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[Ilmoran]

To me, that was what the statement implied.  Unfortunately I cannot read what you meant to write, only what you wrote.

As for 'ignoring' parts of your post, I don't really follow.  I don't think I missed anything relevant to what you and I just discussed.

Sorry, the second comment wasn't clear either:  The original reply of "if you don't want to use cheats, don't use them.  Don't tell other people they can't use them" is what seemed like you were ignoring the rest of the post.  Guess I'm having a bad day on being clear lol.

[j0nas]

I didn't really disagree with the rest of your initial post, that's all.  I don't really think we need cheats to test game mechanics in the first place, for example.  However I do think enough players use reveal and the likes to have more fun with the game to warrant including it by default.  The alternative of requiring a 3rd party to basically decode the running game and hack the cheats in takes a lot more work and introduces it's own annoying bugs, such as not triggering magma buildings, etc.

But that's not what I wrote back then because I took your post to be a bit more anti-cheating than perhaps it was, and so that's what I focused on.

[PiCroft]

It was probably a mistake to use "cheat" as I don't really view it as cheating. I don't use the stats stuff to make the game easier but I do use it so the game gets going faster. Having the fortress crawl along with 7 dwarves tends to get old quite fast. Also, reveal is good for those sad bastards (like me :p) who can't abide garish coloured stone in our fortresses and like nice, neat and uniform coloured Walls. Reveal helps us plan out as we can check where ideal places are for master designs.

And then it's always nice to know beyond doubt that your map has certain features like magma pipes without starting a fortress, mining the shit out of it to see if one exists, quitting then starting over.

[bicker x 2]

This does sound like an excillent idea maybe someone might help tody and write the hard bits for him leaving him to only needing to impliment it i would but i'm somewhat lacking in time and knowlage to do such a thing

[Beeskee]

I use Stonesense rather than reveal, no possibility of save corruption, and the new version of Stonesense supports the new DF. Shift - H reveals hidden stone.

That said, I'd like to see a built-in set of cheats eventually, things like dwarf editors and revealing utilities. Mostly with the hopes that, if they are built-in, maybe they will work right.

[Corona688]

Having to 'install' these utilities is not arduous in the least, and they really can't be in the vanilla game -- if Toady hadn't intended all layers hidden by default they wouldn't be.  You're not just asking for an extension of features but a big change of the spirit of the game.  I really think the third-party utilities will have to do.

[PiCroft]

Having to 'install' these utilities is not arduous in the least,

Really? DLing an out-of-date utility, then its modules, then looking up info on extracting hashes and copy-pasting this into config files, before copying save games between an optimised and a raw version of DF whenever I want to use a utility isn't arduous?

You're not just asking for an extension of features

Yes I am. Specifically, an integration of features.

but a big change of the spirit of the game.

What is the spirit of the game? Isn't it to build fortresses? If I asked "What is the spirit of the game" on this forum, how many different answers do you think I'd get?

I really think the third-party utilities will have to do.

See, this is what annoys me. If this came to pass and you saw an extra menu option whenever you hit 'esc', why would this bother you unless those extra options negatively affect your ability to play? I am not advocating a major gameplay change, but for options that already exist - albeit annoyingly fiddly - to be included in the game so that these options are there and they are stable, up-to-date and don't require switching between programs or downloading a folder full of random utilites.

This could even be placed in text files that can be modified with tokens or decommenting a line or whatever. It doesn't have to be in an in-game menu.

[catsplosion]

You should have options to circumvent game mechanics in order to test game mechanics?  That's a little silly.

That's exactly how testing works.  That's what the arena is; long before he deigned to give it to us, Toady wrote it to help him test creatures.  If you only want to look at a rare situation once or twice, playing the whole game to do it will work fine.  But if you want to look at its outcome a few dozen times and see whether it responds the way it's meant to respond, you'd better have shortcuts.  I do agree that having a "Cheat..." or even "Sandbox..." menu sitting there breaks immersion when you aren't using it.

Just like the arena, it's plausible that sandbox availability would be a worldgen parameter.

[Corona688]

What is the spirit of the game? Isn't it to build fortresses? If I asked "What is the spirit of the game" on this forum, how many different answers do you think I'd get?

This really isn't rocket science.

Things start hidden.  This isn't regarded as a bug.  (Feel free to start your own bug entry if you disagree.)  In fact many features(trees, forgotten beats, HFS) depend on things being revealed by your activities and would break if everything started revealed.

Therefore this is intended, and isn't likely to be modified just to fit your preferences over the designers'.

This really isn't rocket science.

I am not advocating a major gameplay change, but for options that already exist - albeit annoyingly fiddly - to be included in the game so that these options are there and they are stable, up-to-date and don't require switching between programs or downloading a folder full of random utilites.

You're asking for an enormous amount of work to be done in order to please pretty much you alone.  It's not trivial to just "include" other programs in your own, if this was done it'd pretty much mean building their own version from scratch.

It doesn't have to be in an in-game menu.

Then why does it need to be in-game at all?  Why aren't you bitching at the makers of the third-party utilities for making them so difficult to use?  Certainly they could be doing a better job, too, and may actually be more likely to take your suggestions than a game that's intentionally built not the way you want it.

P.S:  I'd also add reasons like 'usability' and 'stability' as reasons Toady wouldn't have released the arena earlier.  It's got a fairly nice interface right now, probably much nicer than the one he used.  Given compiler-powers, much fewer menu options would be needed to test things with it.

[j0nas]

This really isn't rocket science.

Things start hidden.  This isn't regarded as a bug.  (Feel free to start your own bug entry if you disagree.)  In fact many features(trees, forgotten beats, HFS) depend on things being revealed by your activities and would break if everything started revealed.

Therefore this is intended, and isn't likely to be modified just to fit your preferences over the designers'.

This really isn't rocket science.

The 'I know better than you' attitude aside, this is a straw man argument.  No-one is arguing for changing the default mode, like you are implying.  We would just like the option.  Reading the thread before posting really isn't rocket science.

You're asking for an enormous amount of work to be done in order to please pretty much you alone.  It's not trivial to just "include" other programs in your own, if this was done it'd pretty much mean building their own version from scratch.

Another straw man argument.  No-one wants to 'include another program in this one', we want to include certain functionality.  This will take some work, granted, but much less than is required to reverse-engineer the memory layout of the program and implement third-party solutions.  You may think that you're doing someone a favor by protecting toady from extra work, but I'm fairly sure he's an adult capable of making his own decisions.  I am also fairly sure you don't speak on everyone else's behalf when expressing your opinion.

Then why does it need to be in-game at all?  Why aren't you bitching at the makers of the third-party utilities for making them so difficult to use?  Certainly they could be doing a better job, too, and may actually be more likely to take your suggestions than a game that's intentionally built not the way you want it.

It would be an improvement to have it in-game because that way certain things can be done a lot easier, such as activating magma forges when magma is revealed, activating underground tree growth when the underground is revealed, things that few if any third-party application do at this point.  I think this has already been mentioned in the thread, but who has time to read threads before arguing against them nowadays?

[Beeskee]

I don't think anyone is saying that the map should be, or is supposed to be, revealed completely by default as part of normal gameplay.

It's supposed to be hidden. This sort of stuff is obviously supposed to be revealed through exploration.

But nevertheless some folks want to take a peek ahead, or cheat, or whatever you prefer to call it. And there are multiple utilities to do that. But what does everyone say? "It's buggy. And may not work with the new versions. And don't you dare save your game or everything will be screwed up!"

Even Dwarf Therapist, hardly a cheat at all, just a better interface for labors. "But, oh no, mining and wood cutting designations don't work. Neither do some others. And it may be buggy. And may not work with the new version."


Sucks, doesn't it? HOWEVER if these functions were built in there would be less problems. You could hide/unhide sections without tripping reveal flags, because the game itself would know what to do and how to handle it properly (once it's own bugs were ironed out)


I'd like to see all the various "cheating" utilities built right into the game, as options for individual players to use or not use as they wish.If you don't want to cheat, nobody is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to do so.

[PiCroft]

Things start hidden.  This isn't regarded as a bug. 

Hey thanks for pointing that out! Maybe if I advocated that be changed it would be relevant!

You're asking for an enormous amount of work to be done in order to please pretty much you alone.  It's not trivial to just "include" other programs in your own, if this was done it'd pretty much mean building their own version from scratch.

Thanks for talking down to me man, its almost as if I have no concept of how programming works, being a professional programmer myself! If Toady can make a game where every tile is X, but simply graphically obscured until event Y (a dwarf digs near it), do you think it would require "building another version from scratch" to subtly alter this chain of events, such that event Y is tripped automatically for all X?

Then why does it need to be in-game at all?

Because I and others want it? Do you understand the term "suggestion"?

[PiCroft]

btw In case anyone is really interested, I have put a suggestion up on the suggestion voting thingy: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/eternal_voting.php#vote38 so if you like, you can add your vote to it.

[zagibu]

Certainly a valid suggestion. The cheat menu should be accessed with a key, but not be displayed in the regular menu. Also, it would be nice to be able to hide stone again after having it revealed.
Maybe this could be integrated as game-mechanic, by having miners "probe" a wall or floor and then revealing adjacent tiles based on their skill level?

[Kilo24]

Cheat codes in games have a long and semi-venerated tradition, but I doubt that any other game will make as good use of them to as DF eventually will.  Other games won't be as complex, so there's a lot less value and entertainment in experimenting with them.

It should be pretty easy for Toady to code cheats in - hell, he probably already has a few debug commands he'd just need to tie to player input.  While I don't like having them tossed in your face by a prominent menu option in every world, I think it could just be a setting (and also record that you cheated if you ever used any of them, though that part's not that important.)

There's also another benefit in this.  Say your game is being confronted by a nasty bug, and you have a strong hunch that it's caused by something that you can cheat into or out of existence.  Then you could experiment with that, confirm or disprove your hunch, and potentially bring a significant insight on your bug report.  It would also mean that if Toady mentioned the cause of the bug, you'd be able to manually fix it in your game and continue on in your fortress.
Such situations would likely be pretty rare unless we had a full-blown console ala Valve's games or Bethesda's games - but it's not inconceivable that a reveal or invincibility cheat might screw with the causes of bugs in a way that gives Toady more information.  And it does run into the problem of coding the UI for it (shouldn't be that hard to have a text interface, but it's still a large enough drain on time to be potentially worrisome.)  But... it might really help him personally with bug-finding too, even if he's the only one using it.