Bay 12 Games Forum

OK, I can get around this problem by changing shorter history, larger map, fewer civs, more sites. But the standard medium world gen options created a world absolutely saturated with civs, which still strikes me as buggy. Anyway, going to embark on this new world now.

31.14 is pretty unstable. I got several crahses from looking at certain parts of Legends, changing my fortress name and embarking.

*sticks to 31.12*

Yeah, this is because the o-circumflex character is causing some sort of weird line ending or code interrupting error, instead of turning into a block like the rest of the diacritics.  I made a bug report when 0.31.13 came out.  Sounds like based on what Baughn said earlier in the thread that it'll be fixed in the next patch.

Quote from: FleshForge on September 16, 2010, 02:00:04 am

Since you have climates ranging from glacial to scorching, it seems pretty obvious that it's half a planet

Even if this is true, it doesn't mean the planet is necessarily the size of Earth.

I think the issue here is that there are multiple scales being envisioned, and the civ sprawl is the first feature that measures from the inside out.  The size of the villages and their farmland is based on the 1x1 creature size, so that in adventure mode you can walk around and feel like things are mostly to scale to your adventurer.

The other way of measuring scale is from the outside in.  A medium map has oceans, major rivers, mountain ranges.  What is its footprint supposed to be?  A hundred miles?  A thousand?

I'm sure someone has done this math before, but I can't find it.  Let's just hypothesize that a 1x1 tile at the lowest level of play is a square meter.  So a 1x1 local tile is 48 meters across, and a 16x16 local tile (1x1 region tile) is 768m across...  so a medium worldgen is 129x129 of those, yes?    That's 99 km on each side.

Our perception in previous versions on embark is that we are creating a bigger world, one that is much larger than 99 km or 62 miles across.  Our whole dwarven civilization might span a 3x5 area, which would be less than five miles from one end to the other.  I don't think that's how we treat the game from the DF embark view.  We abstract the world map into being a world much larger than the game thinks it is because we see oceans, glaciers, mountain ranges, and lakes that we imagine being tens or hundreds of miles across.  Sprawl forces DF to exist in Adventure Mode's scale, and that kind of breaks it, at least from the embark screen.

Unfortunately, this is the first feature that really highlights just how difficult it's going to be to create two games in one.  Adventure Mode and Dwarf Fortress exist in two different realities, and I tend to think it will get more complicated from here to keep the two together as a unit.  Sprawl creates farms and villages that are to scale with your adventurer, but they are ugly behemoths when considering your new fortress, and they're *everywhere*.

I think sprawl is an important feature for world immersion in adventure mode, and I applaud the effort made to simulate the amount of land required to feed thousands of people (something most other games get totally wrong).  I just don't think it can coexist with fortress mode in its current state.  A decision may have to be made on which scale makes more sense for this game.  If the 99 km region/island attitude is preferred, then civilizations should do most of their work off-map.  In a fully imagined world (thousands of miles across), one that we are taking a narrow look at (a hundred miles across), we may see ten settlements instead of two hundred.  Terrain features would take up more space.  And on and on.

So that it matches the same functionality in Internet browsers and other applications.  Scrolling the mousewheel up should increase the size of things on the screen.  It currently does the opposite until you reverse the keybindings yourself.

Thanks.

Is there any particular reason to give each dwarf their own bedroom?

Here are the reasons:  It gives them happy thoughts.  It gives them a place to store their claimed items.  It makes your fortress more... realistic.

Bed usage is bugged right now, but Toady said it's fixed for 0.31.13.

Do I win the challenge if I did this four years ago? 

Quote from: JAFANZ on September 10, 2010, 01:44:40 am

(the diagonal spokes rely on the fact that diagonal movement takes 1.4 steps for every 1 that orthagonal takes)

This is kinda offtopic, but it needs to be addressed: Diagonals take 1 step, exactly the same as orthogonal ones. Yes, we all know that the diagonal on a square is 2^.5 times as long as its side, but that's not how the game treats it.

I find this funny because it means when you build a square room (5x5, say), you've actually made a circle, because each point on the edge is equidistant from the tile in the center.

This may have been true in the past (I don't remember, I've been playing the game for a very long time), but it isn't now.  While your gusto in asserting yourself was admirable, I hope you tell your sources they were wrong. 

Dwarven science shows that it takes a cat 10 frames to move south and 14 to move southwest.  I did this science myself, and double-checked about thirty seconds ago.

Quote from: Moonshine Fox on September 08, 2010, 12:57:07 am

Hmm, no more shiny water?

No. Much MORE shiny water. If I understand correctly, Ironhand is replacing the tiles for 1-7 with different water-tile symbols, which change/swirl as the water level changes.
This can be done since we are moving to true-type fonts: the game won't actually need these tiles to display numbers in the game.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

While I'm not sure I agree with the idea of using seven whole tiles on fluid levels, I got to thinking:  are we sure the 1-7 fluid tiles aren't going to be displayed as numbers via the new truetype system?  I monitor this thread, but I didn't see this talked about, and I haven't seen mention of a place in the raws to assign graphics to the current fluid levels.