Bay 12 Games Forum

As for the idea... I'm going with the "miners see it based on skill" thing, but of course it would have to be based on the skill of the miner who carves the tunnel.  Otherwise we'd have the prospects changing as different dwarves pass by.  That's no good to anybody, and hard on our processors.

Further up-thread, I was imagining it implemented (within the core code) as a 'radar' on each and every dwarf (yes... some extra processing) whereby once a sufficiently advanced dwarf (weighted on their racial bias, mining skill and degree cave-adaption) passes sufficiently close to a 'feature' (perhaps weighted to the actual surroundings[1]) the revelation might occur to some degree or another (perhaps well within 'effective intuition range' it does a full reveal, as per having opened up the space to it right now, but at its furthest reach it does a non-commital 'flavouring' highlight as originally suggested[2]).

This would of course impact the [F]DFMap utility's compression method to some degree, as I understand it, so fair warning in that direction..!

[1] Certain types of rock might give more or less hints.  Smoothed walls may give more or less hints than the raw one (not sure which), though constructed walls buffering the raw rock would brobably nix the detection at that spot.  And perhaps even the 'fog of war' extended to a limited degree across open space, so that a dwarf passing right next to a natural wall would get a possible detection so far in, but passing one tile away would reduce the range from the 'spotting position' by two tiles.

[2] Possibly, at furthest extent it 'flavours' (or flavours []icorrectl[/i]) 5% of the time, leaving a spattering of maybe-something/maybe-not, with false positives as well as false-negatives, at a low but significant percentage.  This could 'explain' the current spattering of non-black rock.

Intuitively (i.e. probably not entirely correct) sleeping in a warm bed will use up less calories than a not so warm one, because of less need to keep oneself at the right temperature.  But beyond a certain point (or in a hotter climate) you're going to be too warm, needing other body regulating mechanisms to kick in (not sure how much calorific value goes into producing sweat) and perhaps rather than sitting snug, tossing and turning under the covers.

Not to mention other night movements/racing heart arising from dream-induced movements not entirely suprressed by the REM atonia mechanism.

And, indeed, compare with watching TV, where one can find that physical movement and internal functions (including depth of breathing, and often heartrate) has become suppressed, and quite possibly a lot of the usual conscious and semi-conscious thought processes, while the main focus of concentration is narrowed down towards the TV programme.  (Although if you're in the habit of snacking in front of the TV, that would definitely skew the results!)

As someone who often listens to recorded radio shows while reclined in bed, with a similar style of aural concentration/submasking-of-input, I might question if I also burn less calories while doing this than when similarly positioned but actively brainstorming some sort of project or other (in the vain hope that I might remember all my clever solutions, or even that I had any, when I awake in the morning!).

I know I go to sleep quicker when listening to a number of my favourite shows (which can be annoying, as I will probably have missed a proportion of the final one) than if my mind is whirring with active ideas and plans and whatnot, so that's one thing I would need to account for in a comparison, as is the fact that I will stir myself to go to the computer and key up the next recording in that set.  Apart from not having a whole-body-calorimiter at hand, it's probably not something I could analyse single-handedly, in any case.

Man oh man, the Intercontinental Express takes foreeeevvveer!  I've been sitting in this carriage for a real-life half-hour and I'm still not at Genua yet.  Someone shoot me an entertaining tell!  I'm Skuck right now.

Like Sergius says, I use the time for quiet contemplation, brushing up on my language reading skills and other GP->XP stuff.  There are of course faster ways to travel

EDIT: I don't know why, but I find mapping the MUD with zMUD/CMUD terribly addictive.

You ought to have seen my Excel spreadsheets, filled with my mappings of the Smarl river system.  OCD, anyone?  (And, besides, Boot[1] got there long before me.)

[1] Link currently not working for me, I hope it (and Boot) is still out there!

British spellings are awesome, but yes, they do trip you up in this game on occasion.

It took ages for me, back in the early days of the web, to learn to use <CENTER> instead of <CENTRE> (also "COLOR=...").  Given TBL was UKian, you'd have thought he'd have pressed for his own language to be used.

At level 150 in stealing, you get filch, which allows you to steal pretty much
anything off a person, including jewellery. Although you'll probably need to get it to around 180 before you can reliably filch stuff, I believe.

And, infamously, you can even nick someone's underpants from under whatever legwear they're using.  Now, topologically it's probably possible, but imagine the fuss you should have to go through to extricate them from under trouser-like garments.


...wish I were able to play, ATM.  Maybe I'll disregard some workplace rules sometime this week.

Ah, I wonder if my old character still exists. It was a pretty advanced Wizard... named Falken or Corben or something like that...

I need to investigate further. Definitely playing in a group could be more fun as I solo'ed for months.

My on-Mud socialising consists of being absorbed in the social scene of both OOC communications and the occasional RP-ish event, like various in-game wedding celebrations and Guild Events, but for hunting I must admit my head hurts less when soloing than when with a group.  At my own pace, suffering only one's own consequences for complacency/overambition (and minimal responsibilities for others) and no tricky pacing issues ("hang on, I haven't pyrscipated a corpse for ages!" or "shouldn't we hurry over to Bes Pelargic[1], what with Genua being over-hunted?").

In other words, I always feel like I'm not going fast enough when leading, and a spare wheel when not.  That's just my impression, I think most of those who have suffered my participation have flatly denied it when I ask, and I can't say for sure that they were just being nice about it.

OTOH, many hands make light work, and a multi-guild team can "add the biological and technological distinctiveness" of each specialisation to the team.  (Not to mention that certain cooperative Mansion Quest that I know about from loose talk, but never gotten around to being involved with myself!)


[1] But it's not at this point that someone remembers that their arms permit has expired, and so the expedition later gets put on hold while the situation has to be remedied, possibly including buying back the confiscated ultra-deluded weapon that was kept out in the open.


@ILikePie (BTW, you ought to talk to a certain Thief I know about pie!)... Depends.  they have a habit of exploding.

Apologies, I appear to have come quite late to this part of the discussion, should have checekd further down...  And looks like the arguments that I was also presenting weren't understood by you anyway.  Am tempted to remove this reply, but if you're reading it I haven't (yet).

Life is, without creator, extremely unprobable. If some of the physical constant would be different by fraction, life would be impossible. Well, this is, unless we have unlimited or close to unlimited universes or chances for universes, unlimited universe = guaranteed life.

(s/unprobable/improbable/;HTH;HAND)
If the physical constants were different then life like ours would not be possible, but there could be life-type-X unlike us that would be going "It's amazing, if the physical laws were unlike our own, then life-type-X could not exist, for example if the laws were [insert verbatim what our universe is actually like] then life would obviously be impossible".

Cue the puddle of water being so amazed that the pothole in the road is so perfectly designed to hold the puddle that it is.

And any universe that did not have a valid set of circumstances for any form of life would never have anyone in it to consider the ramifications of that universe not supporting life.  But apart from a totally null universe (or universes an short but unintense life-cycle) there's no reason to believe that some kind of 'life' (whether recognised by us or not) would not exist.

This is all true regardless of whether you believe there is just the one universe and all there will ever be) an infinite cycle of =>our Big Bang=>our Big Crunch=>Another Big Bang=>Another Big Crunch=> in which each iteration explores another set of constants, a set of parallel 'universe bubbles' doing the same in parallel or every possible universe that could exist being stacked up in a hyper*N-cube array.

It's like assuming that 'our' Goldilocks Zone is an essential prerequisite for life on other worlds.  In fact, that life must exist on worlds and that there's no electromagnetic life-like construct living within the bounds of a nebula, somewhere, or grazing on the dark-matter halos of galaxies or situated at the event horizon of a black hole and formed purely of the particle/anti-particle quantum 'foam'...  (All of that pure theory...  But carbon-chain chemistry is probably as hard a concept to imagine for a hypothetical creature composed of megneto-fusion torii within the core of certain types of star.)

Taking the Strong Anthropic Principle to prove there is something 'special' about our universe is similar to past assumptions about the geocentric nature of the solar-system.  Whatever the assumptions behind the latter, it has since been shown to be wrong.

The commands "emote" and "remote" are both quests, not too hard although you have to speak the language of where you are taking the quest.  They have multiple versions across the continents.

Ah yes, I remember now when I started an Ephebian character, and (at the time) I couldn't figure out where, what and/or how the Djellian local versions were of the above, so waited until I'd walked over to Ankh-Morpork and used (for once, breaking my usual Chinese Wall or knowledge between characters) my recollections of the Morporkian version (and a little pseudo-Latin interpretive guesses) to stumble my way through the common version despite still lacking the language skills.

(It's different these days, I suppose, with the official Quest help.  But I bet it's still a pain to try and put a Morporkian character through the "learning Uberwaldean for Agatean" classes in Bes Pelargic, at the nominally capped 90% skill in the local lingo.

Simple. Have no pause menus when another player is at your fortress. You can still access everything except nothing pauses.

That's a different game.  At the moment it's micromanagement, to whatever degree you wish.  You can spend three or four hours on a raw map forbidding and unforbidding, laying out the entire digging zones (and whatever building zones you can access/currently have materials for), rearranging employment assignments and stockpiles and zoning etc so as to let it run its course, and/or you can react to every new material produced/extracted/mined/traded for when available to another few hours of player for every gametime hour (which would be highly dependant upon processor speed[1]).

If you force no-pausing, then switching your multiple training units to active duty (and assigning them new stations) while wanting to run through your civilians to ensure they are tasked (or re-tasked) to safe-zone employement only, inclusive of identifying resources in the danger zone and forbidding them, while ensuring that the defensive levers are pulled in sequence is going to produce a different result.

You might as well make it a "Noble mode" hybrid of real-time Adventure-mode style of play as a noble character who has to travel around to say "dig this here, produce this there, you there can have that spare wardog, I forbid you to wear that worn shoe", no longer the (within some resource and physical constraints) omniscient and omnipotent entity that you are now, competing against chance and unexpected arrivals and creatures outside your control wandering across your domain to their own purpose.

Consider it a difference between Management Games and full on God Games, give or take, with either an effective Fog Of War (And Peace) or a limit to simultaneous actions/area of effect rather than just the resource/influence limit.

[1] Actually, using distributed computing to share the processing (especially pathing) across a set of players' machines to make best use of idle time/processing power, and simultaneously smooth out any (unpaused) difference in playing speed might be a good use of multi-player...  Stuff like that would have a low ratio of 'definition data' travelling between machines compared to the equivalent 'data value' of what is calculated, and could be organised to reduce redundancy of data processing with a decent system behind it.  But would anyone really want to reduce their own game's responsiveness (and remove the ability to take a break or fully take stock of the situation) just because they have a better processor and they're doing someone else's machines calculations?

Although a SETI@Home-style worldgen network could do a lot of interestingly intricate stuff.