Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 44: In Which We Review v0.47.05.

Episode Date: February 8, 2021

A new release is upon us! Today is all about the newest offering from Bay 12 Games. Bay 12 Games: Dwarf Fortress : Link to the release announcement.Link to Clinodev's Caveat Emptor releaseMcArcady's Linux Dwarf Pack Alpha-zero 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/

So welcome to Dwarfortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. Hi, I'm Jonathan. And I'm Tony. It is Sunday, January 21st, January 31st, January 31st, 2021st, and unfortunately, Roland is not able to be with us today. He is out making the Autobahn safe for Dwar Fortress. Hey, Tony. Ola, how's it going? Here we are in our new 47.05 world.

Yes. Last week, a new bug-fix release of Dwarfurtress was released, 4705. And that's pretty cool. We're pretty excited about it. Have you had a chance to look at it at all? Do any of the, what do you call gameplay? Absolutely. I have. The night it was released, I downloaded it and started it up with vanilla

and realized, again, that I'm just not good enough player to play with vanilla for any length of time. So then I took the Dwar Fortress folder, and I dropped it into an unzipped version of Prodexas Aeron's lazy noob pack, changed the name of the folder, and surprisingly only enough, it actually ran. D-F hack didn't work, and nothing else. But the graphics were there. Get your tie-set. Yeah, I had my tile set.

So the next day, I saw on Reddit, the Kleino-Dev, had put together a caveat M-Tor package that had at that time, and this is what I'm playing right now. The hero we need. It has the tile set, and it has a dwarf therapist, and that's the two things that I really use. McCarkey has also released a kind of a alpha version of the Linux Dwarf pack. I haven't downloaded

in that and played that, but Clean Odev talked about that on Reddit. Yeah, and DFX already been compiled. I'm imagining it's because the changes weren't that radical in how everything

worked on the back end. So that's my non-technical non-developer take on it as it was probably pretty much more like iterative changes rather than any sort of revolutionary change from the toady one w hq it's been so long since there was a release though i really wanted to get on there and plus it was like two days before we were going to record this yeah i'm in with vanilla i've just yeah and i've just been rocking out with vanilla just to kind of check it out and yep it low and behold plays exactly the same um i didn't really ever have

huge stress problems and I'm not saying that as a flex I think it's probably because my 47.xx stuff I was just kind of into generating these really old worlds which seemed to be incredibly problematic so I'm going to just say

that the reason I didn't have stress problems is probably because everything died too fast or I got lucky. I'm glad that it sounds like early reports are that the stress stuff is is taking care of to people's satisfaction. like that Dorbs can see dead bodies now without, you know, having the fort fall into ruin. Hey, that's exciting.

Your world that you built on it, it was an old one, right, over a thousand years? Yeah. And the new one that I rolled for the vanilla release is also 1,050 years. And I, you know, I'm just, I'm super curious about those worlds, partly because I love the fact that by that point there's tons of artifacts and there's books everywhere. and, you know, I guess the added disadvantages that there are necromancer towers everywhere, but it's pretty neat. Like in this 150-year-old world I have,

it looks like there's a bridge between two islands and, you know, tons of sites. And, you know, I don't have legend, whatever it is, the, you know, the things that you, excuse me, visualize legends mode. I don't have any of those working right now, but I'm sure it's cool. And it doesn't look like it's quite as tower crazy.

That's what I was going to ask you. if the necromancers had, you know, dominated the civilizations with a thousand-year-old world for you? Although I've just found in one area, three towers in a row, basically one, two, three in a row, and then up to and over one another tower. So, yeah, maybe it's still a little tower heavy. But I'm still alive after the first two months of having, you know,

having the game up. So, hey, that's an improvement so far. So we'll see what happens. I'm cautiously optimistic. I've got his notes up here, and that is one of the items on it that I found interesting was I'm hoping that this has at least some effect on the inevitability of a necromancer takeover, it seems, in long-term fortresses. So there's an item here in the major bug fixes that says, stopped corpse raising, shape-shifting, and non-living. non-vampire visitors. Now, I don't exactly know

what that means, and I've not dug into the Bay 12 game forums since this was released to get more explanation on it. It says visitors, non-living, non-vampire visitors. Technically, a visitor, and a migrant are two different things. And I think that

Necromance is migrating in has been one of the bigger problems for fortresses. Yeah, that's where things can tend to go wrong or right. Yeah, so Does that mean they're not coming? Well, yeah, which would be nice. I would rather have necromancers, unless it's through the villains mechanism,

I'd rather have necromancers not just migrate in and, you know, have. And also the, you know, the undead migrants who come in and, you know, just take up shop and turn into fish cleaners and things like that, get married and have kids, rotting corpses. I think that's done, right? I think that's what it, that was my read of the situation here is that you're not going to have, like, you know, the undead Chungus's hand guy come and establish residency anymore. That, that I think is what that means. So this week, I think I'll go on the Bay 12 forums and ask people if they know and maybe even Todi will respond at some point what exactly that line means. Yeah, I was just going to play it out and see what I have.

happens. But yeah, I mean, it was kind of wacky because one time almost my entire fort in one of these was, because I think that's all that was left in the world were those things, basically. I'm happy to report that my fort, even a short period in, is all dwarves and no longer all undeads. So we'll see how that goes and see how it keeps going. Also, I like the one that says that this update stops visitors from siding against the fort in any conflict where the fort's tame megabeasts are involved. What was that? If I read that right, visitors would come in,

they would see megabeasts, which I guess are like captured, forgotten beasts. So what is a megabeast? Isn't it like the forgotten beast? Yeah, I think also things like the Titans, though, like if there's like a Colossus walking around, That's not a forgotten beast, but I think it's also a megabeast. Let's take a look.

D.F.Dwarf FortressWiki.org. According to Dwarfortress Wiki, Megabeas are special and very powerful boss creatures, distinct from and larger than semi-meagebeests, who are created during world generation, each associated with a number of spheres. They are named historical figures, and the game will announce their presence by name.

The mega-beast species are the dragon, the hydra, the rock, and the bronze colossus. Forgotten beasts and Titans are procedurally generated megabeas. So we're talking about forgotten beasts, titans, plus dragons, hydras, rocks, and the Colossuses. Colossuses? That makes sense. So it's the named, named beasts. Yeah. Right.

Okay. Now we're clear. So if you had one of those that was, he had captured and tamed, then apparently, visitors who had come to your fortress would say, oh God, you've got a Colossus here. Yeah, okay. That makes sense. Even though it was friendly.

It is amusing now. Yeah. Although that would be a flying air quotes bug that can lead to some interesting gameplay. I found that there is a very useful feature of dogs. So I've got to tell you, my particular fortress is just swarmed with macaques and lemurs. And they, you know, are stealing everything that's not bolted down. Or at least they were.

Those things are ruthless, yeah. Yeah, and they're swarming. I mean, you'll have like 20 of them at a time on your screen. Be wave after wave, macaques, and then lemurs and separate waves come into, to, for some reason, they really like my stone blocks that I keep outside my fortress for wall building. And they tend to come in and pinch them all. So I created a really big pin zone outside the interest of my fortress and around my stockpile of stone. And I put all of my stockpile of dogs in it.

So as soon as a lemur shows up and penetrates that pin zone, the dogs attack it and run them off. It's pretty great. I love it. All right. So you just keep your dogs penned in and then put your special stuff in there. And then the key is and lemurs and stuff can't get in because the dogs will take care of them. That's right. And they will kill them too.

So, yeah. Well, pretty handy. Good boys. Last week talked to Roland or last episode that is I spoke with Roland about buying beasts from elves. And he seemed to think that that was just the bees' knees. So I decided that I was going to start trying that. that. So I've bought an elephant, a python, a possum, a Drake, which I was thinking was a dragon, but apparently it's a duck. Yep, a little duck. Yes, that's probably not going to be this

scary thing that you were hoping. Not at all. Yeah. And an elephant, I think I may have already said elephant. A elephant seems good. Yeah, a giant weasel. A giant weasel. So I have another pin that's outside my fortress that has a python, a weasel, an elephant, a possum, a duck, and a llama. Yeah, so I was just having some fun with it. Yeah, right. Get your menagerie. It'd be fun to then put them all into a party and set out as a traveling circus in the world,

see what happens. Well, I was interested to see if the python would kill the possum. But it hasn't happened yet, so they seem to all get a long. You know, the lion lies with the lamb, right? Yeah, I think if they're tame, they all sort of get along. I played around one time trying to tame some things, but I think sort of the wilder things are sometimes the more continual taming interaction they need. And I ended up with people getting bitten and hurt and stuff. I think it was like my cave crocodiles.

I think I hadn't quite, I don't know, taken things far enough or something. My cave crocodiles were a little dicey. so my fortress is about two years into it and I've got I've got 61 dwarves as my population right now I'm looking forward to over that 80 dwarf mark

to see if it triggers a goblin siege so I'm looking forward to that so I'm feeling hopeful that we got this bug release because I'm hoping that that means that things may be getting closer and more

together with this steam release. Maybe we'll see it by summer. That'd be pretty exciting. It would be. Hey, I was noticing that, have you ever bought anything or hung out on itch.io at all? No, it's kind of like steam, but not, right? It's just an alternative to steam, huh?

It seemed to be a little bit looser than that. It seemed to be very much less establishment, I guess you could say, that you probably aren't going to find AAA games or anything like that. It looks like it's mostly an open marketplace for indie developers to sell games. Yeah, that sounds really cool. You like it.

It does. I like the idea of that. I think that it probably will. And I don't know what they meant, but they said that for games that are on Steam, they also have, like, keys. So I don't know if there's sandwich that you can play it on Steam maybe.

I don't know. That's pretty cool. because I imagine that the mod community on Steam will be pretty solid. Yeah, itch.io, yeah, this one looks really good. I think this is one of the good guys. I was trying to think, because I knew that there were a couple of Steam clones.

I know that there's epic games, and I think you want to stay away from them. But, yeah, itch.io is pretty cool. Awesome. Yeah, I think the modding community is going to be pretty cool for this. I'm super interested to understand what and how easy it will be to drop in mods for, for Door Fortress and, you know, will D.F. Hack continue to, like, is it going to be a mod that can

be pushed in Steam or is it going to have to, or does the Steam release fundamentally change how DF Hack's going to have to interface with it? All of these questions. And more. We'll soon answer. Next week on Door Fortress Roundtable. And to any other than I came about what he thinks like is going to think, are you cool with us? I don't think that came up. And, you know, I'm guessing, he's probably pretty okay with it. It doesn't seem like the kind of guy that would be like, don't mess of my art. No, in fact, I know that he's okay with that from not maybe from our interview,

but from other interviews, since the modding community is so integral to the Dwarf Orchrist, it allows him to focus on the gameplay mechanics. Now, that's probably not going to be the case as much anymore if he's having to worry about the steam release. And, you know, he took responsibility for, for a pretty awesome looking tile set on his own. Yeah, yeah.

So, and while I know that it's Meph and Mayday who are making the towel set, at the end of the day, it's still TOTI, who's the one who, you know, the buck stops at. Yeah, it does. If it wants to look good and fit with the game. And his UI and his UI stuff is coming along. It seems really well. Loving those updates. Watching it be played in the video was pretty cool when he posted that video update and

you could actually see the game kind of working. That's pretty neat. That did make me feel better about it. I'm skeptical about a major UI change happening all at once without testing being able to be handled by the public. Because this is going to be a huge UI change happening all at once. Now, I realized that he also said that the keystrokes are still going to work, but still, it's going to be a huge change from what we're used to. Yeah. it's an interesting way for software development because I know when we had him on he was basically

it kind of said that he wasn't really into the idea of beta testing or maybe that he wasn't not that he wasn't really into it but it was just like that's just not something that they really explored much they didn't really do beta tests well the model worked for that too right yeah yeah oh yeah and this isn't like I'm not thrown shade it was just you know it'll be interesting to see how that works with something that with broader you know but it's something it hits the numbers that the Steam release will probably do. Can you still release without a beta test? It'll be fascinating to see her if he'll adopt the concept of the beta channel,

like what you have with Steam games, where you can either be on stable or beta. Well, the answer is yes, you can. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, he can, but will he? That's what I'm saying is, I wonder. My only fear of it all is that he's, you know,

the people who are already in the dual fortress community are going to love it. And, you know, we're going to be evangelist for the game. But it's whenever people from outside who've heard about the game and read all of the articles in various magazines and media outlets, they start playing it, what's their reaction going to be? And how is TOTI going to react to any potential negative commentary? I would imagine the comments will still be kind of like they've always been. this game is so hard. It's impossible to play. It's just, it's just letters on the screen that don't mean it. You know, like, there's still going to be that kind of level of like, I'm not curious. I'm not a curious enough person to actually try to get interested in this. I think there's still going to be those people out there. And I think those still people get, those people still get paid to write articles. And that's an easy article to write about Door Fortress, right? That it's hard. This game is really hard. And so the people are going to absolutely be writing those things. No question about it. But I think it's,

you know, will a certain percentage of those people, do they have a shred of curiosity in their bodies or are they simply just going to parrot what people have already said? I feel like we'll see more people come in because I think that the way the Steam photos position it is that it's a graphical game first. And then this idea of, you know, quotes and tildas and that kind of thing, You know, that's kind of the way it used to look.

So I think that'll shave off a fair portion of that. And I also think in the like Venn diagram of people in the world that know about Door Fortress, I think that, you know, and people who don't, it's like there's, it's a very small number of people that even know about it. So the fact that it's going to be graphical and on Steam is going to just immediately bring people in, especially like the rim world people, I think, are going to be all over it because it's so similar.

A lot of those people are already Tor Fortress players, too. It's true. It's true. But I think Rimworld is much bigger community, just by the nature of the fact that it is more, I mean, it looks like other games. You know, the fact that Rimworld used the tile set, I guess, if you will, from what is it, like prison architect or whatever. I mean, that immediately made it so much more accessible. And, yes, but I think so if you've taken the time to get good at Rimworld, world, you'll probably be one of those people who will want to dig a little deeper with Door Fortress. You know, think about Room World, but now you've got multiple levels.

Like, that's something that a lot of the remote players, I think, have been excited about. The idea that you can build on multiple Z layers and not just be stuck on one. So, time will tell, huh? Yep. Yep. Okay. Thank you for listening to my TED Talk. I know. That's okay.

People know what they get. let's get an early download of a podcast. You're getting your money's worth today. You're getting your money's worth, kids. Now, basically, the last couple weeks, I've, well, actually, I've, well, actually, I had played much drill forsters at all until the release and then I've played for you know 36 hours straight exactly it's fits and starts isn't it um it is absolutely it had been it had been a whole year since there was any release and so I think the fact that we had this activity is pretty

cool so I mean you know that kind of because I was kind of like you I'd I'd sort of done everything I could think of um you know for a while and then got interested in another game. Don't hate me. But yeah, and yeah, so this is kind of like, oh, I can go try these things again and see what happens. You know, see where I got stuck before. Was it a bug or is it just that I'm crap?

And before we answer that question, you know, let's see what happens. I've been working on another side project with a friend of mine program and thing, and which is why I haven't been able to spend nearly as much time on Dwar Fortress as I would like to. but hi George hopefully he won't mind that I spent

36 hours whenever we're going to be trying to have our beta release on Monday your IPO oh no no no nothing nothing that that serious but but for about you know 12 hours

of this weekend I was playing Door Fortress when I probably should have been working on the other project Hi George you listen to this I think I think you listened to our podcast with a three or four week delay. But the time he hears this, he won't be mad

at me anymore. Oh, he's already going to know all about 4705 and have formed tons of opinions, I'm sure. Yeah, it's interesting. I've talked to him about playing the game and he thinks that the game sounds interesting, but he's afraid that it will become a time black hole

for him, and it can, much like I just said that I spent 36 hours playing this game. It can become a very big time sink. Yeah. I can't remember where I was going with that. Oh, but he said that rather than playing it, he just likes listening to our podcasts

and hearing us talk about the dwarfs. Yeah, I've talked to a few people who say, oh, I enjoy listening and talking about, hearing people talk about and reading about the game more than I think I could enjoy playing it. But I also think that's because the barrier to entry is kind of intimidating. You kind of have to sit down and want to figure out,

you know, you kind of got to sit down and try to get into it. And, you know, there's a lot of crazy stuff going on. right now so I can see why people might not be as keen to sit down with something like that. I certainly appreciate that where that's coming from. But I also think one of the cool things that I think Steam will do is because more people will get involved, we'll see more tutorials, people will probably be popping up Twitch things more often. There will be more YouTube channels talking about how to get going on it, you know, maybe from some bigger, more well-known streamers from other games.

I wonder if that's what could happen. It'd be like among us. I'm looking forward to seeing the, yeah, the YouTube videos with the new interface. That'd be fun. Yeah, totally. It's going to be fun to see how it goes. But yeah, I think that even in the GUI version that I saw in that video, you can still see there's some, you know, it's obviously still the same underpinning system that runs everything.

So I still think, you know, if there are things like the fact that the door, doors are always flashing. That's one of the things that somebody was talking to me about. They're like, doesn't it drive you nuts that everyone's always flashing all the time? You know, all these tiles are flashing and there's like dots everywhere that blink in the fort and that's so annoying. So I think, you know, there's still those little graphical foibles that will make people feel weird. But hey, if the mod community is anything like it is for Rimmer World, people can just get mods to change that kind of stuff. I'm sure that's the way that'll work, which is neat. There's a couple other items that he's

It's got in minor bug fixes and tweaks in this 4705 release that I thought are noteworthy. One that I like, make people that work outside get used to bad weather. Yes. So make them into Midwesterners, basically. No, sorry. I resemble that remark. Yes, I know you do. There's been some talk within the last year or so on Reddit and on the forums about how memory works and how long-term

memories form. So I thought it was interesting that he wrote that he stopped many minor thoughts from forming memories. And what I'm hoping that means is that someone won't dwell on getting caught in the rain, you know, 30 years later. And how would that be a long-term memory? Yeah, we talked about this. I had a, I had some dwarf that was like a really skilled crafter and she got stuck outside one time. I don't know. Who knows when? Like, it doesn't even matter. And it was like basically she just lived in this world of pent up rage and depression over that one time that she couldn't get back before it started raining and then eventually went mad and killed people and it's like yeah okay maybe that's not so balanced like like i hate it when it rains too

but i it doesn't spoil my life you never know what turns auto octavius into dr octopus right it's true it's so true i know maybe that's the very maybe that's the variety of it all um But I also think that's why people were kind of glomming on to the idea of the dwarves of, you know, how Krug Smash had that world where basically he was killing everyone and having them be brought back as happy undead. Yeah, yeah. He made the zombie fortress. I think that, I think this patch will probably ruin that, that theme.

I think that breaks his little creative streak there. And I see he's only just getting back to that. world, you know, that fort that he was playing. So I'm sure he's probably just like, dang it. What have I, what have I done? That was a very dark period in the Krug smash timeline, that little period where everybody was being murdered to just to be their face back. Yeah, I almost wonder if that's why he went on hiatus for such a long time. If he was just like, mentally, he was just like, oh my God, I can't live with what I've done here. I've got to take two months off just to catch.

my sanity, you know, I mean, not off, off, but from his main story. I know he was doing his battle matches and stuff, but still, it was like, you know, it was pretty, you know, I wonder if he's just sitting at his house going, am I the batty? I wonder if, yeah, I'm wondering when he'll jump into the new version and, because he's not bound by DF hack or anything. He just, he rolls vanilla except for his title set, I think, so. I think you're right. Yeah. So, also, So removed stress from migrants, for example, ones from old forts. So that's kind of neat. And I guess that I just intuitively thought that this was the case where if somebody has

emotional problems from their previous fort, then they would probably have those same emotional problems and memories whenever they come into your fort. Yeah, they did. It was annoying if you ever had one that was a pest. I think ages ago when we had that fort that we were passing around and playing. and I think you'd named them after, like, with musicians or something, right? Right, right. And there was one guy that was, I don't know, he was just a downer.

He was like a debby downer. And I'd kick him out. And then, you know, and then I'd started a new fort. And he turned up again. And I was like, no, not you again. Go away. They just kept turning up. Like, apparently he's just such a misery guts.

Nobody wanted him. And he just kind of kept getting kicked out of everywhere, I guess. I don't know. You never seemed to found a home to find a good. home. I guess the rain was just a little too much for him. My guy, you need a desert. Here I think is my favorite line of all of the bug fixes and tweaks, though, vengefulness is no longer stressful. I like the idea of that. That means that, you know, no longer will someone, you know, stress out about the fact that they are, you know, plotting vengeance. Now it's more of a

revenge is a dish best served cold kind of thing yes yes in the back of my mind i plan on taking you down buddy and i am relishing the thought i wonder if that makes the villains stuff even more effective somehow like does that add to the villaininess of the villains because now that you know now they can just be cold calculating people and not get stressed about it because before if like if they were hatching their criminal plots and it was stressed them out. They might avoid that. So like, what have we done? Is this going to, did things just get real bad? Or is this, like, are we going to start seeing a ton of new villain stuff happen? Hmm. We'll find out. Yeah. That's the spirit.

So that's the new release of Dwar Fortress. And it seems pretty stable so far. Again, thanks Clino Dev for throwing together the caveat M-Tor, Windows 64 version. And thanks to McCarckney for getting the Linux dwarf pack up and going. And there may be some other ones out there by this point. I'm not aware of them at the time of recording here. It was just released probably less than 48 hours ago. I think it was released on 5.30 p.m. on Friday. It's Thursday, I think, wasn't it?

It was a Thursday? Okay. Yeah. Okay. But it's only recently come out, and we've already got some modders out there trying to update their packs. And typically, I will wait until, the packs are released before I start playing the new versions.

But this time I really wanted to, so whatever, because it's been so long, right? It's been over a year or almost a year since the, uh, since 47.00 came out. A year ago that the final bug fix was released 4704. It was like February something.

So yeah, so hopefully before January 2022 we'll have this team release. And, um, then I think things are just, going to be off to the races. It'll be pretty exciting. Well, I guess that that's going to wrap up our episode. I think we covered it. I think

we've covered the coverage of the hot new 4705. Basically, the summary is we've got it. We've been playing that neither of us have quite enough to share from an inexperience standpoint yet. But it hasn't crashed. Doggone sure hasn't crashed, and I generated some

big worlds. The only thing that I can't test that was of interest to me was I was kind of excited about the Mac release of it before because the new Mac silicon chips are the fastest single core chips so the Mac M1 should be the best platform in the world to play Door Fortress on. So I can't test that because I don't have access to it anymore.

Right. But hopefully someone out there can let us know if it works on the new Mac because that would be very exciting for somebody that wants to play. Maybe he's got access to a Silicon Mac and he can natively compile it, in which case, beware.

All right, Tommy. Well, have fun the next couple weeks playing into a fortress, and we will catch you on the backside. Absolutely. I'm excited. This can be fun. Good stuff.

Looking forward to hearing how your fort goes. Yeah. All right. It's a wrap, as Admiral Ackbar would say. Later, ma'am. All right, see ya. All right.

Case later, Tommy. Bye. This has been the Dwar Fortress Roundtable podcast. You can find all our past episodes at DFRoundtable.com. Stop by and leave a message or suggestion in the comments section for this episode. While you're there, you can subscribe to Dwar Fortress 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 Urest at DFRontable. that's u r i s t at d f roundtable.com please consider donating to the creators of dwarf fortress at bay12

games.com if you'd like to help support this podcast you can find us at patreon.com slash df roundtable music for this episode is from filmmusic.io skye cullen and folk ground are both by kevin mcclough. You can find more from kevin mclout at incompetect.io. Thank you.