Elderlore

Source: Dwarf Fortress Development Log

The Bay 12 Report for this month has been posted. In particular, I finished the war issues I mentioned, so it should all be bugs and SDL tests and requests etc. that have been piling up from now until the release, which shouldn't be too long, though I'll be off for a day somewhere this week for an upcoming family thingy. Fixing the war issues involved moving some of the world gen events to a weekly instead of a yearly schedule, so the legends have that extra information as well, at least for war and beast attack events. I'm sure other things will be moved to respect the new scheduling over time. It's a project as usual.

We've also been working with world village pictures a bit. The highlighted '#' from the earlier pictures are obviously a little obscene, but the landscape is also changed quite a bit from the original biome, and we wanted to indicate that. Here's a medium and a large world with some human sprawl. Currently, the lines indicate crops on flat grassland and the AE and ae represent crops on hills (replacing the set intersection and the 'n', respectively). The '+' are the market sites/towns (though those remain unimplemented in adv mode). I think the only downside now is the loss of the river display on farmed rivers. I'd kind of prefer having the rivers printed instead, but it's also important to show sites when you have them, especially in cases where the farm clusters aren't anchored by a town and don't spread off of the rivers since you'd have no idea humans were present there. Perhaps it could hide river farms that are adjacent to enough other sites.

Source: Dwarf Fortress Development Log

I've got it basically to a place where I'm not really satisfied, but the major issues are handled. Dealing with these underlying population changes was going to be the main place on the dev page where I try a somewhat delayed lackluster release instead of overcompensating with lots of features and a gigantic delay, and we'll see how that works out soon enough. There are lots of growing pains with the high number of sites. All of the human villages feel that they need warlords, and this ended up leading to an heir shortage and villages being passed down the line to great grandchildren since everybody in between is spoken for. The wars are also long and grueling since one side can't yet take multiple sites in a year, so most of the lines of succession end up being broken immediately anyway. I think that might be the last thing I handle before wrapping things up, but it all just really needs the code that's going to come in with the villain section to handle the individual world gen decision making and hierarchy forming which'll hopefully leave the political situation less fractured and more stable. In the meantime, here are a pocket map and a smaller map with the village details placed in the pixels.

Source: Dwarf Fortress Development Log

I've been working through world gen battle and site conquest issues with regards to the new populations, and that's mostly sorted out. The kill counts are even more ridiculously high now, especially for the demons that work their way into leadership positions. The highest one I saw was a coati demon that convinced the humans that he was their god of misery and went on to lead a war against the elves for several hundred years in which dozens of settlements were razed and he personally had 7000 kills. I won't be able to adjust how that works until there's more tactical information kept for the battle but I'm just going to have to leave it for now. There are lots of side projects in all of this stuff I've been working on that are being ignored, since a release needs to happen at some point. The main remaining entity pop issue is making the village maps react to high Z variation better.

Source: Dwarf Fortress Development Log

I fixed a few issues that were occasionally making the meshes defining the village plots disappear or fold back over themselves dozens of times, and I stopped historical figures from bouncing around between cottages each visit (the cottages and other small buildings are going to be numerous in the not-yet-implemented towns, so they don't have quite the same historical standing as the old hovels and that had to be accounted for). It elevates non-historical people to the previous historical status when you learn their names (and in all the old cases), and it doesn't show anybody's name until you learn it (you know everybody in your starting town). People that have things for you to do still blink, so it isn't any more difficult to find them (aside from their buildings currently being gone, so the giant crystal glass law-giver lizard demon thing was just hanging out in a cottage with a few people). They'll probably blink due to their historical importance until we've got better direction-giving and description-giving, at which point they'll probably still blink because you are looking for them and know that you've probably got the right person, so I only expect finding people to get easier, though you might have to end up asking an additional person or two if it isn't an obvious location. In any case, I won't be focusing on that kind of thing until we get down the dev page a bit. Now I'm going to revisit some of the broken bits of world gen and make sure that the entity pops and historical figures are playing nice there.

I made another post in the Future of the Fortress thread a few days ago.

Source: Dwarf Fortress Development Log

There are villager sightings... though it wasn't as satisfying the first time around, since there were 140 humans packed into a single cottage. That's fixed, but there is still quite a bit to be done. As expected, the addition of larger world populations has proved to be one of the dev page items capable of messing up the faster release schedule, and the idea now is just to push through until it works, fix some unrelated bugs and get a release up. I expect it to take a week or two yet. If the month-end break gets in the way, I'll postpone it, but it might not even come to that. It's hard to say since I'm pretty much just fixing issues and following ripples from the world gen changes and so on.

Source: Dwarf Fortress Development Log

I've got simple cottage + garden plot layouts now, and I ended up messing with the distribution of rivers on the world map, since most human-habitable areas just didn't have any accessible water above ground and civilization spread was suffering for it. There should be non-desert areas without surface water based on the geology, but additional underground water behavior is for later, so we're now be-rivered. This is a large map where rainfall is respected universally. Only the high-volume river squares are shown there. This may end up being the standard view, though I'm ambivalent about the little tributary stubs and exactly where the cut-off should be. Here is the same map with all the usual streams visible. Finally, here is the map showing every brook, with some highlighted drainage basins. The added information should come in handy, especially with smoothing out river valleys a bit and giving mountain ranges more character, but I'm going to pass on that for now while I continue to iron out villages. Next I need to get the people themselves appearing properly and make sure adventure mode still functions. Doing the other critters' site maps is an additional project, but a lot of the hardest work is already done there with the human layout.

Source: Dwarf Fortress Development Log

I guess 11AM is my new 7 now, but I should probably try to avoid that. In any case, here are some structureless villages (~700KB). I made that with several 8x8 dwarf embarks. There are little wagons scattered around. Those villages are heavily oriented toward growing crops, and a lot of them might get associated manors etc. later, the way they look, but we can play around with other kinds as we expand adventure mode.

The transcripts of the latest DF talk episode are up at the DF Talk Page, courtesy of mallocks.

Source: Dwarf Fortress Development Log

DF is four! In terms of the public release, anyway. I stayed up past 11 trying to get the roads working so I could have a decent village screenshot for the occasion, but it is still acting up, so we'll have to settle for lousy farm outskirts. Zoomed out, with the dwarf embark wagon at the bottom and the rows of green crops at the top with some quite angular paths. The plots are allocated between crops, meadows, pastures, etc., and the boundaries should wind up meshing nicely with the roads, keeping buildings near to the road in general. Hopefully I can get this stuff sorted out, after I sleep. I should be back to bugs once I've got the village map working, but we'll see how it plays out soon enough.

Source: Dwarf Fortress Development Log

Zach's birthday is today, so we will be out and about a bit. Dwarf Fortress Talk #9 is up: forum thread ,DF Talk page with download. I made another post in the Future of the Fortress thread yesterday. LASD wanted me to let you know there's a Crawl Tournament going on this month, and some Bay 12 forum people are participating .

Source: Dwarf Fortress Development Log

Jaz McDougall of PC Gamer interviewed me for their web site, and they've posted it here.

I've been playing around with villages spreading out and supporting larger towns that arise around market locations (which are just determined by rivers/oceans and proximity to other villages and existing markets until we have more information). Here (details) are some highlighted farming villages and towns, letting humans play around on an island for a few hundred years by themselves. There are 199 settlements according to the legends screen. The gray squares on the detailed map are the village buildings themselves, and the crops and pastures will be spread out around them. I won't be sure how the spacing will all play out until I get to the adv mode maps, since the feel of walking between villages is important, and there will probably be a few more isolated villages (it occasionally makes them now but really seems to prefer keeping things tight). Right now the villages all have around 100 people and the largest town there has ~4000, with each farming village supporting 50 townspeople in addition to the villagers. It's not a 10:1 farmer:townsperson ratio or anything, but our maps need to be kept more varied, so the ratio is 2:1 instead at this point. It'll probably end up looking different as I play around with it, and I can make it adjustable once I settle on a system. I'd like to keep the larger towns reasonably compact so the buildings can be bunched together properly, but if it ends up being too slow I can spread out the homes as much as necessary. The overall feeling of the area should be a little less monotonous once there are some local woods and other features mixed in, and of course we're planning on eventually tormenting the villages in a variety of ways which should keep moving through settled areas exciting enough.