Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 21: In which Toady One and ThreeToe talk about the upcoming release.

Episode Date: January 12, 2020

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Welcome to Dwarf Ortrish Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfey. We'll have part two of our conversation with Tarn and Zach Adams in a moment. And after that, we're going to have you sit in on a few excerpts from a meeting we had last week to get together and say hi after the break and to make some plans for the upcoming episodes of the podcast. You should also be aware that we recorded the session with the Adams Brothers in mid-December. before the extensive dev notes that came out on New Year's Day that publicly confirmed that they plan to post the villains release this month. So keep in mind that we know more now from the dev notes

than we knew when the session was recorded. All right, enjoy the rest of the interview, and we'll be back for a short chat afterward. I have kind of more of an engine kind of question. It seems like a lot of the stuff your guys are doing with the procedural stuff, it's almost feeling very machine-learning. Is that an angle that you guys think you might ever take it as some of these machine learning tools start becoming more accessible?

Yeah, they'd have to be like all the machine learning stuff we've seen recently. I mean, I don't know if you guys played AI Dungeon 2 when it came out, all the GPT2 stuff, all that kind of thing. It's still way too resource-intensive to even that are doing. And, I mean, especially with the game, the way it is already, right? And I don't know.

And also, I know nothing about it. But, but, like, you've seen, like, this is not machine learning precisely, but it feels more like machine learning than some of the other procedural generation when people are doing, like, waveform collapse. And Caves of Cud, in particular, has a bunch of, like, waveform collapse and stuff. and I'm sure other other other things do by now and you can definitely get different looks from that and

I like the I mean I like the fact that you can get different different looks from things so as we continue on especially when we're like considering doing like the magic release and having like different planes of existence and other weird places where we're going to want to have different looks

and I think there'll be more tools on the table, I'm just sure with them. I think it'd be great if you guys were the first non-graphical game to require a GPU. Yeah, I know, we need more experts on the team to do anything. Yeah, we have to find some way making a GPU do something that had nothing. Yeah, people do that.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, I don't do it. I don't know how to do it. I think the list of the fastest supercomputers came out recently and the number one computer, I think it's on by Google. They don't have any kind of graphics display or any kind of video display, but it is all on GPUs. Yeah, I mean, Bitcoin works the same way, right?

Big Bitcoin miners are all just wrapping graphic cards together or something. As an aside, I read a review of the I-9-9900 CPU, and one of the benchmarks used was DF WorldGen, which I thought was pretty great. cool, that's really relevant for me. Yeah, I mean, it seems like, I mean, I guess it's a benchmark if you pick a seed and a version and it doesn't have a generation bug. Hopefully the world's all still generate the same way.

Those are the worst bugs. It's like the absolute worst bug fix is the one where it's like, it's year 250 of the world and it's slightly different than the same seed that you generated half an hour ago. and why it could take three or four days just to go backwards through the world gen and figure out where it initially diverged and it's always from an uninitialized variable pesky semi-cule trouble trouble everywhere

but yeah no they seem fine now I've had a few in this release because there was so much world gen stuff this release this release has been nasty with that kind of bug well, seems fine for now. How do you guys test your releases before you release them, or do you just kind of release it and then see what people say and then issue point releases? We hit all the main features to make sure they aren't broken,

and then, yeah, we release it. Yeah. Awesome. It's like I, yeah, we play, I mean, I play through every line of code I write. I try to, you know, it's responsible to run them, But that does not capture a lot of the interplay that you get these, you know, with the game now. Everything's just to link together and weird things happen.

And we usually, you know, I hand it off to Zach, especially as soon as we get a version that's up and running, which, of course, doesn't happen until near the end of the police. And, you know, he'll play games for a couple weeks or whatever. Find a lot of stuff and then fix what we can there. But still. Yeah, like what we're doing now, like running this 30-year. for it. We don't run for a year for it's. It's just not

practical. It's not practical. Yeah, with all the new features coming out and having to get it out. Like with this villain release, it's been way too long. We don't want to just test and test with that. I mean, especially because, you know, you can play earlier versions of the, you know,

so it's like a test for a beta version, basically. You know, we're alpha. Yeah. Well, I think some of the bugs are hilarious on their own. I know there was that one about the cats and the alcohol and the taverns and stuff like that. I mean, that's just the stuff of legends. Yeah, and hopefully we'll get some real doozies in this in this next, in this next version. There's a lot of new moving parts

and like now we have all the failed experiment maggot creatures and stuff. And that's, yeah, wasn't there, there was a bug with a giant monster composed of human body. that like got a job as a farmer as a village. Yeah, the first the first giant amalgamated undead zombie that we had

just quit the necromancer immediately moved to a town and became a farmer. Like a very large farmer. But I mean, I guess that's good, right? You'd have lots of farmhands. And they don't need to eat either. So even though they're so big,

they don't need to eat. And yeah, I guess farm hands, like technically like 200 little dangling hands. but although to be clear that's not how the amalgamated zombies work we haven't solved the centaur problem of being able to glue things together yet that's that's kind of a magically sort of question of rewriting and figuring out how to rewrite the bodies to do gluing so they are they are really at the tissue level smashed together and just kind of a giant meat blob but it's funny too because it still has the name of the the person that I guess is like forming the brain. It got scrunched in to form the brain because it's based on a historical figure that gets an additional hundred people smashed into it. It's all the name. It's kind of a, yeah, it's a sort of a Tetsuo type thing. All right, I'm going to shift gears a little bit into a little bit of meta subject. Me and Roland

got together over Reddit. And I'd listen to Dwarfork Fortress talk probably five or six times through, and I couldn't believe that there wasn't someone else who had a Dwar Fortress podcast out there, and I think that Roland was kind of the same way. So Roland and I started this thing. So how did Dwar Fortress talk get started? So it was actually another, it was Rain Seeker actually had radio experience, and I think he offered to set it up for us, and we don't really have time to do it ourselves.

so with other it was it was other people came together to do it like you guys are doing so yeah i'm trying to think of like like the original the original emails uh that were sent about this thing like when was the first episode released um as rain seeker yeah rain seeker kind of uh was the ball that got that rolling um and he may have actually been the one i'm finding these emails right now where it's like they're from like 2009 where rain seeker sent us um sent his emails about like hey what do you guys think about the podcast idea and stuff or whatever so i think i think uh like many things we were not the prime mover on this like like the same thing with like patreon and stuff right i mean people were bugging us for quite a long time like hey you guys should get

to this. This seems like a really nice fit. And we didn't because we're stupid. I'm slow and not early adopters at all. Yeah, here's a thing.

Oh, I found one. Yeah, Rain Seeker. Would you be interested in doing a short weekly or bi-monthly podcast with me about Dwar Fortress? And then we're like, ah, you know, we feel too busy or whatever. So he came back a few times and actually got that ball rolling. Yeah, so that was like 10 years ago.

Yeah, that looks like August 5th, 2009 was the first release date. Yeah, that's squares with these email dates. So, yeah, you can thank Rain Seeker for getting that started. Thank you, Rain Seeker. Don't hear much out of them anymore. Of course, I don't spend enough time on the Bay 12 Games forums. I actually don't spend enough time. playing Dorf Fortress, you'd think that that would play more, considering that we have this

podcast. We have periodic contact with Capintastic, and we talk about occasionally getting the gang back together, and then the email communications fall apart, because we are way too busy to edit and stuff. Yeah, I mean, it's been 10 years since it started. So people have live. Yeah, it's been hard to get it back together. We have failed thus far, and most of it.

that's on us. Well, actually, we need to get a rainseeker on here then and have him as a guest to talk with him about the Door Fortress Talk podcast. That'd be fun. Yeah, and Captain Tastic is reachable. I know he's on Twitter and is a human being findable. I will ping those two. And if they happen to be hearing this, ping us. So, yeah. Is there anything that you folks would like to put out that we didn't cover in our questions to you? Wishlist us on Steam. That happened on day one. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah. No, the wish lists always help. You know, if you're interested in the graphical version, of course, the classic version is still going to be there. Yeah, congratulations to the generous. We still need support up until. tell the steam release, we've got to pay the rent. Yeah, yeah. None of people have been great.

I have not really out the best way to ask you guys, to tell you guys that I want a crayon picture. I'm a five-a-monther on Patreon. Oh, did you check the reward box saying you wanted a reward or whatever? I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it's a very,

I mean, there's some imprecisions in the system, but I go through the list of the people that do that on their initial pledge. But Patreon doesn't tell you if people have changed the boxes and stuff. It's impossible to find... Yeah, so as far as... I mean, just shoot us an email

as far as the grant. Yeah, and that goes to anybody who's... Yeah, anybody who's not sent us somebody or you can contact us by email if you haven't received. Yeah, we're not trying to stiff anybody on those things, so

just contact us. Cool, cool. I'm going to bring up something completely unrelated now. First, I want to say that I think that it's been long enough that the interdict on mentioning Krug Smash on the podcast should be over with now. I think that we should be able to talk about him and say

his name as much as we want. Oh, I already screwed that up already. I'm not supposed to say anything? That's all good. Well, no. See, the first few episodes of this, it was every third word out of our mouth was about something that Krug Smash had done because I was such a,

and still I'm such a huge Krug Smash fanboy. I don't know if you guys have noted what he's doing right now. And, I think it was today anyway. I watched it today. He released the first fight in his tournament. No, we are not day to day up to date. We watched a bunch of videos, but not day to day.

So if you check out YouTube and Krug Smash's last two videos, the first one is like 20 minutes, and the last one just like five minutes long, it is, he's basically got a tournament set up. There was a tournament that ran... last summer that we actually talked about a little bit on the podcast, but we never followed up with. Do you remember that, guys?

That was the Reddit one, right? Yeah. Yeah, I saw a bunch of fan art from the Reddit tournament. Yeah, we need to follow up on that and see how that went. But yeah, I encourage everyone to check out a Krug Smash's tournament on YouTube. This episode, so whenever I was in college, me and some buddies of mine thought we'd on a lark just, you know, get, drink some beers, have some fun, and watch faces of death.

Oh. Yeah. The party went really dark, really quick, and that's kind of what the first episode of the tournament kind of felt like. Yeah, well, people are killing each other inside some kind of arena or something. I mean, that's not pleasant. Yeah, I mean, our inspiration was like the Iliad. I think what blew me away in those in like some of the tournament stuff

and actually in adventure mode one time as I played the black black widow or brown recluse man and all of a sudden I realized I had multiple arms and I was just like oh my God they've really done this those crazy crazy people yeah although for people inspired by the Iliad we added tendons surprisingly late okay um well see actually i haven't looked at the dev notes since we last had our last

uh meeting so sounds like we're getting close to our release so we did note that uh that you use the word release in the dev notes for the first time in early november um the word release that's what we were looking for and we actually have a pool as to when the actual release date is going to be. I think that any of us have... Well, we can't tape the release pool, you know. If you guys have money on stuff, we're not going to like...

Who are those guys, the FCC? Who's in charge of? Yeah, yeah, there's probably some kind of gambling rule about this. I'm sure all those rules have been lifted by now. Oh, that's right. We're in no rules land now. Yes, that's a different era, for sure. Yeah, that's true.

If you need plate, testers for the new release? We've done that. We did that once. It might have been the World Activation Release or the one before that, I don't recall. We had a little, we had a little beta thing with a private wiki and stuff. And the problem with that was it kind of people started yelling at those testers when the release had bugs. But the release had bugs because we released it and knew those bugs were there.

They had found them, but we still had to put a thing up. and then we you know some of those bugs we got to and so forth but um so yeah we're currently in the not not using tester phase to avoid other people being harassed or whatever and i'm not sure what the future's going to hold especially as the steam release comes we may revise our policy there because it's going to be a big deal to not screw that up although i'm a big fan of not messing with what works so clearly whatever you guys are doing is working well so i'm like Don't spoil the magic. Yeah, well, I mean, it's kind of

unavoidable change is coming. So we'll have to think about our whole system. So, yeah, who knows? And have you been having good experiences and stuff working with the Ket Fox people? Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, we've known Tanya for years, and now we know the rest of the crew.

Yeah, another great. We love all the Kitt Fox people. Yeah, they've got some packs again. I'm doing a GDC talk with Victoria and San Francisco in March. They're a communications director. And we're going to talk about the Dwar Fortress community for the last 16 years of community management. And hopefully that talk will be public.

I've done a couple GDC talks now, and they've all been free. It's one of those things where they kind of decide somehow to put some for free and some hide in the vault. But hopefully you guys will do that. Yeah, if it's free on there. And there's no restrictions as far as I know about just posting slides and stuff anyway. so because we're going to yeah it's good it should be interesting especially for people who

weren't on the forum in 2001 or whatever because we're going to bring we're going to go all the way back talk about you know how how how this happened and how how what we've learned about internet communities and managing so yeah that workshop stuff's going to get interesting yeah no fortunately mef is is still on board for helping us with that stuff. He has a lot of experience doing masterwork, like managing large numbers of mods. Yeah, he was on,

and he was basically saying that the way he plays the game now is he mods. That's his jam. Yeah, that's cool. It is cool. I guess we will wrap up the episode then. Thanks so much to Z. Tarn Adams, for joining us here on Dwarf Fortress Roundtable.

Yeah, thanks so much for taking your time today, guys. I really appreciate it. You got a lot going on and holidays and stuff. It's fantastic. Also, let me just thank you so much for making this game in the first place, because, you know, it's like turned into y'all's life's work, and it is so neat to be able to share in someone's, you know, they've turned their life into an art piece.

That's pretty cool. well i mean we wouldn't be anywhere without you guys without the fans would not be happening so no cool we're all in it together and hopefully uh it will continue to be super fun um yeah uh like big heart thank you for making the game and uh stay true to it thank you very much yeah thank you yeah yeah no problem we're gonna we're just gonna keep on going to fun going forever and ever forever and ever that's the spirit yeah that's what we want to hear yeah well i mean once you put in 17 you can you can at least say that you're good for 17 more yeah just tell that jury duty stuff that you've got work to do well you have to go in in person to tell them that that's

the problem yeah you still so no matter what the week is the week gets all broken up but i think you could get yourself out of jury duty just explaining what you do so here's the deal um we put the arm hair. We model arm hair. Well, is this case about arm hair? I just can't prove. Is it reanimated arm hair or regular arm hair? It's like, let me tell you about justice. You take a hammer and you hit something. Anybody you want. People get a little upset, but it's no big deal if you pick you home. I write a video game, you see. We do justice a certain way.

Okay. Well, for Dwell Fortress Roundtable, we are signing off for this time. We'll see everybody next time. Hey, thanks again, everybody. Thanks. Thank you. Okay, so, wow, we had a lot of response after Tarn and Zach told everyone that we have our podcast. Who knew they'd be so popular?

I know, right? but we had a well let me just say that the stats show that now episode 20 the most recently released episode is the most downloaded episode of dual fortress roundtable all right man so are you guys going to kick off any any you know last remaining forts before the new before the january 31st update arrives well yes that's what um that fortress that was streaming. Yeah. That is actually a fort that I spun up last night after the one I spun up yesterday morning. You went to hell real quick because of reasons. But, um, literally or you punctured a vault? No, no, it was figuratively.

Okay. Now, what happened was I had a bunch of migrants come in, but they came in from the other side of the river and I didn't realize that they couldn't get across the river. So they ended up having like seven people kind of starved and became really, really grumpy. When I finally realized what was going on, I put a bridge over the river and they came into the fortress, but nobody was happy. And everything started spiraling downhill. So before the year was up, everything was just fish. Oh, it happens.

Yeah. So I quickly retired that fortress and started the one that I did last night. But yeah, the reason I'm doing this is so that I can get some chops up. with Vanilla Dwar Fortress before the new one comes out? Yeah, I wanted to do the same thing. I wanted to play a vanilla because I've played it a couple times, but I just went all in on tile sets and loved them. I think they're awesome.

But yeah, so I tried it on the Mac, and the Mac version of Dore Fortress is a rough road, the vanilla version. So I had all kinds of problems. Maybe if somebody's listening and they have suggestions on how to get it working well, that'd be awesome, love to hear it. But yeah, it's like it, you know, on the Mac screen, it's high DPI. So, you know, the window pops up and it's teeny tiny.

You need a magnifying glass to look at it. And if you resize it, the game will resize the fonts and stuff. But then it introduces like two to 300 milliseconds of latency when you touch the keys. So it is a wildly unpleasant experience. As we're on Windows, it's, you know, it's pretty solid, you know, pretty reasonable. I just need to be able to disable aquifers because I'm too much of a new to deal with those. The Linux version is pretty good. The only thing that I've run into is I can't get the zoom in and zoom out, the left square brace, right square brace, which is supposed to zoom in and out.

I've not been able to get those to work, and I'm not messed with the key binding, so that might help. But that's the only thing that I've really run into that didn't seem to be working as advertised on the Linux version. Yeah, that's cool. So what do you guys think of the of the notes that we got? I know that when we were talking to the guys that sounded like some of the things that they wanted to add might not be in the game. But I, you know, and then I was looking through the notes and reading the Reddit thread and it looked like people were like, oh, this didn't make it and this didn't make it. But I couldn't really get a good sense of what will or won't be in it. It looked like it was kind of what I would have hoped was going to be in it.

I haven't read the notes as deeply because that was quite a post that he made. yeah it was would you just quit reading when it mentioned the podcast for like I'm tit to do up there we're got not exactly it sounds like that perhaps some things got left unfinished that they had planned on wrapping up and it may create some interesting um interesting issues our our company does not like us to use the word bug so use the word issues as a euphabism. for bug. Undocumented feature.

Yes. I'm looking forward to some of the mayhem that may come about. Yeah. So I joined right around the time of the 40, not this current one, but I think maybe one release before. And when I first started playing, there were releases.

And I was like, oh, that's cool. The game gets updated all the time. That's neat. But there hasn't, you know, been too many updates since then. So I'm not really sure how it's, I'm not really sure how it goes when you have a big or what I think will be a big feature update.

I mean, I know, I, I'm assuming it's going to be more than 45 or 46. I'm guessing 50 something. What do you guys think? Like, what version number do you think we're going to get? Yeah. Hell, he, the way he was talking, it may change the numbering scheme this time. Oh, yeah, go to it. I was wondering, you know, I was going to go to like the Firefox thing.

It's like version 71, version 72. I don't know. He said that, yeah, I asked that question in our interview, and he said that, yeah, he's still got the list. Yeah, they're still using that right now, but they may change, especially given that Steam is going to want actual version numbers. Yeah, and that's cool. And I really think it would be such a pay-in-the-ass for them

if they had to have one versioning system for Steam and one versioning system for classic. Yeah, it was pretty, exciting hearing the talk about, you know, what was going to get put into Steam and just hearing the kind of discussion of, well, we're getting closer to Steam so that, you know, some of these things will be able to, you know, get us closer to that release. I was just like, gosh, that doesn't seem suddenly quite as long as I thought it might be. Like, the Steam release could be is like summertime, maybe. Who knows? Well, what it sounds like now from this is that I'm going to be able to

cobble together, enough stuff to have the intro to the part two of the interview just from us talking. But I mostly wanted to, for the intro and for this session, if we were going to use it for for actual airing, I just wanted to say hi to you guys and say, hey, how's your new year been? It's been a while. And how about them, Adam's brothers? Totally. Yeah. I ended up getting influenza. So that's not great. Even though I had the stupid shot, I still got it. I don't recommend it just as an ailment. You know, if you're looking for some sort of a seasonal ailment, I would, you know, just keep looking. Don't settle on influenza. It sucks. Yeah, other than that, didn't really do much. Good time. Yeah, me neither. I also got sick. My nose is

completely clogged. That's why I sound like this. Beside that, I'm fine. I can't do my homework because my program keeps crashing. And I found out that Wolf Fortress hates my new drawing tablet. So whenever it is plugged in, the game crashes. It is plugged out. The game works completely fine. But I can't play adventure mode as when it's plugged in. I don't know. I over the break have been, wow, I feel like that I've not done anything, and I have been healthy, happily. Yeah, I've been working and basically editing the Adams podcast.

And I think that's, that'll do it for now. I will. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, and I think the release, I'm almost sure, will be. on Friday the 31st, because why else would you say January if you didn't mean Friday the 31st? Right. So, and I'm going to, probably until that release comes, as quick as I can get them episodes edited, I will probably get them out so that we can maybe get that one that we record next week, make sure that it gets out before the actual release happens. And after the release comes out,

then we'll get back to our regular two weeks, two week schedule. But given the enthusiasm that's, that's surrounding our podcast right now and the fact that we've got a big release coming up, I think it would be nice to have a little extra content out this month if we can make it. Yeah, sounds good to me, yeah. Go. All right, well, I will see you guys, Dick's Wednesday.

All right, take it easy. Have a good one. Have a good week. You guys, both of you get to feeling better. And don't give it to me. Right on. All right. See you.

Later, guys. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye. This has been Dwarfortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things dwarfy. You can find all our past episodes at df roundtable.com. Please stop by and leave a comment or suggestion in the comment section of this episode.

While you're there, you can subscribe to Door Fortress Roundtable or find us in the podcast service of your choice. Music is Skykew Ellen, composed by Kevin McLeod. You can find Kevin McLeod's music at Incompetec.com. You can find a link in the show notes. This is a almondwood podcast. crafts dwarf ship is of the highest quality it is encircled with bands of pecan wood this podcast menaces with spikes of almond wood on the podcast is an image of a four-pointed star in almond wood