Dwarf Fortress Roundtable - Ep.16: In Which Meph Joins the Gang to Talk Modding and Tilesets

Episode Date: October 6, 2019

Meph Tileset Launcherbrolol.404 modsSpriter's ResourceOpen Game ArtArmok VisionThe Purging of ShieldfrenzyIncompetechBay12 Games Donation Page — Please Donate To The Adams Bros!

Welcome to Dwarf Fortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfey. I'm Jonathan. I'm Roland. I'm Tony. Well, I'm Patrick, aka Math, that people might know from Tarcet's or Mons. I'm originally from Germany, but I spend most of my life somewhere else. I've heard of this Germany. Yeah, it feels like...

We're the good guys in all the Hollywood movies. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Nice beer. It's October. You know, what can you do wrong? So how did you get into Door Fortress? What's the story there? Well, I was in Argentina or in South America in general, and I noticed that I don't speak Spanish very well. But I ended up staying in a place for a month, learning Spanish, for continuing to travel.

And I had a crappy netbook with me, and I wanted to play like an interesting indie game. and I stumbled across both murdered and Dwar Fortress, and that's how I start with it. Yeah, that seems like a good intro. How did it help you with your Spanish? Were you able to... Actually, there's a YouTuber guy that does some cool stuff from Argentina in Spanish.

I don't know if you've come across his stuff. Probably not, but... Well, I can understand Spanish now. Then again, the Argentinians have different sort of Spanish, some different pronunciation of words. And the netbook was so crappy that Dwar Fortress was running quite. slowly in the end when you have a bigger fort.

So I started modding and trying to make it faster. That's how I started with the modding. And so were you looking at performance stuff first? Or were you just like, oh, look, I can add new playable races or something? Did it just kind of snowball or were you like? It's certainly snowball. I did accelerate a dwarf fortress first, simplifying all the materials and the rocks and wood and so forth. And I got the game running a lot faster, I think about 20%.

And then I started, oh, maybe, you know, this is fun, and people want to play this. So I started making a mod. Was that the origin of masterwork? Yes. Yes. It's not the greatest naming scheme, but I try to make the game better. And then I looked in game and the items have like different quality levels. So I tried to make the highest quality level as the name.

And for people listening that aren't familiar with it, it's a pretty common. comprehensive, almost like a redo of a lot of the mechanics in the game, it really adds a lot of depth. And it's been really popular, but I'm sure an absolute nightmare to keep maintained when version changes. Yeah, it's kind of all right. The 3411 to the 40 version of the jump was horrifying because I had to redo everything. It was inevitable. Yes, I started from scratch. Oh, man.

So do you think you'll continue with masterwork, or are you kind of looking at other stuff now, or what are you focusing your efforts on? I did the mods, then I started running out of things to add to the dwarfs because it was getting too big anyway. So then I started with alternate races that you play with different play styles. And then I started with a tile set, which is ultimately why Kid Fox hired me for the official tile set. Right now, I'm doing warlocks. Like I did a race of evil villains to accompany the villain update. Oh, cool. But it's kind of playable.

Like, if you go to Bay 12, you can find test version. So, Meph, if you can talk about it. How did Kit Fox games first approach you about the joining the project? Well, Tanya, who kind of runs the show, wrote me a private message on Bay 12. And then I got an email saying, oh, yeah, you've got to sign this NDA if we're going to talk about you doing something.

And I had no idea what this was about. It was something Dwar Fortress, and I had to sign something saying, I can't talk about it. But that was only up to the point where they made the Steam announcement. So now I'm actually free to talk about things. Oh, that's cool.

So you're covered, like basically they were saying, don't spill the beans on this going to steam but once it goes to steam like we're not going to send people out to like break your knees if you talk about things i'll break their knees no um yeah at the beginning it was all very hush-hash it's kind of weird going to bay 12 writing about mods and tileset when you're at the same time working on something for it for like half a year and you can't talk about it do you think you'll keep on with the mods do you do you see yourself putting together another version of Mastercraft, or is it sort of like your tile set and launcher

or kind of the natural evolution? Well, I think the launcher is the most important because when I started modding, the people were like, half of the people were like, oh, yeah, we want to do A, and the other half is no, A is horrible, we want to do B, and in reality the people only wanted options.

So some kind of mod manager would be very beneficial for the game. Personally, I will continue doing moths because they are fun. And it will probably convert my tile set to get a free graphical version of the game because only people that pay 20 bucks can do the Steam version.

No, that's cool. I mean, personally, I can't imagine going back to a world without war corgis. I'm a huge fan of the War corgi army. I didn't think I'd enjoy that dog. Update you did as much as they did, but that really changes things.

It was awesome. Don't thank me for those. Bro, lull. Dot 404 wrote the I just made the sponsor him. The sprites. His name is not very confident

to beoking, I know. He does a lot of mods lately. What's your go-to when you play the game? Do you play it modded? Do you play it unmodded? Do you just play the modding game now? And that's it? It's brave.

Brave of you to assume that I actually play the game. I know. I realized halfway through the question, maybe you're just playing mods now. You're just like, I'm going to do as much as I can. I did play the game in the beginning. It was quite fun with all the sieges and the high difficulty spike. But eventually, except for doing mega projects to keep yourself entertained, there is no end

game in it. So playing the game is a little bit boring to me right now. If in comparison, I could do something creative and productive, that is fun while doing it, and then have a couple thousand people play it. How about a forgotten beasts is the playable race? I did that. The AI doesn't like that one bit. Oh, no. Yeah, that doesn't seem like a good idea. The warlocks I just wrote, they had night creatures and forgotten beasts as pets,

and the AI is broken. Every time you assign military, they attack your own military. I kind of love the idea of that, though. That's kind of hilarious. Okay, guys, get them. So what got you into the graphics? Like, how did you start pulling sprites? Because I think I read on Reddit somewhere that you were, like, pulling from Secret of Manna and some old SNSROMs and stuff. Well, I started with, I wanted a large task set,

and no one had done one. So I started meddling around with 64 times 64 sprites, and it didn't really work out. And then I just posted on the forum how to use TVBT, like this TWBT D-Effect plugin how to use all of the functions and write a few tutorials

and I hope that someone else would do it. And there were two people, DiBujor and Obsidian Soul, who started on 32X tile sets, but they both abandoned them. Like they did a few sprites, uploaded them, but nothing playable,

and then they disappeared for a year. And eventually, I gathered together the scraps. I wrote them some emails and it's like, is it okay if I used to? they were fine with it and then I started making a tarset based on this because at that point I had no spriting experience whatsoever

there are websites deviant artists great open game art spriters resource where people rip things from older games and since I'm a huge nerd and I like the old Super Nintendo games and stuff I did hide east eggs like there are a couple of sprites from all kinds of JRPs and RPGs in there It's not that I couldn't have created them myself or taken them from somewhere else,

but I did intentionally hide them in there. So if you find some teenage Ninia turtles or something from Zelda, then yes, it's in there as a little joke. Yes. Yeah, that's a link to the past. My favorite game ever. Mm-hmm. So you recognize the tree stumps. I saw that.

It really makes it much more comfortable and familiar. I like it. It was a very calming tree stump. Mm-hmm. As long as you don't run into any spongeman. That's cool. Do you think you'll keep evolving your free tile set once the Steam version comes out? Because I know for a while you were really dumping the updates. You've done like four in a row. It's pretty intense. Well, it depends on so many things.

Like when I have a lot of time, especially when I'm in one place with electricity and Wi-Fi, then I can do a lot of updates. Officially I will of course support the Steam version because if Tarn adds more things you will need more sprites later on they also hired me as the mods support so I have to figure out how to make the mods easier to install for people and the comparability between different mods should be better in the Steam version eventually.

I will update masterwork for it. I want to make my tile set work with that new version so yeah there's a lot of things there are a lot of things that might or might not happen with Dwar Fortress that I can do that's pretty cool I think yeah the I know Steam's pretty good with its with its workshop that

that seems like it could really open up the doors to modding in some ways I mean I know the doors are pretty wide open as it is but as far as like making it easier for people to figure out how to get their mods built into a framework it seems like that might that might be helpful. Have you found that or is it just like, oh my gosh, what are these guys doing? I think Tom has to do a lot of internal changes. It doesn't depend on the steam workshop.

It is something that Mr. Adams has to do himself. So it will be available for the non-steam version as well. Oh, cool. You mentioned earlier that you were making some warlocks and some villains for the villains. update. I don't suppose you have any ballpark idea of when that update's going to drop months? No idea. Yeah, okay. Like, I'm not working with Tarn. Tarn Adams is still his own

thing doing Dwar Fortress. And then there's Kit Fox games who hired Mike and me to do the sprites. So we usually communicate with Kit Fox and we have our own secret forum where Tart Paws are now and then. But we are completely removed from all the other development. Like, I know as much about the villain update as anyone else on page 12. I mean, I would say that makes a lot of sense just because I'm sure that just given the way

those devlogs read, I just could see the Adams Brothers as kind of being their own island and just, you know, like, they go into dev and the door is closed and then the door opens and a blog post comes out and you're like, oh, that's what you do. Cool, cool. Unfortunately, every blog post that comes out on the dev page seems to, to be opening more doors and not seeming to get any closer to a release, alas. I feel like that's the history of the game, though. You know what I mean?

It's like, it's always just, oh, I thought this would be cool, so I did it. Oh, I thought this would be cool. So I did it. And then eventually, it seems like all of those things just kind of naturally pause. And then an update comes out. And you're like, oh, okay, cool. Great. It's like one of my molds.

So what happened with your, I know, I saw some stuff about you, like, animating sprites and like adding fire that moved and stuff like that. Can you talk a little bit about like what's going on with that? That looked pretty cool. Well, yeah, sure. I wanted to do some animated creatures just as a showcase

for Tom to convince him maybe add this to the game. He's not yet at the programming stages for the Steam update. So all the animations I did were for the current one, the Free War Fortress. So you can play with these animations right now.

like they are in my tileshead. It works with an update Jarpa, who is the author of Armagh Vision, wrote for this D-Effect plugin. So you can chain multiple sprites after another, either at the sequential order or a randomized order. So I can do flowing rivers, glistening, gemstones, glowing magma. So that's all fine. The only problem is it's quite unstable and leads to crashes for some reason.

so my default setting is that animations are turned off so if you download my tile set and play you will not see them unless you turn them on manually oh okay well that makes sense yeah I think it's a cool idea just to kind of spice it up it definitely feels like well it's something to take a look at and explore while the game is in mid-dev cycle so that's pretty neat

All right, so let's talk just a little bit about the release notes. He's pretty much gotten everything done in the network rewrite that he wanted to. Yeah, I mean, it looks like things are coming together. That's great. But then I feel like then it all just kind of, you know, he's like, and then I decided to go ahead and look at the AI frame rate code. And then suddenly it's like, oh, we're down that rabbit hole. So you never know.

You know, it's like a, it's a mixed bag. My problem with the latest updates is that every time he goes into like the, I wouldn't say hardcore scriptor read English, but every time he's talking about like scripting stuff, I'm completely out of anything because I'm like, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, sure, I like, so I can't really you know what I say anything that actually gives me

another thought for a question a MF question which is as far as modding goes how much of it is shifting stuff around in like config files

and how much of it is actually writing code and what kind of code is it or you know could you just talk a little bit about like what does it take to get in and start modding this thing

yeah of course all the raw modding is based on text files so it's just shifting around tokens within dwarf fortress specified text files. It doesn't matter what programming language you know it will not help you because it's all unique to dwarf fortress.

The only coding, if you want to do any, would be in DFX, like C++, Lua and Ruby, or if you write an external utility, like, you know, dwarf therapist or perfect world, they are obviously written in something else. So if you want to get into modding, the easiest way is to get a note, let's say, Notepad++, some kind of text editor, and download a small mod by someone else, open the Draw Fortress Wiki in the next tab, and compare notes. It's quite easy to get started with it, really. Yeah, that's pretty cool. It looks like he's left a lot of things open to interpretation or modding. What are what are what do you think are like I feel like you've sort of pushed a lot of the boundary what can be done is there anything that you've found which is like a hard boundary where you're like oh I better not touch that anymore I've just broken the game tons yeah yes one thing that's the most horrible thing for modders is crashes to desktop with no arrow log like the game just shuts down and you don't know why and there is no inbuilt system to figure it out So you need a lot of play testing for this.

And it's the main reason I'm looking forward to the Steam update because D.FEC causes a lot of crashes. And I just can't find it. And it must be infuriating to the players. And I'm always sorry when I hear, oh, yeah, it crashed three times in a season. I was like, oh, God, damn it. And within the Ross, there are a lot of hard-coded things

where I don't know why they are not accessible to players or modders. and unfortunately it's not open source so you can't look at the uncompiled game and see how Tarn did it. You have to guess and reverse engineer how things work. And yeah, for example, there is an interaction hint that says in magma or in water. So you would assume if a person is standing in water,

you would use it, but it only works from 4-7 water. Like you know the depth of the water is between zero and seven. seven and underneath three it doesn't count but no one mentions this and the AI will not count this tile as water because it's predominantly air or floor so it will path find usually like normal through it and if it's higher than four it will swim and then it would use the interaction but the AI isn't smart enough to do this while swimming so I tried to make a water based race that uses this entire interaction system to move quickly through channels and everything. And they're like, no, no, no, no, no.

We can breathe underwater, but we will not go into this tile. It's flooded. These stupid fish people. Well, and for that, they deserve to die. Yeah, but they can't drown. Oh, magma. There we go. Yeah, but yeah, there are a lot of limitations that should not be there.

Like, you can't add a new profession. Oh, interesting. like it just can't be done so there was a heck that opens the exit and changes the string dumb like it looks for names and replaces them with other names so i use this in the old masterwork to cheat in a little new things but oh my god it's so hecky it's so bad i noticed you managed to do things like add in new workshops um yeah that's easy yeah that part's easy because I know, like, some of your latest ones, like, you can hire immigrants, basically. Like, you can bring people in from other, like, you can hire a Spider-Man to come in and fight crime in your base or whatever. That stuff's pretty, that stuff's pretty straightforward as far as, like... Yes, this is very easy, and I did this, like, five years ago. It has been in the mod for Asia, but I just made new sprites for it for the new tar set and bundled it up nicely.

And now people are like, oh, my God, you can do this? Yeah, it's pretty cool, man. Way to bring us up to the real world. No, it is really cool. Definitely adds a little bit of depth and some new replayability in it. It certainly gives some ideas for stuff you can do in a game that hasn't been updated over a year.

Very cool. Thank you. Anybody else have other questions? This is quite weird because this is the first time I have an interview that is focused on Dwar Fortress and not what I usually do. What do you usually do?

Well, usually I get interviewed about my, like, real life, like, the tourists I do. I mean, that sounds pretty cool, but what it's so, yeah, do you want to, do you want to talk about it? It's like, what is your, what is your day job, your racket, your other thing? You just lost our uniqueness. We're going to, just wait, we're going to tie it all back to the forts. So don't worry. This is amazing. Maybe I just like talking about myself.

Who knows? So what is it? Yeah, I know setting it up, you were like one of the times you were in, you were in Reckyvik, and I was like, oh, cool, I love that town. But yeah, so like what, what takes you, what's your thing? My day job is traveling, and I do expeditions, like mountaineering, cycling, Siberian, winter, Sahara, and summer, and so forth. So usually I'm kind of shoehorned into doing interviews for sponsors and outdoor companies and stuff

like that. So this is a nice change of pace. Yeah, you should try the other way. Try introducing Door Fortress into into something where they want to talk to you about, you know, summiting Shishapangma or whatever. I call Black Diamonds. Like, have you heard about this video game? Let me tell you about it. Did you know that there are four types of mica? It's a mineral. Yeah, then just go on. rambling for about an hour until they stop the interview and go like oh yeah thank you

goodbye we will never talk to you ever again this is not why we're paying you sponsorship canceled your new your new cycling outfit can have bay 12 on it you can have like a bay 12 games jersey i do that do you i would totally do that that's awesome i think get adams on the phone let's do it yeah after he sold it on steam and made a couple of millions he can sponsor me. Yeah, totally. I think he probably would, judging by his interview, he's just like he was the Brewster's Millions guy, you know, let's give it all the way. Well, it's pretty... You know how expensive the Everest is? Come on. I'm sure it is. Yeah. Well, yeah, I always found like with traveling border crossings were

always the most... Like, those were always days when you really never knew what was going to totally happen. I mean, you can prepare, but we're things always seem to happen to me when I was traveling border crossings. Oh, for example, when I went from Sudan to Ethiopia, they wanted $50 bribe from me, and I wasn't prepared to pay them. So I cycled illegally into Ethiopia, and the border guard was like, oh, yeah, you have a visa for our country, but you don't have an exit stamp from the other one. But don't worry, my friend here has a girlfriend, has a female friend, and her boyfriend is a Sudanese border guard. So we're going to like hand your passport along those and he will arrange a stamp for you. And then I was just sitting around in Ethiopia in this little office for an hour and they managed to do it.

Yeah, those kind of connections and hookups. You know, it's kind of funny. Like the world works like that. And you kind of lose that perspective when you live in or spend most of your time in Europe or North America or something like that. You don't really see that that stuff happens a lot. You know, you just kind of have to go with it. Enjoy the experience. yeah well Europe's great

open borders yeah yeah so guys I did finally finish my year in Luridwips and I uploaded the save last night it's all in your pocket again there and I promise that it will not take that long

ever again I think I had it for a month yeah I think there have been like eight updates to the MF tile set since then so I have to remember which one yeah we've been doing that kind of a you know each of us works on it for a year and then passes it over and it's you know kind of like that nobody wants to be the one to be the fortress ruiner so we're going to see how long we can keep it going very slow and steady and um and hope for the best and i i am very happy to say that during my

year there were no wherebees come up and there were no attacks i did uh set up a couple more training rooms and we've got a couple squads that are training right now and toward the end I realized that I hadn't put any kind of stamp on it so it's almost complete but not quite in the middle of one of the floors that had a bit of open space to it I believe it's the same floor that the bedrooms are on I put in floor tiles the dwarf fortress roundtable logo they're about to finish that up nice yeah that's cool yeah I'm not good who's playing the bloodline game next uh rolling okay i'm having the safe year right now going to have a look at what you created the monster i think this is one of the things i

think that meth was mentioning earlier it's like you kind of get to a point in the game and you're like oh okay yeah so now nothing can get to me and i can kill everything so what do i do now and i think this is kind of what people do with the game so we've we've decided to make additional handicaps for ourselves by letting somebody else play two out of every three years, you know, and then kind of, it's interesting because you, you end up seeing how somebody else approaches a problem in the game that, you know, like, well, I've always built a siege entrance to keep things out. And, you know, I look and it's like, oh, well, Jonathan's done something totally different here. And how did that work? And, oh, it did work. Okay, that's interesting.

well in the old masterwork mod for 3411 you would all die i would assume because i put in so many hidden things that will kill you if you wall yourself off like there were cobald like invisible shades that infect your dwarfs and then there is this um interaction timer called partied out when they go to their meeting room and make a party and then they stop when this time i hit zero and when this time i hit zero he summons an army into your dining room something like this they were like a Lovecraftian cult with a cult leader that slowly converts

your SIF members what else did I do like hidden interaction based invasions that will mess with people that think they are safe I like it because you do get that kind of sense of complacency when you're like well crap now nothing can get to me so

I guess I'll start punching holes in the ground and see if I can find the hidden vaults or whatever where death comes out of. If you want an example, I just posted a link to a story someone wrote when it happened to him the first time. Cool, got it. The purging of shield frenzy.

Gotcha. Yeah. Cool. It was a love crafting cult that appeared in one guy's fault. Awesome. If you've read Shadow Over Innsmouth, it's a little bit like this. Oh, yes, I love it. anyway please continue so do you think you'll bring that forward some of these masterwork things or is it just too complicated to try to port them to these new versions of 4412 or whatever um it's not possible anymore because the AI uses interactions differently it was kind of touring complete before because if you don't give them an interaction hint they would constantly use it whenever they have a valid target and right now the AI changed to oh we might

maybe use it in 500 tips from now or maybe not. So in earlier versions you could do a very complicated system where it's like else if and if else. Like it's very coding like and now that doesn't work anymore. So I lost like the entire mod due to that. Like for example, the old warlocks. You had seven warlocks, seven mages and you had a lot of skeletons. You can make more skeletons, but not more.

more warlocks. And because you could play the game forever with your not aging, not eating, not drinking, not sleeping skeletons, I had to devise a system how they could die. So I added a little like in StarCraft 2 with pylons. You build certain constructs and they keep the skeletons alive in a certain range. And if they go outside, they go slower and slower and then finally crumble. This I can't do with the new wallachs I made. see. Anyway, yeah, that takes a lot of time to code and to test in game, so most mods don't do

stuff like this. That seems pretty fair, and plus then you're also, when you invest a lot of time in something like this, you're kind of at the mercy of the developer who being basically unaware of what's going on with the mod community makes changes that

completely break and shut out mods. So I can imagine it's like, why would I do this again? When I know then in a short year and half's update time frame it's all going to go away yes like the warlocks there were three weeks of full-time work and a week of testing but um that was at the time when the mod was very popular so i made a forum poll and said which kind of race do you want next and here is a paypal link that was before i did any petri on stuff and yeah people donated enough that i can invest a month

into it, which is quite luxurious in comparison to other modders who do it next to their school and or job. So that's the main reason why my mods aren't that much larger. Makes sense. Meth, thank you so much

for coming on and talking with us. I'm so sorry that we have had inexplicable audio issues, but hopefully I'll be able to edit through them such that the end listener won't hear them. Well, good luck. We swear it's the first time.

It never happened before. Yeah, seriously, thanks for. I believe you. Thanks for putting up with us. It was really good to hear about the, you know, the tiles at the background and the modding. We haven't really covered that before. So it was great to have you along. So thanks a lot.

Well, I do have a question for you guys as well. Like, German talks is obviously the head. person recording everything. He's the president of he's the president of D.F. Roundtable. I wouldn't say. Chairman of the board. Head of it. I do

I do seem to be the producer and the technical person behind it. But yeah. Yeah. What does everyone else does besides playing bloodline games? Well, for example, I did

the original post where I asked people if anybody was interested to get in contact with me and start a podcast. And that was your man. And later we found Tony and we liked him so much that, well, we basically asked, Mom, can we keep him? And yeah, we did. Tony, I don't really, I think that you have something to do with IT, but I've never actually asked you what you do. Yeah, I work in artificial intelligence, so.

Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, it's pretty fun. I don't want to say anything bad about it because eventually I feel like the AI are going to listen to the podcast, and if I say something bad, like I don't want it to blow back on me. Your company is not named Skynet, is it? I can't say. All I know is the AI is wonderful and it's going

to be helpful and make our lives all better, and we should really respect the AI technologies. Dude, don't kill us. That's my official statement. All right. So thanks again, Meph, for joining us. And until next time, this is Dwarf Fortress Roundtable.

Yeah, so everyone have a great week. Hey, thanks a lot. Kiss you guys next time. Until next time. Ciao. This has been Dwarfortress Roundtable, the podcast for all things Dwarfee. You can find all our past episodes at DFRoundable.com.

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