Like so many others, I first realized that Dwarf Fortress was something special when I stumbled across Boatmurdered. A couple of hours later, tears of laughter streaming down my cheeks, I was hooked. I too wanted to brutally abuse flaming elephants. And I have. Oh my, I have. One of my big frustrations with Dwarf Fortress however -- y'know, apart from clothing, and the military, and the UI, and stockpiling, and, and, and... -- is the difficulty in actually getting to the nuggets of narrative goodness. There are three logs, all of which are continually silted up with page after page of system babble. 'Urist Halfheart Cancels Job: scared by a cabbage.' 'Warning: rough stone.' 'I saw a squirrel!' Yadda yadda. In the mean time, items of possible narrative interest get buried, recorded somewhere well outside any of the main logs, or even entirely omitted. Changes of date never get mentioned, save at season boundaries. Engravings and artworks need to be hunted down and examined at source for details to be retrieved. Combat logs are near-anonymized, for reasons that utterly escape me, and tend to get shredded into little pieces that prove wildly tricky to actually patch together. You may see that Stukos the Cheesemaker enjoyed shouting at an official lately, but good luck trying to find out who he yelled at, or what topics the conversation touched on. And if you want to see the history of your civilization once you've started a fort, you have to duplicate your entire save files, trash your fort in one set of them, and then open the remains in an entirely separate program. So, I'm hoping that CE will have, effectively, an Overseer's Log -- something separate from the general flow of system messages that gives straight-forward access to the sorts of narrative details that would be useful in writing up a Let's Play. Historical details. Meetings. Mishaps. Artworks. Fights. Lunacy. Bios. Ideally, log entries would be brief, but allow detail to be called up without leaving the log. Heck, perhaps you could even have a setting to pause the game at dawn, to discover what happened during the previous day. What do you think? What types of narrative details would you like available?
There was a discussion a long long time about this. I believe the devs are going for something like this, players telling their own stories and being able to share saves to make a Boatmurdered like story.
Well at least the point about finding out what they talked about is in CE. You can see which topic the person you´ve selected spoke about.
