Bay 12 Games Forum

I did another 3-minute profile on my 260-citizen fort, this time with the knowledge of the source. Percents are going to overlap some. Specific seconds are not.

The slowest thing was line-of-sight checks. Due to the fact that it was only counting the checks in the function itself, this was a total of 14.7% of CPU time. However, if you remove one specific thing from line-of-sight checks (more on that later), it's 8%, and thus faster than the next thing. 13.181s in the function itself.

Great to see numbers here, thanks!

I know 14.7% doesn't point to any massive optimization potential, but -- is the line-of-sight implementation more amenable to a concurrent/thread-pool approach than the pathfinding?  I would not expect LOS to use global mutable state, but I wouldn't have expected that for pathfinding either, so what do I know.

Hope everybody's ready to get cave adaptation.

Posting to follow.

I enjoyed figuring out the cross-rhythms/polyrhythms  (I'm a huge Captain Beefheart fan).
But I can't wrap my head around the unusual scale systems (like dividing the octave into 24 notes and then building random tetrachords).  It comes dangerously close to being"grey goop" for me. Or intriguingly alien but ultimately samey goop. Adding some familiar scales/modes to the mix would make the random scale systems more interesting to me.. Just like forgotten beasts seem more special in a world where theres also ordinary bears, cats and capybaras etc.

It seems to have solid precedent.

Also, this one looks fairly conventional:

The uto hexatonic scale is thought of as two disjoint chords spanning two perfect fourths. These chords are named ngub and ozse.

The ngub trichord is the 1st, the 5th and the 6th degrees of the semitone octave scale.

The ozse tetrachord is the 8th, the 10th, the 11th and the 13th (completing the octave) degrees of the semitone octave scale.

with the upcoming addition of taverns and the recent addition of both sexual preferences and lust propensity what are your thoughts on one of worlds oldest professions, prostitution? as taverns and bars where being used as makeshift brothels for centuries and some evidence's that temples to fertility goddesses had sacred prostitution as far back as 1800BCE.

Very old quote from a thread on this subject:

Speaking of cheap tricks, were people turned off because Ultima (7?) had prostitutes?  Ultima 7p2 had a nude lesbian scene.  That kind of thing doesn't bother me.  I'm not sure what I think about dwarven prostitutes though, or even dwarven marriage.  Both genders seem like a bunch of heavy drinking workaholics, though they do share beds with their spouses (and their pets).  The dwarves I'm portraying aren't "slightly stupid" in a general sense, as they are very talented artisans and engineers -- this mechanical/crafting bent pulls them away from the common man analogy.  They are also emotionally unbalanced and strangely attracted to lava flows, though.

Even worse, the variability between playstyles and the resulting fortresses (and the nature of the computational loads etc.) makes a single test fortress impossible, and would require a lot of test fortresses.

Yes.

Ideally, yes, but then you're introducing the time as a factor, which needn't be one. FPS doesn't fluctuate that much if a fort is stable (assuming you let the game run for a bit after loading), and big changes (breaching the caverns, releasing the clowns, etc) require a re-measurement anyway. I would even say that you can treat them as separate forts, for testing purposes, since the load is of a different variety.

The thing is, unless you're taking precisely timed measurements, time is already a factor.  "Assuming you let the game run for a bit" means, in experimental terms, "let your silly human brain find the moment that best satisfies its biases."

A single test fortress won't work, but a set of test fortresses seems necessary.  Letting people run their own fortresses introduces possible confounding factors, e.g. people on slower computers might compensate by running less demanding fortresses.

I don't have any AMD PCs.

Honestly, it might be hard to get any rigor in the test unless you can create a standardized benchmarking package (maybe using DFhack to capture FPS information?)  Other games have that (with a variety of preset scenarios), DF could too.  Otherwise, there are just confounding variables all over the place (if the methodology is just 1. run game 2. "quickly" write down your impression of average FPS).

Derails are fun, why prune them?

From the OP:

The purpose of the thread is to discuss current developments.  [...]  Questions and comments about the development page or DF development somewhat more broadly work here, though any contentious topics that lead to derails are discouraged -- there are threads for those too.