Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[cephalo]

Ah, but the next version (..or the one after it, likely) will support proportional fonts. Meaning, text will not be limited to one letter per cell (unless you turn this off); it'll use a truetype font instead. How's that?

Whoa.  Will the borders/positioning of text areas have to be based on the tile grid, or will they basically be free-floating?  Are they just rendered on top of the tile grid?

Based on the tile grid. I'm altering the interface the absolute minimum amount (adding an option to justify left, right, center or not use truetype at all - defaulting to left), which means it'll be justified inside a box based on the amount of space it'd take if not being rendered using truetype. It's not ideal, but it should be fine.

Improving this is the fact that there are (accessible) functions used to decide what text is used in the first place based on how much space is available, which I can modify to take the proportional font into account.

I've yet to complete the project, but it's looking good. I'll see if I can get some screenshots up next I have internet.. er, which will be a week from now. (I have web access via my cellphone, so I might post here, but uploading images is a bit harder.)

Wow, this could be the start of something big. I've always loved the text based graphics for the graphics, but for the purposes of text it fails miserably. That doesn't even make sense... but you all know what I mean.

[Baughn]

That sounds radtacular.  You should make it only accessible via a widget-oriented API, so that Toady can only have nice fonts if he stops coding menus entirely from scratch (I have no proof that he does this, but it's the only explanation I can imagine for the types of crashes that used to happen on the military menu).

Heh. I'd do that, but then it wouldn't automatically work with all the old code.

Instead, I'm trying to write a widget library/UI builder in scheme, instead. Which under the covers does much smarter updating. We'll see what happens. ^_^

[Mephansteras]

So far my tests have still failed to determine what causes a civ to deforest an area. But I'll keep working at it.

All this messing with the Entity files does bring up a question, though:

Toady, how are you going to handle food production for the various entity sites? For example, will a farming civilization like humans produce more food and therefore have larger populations than a non-farming civ like Elves or Goblins?

EDIT: FOUND IT! Deforestation is determined by the [OUTDOOR_WOOD] tag!

[G-Flex]

I wasn't aware that Baughn had capability/authority to do that much with the interface code. Is that a recent development, or no?

[Footkerchief]

I wasn't aware that Baughn had capability/authority to do that much with the interface code. Is that a recent development, or no?

Regarding capability, remember that the entirety of Battle Champs is open-source (and Baughn may have access to some closed-source code as well, I'm not sure).  I wouldn't be surprised if that included a simple "display this string as tiles" function, which Baughn is now modifying.

As far as authority, yeah, it's contingent on Toady's approval as usual.

[G-Flex]

Yeah, but I still can't help but feel like Baughn's talking as if he can speak on behalf of Dwarf Fortress's development himself. This has happened a few times now, to the point where I'm wondering if it's just a fluke.



I also don't understand the use of Scheme. It seems fairly ill-supported and obscure to me, not to mention extraordinarily counter-intuitive (functional languages seem to have this latter problem often). I've heard Javascript would be a decent choice, especially considering JSON (or even XML) for object definition, given the amount of support they have.

[Urist McDepravity]

Yeah, but I still can't help but feel like Baughn's talking as if he can speak on behalf of Dwarf Fortress's development himself. This has happened a few times now, to the point where I'm wondering if it's just a fluke.

Lets just not turn this into another flamewar like you did with in-game scripting. Baughn's part is open-sourced, http://github.com/Baughn/Dwarf-Fortress--libgraphics- and he can do w/e he want with it (and, you could too, its open-source), and talk w/e he want about what he does with that part. Its always up to Toady to accept his changes into his tree, and its obvious for everyone.
As any other open-source, if you dont like what Baughn does, you can fork it and do it yourself.

[Cruxador]

Yeah, but I still can't help but feel like Baughn's talking as if he can speak on behalf of Dwarf Fortress's development himself. This has happened a few times now, to the point where I'm wondering if it's just a fluke.

Lets just not turn this into another flamewar like you did with in-game scripting. Baughn's part is open-sourced, http://github.com/Baughn/Dwarf-Fortress--libgraphics- and he can do w/e he want with it (and, you could too, its open-source), and talk w/e he want about what he does with that part. Its always up to Toady to accept his changes into his tree, and its obvious for everyone.
As any other open-source, if you dont like what Baughn does, you can fork it and do it yourself.

I think what he was saying was that it may seem somewhat presumptuous of Baughn to speak as though he's the decider on this matter, when it's still Toady's DF. Except that Baughn's doing a good thing which is a huge step forward as far as interface goes, and I really doubt Toady wouldn't include it in the vanilla game. And even if, for some reason, he were to not do so, Baughn could have his own DF download available, like he did with the 40d# series.

And of course, there's the possibility that he's already discussed it with Toady.

[G-Flex]

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to disparage Baughn doing whatever he feels like with the source, or working on whatever projects he wants, and the work he's done has definitely been quite valuable. The problem, in my opinion, is that he talks about it with a sort of authoritative tone. It's probably mostly unintentional, but I still would rather not have people falsely assume that he's talking about stuff that's being necessarily developed for DF proper, and I think he comes off that way sometimes. Again, I'm willing to believe it's unintentional; I don't think he's some kind of egomaniac or anything like that.


Also: "If you don't like it, do better yourself" isn't a very good argument. People should be willing to accept and consider whatever valid criticism or input may exist regardless of the source. Baughn would probably agree with me here, since he's presumably a sane person.

And even if, for some reason, he were to not do so, Baughn could have his own DF download available, like he did with the 40d# series.

Baughn didn't build the 40d# releases himself; he still relies on Toady for that, as far as I know. I could be wrong, if something has changed.

[Qmarx]

Along with the in-game encyclopedia for new creatures, would it be possible (and useful vs above comments) to procedurally generate descriptions of what the various metals are good at?

Well, documentation is documentation, and we've obviously been lacking there.  Having random metals would allow for a natural improvement of the descriptions for the stock stuff, so maybe that would be a good ticket.  We got the reaction lists up for stone sometime in the past, and I guess it would be something like that, where it would be able to compare the value of metals.  I don't want it to display kPA values and stuff, but I guess it could display a list of the common metals and show where your dwarves think the metal/material in question fits in to the picture.

Isn't that basically how Moh's hardness scale works already?

[Baughn]

Two different things:

- The proportional fonts. I've already talked that over with Toady, and he's fine with the proposed interface - as you guessed, there was already an "add this string to the output" function, which I'm just modifying. I'm fine with speaking authoritatively on that, as it's near-guaranteed to go in.

- Scheme UI builder. Not even discussed it with toady. Did I strike the wrong tone there, then? It's just an attempt to show him another way to do things, not something I expect would affect DF as such..

[Urist McDepravity]

Baughn didn't build the 40d# releases himself; he still relies on Toady for that, as far as I know. I could be wrong, if something has changed.

Not exactly. There is pre-compiled binary ./libs/Dwarf_Fortress which is dynamically linked against libgraphics.so.
As long as you dont break API, you can re-compile libgraphics.so and it will work w/out Toady's input at all, with old binary.
Thats how 40d# versions were developed, git always had version ahead of what Toady released, I did compile some my own versions of it trying to fix some bugs. So its possible to introduce new interface features w/out breaking API and therefore, w/out need of recompiling DF itself.

[Baughn]

ABI, rather; Application Binary Interface.

API is, in this case at least, source compatibility - if I don't break that, Toady can compile a new version without issue; if I do, he has to change something in his own code.

The ABI is something else again, and maintaining that takes a lot of (often counter-productive) work. I usually end up maintaining two branches. One with just ABI-compatible fixes, one with breaking changes. Then I merge them before sending toady the final tarball.

[Tormy]

Two different things:

- The proportional fonts. I've already talked that over with Toady, and he's fine with the proposed interface - as you guessed, there was already an "add this string to the output" function, which I'm just modifying. I'm fine with speaking authoritatively on that, as it's near-guaranteed to go in.

- Scheme UI builder. Not even discussed it with toady. Did I strike the wrong tone there, then? It's just an attempt to show him another way to do things, not something I expect would affect DF as such..

Good luck with this and thanks for your contribution in the DF development.

[Quatch]

I haven't actually played DF since the 40d version.. don't intend to, anytime soon. Frankly, at the moment it's more amusing to improve it than play it. I'll play later, once all the bugs are out.

Is this what happened to Toady, back in the dark ages before I found DF, when he stopped playing the game he wrote?

Along with the in-game encyclopedia for new creatures, would it be possible (and useful vs above comments) to procedurally generate descriptions of what the various metals are good at?

Well, documentation is documentation, and we've obviously been lacking there.  Having random metals would allow for a natural improvement of the descriptions for the stock stuff, so maybe that would be a good ticket.  We got the reaction lists up for stone sometime in the past, and I guess it would be something like that, where it would be able to compare the value of metals.  I don't want it to display kPA values and stuff, but I guess it could display a list of the common metals and show where your dwarves think the metal/material in question fits in to the picture.

Isn't that basically how Moh's hardness scale works already?

Moh's hardness is sorta like that, a ranking of hardness (turns out if you use a Ratio level of measurement (ie. rockwell), its non-linear, esp near the top.). And yeah, I suppose it would start to address the issue I suggested, being that hardness is pretty important in the battle calculations (as it stood), but what I was looking for wasn't an additional kind of number (albeit a compressed to 1-10 scale would simplify it for most people), but an in-world recommendation engine for the "dwarf-preferred" material for this endevour (well, dwarf-third-preferred, after Ad. and gold).