Hello, below I'll be giving my thoughts and impressions on how the current versions plays, including bugs and odd things I've noticed. They will go in order of least serious to most.
There's a bizarre bug where if you enable the snake people in the fortress defense mod, you will only get snake men visitors to your fort. I tested this by disabling them and getting new visitors from nearly all the civilizations, including mod races.
Javelins are still impractical to use. Meph, if you're reading this I noticed you tried to change things up, making it so that you can now build javelin ammo out of something other than steel. However, I'm still limited on what I can make them out of (no cobalt, for example). Altogether it just hasn't been worth the trouble of building the special furnace and using bronze for training and iron for combat, as I did in the one fort where I used them for military forces. One huge problem I want to stress is the lack of reactions for javelin ammo in the craftshops, so no bone or wood javelins to train with.
Stal's Armory Pack seems to be broken in that the armors do not show up even when I mark the green check. I turned on the other large arms & armor pack included in the launcher and its armor sets work fine. Nice implementation, by the way. I especially love the detail where you can couple bevors with sallets. Very immersive and gives a lot of decision making space when equipping troops.
Elves don't bring a guy with their traders who has a catalog like the humans and dwarves. I think this is a vanilla bug but I remember it being fixed in an earlier version of masterwork. Can it be fixed again? I want to mail-order giant rattlesnakes again!
I don't believe the FPS boosters mod is working (the one where junk decays). I did switch off the food one, because it didn't make sense to have food rot away after it's been cured and whatnot, but also because I can save my FPS perfectly well by just turning off "Prepare Lavish Meal." Corpses just aren't disappearing, and neither are old tattered clothes. I did check the green marks for these things BEFORE worldgen by the way.
Invasions seem to be much rarer than I remember. I've not had a fort that's been exciting at all in terms of invasions. My last fort had one undead siege in the first year with two squads of zombie frogmen, but nothing after that for the next two years, or thieves either. The fort before it took three years before the first siege of one squad of white tiger men, by which point I had a bunch of steel clad stormtroopers. I am taking the usual worldgen measures to get high invasions (high civ counts, pop counts, etc.).
I have to be very careful about what MDF launcher settings I use, namely the tilesets. Phoebus seems to be the most stable. I tried Meph's and it crashed me on worldgen 100% of my attempts. Also, trying to use the multi z-level viewing, though extremely useful and immersive, is asking to crash. Strangely, I couldn't get Advanced Paramaters worlds to load for embark, and then only about half the generic ones I generated would load to the embark screen.
I have random FPS cascades. The worst one took me from about 130 FPS and 21 dwarves in a first year fort down to 55 FPS when nothing special seemed to be going on. It has kept on happening since. Sometimes it goes on and on until the game crashes and sometimes it goes back to normal. This is the most serious difference I've noticed with the latest version. It's a game killer, big time. This one is so bad I think I'll just be going back to the last version, which I've still got on my PC. Not sure if it's MDF or a vanilla problem I'm just noticing in MDF, but if anyone else is experiencing this please post it to help the community learn more about it.
Some more details about the fort this happened in: It has steep cliffs, a population always below 80, a medium animal population (<110), a single-floor layout, lots of trees, unbreached caverns, and only one invasion in the past that I camped out during. No running water either, and the cascades happened after my cistern was finished. The last cascade that made me give up happened while I had 78 population and I suddenly just went down to 15 and this went on for about a game month before it crashed.
I also don't think it's my PC. It's ran 150+ pop forts much bigger than the one detailed above at >30 FPS, for 5+ game years in older versions, and I haven't been experiencing performance degradation with any of the other (many) games I play.
I hope this helps the mod devs out find and fix small quality of life problems. Sometimes I wish the frustrating kinks would be focused down first before new stuff like new races is focused.
Well, I would like to say Meph is currently in the heart of Africa on what constitutes his primary job: bike touring and mountain climbing the world while documenting the travels. So he wont be available to answer immediately JAK.
I'm not sure which race/s you tried to play, so I'll try to be as generic on my replies to your bug reports.
1. snake people... I've not had this issue with this, are we talking nagas(savage) or raptormen(civilized)... I've had issues with visiting raptormen sitting in ponds for decades never moving on dwarf forts. I generally haven't played kobold(savage) long enough to get visitors, so I'd have to test that out. There is a max number of visitors who are not merchants or invaders allowed at a fort. I'd have to look to see if its a setting, but if you get a stack of raptormen sitting in ponds like I did, well you wont get any other visitors until they leave.
2. Javelins are buggy for me. I play orcs more often than not, and I've discovered that only the urukai will really use them. Orcs have wood versions available from the orc fletcher shop, but I think there is some sort of "size" issue that is making the urukai the only ones willing to toss them. I just use bows, since the primary orc archers the snaga will pick them up. I'd like to investigate that one, but I really need to know which race your using to investigate.
3. Stal's Armory pack, well I don't know how your trying to use it... I haven't messed with it. But I'm assuming you are trying to forge them, and they aren't showing up. I can check and see if they was added to the entity files, they may not have. That is my bet to why they aren't showing up.
4. Elvish liaison - there was an issue with attempting to force things when 43.03 first came out, most have been worked around. I don't think elvish liaisons were brought back as automatic. Elves don't send liaisons generally, and I've never seen a human liaison while playing dwarves, but it should be doable now.
5. hmmm Junk decays... well that's a dfhack thing. I can look to see if the owner of those scripts have reports on people not seeing junk disappear, but I've not personally had any issues... I can run some tests. they are suppose to take 6 months to eradicate corpses sitting on the ground outside of a stockpile. Decay undead is working, as invasions of undead receive insta death on arrival on the map(a DF v43 issue I'll discuss in the next point). Decay food is working, I've accidentally starved more than one fort with that. Decay clothing require them to be on the ground outside of a stockpile (stockpiled clothes are considered to be new waiting for use). I just rather use lava trash dumps to get rid of my junk, the reason I turned them all off.
6. In DF 43.03+ Invasions cannot be forced anymore, due to invasions being world events, tied to a hundred variables including distance from a nearby enemy fortress, knowledge of your civilization, knowledge of your fort, level of hostility, age, size, wealth of fort, etc. Most of this came from the rumor system being put in vanilla DF. Basically at the start of a civs active season, they send out traders and war parties from their forts. Traders have almost no restrictions, fast travel times and will appear usually in the first month of the season. Invaders start out, but travel slower arriving later in the season, wont travel too far from their fort (around 10 region tiles, the left map when your embarking), have to know where you are, must be upset with you or your civ, etc. etc. the last 2 are the hardest, you can tell if your close enough to a group by seeing civ list in the world map, those listed are at least close enough by outpost or town to discover you and attack you. But if they have never heard of you, they wont attack. On top of this they may be busy attacking someone else, or they may not have any military units to send. the game now takes all of that into context.
Additionally decay undead mod works back to the point they became undead and undead armies were long undead before they embarked from their towers, so they get struck down with instant death when they appear on the map. If they aren't led by a necromancer who can revive them(and even then I've seen the necro ignore his dead undead army), well you just end up with stuck loot on the edge(sometimes off the edge) of the map. It also causes the siege tag to be stuck for a period of time.
7.known issues... I've got a suspicion of the problem and Its not Meph's tileset (well not in whole). same with your other issues. many are using LAA to get around this, but in some recent tests I've performed, I think I've nailed it down to something completely different. I'm going to run a couple of more tests on the 3 computer I have here, and see how often I can duplicate it.
8. FPS cascades, vanilla 43.03 issue. along with the new rumor system the game also performs all sorts of other world events (wars, leader successions, thefts, baby stealing, family trees, local, region, world pops,etc) on a more real time scale unlike older versions (relegated to seasonal and yearly marks whose dips were usually unnoticed). also even if you can't see them, there are creatures and things going bump in the night in the lower caverns... I noticed that disabling the masterwork vermin helps reduce FPS issues. There is a vermin that likes to attack things on cavern layer 3 that can infect madness in and kill mobs. I've opened that cavern by accident and had to DFHack that vermin out of existence due to its local pop in the millions, corpses from their infections everywhere, and to save my fort. people running vanilla DF 43.05 (the x64 version) have reported that such odd FPS cascades have diminished. hopefully MW will update to that when meph returns. Its not your PC. using LAA has shown to diminish these FPS issues also.
thanks for your input. I hope Meph returns safe and see all the work that has been done in his absence.
