Bay 12 Games Forum

My interface has:

"u: Usable
 j: Unusable"

I'm not quite sure what those two mean with regards to foreign/non-foreign. I'm playing 40d with default graphics, if that makes a difference.

quote:

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Originally posted by Toady One:
<STRONG>When I was in grad school, I went to throw some garbage out in a dumpster by the campus housing.  There was a raccoon there.  It was pretty small, so I figured I'd just walk toward the dumpster and it would scamper off.  It didn't have any buddies around (there was a pack of five or so peaking into the window last time I was at my grandma's place).  Anyway, so I took a step forward.  The raccoon took two steps forward.  And it growled.  I lost.  I had to bring my garbage back inside and throw it out in the morning, when creatures of the night aren't haunting the area.</STRONG>

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Those wouldn't happen to be the Rains raccoons, would they?

So earlier, I was watching my dwarves launch chunks of rocks at some pesky humans, when I noticed that the rocks would break ice that it landed on and fall into the water. I hadn't noticed that previously, and it was just a little detail that made flinging chunks of talc and rhyolite that much more enjoyable.

What little things have happened or surprised you while playing that surprised you with their accuracy or unexpectedness?

elipsis

quote:

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On my main computer (a fancy gaming rig with dual core processors and all that nonsense) BOTH scrub and tundra were capped at fluctuating between 59 and 60.  

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If your machine seems to be hard-capped at 60 fps, try turning vertical sync off in your graphics card settings. I don't know the technical details, but having vertical sync on will force the game to run at a max 60 fps to match what the monitor is refreshing at. If your main computer is really a beast but vertical sync is on, the beastitude is never unleashed.

So I thought to myself, wait a minute, we don't even do this in real life (Middle East, a few other places excepted). Why would dwarves do it? And then I said to myself, well, because they have access to magma. Strictly speaking, if we were to try to do this with wood, it'd be incredibly inefficient. And here's why:

According to my back-of-the-envelope number crunching, it takes 2.57 MJ/liter of water to raise water from 23 C to 100 C and to boil it all off completely.

If we look up wood burning energetics, we see that a value of 30000MJ/cord ( slightly biased source:woodheat.org) for hardwood isn't far off. Note that things like pine would give off less heat. 30000MJ/cord is about 4220.7 MJ/m^3. If we take a chunk of wood the size of a liter of water, 1000 cm^3, and completely burn it, we would get 42.27 MJ out of it. So assuming we have perfect efficiency (WHOA HORRIBLE ASSUMPTION) it would require .061 blocks of wood at 1000 cc's to boil one liter of water. So we'd need a block of wood a quarter the size of a quart of water to get one gallon of water out of the system. IF everything was ideal.

So the 30GJ number for the wood was for perfectly dried wood in a bomb combustion chamber (filled with oxygen for better combustion). Unless your dwarves were seasoning their wood for several years in a sheltered location, and then burn the wood in an oxygen-rich environment, the numbers they'll get out will be much less. New wood has tons of water, so it has to boil that water off as well as combust, meaning less energy out. So let's say that our actual number is 1/4 of 30 MJ, taking into account the various types of non-hardwoods (tower-caps, for instance) that we're burning. So now we need a block of wood the size of a quart of water to boil a gallon of water.

Of course, when we're burning this wood, not all of this heat is going into the water. Far from it. Depending on the quality of the stove, anywhere from 70-90% of that heat is getting radiated away into the surroundings, regardless of the quality of the wood. So if our stove was 20% efficient in burning wood, a significant accomplishment, then we'd be burning a gallon and a quart of water-sized amount of wood to boil one gallon of water.

Add in other inefficiencies, like loss of steam and other thermal factors, and we can quickly see the amount of wood we need going up and up.

Post summary in one line: use magma instead.

Sorry if any of my numbers are off, I'm not a thermo guy. It's interesting to note that you'd need magma in order to boil this saltwater, so you'd have to pick your biome carefully. A volcanic coast line?

So I only looked through the core components and some of the bloats, and I'm not a regular reader of the forums, so forgive me if this has been said before, but...

I think it'd be neat if, after a child is old enough to become a real active member of the society, you could assign it a task it had to complete before it could join the community. That task could be forging a sword, or chopping down X trees, or killing N antmen, or even something like killing a wolf with only a shield and a spear and a loincloth. It could be optional, with some reward, like starting off a class with a higher skill, but with the risk that they would fail (which would probably mean die/be maimed). If you tell your munchkins to leave the map to slay a dragon, they probably won't come back, but if you tell them to mine out a new kitchen, then they'll probably have a higher rate of success.

This could also serve as a nice population control, and a more humane way of killing off those pesky kids.

So I was paging through the Something Awful photoshop phriday column when I came across a gem.

SA Photoshop Phriday

Scroll to the bottom of the page and check out some 'shopper's homage to DF.

edit: link corrected, thanks for the heads up.

[ October 27, 2007: Message edited by: sideburns17 ]