Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: Bumber on October 13, 2015, 11:47:58 am

Ramps seem like they'd be more complex for the pathing algorithm. A fortress of stairs should be a straight line to any point on any level.

All I know is that my FPS is consistently higher than in the ramp-based forts than it was in the staircase-based forts.  I think it gives more flexibility for the dwarves to dodge one another as they are descending or ascending.

I'm willing to believe that ramps can help with fps, but not for the reason that you think they do. I'm assuming we're talking about 3-wide ramps that make 90-degree turns each z-level vs. 3x3 vertical stairwells here.

On the ramp, if a dwarf is on a collision course with another dwarf going the other way, he only has 1-2 options (depending on if he was in the middle or on an edge to begin with) for which way to move aside so they can pass each other faster; in fact, this will likely be just 1, since the pathing should make them all stick to the inner edge of the ramp, so they'll nearly always just move 1 tile outwards from the center of the spiral until they can pass each other. Moving 2 tiles outward is pointless, although the pathing algorithm will probably check for that as well.

Compare that to a 3x3 stairwell, where a dwarf in the middle tile has 8 directions to choose from, and even a dwarf entering and leaving the stairwell from the same edge on both his "entry" and "exit" z-levels, e.g. on one of the 3 right-hand tiles, has 5 tiles to choose from that are equally good, and even in the best case of a dwarf entering and leaving the corridor from the same corner tile, they still have 3 tiles to move aside to (assuming diagonal movement is the same cost as orthogonal, which I'm not entirely sure is true). Likewise in a 2x2 stairwell dwarves always have 3 directions to move aside to to choose from.

So it would actually be that the dwarves traveling along a spiral ramp have less flexibility with regards to choosing their path, but this may be more efficient computationally, since there are less options to consider.

Objects moved by liquids do not become invisible.

Well, objects moved by magma which are magma-safe do not become invisible, I assume water works the same way.

This is not the same as saying the bug was fixed. It was never intentional behaviour, your response mostly gives the impression that you've never run across the bug. I've seen it a couple of times, and would like to clarify that it didn't happen every time, most of the time, or even necessarily very often. But it did use to happen on occasion. The "invisible" bit refers to the fact that said objects could still be found and their tile zoomed at using the stocks menu. IIRC it was possible to use dfhack to manually move the object, at which point it would become visible again.

Animals should be bisexual by default in-game.

It has been observed that a male pet rabbit can mate with any object he finds appropriate.

And then there's this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=All_S7zAOYI

A quick primer to key Finnish words and phrases in the video: "poikki" = "cut", "ei" = "no", and at the end there's an exchange:
- (male) "Couldn't we try two girl rabbits?"
- (female, laconically) "These already are girls."
- (director, male) "Let's just go for lunch."


That's mostly just rabbits though, and at least with them, the humping is partially a dominance display thing. Rodents tend to have high sex drives and high reproductive rates, as do some apes (at least bonobos and humans) and e.g. dolphins, but that's still a far cry from making it justified to have this apply to even just all mammals.

I've always felt that invaders make it more annoying. Fort being flooded with worn goblin-tainted thongs while I'm mass producing high-quality pig tail goods.
...

I also agree with this completely.

The last time I ran a longer-term fort (34.xx) I had a 11x11 room for all my farms, this meant 4 quadrants with 5x5 farm plots and the aisles between them for seed stockpiles (no bins allowed). After a year or so, I tend to have both excess fibre plants and excess food available. I even farmed some dyes eventually, once I bought the seeds/gathered some, but mostly I allowed my dwarves to use undyed cloth as well as dyed cloth. I don't like using anything bought from the caravans unless I have to, so I farm my own pig tail/rope reed, and tend to have a bit of wool production as well (but that's not really viable to keep a large fort clothed)

I also had one floor of my fort setup for automated clothing production. But that's actually the end point: I had an initial stockpile that only accepted fibrous plants, workflow was set to process that into thread in two workshops that took only from the previous stockpile. The workshops fed into another stockpile which had 2 looms taking from it (again, workflow made sure that all thread was being spun) and feeding to a cloth stockpile. Like I mentioned, I eventually involved dye in the process, that the dye, dyers and their workshops go in in this part of the manufacturing line. And then the dyed or undyed cloth was used by clothier's workshops and workflow kept iirc 10 each of trousers, tunics and shoes available. I had 2-3 dwarves with skill for each of the workshops mentioned above who had most other jobs disabled, and it worked fine.


And yea, I also want to second that you need a lot of bags for some stuff, although you can survive without making them you'll have to skip some production avenues entirely (flour, glass, dyes too actually). And all in all, yes, the cloth industry can take a bit of time to get started, but once it's running it can be easier than many others if you set it up well. Where it really stands out and what you're seeing is that many players who haven't played large forts for long often get surprised by a lot of dwarves suddenly needing clothing replacements. You at least used to be able to get around 100 dwarves in the first year, and they'll start discarding their clothes almost exactly at the same time: if you don't know this is coming and/or haven't started preparing for it in advance (and don't have loads of goblin rags lying around because you haven't gotten around to burning/atomsmashing it yet), you'll have a lot of unhappy dwarves for a long time, until you catch up with the demand. This wasn't an uncommon cause of tantrum spirals.

Yeah, that's why the slope is important; it should naturally resolve any pileups that happen.

If that's an issue, then it sounds like I probably won't be using stacked carts. That could cause difficulty in keeping the weapon firing continuously, anyway, especially if the stack is dwarf-hauled.

Unfortunately, time for building is in short supply until the weekend, so it has to be just plans for now.

Can one consider an impulse ramp array (say 50 tiles long) to be the equivalent of accelerating a cart down a 50-z ramp at 45°? That would help with determining what the size of this mechanism would be like.

Too tired to dig up the source of the info now, but iirc carts attain maximum speed far before 50 tiles of impulse ramps or 50-z of downramps. It's possible to temporarily (friction will of course start slowing it down immediately) get a cart above said max speed by bumping a heavier cart at max speed into a lighter cart, or at least was in 34.x. There was some science on that and I remember speculating if it would be possible to use artifact gem (or other esoteric materials) minecarts to bridge the gap in the weight sequence of materials, to get a full sequence of successively-lighter bumpers, all the way from platinum down to feather tree wood. Any excess weight over 2 times the weight of the lighter cart didn't count for the momentum transfer iirc, or something like that, and the weight difference between the lightest metal and the heaviest wood was/is over 2 times, hence the need for artifact materials in between.

They accepted him, as he was still a king when I started my next fort.

I hope you named him something suitably awesome. Conan or somesuch.

If you didn't, it needs to be done as soon as possible (once he moves to your current fort, or unretire the King's fort in between your current and the next fort, just so you can rename him).

I agree. This game is based on medieval Europe. Children should also farm and do whatever they're physically able to.

Well, they do help in harvesting already.

Picking up stray socks and worn clothes to store them would also be nice, but to be honest probably completely unrealistic.

Maybe I'm being too simple here, but what if you forgo the fancy dwarfputing and just have a weighted cart line that triggers the appropriate pressure plate for the main cart line to disembark at? Add a second weighted cart with perpendicular rail lines and you have a Cartesian coordinate system.

You'd still need a bit of logic to accept only the signal of the first weighted cart, unless the second weighted cart travels right in front of the passenger cart or in its own dedicated lane. Actually, you could throw both the weighted carts in front of the passenger cart, as long as you accept only the first cart (i.e., there's an extra plate that disengages the weight check for a bit whenever a cart passes.) The first cart is removed from the track after the axis switch, or maybe sent behind the passenger so they can have it for additional trips.

Good of you to think of a simpler solution

Also, in focusing just on Star Topology vs. Token Ring, you're focusing too much on computer science/mathematics. Think like a public transport planner for a while: if you have lots of stations, a single loop clearly won't cut it, but several loops and/or lines intersecting them can cover a large network much easier than pure star topology, and requires far less logic, since each subset (loop or line) of the network has fairly simple logic driving it. It does of course require some changes of lines at stations etc.