Bay 12 Games Forum

Have you had any luck fixing the cases where dwarves have a valid square right next to them, but insist on mining it out from the other side because of the set order in which they consider valid squares?  If I'm not mistaken, most of the time that would be fixable by having them prefer the closest valid square, where "closeness" is defined as abs(dwarf.x - destination.x) + abs(dwarf.y - destination.y) + abs(dwarf.z - destination.z), which is much simpler than a full path.

Given that the 05/29/2012 devlog now says "relevant designation jobs use the nearest square instead of starting at top left", I will consider this question answered   Thanks, Toady!

Diplomats will come, anyway.  They won't leave until they have a chance to complain to the mayor or whatever about how they've been waiting, and haven't been able to see them for the past 5 years, and they'll just keep waiting until they go insane if they have to. 

There is, unfortunately, no way to stop that that I know of.

Do we know what they path to at all?  I seem to remember that they can talk through walls....

I think someone actually did mod coal dust, actually.

I understand that but how are the random numbers used?

They're used to make random decisions.  For example, during worldgen, to decide whether or not to make a river, mountain, etc.  Or when in combat, to decide if an attack will hit or not.  Say that your dwarf should have a 70% chance to hit.  You generate a random number between 1 & 100.  If you get any number between 1 & 70 from your RNG, you call it a hit.  The numbers between 71 and 100 count as misses.  So the random numbers help you tell the computer to do things sometimes, but not always.

Think of it as telling your computer to flip a coin to decide what decision to make.  The random number is, essentially, the result of your coin flip.

Actually, rather than having mothers carry them around, leaving babies in the hospital (if one exists) would make a lot of sense.  And if there is no hospital, they should leave them in a bed they own, or barring that, some barracks and carry them around mostly as a last resort.

Then again, a number of players like using babies as shields....

Is this project still alive? Or is it dead? _{has he thoughts within his head}

So anyway, I was checking out the material strength tags, namely the

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[IMPACT_YIELD:10000]
   [IMPACT_FRACTURE:10000]
   [IMPACT_STRAIN_AT_YIELD:1000]
   [COMPRESSIVE_YIELD:10000]
   [COMPRESSIVE_FRACTURE:10000]
   [COMPRESSIVE_STRAIN_AT_YIELD:1000]
   [TENSILE_YIELD:10000]
   [TENSILE_FRACTURE:10000]
   [TENSILE_STRAIN_AT_YIELD:1000]
   [TORSION_YIELD:10000]
   [TORSION_FRACTURE:10000]
   [TORSION_STRAIN_AT_YIELD:1000]
   [SHEAR_YIELD:40000] used pine
   [SHEAR_FRACTURE:40000]
   [SHEAR_STRAIN_AT_YIELD:1000]
   [BENDING_YIELD:10000]
   [BENDING_FRACTURE:10000]
   [BENDING_STRAIN_AT_YIELD:1000]parts. As I understand, IMPACT_YIELD and IMPACT_FRACTURE relate to Yield strength and Ultimate strength, respectively. The compressive, tensile, shear, etc etc yield and fracture values, which are only apparently used during wrestling, all relate to their respective ultimate stress and strain values, I believe. I'm afraid I don't fully understand Toady's system. It would have been easier if the values that define material strength were the various moduli (Young's, Poisson's, etc.) along with their respective ultimate stress/strain values, which would determine fracture points and so on. I'm not sure. Maybe that's how it's set up right now. I mean, IMPACT_ELASTICITY probably refers to Young's Modulus. I'm not sure. Again, I'm not really a modder, and even if I was, I never learned anything from my Materials Science course.

I know, this is probably a bit off-topic, but it's an interesting thing to look at. It's not terribly important right now, since most of these tags aren't really being used to their fullest extent, but I think that this should be a next step somewhere down the line, don't you think?

It's alive, I'm just working on other stuff too.  Started a new class, but will gather this up when I have more time

Anyhow, you're right that some of the stuff is confusing.  I looked into it too, but haven't had much in the way of materials science.  The wiki article has more info.  I'm not sure why that article is listed as being for an old version of DF, though, given that the properties have not changed since then.

If you can find any way to translate all that data on wood strength which is linked in the OP to the terms DF uses, feel free to explain it to us.  I'm no expert, but the people I talked to seemed to think that the properties related to metal strength and didn't make much sense for wood.  I don't know if you can help DF make sense of them or not, but if you can, please share your calculations with the rest of us!

Quote from: Dorfimedes on May 19, 2012, 02:01:04 am

Quote from: ClkWrkJester on May 19, 2012, 01:32:38 am

One of my dwarves just cheerfully made my fort a wooden earing with a wooden picture of his best friend on it.

Who later made an amulet. With the other dwarf's picture. I want to murder both of them.

...And then every year after that for the entire length of your fort's lifespan you'll be cursed to have shitty artifacts with pictures of one of them dying horribly. Calling it.

I say you kill both of them by equipping two military dwarves, making them beserk, seperate the two friends, dump one soldier into each and have them beat the friends to death with there friend's artifact!

Maybe someone who has a grudge will end up with a fell mood and kill one of the two to make an artifact?