Bay 12 Games Forum

There is a noise mechanic, but it looks like it doesn't really matter much and walls don't help: https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Noise

For me walls and rooms are mostly for aesthetics.

That bugs me too.  I've wanted to play as robots that survived their creators, but weren't linked together in some gestalt super intelligence.  Can't do it with out mods.  There are probably balance concerns they'd have to work out, but it can't be that hard.

On that note, it also bugs me that there's no way to change the portrait of robots to look like organic species.  I get that it's a minor thing and you can RP it however you want, but I kind of hate how the mammalian robots look and especially once I research synthetics I'd like to be able to make them look like my other species.  Even if there was some indication on the portrait that they're robots, like a symbol or colored background or aura or something, that would be fine.

A dev diary today seemed to confirm that the next DLC is going to focus some on primitives, which... could be interesting since that's a pretty barebones mechanic right now, but I'm not sure what exactly they can add to make it worth a full DLC release.  It may end up being something like the vassals changes in Overlord, but I can't think of how they'd add much to that.

Also a little frustrating we still aren't getting internal politics, but at this point I don't think Stellaris ever will.  They'd have to rework so much that that may have to wait until Stellaris 2, when / if that happens.

Also also, yet another mechanic that isolationists won't interact with, but oh well.  I guess it's not as bad as playing hive minds, where like 1/3 of the game doesn't apply.

I caught a shiny makuhita randomly, but it's the only shiny I've seen so far.  Not sure what the odds are in the current games, so that may not be unreasonable.

I also just finished everything up through Area Zero and just entered there.  Haven't lost a battle yet, but I got a little nervous with the last Elite Four battle due to a lack of good counters.

I'm curious to see where the Area Zero stuff is going, and if there's a legendary pokemon at the bottom of it all.  I hope the game hasn't been foreshadowing one, because if it has I've been too dumb to notice.

A fairly short answer:

With a game with a codebase as huge as DF's, it would be very hard.  Essentially, every code block that touches anything that more than one thread might want to operate on needs new multithreading guards to be added to it.  This is notoriously error prone, and if done badly can make the game run slower than it already does.  If done wrong it can also make the game behave in interesting and unpredictable ways, not all of which are obvious like crashes.

The fundamental problem with DF is that it uses a ton of huge central and global data structures that would have to be protected this way, and it limits what multithreading can do to benefit it without a significant amount of architectural changes.

And even then, it's hard to get it right in a way that speeds things up.  Pathfinding is actually one thing that might benefit from multithreading, but as Putnam recently discovered it's really not a major contributor to the game's speed so there wouldn't be much point..  You can use it to do things like temperature calculations on tiles in parallel, but then you have to handle complex border cases where your divided workload touches on bits from other threads and that may nullify any speedup.  The examples are endless.

I'm not sure about worldgen.  I'd guess that some of its work could be broken up, but most of the time is spent in history generation, which is another example of something that is hard to split up because of how interconnected the pieces are.  You can't hand two separate threads the job of generating historical events and just let them go, since they might create events that impact what the other threads are working on, so you're back to needing synchronization.

I'm sure there are parts of the game that could be sped up with multithreading, and probably even in its current state, but it also comes down to a question of how the programmers' time should be spent.  So far, Toady has decided it wasn't a good use of his time, and that's probably reasonable since he has a better understanding of the code than anyone.  If the game were rewritten from the ground up with parallel work loads in mind it might be a different story.

Someone with more recent experience can probably chime in, but I always embark with a soldier with at least 4-5 levels of dodger skill.  That's helpful under any combat circumstances, and as the saying goes an ounce of prevention by dodging attacks is worth a pound of cure by needing armor or staying in a hospital.

That soldier usually gets 4 levels of a weapon skill, and a level or two in teacher depending on how I spread the skills exactly.  I don't know if teacher is actually that useful, but I was under the impression that it was good to help train new recruits up.  I wouldn't be surprised to learn that its impact was minimal though, especially at levels 1-2.

There's still no bug tracker, but does anyone know if this has been reported on the Discord or wherever they're trying to get bug reports now?  This is the one bug that's keeping me from really playing seriously right now, since it cripples the military.  The workarounds are clunky enough that I'd rather wait for a patch.

In my case, it didn't look like just equipping a weapon caused them to pick up ammo.  In my case I was using modded creatures with bows instead of crossbows so maybe there's an extra bug there, but they were scheduled to only wear their uniform part of the year and despite dropping and picking up bows, they didn't restock ammo.  They did pick ammo up when I first drafted them, but after firing all of the arrows in archery practice they never grabbed more even after several years of going on and off duty and changing equipment.

I think I agree.  They look reasonable and fitting for school outfits, but I do really wish I had other options.

Kind of hypocritical since I stayed with the default outfit in Shield for the entire game, but this game made me want to change it...