DFTalk 24

dftalk 24

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Capntastic: Welcome to another episode of Dwarf Fortress Talk. Here I have: Rainseeker!

Rainseeker: What!? I'm back!? After a five year haitus!? What? Hey guys. I've missed you!

Toady One: It's amazing. It's amazing to have the whole team back together.

Capntastic: And Tarn Adams, AKA Toady.

Toady One: Hey-o. It's Toady One, here with another episode, and all kinds of co-hosts and stuff. Amazing.

Rainseeker: Let's talk about what's happened to us, individually, in the past five years, if you guys don't mind.

Capntastic: Can we skip the last six months or so?

Rainseeker: Yeah, if you want, because everyone probably know what you guys have been up to. My wife and I started a gluten-free bakery, and we've been running that up here in northern California. It's called Measures of Joy, and you can find us on Facebook. We may have been doing it while we were still doing the podcast?

Toady One: I think so, I think so.

Rainseeker: But we're firmly established by now.

Toady One: That's awesome.

Capntastic: I know you're getting some really excellent opportunities in terms of gift baskets for some celebrity event?

Rainseeker: Oh yeah, we went to the Emmies. That was fun. I got to meet the guy from Leave It to Beaver. And I got to meet the guy from Scrubs. The janitor on Scrubs.

Capntastic: Oh! That's the good one to me.

Rainseeker: Yeah, it was fun to meet him. I also got to meet... I don't know if you guys ever watched 30 Rock, but there was a guy on their writing staff. Well, acting on their writing staff, because it was a fake show. A show about a fake show. I was so excited to meet him because that was my favorite show at the time. But anyway, our business is moving forward and I've been doing some screenwriting over the years, too. Nothing's published, but that's been my creative hobby. How about you guys?

Capntastic: Got a job at a machine shop. Not much else. Currently laid off.

Rainseeker: Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.

Capntastic: Yeah, it's a mess all over. I'm doing alright, all things considered.

Rainseeker: That's good. Oh, my son got married.

Capntastic: Fantastic!

Rainseeker: Yeah, he got married last year. How about you, Tarn? What are the big life experiences you've experienced?

Toady One: Still in the same apartment. Still dwarfin'. We traveled around for some events, which is fun. We went to Korea and Switzerland for some events, which was pretty amazing. But mostly, of course, just going to San Francisco or whatever, for the Roguelike Celebration and GDC and a bit of traveling. Just a lot of work, though. And of course, the whole Steam thing, which is probably the biggest thing that's happened in the last five years.

Rainseeker: Yay, Steam!

Capntastic: Globally, one of the biggest things that's happened in the last five years.

Rainseeker: It kind of looks like you're finally taking my persistant suggestion of having a better user interface. That looks amazing.

Toady One: It's about time. Something happened there, for sure. Can you send images over our little Discord chat?

Capntastic: Yeah, drag and drop.

Toady One: You can use drag and drop?

Rainseeker: Yes.

Toady One: Oh, 'add a comment.' I'll just add that comment.

Capntastic: There should be a game called drag 'n' drop. [dragon drop?] There is, for sure.

Toady One: I sent a little image over Discord chat. We've been testing out screens.

Rainseeker: Would you look at that?

Toady One: This is a little prototype embark screen that hasn't had any artist attention.

Rainseeker: Clearly, but that's fine.

Toady One: So those are all my terrible color schemes and stuff.

Rainseeker: [laughter] It really is very bad.

Toady One: It's kind of earthy. Earth tones. It's like Elf Fortress.

Rainseeker: [laughter]

Capntastic: I do like the little ornamentations in the corners.

Toady One: Those were the parts that were actually drawn by the artists. Just that, and of course, the items that you see there. But the very stop-sign-looking plus and minus look, that's all me. But, if you remember how the game works, you used to have to type 'n' for new item, and it would take you to a whole different screen with the typing filter and the categories and so forth. Here it is, all in one place. You can see your items on the left. You can see the typing filter and categories on the right. You can see a scroll bar with a little dwarf face on it.

Rainseeker: Oh, there it is!

Toady One: The ones on the right also get scroll bars. The middle one gets a scroll bar because, of course, there's more categories than that when you aren't filtering. There's always going to be a lot of stuff, which is going to be one of our main obstacles when we're going through all of the screens and things. I had typed 'bronze' into the typing filter and there's still pages of items.

Rainseeker: Yeah, there's bismouth bronze. All that fun stuff.

Capntastic: I'm curious... It's a me thought. I'm curious if bismouth bronze tastes like Pepto-Bismal.

Toady One: [laughter]

Capntastic: I have to filter myself.

Toady One: They could grind it into powder and put it in your breakfast cereal.

Rainseeker: There you go.

Toady One: And you see, for instance, the willow wheelbarrow on the left. We haven't done materials for wheelbarrows, so that is a distinctly not-willow wheelbarrow down there.

Capntastic: Oh, look at that.

Toady One: But yeah, it's a nice stepladder.

Rainseeker: [laughter]. Wow, that's cool. So what is a stepladder for? That's the first time I've seen that.

Toady One: Were you around for the 3D trees?

Rainseeker: Yes. Yes, I saw that.

Toady One: Some point after that, we started growing fruit on trees. You can take a stepladder over and climb and pick the fruit from the trees.

Capntastic: It's cute.

Rainseeker: That is cute.

Toady One: One of the leading causes, perhaps, of dwarves being stuck in trees.

Rainseeker: What? [laughter] Please explain!

Toady One: [laughter] So if the stepladder is removed or if the dwarf is otherwise chased up a tree or something, they'll just be up there. They have some code to help them get down now, which is useful, but you can also just chop the tree down.

Rainseeker: So what you're telling me is that someone could be climbing a tree, minding his own business, picking an apple, and Urist [Urick?] could come by be like, 'Oh! A stepladder that's just sitting there. I better put it away!' and puts it away, and that's how they get stuck?

Toady One: I don't know. I don't if they get swiped, or if they cancel the job, or what the main vector is. This is something that should probably be investigated a little bit more.

Capntastic: I've seen the opposite, where there's just stepladders out in the trees, or where the trees are. Not up in the trees. That would be wild.

Toady One: Well, why would a dwarf ever clean up after themselves?

Rainseeker: [laughter] Right!

Toady One: I posted another one. This is a little sparser, this screen, but this is the animals tab.

Rainseeker: Are we able to post these for the people that are listening?

Toady One: I'm going to tease them currently, while we think about the plan for this. We could put them up on the dev log though. Or hide them on the top page.

Capntastic: I think the teasing's already begun.

Rainseeker: Yes!

Toady One: We're into the teasing right now. This is fun.

Rainseeker: Yeah, teeheeheehee!

Toady One: In this screen, I've responsibly bought four of each type of cavy. So that's a total of sixteen cavies.

Rainseeker: Mommas, and poppas, and the babies.

Toady One: All them babies.

Rainseeker: The whole family.

Toady One: You can see, on the right, the variety of hen and chick and rooster pictures. And the variety of goat and pig pictures. You can see a water buffalo calf. Lots of little animals and things. Another scroll bar. More plusses and minusses. You'll note that the total number of points you have to spend is not displayed yet, anywhere on the screen, so that's something that needs to be done in the list of many things that need to be done. But I think it's pretty cool! It's different than it was before, for sure.

Rainseeker: Yeah, it's coming along, buddy! Good job. Out of curiosity, where are we with Adventure Mode?

Toady One: I've got Adventure Mode showing up on the screen, which is a huge first step. People wandering around and looking like either people, or the debug creature. The thing is, we haven't finished the layering on, say, the human. Because the dwarves, currently, are built from twelve layers. Including, like, here's your left arm, here's your right arm, here's your face, here's your beard, here's your shadow underneath you, and so forth. So there's just a little bit of extra art that needs to be done. And we're hoping, to some extent, to get the animal people up and running that way as well. Although, of course, since there are 200 animal people, it's not something that we can do perfectly for every single body type.

Rainseeker: The snail men may look kind of odd, I would imagine.

Toady One: Snail men definitely look odd, and, I think, slug people are different from snail people because slug people don't have legs and snail people do.

Rainseeker: Oh!

Capntastic: Interesting.

Toady One: It just seemed appropriate. I don't know why. It's kind of a turtle thing, or something. Because a slug is kind of like a snake, morphologically, like it's long. [laughter]

Rainseeker: That's true.

Capntastic: Hmmm.

Toady One: A snake person can't have legs, right? There's some definite rule there. And so a slug person doesn't have legs, because...

Rainseeker: Well, we're talking Jabba the Hutt, here, right?

Toady One: Yeah! So if Jabba the Hutt had a shell, would he grow legs?

Rainseeker: That's a good question. I don't know. I think, possibly.

Toady One: We were probably a little torn on this.

Rainseeker: [laughter]

Capntastic: Sounds like you just came up with a Star Wars spinoff film.

Toady One: Yeah, we could use some more of those. They probably have five or six in the pipeline, right?

Rainseeker: I want my Star Wars crew to be all from the snail planet. Just the snails with legs.

Toady One: [laughter]

Rainseeker: That's what we want. Lucas, you've heard it here.

Capntastic: He's probably listening.

Rainseeker: He probably is, yeah. And he has those algorithms.

Toady One: [laughter] Does he have algorithms?

Rainseeker: Yeah, yeah yeah.

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