Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Starver on August 07, 2009, 05:18:39 am

(was under the impression that a cage on a Animal-type stockpile acceptign that creature would not 'pass on' a Dump select to the contents, but I might very well be wrong about that)

I don't mean this to sound insulting; but you are.

No insult taken.  The way I did it worked well with how I dealt with the caged enemies, anyway.  I may or may not  change the way I do things, with this new/corrected information under my belt... 

Try to make the fortress more decentralized to reduce travel time.

RTA: "...to reduce Time Travel".

(Don't mind me, just passing through the thread...)

Hunter cancels hunt, interupted by goblin hammerman x10

While "Urist McHunter cancels hunt, hunting vermin for food." isn't quite as bad, this was once the bane of my existence.  Assuming I hadn't already got a "Urist McHunter has been struck down" by the time this state of affairs happened.

(Thes days I don't even use hunters.  I conscript any immigrant ones to build upon their marksdwarfship, and rely upon cage traps, taming and breeding anything that stumbles into them.  My butcher, haulers and associated client trades often can't keep up with the availability of surplus and slaughterable animals and the resulting products.)

Can we get some clarification here?

Take what I wrote as personal observation, only, during short-term fortresses playing.  i.e. suddenly realising (possibly after losing a squad member) that a romantic attatchment had arisen without my noticing.

I've never actually seen (read: noticed, so if there's a notification it's probably never happened) a marriage other than one that pre-existed the immigration wave that brought the pairing.  Nor (again, noticed) a loving relationship with a different person from the spousal one.

I've had an amazing number of children arise, but usually only from "good Catholic dwarfs" that came paired in a wave (with or without children already in tow) and kept "popping them out" year on year for the decade or so of Dwarf-time that I kept on playing the fortress involved.  Certainly long enough for native-born babies to achieve majority and become peasants (with strong "Grower" skills, of course) in their own right.

The only other relationship 'anomolies' are the lone-parent immigrants, where one or two kids come along with the new worker, but the spouse/other parent is absent as an entity from both the wave and the relevant page of information for those that arrive.  But that's just an aside, and not important to the discussion at hand.

Now think about what would happen if Every.  Single.  Choice.  was simulated until you look at it, at which point half of the work would be wasted.  It would be so slow.

Half the work would be wasted after one choice, potentially 3/4 after two choices.  Potentiall 7/8ths after a third choice.  Less if some outcomes of some choices preclude later choices being made, or conversely remove from play prior branches.

Like Something might or might not happen the 'virtual' Qubit (this not being run on a true quantum computer, but being emulated) represents as 0 or 1.  SomethingElse might or might not happen, resulting in a further 0 or 1 (we now have 00, 01, 10, 11).  If a ThirdSomething must(/could) happen only if neither of the prior two happened then only 000 and 001 are viable branches.  If a ThirdSomethingElse could (though need not) happen if only one of the prior two happened then 010, 011, 100, 101 are also viable branches, though arguably you'd be talking about a total of 000-, 001-, 01-0, 01-1, 10-0, and 10-1 as valid states of four seperate qubits.  Whether there'd be 11--0 or 11--1 combinations (something arising from the conjunction of both initial possibilities both being true, assuming the fifth qubit position is allocated to the actions only possible on that).   The nature of the quantum calculation would result in there never being any valid 11111 solution (it would 'collapse out' of the calculation, being a nonvalid state in classical terms).


But, anyway...  The way I see it is that it would work upon the "Hidden Variable" level.  The game would have a definite idea of the 'sub-planck' activity.  It would be data intensive (not so much as if emulating true superposition information), but apart from the game's induced randomness (a deviation from the how the Hidden Variable idea is supposed to work in the Real World, of course) otherwise linearly deterministic.  It would then hide it behind a layer of 'macro-world' abstraction which obscures the pure determinism and 'fudges' macro-explanations that appear to indicate a quantum-level multiplicity of states.  i.e. the "split experiment" or "quantum tunelling" phenomena is explicitly coerced from the background data on a "coulda, shoulda" basis.

If you see what I mean.  And I wouldn't blame you if you don't.


(For the record, I am a believer in the Real World being utterly deterministic, below the Planck-dsitance and Planck-time resolution which is the limit of our detectability.  Apparently instantaneous "Action at a distance" effects are just a result of this data sloshing around affecting things accordingly, or perhaps something more exotic that is beyond the wit of man...  Imagine a 'creature' within Conway's Game Of Life.  Complex enough to be 'conscious' (to itself, though to us 3D, non-gridded creatures, it would just be a trivial fully deterministic automata), it could not possibly correctly assimilate a conscious awareness of individual on/off cells, and probably not even individual 'glider' combinations (save for the disturbances they set up in its cellular "structure") which might pervade the cellular 'universe' and fulfill the same function as photons, or even gravitons in certain circumstances.

Apart from being able to detect an "orthogonal bias" to the structure of the universe (for much the same reason as all edge tiles of a square area in DF are equidistant from a central point), it would be hard to understand how a Conway-esque 'flatlander' creature (to bring to bear Edwin A. Abbott's novel, as well as Ian Stewart's 'sequel', "Flatterland") would imagine the structure of the universe 'he' resided in.  It certainly wouldn't feature "oh, I'm just a simulation ticking away on a massive supercomputer, whose transisters operate by means of doped silicon connections altering the availability of electron-holes", for that would be something way beyond the ken of the Conway-creature.  Ditto, doubtless, the 'mechanics' behind our quantum effects and whole universe (not for one minute suggesting that there's a Great Programmer who set it up, though!), and so the DF universe (whose Great Programmer we ourselves know to exist) would be trivially deterministic to ourselves, and yet exhibit 'quantum' effects to the inhabitants as far as the detail of the simulation allows.)

But I think I ramble too much. I wasn't going to write the above two paragraphs, but it looks like I ended up doing so.  (That's determinism for you!

... then dropping blobs of magma through the water stream in a timely fashion.

I think timing is the key.  As far as I could tell (I'm not a master at interpretting movies, like the one given in the prior post, so I could be wrong) the obsidian pillar that was created is as a result of the watr and magma not solidifying at the junction, but being created when pooling at the bottom of the shaft.

And, if it is indeed the case that falling blocks cause "cave-in effects" without needing to hit bottom, then (despite my prior response) the bottomless pit is the answer, not to swallow up the obsidian (though it will) but to take the unreacted water and magma globs that don't time correctly.  (I'm probably wrong in my interpretation, there...)

A dead ruler is a dead ruler, sorry to say.

Also the consort exists for only one reason: to make dwarf babies. Consorts aren't actually royals, I think, even in real life.

In which case, instead of "Consort demands <level foo> Bedroom; <level bar> Dining Room; <level baz> Tomb", surely it should be "Noble demands <level ni!> Office; <level foo> Bedroom; <level bar> Dining Room; <level baz> Tomb, and <level foo> Bedroom; <level bar> Dining Room; <level baz> Tomb for my partner".

At the moment the consorts get unhappy about "lesser" dwafs getting too good a room, and seem to expect more or less the same rooms (all but the office) as their SO, at least for the married nobles I habitually cater for.  (Too lazy to check Wiki to ensure this is completely correct!)  And they get upset about other people's stations being over-catered for, so they must have at least some pretentions.

Not a totally serious suggestion, save that a demand of "my husband will have an armour stand in his bedroom", or even "I command you put a coffin in <random dwarfs> room" (as a present or a subtle warning?  who knows...) might be interesting.

Of course, a consort could have their own self-esteem non-issues (after all, nobles marry nobles, IRL), but every now and then you'd get a Mrs Simpson to your Urist McEdward, without the resulting abdication.

(Actually, have abdications been mentioned?  Or is 14thC politics a little too absent of "retire to [the|another] country potential in a "Noble 'til I die!" manner.)