Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 49: In Which A Skull (and Poor Management) Destroys A Fortress

Episode Date: April 19, 2021

Nothing groundbreaking this episode. Just the podcast people chatting about Dwarf Fortress, dev notes, and the like. Be sure to check out Roland's epic reading of ThreeToes' April Mission Status. The Stack Exchange Article We Brought UpApril Bay 12 Games UpdateSupport Dwarf Fortress Roundtable on PatreonSupport Dwarf Fortress at Bay12Games.com 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/

I had a number of long-term residents, but then a visiting poet turned into a where panther and ate everybody. Such is life. Dwar Fortress WikiQuote number 419. Welcome to Dwarfortress Roundtable, discussing social distancing among forgotten beasts for over two years. Yeah. I'm Rowland. Beautiful. Loved it. I'm trying a new thing with the episode starts.

Trying to get away from the podcast for all things, Dwarfie, because it just sounds very stale in my ears, as I'm saying it. And for accuracy, we also cover things which aren't Dauphi, and we don't cover everything that is D'Rfie. So... That is sadly true. I think you're right, because I feel like there's a number of D'Rvey topics that we've yet to touch, and that's okay.

That is true. That's right. And there's no cynicism in that at all. We really do and did feel that we would cover that with some topics. And we may. And we may. We've got another in episodes left, so. That's right.

Okay. At least two more versions of Door Fortress. If I live another 50 years thinking optimistically, that's two more versions. So that's great, you know. Thinking optimistically, 50 years. okay so it's this is just the three of us it's been a number of episodes since it's been just the three of us so how you all been doing dandy um yeah pretty good i also didn't say the date i've been trying to put a date stamp on these so it's april 11th 2021 as we record this and have you

guys been playing dwarf fortress have you had a chance the last couple weeks i have done a little bit of gameplay. Anything interesting happened? Well, one of the cool things happened is the, the, all the, I've been using a Mac more and it just hasn't, the lazy packs haven't been updated, but they are now. And so everything's working beautifully now on, on Mac. So that's really exciting. So I started playing there.

And then I, and I've kind of come to realize that my hubris in, in deciding to play these thousand, 50-year-old worlds or whatever in thinking that everything would be hunky dory, that maybe that's not the case. And so I'm staying in my lane now and I'm going back to some of the younger worlds and it's, it's, it's been a good

experience. When you say the Mac, this is still an Intel Mac, right? It's not the M-1. Yeah, no, it's not the fancy one, not the hot new one. I don't have that one anymore. I saw in Reddit a couple people have asked for some follow-ups on, does it work? Does it work? And I don't know.

um yeah it i didn't just a met a mac moment i did not like the new big sir update i feel like it broke lots of stuff and uh and and so i gave up on the whole thing and i'll just stay on the old version until until i like it and thanks for coming to my ted talk today so yeah if anyone out there is running a m1 mac and have gotten to a fortress to run on it we would love to hear from you yeah and see if there's anything that you that you had to do differently any settings that you had to set to make it work. But yeah, it would be great for that thing to run on the new, you know, the risk-based processors.

No, wait, they're not risk, they're arm. Arm, my bad. Yeah. I'm wondering if, if Tarn will end up releasing a universal binary when he updates. That'd be interesting to see it. What's a universal binary? It's one that's this way that Mac does its thing when it switches processor architecture. So each, like each application that you download,

has two binary files in it and then the Mac realizes which hardware platform you're using and then executes the proper binary instead of running the Intel binary through emulation. So basically it's just double binaries. It's a pretty cool system. It feels very invisible if you're operating on. What if it doubles the size of the file? It does a little bit. It's just basically two executables in one. Yeah. I mean, that's what it is. It's just the two of the machine executables in one. But yeah, the files are definitely bigger. But For whatever reason, I was thinking that Tarn isn't even the one who did the compiles for the Mac version. That would make sense, I'm sure.

I was thinking that somebody else did the Linux and Mac version compiles. I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure it's someone else, yeah. Yeah, I believe that. So it's a lot to ask of the poor guy. You know what I mean? Let it focus on the important stuff. Please note, since recording this segment, it has been brought to our attention.

the compilation of all platforms does indeed take place within Bay 12 games proper it is not outsourced to any other party we now return you to your regularly scheduled podcast well I've never had a king before in mine and so for the very first time

I have a king in a fortress awesome cool it's pretty exciting yeah how did that happen accident all of a sudden somebody just became the king. And that was it. And I was told about it. A good old accident. Ah, yes. And I'm like, oh, the happy accident is here. So now I have a king and a barony. And I'm like, well, that, that was fast. And this fort's new. I mean, it's not even, and it's a newish world. It's only 125 years old. So it's

not like I'm playing the end of a civilization or something. I think it is just totally blind luck. Kind of awesome. So pretty stoked about how quickly this fort's going to make it or die or whatever it's going to happen. Now, it has some repercussions on your fortress, right? Did that king move in or did one of your citizens become the king? That's such a good question. I don't know where this guy came from. It was sort of like early enough in the game that I wasn't really paying attention to anybody. So I have no idea.

No, momento, if it actually says the king is coming or like the king's entourage is coming to your fortress, then he came to your fortress. if it says so-and-so became a king, that means that one of your dwarves became a king. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, one of them became the king. And now they want a temple, the mucus tentacle creed.

That's the, that's the lovely sect. So that will be his throne room. Delightful. Yeah, I suppose it could be, huh? Well, anything, Roland, interesting to report in the worlds of dwarves for you? Well, except for the fact that I now have a new PC

that is powered by a risen nine. Yes, I kind of splashed out on my new processor, mostly because I thought, well, maybe, maybe I want to actually play a war fortress really, really well. So I'm going to put more money on the table. turns out that work very well

I had a lot of stuff to do on the PC so I haven't got to play that much I basically just managed to generate two worlds the first one was like a medium world where the 250 years took me about seven minutes I was astonished what It takes me about 15, 20 minutes to get the 250-year world, I think. Yeah, it was really fast.

And then I got really cocky, so I made the longest world possible. So it's like 100,000 years. I also cranked up the SIF amounts. So I got a lot of people in a massive world because, obviously, I also took the greatest world map size. Took me about half an hour. And I think that's pretty good. That's a pretty good ratio. Yeah.

It's okay. Whatever I did, I once tried a large world with a long history. And I think that it crashed sometime in the middle of the night because I went to bed to let it go. Oh, bummer. It was just for fun. I was just seeing how long it would take. But at that time, it was taking me maybe 30 minutes to do a 250-year world on medium-sized. I'm also equally impressed Roland

that you are able to get hold of a Ryzen processor right now Honestly it was really easy It was really easy I even got it for super cheap Good grief I don't see a problem with processes Like I was even even able to get a The bigger version of the Ryzen 9

So the biggest in fact Now you're just flexing Is that 5990 or What is that? And now I'm just flexing, yes. But that would have cost me double. So I was like, nah, which would still have been a fair of good price for the processor. Next up on the Door Fortress Tech podcast.

We'll be testing the new I-11. I-11. Oh, I would love to play on that. But seriously, though, I did not got to play because I had a... a lot of issues when it came to the PC, but I'm very happy to see at least the world generation runs very, very well, especially because I came from an older I-7, and this is now like an upgrade of, I don't know, 600% or something. That is really, really cool, and it works great. That's great. I'm looking forward to hearing how, if you notice a difference in daily

activities inside a fortress, see if it feels better. Yeah, I'm going to try, like the first fortress I'm going to start is open when it comes to the population cap because I kind of want to see where I can go. Yeah. My old PC was able to do 200 wars when I minimize my animal population. So I think this one could maybe go to 350. I'm very, very excited to see where this is going. I will report back hopefully in the next episode how that went. Cool. I think that's pretty darn cool. That's neat. I'm so happy to hear that you didn't need to buy a GPU to play Door Fortress because there's where your sadness really start to kick in. Yeah, I still have my old one because I really, really did not get anything. And even my current GPU, that's like four years old,

is worth around 600 bucks. So you can't imagine the prices on the newer ones. It's ridiculous. And no, no, no. Yeah, it's so lame. You talk about the graphics with Door Fortress, but I just ran across an arcade stack exchange article about Dwarf Fortress and the Aski and Dwar Fortress.

And it was interesting. and I never really thought about it before, but they are building a tile set. They're representing ASCII with graphics because it's not real true ASCy because true ASCy has, you know, at its base, it's only got, what, 128 characters? And if you go with extended ASCII, it's got, what, like, 256? And they were talking about the fact that we're actually a tile set,

a graphical representation of ASCII, plus other strange and cool characters that they do that because with GPUs you can offload the graphics to a GPU even if you're not doing 3D fancy routines it still can utilize the GPU of a computer or the video card

where that wouldn't be able to be done if it was just straight asky I don't know how much of this I don't know why Tarn decided to do that I'm assuming it's been that way since the start I wonder if it was that just thought like it would add some flexibility or maybe at some point in the development, somebody was like, hey, Tarn, can we do it this way? Can you use little shapes instead of an X and a colon? He's like, yeah, go nuts, but I'm not interested in that. You know, it seems to make it. I mean, I could imagine that that went that way. I thought that's mostly because he was more interested in actually programming like the framework of the game in. instead of graphics, but he did it the graphics in this way because he thought he would come back to it and actually give the game some actual graphics.

I think that's why it's coded like that. So the current graphics are more like, how you say that, a fill a box, so to say. Yeah, sure, playful. Yeah, yeah. It's just like, you guys go nuts. I just posted the link to the Stack Exchange article. I'll put it in the show notes. But the title is pseudo-asky graphics.

What's the point? Indeed. I think we've got that figured out now. Well, I want to talk a little bit about my fortress that is running right now called Golden Light. So it was the first fortress that I've done where I had it capped out at 100. And, you know, the way Blind was talking in a couple of episodes, ago, that's how I set it up, where I, in essence, just chopped everything in half and ran with that. So it was working really well. I also uncapped the frames per second. And I didn't like that

as much because everything moved way too fast for me. Now, I think, Tony, you like that? I do, yeah. But I like to sit there and watch them digging out caverns and think about what I'm going to do next. So I have got really behind in this, in this fortress, and that's part of what ended up with the downfall of it. So, you know, spoiler alert, most people get killed. Aw. One of the things that I wanted to do was play around with some artwork on my dungeon floors. So I went out to the internet. I found a line drawing of a skull, and I took some online graph paper that I downloaded at Incompetect.io. They are the people who do our music as well.

And so I took that graph paper and I superimposed it on the line drawing of the skull. And I did a pixel by pixel drawing on a floor of that skull without the lower jaw. So my dwarves dug it out. I'll post that. It's probably going to be the picture that we use for the episode this week.

But it looks really cool. It took me quite a while to do that. And while I'm watching them dig... What's that? The skull is really cool looking, by the way. If you can't see it, it should be the thumbnail for the episode. It's awesome. The bad thing about it is, is while I'm really being interested in that,

I'm watching the dwarves dig that all out, and it takes them quite a while. While they're doing that, I am ignoring what's going on with the rest of my fortress. I am not paying attention to fortress security. So I realize that I have like 80 dwarves now. it's almost two years into the fortress I've got my my threshold set at half height so I should be seeing some goblins pretty soon I figure so I quickly build up a squad I get my squad set I get them set up with armor and everything and no sooner do I set them up with a training area than the goblins show up four goblins I'm like I can take four goblins you know a couple of them have been training for a little while we should be all right so I set it up the four goblins come in they waste no time in slaughtering all of my soldiers then they go into the go into the fortress and just start slaughtering everybody so i go from about 80 dwarves down to a single dwarf in a period of about 30 minutes of real time and then they leave they don't

kill that last dwarf then they leave so i'm like huh well what do i do i'm sitting here trying to decide whether I want to just scrap the fortress and give up whenever I get a migration wave of nine dwarves. So these poor nine dwarves that just came in have the task of cleaning up the mess that was left behind by the goblins. Oh, no. This one dwarf that survived the goblin assault is pretty much useless because he's just running around with an exclamation point all the time. yeah he's mentally going to be pretty disturbed about that so the period between finishing the skull uh the skull was going to was planning on being my mausoleum and so i'd started putting caskets in the eye sockets of the skull and so no sooner do i get about half of my my my caskets

placed when the the bad guys show up so i'm wondering you know i think maybe really what it was, was that the skull art sent out some energy into the air and summoned the four goblins. So I think that the skull cursed it. So I'm going to go ahead and play this fortress and see if I can get it back on its feet and see if we can survive or if it is indeed cursed by the skull. I will be doing that line art with the floors for mausoleums from here on out, though, because I think that's a cool idea.

Yes, yeah, it is definitely cool. Like a corn dedicated temple that curses your fort into eradication is pretty bad. I'm cool. Yeah. So, we'll see. So that's what my most recent fortress has been like. There's a joy in that. I haven't done this in a while.

Let's take a look at the three-toe comments for the beginning of April. There is a land where Dwar Fortress is easy enough for the casual gamer to learn and play. I know there is such a land for I have seen it. I've created 29 dwarven bedrooms with only a click and drag of the mouse after easily placing beds and doors. The same could be said about offices and tombs. I can see the game coming together in an easy, accessible way

that is only limited by your imagination and the level of cruelty that you deem fit to inflict on the elves, goblins, and others who would dare try for. with you. Congratulations to the generous Frito. Great. That was awesome, man.

I loved it. That was incredible. So, yeah, one thing I love about that is he seems to confirm that you can place your beds and then click and drag around them, and it will create bedrooms out of it. Yeah, I like that. I love that.

Yeah, and he sort of shows that in the video that he made. But he didn't do it with bedrooms. He did it with tombs, with caskets. So hopefully you don't place as many caskets as I did have to put as many caskets as I had bedrooms in my recent fortress. But typically that's not a good thing. I think that is going to be great. That's really all everyone has been kind of wanting. It's like make it easier for us.

to bring new people into the mayhem because yeah it isn't that now so i just think when it hits steam it's going to get you know people are going to people are going to see it for what it is and go all rim world on it yeah and i for example already know at least five people that will get the steam release as soon as it is out mostly because i kind of uh will making sure of that but you know it's five people more that's pretty neat doubles our numbers i talked to my daughter yesterday we were discussing it and she said that she took a look at playing the game because i make a podcast about it so she kind of wanted to check out and see what it's about and she got immediately turned off and didn't even play it so then i told her that we know most people they start playing it they don't get it at

first and they kick it out for for a couple months or three months or whatever then they come back the next time and they'll enjoy the game so that she said that she now looks forward to playing in the game and hating it once and then she will she will maybe then wait it for a while and come back to it but i think that she is part of the core demographic of who wants who we want to be able to reach with what comes out as the steam release yeah yeah i think you're probably right And I think we don't even know yet maybe how all it's going to go and who all is going to get involved. It's just going to, I think it'll just take sort of a life of its own. Yeah, she's 16 now.

Hopefully it will come out, the steam release will come out before she goes off to college so that she can show it to her roommates and friends there. She's optimistic now. I know, right. Okay. Wait, when do you go to college? College? Typically at about 18. She'll be, she'll turn 18 halfway through her last year of high school and then

college after that. Okay. College is what's considered higher education here. I don't, I know that the terminology gets, is a little different in Europe. Yeah. Yeah, it is. But, okay, well, we do still have then like, what, two years left. so big chance that she can indoctrinate her dorm mates

yeah i will give her the dwarf fortress roundtable poster to hang on her locker she'll be sure to do that like no joke do that yeah i somehow don't see her calling off and saying hey my dad does a podcast on a computer game be like yeah who doesn't let's go hang out yeah i don't know maybe that's the maybe that's the group that i want them want her hanging out that's that's the group i hung out with when i was in college there was we were big into the into the muds and muds and oh what was the other mud yeah muds and mush yeah i played dicu mud on a salarice workstation that was great

this is kind of that kind of a thing you know in a lot of ways yeah it's that flavor there's one thing that I need to know for for for now there's a way that you can tell your dwarves to clean up the outside as well as the inside of your fortress yeah I know why you're asking that yeah because it's my the outside of my fortress is a real real mess and and yeah it seems like there's a way to tell them to do that and also to collect bolts from the outside of the the fortress. Oh, yes. Yes. So I think the key you want is O, and then I don't know what you do from there, because I haven't quite figured it out, but it's something along the line. That is it. That is it. That's it. Yeah, it's O. And then the current standing orders. Great. Great. That's what I was looking for. Yeah. That does it. Current standing orders. Yep. So you can, let's see, what do you get to do here. Announce some job cancellations, dwarves gather animals, food, furniture, bodies, refuse. And I think you can forbid everything.

Everything. Yeah, there's things I don't understand. Mix food. No mix. I don't really know what that means. And that they have a dedicated barrel for every single piece of food, meaning that for example, when they have small mouth bass, then they put that centered in just one barrel instead of spreading it over the anti-stock barrel. And I think then is it Z? Is it activity zone orders? Or I'm not sure which one is that says go do all these things outside so cool that's what i was looking for that's exactly what i was looking for i will go into it later i just couldn't remember how to get there right it's complicated this interface and and i think that mechanic is kind of complicated too i get why it's happening but it is a complicated i think it's quite a complicated mechanic for the for the most part the defaults

makes sense i just wish that you it would be nice if if the dwarfs have a have an entrance to the outside or have constructions on the outside that there would be a radius around those things that the dwarves consider part of their policing area and that they need to clean up regardless of you having to tell them to do things outside or not that would make some sense but yes i would like that they'll be nice like you don't have to take care of everything but just this area where everyone's walking it would be great to not have body parts there up in the upper higher left hand corner of the map if there is a you know a a dead buzzard you don't have to go clean up its course but the 12 dead dwarves that are like right

outside the doorstep could you go ahead and kind of put those on a stockpile or a gasket please or the um the bolt that's at the bottom of a lake how about we don't spend a lot of time trying to get that one that would be great because i've i've there was i had set something up one time and things were falling into the water and they were they kept trying to go get it and then the more people that would fall in the water then die, then there were more things they were trying to recover. And then so basically my whole fort just lemminged into the river trying to collect this bolt. And then that was a pretty sad ending to the story. So yeah, yeah, it happens. Coming up on our next episode is the 50th episode of Dwarfortress Roundtable. A completely arbitrary,

but somehow significant milestone, I guess. Yes. 50's a lot. So that's going to be a lot of fun. Wait, we've been doing this then for, don't say it, three years? Is it three now? Since, no, two full years we're working on our third, I think. We started in October, sorry, in March of 2019.

Yeah, so it's a little over. two years. Damn. March 2019. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yep. And I talked about this on the last episode, but it didn't make the final cut. But I want to, first of all, thanks for all of our patrons on Patreon. They help us make the podcast better, and we plan on continuing improving it. And to that note, we plan on starting to do shoutouts for our patrons on Patreon. If you would prefer that we do not do a shout-out for you, if you would go ahead and either send us an email at Urest at D-F-R-R-T-R-Table.com.

That's U-R-I-ST at D-F-Roundable.com To let us know that you would prefer that we'd not give you a shout-out, or you can send us a message on Patreon itself. What I also thought that you could do, if you don't want your name or your username shout-it-out, but you wouldn't mind a shout-out, send us your dwarfy name, Make up something like Eurist McGeneres, and we'll make that your dwarfy name. If you've got a reputation to protect.

Exactly. And you still want to feel part of it. If you don't want people knowing that you support something as sketchy as us. If you're planning on running for political office, let us know, and we'll take that into account. Exactly. So, yeah, so I just wanted to let everyone know that we're going to start doing that before we start doing it, because, you know, the patrons are our health. helping this out financially, and we really do appreciate that. Thanks.

Indeed, yes. And thank you for all the folks who've been listening over the last couple of years. It's been a wonderful, wonderful trip. I sound like we're wrapping up the podcast. We're not. We're not quitting. We refuse to quit. Absolutely, we refuse to quit before the steam release comes out anyway.

True. Yeah, no, it's got a, it's got a steam on. Full steam ahead, full steam forward. Yeah. Full, full, full, full, full, full itch ahead. full it's head Does anybody have anything they would like to add for this week's episode?

I feel pretty good about what we've covered some great ground. I would love you to post some of those photos of the art work that you're doing because that's freaking awesome and hopefully our listeners can check that out. All right.

And with that, we are going to wrap things up. Thank you so much for listening. And guys, thanks for joining me on this episode of Dwarfortress Roundtable. We'll see y'all in a couple weeks for episode 50. Awesome. Yes. Can't wait.

Really. We'll see you next time. Thanks, everybody. This has been the Dwarfortress 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.

content on our YouTube channel, and you can send us an email at Urest at DFRoundable.com. That's UR-I-S.T at D-FRoundable.com. Please consider donating to the creators of Dwarfortress 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. Sky Cullen and Folk Round are both by Kevin McLeod. You can find more from Kevin MacLeod at Incompetect.io.