Here is a list of the features I plan on adding to my little “Lumberbot” game some of you may have seen. (If you follow my wife on G+ that is.)

For those of you who don’t here is a link to it: Lumberbot

Here is the link to the G+ post my wife made about it with her brief write up of how to ‘play’ with it: Lumberbot Discussion on G+

Now that that’s out of the way… Here is a list of things and notes about what I want to add to it in the order they happened to occur to me.  Brace yourself, wall-o-text incoming.

• Adding a map.  It needs a background grid for having randomly seeded resources that the various ‘buildings’ that generate the bottom tier of materials will require.  Rich soil for a farm, rich minerals or metals for a mine, etc.  I’m currently planning on using tiles the size of the farms/mines for drawing the map but having the actual underlying grid size for the buildings being at 1/4 that size. (The size of a robot basically)  Individual trees would probably be the size of the smaller underlying tile which would make for 16 per farm.
• Farms would be an area on the map that is designated as such.  To place a farm you would need to fully clear the area on which you want to place it and it will need to have soil.  To change a crop you would need to stop planting and wait for all the plants to be harvested or there would be an option to clear the farm but doing so would make you lose all the plants you currently had growing in it.  For now farm plots would all be of a fixed size but I may look at allowing larger sized plots later.  Possibly as a tech upgrade of some sort.
• Haulers would behave like the bots currently do in what I have now.  They would own their own tasks and you would have to edit them to change where they went and what jobs they did.  Buildings could toggle on allowing drop-offs or pick-ups.  There should be some way to select all the haulers that have the building as a destination on their route. There might be an upgrade to allow the haulers to know before they even go to a building if there is anything at the building for them to do.  (So they can just skip it right away without having to run over to it and then on to their next node)
• A second class of ‘bot’ would consist of workers who would be assigned to buildings.  It would be these bots who would say cut down trees and stack them to be hauled off and plant new ones.  The production of a building would depend on the number and skill of the workers assigned to it.
• Two classes of workers would exist.  ”humans” who would gain skill over time but cost more in “upkeep” (pay) as they do and “bots” who would only gain skill via an upgrade but require less upkeep per upgrade than the humans.  The cost of upgrading a robot might be fairly expensive compared to just training up a human but in the long run the robot would be cheaper due to it’s lower upkeep costs.
• Haulers would also have two classes.  Vehicles that would be driven by humans and automated robotic haulers.  The vehicles would be cheaper to get but the combined upkeep of them with the human would be more expensive in the long run.  The intent is that you would start with some vehicles and then once you could afford the automated ones you would swap the humans over to being workers and replace them.  (or at least that’s my current thinking)
• There would be upgrades that you could get that would serve as multipliers to the “skill” of the workers.  Better drills would mean that your mining workers would be able to mine that much better for example. 
• In general, the more valuable an item or resource is the longer it will take to gather/make it.
• If the upkeep cannot be afforded then the humans may quit and leave.  If a skilled human quits you will have to train up a new hire to replace them.  Robots on the other hand may break down and require more money to be spent on repairing them.  There might be a small chance of catastrophic failure for the robots if their maintenance isn’t done which would result in the destruction of the robot.  Some upgrades might increase this chance making it more risky to miss an upkeep payment for upgraded robots.

I’ve updated it with a few new features including a help page.

One of the shinier new features is the ability to export and import maps.  I have a sample map you can import here.

In case you forgot, the link for this version of GWT is: http://thefool76.com/html5/gwt/

More mad webscience. This time it’s another version of GWT.
Yes, I re-wrote this thing yet again using HTML5 for some added features.

For those of you who don’t know, the Gaming WebTop (GWT) is a project I’ve been mucking about with for more than a few years now. It’s intended to be a virtual web based gaming table for doing Pen and Paper RPG games.

This time, everything is currently client side. So any maps you save are only saved for the specific browser you are on. (So if you open a different browser or go to a different computer you won’t see the same saves.)

Printing maps seems to work reasonably well for all browsers* except for Opera. I strongly suggest closing all floating windows before printing though. In my tests the background image behind the map did not print so you won’t be wasting printer ink on that. You should only get the map and the grid overlay (if it’s toggled on).

http://thefool76.com/html5/gwt/

*When I say all browsers I really mean every browser except IE. Unless you have the latest version of IE this won’t work at all and even if you do I make no promises. I personally suggest using either Chrome or Firefox.

Just a quick question that I’m spamming across social media sites.  Mostly out of curiosity.

How many of you use more than one social media site with any regularity and if so, which ones? 

For me it’s Facebook, G+, Twitter, and Tumblr.

So a while ago I started a story fort in Dwarf Fortress but due to moving and other things I never finished it.  I liked the premise but I don’t really want to return to the old version of the game I had started it in.  So I’ve decided to restart it in the current version.  Seven Dwarves, ten axes, and a forbidding landscape.  Lets see if they live.

Diary of “Mandy” the Chief of Lebesbomrek (Apexwhips)

—- First Entry —-

I found a mostly blank recordbook in with the axes on the wagon so I have decided to use it to record a … well a record I suppose. After all keeping track of a fort’s history is traditionally the job of it’s leader.  Though to call this place a fort seems a poor joke at best.  God forsaken hellhole is more of an apt description but let me start at the begining, or at least as close to it as I dare write down. 

First off, let me just mention that the names within this journal are not our real names.  Not that it would matter much if they were as I fear we may just all die out here.  Those who come across our rotted bones will probably have little care that we are all escaped convicts.  That’s right, we are a pack of criminals.  What we were in for little matters now and I’m not about to write it down in any case, lets just say we were all incarcerated for our crimes at the prison fort of Axegrind.  Being part of the general hauler crew, we were not watched quite as closely as the more skilled laborers so we were able to escape our dismal fate using a plan I devised.  It wasn’t a terribly complex plan, we simply deconstructed some key support beams on the guard house and then stole a supply cart in the resulting chaos. 

We hitched up the first two animals we could find, a horse and water buffalo, to the cart and drove it out away from the fort as fast as we could.  Would that we had paid more attention to the contents of the cart and would that we had been caught.  A hammering would have been preferable to this fate.  After the initial rush of escape had died down we took a look at what the cart we stole contained.  Curse our luck it was a cart meant for the guards and contained nothing but a crated full of copper axes.  No food, no drink and worst of all, no picks.  We did have the foresight to each take some small amount of food with us in our escape and we prayed that would hold us till we got somewhere we could trade the axes for better provisions.

On the second day of our journy we entered a dead forest.  It was the start of spring so the lack of leaves on the trees wasn’t unusual, but something just felt wrong about the place.  We kept on though afraid that the guards from Axegrind would be after us.  Now though I am sure they stopped chasing as soon as they realized where we were headed.  No sane dwarf would want to be in this place.  On the morning of our third day of freedom the wheel came off the cart.  That in of itself wouldn’t have been so bad except that the cart promptly dropped to the ground with the distinct sound of splintering wood.  When we lifted it up to inspect the damage, it was clear the axle of the cart had snapped through when it fell.  

That was when the undead Buzzards attacked. 

New Features

• Better support for including alt-textures - Pack creators can now include an alt_items.txt and/or alt_terrain.txt file in their pack. These files are just a simple list of alternative files for terrain and item tiles within the zip. Place each file on it’s own line. See the ones in the included simpletech.zip for examples. 
• Generic Block mode preview for alt-textures - Since I cannot really know what tile is meant for what in an alt texture sheet, I just load them all on a basic block model. (Block in the sample.mdl file) This means that the tiles in an alt-terrain.png don’t have to be in any particular order to still get a preview. (Mind you it also means that multi-tile textures and objects don’t get a custom model.)

Download

Three new buttons were added at the top. They are in order: 

• Save Button - Saves your current mix.
• Terrain Button - Switches to editing the terrain.png
• Items Button - Switches to editing the gui/items.png

Pressing the ‘z’ key will now toggle zoom mode in which the current selected tile is zoomed to fill the picker.

Right clicking in the right hand picker will now preview tiles without doing the swap. 

Download 

New version up.

New Features

• alt pack folder and alt terrain folder - Any pack (.zip) placed in the alts folder will be read by the pack regardless of the directory it is looking at. Additionally any .png in the alts/terrain folder will be read by 
  the pack as an alt of terrain.png. Packs in the alts folder will be prefixed with a * in the listing and files
  in the alts/terrain folder will be prefixed with a +.
• secondary model previewer tied to the right hand picker

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue with the side of the large chest model using one of the back tiles instead of the side tile.

Download

I have a new version up.  This one includes the ability to change packs from within the program as well as support for HD textures.  It can even mix tiles between different pack resolutions resizing as needed.

Download

I have the alpha version up and ready for it’s first public testing! *cheers*

Currently I only have a windows build done but it has been confirmed to run under Wine by my official test ferret.  A linux build will be coming.

To use, just download it, unzip wherever and then run texmix.exe.  It will default to using the default.zip pack I distributed with it and it will save to test.zip when you exit.  For more information (Including how to specify other packs on the command line) check out the README.txt file.

You can downlaod it here: http://thefool76.com/minecraft/texmix_bin/Texmix.zip