Hm, maybe, but what about distance? The way you describe it, it sounds like it would take the same amount of time to go from point A to B if they're adjacent as if one's at the surface and one's at the magma sea.
Distance would make a difference. I am glad you asked because I didn't feel like I made it clear enough...
Then I'm glad I asked it, too.
Anyway, the way I suggest it, you have point A and B on the same accessibility map. Distance would be calculated either by a similar pathfinding algorithm as what is currently in place (which might partially defeat the purpose of my accessibility map idea, though this might cut time down by eliminating many other possibilities) or a simple calculation of linear distance maybe modified by some other parameters... I'd prefer the former. Anyway, you have that calculated the instant an entity needs to get somewhere, then the distance is divided by the the speed of the entity to get how many game-time-units (ticks) the dwarf would take to appear from point A to point B.
This would sort of abstract out the possibilities of having travel interrupted if things remain in dwarf mode time (as during the time between initiating travel from point A and arriving at point B, with my suggestion, the dwarf would effectively be incorporeal (teleporting)), but I think that is acceptable if we are talking about short distances encountered when having to navigate through a fort that is not under attack or something. If time is switched to adventure-mode-time during travel (while the dwarf is effectively incorporeal), what could then happen is the game could just put the dwarf a percentage of the way to the destination proportional to the amount of time that had already passed since entity started travel over the total calculated amount of time to travel from point A to point B calculated beforehand. That might make a slight lag when changing between time-modes, but it probably would be acceptable since it would pretty much be performing just as many calculations during that time switch as what the game normally does now in a given time tick. I hope I make sense. It makes perfect sense in my head, at least.
I understand your idea now, at least.
EDIT:The dwarves spending so much time hauling is an intentional design choise so that your fort looks bussy.
Oh, I really hope that's not the reason behind that design choice. Just doing it to make things look busy is LAME in my opinion.
However, I agree with your emphasis on the importance of hauling in the game. But, speeding movement up would not at all diminish this importance at all. It would remain just as important, and hauling-related-technologies would still be huge game changers and time savers.
I think that doing it "to make things look busy" is not nearly as "lame" as you imply. After all, forts are supposed to look busy, no?
Also, I'm a bit fuzzy on what your suggestion is. Is it slowing down the in-game clock in Fortress Mode to more like Adventure Mode, plus time-skips, or is it what we have now plus accelerated mode?
What I am suggesting is keeping dwarf-mode time as it is right now, but with the option of toggling the game to Adventure Mode time at will and perhaps automatically during combat. No accelerated mode, though I am not against the ability to time skip in addition to this.
[/quote]
Ah, I see now. Thanks for clarifying. This seems reasonable, now that I understand your idea. (I'm not sure about switching to adventure-mode-time, or doing anything, immediately when "combat" occurs. Sieges, maybe, but "combat" can be anything from the goblin siege, your militia, and a titan having a three-way (that...came out wrong) to Urist McGenius falling off a bridge abd triggering a combat report.)
To do this would require the following in order to keep things rectified between Adventure and Dwarf modes:
1. Adventure mode hunger/thirst/sleep requirements implemented in Dwarf Mode
2. Increasing the amount of food/water units harvested when harvesting a tile of plants/butchering an animal/getting water from a well to accomodate 1.
A possible issue with these: Would the food units be compressed when moving from Adventure-Mode-Time (which I'll herein abbreviate AMT) to Fortress-Mode-Time (FMT), or how would you have hunger dealt with at the FMT level?
3. keeping entity movement speed per game-time-unit the same in dwarf mode as it is in adventure mode (make dwarves move as fast in Dwarf mode as in Adventure mode)
This seems fairly sensible.
It would also require some sort of abstraction of fluid mechanics... but this could still work with keeping fluid in dwarf mode as is, though it would be ridiculous.
Andeerz, we've already got an abstraction of fluid mechanics. I see your point, though...
More plump helmets would need to be harvested per tile. That also means that fewer seeds would need to be made per plump helmet, or else that more seeds would be needed to plant one tile with plump helmets. And what about animals? Are you going to up butchering returns? But wait, bones are tied to the same system that creates meat! So, either we'd need to accept having a lot more bones and such plus a little tinker, or we need a major tinker with butchering returns. My point is that everything needs to be changed if the timescale is, or else nothing works.
I am completely ok with this as it would just be a simple change of parameters. No need to change the number of bones, just change the number of meat units. And for organs, make them divisible, which wouldn't be implausible. It could be coded in minutes, though it would probably take a few days or weeks of playtesting and debugging to get stuff realistically balanced. But that's what we players can help with with our feedback!
Again, the code that says "This body part gives 1 meat, this body part gives 1 meat...for a total of 14" is the same as the code that says "This body part gives 1 bone, this body part gives 2 bones...for a total of 20," or whatever the numbers might be.
I am suggesting changing four other things, though:
1. hunger/thirst/sleep requirements
2. Adding a toggle between adventure-more and dwarf-mode time (1 tick = ~1 second and 1 tick = ~1.2 minutes respectively...)
3. Increasing the amount of food/water units harvested when harvesting a tile of plants/butchering an animal/getting water from a well
4. keeping entity movement speed per game-time-unit the same in dwarf mode as it is in adventure mode
Let me know if I need to make anything more clear...
Nah, I think I get your idea now. It seems like a pretty happy medium between the two sides.
So...you're tending towards the "Slow down FM to AM speed" side of the argument? Sad, it means I need to argue with you.
Nope. I am not suggesting that. I am suggesting keeping FM and AM speed just the same. Just change the movement speed in dwarf mode to that of adventure mode and do the other things necessary to make it all work which I mentioned above in this post. The only huge obstacle I have yet to think through well is fluids... though, again, I could be missing something else that makes my suggestion completely not feasible.
Also, both my suggestion and the OP's suggestion, as far as I understand it, would not make the game take any longer (barring any sort of increased computer resource requirements that might kill framerate...). In fact, my suggestion at least might actually speed up stuff since getting from one place to another would be faster... though this might be offset by increased sleep and eating requirements. Overall, I think overall time requirements for getting a fort running would end up being the same...
...Do you want me to repeat my argument from the post before yours, or do you mean "Toggling won't make the game go longer?" The latter seemed obvious to me.
Frizzl: Thnks for the big update from computer science.
