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[Toady One]

The in-game manual is "done" and usable, although it will benefit from input and I will keep improving it.  The html version awaits some scripty stuff that could be done sooner or later depending on the schedule of X.  I think he's on a boat or something.  A quant is involved.

[Gezol]

See, this board is educational. I had never heard the word "quant" before, and having looked it up, I am now totally ready if it ever comes up in conversation. Mind you, I'm not sure when I'll be having a conversation about barges, but when it does happen, I'm totally ready.

In any case, "quant" is a fun word to say. Quant quant quant quant.

So, uh, yeah, dwarves. Boats might be a fun bloat, though I imagine they would take a fair amount of work to implement.

[Toady One]

TT taught Eagleon a word on the irc channel a few days ago.  I won't repeat it.

We'd thought about making large underground lakes and you could build platforms on them or something.  Rafts would be fun, but I'd hate to code moving goods around on ferries, since there'd be a lot to think about...

Bug fixing today.  Traumatic, but I managed to get the ones I was working on.

[DungeonHunter]

Do you have sometimes trouble to fix bugs because it's so hard to reproduce the circumstances under which the bugs appear? One time I didn't want to change the code (boosting player stats etc.) just to get to a point in the early game where a bug was. I didn't really realize it by that time, but it took me two hours to get to the point without dieing just to see that the problem has been fixed...

[Toady One]

Yeah, bugs that occur in rare circumstances or only intermittently have been the most frustrating kind.  Often you'll have to concede and change the code to create the circumstances you want -- but sometimes that makes the bug go away, until you change it back...  or when you change the code, you introduce another bug without knowing it...  bug-fixing is an arduous process, although it becomes faster with time.  It's easier if your compiler has some tools that can help you, or if there are tools available (free, hopefully) that you can use in conjunction with the compiler.  To me, programming itself is quite annoying, but it's nice when something is finally up and working.

[Captain_Action]

I was wondering Toady, have you played any of the following games?

Sims (1 or 2)
Dungeon Keeper (1 or 2)
Evil genius
Majesty

[Toady One]

I've never played the Sims, although I think I saw TT play the first one once.  I played Dungeon
Keeper 1 a bit.  I haven't heard of Evil Genius.  I'll probably look it up tomorrow now that you've mentioned it (it's 4am now!).

X suggested Majesty a while back, and I went through some of it, though I got stuck on some of the scenarios.  It was a neat idea though.

Are you asking in this thread because of the overlaps with the Dwarf stuff?

[DungeonHunter]

How many lines of code does your sourcecode have? I guess pretty damn much for it doesn't seem to me that there are any external flatfiles or sth. (I might be wrong though).

[Ancient_Sleeping_Dude_Rei]

Well, those 4 games can really be good for explaining DF, xept the sims one. Now I shall activate the dreaded Point-By-Point-Explanation!

Sims 1-2: Having to care for the moods of your sims (dwarves), building them a home (fortress) and furnishing it (with only a bed and a cabinet)!

Dungeon Keeper 1-2: REALLY fits in, since you are doing pretty much the exact same thing. Deep below the earth you are digging out a dungeon (fortress) which your evil creatures (dwarves) inhabit. They range from imps (miners) to more offensive ones like warlocks (marksmen), mistresses (axedwarf) and those fancy dark angels (Elite Swordsman), can't remember their names. Also all the creatures have some sort of job in the dungeon, for example the warlocks go to the library to research while trolls (blacksmiths) go to the smithy to create doors and traps. And hey, even the color of the tiles you've marked for digging is the same as in DF!

Evil Genius: Well, I think they made a game about being a supervillain (with minions) loosely based on Dungeon Keeper, since it's the same, dig into a mountain, build a stronghold of evil, destroy the invading forces of good. But the trap system is SO much cooler  

Majesty: You build a city (not underground though) and you recruit heroes to inhabit it. However your control of the heroes are VERY limited, since you can basically only place an exploration flag (first hero to reach this place gets gold!) and bounty flags on monsters. That's it. No more control. They just wander your city when they aren't to interested in the flags, spending their money in inns or buying better gear, and you collect taxes from all the stuff that goes on. The forces of evil are always walking the wilderness though... or invading! Ever been invaded by 30 goblins of various types that all have an immunity to magic spells of mass goblinoid destruction?

And this concludes the PBPE. Hope you didn't suffer too much.

[Toady One]

I'm not sure what a flatfile or sth is, but I have lots of external data files.  There could stand to be some more, but creatures, subtypes of items, language, gems, etc. are all in txt files (which are processed and compressed).  Right now the source itself is hovering around 235000 lines.

Of course, the Dungeon Keeper parallel only goes so far, so I wouldn't say "exactly the same thing", since DF doesn't follow either a "campaign", "scenario" or "sandbox" format.  The units don't have fixed types, there isn't any personal influence (you can't pick things up) etc, the goals are different, and on and on.  The dig color is interesting though.  Something about brown is diggish.  Must be the earthiness of it.  I only had 16 colors to choose from, and they had millions, yet brown it was.  I wasn't thinking of DK at all when I started, although I was reminded of it after a while.   Dwarves was originally like Mutant Miner, which I didn't release, which itself could be called...  an ASCII cross of Digdug and VGA Miner, if you wanna force games to have predecessors.  I can see why people think that way, since many commercial games are purely derived from prior offerings (and movies, and music...).  Dwarves was more like "okay, so mutant miner was fine, but when I added more miners it was too slow...  but I'll try again, since I really like the image of digging away at a cliff face...  what else mines...  dwarves mine...  yeah, it's another fantasy game, but so what...  so we'll have them go into a mountain and like, find $ symbols and pockets of monsters like in the miner game...  yeah, that sounds fun...  real-time this time...  but how do you get more dwarves...  do they eat?...  and dwarves like to make things..."  I thought like that for a few days, trying to flesh it out, then I had another idea, called up TT, and we talked for another 2 days almost uninterrupted seeing if it would all work...  we're still working from those plans more or less.  As far as other game inspirations are concerned, when you are working with a spatial text game like this, there are so many roguelike examples floating around that it's hard to avoid them, so a lot of my lazier display decisions have fallen back on what has been done previously, and I've used D's for some things and &'s for others as a kind of tribute.  I think you probably have to go back to the early 90s and before to find the games that actually influenced my outlook.  As it stands, I already have more game ideas written down than I can do in my life.

[Ancient_Sleeping_Dude_Rei]

Well of course it's different from Dungeon Keeper, but still, there ARE alot of similarities. Seriously though, the first of the new (well, newish) sets of the dwarven movies, when you dug into the mountain the first time, instantly I thought "dungeon keeper", "dungeon keeper 2", "evil genius" and finally "I wish there were more games like those I could play".

And let's congratulate me for another first post on the page award  

Also, about the format about campaign, scenario etc etc. I guess the whole game is a mix between campaign and sandbox from what I've heard. Also, I looked up that VGA Miner on google, and from the top link I checked the game (if I saw the right one) looks alot like a newer game by xgenstudios called Motherload. Same thing, you dig down, find minerals, fly up to the surface and sell said minerals.

Hmmmm, more games than you can do in your life, ey? We need... Toady Clones!

[Captain_Action]

Yeah, I saw some overlaps. But I'm glad that you've haven't played most of the games on the list. It shows that you are innovating, not merely copying (as I would've   :roll: )

I've notice you are starting up with civs on your to do list.

You might want to read this : http://www.mu.ranter.net/theory/printversion.html

It's VERY LONG, but is has alot good info. There in the Food Basis section (about 1/3 down) is the good stuff.

[ July 07, 2006: Message edited by: Captain_Action ]

[Toady One]

Hrm.  I'm not sure what the end result would be.  Reading that, it seems that while having a high concentration of essentially pointless characters might be realistic and believable, it dilutes an RPG, unless interacting with them is as interesting as interacting with nobles, merchants, soldiers, etc.  Ultima 4 would have been boring if most of the world were a farm and 9/10 NPCs were a farmer.  Once you've decided to have "too many" non-farmers, trying to cater to believability by adding magical farming or jungle living to explain everything etc is a similar problem, since it restricts the setting.  The issue doesn't stem simply from designers being unimaginative as the author states, though I understand why someone would say that in general.  Thinking about the dwarf fortress system, the dwarves themselves fall into a category the author didn't discuss (maybe I missed it), which is "the farmers only eat once every few weeks, so low food output is fine".  This isn't realistic, but it makes the game fun, rather than being a strict farming sim.  Time passes quickly, and you'd get a flash-induced seizure if they had to eat every day, and if you slowed down time, then nothing would happen in the larger world while you played.  I like making games complicated, but there's still escapism and suspension of disbelief there.  In a way, if somebody likes reality that much, they probably wouldn't play games at all, so it seems like a contradictory philosophy, unless they are specifically interested in medieval times as a historical setting.

As I add in farms and so on in the larger world, I'll probably have too few farmers, not out of ignorance, but as a design choice.  That's still a long way off though -- I'm currently doing very simple things.  Once the game is posted (in a month!), we can look at everything and discuss it again.  I don't think I'm closing very many options the way I'm currently setting things up.

[X]

I wrote something about reality in games once... As I was like 14 at the time, it might be best not dug-up.

I promise a picture of a quant pole and the manual-online soonishish though.

X

[Captain_Action]

Nope, you didn't miss anything. The food portion was completely about humans and maybe kobolds. If kobolds fit into the hunter-gatherer type.

As for the dwarves, the plant/fungi planted seemed to be very low maintaince. Further more, the dwarves seem to understand the concept of irragation. Which would make sense in an underground envoirment.

I recall there was a bloat about storing too much food, roach infestations perhaps? Will they only go for stored/rotting food. Or will the bugs go after the planted crops too?