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[Martin]

What about liquids? Does opening a tunnel and then flooding it to prevent entry count as blocking?

Is water a construction or is it a natural feature? Mining accidents will happen, you know.

What about the economic stone mod though? I don't know how the economic stone stuff works in vanilla though, so I don't know how much different it is.

I'm okay with economic stone mod since it only affects the game interface. For the same reason, macros and such are fine as I understand they're now in the d40# chain that are almost certain to become standard features.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

I think that the new version actually breaks all the mods for the most part.

[smjjames]

Graphics sets should be ok, I think.

In any case, Mike Mayday will probably get a new version out for the release pretty quickly. We'll have to see whether his updated graphics pack will change anything besides the graphics and the economic stone mod.

As for the cat mouth thing you mentioned earlier, Toady fixed the cat mouth bug, so we won't need the current fix that we have now. In fact, it probably wouldn't even work with all the tissue and material stuff.

[Moontayle]

Too late to give this a shot? If the release comes out next week as Toady says then I'll have two full weekends of 12 hour work days in which to do this. Just me, a room full of computers, and Dwarf Fortress. For 48 total hours.

[Solifuge]

I also heard brief mentions that all the methods players have heretofor used to make their fortress impenetrable have been rendered obsolete by REDACTED.

I'm anticipating Siege Towers, Sappers, Tunnelers, or the like, though I'm not 100% certain. Dragons might be flighted now too, since he said that flier logic was fixed for beastman sieges.

If so, the Pathing requirement might be annulled?

[Martin]

The rules are certainly open to change once we see the game - as are the goals (part of the reason I haven't posted them). If invaders are able to take down constructions in a meaningful way then certainly a rule change would be in order. I don't consider the few creatures with buildingdestroyer tags to be meaningful at this stage - though the equivalent to Orc mod with war elephants might be enough to change my mind. Flighted dragons would not be enough to change the rule since, among other things, they have buildingdestroyer tag already.

We'll see what the means for subterranean critters as well so we might even get different rules for above and below. Like I said, when the goals are revealed, the anti-turtle rules will seem more apparent.

As to the timing of all of this, Toady has thrown a small wrench in the works. Looks like we're about a week out, which is just fine for me, but releasing Windows-only at first might be a problem for the players. I'm on a Mac but I have a Windows partition, so that's no biggie to get things rolling. No matter how we do this, players that don't have a Windows machine are going to be at a bit of a disadvantage. If we delay, I have no doubt that some people will fire up a fort and gain a fair bit of experience on those that have to wait, so I think we'll just start straight out and perhaps have to extend the challenge a week for those other players. I'd propose a further honor-system rule here: Could we have two deadlines? One for people playing on Windows that can start straight out, and one delayed by n days for Mac/Linux players based on how long they have to wait to start? That way everyone gets the same amount of play time?

Montayle added as a player.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

We could set a longer time period and just say that you stop at 3 weeks real playtime and turn it in trusting people to be honest, but really it comes down to what Toady means by "Delayed" because the first release also will not have the improvements from the 40d# series so some may not be able to play because of that to. Really there is no good way to do this without more input on timescales here. Maybe you should ask Toady in reference to this for the vague time scale so you can adjust this challenge.

[Imp]

I am willing to score two sets of maps, if that's what we're doing.

I expect that those who have to wait to start will be as busy as the rest of us in learning about the new features, through talking with people who can play it and reading the forums.  I expect the forums will explode with people discussing all the exciting new stuff they encounter, and how their experiences have differed from what others are posting, so within days we will all be getting tons of other peoples' ideas to affect how to shape our forts.

If I was a player in this contest I'd honor the no save scumming rule, but I think I would be playing more than one map (not the same location, that's to close to save scumming) unless the rules forbade that too.  I'd try general plans out on the other map(s) and see how the world reacted before I took large scale 'gee I wonder if this might work' risks on my contest map.  In short, to some extent I'd be getting some of the advantages of having a delayed start and a chance to see how play was working by playing 2+ games at once if I could.

Not sure that's avoidable, unless you rule it out.  And I'd like to see as many participate as are interested, participation's what makes things like this great.

[kilakan]

I gotta say, there's no way I'd have "one" contest fort.  I generally play by the no save-scumming, turtling, ect. anyways, but I also play a few different forts at once.  So I may do like Imp and test out some ideas of suicidal "fun" maps, then take my safety and knowledge over to my main contest fort. For instance, I'm not going to be taking on the challange of milking and extracting until I figure out how to do it without extreme micro-management.  I also agree that some people may get an advantage cause they can handle non 40d# maps, and will start earlier, while the people who wait and start on 40d# merged, may get through way quicker and thus have far less play time.   

Basically, we may as well start off when windows is released with that, have a date, and when the others come out start their respective timers.

[darkrider2]

I actually want my contest fort to be the first I play on the new version. Just so I can tell everyone about all the FUN I will be having. 

[Jim Groovester]

I say start immediately on release. There will probably be no shortage of game crippling bugs that will occupy the Windows users and prevent them from making too much progress anyway.

I also say make the deadline the same for both parties, if the difference in release time isn't too great.

[Jimmy]

I agree with Jim on this. It's likely that game breaking bugs will prevent any meaningful progress in new forts until at least a few weeks of bug fixes are completed. If Toady gets a Mac/Linux release up in a week or two, there won't be significant differences between the two groups. (Out of curiosity, are any other players here running non-windows systems?)

I frankly think I'll be spending my time posting in the Bug Reports forum instead of building a fortress. Maybe even developing my wiki editing skills. However we do this is fine, so if you want to have separate timers go ahead.

[Ultimarr]

Out of curiosity, are any other players here running non-windows systems?

I personally am using a mac.

I think jim is right also, since it would get really confusing if there were two sperate deadlines. Plus, we can't start ON release day anyway since Martin needs to find a suitable map/get the rest of the challenges up.

[Imp]

I'm just so delighted several of us are interested and involved in this contest.  It's thrilling to be part of it, above and beyond the thrill of whenever the release does occur.

[Kipi]

To me it's okay to wait the release for every OS so that everybody can start at the same time. I probably will wait the update of mayday graphics before I launch the new version, so the extra wait for simultaneous launch won't be a big deal to me.