Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Ieb]

Okay, after adding it that adult age is at 4 years, I noticed a bit of a change. On two of the subjects.

Code: [Select]

Born in 212(23rd of Timber) - Maxblood 4821
Born in 212(3rd of Galena) - Maxblood 5804
Born in 212(4th of Malachite) - Maxblood 843
Born in 212(6th of Granite) - Maxblood 761
None of them have turned peasants yet, but it is apparent that SOME creatures born in the fort grow up as they should. I have no idea why the other two however did not grow up at all, I figure they never will either.

There is nothing that I can see as odd about their parents either. 3 of the kids are the only children of the couple, the last one is the youngest daughter of a bunch of kids, the second eldest daughter living in the fort is of a perfectly fine size too. It can't be something stupid like dorf genetics, one of the baby sized kids has both parents of the usual adult dorf size.

[gestahl]

The rest have steel weapons, but I thought silver was better for armor penetration, while steel had slightly more critical hits, with the overall nod to silver.

I didn't read the whole ten pages, but you said you keep getting deflections. That will happen more with silver weapons, and may be what's causing the dispairity.

[Deepblade]

I didn't read the whole ten pages, but you said you keep getting deflections. That will happen more with silver weapons, and may be what's causing the dispairity.

We've already solved what's causing the disparity. Native born dwarves are not increasing in size like they should. And, since blunt damage is reliant on creature size it's causing Edem II to be terrible at combat, since he's about the size of a cat. The only way to remedy the situation somewhat was to give him an edged weapon.

[VerdantSF]

The only way to remedy the situation somewhat was to give him an edged weapon.

Now armed with a steel pick, Edem II is mining goblinite like a boss .

[Tacomagic]

I will now have nightmares about being torn apart by a squad of cat-sized dwarves wielding pick-axes.

Thank you very much.

[Urist Da Vinci]

Okay, after adding it that adult age is at 4 years, I noticed a bit of a change. On two of the subjects.

Code: [Select]

Born in 212(23rd of Timber) - Maxblood 4821
Born in 212(3rd of Galena) - Maxblood 5804
Born in 212(4th of Malachite) - Maxblood 843
Born in 212(6th of Granite) - Maxblood 761
None of them have turned peasants yet, but it is apparent that SOME creatures born in the fort grow up as they should. I have no idea why the other two however did not grow up at all, I figure they never will either.

There is nothing that I can see as odd about their parents either. 3 of the kids are the only children of the couple, the last one is the youngest daughter of a bunch of kids, the second eldest daughter living in the fort is of a perfectly fine size too. It can't be something stupid like dorf genetics, one of the baby sized kids has both parents of the usual adult dorf size.

I looked at the differences between the dwarves who did grow up properly and those who didn't in a large population fort savegame. I explored various parts of the creature data using DFHack.

I found that dwarves who did grow up properly have:
unit.flags3.unk1 == True
whereas most other dwarves in the fort (including migrants) have:
unit.flags3.unk1 == False
Also, migrant dwarves who are 100+ years old have:
unit.flags3.unk1 == True
The meaning of this flag is unknown to the DFHack team, but I suspect it might be related to the problem.

I also noticed that dwarves who migrated as children are distributed between baby size and adult size according to how old they were when they arrived at the fort. This suggests that the problem is in the code that changes size on a yearly(?) basis, and not something that happens at birth.

[kuniqs]

All I will add, is that fortress-born children tend to become mayors.  This is because they have no job and they follow their mother around stand around the dining hall because they're orphans.  They do no work, and just loiter and chat with the other dwarves, quickly ranking social and friends, easily becoming mayor.

This means, on average, your mayor is the size of a cat as he goes around charismatically pointing at people, shaking hands, and making the ladydwarves swoon.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So, dwarf fortress is the only game when you can roleplay Ben Gurion. It's like Monty Python: the Game.

If creature size on both ends (attacker & defender) has difference in power of blunt attacks, then it puts some weapon research into question. Could anyone give his biggest, strongest dwarf a warhammer and compare that with another dwarf with an axe? Maybe hammers are even better than axes when the wielder is strong enough.

[Button]

Well I got a few migrant kids who showed up, let's see...

Code: [Select]

Born in 191 - Maxblood 5700
Born in 183 - Maxblood 6240
Born in 187 - Maxblood 6060
Born in 196 - Maxblood 5760
Born in 197 - Maxblood 5880
Born in 197 - Maxblood 5940
Born in 199 - Maxblood 6060
These dorfs are currently from 18 to 25 in age, and judging by the older dorfs around, they seem to be of appropriate body size.

Is the difference in the range size of the birth year and age due to the bug, or a reporting error?

[BoredVirulence]

Okay, after adding it that adult age is at 4 years, I noticed a bit of a change. On two of the subjects.

Code: [Select]

Born in 212(23rd of Timber) - Maxblood 4821
Born in 212(3rd of Galena) - Maxblood 5804
Born in 212(4th of Malachite) - Maxblood 843
Born in 212(6th of Granite) - Maxblood 761
None of them have turned peasants yet, but it is apparent that SOME creatures born in the fort grow up as they should. I have no idea why the other two however did not grow up at all, I figure they never will either.

There is nothing that I can see as odd about their parents either. 3 of the kids are the only children of the couple, the last one is the youngest daughter of a bunch of kids, the second eldest daughter living in the fort is of a perfectly fine size too. It can't be something stupid like dorf genetics, one of the baby sized kids has both parents of the usual adult dorf size.

I looked at the differences between the dwarves who did grow up properly and those who didn't in a large population fort savegame. I explored various parts of the creature data using DFHack.

I found that dwarves who did grow up properly have:
unit.flags3.unk1 == True
whereas most other dwarves in the fort (including migrants) have:
unit.flags3.unk1 == False
Also, migrant dwarves who are 100+ years old have:
unit.flags3.unk1 == True
The meaning of this flag is unknown to the DFHack team, but I suspect it might be related to the problem.

I also noticed that dwarves who migrated as children are distributed between baby size and adult size according to how old they were when they arrived at the fort. This suggests that the problem is in the code that changes size on a yearly(?) basis, and not something that happens at birth.

I suspected it would be something like this. Either way, good find. Try testing what happens when you change that flag on migrant children? (I suspect you are already doing something)

[CognitiveDissonance]

Reading all the above, I'd like to venture a theory - maybe only "major historical figures" are getting proper aging flags, while regular dwarves aren't.
Just a theory, but maybe a dwarf only gets their info updated if they are entered into the legends - and unless my (meagre) reading experiences are wrong, not everyone does.

Also, and I think this may already have been stated in other words, maybe this is a process that worldgen handles that the game simply forgets to do once worldgen is over.

[Ieb]

I don't think that's it, of the kids I have, none of them have done anything important like create an artifact. One of the properly growing up kids doesn't have any friends either, while all the rest have at least two, so yeah, that's not effecting them at all, I think.

[Gargomaxthalus]

This is definitely NOT something that don't you want to hear about when your a newb who finally has a decent fortress, which happens to have have about 30 children/babies running around. Now I'm left with the bleak prospect of running a eugenics program to weed out the the dwarf Dwarfs in order to increase my survivability. This also makes my goat herd seem like a waste of time to maintain, since I can just buy metric shit-tons of cheese each season instead of playing musical pastures, as well as upping the amount of leather that I'm trading for.


This issue once again highlights the huge downsides to Toady's one man coding show. I really wish that he'd at least let some people in on the bug fixing, since that wouldn't require him to let them "look behind the curtain" and would give us a much more stable game. I mean, it's not even appropriate to call DF a "game". It's meant to be a simulator and a huge issue like this causes it to be a complete failure in that regard. I mean no real offense but one of the best known sayings is that "pride comes before the fall". It seems that DF !!SCIENCE!! needs to be kicked into overdrive in order to find out whether or not anything is truly as it seems. It's great that Toady has so many great ideas about what DF could be but he needs to take a few steps back and determine whether or not he can be at all happy about what it IS.


Once again I apologize if this seems overly hostile, but this should have never happened in the first place. This issue is so massive that no one really knows how the simulation is actually supposed to work. This is about more tan a few midgets, this issue is interfering with many of the games metrics and could be giving even Toady bad data that he hasn't been aware of. This isn't a should be fixed, it's a MUST BE FIXED SOONER RATHER THAN LATER, MUCH SOONER!!!!!!

I've gone on about this for far to long and once again passed far to close to the event horizon so I'll leave it at that.

[CognitiveDissonance]

*snip*

Well...
- Equip your dwarves with picks, axes, swords and crossbows. You will be fine military-wise
- Tiny goats still produce cheese and wool (AFAIK)
- Toady is unlikely to change his mind anytime soon. Similar arguments generally have to go back and look at the "This is a pre-alpha" on main screen. He means it. I'm okay with that.
- Watch out for event horizon. Really bad (good) sci-fi shows happen there

[slothen]

This is definitely NOT something that don't you want to hear about when your a newb who finally has a decent fortress, which happens to have have about 30 children/babies running around. Now I'm left with the bleak prospect of running a eugenics program to weed out the the dwarf Dwarfs in order to increase my survivability. This also makes my goat herd seem like a waste of time to maintain, since I can just buy metric shit-tons of cheese each season instead of playing musical pastures, as well as upping the amount of leather that I'm trading for.

Considering its been completely unnoticed for probably years, the relative significance of the negative effects is unclear.  Domesticated breeding programs are a definite victim, but hardly inviable/useless.  Meat, bones, wool, and war animals take a hit (one that no one has really noticed, except for weak war animals), while leather and milk and eggs do not.  Dwarven eugenics seems pointless considering its possible that all children are affected, and tiny dwarves can still be quite effective in combat.

rant

not the thread for this.  While this has all kinds of potential systemic effects, the worst ones are probably spared from most forts.  Regarding its effects on combat balance, your concerns are valid but possibly overstated as this bug would not effect arena mode and very likely does not effect adventure mode or any worldgen events.  However, I would love to hear this bug discussed by Toady during the next DF Talk.

[Ieb]

Although to Toady's defense, we don't know how long this bug has been in, because it only now got noticed. Maybe it's been years, maybe it's been in since the last update.

Although I guess that's easy to check, just DL older versions and use DFhack in 'em to check maxblood on kids.