Source: Dwarf Fortress Development Log
I went through the purring maggot process from animal trap capture to storing the milk in barrels in a food stockpile. Of course, the issue with this has been dwarves just up and eating the maggot at any point in the process. I changed it so that they would only eat purring maggots if they were starving and nothing else were close by. I tested the change by having the starving dwarves stand in a meeting zone with the food up in a stockpile to the north. In between the stockpile and the dwarves, a succulent purring maggot tempted from an animal trap. They performed well, passing up the maggot for other food. At the end, there were seven dwarves, five pieces of food, and the maggot. I made them starve again -- five dwarves ate regular food, the doctor ate the purring maggot, and the fisherdwarf ran downstairs, caught a live cave spider and ate it on the spot.
I also handled a gremlin pathing problem and some strange things like the dwarves tanning mussel shells to make mussel leather.
Source: Dwarf Fortress Development Log
As usual with recent combat revisions, the results swing back and forth wildly until the result is better than the starting point -- at today's worst, a human scratched another human in half with his fingernails, but I also had a human hack off a couple hydra heads with an adamantine short sword, and the monster kept coming, which was fun. Using the instant-butcher command from the arena, we had a skull from each severed head and five skulls from the eventual corpse. In general, I rebalanced bleeding and handled some other combat problems as well. It would be cool to have the hydra heads get knocked out one by one if you box them right, but there were some annoyances with that so I'll handle it when I do brain-death later on (after this release). For now, hydras get the NOSTUN tag so they don't get KO'd by a single head's traumatic experiences. I gave them NOPAIN and rapid healing as well, for more fun. I also fixed a bug where the arena slowly heated up to just above the boiling point of water slowly over time if you were controlling an individual creature -- it came from initializing a weather variable wrong in the fake 1x1 world that the arena inhabits.
Source: Dwarf Fortress Development Log
I started testing out the hydra this morning and found I couldn't quite hack off its heads with an adamantine two-handed sword. While I was working through the numbers there, I got a crash report which ended up being this horrible intermittent doesn't-happen-with-any-debug-information-enabled beast I've only finished off just now, so I'll be back at the hydra tomorrow! I understand what's happening with the neck severing now so I should be able to get to testing bleeding, KOs, and so on without much trouble.
Source: Dwarf Fortress Development Log
Still cleaning things up -- after a day of speed stuff, I fixed the list of available metals for caravans/embark (there are always things missing like iron or things extra like adamantine), fixed some display issues with traction benchs, fixed a problem causing volcanic features to shift away from the reclaim area, stopped demon masters from fighting with their adopted civilians, fixed some text/problems in preferences screen ("likes (tree) fabric", "cow cow cheese", "likes ant bone")...
Source: Dwarf Fortress Development Log
The next SDL/OpenGL/etc update 40d19 is up. The download is at the forum thread
here
. Let us know how it is performing there.
Source: Dwarf Fortress Development Log
Fixed a crash from a weird combination of holding an entity position and recreating a squad and scheduling orders, and the mode in the main screen where you order squads around is finalized now, unless I add an easy order to just "defend the fortress" which seems possible. The military organization screen is next.
Source: Dwarf Fortress Development Log
Military bugs and usability complaints starting tomorrow. Most recently we fixed demons with disconnected lower bodies... burrow deletion... hunter troubles (poor dwarves clubbing with crossbows are pretty good about safety now... hunters always seem to become broken!)... lots of buckets filled with water being scattered around that aren't ever used again because they aren't empty...
Source: Dwarf Fortress Development Log
Here's the March 1 report
. A lot of the item weights were quite strange as I brought up before, so I overhauled the mass system so that things are more consistent and are at least internally represented using real world units. Tissue by tissue, my embark dwarves were between 43kg (short and incredibly skinny) and 122kg (broad-bodied and very fat). The little bits and severed pieces of arena critters are also weighed out appropriately with respect to missing parts, and trousers don't weigh a zillion whatevers anymore. Actually, the capital gamma (the weight/mass symbol) is a kilogram now, but we are still using the same symbol at this point.
Source: Dwarf Fortress Development Log
I fixed another world gen crash -- one that only happened with (time-consuming) optimized compilation and didn't repeat consistently (rarely, for certains seeds, and for those seeds at different years each try etc.), having to do with how the genetic information was passed along. So that's good. Not so good was Scamps's latest fun idea. His favorite toy to play fetch with is the stuffed hamster/rodent thing with the fur chewed off that I mentioned before, and we did a few throws in the early morning while I was working on the crash. The third time he brought the toy, I picked it up by a stubby back leg and threw it out of the room as usual, but this time I was greeted by a spiral of water... quite a lot of water. It seems that right after the second throw, he took the toy out to his water dish and soaked it before bringing it to me. There's no way for the second throw itself to have bounced and hit his water dish since there's too much wall in the way, and I confirmed that his water was lower and had been splashed around the floor. And it's not like there was a lot of time between the throws... he just chased the toy, brought it to his water, got it wet and brought it back pretty much. A troubled boy. I'm kind of afraid of his next plan.
Source: Dwarf Fortress Development Log
Fixed a crash on the military screen, fixed a problem with arena items disappearing, reorganized the attribute descriptions a bit, made some adv mode keys work that weren't working, fixed some broken ramps in caves... I took all of the old underground features that no longer exist out of the site finder, though I didn't do desired updates there yet. There was kind of a violent explosion of boiling human blood when I was testing a human vs a magma man in the arena... it was a little weird, but I guess that's okay.
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