Bay 12 Games Forum
Dwarf Fortress => DF General Discussion => Topic started by: shinyarceus4 on February 01, 2013, 03:09:37 pm
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If the world map is supposed to represent the entire world your dwarves live in, then the planet the dwarves live in is either inanely large or small but non-spherical. The Mercator projection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection) used in real-life maps are highly distorted near the north and south poles, so landmasses like Greenland and Australia are much larger than they actually are. Yet in Dwarf Fortress, the distances are uniform no matter how far north or south you go. 1 square region at the equator is exactly the same as one at the north or south poles, where a square map as the Mercator projection is so distorted as to be unmappable. Is the DF world map just one part of an infinitely large planet where every terrain combination exists? Or is it just dwarven physics saying that the planet isn't even spherical at all? What do you think?
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The map is not a "world", it's a "region".
Keep in mind that you can start as an adventurer from "outside" the region. (Functionally created from nowhere, but presumed to just be from some other continent.)
Also, keep in mind that the standard "world" is an "island", not even a continent.
Since a tile is 2 meters by 2 meters by 3 meters, and we know the exchange between local tiles, area tiles, and regional tiles, even the largest of maps in the game (257x257 regional tiles) are only the size of Ireland.
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Remember, this takes place back when everyone believes the world is flat, therefore it IS flat.
Think Discworld
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Remember, this takes place back when everyone believes the world is flat, therefore it IS flat.
Think Discworld
Discworld is a subjective reality where belief actually does shape reality.
DF has a roundworld with objective reality. What you believe doesn't mean what's really there will be any different. (Otherwise game physics would be subjective and change from place to place and perception to perception, and game physics are absolute and objectively measurable.)
It's a round world, just that we're looking at a piece of the world that is very small so the curvature of the planet doesn't screw things too out of proportion.
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Torus maybe? Toruses are cool.
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Torus maybe? Toruses are cool.
The DF map is mathematically closer to a quarter of a torus segment than it is to to any section of a sphere. If Toady wants to stick with Cartesian grids, no DF world will ever be properly mappable onto spheroid.
I don't see what's wrong with imagining a DF world to be a thin cuboid hovering above hell. It's fantasy, it can be weird.
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I don't see what's wrong with imagining a DF world to be a thin cuboid hovering above hell. It's fantasy, it can be weird.
Preposterous. The map is clearly a turtle's back.
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Remember, this takes place back when everyone believes the world is flat, therefore it IS flat.
Think Discworld
A flat earth wasn't actually a commonly-held belief in European history. Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the planet by measuring a stick's shadow, which he wouldn't have attempted if he thought the world was a plane. Also, the Aristotelean model of cosmology arranges round planets into spheres of motion. This was adopted by the Catholics who at the time were telling most people what to think. http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/retrograde/aristotle.html
The map is not a "world", it's a "region".
Keep in mind that you can start as an adventurer from "outside" the region. (Functionally created from nowhere, but presumed to just be from some other continent.)
Also, keep in mind that the standard "world" is an "island", not even a continent.
Since a tile is 2 meters by 2 meters by 3 meters, and we know the exchange between local tiles, area tiles, and regional tiles, even the largest of maps in the game (257x257 regional tiles) are only the size of Ireland.
I think the weirdest thing about that is that the north and south borders are always extremes of hot or cold.
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I think the weirdest thing about that is that the north and south borders are always extremes of hot or cold.
You can change it if you want, but basically, I think it's because Toady wanted to ensure that every map had every biome available. It wouldn't be quite the same if you started a new world and the playable region carved out of it is basically Greenland - a freak ton of tundra and only a little livable land.
That way, all the different critters can exist on a single map.
(And since I like playing with advanced map features, I tend to make the maps go from temperate to tropical, along with upping the variances and screwing with the weights on a lot of other things so that I can get more maps that have intersections of interesting biomes, so I can get an embark that has, for example, a good mountain and savage forest and evil swamp converge.)
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Actually, the weirdest thing about DF Maps is how Large regions can have two poles.
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DF worlds are flat. End of discussion.
Else there would be much deformation in the tiles closer to the edges of the world.
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I have always imagined that all Dwarf Fortress worldgens exist on the same planet.
In WH40k there are so called "demon worlds" that constantly shift and change, my best guess was that the regions constantly shift and that old regions are shifted into new.
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Actually, the weirdest thing about DF Maps is how Large regions can have two poles.
Maybe they aren't poles but rather different regions. Or perhaps a large region is like a "side" or face of a globe.
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How can you have a planet shape poll and not have the one canonically correct answer on it?
It's a sphere. It's supposed to be an Earth-like planet and we're only looking at a tiny portion of it, small enough that distortions from the curvature of the globe doesn't significantly impact the map shape.
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it's a sphere, clearly dwarves get smaller as they walk away from the equator. This effect is particularly noticeable at the caps. where size, and therefore momentum of the water molecules is decreased enough to become ice.
I think that's how it works on earth too.
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i believe it is shaped like a banana
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i believe it is shaped like a banana
Yeah, right. [/sarcasm]
How can you have a planet shape poll and not have the one canonically correct answer on it?
It's a sphere. It's supposed to be an Earth-like planet and we're only looking at a tiny portion of it, small enough that distortions from the curvature of the globe doesn't significantly impact the map shape.
But... only one pole of the planet is cold, not two. and the planet spins, considering we have a day/night cycle.
So... problem ?
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How can you have a planet shape poll and not have the one canonically correct answer on it?
It's a sphere. It's supposed to be an Earth-like planet and we're only looking at a tiny portion of it, small enough that distortions from the curvature of the globe doesn't significantly impact the map shape.
I was saying though, when you look at a model of the Earth and start looking at the pacific, you are looking at one "side" (wrong word) of the sphere because you cannot see, for example, Moldova but you can see Kiribati. I know spheres only have one side but it's one "perspective" of the globe or something. Maybe a large region in DF is like that.
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But... only one pole of the planet is cold, not two. and the planet spins, considering we have a day/night cycle.
So... problem ?
Yes, I've only said in every post since the second, including the one you're responding to, that you're not looking at the whole globe on the map, just a region. (Which is why adventurers come from "outside".)
There isn't any pole, the map only represents a slice of one hemisphere. It's a slice small enough that distortions from Mercator cartography are negligible.
Again, the whole map is still only the size of a nation like Ireland or Belgium. A Pocket Island is hardly the size of a tiny country, and a large land is not even close to a quadrant of the Earth. (4 m^2 local tile * 48*48 area tiles * 16*16 world map tiles * 257*257 total area / 1,000,000 m^2 per km^2) = 155,829 km, or around the size of Greece.
Toady merely exacerbates temperature differences to give the full variety of biomes per world. Nothing ever says the north end of the map is a pole or an equator, and nothing says you fall off if you go past the edges - in fact, the game explicitly has mechanics that rely upon things coming in from past those borders, so that's just wrong.
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Where did Toady ever say that the world that the game generates is meant to be a sphere?
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Armok made the world in his own image.
And behold the world was a d6.
Then in his infinite wisdom Armok decided that one face was unsurpassably hot and one unsurpassably cold.
Armok then created all the creatures that move upon the cube and sentenced them to mediocrity.
Ever since dwarves all over the cube over have been alcoholics struggling to come to terms with never being outright successes or abject failures but merely blood for the workings of the cube.
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Where did Toady ever say that the world that the game generates is meant to be a sphere?
The point of what I'm saying is that it's not meant to be the whole world, just a slice.
He's said that he would have made the world into a sphere, but programming anything but a rectangle would have been a serious pain.
However, more to my point, he's also said that it's not the whole world, but a region where populations walk in or out (moreso in the past), including the still very-much-observable fact that any new start of an Adventurer allows for a start as a "Human Outsider". Meaning, not from that region.
The quotes I was specifically thinking of were from one of the DF talks, I believe, but those things are frustratingly difficult to actually search if you can't precisely remember the terms, so I came up with a quote that was as close to the one I was thinking of as possible.
A flat projection of a sphere is somewhat tricky. You can't represent everything with a rectangle, anyway, not without distortion or tearing. You can't even do a portion of a sphere without distortion. So, the current world is distorted, if you assume it's spherical in the first place. Right now the edge blocks, but what did you want? If you wrap around the left/right edges, you have a cylindrical world. If you walk off the top, you have to decide where you want that to go as well, and you can either end up with a torus or some kind of weird projective space depending on how you define it, but you're not going to get a sphere if you want a rectangular map. An actual sphere would require significant revisions to world map storage and how it interprets the local maps in that space.<P>We have lots of land now because water is relatively pointless space. This can change when ships go in, yeah. It also doesn't simulate an entire world so that repopulation can occur from the edges and shores of edge-touching oceans. I haven't done the Life Cycles arc, but even after I do, world population will probably always have a downward trend if the world is self-contained, unless the game is relatively non-violent.
As for the intent to make a sphere, best evidence is to see this older post (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=213.msg1817#msg1817).
The limits of the world are just set up the easy way right now. It would be very tricky to make the world a sphere, just because it is impossible to tile a sphere evenly with squares, so the current map storage system wouldn't work. Making the world a torus or a cylinder would be easier :) When I set up the universe/world parameters generator, the limits of the world could be any sort of thing -- just a mist that you walk into to go to a different world, or a drop-off into the void, whatever. Making the world round will be much harder.
It's meant to be as close to a spheric world as possible without screwing around with complex mechanics that wouldn't add too much to the game, anyway. (Unless Toady eventually wants to start having trade with "distant lands" you can't actually enter, and are just abstracted.)
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What you believe doesn't mean what's really there will be any different.
This is why we can edit the raws. :)
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I wouldn't say that counts as evidence that Toady intends the world generated to be considered spherical; or if you want to be precise, that the region generated is part of the surface of a sphere. He probably doesn't care; DF is a work in progress, and he hasn't put all that stuff in yet. He's got ideas for randomly generated creation mythologies, world shapes and all that stuff in the pipeline though. Maybe he'll think about expanding or at least implementing world shapes in the future. Personally, I can't help but think of the world as being an oblong bounded by impenetrable opaque barriers because that is literally what is represented in game. You have to mentally fudge what's actually happening in game to think of the world any other way.
Whether or not you interpret a DF region as being a segment of a larger world is purely a matter of preference. The code can call in new populations ex nihilo as required; whether you choose to imagine this represents populations wandering in from elsewhere or not is up to the player.
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Considering that the world is created by Armok, I'd imagine that he can shape it however goddamn well he pleases.
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I wouldn't say that counts as evidence that Toady intends the world generated to be considered spherical; or if you want to be precise, that the region generated is part of the surface of a sphere. He probably doesn't care; DF is a work in progress, and he hasn't put all that stuff in yet. He's got ideas for randomly generated creation mythologies, world shapes and all that stuff in the pipeline though. Maybe he'll think about expanding or at least implementing world shapes in the future. Personally, I can't help but think of the world as being an oblong bounded by impenetrable opaque barriers because that is literally what is represented in game. You have to mentally fudge what's actually happening in game to think of the world any other way.
Whether or not you interpret a DF region as being a segment of a larger world is purely a matter of preference. The code can call in new populations ex nihilo as required; whether you choose to imagine this represents populations wandering in from elsewhere or not is up to the player.
If you want to interpret the game world as a plane and Toady doesn't want to change it, that's one thing; The game actually supports that claim.
If you want to interpret the game world as having impenetrable boundaries or not a segment of a larger world, that is not; Creatures move into the world from outside the boundaries, including "human outsider" adventurers, which you can find proof of yourself in less than a minute if you just open up the game and start a new adventurer. That is explicitly what Toady has said, and what the game demonstrates.
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What you believe doesn't mean what's really there will be any different.
This is why we can edit the raws. :)
In-context, I was talking about the difference between Subjective Reality and Objective Reality.
In Objective Reality, if you think that the sound of a creature bumping around on the other side of a door might be a troll, you can open up the door, and find out it's just a kitten bumping up against a chair. If it were Subjective Reality, your belief would change reality and make that kitten actually be a troll if you believed it would be.
Dwarf Fortress exists in Objective Reality - things are defined, and your perspective on the matter doesn't change reality. Changing the raws merely changes the objective properties of materials or shapes of objects, but they are still objective and measurable. (Just like how changing a stick by cutting it down from 5 inches long to 4 inches long doesn't change that it's an objectively measurable object.)
Considering that the world is created by Armok, I'd imagine that he can shape it however goddamn well he pleases.
Armok doesn't exist in the current game. There are gods, there are creators, but they're not Armok. There isn't even a word for Armok in any race's languages. Armok is merely an artifact of a previous game until Toady decides he wants to actually put Armok in.
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Though it is largely without basis I believe that the "Forces Unknown" that guide adventurers are Armok.
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Armok doesn't exist in the current game. There are gods, there are creators, but they're not Armok. There isn't even a word for Armok in any race's languages. Armok is merely an artifact of a previous game until Toady decides he wants to actually put Armok in.
According to the lore of Dwarf Fortress' prequel, Slaves to Armok: God of Blood, Armok is the creator of the world and the in-game explanation for the random world generation:
"Armok, the God of Blood, is just about the only constant in these chaotic random universes. A general sense of conflict keeps Armok appeased - when the universe becomes too boring it is set on the anvil of creation to be reforged."
"The destruction of the world by Armok will arise inevitably in most game worlds. As civilizations spread and the frontier closes, the world will start to look homogeneous. Armok, looking upon this decadence in disgust, will reform the world. Basically, when the universe has become too boring, it will be changed."
This also heavily implies that Armok is the in-world personification of the player entity.
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Pfft. "Objective Reality" is a non-concept.
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And that's why no-one can relate even on a basic level, the world is completely different for every single person, and we're all trapped in our own nightmarish delusions without being able to understand others as they are all screaming whales inside a horseshoe made out of spiders, at least to our perspectives.
If someone can look at a glass of water, and another person can look at said glass of water, if they can both agree it's a glass of water then that's the objective reality.
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Let's just wait until Toady does the next FOTF:
Toady, what is the shape of the world?
Inspired by this thread: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=122411.0 (http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=122411.0)
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This also heavily implies that Armok is the in-world personification of the player entity.
This is also not true:
Our eventual goal is to have the player's role be the embodiment of positions of power within the fortress, performing actions in their official capacity, to the point that in an ideal world each command you give would be linked to some noble, official or commander.
The player is the collective positions of authority in the fortress. Basically, you are a council of the nobles doing their respective jobs.
At the start of the game, you are the expedition leader, alone. When you assign a bookkeeper, you gain access to what the bookkeeper knows when they have accounted for objects in the fort enough to know it - when you want to know how much of something you have or where it is, you ask the bookkeeper, and they tell you. Otherwise, you only know of what you manually look at in a stockpile and count for yourself.
Likewise, you aren't given immediate access to knowledge of who killed a creature. A god would know. Dwarves who just happened to find a dwarf murdered in the night wouldn't.
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Perhaps though the player's role is actually synonymous with Armok's role. He controls the positions of power within the fortress.
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Perhaps though the player's role is actually synonymous with Armok's role. He controls the positions of power within the fortress.
Isn't that just redefining something into meaninglessness?
You're basically saying that Armok is the player because Armok is the player, no matter what the player might be proved to be. Armok, therefore, would have no definition or identity of his(?) own, other than the player.
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Isn't that just redefining something into meaninglessness?
You're basically saying that Armok is the player because Armok is the player, no matter what the player might be proved to be. Armok, therefore, would have no definition or identity of his(?) own, other than the player.
Basically yeah. Except he's a god. Kind of.
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Perhaps though the player's role is actually synonymous with Armok's role. He controls the positions of power within the fortress.
Isn't that just redefining something into meaninglessness?
You're basically saying that Armok is the player because Armok is the player, no matter what the player might be proved to be. Armok, therefore, would have no definition or identity of his(?) own, other than the player.
You speak as though you're unaware of how religious thinking works. Once you bring a god into the discussion, rationality flies out of the window.
It's nice that Toady's been thinking about about the player's role in Fort Mode, but right now, you are just playing as the dwarven communist hive-mind. You're certainly not playing as 'Armok'; Armok only exists in the (purely whimsical) game title.
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And that's why no-one can relate even on a basic level, the world is completely different for every single person, and we're all trapped in our own nightmarish delusions without being able to understand others as they are all screaming whales inside a horseshoe made out of spiders, at least to our perspectives.
If someone can look at a glass of water, and another person can look at said glass of water, if they can both agree it's a glass of water then that's the objective reality.
Fucked up if the water was a hologram the whole time.
Also I'm pretty sure people are trapped inside isolated nightmare delusions. Have you ever read this thing about how shitty people are to each other in Dubai (http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html)?
Of course I'm not stuck in a virtual hellish fuckscape, I'm just a western cyber-hedonist aping individualist traits when individualism is enforced as a universal norm, sitting at a computer made from dubious coltan at a shitty noxious taiwanese factory, doing taxes to pay for drones to blow up impoverished people on the other side of the world, checking the on line discussion of a violent video game that lets me build things I can't irl
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And that's why no-one can relate even on a basic level, the world is completely different for every single person, and we're all trapped in our own nightmarish delusions without being able to understand others as they are all screaming whales inside a horseshoe made out of spiders, at least to our perspectives.
If someone can look at a glass of water, and another person can look at said glass of water, if they can both agree it's a glass of water then that's the objective reality.
Fucked up if the water was a hologram the whole time.
Also I'm pretty sure people are trapped inside isolated nightmare delusions. Have you ever read this thing about how shitty people are to each other in Dubai (http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html)?
Of course I'm not stuck in a virtual hellish fuckscape, I'm just a western cyber-hedonist aping individualist traits when individualism is enforced as a universal norm, sitting at a computer made from dubious coltan at a shitty noxious taiwanese factory, doing taxes to pay for drones to blow up impoverished people on the other side of the world, checking the on line discussion of a violent video game that lets me build things I can't irl
That's still not grasping the key difference between objective and subjective reality.
In objective reality, you can still have delusions, sure, but they're just delusions - they affect nobody but you.
In subjective reality, your delusions change reality. They affect other people as your delusions become things they actually experience.
Although it was empowered by an artifact, Michael Crichton's Sphere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_(novel)), where one character's fear of a giant squid causes one to actually appear and start attacking the characters. Their subjective experience alters reality.
For a real and true delve into what subjective reality really means, Paranoia Agent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_Agent) is perhaps the best example that comes to mind.
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Why bother so much with this? I mean, right now we have some kind of a quarter of the world (based on the fact that generally you get a map from one pole to the equator), not the whole planet.
In the end it could be something like a huge square, just like now, with the sides connected to represent some sphereness, and as for the poles? Screw them. It could be kind kind of a Civilization 3 map, I didn't see much people complaining about that. This could give us really huge worlds to play with, specially once ships go into play.
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I'm generally with NW_Kohaku on this, but with some minor differences. General thoughts:
* The largest DF map currently available is a "Region", and there are several different good reasons to believe that said Region is a part of a greater whole ("World", for simplicity).
* The largest currently available Region corresponds to a large island or small sub-continent in terms of practical extent.
* The lack of latitude variation, arguments about spherical vs. rectangular mapping, etc. are unfortunately in the scale range that it is not possible to unambiguously determine which effects are the result of design decisions, world shape, mapping conventions, simulation simplifications, and game mechanics. The simplest summary is that "the Region is a small enough patch of the World that the inaccuracies caused by representing as a square grid are low in comparison to other simulation issues".
* Regions are usually generated with a range of North-South climactic variation that seems unusually high for the practical size of the region if it occupied a similar size on Earth. This is somewhat in conflict with the previous point, as on our Earth these two assumptions don't go well together.
* The DF vertical structure is clearly quite different from that of Earth, in particular the presence of super-dense structure at the base of the geological column.
My default assumption used to be that the largest Region is a "trimmed octant", roughly 1/8 of a sphere with the pointy polar end trimmed off; but this doesn't work out as well as I'd like.
An interesting case could be made that the DF World is smaller and/or differently shaped than our Earth, but due to the presence of a hyper-dense basement the net surface effect remains similar (cf Ringworld and Scrith, for one vaguely similar example).
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A smaller but denser planet? So gravity remains the "same" for example? That's interesting indeed.
However I really don't worry too much about it. I will be happy, as I said before, with a civ3 kind of map, a rectangle warped around and the up and down parts with a line representing the poles.
One can even justify people not walking in straight line to pass from one side of the pole to the other as I don't know, they preferring to stick to the coast in oder to avoid the worst cold, lose themselves or whatever.
The only thing I see about a map like that is the huge amount of data it would bare and the size it would have in your hard drive.
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I don't see what's wrong with imagining a DF world to be a thin cuboid hovering above hell. It's fantasy, it can be weird.
Preposterous. The map is clearly a turtle's back.
So demons are really the Turtle's anti bodies then?