Development in 2010 (RSS Feed)

• 12/31/2010 It's the last day of the sponsorship drive. If you want your chance to sponsor an animal, better make it now. Your generosity has helped push a lot of interesting and exciting animals to the top of the list. Let's close out the year with a little more animal madness. Pick your favorite beastie, and become a sponsor!
• 12/29/2010 We're down to the last few days of the animal sponsorship drive. If you contributed and did not receive an email with sponsorship information, please contact me at toadyone@bay12games.com. A few of my replies bounced, so I know there are some of you out there. Here's the forum thread for the sponsorship drive. We're up to 96 distinct animals sponsored so far, with at least one representative from every category on the list! To account for lags in communication, we'll probably hold off announcing the results until mid-January. If you haven't emailed me your animal selection, please try to do so soon so I can get everything figured out promptly.
• 12/23/2010 Christmas is almost here and the support drive is exceeding all expectations through your generosity. It's not too late to claim your animal! Nine days till the end of the sponsorship period at the new year. On the programming front: 18 types of grasses have been added for your bovine animals to graze on with more to come. Imagine evil grass that looks like a mass of wriggling worms. Happy holidays!
• 12/17/2010 Rainseeker's Animal Sponsorship Drive has begun. Here's a forum thread.
• 12/16/2010 Eggs. They are in the game now. So is a new megabeast with a 200 ft wingspan. The mighty roc. First roc was named "Egul." That's how bad it is. Oh, yeah- dragons get eggs too, along with other assorted animals and thinking beings. Dare steal an egg from the dragon's lair, or the nest of the great roc?
• 12/13/2010 Your dwarves can shear sheep and other woolly beasts now. There are sixteen new domestic animals. Eggs, vegetable oil and clay upcoming.
• 12/08/2010 There are lots of goods moving around now. It has taken a lot of iterations to get it up to this point, since trade imbalances and over-production that grind the whole system to a halt are fairly easy to come by. The more industries that get tracked in world gen, the more everything moves freely, which is nice. We've had to manage lots of decay rates to keep goods from getting massively stockpiled when they shouldn't realistically be stockpiled.
  
  Towns still hang on to their local food supplies very tightly, so aside from the occasional food trades there's nothing really in place that's causing certain cities to become much larger than others. That'll take more military stuff in part, but it might be enough to add more reasons for migration. Right now they don't migrate from town to town, only from villages into towns. We're going to spend a bit more time addressing things like this before we are out of world gen again, but there should be more than enough in place now to get interesting merchant movement during regular play when we get started on that.
  
  Here are the latest posts I made in the Future of the Fortress thread.
  
  12/05/10 11/18/10 11/15/10 11/08/10 11/01/10 10/24/10 10/21/10 10/19/10 10/17/10 10/12/10
• 12/03/2010 Here are some pictures of where we are at. The green lines are the connections of towns to the agricultural hamlets that sustain them. The yellow lines are potential trade routes between towns and, eventually, cities. As you can tell, the more sites you allow, the more interesting the trading will be. You'll be able to produce pictures like these from legends mode.
  Medium island Medium region 1 Medium region 2 Small island Small region
• 12/01/2010 The Bay 12 Report for this month has been posted.
• 11/30/2010 There was a holiday and an inadvertent holiday (I was stranded elsewhere), but I managed to get further industries up. They produce crafts, various clothing and wood among other things. Next I'm going to try my first trade interactions to see how the framework holds up before I commit further industries to it. This should see the market towns increase in size as the livestock walk into town and the shoes walk out, though I'll probably need more metal/wood/dye uses up before town-to-town trade produces meaningful differences in population or otherwise. There isn't much of a political structure, so a lot of what would normally be sitting on top of trade (taxes/etc.) is just going to be glossed over for the most part for now, although there will need to be support for the castles/armies/etc.
  
  Scamps has new records of 12 consecutive bats of the crumpled paper out of the air from the top of his cat tree and 47 consecutive fetches of the big plastic ring he likes. He still curls up with and wrestles his plush toys, but for some reason he prefers to chase after and return random garbage and dry rattling bean pods.
• 11/24/2010 We had our first snow/windstorm of the season on the 22nd. There aren't too many trees around my place and it's in town, so power was only out for a few hours. Zach's power is still out and will be until Thursday!
  
  In order to make things more interesting, I've redistributed mineral, animals and plants. Metal isn't as easy to find, so I've added metal/soil to the site finder, allowed it to mark multiple hits (one per map square), allowed you to break out of it as it is chugging along and made the aquifer readout more consistent. Animals and plants occur in more or less coherent ranges (respecting biomes) instead of being in or out of each region independently. Mining, smelting and gem-cutting are up in world gen. Once I get a few more industries up I'll probably make an attempt at trade.
• 11/21/2010 It took a little bit of time to sort out exactly how to store the information and how much resolution we could get away with in terms of specific items and materials. I have a yearly crop cycle working in world gen now to test it out, and it is able to track the amounts of plants specifically throughout the world's sites -- in a mod with hundreds of crops it might have to abstract it away to "edible plant from location A" etc. They need to eat their food now, and it became clear that the first transfer of goods we'll need is some food for the newly founded villages while they wait for their initial planting to grow.
  
  Next I'll need to set up the other industries, and then I'll have enough different goods stockpiled to set up value computations and trade.
  
  KaelGotDwarves asked me to mention his Secret Santa thread. I believe the sign-up ends at the beginning of December, so hop over there now if you want to be involved with it.
• 11/17/2010 Alright. We got some bugs out the way and will make a big bug crunching push after this next release. But now! The caravan arc begins in earnest. Before we can start moving the goods around we need to know what resources the sites are storing around the world. As you can imagine, that's a lot of stuff. Next will be the consumption of the resources, meaning lots of starving peasants. Eventually you'll be able to save the day with your caravan of needed prickle berries.
• 11/16/2010 This one fixes up several crashes and other problems. Maybe most notably, the problem where you'd become a criminal in adventure mode just by going back to a store, the handedness issue with uniform assignments (it might take it a while to clear out problems in old saves as uniforms are reconstructed), and SDL movie recording. You can find the other changes inside the download at "release notes.txt" and "file changes.txt", or in the DF announcement thread on the forum.
• 11/16/2010 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.31.18
• 11/15/2010 Fixed the theft problem from adv mode, the uniform handedness problem in dwarf mode as well as various smaller bugs. It announces/reports falling damage now as well and vomiting only occurs once before the creature starts retching instead.
  
  If everything goes well, I should be able to make a release tomorrow.
• 11/14/2010 Fixed a crash from weapon traps. Fixed a crash that comes up entering markets on occasion. Fixed a crash from backing out of "human outsider" during character generation. Fixed a world gen crash related to civilization populations mixing and secondary population members taking over leadership roles in the absence of historical figures when caste mods are present. Fixed a crash from walking off the left or upper edge of the world.
  
  Thanks to Janus for the more readable background. Zach and I are responsible for adulterating it with the misaligned little avatars, he he he.
• 11/13/2010 After another release to work out some of the issues with adventure mode, the caravans begin to roll. The peasants are free from their hovels, tilling the fields and tending to their pigs and chickens. Great walled towns import food and goods from all over the world. You will be able to run one of these caravans, buying and selling across land, guided by the law of supply and demand. Not only that, you can do it on a horse.
  
  One of the most exciting things about this next arc is that fortress mode and adventure mode will be bound together more than ever before. The dwarves will be forced to deal with the economic situation of the outside world, and adventurers will be able to experience the vast amount of dwarven goods your fortresses dump onto the market. It should be much fun. -Zach
• 11/11/2010 If you want to try out the improvements to adventure mode, I'd recommend generating a new world with at least 100 years of history. I tried out adventuring in a world from 0.31.03, and it technically worked, but there wasn't much to do. The reason I recommend some history is just to let the beasts get settled a bit, though it's not strictly required. We haven't gotten threats moving around and arising during actual play yet, so your worlds will inevitably run out of adventure opportunities as you exhaust them, and games tend to be fast-paced and brief overall once you get the hang of it. This will change during the next few major releases. There's an update to the "Your First Adventurer" manual section that might be worth glancing at even if you have played an adventurer before. Don't be surprised if you die learning a few facts about the world.
• 11/11/2010 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.31.17
• 11/07/2010 The peasant asked me to kill the spouse of the shadow monster. The lair was a little disgusting, but I managed to pick around and find a few coins from its human and goblin victims, minted by the Nation of Rabbits and the Tick of Constructs respectively. The spouse itself was dispatched with relative ease. I went straight to the castle overlooking the river to report my deeds. The lord there sent me off to kill the dark creature bridegroom, and I took a swordsman with me.
  
  The river ran pretty close to the gates, and when I walked out, we had a little alligator trouble. Well, the swordsman had more trouble than I did and ended up in the middle of the river where I couldn't help. The alligator became Skinnyrends and I left on my quest. I found a bronze breastplate in the first chamber, with no sign of the bridegroom other than the mess. I found him in the next room and lopped his head off with my axe. He wasn't alone however. The dark creature was still living there! This would be much more difficult. After getting my weapon stuck in her shoulder, she bit my arm and kept shaking it repeatedly. I broke free after losing a lot of blood, and that's when she took her copper meat cleaver to my toe. I fled, leaving my toe and axe behind.
  
  I made it to a market just before nightfall and the shopkeeper graciously let me sleep on the floor overnight. In the morning I gave up my coins, my breastplate and half of my clothes to get a bronze great axe. My right arm was still useless, but I could manage the weapon with one hand. I went back to the castle by the river to report my success... a technical success, anyway, since the quest was for the bridegroom. As I stepped through the doors of the keep, I witnessed a scene of horror. The alligator Skinnyrends was inside, and the lord was next to his own head on the bloody stone floor. One of the lord's soldiers was holding his own, but I managed to put down the murderous beast myself. I reported my news of the spouse to the soldier, and with my late rescue in the keep, I became a greatly respected figure. Unfortunately, I would need to travel to a castle far away to quest for further glory. Outside the keep, I noticed an elf prisoner. I also noticed his nose was missing. A forensic examination of the keep revealed the body part among the remains. I needed somebody to travel with me in the wilds to help dissuade night attacks on the long journey, so I invited the prisoner along. We made it to the second castle after sunfall and slept in one of the towers.
  
  In the morning, my potential was recognized, and the lady of the castle, speaking for the Nation of Rabbits, sent me after a malicious goblin outlaw, Strodno Stealfrenzy, who was no longer associated with the Tick of Constructs but was still a leader of a large band. I invited a couple of lashers who were in the keep, and along with my elf buddy we set out for the nearby hideout. I ran out ahead of my buddies and took a few grazing crossbow bolts for my haste, but I managed to put down the archers and faced the leader. He only had a bronze slicing knife, but it was his weapon of choice and he managed to cut me all to pieces before I finally took his leg off. I thought that would be the end of him, but he hacked my useless hand off, so I kept my distance while he bled. After I killed a few of his soldiers, he started crawling away into the woods. I went back to the main battle which had gathered behind me to find all of my friends were dead, surrounded by injured goblins. Despite my wound, I was able to avenge my companions. Strodno was pretty far away by this time, but I found him at the bottom of a hill. He deflected the blows I was sending in at him, so I put my great axe away, grabbed his knife, wrenched it away, and threw it at his arm, where it stuck. He punched my foot, and I took out the axe and stopped the fight.
  
  I grabbed up some human armor they had stolen, and one of the lashers' helmets bearing the maple tree insignia of the Nation of Rabbits. Then I realized that it was the late afternoon and I was alone in the wilderness with a long way to travel. Fortunately, there was a village on the way, and I crashed in a cheesemaker's house for the night after pulling a couple of bolts out of my body. He respected me for my deeds, and I convinced him to come along with me to the castle to avoid night trouble. We were attacked by bandits on the way back, but it was a small group and they weren't very talented, so I was able to fend them off myself.
  
  The lady of the castle decided it was time for a real task, and I was quested to slay a minotaur. This time I brought a halberdier, a pikeman, a bowman and a spearman. And the cheesemaker. The labyrinth was a long journey, and we were attacked on the way by a self-styled goblin captain leading the Trampled Plagues, a group of about ten goblins. I knew the leader of such a large group would be difficult, but I didn't want to risk losing my overly brave companions in the wilderness, so I stood and fought with them. It was the heroic thing to do, anyway. The captain was tough, and he parried all of my strikes, even cracking out one of my teeth with a thrust of his iron longsword. My halberdier arrived and stabbed him in the side, at which point I saw a great opportunity to kick him in the hand. A fairly revolting compound wrist fracture ensued, and he was easy to defeat after that. The battle had raged all around, and I found that our only casualty aside from my tooth was the poor cheesemaker.
  
  We had been avoiding sleep -- even in a group, if you are caught sleeping things can go very badly. On the other hand, if you avoid sleep everybody becomes ineffective, and we were all very tired. In a stroke of good luck, there was a village hidden in the unexplored area between the Nation of Rabbits and the minotaur's labyrinth. We rested there until dawn, anticipating the final assault.
  
  We descended into the labyrinth in the afternoon and quickly became separated. As fate would have it, the minotaur found me first. I didn't want to be completely heroic all by myself, so I fled back down the passage. I bumped into my archer, and he sent an arrow at the charging beast, to no effect. As I flailed helplessly, the minotaur gored me, knocked me over and then, remembering its human parts, got me in a hip lock. I kept missing, so I took the only opportunity that arose, and bit the monster on the chest. After that it wrenched my leg nearly off, ripping all sorts of connective tissue and an artery. It then knocked my bowman over and wrenched out my other hip. Just at this time my halberdier arrived, covering for my inadequacy yet again by hacking off the minotaur's nose. That was the last thing I saw before I passed out.
  
  I was really surprised to wake up, but there I was. I checked myself over and found I hadn't suffered a single additional injury, and I couldn't see the minotaur. Ah, there it is! Dead. I looked at the halberdier. His left ear was busted up, but otherwise he was fine. Both he and the pikeman had minotaur blood on their weapons. Then I remembered I could look reaaaally closely at the weapons and divined that the halberd had indeed killed the minotaur in the year 257.
  
  There wasn't enough time to get back to the hidden village, so we slept overnight in the labyrinth. Creepy, and smelly no doubt, but we were still alive when the sun rose. On the way back to the village... "Halt in the name of the Tick of Constructs!" A goblin patrol! The three blade weeds were there in orthoclase on their mail. Unlike the bandits, they were heavily armored. My bowman managed to shoot a few of them through their leather hoods, but a violent melee was soon engaged and both the pikeman and the spearman fell. I'm not sure if there were more in the woods, since several of the goblins were killed, but when I got a chance to flee I did, along with my surviving companions.
  
  We arrived back at the hidden village and reported the news that the minotaur was dead. The word spread around, and even the Tick of Constructs respected us for our heroic acts. We all retired together in that village as famous heroes of the Nation of Rabbits, although the halberdier deserves the bulk of the credit. I was the guy missing the hand, tooth and toe who had a penchant for dragging unfortunate peasants into his misadventures.
  
  There are still things to work out (some arising from that game above have since been fixed, others are lower priority). I'd still like to do some aiming fixes, a basic companion display (since that can get really confusing), some dwarf mode testing/fixes, and more, but it is coming together nicely.
• 11/05/2010 I'm still working, fixing up bugs and other issues. I'm about halfway through my list of things I'd like to clean up, with the worst ones (castles occasionally being placed halfway underground, etc.) being handled. I'm just going to keep at it until it is ready.
• 11/01/2010 The Bay 12 Report for this month has been posted.
  
  I know I just said I was done with features, but I was on a roll and did aimed attacks and random combat opportunities. Enemies do it too. It shakes up the combat flow quite a bit, and you'll occasionally see them use their secondary attacks when opportunities come up. Opportunity maxes out on unconscious opponents and enemies also know how to pick the best strikes, so fights can be finished quickly now. Now I'll get to the pre-release cleaning, he he he.
• 10/31/2010 After bringing justice to a few brigands out in the hills in the harshest possible terms, I was in good enough standing to bring along a couple soldiers from the castle, though the lord of the castle wasn't willing to entrust me with any important tasks. One of my companions gave me a tip that there was a night creature haunting the northern forest, and though we got in a little over our heads, in the end victory was ours and I returned triumphant. The lord was pleased and decided I was ready to try my luck with the cyclops living out in the tundra. I asked another five guys along and slew the monster quite easily. On our way back, ambush! The weather was horrible, so I couldn't see clearly, but the red eyes of goblins shined through the falling snow. Then the bolts started flying. It's not that easy to stop a hero though. Ten goblins were soon dead... and I only had two soldiers left. We returned to the castle, received praise for the defeat of the cyclops and jumped into the next quest. Apparently goblin banditry was not uncommon here, and I was to put down a particularly vicious goblin to the west. I left with nine warriors, and we spent the night in a village near the goblins' hideout to avoid being ambushed in the wilderness while we waited for the sun. At dawn, we commenced the attack. There were eighteen of them, and their leader Ngokang Doomtrammels was the first to charge. That didn't work out well for him, but we were taking heavy fire so I marked a goblin crossbowman and tried to make my way there. After a bolt in the stomach I was able to dispatch him, but a goblin with an axe was behind me and I lost my head. They impaled it on a highwood spear with my body so that the next adventurer might take heed.
  
  So that's bandits and sleep permission. After that, I cleaned up the wrestling interface a bit and added damage text for those attacks. Given the new night creatures, we were kinda hoping to get the game out today, but it'll be better served by some polish since we just finished the features we wanted to add now and there are still a number of issues. We also want to fix some dwarf mode bugs. It shouldn't be too long though. The month-end project was obviously passed up this time around, and I'm going to keep on working until its up, and then I'll probably just keep on until the end of November as well.
• 10/26/2010 Here the adventurer is approaching a castle. These are map exports of the castle (main level, up, up, up, up, up). Larger towers, tops. Little square towers. A gate and up the hill to the keep. There's lots more to be done, but not for this time -- these simply serve as places for you to find important people that will let you do important things, as well as being able to have a reliable place to grab some warriors to come along with you once you are a hero to the civilization.
• 10/22/2010 Here's the initial quest map pointing to a night creature, which hasn't changed. Here is the beginning of the journey on the new travel map. This is halfway through the journey (map), and this is right outside the destination (map). We've decided so far to leave the travel map unhidden, and you still end up exploring the larger world/quest map as you move around into unexplored areas as before, but we'll see how that situation changes over time. Even a pocket island can seem fairly large in this mode, and it should work well for (multi-tile) armies, bandits, hunting/tracking, travelling merchants, etc. as all that goes in. There are still some issues to work out -- notice that the forest pattern is the same in all the images, for example, he he he.
• 10/20/2010 I put stores back in over the last few days, and today was minotaur day, since they share some night creature characteristics and so were a good candidate to raw up. They live in their labyrinths and use weapons from the people they've killed. You can tell when they've been eating dwarves because of all the small equipment laying around or by the artwork on the crafts. Well, there's also the direct evidence. Minotaurs start with some natural skill (you can assign natural starting skills by type and level in the raws now), so victory isn't often easy. My second adventurer met a minotaur with scars, my first character's blood spatter, and my first character's halberd, and I promptly added myself to the collection. They don't bathe yet apparently, although I have no idea if minotaurs should ever clean themselves or not.
• 10/17/2010 You can now learn about the troubles of a community from anybody in it, and you can report your successes to anybody. If you don't report back, you don't get any credit, but if you do, then for now everybody knows instantly and the communities that have been wronged by a critter will consider you more of a hero. This makes them more likely to come with you and allows you to bring more people along. There's some oddness right now if your character dies before reporting back -- the town will still want the creature killed, which is fine up to a point, but any new adventurer that gets the quest can immediately report back that the creature is dead. That character doesn't get credit, which is good, but it is a little strange. Ideally you'd be able to go off and bring back some proof or take people to see proof, and earn a bit of credit (or lie to get even more), but for now I'm just leaving it as is.
• 10/16/2010 Today was the last day with night creature dens for this release. You can actually find some useful objects that are scattered around from their victims, and a few they took to better perform their business, like meat cleavers and boning knives. And other stuff. Now I should be moving on to the human side of this, by making it easier to understand what's troubling a community and becoming a hero by helping them out.
• 10/13/2010 Diversified the dwarf mode troubles a bit, he he he. I should be back to postable stuff after today.
• 10/11/2010 Dwarf Fortress Talk #10 is up: forum thread, DF Talk page with download. Adventure mode has cauldrons of blood, and dwarf mode has received its first night creature blessing as well. Proper burial is now somewhat more encouraged. An alternative form of memorial has been made available for those whose bodies you have misplaced.
• 10/09/2010 Stalk the living dead, A Terror to Behold, in the new Threetoe story. It has been posted up in the story section and there's a forum thread as well.
• 10/08/2010 An eyeless, horned woman shambled out of the woods and dragged off an unfortunate villager to her lair. After a time, the transformation was complete, and the man became known as a "dusk ogress mate", having become a horrible creature similar to his new spouse. Eventually, he fathered a dusk ogress, the children of his first wife forgotten, and he began to make visits to nearby villages himself to kill the innocent. Fortunately, he never attacked his old village, for he would not have recognized his previous family if he had.
  
  Of course, it's not a dev log story if it doesn't have a bug. Instead of staying out in the woods, the dusk ogress mate maintained a lingering connection to his old civilization and moved into a town. Despite his eyelessness, he made a fine fishery worker, and the townspeople never noticed that he was going off every few years to bring terror to neighboring communities. They didn't notice the horns either. I've fixed it up now. It wouldn't be a bug if it were a different kind of night creature, but we're starting with ones that live out in the wilderness.
  
  At this point, each randomly generated troll starts as a unique critter in the world, but they are able to increase their numbers a bit through the transformation process. This has also lead to our first remarriages as the partner left behind in the village can move on, and the trolls themselves dump their transformed spouse once their troll child reaches adulthood. The transformation is permanent, however, and although the transformed cannot initiate transformations themselves, they can attack villages. Later night creature transformations will no doubt allow the transformed to perform transformations (as with the standard vampire/werewolf stuff). Since the transformations are happening during world generation, I haven't yet had to tackle issues like transferring wounds or items to new bodies, and even if transformations go into regular play during this release, I'll probably avoid those issues for now.
• 10/07/2010 We're starting with night creatures, to give you some challenges easier than killing dragons and giant metal statues as well as some smaller places to explore than world-spanning caves. It is now more dangerous to travel alone after sunset (this requires being able to sleep/wait quickly if you are safe somewhere at night, which'll be in before the release). We're beginning with a fairly simple variety of randomly generated "troll/hag" creatures with grisly habits. Doing more types will depend on time, though we'll definitely get to some new stuff. Although the default ones are all generated, new tags will be available for modders to mimic their behaviors. Everybody in town will have something for you to do or be able to direct you somewhere definite, and you'll be remembered for what you do, which should allow you to move on to better things with more buddies, or give you a place to sleep safely at night. Some stores will be back in the market villages (in preparation for larger towns, which likely won't be in), and hopefully it'll be enough to create a little flow of play back and forth in adventure mode. There will also be some night creature additions for dwarf mode which might work better as surprises, he he he. Depending on how everything turns out over the next few weeks, we may get to more or less of it or change the course a bit, but this is the plan. It'll leave us with a very simple skeleton of a game in adventure mode, but it should at least be a game, with the rest of the dev page playing nicely with what we get. I'll also be cleaning up some more bugs before the release.
  
  I'm about halfway through editing the next DF Talk episode. I'm hoping to get most of the way through it tomorrow.
• 10/04/2010 There was a bumpy lag in the last one, and that should be cleaned up now. I've also added an init option to stop the dwarves from tracking blood around your fort (the default is no tracking). Finally there are some new refuse pile options (skulls, bones, shells, horns/hooves, teeth).
• 10/04/2010 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.31.16
• 10/03/2010 The invasions should work again now (including any old saves). There are also some raw changes you can check out in file_changes.txt. Assuming this release rolls out fine, I'll be starting up on adventure mode for a few weeks now.
• 10/03/2010 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.31.15
• 10/02/2010 I started with some bug fixes, in particular making invasions work again. I also resolved several tracker reports involving the raws and typos. For people that haven't been updating their own raws, this'll include the addition of a few new creatures and rehabilitate some others, fix up (non-)rotting plant debris and some other issues. I'll release this before I start up on adventure mode, tomorrow or thereabouts.
• 10/01/2010 The Bay 12 Report for this month has been posted.
• 09/23/2010 The full change list is over on the forum release thread and in the accompanying release_notes.txt. This release mainly addresses migration bugs and gives you some options for managing site sprawl during world generation while toning it down in general. "Create World Now!" has some choices to make this a little more straightforward than digging through all of the pages of parameters. I'll take care of any problems that come up, but the plan is to do a week or so of month-end project stuff, and then I'll be back on adventurer mode and bugs when October rolls around.
• 09/23/2010 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.31.14
• 09/19/2010 I put up a new Mac version yesterday to fix some library issues. I should have another all-OS release up soon as well which'll hopefully sort out some of this version's overall issues. It has been a bit more hectic than anticipated with clothes shopping and family gatherings and jury summons and no sleep and whatever else there was in there.
  
  Here's a post (9/19/10) in the Future of the Fortress thread from just now.
  
  Here's another (8/24/10) from last month.
• 09/17/2010 There's the Mac version, which due to more compiler woes will work only with Intel Macs at this point, as far as I understand it. The Windows version doesn't work on Windows 2000 anymore either, as some people have noticed for me the hard way. I've been catching up on email that piled up during the long release cycle, and I'm going to handle more email and forum questions and so on. Then there will probably be another bug fix release before the month end project work begins.
• 09/15/2010 The full change list is over on the forum release thread and in the accompanying release_notes.txt. The SDL Windows version may be missing some DLLs -- the dependency checker tells me it is fine, but I won't be sure until people tell me it isn't working, naturally. The additional DLLs are here in case it comes up. Just unzip that in the main folder. The upgrades to the SDL version also required me to update my Linux and Mac compiler this time around -- and the Mac Mini is kind of choking on that for the time being. Hopefully I'll be able to get the Mac version up soon. In addition, I noticed tonight while adding the FreeType copyright info that my "About DF" page from the 40d# series disappeared somewhere in there, so I can't distribute the older SDL versions from 31.06 to 31.12 according to the SDL license -- it requires the About page mention as well as the distributed license. In general, the rewrites for this version were pretty wide-ranging, so I wouldn't be surprised if there's some instability. I'll post fixes as necessary before embarking on the next proper release.
• 09/15/2010 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.31.13
• 09/10/2010 A few days ago I fixed up some problems with liaisons and diplomats (like there being liaisons sent from civilizations that aren't your parent, and demon diplomats rampaging around destroying your buildings). I also fixed up some targeting issues that were causing interrupt spam among other things. After that I cleaned up some village issues that popped up in preparation for the release. I think the last thing I need to do is handle some of the world gen lag -- it is faster in parts, and slower in parts, but the slow can be bad, so I've got to sort that out, then I can put it up.
• 09/06/2010 I finally got some time for bugs today, and I'll probably continue to graze on the stickied tracker issues a little more before the release. So let's see... the cursor should center properly on buildings again when you are linking them to levers. There were issues with people sleeping on the floor when they had rooms, or sleeping in the wrong beds, that should be fixed now (you might have to replace some beds in old forts though). You can make wooden swords with obsidian and get the right material out (obsidian instead of wood) and I sorted out some material template issues with native metals. Glass vials should have the right material. I took another stab at a crash involving aborting zone placement, though I don't have the crash myself so we'll have to see on that one.
• 09/05/2010 The parents ended up having some vacation time, so we all went for a little hike along the Hoh River. We also ended up staying a night in a nearby hotel in Forks. I didn't know until the trip that Forks had gained some notoriety in recent years. Apparently we missed the official annual Twilight Day by about a week, but there were still plenty of things to be seen, including many shirtless dolls for sale.
  
  Baughn's TrueType code is coming along nicely in the SDL version, so the next DF will have an experimental version of that. This frees up the glyphs in tilesets from most of their text display duties, so that, for example, the number zero won't generally be displayed as a coffin in custom tilesets now, and it supports variable width fonts. There are places where the TrueType fonts need to be used where they aren't currently and there are some justification issues etc. that need to be worked out, but it appears to be mostly working, so you'll be able to play with that.
• 09/01/2010 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 'Æ'/'æ' represent crops on hills (replacing the '∩' 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.
• 08/27/2010 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.
• 08/22/2010 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.
• 08/19/2010 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.
• 08/15/2010 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.
• 08/12/2010 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.
• 08/09/2010 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.
• 08/08/2010 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.
• 08/05/2010 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.
• 08/03/2010 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.
• 08/01/2010 The Bay 12 Report for this month has been posted.
• 07/25/2010 A few crash fixes, liaison replacements should work, and you should be offered a barony properly when you hit the triggers.
• 07/25/2010 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.31.12
• 07/23/2010 This release is all bug fixes, mainly with equipment and training. The full change list is over on the forum release thread and in the accompanying release_notes.txt. Now it'll be half month-end project and half unburying myself from email etc. I'll probably start out in August with the site sprawl over the world map and keep up with that for as long as it takes to allow adventurer sites and the other things that come out of it.
• 07/23/2010 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.31.11
• 07/22/2010 The next release should be ready tomorrow morning if everything goes well. Archery training seems to be working fine now. There are still various equipment bugs, but it's not nearly as bad.
• 07/19/2010 Here are some replies I made to questions over on the dev page thread.
  Posted 7/19/10.
  Posted 7/06/10.
  Posted 7/01/10.
• 07/17/2010 Yesterday I messed around a lot with sparring and skill demonstrations and made sure they were moving between them properly, and I balanced out some of the timers and skill increases there. The combat rebalancing had had an effect on sparring injuries, which had already been a bit of a problem (and have historically been a major problem), so I put in some more safeguards there. I also found that anybody that was bleeding modestly would take a dive and decide they needed to be carried off to the hospital, even if the bleeding subsequently stopped. That's fixed now.
  
  Today I took some time to think about the site/population rewrite that's the foundation of a lot of the future developments, mainly having your own sites in adventure mode, having sprawl/rural areas, villain groups, and having more dwarves live around you off-map in dwarf mode. Since I'm aiming for the 22nd or 23rd for the next release, I'm not sure if that rewrite is going to fit or not. I'd like to take some small steps on the dev page each time I release, but this one is larger and it still needs to be done early. If we wind up with some more days of bug fixing and then the site/pop rewrite first thing for the release after the next one, I wouldn't be surprised.
• 07/15/2010 I cleaned up a number of training issues today. There was various lingering information that would gum up barracks selection over time, and individual training could interfere with squad barracks selection as well. Some out-of-whack personality effects had far too many soldiers skipping out on their individual practice. Demonstration/training organization has been sped up a great deal, and I fixed another problem with class timers. Civilian jobs should respect attribute growth/maintenance properly now, though we'll have to balance that a bit no doubt. Shell moods are restricted to dwarves with shell fetishes. Goblet/flask construction shouldn't shuffle the metal types anymore.
• 07/13/2010 I stopped the main cause of people carrying around three or four weapons, shields, etc. and I freed up equipment that got locked up when a squad with empty positions was disbanded. Fixed a crash on the military ammo screen and another crash/hang on the squad screen. Shell crafts and other shell objects should work for next time. Artifacts made from body parts (shells, bone, etc.) should get the right material.
• 07/11/2010 All right. So these releases include some ongoing work on combat, mostly, and other bug fixes, as well as some token work on the new dev page. The forum became corrupted while I was releasing 0.31.09, and I ended staying up until... around noon or something cleaning up the forum, and I eventually got 0.31.09 up yesterday afternoon. It had a few bad bugs, which led to 0.31.10 and very little sleep. Those bugs are hopefully fixed now without having new friends to replace them, so that I can start up on the next release cycle properly.
  
  I've got emails to catch up on, some other B12 stuff, and sleeping to do, so it might be a slow day or two now (assuming the release marathon doesn't continue...). We're going to continue on with bug fixes, of course, and we're still choosing the dev page items to do next. Lately we've been shifting between getting enough entity pop stuff in to open up the rest of the list, basic combat enhancements like aiming, and getting a few more of the adventurer skills done, but no decisions have been made.
• 07/11/2010 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.31.10
• 07/10/2010 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.31.09
• 07/09/2010 I thought it would be ready today, but I ran out of time (it's 9AM, again, so I guess I ran out of time a while ago). It should be up at some point tomorrow, unless something really weird happens.
• 07/07/2010 I fixed up a number of issues with hunting -- they'll shoot from farther away, pick up equipment/ammo more reliably and return kills more reliably. There are still problems with persistent equipment assignments and other such issues, but they work better than before. Military marksdwarves will fire on their enemies properly now, and I made the kill order work a bit better, so that non-targeted benign wilderness animals wouldn't gum it up and it'll force targeting of targets that aren't normally allowed (it was a bit confused about those). Benign animals shouldn't freak out civilians quite so much, though they'll still get scared off if something comes within a few tiles. The arsenal dwarf was obliterated to let equipment move around more easily. The position might be back later, but not without being more useful and interesting.
• 07/06/2010 I started with the perpetual bleeding issues, and that lead to another spiral of combat fixes, but now hunting/ranged military/etc. fixes are finally the thing that is next, in case you were waiting for that. So, combat fixes. Wounds with items stuck in them won't bleed perpetually anymore, and the "major arteries" tag now works -- this includes the heart which is beyond major and beyond an artery. It should always gush out nicely when it is broken open now. My test for that was to set up two lines of 11 crossbowmen each and just wait for a good shot, but the heart wound ended up being a guy getting shot in the arm, dropping his crossbow, running over to the opposing line, and jabbing his stack of bolts into somebody's chest.
  
  I fixed up disemboweling, or rather, it just happened to be mostly fixed due to the changes over the last few days (there were still a few things wrong). Due to the cumulative wounds, even thrusts can lead to guts popping out. During the test (a 20 sword free-for-all), a guy got stabbed in the lower body twice, his guts popped out, and then a third guy came up and severed his exposed guts, so that all seems to be working. I also cleaned up a bug with giant creature wrestling that caused them to sometimes appear to do nothing (because a force variable blew out), and I stopped unconscious people from performing phantom dodge rolls that didn't let them dodge but let them reduce the squareness of some strikes.
• 07/05/2010 Today I spent quite a bit of time charging arena swordsmen in various armor at crossbow lines, and I'm happier with the results now after a lot of changes. The bolts in the currently released version are more like flying cheese graters or something in that they are light but really flat with a cutting surface, and the contact area changes I had to make to fix that propogated back through everything through a series of other tweaks. By the end, unarmored macemen were much worse off when fighting unarmored swordsmen than during the tests a few days ago, and the tables turn when they are armored, which I suppose is all right, though it's still too stark. I'm going to move on to the ammo assignment/hunter/etc. bugs as well as the perpetual bleeding issues now, and I can come back to combat balance more after the release as problems crop up.
• 07/04/2010 I worked with melee combat a bit more today, mostly with screwy item calculations. The shield/boot/glove masses are fixed (they were all being bugged down to 10 grams), and the surface areas for small non-weapon objects were off (hitting enemies with a rock was like slapping them with a really thin floor tile). There was also a problem with charging that caused a lot of extra deflected strikes. I'm going to move on to ranged weapons next, including broken ammo supplies in dwarf mode.
• 07/03/2010 The pristine dev pages were bugging me, so I did sharpening stones, the hunger/thirst extension, butchery, and a prepared elf brain in my backpack so that I could color a few of them the "in next release" color. You can make a sharpened version of any stone right now -- we'll restrict the candidate minerals a bit once surface rocks are a little less homogenous in most places. During the course of adding basic knapping, I put in support for custom (buildingless) adventure mode "reactions", so some modding should be possible there for people that want to add their own production chains. The syntax for reagents/products is the same as dwarf mode, with the same capabilities and restrictions. Now I'll be back to combat/archery bugs for a bit, then we'll do a release.
• 07/01/2010 The Bay 12 Report for this month has been posted. The new development page is up as well.
• 06/30/2010 I've added in some more cumulative damage effects and fixed problems that had arisen with the swing velocity and impact calculations. The bronze colossus can die, unarmed striking fights end eventually now, and I had 13 dwarves with maces beat 13 dwarves with swords (with 2 and 3 dwarves remaining in two tests), so many of the issues seem to be resolved. Several bugs related to ranged weapons should be up within a few days, but I'll probably want to check a few more things here.
• 06/28/2010 The material-based random critters should be killable now. We're also putting together the new dev notes, and hopefully those will be up on the 1st. I'll probably continue with combat bugs tomorrow.
• 06/21/2010 Because the release (releases...) landed on the 19th, I thought it would be better to move the month end stuff up a few days and then just get started back on DF around June 27th instead of the 1st. I expect to continue on fixing things, with a bit of adventurer skills stuff thrown in.
• 06/19/2010 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.31.08
• 06/17/2010 I got rid of some of the flashing and debris from the SDL version, but there's a bit left to do there, then I should be at a good place for the release of the latest bug fixes. Scamps has his annual checkup tomorrow. He is a growing beast, ornery with strangers, and even non-strangers have accidents (today: "... he got a vein"). I'm a little worried about how that's going to go for the vets, with whom he may now have a personal vendetta, but they have lots of medical equipment on hand so it'll be fine.
• 06/16/2010 Hunt adventure with Root, a new Threetoe story. It has been posted up in the story section and there's a forum thread as well.
  
  Bug fixes are ongoing -- fixed a few crashes on the military screen and cleaned up some of the rules governing commander assignment. Feeding and watering of injured dwarves should happen for a lot of the dwarves that were being neglected. A few item attachment/naming spam bugs removed, fixed up some weirdness with craftsdwarf shop interface and traction bench manager orders.
• 06/13/2010 Continuing along with the bug fixing:
  • made stockpiles able to take from other stockpiles again
  • made ownable items like cloaks that are part of uniforms not put soldiers into pickup/drop loops
  • made cooking require a non-liquid object to start (prevents liquid food errors, powders okay)
  • fixed crash associated to assigning daggers to dwarven soldiers
  • fixed crash when over 200x200 in some screens
  • fixed some job overwrite issues
  • made alcohol turn into separate liquid objects less often
  • made non-brewing events that create liquids handle alcohol correctly
• 06/11/2010 Here are the upcoming changes from the last few days:
  • allowed options screen from dwarf/adv mode setup
  • made workers stop taking new jobs if they can and want to eat/drink/sleep instead
  • reduced hunger/thirst/drowsiness skill/speed penalties
  • made hunger/thirst/drowsiness thoughts occur a bit later in the process
  • made certain jobs like updating records and partying quittable at any time due to hunger/thirst/drowsiness
  • stopped doctors from picking up and dropping their patients repeatedly when it was time to carry them
  • restricted doctors to using tables and traction benches in hospital zones
  • fixed pathfinding problem in special features that were placed within surrounding liquid layers
• 06/09/2010 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.31.06
• 06/08/2010 I've fixed a few of the annoying equipment bugs (dwarves swapping out their equipment for newly-made items of equal value or items from caravans or other visitors/invaders/immigrants, and dwarves trying to use too-large equipment), but there's still a lot left to do. That said, I'll probably put up a release tomorrow at some point and then continue on. It should incorporate Baughn's fix for the image export crash, and if I can manage it tomorrow, you'll get detailed map export back. I also fixed a crash on the stocks screen from scrolling over globs when there was fat from historical figures present (including fat from certain unnamed stray animals), and I consolidated the entries there a bit and sped it up scrolling over large groups slightly (more needed there).
• 06/06/2010 I fixed a hospital crash (from nearly spent bars of soap) and another zone problem which screwed up hospital furniture and left ghost zones floating around. I also handled another cause of negative distances in the build menu (channeling out brooks). There were some problem with the raws that I cleaned up as well, most importantly the material values that derigo noted which were screwed up for tooth, horn and a few other materials. Natural attacks will be more dangerous now (instead of jello-like...) although the numbers versus clothing could still use some more work. I'm going to try to handle a batch of equipment bugs tomorrow if the day goes smoothly.
• 06/05/2010 Dwarves that get stuck permanently with "no job" after individual training will be unstuck for next time. I handled a few other crash issues as well. Continuing along with bugs tomorrow.
• 06/04/2010 DF 0.31.05 is up in this forum thread. If everything works out, this'll be the last forum release before we go to the main page. This one fixes the graphics crash, the squad creation crash, the melting items crash and some mayor/expedition leader problems, among other things.
• 06/02/2010 There shouldn't be any more duplicate mayors or disappearing positions when a leader dies, animals and babies won't cause spam from cleaning jobs or haul soap all over the place, and dead expedition leaders and mayors will be immediately replaced. I also fixed a problem with ID numbers when loading/generating worlds in the same session. Tomorrow I'll be getting the new merge changes compiled up (Baughn has worked out the graphics crash and some other issues). There might be another day or two of testing there, in which case I'll handle more dwarf bugs as well. Then we'll be at 0.31.05.
• 06/01/2010 The Bay 12 Report for this month has been posted. I ended up working on the month-end project pretty much every day of my vacation, but that's to be expected. I'll be back to DF bugs tonight, and there should be a new version up soon.
• 05/22/2010 I've fixed a few things for next time, probably most notably that melting items will be safe again instead of giving you frequent crashes. I'm going to take a little time off now, or at least give myself a change of pace with something else. I'll be back on June 1st, but if I get a patch for the graphics mode crash before then I'll try to get something up this month. Otherwise, I'll put something up during the first few days of June.
• 05/18/2010 If you've gotten unexpected messages about blocked PMs on the forum recently, or even if you use PMs in general, see this thread.
• 05/16/2010 DF 0.31.04 is up, but I've put it in a forum thread instead of as the main download. A lot was rewritten and I don't want to jump to replace the main download links until the worst bugs are sorted out, but I don't imagine people would appreciate another months long private testing process. Hopefully the show-stoppers will be ironed out soon. Then I can get back to military/equipment/combat/etc. bugs. I'll probably be taking some days off in a bit... it has been a long time since I took any time off and I'm starting to feel it (or maybe that's just because it's 4PM and I didn't sleep getting this thing up the last many hours). I'll let you know in here when the month-end or whatever break begins.
• 05/15/2010 I managed to mine out a Linux tunnel and kill some Linux wolves, so it looks like we have a running game over there. Image export didn't compile, and I've still got to fix that up, but it looks pretty straightforward. I don't know if I ever had Linux sound on my computer, but it might also be out of commission. That might be harder to fix, but it isn't as important for now. The rest looks fine though, as far as I can tell. I had to do some massive find-replaces to get the compilers to agree on things... that included changing the word "long" in 17000 places. I caught all of the displayed text instances I could think of or search out, but if the occasional sentence on screen has devolved, it'll be easy enough to fix when it is reported. I haven't gotten a chance to fire up the Mac, and morning has rolled around on me, but that should happen soon.
• 05/14/2010 There were bumps with adventure mode announcements acting loopy near the end, but I've finally started working on Linux DF. Right now I'm just sorting out a number of minor compilation hiccups, and I expect to have a running game to scrutinize tomorrow. Mac generally goes smoothly once Linux is up, and then it will be ready to go.
• 05/12/2010 I did an interview for digital humanities person Elijah Meeks's HASTAC blog.
  
  I've gotten a chance to check them, and the macro record/playback, window resizing and mouse wheel zoom are still intact. Graphical map export isn't showing sites for some reason... but it seems that it's now mostly small stuff like that left on Windows, so I should be on to Linux and Mac compiles. The next release should have all of Baughn's stuff, from the speed improvements to the perks I mentioned up there to Linux and Mac versions. I thought it would be up a few days ago, but there have been a whole host of issues that I've just had to go through. Saves from DF 0.31.01 and later will be compatible.
• 05/09/2010 I spent all day fixing compile errors (starting from 3500...) and link errors (only 38!), and now that it has rolled around to 9AM, I finally got something running post-merge. The arena was fine, but there was a world gen file error and broken keys and some debris on the screen, so it's not quite ready to go yet.
• 05/08/2010 The original game seems to be working fine after all the merge changes, but I still need to iron out some bugs that come up after the code is put into place with the SDL stuff. If I'm lucky it'll be up tomorrow, but it'll depend on the fixes. The drudge work is pretty much handled now though (drudge-work-wise, I just need to convert the 0.31 key defs since they are in a different format in the SDL version).
• 05/03/2010 While I was working on the adventure mode screens update, Scamps ran into the room and jumped up on my arm so that he was hanging from it briefly with his front claws. That startled me and I swung to the right, knocking my desk and banging my knee into my tower. Somehow that popped the case open, and when I looked down my computer was laying open on its side with my phone sitting inside of it on top of the motherboard next to a spinning fan. It seems fine, though. I guess the memory is in perpetual danger though, from falling phones and stuff. Scamps, who was crouched right next to the scene with his little tail wagging, got a ten minute timeout.
• 05/02/2010 The merge is ongoing. I finished the first pass on the 73 screens I needed to update to the 40d# format, but I've got to go back and pick up errors and otherwise clean them up. That's the bulk of what needs doing. Then it should just fit in nicely, with a few more tweaks after that.
• 05/01/2010 The Bay 12 Report for this month has been posted, and mallocks has prepared the transcript for DF Talk 8.
• 04/27/2010 I've contorted the 0.31 code to look more or less like the 40d# code, but I still need to rewrite the screens, which'll take a while (and be a source of all the merge bugs). Everything's working at a basic level though, so it looks like it'll at least go through, even if it takes a bit more time to clean it up. The rest of the game needs cleaning up anyway, so it'll fit right in. After I get the merge out, I imagine the priorities will be military/equipment bugs and merge bugs, unless something worse has crept onto the bug tracker in this time.
• 04/25/2010 The forum has been moved and updated. Somehow during that time my non-spam email count got back up to 150, but I've got it down to 30 again. The SDL/OpenGL/40d# merge is underway. Here's an interview I did for Game Console.
• 04/17/2010 Here's Dwarf Fortress Talk #8, covering the sciences that topped the community poll: forum thread, DF Talk page with download. I handled the eternal suturing/wound dressing trouble and verified that melting rains are gone. I am now 32. I guess I need another bit.
• 04/16/2010 So far I've handled vermin not rotting, a crash from the site finder, and river fish availability (which related to the melting rain bug but I haven't gotten to that one yet so it's probably not fixed -- temperatures are a bit more sane though... but maybe not sane enough). The fish availability fix changed how some checks in world gen worked, which bloated the memory usage there, so I had to spend quite a bit of time getting that back down to where it was before, which also speeded up the map cursor in embark and a few other things. I had to change how map features are created to get it to work, and I've left in the old method for existing worlds. I tested it out with a few old saves, but let me know if something strange happens there.
  
  It appears the fixes that we put in to save the forum from the rush of traffic have caused it to load poorly/not at all for people with high latency connections. The server is pretty stretched in general, so we're going to move the forum and perhaps the bug tracker to a new one that can handle the php better. I spent some time today with that, and it will be an ongoing project. I will keep you posted as things happen.
• 04/12/2010 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.31.03
• 04/12/2010 Here's the next one. I fixed some crashes and a pathing problem, and undead should be easier to kill in general. There's a forum thread here.
• 04/11/2010 Things are finally settling down. I got a chance to program a bit today, and I fixed another crash bug today (deleting hospital zones) and failed to reproduce a few more bugs, he he he. I'll be continuing on with that tomorrow. I also did some preliminary merge code yesterday. There are a few more things to check, but it looks like that should proceed without any weird surprises.
• 04/08/2010 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.31.02
• 04/08/2010 The first bug fix release is up. It's just a few crash fixes and some raw reshuffling. Things are still settling down, but all the same there should be more releases in the coming days. There's a forum thread here.
  
  I did an interview with Negative Gamer, which has been posted here.
• 04/06/2010 Now that the initial release rush-of-things has settled down, today was going to be crash fix day, and I took a look at the first few issues on the bug tracker, compiled something... and it crashed before I got to DF, which isn't the crash I wanted to see. Then Firefox crashed. Then the memory checker told me it found lots of bad, bad things. So I guess I'm going to get something new for the memory checker to check. This means I'll be delayed a bit, but at least this happened after the release. It was close!
• 04/02/2010 All right! I am still recovering from lack of sleep, but the 14 hours I just put in should help. The site was down for many hours yesterday, due to more traffic than my current configuration could handle, so the web server software has been replaced due to the heroic efforts of Baughn and some Footkerchief with a little watching-in-awe and dictation taking by myself. I now have over 200 emails that require some action on my part, and I'd like to input existing issues/categories into the bug tracker before it becomes over-burdened. That could take a while. I also need to catch up on crayon and ASCII art rewards, some of which have been languishing for some time. Then I'll start in on crashes and the merge with the OSX/Linux/SDL/improved-OpenGL port. I'd like to thank everybody that has supported the game, in whatever way, and I'll be back on it once I unbury myself.
• 04/01/2010 Released Dwarf Fortress 0.31.01
• 04/01/2010 Here it is, along with a new web site! There's a forum thread here, and the Bay 12 Report for this month has been posted as well.
• 03/28/2010 Still on track here. Scamps learned to fullscreen Dwarf Fortress and he learned that scratching my computer's case is a great way to get attention. Elsewhere in the animal kingdom, Momuz the three-eyed marmot demon fooled the humans into believing she was their skeletal goddess of death, and she took over their civilization after threatening them with violence. The town's local warlord apparently didn't like this arrangement, because he asked me, the elven adventurer, to kill her. I found her sleeping in a little hovel in the early morning and hacked her to death in her sleep, but the humans weren't grateful and tried to kill me! How rude.
• 03/26/2010 Fixed a crash related to vermin getting caught in cobwebs, and another series of crashes related to temperature. The conditions for the different landed nobility to be elevated from your fortress population are in the raws now, as are megabeast and semimegabeast and titan attack conditions. They can be set based on population, exported wealth and created wealth. So, for instance, if you run a low-population fort for whatever reason, you can adjust the numbers. This came up during the course of debugging the landed nobility... and it turned out the liaison was not coming back in subsequent years because the visiting dwarf lost the position upon leaving the map... anyway, that's sorted out.
  
  The current situation is that I expect a (buggy!) Windows release in about a week, with the 40d# merge commencing at that time (or within a few days of the release). This is a bit of a change of plan, since I was originally going to release for all operating systems at once, but I feel like I'm going to get even more bogged down if I don't do it this way and the initial pre-merge release will give us a control to work with in the same way that 40d can be compared to 40d#. The initial merge release shouldn't take too long though, and it will be the top priority aside from the worst catastrophic crashes and things of that nature. I know the merge changes make the game playable for many of you when it otherwise isn't.
• 03/23/2010 The main issue now is a frequent random crash that has appeared that I'd reeeeaaaaally like to have cleaned up -- we caught one of them just now that happened when an old mayor needed to have mandates cancelled after losing an election. There still one that happens in younger forts though. Testers are on their seventeenth version overall, and I imagine it'll be that way for the rest of you as well once I get it sorted out, bandwidth permitting.
  
  "Stands up" spam in the combat log led to weird repetition of previous announcements... all sorts of problems with fluid containers... fixed up some temperature check code that sped things up a bit... lots of cheese/milk job problems fixed...
• 03/20/2010 A bit of distraction from military matters -- they started walking into water 6 of 7 deep if there was an available ramp, then scrambled right back out. Milling jobs were using wooden chests and then calling them wooden bags afterward. "Skeletal" slugmen and other oddities no longer occur (you can still get zombies). I got rid of the snow display during world gen, made scorching areas available again, and added parameters and parameter sets to make worlds that are surrounded by water on all sides for people that like that look.
  Large Medium Small Smaller Pocket
• 03/18/2010 Stopped dwarves from deciding to reverse their uniforms/clothing choices in their minds, thinking about how strange it would be to put your socks on over your shoes, and then dropping everything, including stuff they got on right the first time... various problems with training activities not clearing properly... cleaned up issues with specific bed assignments (to positions within a squad), changed the sleep schedule options around... I also ended up making reclaim civilian, at least for now, since there were too many issues with starting out a bunch of pre-made squads. This also messed up soldier migrants, but I've compensated for that by giving migrants higher and more varied skills in general, including the skills of a former soldier at times.
• 03/15/2010 I've answered some questions over in the List thread.
• 03/14/2010 Let's see... lakes were extending underground... like way underground, causing all sorts of magma trouble. Fixed an arena crash. I just need to fix up the various equipment/training bugs now.
• 03/12/2010 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.
• 03/11/2010 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.
• 03/10/2010 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.
• 03/08/2010 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")...
• 03/05/2010 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.
• 03/04/2010 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.
• 03/03/2010 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...
• 03/01/2010 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.
• 02/27/2010 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.
• 02/26/2010 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.
• 02/25/2010 Sieging humans brought some war polar bears, and one of them started a camp fire. Highly trained!
  
  Fixed that up, made the new categories in the labor list light up properly when sub-labors are selected, fixed annoying ant colony display bug (they were being displayed wherever on the screen), fixed that fever bug from the 13th, stopped metal crafters from turning the coal they brought into "large coal gems", fixed a crash with cobweb placement, got appropriate wilderness creatures to enter the map from liquid/air edges properly, and fixed some of the legends text export information (still unclear whether that's going to be replaced/augmented by xml)...
• 02/24/2010 Science in DF was the runner up for the topic of the last DF talk, so we are holding a science specific poll here for the next talk. Vote for your favorites!
  
  Here's a List thread reply (2/22/10).
  
  Cleaning progresses. Another poison crash and other problems with poisons, stopped the bronze colossus from blowing out some combat variables, fixed some problems with entity material selection, added plaster trading, fixed issues with flying item thieves, slowed down skill/att rusting a bit, some designation coloring and other display issues... The animal people will now dip their darts in whatever nasty stuff they can find down there, instead of just venoms from bites and stings. So any poisonous liquid/dust breath, poisonous secretion or poisonous blood that is around in their cavern will be used.
• 02/22/2010 The next SDL/OpenGL/etc update 40d18 is up (Mac too!). There are still some adv mode errors and so on -- the important thing we are checking is the general FPS, since the other problems just have to be worked through on the main merge anyway. Votes in the poll and comments are helpful. You can grab it at the forum thread here.
  
  The missing DF talk segment is up on the DF Talk page with download and transcript.
  
  Main-release DF issues continue to be worked through as well. World gen crash fixed, various complaints about the military controls addressed (lots left there). It also called not-yet-placed doors and other buildings "unknown frozen substance doors", which wasn't correct for things like wood or anything else. I'm trying to catch up with the future of the fortress questions, but they are outpacing me recently, he he he. I think I have about a dozen replies left to do.
• 02/20/2010 Non-programming bug to report: I know a lot of you were disappointed by the latest DF talk. I was sort of confused by the specific complaints at first, but I actually went back to the transcript today and found that somehow I only managed to send 6 of the 7 recorded segments over to be edited. The missing segment? A 27 minute file starting with "All right, so now we're going to talk about the future of the artifacts", which was the main draw of the talk for pretty much everybody. Sorry for not catching my mistake sooner! The file is intact, and we'll try to get that together promptly.
  
  We still had DF bugs to go around. Liaisons had been hanging out doing nothing, staying in some fortresses for years before moving on, but not all of them. After a bit of poking around, I found that one of the liaisons that chose to linger was in fact trying to meet with a batman blowgunner far underground. Apparently any creature that was around on the map before the dwarves that wasn't a historical figure was thought to hold every responsibility for every civilization, including receiving diplomats. The new animal people camps created this situation.
  
  I recently updated the material values in the raws, but it wasn't working out. This is because, despite my attempt to select every material, it only affected the last material on the list for a given creature. So while dragon teeth were virtually worthless, dragon pus was like creamy gold. Infect and collect!
• 02/18/2010 Apparently in my previous testing, I haven't had a dwarf with a splint that had time on his hands. Usually they'd get their splints and then run out of the hospital zone and do their work or grab a drink or whatever. The latest dwarf, an idler, threw his splint on the ground immediately because it wasn't part of what he expected for his normal clothing and because he didn't think his arm was broken at all. He also threw his wound dressing on the ground. Fortunately he didn't pull out the sutures. That's all fixed. I also fixed a mood bug that was making them go to the work shops and yell "I must have items!" instead of being more specific. And the hospital wasn't storing as much stuff as possible in its chests, because it thought spider silk hidden down on levels deep below had already claimed the storage space for raw spider silk suturing.
• 02/17/2010 Humans stopped using wood at some point in there and were paranoid about building their homes on top of cavern features far below the surface, so I helped them out there. The first food store I walked into was selling yummy firefly brains, so that still needs a little work. I forgot to set the boiling point of the gas inside the body of a floating creature, so the poor thing died with the message "<name> has condensed." The former gas was in a puddle. You'll still be able to get this to happen if you lure them out of the caves onto a glacier. The feature layers also weren't taking into account the local erosion elevation drops from rivers, so occasionally a stream bed would be floating in the sky above underground features and cave-ins would happen immediately, leaving little spikes of stream bed where the cavern's columns and walls had been.
• 02/16/2010 Four crash bugs fixed (two in each mode), smelting jobs fixed (they stopped appearing on the list), fixed a problem loading world gen parameters, hid a lot of announcements that were appearing improperly in adv mode, some grammar stuff... a few more old hands are checking things out, and apparently there are still plenty of crashes to go around! People wrestling teeth... cave crocodile killed 20 of 40 war dogs before going down... wolf corpse smacked into a zombie wolf's face, knocking out an eyetooth (that one is fine, he he he)... crossbow bolts failing to penetrate clothing now...
• 02/15/2010 Finally handled a world gen crash that has been a problem for a long time. Earlier I stuck some blind cave fish men (yes, be prepared) in the arena to try them out, and they wouldn't do anything but wander around. It was frustrating, but after a bit I remembered that they didn't have the EXTRAVISION flag. Then it was fine!
• 02/14/2010 Here's Dwarf Fortress Talk #7, covering artifacts: forum thread, DF Talk page with download and transcript.
• 02/13/2010 It's 10:30 AM now, 26 hours after the last entry... so I'm going to go ahead and start marking the dev log with the day that it actually is instead of the day that I woke up on. There is less math that way. Zach tested out windmills and dye, taking a dimple cup farm up to trading blue trousers to the elves. It all worked, surprisingly enough. Poisons had some lingering errors, which I worked on in arena mode for a while. Two crash bugs fixed up there. I made a creature earlier with a poison that gives you H1N1, basically, and there's apparently a bug with fevers... they never go down, even after the illness itself leaves the system.
• 02/11/2010 Ha ha, it's 8:30 in the morning again... I should figure out a way to write the dev log halfway through the day, with a time machine or something. Anyway, some stuff works better now. Glass even worked on the first try.
• 02/09/2010 Today we wanted to see how the hospital zones worked out over there in a real fortress environment, so Zach took his fort and made a dwarf-dropping device. After a few false starts, we got a dwarf with a compound fracture in his left hand. One of the caretakers wanted to clean the dwarf off but kept dumping the water next to the dwarf, over and over. Once that was sorted out, surgery began. The dwarf Zach had selected didn't have any surgical experience. As I was watching, blood splattered on the walls and floor, and another dwarf ran over to diagnose the patient again, while the dabbling surgeon moved between repairing the compound fracture and trying to stop bleeding from malpractice. Eventually it was time to suture up the wound, and the dabbling surgeon did this... then again... then again... our poor patient had four sutures in his left wrist before I got the bug figured out. Bandaging worked out fine, but I had screwed up the meal requests for patients that can move under their own power, so while the patient was waiting for a splint to be constructed in the workshops the caretakers left him to die of thirst. I got the splint together just in time, the caretaker put it on correctly, and the patient jumped out of bed and ran to get a drink.
  
  Scamps received many toys today. We have a few more toys to give him on each of the remaining days of the week. He enjoyed them very much, but when it came time to play fetch when I was working tonight, he brought his favorite old toy (which has a lot of its fur chewed off, especially in the throat area).
• 02/08/2010 There's a List thread reply here (2/8/10). One of Zach's horses was savaged by a nightwing and succumbed to infection two months later. It didn't go much better down below, where one of his dwarves was taken carp-like from the top of moat by a gigantic beast. The kiln was busted, and now it's not. Some problems with hospital item storage came up. Zach also found some pigtail trousers that weigh twice as much as a bin of pigtail cloth.
  
  Scamps turned one today! When we weighed him, he was fourteen pounds. The birthday party is actually a five day festival (during which I'm still working), and he'll be receiving his gifts tomorrow.
• 02/07/2010 One of the fun new things down below has some critters in it, but it's not as fun if the critters are set to be wilderness creatures and so eventually roam off of the map, leaving the fun new thing completely empty. That's fixed now. Brewing stopped producing seeds apparently, and Zach had to turn to the underground critters for food. Brewing is fixed. Some job material problems that left products without materials were fixed. I'm also working through some ammunition and equipment problems. I've been balancing about halfway between stuff I had listed from before and stuff that has come up in more recent testing.
• 02/06/2010 Zach set up a little fort in part to try out the clothier's shop, well use and the supposedly fixed caravans. There was an accident during the well digging, and a couple of dwarves drowned, but the well worked out in the end. The dwarves couldn't recover one of the bodies but they set aside a casket for him. The caravan arrived properly and Zach traded away the other dead guy's clothes and some rock toys for pigtail and cave spider silk cloth. The clothier was completely busted (the buttons just stopped working), but I managed to clean that up. With the immediate goals checked off, the digging projects moved deeper to test some endgame stuff, but a large underground beast managed to get into one of the stairwells and there were further deaths. In the meantime, I cleaned up some bugs with the raws, including some trees that dropped gray wood.
• 02/04/2010 The next SDL/OpenGL/etc update 40d17 is up for Windows and Linux. Mac has been delayed a bit over some library issues. You can grab it at the forum thread here. That thread can also be used to provide feedback. Remember that this is not the next major version of the game. 40d17 itself is fairly buggy itself due to a massive rewrite that had to be done to support the new input system, but that's what the thread is for. Hopefully it'll all be worked out by the time of the merge.
• 02/03/2010 I fixed up pack animals and an overall lack of minerals on the map, and 40d17 is alllmost ready. One of Zach's dwarves grew attached to his trousers. Then all of his military dwarves decided not to drink and died of thirst in the barracks while training. Then it crashed. The work continues!
  
  Here are some List thread posts: 2/4/10 1/26/10
• 02/02/2010 Zach played around with a couple of forts today. In the first one, he broke through the rock and found he was in a huge pillar surrounded by an underground lake, so he dug out a shelf and a stairway down and then bridged over to some mushroom-farmable land on the other side. There was some bizarre table dancing where they'd drop and pick up their food while slowly eating it. Then it crashed.
  
  In the second game, he had some werewolf trouble on the surface. It tore his fisherdwarf's head off and after he organized the other six dwarves to attack, his carpenter and another dwarf were killed. The survivors couldn't clean themselves up because the pond water was too bloody. One of the reasons for that was the carpenter -- when he had sorted things out and went to look for the bodies later on, Zach found his rotten corpse down there. After the fight, raccoons invaded the scene and stole shoes and gloves from the field. There were only four dwarves left, and hoary marmots began wandering the fort freely. He had been at the site for a year, but strange bugs with pack animals caused caravans and migrants to be shut off, so he wasn't getting anybody new. I've got that bug reproducing now, so I should have it sorted out tomorrow, hopefully. As I'm writing this dev log entry, Zach's current project is getting the pond drained to reclaim the skeleton. I'm also working on the last bits of the 40d17 stuff (not the merge, just the next test release).
• 02/01/2010 Zach's glacier tiles disappeared as he dug staircases, so he ended up taking apart his wagon to build a staircase down to the rock. There was a lot of fighting with wolves, and the kill order mostly worked but it kind of acted strange, and eventually he got a crash on the military screen. On the other hand, I fixed a crash with liquid spilling out of certain unsolid creatures, the problem with booze being ignored and some of the others. Cats and dogs had four mysterious unattached fingers that moved with them (just four in total, and they had all of their normal toes, front and back) due to an extra tag. I added some more raw error logging there to detect body tags that don't get attached properly.
• 01/31/2010 Here's the February 1 report. Zach assigned axes to a couple of different dwarves and commanded them specifically to kill a crocodile and a giant toad that were tormenting his civilians. The missions were successful, but the toad had already killed two civilians. They were laid to rest in pieces in their coffins. A sever bug caused those pieces to be somewhat ill-defined as "partial remains" instead of the specific parts. I'm testing the fix for that right now.
  
  We also solved the mystery of the crash that has been plaguing him the entire time. Apparently when critters came wet out of the water and attacked people, some of the water transferred over and cleaned off other spatter on their victims' inventories, and that routine wasn't written correctly to handle the near-simultaneous adding and taking away of inventory spatter. I think it's the same as an intermittent crash bug I've been having for months but could never reproduce reliably, so I'm happy that one is out of the way.
• 01/29/2010 Zach found a cave crocodile and his miners were also harassed by multiple -redacted-... and meeting zones didn't work. I'm not sure exactly what sort of civic project he was working on, but a room ended up flooded and he built something involving a lever trying to get the room dry again. One gremlin showed up but he chased it off. Then he found some problems with the Z status screen. He also set up a magma forge and a magma smelter and got a gold operation up and running down in the depths. Then it crashed. I finished some of the lingering 40d17 problems, and I may or may not be back to regular work tomorrow depending on if I'm needed there again immediately.
• 01/28/2009 Be taken away by Snatcher, a new Threetoe story. It has been posted up in the story section and there's a forum thread as well.
  
  Let's see, Zach's dwarves insisted on drinking from a pond instead of drinking their booze, but he managed to melt a dwarf with magma and have the rest killed by underground beasts within ten minutes, which is positive. Adventure mode was kind of a mess on the other hand... he somehow started with a complete set of adamantine equipment, with which he couldn't injure a mob of leatherclad villagers despite my testing a similar scenario in the arena mode. I didn't ask him why there was a mob after him. Prior to that, they sent him to find a demon at a vague location to get a quest... dunno if that was a bug or not, since I haven't checked the legends. Anyway, more to do.
• 01/26/2010 Okay, we've got a handle on the big 40d17 issues, but it'll still take some coordinating. I'm also working on getting an ugly crash-test copy out to Zach, for which I have to iron out a few of the weird game-breakers so he can even try it (like, why are the dwarves all moving at 1/3rd speed now even when the FPS is fine?), and then I should be back to the march toward the main release.
• 01/25/2010 40d17 was in worse shape than I thought (my fault), so I'll be continuing to clean that up again tomorrow. Baughn will have to go through whatever I send him, so we're delayed overall there and I don't have a release date for testing on that. I managed to pull the list thread responses together. Here are the two new ones along with the others I haven't linked here:
  
  New 1: 1/26/10 New 2: 1/26/10 12/09/09 12/08/09 11/17/09
• 01/24/2010 I've organized all of the remaining notes... massive but contained. I should have everything I need to get 40d17 up, so I'll be doing that tomorrow hopefully, then I can move on to the hydra testing. I'd also like to get the list thread questions up tomorrow or the next day. I'll post a link here when it is done.
• 01/23/2010 For rope ladders/etc., I didn't want to tackle the two big issues there (pathing and multi-z buildings), so I went ahead with the quick fix, which is allowing you to build stairs most places, including down into an open area. When I get around to the proper solution, that ability will likely be removed.
  
  In any case, the underground is complete. There's still a lot left to do, and I'll be all over the place fixing this and that, but I shouldn't be adding anything else giant and new that will further slow things down. There are a ton of "test this!" and "do this for this person" notes lying around, and I've got to go through all of that and plan my route to a release.
• 01/22/2010 Fixing issues with cave ramps took four hours longer than I expected, but I managed to get them working, as well as all the magma features and drainage problems I know about. This leaves one day to play around with the deep stuff, and then I'll be to the last part, the ladder issue, which I may or may not do something with. So the underground stuff on the list should be greened out in a day or two.
  
  For a while now, Scamps has consistently rolled on to his back and stretched out whenever I go into the kitchen. He meows once then waits. He isn't begging for food -- he just wants me to go over and rub his belly. This is called Tummy Time.
• 01/20/2010 I'm staring at less than a page of notes for the underground now, so I could be done with that by Friday, which would be nice. The plant growth stuff is all working out, so things like giant tower cap farms should be feasible, once you break into a spore source for them. The adventurer can interact a bit with the underground, and it might happen away from sites like caves and old fortresses, so I had to create weird invisible sites to store the changes permanently (not mining yet). There were also a bunch of spatter display problems I fixed. Next I'm doing tweaks to cave openings and handling some problems with magma pools and internal volcano generation involving water layers draining down below into the magma and so on.
• 01/18/2010 I've been working on the laundry list of map tweaks for the underground. Next up is testing out underground plant growth over the course of a game, especially as it relates to player-expanded caverns. Scamps hit 12.5 lbs, he's still skinny, and not yet one year old. Maybe he will be a megabeast after all.
• 01/16/2010 The topic vote for DF Talk #7 is up, and voting closes Saturday afternoon (on the 23rd).
• 01/15/2010 Okay, the underground life checks are done. Gas/liquid leaks from internal tissues of those kinds, getting them to exit the edges of the map correctly underground (there was a little bit of underground monsters running up out of available stairways to exit from a surface edge, but it was mostly okay and should be fine now), checking up on the new titans, etc.
• 01/14/2010 I'm hoping to be through with all the life-related checks for the underground tomorrow, which would leave the map-related stuff and that rope ladder issue.
• 01/12/2010 I've been steadily working on the email/private message backlog from the holiday illness. I have 25 emails and 15 PMs left, so hopefully I can have those boxes empty soon, in case you've been met with silence lately. I didn't end up with a lot of time, but I got to testing out gremlins as well as making sure that the curious beasts (beer guzzlers, item thieves, etc.) work out deeper down. The gremlins made a few runs on the caged dog I set up as bait for them (they wanted to spring the dog loose), creeping up three underground layers worth of stairs I built for them.
• 01/11/2010 I finished up the lingering underground civ issues today -- how they are listed in the civ screen, an issue with how critters that become notable are linked to the underground civs, that sort of thing.
• 01/10/2010 The transcript is up for DF Talk 6. I messed around with underground populations a bit more. I also used the new locations associated with announcements to turn off all of the combat spam in adventure mode for events that your adventurer can't see. Later we'll need some general sound announcements for those, perhaps, but collapsing them down to something concise is more than I can do this time around. I should be done with underground civs tomorrow.
• 01/09/2010 Ran through some underground invasions, fixing problems as they arose, and did a bit more with underground entity population regulation over long periods of time.
• 01/08/2010 I fixed up some body problems with the new critters and tweaked some of the combat stuff relating to size. I still had dizzy-breaks and my-eyes-are-sore breaks, but it was a lot better than when I tried this earlier this month.
• 01/07/2010 I think I'm mostly back together now, so we should have regular development logs again since there will be development again. Here's Dwarf Fortress Talk #6, covering adventure mode: forum thread, DF Talk page with download.

Current Log
2019 Log
2018 Log
2017 Log
2016 Log
2015 Log
2014 Log
2013 Log
2012 Log
2011 Log
2010 Log
2009 Log
2008 Log
2007 Log
2006 Log
2005 Log
2004 Log

Dwarf Fortress started October 2002, this log was started around the same time as the "back to the dwarf game" thread.