Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 42: In Which We Discuss Life, The Universe, and FPS.

Episode Date: January 10, 2021

Hey, we're back to talk about Dwarf Fortress. If you've gotten this far, you probably already know what we're about - but if not, we're three people who get together every two weeks or so to talk about our favorite game, Dwarf Fortress. Join us! Tony's Reddit post on the Mac M1Peridexis Errant's Lazy Newb PackThe Hitchhiker's Guide Support Dwarf Fortress Roundtable on Patreon Musical Attribution – Thanks so much to Kevin MacLeod for making his awesome music available to content creators! Skye Cuillin by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4371-skye-cuillinLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Folk Round by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3770-folk-roundLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfie. I'm Jonathan. I'm Roland. I'm Tony. And we're back for another season of dwarfy goodness. So welcome back, guys. I hope everybody had a nice break. Oh, yeah.

Well, good is good. I played plenty of Dwar Fortress, and I finally had a fortress collapse under its own weight. My frame rate went down to 10, 12. It was just so slow that I was just too annoying to play. So I retired that fortress. As you should, sometimes I found when that happens, you can go cut. down trees because I've had somebody get stuck in a tree and if somebody gets stuck in a tree I've seen that do really bad things to my forts and then I go cut down the tree and then

all is well again if I can manage to get a dwarf up there and that power that it probably takes to get him up there with the broken frame rates but that could be a problem sometimes unless it was truly just a giant fort that you had it was a good sized fort and I had like 180 dwarves in it so that was part of it. I was also in a heavily forested area, so it's quite possible that I had someone stuck in a tree, and I wasn't

aware of it. Yeah, that can be a killer. Although, I didn't have any warnings for like the last year saying that anybody was dehydrated or starving or anything. That's a good sign, I guess. Yeah, I guess so. And I had that happen earlier in the fortress. It was,

I had two or three dwarves who weren't able to collect the items they needed for their artifact. And you know what happens whenever that happens. They don't love that. Yeah, you try to get what you think that they want. And if you can't figure it out, they just go into a melancholy and, you know, wander around outside in the rain until they die.

Oh, it's sad to see it. If you're lucky. If you're not lucky, they go berserk and start killing people. Yeah, I hate it when they just, when you just can't get them back. It's very unsatisfying. True, true. You just feel so darned. bad for these guys sometimes what about you guys how did you all uh have any notable fortress activities

in our break i was cruising along really well with um my fortress on on this mac i have where the performance was doing really well and i think we talked about that a little bit in the episode that we well i guess that we didn't end up releasing uh yeah but i'd gotten it running on the mac m1 chip what will forever be known as the lost episode yeah the lost episode, but I'd gotten it running really well on the M1 Mac, and then I've updated to the new version of Mac OS 11.1, and it doesn't run anymore, which is a bit of a disappointment. So there's no more door fortress on Mac. Even with, so it won't run under Rosetta, or Rosetta 2? Nope, it just crashes now.

Same thing. Everything was all hunky-dory and great, but now it's totally done. So I upgraded to the new version, the beta version of MacOS, and it's still broken. so pretty disappointing that's sad yeah it is so hopefully you know we will either lose Dorf Fortress on the Mac or when Tody does the new release

he'll compile for the new max but yeah so it's kind of a bummer so I started playing around and see if I can get it to run under any other ways and methods and means but it's just kind of not likely but oh well

so Tony do you do any Mac development? No, not really. I'm not like a coder. I can install stuff and I can play around with binaries and config files and, you know, OS level stuff, but I don't write software or anything now. So, yeah, I was kind of wondering if there was something fundamentally different about the arm architecture that causes the libraries being used to build Door Fortress to fail.

Yeah, I don't know. It's very weird. Yeah. No, what, this isn't a coding park there, so. You know how much great information you get from the Door Fortress client when it crashes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Was that sarcastic or?

Yes. Quite. I think Meph brought that up one time when we had him on. He was describing the trials and tribulations of just how painful it can be. Yes, the warning messages and a dwarf fortress crash are akin to the warning messages Windows gives you whenever you pull the plug on your computer. Oh, nice. We're just getting a few things ready for you. Oh, thanks.

Roland? What are you going to do? Yes. Did you have any holiday fortresses? Yeah, but nothing really that special because all I did was I started a new world. made it very very peaceful and I just quickly wiped out the only goblin fort

in the entire world so that I had no evil beings to deal with and then I just started plopping down fortresses like a madman and trying to find like the best pathing stuff

it was just about pathing and then making the way I built fortresses more like how you say less FPS knowingly so that my wolves actually go somewhere instead of dragging my poor PC down I did that a lot because it started to make kind of a weird sense of fun because you know you see like oh yeah okay I can dig things out this way, but if I do it the other way, then I have a few steps less that my dwarf has to take

to get from A to B. And this mind work you have to do for that is absolutely dumb and exhausting, but I liked it. Besides that, I just played some adventure mode and went around as a bard because I liked the music instruments in the world, or generally in Dwar Fortress. And I managed to get a troupe going with a drummer, a flutist, an elf with a flute, of course, made of wood. And I later on had something that came really close to being a banjo made from glistening metal, aka like the holy metal, with forgotten beast strings. And I picked it with a goblin bone, what's it called, like a plectrum. Yeah, it's wonderful. It was so ugly in my mind, but so lovely.

Also, it was worth about a full fortress of people, so, you know, I have that going. You talked about optimizing for FPS, and that I think is one of the things that I decided that I need to work on a little bit better. I need to work on keeping the stockpiles a little bit closer to the workshops that the dwarves are working in because I have a feeling that a lot of my frames were eaten up by dwarves hauling stone from, you know, five levels away. Because I had a lot of stockpiles, I would, every time that I had a, you know, an area that was pretty much mined out as far as I wanted to do it, I would just move my workshops downstairs and build more stockpiles. so without decommissioning previous stockpiles. That's pretty cool. That might help me next time. So what are your tips for, like, what do you think are some of the best things people could do to have an FPS efficient for it?

That one's for Roland. Not good at that. Well, okay. The first thing I've noticed is, of course, stairs while being. fairly fast are usually not the best way to do things. I have the feeling that making a wide channel from A to B sometimes is just the better pathing for things. I mean, okay, if you want to go down 22 Z-levels, then you might want to consider doing

stairs instead because that is just way faster. But, for example, I like making my trade depot down in the fortress itself, so that the traders have to go all the way into my fortress, while my dwarfs just have to haul things from inside the rest of the fortress to the inside of the trade depot that is, you know, not that far away. I got a couple questions. So whenever you said that stairs versus the widened path, are you meaning that you should, you think that channeling down Z layers is better than stairs or just that you should try to keep your stockpiles on the same Z level as the activity that you're feeding from those stockpiles?

Yeah, about that. This is really interesting because I tried, something that I read on the wiki and it worked kind of great but it looked not as good because what I did was I made only the workshop areas in a specific Z level and then the Z level below that was just the workshops for these the not the workshops the stockpats for the workshops above so all the the dwarf had to do was go to the workshop and then craft something

or get the materials from below and then go up again craft something and bring it down again and all the workshops below were linked to each other so that the dwarf just had to go into the stockpile layer which was

also accessible from the main stairway and that seemed to work fairly well but it looked pretty bad because you have a full layer of just stockpiles and nothing else and just random stairs everywhere. It's interesting the differences in aesthetics because I actually do that.

That's my normal operation to put the stockpile a Z level below or above where my workshop is so that they can have a stairway that pretty much pops right up in the middle of the stockpile. But I like the way that looks personally. Yeah, I agree. I've been doing that with mine. I like to give them those stairways. with little access to their stockpiles and stuff.

I've been doing that a little bit, but I'm not very good at making it look pretty, I guess. So it would be interesting to find out if there is a difference between, you know, clock ticks between a dwarf going down 20 Z levels by stairs and 20 Z levels by channeled. Yeah, there's a bit of a difference simply because when you want to do

the channeling right then you have to make one ramp up one ramp down on the same level thus the way for channeling is longer than just a stair so if you want to do like a

fast way from the top of your fortress to like the pits or the magma forges then stairs are the way to go yes but when you give them more space you know like not just a single pathway, meaning one block wide,

but you give them more space. It seems to be better for your FPS. So making everything that is connected to each other should be above or below each other. Some things that are not connected can be on the same space, but in general it seems to be working fairly well when you put the workshops in like a top, down tower kind of thing where you have like the the workshops on top then come the stockpiles in the

middle and below that maybe even more workshops and all three Z-levels are accessible by your main stairway cool I also did a thing where I just did a main stairway around my dwarven toilet trademark that took the dwarfs forever to get down and up but I had some special stairways that only go from one level to another for example I had a stairway from the main living hall going down to the first cabin layer

I had a second stairway from that very same level to the second cavern layer and so on. And so they had like fast ways to go up and down to specific Z levels. What? Great. Also I put the, what you call it, like the loom where they have to go out and get some spider webs. I made a small loom workshop thingadipob

in the cavern layer. so that they actually have to go to the cavern layer to access the loom, make clothing and not clothing, just cloth, just cloth. That kind of worked great, but I had to make some specific hauling goals that had little to no job, and all the had to do the entire day was just hauling, which wasn't great for their mood, honestly, but it sped up. My fortress as well as my FPS, I would say. In case anyone is listening and heard the phrase Dwarven Toilet trademark, that refers back to episode five in which horse soap, animal pits and auto flush toilets are considered. And glancing over the show notes, I believe that that was also Tony's very first episode with us. So it was back in May of 2019.

It's good. I always like to start in the toilet. Something else that you talked about right there all and reminded me the dev update that came out at the beginning of the month. And Tody said the stairway creation is going to be improved in the new version so that it creates a up stair and a down stair and an up-down stair all with the same movement. So you don't have to put a down stair on.

one level and a upstairs on the level below. That was surprisingly hard for me to wrap my head around whenever I first started playing the fact that you needed to do the stairway from both sides. Oh, yeah. Okay. Okay. Honestly, like, what's it going to do? Basically, whenever you say stairway.

I didn't understand that I was trying to figure it out. And I was like, well, isn't that the way it works? well a bit but if you build a down stair from from level one if you want your doors to be able to get back up it you've got to go to level two and build either an up stair or an up down stair on level two in the same spot okay so now apparently it sounds like that whenever you build a downstairs from level one it automatically creates an up stair on level two so that you don't have to do two operations to do the same staircase. Oh, all right. If you think about it in real life, whenever you build a staircase down, it exists for the other level two. Yes, so the way that I've done it is I'll build a staircase down.

And then on the next Z level, I build the up down. That's the way I do it as well. And you're saying it'll just be like a stairway button. And it's not going to sweat us the concept of up down staircase. Especially becomes important is whenever you're building a, stairway down into an existing layer that, I mean, an existing hollowed-out area, because before you would actually have to go to construct an upstairs, and otherwise you're just going to be opening a hole in the floor, right?

Yeah. And now it does just construct a thing for you. That sounds like that's going to be the idea for the, in the steam release. Interesting. Yeah. Well, I, for one, welcome our new stair building overlords. This sounds pretty cool. All right.

Did you guys check out the winter video that TOTE released? I didn't see a video, no. Yeah, he did another, I was in, I guess, mid-December. I will post a link to it in the show notes, but he is playing some on, on Zach's fortress that Zach was using for testing. So, yeah. You know, I actually think that it's getting to the point where I can be optimistic that we might have a release this year. Oh, yeah, I hope so.

But we're not talking about like spring. I'm pretty sure it's like autumn or maybe even late autumn, early winter. Because I feel they still have some. ways to go, especially when it comes to, like, polishing, which is fine. They should take their time, yeah. I'm not trying to pressure them, but, you know, I do honestly have my hopes up, yeah. Yeah, I think it's reasonable. I think you're right.

I think it'll be next year. I was going to say next year at this time. Next year, pretty darn close to this time is what I think. Oh, you think 2022? I'm imagining that something's going to need to come out this year. I think you're right. I mean... I'm surprised that, yeah, I don't know.

It has been a while since the announcement. I appreciate him not giving us the next version of cyberpunk door fortress style. Yeah, that's what I wanted to say when I was like, oh yeah, take your time. Please polish the middle of game. but I'm glad you got the hint Yeah, I mean honestly Can we just talk about that being the biggest gaming Face Palm of the year

And we certainly don't want to see that happen to Our beloved game here So whatever it takes to not have Us clipping through the floor Or whatever the Door Fortress equivalent is All the Door Fortress bugs are often much more entertaining But yes, exactly we do not want to have that kind of trouble.

Hilarious though it is. Where is my house and fuffer? There's that. I do appreciate the steady trickle of graphic view updates that we're getting. I think that that's really cool. And of course, I always like the stuff when he goes to the forums and starts, you know, responding to people's questions. I did notice that one thing that had come up is something that we'd talked about a bit

here which is just how quickly undead sieges can come now and there seems to be some i noticed that there was a little bit of a controversy in the forums about that where somebody was just like you know somebody had said hey will you be tuning the undead sieges you know much the way that you've tuned other things to make it kind of be a little less overwhelming and then of course somebody replied back L2P noob kind of thing, you know, just like, oh, get good or whatever, which I haven't seen very much in the Dore Fortress community, and I appreciate that I haven't seen that very much, but I was sad to see that in response to somebody saying, can you tune this? Because I do think the necromancer siege thing is a little, I think the pendulum has swung

a little too far in the wrong direction, because if you do old worlds, you know, it's not as easy sometimes to just not build next to the tower. Yeah. Was this on Reddit or was this on the, the, uh, it was on the, it was on the, it was on the, it was on Bay 12. Oh, wow. That's really surprising. And I think cleaner dev had kind of said, well, look, you know, there's a balance here, guys.

And I think balance is pretty reasonable. And then, you know, somebody else was just like, don't be such a new. And I was like, oh, come on. Don't, you don't need to flex your door fortress skills. It's not, it's not a thing. You know, this is not a thing. we need to compare as humans. But yeah, I would love to see a little more balance in that.

So I was kind of glad to see that that was part of those Q&As because you can definitely get yourself in some trouble with WorldGen now. If you go Old World and those Necromansors, I think, are just a bit too powerful. Yeah. Well, I was really happy about our non-toxic community and like the friendliness of everybody. but, wow, don't be rude, people. Yeah, this goes out to our listeners.

Don't be rude. It's, you know, you know how it goes. It is something that the community is going to have to keep a bit of an eye on, especially when this thing comes to steam and there gets to be a wider player base. Yeah, that is true. Well, yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, even taking this one, yeah, like, I think, in many situations, not building next to the tower is a good idea.

I mean, just is a way to play. Not putting yourself right next to the tower is awesome. But I do think that when we reply to people posting these questions, like, why did the undead come before my first migrant wave? Like, that, I think, is not an expected thing to happen. And I'm not sure even the most grisliest best door fortress player in the world would be able to survive and thrive in that kind of a setting. So I think, you know, like this game is wonky and there's no, no two worlds are the same.

So I think responding to people, you know, if you're going to take the time to respond to people, just, you know, be cool, is honest and just, you know, explain it like it's your grandma or something. I don't know. And you can have played your grandma, don't do that. I don't know, but you see what I mean. You can play this game for quite some time without realizing that. those particular symbols on the cryptic world map mean a necromancer tower because it wasn't until we were playing and we were looking at crazy world, which is Tony's really crazy world.

We were looking at that and I discovered that those actually were necromancer towers. So I might have plopped my fortress into the same square as a necromancer tower and not really even realized I was doing it. Yeah, after playing for three years. Yeah, that's the thing. That's the thing that I caution. It's like you kind of rest on your laurels a little bit in this game. Like you're like, I got it.

I know exactly what I'm doing, which is how I ended up with that crazy world thing. I was like, I got this. I can survive anywhere. Let's do a, let's just take the guardrails off and go and sing and, you know, let it build that 1,200 year old world or whatever. And it's like, oh, yeah, okay. This introduced a new level of challenge and difficulty, which is what I was looking for. And to act on the principle of charity, it could also be that the person who wrote the message, don't be such a noob or however it was put, it may not have been voiced in his head the way it came out on her, on the screen, right?

We have all had that experience, I think. Absolutely. Internet. You know, tone of voice does not come across in text communications over the Internet. What are you saying about me, man? And the person who receives that voice is most likely going to be a bit defensive anyway and will interpret it in the worst possible stance. Yeah, it's tricky. But yeah, I think the reminder there is that we are going to at some point see an absolute delusion of new players because I think there's a whole bunch of room world people out there who are kind of like eyeing.

eyeing this release very carefully and I think are going to take to it very quickly because I think Rimworld is definitely a great enabler or a conduit. I think if you know how to play Rimworld really well, you're going to be able to

land this game really well. We're also going to have a deluge of Fortnite players who are going to go, God, this game sucks. How do you play this? This is awful. This game's broken. Why do people say, this is good. It will be interesting, nonetheless.

Yeah, I'm kind of excited to see what some of these room-world people bring to the party because those Rimworld mods are hardcore. Yeah, they are a delight. It's going to be awesome. I'm like, come on, room-world modding community, bring your wondrous joy to us because some of those mods are just are the coolest things ever. Yeah, as I say, I was stuck in trying to fix the Mac version of the game,

doing all kinds of unfun, non-dorffy things to make it, to get me back up and running, but to no avail. So that, if that sucked up my playtime, which is just installing the game, is definitely not the same as playing a game, way less fun. So, yeah, if anyone has had any luck, so when you first, we're talking about the new arm processor-based. Yeah. Is it a MacBook Air?

Is that right? Yeah, that's right. So, but the new MacBook Air and I think a MacBook Pro 13. Both have the newest versions, have this new Apple silicone M1 processor. It's an arm based, no longer Intel. That's right. So they are also updating their operating system to go along with arm-based instead of Intel. And it sounds like it just broke to a fortress on this most recent operating system update.

You had it running before, though, right? I did. I did have it running before. And I feel like this one's on Apple, because I'm like, Apple, is Door Fortress not part of your testing regimen when you release OS releases and point releases? Because it really should be. So Tim Apple, if you're listening right now, buddy, get this sorted out. Did you have to use the Rosetta interpreter to get it to run it? You don't have to do anything. It's awesome. It just does it. it by itself. So it knows that it's a Mac app and it looks at it and it's like, oh, it's an Intel Mac app. Let me just go do this thing that you'll never see. And then it runs it and it just came up. And I was like, well, that seems too good to be true. But yeah, it worked and you have to do the normal Mac jankiness, like change the print mode to frame buffer. I don't know why that works, but I read that years ago and I always do that now and it's makes the Mac version so

much more pleasant to play on. But you can have nothing. You can generate all the worlds you want. Mac had nothing to do with this. And I realized that I could, you know, burn in hell for the all eternity for running this non-Macintosh app. But I'm going to say, okay, do it anyway. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm sure it'll get sorted at some point. But, yeah, so I was just kind of wanting to update that because I had posted a Reddit thread sharing some of the benchmarks that I'd gotten in. and was very excited about it. And I've gone back subsequently to edit that Reddit post and say, I think something broke it. Post that Reddit post to, if you don't mind, that Reddit thread to the channel

so that I can put that in the show notes. Yeah, I can do that, you know, what it was at one point in time. I have a couple more things I'm going to try. I haven't given up. But I had also sort of playing around with, there's a guy that does the Linux that maintains the Linux new pack and I think it's Mick Arcady

Does that name sound right to you? Yeah, well I always said McCarkety But but you know There we go yeah So he's got his thing LNP forge and you can basically It's just you pull it from GitHub And it goes out and builds you a package

For it which did Which has worked on Mac and has been awesome But again there's some challenges But it's it's close I feel like I can solve this So I've got a few more things I'm going to pull out of my sleeve even today and make it work.

That reminds me also. Paradexia Sorant released version 11 of the lazy new pack for Windows machines. I haven't tried it out yet. I haven't downloaded it. I will probably do that this evening if I have time. But yeah, glad to see that that one's out.

And for whatever reason, I could never get the versions after six to run stably for me. me. Version six, release six of the lazy new pack ran fine. Everything after that for me has

crashed. So we'll see. Hopefully this one doesn't crash. I'll report my findings. Okay, can we just add for a single second that this guy is an absolute machine?

He is cranking out stuff while working. and doing other things, it's amazing. Like, thank you, thank you, big, big ass, thank you from the whole community, because he needs it, no? Yes, Paradexia Sarat, but there's so many creators out there. Well, you've got the legions of people who are helping keep Stone Sense and some of those utilities functional and running,

and then I think there's been, I can't remember what happened with Texville text, but I think there was some hackery that happened there to keep that functional and running too. So it's pretty neat. And the crew behind D.F. Hack, whoever they all are. Yeah. Again, is another real feat of strength. Pandemic flex.

It's a lot like open source software maintenance. It's in a lot of respects, a very thankless job for no money. And people just have to do it for the love of it. Hey, everybody wants their free Adam 18 axes, so I'm glad that they're out there for the taken. Anyway, let's wrap this up.

I'm trailing off into the sunset. We're going off into the sunset, indeed. You guys got anything else you want to talk about before we wrap this one up? I don't think so. I think I'm set. This, you know, this is just kind of like a welcome back to the, to the world. And here we go again.

Here we go again. This is episode 42. I would be remiss in saying, I would be remiss and not saying that this episode is the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Did nobody? I know that some of them is just going to be remiss and I got it. I got it. Okay. You know me.

You still are rolling. Yeah, no, that went over my head. I'm sorry. Okay, well, then you certainly, you seem like a person who would enjoy reading the Hitchhackers' Guide to the Universe. Galaxy. Oh, yeah, my bad. Skeptics Guide to the Universe, Hitchhackers Guide to the Galaxy, right. It's something that, it's a short novel, the first one, and by the end of that,

novel, you'll get that joke that I just made. And by the end of that novel, you'll know whether or not you want to continue it. Most likely, though, you don't want to read them all. Okay. It's fun. It's probably a 150-page book. It's a blast. It's easy.

Yeah, okay. The Hitchhackers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams from about 1980 or so, 79 or 80. Yeah. Yep. Okay. Later, folks. All right. Well, rock and roll.

Awesome. dudes. This has been the Dwarfortress Roundtable podcast. You can find all our past episodes at DFRoundable.com. Stop by and leave a message or suggestion in the comments section for this episode. While you're there, you can subscribe to Dwarfortress Roundtable or find us in the podcast service of your choice. You can find video content on our YouTube channel, and you can send us an email at

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