Bay 12 Games Forum

Oh yes, it will be fun. You look forward to artifacts now, provided you're confident you have everything a moody dwarf will need, but later you'll be biting your nails wondering if the next artifact will be a piece of armour that can make your dwarf fly or a weapon that has a mind of its own and tries to kill everyone.

"Sure, that's how it starts - oohs, aahs. But later there's running and screaming."

I've been contemplating the fuilds in DF recently, and judging from how ripples move, and how slowly water flows down a corridor, fluid movement appears to check only one direction per game frame, rotating through each of the 8 ordinary directions, falling down, and pressure pathing. Any discussion of fluid memory storage should focus on time efficency over space efficency. It would be nice if a sub-block of fluid could instantly flow into it's most stable state, i.e.

46 -> 55
37 -> 55

which could be accomplished using a table lookup, except for the complications of walls, empty space, and z-levels...

but anyway, my ideal amount to measure water in a tile wold be 60'ths, as it's evenly divisable by 2,3,4,5, and 6, giving more chances for the levels across multiple tiles to become even and 'still'. Currently, if you have a pit with 7/7 water, and you channel next to it, you'll have a 3/4 waving back and forth forever, channel 2 tiles, and 2/2/3, 3 tiles, 1/2/2/2 until evaporation occurs. with 60 levels you would have 30/30, 20/20/20, 15/15/15/15, each becoming stable, and exiting the moving fluid state. an 1/60th is small enough the game could fudge it a little if needed to make a stable state so it can stop processing, it could be displayed with 1-9="1", 10-19="2"... 50-59="6" and 60="7" so it would look the same to players.  0-60 could be held in 5 bits, with 3 extra special states for whatever purpose (damp ground, pressurized, flag to look at extended data...), and 3 bits for fluid type could round it to a byte (none, magma, fresh/salt/stagnant/dirty water..) it would also be nicely near the figure someone mentioned of 70 buckets of water in a tile. making a space not far from 4x4x4 buckets in size.

Those wacky Sumerians with their sexegesimal system were pretty smart (I learned about them in a book I have with the best illustration ever, ancient egyptian algebra homework, utterly incomprehesable unless you're Daniel from SG-1)

I had built a huge pressurised water tank, 40x40x10, over a grid a of fortifications, over a spiral wall to the main entry of the fort.

Goblins arrive, Dwarves sent inside, goblins enter the death spiral, inner water lock sealed level pulled, prepare to flush the goblins...

...

why is there a baby on top of a wall between fortifications? there was no path to it, solid floor above, so couldn't have been dropped...

...

(projectile birthing?)

...

Nirvana album cover successfully replicated.

A lot of newer video cards are actually slower in the old '2d' commands, so just because something should be simple and basic does not mean faster. You'll have to try each mode to see what works best for your CPU/GPU combo.

When assigning, the color of the dwarf name reflects if they already have as assigned room; I make it a habit to only assign unassigned dwarfs rooms, to avoid doubles...

However, I would call this an accesability bug, nothing in a user interface should be indicated by color alone.

So, As I mentioned in a thread about assigning tombs/slabs, a single character indicator would be nice to add to the list, prefix the name with the character used for beds "θ" (probably not the right one, but close) if they have a bed, blank space if not.

I really appreciate the positive feedback.

Contempating the n-dimensional 'brain-map' idea, I could visualize it as a hyper-cube structure, with dimensions partly defined by dwarf soul attributes, and clusters assigned to particular skills... trying to think of an effective way to do that as there would be a lot of sparse space.

But at least overlapping sets of bit could be arranged, for example there would be a set of bits for 'stonecrafting', and a set of bits related to 'musicality', and there would be a small number of bits that are in the intersection set, so that a dwarf with high music sense working as a stonecrafter would be most likely to get bits in that particular area set.

This also feeds back into the 'brain injury' thread, as an injury/syndrome/curse that affects an attribute could then affect those particular skills appropriatly by masking out the affected bits.

For more efficent use of space a hybrid system might be better. Bits within a skill could be tiered by difficulty, so that (again, for example) while a skill has 256 bits only 32 are used in bitmask form, stored as an an offset and mask. so no skill would be "0x00,0x00000000", middle skill would be "0x7E, 0x0B4F5091", and max skill "0xDF, 0xFFFFFFFF"; that is, all bits below the offset are assumed set, and all bits beyond the mask are assumed unset, whenever the high bit would be set, the offset is incremented and the mask shifted by one. This would model the need to learn the basics before advanced techniques while also saving storage space.

At which point the overall skill is basically defined by the offset which can be used in skill calculations, and the mask is only used to model learning.  However, a dwarf might get stuck, unable to advance because he just dosn't get one particular bit... I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

I also like the idea of only updating when a dwarf sleeps; I could see it as bits in the mask might get set by training and working, but the offset only moves when they sleep. This jibes well with my concept of dreams in reality; I think of them as the time when the brain sorts out the things it learned the prior day, prepares the stuff it thinks it'll need for the next, and opens up short term space for new things.

That wouldn't apply to books, a book might contain only advanced knowledge, and be incomprehensible to a novice, or a scattering of basic and advanced. Just like a calculus textbook would only be useful for a 4 year old if he also had some crayons.

This may not be suitable for DF, or it may be ideal for DF, but this is an idea for game character skills that has been brewing in my head for over 15 years that I'd like to share. Reading the Books thread reminded me of it, and how it might apply to DF.

Instead of a simple number to represent a skill, use a bitmap.

From 8-1024 bits represent parts of the skill, depending on how refined you want it. Easily expressed to the player as a number by using a 'popcount' (the total number of turned on bits) which can then be converted to a text description from Dabbling to Legendary.

When a character is training a skill by independant study/work, they have a chance for a random bit to become set, representing the invention of a particular technique. if the bit is already set.. well, they already knew that, so it naturally becomes harder for them to invent something new; it could also be weighted to preferr bits near other already set bits so that knowledge is 'related'.

When two artisans meet they can exchange techniques, as an abstraction of: Cheesemaker knows how to make Chedder, and can train others to make Chedder; however, an immigrant cheesemaker knows how to make Swiss, so when they work together, they can both become better cheesemakers. Now, it's possible to take the skill bits and give them labels so that bit 27=Chedder, bit 74=Swiss, bit 35=Feta... but the core idea is just an abstraction to simulate the limits of passing down knowledge, invention, and exchange of knowledge. Not the creation of a specific item, but little tricks and techniques gained as you master a skill, like that altitude affects baking time, how to crack an egg without getting shell bits in the food, and that arrows used for hunting animals have the head in line with the nock to pass through the ribs of a four legged creature, while war arrowheads are perpendicular to the nock to pass the ribs of a standing two legged creature.

This relates to the book thread in that a book may have a specific set of techniques, so if the caravans bring a book about glassmaking, it can be studied by all your glassmakers over and over, and may eventually grant all of those, but only those bits; you can't become a Legendary crafter by reading one book over and over, but only by a combination of study, practice, communicating with your peers, and invention. A crafter could also write a book, copying a number of his bits based on his teaching/literacy into the book. The value of a book may be related to how common those particular bits are globally, a book of common knowledge is cheap, but the secrets of the finest armourer from the dwarven mountainhome would be precious indeed. But the books are just an aside.

This will also possibly make immigrants more useful, as even if they have less overall skill, they might know a few techniques your fortress dosn't have. It also makes possible traveling scholars, travelling the world in search of knowledge by exchanging it; which might also make a very unique style for an adventurer... Travelling the world to learn the secrets of leatherworking... A mood could set a large number of bits at once... and a head injury could knock some bits loose...

Skills could be grouped then unequally divided, such as 1024 bits being for 'Farming' skills, with different ranges of bits for different skills, Milking probably has fewer little tricks and tips than Cooking; but all of "Food preparation" (Cooking, Butchery, Cheesemaking, Plant Processing...) may be comparable to "Animal Husbandry" (Milking, Shearing, Beekeeping...)

Again to be clear, I am not saying to tie each bit into a specific sub-job, because there will always be some detail to add, but just as an abstraction of a 'set' of techniques a skill may have. Kinda like how instead of 'Hit Points' DF has body parts, but dosn't have every part.

This may be like how Toady is implementing 'Secrets', the idea of handling specific peices of knowledge at the civilization level, and this may be way to much data for all the individual skills of all the intelligent creatures in DF; but I thought it may be worth sharing.