What if your fortress is built into an established volcano and vents near the pipe?
that...that would be bad lol
Why?
My biggest concern with this suggestion is FPS. IMHO, it should be added with other kinds of industrial waste--cohesive, and all industries get hit at once.
Perhaps it could wait until smoke does more than bad thoughts, too.
As far as FPS is concerned, I would assume it would do no further bogging down of the system than waterfall mist would, while miasma is going on about it's way. I do understand though, that DF is highly deceiving in terms of system resources. When I first downloaded the game, I perused the forums for a bit. Saw several people talking about FPS problems. My initial impression was that of shock.. were these people having FPS issues using windows 98 on a 333mhz rig or what? Then I downloaded it to my old as bawls laptop as well, and found out quickly. DF loves your CPU. DF loves your RAM. On my laptop, which is around a circa 2002 "gaming" laptop (a Cadillac of its time, a dinosaur on jalopy wheels these days),I managed to crash the game about 8 times from graphics freezes before I finally managed my resources well enough to get past an embark. (my current PC, actually uses a 2008 cream of the crop CPU(3.0x2) and 4ghz of ram at 64bit. I STILL, even with this, on a 5X5 embark area (I hate 4x4) I'll have graphical stutters. Nothing major, but enough to make me scratch my head in disbelief at just how much this game has going on behind the scenes.
So, with alllll that said, I do share you're concerns with adding even more particles and this and thats, and what effects it will take on frame rate. I wouldn't imagine that a 3x3 area of smoke would add enough to make a noticeable difference, unless you're setting up and simultaneously running 18 furnaces side by side - if you have that sort of an industry, well then power to you. I would imagine the amount of smoke produced from something comparable to a decent camp fire, wouldn't be more than 2x2, if not a single tile wide within rising 4 to 5 Z-levels due to dissipation, unless of course it has nowhere to go)
All in all, at the end of the day, to even view this thread much less think on it, would be Toady's call. The idea came to me, so I figured I'd suggest. How better a way to have legitimate holes poked in it, so that it can be refined and fleshed out (or even scrap completely, as not all ideas are good ones, ESPECIALLY in my case, so I've found out over the years)
and to answer your question of "why", on the volcano thing, my first thought was the fortress being flooded with magma down the vent shaft. I'm a glass half empty kinda guy most days
(and believe me, it was a bad one. coming back from vacation only to walk into a s4!t storm at work...yeesh) Thanks