Bay 12 Games Forum

I've heard vague suggestions that it's possible to alter world gen settings in such a way as to make caverns more full of deadly crap to overrun my fort. Is this true, and if so, how? I'm finding that I'd like the caverns to be more dangerous than they are, even though they're by no means tame.

Is there a way to not have to turn my head sideways to view job names? I'd rather turn my head sideways to view dwarf names.

Up until now I'd assumed that my gradually-decreasing framerate over the course of an average fort was due directly to the increasing population -- more dwarves pathing, etc. I'm sure that's a significant part of it, but today I had what seemed like a strange experience:

I started out with the FPS capped at 400, as is my wont. As usual, my framerate started in the 300s and then gradually decreased over the course of the game, until at around 70 population it was well below 100. At this point, I allowed my entire fort to be murdered by an angry goblin. When I was down to less than 10 population again, I realized that the framerate hadn't gone back up, and was still around 50!

Can anyone explain the real reason for the drop? Is it because of all the items lying around in the fort? I admit that my fortress was not exactly tidy; a lot of workshops were cluttered, and stockpiles were massive and constantly overflowing. Or is there some other reason? I kept animal population to an absolute minimum, and all of them were dead by the end anyway, so I don't think it's that. But what exactly is changing over the course of the fort, if not population, that causes this permanent drop in framerate?

This is driving me nuts, so any reply would be appreciated. I'd really like to get to the heart of this issue so I can figure out how best to optimize framerate in future forts.

In other words, what will I be missing out on if I cap my population at a very low number, like 30-40?

I'm trying to find ways to maximize framerate on my terrible CPU, and I've noticed that my framerate starts to drop below 100 around the time I have 40-50 dwarves, so I'm wondering if it would be best to just keep my population low. However, there are some aspects of the game I don't want to miss out on.

For example, will I be limited to smaller sieges based on a lower population, or is it entirely dependent on created wealth? Will I be less likely to encounter terrible, deadly creatures if my population is low? I know I won't get all the nobles, but that in itself isn't particularly important to me; I'm mostly interested in building elaborate contraptions, combating overwhelming threats, and that sort of exciting thing.

What worries me is that init.txt claims that "your population must be at least [...] 100 to obtain the current game features." What features is it referring to, and can anyone give me a general list of any interesting stuff that I might miss?

Thanks so much for any replies.

Alternatively, you could just gen your map from the 'design world with parameters' defaults instead of 'Create new world now!' The layering is much more sane with those presets, and will create a world with ~5 Z levels between the lowest point on the surface and the first cavern, and then 1 Z level between each feature after it, while retaining a full underground.

Holy cow. For some reason, I had assumed that "Create new world now!" would be identical to using those default parameters, and thus figured that it was already using the minimums. Obviously, I was wrong. 1 Z-level between each feature sounds very excellent.

I'll go and try this now. Thanks to everyone who's replied!

http://www.bay12games.com/forum/index.php?topic=54200.msg1164978#msg1164978

Bah! My mistake. I should have inspected first-page topics obviously dealing with HFS before posting this one. =P

This excites me greatly, however. I can't imagine a sight more pleasurable than a goblin siege (or, better yet, an elven caravan) wandering onto my fort only to be devoured by demons. Can you imagine the looks on their faces?

Time to get to work.

I was hoping that the new version would do something about the "can't have more than one stockpile drawing from a given stockpile" thing, but alas, it seems not.

However, the burrow system has made me determined to design an awesome decentralized living system in which each workshop has its own input stockpile (e.g. a small wood stockpile by each carpenter's workshop, etc.), and I'm not sure what would be the best way to keep them all well-supplied.

Obviously, I can assign a loop in which stockpile A draws from stockpile B, stockpile B draws from stockpile C, and stockpile C draws from stockpile A. But this seems like it would just cause my dwarves to perpetually run around moving stuff needlessly between the stockpiles, which seems undesirable.

Is there a better way of doing this? I've never tried this sort of thing at all, so most any advice would be helpful. Thanks!

Hello,

I'm in the midst of developing a (vaguely) Roguelike game and, mostly just for kicks, decided that it would be nice to implement water into the game which would hopefully behave roughly like the water in DF. I am, however, extremely terrible at figuring out even remotely efficient algorithms for things like this, so this is where you folks come in.

As my game is entirely 2D, can someone knowledgeable about this subject explain approximately how the water in DF works, or might work, when ignoring any Z-level-related complications? I.e., if in one frame I have a bunch of variously-leveled water lying around on a flat surface, what's the basic algorithm that should be applied to it between that frame and the next in order to create reasonably DF-like flow of the water?

I'm sure that the answer will be extremely simple and obvious, but, as I said, I freely admit that this isn't my forte. Nonetheless, I'd really like to get something working so that I can mess around with it. Any help would be greatly appreciated. =)