Bay 12 Games Forum

DF pistons also displace water, in a sense, though the result is bit different than expected.

Anyway, come to think of it, if the fluid model has to check every tile above it, wouldn't it end up doing more calculations than tile-based DF currently uses for single-z lakes?

Yeah, it would, but that's the cost of maintaining pressure and depth. At least my cheap way of doing it; actual pressure and inertia can get pretty complex pretty quickly.

It also depends how many directions you want to manage. Going only for face directions (no diagonals) decreases the amount of checks a fair bit. SS13 uses a curious handling method that, if every space around it is open, it can do diagonals, but only in that instance. Not quite sure how it works.

PTW
And... do you need some calculation system for test all these staff you made? I can write simple app on C++ to help ou with it if I will have some time(I strongly wish I will).

Regarding what? If the simulation would work? By all accounts it should, I ran enough excel 'simulations' during my time with this. However, by all means proceed if you wish to. Toady has ultimate say in what goes in his game, but the easier we make it for him to understand and implement, the better.


ALSO- Regarding the hideous monster that is MIXING FLUIDS. I looked again at the SS13 code and saw a curiosity. They have multiple gases that remain conserved, each representing their own units... because it averages each type of gas individually.


Each gas has an ID and their moles are recorded individually within a tile. Pressure is the combined total of all gases. For each ID within a tile, where air_gases is the total of all gases within the tile, it averages the moles. Each type of gas is averaged individually. I'd actually torn on just how much more computationally expensive this concept is though, and my gut is saying not all that much. Since it only averages for the IDs which exist, on average it only does 3 averaging for common gases (O2,N2,CO2), and an additional averaging for temperature. Adding more gases adds another layer of checks, but only on the tiles which contain them. This isn't a bad idea for a system at all. Bit expensive, maybe, but it handles mixtures exceptionally well.

As for its use in 3 dimensional space, it already only works in 4 cardinal directions, so its a matter of adding 2 more directions up and down. there's a bit of handling involved for when air flows out into space (gets deleted), so something like that could work for open sky in DF.

EDIT: Upon subsequent testing I can absolutely confirm that - while triggering gas flow definitely causes everything in a tile to perform averaging calculations - specific moles of gas remain untarnished when mixed. I mixed O2 and Freon, and found that after filling a vacuum to roughly 100% of O2 with an average of 108 moles per tile, then releasing freon into the chamber, the moles of O2 remained roughly at 108. Definitely shows this system is the case; it averages each individually.

Quote from: Qyubey on September 18, 2016, 05:34:27 am

Had some adventures in coding of my own. Do coroutines exist for C? (What I assume DF is coded in). If so, you could manage that 'scheduler' idea really easily.

Absolutely. The problem isn't "do threads exist?" but rather "can I use threads here and not horribly mangle the data?"
Multithreading isn't something you can just bolt on when you need it, because every bit of memory it interacts with is now also multithreaded.  And once that happens, your entire program is multithreaded and large portions aren't set up for it.

I... wasn't talking about multithreading persay - more than you could schedule the game to only update certain things less often than a tick. Nevermind though; talked to a programmer friend and he said you can achieve the same with updating functions anyway.

I have a habit of trying to shoot down ideas, only to suggest legitimate ways they would work.

I really don't have the insight or technical knowhow to keep up with you on this (or the time for that matter), but having read the thread I feel the need to commend you on the amount of effort you have put into it. Good job.

also, dwarven pressure chambers.

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Maybe give each creature a different pressure tolerance range that can be modified by slowly changing pressu -.

- re with diminishing returns.

Giving the player the ability to manipulate pressure would inevitably lead to dwarven pressure canons. Weaponized systems of explosive decompression... basically all kinds of cool stuff. Today can try to impose an arbitrary tech cut off, but if he builds a good enough simulation there's not much he can do to enforce it.

Neither did I - didn't stop me. The U-Bend problem regarding cellular systems has always struck me as a curiosity so I just wanted to tackle it in a constructive way. There really is no getting around it: solving the problem REQUIRES communication between cells. I tried to do full-on pressure simulations, but they were too abstract and complex to function well. Going for things like Depth and inherited pressure work a lot better. I even considered creating a new topic for using a similar system to show the inherited pressure of rock tiles from things around it, thus creating a real cave-in system - but that idea still needed a lot more work. Specifically- how do caverns not just implode immediately? I didn't find an answer...

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I was referring to pressure adaptation there. You can withstand a lot of pressure so long as it changes slowly. Although that does mean that if you pressurize yourself, then walk out onto sea level, open air, you might explode.

I think the ability to manipulate pressure is a powerful creative tool. Any kind of block-item-creature interaction is the heart of player interaction with a sandbox, so having a variable system like pressure is inherently interesting and gives way to a lot of possibilities. Elevators, vacuum transport systems, piping and bursting pressures - it's all good fun that fits right in with the game.

As for the tech level, if Dwarves have screw pumps, they can definitely manipulate air pressure - both positively and negatively. I don't think we'll be getting Dwarven Air Tanks or anything, but creating simple steam boilers and vacuum tubes isn't too difficult. I mean, Geysers are natural steam vents - it's in nature, it's doable.

When an intelligent being gets older it should in some way become wiser so how would we represent that?

Just make mental skills the last to go, unless they develop Alzheimers.

...This discussion about environmental magic is really reminding me of something else I used to play a lot; the Thaumcraft mod for Minecraft. Specifically thaumcraft 2, since they basically redid the entire mod for v3 onwards and I didn't really like the changes.

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Anyway, Thaumcraft 2 was essentially a mod that added the concept of Environmental Magic to minecraft, and it was pretty interesting. Magic existed in two forms; Vis, which was the magical energy contained within physical objects and beings, and Aura, which was the latent, environmental version of this energy. All of the world had magic, specifically an equal baseline level that would cause supernatural things to occur (or maybe they were drawn by it, who knows). This balance was maintained because any magic that went over a certain threshold would either crystallize into solid reservoirs (Vis crystals), or seep into adjacent areas of a lower Vis.

The player, as a component, could melt down items and crystals to extract literal liquid magic (although it seeped into the environment if you exposed it to the air) or build a condenser machine that converted aura into vis. With Vis you could do all the magical building and research and junk, but the tradeoff was that melting down objects was very inefficient and tended to convert most of it into Taint. That was the 'evil' side of magic that had a habit of exploding containment tanks, seeping into the atmospheric aura, and making the entire biome evil and spawn monsters. The entire system was this interesting ecological and environmental experiment, with a weird analog about pollution. You needed Vis to do magic, but the cleanest ways of producing it were slow, so you went for cheap and fast ways that produced a lot of pollution that would take a lot of effort to purify down the line.

Not saying we should exactly have this system, but having tiles record a value for environmental magic that is absorbed by creatures, and then gets released when they die, is interesting. I suppose I should also rundown Thaumcraft v3+ since it changed up the system (although it kind of lost that pollution analog).

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V3+ had the same concept of magic being inside everything, but instead each item had it in the form of certain 'aspects'. So like a tree has 'Arbor' aspects while 'Ignis' is for fire-related things. Magic itself is collectively called the 'aura' and is seen to permeate the entire world, but it can be expressed in two raw forms; Vis and Essentia. Vis is basically just mana for casting, but Essentia is either the liquid or crystalline concentration of a certain aspect. Magic also tends to congregate at certain points in the world as 'nodes' - which you can do a lot with; break them and get a big harvest of magical items, drain them and let them slowly replenish (with more complex aspects taking longer), or contain and relocate them [the environment determines their aspect generation].

The other aspect of the mod is Flux; since magic in the environment is technically in equilibrium (anything that uses it tends to just release it back into the ecosystem to be reabsorbed), taking magic from one place and introducing it into another can disturb the balance. I don't think having low magic produces any effects, but high magic is called Flux. It causes the generation of a lot more magical things, like floating wisps, magical creatures, and crystals - but also tends to push the biome towards being more corrupted.

I think the new system they use is a little too insular for my tastes. I love the concept of Nodes since they're not really physical things, and they can exist potentially anywhere - in midair, under the sea, in lava or pure rock - and generate aspects based on the tiles around them. Finally getting up to the point where you can 'bottle' one is a good achievement. However the removal of keeping a balance between Vis/Taint whenever you convert energy is really sad to me, since it was so interesting.

Anyway, mostly just dumping for idea fuel's sake.