Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 70: Progress Bars, Mouse Control, and the Fall of Hatchetromances

Episode Date: June 15, 2022

This episode, we discuss the tragic end of Hatchetromances, and spend some time talking about the June Future of the Fortress post. Future of the Fortress for June Support Dwarf Fortress at Bay12Games.comSupport Dwarf Fortress Roundtable on Patreon

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfy. Every couple weeks or so, your hosts gather to talk about our favorite game, Dwarf Fortress. So let's join your hosts, Roland. Did you honestly, you named a cat Wi-Fi? Tony. I find it a little dense sometimes, like the way that the questions are. And Jonathan. Yeah, we could, but it gets a little bit more complicated whenever I have to...

As they present insightful, irreverent, and often incorrect analysis. And always remember, losing is fun. All right. This is episode 70, guys. It's a minor milestone of sorts. Damn, yeah. 7.0. 7.0. Nope.

Go that long. A biweekly podcast. No, bi-weekly, semi-weekly? What is it? Semi. Well, the good news is we've been renewed for another season. I just heard from the network. Yeah, I saw the letter.

Really nice of them. They've extended our contract. I'm humbled. Hold on, hold on. You guys got letters? I didn't get my letter. Which one would you like? Which letter would you like?

There's 26 of them. Be unique and special in its own way. Hold on. I got to call the producer. Yeah, yeah. We should talk to Kevin about it, right? Quick, call the producer. Why are you talking to yourself?

Oh, well, yeah, executive producer, I should say. Is that one of your cats? Yeah, yeah, yeah, Ginger is the executive producer. Executive producer, Ginger, muggins. I have a great way of, like, going from cats to mice, you know, that, oh. There's a natural progression there. Yeah, it is, it is. Talking about mice, the Wolf Orchurchs now is a mouse-only game.

yeah so are we getting into the content here because before we do before we talk about that i want to talk about my my my fall of my fortress let's do it so hatchet romances was the name of my fortress that i had been running for the last few months and things were going very well catch it hatchet romances yeah yeah like like loving your axe which is kind of a cool dwarfy sentiment but in any case so i had like 126 dwarves everything was running well, I had already fought off two or three decent-sized goblin attacks, and I had three squads that were all very well trained. Things were going very well. So as I have done before, I have left my fortress spinning and got up to do something else and to come back and check on it

later. Because, you know, typically, if something goes horribly bad, you'll get a pause because the game will tell you, right? It turns out that if you let your dwarves run out of alcohol, it does not pause the game for that. And then whenever you're in a cold biome and you have an especially long winter and you have no alcohol, nothing happens to pause the game for that.

Yep. So I get up, I go do something. I come back in a 20 or so minutes and I see that I'm being attacked by a, it did pause because I was being sneak attacked by elves. So I go ahead and bring up one of my squads and it gives me a message like saying that there's nobody in that squad. Oh, no.

And then I take a look at my population. When I left, it was 126. When I came back, it was nine. Oh. Oh, dear. My entire fortress died of dehydration. So I started looking a little closer. I have a problem with ghosts, as you can well imagine.

Yep, for sure. Because there's nobody to bury the dead. This elven attack at that point fairly well wiped out the rest of my dwarves. And I thought that I was going to see the message that says, what is the terminology, your fortress has fallen? Or do you succumb to the invasion? or resolve has been broken, yeah. But, yeah, your fortress has been broken or stuff like that. But, well, it didn't happen.

And then the siege ended. The elves went away. And I'm like, well, why is the game still going on? I had no dwarves, but there was one human soldier. There was one human left. So, and I don't know if you saw on the Discord, I was kind of chatting back and forth with Pirodev during this. So there was one.

human left. I was like, hey, my fortress is still alive with no dwarves. Maybe I can hold out until I start getting a couple waves of migrations if this human doesn't leave. Because this human was a citizen of my fortress. He had come into new soldiering and he had petitioned to become a citizen or a resident. And so he was there, but you can't give them any orders. Oh. So he is going to the caverns to drink, because there's no alcohol. He's going to the caverns to drink, going to grab something to eat, and then going to the temple to pray. That's is its whole existence for like five months. And then I started getting migration waves.

I get like two of them. They were small, though. And then I'm thinking, hey, everything's going well. We were cleaning up the dead. Things were starting to look up for the fortress. All we needed was a couple more migration waves. And then a vile force of darkness. Of course it did.

And yes, at that point, the fortress actually died. So, yeah. Hatchet romances had a exciting, tragic, and, And I'm not sure what I could have done to prevent it except not leave while the game's going. Oh, and also make sure that you have enough alcohol. That's another good thing. Thus falls, hatcher romances.

It gets you every time. It goes quickly, you know. So I've got a new fortress. Can't remember what the name of it is, but I've got a new fortress that's in the same world that has been spun up that will be the subject of the patron advertisement. Which I like those.

I think those are fun to do. It's a sad tale. But, but, but, but, you guys have any, really happy? Have any exciting, exciting, uh, fortress stories to tell? I have been playing around with the idea of, I, I get really excited about bridging the continents. So if you can. I saw that. Find some that are close enough together.

So I, I, I basically did one where I stretched the, embark zone to this really long, thin strip. And so there's like a tiny spit of land at the top and a tiny one at the bottom. And so I was going to try to, previously when I've done this, I've built bridges the whole time. You know, to just kind of. Right, to bridge the continents. I didn't think of it any way that I could do that. This time I decided to tunnel down.

So I made these huge winding ramp that kind of goes down all the way underneath the ocean. And then it winds its way back up. And then I put a depot on, like a tray depot on the other side. And it shows it as being fully accessible the whole way through. And so the tray depot comes and it comes into the fortress from the top and then goes down the ramp and all the way down to the bottom. And then comes out on the other side on the other continent to the depot. So I think I've bridged. So I'm.

I would also consider building a bridge on top, though, because if your fortress falls, I don't know what the status of the depot would be. and I don't know what the status of your passageway underneath the mountain would be. Ah, yeah. A bridge might look to the game as a overland route where a tunnel might not. That's true.

Not sure. I have no idea how that would work. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. Usually you should be able to check whether or not you can now send people to that continent. And if you can, that means it actually work.

Or so I heard, I've never done it myself. Yeah, you've been thinking about this for a while, right? Yeah, I've been wanting to do that for a while, and I'm pretty motivated to see if it'll work, and then I was going to try an adventure remote and see if it lets me do it. So that's that. So far, it seems to be working, and I haven't been invaded, so very exciting. It's time for Memorial Gardens. Unfortunately, Logan Hastings, chief administrator of the Hatchet Romances Memorial Hall has informed us that due to overwhelming popularity, the hall has ceased operation and will likely not be reopening.

Administrator Hastings would like to also send final greetings from the many remaining ghosts of Hatchet Romances. Kinem Rosh. All right. Moving on. So the most recent report that happens at the beginning of every month came in. And they surprisingly noted that financial support has been, and if you look at the numbers, you can see them, it is a downward trending graft, I would say. So they went to the lengths, which they rarely ever do, of basically putting out a little bit of an appeal for financial support to, Tarn and Zach, so everyone out there, I think that we would like to, I guess I'm speaking for all of us, would like to encourage, if you can, to go to Bay12 Games.com and if you can give a few bucks through their Patreon or, I think they have a PayPal link to help them through the end of this Steam Dev push, that would be great if you can do it. Yeah. Did I overstep my

boundaries, guys? No, I think it's good. I mean, you know, it's a game that runs on donations. And If the donations stop coming in, then the game can't be made. So I think that's pretty reasonable. I think it's been a really crappy time for people right now. I think in the economy's not, you know, I think people are feeling a lot of the pinches. And so it's sad to see it kind of manifest itself here. It's also been a long time since there was a Door Fortress release.

So I always wonder, you know, does. That I'm sure is part of it. Is there a fail, a fall off rather in that? You know, it's like it's been years. And, you know, it's going to be another probably year. So, yeah, I hope that it's, I hope that it's okay. You know, I would pre-order it if that were a problem. Don't get me wrong.

I think that it's completely reasonable to drop support. If, you know, we're in a pretty nasty economic time, as has seemed to be for the last 20 years. But, yeah, it's totally reasonable to have the money dropping down because there hasn't been a release since we started this podcast, basically. But the only reason that I really have really. brought it up here was that it's possible that there are people who listen to this podcast that don't follow the dev notes and don't go to the Bay 12 games site and wouldn't know that they were doing the appeal. So I just kind of wanted to mention it here. Yeah, it's great. Yep. I think it's entirely possible. Some people haven't, don't know that that's a possibility. So great to

get them a little bit more support. Good. Good. All right. So I guess we're ready to get into the good stuff. Let's do it. As Roland started to speak of a little bit, I'd like to first explain for those same people who might not know that they were appealing for support. Some of our listeners may not know what future of the fortress is. So at the beginning of every month, the Bay 12 games, TOTE and Zach will give a report. They'll talk about the financials. But also, Tody will spend some time to post answers to all of the questions that he gets, people can and directly asked Tony questions in the Bay 12 forums. And this particular post has been running for years and years and years,

and he does this every month. And they're big questions. I mean, they're detailed questions, but it's called Future of the Fortress. So in the June Future of the Fortress, there was a question that referred to one of his dev notes that had posted earlier. And in the dev notes, he mentioned that the Z screen would be replaced by some

mouse hover tooltips. So one of the users, I think his name, the username was Sue, SU. One of the users kind of asked a question and expressed concern with replacing keyboard navigation with tooltips and mouse navigation. And that user was concerned that the keyboard would become a second class citizen with Door Fortress development. And TOTI seemed to confirm this by leading the answer with, and this is a quote, that may be the case. So it's hard to read it any other way. So after that, there was a little bit of very cordial and very, very friendly,

but there was a little bit of pushback from some users on the forums indicating that this was not what they understood to be the case, that they were surprised and concerned that a lot of the keyboard navigation would be replaced by mouse clicks. That said, Zach himself, who is the person who's been playtesting, the steam release, feels that it's gotten easier. And Zach is, of anybody, he is probably the most professional dual fortress player that there is.

So, I mean, his job is to play Door Fortress, right? Fair. So, yeah, I'd... All right, discuss amongst yourselves. I had thought that they were always going to leave the keyboard shortcuts in because I think that's what they said initially. So I'm totally aware that things change

and that it might have been more complicated to do that than it sounded like when they started. So I feel like that's okay, like things happen. And ultimately, you know, he does need to fix the interface and make it more accessible. But, you know, I guess, you know, what impact does that have? And I'm kind of looking at some of the other replies right now. And somebody says, you know, digging 100 Z-level deep staircase with the mouse, no thing. And then it goes on to say intelligent people currently do it with the macro. Well, I guess I'm not intelligent.

I don't use macro. Sorry, Patrick. I'm an idiot, apparently. I'm not intelligent. So I don't think that I don't. Yeah. I don't. Yeah.

That's one of those cases where the medium of communication that is the internet sometimes not be the best and doesn't come off. Totally. I'm quite sure he didn't mean to that to the other way of saying everyone who doesn't use macros is an idiot. A great way to solve this problem would be using macros. Well, I agree, but that's a tricky way for people that don't, you know, that don't really know or want to learn how to use that. Yeah.

No, I, I'm obviously aware that there would be workarounds, but I was like, oh, wow, okay, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. Are those macros, are those D.F. Hack things, or are they built into the game? I think it's D.F. Hack? I know. Well, then there you go. Sorry, Patrick. That's not going to work. Because I think it could be a while before D.F. Hack comes back to life. Could be. I think that's going to be a big one. I mean, it's any sort of big update.

It's going to take a toll. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to take a toll on D.F. Hack, which is fine. It's like it's a community run thing. Nobody needs to, you know, nobody needs to freak out. You know, I'm not so sure, though. D.F. Hack may still apply to the classic. version so yes yes probably so and and that's the question we were talking yeah we were talking earlier a little bit out of band i am one of those people who is going to buy the steam version i'll play it for a while and stuff but i suspect that i will buy the steam version to support them and whatever anything else that they sell on steam i'll probably buy as well or actually more likely i'll do it on itchio or it's you or how

however you pronounce it. But that said, I will be also continuing to play the classic version, most likely, especially if it gets some of the gameplay updates, not UI, but the gameplay updates that the Steam version gets. Yeah, I agree. I'm a day one buy on this thing anyway. Like, I was always going to support him. I would love it if, you know, yeah, I would love it if the keyboard shortcuts worked and I'm still going to buy it. So, you know, I totally understand that things change and the game's got to adapt to survive.

Sure, that makes sense. You know, as long as it's still, I guess I look at it like this, like figuring the game out the first time was the hard part. And I think if you're one of the self-selecting people that manage that, whatever he's doing to change it isn't going to be insurmountable. It's going to be something that any and all of us will figure out. and continue to use. You know what I mean? You talk about self-selecting. It is a self-selecting group of people.

Yeah, this kind of self-selecting group that will take the time to learn Dwar Fortress also may be a little bit like me, and this is a bit of a blanket statement, and I probably should, but perhaps the people who self-select to play Dwar Fortress are also people who self-select to be a little resistant to change.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, there's an investment of your time and brainpower that went into kind of learning how the, you know, kind of crazy systems work. And if all of that changes, it's just kind of, you know, it's something you're going to have to go figure out again. Yeah. I was running Windows 2000 up to like 2009. I was running Windows XP until it, until they stopped supporting that, which was what, 2014? I did not want to switch off of Windows. seven and now if i will not switch off of uh windows 10 well i can't actually because my computer apparently won't support it because even though it's only three years old it doesn't have the right uefi oh yeah for windows 11 yeah that's such patchable like that's an easy you could i promise you could figure it out is it what you do a uh a firmware update on the bios No, there's some workarounds for it. Like, if you, if you Google, it's, it is.

Windows 10 is working fine for me, so. Yeah, and 11, you know, 11 is, I guess, you know, what is it? Every other OS is the kind of one that Microsoft gets right. I hear Windows 11 is pretty good, though. It's basically Windows 10 with your, uh, with your docking panel in the middle. Yeah, it's got some shenanigans. Like, it's little ads pop up here and there. I'm like, what's this?

Oh, God. Oh, God. Great. didn't install Candy Crush you know is that kind of crap

that was the kind of crap that I hated about Windows 8 and honestly that's why Canonical got rightful

pushback for Ubuntu whenever they went to the Unity the Unity desktop environment where they were

basically your operating system searches for programs would bring up Amazon ads ooh

yeah that was nasty wow really really got the mind cart into the caverns and into the second layer here. Sorry. That's my fault. I did it.

We've really gone off track. Coming back. Yeah. Let me save for our Windows podcast. Windows 11 talk. I'm already bored. Let's... Right.

Ultimately, I can add that I don't know how any programming works okay i have to say that beforehand because i am the person in this podcast that PCs are like magic rocks to me i can work with them but only in like user interfaces and we go beyond the actual program i'm completely out so i don't know how it works it's a tool for you yeah yeah sure so i'm just talking out of my ass but i would have actually expected that we keep the the keyboard stuff and then just get like mouse support on top like the df hack mouse support kind of stuff you know the lazy new pack mouse support i assumed it would go slightly in that direction with added like buttons in your field of view but apparently that's not the case so i'm very you know i'm i'm i really don't

know what i'm going to expect are we talking about like i have to click on on like a arrow down to to go down the Z level or something like that. That would not be fun. Yeah. But let's just say that. Criticizing it is criticism on a very high level.

Also, we already have the worst possible option to move a game and to like, you know, direct a game. It's only keyboard. We're literally going the way of less resistance. We're getting

mouse support. So, go to from only keyboard to only mouse is like it's so much easier so we can learn it sure it might you know it's a step in a different direction we have to learn something new but i believe that the people that i want to play to war fortress all my friends that you know have resisted until now because of the controls they will not have any problem with that and that includes so many more people. Yeah, I agree. So yeah, there will some people that will be

going like, oh, no, I don't want to play this because you know, no keyboard support. But honestly, in like several months after the, after the Steam release comes out, I bet there is already a mod that brings back the keyboard.

Yeah, and I think didn't we go through this whole thing where they were like, should we do mod support in Steam? And we were like, I mean, yeah, if you can, that'd be really cool, but if it's too hard, don't bother. And they like, what are you, idiots? Of course. That only takes an afternoon.

And I was like, okay, I thought it was harder than that, which is why you ask. Yeah, so as long as we have mod support, that's cool. Like, somebody's going to figure this out. Yeah, exactly. Roland, you said that we already have the worst possible interface, which is keyboard only. So that tells me that if you were a programmer, you probably wouldn't use VIM. See, I don't even know what that is. I don't even know what that is.

Yeah, that was a joke. That was a joke for Tony, actually. It's a way that it's basically Door Fortress, but for editing files on Linux. Oh, God. Unix. Yeah. Great. Or Unix, because I first started using VI on Salaritz.

We were talking about how old I am. Yeah. It's Unix. No, I mean, I'm still in, you know. I don't know. I am encouraged by the fact that Zach seems to like it. Yeah, I am too. I think if he's the one that plays the game,

he's probably going to have less of a filter with Tarn than the Torfurture's community. What do you mean by less of a filter? You know, it's like if your brother does something, you're probably going to feel pretty comfortable going, I don't like it, you know, in a way that the community is probably going to be like. Gotcha.

So Tarn, have you considered, considered the, you know what I mean. So I feel like Tom's probably a harsher critic and is probably pretty clued into what the people playing it want. And so, yeah, if you can figure it out, yeah, I mean, sure, it would be cool if everything were left the same. But you're right, Roland, I think if we figured out how to do the worst possible way of playing the game, then we can figure out the mouse. Yeah. We can

figure out the mouse. We are going to figure out the mouse. It's not going to be a difficult thing it's the more casual way which is you know good it actually opens up the game for long old people i completely agree yeah i think if it brings um if it brings more people in that that's that's the intended goal here the goal was to let more people play the game not keep the 12 of us that play this game regularly happy yeah yeah exactly like all of our listeners. Exactly. Yeah, and if the point of this whole exercise is to get them a little bit of a financial

financial inflow, then, yeah, you need to open up the, I guess, the game to a bit more of a mass audience. Yep. Precisely. Just hope that, hope again that they can find a way to not take away my shift greater than and shift less than for. Z-level navigation. No, that has become

freaking muscle memory. No, totally. That would be really useful to keep that. Even though I oftentimes will go to the help screen by accident by hitting shift question mark.

I say shift question mark. It's just shift that key because that key is a question. Yeah, I do that a lot. I mean, these are the things that we just figure out. Well, I am so glad I have a, you know, like a European

keyboard because my shift is right next to the less than and there is nothing in the way that i can press that gets me into any other screen very nice yeah byron would like to take this opportunity to welcome all hungry dwarves to the tavern the fruit of theaters located on level two of the newly established hamlet of boltstills grab some plump helmet or yak spleen-based cuisine and enjoy it with a nice mug of Dwarven Rum. That's the fruit of theaters, Bolt Stills first and only tavern.

Tell them Byron sent you. Okay, so I think that I feel better now about the idea of potentially the situation, I guess I should say. Because I still don't want to lose the Z screen. That one, I guess it could be replaced with other things. But just the idea of not being able to hit my Z-key to just quickly glance over how many, you know, ax-masters and how many, that's not the word, axe master, legendary ex-dwarves, yeah. And on the same screen, I can see how many legendary ax-dwarves I have and how many units of alcohol.

I think you can see the units of alcohol now in your general overview. When you were playing the game, I think it's right there, including happiness, which is like, what? Hey, that brings up another question that I want to ask, and we will do it after I confirm that we are done with this topic. Okay. Anybody have anything else they want to add about the future of the fortress? And if you don't go over the future of the fortress, I encourage you to just at least take a look at it. Go to beethovengames.com, click the Door Fortress link. and that will get you to the dev notes.

And at the first of every month, and he's been doing this religiously since I've been playing the game, he will post a future of the Fortress reply on every beginning of the month. So click the link there and go check it out because if you haven't seen it, it's nice occasionally to go through

and hear what Tony One's thinking, especially since they don't seem to be doing the podcast anymore. He's very transparent. I suppose we could have them on come talk to us. But it's so nice to have. the transparency. I certainly don't want to ask him to be on before the release.

I'd like him focused on the release because I think they're still making fall. I'd rather wait for the dust to settle. Yeah. You'd rather wait for, and I do want to ask him to be on again, him and Zach. But I'd rather wait for the dust to settle and have all of the, you know, the big time channels already have interviewed him so that we can ask them things like, what was it like to be the son of a sewage engineer? Yeah.

I can actually add one thing. that I found quite funny about the future of the fortress thing, which is he actually puts down, like, medical one, lots of mouse usage, in particular, click, hold, scroll menus and the like, put strain on the tendons that can lead to chronic inflammation, which on the one hand, funny, on the other, so nice of him to actually realize that, because I get it a lot, especially when I work a lot or play a lot,

then I get it in my mouse hand. So it's like, you thought of us. It's very nice. In a previous job before I realized that I prefer track balls, at least part of the time, I was getting repetitive motion injuries for mouse use. I finally figured out, but it wasn't in my wrist. It was my shoulder. So I would have problems with shoulder repetitive motion injury,

and I lost a lot of range of motion in my right shoulder until I figured out what was causing it. in which case my wonderful wife did some physical therapy exercises with me. Tell me get that range motion back. But changing to a trackball at that time really alleviated it so that I was using a trackball at the office and a mouse at home. And being able to switch it up really helped. Maybe I should do that. It's a good idea, actually. Yeah, a trackball is nice.

you get used to it. I used the, uh, there was a Logitech mouse that had a button on the other side and a, and a ball that sits up on the, on the peak of it. And you use like your, your middle three fingers to, to, to, to move it. Now my track ball is a one that I use a thought, your thumb to move the track ball. Okay. Okay. Interesting. You can get used to anything. There's problems with any of them though. Yeah. Track balls don't tend to do as well, even with the ones who have, have mouse scroll built into them, it's not as natural as it is on a mouse. So scrolling through web pages isn't typically as easy with a trackball. But clicking and dragging and things like that certainly are. Yeah, I think you're right. I think any UX, UI stuff that they do is going to be

something that we'll be able to kind of figure out and make work. I'm totally not worried about this. I do, I think I will miss the thing of like BWC, BWM, BWM, BW. well you know like that remapping all those will probably take some time but as long as you kind of are more thoughtful about what you're trying to do rather than just being like tick tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak tak oh yeah i actually made a recording of me adding some bedrooms and i named the recording the sound of dwarf fortress click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click yeah yeah yeah the black room interface oh oh shit well i'll tell you what i could see the bedroom interface getting

way better if you could use the mouse to just like drag a box over everything that you did in your bedroom. Yeah, see that? Some of the things might change in ways that feel less great, but I mean, getting that is great. Like I want my doors to sleep in dorms more because I hate the process of building bedrooms because it's such a pain in the butt. I really hope that there is not enough pushback and there wasn't in the in the forums. Don't get me wrong. It wasn't nothing was nasty or anything like that in the forums i don't want to to portray that at all but i just want to hope that along with the financial issues that that that seem to be happening uh that they don't get discouraged by any negativity uh in the community

based on them going like well then you know we've been working for three freaking years on this if it's going to be pissed off about it what the hell are we doing yeah i i don't want that i think he's just going to go on do his own thing that feels like the kind of guy that's always done that because i think that's why he's a one-man shop you know It's his game, you know, like, I think I like his vision. I like the game he's made. So I'm willing to trust that he's making decisions that are also going to be things that I like because he's got a great track record of doing things that I like.

You know, like I doubt, you know, he's not going to start shoving NFTs in this thing or whatever. You know what I mean? It's like, it's going to be good. In this particular future of the Fortress, there was an explicit confirmation that they are going to be releasing with, before adventure mode's done. So, yes, that is the thing. He said at 2 to 1, everyone wanted them to do that, and they were fine with it.

They think it's the right way to do it. Yeah, I think that's super, super, super, I wonder if it will be called early release. What do they call it with Steam? Is it early release? Early release, yeah, I think that's everything that goes into Steam these days. It's all early release.

Yeah, I mean, look, it's always going to be early release this game. he's not going to we're not going to get a finished version and I almost think it's like games that I do feel bad for some game devs because it's really difficult to ship a finished game now because people expect that you're going to keep patching and adding more stuff to it and like I was looking through steam the other day and there's some game I bought a while ago and it's not perfect it's okay it kind of does what it says it was going to do but a lot of the reviews are like dead game developer no longer updating and it's like well he shipped a game dude he's not working on something else now you know like you can't

expect people to pull the Tarn Adams and support the same game by continuing to make it better forever. So, you know, I think it's going to be early, and I think that's just kind of the way a lot of this development stuff's kind of going these scenes. Yeah, have you seen the latest release that Bethesda Software did for Commander King Goodbye Galaxy? It's awesome, man. I don't know about that. That was a joke. Commander Keene, Goodbye Galaxy predated Doom. Yeah, I remember Commander Keene from many years ago, the platformer. Yeah, that's, there's something for you to play this afternoon. Yeah, that was slightly before my time, so.

Commander Keen was great, though. Yeah, yeah, check out, so, yeah, that was my favorite platformer. The Door Fortress plays a lot, like, games that came out in that era. That's true. Yeah, the music for it was great. That's, it was happy music. It was, also, I had a Gravis game stick that came shipped with, with Commander King, Goodbye Galaxy.

That's what he's going to announce next. He's going to announce joystick support for Door Fortress. Oh, not just that. It's going to be the Dwarf fortress controller. Totally. He's going to do his own Dwarfurtress-Branded keyboard. It's called a keyboard. Which would be cool.

Or now it's called a mouse. A Dwarstress branded keyboard. Yeah, that would be great. Jack Dillon, patron of the fierce sanctuary, Temple of the Healing of Soldiers, invites all dwarves to come meditate on the healing of soldiers, and perhaps become one of the fortunate chosen. Patron Dylan would also like to solemnly announce that the artifact Applewood toy axe Arothlin,

magic moths, is on display at the Fierce sanctuary, located on level four of Boltzills. All right. All right. What else do we got? Yep. There was a question. Man, I wish that I could go back into the recording that we just made because Roland had said something that reminded me of something that I wanted to ask. and I can't remember what it was.

Aw. The happiness bar? Yes, thank you. Thank you. Oh, having a happiness bar for the dwarfs. There is a bar at the bottom of Dwar Fortress now that I believe, is that a happiness bar? It says, has a H-colon, then has a series of numbers. Like red zero, yellow zero, white, six, blue one.

you know what I'm talking about it does you're talking about pantom colors where you do the FF zero FF or whatever Oh my God, don't tell me if we always had a happiness bar and then never saw it I think it's a DFF thing

Let me uh Oh that would explain it but oh god no I feel stupid Let me go ahead and start up I'm going to go ahead and start up You guys have a happiness bar? Yeah no I really feel like that Like excuse me

Somebody has a happiness bar Okay, so I'm using Phoebus in this one And I don't know if you folks have noticed But Phoebus takes a long time Forgera Fortress to launch That's true Which is weird Why Phoebus

And not other tile sets Take this long for it to long You know what we're doing that 45 seconds to a minute One other hope that I have For this upcoming release Is that there's a native Mac version It's right now

The version that they're using predates the current Mac chip set architecture and so that's a bummer because it has to run emulated and you know definitely like the emulation's good but it's still emulating and it would be awesome to have a native compiled client did he compile yeah he did compile the mac stuff so um someone's going to have to buy him or he can buy a m1 mac I guess yeah maybe he can help have somebody help him compile it or something because like if he wants to stay on the apple ecosystem I wouldn't doubt that they're going to drop Intel support in the next couple of years.

Windows Shift S, and I'm now going to paste this into podcast insight. Okay, look at your Discord. Oh, God. Oh, God. I think you're right. No way. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Lower right-hand corner.

The H-0-0-0-0-20-0. Oh, that thing. You know what? I've seen that. I've never understood that that's hard. Oh, no. I think that might be a happiness bar. Oh, no.

What is that? What are those numbers? I think they're happiness. You got zero. Oh, God. No, they are. No. What's the one in the middle?

What's the white one? I only have 20 dwarfs. I only have 20 dwarves in my fortress. It's a brand new fortress. So they're all neutral at this point. Oh, is red. The blue to green is happy. Blue to green is happy.

White is just like, things are cool. Red is furious. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. We have a happiness bar, and I've been just blind. Oh. This time, I just didn't know what that was. How did we find that out?

Oh, no. I just, I saw it. I figured it out. I've been wondering for, ever since I've been playing. Is this one of those things that Kleeneuve and TechGood are like, guys? Probably. Oh, God. Hey, fellas.

I need to put the, uh, the Picard face. baseball meme on this episode. Yes, please. Yeah, maybe so. Maybe so. And it's also an awesome opportunity for both Klineodev and TECA to go, guys, of course. So, you know, they've totally can come out and diss us for this one, that's even knowing. It's been years.

You didn't know it, guys. You guys didn't know that. Oh. None of us knew it. Oh, I kind of figured it out whenever I was playing. Oh, what it was is whenever my hatchet. Romances Fortress died and all of a sudden there was dwarves that were in the unhappy state, the ones that were left, all the numbers were in the red.

I was like, oh, huh, maybe. So, yeah, cool. So is it? I was able to point that out. I think it's D.F. Hack. It doesn't happen whenever you, whenever you are in a vanilla or without running DF. Hack. Okay, so it's a D.F. hack. Okay. Oh, well, I mean, I only play the.

I don't play D.F. Hacks. Of course, I never knew about that. Sure. Oh, man. It's been, it's been years since I started this game. And I still... I'm going to be really happy to know that one. Well, happy to help. Yeah, thank you. Well, today was not a wasted podcast.

Well, you know, it wasn't, it really, I absolutely wasn't wasted anyway, because we very rarely have any opportunity to talk about any kind of thing that can be even remotely considered close to drama. This is an extremely undramatic community. There was a little bit of consternation. Is that the right word for it? After the future of the fortress this month, so I thought that it was wise for us to get out there

and tell everyone to relax. Yes. That's true. That's not what I meant. I was actually in the war in the camp of afraid whenever we started this podcast today. And now I feel much better about it. So thanks for being my therapist.

Well, guys, I hope everybody listening it feels a bit better about this because, again, you figured out how to play the absolute hardest version of this game that will ever exist. And like we've shared today, anything that's done is going to make it easier. So, yeah, if you've learned to use a keyboard, you can also learn the mouse.

So I'm okay with that. I think we're in good. I think we're going to be in good shape. So I'm relaunching Dural Fortress here. I turned D.F. Hack off with the Paradexas-A-Ront starter pack, which, by the way, I imported my fortress, Hatchet Romances, into the newest starter pack from Paradexia-Sarrant for Windows, and it imported flawlessly, and I'm not getting any crashes. So I put the Jonathan Thumbs Up for this.

I think it's release seven of the Paradex of Sarant 4-Fortress starter pad. Always a good one. Yep, yep. Always good to see that. Always good to have it seamlessly pull in a previous save. And I hope that they're able to keep that going with the steam release because it still does have a lot of really useful stuff.

I mean, maybe we won't need it, but I doubt it. I still feel like there's aspects that would be useful to have in this. But just because we don't need it, doesn't mean we don't want it. It's true. It's true. I like copping Linux distros. I like copping tile sets. I like change.

So I think it's fun to just see, play it one day with Iron Hand, play it one day with Phoebus, another day with Betlinger. Right? I agree. Again, sitting here waiting for this thing to, oh, I turned off DFX,

so it isn't going to change, the text will be text. Well, I guess we've got until fall I think that's what he's saying is fall for the release even though it seems like it's being spoken about like it's more imminent

I think we still got under six months before we're likely to see it. I can confirm the happiness gauge is not there when DFF hack is turned off okay perfect so that's a hat

that's a high DF hack thing wonderful yep still stupid but okay yeah still been there the whole time to either of you

ever launched DOR Fortress without using DFHack I don't really play it we did that I mean, currently, yes, because there hasn't been that much updates. But I remember when the last update was out, I did not wait for the FX to get updated. So I downloaded the very first, you know, new update. That was quite buggy.

And if I remember, had a lot of squad problems and squad bug fixes where you set them out and they never return. I played a long, long time with that, and that was, like, pure vanilla little fortress. I mean, if you use TWBT, you're using DFHack because the TWBT with dial sets is a DFHack utility or plug-in or whatever. Yeah.

Okay. Anyone else got anything they want to talk about at this point? I think we're good. I think we're good, no way. Okay. Everyone out there, happy fortressing, and we'll catch you next time. See you.

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