Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep. 97: DF Hack Corner with Myk from the DF Hack Team

Episode Date: February 12, 2024

Hey everybody - Great show with one of the leaders of the DF Hack dev team. We discuss the newest release of DF Hack and lots of other things, including some silliness (as usual). Hope you enjoy listening as much as we enjoyed making it! DF Hack Docs Link to join the DF Hack Discord Server

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. My name's Jonathan. I'm Roland. I'm Tony. And I'm Mike. We are welcoming Mike in from the D.F. Hack team. Welcome to Dwarfortress Roundtable, Mike. Thank you very much.

It is an absolute honor to be here. I'm very happy to have the opportunity to talk to everyone. And I've always loved this. podcast. Well, thank you for joining. The honor is ours. You just had a big release this week, right? Of DFA. Yes, 50.11-R5, which is quite a large number for releases we can get in for a single Door Fortress version. A lot happening with that release. It's twice the size of normal release, largely because many contributors had extra time during the holidays. And so we had an influx of contributions. And of course, I had a little more time myself and got in a lot of good coding time.

So a lot is happening in this release, a lot more than it usually does. And it's been a fantastic achievement to get it out, stable, and have everyone start playing with it. How is the DF hack team administrated? Do you have, like, a team leader, or how do you guys set up? Lithazor is the DFHack lead, and he has the deepest knowledge of the technology and the longest tenure on the team. But he's also quite busy. So I have taken over a lot of the administrative functions, like release planning and a lot of the coding and community management. So he is the leader, and I take up a lot of the responsibilities that he doesn't have time for.

So you said that there was a lot of a lot more contributors this time than typically you have. Is that the contributors, like number in the tens or the hundreds? It is all over the place. We always have a steady conversation. going on the D.F. Heck Discord about ideas that people have. And I helped get them oriented and walk them to the code. And then they start up PRs and pull requests on GitHub. And we do some code reviews and talk about it. There's normally, I would say, three or four people actively working on things. And then there's also a large number of pull requests that have been sitting in the

backlog for a while. And every once in a while, the authors will come back and work on them and we'll talk about them and after maybe six months or so, they'll be in good shape and we can get them merged and pushed out. So there's not a huge number of people, but there's certainly plenty enough to contribute quality code and plenty of people to keep me busy talking. Yeah, if any of you out there listening are contributors to DFHack and we screw something up about your program, please let us know. I've talked a lot. Do either you, Roland Tony, have any questions before we start looking at features? No.

No, let's dive right in. Let's dig in. Okay, so let's see here. So we were talking about, in a recent episode of D.F. Roundtable, about bridging two continents together, and there's been some discussion on the Discord about the shapes that you can have your embark location. So it looks like this embark anywhere might be pertinent to that. So what does embark anywhere?

Yes, that's one of the marquee items of this release, where you essentially get to ignore all the warnings that DF gives you about where it's not wise to embark and embark there anyway. So you can start connecting continents by just embarking out in the middle of the ocean and having your embark area adjacent to one that joins the shore, and you can then have a series of embarkes

across any distance required to join the continents together. If you embarked in the ocean, then the game isn't going to give you any land. Therefore, your dwarfs are just going to drown. It's funny. It's hilarious to watch it. So you need to start paused and do something about that. Yeah, really quickly retire the fort because they go down. It's tango down.

It's kind of funny if you're cruel. If the ocean is frozen, then you do have some time to dig through the ice and get situated in the bedrock. Oh, I see. So like a dwarf fortress without an entrance? Yes. I mean, you could likely build some flooring over to the edge and then build a bridge to connect to the very edge on the surface. And I bet that would work for allowing caravans and immigrants in and invaders. Oh, actually, maybe not invaders.

because they won't have an actual path to the embark site. Yeah, so you probably won't get anything, will you? Because they can't actually path to it across the world. Welcome to the Dwarven Fortress of Atlantis. Yes. The island city. So when you do something like that, you might also be doing things that the program doesn't expect you to do. So you could certainly probably cause some unexpected conditions when you do things like embark in the middle of the ocean where they don't.

never playing you to do. Absolutely. And yeah. That's called the fun zone. We don't really know how the game will behave in all these situations. That is part of the fun of fighting out. Maybe when the boat's release comes out, you can embark on a barge or something. That would be awesome.

Oh, you mean in like 30 years? Yeah, in 2040. I'm excited. So besides drowning your dwarves, what other kinds of places can you embark that aren't typically allowed? Like, I guess in mountain ranges? Yeah, on top of the mountains. that aren't normally accessible, likely having the same problems that you would in the ocean,

that you won't have any visitors because they can't actually path to your site location. One of the most interesting places, I think, to embark would be inside of another site, like inside of a Necrimenzer Tower or another Dwarven Civilization's capital or a goblin hive. Super fun to do it if you haven't tried it. Yeah. And I think this will give you a little bit of a preview of what adventure mode might be like, because these are the actual sites that you. would be walking to an adventure mode.

Now, of course, they may be extended and modified a bit before adventure mode actually comes out. But if adventure mode were, uh, existed right now, this is what you would see when you come to these sites. They actually have warrants dug out in the, in the stone. They have, like the Dwarven areas have forges and, and basic things set up. Everybody seems to have a trade depot. Tony, you talk like, uh, you've, did this utility used to exist or is this

something that was... I've done it back in the olden days on the 47 or whatever the last pre-steam release was. Yeah, very unpredictable what would happen. I think I did embark in a goblin, I don't know, fortress or whatever at one point in time, but there were so many other characters there, the game just basically froze. Because I think there were like 10,000 characters or something. Because I kept getting people kidnapped, and so I was like, all right, fine, I mean, it would bark right in middle of your fortress surprise. And, yeah, it didn't go great. The computer wasn't very happy.

It turned out. So it was kind of death by frame rate. And that's also a problem that could happen in adventure mode in 47. Yeah. Because if you can go to a goblin site. Yeah. How does that, how's that going to work out when you run into a site with like 3,000 dwarves or whatever? That's going to be up to Putnam and Tarn to figure out, because I think that will be a problem.

They need to figure out how to either reduce. the processing required for that or just cap the population to something reasonable per site? Yeah. Hmm. Hmm. Indeed. So that's Embark Anywhere. So that was in D.F.Hack 47, but

was just now being re-implemented for version 50. Is that correct, Mike? Right. Yeah. It used to be a single feature in a tool called Embark Tools, which no longer exist because the grand majority of its functionality has been implemented in vanilla now. Like the indicator of whether you have sand at an embark site was part of

those embark tools. But now the vanilla screen just tells you that there's sand. In the ancient annals of metal bent, etched by the skilled hand of Amrab, a tale unfolds reminiscent of the olden sagas. Approaching the year 10,

the resilient dwarven fortress witnessed a resurgence. Despite the lingering plague of year seven, life bustled within its stone walls. New generations blossomed through birth and migration, breathing vitality into metalbent's once dwindling population. The resolute dwarves, facing two sieges, emerged victorious, their halls echoing with the clangor of triumph. Yet, success bore its own challenges, goblin prisoners overflowed the dungeons, prompting contemplation of a Grand Coliseum. Amidst construction, the specter of unexplained deaths lingered, casting shadows on Metalbent's newfound prosperity. M. Rob's ancient words bridge the ages, painting a tapestry of resilience and strife in the heart of the Dwarven fortress.

How long have you been part of the D.F. Hack team? It's been, I would say, about three years now. I started because I started because I was, I actually started because Python 3 was deprecating Python 2, and QuickFort stopped working for me, the old Python-based QuickPort. And I thought, hmm, maybe I can re-implement this in something more recent and make it cooler in the process. And so I worked on that for well over a year. I think I just worked on QuickPort.

And in that time, I just became more and more involved with the DFHack team and worked up to where I am now. So it's kind of feel good whenever you see, you do. utilities and features that were implemented by D.F. Hack, it's got to feel good to see those things rolled into the vanilla. Absolutely, yeah. Like the search widgets that we added to DF50 are, that's being used as the inspiration for what Putnam is doing now for 50.12. And so Putnam is going to create search in vanilla for a lot of these screens. And DF hack served as kind of like the crucible for figuring out what the feature might look like. And then she's taking that to the next

level and putting it straight into vanilla, which is great that we're able to bring that to all of DF players and not just the ones that use DFHack. Is each utility written independently in DFHack? Do they all use a common programming language? Yes. So there's the core functionality of DFHack, which is simply a library that gives you a lot of common functionality. And then you have plugins and scripts.

Plugins are written in C++ and scripts are written in Lua. And they're independent in that they have all the business lines. in their own file, but they may call out to other scripts. They may call out to the core. They may use the Lua interop layer to access DF memory directly. So they're independent units, but they do act as an entire whole across the program, since there's more and more shared code as time goes on. Yeah, I'm kind of a geek for knowing how the underlying programming and all that sort of stuff works.

So, yeah. Well, for this next version, or for this version that just came out, I did just update the architecture diagrams for DFHack. So if you go into the dev guide on our documentation, you can see some spreadsheet or some presentations about how the architecture works, at least at a high level. Cool. I will check that out. So that's in the DFHack docs, or is that under on the GitHub page? It's in the docks. Cool.

And the dev intro linked from the main page of the docs. It's called DFHack Development Overview Near the bottom of the list of links Sorry, I'm getting sidetracked here There we are No, that's okay, I'm also looking it up DFX documentation Quick start, nope

So the docs scroll down to where it says DFX Development Guide And right underneath that is DFHack Development Overview It's that one Got it! Ah, okay, cool So how does the, you know, how do you go about figuring out how to add these features. Are you pulling up the game in Ida Pro and watching memory? Or what are you,

how are you doing this? So the first step, I guess, is to figure out what should you do? And, you know, as the more I work with the code, the more ideas I come up with and I just kind of put them on our backlog for later, later thought. But I would say the best place to go looking is on Reddit and the Discord servers to find out what players are complaining about. What are players having a hard time with. And I think, well, how is it that we could improve it? What's what are we, what's achievable that would solve this problem? And it's very motivating to think how are real players going to be having more fun with the game and how can we help them achieve that? So that, that I think is the main motivation for where these features come from. It's just thinking like, what's going to benefit

the players most? And then I go back to, okay, what similar tools do we have? What architecture does it have? And I'll start from there and go and just build it from scratch. Like, for example, something that comes up a lot is digging through aquifers and how absolutely terrible experience that is. Every step you take, your designation disappears and you have to go redesignate it. And your miners have walked away and now they have to walk back. So I'm building a tool that will avoid that and allow you to paint. You know, this is a damp dig area.

And then they'll just continue digging through the damp. And it's a hard problem to solve, but it's also one that people are really affected by. And so it stays on top of my mind. And every time I have a thought that might further that idea, I go jot it down. And then eventually enough ideas come together. And then you get a tool. Honestly, I think that's one of the first complaints that we had on the podcast was having to redesignate every time you freaking run into damp stone. Yeah, it's really and hot as well.

or warm. That was another one. Like, man, I don't want to, I don't want to dig down. I don't want to do this. You're like, yes, I know I'm taking beneath a lake. Yeah, it's like, it's going to be fine, guys. It's above, we're cool. Like, don't worry about it.

And it's just fine until it's not. But, you know, that's a risk I'm willing to take. Until it collapses and then you flood out your fortress. Yeah, or you just dig into the fire. Oh, well. Right. I mean, yeah, there's a reason those warnings are there, right? So you don't want to make it unilaterally just ignore warm and damp.

You need to have. something more nuanced. Yeah, it's not mattress tags. Yes, I'm digging, I'm digging, an aquifer tap. I'm going to have to dig through an aquifer. Yeah, it's not, it's not the mattress tags warning. Like, I get that there's some value there. Yeah.

I understand that I am taking the chance with my dwarves' lives. I'm okay with that. Yeah, it's a risk I'm willing to take. I got to go. I got stuff to do. I got a fort to build. More importantly, it's a risk that I think Eurist is willing to take. Absolutely.

I mean, he has no, he has no opinion on this. Like, I tell him to do things. Urist does what I tell him. There is no questions asked. It's not a fair world, but it is a world. He is like the strong silent type. I appreciate that. You're here.

Once I get this tool written, then my test is going to be, like, find an embark site that has like a 40 Z-level aquifer and build my entire fort inside of an aquifer with drainage going everywhere. and just have an entirely new way of playing the game. I think that will be fun. You can have water wheels. Yeah. Right, yeah, water wheels just like next to your bedrooms, just as the water flows through.

That would be awesome. Good degree. That sounds like a, yeah, a lot of work. But I would be very interested in seeing that actually play out. If you manage to have a full, I imagine like an egg-shaped fortress and it's just surrounded by water and then it's rock again. Yeah, interesting. Sounds like a lot of pain, but cool. I'm not going to lie, this is hard work.

These tools are not super easy to write. Some of them are, of course, easier than others. When I brought building plan to V50, that was. several weeks of very intense coding, keeping track of what items are attached where and what you have to unsuspend at what time, there is a good amount of code behind that thousands and thousands of lines of C++ and Lua.

But it's definitely rewarding at the end when you see people benefiting from it and saying that they're relieved that they don't have to deal with these issues anymore. Yes. Well, we thank you for that work. Yeah. That's what I was thinking too. Especially from someone like me

that doesn't know a lot about coding, to me, it's basically like you're doing magic. You're telling me you're like the wizard with the long beard that is like doing fancy schmancy spells. And I'm like, hmm, cool. Yeah. Things float now.

Nice. I love it. You know, I was just describing what my friends could do with playing music as seems like magic to me as well. So I know what that feeling is like. Yeah. So squad equipment fixer. That is another of the big

the big features that are coming out in the in this new release of df hack want to talk about that yeah so yeah there's definitely some stories behind that it's something like the tool that that was named uh uniform unstick existed back in 47 and it it did a lot of the logic here a lot of the stuff that's coming up for v50 it's they're starting from tools that worked before and so they're not starting from scratch which makes them easier to write right but of course we want to make them more useful. We want to integrate them into the UI now. We want to make them more functional and actually solve the real problems that people have. So one of our members on Discord updated that tool, so it was basically working. And we got that merged. And then I thought, okay, where else can we

go with this? And it seems no one's going to use it unless it's actually on the equipment screen. So I wrote an overlay that will add in that little button on the overlay screen that says, you know, click this and run the tool. Because otherwise, no one's going to know about it. It's just not going to get used. And then I thought, well, this doesn't really solve all the problems that people are having. It solves some of them. But it doesn't detect when the same piece of equipment is assigned to multiple people. And then they can never fix that problem. So now it does that.

And then it came up that, what if you have a minor assigned to your squad? And his uniform isn't working because he's a minor. And he has that invisible minor uniform that conflicts with the squad uniform. We should warn on that too. So we added that in. So we added more and more features that are in theme. and got to the point where now you click on it, get the report, see what you can fix, what you can't fix,

and then just click the button, and it does what it can do. It will unassign items that are assigned to multiple people, and then when you next click on the update equipment button, the vanilla button, it will go through and assign appropriate equipment to them. So you can actually get those icons that were forever yellow actually to turn green and have appropriately equipped squad members. for some people the first time ever. So it had quite a journey during this development cycle to come from where it was to where it is now.

Hmm. Okay. I like it. Have you run into that before, Roland? Yes and no. I do get my military to be all green. Actually, let me just click for a second and see if it's currently all green. Ah, look at that.

It's almost all green, except for. my archers, they usually need a little bit of special attention. It definitely has an effect, or your play style definitely has an effect. I also personally almost never had this problem. That generally the way that I play

for whatever reason ends up with most people getting their equipment appropriately. And every once in a while I'll have just like one unit that won't do it for whatever reason. But in general, I'm all green as well. But I definitely see this recurring statement on Reddit and Discord that this happens to a lot of people. I have sometimes a problem where

my military names an item and then refuses to continue to use that item. So I have a lot of spears and especially shields. I have a lot of named shields and for whatever reason

they simply don't want to pick it up anymore. Then I have to assign a new one and they name it again and then the whole thing starts again. So I have like, I don't know, 15 plus named shields that nobody is using at this point. I don't know.

Really? How often do you guys have your armies name their items? It rarely happens for me. Well, I mean, these are, how you say, professional soldiers, so they're not civilians that also have soldier duties. They don't really

do anything else. So they, they sit around and train constantly like professional standing army and uh yeah no they they do name their their stuff fairly quickly and and it's always weird for me to see a dwarf name a new item and like your your sword is just in a chest right there like just take it out just continue using it no doesn't want it okay whatever so maybe that also gets fixed by that. I would love that. It's possible. I haven't heard of that happening before, so I don't know if you've written

anything to specifically address it. But find out. Anything else that we want to add about the squad equipment fixer? I will say that it's not complete. There are definitely cases that it can't handle

by itself, such as if you have a unit that has immigrated to your fort, that still belongs to the squad from his own old fort. It can't fix that, but it will tell you about it so that you can assign them to a current squad and then unassign them to clear that state.

There's definitely more that could be done here, and I'm sure once it goes out there and people determine what its limits are, we'll find out more information about what needs to be addressed, and we can spend more time on those specific cases. So you can have a migrant who is still a member of the squad at his old fortress? Yes, with the commands or the orders that he had

when he last left the fort so if he comes in with a station order he's not going to be doing very much and you can't you can't fix it unless you clear that squad state well that's interesting that that actually explains a few things about one dwarf i know that he is in a in a squad from a previous fortress but i just let him be because you know he writes good books but good to know thank you so so what he like if he's got a station order would just like come on your screen and just stop and be one of those people who just hangs out on the outer edge of your map? It's something like that.

They certainly won't pick up any jobs. Yeah. Which is the symptom that I hear complained about. Well, there might be a routine that brings all the migrants into like the meeting area and from there before they actually get assigned to your fortress. Because I think there's a lag time between the time they appear on the map and the time that they actually get added to your population. And they have that little migrant icon flashing above them for that time.

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Oh. So what's the story behind this one? Oh, yes, I'm very excited about that. I am too. when I was writing the release notes you have to choose which tools to highlight and this one I was very excited about

but I just, I couldn't make that list any longer and so I didn't get a highlight but it was one of my personal favorites for this release because it makes revealing the map safer something that I see repeatedly complained about or like the advice that I see on Reddit

a lot is that you know run reveal when you embark plan out your fort but don't forget to run unreveal before you unpause. Otherwise, everything goes crazy. And what Goui Reveal does is that it will reveal the map when you bring it up. It will force pause the game, so

you can't unpause. And then once you close the window of Goui Reveal, it will then hide the map again and get it back to its regular state. So it brings the very common workflow of do an X-ray of the map, do some planning, and then hide it again. And it makes it safe, so you can't

shoot yourself in the foot. Okay. You know, that was one of the things that took me a lot of time to get used to in the new version of Tour Fortress is that things that automatically paused the game before, states that the game was in no longer sometimes paused the game, like digging. For example, whenever, you know, in previous versions, anytime that you were, had the, you were laying your digging plans, the game was paused. So they didn't dig while you were planning things out. And, you know, now while you're, while you're setting up the places to be dug, your miners can keep digging. And in most cases, that's fine. But it really is hazardous whenever things are going on behind a window and the game's not paused.

Yes. So I take it that this would be one of those cases where that would be a good thing to not have things going on behind your window. Yeah. So what's the difference between the gooey slash utilities? and just the regular utilities without the GUI in front of them? Normally, if there is a bifurcation like that, it's because the core business logic and the command line interface is in the non-Gooey version of the command,

and then just the interface portion of it is in the GUI section. So, for example, right now we have Building Plan, which implements the core plug-in, but once we do get around to implementing GUI Building Plan, that will be the GUI interface for configuring, all your material filters without having to go through the actual build interface to get there.

That's something that's on the plan to get done. Gotcha. Or in this case, GUI Reveal. You know, Reveal by itself has baseline command line functionality, but GUI refill makes it more user-friendly,

gives it an interface they can actually see on the screen, and gives you some, like, live feedback of what's going on. So with GUI reveal and reveal, are they the same utility? It's just that the GUI adds the more friendly user interface to it?

Yes, GUI reveal adds the interface and then at the correct parts of the logic, it will call down to just the reveal command to actually do the things that it does. So it's just a wrapper around the command line version. In the shadowed embrace

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Christopher Harris extends his hand in welcome. Embrace the opportunity to delve into the depths of knowledge, to commune with the essence of Istrath-Totwalt, and to illuminate the path towards enlightenment. Some other things that are in the new release. So you've revised the control panel. Is that the case? That is true.

So the control panel is something that's been on my mind for a long time because it's what I intend to be the easiest entry point to controlling DFX tools. You know, two years ago or so, we put out this poll on Reddit for what do you want to see from DFFHack. and the overwhelming majority, like everything else was barely a sliver on the pie chart. It was usability. We needed much better usability. And of course, I've taken that to heart

and it's been the main focus ever since. But the control panel was one of the things that came directly out of that, that we needed a way to show people what was actually available and what it does and give them an easy way to interact with it. So when I wrote it the first time, I gathered the tools together by how you interact. with them, whether you clicked enable and they got enabled, or whether they were something

that ran in the background on a repeat loop that uses the repeat functionality. Those all got different tabs. But as we started porting more and more tools and creating more and more new tools for V50, those lists started getting very long, and the kinds of tools that were bunched together were not very similar to one another. So this new version of the control panel then now separates the tools by why you might want to enable them. So all the automation tools are now together. All the tools that affect gameplay in some way are now all together. All the tools that are just straight bug fixes are just together.

So now you have a little more confidence in saying, okay, I want the bug fixes all enabled. That's a no-brainer. I'll look at these gameplay ones, and maybe I'll enable a few of those that look interesting. And, okay, I don't like having to manually manage the farming anymore. So let me go enable auto farm on the automation tab. So it should be much easier to make confident choices about what you enable now. And that was my goal for it. Gotcha.

Yeah, I've got that pulled up right now. I don't have anything to compare it to before because I don't think that I ever pulled up the DFF control panel before now. Oh, oh, spear to my heart. I'm so sorry. I didn't know it existed. What I always would do is I would click the little DF hack button in the corner and it would bring up the short menu and I would click GUI Launcher. And from that point, that's where I would do all of my interfacing with the F hack from the launcher and not from the control panel. Yeah, I mean, that certainly works.

And that sometimes is faster to do it that way if you already know what you're doing. But for the grand majority of people who would like to see things a little more organized and presented to them, the control panel gives you a better way to do that. Holy Toledo, look at all of these things you can auto start. Yeah, I was just playing with that. That's why I got to buy it. Pretty neat Oh man Oh

Good Lord So we need to have a We need to work on DF hack evangelism All right So yeah This Oh I like this

Oh look at all these things You can auto start Yeah Yeah honestly I just went to another tab It's pretty cool You don't even have to play Dwar Fortress anymore

The game just plays by itself now I don't want to propagate that kind of sentiment because that's not the intent here and I can say that even if you have all the automation tools on there's still so much to do and so much to explore

that I mean it's only for if you actually find it more fun to be concentrating on the other things not everybody wants to spend all their time doing the micromanagement and a lot of these automation tools are targeted at removing that micromanagement and letting you make more strategic choices

more large-scale army direct or megaproject or shaping the landscape with the water and magma. Those are things that can't be automated that take a lot of human insight. And those are the things that are most fun for most, I don't know about most, but many players. So that's what we're trying to enable here. We don't want the game to just play itself. Yeah, that's true. And that's what I was, I've had some conversations with some people online somewhere about Quick Fort and Dream Fort.

and it came up if what your joy is is setting up your fortress then implementing DreamFort with QuickFord is probably not going to be what you like because it is definitely a you know a ready made turnkey system that set you up to go

but if what you want to do is get your fortress set up with self-sustainability as quickly as possible and then start building your you know your new colossus then the dream form might be something that you're interested in. Yeah, I think that's probably a pretty good way to think of it. You know, this interview has made me gain some new planes. And I'm getting ready to start a new fortress, actually. So these controls in the control panel, these automations, do you need to do that at a world generation?

Or can you do that at any point? So for the auto start, you can configure that at any time. You can do that from the title screen because what that controls is when you start a new fort, what's going to happen automatically? That's why it's autostart. The sister tab to the auto start is just enabled, which is what's

enabled right now. So on the title screen, that's all going to be empty because you can't really enable anything on the title screen. But once you're in a fort and you're playing, you can see what's enabled right now on the enable tab, and you can choose what I want to start next time when I start a new fort on the auto start

tab. If I have a fortress that already exists and I have not got anything set for Auto Start when I start that Fortress. And I start Auto Butcher, for example, if I select Auto Butcher Auto Start from the control panel, whenever I launch that next, that fortress that already exists, will Auto Butcher be enabled or will I have to go in and enable it? If you already have a fort loaded, then you'd be going to the Enabled tab and just enabling auto butcher from there. And once you enable something for a fort and keep it enabled while it's saved, when you load

that save, that tool will still be enabled. Okay. You know, I think we'll do that. Continue active game. Yeah, yeah. The reason those two tabs are split apart is because you may want something started up normally, but then you may want to turn it off. And then if you've turned it off for a fort, it should stay off when you

save the game and load it again. Cool. And I don't necessarily think those questions are, whenever you work with something a lot, things that other people might wonder are not things that you might have considered that they would wonder? does that make sense and things that you might take for granted maybe things that other people

might not take for granted yeah that's why i spend so much time lurking on reddit to find out what people are actually saying so why don't we uh why don't we give tony a uh smooth out here oh yeah i need to bail because that yep it's top of the hour and i got to go do work which is a bummer but anyway there you go so tony's got to leave us now uh thanks tony and uh and Adios. See you guys next time. Next time. Yeah.

All right. Bye. See you. Bye. Bye, guys. How quickly do you start hearing feedback from users whenever they run into things, bugs and stuff? Yeah. Feedback is tricky.

We always try to gather some information from users about what they want to see. But it's hard for people to tell you how to do it right. It's much easier for you to produce something. And then it's very easy for people to say how you do it. did it wrong. So we go that route more often. Cunningham's Law. Yeah. We're familiar with it. So that's why we put out the betas. That's why we have the testing branch and discuss it on Discord. So I usually ask for feedback from a few people on Discord, and then we put out a

beta for something major and get some feedback from users there. It's hard to get feedback. I normally discover what's working and what isn't more passively, just from seeing what people say on on Reddit or on Discord does that in passing what they are frustrated with or what they like. And then I take notes on like, okay, that worked or that didn't work. And then we go try and change things accordingly. So yeah, it's not easy to get feedback. You have to work for it. Yeah. Yep. Understood. I don't know. Do you have telemetry built in so that you're reporting information back without the users knowing it? No. We don't have any telemetry like what's being used inside of DFHack.

We do have the metrics that Steam gives us about, you know, what the number of players are and how long they run it. But, you know, that's just general volume information. There are some files on your local hard drive that keep record of what commands you've run so that they can be sorted properly. And when you run the launcher, the commands that you run more frequently will be sorted higher on the list. So I'm considering at some point asking people to send me a lot.

that file, just so I can get a read of which commands are being run most often, but nothing is sent automatically. That would actually be kind of cool to have an opt-in to be able to do that. I'm very much a fan of telemetry, and I actually don't mind opt-out telemetry for software, but I know that that's a touchy subject in the FOS community. Okay, well, anything else that you'd like to discuss for this? So we're going to have you back on again to talk about a quick fort in detail. We're going to just do an entire episode on that.

But this particular episode of Dwarf Fortress Roundtable is all D.F. Hack Corner. Well, it has been an absolute blast talking with you. And I look forward to next time. So if people would like to contact you, Mike, how can they do that? You can always tag me on Reddit. I'm one of the moderators on the subreddit there. so I'll always get that. But if we want to have a conversation back and forth,

the best place is the DFFHack Discord. It's HETPS-K-S-Sash-Sash-DFHack.org slash Discord. We'll get you the invite and just come talk to us there. There's a constant discussion going on about ideas and features that work and that don't work. And we'll have a link of the show notes. All right. Well, thanks, Mike, for joining us on episode number 97 of Dwar Fortress Roundtable. So for Tony, I'm Jonathan, and good luck and dig deep, right?

Yeah, thank you for coming on. And I had a good joke and good Lord. I was just about to remind you to make sure you got that in. It was something about polar bears, wait. Polar bears actually drink Dr. Pepper. Polar bear, what? What? Yeah, there was some anthropomorphic polar bear commercials.

with Coca-Cola years ago that anthropomorphize grizzly bears that would actually rather kill you Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But we had normal polar bears just drinking Coca-Cola while swimming on ice. Yeah, you're right.

No, but that was a real life. Did you remember your joke? No, I think it's gone. I'm sorry. You can say goodbye. Yeah, you might want

to write these down, you know. Yeah, you're absolutely right. I'm going to write it down when I come out of the shower because my brain is a sieve and, uh, um, it's okay. All right. So until next time, you all have a great day. You too.

I'll talk to better. Say goodbye, Roland. You haven't, you haven't ever said goodbye. What? I haven't? Oh, goodbye, Mike. Goodbye. It was an absolute pleasure to meet all of you.

Okay, so, well, I'll patch some, something. them together to make that sound smooth. Couldn't work. This has been the Dwarf Fortress Roundtable podcast. You can find all our past episodes at DFroundable.com. Stop by and leave a message

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