Print

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

[Graebeard]

Oh man.  So.  Excited.

[Snagger]

I'm getting the error message "Could not attach to Dwarf Fortress! Are you sure it's running?"

It's definitely running, I'm using Lazy Newb Pack.  I tried putting the *.dfmap file in the Overseer directory, but still the same message. I searched this thread and it was brought up once before but the only suggestion was to run in Administrator Mode, which still doesn't work.

Any ideas? Thanks!

[Rose]

make sure you got the right one, it's easy to miss.

[Snagger]

make sure you got the right one, it's easy to miss.

I'm sorry, the right what?

[thewonderidiot]

I'm getting the error message "Could not attach to Dwarf Fortress! Are you sure it's running?"

It's definitely running, I'm using Lazy Newb Pack.  I tried putting the *.dfmap file in the Overseer directory, but still the same message. I searched this thread and it was brought up once before but the only suggestion was to run in Administrator Mode, which still doesn't work.

Any ideas? Thanks!

Japa means that you've got your hands on an old version of Overseer. There's no connecting going on anymore. This is where the latest version is: http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=3882. Just click the "Download Now" near the top of that page. 

[Cobbler89]

Bwahahahahaha... I now have a bunch of pics of the one noteworthy-lookin' part of my old fort, the aqueduct channelling water from the river to a drainable basin (floodgates for the win) just below my farm (only had to pump water one z level and let it drain down a hole back into the channel to get farmable land underground).

Spoiler: Behold the watersource! (click to show/hide)

A view down the channel. It's kinda water-deprived because last I played it was down for repairs.


The basin. Note the drain in the bottom.


An overview in which you can see the channel, basin and the farm one level above (well, the space where the farm is).


Showing off the drain...


...from far away from the basin.


Where it leaves the map. See note below about floodgates and fortifications.


The river itself; there's a bridge there that Overseer doesn't render.

Comments and suggestions, u.i.-related:

A visual oddity in the gui the first time I started 0.70.0, but never after:


Cancel doesn't do anything (at least, Windows 7).

Is the user supposed to be able to resize and maybe even maximize the window? Because whenever it gets focus it locks the mouse in such that you can't access the sides/buttons, which makes them a tad tantalizing.

Hitting alt-f4 instead of escape crashes it with no apparent error in the log that I noticed (although this should be easy for you to reproduce and figure out what's going on if it's not an oddity with only certain hardware or OS versions; but let me know if you want to drop in the logs from doing that anyway). Haven't tried changing focus and then hitting the red X button in the upper right of the window.

I commented out the line in plugins.cfg referring the DirectX, rather than dig out the official Microsoft install (of the whole thing or the particular dll). Obviously the program's interface has a certain level of capacity to handle exceptions and a certain level of ability (as its rendering subsystem has specific dlls for its use of DirectX and of OpenGL specified in plugins.cfg) to not bother loading dlls if it's not asked to (something I'd love to know how to do in c++, incidentally). Could it be made to simply check which libraries are useable rather than needing plugins.cfg and failing if it finds one of those specified in it isn't there or isn't useable?

Comments and suggestions, rendering-related:

Could we get a button to skip to night or day, in the event we wanted to not have time pass while we're viewing but be able to view in night or day?

I assume fortifications and stairs are in the works, but could we also get floodgates, bridges and doors?

If we do, could there be (a) button(s) to toggle their state (open/closed, raised/lowered/flat-out-hidden, that sort of thing)?

Could a box be put around the edge of the map below the ground level so that when viewing underground areas the sky doesn't shine through?

Is there a way to make trees smaller so that I needn't have especially tall z-levels to prevent trees that are floored over (to make ceilings outside) from sticking through the "ceiling"? I realize that changing this would make forests seem less dense; a user-configurable setting would probably be ideal, if it's possible. (I think I may have seen some discussion of this a while back, but I figure it can't hurt to ask -- it might even be in the settings and I just didn't notice skimming them.)

There's a funny tendency for 1) trees to appear before Overseer has finished putting in all the map below them, and 2) trees occupying a rectangle within range of the camera to appear weird when the camera is a fair distance above the ground. Do I need to tweak the settings for tree distances, or are we waiting on more/better imposters for those distances that suddenly cut off to no trees, or what? (I'm pretty sure some combination of these should make it look... well, less funny than it looks to me using the default settings presently. But I'm no expert on what's going on and figured I'd ask first to get some pointers before trying to "fix" it myself, and then once I have a basic idea what to try start fiddling.)

Comments/suggestions, control-related:

You know how it pulls back a tiny bit when you stop moving? Sometimes that jerks me back farther than I'd moved in the first place. And sometimes after I've moved it leaves me in one spot but wiggles until I move again.

Could we have forward/backward never move up or down, and up/down move up and down only, regardless of camera up-down angle? It'd make floating around at odd angles so much easier.


Hope you find the feedback useful. I'm thinking of finding a big ol' Adventure Mode human city fortress and exporting it to take shots of its towers and sewers.

Oh, and a random note about seeing through ceilings: I think there are two separate reasons, one of which is a non-issue though it could be considered a minor bug and the other of which is really to our advantage and out of our control. Seeing the caverns through the surface is likely the result of that particular area of surface simply not having loaded up yet -- it typically takes about a whole minute for Overseer to finish loading/rendering the entire map on my laptop, after which everything is smoother, and as noted above even the trees appear before this process is done. I could be wrong about that though -- there might be some other bug that allows seeing through the surface in quirky circumstances. The general lack of ceilings underground is due to the way Dwarf Fortress reveals tiles, revealing floor below but not above, which naturally carries over into the export which is what Overseer renders from. Should DF ever start revealing ceiling above as well as floor below, Overseer would actually have to be adjusted to be able to view underground areas from above and actually see what's in them (and this adjustment would be wicked complicated). We really should all hope that stays as it is for the foreseeable future, unless somebody comes up with a really easy algorithm for excluding ceilings/walls as desired so we could turn on and off a "cutaway" view mode (which I don't expect to happen, but hey, maybe there's a genius out there working on it right now).

Cheers!

[thewonderidiot]

Wow, long post. I'll go piece by piece. I think in most instances the underlying reason will be just that this is an early early build, and I released it as soon as it was usable at all.

A visual oddity in the gui the first time I started 0.70.0, but never after:

Weird. Never seen that, and if it only happened once I have no idea what could have happened.

Cancel doesn't do anything (at least, Windows 7).

Yeah, didn't get that far. Eventually upon startup users will be able to select their desired geometry generator and set options for it. Cancel will mean something then, so you can go back and change things. Right now it's the first thing that shows up, so there's really nothing to cancel. Also, I'm sure you noticed, there's an X in the upper right of the open dialog that similarly currently does nothing.

Is the user supposed to be able to resize and maybe even maximize the window? Because whenever it gets focus it locks the mouse in such that you can't access the sides/buttons, which makes them a tad tantalizing.

Not without breaking the mouse out of the window, at least yet.

Hitting alt-f4 instead of escape crashes it with no apparent error in the log that I noticed (although this should be easy for you to reproduce and figure out what's going on if it's not an oddity with only certain hardware or OS versions; but let me know if you want to drop in the logs from doing that anyway). Haven't tried changing focus and then hitting the red X button in the upper right of the window.

Thanks, probably forgot to properly destruct things in that instance. I'll make sure it does the same thing as Escape.

I commented out the line in plugins.cfg referring the DirectX, rather than dig out the official Microsoft install (of the whole thing or the particular dll). Obviously the program's interface has a certain level of capacity to handle exceptions and a certain level of ability (as its rendering subsystem has specific dlls for its use of DirectX and of OpenGL specified in plugins.cfg) to not bother loading dlls if it's not asked to (something I'd love to know how to do in c++, incidentally). Could it be made to simply check which libraries are useable rather than needing plugins.cfg and failing if it finds one of those specified in it isn't there or isn't useable?

If I'm not mistaken, on Windows OIS (the input system) requires DirectInput, so the presence of DirectX is required even when you're not using Direct3D for rendering. Outside of that -- this is an Ogre-level issue, and would require changing the Ogre library.

Could we get a button to skip to night or day, in the event we wanted to not have time pass while we're viewing but be able to view in night or day?

Yup, finer controls like this will all have a graphical interface eventually.

I assume fortifications and stairs are in the works, but could we also get floodgates, bridges and doors?

Yeah. Stairs are really tricky, and fortifications are even trickier with the current generator. It'll take a lot of thought to get those in and working. Bridges, floodgates, and doors are all easy though, and will all go in at the same time.

If we do, could there be (a) button(s) to toggle their state (open/closed, raised/lowered/flat-out-hidden, that sort of thing)?

Yup. I plan to make all non-world-geometry objects interactive, so if, for example, a staircase gets placed backwards, you could rotate it.

Could a box be put around the edge of the map below the ground level so that when viewing underground areas the sky doesn't shine through?

Yup, when I get around to it. That's a lower priority than improving the geometry generator and getting stairs and such in.

Is there a way to make trees smaller so that I needn't have especially tall z-levels to prevent trees that are floored over (to make ceilings outside) from sticking through the "ceiling"? I realize that changing this would make forests seem less dense; a user-configurable setting would probably be ideal, if it's possible. (I think I may have seen some discussion of this a while back, but I figure it can't hurt to ask -- it might even be in the settings and I just didn't notice skimming them.)

There's an all-vegetation scale value in overseer.ini, and you can control the sizes of individual species in xml/plants/*.xml.

There's a funny tendency for 1) trees to appear before Overseer has finished putting in all the map below them, and 2) trees occupying a rectangle within range of the camera to appear weird when the camera is a fair distance above the ground. Do I need to tweak the settings for tree distances, or are we waiting on more/better imposters for those distances that suddenly cut off to no trees, or what? (I'm pretty sure some combination of these should make it look... well, less funny than it looks to me using the default settings presently. But I'm no expert on what's going on and figured I'd ask first to get some pointers before trying to "fix" it myself, and then once I have a basic idea what to try start fiddling.)

They page separately from the world geometry. For world geometry I'm using a custom paging solution, and for plants I'm using Ogre PagedGeometry. Honestly, I don't know a single thing about batching and impostors.... no clue how I would implement it myself if I had to. The trees show up first because PagedGeometry is able to get them onto the screen rather quickly, while PolyVox's SurfaceExtractor is crunching away on large chunks of voxel data that take much longer to prepare (PagedGeometry loads models directly -- PolyVox has to generate the 'models' manually).

For the distance thing, yeah, you'll need to modify visible tree distances. There'll be a GUI setting for that eventually as well, just like everything else.

You know how it pulls back a tiny bit when you stop moving? Sometimes that jerks me back farther than I'd moved in the first place. And sometimes after I've moved it leaves me in one spot but wiggles until I move again.

Yeah, and it's really damn annoying. I need to look back into that. It only happens for me when my framerate is low enough.

Could we have forward/backward never move up or down, and up/down move up and down only, regardless of camera up-down angle? It'd make floating around at odd angles so much easier.

I can make it an option. I know that this setting would bug the hell out of me.


And you're right about the ceilings, I hadn't considered that ceiling tiles weren't revealed, and all of my test maps were made with "mapexport all". I'll have to account for that.


Thanks for all the input! Sorry that it's so bare-bones right now, I just want to get everything working before I try to make it too fancy, and I only have limited time to actually work on it. Current priority for me is implementing dual contouring to replace PolyVox's marching cubes extractor. That'll let us set "hardness" of Voxels, and keep sharp edges on constructions while leaving natural terrain smooth. It'll also let me decrease the polygon count significantly (hopefully) and possibly significantly reduce the number of voxels required to store a tile (which, incidentally, will also make smoothing on terrain work a lot better). It'll also let me define visible boundaries between types of voxels -- which will let me implement voxel transparency for things like water and glass. Plus, if I make the voxels surrounding staircases harder than other voxels, I won't have to worry about the effects of smoothing making the staircases look terrible.

Or at least, that's the plan/hope. We'll see how it all turns out. And remember, even if it takes me a long time to get around to your suggestions -- they're not going unnoticed!

[runlvlzero]

Some 31.25 Screenshots.

I'll say with the large megaproject maps I had to double the paging values in the ini otherwise I would crash before it could load geometry. But it was stable once I did that as long as I wasn't to aggressive with moving. It works good on my 3x3's without allot of Z depth though. The occlusion of geometry helps allot so that works.

That AussieGuy's Swordthunders:

Adamantine Throne - HFS

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Guardhouse and Villa - HFS

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

And the famous Roadtruss, by Crossroads Inc.
Roadtruss

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Ide like to point out that these respective forts belong to their respective creators and I just took pictures =)

[Greiger]

Haha I never thought of loading Roadtruss into Overseer.  Looks pretty awesome.  Can't wait til overseer sees windows and fortifications and bars and such.

[Cobbler89]

Glad to hear of the general roadmap for the future; sounds very exciting.

While I'm in overly thorough feedback mode, a couple things I forgot to mention.

Water and smooth edges, as can be seen in one of the aqueduct shots, appears to make the floor beneath it rise up to the level of the water. This is, obviously, due to the fact that water is handled essentially as a block of varying thickness and smoothed with the other edges as any block would be; I expect that's among the things that'll change with the duopolyvoxel calculationrendering enhancement (honestly have only a vague clue what's actually going on there, being sorta new to graphical stuff; heck, my understanding of "imposters" in the trees issue is a bit of a guess based on a little I've heard here and/or read in the settings file). I just mention it for completeness.

Something I do think merits mention in any case (although it may have been noted at some point earlier, I can't recall clearly) is that using printscreen to get the image on the clipboard seemed to capture just black when I tried it with Overseer in fullscreen mode (set from the settings menu between starting up and the file dialog). Would there be any way to export via Overseer whatever it has in its window, thereby not only solving that problem but simplifying getting a picture of just Overseer when windowed?

Finally, a couple clarificatory recomments:

Regarding the resizing/maximizing -- and, for that matter the close button next to the minimize/maximize buttons -- I guess my question had more to do with, shouldn't either the app not make it difficult to resize/close in that manner or else make it altogether impossible, whereas right now you can do so but only by silly means (switching focus to another program and then clicking on one of the buttons of Overseer's window or dragging the edge of it to resize, immediately after which -- barring closing or minimizing -- the mouse is locked back into Overseer again)? It just struck me as quirky that resizing and such is allowed, but requires doing weird things that suggest it wasn't meant to be allowed (at least not yet).

Regarding the ceilings, I don't know that anything needs to be accounted for since it's nice being able to see underground areas from above; it is, however, worth keeping in mind in case it ever became relevant, or unless you wanted to do something special to suggest ceilings while still letting the viewer see through, or anything else special.


I'll go fiddle with plant settings and in the meantime rest assured that this project -- the bare bones of which are already impressive! -- is well on its way to greatness. Thank you so much for letting me see my fort in 3d!

[Crossroads Inc.]

Runi thats freaking AWESOME!
I didn't think Roadtruss would even load up in overseer given the version it is!
Of course seeing makes me realize one important thing... We need WINDOWS In Overseer
My Poor tower looks like Swiss Cheese!

Thewonder!  You should add that to the front page as one of the examples

[thewonderidiot]

Water and smooth edges, as can be seen in one of the aqueduct shots, appears to make the floor beneath it rise up to the level of the water. This is, obviously, due to the fact that water is handled essentially as a block of varying thickness and smoothed with the other edges as any block would be; I expect that's among the things that'll change with the duopolyvoxel calculationrendering enhancement (honestly have only a vague clue what's actually going on there, being sorta new to graphical stuff; heck, my understanding of "imposters" in the trees issue is a bit of a guess based on a little I've heard here and/or read in the settings file). I just mention it for completeness.

Yep, exactly! That's another issue I hope to solve with dual contouring.

Something I do think merits mention in any case (although it may have been noted at some point earlier, I can't recall clearly) is that using printscreen to get the image on the clipboard seemed to capture just black when I tried it with Overseer in fullscreen mode (set from the settings menu between starting up and the file dialog). Would there be any way to export via Overseer whatever it has in its window, thereby not only solving that problem but simplifying getting a picture of just Overseer when windowed?

Finally, a couple clarificatory recomments:

Regarding the resizing/maximizing -- and, for that matter the close button next to the minimize/maximize buttons -- I guess my question had more to do with, shouldn't either the app not make it difficult to resize/close in that manner or else make it altogether impossible, whereas right now you can do so but only by silly means (switching focus to another program and then clicking on one of the buttons of Overseer's window or dragging the edge of it to resize, immediately after which -- barring closing or minimizing -- the mouse is locked back into Overseer again)? It just struck me as quirky that resizing and such is allowed, but requires doing weird things that suggest it wasn't meant to be allowed (at least not yet).

Actually, I had both of these things in the previous version -- pressing P or Printscreen would dump the current frame to a file, and pressing the space bar would release or grab the mouse. I'll add those back in for the next version.

Regarding the ceilings, I don't know that anything needs to be accounted for since it's nice being able to see underground areas from above; it is, however, worth keeping in mind in case it ever became relevant, or unless you wanted to do something special to suggest ceilings while still letting the viewer see through, or anything else special.

Well, with backface culling enabled you'll be able to see into the caverns from above but not out when inside the caverns.

I'll go fiddle with plant settings and in the meantime rest assured that this project -- the bare bones of which are already impressive! -- is well on its way to greatness. Thank you so much for letting me see my fort in 3d!

No, thank you! 

Runi thats freaking AWESOME!
I didn't think Roadtruss would even load up in overseer given the version it is!
Of course seeing makes me realize one important thing... We need WINDOWS In Overseer
My Poor tower looks like Swiss Cheese!

Thewonder!  You should add that to the front page as one of the examples

Haha, yeah, windows are another thing I don't want to touch until I get me some transparent voxel support -- so soon (hopefully)! I'll add that screenshot of Roadtruss to the first post.

[runlvlzero]

Runi thats freaking AWESOME!
I didn't think Roadtruss would even load up in overseer given the version it is!
Of course seeing makes me realize one important thing... We need WINDOWS In Overseer
My Poor tower looks like Swiss Cheese!

Thewonder!  You should add that to the front page as one of the examples

 

Thanks for sharing your fort with the community =) Ya it's pretty fun to go through and see the old mega projects. I think we have 31.25 map export functionality for good now, so down the road it will have all kinds of goodness going on =)

[Crossroads Inc.]

You are welcome shame more people didn't post about it when I put up the whole thread Still good to see some remembered it.

[C0NNULL]

I also had the d3dx9_43.dll problem. Then I realized I hadn't looked at the GPU drivers for a while, (NVIDIA GTS 450,) and that fixed it up.

I like the look of this better for some things. Other things do not require diagonal walls in my eyes. I guess that until we can designate the difference in game, it'll be something that I just live with. (Because Pong had killer graphics.)

I added three pictures to my project thread, Which you can find here for your enjoyment.

Thanks for the program.