Welcome to Door Fortress round table the podcast
for all things do. My name's Jonathan. I'm
Roland. I'm Tony. And we are welcoming back,
Mike. 1 of the developers of D Hack.
How you been doing, Mike? I've been doing
great. Thank you so much for having me
back on the show. Oh, sure. Sure.
I think the idea here today is that
we're gonna kinda take a little bit of
a deep dive into quick.
Well, I have lots of things to say
about that.
Before we do that, I want to give
a quick update on metal bit. Alright. I
locked all my people in the same room
together. They they it improved their happiness very
much so.
Gosh.
Put them in there with some drinks and
some food, and everything was Hun Dory. They
seem to very much enjoy each other's company,
the happiness index of the of the fortress
went up.
It's been a couple years now and no
babies have come from it. So
oh
Yeah. Funnily enough the alfonso I actually wrote
on the the discord about that. I was
about to say Twitter. X. He wrote that
it works better if you have a non
specialized meeting area. So you don't make a
tavern, and you stick them into the tavern
and block the doors
using a bar or whatever.
But you just make a meeting area. And
apparently, you don't need beds, so I was
wrong about the bad part. Who was? What
the credit Was that rin? The
zones those. Thanks, Alfonso.
And scene. Alright. So that's the the middle
bit update. So I'm not going to... I'm
not going to discontinue the fortress. I'm gonna
continue to to play with it until it
either is destroyed
from its own collapse from within or somehow
something
kills it from the outside, But... Yeah. I'm
gonna I'm gonna keep on running it. That's
the spirit. Yep. That's the spirit.
Slow as it may be. Mike, have you
been planned dwarf fortress lately? I I've certainly
had door fortress open a lot.
Although, it's hard to say what I've been
doing is playing. Are you playing D hack?
I play D hack. Yes. It's
there has been something of a a sprint
of of development going on for the past
couple weeks.
We're to been a break next speed, and
we will eventually have a beta out to
get this all, you know, tested and released,
but it is... There's are so many changes
going on right now. I'm
I am just coding, no playing, just coding.
Awesome. Well, thank you for your sacrifice,
I guess. I don't know.
Well, it it kind of feels like playing
the game a lot because it's... You know,
it's like the matrix. You you look at
it and you you can see what's going
on with it. I look at I look
at the memory of door fortress I'm like
oh, okay. I see how this is shaping
up. That's... Okay. That's gonna be cool. That's
gonna be. They're gonna love that. So are
we working to to make sure that it
stays up with
51 dot x that they're coming out with?
Is is that the goal?
Well, we've we've done that part actually, when...
Because they haven't released to a new beta
in a little while now. Right. And whenever
D development slows down D hack development speeds
up because we don't have to keep an
eye on what's changing.
It's a good point. So the the 51
compatibility has been stable for quite a while.
And and we've been working on our own
infrastructure and getting a lot more things done
that we could have done before because we
just didn't have time.
So are there any new interesting features that
are gonna be coming to D hack that
you'd like to share with the listeners? Sure.
So I think the... The thing that makes
you you're really excited. Yeah. I mean, they
definitely are exciting. The the the kinds of
things that we're able to do now is
it it's just... It's building more and more.
We've been working on getting our Ui it's
a little more user friendly. Mh. And
1 of the tools that got a major
overhaul is gui design.
Now, it's it's always been useful in that
you can you you can draw shapes. You
can move things around and stamp
designations down,
but it was a giant text blob and
kind of hard to figure out what its
current
status was and very difficult to use.
So it's been completely redone with, you know,
graphical buttons
and much better organization,
and you can just draw free form shapes,
drag them around,
adjust the points
you can have
you can draw paths that your your your
doors will take out, change the width of
the lines.
May, it curved and then do a rec
curve on it with busier curves. Wow It
is... Wow.
It it's quite advanced. And the thing is
It could have done this for a long
time. It's just that nobody knew how to
use it, so it was going unused.
So redoing the Ui is is is it's
like having a whole new tool to play
with. You know, it's funny You say that
I've been using a computer for... Oh, well.
My first windows machine was 3.11.
So it's been that long, and I have
just learned how to control a z curve.
For whatever reason, all these stinking years,
I never quite...
Would be able to predict what would happen
whenever I clicked the second time. I I
guess for those who don't know what a
ob observe curve is, it's... If you have
a line, and then you click on a
point somewhere outside the line,
it'll kind of gravity pull the line towards
that point so you have a curve, and
then you can put another line on there
and so you can have more of an
s curve
and you drag them around to to affect
how have a line curves through space. Yeah.
A lot of the the wonderful windows Microsoft
tools would never let you change it once
it got laid,
you would click once, and it would make
it twist, and then you click it again,
and it would make it twist some other
way that I thought seemed random, but I've
just recently figured out what that randomness,
how you control it a little bit. Thank
you, Wikipedia. So sorry. IID derail derailed you.
I'm good at that. Thought I thought you
were talking about a Brazil curve, so I
really
was confused, and I really appreciate clarifications. Thank
you.
Well, it can do circles too. So you
can make your own f z curve that
way. Wonderful. Good. Good to know. Thank you.
I wanted to lose our our clean rating
aren't way. For the low brow listeners, the
10 year olds listening. That was for you.
Because That I was actually a significant amount
of work, getting that that darn algorithm to
to produce pretty looking circles.
It's
took me almost an entire day just of
tinkering with that thing. Draw circle has worked
great for... Or sorry, Dig. Yeah. Dig Circle.
That's right. Yeah. Dig Circle has worked great,
and that was what I was using is
the standard that's what I was trying to
match.
Because the new algorithm is much more mathematically
accurate for el. The other 1 could do
just circles. Mh. But when it was a
circle, it just didn't look as pretty as
dig circles circle. Yeah. Yeah. Dig circles is
awesome. So now now the Gui design circle
is exactly the same shape as dig circle
circle. Oh, that's cool.
I use I use Dig circle for
doing exploratory digging. So I will like to
sit there and run Dig circle 3, dig
circle 5. Dig circle 7, dig circle.
You know, it just go like the odd
numbers over and over again, jumping it up
by 3 or 4, and then I like
just draw a line through it. And then
just have them dig out this this c
centric ring system in the level. I love
it. That that is exactly what I did
to make sure that the lines I'm drawing
notches with the circle. That's exactly the pattern
I did.
Like lie it all and double check my
work.
Queen Manifesto
on the art, and necessity of memorial slabs.
Section 1, the enigmatic lure of stone slabs
discovered by Deck Broad Brew.
Greetings my ill subjects.
It is I, queen to bowl wheel channels,
here to clarify a matter of profound significance,
and some cons combination among meadow bent, my
unwavering admiration for memorial slabs.
Some my ask white slabs.
To which I respond, why not.
Imagine if you will, the sleek, shiny surface
of a jet slab the majestic balloon of
micro klein and the mysterious depths of ob.
These slabs are more than just rocks, they
are canvas for the soul as if the
universe decided to leave its calling card in
geological form.
Consider the jet slab.
It's as if a piece of the night
sky decided to moonlight as a decorative item,
perfect for memorial dear uncle Y. Who in
an ironic twist was particularly afraid of the
dark.
Micro klein with its tantalizing blue hue serves
as a whim reminder of cousin S, whose
fondness for swimming was matched only by his
inability to float.
And then there's ob, the mysterious black mirror,
reflecting not just the visa of the behold,
but the profound realization cousin thick enthusiasm for
Magma should have been tempered by a basic
understanding of physics.
Deck and broad brew renowned for his unparalleled
ability to ex ancient texts while balancing a
tanker of ale, une earth the first section
of queen to bulls manifesto.
His discovery was celebrated not just for its
historical value, but for proving that even the
finest ale can coexist with archaeological breakthroughs.
How are the snake people roland?
Cobra? The the the the Nick people are
doing
absolutely amazing. I have started a little bit
of a new
fortress
in that world on a volcano, which is
why I inquired in the discord about
funny new
execution methods
but
I'm not too happy with the way the
fortress is shaping up. I might just
go back at to a previous safe side,
you know,
can redo it. And for that, I was
considering doing more quick forward, especially with the
league circle stuff because I wanted to try
out some kind of
organic circle ish designs.
And and you said you changed something about
the the circles? Yeah. Well, not not for
dig circle, but for the circles
produced by gui design
are are now... More pleasing. They used to
be much, like, jagged and kind of triangular.
Like, Dig circle is clearly a circle, but
the circle produced by do we design before,
looked
just like a diagonal square. So it never
quite had the same effect So it wasn't
it it wasn't a very circle circle. It
wasn't a very circle circle. Mean that the
algorithm was clearly correct. But when it comes
out on the screen, it just was way
too drag id.
Yeah. The the resolution that you have to
work with is fairly low. So... Right. It...
It's about getting the circle, the the theoretical
circle
you know, lined up properly with the tiles
in a way that comes out good. So
Gui design Ui improvements,
anything
else that you like to mention? Yeah. And
we've also had a... Some fantastic people contributing
to D hack over the past month. Awesome.
And
1 of the new tools has been
been clamoring for forever ever now is gui
tile types.
So if you want to just go to
your map and play god, you can go
reshape the terrain to your heart's content. Oh,
my.
Create new mountains and
just shape it however, it is that you
want, or if you just dug your yourself
into a vein and you wanna fill that
vein back up with walls. You can now
do that with a few clicks too and
play Mini god instead of full Arm.
Oh, that's neat. Even after the fortress has
been started?
Sure. Yeah. Yeah. It's
it's a general tile editor. So it's... Again,
these are tools that have always been functional.
It's just that the command line usage of
tile types has been pretty...
Opaque, and difficult to comprehend. And now that
it's all visualize on the screen, using the
same graphical buttons that we're using for gui
design, it's it's much easier to get things
in a in a state where you can
be productive and get done what you wanna
get done. Oh, 0, okay. Can you can
you break that down for me?
Does that mean I can actually edit the
world map or does it only work in
fortress mode? Oh, it is in the in
the fortress mode in the in the local
map?
The
it does open up the opportunity to do
things at the world level. We don't have
any current tools that act on on world
structures,
but we could. We just haven't done that
yet.
So like, if you want to connect islands
That mh.
That's... It's in the cards. Not not not
yet, but that's someday, that would be possible.
In my head, I have the old Sim
city
map designer
where... That's what was coming those coming to
me too. I was like, okay. It's like
Sim city 2 thousands
Where you? I can... Where you build out
your your landscape, and then you play on
it?
Dam up the river, build the city in
it, and then blow the dam.
See the fan to do.
You you have the heart of a door.
Oh, you know, it's it's like playing the
Sims and taking the ladder out of the
pool.
No. No takers. Okay.
That sounds like a pretty exciting
feature though. I I think that seems very
powerful.
That it is. And you know, it's is
it power that you can wield? We'll we'll
find out whether there's more safeguards so we
need to put in place because we're really
trying to make things safe and fun for
players.
And sometimes these tools can be so powerful
that you can destroy your own games. So
we we're trying to put the safeguard. So
it's not so easy to do that.
Yeah. It allows you to crash your fortress
and make corrupted saves. Great. Mh. Yeah. I've
done that enough.
Okay. Wait.
Is there a possibility where I can change
a specific tile type to, for example, an
evil bio?
Okay. You wanna get technical.
Okay.
So
the bio is not
a tile type, but it is a map
tile property. You can
associate any particular tile with any bio that
you have access to.
So
again, this is not something that we have
tools to make really easy, but it is
very possible. If if a modern wants to
do something specific with this, this is possible
today, where you can have specific tiles being
parts of specific bio
So, like, for for crop growth or
a a spot of re
terror.
Give the same thing. You have your you
have your your little pit in the center
of your map that you take things or
in the center of your tavern. I call
it cemetery.
Yeah. Yeah. For example, for example, but I
was reminded of a previous fortress
that I...
Put into some kind of... It it didn't
say mountain, but I couldn't grow anything.
And I was like, oh, this this spot
is nice. It doesn't have any trees. My
me, I couldn't grow anything above ground. That
that was very annoying. Mh. So there there
is kind of a possibility. You to change
that around. So I could be able to
grow
something and then bio that used to be,
for example, like a mountain buying.
I I don't know off offhand whether it's
arbitrary that you can set it to arbitrary
volumes or whether you have to have it
somewhere on your map,
I know that if it's on your map,
you can just assign any title to it
that you want. Mh mh. But can you
just sn it from other places in the
world, I'm not not positive on that. I'd
have to go look that up.
Okay. That's that's still pretty cool. Any other
things that you wanna mention about the up
coming features before we, you know, nerd out
on Quick forte?
Sure.
We we also have quite an influx of
adventure mode tooling.
That's in the works.
So much that I've had to rethink part
of our architecture for how to support it
properly. So in the next beta, I think
you can suspect a lot of things coming
for adventure mode and and improving the experience
there. I've never really thought of D hack
in adventure mode in the in the same
realm.
Interesting. No. What what do we expect? Yeah.
That... That's why it's been such a a
big change for us. A... We've always had
some adventure mode tools, but not really a
a
solid, easy to use, well presented corpus of
functionality.
So what would that look like? For a
a fledgling
adventure mode player. So
First thing I brought over was the notification
panel.
So in fort mode, that will tell you
things like, you know, invaders are on the
map. Or
traders are ready to trade. Yeah. There's Dwarf
camp find needed item. Right. Right. Or Moody,
Moody or dwarf can't find or can't find
a workshop to to be moody. Have a
had that 1. But... Yeah.
In adventure mode, there's different kinds of things
you wanna keep an eye on and different
things that are important. So I split up
going notified to have separate
notifications that can appear in each mode. And
in adventure mode, you can look for things
like actively losing blood. This is how much
time you have left before you bleed out,
Did you know that you're drowning? Here here
are some bubbles to visualize how much breath
you have left for you?
Where you completely drown.
And then there's also a version of, you
know, here's the local wildlife that you can
see So you can quick zoom to them
if you wanna run over there and stu
whack on an elephant with a stick.
That always that always a good strategy.
Always a good strat. Elephants are very gentle
and or fortress. Mh. Never if you've never
dealt with them before. And and then there's
a whole bunch of stuff around conversations and
party management, like, being able to move someone
from your extra party members into your core
party,
being able to just side that you're done
with your current body and you wanna jump
into somebody else's body.
That is now a thing.
Oh, if someone kills you, you can decide
like, maybe my you're can just go go
and have it them for a while, and
then you can go and play continue your
adventure as the person that just killed you.
Spicy
possession. I like it. If Okay. That's right.
We've also done some things in the speaking
menu, right now, you have to kind of
search for things in the conversation to get
something they wanna talk about talk about, but
the kinds of things that you can search
for aren't always the kinds of things that
you want to be able to search for.
So we've
redone that whole interface talk to be able
to search for a wider variety of words
to get to where you wanna go. Like,
it's it's it's important for you to be
able to boast about the things that you've
killed. So now you can search for the
keyword
slew, and they will go and just show
you the ones that are things that you
have killed that you can boast about some
people can start to become more impressed with
you.
Mike, have you ever listened to the old
door fortress talk podcast with with Ton Zach?
Yeah. Yeah. I've
I still have that in my subscribed favorites.
It's just in case anyone shows up. Yep
Yep. I listened to it occasionally all the
way through, you know, once a year or
so... But but you talk about,
being able to shift your in essence since
your consciousness to another character on the screen.
They actually talked about that like a half
hour on and I want the you know,
early teens
episodes of dwarf fortress talk and discussing or
not that was something that they wanted to
allow happen.
Allowed to be able to happen. Because because,
you know, in essence you could you could
shift your
whether you're about to get killed by a
the general from next door, you can shift
to him and have him to jump off
of a cliff, and whenever Yeah. But so
I was wondering if you if you had
watched... If you'd had listen to those and
taken any inspiration from some of the things
that they talked about in the past. Well,
this particular tool is not a new d
effect tool. It's called... It was originally called
Linger.
And
I don't know who eventually wrote it, but
that may be where they got the idea
By me. By me. And it raises a
good question of
what capabilities are not in the spirit of
game. From and this is of course something
that we think about a lot. We we
want to make sure that D hack is
is expanding the experience for for players. And
not restricting or going against a kind of
vision.
So I mean, in general, we try to
air on the side of agency, giving players
the ability to do the things that they
want to do, the things that they find
fun. But... Yeah. The question of is this
against the design or the intent, is something
that is always on our mind. It's something
that we consider for every feature that we
add. Yeah. That's come up on here several
times. And I think that the podcast
position that we've come up with is, You
know, you're playing the game. It's not a
competitive game, do whatever you want to, that
makes it feel good to you. So Yeah.
To be honest,
those
comments were mostly referring to already implemented D
hack
features, so they were already kind of vetted.
So, I mean, could you give us an
example about what you're talking about?
You mean, like, what what kind of ability
is against the intent of the game? Yeah.
So something... A recent example is the damp
dig
feature, which I added,
2 versions ago? I think. U. Thank you
very much. Yeah. That's been right. It doesn't
mean that a lot of people were asking
for. Yeah. But as part of that, you
also get to see things like which tiles
are aquifer and which tiles are just damp.
And there was quite a bit of debate
there. Is is this information
that was being intentionally withheld from a player.
Is it? Is it reasonable
that the player would not be able to
see this information
because clearly, the doors themselves can tell that
a tile is leaking
because the water is going to appear.
So why shouldn't they be able to visually
distinguish between a damp and an aquifer tile.
So we try to think things through in
in character and in the game to make
sure that it makes sense. And doesn't appear
to be against the intent of the design
before we go through something like that.
Of course, there's an entirely different class of
tools that we call Arm mark tools which
is just you become Arm mock do whatever
you want. And,
for those who don't know you can hide
those tools from the D of hack interfaces,
by going into the control panel into the
preferences
and turning on mortal mode.
So if you have mortal mode enabled, all
those Arm mock tools are just
just gone.
And you don't have to be tempted by
them. Is fast or 1 of them? Yeah.
Store is 1 of them. Yes.
I like fast store.
But it leave things like the the dig
commands.
Right. Yeah. Anything like productivity
design. Those are clearly
not against intent that is just a, helper
to the interface, and and those are are
always available.
Queen Ball's manifesto
on the art and necessity of memorial slam.
Section 2, the eternal significance of memorial slabs
discovered by potato bomb.
But le not stop at Mere aesthetics, my
beloved dwarves.
Memorial slabs serve a far grander purpose than
just looking fabulous
They are our eternal margin notes in the
book of Metal bench history,
scribble with the saga of our departed kin.
In a world where goblins could attack at
any moment, or where 1 might unexpectedly find
oneself on the wrong end of a carp,
it's crucial to have these tangible reminders of
those who have, quite literally bitten the dust.
Imagine a future where our descendants,
delving through the ancient halls of meadow bent,
come across a meticulously crafted jet slab.
They'd read a uri the fearful and laugh
at his nocturnal pho,
while feeling an odd sense of pride in
their quirky heritage.
Our tales of bravery, fo, and inexplicable decisions
to punch a cave spider will live on.
Etched into the stone for all eternity.
Without these slabs, how else will future generations
know that bravery sometimes means running away, and
that wisdom occasionally involves not inhaling the deadly
dust from a forgotten beast.
Potato Bomb, whose nickname came from his explosive
enthusiasm for uncovering relics stumbled upon the second
section of the manifesto.
While digging with nothing but a spoon and
sheer
determination.
His find not only expanded our understanding of
do and humor, but also proved that persistence
and a pinch of madness go a long
way in archaeology.
Also, how would you give the elevator pitch
on Quick forward and what it does?
Quick forward is a way to take away
the repetition of design. For a lot of
things you know how you want it to
go, and you may do it the same
way every single time,
and quick fourth can just do it for
you in 1 click. Quickly instead of forcing
you to go through the hundreds of clicks
that may be required for creating,
you know, 60 new bedrooms or your your
standard dining hall that you love to make
in every 4. But takes a lot of
clicks to get done. So Quick forward is
at its core productivity tool. It certainly expanded
from its original
abilities.
And its goal essentially is to be able
to do anything
related to the map that you could do
as a human in the game just quicker
and and more reliably and fewer clicks.
So if there's something that you can click
on the map and change, then quick forward
aims to be able to do that as
well, So if you need to do that
a hundred times in a row, you don't
need to do it by your own hand.
Cool. I I know that I especially love
the bedroom,
the bedroom layout.
It... That's part of the some of the
blueprints that are included with D hack.
So everyone everyone probably... Who's listening to this.
Podcast knows that I used
Quick fort. And specifically the dream for blueprints
to develop the map that I'm currently running
and
Yeah. It was, like,
set up a
a
ready to go fortress
in about 2 hours
instead of spending, like...
3 days getting something that was not as
efficient. So it that was it was really
handy that way.
1 thing I kinda wonder is what's the
best way to
develop your own? Let's say that that I've
I've got a particular kind of,
Tavern that I like to build, and I
want to save of the blueprints of that.
Is it best to just go in and
edit a a spreadsheet for it? Or is
it... Is there way to to take that
snapshot from your screen on a, under Fortress?
You definitely can go into a spreadsheet and
do it manually. That's an Tony's favorite way.
And many of the features in Quick fort.
Can only really be done that way because
they're there 2
specific esoteric to be automatically absorbed from the
map. U. But I... By far, the easiest
way to do this is to fire up
Gui blueprint
and just select the area that you wanna
copy of, and you'll will generate that blueprint
for you. So a a quick forward set
of blueprint is 1 blueprint per layer. There's
this probably gonna be a a dig layer
where you dig out the the layout.
And then you're gonna be placing stockpile, you're
gonna be building buildings.
Each 1 of these goes into a different
blueprint mode,
and you lay them down down as you're
ready for that step. So you apply the
the dig blueprint, wait for your doors to
dig it out, and then you can apply
your your
your stockpile and your buildings and get all
that built in in the second phase.
And so Blueprint will take a snapshot of
everything that exists on that tile, and then
construct for you a sequence a sequence of
blueprints that will
recreate that exact scene.
Including furniture layouts and and such?
In including furniture layouts, including the names you've
given to the buildings,
its capabilities are are constantly being extended. Like,
right now, it doesn't record. If you've set
up links between the stockpile files. It record
that, even though you can put that into
a quick for a blueprint if you're writing
it manually. Mh. So over time, it'll will
become more complete, but it will at least
give you the basics of a digging layout
in the building placement and the zones
and everything else that's there. What'd you say
the command was
capture blueprint?
Gooey slash blueprint. 2 slash blueprint. Well, that
also
create orders.
So for example, in in Dream for it,
whenever you lay down a a particular blueprint,
it will tell you. Okay. Hit the o
key to order
from your manager, the things that are needed
to to build this particular,
to this particular level of the of the
blueprint. Is that something that you would have
to do manually or or is that include
whenever you do the gui blueprint? That is
included in any blueprint.
When you run Quick 4 orders or use
gui Quick 4 to generate major orders, it
will scan the blueprint whatever it contains.
And figure out what it is that you
need to build in order to to complete
everything on the blueprint. And then it will
generate those major orders for you. Oh, that's
cool. That's cool. Awesome. Yeah. A lot of
this was just built from my own journey
to
try to really examine the the the structure
and the the functionality across door fortress.
And so I spent a lot of time
building things, changing them slightly tweaking them, And
so I was looking for ways to increase
my own productivity
and going and figuring out what you need
to build every time was this about real
big time sync, so getting that automatically generated
was 1 of the the great advancements of
Quick 4 over the years. So you
adapted Quick fort from an earlier version to
the to the... The current door fortress. Is
that correct?
That's right. Yeah. Many years ago, there was
an... Hot key script that would
just take a sequence of keys strokes and
play them back into the door fortress window.
And back then since everything was keyboard controlled,
it could deter
make stuff happen in the game, as long
as you don't, like, run up against the
map edge or you know, accidentally click on
a unit where you didn't want to click
on 1. So it was a little bit
brittle, but it kinda worked. Mh.
That was taken to the next step,
and a python
application was written that did much the same
thing where it would replay he back into,
back into the door fortress window.
And I saw that. I saw the limitations
in that and how brittle it was and
how slow it was for a lot of
things. And I thought, well, what what if
we moved this into D hack itself? Think
of how much more we could do. And
so, yeah, this is a implementation of the
idea of those 2 original quick forward implementations.
And,
the blueprints that you could be used back
then can still be used in Quick fork
today. Oh, wow. At least for for dig
and build. The things like rooms no longer
exist. Now they're zones. So the concepts like
that have changed. Those blueprints will work, but
buildings and and digging is exactly the same.
So any old blueprint to have from back
then will still work. So whenever they whenever
they do updates of of dwarf fortress,
how does... How hard does it? Keep quick
fork compatible with the,
updated versions. Do you have to do a
lot of changes or is it pretty much
stayed static?
There was a
significant amount of change
between version 0 dot 40 705
and version 50.
Because essentially, the keyboard
went away for for most of the control.
U. And although
D I quick for it did the dig
and the buildings
and the stockpile programmatic.
It did many of the other things that
the same way the old Python script did
it by playing back keys constructs. Like all
of the stockpile
configuration where you go through and select which
of the items you want that stockpile to
hold. That was all, like, you know, right
arrow, down arrow, down arrow, enter, down arrow,
enter, state the escape. And it would play
back these character sequences. And, of course, all
that just completely disappeared when we went to
v 50.
So
it took me
I think a month or 2, but it
is now completely programmatic and there aren't key
strokes at all anymore. And all of that
was
built from the ground up to interact with
the door fortress memory to create things like
zones and
stockpile configuration. But you haven't had to... You
haven't had much problems
since Version 50 came out. And once you
got it compatible with 50, they haven't made
Mh changes that have destroyed the Quick fork
too badly.
Yeah. There hasn't been any Ui or map
related change since then that has had any
effect on it? That's good. That's great.
So... No So pump stacks.
So so pump stacks are the thing that
we still have had troubles.
Getting to work. It might it might help
if I had pump stacks down
without Quick forte it. I don't know if
you have heard our
tribulation with with pump stacks.
I've... I've been keeping close to tabs on
it.
Have you not going great? Have you got
any pointers to give us?
Yeah. I know that may not be the
best for an audio medium, but, you know,
that's all we did. Well, 1 thing that
I've certainly run into that can cause problem.
Is that if you start your pump stack
too low and the pump itself gets flooded,
it will d. So you wanna make sure
that you don't even start your pump stack
until you get to a layer that you
sure the water level isn't going to rise
above.
That's 1 thing that's caught me a couple
times. Yeah. But other than that, it's kinda
of straightforward.
Oh, Yeah. We're out Gents, you know, dang.
I mean. I don't know what this say.
You... I think I'm just not aligning things
properly. I I think it's... I'm sure it's
an Ab hack kind of thing.
Between keyboard and share. Gotcha might not know.
Yeah. That went over my head. Yeah. Totally.
I think I'm just not lining things up
properly because they'll dig the holes out. I
mean, they're very good at digging things, but
then, like, I don't know. Things just don't
seem to line up, And I think I'm
just putting things in the wrong place. So
I guess They just need to spend a
little bit more time with it, but I
found a more effective way to kill invaders,
so I kinda got it distracted with that,
and I've been optimizing my killing floors. So
the the difficulty with alignment is actually why
I wrote those blueprints to begin with because
it it is hard to do it manually.
Well, you can lead a horse to water,
man.
Yeah. But, yeah, You gotta... You have to
dig those channels in very precise spots and
if you do line it up wrong, then
it is just not gonna work. Your your
pumps will just sit there and not pump.
Yeah. This summer, I needed just... Sit down
and just decide that I'm not gonna do
anything else in the game until I get
pump stacks to work and get to where
I'm comfortable with them, because otherwise, that may
never teach myself how to how to do
it. Just like with Quick 4. I thought
the idea of Quick 4 was great for
the longest time. And I believe that it
was... Either whenever you were on the podcast
before or maybe it was something in the
the discord server that convinced me to give
it a try. And
And now I am very happy that I
did. And my my biggest fear is that
I'm just gonna get lazy and just do
dream for in Fort after Fort after 4.
Well, now that gui design is a little
easier to use. U. Then it might not
be so bad to do things organically that
way. That's true. That's true. But this guy
what I'm doing right now too is I
I start with a quick 4 or I
start with a dream for it, and then
I extend that with Gui design to get,
like, organic trails coming out from it and
and having more of a
esoteric living space than than the template. Is
the the new interface for for gui design,
is that available in the beta now? Or
is is that in the a point release
for the main? Not yet in the beta?
It'll it'll be out in the beta probably,
next week as we're recording this, probably around
the the 20 eighth or so. Okay. Yeah.
20 first to 20 eighth of of June.
So then by the time, the listeners will
listen to this, they may be able to
check it out in there if they're in
the beta branch of D hack that they're
been may able to use it.
Yeah. And and we'll run that beta for
a few weeks and then push that to
stable as well. Because of of all the
infrastructure changes, We we do want to run
a, a longer beta this time. Just to
make sure that everything is completely solid. Before
we push it to the 90 percent of
players who are on just the the regular
stable branch. That sounds like that that may
be a a good idea with all of
the
the memory changes that are... Mh. That have
the potential to to crash the game. Not
really afraid of the crashing that that part
is pretty safe because the problems that may
exist are in the lu lair, and they're
not going to crash the game so much
as just... Not work themselves. We just wanna
make sure that those things are all smoothed
out before we release it stable.
Queen Manifesto
on the art and necessity of memorial slabs.
Section 3, the humorous imperative discovered by David
El,
Lastly, let us not overlook the humor inherent
in the act of memorial.
For what is life without a touch of
Levi.
Memorial slabs provide us a chance to immortal
the sheer absurdity of our existence.
They stand is a testament to our ability
to laugh in the face of danger, and
at times, laugh at the face we make
when we discover that danger is, in fact,
quite perilous
Therefore,
my dear dwarves, I decree that every dwarf
shall have their own memorial slab.
Each slab will tell a tale of bravery
curiosity,
and the occasional mishap with a lever operated
flood gate.
It is our duty Nay our privilege to
craft these slabs with pride, ensuring that the
legends of metal bent endure embellished with both
glory and humor.
Let us chi our history into stone, 1
entirely avoid demise at a time.
With jet black affection.
Queen to bowl wheel channels.
David El, a legend in his own lunchtime
discovered the final section of queen to bulls
manifesto,
while on an ill advised quest the perfect
sandwich.
His knack for une unnerving ancient documents in
the most unexpected places continues to battle and
unmute his peers.
So I know that we talked about the
D hack, new features that are coming up
is Is there anything in particular for for
Quick fort that you would like to implement?
Maybe not something you're actually working on now,
but anything that you envision for the future
of Quick port itself? There are so many
things. I I have this... You know, Quick
for was my first major project. And I
and I had... I I kept this Google
doc that kept on getting fuller and fuller
of all the ideas I had from implementing
it, and
it's it's pages and pages long now.
IIII wanna do things like being able to
set the
the the Zoom hot keys from a dig
blueprint so that if you lay down a
level, then you can automatically say, go get
the next unused hotkey key and have that
zoom to this level. Oh, and name it
this. You know, you know, things like that
that think map related items that you'd have
to do manually. Could be done in a
blueprint. And there's no reason to to have
to to do it manually if you can
get it done more quickly.
I'm not sure if I understand what you
just said.
I'm am sorry. Okay. I I talk like,
an engineer sometimes, and I just kind of
assume that everyone's following along with me. Yeah.
I... Okay. So, like, if you hit the
h key. And you bring up that panel
that I think the top 1 by default
is wagon area. Yeah. When you hit have
1, it gets back to the to the
to the starting spot. Yeah. Mh. Hockey. And
in that in that section, where you can
go to any map location and you hit
1 the buttons that says Zoom here. And
then you associate that spot on the map
with, say, f 2.
And you can name it, like, farming level.
And then from there on, you hit f
1. You jump to the surface. You would
have 2 you jump to the farming level.
And
I use that all the time to jump
quickly around my fort. Oh, yeah. But it
would be much more convenient at that were
set up for me automatic from the blueprints
I've already used to designate those levels. Do
you not use that roland? The hockey keys.
Yeah. No. I I do. I know for
like, F1F2F3
Zooms different spots in your
mode.
I I think I understand what do you
mean now. You mean,
you set up the blueprint for your farming
area,
and then that, like, automatically also makes
the hot f 2 to the farming area.
Is that
Right. Right.
Okay.
That's that's that's me. That's cool. Quality of
life improvements. And we've already implemented things like,
you know, set up a tavern and
configure it this way, but there's lots more
that we could do. The thing is the
quick fork dream for blueprint was the first
time that I ever was able to have
in rooms in a tavern and have them
actually work the way the thing was designed
to work. And never and never quite g
how you were supposed to associate a bedroom
or a or a rental room
in a tavern or to make it an
in in essence. Right? So the... In dream
for, the tavern that gets set up there
has... I don't know, 3 or 4
2
tile bedrooms. So that basically have a bed
and nothing else in it that that people
can can crash in.
So... And they are still... I I believe
that they are still part of the Tavern.
Am I right? It... Yeah. It's it's set
up the way that the game wants you
just set it. But it is kind of
an optimistic thing because the game hasn't actually
implemented visitors coming to stay in those rooms.
It it doesn't really work but once door
4 just implements that mechanic, you, Dream fort
will be ready for it. While we just
set up properly for that. Funny only thing
is my mayor actually claimed 1 of those
as her bedroom. Mh. I just like... Yeah.
They they aren't... They aren't properly reserved for
visitors. Anyone can just go loads a bedroom.
It's it's unfortunate. I like the idea of
it, which is why Put it in there,
but it doesn't really work yet. Well, cool.
But but, yeah. But if you're Tavern have
that set up in it and I very
much appreciated that. Mh. It's actually a quite
a cool Tavern with the Dream fort Tavern
is. So assuming that you are the 1
who made the dream for fortress layout.
Yes. Although, it has received a lot of
a feedback and help from community members over
the last decade or so since I've been
working on it. It just... It gets refined
pretty much every year where people come in
and say, why is done this way, and
I like, oh, well, because in version 42,
that's how things works. So let's go change
that. And update it And you said in
a... In some of our pre show conversation
that that you're making some changes to dream
for at the present time. Right? That's right.
Yeah. I got a whole raft of very
good suggestions such as we don't really need
a temporary trade depot, just build in its
final spot. And that will simplify the the
start process. Mh. And I was like, you're
right. Let's go do that. And we we
went and did it.
Another suggestion was maybe you shouldn't have a
well in the middle of the tavern. Because
Tavern bras, people fall down that well.
So
I redesigned the tavern area just to not
have a well, and I moved that over
to the very edge of the hospital. So
it's a little more out of the way.
I never could get my my stinking doors
to fill up my wells with buckets. So
eventually, I I cut a channel from the
river and and put some some flood gates
so that they filled up through the side.
Took me a very long time to realize
I just wasn't gonna be able to do
it that way. And if I would've realized
that sooner than it would've have saved me
a lot of time and effort and d
dehydrated dwarfed. But, yeah.
III kept the option there for bucket per
brigade because some people are just afraid of
routed water, but, yeah, Routing waters by far
easier. Yeah. And more effective.
I'm gonna have to jump off in about
2 minutes. Okay. So I will leave you
guys to wrap it up. Tony, do you
have any other questions about Quick fourth that
you wanna throw in here before I take
off? I don't. I just am truly enjoying
it, and I have to say 1 of
my favorite things. I think I mentioned this
before that I learned from watching your video
is
being able to channel the water off the
map, and then to carve the fort or
whatever to allow the water to flow out
is, like, truly 1 of the best things
that I've experienced in the game never.
It was like it's like the greatest thing
in the world for saving a dying for
it. So
million thanks for that 1. My door you
much some glad any door in life on
that 1. No. I'm really enjoying Quick for,
and I am really trying to figure out
how to make even better use of it
and get brave about about about, building the
things out. So it's very cool. Thank you
for your work on that. It's... Well, thank
you very much.
I'll do some more,
Youtube videos for tutorials to love more of
the
get more of the information out. Yeah. That
right. We got a promo your your Youtube
channel. So, Tony, thanks, man, and have a
great summer to you guys later. We'll we'll
we'll get with you out to to plan
the future. Yeah. Thanks again, Mike, for joining.
Appreciate it. Thank you. And have a great
day.
Rolling anything else that that you wanna ask
about quick forte or about
D hack in general?
Ask
not not really.
Besides
showering you praise for doing D hack and
Quake fort.
I don't really have questions.
Well, then here's a question for you. Like,
as you're going through adventure mode,
what do you think D hat could add
to the experience to to make it less
frustrating or to make it more interesting or
anything like that. Can D hat give us
a goal? You know, that's something that and
thinking about you know, because...
Okay. What 1 of the basic elements of
door fortress is that there is no specific.
It's more of a... It's more of a
toy
than a game. As I've heard some of
other podcasts say. And that's a good thing
for a lot of things. But but also
some people like to have a little more
direction or a little more activity.
So... Well, let me just say that I
also think... And and this is a point
that role made in our last episode, I
think. That works really well in Fortress mode.
Because you can set Fortress mode aside and
let it spin for an hour and then
come back and pick it back up and
see what's happened.
Whenever you're not actively doing things in adventure
mode. It ain't do nothing. So You have
to actually do everything
with my with a man. So... Yeah. Yeah.
I don't know. I don't know how that
would work, but...
Yeah. For example,
when you talk to someone, and they're like,
oh, no. Like, a cy has been
eating my goats and you ask them. Okay.
Cool. I I can kill the cy for
you. Do you know anything?
I mean, ultimately, yeah, probably is more of
a
Toby has to do something about that
thing because Mh.
That person is going to say,
I know absolutely nothing. I can't even tell
you who could know where the cy is.
And I
I feel... Okay. This might just be in
my head, but I feel like we will
get some kind of direction in the future
because
if you go into adventure mode and you
make your adventure, you get 3 options of
what to choose from. 1 of them currently
being locked. And it says something about guidance.
So I'm not sure if it just means
that you get more points
in the game to, like, spend on your
character, or if there are no,
like, new features
plan
that actually give you some kind of real
guidance. Tell you you're, like, oh, this goes
there. The cy is over here. I I
believe it's
more that that it's a an actual feature
that will be like your adviser in the
game where you you are the the child
of a deity. Right? Mh. And your deity
is more all knowing and and can give
you hints like that. I think that is
the idea. Although I've not personally seen the
actual
implementation of it. Besides D hack hal aren't,
III
haven't really used that much D help in
in adventure mode. Maybe the casual full heel.
You, because I forgot, oh, I'm bleeding, but
that was the before.
And couldn't you just heal yourself by quick
traveling somewhere? What? Isn't that a thing in
in adventure mode? You you show up at
your destination fully healed? Is this...
That's my understanding.
Oh, I well
I didn't even know that.
Okay.
Apparently, I have to try
out the what happens if far fast travel,
but I I just remember that I was
bleeding really badly because somebody punched me in
the in the mouth, but thing. Mh. And
I lost, like teeth. I couldn't speak, and
I was bleeding heavily, and I was like,
yeah.
But
you said something about, like,
information bubbles like, hey. Excuse me. You're bleeding.
Hey. Excuse me. You're you're, like hungry or
whatever. Then, that could be really cool. And
if I add onto that, not all
adventure
wilderness
creature people can eat all the things. I
I
clearly remember a problem when I embarked with
like an Elk person or whatever. And they
had a piece of meat as, like travel
food,
but the Elk person wouldn't eat it. Mh.
And then I was, like, beans.
And at some later point, I I don't
know what I played, like, a tiger or
jaguar,
and I picked some berries, and I was,
like.
I can I can continue living for, like,
2 more days? And then my tiger person
just leaked the berries.
So
would also be helpful if the
hunger bubble
would show you, you know, for the less
intelligent people like me that, oh, your tiger
by the way just wants meet. I I
know this might be obvious sound or... You
know, edible food is on the map. Oh,
yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Your your
news starts tingling
Just follow the nose. It always knows.
Since dwarf fortress
adventure mode is a rogue like
implementation,
we need to figure out a way to
put an name let of Indoor in there
somewhere.
It needs to be an.
I'm an avid fan of Net hack in
its history.
So, yes, I very much on board with
that. Yeah. That that... Yeah. You just just
have a have d hack place an amulet
of Yan or. So somewhere on the, in
every... In a world, say, you know, just
just... Maybe if whatever you implement demo, whenever
you load D hack, it just makes sure
that there's a artifacts somewhere in the map
that's... Whether it's, you know, the... In that
world map that's it's the name little indoor.
And the key for every adventure, the holy
grail per s is to find the amulet
of the indoor. Yeah. Well, I think
Maybe 1 way to do that is to
find out what the demon slabs are, and
then go put it in there with the
demon lab.
Then you have your own little game boss
a fight as well.
Yeah. You know, that is another thing.
So I have not yet
I've been playing for how many years, Roland.
We've been doing this podcast for 5.
I play for maybe a year and a
half, 2 years before we started the podcast.
So... But I've still never made it to
the circus. So...
Yeah. I think that that that having
some sort of tools in D hack to
help you find the circus
might be handy. Then from that something
this. Yes down. It's it's down.
It's it's fairly easy...
I bottom dot, my my levels, my Z
levels.
So I I still did. Did you though?
To did you? Well, I... Did did they
stop counting. It's like, negative 01:27 or something
like that? 01:28. Did you dig there?
I thought I did. Maybe I did.
Apparently not.
Well, getting into the circus
is
not
hard,
but I don't know. Every time I did
it, I was kind of disappointed because it's
just death It's like,
the sweet release of death is claiming me
now. Then you have, like,
40 boiling fiends that come rush out and
just kill your...
Like every single living being in the next,
like 6 tic, and you're like, mh cool.
I like hell. This is
adventure. So I'm assuming Mack if you under
the circus.
I I have, Although, not Not that many
times, but I am aware of the techniques
involved. I I do enjoy kind of setting
up interesting kill zones where my my soldiers
have a chance of, of fighting back. Mh.
There was someone on the d hack server
just a couple days ago We were discussing
this where he got he got the demons
to spawn. I don't know if. We're allowed
to go into spoilers here. Yeah. No no.
I'm gonna put... I'm gonna put it in
the in the title, and we talk about
the office...
So.
Yeah. As as Tony said, this is like
the worst kept secret in in gaming.
So this is yeah.
At this point is not spoiler.
So he carved the fort notification into the
open area of an ado spire so that
the circus is visible and and begins to
spawn.
But kept them so they were contained within
the spire, and then dug out to the
very top of that spire was just a
floor, but nothing underneath it. Now, if you
drop something on a floor in door fortress,
it'll just crash straight through. So then you
can go and set up a a trap
where you dig out part of the ceiling
above it and collapse a ceiling that is
the same size of the hole or the
the floor on top of the of the
open hole. U. And the vas ceiling will
just crash right to the hole and go
straight through that bunch of demons
that have been gathered up at the surface
trying to get out of of their of
their little trap there.
And that did quite a bit of damage,
and you only needed to mop up a
little bit after that.
And I thought that was extremely clever, and
I wanted to try that myself a couple
times, but I haven't gotten around to it
yet.
So just dean killed a bunch of demons?
Or or at least seriously named them because
they're... It's having large pieces of terrain crashing
straight down through their tile. Like that's that's
pretty genius. I thought so. Yeah. Like, my
best idea was to have them come into
a
open area that has a bunch of vertical
bars built everywhere. So they have to kinda
go through this maze, But vertical bars, your
bark can shoot through without any trouble. So
while they're making their way through this this
maze of vertical bars, we'd be shooting them
from the sides and trying to to get
them,
get them all dead. Before they make their
way to the 5 all door and break
that down. Great. We're gonna talk about.
Network worked okay, But I I like I
like collapsing the terrain on top of them
even better. I haven't I haven't even touched
archer with with with version 50 yet. III
tried it to set it up, and I
was not successful.
And even even in dream for it, I
even bothered hiring archers to to shoot in
the target range,
is It's doesn't work. Once you get it
going, then they're they are pretty valuable, especially
for the fire demons that you can't tell
the otherwise get close to. Yeah. Cool. Okay.
So we're running a little bit over an
hour. So
maybe we should think about wrapping up. So
Mike, Roland, did do you guys have anything
else that you would like to bring up
for us to discuss on this fine early
summer afternoon?
I I have nothing. No.
It's what... It's like a past midnight where
you are now. Right? Yeah. It's it's good.
Getting sneak.
8
minutes away from 1AM.
Oh, wow. So, yeah. I think that will.
Thank you so much for staying this late
to Do appreciate. Accommodate my schedule here.
So it it was a blast. So this
is coin to wrap up season 6 of
Dwarf fortress shrine table. We will be we
will be take the summer off, we will
be back
sometime in the very latest part of summer
earliest part of autumn,
some probably in September at some point because
that's a that's that's how we do things.
So, Mike, Thank you so much for coming
back on. And, of course, we will have
you back on whenever
D hack has other releases or really whenever
you wanna come back on, just let us
know. Well that this be all the time
it.
So, yeah, you got anything else that you'd
like to add before we wrap this 1
up? Well, there will be new versions of
D f coming out before you get back
from hiatus. Mh. And there's gonna be a
lot more to talk about then. Yep. So
keep digging. Yep. So we won't have you
on early on in the in the next
season to talk about
D and D hack.
Right?
Everybody, have a great summer. Good luck and
dig deep. Right? Yep. Have a some nice
summer
weeks.
And for Tony, chao.
Ciao.
Del. What's that? I was pretend Tony. Oh,
yeah. That's cool. I will use we'll use
your cha as thomas as chow.
This has been the dwarf fortress round table
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