rob86

I tried LMMS a few months ago, and I wasn't that impressed. I respect the efforts of people who are trying to make a free alternative to FL Studio, but it has a long way to go before it can truly compare with FL Studio. It's missing features of FL, it has some bugs, and on the superficial level the blocky interface just doesn't seem as nice, whereas FL's sleek interface seems to be almost perfected after so many years in the business. The bug I'm talking of is this I had an idea for a song in 7/4 time. I played it on my guitar and wanted to get it down on the PC to share the idea with a friend. I started up LMMS, and found that it wouldn't quantize my notes right in 7 / 4 time so it was useless for that. I wasn't going to line everything up by the millisecond manually. I started up FL Studio, and got my song idea down easily in a couple minutes. I don't know if this is a bug, or just something they haven't implemented yet, but regardless, it wasn't working right when I needed it.To be honest, I never gave LMMS much of a chance. There's no way it can compare to FL Studio right now, at least I don't think so, so that kind of discouraged me from actually trying to learn it's way of doing things. Is it good for free software? Yes, it's good free software. It's certainly enough to get someone started making music this way, and the things it's missing are most likely for really advanced people anyway and the average hobbyist or beginner wouldn't miss it. Would a professional choose LMMS over FL Studio if both were free? I highly doubt it, unless they're really into supporting the open source software philosophy. Can it make professional sounding tracks? Yes, surprisingly, my friend who initially detested LMMS, was a little more dedicated than me actually did some nice sounding electro-pop tunes with it and claimed it worked almost as good as FL once she figured out how to work it.I think LMMS has a chance to become better than FL Studio some day, because the open source community can produce great stuff. It's not quite ready for me yet, though.For anyone who is interested, my friend had plans of doing an in depth comparison between FL Studio and LMMS. She's done a bunch of music in FL and switched to Linux, and for a project, she's going to "remix" her tracks in LMMS and blog about differences she experienced and what she had to do or download extra to achieve the results.That plan seems to be on hold though, as Ubuntu annoyed her and she went back to Vista and FL Studio..

You play guitar? I didn't think any other guitarists were on here. Not bad soloing, but I think the mixing needs some work. I'm no expert, but usually the bass goes in the center and I think it would definitely improve the sound of the mix. I'm listening with headphones and the bass is killing my left ear. Also, solos usually go front and center, because they should be mixed to stand out. I would record your rhythm track twice (not just making a copy) and put oneo n the left and one on the right. I bet it'd sound cool. Your solo seems to be perfection, you must have been practicing your licks a lot! Add some fills to your drums too, it would improve it a lot. I know you said it was basic, maybe you were just being lazy like me (I hate spending time on the things like that and prefer to just jam!) And I love the ending..reminds me a lot of my compositions. They always end like that, heh. I don't know about you, but when I'm soloing, I just go on forever and the song ends, I'm still going.. Check out my review on here about the BOSS BR-600...... I love that thing. I use it almost daily, when I'm not busy.

I guess the Software Santa abandoned us this Christmas, what terrible news. I was looking forward to the jolly soul spreading the Christmas joy this holiday season. We must have a lot of people on the naughty list. I bet it's because of all of you no-quoters! You know who you are!

I was disappointed when Rerun didn't get to keep Snoopy's brother too, but I guess they had to end it like that or there'd be a lot of parents complaining about the bad influence. "Rerun has a dog, why can't I have a dog??????" It's Miracle on 34th street. A Wonderful Life is a classic too. Grinch too. Frosty, also. I've never seen a Rudolf movie?! What's that one where the boy gets a red rider gun and the dad curses a lot? Oh yeah, A Christmas Story. That's a great movie too, pretty funny if I remember correctly. I'll have to watch it again. "You'll shoot your eye out!"

It's that time of year again, Christmas! I don't think it's hardly been mentioned on here at all yet. One of the many great things to do during the holiday season is to watch classic t.v. specials, or movies. I'm sure there are a lot that I like and can't remember, but one that has to be named is a Charlie Brown Christmas. It's short, but charming and unforgettable. I always liked 'ol Chuck Brown. I like "I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown" as well, I remember wanting a dog just like Rerun so it really brings back some childhood memories.I recently watched a not-so-family-friendly christmas edition of Blackadder for the first time, which was very funny! I can't think of anymore right now, I have a horrible memory, but I'm sure I'll remember more when I look through my collection of xmas videos.

I'm with armynavy123 here. I love winter, it is an absolutely incredible season. I love watching the first snow, and walking around on a moonlit night with a snow everywhere is amazing. It's so bright, the snow lightens everything up and makes it seem more cheery. I love to walk on the snow covered river in the middle of the night, it's so bright you could read, and it's beautiful! There is not much I look forward to more than the Christmas season, I am not a religious person, and don't celebrate the season for religious reasons, but I love the holidays nonetheless. I love putting up Christmas decorations, and going around and looking at the beautiful decorations put up by some people. Where I live, the "Natives" don't have to pay for electricity, so it's a tradition for almost their entire community to do some really extraordinary outdoor christmas decorations. They invite people from all over to look at them, as their gift to us. It's a treat to go around every year and look at them. Now days, with energy saving bulbs, it doesn't cost too much to have lots of lights, but the tradition started when it was quite expensive to have a lot of lights.

Is there a big difference between the ATI HD4670 and the HD4650? And is there a big difference between 1GB and 512mb models? The 4670 seems like a popular choice online, but all of the computers I've seen come with at best a 512mb ATI HD4650.And what's the difference between AGP and PCI? AGP is faster? Is it recommended to go for a more expensive AGP one or are the PCI ones ok?And (there sure are a lot of things to consider on computers) is DDR3 RAM significantly better than DDR2 RAM? Would 6GB DDR3 be better than 8GB DDR2?

I've always wondered about something. Why do the little user interfaces on all kinds of things always say **Welcome!** or something similar. I've used a wide range of gadgets, from mp3 players, to musical keyboards, to phones, guitar amplifiers, mostly things with small LCD's and there's always a good chance they'll start up with a "Welcome!" I don't know about anyone else, but I've become so used to it, that I don't even notice how strange of a word choice it is, until now that is! I've even made some small programs that say "Welcome!", though I had no idea why, other than it just seemed like the thing to do for my first programs.Once in a while, you'll get something that says "Hello!" too, but that seems more rare..at least from what I've seen. Usually these come with a nice little "Goodbye!" when you shut it off.I'm thinking there has to be a reason for it, is it originally due to poor English translation coming from early Asian companies and it's become the accepted thing to put in so the world keeps using it? Most (not all) of the things I've seen with this greeting are made by Japanese or Chinese. A long time ago, they might have wanted to put in a friendly generic greeting, but their words didn't translate to English so well and sound like something you'd see on the mat in front of someone's house.Now you see or hear it everywhere. It's not just on gadgets from Asia. You call some phone service (support, weather whatever) you're greeted with a "Welcome!" or "Bienvenue!" (in my part of the world anyway). When I connect to my ISP, in the modem log I get a "Welcome" or "Bienvenue" there as well. Why are they welcoming my modem? The average person doesn't even see that message. It just seems strange to me. It's like opening a fridge door and seeing "Welcome to your fridge!" or turning on the T.V. and seeing "Welcome to the T.V.!". "Welcome!" just doesn't seem to belong on the UI of some electronic gadget.

I have my audio hooked up to an external amplifier and four 3+ foot hi-fi speakers (the wooden 'cabinet' whatever you call it, not the actual speaker..). I don't get surround sound (I don't care, I tried it but it never worked in half my games anyway) but it sure beats the cheap speakers that came with the computer. The irony of the matter is, I prefer using headphones anyway. Once in a while I turn up some tunes, but most of the time I just plug some headphones. I hate loudness! I just happen to like hooking things up.. I didn't buy the equipment, it was just used stuff nobody wanted.

Thanks for the reply. I'm not going to worry too much about the ATI driver - ubuntu compatibility, I'll have faith in them. I hope I don't regret it! I don't use Compiz anyway, and a lot of the ATI problems I've seen seem to be with that.

As much as I'd love to have a top of the line, high-end graphics card, I'm going to have to go with a budget model right now. How good of a card do I need to play most games, on low graphics settings? Any major difference between ATI and NVIDIA? I've been seeing a lot of ATI cards in mid-priced pre-built computers lately, mostly in the ATI 4650-70 area. Is something around that range adequate? Should I look for a similarly priced NVIDIA model instead? Or is it useless for games?I just want to get an idea of what something in that price range is capable of. Could it handle (on acceptable video quality at least) games like, Empire: Total War. What about FPS games like FEAR2, Half Life2. I'm not so into gaming that I need to play the newest and prettiest FPS on the market, but I'd like to be able to most games that at least have been released in recent years. I've been using an NVIDIA 5200 on this computer, and it often does the job in older games like Rome Total War, Doom3, but a lot of games just plain don't work.And a question regarding 7, I noticed that almost every game out there says compatible with XP and/or Vista. Does that mean half the games out there don't work on 7? I waited for Vista compatibility to improve before getting a new PC, now they go and release a new OS that's pre-installed on everything..... damn Microsoft! I look on google and see a whole bunch of "Game not working on Win7!!!" but maybe it's been improved since then. I guess my general question here is, should I avoid Windows 7 if at all possible, or is it better than Vista? I'll probably end up installing Linux anyway, but still.. I need Windows to run Windows-only software.

I was wondering if my dwarf was injured by the dreaded Carp fish http://dwarffortresswiki.net/Carp/ , but I don't think he would have survived at all had he encountered that. I'm not sure how he was injured, but I wish I could kill him off somehow. He's taking up a bed, he's taking food and my other dwarves have to bring him water, but he doesn't do anything but Rest Rest Rest. You can chain war dogs to the front of your fortress with a chain, apparently it's supposed to keep them guarding against thieves.

I started over too, I didn't have to, but I wanted a change plus I wanted to try organizing things a bit better. It didn't work though, and my dwarves are organized just as chaotic as before. Almost as soon as I started the game, my fisherdwarf sustained serious injuries, and he has a mangled (red in the info) leg. I was hoping he would heal, but he never did, and he's just a waste of space. I had a hard time surviving as I didn't have any booze and I have no idea how to build a well.Interestingly, my area is completely different than the last one. There is hardly any stone, and there seems to be a lot of sandy stuff. I found a useful vein of copper though, it's pretty long. Last time, I didn't have much metal to work with.I think I saw that thread, at least I saw one about donations. It is a hefty amount, but I guess some of the people donating that much are probably getting a lot of play time out of the game. I know I've played it a lot longer than the popular World of Goo indie game already and that's not even freeware. On one of the wiki pages about bedrooms, it talked about designing bedrooms. Some of the bedroom designs, the fractal ones on there look like they took a LONG time to make. Personally, I would never get _that_ obsessed with the game, but some people do. I guess that's who feels it's worth $50.

I haven't been paying much attention to commercial computer games for a few years, because my computer couldn't run most of them. I'm thinking about getting a new PC and I might finally be able to play some of the games I missed out on.What are some good games released in the past few years? I'm open to any genre. I can't play online games like WOW on my connection though.

This reminds me of a funny story. It happened a couple years ago My father got a brand new expensive cell phone and was showing it off to me, he's not the most agile person with small electronic gadgets and it slipped out of his hand while he was pushing a button, he bounced it in the air a couple times trying to catch it, then it bounced off the kitchen counter, and into a kitchen sink full water. He was pissed! The phone shut off and seemingly looked dead, but I told him to dry it out for a couple days. But, by some miracle, the phone survived and worked perfectly. Strange.. a miracle?

Am I missing something? Your reply was just a quote of my post. Anyway, I started to experience some severe slowdowns in the game, with so much going on at once. Next time, I will limit the amount of animals I have running around I think. My fps dropping to around 20fps (normal is 100). I managed to speed it back up a little to 50 or 60 which is better than nothing by editing data/init/init.txt and changing something to PARTIAL:2 or some other number, I haven't figured out what the best number is. You might need to try this tweak soon. For a game with these graphics, it sure is CPU intensive!

Yeah, I remember meeting someone from mexico who had loved brain and intestine tacos. Gross! Aren't sausage casing made out intestines, or do they not use that anymore? I don't mind sausages, they taste alright.

I'd love to try living in an igloo. I could probably handle the temperatures, I'm used to the cold, and it'd be an exciting experience. At least that's what I'll say, until I start freezing to death. I'd be sleeping in some really warm clothing though. I think it would feel a bit claustrophobic. I would worry that a polar bear would sit down in front of the door and suffocate me. I imagine constructing an igloo is a lot of work, or else I would try it. I like to test my wilderness survival skills. I don't feel like cutting and carrying huge blocks of ice though. Have you seen those hotels made out of ice? I can't remember what they're called, I can't even remember what they're like, but I think they are entire large buildings built out of ice with ice furniture, ice beds and everything. It is absolutely amazing. I don't know how they keep it from melting. Maybe you can find it on google. I think it's mostly for people who want a unique honeymoon or anniversary because they offered romantic dinners and other things. I don't think many people are allowed in it at one time.

It was started in 2002, released in 2006, and it's still being created. Technically, the game is still in alpha status for some strange reason. I'm angry now, guess what just happened. A raccoon somehow stole my $15000 loin cloth and $20000 harp artifacts. They were worth much more than my entire fortress! I had no idea how to stop it from happening, you think someone would kill the damn raccoon, but they didn't. I probably won't play this fortress long enough to spend that much money anyway. I kind of want to start over, now that I have some idea what I'm doing. I have 43 -- nevermind, 42 dwarves now. One moron just drowned while fishing. Ah well, one less mouth to feed. I have two children dwarves, they can't do anything. Won't let me cook them for dinner, either.. My dwarves need meat. I don't have any animals to kill, do you have to click on each one and click ready to slaughter or something? The cats keep becoming pets and it won't let me slaughter them. I'd slaughter that damn raccoon if I knew how.. Hey, my dwarves organized a party in the dining room. They're walking around and drinking at the tables. Weird.Most of my dwarves are content (not overly happy), but there is one who is really depressed. Ironically, it's my sheriff, who I gave a nice office, a bedroom, and a personal dining room , out of nice material, with silver furniture and he has nothing to do but walk around and pick some plants in his spare time. I can't make him feel better, it didn't help when I drafted him to fight off goblins. He's going to go insane soon, I just know it. You just can't please some dwarves.

I don't think there's too much to zones. You can make a garbage dump zone which is just an area where they dump things you tell them to. There's a fishing zone that tells them where to fish. There's a sand collecting zone too, which sounds like what you need. I haven't even seen any sand. I never experienced any flooding that you mentioned earlier either. I read somewhere that there are cave-ins that kill the dwarves, but haven't seen this yet. Dwarves can also become sensitive to the light if they spend too much time inside.. when they go outside they apparently will be slow and weak. If you have a military you don't want to keep them inside all the time, I guess. The guy who made this game seems to have thought of everything! I guess the dwarves must have kids sometime because I read somewhere that even their babies need a drink to get through the day. Dwarves like to drink even at a young age. Most of my dwarves have that message in their info. And I have no idea why a wounded cat would prevent trading from happening I hate that it pauses the game all the time too.. You mentioned earlier that you were going to plan your fortress before you build it. I saw this utility that helps you do that. http://dwarffortresswiki.net/Useury/DF_Designer/ I don't think I'll be using it, but you might like it. It has a 3D preview though it's not very fancy.

I've never seen purple trees before. You could have "looked" at the blood with the 'k' key maybe? I can't remember what it is, but it might tells you what kind of blood it is. Hunting is a dangerous job, two of my hunters were hunting a unicorn, and getting wounded, I immediately disabled hunting in their job list, but they kept hunting and eventually were mortally wounded and bled to death. Stupid, why would they hunt a unicorn when they were wounded? I don't even know if they use weapons.I think when you slaughter or hunt an animal there are bones left over, they might go to the refuse stock pile. Not sure. I just know I have bone somewhere to make crafts out of. I haven't seen any large creatures yet, (except the deadly unicorn) like mythical creatures or elephants, but they're out there. The elephants apparently give you a lot of bone to work with. I do have a farm outdoors, but it isn't much different than a farm indoors. You just plant different things. I'm not sure where seeds come from, I just farm whatever I have. I think when you cook food, it kills the seeds, but when you brew it it saves the seeds. I _think_ you need seed bags to store seeds in, but I haven't really paid much attention to farming. When the traders come they ask what you want them to bring, you can move the little sliders (they look like |O|:0:0 or something, can't remember really) over to the right for high priority, but that raises the price. Then they tell you what they will pay a lot for. Trading is a bit hard at first but it makes sense once you do it a few times. First you have to have a trade depot and it needs to be reachable by wagon. That means 3 tile corridors (you can hit the 'D' key to show you if it will work). You should have a broker noble, you can set it in then noble window, he's the professional trader. Other dwarves can trade but they get ripped off. Then you go to the trade depot and query it and hit 'g' for goods, then you pick some goods you want the dwarves to transport to the depot. This is where bins come in handy, because instead of carrying 10 crafts back and forth, they can carry 1 bin with 10 crafts inside, saves time. When the goods arrive at the depot, and your broker/trader arrives (sometimes he's lazy and takes his time) you can hit 't' for trade, and then you just swap items.You can cheat too and deconstruct the trade depot when the caravan is unloaded, they won't get angry (bug?), you can keep everything they brought, but they won't want to trade with you much more other years because they don't make any money. I've been finding some silver nuggets which I wasted on making my sheriff's bedroom and office. I should have used it for weapons.. I can't make wooden swords.I was right about the goblins coming to attack, a squad of them arrived and murdered about 4 of my dwarves before my miners and sheriff took them out. I did survive the attack, but somehow seeing the bloodied corpses of my beloved dwarves seems like failure. I don't know why I'm not attracting more immigrants. I had about 24 at one time, one went insane because his masterpiece didn't turn out right, two died hunting, and the 4 died in the attack. It keeps saying my fortress failed to attract immigrants. My fortress looks like a mess, it's really unorganized and has miasma everywhere. I don't know where it's coming from. I look around for rotting things but there aren't any. A lot comes from the butchery, but I don't know why, so I just put it in a small room by itself. My fortress is maybe 5 levels deep but there aren't too many things on the levels. I'm just digging deep for ore. I'm surprised no big game company has picked this up and made it more modern in appearance. I think it would be a popular game, it can't be any worse than some games they put out. DF has a big community of artists and programmers, they have made 3D map visualizers and realistic terrain maps, and great user interfaces (in utilities like Dwarf Therapist, you can't help but wish the whole game looked that clean and organized), but it must be too complex to re-make the entire game with volunteers alone. Maybe it wouldn't even run well with 3d graphics, because on my computer my FPS drops quite a bit on a busy screen. There's a lot going on.As for trading, (again), you could sell wood and stone (the gneiss that's everywhere), but it wouldn't be worth it, it's better to make it into crafts. If you just trade big boulders they are heavy and the trading caravan won't be able to hold the weight. They'll go back to their home and say "This guys cheap, I'm not carrying any more valuable goods across the hostile lands for him!"Oh, and make sure the caravan isn't killed by anyone. I think you get blamed for it and the civilization sends an army to kill you.If you're trying to get rid of all the useless gneiss that's everywhere, you can either make a stone stock pile or a garbage dump (I think it's called a Zone). The dump can hold an infinite amount of the worthless stone. You have to go into the designate menu, and then look for the "Dump" option, then you just designate a boxed area over the stone you want dumped, but try not to dump the valuable stuff.

It doesn't hurt my eyes even though the tiles are small, but people have made larger tilesets. The default I think is 8x10, most of the "best looking' tilesets are 16x16, and some come even bigger. I liked Morrowind, I couldn't believe the game actually worked on my old computer. It's a nice looking game. DF is nothing like Morrowind though*. DF is hard to fit into a genre, it's a bit like a city building game reminiscent of Caesar, and architecture counts (dwarves like big rooms with nice materials, hate long walks etc) a bit of an RTS since you make food and drinks at workshops, to build an "army", bit like tactical strategy game or RPG because you can equip military squads with weapons and armor. It's a bit like Sims because you have to cater to the dwarves needs (some "upper class" dwarves like silver or gold, so you make their rooms silver) or some like raccoon meat, so you hunt raccoon for them. They have moods, they have love or hate relationships with other dwarves (though I don't think the relationships mean much) It's also kind of a puzzle game, because (I haven't done this yet, so I'm not sure) you build death traps - indiana jones movie style- to fight off invaders. You can divert lava or water, or put parts together to make things. It's also a mining game. There used to be a very old computer game that was relatively popular where you mine deep down and look for ore to sell and buy new equipment. It's like that, but instead of being the miner, you have teams of miners. The geology from what I can tell is quite realistic, at least I have to study geology on wiki just to understand what I'm doing. There's a lot you can do, maybe I didn't even name it all. *DF does have an Adventure mode that's RPG style, but I haven't tried it and it isn't the focus of the game, more of a bonus mode to read some randomly generated in-game legends and history.

The animals are for eating! I think you can eat any animal. I'm not sure if they have other uses. You can use their bones and stuff to make crafts. I just breed cats for food. The dogs can be used for hunting and attacking thieves, the cats kill vermin in the fortress. All the animals can become pets and make a dwarf happy. Sometimes I don't understand my dwarves, there's a lot wrong with this situation that happened:A goat and a raccoon died on top of the dining tables (why are they in the dining room anyway), and even though I set the dwarves to dump the corpses in the garbage, everyone avoided it, even going so far as eating beside the corpses, until purple "miasma" was filling the room, and still nobody cleaned it. I eventually cooked something with the corpse in the kitchen.Don't forget your miners need picks.. I only brought one along and had two miners, I don't know what the second miner was using, his finger nails I guess. He became a legendary miner. I'm trying to do some real mining and smelting now, which is kind of hard when I don't know anything about geology. You have to dig around and find some ore, then make some charcoal, then smelt the ore into a bar, then forge the bars into something. As for where to find ore, I have no idea. It comes in either clumps or veins, at certain z- levels. I've done a few new things recently, traded some crafts for some stuff, pissed off the elves (don't trade them anything wooden), created a soldier, built an office for my noble and sheriff. I'm still on my first fortress, and I have a feeling the goblins are going to be invading soon to tear it down. I doubt my one soldier and couple war dogs will be able to fight them off, and I haven't figured out how to make traps. I'm not sure what happens when you create a military, maybe you can attack other civilizations. There is so much to do. Here's a tip, make a lot of crafts and bins (they hold the crafts) then you can trade them and get some new items. I got some new picks and weapons that way, and a wide variety of disgusting sounding food (Spider meat?) of course you need a trade depot and a broker noble dwarf. I think my dwarves appreciated it, they were just eating vegetables for the past few years. Check out the 'Dwarf Therapist' utility .. it lets you organize your dwarves jobs. Pretty useful. If you're on windows, you probably have more options for utilities than I do. I was lucky to find one that works on linux. I too wish other people would try it. I'd like to hear what other people think about the game itself and not the screen shots. By the way, it was started in 2002 and first released in 2006.

Okay, I have to admit, Dwarf Fortress is a great game. It might look a bit crude, but I haven't liked a game this much for a long time. I'm overwhelmed by the depth of it, I've been playing it for hours over the last few days and I've barely scratched the surface of what you can do. I can't wait to get back to building my fortress, and to be honest, I'm cursing myself for discovering this game. It's eating up all my free time!It's true what they say about forgetting the bad graphics. I'm so immersed in the game that it all seems to come together in my mind. The User Interface, while admittedly still pretty non-intuitive, begins to make more sense with experience. For a game this good, I'll deal with the minor flaws.If anyone likes this type of city building game, they should definitely give this an honest try, with a tutorial and the wiki handy. I would dare say it's nearly impossible to learn without some kind of help. The game has it's flaws, mostly in the user-interface and menus being confusing. It's not always obvious where to find things. The graphics really aren't so deplorable once you get used to them, they aren't necessarily a fault. They are surprisingly refreshing after years of games made during the the high definition 3D gaming movement. I always complained about strategy games becoming too 3D and graphic intensive, with bigger and bigger units that fill the screen, making strategic gameplay nothing more than scrolling and rotating around trying to get a good view of the action. Dwarf Fortress might just be the answer to my wishing. It's hard to believe one person made this game. If you ignore the dated graphics, and you'll be able to, this game rivals even big brand name city building-type games in quality and I've played quite a few. This is no obscure game that nobody plays, there is a very active forum with ~200 users active when I visited. I asked a couple Newbie questions, and within seconds there were replies. Dedicated fans, for sure!

As far as I know the game pauses when you quit it and you continue where you left off when you load it. The keys seem to be one of the annoying parts of the game, I think you can rebind them but I haven't tried that. For example, my little + key won't work, but my - will. I have to use the num pad to navigate the menus which seems awkward, and to make it even awkward, some of the menus use the arrow keys. I read in a tutorial that you can supposedly use alt + arrow keys on the menus, but that didn't work for me. Perhaps you have to set them up this way yourself. I think there are 3rd party visualizers that show you what your fortress looks like in 3D. If you look in the game, there's a hotkey for Visualize, which doesn't do anything - I imagine this must load some open of addon. There are also other utilities which I haven't tried, like Dwarf Foreman, Dwarf Therapist. There are a whole bunch of tutorials out there, but I found this one was pretty informative. There are quite a few pages to it. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ If you haven't seen it yet, the http://dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Main_Page wiki is a must see webpage to understand what's going on. I haven't tried adventure or legend mode.