Bay 12 Games Forum

You know what?  Who is moderating this forum?  Remove the post, please.  I've already apparently pissed off one person I respect unintentionally and don't want to risk anyone else getting upset about my ideas here.

The regexes are nice and all, but if I remember correctly the CREATURE_MAT:ANIMAL tags are there for the benefit of generic animal products. Replacing it with LOCAL_CREATURE_MAT reintroduces animal specific products which are unwanted in Masterwork. Generic animal products shortens lists and helps fps.

Oh is THAT what that is?  MY bad.  I hadn't realized that was intentional behavior, and thought it might be a holdover from a previous version.

It could still be switched on and off from the other menu that controls the FPS options tho.  Maybe I'm one of those people who actually like rhino leather armor eh?

I'm not... but I could be...

It is... and it would be

ab9rf: I never claimed to have any science.  I was saying that I do NOT have science but have seen it at work.  So yeah I agree but it's entirely besides the point.  Reguardless the original idea I was attempting to argue against was that fwere stone drop types would lead to better FPS, and that of course cannot be the case since, if lowering the mineral types has some affect before mining out those stones, having fewer results from a calculation that has NOT been run yet cannot possibly have ANY effect of increasing FPS.

Not science.  Common sense.

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That would be pretty good science, if he tested in in identical conditions in identical locations on identical worlds, and perhaps repeated it a few times. Once probably isn't enough, especially if it was on different types of embark areas.

Seeded Perfect World created map, exact same settings, same year, same embark tile, same embark profile, nothing else changed but the rock/soil/mineral types... the ground looked a touch different but the overall form was nearly identical.

The test wasn't "rigorous" or repeated, but the world was close enough in generation that the name of the civ I embarked as and the volcano in the tile was named the same.

At any rate, the difference was there... but minimal at best.  And didn't stop the framerate from dropping below 30 fps when I dug into the volcano and spilled it's magma into a caisson.

It is because of that that I conclude that fewer drop types of stone from the same amount of minerals wouldn't cause any appreciable effect.  It's not tested because it cannot be tested, therefore is an unfalsifiable hypothesis.  However, it is nonetheless my hypothesis and I don't particularly care how the science works out because it makes complete sense.

I could hypothesize that, tommorow, the sun will rise.  If I don't test it, it doesn't change anything about what happens tommorow.  It just makes sense to me that it will happen that way.

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I've made FPS improving mods for a few different games.  Overall what generally works for any game is fewer objects taking up memory, less stuff in RAM, less detail on 3d meshes, smaller textures, and the like.  What all these share is that anything which is defined within the game must by necessity take up either space or processor time.  Since the minerals in the original suggestion are still defined, they are taking up either space or time.  In DF's case, it would be space in the RAWS, which is both disk and RAM space, and processor time in loading them.

In fact, having extra calculations to determine if the inorganic being mined had a specific type being dropped might very well cause more calculations to be performed when mining, although it's unlikely to be something that's even measurable unless one were stress-testing with 1000 Legendary Dwarf Miners at the same time (ie. Supremely Unlikely)

It would be a nice feature to have be OPTIONAL to have stones with specific drop types.  Generalizing the game seems like an ineffectual response to a problem that isn't caused here (namely the FPS issues).  That's all in pathfinding.  But you're right in that modders and even Toady, himself, could find uses for these variable drops.

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TL;DR I do not believe this will affect your frame rate in any way.  It may be simpler and lead to a "faster" game for the players' decision making process, however.  Green stone, Grey stone, if it's all the same stuff it doesn't really matter.  It's rather unlike Dwarf Fortress to make anything less complicated than it needs to be, however.

IT was a lot more succinct before I had to start modifying it and defending my position against imagined attacks and missteps in my own phrasing.  That is not TL;DR territory by any means lordcooper, it doesn't even take up more than one screen on my browser window.  Your tolerance must be low.

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Jeoshua: So...you want each topic to relate to a few topics directly related to one issue, or something? Or am I completely misunderstanding you?

I guess I may not have phrased it as well as I could have.  Not that each topic should not discuss the idea to absolute death, and the situations that must arrive from it's rules and what-not.  That's natural and part of discussion.  If I didn't want people to discuss things I would have suggest people not suggest things in a discussion forum, neh?

No, what I mean is that when thinking about a suggestion, ideally a person should try and figure out what the simplest set of rules that define that suggestion really are, and consider how they link together and what arises from that.  Which is why I kept telling Kohaku that if anything I have no real issue with the Improved Farming: Redux thread since it really does do that, in incredible detail.

Yeah but the Yumi was a short bow on the bottom, long bow up top.  Sort of a hybrid even if, overall, it was one of the largest types of bow ever made.

The other points, about being on horseback giving no benefits to penetration or damage, are very true.  This has been tested and retested, and the dangerousness of a mounted archer is provably NOT in it's damage or penetration, rather in their mobility and their area-of-threat since they can move fast and see far from their elevated perch.  A moving or stationary horse adds no measurable damage or penetration.

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Parabolic arcs, once set up for one object, could easilly be set up for everything else, if done correctly.  The acceleration of any object towards the ground is a constant, being measured as "1 G" (9.8 meters per second per second, acceleration).  This does not change depending upon velocity or even distance from the earth. 

A spacecraft in orbit falls at ~9.7 m/s².  However it moves forward so fast that the earth is curving away at the same rate, so the craft never hits ground, even tho it is being acted upon by nearly the same amount of gravity and constantly falling.  If the craft begins moving faster, the ground will curve away faster than they are falling, and the craft can be said to be moving outward from it's frame of reference.  In reality however, it's trajectory is still curving toward the Earth at the same rate, it is merely moving laterally faster than the earth curves.

A bullet fired from a gun will hit the ground at the same time as one dropped from the same height.  The bullet's lateral motion does not affect it's downward rate of descent in any way.  Additionally, the bullet is not traveling fast enough for the curvature of the earth to allow it to be considered to be in orbit, so the bullet will indeed hit ground at nearly the same time as the bullet which was dropped.  Arrows are similar, although their aerodynamic properties mean it falls somewhat slower when moving laterally.

Gravity affects everything equally, and outside of special cases (such as friction or magnetics) everything will always fall down at the same exact rate while in the same gravitational environment.

I sincerely hope that this is being taken into account.  Right now there is no "gravity" in the game.  Everything just "looks down" and "hits ground", generally not even passing through the areas in-between.  At least this was the way it worked last time I saw any real science done on it, and since Magma Pistons still work I would imagine that is still the case.

If, instead, every object gained downward acceleration every tick that it was unsupported, "parabolic minecart paths" and "falling arrows" and "realistic catapults" would fall into place naturally and without even having to think about it.  The only complexity introduced in those two later situations would be getting the AI to understand it has to aim farther up the farther away the target is... which can be calculated relatively simply by a binomial equation.

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It seems Toady has already thought of this:

Assuming gravity works like real world gravity and you can invent a time unit (obviously not linked to the dwarf mode calendar, which moves too fast for this), then a choice has been made.  It wouldn't make any fewer dragons fit in the tile though.  I think for the purposes of the minecarts it turned out to be 2m x 2m x 3m with 10 clicks / second, but it isn't that important or far-ranging in effect.

So here's to hoping he's made it generalized enough to be applied to any kind of object.

Well I'd say that, since if you change nothing else about, say, humans (or any other entity) but add CIV_CONTROLLABLE, you can embark with them and build smelters, kitchens, stills, and all those "normal" buildings.  So in effect every entity already contains a "virtual" [PERMITTED_BUILDING:KITCHEN], for example.  The issue came up that if some reaction is added to the kitchen Entity checker doesn't pick up that there's a missing reaction when cross-checking.

So it's not the Buildings that were at issue, but the Reactions.  The program doesn't pick up that BUILDING:KITCHEN, SMELTER, STILL, etc reactions can theoretically be made by every race.

Well no, I don't have and hard science on that point.  The main problem is that there isn't really a way at this point to set drop types.  However I did recieve a decent boost in on-embark performance with Masterwork's Less Soil, Less Rock, and Less Mineral types selected.  Take that as you may.  It's not hard science but I did notice I was getting about 10 fps more with these FPS boosts, vs not having them on.  That's only on-embark, and the number was in the several hundred calc-fps (uncapped).  Later on it didn't really help with the pathfinding or water flow fps.

So really it doesn't help much, and maybe I shouldn't have said "significantly".  But it does have a measurable effect when all else is equal.

This was right on embark, so the affected variable was the number of different stones, soils, and minerals the game was keeping track of.  I can only assume that since these would still be present if they had drop-types, it wouldn't have changed anything.