Difference between revisions of "40d:Utilities"

Revision as of 23:42, 10 November 2007

Here are third party applications (that were not written by Bay12Games) developed for Dwarf Fortress:

Movies, Screenshots, Map Files

DF Map Compressor / DF Map Archive

The map compressor was created by Shadowlord in May 2007. Extract from the website :

"The DF Map Compressor is a program I made to encode Dwarf Fortress fortress or world map images into a much smaller format than is possible with normal image formats. Here's a quick summary of how it works: It determines the size of your tiles from your DF font file (or asks you), splits the map up into tiles, identifies duplicate tiles, writes out every unique tile image, and then writes out a list of ID#s for each tile position which points to the tile image for that tile. What it outputs is piped through the LZMA compressor (the one used in 7-zip), to compress it further. The .df-map file which it writes out is usually less than 100 KB in size. (By comparison, a PNG of the same map can exceed 2 megabytes, depending on how well you compress it, whether you change the color depth, and whether you are using a graphical tileset or detailed font)."

The compressed (.FDF-MAP) map can then be submitted to the Dwarf Fortress Map Archive; an online repository website which uses a Flash based viewer to view the map in your browser. (Read more about the DF Map Archive on Markavian's [User page.)

CMVPlayer

Download CMVPlayer.zip

First released by Jifodus in April 2007. This application enables playback of the DF movies (.cmv) without starting DF. It also provides some more functionalities, such as :

Rewind
Pause
Play frame per frame

To use, simply unzip the file, and drop and drag the movie on CMVPlayer.exe.

Rick's utilities

Fabulous tools made by the marvelous Rick. All Hail Rick!

Outdated tools (v0.27.169.32a): reveal.exe tileinfo.exe

Current tools (v0.27.169.33a):

adjuststart.exe

Download adjuststart.exe Modifies the starting number of dwarves and/or the starting points.

heal.exe

Download heal.exe Heals creature limbs (any creature you can highlight with V basically). You can optionally hurt a creature by specifying -hurt on the command-line arguments.

reveal.exe

Download reveal.exe Makes as much of the map visible as it can (eg, it can't reveal unallocated map blocks)

If you want to reveal the entire map, go to the furthest Z level down you can get to, and designate the entire bottom to be mined, then remove the designation, then run reveal.

foreman.exe

[1] Makes switching jobs on and off for large numbers of dwarves simple. Dwarves are grouped by their profession, or custom profession if they have one. By clicking on the graph you can enable any job for all dwarves with that profession. Still in alpha for this version of DF, if it doesn't recognise one of the new professions, check the file debug.txt in the directory you run foreman from.

Enable Magma Buildings

Helper utility for Rick's reveal.exe enable_magma_buildings_33a.zip

You need this utility in the case that you used the reveal utility, and there is a magma pool or pipe on your map that does not reach the surface. (If the hide utility is ever updated, you could also hide a few magma tiles and then dig them out. That worked in the old version.)

Because there is no actual flag that controls whether magma has been seen (the game searches a list, probably a list of notable events), I had to patch the game's code. This means you need to run the patch every time you start dwarfort.exe.

Macro Programs

A program that lets you program scripts/macros so that when you press a certain key combination, or in any other fashion activates the program, a series of keystrokes is sent to the active program instead.

AutoHotKey

AHK lets you define global hotkeys to send a sequence of keystrokes. For example, you can have alt+w replace b-C-w-Enter-Enter to make wall building much easier.