Bay 12 Games Forum

No, there's something other than catastrophe that limits which mutations will stick around: the order of the mutations. Like I've said approaching a dozen times the first species that figures how how to do something has a great advantage, so great that they often close doors to other species that could physically fulfill the same role but just didn't do it yet. To mutate in the same direction means having to compete with the king of the hill and it's such a long arduous road to become good at something like that that species just don't. They either have to find some other place where they can do that thing or wait for some other time when they can do that thing.

I've explored this subject as a hobby and put in some serious effort to study the way life works- I wouldn't walk into something so fundamentally broken~
Probably.

-

I always meant for species creation to be a fairly quick process. If I could hover over your shoulder in person I'd just have you sketch a hundred little things- LITTLE things -and just kind of tell you to steer away from certain things. From the last thing I drew you can see that I'm not exactly aiming for a high resolution 3d environment with super detailed creatures. This is more like laying down the skeleton of what would be there. After an epic or so we could draw out fantastic art pieces of what some biome looked like, or really any time beyond that when somebody feels like it.

But as for months of struggle it's going to be easier for other people simply because they'll be able to look at what we already did. After we've got some better branches for stuff besides burger I'll feel better about rolling it all up in a nice package to stick in the first post.

-

I remembered another semi-prompt. I thought we might get more done if we left most of the behavior description off of what we present and let other people try to decide what the variation was useful for. Don't need to completely stay out of that after people have given some input but it ought to stir up at least a few of those interesting cross-person ideas that I'm fond of. What do you think those three I posted DO?

It takes me some effort to actually play a fort out until it's end or go through with abandoning it to start another in the same world. I think I've only had about five in the same world any time this year.

When I first started playing I used to have many very short lived forts in the same world though.

Yeah, Toady avoids compatibility breaks when he can. When he adds new stuff and you load a world generated without it then you basically just get a bunch of nothing in the world in that space- so you need to regen to get some of the new stuff but you don't need to keep using an old version to keep playing a fort.

He lumped a whole boatload of compatibility breaking stuff together so 2009 didn't see any new versions and people just played ole 40d for ages and ages. But after that bodies were entirely different, the military was more than just saying which dwarves were in charge of others plus a general weapon and armor class and those whole cavern things. The bodies having proper material qualities was the big compat breaker but he tried to rework a lot of other stuff which lead the the rather long delay between releases. Runs pretty well again nows though.

There shouldn't be another big break like that in quite awhile.

Thought of a reasonable variant of the jellyfish like one: The feeder tentacles are tucked back into a mouth cavity. It has to engulf its prey and pretty much press down on them so they can't thrash around, then it extends the feeder parts into them.

Thrashing is not a big deal for the earlier species but I happen to have introduced two things you could see whipping around. I don't picture this species being that much larger than the adults of those but adolescents would probably be swallowable.
Plus anything with much of a shell will be really at the mercy of this thing once swallowed as we don't have anything with full coverage shells.
I'm thinking it might want to reinforce the new body cavity with shell bits but I can't picture how very well.

You can scroll the mousewheel to scale tile size.

I'm all for not calling them clowns. Clown made me want to see how a circus worked, spartans would make me think of fighting type stuff and I'd ignore it unless I was trying to figure out the military.

Actually the animals use a stripped down pathing code so they are less intense than dwarves. It still adds up though as you could have hundreds of animals if you have just a few species.

If you know about the A* pathfinding though you'll know that wandering around the meeting hall is actually rather low intensity. Wandering between several though does bring them up closer to the kind of processing weight of dwarves doing stuff.


If you really want to know how much pathfinding is slowing a fort down though just cancel all of the jobs so the dwarves sit around idle. If they are not pathfinding you'll have near minimal slow down. If that's still too little FPS then you're going to have to get rid of other things, like perhaps the dwarves themselves.

Or friggin butcher those animals. Having them in a cage doesn't do anything but take up space and honestly I know as well as you do that you're not planning to let them out.

-

Separating a cat from it's owner is easy. Just send the owner over to a lever while the cat is following him. If you don't want to try to stick a hall of spikes behind him you can use a pet forbidden door with a hatch linked to that lever just in front of it. Nice little drop into a pit and voila~
Just sitting in a 1 tile pit the cat obviously can't do any pathfinding but if you want to take it further I'm sure you can think of a way to reduce it's footprint even more.

No, forbidden doors are treated like walls for pathfinding. If you have only forbidden doors leading into your fort invaders can't figure out how to get in. If they work out their path first and you forbid the doors after that they will walk up to the door before there is a problem but they may be able to bash down the door by then being close to it.
Pet forbidden doors were a big problem because dwarves can walk through them so they are treated like acceptable space to walk through.

The game is sort of better about this now. If you had a dog standing at a door just trying to go through it over and over you would get some slowdown for awhile but the game picks up that pathing isn't working now so after awhile it will just stop trying. If you were to mine out a wall or such after this the dog wouldn't bolt out to go wherever it wanted but would just sit there for awhile before it tried pathing again.

-

Your system sounds pretty similar to mine. All of the pathing and that doesn't seem to slow it down nearly as much for me as the number of things in the fort. You might consider smashing a lot of your loose stone under a bridge (or for time's sake just modding stone types you don't like or want, to evaporate- make sure you don't have any workshops made of them though.)

Likewise I just don't play with 100 dwarves anymore. If I wanted to retire a fort I might raise the cap and try to attract the king but for actually designing and executing the fort I don't go past 40 dwarves.

You can get some decent speed up from turning off temperature and weather though. Once you've finally got the magma up to do whatever you desire you could turn temp back on. So long as your guys didn't walk through magma you won't have cheated yourself out of any FUN.