I'm not in favor of full on real time, just that the abstraction be less severe, to allow for sensible levels of micromanagement in dwarf scale time. I think this problem will need addressing sooner or later. For example in the army arc, let's say you sent your army out on 2 month patrol, that 2 months would zip by in fortress time. Good heavens would that be a huge disconnect, Urist McLazypants managed to drag a solitary table across the fort in the time it took 200 dwarves to march 200km.
Edit: spelling on a smart phone...
My goodness, what do you make your tables out of, slade? In two months, my dwarves can haul about a dining room's worth of furniture each. Try to not make up figures.
And GWG needs to calm down.
Probaby, but look at it from my perspective. The way I see it, these people have been more or less leaving their arguments unchanged as I point out the problems with them. At least they stopped accusing me of calling time-skips a bad idea...
I don't wanna be selfish, but I wanna explore a response to one of my posts...
I don't consider that selfish.
The way I see it, perhaps all that needs to be done to get at this pathfinding burden problem without introducing anything all that novel into the game is to (when things are running "fast" as in 1.2 minutes per game-time-tick like dwarf mode does now) have it so that the game would calculate accessibility of tiles the way they are calculated for Trade Depots sort of. So, there would be multiple sort of "accessibility maps" the game would have to store (I'd imagine it would only need to be a handful and not be that resource intensive). Then, any time an entity needs to get from point A to point B, all that needs to be calculated is if point A and point B are accessible to each other (fall within the same accessibility map), and if so, how far it is away, and see how many game-time-ticks it should take for the entity to appear from point A to point B (teleport). That would be the only abstraction that would need to be made between time modes.
Hm, maybe, but what about distance? The way you describe it, it sounds like it would take the same amount of time to go from point A to B if they're adjacent as if one's at the surface and one's at the magma sea.
EDIT:The dwarves spending so much time hauling is an intentional design choise so that your fort looks bussy.
Oh, I really hope that's not the reason behind that design choice. Just doing it to make things look busy is LAME in my opinion.
However, I agree with your emphasis on the importance of hauling in the game. But, speeding movement up would not at all diminish this importance at all. It would remain just as important, and hauling-related-technologies would still be huge game changers and time savers.
I think that doing it "to make things look busy" is not nearly as "lame" as you imply. After all, forts are supposed to look busy, no?
Also, I'm a bit fuzzy on what your suggestion is. Is it slowing down the in-game clock in Fortress Mode to more like Adventure Mode, plus time-skips, or is it what we have now plus accelerated mode?
Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot that you don't actually care about watching dwarves' lives, so you don't care that it would be impossible to play an actual fortress-building game while also enjoying the little details in dwarven daily life. Because if the timescale was slowed like you are suggesting, it'll take a lot longer to go through a fortress week and still enjoy the little things. To say nothing of my earlier point that fortress-making is usually done with the steps all mixed together...
You're straying into full-on strawman territory. Nothing has been said or even implies that it would take the player longer to do things. I think it would actually take less time because you could spend the same amount of player time watching stuff going on but less player time sitting around waiting for things to be done. It doesn't matter if you want to mix your steps together, just skip to whenever you feel like beginning the next step and do it. The bulk of your arguments so far are just ranting about nonexistent theoretical limitations on the system that you seem to invent yourself just to denounce. If you don't stop putting words in my mouth and making wild assumptions, I'm not going to respond to your future posts in this thread.
Sounds funny, seeing as you were claiming I thought time-skips were bad for a while. And, anyways, what part of "Hey, let's have more time calculated per in-game day" does NOT imply that it would take longer to get stuff done? I'm not talking about theoretical limitations, I'm talking about the obvious ramifications of having Fortress Mode run 28-72 times faster: It takes more RL time for the same amount of dwarf time. Does that not describe your idea?
More plump helmets would need to be harvested per tile. That also means that fewer seeds would need to be made per plump helmet, or else that more seeds would be needed to plant one tile with plump helmets. And what about animals? Are you going to up butchering returns? But wait, bones are tied to the same system that creates meat! So, either we'd need to accept having a lot more bones and such plus a little tinker, or we need a major tinker with butchering returns. My point is that everything needs to be changed if the timescale is, or else nothing works.
I got your point quite awhile ago, my point that you continue to refuse to address is that the current system requires more tinkering for each new addition, and potentially requires systemic tinkering for re-balancing with some new additions. Talking from a program design perspective, it's like investing in a more versatile program architecture to save effort in the long run. Obviously my idea would require a lot of work on the front end because everything currently having to do with time and related to the current time abstraction would need to be adjusted. I never claimed that it wouldn't. Again, you seem determined to rail against nonexistent issues or things I haven't said. I don't care how much effort this idea would take, and I have no reason to, because Toady is in charge and no one's making him do anything. I will suggest whatever ideas I think would be good, no matter how radical, and he is free to listen or not listen to them. You're wasting everyone's time by presuming to have a claim on Toady's and presuming to dictate what he should or should not do based on how much of his time and effort would be spent.
If I thought that it was a good idea, I would be all for it, no matter what the programming time. But I don't. The point of that was pointing out that it would not be quick and easy to change the fortress mode timescale, like you seemed to be claiming.
Summary of points made against my idea, not by anyone in particular:
-"Ignoring all the stuff the OP has written about how this would work, it wouldn't work!"
Which stuff?
...Also, who was the OP again?
-"I feel that I own Toady's time and labor, and reject this idea on the premise that it would require an expenditure of too much of both resources, which I own."
Where has anyone implied that? No one feels that they own Toady's time or labor, any more than they do the money in the federal treasury. That doesn't mean that we want the government to waste its money on stupid stuff, nor that we want Toady to spend his time on ideas that many of us feel would make the game worse and not ones that would make it better.
-"It's crazy! But I feel no particular desire to raise any actual argument about why that is."
Who has said that? I have done my best to explain my arguments.
-"I can sit here and endlessly bring up seemingly-different but for the purposes of this argument the same issues and declare that these potential problems invalidate this entire idea, and continue the process when each of my specific but suspiciously similar objections is addressed. And I apparently plan to continue to do so."
Um, who has done this? Yeah, I've brought up the same issues a lot, but that's because you haven't really addressed the core issues.
3. Just ignore the time difference. Change moon states and day/ night so that they aid gameplay, not realism. (Strangely, I feel this would bother immersion less than timeskips and long loading screens)
Thanks ebbor, that could be a very valid point. I would NOT like anything that involved much of a loading time. I think that it could be entirely possible for Toady to achieve a negligible loading time with my idea, but Toady is the person best equipped to make that determination.
He's saying to add flavor divorced from the calander (which I think is a good idea), just FYI.
-snip-
I do like your idea a little bit Andeerz. I think it would be an improvement over the status quo. However, to be honest, the most important part of my idea to me is real time game speed, and time skipping is just the way that it's made to work. It's the place where I'd like the abstraction to be shoved into because I feel that it's a better place for it. I also think slower time scales could be improvements, but I still think real time is the best because it avoids artificial time distortion of the game's balance, especially multiple inconsistent time distortions across different systems.
Funny, I feel just the opposite. The time-skip may not be any less demanding of Toady's time and energy, but it isn't hotly debated and it won't require that players wait a lot longer before anything Fun, like migrant or sieges, happens.
Timey wimey wibbly wobbly stuff: It's complicated.
Give me a made up example! I don't care how contrived it is. This would help a lot in figuring out whatever weaknesses there might be in whatever suggestion.
I think it's a Doctor Who reference.
As far as I know, you're only abstracting pathfinding, whitout actually changing anything. So no. I don't know how large the gains would be.
I am suggesting changing four other things, though:
1. hunger/thirst/sleep requirements
2. Adding a toggle between adventure-more and dwarf-mode time (1 tick = ~1 second and 1 tick = ~1.2 minutes respectively...)
3. Increasing the amount of food/water units harvested when harvesting a tile of plants/butchering an animal/getting water from a well
4. keeping entity movement speed per game-time-unit the same in dwarf mode as it is in adventure mode
Let me know if I need to make anything more clear...
So...you're tending towards the "Slow down FM to AM speed" side of the argument? Sad, it means I need to argue with you.
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For everyone who seems to be confused about why I think that slowing down Fortress Mode to allow for realistic schedules, like three meals a day and day/night cycles, here's the biggest argument I've been repeating over and over yet which has been ignored and/or misinterpreted every time I've repeated it:
It would make everything take longer IRL.
Let's choose a number for the heck of it--the number I came up with, x28, seems to be the most conservative and fit the dwarven "day" fairly well, as dwarves eat twice a month and I believe sleep half that often.
So, currently it takes about two hours, let's say, to get a fortress from Granite 1, 1051, to Granite 1, 1052. Maybe half (probably less, depending on playstyle) of that is designations and other things the player does that cause the game to autopause; let's assume that this number does not increase much, although if we increase the amount of work dwarves can do in a day from "maybe make a chair" to "make a few pieces of furniture," which is probably more realistic, then obviously you'd spend longer than that one hour. That leaves one hour of waiting and watching while the dwarves follow your orders. If the game was slowed down to 28x speed, that hour would become 28 or so, and that means that you'd make it tothe end of the year at the end of a bit over an RL day, spent playing constantly without any breaks. How does this not affect things? Sure, with time-skips, you can argue that you would be able to have your fort skip past the time you spend waiting for things to get done, but whose fortresses are only doing one thing at a time? This is extra-true at the start, where after digging out the start of your fortress you are planting crops, building workshops, filling bedrooms and dining rooms with beds and tables and stuff, et cetera. In short, playng at the new speed would make things take A LOT more of our time to get done. Who wants that?