Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm not in favor of full on real time, just that the abstraction be less severe, to allow for sensible levels of micromanagement in dwarf scale time. I think this problem will need addressing sooner or later. For example in the army arc, let's say you sent your army out on 2 month patrol, that 2 months would zip by in fortress time. Good heavens would that be a huge disconnect, Urist McLazypants managed to drag a solitary table across the fort in the time it took 200 dwarves to march 200km.

Edit: spelling on a smart phone...

My goodness, what do you make your tables out of, slade? In two months, my dwarves can haul about a dining room's worth of furniture each. Try to not make up figures.

And GWG needs to calm down.

Probaby, but look at it from my perspective. The way I see it, these people have been more or less leaving their arguments unchanged as I point out the problems with them. At least they stopped accusing me of calling time-skips a bad idea...

I don't wanna be selfish, but I wanna explore a response to one of my posts...

I don't consider that selfish.

The way I see it, perhaps all that needs to be done to get at this pathfinding burden problem without introducing anything all that novel into the game is to (when things are running "fast" as in 1.2 minutes per game-time-tick like dwarf mode does now) have it so that the game would calculate accessibility of tiles the way they are calculated for Trade Depots sort of.  So, there would be multiple sort of "accessibility maps" the game would have to store (I'd imagine it would only need to be a handful and not be that resource intensive).  Then, any time an entity needs to get from point A to point B, all that needs to be calculated is if point A and point B are accessible to each other (fall within the same accessibility map), and if so, how far it is away, and see how many game-time-ticks it should take for the entity to appear from point A to point B (teleport).  That would be the only abstraction that would need to be made between time modes.

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.

EDIT:

Quote from: 10ebbor10 on June 15, 2012, 03:18:49 pm

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?

Quote from: GreatWyrmGold on June 15, 2012, 02:34:04 pm

Oh, I'm sorry. I forgot that you don't actually care about watching dwarves' lives, so you don't care that it would be impossible to play an actual fortress-building game while also enjoying the little details in dwarven daily life. Because if the timescale was slowed like you are suggesting, it'll take a lot longer to go through a fortress week and still enjoy the little things. To say nothing of my earlier point that fortress-making is usually done with the steps all mixed together...

You're straying into full-on strawman territory. Nothing has been said or even implies that it would take the player longer to do things. I think it would actually take less time because you could spend the same amount of player time watching stuff going on but less player time sitting around waiting for things to be done. It doesn't matter if you want to mix your steps together, just skip to whenever you feel like beginning the next step and do it. The bulk of your arguments so far are just ranting about nonexistent theoretical limitations on the system that you seem to invent yourself just to denounce. If you don't stop putting words in my mouth and making wild assumptions, I'm not going to respond to your future posts in this thread.

Sounds funny, seeing as you were claiming I thought time-skips were bad for a while. And, anyways, what part of "Hey, let's have more time calculated per in-game day" does NOT imply that it would take longer to get stuff done? I'm not talking about theoretical limitations, I'm talking about the obvious ramifications of having Fortress Mode run 28-72 times faster: It takes more RL time for the same amount of dwarf time. Does that not describe your idea?

Quote from: GreatWyrmGold on June 15, 2012, 02:34:04 pm

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 got your point quite awhile ago, my point that you continue to refuse to address is that the current system requires more tinkering for each new addition, and potentially requires systemic tinkering for re-balancing with some new additions. Talking from a program design perspective, it's like investing in a more versatile program architecture to save effort in the long run. Obviously my idea would require a lot of work on the front end because everything currently having to do with time and related to the current time abstraction would need to be adjusted. I never claimed that it wouldn't. Again, you seem determined to rail against nonexistent issues or things I haven't said. I don't care how much effort this idea would take, and I have no reason to, because Toady is in charge and no one's making him do anything. I will suggest whatever ideas I think would be good, no matter how radical, and he is free to listen or not listen to them. You're wasting everyone's time by presuming to have a claim on Toady's and presuming to dictate what he should or should not do based on how much of his time and effort would be spent.

If I thought that it was a good idea, I would be all for it, no matter what the programming time. But I don't. The point of that was pointing out that it would not be quick and easy to change the fortress mode timescale, like you seemed to be claiming.

Summary of points made against my idea, not by anyone in particular:
-"Ignoring all the stuff the OP has written about how this would work, it wouldn't work!"

Which stuff?
...Also, who was the OP again?

-"I feel that I own Toady's time and labor, and reject this idea on the premise that it would require an expenditure of too much of both resources, which I own."

Where has anyone implied that? No one feels that they own Toady's time or labor, any more than they do the money in the federal treasury. That doesn't mean that we want the government to waste its money on stupid stuff, nor that we want Toady to spend his time on ideas that many of us feel would make the game worse and not ones that would make it better.

-"It's crazy! But I feel no particular desire to raise any actual argument about why that is."

Who has said that? I have done my best to explain my arguments.

-"I can sit here and endlessly bring up seemingly-different but for the purposes of this argument the same issues and declare that these potential problems invalidate this entire idea, and continue the process when each of my specific but suspiciously similar objections is addressed. And I apparently plan to continue to do so."

Um, who has done this? Yeah, I've brought up the same issues a lot, but that's because you haven't really addressed the core issues.

Quote from: 10ebbor10 on June 15, 2012, 03:18:49 pm

3. Just ignore the time difference. Change moon states and day/ night so that they aid gameplay, not realism. (Strangely, I feel this would bother immersion less than timeskips and long loading screens)

Thanks ebbor, that could be a very valid point. I would NOT like anything that involved much of a loading time. I think that it could be entirely possible for Toady to achieve a negligible loading time with my idea, but Toady is the person best equipped to make that determination.

He's saying to add flavor divorced from the calander (which I think is a good idea), just FYI.

Quote from: Andeerz on June 15, 2012, 03:37:37 pm

-snip-

I do like your idea a little bit Andeerz. I think it would be an improvement over the status quo. However, to be honest, the most important part of my idea to me is real time game speed, and time skipping is just the way that it's made to work. It's the place where I'd like the abstraction to be shoved into because I feel that it's a better place for it. I also think slower time scales could be improvements, but I still think real time is the best because it avoids artificial time distortion of the game's balance, especially multiple inconsistent time distortions across different systems.

Funny, I feel just the opposite. The time-skip may not be any less demanding of Toady's time and energy, but it isn't hotly debated and it won't require that players wait a lot longer before anything Fun, like migrant or sieges, happens.

Quote from: 10ebbor10 on June 15, 2012, 04:02:03 pm

Timey wimey wibbly wobbly stuff: It's complicated.

Give me a made up example!  I don't care how contrived it is.  This would help a lot in figuring out whatever weaknesses there might be in whatever suggestion.

I think it's a Doctor Who reference.

Quote

As far as I know, you're only abstracting pathfinding, whitout actually changing anything. So no. I don't know how large the gains would 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...

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.


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For everyone who seems to be confused about why I think that slowing down Fortress Mode to allow for realistic schedules, like three meals a day and day/night cycles, here's the biggest argument I've been repeating over and over yet which has been ignored and/or misinterpreted every time I've repeated it:

It would make everything take longer IRL.

Let's choose a number for the heck of it--the number I came up with,  x28, seems to be the most conservative and fit the dwarven "day" fairly well, as dwarves eat twice a month and I believe sleep half that often.

So, currently it takes about two hours, let's say, to get a fortress from Granite 1, 1051, to Granite 1, 1052. Maybe half (probably less, depending on playstyle) of that is designations and other things the player does that cause the game to autopause; let's assume that this number does not increase much, although if we increase the amount of work dwarves can do in a day from "maybe make a chair" to "make a few pieces of furniture," which is probably more realistic, then obviously you'd spend longer than that one hour. That leaves one hour of waiting and watching while the dwarves follow your orders. If the game was slowed down to 28x speed, that hour would become 28 or so, and that means that you'd make it tothe end of the year at the end of a bit over an RL day, spent playing constantly without any breaks. How does this not affect things? Sure, with time-skips, you can argue that you would be able to have your fort skip past the time you spend waiting for things to get done, but whose fortresses are only doing one thing at a time? This is extra-true at the start, where after digging out the start of your fortress you are planting crops, building workshops, filling bedrooms and dining rooms with beds and tables and stuff, et cetera. In short, playng at the new speed would make things take A LOT more of our time to get done. Who wants that?

I ws doing this partly to try and see if such a list could be made and stick to the suggestion forum, and ideally be stickied once it became important enough to attract Toady's notice. Actually, that's part of why I advise people to chip in their two cents about the issues and what suggestions they see a lot.

Savage biomes can have normal animals. And any creature's attack can be dodged.

I just noticed this error in my errorlog:

Receive job pay: NULL JOB
...What? Is this some kind of holdover from back when there was an economy?

Check the raws.

The dwarven ethics state that slavery will be severely punished. Or is it capital?

Quote from: Vargas Gray on June 14, 2012, 10:10:09 am

Yes, vermin do eat food but it would be fun, as you're idea with the nesting birds, with a more diverse behaviour of vermins as a whole. Damn it would be fun to even breed vermins and use them as a food source. !crunch-crunch-crunch!

Except dwarves already use vermin as a food source - when they're starving, and it causes bad thoughts.

The idea was to be able to breed vermin, specifically for use as food.
Which leads to an image of a dwarf-bred rock beetle, which feeds on rocks and can be cooked into dwarven bread.

Quote from: GreatWyrmGold on June 15, 2012, 09:58:57 am

Am I the only person who likes being able to stop at any point in case of dwarven stupidity or poor planning on my part, and who likes being able to watch dwarves' stories play out? Besides, you're assuming that dwarves will be able to carry out those steps without supervision, and that I only focus on one thing at a time. As soon as I embark, I have my miners and woodcutter go to work. As soon as I have a food stockpile, I start gathering plants. As soon as I have space for workshops and stuff, I start making furniture and stuff, and sometimes even sooner. As soon as I have a hole in the ground and a meeting place, I build a trade depot and start work on traps. As soon as I have farms and a dining hall and stuff, I start work on walls and finding the caverns. I don't mine out my fortress, then make furniture for it, then set up everyone in their own little rooms, then make a depot, then make traps and walls, etc. If I had to play like that, I think I'd stick to older versions.

You would be in charge of how much time, and when, the game skips. The game could be told to skip until a certain dwarf has "no job", until all constructions are completed or suspended, until anything is suspended, until lunch, whatever. Nobody wants less control, the time skip would have to be implemented in a way where you would never be worried that it would skip over anything you didn't want it to.

Again, my issue isn't with the time-skips. It's with the idea of having the game slowed down a ton.

Quote from: GreatWyrmGold on June 15, 2012, 09:58:57 am

How would it be less abstract if you couldn't make a fortress in a reasonable amount of time without missing out on big chunks of time by skipping past them? If I wanted to play a game where I couldn't watch the little guys running about, enjoying their daily lives, and so forth because then it'd take too long in real-world time to get anything done, I wouldn't be playing DF.

You and 10ebbor10 have been saying you like to be able to watch your dwarves going about their lives. With my system you only stand to gain in that. You get a much, much more detailed dwarven daily life to watch. Skip to morning; Which dwarves get up early and which get thrown out of their bed by the manager because they're late for work? Skip to lunch; Dwarves eating and socializing in the meeting hall, Urist McTouchytummy is having issues in the latrine and Urist McWorkaholic is working through lunch, he brought food with him to his workshop this morning. Skip to the middle of the night; Drawbridge/door is closed, bogeymen lurking outside, Urist McNightowl is wandering around in his pajamas or possibly sleepwalking.

Only...haven't you been paying attention to your own ideas? If you stopped at three times every day, you'd still be going at an unArmokly slow rate through the fort's years.

The point is, you get real dwarven life to watch instead of the very rough approximation we have now. All the abstraction is packed away behind a time skip that you control.

I also want to be able to build a fort in a reasonable amount of time. So sue me, I want to do the intended purpose of fortress mode while enjoying the game's depth in between designations.

As for food running out, you're thinking about the current food system. One plump helmet now is an abstraction for a lot of plump helmets. In terms of game-world time, you wouldn't run out of food faster, you'd just see more plump helmets in each farm tile, hauled at once, in each barrel, and being eaten. You'd be growing more to compensate.

So, you're suggesting that virtually every aspect of the game be changed in a way that would irritate or anger a bunch of people?

You claim we would be subjected to a lot of boring things, but that's what the time skip is for. I'm much more bored constantly having to sit and wait while my miners mine out 200 tiles to get flux and while instead of building a bridge, my dwarves are chaining eat/drink/on break for two in-game months.

I'm not going to argue over what's interesting to watch, but I am A. going to point out that no one is against the freakin' time skip idea, and B. you people are claiming that we can watch the dwarves go through their lives while skipping ahead to compensate for the obvious dullness that comes with expanding the timescale to a couple dozen times its current size. You can't have it both ways, unless you count the system we have now which requires no fiddling with the system to give you at least a couple dwarves doing something interesting at all times once your fortress has really gotten started.

You also claim it's complicated to code. What seems complicated to me is having to deal with abstracting the time factor of every new thing that gets put into the game and adjusting everything else to compensate. That's how we end up with silly werecreatures that show up and wander off immediately. But I think we should limit the discussion to the merits of the idea and not the cost, because Toady is the only person in a position to accurately estimate how much effort and time an idea will take, and he's the only one in a position to judge whether it's worth his effort and time.

Wait, it's more complicated to code in new things into the already-extant timescale than it would be to recode the basic engine of the game? Where did you learn your programming skills?

Currently, the action you so highly value is represented by things being in progress and then being done. It's not like you get to watch the actual process of anything anyway. If you want to see every block being put in a wall, you can just do repeated small time skips for each construction being finished and it's hardly different from watching a wall being built now if that's how you'd like it. I would like to have the option of skipping the boring work.

Ahem.

I AM NOT AGAINST THE STUPID TIME-SKIP!!! ARGUE FOR WHAT I'M ACTUALLY ARGUING AGAINST!!! Thank you.
Now, then. You say, "If you don't want to see the time drawn out, you can skip it." You also say, "This system will give you 28 times as much dwarven personal life to watch!" Do you see the contradiction? Do you see how I might want to keep the current system, which allows me to watch dwarves run about on their daily business while time goes by at a reasonable rate? Do you understand that I AM FOR THE TIME-SKIP IDEA?

As long as that's clear, it's fine.