Bay 12 Games Forum

He wants magma

I'll get right on that, lol.

Big pointers, hehe.

Designations are a separate 16x16 array per mapblock from the pathfinding data, they are for... designations like digging or channeling and such If it was up to me, that data would be replaced with a designation list but whatever hehe.

I don't really have much to add, but I <3 mechs. The worst part about the last mechwarrior was the waypoints navigation AI used. Your teammates were never where they were supposed to be, especially in a city! Use vector meshes and tweak that stuff so mechs position themselves correctly and people will love your game. The other stuff would just be icing on the cake.

I have read the wiki, and my marksdwarves have EVERYTHING they should need!  A barracks to sleep (but not train) in, quivers, bows, ammo, SO MUCH AMMO D8>, and archery range, the works!  And I ask them to train, but it just says Soldier Unable to follow orders whenever I activate them, why? DX

/cut and paste reply

I have a lot of well trained archers at my fort and can share my experience.

The reason they can't follow orders, is because they are trying to train skills besides archery and have no barracks to train them at. If they are off duty and have nothing else to do they will only practice archery. Keeping them off duty is a bad idea because other combat skills matter too, armor skill for example is very important if you want them to be able to catch up with goblin thieves.

You're also going to enjoy equipment mismatch messages if you use a lot of archers no matter what. What happens is that a dwarf will be going to grab standard quality bolts, but before he gets them you may end up producing a high quality stack of bolts which will cause him to change his mind about the bolts he wants (equipment mismatch). The common knowledge that you need to allocate 1000 arrows is wrong. You just need 25 arrows or so allocated per dwarf in the squad. You actually get less equipment mismatch messages when you allocate less arrows. If you go into the ammunition screen and view assigned arrows for your squad it will be more obvious what is going on.

I don't think I'll take any part of *that* . I'm here to suggest stuff not to "fix" the code through hacks. Controlling the game with external apps is one thing, changing the game  engine is borderline copyright infringement ~ .

Hacking isn't copyright infringement. Besides, Toady will never sue me because I would never do anything to harm him, I <3 the toad.

I'm not  sure why devek is so resistant to any path-finding related suggestions. He might be right that path finding improvements would be a waste of time because it might not take as many CPU resources as we think. My limited test didn't suggest memory thrashing .

You hit the nail on the head. Before Toady did DF, he was paid money to know math. It is kind of like going up to a race care driver and telling them they could take faster turns if they focused out for their weight distribution, it is kind of pretentious.

Don't get me wrong though, there is nothing wrong with pathfinding improvements. It would be nice if when a dwarf constructed a wall, that it did it from the closest tile instead of always building from one side, it would be nice if it grabbed the stone that was close or on the way, it would be nice if we had multi-tile monsters, etc. Toady isn't sitting around trying to figure out how to do it, he is simply busy working on other things(like hill dwarfs, taverns, and cities!). We will get those things when they get to the top of the enormous list of things left to do.

It still seems logical that path finding improvements would lead to FPS improvement because that what all creatures do most of the time.

It is also logical that you could improve FPS by improving any piece of code, but premature optimization is a killer waste of time. The truth is, exponential slowdowns in DF are the result of bugs. The most useful thing the user can do is upload saves before and after such slowdowns occur. Furthermore it is difficult sometimes figuring out how to properly write a piece of code when you don't know what it is going to do, DF is a huge work in progress.

For example, let me show you a graphed view of the function that determines what an object is when you look at it.

There is so much waste in that I could cut away with a few key strokes, but why bother? Right now it is flexible enough to add all sorts of cool new features and items to the game. The biggest performance gains are not possible to implement until you actually know what you are trying to do.

I have a lot of well trained archers at my fort and can share my experience.

The reason they can't follow orders, is because they are trying to train skills besides archery and have no barracks to train them at. If they are off duty and have nothing else to do they will only practice archery. Keeping them off duty is a bad idea because other combat skills matter too, armor skill for example is very important if you want them to be able to catch up with goblin thieves.

You're also going to enjoy equipment mismatch messages if you use a lot of archers no matter what. What happens is that a dwarf will be going to grab standard quality bolts, but before he gets them you may end up producing a high quality stack of bolts which will cause him to change his mind about the bolts he wants (equipment mismatch). The common knowledge that you need to allocate 1000 arrows is wrong. You just need 25 arrows or so allocated per dwarf in the squad. You actually get less equipment mismatch messages when you allocate less arrows. If you go into the ammunition screen and view assigned arrows for your squad it will be more obvious what is going on.