Bay 12 Games Forum

Oh? Memory usage? the smallest int programming variable is 0-255 if I recall correctly so, it could still use 1 to 70 easily.

But as for memory usage...  Say there are 5000 tiles of water... if they used 8 bits for 0-255  they would use 20k of memory.  if they used 0-65000 they would use 16 bit Int varibles which would use 40k of memory...

My machine currently has 2,000,0000k of memory.. so it could in theory hold 500,000 dwarf forts water usages in memory if each one had 5000 tiles of water.... my current fort has about 100 tiles of water so it would need 200 bytes of memory to store water depth information...

I cannot see memory use being a valid argument as the dwarf fortress process currently uses 185,492,000 bytes of memory I don't think  185,492,100 will hurt anything, but if for some reason it did, there is still plenty of room to do a 0 to 70 or 0 to 140 system.

You know....

If you could give dwarfs work area's that they preferred to be in, it would help things like keeping your masons from all abandoning your megaproject if you want a little smoothing done..  Just assign a few to prefer the megaproject's area and a few to prefer the smoothing area...  Could really be useful for many other things as well...

Hmm LOL I think I found another feature to request!

I propose adding a separate and entirely optional screen where a player who has spoken to a trading representative and established relations with their caravans can barter without traders actively being at their fortress and has a nearly unlimited source of goods.

Mechanics and balance vs caravans ->

A player can order a specific number of items such as in my case I want 2000 cobaltite because its a pretty blue. It determines a cost based on the things below and a weight limit for the wagons and I now have to select the items to trade for it like a regular caravan.

Cost #1 Special order - The things actively bought this way should cost 3x as much.  Special orders always have in the past raked people over the coals on cost why should DF be any different.

Cost #2 Wagons - Every wagon that they send will Cost an additional 2000 as they have to do a special run that may not be part of the trade route. This will make buying ore more expensive than buying a bar of metal a lot of times and helps balance.

A fortress credit account could streamline this significantly, as you could trade up spare credit when the merchants come and purchase food in an emergency if your farmers die or something.

Will hiding allow things to be stored in its location?

And while I do know you can  quantum compress the stone in a 1x1 stone dump I was looking for a way to make it disappear without watching my slaves carry it around and grabbing different Z levels stones or me having to mark each and every one for dumping and such.

yeah so... Didn't say they were not often already busy doing something, just said the skillsets matched, and it would be logical to combine them.

 Gameplay wise it might be an entirely different ball of wax and would require a little sacrifice of dwarves that are in already high demand...

The rough engraving is a good idea though, allow an engraving on a rough wall that has not been smoothed and it would make a much less valuable but still very nice engraving.

(As an aside I am using dwarf manager v.2 so making a bunch of masons is kinda trivial.)