Slaves to Armok: God of Blood, Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress

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Recent Developments (RSS Feed, Dev List)

• 07/01/2009: I started off with some minor issues today concerning webs, miasma, corpse materials, etc., and set some other affairs in order. Hopefully by working these things in on occasion I can avoid some of the long and dreary slog at the end where I'm cleaning up random crumbs without having anything interesting to report. I should be back to squads tomorrow or the next day, depending on how I feel about wiping out a few more of these critters. They are in the next to last list category.
• 06/29/2009: The new champion entity position is in, so the old champion unit types are out. Out too are all of the restrictions on changing equipment on your "elite/lord/master" soldiers, and they don't have to be soldiering all the time, though when I do weapon familiarity/attachments there might be some downsides to fiddling with their cherished crap.
  
  If you haven't been following the list thread closely, I've collected this month's larger Q&A posts, often concerning the things I've been working on this month, but also concerning previous stuff and future stuff:
  
  June 29 June 23 June 19 June 19 June 15 June 14 June 11 June 4 June 3
• 06/28/2009: Weapon types beyond the usual six are now supported by squads and other pieces of fortress mode. This'll mostly come up in mods, but you could also bump into a situation where you would really want to use the many scourges or bows/arrows that are around (if you find yourself under attack after a siege and short on weapons for whatever reason, say).
  
  I mostly spent the last few days just cleaning uniform/equipment stuff up, though, and now I can move on to storage and shuffling actual items around, and that should connect up with training equipment and the rest of the squad training rewrites.
• 06/25/2009: You can establish uniforms for your soldiers now. The main idea was to let you easily set a bunch of dwarves to the same armor type, but if you want to set up a uniform with midnight blue silk hoods, steel axes, leather boots, absolutely nothing else, and then apply it to every squad, that's between you and your conscience. The dwarves should shuffle their regular clothes off to squad-assigned cabinets if there are conflicts/restrictions, but you can also just have them put on some armor over their regular clothes as usual. It would still be annoying to get those hoods dyed correctly, but it would be a little easier to do with a burrow and a few custom stockpiles anyway.
  
  There are various ways to tweak the equipment settings for individuals within a squad, and it all goes by the squad position and not the individual dwarf, though you can let a dwarf choose to use their favored melee weapon if ones available, if you don't care what they use. You can also assign specific individual items to squad positions. This mostly matters for artifacts, or if you are just really particular about equipment or some piece of new equipment. Setting an individual item will stop periodic upgrades for that piece of equipment, once I get those in.
  
  Some of these commands/upgrades will be enabled/facilitated by an appointee in larger forts, but as long as you've got that dwarf working in their office it shouldn't be noticeably restrictive. This appointee currently sits around doing nothing, but that should be up soon.
  
  Veteran DFer Nilocy wants you to know that he just bought a Team Fortress 2 server for the Dwarf Fortress Community. Head over to the forum thread for details.
• 06/22/2009: Beds, racks, stands, boxes/chests and cabinets can now be assigned to squad positions. This is optional. So if you want to lay out your dwarves a certain way, you can, or you can risk letting the computer try if you don't want to fiddle with it. You can make barracks from boxes and cabinets now. For boxes, this would mainly be for training ammunition storage near an archery target, and there's not much of a reason for barracks cabinets now, though it might come up depending on how armor eventually gets sorted. Archery ranges now accept squad assignments. With furniture sorted out, I can move on to the meat of equipment selection.
• 06/21/2009: Each barracks now accepts squad assignments for sleeping, training, individual equipment storage and squad equipment storage (which just means ammunition for now). There's also a dormitory setting separate from the barracks setting to indicate that civilians without rooms should sleep in the room. Hospital zones were added earlier. This should keep the beds separated properly.
• 06/20/2009: I've been working on the order scheduler and associated screens. Nothing exciting to talk about that I haven't already mentioned, but I should be moving on pretty soon.
• 06/17/2009: So somebody asked if it's possible to use civilians for jobs and so on while the alert is on, in the zone to which they've been restricted. I was originally thinking more of shorter alerts where you just wanted to get them away from someplace dangerous while you fought something out. However, while I was working on it, I decided I might as well make it more diverse, so I put in burrows.
  
  The ill-named burrows are larger sections of your fortress where dwarves live and work and to which you can restrict their movements. Dwarves can be assigned to multiple burrows, and you can paint them with your mouse in a few brush sizes or lay them out in multiple rectangles (a burrow need not be a rectangle). Any number of burrows can overlap and you can give them names and an ASCII symbol.
  
  Dwarves will only use workshops, stockpiles, living areas, meeting halls, etc. in the burrows to which they are assigned. I've removed all of the "entrance dance" code so that they can survive the mental trauma of not being in their assigned locations, and they can cross locations that aren't in their burrow, but they'll maintain the restrictions in the general sense described above.
  
  There are many, many ways in which this can be useful for controlling labor (you could even have your experienced miners mine veins of your choosing in this way -- it'd be a slightly clunky workaround, but it works). Just the basic burrow mechanic is powerful enough that it is pretty exploitable, so there will be several ways in which dwarves either move beyond their burrows or are affected adversely by heavy restrictions, but I'll leave those for you to find. These effects should all make sense and not be all that restrictive on play, especially if you are respectful to your critters (for instance, having your soap makers all stand in a 3x3 corner in the main hall until they starve to death shouldn't proceed as planned for very long).
  
  A dwarf not specifically assigned to a burrow can work anywhere, but in the future there might be, say, a restricted burrow setting or something that'll exclude such dwarves. There are also items posted on dev about burrow hauling jobs and burrow production limits and all of whatever -- I haven't done any of that. Things like restricting manager orders to certain burrows etc. would all be great (and faster than doing it via particular workshops in general), but I don't want to get too far afield for this release (since I'm already far afield). In any case, the core work and mechanics are done.
  
  Getting back to the immediate topic, alerts can now just restrict civilians to a set of burrows, with the further restriction that they should get to this set of burrows with priority. If a dwarf then doesn't feel comfortable working there because they were previous assigned to areas outside the alert area, they'll be idle as before, but it's a smaller problem than the one described in the beginning of the first paragraph, and it can be easily corrected if you plan on or are forced to stay in that alert state for a prolonged period. Giving individual dwarves different burrow assignments based on their alert state could be a future possibility (perhaps in conjunction with the work-gang class of ideas), but that's not in the cards for this release.
• 06/16/2009: I posted 40d12 (the next SDL/OpenGL revision) for a few minutes before the first people that spotted it in the testing thread noticed some show-stoppers, so that's still an ongoing mission.
  
  Scamps managed to slowly yank at my monitor cable long enough to completely kill the blue channel (not at the connection up there, he's pretty good on the desk compared to down below). So I had to go out and get a new one. At one every two months this could get to be an expensive hobby for him.
• 06/15/2009: The "stay indoors" order has been removed from the game. It has been replaced with three pre-defined-and-changeable and as many custom alert states as you like. Alert states determine which schedule a squad uses and also have a few parameters defining how civilians behave as well. This means you should be able to make a alert called "Underground Attack" that makes squads carry out whatever plan you have regarding plugging up an invasion of ratmen from an underground layer while the civilians meanwhile cancel their jobs and run up to the highest meeting hall you have, while your alert called "External Siege" might see the civilians run down to your lowest meeting hall while the squads run over to the towers and gates... or just wait for the traps to do their job. That's a later adjustment.
• 06/14/2009: I was interviewed by one of our forum-goers, Languidiir, and his co-host, A Madman, for the podcast he's started up on the MS Paint Adventures forum. You can grab it from our site here. It is 60MB and four hours of gabbing about DF past, present and future, basically.
  
  Kill orders can be given to your selection of squads and individual units either associated to the critters at the cursor (you can pick among them if there is more than one there), or the critters within a rectangle, or the critters you select from a list, or all of the critters associated to squads at the cursor. Testing hasn't been thorough, so this might change, but right now your dwarves will preferentially target those critters for whom they have kill orders, and they'll seek out their locations if they don't have a target.
  
  Kill orders can be given regarding any creature not directly under your fort's control, though as to why on earth you'd want to kill the elven dignitaries, well, I just have no idea.
• 06/13/2009: In terms of squad activation, dwarves activate as soldiers immediately when they receive an order (or later when they have an item on their schedule that demands activation). Once the new equipment system is in, we'll have to see how an order given to a civilian will mesh with that now-soldier rushing off to grab their equipment first. It should take less time to grab the equipment in any case, since it'll all be in the same place if they have their racks/stands assigned and prepared properly.
• 06/12/2009: You can give direct squad movement orders, rather than those issued according to schedule, in the way that stationing works (according to the present cursor location), or you can pop over to any of your predefined points and use those to get things done a little faster. You can issue movement orders to several squads at once or several individuals across squads, as I mentioned last time. It stores these orders either in the squad or for a given squad position, so the death or swapping out of a squad member will not change the movement or other orders associated to the squad. I haven't yet handled the cancellation of orders, which will probably be associated to the alert status -- if you tell a squad or individual to go back to their scheduled routine, it would imply cancelling the orders, though that might be tweaked depending on what seems most natural (or if multiple options or full order displays come up or make more sense).
  
  More advanced devices are possible, like having different orders associated to different alert states, or having a series of orders stored up that can be activated for a squad at any time, but I'm not sure what will come in this time. The system should easily support the expansion in any case.
  
  I've been interrupted recently by a raucous birthday party for my father as well as some reading I got hooked on for the month-end project, but there isn't going to be a month-end break once again, so I still think this will be a good month, as slow as things have been updating on the list. And the lack of month-end break will be better than the last time I tried that, most likely.
  
  As he won't have it otherwise apparently, Scamps is now allowed on my desk while I'm working. He's sleeping there between the keyboard and the monitor right now.
• 06/09/2009: In a new main-view mode replacing 'x', squads are selected in real-time (or paused if you pause it -- one-stepping is also available. There will be an option to put you into pause as usual if you are used to working like that). Individual dwarves within a squad can also be selected (several across different squads if you find it necessary). At the squad level, you'll be able to access formation, alert and organization information (as soon as it exists!), and at any selection level, you'll be able to give simple move/attack orders that override any schedule.
• 06/07/2009: The tentative setup is to allow you to organize your fortress into squads by selecting a militia commander over as many militia captains as you want, as well as a fortress guard as a squad under the sheriff (possibly with captains depending on how that turns out) as well as the royal guard squad under the hammerer under the baron/count/duke (again, possibly with captains). Adding those extra captains is a matter of a few lines in the entity definition, so a decision might not come for a while. We went with the tentative word militia simply because regular military words were reserved for the civilization army, and your dwarves often fulfill both civilian and military roles depending on their activation state. Many players keep a full-time military, so things might change here at some point or mix in with the civilization level. Although they are appointed, the captains don't have any special requirements in terms of rooms or furniture or anything like that, so you should be able to do what you like there as far as having several squads.
  
  Limits on squad size are still up for discussion. There's no technical reason why you couldn't just stuff 100 dwarves into a single squad (though it would rarely be a good idea), so there might not be any meaningful cap. However, there should probably be a number of problems that arise out of having such a broad number of critters under the command of one officer. These could be handled by whatever mechanics come up when an officer is unassigned, dead or not present as well. I'm not sure what we'll end up with this time.
• 06/06/2009: The note-taking mode has been expanded to a general system of points and routes for whatever purpose should arise for them. Right now, we're using them for station points and patrol routes. You can still use the points for note-taking exactly as before, and in this way you can also leave a note at a station point/waypoint without having to switch modes. You can also give the points and routes names (if you don't, they are referred to by a number).
• 06/04/2009: I finished and sent out the first pass of 40d12 to collaborator Baughn today. It uses some dynamically-linked files, which should speed up that development branch if it all works out. Back to the military tomorrow.
• 06/03/2009: I got the military control rewrite underway today, gutting many things and separating out squad information. I should be able to start the new screens/modes tomorrow with the first goal probably being simple movement orders and getting patrol routes up again.
  
  As for 40d12, that's still in progress. Instead of getting it out at the end of the month, my linux died and was reborn (the latter with Baughn's help). Now I just need to do some simple reorganization tasks for it as I'm doing the military stuff.
• 06/02/2009: There's a lot coming up with squads, so we just sat down today for some hours and sorted out more precisely how things will be, and by the time I got all the notes written up and sorted in, it was whatever time it is now. The summary for squads on the list doesn't have much of the detail, but the entry has been expanded in any case.
  
  The general idea is to give each squad a yearly schedule with monthly activities. The squads are led by captains that answer to an appointed commander (the overall dwarven civ has a little more structure than that, but it won't be used in dwarf mode yet). You can appoint as many captains as you like. The scheduled activities for a given month will be related to patrol routes or station points (to be separated from squads), standing down to sort out equipment and personal matters etc., being entirely off duty or training. Staffing levels can be set to give dwarves a chance to eat/drink/resupply, and I'll try to get them to keep their assignments maintained at appropriate levels. Sleeping will probably be handled through monthly settings, so you can encourage them to sleep on months where you don't mind losing a game-week or whatever it is of activity, and you should be able to have them sleep either in one group or respecting staffing levels.
  
  There will be a new screen with all of the squads on it that is allowed to run in real-time (or paused). From here, you can give out simple orders that break the squads out of their schedule and set them on an alert status, so that they ignore their schedule and pursue their specific orders until you tell them not to. Orders will be to move here and assume this formation, or to kill this group of creatures, maybe a few others. You should be able to hand out orders to groups of squads or individual members if you like (normally you can't get too far inside a dwarf's head, but for military matters it is more acceptable, and you'd be able to do it with one-dwarf squads even if it weren't supported, so we're allowing it). You'll also be able to access the squad organization menus there (where you set schedules, pick dwarves, set formations etc.). Further fortress-wide notions of alert and what civilians and squads do in these cases is still under consideration. If it's not too time-consuming, things like the notorious stay-inside order might be scrapped entirely this time around.
  
  Squads can be assigned to multiple barracks (and archery targets perhaps) with various (possibly multiple) activities in mind for each -- sleeping, storing equipment, and training. There should end up being various settings for squad equipment, so you can balance using the best weapons with using certain materials or whatever else, and individual settings can vary if you'd like to mix weapon types (which might be handy with formations). If you want to assign a particular item to a particular dwarf, you'll be able to do that, though there will be an appointee handling matters that will need to invest some time (generally, not for each assignment) to allow commanders to issue those orders if the fort is large. The appointee will also handle automatic upgrades to equipment if the squad wants them, so that equipment with better materials or quality can be assigned to a dwarf, who can then swap out equipment during the next available time (if staffing levels are high and they aren't on alert, they might be permitted to do this during duty times as well, depending on how it works out). The weapon options will include non-standard selections, which might incur some kind of complaint or penalty, but might be useful if you are reduced to scavenging non-dwarven weapons after some kind of tragedy and need to get something set up quickly (possibly in conjunction with arming civilians with whatever is sitting nearby depending on how fortress alert status settings progress).
  
  It's still not 100% worked out, but there will be various forms of training, probably to be chosen by the instructor (who is possibly the commander, or the most skilled dwarf in the squad, if there's not an appointment for instructors that somehow transcends the squad structure -- the first two options are fastest). Training will include formation drills, which will allow your dwarves to hold the formations you select without problems and also to build their overall sense of discipline. Unskilled dwarves will be given some basic unarmed and partnerless weapon drills until they are judged ready to move up to sparring, though these drills should also continue even when sparring training is started. A motivated dwarf might use their standing down time to practice as well if they don't have new equipment assignments or other matters to see to. Training with the same partners might build something like squad cohesion, though what that does beyond further establishing formations would be up in the air, but it would eventually give you some things to think about as you break up skilled squads (to establish skilled new captains to better train recruits in their squads for example).
  
  Elite soldiers (eg "axe lord" etc.) will have their options expanded to those of a regular soldier, though they might quibble if you change their weapon type, perhaps to the point of violence at times. There are some notions of individual weapon familiarity and so on that we are toying with as well, but it's unclear what's in and what's out there.
  
  Finally, the notion of any dwarf gaining a legendary skill becoming a "champion" is going to be replaced by the notion of a single champion that can be appointed/crowned/whatever by the baron/count/duke (one reason to have/keep one). There are various options for what the champion might do, but at the very least, traditional-minded dwarven soldiers (a personality facet) would be bolstered by the presence of the champion.
  
  This should all go in, though the time-table is unclear. Most of it is pretty straightforward, but there's a lot of it.
• 06/01/2009: I've updated the appointment/noble screen. Next up is the military screen and the move over to squad work.
• 05/29/2009: Threetoe has a new story up in the story section.
  
  I think the last thing up this month will be the 40d12 release of the SDL/OpenGL updates.
• 05/23/2009: Okay, that and some other little things are done. List updated. I haven't decided if I'm going to tackle another big technical list issue tomorrow (guards, the appointment screen, the military screen, etc.) or one of the more amusing ones (mount prefs, the new demon behavior, etc.).
  
  At the meetup, somebody gave Scamps a toy you all agreed to call "the thing" or something like that. In any case, Scamps has chewed that in half, and he plays with both parts now.
• 05/22/2009: About halfway through the baron update. You can also pass up the barony entirely at the cost of forming trade agreements with the homeland (as the placeholder, and who knows what repercussions in the final version, once we have better armies and diplomacy up).
• 05/21/2009: Okay, the replacement and election issues have been handled. Next up are the nobility-type positions like barons and so on. The current idea is that once it is decided you've got a barony on your hands, your outpost liaison will come and allow you to make the king's selection of the new noble from your populace, and then that dwarf and his or her heirs would be elevated as usual as you pass up to the duchy level. Of course, we aren't actually doing the barony stuff yet, in terms of sending out armies and having other settlements and all that, but this should make you feel a little more invested in the process, anyway, until we get to the proper implementation. List updated.
• 05/20/2009: All right, I've arrived at dwarf mode. Of course, I need to do more routine updates there before I get to the new military screen. Next up are positions that replace other positions after certain requirements are met (like the mayor replacing the expedition leader).
  
  Given the overall shape of the month, the month-end project work is mostly cancelled this time around, so I'll be pushing straight through into June, with maybe a day or two off DF.
• 05/18/2009: Continuing along with yesterday's work. The administration of conquered sites is up now, and it'll create a position from scratch if one isn't provided in the raws (or if the one in the raws can't be filled by current critters on account of requirements). We won't be to any noticeable difference until I get to dwarf mode in a day or two though.
• 05/17/2009: All right, I'm back to work today. I'm currently doing one of the harder parts of this section, which is getting all of the positions filled by handling appointments, succession, elections and replacements from below, as defined for each position in the raws, respecting position restrictions such as gender requirements, first in world generation and then in dwarf mode as well.
  
  There were requests for videos of Scamps rather than simply digital pictures. Such a video is now available on the forum here (uploaded on YouTube).
• 05/16/2009: The symptoms have changed to the point that I can do some mindless HFS work and dev sorting, but nothing on entity positions without The Headache. I guess it'll mean less time needed for HFS when I get back to finishing off the underground, so it's all okay. Anyway, four days should be long enough, being sick. I vote for being better tomorrow. That would be cool. I feel pretty good right now, come to think of it, but I only have a few hours left.
• 05/14/2009: Yeah, sick. I think I'm on the road to recovery and might be able to put in regular work tomorrow. Scamps has a (routine) vet appointment, so everybody is getting a chance to feel a little infirm. The last few days I've managed a little data entry and my standard forum/email stuff, but that's it. The screen still gives me a headache, so I've mostly been sleeping.
  
  Apparently, if the lights are off and it is night time so that it is pitch black (as it is in my room at night), Scamps doesn't really recognize me and will hiss at me until I say something. So much for that sense of smell. Normally I don't sleep at night so I didn't notice. He's also taken to anticipating the throw sometimes when we play fetch, so it's more like fielding practice or trying to take a shot on goal.
• 05/12/2009: List updated. Any of the new positions can be linked to creature graphics in the same way as before now. I've also put in my first code-generated positions using the religions. It should give the high priest a position name related to their religion, for example, though until I fix up the human entities I won't be able to test it and share some of them. It'll also use this sort of generation procedure for all of the goblin positions, hopefully in a somewhat more involved fashion.
  
  I've become more and more sick over the course of the night, so I can't promise much for tomorrow, but we'll see. Next up is the general process of succession/appointment/election using the raw tokens, during world gen and for fortress positions during fortress mode.
• 05/11/2009: The Bay 12 Meetup went well this year, and attendence was more than double last year, which was pretty cool. I put a few pictures up in the thread, though it wasn't the best lighting for a picture. People were kind enough to bring some toys for Scamps, and I should have some videos of him being introduced to the toys for you at some point. For now, it'll be back to work as usual. I'm still going through the many properties of position holders and getting them updated to the new raw format. List updated.
• 05/06/2009: List updated. Still doing various basic updates, but we're getting there.
• 05/03/2009: Continuing on with entity positions. Still doing the basics, like messing with an order of precedence so it knows how to name multiple position holders and so on. List updated.
  
  Scamps has been playing fetch for a while now, with toys larger than his head, but today he tried a toy larger than himself -- the stuffed African wild dog. He managed to wrestle it and drag it back in turns until two complete cycles of fetch were played.
• 05/01/2009: I'm starting with the entity position rewrite this month. Today I went through the notes and reorganized their list entry to remove some ambiguities and set things in more or less the order I want to follow. The primary goal here is to have some military structure in place for both the upcoming squad work as well as subsequent army releases.
• 04/25/2009: Well, that's Underground Month. There's a bit left to do, especially down deep, but I did manage to get some new hidden fun stuff in over the last few days. I haven't decided exactly what I'll be working on next month, but I'll be starting on the 1st as usual. List updated.
• 04/22/2009: The invasion infrastructure has been updated, and layer civs should be able to invade from off the side of the map with all their items and mounts and things, although I've only tested it a few times (past 7AM already...), so there are some fixes needed.
  
  Scamps wanted to see how the kitchen sink worked today, so when I was washing the dishes, he clawed his way up (the outside, fortunately, of) my pants to the waist and watched.
• 04/21/2009: The animal people civilizations are now placed in the layers, associated to large populations, and I added the map revealing mechanism that I mentioned back on the 3rd. I took my first adventurer down into an abandoned fort that had penetrated an underground layer and walked over to the next world map square, so that all seems to be working. Next up likely the attack revamp.
• 04/20/2009: Today I set up a new entity definition for subterranean critters, so that some of the animal peoples will be able to use crude items as well as mounts again. This also involved setting up a different sort of regional population that can be recorded in the histories and linked to entities, so that it can track large numbers of creatures without realizing each one as a historical figure.
  
  The next step is to get those placed in the layers so that it has a very large pool of critters to draw from, something that could theoretically be exhausted but wouldn't happen in practice in dwarf mode, as they don't have to send every last critter after you while they breed back up and you can't currently hunt all of them down (at which point the entire world will be opened up and the exhaustion of local critters won't matter so much, even assuming this is the only angle of attack from below, which isn't the case).
• 04/19/2009: Mushroom forests are in, as are critters as regular wilderness-style populations that can enter the map (I still have to teach them how to leave). The next major goals are more specialized critters and other layer types. List updated.
  
  Scamps's favorite toy to wrestle with is the stuffed animal sloth, which is larger than Scamps. It rolls around pretty well when batted, so it keeps the kitty occupied. The latest bout lasted for about ten minutes.
• 04/18/2009: I messed around with pillars and passageways today. I haven't taught it about dead-ends at all yet, so everything is still fairly open. Plants and critters next.
  
  layer 107: layer top
  layer 106
  layer 105
  layer 104: most stuff here
  layer 103
  layer 102
  layer 101: layer bottom
• 04/17/2009: Mellow birthday today, as the entire event has actually been smeared out starting from when Scamps arrived. I think the current plan is to DF through the 25th now, rather than the 22nd, to make sure the first pass on the underground gets a nice chunk of development.
  
  Dark Diamond has an interview up. It cuts out sometimes as the Skype settings were screwed up on my end for most of the time, but it's still mostly intact.
  
  We'd also like to thank the people at Valve for showing us around and letting us mess with their stuff yesterday. There are a few DF fans there and one of them invited us over to take a look and hang out, which was pretty cool.
• 04/15/2009: There are still a few corner leaks, but large lakes are in. Take the last maps and fill in some of the lower portions with water, basically. I also did a first pass on magma stuffs. I'll probably work on more constricted caves next, and then, likely, the shrooms and critters.
  
  Scamps carries toys to the room he wants play in (generally where I'm at), he can open my cardboard boxes, and he has learned how to pull out the plugs of my electrical cords.
• 04/13/2009: These aren't specifically indicative of anything that's going in the game, but here's an open cave layer I've been messing around with to test the layer join information. These show a lot of grid artifacts which can be removed. They are reminescent of the fractals used for the local outdoor maps, but it's done differently, so there's much more control over the maps and connections as the need arises.
  
  This particular layer covers the entire world and can be walked through from end to end by an adventurer (though I haven't tested that yet, it looks fine so far). They don't all need to be so airy, but this one would be hard to miss digging down, compared to what we've currently got.
  
  layer 54: wagon
  layer 48: layer top, high cavern poking through
  layer 47: more ceiling bits showing and the first floors
  layer 46: visibly connected cavern with apparent central divider
  layer 45: passages visible going through divider, worst grid artifacts
  layer 44: chamber underneath divider visible, buggy isolated area
  layer 43: floor of chamber underneath divider
  layer 42: layer bottom, any passages off edge can admit critters
• 04/11/2009: I got it placing a series of open layers locally now, so it seems everything is set up properly from the world down to the level of the tiles in play. Now I just need to flesh out those maps a bit and get the critters living there to feel some real progress. List updated.
  
  Scamps fell asleep on my shoulder like a very tired parrot today.
• 04/09/2009: The mission is ongoing. Today I got the critter populations set up and linked to local information, so that fish and vermin generation, as well as larger critter generation, will work out properly, for example. There are still a few things to go related to that, but it's mostly done, and it's also the information that's used to place the local tiles used during play, so I'm almost ready to get those generated as well. Once I've got dwarves actually digging into large underground features, I'll be able to make the reveal changes I mentioned before and get critter attacks tested out and so on.
• 04/07/2009: I'm getting more used to Scamps and the new workflow, which includes periodic attacks and toppled equipment. Up to five varied layers are placed at the intermediate level. It'll need to handle local realizations next.
• 04/05/2009: The birthday present arrived early it seems, so I'm marking yesterday and today off as month-end project days, and I'll do a few extra DF days in a few weeks. I should be back at work tomorrow.
• 04/03/2009: The framework for world-level underground layers is up, and I have world generation placing a preliminary set of them (it's currently doing it in a pretty pervasive way, but you'll most likely be able to tone that down from the generation parameters). Next I need to handle the mid-level and local realizations. The current infrastructure for local map features should (mostly) survive, so many of the problems of integrating the new layers with the game are already handled, and things like wildlife wandering in from the edges can just be adapted from the current outside wilderness populations (since the underground layers store them the same way).
  
  Some people asked what I meant by "creature interactions" last time. I meant anything the current outside and inside wilderness populations are used for -- hunting, things for wandering dwarves to bump into, more concerted attacks on the fortress (which are currently scheduled but don't often work due to the nature of the features -- you might remember them from 2D), and other intruders (you might also remember this sort of thing from 2D). It's unclear to what extent the more civilized underground dwellers will remain in their populations or how much they'll be elevated into entity status. If they have items they'll probably need to be pulled up entirely to make things work smoothly, so that wouldn't fit in the same framework.
  
  Before that I'll just be working on some map generation. I also think I'll be able to update discovery/revealing of the local underground so that it depends more on where your dwarves have actually been, instead of revealing everything. Active LOS around every dwarf isn't feasible, but it can push the frontier off through the connected areas when a dwarf is vaguely nearby, anyway, so that there can be enormous connected (adventure-explorable) caverns without having them pre-revealed just because you have some dwarves tinkering around far, far above. I'm sure there will be some issues, but that's normal. This doesn't mean everything will be connected... I guess that might as well be up to world generation, anyway.
• 04/01/2009: Underground Month began quietly with a thinkering day, but I'm pretty satisfied now that everything will work out properly. First up is the framework for world-spanning underground layers with large populations, so that creature interactions can be maintained throughout the life of a fortress.
• 03/24/2009: The OpenGL-update/SDL version has been updated to 40d11 in the related thread. The keypress doubling problem should be resolved. The next update will probably be at the beginning of April. For now I'm working on the month-end project, as usual.
• 03/22/2009: The OpenGL-update/SDL version has been updated to 40d10 in the related thread. There are some keypress doubling problems that can be mitigated by following the advice in the first post. We've got a handle on them, pretty much. Please let us know about any other difficulties you experience. The plan is still to move over to this code for the next major release, so it will behoooove you to try it out now so we can get things fixed. If you've been having FPS trouble in the regular version, this version may very well help you, especially if you have FPS trouble even on the title screen.
• 03/20/2009: After a brief period of the doctor walking up to our injured dwarf, looking at himself and deciding that nothing was wrong, the medical staff were further educated. Then the doctor went off and grabbed the wooden splint and properly fastened it on the patient's right lower arm. The dwarf left the hospital and mined out a passage with the pick in his left hand.
  
  Next up is 40d10. There's quite a bit left to do with health care, but the correct treatment today means that much of the rest should flow by pretty quickly. I might still get a chance to work with it a bit in the next few days. Either way, the underground's still up for April.
• 03/19/2009: The doctors now plan out our dwarf's care in detail, but lacking the tools they need, we still find them prescribing nothing more than bed rest. Hopefully I can get a positive outcome for tomorrow, as I'm looking at 40d10 the day after that.
• 03/18/2009: He's now surrounded by many skilled medical professionals. They still aren't all that useful, but just their presence must be encouraging for him. Well, I guess that's not true either.
• 03/17/2009: The broken-armed dwarf understood that he needed to run off to the hospital zone properly, but care never came, because I'm still working on that. Poor little buddy.
• 03/16/2009: As you might want to gather and treat the wounded without the benefit of tables or beds (due to resource constraints or otherwise), I went with an activity zone for the hospital. I've added a few options to activity zone placement to make that a little easier (they can overlap now, you can flow them out like rooms, and delete a single zone regardless of overlaps). This'll also be a good test for using zones for things like dynamic workshops (way) later if things go that direction, as hospital zones will need to manage several buildings. It might also be useful for some military applications for this release.
  
  In any case, next up are the specific goings-on at the hospital. Unfortunately for the critters, this means repeated applications of (1) create a hospital zone and staff settings (2) debug-chop a dwarf (3) see how it goes. List updated.
• 03/15/2009: Health care list updated. I'm going to work on that list for five days, then I'm going to do 40d10 work for a few days before the month-end project begins. I'll be starting the underground changes at the beginning of April regardless of the status of the other portions.
• 03/12/2009: Still trucking along with wound/scar descriptions. I'll probably change gears to healthcare after the 14th.
• 03/11/2009: Finished off various aspects of style/voice/chin/body sentences. Wound descriptions should be up next. At first they'll be in the description paragraph, and with the healthcare improvements (which is the nextish major topic), there will also be a more practical view for them.
  
  After quite a long time, I've finally finished my night reading, Three Kingdoms. It's been very inspirational for the army work to come after this release is out.
• 03/10/2009: The second Bay 12 meetup is set for May 9th in Seattle. Zach and I will both be there. The details are at the forum in this thread. Please post there if you are planning to drop by!
  
  Tissue styling seems to be working properly, and I got some preliminary information up in the paragraphs. I just need to clean that up a bit and do wound descriptions and then this section will be sorted out. I haven't decided if I'm also going to jump into bearing/mannerisms a bit or if I'm going to wait on that. It'll depend on the timing, since I want to be able to move on within a few days. List updated.
• 03/09/2009: I made it a good way through tissue styling today. There's an entity component in the raws and a creature component, so as long as a creature has a group of tissues tagged in a way that is recognized by a civilization, it can interact with that society's style definitions. For example, if dwarves were administering some conquered humans, human children born there would adopt beards if they identify with the dwarven civilization as their primary group (something which will probably be a little too strict now, as there's currently no notion of tribute or conquering that isn't fairly total). Dwarven children kidnapped and incorporated into goblin society might sh... shave. We'll see how it plays out when I finish it off. The primary motive now is to get beard descriptions showing up in the appearance paragraphs.
• 03/08/2009: I've got some sentences now and have worked out the last real problems with the raws that I could find. The two major remaining tasks are getting styles up and making descriptions for wounds.
• 03/07/2009: Worked through bugs and problems with appearance modifiers today. After the crashes were fixed, various index misalignments caused certain asymmetries to arise. The problems were too serious for the text to cope -- it was expecting symmetry, so it just wouldn't display the worst problems (I've been working from numeric outputs, and I don't yet have the screenshots some people wanted). There was a dwarf with one eye bugged out and one eye sunken in with colorless irises and one quadrant worth of teeth ten times as long as the others and the nose shrunken down to nothing. He was also a little shorter than the average dwarf, and beardless, because it grew out those teeth instead.
  
  By the time I have the first paragraphs up, there will still need to be some balancing, but the monstrosities may be gone. I've got it properly ordering the features by what's "noticeable" or important based on a numeric weighting in the raws coupled with the deviation of the feature from the average value, and I think that'll work out pretty well. I'm going to try to crunch down the paragraphs a bit, but it won't work that well in the case where multiple appearance modifiers overlap between body parts/tissues but don't completely align (this happens with hair so far).
• 03/06/2009: Mostly going through healthcare stuff (including some book summaries that SirHoneyBadger was nice enough to prepare for us) today with Zach to see what should be in this time around, looking around various places to get ideas for fleshing out descriptions a bit, and trying to systematize that. I'll be starting the descriptions tomorrow, which will be pretty exciting since I haven't gotten a chance to see what all of the work on appearance has come to yet. The first batch of dwarves will likely be trainwreck fugly. List updated.
• 03/05/2009: The computer issues are pretty much sorted out now, and I was able to get a little work in as well in the end. In particular it'll set the appearance modifier values properly for older creatures now, instead of starting them, for instance, hairless. Until I get to tissue styling or tissue trimming (the latter of which is definitely going in this time), older units will enter the map quite hairy, as if they've been growing hair all their lives without paying attention to it. List updated.
• 03/04/2009: So, I got up this morning, and when I pressed the button that turns the computer on, it didn't turn the computer on. The power supply did some weird whirrish things after I fiddled with it for a while, but it's dead and I couldn't replace it since it's pretty firmly wired into everything. I'm now 14 hours, a new computer, 4 linux installs, 3 XP installs, 2 bluescreens, 3 shopping trips and a bad product return into the journey. I didn't lose any data, but the old hard drive won't easily fit into the new computer -- now the old drive is in a USB enclosure. I'm almost back together, unless this XP bluescreens again. I think that was due to disagreements with the linux partitions but I'm not really sure. I have a linux partition again, but it's not fully updated yet so we'll see if it holds up. I've almost scrounged all of the necessary drivers to keep XP going on the new system (I had to download them from linux, as my XP disk is pre-SP1 and doesn't recognize the internet until I get it some drivers... which my new computer failed to come with... almost bad product return #2, but I was tired of trips by then and was pretty sure I could take care of it).
  
  No doubt there are a million better ways to go about this, but I can't sit still when my computer dies.
• 03/03/2009: Three more items, the largest being the bite/punch/kick/wrestle distinction in the natural attack skills/raws. I was considering adding custom combat skills for natural attacks and items at this time, but when I was going through it became pretty clear that it's premature, so I just took down notes for it instead for a later release. I'll either continue with the last few skill/atts items or start in on descriptions tomorrow.
• 03/02/2009: There were several minor skill-related alterations, but the main changes were the addition of a situational awareness skill that works with some of the new attributes to handle attack-from-behind/charge surprise/ambush detection rolls, and the use throughout of the melee combat skill for other misc. combat rolls that used to be handled by total skill (a "level" placeholder that's now scrapped entirely). The melee combat skill (and archery) are also currently used to handle weapon "skill synergies" -- that system will likely be changed to something with more branching structure during the Combat Arc, but this will do for now. There's a little more to do with skills/atts tomorrow. List updated.
• 03/01/2009: We came up with some default attribute values for the main civilized creatures, and I changed the att/skill display in adventure mode and dwarf mode to account for all the new atts, and added a bit of grouping to the list so you won't be overwhelmed by things like conversation skills. I'll be working on skills tomorrow as well. List updated.
• 02/22/2009: I fixed the brain problem. As expected, it was flipping all of the relations so that the brain was around the skull, and the lungs and heart surrounded the ribs like ribs, that sort of thing. Various work with combat text and balancing the numbers out. Handled attribute increases over time with practice for combat and a few other places. Made skills get rusty over time (this was done for attributes previously) and eventually degrade. It's a very slow process, so it's not something to worry about unless you completely reassign a dwarf for a number of years or change their weapon for a long while, etc. List updated (checked off a few in the skills/atts section).
  
  Six days of month-end project starting tomorrow, then back to the dwarves, branching into descriptions, more with skills/atts, and health care.
• 02/21/2009: The combat/hunting/sparring reports work. You can view adv mode style messages by creature and category (comb/hunt/spar) now and all of the announcements have associated dates. Those that have associated locations are zoomable from the announcement/report screens. I also messed around with the text some more... a work in progress. It's also highlighted some strange issues, like with the brain pretending to be outside and all that. List updated.
• 02/20/2009: He he, "probably tomorrow" indeed. Today turned into forum day and I got a headache. Tomorrow will be a better day.
• 02/19/2009: Updated another 40 or so announcements -- this time it was all of the ones that cause pausing and recentering. The only pause-recenter that isn't handled is the full invasion, since that full page announcement occurs under a different system. So it's not quite to the point where you could turn off all of the pausing messages, say, and run the game without interruption, but it's much closer. I also finished up the first pass on combat text. Once I get notices up (probably tomorrow), I'll finish that as well.
• 02/18/2009: I've updated the 40 or so peripheral combat messages to the new system and set up the information that is sent in to main strike message creator.
  
  Combat messages in dwarf mode will default to notices -- this means that they aren't displayed at the bottom, but instead give you a little letter notice on the left bar of the screen according to the type of combat message (combat/sparring/hunting). You'll then be able to view the stored combat messages, separated into combat/hunting/sparring lists for each dwarf.
  
  Remaining bits are the strike message's actual text, setting up announcement options by type (appears in a pause box? pauses-recenters? logged with the notices or in the main queue? etc.), setting up the notice screen, and updating the main announcement screen. For any updated announcement that can possibly have associated coordinates, you'll be able to recenter the view from the main announcement screen and from the notices. I won't be updating many of the announcements this time around, but I'll try to catch the ones that I've heard the most about (mineral popups, job cancellations, death announcements, etc.). Announcements that I don't hit will work as usual.
• 02/17/2009: I've been looking over the announcement situation in general, and I think I'll be able to do dwarf mode combat reports as well as put in some announcement zooming/filtering/etc. without much trouble, though there will likely be some restrictions at first (in that I might not update all 500+ announcement types with individual tags at this time). I've put in some of the infrastructure for that, and I've also gotten started on the combat text.
• 02/16/2009: Knocked off three more of the misc. items on the wound list. I'm almost ready to get started on the text and combat reports, which are the last major thing to do with wounds. List updated.
• 02/15/2009: I got back halfway through today, but I haven't slept the last two nights so I'm a little fried. Tomorrow there will be a proper update.
• 02/12/2009: I'm starting that small break I mentioned in the report this month, with the days removed from the month-end pool. Dev updates will resume in a few days. List updated.
• 02/11/2009: Today was compound fractures as well as fractured layers being knocked inward to damage soft inner portions. So a bone in the arm for example could break through the skin if the arm is struck by even a blunt weapon, and impacts can also force jagged skull edges into the brain or a broken rib into the heart or a lung (generally, the broken layers can cross body part boundaries according to the wound's path over body part relationships). List updated.
• 02/10/2009: I handled the liquid/gas/powder tissue creatures running into trouble today. Leaks of inner layers, solidification/condensation damage, wacking away parts of them, that sort of thing. List updated.
• 02/09/2009: Slow day programming-wise, a few wound things checked off (numbered BP stuff and updating melting snow and other 'spatter').
• 02/08/2009: Lots of correspondence/foruming today, but I managed to get through creature/caste specific immunities to poisons and developing resistance over multiple exposures if an effect is flagged to allow this. I also handled some hanging issues with multiple contacts over the course of one illness and a few other things. The list has been updated, with venom's sub-items categorized in three way: ones that are done, the one part I'm definitely putting off (other diseases), and some other items that I'm delaying for now. Those will go in or out depending on how the release date is looking, as it has been a while and doesn't need to be a long long while, even though it will be a long while yet.
• 02/07/2009: I started off with secretion of a powder/liquid material covering today. All sorts of contaminant transfer today as well, so things like secreted contact poisons can be set up now, and the slime or gunk can be moved around by wrestling or strikes (items or body parts). Secretion could be easily adapted for things like sweating and so on later (just by adding something like an exertion tag to the secretion), but I'm passing that up for now. I also set up the poison scheduling. There are a few more things on the list (updated) to consider, and then I'll be done with poison for this release.
• 02/06/2009: Today was material breath weapons. For now, there can be forward puffs of gas/vapor/dust of any material, as well as clouds surrounding and liquid/solid glob projectiles. This can be extended to things like cones and so on later. I tested out these and the poison effects by making the berserk test dwarf breathe dwarven blood vapor that was linked to an inhaled poison effect that caused immediate pain throughout the body. He wasn't immune to it himself and ended up passing out before I did. The list of remaining items, updated.
• 02/05/2009: I finished up the effects today and allowed for inhalation of gaseous materials. I'll need to do material breath attacks to take advantage of that. The list of remaining items, updated.
• 02/04/2009: I did half of the effects I listed before. The main ones remaining are the ones that actually create specific wounds (bruises, blisters, necrosis, etc.). I have all of the tissue/bp selection done, I just need to put the wounds themselves in place. Then I need to do the scheduling to get it all advancing properly and allow healing after the effects have run their course (assuming it's something like a bruise or blister that will heal up). The list of remaining items, updated (no green today).
• 02/03/2009: Continuing along with poison. I've got venoms injecting again and all of the active syndrome information is being set up properly inside the creatures. Now it just needs to hit the creature with all of the individual effects according to schedule/atts/size/etc., as set by the raws. The list of remaining items, updated.
• 02/02/2009: I decided to take a detour into poison land today. The framework should be easily extended to other material effects and to some non-material effects on creatures as well later on (for instance, alcohol effects or ointments that do whatever, as well as auras around creatures, 'gaze attacks', etc etc), but for now, I'm going to go with contact/injected/inhaled poisons that cause syndromes in affected classes of creatures involving pain, swelling, oozing wounds, bruising, blisters, numbness, paralysis, fever, bleeding, coughing/vomiting blood, nausea, vomiting, unconsciousness, necrosis, impaired vision, drowsiness and dizziness as a starter set, with some possible extensions as they arise. If it makes sense, you'll be able to move those effects around from the initial site (for say contact or injection) to body parts by category/function (so you could have something cause headaches, for example, or make the gums bleed... one of the wikipedia snakes had that... not my fault). The list of remaining items, updated (nothing greened out today).
• 02/01/2009: Another month begun in violence... I updated various wrestling, fixed up tissue ordering conventions a bit and updated fireball damage. As the new usual, the list of remaining items has been updated to reflect progress.
• 01/22/2009: Associated stuck-ins to particular wounds and used that to modify how they behave with twists, bleeding and pull-outs. Twisting won't just keep amplifying bleeding to bizarre levels as it does in the currently released version and leaving items stuck in will actually slow the bleeding somewhat, so just sitting there and twisting should no longer be preferable. I also finished up the subterranean creature definitions and about half of the remaining standard creatures. The mission continues next month.
• 01/21/2009: I handled some spatter display issues today, put back in all the blood spatter on items and equipment that was in before (aside from stuck-in twist stuff, which needs additional work). I also updated the tissue-related code in the hidden areas, and updated trampling/rain/cleaning vs. spatter. I ended up spending more time than I intended today preparing some long forum posts, but I suppose that's inevitable with the list I put up, which I've updated to reflect today's changes, as well as the backlog of questions which I let build up on the other FotF thread.
• 01/20/2009: From the forum: "Although I like to watch the Countdown decrease, it has ceased to be a motivator for me and has even been a hindrance at times. Instead, here is the list of remaining items for the next release. I'll be coloring/modifying this post as work progresses. The list is more or less fixed, though there might be minor changes, omissions and additions as I go along." I'll still be posting my work day reports here in the dev log, of course.
• 01/19/2009: 828. About half of the subterranean creatures and much of creature_standard remains, but all of the other creatures have been updated.
• 01/18/2009: 832. Updated about a third of the creatures, including all of the gibbons. I'm not doing anything super accurate with color/patterns for them this time around, as that would take too long.
• 01/17/2009: I did partial fractures today and did some more with healing breaks and scarring, did some changes to permanent deformation wounds (bends/dents on metal creatures for example), handled how heavy bruising and miscellaneous damage causes function loss, did permanent bleeding for wounds like heart bifurcation/throat removal, and refined the contents under pressure characteristics for guts; the ability to grab the exposed guts, attack or sever the exposed guts, the guts getting dirty when they drag on the ground and other such things all came basically for free. There are some dev items on that I guess... you can't yet strangle people with the exposed guts, though I suppose that's now within reach (grabbing the guts now would only open up a pinching attack I think, which would be the least of your adversary's problems). All very disgusting. In any case, that was all grouped under a misc. damage item, so 836. Pfft. 32 left to the wound/fighting count.
• 01/16/2009: 837. Added nails (this will be most apparent once I get the raws back in for things like the big cats, as it'll need to get at the claw material to do damage properly), redefined natural attacks to allow multiple parts (mainly for claws and biting) though it's limited in some ways, went back and started in on the necessary updates for wrestling.
• 01/15/2009: 842. Tendon and ligament damage is done, respect the material sent in for them. You can also get severed motor and sensory nerves in your extremities on occasion when the muscle is (generally severely) damaged. Motor damage is like the current nerve damage in that it stops the part from being used, while sensory damage stops the part from feeling pain but causes problems with rolls (I suppose later it can make movement difficult and you'll also have to watch out for wounds just from bumping into things, or whatever's appropriate). Also did material spatter spreading (the new system has an amount so things like mud can't just spread out forever), and various other material spatter updates (still about half of those to go).
• 01/14/2009: 845. Continuing on with the material spatter update loose-ends, and some stuff with which organs are hit by strikes. I suspect it'll be around this slow down through finishing wounds off, but there are only 41 total remaining there, so it's not so bad.
• 01/13/2009: 849. The main thing today was updating the old blood/slime/vomit/mud/snow system with a material spatter system, so that small amounts of any material can be placed in a map square (it can handle whatever state, but practically that'll mean liquids or powder coating/splatters). Moving away from the old map flags to a dynamically allocated system more like frozen liquids and constructions allowed me some more wiggle room, so it can track the precise amounts up to a point, at which an item is created. This could also allow snow/mud depth effects later on, although that might be merged with items/flows depending on how it works out. It's not a question for the next version in any case.
  
  The current break down is 45 more on wounds, 18 on descriptions, 6 on some skill/att stuff, 65 on venom/poison, 30 on health care concerns, 165 for map features, 260 for entity positions, 195 for squads, and 65 for random crap and tests, in that order most likely.
• 01/12/2009: 852. Finished up the inheritence I was working on yesterday. Right now it'll do dominant-recessive stuff with the color variables, and it can also do that with the appearance variables or do averaging. It's pretty simple at this point, but what's there now could be used to, say, breed your dogs toward certain colors and body dimensions, as well as whatever facial features there end up being (though the colors and patterns would be limited to whatever is in the raws). Of course, the process might involve a lot of culls as there aren't a lot of controls on which animals breed.
  
  I also handled the starting "wounds" for skeletons and zombies, wound pain (so the original goal which initiated the wound/layer rewrite, getting rid of phantom limb pain and other annoying permanent pain situations, has been met), sever stub wounds, and some edge cases concerning parts melting off leaving other parts that need to become severed limbs and so on.
• 01/11/2009: 856. Took a break from wounds today to add "genetic" inheritence for appearance variables. The day ended with some kinks left to be worked out, though I've come a long way from where I was this morning with nobody having kids and all the gods dying of old age.
• 01/10/2009: 861. Bumped into another one of those tough numbers -- this time it was updating temperature effects. Individual tissue layers on body parts can sluff off or boil now, after suffering melting/boiling effects while remaining intact for a short time. They can also be damaged by heat/cold/burning as before. I still have to handle temperature effects for liquid and gaseous layers -- the only vanilla DF cases are things like magma-men, which wouldn't currently take damage because they have fixed temperatures. I'll either put that off or move them away from fixed temperatures to just enough homeothermy that they can stand being in caves but not out by glaciers, or something. The more relevant applications might be mods involving water creatures that could freeze or boil during regular game conditions. So, not sure if I'll get to that this time around.
• 01/09/2009: Another update, this time for Mac as well: Windows, Linux, Mac, and Discussion Thread
  
  On the Mac, for the moment you'll have to open up a terminal and run "sh df" from the folder.
• 01/08/2009: 863. Simple healing and scars. The countdown had a bit of slack built in there apparently, as it wasn't all that difficult. The continuing effort tomorrow.
• 01/07/2009: 895. Some more unit information for corpses, handled wound coloration and added it to init file, handled some morale and 'used to tragedy' effects, siege ammo push-through update, attacks passing through material-less layers, handled knocking back units, handled stuckins.
  
  I've got the Mac up and running, so I should be able to put up the updated Mac version along with the others next time.
• 01/06/2009: 904. I went through and did the first pass on the projectile revision. I think the new agility is being counted too much, as the skill-free test dwarf didn't have trouble hitting me ten times in a row, but I'll have that sorted out when I run the numbers. I also did wounds from falling and the transfer of wound and appearance data to corpses and severed parts. The wound transfer should be key to sorting out issues like exactly where a hydra's heads are and whether or not the skulls have been removed and so on.
  
  Here's an update version (40d8) that fixes a problem with the close button vs. the escape menu. Windows, Linux, and Discussion Thread
• 01/05/2009: 926. Today was the day to go through all 300 occurrences of the old body part hitpoints and update, categorize or remove them. The boiling gold blood came out as gold dust first, because I forgot to transfer the states between creature morphs properly, but after that it came out as a cloud of gold gas properly. I'll have to do it again once I've updated temperature damage.
• 01/04/2009: An unexpectedly irritating snowstorm stranded me up at my parents' place during my mom's birthday party. I did manage to get a half day in -- blood raws with states for the blood (liquid/gas/powder etc.), bleeding information, artery strikes, blood on the ground, fixing up some of the bp names, but I had to leave just before I tested the dwarf with the boiling gold blood. Now I'm starting my next day (after shoveling the very long (couple hundred feet or more?) driveway out in the woods...), so I should be able to test that shortly. 936.
• 01/03/2009: Here's another update version (40d7). Windows, Linux, and Discussion Thread
  • Timer/frame counting fix.
  • Alphabet key support for non-US keyboards.
  Wrote up organ strikes, but it keeps crashing when I hit the spleen. Should be easy enough to sort out.
• 01/02/2009: 942. Messed around with the denting/breaks a bit, then did bruises and some cosmetic info for the later descriptions. Made sure it skipped tissue layers that hadn't grown in yet and set up some indexing information for that. Allowed sufficiently narrow attacks to pass through previous wounds on occasion. Added sinew materials for tendons and ligaments. Organ strikes should be up next, and then bleeding. Also a 40d7 coming up.

2008 Log
2007 Log
2006 Log
2005 Log
2004 Log

Dwarf Fortress started October 2002, this log was started around the same time as the "back to the dwarf game" thread.