Bay 12 Games Forum

Off the current vein of conversation, I was looking at all the dev log things before where there was the calculations of minecarts and positions of characters relative to them and tracks and ledges, following trajectories and the like. My question is:

How tightly bound is the DF world to a grid? Is it actually a floating point position based world displayed through a grid, or is it more so connected to the grid on a mathematical level. If it isn't bound by the grid are they any current considerations to alter game displays in that direction?

I would expect with all the calculations for the entities they would be floating point, but walls and floors and other items might have a 1 tile presence or less than.

This also explains DF frame rates as more migrants arrive at the fortress. Because their 4D mass is so great in comparison to the 3D world they are inhabiting, the gravitational stress is causing time to slow - in order with Einstein's theory of relativity. Because we are not actually in the world, we view the world as slowing down, but in fact it's just that the world's timeline is experiencing gravitational time dilation, and we are not.

The problem is the per pixel part for me. I have this stupid desire to make all the rooms 3x3, so doing anything in illustrator and rotating would ruin all my plans, and probably give me a hernia but if I (or anyone else for that matter) could get around that problem oh the fortress designs that could be made. I tried using inkscape once, but the results were all gradiated, which is another problem of trying to get the program to understand you only want black and white with no inbetween.

You also don't have to set an angle divisible by 360 or whatever, if you make a section less than 360 you can simply place ramps on both edges to produce a spiraling designation pattern. If you pick an angle less than 180, you could have 2 independent spiral sections at once, less than 90 you get 4 sections ect. Which is a really cool thought.....

NEW SERIES!!!!! YAAAAA!!! Only took me two months to finish

PolyStar Bedroom Series:





Each unit is a circle hallway with 12-3 3x3 bedrooms contained therein. Each polystar bedroom pattern is made from 12-3 bedroom units of corresponding bedroom numbers. Pathing will be long, unless you place one polystar bedroom pattern in another to get a central hallway.

One confirmed combination is the 8 polystar placed inside the 12 polystar.

Also, I now have a certain sort of loathing for odd numbers.

This is Onlive we're talking about, they have massive servers running all of these simulations simultaneously. Infinite is an impossible dream but you could get way wayyy up there and not have to worry about pathing or cats or HFS or magma floods or elephants. Seriously, it would be fantastic!

But running a huge fort without lag would be awesome.

Dwarf fortress could probably give us a standard by which we can tell how good the onlive servers are...

Lack of tileset support: I like ASCII as much as the next roguelike, I even voted for you in the annual roguelike contest, but when I want to play with a tileset, I want a tileset. The staircases and bins should not look alike, the text should not look like dingbats, ect.

Designation is not very intuitive: 'd' 'enter' 'downarrow' 'rightarrow' 'enter', down, down, right, down... repeat forever... receive simple circle. PLEASE let us have some real designation tools. I know that dwarf fortress is tile based but behind those tiles is a mathematical simulation of legendary proportions! You're telling me the only way I can effect that simulation is through rectangles? Circles, outline shapes, polygons, lines, thickness, flows, ect. The dwarf fortress community is a legion of artists given an infinite canvas, and to paint they get a smooth wooden ball the size of their fist. Not surprisingly, the amazing simulation of Dwarf Fortress is enough to keep anyone hooked long enough to make that situation turn into something beautiful (read: Raynard Fractal rooms *drool*), but the things we could do with those tools! It's probably me being a spoil CAD brat, but spoiled I remain. Pardon how rant like that turned out.

No manual automation: As it stands, no fort can run for any period longer than a season without a spanner getting thrown into the works. Now unpredictable chaos is the charm of dwarf fortress, but there is a whole ton of predictable chaos that makes it hard for me to play long. Workshop queues being <10 places long and no numerical orders being the big one. You try and you try to make enough beds for everyone, but when a 20 migrant caravan comes you ask for 10, hope you will remember to make 10 more but then only remember to do so when the next caravan arrives. Then you're behind, the migrants get angry, throw tantrums, everyone loses. I could designate repeated beds, only to find 300 beds made, my wood stock destroyed, no trees left, and a migrant cap of 150.

Those are the three biggest things that make me stop playing forts after a while, but I always start again after a while because new forts don't need automation, designation planning is interesting (because I plan a lot), and the dingbats don't bug me as much. One day I'll try to get past all that to actually reach nobles, but that's for another day.

No, every motherboard has a specific shaped slot to hold your processor. SOME motherboards can have more than one shape and SOME shapes can have more than one processor type put in, but that depends on your motherboard's slot type.

Looking up your processor on wikipedia told me that you have "Socket P" and the list of processors that it takes are on the right side:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socket_P
But as Miuramir said, it's probably best to wait for the value processors from the new Intel lineup to comeout. All those processors are old and they don't discount old processors like they do other electronics. A 1000$ processor from 2008 is a 1000$ processor today even though a 600$ processor from 2010 does the same job.

TL;DR You need a new laptop entirely

Well... because you haven't given us an idea of what 'good' is, then I am going to have to make some assumptions:

Let "good" = Anything recent capable of running DF @ >100 logic frames per second.

And for the safety of my soul, I am going to limit the search to commercially viable desktop processors from Intel and AMD (no VIA or ARM love for you today )

You are looking for Core i7, i5 (sans the 'M' moniker at the end), Phenom II's or some Athlon II's, 4 core versions are preferable, AMD has higher avg performance per dollar, Intel has higher avg performance. The higher end i7's are untouchable, really.

The study of processors and which is 'better' is a highly complex and physically taxing process requiring time and effort. As such, no place will be able to tell you anything other than simple benchmarking scores.

Expect to pay > 100$, but < 250$ for a performance and dollar conscious processor capable of doing most anything you would want it to do. Except run Crysis.

If anyone has anything to add please do, I just look at processors for a minor time waster so that is the sum total of my knowledge off the top of my head. I do believe all those ones I listed would run DF without any serious problems. Even Core 2 Duo would be fine for 100fps DF in a small starting location.