Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm building a massive windfarm above my pump stack. I didn't bother to do the math on power required, either. I figure it will be more fun that way.

What are you using for pump material? I'm using magma-safe rock blocks, nickel pipes, and iron screws, but smelting that much nickel and iron means I had to dig out magma smelters and forges at the bottom of the map, somewhat defeating the purpose of bringing magma up to the magma workshops. I'm doing it anyway, just to be dwarfy. And to have a ready supply of magma for other projects.

I've always used bar or grate floors under any kind of mist generation. Although that requires not only water supply plumbing and pumps, but water return pumping as well. I'm not positive how I'd make sure that flooding was impossible. One added measure to consider would be to have the return pumps unable to be destroyed without also cutting power to the supply pumps.

As far as needing seperate levels, it is topologically possible to have a lattice such that magma and water never touch. I can't figure out how to make such a lattice scalable; Since I never plan out more than the next two or so waves of expansion, I always think "What can I do to make it easier to expand later." In any case, the path length for the miners and mechanics would probably become prohibitively long once you got big enough.

Other than the few additional steps needed to climb stairs, I see no drawback to using more z-levels. It's not like you're likely to run out soon.

All this said, I like to see what other people are thinking and doing. My mist generators, if I have them, cover the meeting area and the dining areas. Everyone goes to those places pretty often, and I put my well and hospital near the dining area as well, so I've already brought the river or lake to that point.

Top one, floor made out of glass, and metal bars built along the side to keep anyone from falling off.


Yes, I have built OSHA-compliant fortresses. I've also tapped into magma the hard (easy?) way.

I can confirm that it will run with
[PRINT_MODE:SHADER]
I don't notice any performance change offhand from
[PRINT_MODE:VBO]

ATI Radeon 5800 series video card, since hardware was mentioned.

Quote from: decius on October 05, 2010, 11:26:04 pm

To the original question: I'm running a 3220 kHz (14.0x320) core speed 6-core, 2x4GB 1333 DDR3 RAM 8-8-8-16-27.

I hope you mean MHz, otherwise you DO need a cpu upgrade

Ooops... Off by 10^3 error.

I wonder whether there would be significant performance increases from designing a specific FPGA to play DF and porting it over to that custom architecture (not lit it's really feasible, but it would be an awesome project.)

I suspect the point of deminishing returns would fall somewhere around coding DF to run on existing architecture. The dwarven route would be to to build a custom computere, not a PC, that could only run a given build of DF. Big gains from having a seperate Cat Pathfinding Unit to offload the heavy stuff from the Dwarfs, Rain, And Magma unit.

So... if I pause, disable mining/woodcutting, run a few frames to let them drop their tools, assign them their former tools as weapons, then activate them, then unpause, they should grab their weapons before doing anything else?

Quote from: KaguroDraven on October 06, 2010, 10:59:57 am

Technicly the water is recycled automaticly, as it turns into steam, clean hot water in gas form.

Yes, but if you don't pump it back underground it just floats away as steam, which then turns into rain elsewhere. Nuclear reactors churn out massive amounts of steam, but this is why nuclear reactors are built next to rivers or lakes to provide the huge amounts of water. If water isn't as plentiful then the water would need to be recycled and pumped back underground.

Geothermal can be depleted through for each site, but its just an issue of you have X amount of thermal energy at the site. If you are trying to produce more than X amount of power its going to start to go cold. To increase X you need to dig deeper. The deeper you go the more heat there is, and so the higher the maximum production of the borehole.

More properly, nuclear reactors use rivers to condense the steam and recycle the same water for the turbines. River water has lots of dissolved minerals that steam turbines don't like, and reactor water has Fun products of fast neutron bombadment that organic molecules, like DNA, don't like. Some systems have 3 loops, 2 closed, one open, for reactor water:turbine water:river/ocean water. Closed lakes are a poor choice for cooling water, since the end result is heating up the entire lake.

To the original question: I'm running a 3220 kHz (14.0x320) core speed 6-core, 2x4GB 1333 DDR3 RAM 8-8-8-16-27.

5X5 embark, 31 dwarves, no excessive clutter. I see no drop in framerate from bumping the RAM latency, but an immediate hit from dropping the CPU frequency.

Translation: -I- would benefit more from a CPU speed up than a RAM speed up. If you want to test your machine, create a baseline save, and test it out by bumping your RAM and CPU. If your machine is already at maximum stable speed, bump it down and see how much of an effect you get.