Bay 12 Games Forum

Indeed.

So long as the word rec can determine what words are being typed and in what position I don't need to plan any further ahead, so I figured i'll put my dwarves to work.

Say I want to type MAGMA. The support for the word MAGMA has 5 pressure plates, one for each possible position in the sentence. The AI knows that you typed it and where by water being pumped onto one or more of them. The pump is connected to 6 gears, all of which need to be activated by typing each letter in the correct position followed by a space, exclamation mark, question mark or period. Determining what the AI does with this information and how will result in brain hurts, but being as simple as this I should be able to find some way.

The number of gears to activate the pump might change. If only 2 or 3 letters of a word are needed to identify it then that's fine.

EDIT: 0.1 labeled an Alpha as it seems more appropriate. Will move to Beta if I can get the AI to respond to user input in any way.

The FPS will likely be shitty regardless how it's done. Everything requires endless banks of pressure plates and pumps, the only thing different is the gearing and linkages.

The space and linkage reduction from removing numbers is very tempting... It's practically half the size it was before.

I'll leave you with this frightening image:

He said to turn it into a lair and that would then let you freely embark on top of it with a larger area, I think. I don't know if it would work then.

Option 2 where I make a new user display control and repurpose the existing one is out. I was really hoping it would work, I'd have so much extra space but there's just no way I can add support for words in a space-friendly manner, if it was even possible to begin with.

Unless I can find another way to do it, after laying the (massive) groundwork i'll only need a 9x5x5 area of space for each word programmed into the AI (not including the logic that tells it the words meaning and purpose). They would have to be built aboveground because I will have run out of underground, and you can't build right to the edge, but the entire 3x3 embark would still be enough space to support over 400 words. I hardly need that many, it's just an example.

Pretty much all the mechanics of this need 5 z-levels to work and if I were to take up all the underground and sky I could stack 5 sets of machinery like what I have uploaded on top of each other. With the word recognition groundwork and the word support built i'll have taken up 2 of them. The question becomes will 15 z-levels of a 3x3 embark be enough to build the decision making logic of the AI and all the other things it needs, I should find that out before putting my dwarves to work.

In all seriousness though i've been having trouble motivating myself to continue working on this. I'm not sure how much more my computer can take and what's in it now is only a small piece of the puzzle. Then of course there's the sheer ridiculousness of what i'm trying to do here...

Some Portal has reinvigorized my want for something cool to come out of this, we'll see how long it lasts.

I also haven't gotten a lot done because i've come to a bit of a crossroads. With my original plan i'll need a massive space, roughly 5 levels worth of an entire 3x3 embark to lay the groundwork for word recognition (effectively tripling what is already built, including the space reserved for the AI display control). The linking will be horrible, but not as bad as what I did with the display. With this setup identifying words would be extremely easy and space friendly, needing only an additional 5 pressure plate-pump combinations to identify a word and where it is in the sentance. 5 because that's what i've come up with for the maximum number of words in a sentence. 7 also seems alright for word length.

Another option is rather... extreme. Starting over from scratch. It involves continuing on the path I deviated from on page 1 when I was thinking about how to make the text display mechanics. To support the text display it would need be larger then what I have now and still be mechanism heavy, but can double as the word recognition groundwork and overall be much smaller then the other option. The downside of course is I have to redo everything, but also the logic to identify words becomes far more complex. How much more I don't know, because of how complex it is. 

I'm going to be in the planning stage for a long time and don't need to build anything so I can always change my mind, but really want to figure this out before moving forward.

HELP!!! This was a really bad idea! I don't have much time, its been keeping me capti

Oh right, this. 

I'm headed into unknown territory, blindfolded, so i'm just going to start with word recognition and see where that takes me. I said before that the method that I was thinking of would require me to set a cap on word and sentence length, but if the word rec works how I think it will I can probably increase or decrease it later if need be. I'll be figuring all this out on paper so I can afford to make mistakes and experiment.

I wonder if Excel would work. The problem with notepad is I have to memorize what gears each pressure plate is linked to and with a spreadsheet I can in essence 'link' them and turn sets of gears on and off by typing 1 or 0 on a cell that represents a lever or pressure plate.

If you thought the release of the text display was long, don't hold your breath.  I really have no idea how long it will take (or if it's even possible), but it will probably be a while for the next one. In fact i'm almost guaranteeing it will be longer because the linking of the display was what took so long and i'll be needing to do that a second time for the AI's display.