User talk:ThunderClaw

Hello ThunderClaw,

You're the one who created the decentralized bedroom plan and workshop plan, right?

I had a question. How many floors of each one do you typically need? Also, do you alternate workshop floors and bedroom floors, cluster floors of the same type together, or what?

Gairabad 12:25, 3 November 2008 (EST)

Alternating workshop floors and bedroom floors would be a bad idea, due to Noise --Ungood 12:33, 3 November 2008 (EST)

For a full-sized fortress, you will need 8 floors of the decentralized bedroom plan if you want each dwarf to have quarters. It holds 26 per floor, not including the barrack on each floor. This sounds like a lot, but if you make your 'main' floor a good 2 or 3 z-levels below the surface to get into solid rock, you're able to go up and down instead of just down. Digging to solid rock for the main floor is important so you can control the price of the apartments more easily with stone detailling. Building up from there will make you hit patchy soils, which essentially behaves as non-smoothed stone and is ideal for affordable housing. An unsmoothed stone apartment with everything I recommend will go for 250-350, depending on the quality of the furniture. A smoothed apartment will go for 400-450. An engraved apartment will rapidly jump up to over 1000 or 1500 (many of mine are close to 3000), which makes it ideal housing for legendary dwarves. Also note that if you want to go the full 8 levels (which I recommend), you can omit the barrack on each floor and convert it into a zoo, sculpture garden, or a handy stockpile. Or, you can expand the middle line to 5 hexes wide and put a few shops (i'm pretty sure these do not produce noise) on each floor. The design is pretty flexible.

The workshops should be placed as far away from the bedrooms as is reasonable. Workshops make noise, which can totally ruin the happy thoughts from sleeping in a good room (+10-20 for a good room, -2-10 for being disturbed to awoken due to noise). I put them on opposite sides of the fortress, usually. Be sure to connect the quarters with wide halls (3-wide minimum) because there will almost definitely be lots of traffic in between them. You can use the space in the middle for your dining hall or some offices for the nobles that actually meet with people (the mayor, the baron, etc), to shorten their walks to their meetings. I typically do not need more than 3 levels of workshops for a full 200 dwarf fortress; just as often, 2 work great. Even with 2 levels of the decentralized workshop schemata, you have room for many, many copies of the most important workshops and tons of stockpile space. You may end up with more levels if you need lots of 5x5 plots for shops. The design can be modified to put a 5x5 plot on each side for 4 total if need be. --ThunderClaw 13:31, 3 November 2008 (EST)

Cross-training

What you started on cross-training is absolutely brilliant. It's entertaining without getting into silliness, and all accurate and useful. It makes me wish this wiki did featured articles. I'm glad you're working on this wiki. VengefulDonut 20:24, 10 November 2008 (EST)

Thanks! It's nice to know my work's appreciated. --ThunderClaw 22:30, 10 November 2008 (EST)

Seconding VengefulDonut. Gairabad 22:57, 10 November 2008 (EST)

Screenshots

Hi. Thanks for your continuing work on the intro pages. I'd like to strongly urge you to use a standard tileset and palette (and no graphic set) when making screenshots for these articles -- the characters and symbols used in many custom tilesets (including the one you're using) are not recognizable to anyone not using that tileset. A nonstandard palette makes things even less familiar.

Although less important, you might also consider saving your screencaps in .png format, if you can -- it is a non-lossy format, unlike .jpg, and often provides a higher degree of compression on visually simplistic images (such as DF screencaps).--Maximus 00:23, 11 November 2008 (EST)

We've already got a couple standard pallete walkthroughs, or at least 1. My thinking behind using the graphical tileset was that since a door looks like a door and land looks like land, it'll be MORE recognizable to people who haven't played the game yet. The idea is to push people into the game as seamlessly as possible. It also shows off the graphical options to people who are hanging up because of the graphics on DF (which I've heard more than once!)

Also for some reason Fraps goes absolutely effing berserk when I save DF screens in .png. It's like I took a negative of the screen or something, it's totally incomprehensible. PNG is definitely the superior option for this situation, though, so if I can get it working I'll gladly use that format. --ThunderClaw 00:40, 11 November 2008 (EST)

Hey guys, I noticed the conversation on the recent changes page and had to butt in. PNG-24 is equivalent to JPG and only slightly less lossy. However, both Jpeg and PNG-24 are meant to be used for photo-quality images which have fine degrees of shade distinction, and the potential loss which they are talking about is the shade variation. This is absolutely not a problem in Dwarf Fortress, which is using 8-bit (256) colors. If you're having problems with PNG-8, then use GIF. The only difference between GIF and PNG-8 is that PNG-8 can specify a transparency shade.

Thunderclaw, if you're going to continue to use graphical tilesets, then could you at least include a link to the tileset you're using in the caption, so players know you're using non-standard tiles? --RomeoFalling 01:56, 11 November 2008 (EST)

I planned on it! That was going to go in the introduction of the article. I'll see about using GIF in Fraps, too; I hadn't really considered that. I'll see about that this evening. --ThunderClaw 09:11, 11 November 2008 (EST)

Provided you open your walkthrough with instructions on how to install the specific tileset and palette you're using, I suppose it'll be fine. Maybe that is what you already have in mind.

Anyhow. Provided you're on XP or later and are using windowed mode, you can do screenshots by just hitting Alt-PrintScreen, pasting into MS Paint, and saving as .png. Paint's PNG compression is poor, so you might want to optipng them further.--Maximus 02:48, 11 November 2008 (EST)

I intended to provide a link to a 40d download with the graphics pack already applied. That's how the maker distributes it, so it's really no more difficult than downloading vanilla from bay12. --ThunderClaw 09:11, 11 November 2008 (EST)