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That's right

That is right

[Taal]

Do you guys know about the remote play application?
http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=1315

It allowed users to play Dwarf fortress through the application on there computer, and others through the internet or a network. In a sense Multiplayer as long as only one person played it at a time. However you could only control DF using keyboard control, no mouse input (I never use the mouse anyway).

If you guys were to utilize the same system (It's open source) or a similar system, you might be able to allow gameplay through your program.

DF in Isometric view.

Edit:

Also, as with Macro-Writing Programs, I know that commands can be passed back to Dwarf Fortress program as well.

Turns out you do.

[DennyTom]

Can anyone, PLEASE, show screenshots of the following (currently not having enough time to do it myself):

- cave in
- world on fire or fireball or dragons breath
- waterfall

Thank you very much

[AlienChickenPie]

Is it currently possible to add units to these rendered maps? IIRC, this and two of the earlier isometric viewers do not have the feature, but I vaguely remember a 3D viewer that was able to display dwarves in a limited manner.
Edit: This program is awesome. I just wish it could have a larger draw area.

Scenes from SparkGear 6
Magma flood

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The pumps are represented by pairs of trees for some reason.
Power Conduits

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The conduits are filled with yellow boxes that represent axles and gears. These conduits pass power from the water wheel generator complex (currently frozen solid) to a pump stack that supplies magma to the magma flooder pictured above, and also to a water pump that seems to go nowhere.
Magma Death Road

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The road is partially visible in the previous picture. Enemies enter through a long ramp, and then get trapped when a magma reservoir is emptied on their heads. Ample drainage is provided.
Magma Showers

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The magma conduit pictured feeds two separate magma showers. The one on the left is currently flooded. Unseen in this rendering, a donkey is burning to death inside. The three objects inside are steel chains. Animals can be chained to lure enemies into the showers, and the chains can also be defined as a prison, to allow for a simple execution chamber.

[Deon]

So...

the name?  Stone sense?

It's kind of...

taken.

Really.  For over a year.

This is the first thing I thought when I looked at the thread name. I thought you re-released your old program .

Anyway, good work! Pick a suitable name and it's great. I like the design of the visual part.

[Solifuge]

Didn't mean to infringe on the name when I proposed it; Stonesense was chosen in reference to the Gold Dwarf Racial Power in D&D, which allowed them to detect nuanced details about Stonework and Carven Halls. I do like the sound of it too. Do you have an issue with sharing the name, since both are already taken by TSR/Forgotten Realms?

[peterix]

A little suggestion:

Code: [Select]

pointer_x_pos         == 0x05662B4
pointer_y_pos         == 0x05662B8
pointer_z_pos         == 0x05662BC
window_x_pos          == 0x09A060C
window_y_pos          == 0x09CE6B8
window_z_pos          == 0x09CE694
Use these. Unfortunately don't have linux addresses. Now that i think about it, this should go to DFHACK?

Yes, this should go to dfhack. What version is it for?

[cooz]

Hey,
this program's just awsome! I'm waiting for menus so we can actually play DF in it

My only concern are objects hidden behind walls, 90 degree rotation will probably fix it somehow, but i had another idea...

I modified objects.pcx so walls have half of its original height and i think it works quite well:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

here beds and cupboards are almost fully visible, but I'm aware that sometimes it could look not so right.
Maybe at some point key bind to toggle full/half walls height would be solution for that.


Oh, and here's problem with not visible ground edge - i think black border would do the trick.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Ampersand]

I'm not sure I like what some of you guys are saying. Toady has said several times that he is very uncomfortable with having third party full on interfaces. He doesn't want to have to worry about modifying Dwarf Fortress to meet the demands of the interface, among other things.

[DennyTom]

I do not get that argument - if he does not want to modify game to meet demands of third party interface, then he will not modify it. It is his game after all.

[dyze]

now THIS is the way df is supposed to look!

[Christes]

It actually reminds me a bit of X-COM.

Urist McHunter cancels hunt: interrupted by Ethereal
Urist McHunter has been struck down

[tefalo]

Oh my god...

You do realize that you have created the concept for one of the most epic crossovers now, do you?

[Christes]

I'd be surprised if no has made an x-com mod yet, actually.

[Footkerchief]

Is there any support planned for texture transparency and colorizing?  Also, this is probably more of a general DFHack question, but what's going to be done in the next version when the basic MATGLOSS types (wood, metal, stone, etc.) no longer exist?  There'll still be helper tags like [WOOD] in the material definitions, but they won't be indexed on a predictable basis.

I'm not sure I like what some of you guys are saying. Toady has said several times that he is very uncomfortable with having third party full on interfaces. He doesn't want to have to worry about modifying Dwarf Fortress to meet the demands of the interface, among other things.

I do not get that argument - if he does not want to modify game to meet demands of third party interface, then he will not modify it. It is his game after all.

Spoiler: long Toadquotes on the subject (click to show/hide)

Somebody reported a post in this thread...  it didn't really matter which one.  A bit of chilling would be good.  There are a few people that have failed to chill.  There are quite a few statements here I'd respond to in person myself, and some very sharply, but internet discussions are more fragile and more prone to derailment.  So I'll try to stick to what seems to be the core of the matter.

Which for me (and granted, I'm picking a recent post -- I've read the thread, but don't remember when this came up first in this thread) is along the lines of what Jamuk said.  I'm being asked to assume risk.  I don't accept assessments of the risk as extraordinarily slight -- I've seen no sound basis for those assessments here.  I also don't think the currently proposed licensing/obfuscation method of putting the cat back into the bag would work -- with a principal downside being that it requires me to turn into an asshole who, after initially sanctioning the process, breaks everything that people have been working on.  Publishing an API and then trying to reel it back in just seems completely unworkable and irresponsible to me.  So the point is to assess risk upfront and then make a decision I can live with.

And right now, I have no idea what would happen.  This isn't the same as leaving my math job or adding the Z coordinate.  The first was a decision I had to make personally for my quality of life, and the second was a calculated risk which I didn't really have strong misgivings about (though some people are still pro-2D version, I think I can get most of them what they want over time in terms of gameplay difficulty, etc., though it'll never feel like it's quite on that rail again most likely).  Do I accept that third parties could improve the interface?  Of course.  Do I think I could do better than a third party myself, even over time?  No, not at all, though I can certainly improve on what I've got now to a large degree even without external input (which I, of course, love to receive).  So, initially, there's some attraction to the third party interface idea.

However, reflecting on the position I'd be in, there are things not to like about it.  How many threads were there about broken utilities when this version came out?  If more than half the player base comes in off a third party interface (and given how much the current interface sucks, and how much it is a source of first time downloaders dropping the game, this is not only imaginable, it is very, very likely), how would it be if it broke at each release?  There's no way to mitigate that without my direct involvement -- imagine a release down the line where you can suddenly move dwarven armies around on the world map, with a tactical view and various options.  That interface can't write itself, and it wouldn't be a quick patch, though certainly dedicated people, assuming that about whoever is maintaining the front-end at that time, can pull things together rapidly.  The pressure on me to work directly with them to get the interface out at the same time as the game itself would likely be immense and disruptive, given what little evidence we have from broken utilities.  That's not to say that I often get requests to work with utility writers (other than from the writers themselves, who I generally accommodate), but this would be at a different order of magnitude.

So what's the exact risk there then?  First, I don't want to work with other people.  So, assuming I don't do that, there's now a constant amount of pressure on me and a general disruption in the forums.  The latter could be mitigated with some announcements/guidelines, etc., but the pressure wouldn't go away.  Monetarily, it's impossible to say what on earth would happen, but if I supported the third party interface directly pre-release, I'd likely make more money, but I'd be unhappy.  If I didn't support it directly, but it was there, I'd still likely make more money, but I'd be unhappy.  That's not to say that I don't want to grow the audience and allow more people play the game, but I want to do it in a way with which I feel satisfied, even if that ends up being slower or just plain worse than a hypothetical third party alternative.  If someone, as a potential donor, thinks that's unreasonably selfish, that person shouldn't send me any more money than he or she thinks I've deserved for his or her enjoyment, just like everybody else.  Despite my dedication to this project, I'm unwilling to sacrifice my enjoyment of working on it for anything, including its quality or even its future release if it comes down to that.  That should be plainly obvious.  I'm not a slave.  Of course I do some things I don't like working on, with the interface and more.  I fulfill requests for features I'm not going to use myself.  However, again, the current proposal is of a different order of magnitude, with the potential of ruining it for me, and the end result is completely uncertain.

Given what I've seen here and there, it seems like a full third party interface might develop even without my involvement (rather than the various utilities we have now), but in that case, despite the same issues that might come up, at least it won't be a situation of my own creation that I feel a strong obligation to deal with, although the pressure would still be there.

Incidentally, in the proposed model, I still don't think I'd be able to bring code back in to the core project -- the first Kobold Quest port attempt showed that people bringing in code don't necessarily check or care about the licenses of the code they are swiping, and I can't assume that responsibility for them (it has stuff from Wine which shouldn't have been there).  Problems come up here with tilesets and so on too -- I know there've been a few cases where a contributor used somebody else's art and then it was put in a game, causing some legal trouble, though I don't have them at my immediate disposal.

I may have missed a lot, both problems I'm not thinking of and ways to handle them, since this gets complicated and is, due to lack of information, somewhat unspecified, but that's what I've got right now.

I tried hard to put myself in your shoes and see things from your point of view, but apparently I failed to understand one thing (correct me if I'm wrong): the general atmosphere of the forums and feedback you receive from players is an integral part of your happiness. I was imagining that you could just let the mess settle down by itself after every release, but since I am not this forum's moderator, I can't really tell how it feels to have a big mess of threads about stuff not working.

It generally sucks to have a bunch of people complaining that things don't work, especially when there's something I can do about, that is, work with the interface modders more closely, having in this scenario sanctioned third party interfaces and released a public API.  It's the pressure that would make me unhappy.  It's good when the forum people are happy, but that wasn't what I was getting at so much.

When you speak of pressure, are you picturing direct pressure? I have a hard time imagining people screaming at you on the forums, except maybe for the occasional moron that can be ignored. Wouldn't people rather be putting pressure on the third-party developers to update their interface ASAP? But maybe you'd feel pressure nevertheless because you dislike seeing that people cannot play the game.

There would be direct pressure on me to work with third party developers -- this isn't about screaming.  This thread itself is direct pressure to work with third party developers (or at least get the ball rolling).  That isn't to say I disagree about you posting it.  I'm simply stating what it is, and I think that yes, there'd be a lot more of this, a lot more I'd have to reply to, and a lot of...  pressure.  Additionally, I'm not just talking about external pressure, in fact, principally not -- having created the situation, I would feel some obligation to make it run as smoothly as possible, and I would rapidly become irritated by this, because it's some of my least favorite kinds of work.

One thing I'd like to point out, though, is that you seem to think that a single interface, "The front-end", would come out of third-party development. Even though that's possible, open-source usually seems to bring diversity (look at the number of linux distros), especially in a single-player game where people don't have to use compatible clients, so they can play together. So I think we'd likely see an improved ascii client, a 2d tiles client, an isometric client, a 3d client, and maybe several of each one. In my view it would distribute the uproar, so that at least not everybody would be complaining about the same thing  . But I don't know if you see that as a relief.
[emphasis added]

He he, of course not.  It's worse actually -- more parties to work with.

Lastly, I may have a good way of mitigating the breakage of third-party clients at every release, without requiring your direct involvement. Assuming that you develop your own open-source interface at the same time as your closed-source server, you would likely publish your interface changes to a public SVN server. You would probably do it incrementally, at the rate of one or several commits a day - akin to backing up your work whenever you've made a step. In that case, you can bet that enthusiastic developers will watch those changes keenly, to see what's going on with the interface. This means that third-party client makers will already know that moving "dwarven armies around on the world map, with a tactical view and various options" is coming for the next version (from your very detailed dev notes), so they'll have time to plan which kind of interface they want to provide for that. And since they'll see the necessary code changes evolve gradually, because you'll always need an up-to-date interface for bugfixing, they'll be able to follow closely your development. They might have to adapt to your last minute changes, but otherwise I believe that the days of bugfixing prior to release could be enough for some of them to finalize their clients on time.
Now of course, you have to feel comfortable with that way of working.

Yeah, this somewhat mitigates breakage with those third parties that are active and approaching the situation with some dedication, but the trade-off of working with my day-to-day changes under that sort of scrutiny is definitely a minus for me, and I don't think it could really happen in a vacuum without questions about changes and so on, or without me feeling like I have to provide some sort of documentation as I add things.  I don't know if that sounds like quibbling, but I can't easily overstate how much I hate managing code or collaborating on code or anything along those lines.

Additionally, I think breakages would still happen, especially when staff leave projects hanging (work obligations, got tired of it, vacations, etc.), and it wouldn't change the fundamental situation I'm imagining, although in the case of project abandonment or delays with staffing, where there isn't pressure to work with the (missing) people in question, it's more the pressure to incorporate changes back into the base API, which as I stated in my previous long post, I wouldn't be able to do without potential legal problems.


I don't mean to write as if I'm sure about any of this, but once I drop this bomb in my project, I can see every day becoming "oh man, what a goddamn hassle" instead of what I've got now, which has less of that.  Again, I think the OP is justified in starting this thread, so I'm not raising that as an issue, but I've also spent some hours in here, reading posts and composing these replies.  That stuff just starts to magnify, and I'll either end up ignoring people I don't feel like I should be ignoring, or not ignoring people to the detriment of the core game itself and my own well-being.

What I would like to hear from Toady is what kind of graphics he has in mind for when he gets to the interface overhaul. That way we could at least prepare some sprites ahead of time and have nearly complete graphics sets as soon as the version with the new interface comes out. I personally waste a lot of my free time doodling in GIMP, so I might as well do something useful.

Depending on the stage of the interface overhaul, ultimately I'm going to be support 2D tilesets (probably in dimensions of multiples of 4 because I'm lazy with image file headers).  So if you want to draw up some 32x32s or something, you won't be wasting your time, I think.  It should be fairly straightforward to support single z-slice isometric stuff as well, once I get that going, since I'd just have to change the print locations and print order, though transparency decisions are probably annoying, and it's slightly more annoying to get multilayer isometric stuff going, since people are going to want various options about display there, so I don't really have a clear opinion on the future of isometric.  The support for a resizeable viewport/window is definite, but nothing has been decided on layering there (for instance, critters walking over grass tiles, that kind of thing -- people will want more and more out of this system, such as inventory and wound displays, and I'm not sure where lines will be drawn, or where it will bog down, anyway).

yeah but did the whole negativy and hostility bring anything beneficial here?

What did it do beneficial? It finally caused Toady to step in and give us a detailed explanation of his point of view thus I guess the best way to get him to respond is to insult one another. Or just report posts.

In case you weren't joking, I wouldn't overstate the value of the report.  I was already following this thread and was planning a reply.  The report got me to come in a day early or so, since things were starting to get sort of silly.  And they still are.

What to take away from the above?  As far as I can tell, he's a little uncomfortable with visualizers, he'd be more uncomfortable with a full-on third party interface, and he'd be really uncomfortable with directly providing support for such an interface.  However, he also seems to understand that it's inevitable that people will at least try, and won't resent them doing so.

Personally I think it's somewhat irrelevant since the interface idea is doomed, barring some very major breakthroughs in memhacking menu states etc.

[DennyTom]

I have made three simple mockups solving problem with dificult recognition of edges.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)