Future of the mod
Ok guys, a longer post to come.
I am in Chicago right now. I have finished the Route66 on bicycle and will continue next to Niagara Falls, then Canada, then NewYork. I have just above 1 month left for my trip before I return home. Inspired by smakemupagus's orc fortress, I thought it would be a good idea to write some quick race-plugins, on the fly so to speak. Making races, with completely different game mechanics takes a lot longer then I thought however. I also can barely play any testgames on a little netbook that runs DF mostly on 20-30fps, or not at all (crash)
Since the polls show that most people would prefer working on the dwarves, with humans/drow a second, and "dont care for embark races" as a third, I think I have to say that these ideas have to wait. What I can do is help any of you, if you intend to write this yourself. Like I said, smake gave me the idea in the first place,with his orcs. So if anyone wants to try his or her hands on humans or drow, I can send you everything I have done so far on those races. I will also offer help with any reactions and things like custom embark screens and putting those races into the GUI/Settings.
The rest of the mod comes along fine. As you have noticed bugreports are lower then ever, and most of what I get is minimal. Balancing is still random at times
The manual is being written by
Godlysockpuppet (the html template) and looks a bit like hugos downloadable wiki at the moment. I will improve an that one, although I am unsure if I should write something about all things in DF (even vanilla ones) or only mod-related things. I wanted to do all at first, but seeing how everything is covered in the Wiki already, and people who play mods rarely need to look up vanilla things... and that the manual would get rather big and harder to look though... considering all that I tend towards writing it only for mod-related items. Comparisons, for example how mithril fares against steel, will still be included of course.
The new GUI, written by
Roses, uses Python and should run on Windows, Mac and Linux. I havent seen any code yet, but most features seem to be finished. It contains a tree-selection using checkboxes. All items can be selected ONE-BY-ONE. That means you can tick a checkbox "weapons" and all weapons are added or removed. You can open the "weapons" tab, and find melee and ranged. Open melee, find one-handed and two-handed. Open two-handed, and you will see all 5 two-handed weapons. You can select or deselect any of those individually. Same goes for inorganics, creatures, items, buildings, and so on. Open creatures, open birds, deselect kea, because you dont like them.
Roses plans to release this as an utility for vanilla df, but I will of course write a lot of more detailed and custom options for the mod.
Zenerbufen is usually working on the Mac and Linux updates, but he is really, really busy in RL, so please excuse the missing updates for those. If anyone wants to do one or both of these now, just send me a downloadlink and I will add them to the frontpage.
I also want to adress a few topics that sprang to mind:
DiseasesI am, and you as well, not very pleased with how they turned out. I want to remove or at least severly limit the sick dwarf migrants. Instead I plan on adding vermin like rats that transmit plagues, as well as domestic animals. Chicken pox that kills all you tame birds, or rabies that lets your dogs go berserk. The plagues will be rewritten and can be cured/immunized by either potions/special alcohol, or a better system for the wards. I dont like how these turned out and will probably use a completely different system for those.
Domestic animalsOne of the industries I havent touched yet, these will experience a significant boost. Special items upon butchery, more grazing, more warbeasts. Just to let you know
Mixed InvadersAll invaders always have the same sprite/race. But there is a trick to have different races in one invading army, used by both deon and narhiril so far. I want to do the same, to give the invaders more character. No more goblins or orcs invading. No. One army of goblins, orcs, trolls and ogres, with boars and wargs as pets. No antmen siege, but antmen shepards herdings groups of giant ants. Automatons should bring mechanical siege engines, clockwork spiders and other steampunky stuff. All these will take a while, but are possible.
HellI currently have custom demons in hell that pose a sort of reward for players that defeat the HFS-invasion. Easy to defeat "souls" that drop goodies, and adamantine beetles that can be tamed and give unlimited adamantine. I have those in the mod since the first release, but never got any feedback on those. I am thinking about replacing those with harder enemies. You defeat the 100 demons rushing you after you opened hell ? Well, next level would be to build a staircase down and fight even harder non-flying demons. Any thoughts on that ?
If anyone wants the current work I have done on drows or humans, just leave me a PM, or I can offer a downloadlink right here.
EDIT: Another little note here: Big thanks for 6.000+ replies, 200.000+ views and almost 30.000 downloads (all versions)