May 9, 2024: The May '24 Report is up.
News: April 23, 2024: Dwarf Fortress 50.13 has been released.
News: February 4, 2021: Dwarf Fortress Talk #28 has been posted.
News: November 21, 2018: A new Threetoe story has been posted.
Forum Guidelines
Steam is good. Dwarf Fortress is good. They, however need not touch.
Shouldn't there be some additional vermin remains showing up around the Mills and Querns? I'm finding it a little hard to understand why the cats in this Fortress are not finding vermin around these two locations. Mills and Querns. Especially since DF doesn't have a floor cleaning broom tool, or sweeping job task. Knutor
I like the idea. But this seems almost like dwarf economy stuff. So I'd guess that this would be taken care of when the dwarven economy is fixedYeah, until dwarves can be taught how to not suck at economics and bring the fortress down with them, this will have to wait.
Gamey and stupid to put it bluntly.Well-put.
(continuing from the other thread)I have dealt with this problem extensively in the above spoiler, mostly by pointing out some of the things mentioned in a rather far earlier post by Andeerz. Seriously, don't make an argument that is countered by the argument you're trying to counter, it's annoying.But what if, say, I have an unguarded bridge, or even just dwarves outside. The enemies would teleport towards them (as by the way fast mode is elaborated in the OP) without giving me chance to react. If you are using the other suggested system(where everyone in PANIC mode doesn't get slowed down), the enemies spotting and chasing them would give them a speed boost compared to the others, giving you no time to get the other outside dwarves (who haven't seen the enemy) inside.IMO that's appropriate when the enemy is sneaking up on you.
You're assuming an awful lot of perfection on the speed synchronization for someone who thinks we need to screw with the base of the game for dwarves to handle time-critical matters...As for this can't be exploited. There's a difference between your suggested mode. Dwarves move faster in the PANIC mode. What about players using caged goblins to scare goblins to work faster, or using a drop tower, or an arena. The arena will especially be a problem, as the game won't be able to tell the difference between a real fight, an arena fight and prisoners escaping. Entering panic mode everytime someone fights would slow down the game to much, especially with hunting.Panicked dwarves can't execute normal jobs and drop the stuff they're hauling... even disregarding that, every speed increase of some dwarves would be more than offset by the slower speed (per hour played) of the rest.
I don't see the problem with drop towers; triggering crisis mode would be appropriate, otherwise it takes a day for a goblin to fall down to its death.How long do you make your drop-towers? IIRC, a tick is around 3 minutes; let's call it 5 to make it even and give you an edge. 10 z-levels is 50 minutes. Nowhere near a day. Sure, a bit more than is needed IRL, but A. some things aren't worth screwing with (and possibly up) the core of Dwarf Fortress's titular mode.
For the arena we'll probably want to indicate that all combat in a certain zone (or let's use a burrow) is not dangerous. We'll need something like that to have a functioning arena anyway, so that we can actually have spectators that aren't trying to run away.Frankly, aside from this idea requiring fast-mode combat which kinda makes slow-mode significantly less justified to implement, I'd probably just designate the whole map as said burrow/zone, just so I didn't get a 72x slowdown in realworld speed whenever a badger got angry at a dwarf, or a dwarf fell off a ledge (it happens more than you'd think!), or the CoTG beats a criminal, or c baby bird lashes out at its broodmates, or a tantrumer punches a dwarf, and always lasting until the game decided the combat was over.
"What complicated checks?" What do you think slows down late-game FPS so much, goblin sappers getting into your motherboard? Or if you and ebbor mean the complicated checks to decide "It's time to enter...the Slow-Mode zone!", then you might have a point, EXCEPT that you'd have to check a few dozen conditions (probably) for every dwarf. And probably every other firendly unit on the map, if not every moving unit on the map plus sponges and airdrowning whales and fish.Third, what about the FPS if the game has to do all those different and complicated checks every tick.What complicated checks? It has to check whether crisis mode is active to determine the number of ticks in a calendar day, which can be expressed in a single bit. It has to award action points to dwarves depending on their crisis status, which, again can be expressed in a single bit, a flag that can be toggled when the action/job is assigned. Checking two bits per calendar day is not a lot.
So, goblins shooting at dwarves or vise versa counts as "Crisis-time!", but dwarves shooting at wildlife doesn't count? See where FallingWhale has a point about your idea? Shooting a crossbow is shooting a crossbow, whether it's to feed your family, protect your fortress, or release your stress over miasma and dead spouses.Hunting based forts would then move at a crawl, as would forts with an arena, a live firing range or a siege training range.Hunting, in particular if it's common, can be considered an economic activity like fishing or harvesting plump helmets. A hunter going mano a mano with its quarry is rare enough that it doesn't become disruptive.
Soldiers training can be considered an economic activity, since there's about as much risk involved as with common economic tasks. Any live training would be rare enough to be done as real combat.The above issues multiplied, PLUS the fact that live training isn't as rare as you'd think. Many of us currently use it aftr every siege, to empty cages and train recruits, and even if that's not always true there will always be people like that. Respect those who play differently than you!
Holy carp, why do you exaggerate? It takes my dwarves less than a day to cross the fortress. At that rate...assume 1.5 days per map tile to be nice to Silver...that's 24 per region tile...crossing a Pocket world would take only maybe a single year, and that's if you're far away and taking a liberal estimate of time. If you settled the opposite side of a big world, it might take a decade or two to get a caravan to you, but what are you expecting, and how long do you think it would have taken a bunch of heavily-laden wagons to travel from somewhere in Africa to China in the 1300s?why can't you just put the rest of the world into fortress mode scale when using fortress mode? if it takes you a week to walk to the edge of a map it should take several months to travel to other forts or cities. so if you send out an army you could check travel reports while fiddling around with your fortress until they arrive.Because that would essentially slow down the rest of the world. If caravans had to walk from the mountainhome to your fortress at the same speed as your dwarves, it might take decades or even centuries before they arrived.
So...let's see now. Whenever an enemy sees a dwarf or vise versa...dude, that's like always until you get your dwarves underground, and even longer if you have grazing animals.Whenever damage is done to a dwarf is a bad trigger too, because that means whatever enemy you have is already in the fort, giving you no time to prepare, as well as a series of other problems.In any case, enemies entering the map would either move at fortress mode speed until a mode change is triggered, so you can see them coming. Whenever they're at crisis mode speed, that means at least some of your dwarves are too.
Wild animals are enemies. Wild animals are everywhere. Why does it need to be addressed, if we're not even sure if this idea should be added at all?Triggers: If "whenever a dwarf panics/sees an enemy" is a bad trigger, we need to scrap that idea.Please elaborate. Enemy recognition is a rather specific requirement, and one that will have to be adressed sooner or later anyway.
So, now I need to wait until the messenger reaches my mayor to get back to fast-time and get some stuff done? Or do you mean actual military, and fail to realize the number of challenges and playstyles that do without for whatever reason?Having messengers force slow-mode until they reach your guards is dumb; how do you define guards, and what if you're not protected by them and rather by, say, some kind of trap/s?Anyone with some kind of official capacity would suffice. If you choose to bunker in and kill anyone that approaches with traps, that's a choice with consequences.
"This guy's not important, I can ignore him." This is a completely arbitrary thing. Sorry, but just because the player says it's not important doesn't mean it's not. Soon you'll need to get back to the fast-mode combat problem that your idea has.Can you not see issues with marking critters as unimportant at will?It's an optional measure, not essential. Since it's completely under control of the player, I can't see what would cause problems for him: after all, he would forego the option to have precise controls.
They should always do things the more efficient way, that's my point! And what do you mean by "you can only wring so much efficiency out of them?" If dwarves suck so much at handling time-sensitive issues that you want Toady to spend years rewriting the basic engine, then obviously it can be improved. Are dwarves as efficient as they can be or is there a reason for your idea?And why is "dwarves handle time-sensitive issues" not a good way for fast responses to happen when most things that would require them autopause the game? And of course it's vague--there's at least a thousand situations it would apply to.They have to recognize time-sensitive issues, they have to figure what is better in that specific situation, and given their walking speed, there's not that much more efficiency you can wring out of them. And if that was no problem, why wouldn't they always do things the more efficient way?
Hm...so you're saying that forcing the player to play 72 times slower isn't anything? Okay, clearly we aren't thinking the same things here. I'm saying that playing that slow would suck, because presumably it would take 72 times as much real-world time to do the same stuff in dwarf-time. It might be neat to go to slow-mode sometimes to watch the dwarves run about, but usually I'd rather have a fortress that's getting stuff done. Therefore, random points of slow-mode (when I'm likely watching something other than dwarven life) would be BAD, in my book.Games are not about forcing you to do stuff, they're about letting you do stuff within limits. By your logic, the best game would be an awesome but non-interactive one, whic isn't really a game at all.Then yours would be an editor, nothing more. The player has to face some constraints, otherwise he would reach his goals as soon as he had formulated them. In any case, I'm not forcing the player to do anything, just as the current version of the game isn't forcing the player to do anything but to follow the calendar and timing rules used in the game. Tell me what I force the player to do.
Yea, yes, so you say. Everything has to be PERFECT for there to be no efficiency difference--and if there isn't, then dwarves can handle every-second-counts situations as well in fast-mode as in slow. And how is there no button? You only go to slow-mode when the game tells you to, in those time-vital situations? Then why the *&$% do we need to include a slow-mode at all?If tere is the slightest difference between the modes, as far as anything goes, it will be abused. It's not like "minimising haling distances improves efficiency," or even "building this complicated device improves efficiency," but "oressing this button improves efficiency."Disagree, there's no button to be pressed and there are no efficiency differences between modes.
I have pointed out time and time again that it does not take a freakin' week to walk down the hall in Fortress Mode. I have crunched the numbers with some estimates that were VERY generous to your cause, and there is anyways no reason that the merchants couldn't run at one abstracted rate more appropriate for their relevance to gameplay and to realism while the fortress runs at a different abstracted rate that optimizes gameplay enjoyability. Some sacrifices must be made.I think that reaching the edge of the territory you control taking a week isn't too unreasonable, considering that you'd have to be pretty damn far away in DF for it to take a week. Dwarves aren't as slow as you all seem to think--a muner can dig many tiles a day, and I don't think it takes multiple days to build something in a workshop, barring huge haling distances.They walk slowly. Too slow for soldiers, messengers and even traders. As said before, economic activity can be abstracted without much problems: the military and diplomatic manoeuvers are where the problems lie.
Arbitrary production changes...that are actually just like what we have now, only changed to better fit the model required by their suggestions. Very arbitrary. And "predictable situations?" "Every time a dwarf sees a crreature it deems an enemy" might be predictable, if only due to frequency, cut "A messenger runs from a nearby town" is nowhere NEAR predictable (or at least shouldn't be; if the nearby human hamlet has a goblin attack every 17th of Galena, there's a bigger issue than it taking a week to get from the edge of the dwarves' eyesight to the mayor's office). "In addition the game derives much of its charm from the fact that every craftsman has to walk a very specific path to a specific storeroom to pick up specific items." Erm, even taking that as true (for me, it's more the stories and the structures I make), what relevance does it have to do with this discussion? And of course Fortress Mode is like the fast-mode, the suggestion was for a slow-mode!And one last question: Why is the slow mode needed? Couldn't we accelerate the working and consuming speeds a la the suggested fast modes and leave out all of the issues, obvious and not, which would occur with such a fundamental change to the Fortress Mode engine?The fast modes, AFAI've seen, contain a mass of arbitrary production changes: that will make abuse inevitable, balancing becomes an enduring headache for each update, and it breaks suspension of disbelief much more than a mere time speed change for some dwarves in specific, predictable situations. In addition the game derives much of its charm from the fact that every craftsman has to walk a very specific path to a specific storeroom to pick up specific items. Lastly, fortress mode already is a kind of fast mode, because it minimizes working/sleeping speeds to make time for dwarves walking around, and only shows a limited number of work/eat/sleep cycles instead of one for every day of the year.
edit: ninja'd by AndeerzHuh?
>This is a game of emergent behavior; little events earlier on can have profound, often unforeseen effects down the line
Then I wonder why you would abstract them further away?
>And I think it would be really silly to introduce such a break in continuity of movement... Combat would seem to me as if everyone except for the combatants are statues.Wow, this is really...I'd come up with a rebuttal, but there's a perfectly good one in the post you're replying to.
Pretty much, so their actions stay congruent with the calendar, their productivity remains the same the whole year, while the dwarves that need it get their fast action. They become combatants too when threatened and flee at fast speed.
>And how to define someone as a "combatant" or "time sensitive" or whatever in a way that doesn't seem clunky and kludged-in and possibly game-breaking seems impossible to me.See above note.
Anyone fighting or alarmed by the fighting. Seems straightforward and simple to me.
>when combat is occurring, (everything is) involved in combat in some way, shape, or form.This isn't a bland strategy game, where no goblins can enter the fortress until they have killed all of your militia. It only takes a single goblin running inside to ruin your idea of "Civilians will never enter combat."
Most dwarves are inside a fortress, fighting usually happens at the fringes.
> What if such a stray arrow (or stray dwarf being hurled by a colossus) hit one of those non-combatants that is standing absolutely stillAnd the fact that he is, relative to the combatants, a statue until such point as they scare him doesn't faze you a bit?
That civilian will most likely already be alarmed, since fighting happens nearby. In the rare situation that he's not, he'll become alarmed by being hit and will flee to safety if he can or cry for help.
>What happens when we are dealing with siege machinery which might someday be able to destroy constructions and walls?See above.
I don't see any problems that will cause. These are hostiles, so they'll alarm people.
>Everyone would obey the same rules regardless of game speed or what is happening / My suggestion would require fundamental changes in code for only one thingDifferent between modes, identical between parts of the fortress.
On the contrary I'd say, you specifically mention different speeds, hunger rates, ways of moving about and production rates for both rates. Essentially, making an entire new game mode. Whereas I would only change the amount of ticks in a calendar day, and not even for all dwarves.
Taking reservations about in into account, I'd say that crisis mode should apply to any dwarf that's executing a military or diplomatic action.Oh Armok, that's bad...it's not like the militia is ever activated except to deal with sieges, or that diplomacy is ever involved with anything but the occasional messenger from a nearby town...
People have been discussing why they think their own idea for abstraction is better. The reason I think mine is the best (from the "Dwarf Mode Real Time Game Speed w/ Time Skipping" thread) is that for a game designed to run on emergent, procedural behavior, abstraction based on a procedural level with NO abstraction is superior compared to abstraction created arbitrarily by the game developer. As far as I'm concerned, with that unabstracted mode, you can then procedurally have as many different levels of abstraction as anyone could want without Toady having to rebalance everything for every mode.Sorry, bud, a video game is, by its very nature, an abstraction. Tiles? HUGE abstraction. Arbitrary bounds between body parts? Abstraction. DF's wound system in general? A very detailed abstraction, but an abstraction nonetheless. You can't avoid abstraction, you can just make it playable. (Andeerz made this point, but I'd like to imagine I made it better.)
Also... with regard to hunting, arenas, shooting ranges, etc.Here's an idea: Include a fast-mode combat system. That would solve most of these issues. "Fort's in fast-mode and a goblin is attacking a peasant? No problem, just use the fast-mode combat engine!" Each frame is only a few monutes, you know, not hours. That might have caused some of Silver's misunderstandings, coms to think of it...
For arenas and shooting ranges, I think what can be done is just have it run without triggering the slow-down so long as these activities occur in the designated area.
For hunting... hmmm... perhaps any combat involving a hunter and a wild animal could be toggle-able as not able to trigger slow-down.
Possible issues would arise depending on problems listed in #2 in the original post. If it is impossible for the game to calculate more than one complex action or movement occurring in the same tick... ugh... it would require combat to be abstracted in cases where one wouldn't want combat to trigger a slow down (i.e. hunting and arena combat). The reason one would probably have to abstract combat is because most of the movements that happen during adventure-mode combat occur within a handful of seconds of game-time, which would occur within a single tick if we are talking about fortress-mode time (1 tick =~ 1.2 minutes). That means any combat occurring in dwarf-mode time in my suggestion without triggering a slow down would have to be simplified to a single calculation every 1.2 game-minutes of combat determining what happens, as opposed to what would happen were the game to slow down to adventure-mode speed. So, unless we are ok with such combats being pretty much auto-calculated (an average fight to the death probably wouldn't last more than two, maybe three dwarf-mode ticks; so that would mean two or three calculations determining the victor of a one-on-one duel, instead of many order more calculations in the same amount of game time in adventure-mode speed), combat would have to trigger a slow-down.
For maybe arenas and definitely shooting ranges, such an abstraction would be alright... But for hunting, I think it would not be good to do at all, since the position and movement of the hunter is particularly important.
Actually... come to think of it... I think that this is a problem that cannot be fixed to my satisfaction, at least for hunting. Crap! I think this defeats my suggestion!
edit: Also, If scouting does become a legit part of the game (and scouting is an essential part of any military) then the military should absolutely begin to work on some sort of scout/stealth skill as part of their training regiment; if only just a little bit or perhaps, in some way, selective to individual dwarves in a squad.This definitely shouldn't be on the general curriculum. Perhaps ambushing, tracking, navigation, and such could be selected to train in the same menu that you choose when to have them train--e.g. Granite, 5 minimum, practice combat skills; Malachite (skipping around some), 6 minimum, practice Ambusher; Obsidian, 3 minimum, practice Dodging; and so forth.
Substituting would only affect jobs the dwarf would normally take, but the base material would be different. For example, a creative dwarven carpenter told to make a bed might sometimes grab some object like those mentioned above--say, a roll of cloth--and make a bed out of it. In this case, that would result in a normal bed that happens to be made out of cloth. These wouldn't be mentioned either.
So, what do you think about this...wait for it...creative suggestion?
Yup, because there's nothing better than a weapon smith using up your adamantium reserves to make a warhammer without telling you.
