Print

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

[Robosaur]

It kinda breaks immersion that right now, a single skirmish between a dwarf and an invader can last for days. Especially when we start making fancier creatures, with slow-acting venoms that only take effect after 24 hours. However, making fortress mode run at the same speed as adventure mode would make it take FOREVER.

Does anyone have any potential solutions?

[SixOfSpades]

Make actions that really should be done every day, like eating, drinking, sleeping, & breaks take only a handful of ticks, and increase dwarves' movement rate, so that they actually CAN hear the lunch bell, head to the dining hall, get their grub, wolf it down, and get back to work in less than one dwarf hour.

Drastically increase the working time for all crafting jobs, so that the mason takes 6 days to carve a stone table, rather than 6 tables per day. While we're at it, make higher-skill dwarves take longer to perform the same task than their Dabbling counterparts: Any bozo can take 5 minutes to sharpen the end of a stick and call it a training spear, but a true master can easily take a year or more to create perfection, and still think it well worth the trade-off.

Make all combat actions happen nearly instantaneously, except perhaps periods of unconsciousness.

[Bumber]

It's completely unfeasible, IMO. There are constraints of pathing time and fluid calculations which mess up any realistic and balanced movement speed. Not to mention the player being able to tell what's going on.

Being able to skip long periods of time in adventure mode is about the best that can be done. The rest is a necessary abstraction for the sake of playability and entertainment.

Edit:
I guess you could mess with the timescale such that each month equals one day cycle. You'll know the month is nearing it's end when the sun finally begins to set. The full moon would last a whole month, occurring only once every 11 months or so. The end result is that seasons change much quicker in adventure mode while day/night lighting becomes possible in fort mode. Plus it even makes some sense that a planet can have an orbital period of just 12 days, if you're inclined to think of the DF world in such a way.

[Andeerz]

See this thread.  If you can fix the problems with this, then we have a solution. 

[Ops Fox]

Given the apparent insurmountable problems with outright speeding Dwarf fortess mode up to adventure mode speeds and the problems presented by providing two toggle-able speeds. Instead of focusing on the fortress mode being, 72 times faster than adventure mode, just focus on the dwarf fortress modes speed and what is lost in its current speed.

Simply stretch a dwarven year so that it takes four times as long, leave the rate dwarfs do things the same. The idea being that, while it wont be as realistic as adventure mode it will still be more so. Your dwarfs wont take month long breaks once a year, they will take week long breaks every few months; Your dwarfs will eat about 32 meals, rather than 8 in a year; etc etc.  Obviously that still isn't realistic but it is a slight better it also opens the door to some rather interesting things, since a current dwarven day last about 45 seconds quadrupling that gives us a three minute day, enough to simulate day and night cycles. Simulating day and night cycles alone would be a massive boon to the game as it could open the door to nightly frosting in cold or temperate biomes, better representation of wereism, reduced visibility for your dwarfs and maybe cutting down on the players omnipresence at night.

The old real problem I see with just stretching the time scale like this is crops, since they are the only form of production actually limited by days and seasons. The solution I imagine is as straightforward as the problem, increase crop yield to compensate.

[Dirst]

Month-long breaks are no worse than declaring war in Civilization and having your army arrive at the enemy city 120 years later.

The day/night thing might be abstracted differently though... Maybe work is slowed down by distance to one's bed (commuting time), rather than actually going there once in a while.

[Ops Fox]

Month-long breaks are no worse than declaring war in Civilization and having your army arrive at the enemy city 120 years later.

The day/night thing might be abstracted differently though... Maybe work is slowed down by distance to one's bed (commuting time), rather than actually going there once in a while.

I actually did not think about dwarfs sleeping at night, every night.

I think it might be better to leave it like it is now with dwarfs going to bed every few weeks(months in the current time scale) rather than changing the rate they nap. However it might be neat to have it so non-cave adapted dwarfs time their naps when its night and cave adapted dwarfs just nap when they get tired.

[Deboche]

If you play the Sims they take some days to go from baby to adult. If you had to play 365 sim days for them to age a year, you'd have to use the >>> speed setting a lot more.

There will always be a discrepancy between the calendar and the real time.

[Andeerz]

REGARDLESS OF IMMERSION AND REALISM:  Unfortunately, there is a real problem with discrepancies between game modes that needs to be solved somehow as development in the game continues.  This problem mostly has to do with how long it takes for things to traverse the map, particularly entities that have to exit and/or enter the embark area.  This will make implementation of several very important planned features problematic. 

As an example that illustrates the problem, think about a fort placed at a major road or trading route that is invaluable for timely travel across the region or empire or whatever you are part of.  A caravan that moves at normal speed everywhere else along the road all of the sudden starts to move 72 times slower when it comes to stop at your fortress and/or pass through.  What should only take maybe a few hours now takes several days or even weeks, which is a big deal if we are talking about activities that are time sensitive.  What if the caravan needs to make it to a major trade fair at the regional capital but needs to stop by your fort first to rest or pick up something?  What if you have to send an army from your fort that has to make it in time to break a siege at another location?  Should these kinds of things get an exception when it comes to movement speed?  If so, what kind of exploits does this open up (the answer: a lot)?   

Look at the thread I linked to earlier.  It discusses some possible solutions, but they all fall short in one way or another.  Seriously, I think people should revive that or the other threads that have done a great job of discussing it and try to discuss it further and come to a solution.   

   

[StagnantSoul]

The fortress time needs to be slowed exponentially. Halved, or quartered.

[Sizik]

Given the apparent insurmountable problems with outright speeding Dwarf fortess mode up to adventure mode speeds and the problems presented by providing two toggle-able speeds. Instead of focusing on the fortress mode being, 72 times faster than adventure mode, just focus on the dwarf fortress modes speed and what is lost in its current speed.

Simply stretch a dwarven year so that it takes four times as long, leave the rate dwarfs do things the same. The idea being that, while it wont be as realistic as adventure mode it will still be more so. Your dwarfs wont take month long breaks once a year, they will take week long breaks every few months; Your dwarfs will eat about 32 meals, rather than 8 in a year; etc etc.  Obviously that still isn't realistic but it is a slight better it also opens the door to some rather interesting things, since a current dwarven day last about 45 seconds quadrupling that gives us a three minute day, enough to simulate day and night cycles. Simulating day and night cycles alone would be a massive boon to the game as it could open the door to nightly frosting in cold or temperate biomes, better representation of wereism, reduced visibility for your dwarfs and maybe cutting down on the players omnipresence at night.

The old real problem I see with just stretching the time scale like this is crops, since they are the only form of production actually limited by days and seasons. The solution I imagine is as straightforward as the problem, increase crop yield to compensate.

I think is the best compromise, provided most Fort mode tasks take the same time as they do now, so as to not completely disrupt the gameplay. One exception could be crafting, which can, say, scale the time taken based on the quality of the work, so basic things take the same game-time they do now, but masterworks take much longer.

[Andeerz]

The fortress time needs to be slowed exponentially. Halved, or quartered.

Hmmm... if fortress time is slowed to one quarter of what it is now, then each "tick" of Fortress-mode simulation will be 18 seconds (or 18 Adventure-mode ticks).  This might make the suggestions in the thread I linked earlier somewhat more plausible...  And if the game gets optimized such that FPS death doesn't happen at a large population, then this would not make the game seem to take much longer...

Ideally everything in Fortress mode would operate at the speed of adventure mode, but just sped up in terms of what we experience, and not what is actually happening in the game (as in, there is no loss in resolution of the simulation at all...).  I am not sure that will be possible for average or even top-end PC hardware any time soon, regardless of optimization.

[utunnels]

I think it is fine to adjust time scale to whatever the players feel right. Because we usually care about real life time, not game time.  There's nothing wrong a skirmish lasts for days, or they only eat once per month, as long as the game play feels smooth.

It reminds me of some sim games, like Silent Hunter 2: It can be quite frustrating, when you have to drive the damned boat to the port.

[Andeerz]

But, there are aspects of the game (your fort interacting with stuff outside the embark area, of stuff from outside the embark area interacting with your fort)  that will not be smooth if this is not taken care of, especially when certain planned features get implemented.   This needs to be addressed somehow. 

[utunnels]

The easiest solution is scaling the day/night cycle. But I think some people must want to disagree, so maybe an entry in init.txt should solve most of the problems.

For example, a dorf needs 72 days moving from site A to site B in fortress mode, but he only needs 1 day in adventurer mode (I don't know if the math is correct but that is the idea). He sleeps every 72 days in fortress mode (again this is a pseudo value) while he sleeps every day in adventurer mode.

If we change a value in init.txt, for example:

[TIME_SCALE_ADV_MODE:72]
to
[TIME_SCALE_ADV_MODE:1]

Now the dorf needs 72 days to make the travel in adventurer mode, but the sun only raises and falls once during these 72 days. This doesn't have actual impact to game play, except it may not feel realistic to some people.