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[Toady One]

The "Hair and Nails" Release is up...  I just couldn't resist finishing it up.  I've updated all of the relevant pages.  I didn't get much of a chance to test it amid all the typing, so let me know if/how it works.

[Demon]

There are some bugs...    

If you try to use the same universe again the creatures replace blood with "|" and all become tiny and lose all their body parts...  hopefully that just means that all the variables are 0 and you just didnt do restoring yet...

another bug I found was that in a hair growth description for a random race there was some code in the description rather than how the hair growth was shaped.

Other than that, it looks great!  And by the way, how much time goes by when you hit comma?

[ February 19, 2002: Message edited by: Demon ]

[Toady One]

What do you mean by code?  What did the description look like?  I couldn't find anything in the hair growth description paragraph, but it could be there or somewhere else, depending exactly on what was displayed.  I haven't been able to reproduce this one yet.

I did do restoring, but I didn't test it  Apparently there is a bug reloading the motifs or materials...  I got it to lock up over here, so it is reproducible.  This one should be very fixable.

So "period" makes you wait 100 clicks, whatever that is (maybe one second).  "Comma" on the other hand, makes you sleep for 288000 clicks which is 28800 seconds which is eight hours.

I'll try and put up bug fixes as I catch them...

[Demon]

Well, I'm trying to see it again, but apprently its working fine now...  It looked something like
BG(I dont remember)[g]:bg(some word here)[6]:Flower shaped
in the middle of the second hair growth description of the head of a random creature.

If I ever see it again, I'll be sure to write down exactaly what it says...

[Toady One]

That was enough -- I found it...  it was in the pattern descriptions.  One of those errors caused by using the "Find and Replace" command one to many times (so it replaced some text by a bit of code.

I'm still working on the other one.  I found one problem with the loading procedure, but apparently it wasn't enough to fix the problem.

[Toady One]

I think I've fixed everything.  At least I found another error (this time it had to do with how mammal materials are stored -- the color variations are stored in a different place than the rest of the material parameters, but the material parameter structure still had the old color variable.  These variables weren't initialized since I didn't use them, but the program still tried to save and load them.).

I'm trying to upload a new version now, but WSFTP/the website/my connection is/are being annoying.  It should be up shortly.

[Toady One]

The new version is up.

There is still a slight error -- the gaseous weight compared to air wasn't initialized for creature materials, so it will most likely say "when in a gaseous state, this material is weightless."  It should read "this material is much heavier than air" for all of the creature materials.  In game terms this would have the effect of making a vaporized creature billow close to the ground after it is disintegrated, rather than diffusing into the atmosphere...  I'm not sure what would really happen, but the fog effect would be more amusing I think.  I guess the tissues would actually break down into their constituents, some of which would actually be lighter than air...  then there's temperature to worry about as well, since the constituents would most likely be hotter than the surrounding air...  and flash points and all that...  uck...

[Harlander]

The new additions to the game are pretty cool. I've had some amusing moments with the new races, like slicing dwarves into pieces with a titan.. then one got in a lucky stab, and the titan spent the next half-hour being stabbed to death by little folk. After many, many attacks in which the titan's eyes, then its lung, were skewered, an incredibly sly strike severed its spine. After one character's death, I saw a wounded, stunned leprechaun regain consciousness, scream in pain and pass out.

The descriptions of creatures are interesting (melting point of flesh? Yum) although some of them are a little difficult to comprehend, I think because they're described in more exacting detail than one would usually describe, say, a toe. I think some of the detail is a bit excessive in most situations (I mean like showing the shape and colour of individual hairs - a description of the overall fur (or hair) effect could make more sense)

[Toady One]

You were out killing leprechauns?  What has the world come to...

Yeah, I agree about the descriptions.  While I was working on them, I saw that when I said I'd get the descriptions up to a "certain quality level" for this release that this would mean over-done instead of under-done.  It's easy, though time-consuming, to take a lot of information and just splatter it on the screen.  It will be harder to distill the information into a coherent form.

The hair, as you point out, is one of the best examples of this.  I think it was necessary to go overboard on body parts within the code -- now it is trivial to have a witch say "go get me a curly red hair...  it doesn't matter which animal it comes from," and that's a good step forward.  In addition, if I find a solitary hair on the ground, I'd want a description like this since it would exist in isolation from the other 300 paragraphs in a species description.  However, I still have to figure out how to take the 8 different types of hair that sometimes occur simultaneously on a mammal's face and say "this creature has long whiskers and red eyebrows."

I have some ideas...  perhaps each possible feature in the mammal definition will have an "unusualness"/"interest"/"danger" factor assigned to it, and the three or five most prominent things which occur in a given species will be moved up to a higher description level.  That way, you can access the creature description and get a good overall feel of it, but if you want the nuts-and-bolts, you can get them too.  Maybe if you try for the nuts-and-bolts on an actively attacking creature it will take some time, but I'd have to figure out how to do that right.  The nuts-and-bolts of a far away creature should be inaccessible, unless you have excellent vision or prior knowledge.

I had a titan with wounded 579 times by Drooling Creepers (wolf-sized quadrapeds).  There were a few dents on my skull, but I never got brained.  I had to quit to get back to programming  

[ February 19, 2002: Message edited by: Toady One ]

[Zonk]

i think:

titans should be stronger(normal strenght for their size,not "weak"as the description says")
gecko-man should have some differences from human aside being reptile
cyclops(random race)should have one eye,bears should be bigger,bulls should have horn..i know it's normal random races have
bug

for the rest

IT'S COOL!!

when will we have the new version with the new interface?