Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Lord Shonus on February 04, 2010, 06:26:44 pm

Not unless it was a Masterwork Baby.

I don't wanna ask how you train up the appropriate skill for that one...

Best.  Crosstraining.  Ever.

I disagree. If such an alloy could be made and it's properties mimicked, don't you think that the properties of metal would need better definition? Our ideas aren't exclusive. They work well together.

What ideas?  You just find a textbook, put those numbers in.  Most of them are already in.  Bronze will be harder, but you can't make it without tin.  Wootz?  Add it yourself.  Historically, only one reserve of ore ever made it, and it took centuries to figure out why.  It's already part of several mods, anyways.

If you're suggesting actually using computer modeling to have alloys go in as recipes, and get their engineering properties to just fall out based on first principles, that's never going to happen.

Although, if there metals are similar enough (leading to direct substitution with minimal lattice distortion), the assumption can hold sufficiently well. That being said, those are very rare cases.

Also, I just realised, for that formula to be correct (assuming assumptions may actually be assumed), the right hand side would have to be 100 / density, not the 1 / d I said before. Silly percentages adding extra terms.

You really can only form alloys between metals with similar valencies, crystalline structures, and atomic radii. So, you'll always end up with minimal lattice distortion, at least for certain values of "minimal". 

In fact, most properties will be very close to the weighted average.  Most physical properties, anyways.  Unfortunately, not engineering properties.  As in, the various strengths (sheer, impact, compression, tensile, etc.), I.E. the ones we really want!  There's just no way to do it.  You'd have to simulate the atoms interacting...because there is no formula you can evaluate to give you the answer, so simulation is the only bet.  And that will take forever and you'll still have to approximate, because those damn quantum equations aren't fun.  If you model them like springs, that push if they get too close, and pull if they get too far, that's pretty close to the real way that atoms behave.  But even with that simplification, you have to simulate, you can't solve the equations for even only a dozen atoms interacting, and most alloys you would need more than that!  In fact, I don't think you can even do it for 3 atoms at once, without having to simulate instead of just use an equation. 

In conclusion, without some kind of unimaginably awesome mathematical breakthrough, there won't ever be an equation for working out the engineering properties of an alloy.  I model proteins...so if there's a good way to model atomic dynamics and have a highly accurate approximation, I'd love to hear it!   While it would be awesome if in DF, you could just go and say "Hmmm, lets add a bit of tungsten to my steel, see how it behaves!" you're basically asking the impossible.

PS, percentages don't add extra terms!  50% = 0.5, not 50.

Pottery.  Sedimentary clays could be added to the raws as rocks, which could be used to make ceramics.

I've thought about that one myself.  A previous poster has already outlined the basics.  I do like the idea of bone porcelain, makes elves useful for more than just practice bolts.

Now optimally, you'd be able to set dwarves to gather clay, just like they gather sand.  However, I don't think that's coming in the next version.  Meanwhile, you can just turn all clays into sand as well, and tell users of your mod that it's an honour system, if your map only has sand, only make glass.  If it only has clay, only make ceramics.

Next:  I'd like to have the pottery workshop just make unfired pottery, which is then hauled to the kiln for firing.  This depends on some wishful thinking on my part though.  Namely, that we can specify in the new reactions, to preserve the quality of one of the reagents in the final product.  That is, masterwork unfired clay mug + kiln = masterwork clay mug.  Also, it relies on being able to add new reactions to the kiln, which is something I'm not sure will be in there.

Having the kiln right in the shop isn't really bad, per se, I just feel bad for the existing kiln.  Being used for nothing but pearl ash must be a boring life

I thought the old buildings were going to be converted to the new system?

No, Toady has said that most, maybe even all, of the old buildings will remain hard coded.  At least, as of 09/18/2009 that's what he said.  Still unknown is if we can add custom reactions to the hard-coded buildings, or if it will remain limited to just the smelter, plus the new custom workshops.  I'm eager to find out, though   

Hey guys, sorry if I missed somebody else doing this in the past 37 pages, but I decided I missed the funny mishmash of words for dwarven names (Plus its easier to keep track of your olins and urists vs. all of the random Kobold names, but I didn't want to just nickname them Bob and Fred), so I threw together a Kobold Language File!

My methodology is pretty simple:
You can get pretty reasonable looking fake words by observing the frequencies for letter triples in real words, and
generating new triples randomly, based on those probabilities.

So you start with nothing, and look at your rule for starting with nothing, and randomly pick a letter according to that rule.  Then you look at  your rule for a blank, followed by that letter you just chose, now you have two letter.  From then on, you use your two-letter rules, and generate a new third letter, and then use the last two letters in your word-in-progress to generate a third.  It continues until the third letter you generate is a blank, indicating the end of the word.  (To get reasonable lengths, after the word reaches 6 letters, it has a 50/50 chance from then on, of saying forget the probabilities, if a blank is a valid choice, I'm taking it). 

I used 3 languages for the source words:

1)  Dorfish from DF (Kobolds steal everything from dwarves, even words)
2)  German (Kobold is a german word)
3)  Hebrew (Tolkien based his Dwarf language on Hebrew, and since I couldn't find many Tolkien dwarf words, I went straight to the source!)

(I transliterated all three into unaccented Latin letters).

So that generated me as many words as I could ever want, and almost all of them had a vowel, even!  From there, I sorted the DF dictionary of english words, by the length of the goblin word for them.  I then rearranged the order a bit, to make words I thought Kobolds would use at all/commonly to the end, and words they would use commonly towards the start.  (Word length is almost invariably proportional to usage.  If you make a new word that's long, and it's useful, it'll get shortened.  Cellular Telephone -> Cell Phone -> Cell.  Television -> TV)  Then I lined my words up with that list, also sorted by length.

Result:  Kobold Dictionary

There are some (sometimes humorous) coincidences:

I know a guy who goes by "Gares" online, and the word "gares" was randomly generated, and assigned to the english word "Fetid". 

The neo-Kobold word for "Spray" is "jet". 

Also, the word for "Skirt (clothing)" is "gurl".

The name for "hole" is "dor". 

That's all I've noticed, I didn't read it too carefully.  Since it's generated based on real words from real languages (And Dorfish) I think they're mostly all pronounceable.  There are no duplicates, but there may be heterographs.  But that's ok, English has heterographs

If you prefer the unintelligible names, I won't force you to use this

Oh, one last thing Urist -> Dagger -> Nurg. 
Urist McDwarf, meet Nurg Koboldmann.  Rolls off the tongue a bit better than Dlufululugalmus, I think.  But that's just me. 


Oops, split in two due to 40,000 character limit!