creatures sound mundane.

I'll get back to work slowly on this. As mentioned, it might take a while: I'm being awfully picky about this, and I see little point in releasing work half-finished. If there's any more broad suggestions from anybody please speak up now, rather than later.

[Button]

My only objection to "hominid" is that it has a very specific meaning which most (all?) of the animal people don't meet - namely, being an ape, which requires being a primate, which requires being a mammal, which requires being a vertebrate, etc. Calling a gorilla person a hominid would be fine, but calling a slug person a hominid would make my science hurt.

"An upright, slug-like person" perhaps? Could also go with something more like the vanilla description of demons with furry bodies, e.g. "A slug twisted into humanoid form."

I'm still a bit concerned about "diminutive," as it makes me think, like, gnome-sized. "Half the size of a human" might work, except that it might imply half the height of a human, which is almost certainly incorrect. I don't have a good answer without, like, a fantasy humanoid volume-to-height-ratio calculator.

...oh hey I can model that very roughly with a cylinder.

This textbook I found on google uses a h/r ratio of 12 for a cylinder modeling a human, so sure let's go with that.

This would mean that to calculate the height of a humanoid of volume V Urists^3 the formula is

Code: [Select]

h = (144V/pi)^(1/3)
Since a human is 70,000 U^3 in volume, we can model that a human is 147.49 U tall. Since an ideal human figure is about 8 heads tall, we can model roughly how far up on a human a given humanoid would be by comparing its U height against the height of a human head, 18.437 U.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Results:
35,000 U^3 humanoids (e.g. mosquito men) are roughly 117.06 U tall, or 6.3496 human heads. They'd come up to above a human's nipples.

45,000 U^3 humanoids (e.g. dingo men) are roughly 127.29 U tall, or 6.9044 human heads. They'd come up to a human's chin.

Obviously this assumes an identical volume distribution between humans and each given humanoid, which will need to be compensated for in the case of particularly non-human-like animal people - e.g. legless animal people are going to be significantly shorter than calculated, as they maintain their thickness throughout their bodies, instead of having relatively low-volume legs to increase their height.

[Taffer]

My only objection to "hominid" is that it has a very specific meaning which most (all?) of the animal people don't meet - namely, being an ape, which requires being a primate, which requires being a mammal, which requires being a vertebrate, etc. Calling a gorilla person a hominid would be fine, but calling a slug person a hominid would make my science hurt.

"An upright, slug-like person" perhaps? Could also go with something more like the vanilla description of demons with furry bodies, e.g. "A slug twisted into humanoid form."

You're right of course. I'll use humanoid.

I'm still a bit concerned about "diminutive," as it makes me think, like, gnome-sized. "Half the size of a human" might work, except that it might imply half the height of a human, which is almost certainly incorrect. I don't have a good answer without, like, a fantasy humanoid volume-to-height-ratio calculator.

...oh hey I can model that very roughly with a cylinder.

This textbook I found on google uses a h/r ratio of 12 for a cylinder modeling a human, so sure let's go with that.

This would mean that to calculate the height of a humanoid of volume V Urists^3 the formula is

Code: [Select]

h = (144V/pi)^(1/3)
Since a human is 70,000 U^3 in volume, we can model that a human is 147.49 U tall. Since an ideal human figure is about 8 heads tall, we can model roughly how far up on a human a given humanoid would be by comparing its U height against the height of a human head, 18.437 U.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Results:
35,000 U^3 humanoids (e.g. mosquito men) are roughly 117.06 U tall, or 6.3496 human heads. They'd come up to above a human's nipples.

45,000 U^3 humanoids (e.g. dingo men) are roughly 127.29 U tall, or 6.9044 human heads. They'd come up to a human's chin.

Obviously this assumes an identical volume distribution between humans and each given humanoid, which will need to be compensated for in the case of particularly non-human-like animal people - e.g. legless animal people are going to be significantly shorter than calculated, as they maintain their thickness throughout their bodies, instead of having relatively low-volume legs to increase their height.

I won't be using diminutive. I'm tempted to just use "short", as it's the same adjective dwarves use (incidentally, they're at 60,000, which seems wrong by your cylinder calculations if we consider their descriptions). I'm sensing that Toady's sizes aren't perfect.

If I use "short", "medium-sized", and "large" for the animal men, that leaves me using your original chart for the giant animals. Even just that much would give people a sense of their size, and they can still go to the wiki for the exact size.

[Button]

"Short" is fine.

Yeah, dwarves and elves are the same size but one is stocky and one is thin - just taking human proportions and scaling up and down is a very rough way of doing things. Rougher still if you don't even take proportions into account and just model them as cylinders .

[scamtank]

Hey, is this the place where people can scream into the ether about what they think other people's mods should be like? Because I just thought of a few missing pieces that'd be totally in MM's giant, pervasive scope.

1.) Expand animal dissection beyond the creatures that've been in for the past six years or something.
While the whole business depends on DFHack to be useful in the first place, it's just a shame that while you can buy kegs full of black mamba venom to coat your bolts and trap blades, you can't actually milk the snakes that you catch yourself. It's a real simple fix, too. Adding [EXTRACT:LOCAL_CREATURE_MAT:VENOM] to the bushmasters and copperheads and other critters that've been added since should be the end of it.

2.) Sidestep the ancient, ancient bug about creature descriptions being almost nothing but gigantic and massive by just removing a few lines.
Like it reads up there, the thing is that when a creature's size is adjusted by HEIGHT and LENGTH body appearance modifiers at the same time, the counter just goes nuts. BROADNESS has no problems with either. Commenting out either one of those two will make the descriptions truthful again with a minimal loss on flavor.

[Button]

0. It sure is!

1. I thiiink the vanilla extraction reaction only works on vermin, and kills them. So your first point might be more difficult than you'd think.

2. This would take some testing. Are we sure that these fields aren't used for anything else, e.g. calculating which parts of the body are easiest to hit?

[scamtank]

Wait what they were proper creatures and not vermin all along? Shit, that's an embarrassment. I'll probably jigger mine to be milkable with this revelation, but that solution's a little out there by the standards of this project. All the properly tiny creatures seem like they're tagged up right, too. Never mind that one.

From quick empirical testing and personal experience? Nah, that's probably more affected by what body parts are connected to which. There was no immediate difference between side shanking/backstabbing giant snakes with only LENGTH, only BROADNESS or all three attributes defined. Head and facial features were hideously hard targets throughout and the tail seemed like an easier target from behind compared to the main body no matter what, most of the time, except for when it wasn't.

Creatures work sensibly without any of the three tokens, anyway. Even rummaging through the mapped out structures with gm-editor doesn't show any obvious links besides the genetic lottery dice roll at birth that modifies body size and spices up the descriptions.

[Igfig]

Taffer, that's a great idea! A thought: could you perhaps put all the descriptions in a Google Doc with comments enabled? That would make it really straightforward for people to offer suggestions on and tweaks to what you've got there, or help fill in any descriptions you find yourself stuck on.

As a tangent to the HEIGHT/LENGTH/BROADNESS situation, I've been thinking for a while about filling in some new numbers for all of those, to better represent how creatures are actually shaped. I mean, I'm pretty sure everything is treated as roughly spherical right now. Ideally, humanoids should have larger height and smaller broadness and length, beasts should be longer instead of taller, snakes should be all long and not much else, and so on. In some cases I might refine those figures even more, so that elves come out as tall as humans but thinner, and dwarves come out short and broad.

That said, I'm not sure if that's a small enough change to put in the core Modest Mod or not. Any thoughts?

[Taffer]

Taffer, that's a great idea! A thought: could you perhaps put all the descriptions in a Google Doc with comments enabled? That would make it really straightforward for people to offer suggestions on and tweaks to what you've got there, or help fill in any descriptions you find yourself stuck on.

I'll see about doing that in the next week or two. For a variety of reasons I'm quite busy at the moment. I've been working directly on the raw files in Linux, so transferring it to a Google document would be a bit of effort. Nevertheless, if there's interest in helping out then I'll do so. Might be best if I just e-mail the appropriate files to people or rely on Github, though. It feels like every time I go to work on it I think of something new that I want to add to previous creatures, and sometimes I run into something that I've done badly and need to go back and fix it everywhere. (ie, adding colour to dozens of descriptions before bothering to test in-game and realizing that their colour is already displayed in-game separately). There's a LOT of "It is roughly the size of a large bear." for the giant creatures, as a great many of them are more or less the same size.

Aside from the conversion to Unix line ending format and the possible odd whitespace change, I've also renamed a bunch of creatures that were overly specific, in some cases taking liberty with the original animal names. (ie, brown recluse spider => recluse spider). Just a heads-up for the WinMerge/visual diff comparisons.

I've also decided to fix up a few standard description errors in the regular, non-giant/man creatures when I spot them. I particularly dislike colours in the descriptions, as many in-game descriptions already include the creature colours redundantly, and sometimes contradict Toady's description.

Two of my best so far:

Toad Man: [DESCRIPTION:A small, amphibious humanoid with leathery skin and large, glassy eyes.  They secrete poison from puffy glands behind their ear holes.]
Worm Man: [DESCRIPTION:A small, gaunt humanoid with a segmented, thin body.  They are legless and writhe forward to move.]

I'd love to have all of my descriptions conjure up an image in my head, hopefully a vaguely menacing one. Most of them seem to fall short of this goal. Unique physical description is always preferable to vague claims about personality or behaviour.

As a tangent to the HEIGHT/LENGTH/BROADNESS situation, I've been thinking for a while about filling in some new numbers for all of those, to better represent how creatures are actually shaped. I mean, I'm pretty sure everything is treated as roughly spherical right now. Ideally, humanoids should have larger height and smaller broadness and length, beasts should be longer instead of taller, snakes should be all long and not much else, and so on. In some cases I might refine those figures even more, so that elves come out as tall as humans but thinner, and dwarves come out short and broad.

That said, I'm not sure if that's a small enough change to put in the core Modest Mod or not. Any thoughts?

I don't really mind, but hopefully it doesn't result in much description rewriting. I'm not familiar enough with DF's systems to know whether such an effort would pay off in gameplay or not. I'd love more Modest Mod improvements so long as they improve on vanilla Dwarf Fortress, don't deviate in style or intent, and don't rely on DFHack.