Bay 12 Games Forum

My first attempt has ended in Fun. I embarked, got a decent fort running then went to set up my soap production, only to find an alchemy shop requires clear glass vials. Having neither sand nor an underground pool to make sand with the tree bug, I decided to flood the fort with the nearby river. All but one dwarf died, and the remaining one stayed alive and sane for a miraculous half a year on nothing but vermin and river water. A river infested with carp I might add. After watching him for awhile, I decided to attempt a single person fort... Unfortunately, after building a small shack with a bed for him (since he was a woodcutter), he got thirsty one last time. Alas, he ran to the river of carp and was not as lucky as his previous visits. He was yanked into the water and promptly torn apart by a swarm of carp. Unfortunately I had not a single bar of soap to scrub all the blood from the river...

I haven't read through the whole thread, its a bit long... But have you tried this approach?
Start with your basic searching or whatever you decide is the fastest method. Then, record where dwarves move and create a seperate list for this. The first list will have all the world areas, and the second will have areas which dwarves have recently walked on. The second list will have some sort of counters assigned to the areas which will count down, and when the number reaches zero, the area will be removed from the list. This will make the list into a sort of short term memory for where dwarves have walked recently. This assumes your dwarves will move in relatively the same areas and pathways a majority of the time, which unless they are fleeing from goblins is a correct assumption. For example, most forts have a main hallway through which dwarves will walk. Using this method, the second list will very quickly acquire paths from common tasks, such as food stockpile to dining hall or storing mugs in their stockpile. This second list will be checked first for a path from point a to point b, and since it will be much smaller than the main world list it should take quite a bit less time to calculate a heuristic for. Another benefit is if you have dwarves running through a massive stockpile room. Take for example one of my forts which has a huge 1 z level room carved out which is probably about 100 by 100 in size and filled with stockpiles. Dwarves running from room entrance A to room entrance B will almost always take the same path or only 1 or 2 squares off the same path. So rather than generating a heuristic for the whole room, the path will be charted once, then followed by all further dwarves to come down that particular path with a much smaller list of areas over which the heuristic must be done. There are some problems with the method, such as the paths being potentially inefficient and doubling back as well as the extra processing done to make and maintain the 2nd list, and they may or may not cripple this technique.
Knowing C++ decently enough to try out this approach, I think I may start trying to implement such a search tommorow...

Yep, one of my forts has a military dwarf with over 300 kills, both goblin and orc. I even cleared a wide area of trees in front of my entrance so I could watch the enemies fly farther before exploding on the side of a tree. It is really quite impressive to watch when a seige comes.

Uh oh, Baboonanza hasn't posted in about 3 weeks... Come, my fellow dwarves, it is time to mount a rescue party!

Oh, and bump. I couldn't let this thread sit on page 3 now could I?

Put walls on the bridge, then install pumps allowing you to instantly transform your entrance bridge into a magma river.

Low FPS. My forts will last for many years, during which time megaprojects are constructed... And still nothing topples my fortress. Until FPS drops below 20, at which point I can no longer stand playing the map.

Yay! My magma poem is just short enough to fit in my sig!