Bay 12 Games Forum

I noticed a discrepancy in the crop raws. It's probably a copy-paste issue. Oats have the prefstring "beer" but lack the corresponding tags to make any drinks. May I suggest "florets" as a new prefstring?

This was the first problem I noticed, not sure if there are more problematic raws.

Though I am glad to see an interest in this kind of tileset, I wish you had given credit to all the original creators. Many of the tiles appear to be copied from my tileset (chests, gems, trees, logs, half-barrel, ladel, plants). Other tiles look like the originals set down in Plac1d's tileset which I used when making my modifications. It would be nice if you gave credit to all the sources of these tiles. Other than that, it looks great. Keep up the good work.

I have never seen my dwarves move boulders without using those wheelbarrows, and was also recently annoyed by how slowly the rock clean-up was going. My solution was to make several smallish stone stockpiles. Each one can have a maximum of 3 wheelbarrows assigned, so more stockpiles = more wheelbarrows = faster cleanup.

Wow. That is a huge update.

Question for the super experts: While looking through the raws, it seems that this version is the first where a 'base' critter has a vermin tag, as well as giant/animal person variants that inherit tags from the base critter. So then, will the giant version of said critter inherit vermin traits like becoming unbutcherable?

Quote from: Urist Imiknorris on April 13, 2011, 06:58:20 pm

Armok.

*facepalm*

Might as well:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I also fixed an error that you probably didn't notice.

Challenge Accepted!

Well let's see what I can contribute. Thanks for taking the time to update the wiki, by the way.

Being a bit dissatisfied with the lack of complete documentation on advanced world generation, I''ve decided to take it upon myself to improve the docs.

At this point I mostly know what most of the parameters do, but there are some that I'm unsure of the exact meaning/effect of and considering that I'm trying to write comprehensive docs I'm hoping some people can help me with the following questions:

• Site Cap after civ creation - What exactly is a "site"? Does this mean town/fortress/lair or what?
• Percentage of beasts dead for stoppage - i'm assuming that this means history generation will stop early if this % of beasts die for any reason. please verify

The last time I heard anything official, the program will begin checking megabeast % every year after the year 200. If the number of megabeasts killed reaches the set threshold, then world generation will stop regardless of what the "End year" was set to.

• Cull Unimportant historical figures - Does anyone know what constitutes "unimportant"?

From my personal experience, unimportant figures are people who suffer early deaths, never having offspring or killing anything named during world gen. Frequently, residents of goblin towers would get murdered by demons at a young age, and after culling 'unimportant' peoples, Legends mode would say something like that the demon had killed "a creature at Eviltower in the year 102"

• Min/Max Elevation - If I understand properly this does not actually impact the depth of the terrain, only the range of elevation levels available at the regional level. Please confirm/elaborate
• Rainfall - What are the effects of rainfall besides filling murky pools, unhappy thoughts, and being required by certain biomes?
• Temperature - What are the units here? They can't possibly be celcius. Are they degrees F or some arbitrary unit?
• Drainage - What does drainage do other than being required by certain biomes?
• Mesh Size - How exactly does mesh size work? Does a mesh size of 2x2 mean that the map is divided into 2x2 blocks each with weighted elevation/etc applied to blocks as a whole or what? What's the overall effect?

Based on my personal experience, mesh size determines how 'finely grained' changes will be between world squares. So a 8x8 mesh should produce large swaths of land with similar values for rainfall or elevation, etc. Smaller meshes allow more diversity within a given area than do large meshes.

• Minimum mountain peak number - What's the point of this parameter? I mean why does anyone care about peaks?
• Partial/Complete Edge Oceans - How are partial and edge defined?
• Mineral Scarcity - I noticed a thread on this a while back. has anyone compiled the results of peoples' experiments?

Yes, Urist Da Vinci did a great job. I don't have the link handy. Values are inversely porportional to what we care about: metal. A value of 300 = good abundance. A value of 10,000 = nearly empty rock.

• Titan number - After playing with this parameter a bit, I'm guessing that this actually impacts the total number of titans/megabeasts/semimegabeasts but does it include forgotten beasts?
• Night creatures - Can anyone confirm that setting this to zero eliminates bogeymen?
• Desired good/evil squares in small/medium/large subregions - What is a subregion exacly? A biome? And how large or small qualifies as large, medium, or small?
• Minimum initial/final X region count - What exactly is a region or subregion and how does it differ from a biome?

Based on my personal experience, regions are contiguous (or nearly so) terrains that have a single alignment (good/neutral/evil). A forrest region may encompass several forest biomes (wet tropical/dry tropical/temparate broadleaf/etc) Having only 1 mountainous region results in a single huge mountain range (assuming other mountain parameters are unchanged). Regions may share a border, but separate mountain regions do not physically connect to each other. Generally, more regions = more variety in the world.

• Erosion Cycle Count - Does anyone know of any guidelines on what values of this result in what effects?
• Periodically erode extreme cliffs - I'm assuming that turning this off results in more extreme cliffs, but does anyone know how it works exactly?
• Orthographic percip. and rain shadows - I'm assuming this is related to mountain lift effects on wind but can anyone elaborate on why you might want to enable or disable this?

You might want to disable this if you hate having badlands and/or deserts constantly appearing along one border of your mountain ranges.

• Max number of subregions - What's a subregion and whats the practical impact of changing this?
• Natural Cave Size - What are the units here? Tiles of empty space?

Based in part on 40d experiences, increase in values results in an increase in cave complexity, not in empty space. So you get more twisty passages and the cave complex stretchers across more Z levels.

• Allow Init Embark Options to Show Tunnels - What is this?

Dwarves and goblins will construct tunnels between their own settlements during world gen. If you want to see them on your embark screen the same way that you can see roads then change this parameter. In v0.31.xx, roads and tunnels are usually obscured by settlement boundaries on the embark screen. They were more visible in 40d.
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I think that's about it. Everything else I'm pretty sure I understand pretty well, or can figure out from the list of rejection errors and other stuff on the wiki.

Your answers will help to reduce constant redundant questions, so thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

Lets switch tracks for a minute.

I was about to ask Toady this one directly, since I can't find a direct answer in my forum searches. Maybe the B12 forum can deliver?

Question: Has Toady ever mentioned taking the principle of stigmergy from the ACO scheme in order to dynamically modify the PATH_COST value for tiles as dwarves travel over those tiles? My thought is that since we can already improve framerate by manually designating High Traffic Areas, perhaps inserting some code to dynamically modify High Traffic areas as the dwarves are travelling would provide the same benefit while keeping the same A* algorithm in place.

So how about that? Have I missed Toady's prior comments on this very topic?