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[Doomduckie]

Or just really cool cave complexes and later the potential for huge cities- that's actually probably a prereq of the Bustling Town arc and the Army Arc (because you'd need large populations to make good armies/caravans from the actual civ instead of popped out of nowhere).

Huge cities would be awesome in the future- imagine playing as an urban thief or an assassin hired to kill nobles by other nobles and never leaving the huge capitol city with a population of 10s of thousands. DORFS CREED.

[catfry]

I had a thought for dwarf mode combat logs. Maybe if you want to watch a specific battle, you can pause with the screen centered on the battle, and then use the one step (.) option to move a turn. I don't know the relation between the game's turn, and the combatant's turn, so it's just a suggestion.

Or in-game control over the FPS to go into 'slow-mo' while a fight was going on...

Yeah, the thing that we all want to do, I think, is to learn what is actually going on in the battle as it happens. We want to see what gets stabbed by who and how badly the guts are being torn by that spear, during the action.
The problem is there will be too much information if the game is allowed to run normally so some sort of special circumstance handling of time flow during a battle might be a solution.
Of course it might get annoying if the game default will be to pause everytime somebody gets hurt in the same way its annoying with mineral dicoveries all the time.
But an option to enable 'adventure style' time flow where the game pauses, generates a combat report of what battle action just happened, and prompts the user to resume might work.
Isn't some of all the graffic work by Baughn also enabling the option of transparency of text? Maybe some more text could be diplayed on the screen without it being too obtrusive. 

[Larington]

Hmm, perhaps in addition to the time step button when game is paused you also have a 'combat time' key press, where it then starts giving a blow-by-blow account in your announcements info instead of the usual xx has been slain message (And doesn't auto pause at each blow)? Of course there'd be all sorts of issues with working out what tick rate would be appropriate based on the performance of the computer running the client.

[Areyar]

exposing several init settings in the titlescreen options would be a good start.
even if it would require exiting the current game, not all people will be savvy enough to find the file manually and edit it in a meaningful way.

--
a sensitivity setting for discoveries is a good idea. same idea as the job cancel messages or a list in which messages can be switched individually?

[Inquisitor Saturn]

Maybe you could set a zone where you see all the combat that takes place within that zone, and with the option for it to always be on or for it to only show on step-through?

[Osmosis Jones]

How about you just have another panel, like the (b)uild menu or somesuch. However, instead of containing the list of options, it displays the current battle report. Like a normal menu, this pauses the game, but it also includes the option to step the time forward.

[Footkerchief]

Hm, let's see... "Subterranean Creatures" is only 3 shades of blue away from completion, while "Standard Creatures" is more like 5 shades away.   Based on Toady's past rate of color change during non-countdowns, I can conclusively predict a May 16th release.

[Strife26]

Thank you Toady. Looking at this, I realize how much this next update will have. And I never actually looked at the list. Just the quotes of it.

The only way that release could be better is if it could be in time for my birthday.  Which it won't

Oh well!

[Tormy]

Or just really cool cave complexes and later the potential for huge cities- that's actually probably a prereq of the Bustling Town arc and the Army Arc (because you'd need large populations to make good armies/caravans from the actual civ instead of popped out of nowhere).

Huge cities would be awesome in the future- imagine playing as an urban thief or an assassin hired to kill nobles by other nobles and never leaving the huge capitol city with a population of 10s of thousands. DORFS CREED.

Yep, I agree, huge cities would be awesome to have. Perhaps capitals should occupy multiple world map squares for example.

[Granite26]

IMHO:

Nobody really wants to see the full combat log scrolling, but they DO want to see hits pop up.  Urist slashes Cog on the left upper buttock, cutting through skin and flesh and hitting bone. Kind of thing.  4-5 lines of semi-trans text on the bottom of the screen, scrolling up.

Combat time could just be a second FPS cap in the ini file.  NormalFPS, CombatFPS, with a button press to cycle through the options (Maybe make it generic so that people could define as many different FPS caps as they wanted).

Nothing else would have to change:  If you didn't want to see the combat, just let the messages scroll up too fast to read.  If you want more detail, pause and go to the full logs.  It's the best of all worlds...

[catfry]

It might just work. If I understand you right though combat msgs would completely spam the message log drowning out ordinary msgs. This is a somehwta ordinary thing in the game though, for example cancellation msgs can come hundreds at a time, and if you forbid outdoors the log also get filled with 'cannot reach site' or whatever that message is.

[catfry]

Wounds/Combat (last changed Jan 23)
[spoiler]

• Updating material spatter display
• Updating snow-covered building colors
• Updating blood spatter on weapons/clothing during wounds
• Updating bleeding/pain during weapon twists
• Updating HFS wound-related stuff
• Updating wrestling shakes
• Updating wrestling tear-aways
• Updating strangulation
• Updating joint-lock breaks
• Updating gouge damage
• Updating some spatter removal code

I belive Dwarf Fortress is the one game in the world where we get updated on the progress to this level. Toady you are a riot.
So joint-lock breaks are done in an hour or so, which of the light blues comes next? Let's start a betting pool! I bet 5 ecu's on wrestling shakes!

[Jurph]

shouldnt all this kind of stuff be engravable?

in granite of the year 495 urist mcuristurist the axedwarf battled gobby gob gob the goblin during the 12731678th siege of smellypeaks
urist stabbed gobby in the guts, gobby ripped off urists arm, urist decapitated gobby etc.

 it all seems like the kind of thing that dwarves would "write" about, with the major points covered. would sure make for more interesting engravings than yet more masterful depictions of squares

I would think the engraving would be a depiction of a single line from a combat log, since engravings are static in time.  I can imagine combat logs being parsed into a very short summary of a battle, and possibly being entered into the available pool of legends.  For example, one day of a very famous battle might be distilled by all but the most historically-minded dwarves as:

In 2nd Malachite of 1863, Cog Chamberlain's Squad "The Mains of Iron" killed 30 goblins
In 3rd Malachite of 1863, the Squad "The Fences of Pickett" was annhihilated!

So each dwarf might be remembered for one action in a battle - one of his thirty kills, for example, but the details of that kill would be part of the story.  You take that action, pair it with a little more information about the fight (say, the outcome from the combat log) and it makes a nice little history lesson:

The engraving is a masterful image of a dwarf and a goblin.  The dwarf is shooting the goblin in the eye with a crossbow.  This relates to Cog Battletoad slaying the goblin swordmaster Nizhniy Tagil in the battle of Boatmurdered in Felsite of 208, with the legendary iron crossbow The Flames of Iron.  The goblins fled the field of battle!

This would require creating a second layer of legends.  The top layer would be "Battle of Boatmurdered, Felsite 208 - goblins fled the field of battle" but there would be a sub-legend for each of the following events:

• Death of a legendary dwarf
• Death of a legendary foe
• Naming of a weapon
• Death of a dwarf holding a named weapon
• Death of a megabeast
• The death of any dwarf who has made more than N kills already in the battle
• The death of any foe who has killed more than N dwarves already
• Some critical hits ("Oy, did you see that?!  I'll be telling my grandkids about that one.")

If the events can get scores for importance, then the legend of a given battle would include only the top 25 or so scores, giving engravers a huge library of events to choose from.  If the engraver has some latitude to adjust scores (for personal friends or dwarves of the same faith) then you could end up with engravers distorting history based on their unique biases.  Hrmm.  Maybe this belongs in the suggestions board instead of here.

[SirHoneyBadger]

So add it 

This thread is getting pretty crowded with ideas, anyway. Not that that's a bad thing, but hopefully something productive can come from them.

[Mephansteras]

Ideas are good, yes, but I think we should move any ideas that get more then a few posts over to the suggestions forum. That way this thread won't get too cluttered and the ideas can get their fair share of thought put into them. Otherwise I imagine a lot of ideas would die just because everyone started talking about the next day's dev notes.