Bay 12 Games Forum

That's really interesting and probably has some convoluted cause deep in the AST in clang that they figured was good enough if it gets optimized away for normal builds.

On that note, I'm curious how you found this / why you were inspecting the generated ASM from a non-optimized build.  Inspecting the ASM of an optimized build would be challenging if you're trying to hand optimize it, but I'd expect you'd be compiling anything performance sensitive with compiler optimizations so I'm not sure how useful an unoptimized build is to even look at.

That said, I've never actually used inline ASM in C or C++, so is it possible to reliably infer the registers used so you can hand code it?  I'd be afraid even that might change when optimizing the code.

I'm actually not familiar with that story but would be really interested to know what happens to dwarves who end up submerged in water that gets that hot.  I believe some things have changed with the damage calculations over the years, but there were some really old stories of dwarves whose fat all melted but they were otherwise fine.

Some maps are so choked with trees that they legitimately are just in the way.  I keep having to cut them down to make space for above ground constructions in my current fort since I'm building an aboveground castle.

Which is fine, but that interacts kind of badly with elven tree diplomacy and wildlife agitation.  Recent experience makes me more worried about agitation than the elves: based on my observations with DFHack, with the default settings if you cut down more than 5 trees a year you're building up more agitation than it decays and it only gets worse if you're also fishing.  I don't have the game open right now but I remember that the settings page implied you're supposed to lose 2,000 agitation per year by default, but it's only 500 at the end (or maybe first) of the year.  Makes me wonder if it's supposed to apply that much per season and it's broken.

At least in my current fort I've only been accosted by small agitated animals that even my kids can kill, but I'll never forget the unending conga line of agitated giant hamsters, flies, and opossums from the last fort that were very deadly.

What are the plans to add baby graphics for dwarves and other layered creatures?  Is that on the backburner due to the level of effort?

I've tried to add baby graphics for a modded species using layered graphics and it looks like the game doesn't support it yet, even discounting the lack of graphics.  There doesn't appear to be a [CONDITION_IS_BABY] tag, and trying to use [LAYER_SET:BABY] or [LAYER_SET:CHILD] with dwarf-style graphics raws caused the parser to malfunction as if it didn't expect to see [LAYER_GROUP] or [LAYER] tags beneath it.

That's all very good advice that I agree with, and I've made those mistakes myself many times.  I've gotten much further in the games where I used game engines than when I tried to build them from scratch, and the only game I've ever completed was using XNA during a game development class in college.

The big one I still struggle with is finding a practical scope for a game.  My last two projects were way too big.

One was an action-adventure RPG shooter that was supposed to span a full narrative over like 10-12 levels.  I churned on that for 2 full years and got most of one level done, and that was using Unreal.  I realized that there were parts to the process that I hadn't even considered, like level design, which I had no skills for, and after years of working on the game had no patience to learn.

The other project was a space 4X game that was supposed to be more detailed than most 4Xes and be more fun to play peacefully with internal political and population dynamics.  I burned a few months on it, got to the point of randomly generating solar systems in a galaxy, and burned out because I wasn't using a game engine.

I was just wondering about that actually, but assumed that in seriousness it wouldn't get to that point.  Russian culture is very "traditional" in that regard, isn't it?  Women aren't allowed in combat positions in the Russian army, right?

I feel like it would be a turning point in public favor against the war if they tried.

Of course, they also have literally millions of people they can burn through before that would be needed so I don't think we'd see it anyway.

Pathfinding itself actually doesn't cause much performance hit, outside of pathological conditions like flowing water causing the connectivity map to recalculate frequently.  Putnam did a lot of profiling to confirm that.

Citizens are supposed to be able to climb down from getting stranded now, so that should be better than it was at one point.  Animals still get stuck in trees, but I don't think they contribute much to FPS since they don't do much but randomly wander.  I think there are still some outstanding issues like having strange moods in burrows that can cause FPS to tank if a dwarf can't reach an item they want.

That said, reducing the number of creatures will always help.  I'm pretty sure the number of fort citizens has an outsized impact since they do more than things like animals, but I'm not sure if sapient creatures like goblins or random cavern civilization creatures have the same impact as dwarves despite having no meaningful relations or other things to calculate.  For all I know the game does the calculations and just does nothing with them.

I am curious if it's practical to amortize unit calculations though, like half of the units "thinking" on A frames and the other half on B frames.  The game may even do this for all I know, since you'll occasionally notice dwarves pursuing some task for a while after it's meaningless, like station orders, before abruptly changing to something else a few frames later.  The complex interactions between units probably make this hard to do in practice too.

One thing that would definitely help some people is fixing the fact that you can get hundreds of cavern people on your map.  I don't know if it's just a problem with agitating them and getting unending ambushes, or if they just accumulate over time no matter what.  I'm also not sure if they start accumulating or showing up before the caverns are revealed.

Are they still marked to be taken to the depot?  Other items were hauled away?