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[GoblinCookie]

As a result of a bug with site loading I had to scuttle my adventurer and his world, since the sites kept messing up the location of trade depots, wrecking trade  .  Mainly by exploring the workings of the bug I did learn something though, what I learned is how the items and the sites actually work; it is rather interesting. 

In summary, the sites architecture do not actually exist as soon as you leave the site.  Instead every single time you leave the site the game recreates the site from scratch based upon the same data, since the geography is the same and the random seed is the same in theory the site architecture should be the same every time; though in practice this frequently does not work out.  The geography is itself generated in the same manner I think, based upon a set of data that includes the random seed; this means that the whole adventurer mode gameworld is basically a tree with the geography at the bottom and the sites as branches coming from the geography.  Then having generated the architecture it then generates the people, the non-historical population is generated based upon a seed in the same manner as the architecture while the historical population is stored abstractly and used to add the historical characters into the game. 

Here is the funny thing, items do not work this way; at least certain items do not.  The game keeps track of the explicit location of a set of items regardless of the sites and their architecture so the items will always appear even if (as should not happen) the site architecture has shifted; sometimes resulting in items in the middle of walls.  Here is the catch, the game keeps track of the location of the items but not who owns them, whether that is an individual or a site.  The catch to this is that any item that is picked up or interacted with by the adventurer or by anyone else that is onloaded becomes a special item which is tracked, with the consequence that every item that the adventurer touches become unowned; the adventurer's touch presently destroys property.  If the adventurer sells an item it appears to become site property ($item$) but the moment the site reloads the item becomes unowned because it is a tracked item and while it's location is tracked it's owner is not. 

Items previously sold to a site simply become heaps of unowned items the moment the site offloads meaning that you cannot buy back items that previously you sold but you can just walk away with them and it is not actually stealing according to the present mechanics .  All owned items are only owned because they do not actually exist when the site is offloaded but are generated based upon a random seed in the same manner that the architecture is.  The same thing applies to private property, items are assigned owners when the site is onloaded based upon who is presently carrying the items; meaning that an object left around at a location ceases to belong to you (or anyone else) the moment the site (or area) offloads.  This is the real reason why the game does not allow you travel mode with stolen items is that doing so makes the stolen items not stolen since they are tracked items. 

[Untrustedlife]

That is not how it works at all.
I have come back to cities and been able to buy the figurines I sold earlier with a different adventurer.


The cities change based on their populations, they used to be more static (in 34, because the world wasn't alive) but now populations change, and therefore so does the architecture of the city. Toady has said, once its generated, its there. Homes get added on the outskirts, (this was in 34) it works differently now that populations actually change and cities expand.

http://www.bay12games.com/media/Dwarf_Fortress_Talk_13.mp3




Also it lets you travel with stolen items after you leave the site.


Also the legends file keeps track of exactly how the cities look once they have been generated once.




now, since version 40, they expand as needed.
A different df talk talked about this but I don't have time to look for it right now.


Also each site has an item list that lists exact amounts. (its pretty crazy how in depth it is actually)

[GoblinCookie]

That is not how it works at all.
I have come back to cities and been able to buy the figurines I sold earlier with a different adventurer.


The cities change based on their populations, they used to be more static (in 34, because the world wasn't alive) but now populations change, and therefore so does the architecture of the city. Toady has said, once its generated, its there. Homes get added on the outskirts, (this was in 34) it works differently now that populations actually change and cities expand.

http://www.bay12games.com/media/Dwarf_Fortress_Talk_13.mp3

Also it lets you travel with stolen items after you leave the site.

Also the legends file keeps track of exactly how the cities look once they have been generated once.

now, since version 40, they expand as needed.
A different df talk talked about this but I don't have time to look for it right now.


Also each site has an item list that lists exact amounts. (its pretty crazy how in depth it is actually)

It allows you fast-travel with stolen items but then those items become unowned once you stop travelling because fast-travelling offloads the game, they effectively become unowned once you travel which is the reason why you are not allowed to fast-travel with stolen goods. 

You said cities, it may be that city shops are a special case and that all items that are found within the area of the shop are tagged as owned by the shop when the city is generated but that the same obviously does not apply to dwarf trading depots, which is what I was talking about.  It is however clearly the case that items sold to trade depots become unowned items sitting on top of the trade depots that are quite seperate from the owned items inside the trade depot building, it may be the case that shops establish initial ownership of tracked items based upon location which would mean that if you left an unowned item in a shop then offloaded the city the item when you came back would belong to the shop.  Trade depots on the other hand establish ownership based upon things being inside the building, but as tracked items are always placed on top of the building and never in it, anything sold becomes unowned ultimately.

The ability of the cities to expand has nothing to do with the subject; the populations are simply part of the basic information that the site uses to generate the site architecture every time that the site loads up, cities come in various fixed sizes as well.  The city is simply defined as being of a given size in the core data and the abstract world progression can increase that site, the site simply calculates how many buildings it is going to generate according to the size of the city and then ruins/abandons a given number of these buildings if the population of the city is smaller than the level of the city.  It is certainly *not* the case that the game stores the actual architecture of the city or any other site in the save game or anywhere else, or why does it sometimes happen that you get a different site depending upon which direction you approach from?

[Untrustedlife]

That is not how it works at all.
I have come back to cities and been able to buy the figurines I sold earlier with a different adventurer.


The cities change based on their populations, they used to be more static (in 34, because the world wasn't alive) but now populations change, and therefore so does the architecture of the city. Toady has said, once its generated, its there. Homes get added on the outskirts, (this was in 34) it works differently now that populations actually change and cities expand.

http://www.bay12games.com/media/Dwarf_Fortress_Talk_13.mp3

Also it lets you travel with stolen items after you leave the site.

Also the legends file keeps track of exactly how the cities look once they have been generated once.

now, since version 40, they expand as needed.
A different df talk talked about this but I don't have time to look for it right now.


Also each site has an item list that lists exact amounts. (its pretty crazy how in depth it is actually)

It allows you fast-travel with stolen items but then those items become unowned once you stop travelling because fast-travelling offloads the game, they effectively become unowned once you travel which is the reason why you are not allowed to fast-travel with stolen goods. 

You said cities, it may be that city shops are a special case and that all items that are found within the area of the shop are tagged as owned by the shop when the city is generated but that the same obviously does not apply to dwarf trading depots, which is what I was talking about.  It is however clearly the case that items sold to trade depots become unowned items sitting on top of the trade depots that are quite seperate from the owned items inside the trade depot building, it may be the case that shops establish initial ownership of tracked items based upon location which would mean that if you left an unowned item in a shop then offloaded the city the item when you came back would belong to the shop.  Trade depots on the other hand establish ownership based upon things being inside the building, but as tracked items are always placed on top of the building and never in it, anything sold becomes unowned ultimately.

The ability of the cities to expand has nothing to do with the subject; the populations are simply part of the basic information that the site uses to generate the site architecture every time that the site loads up, cities come in various fixed sizes as well.  The city is simply defined as being of a given size in the core data and the abstract world progression can increase that site, the site simply calculates how many buildings it is going to generate according to the size of the city and then ruins/abandons a given number of these buildings if the population of the city is smaller than the level of the city.  It is certainly *not* the case that the game stores the actual architecture of the city or any other site in the save game or anywhere else, or why does it sometimes happen that you get a different site depending upon which direction you approach from?

I have never had a city suddenly "regen" based on where I approached it from they look the exact same , I have heard that goblin sites do that(and I never spend slot of time in those so it's possible) but I spend the majority of my games going back to cities I've been to previouslY and it definetly  isn't the case with cities, or even hamlets , that site map was exported directly from legends,  toady has stated that cities generate the first time you approach them, but afterwords it just loads the pregenerated site map from legends , the next time you come. And adds houses if it needs to that is exactly how it works. I'll take toadies word for it.

I'm sorry but you are wrong.


This is why you can die in a city or hamlet then find your body in the exact place in the exact building you died in.  ( it most definetly isn't off of a seed, if it was the slightest variance in a towns variables eg the population being off by one would change the layout completely the hamlet would look COMPLETELY different I'm talking half a map away) This is also why when you go back to a city and have high memory most of the city will be revealed you explored it already this is also why meadhalls castles and sewers look the exact same if you leave a city and come back, taverns are a bit more interesting (the kind of liquor  changes every day) but the tavern will look the exact same the next time you go it it.

This is also why you get a big lag burst the first time you approach a city but afterwords the lag is less because it is simply loading it from a file.as toady has stated in past df talks. Toady really really cares about consistency.

Now it may be that when the actual city "level" changes that the architecture is regenerated, since I'm going off of what toady said before the world activation release, though I believe he also talked about it in one of the talks he did while working on the world activation release.

However you were talking about trade depots I thought you were talking about cities. Sorry

[GoblinCookie]

I have never had a city suddenly "regen" based on where I approached it from they look the exact same , I have heard that goblin sites do that(and I never spend slot of time in those so it's possible) but I spend the majority of my games going back to cities I've been to previouslY and it definetly  isn't the case with cities, or even hamlets , that site map was exported directly from legends,  toady has stated that cities generate the first time you approach them, but afterwords it just loads the pregenerated site map from legends , the next time you come. And adds houses if it needs to that is exactly how it works. I'll take toadies word for it.

I'm sorry but you are wrong.

Wrong about what in particular?  The essential point of the thread is completely accurate, that by simply moving items and offloading the site the player can annihilate property ownership from the game. 

They are supposed to always look the same, because they are using the exact same random seed every time along with generally similar base data.  What I am talking about is a bug, but it is a bug that is revealing of how the game is actually working, the game does not store the architecture of the city or any other site, instead the architecture is recreated identically every time you visit it; or rather it SHOULD be recreated identically.  So instead of actually storing what the city or other site looks like the game stores the recipe book that will make a site that looks like that; this is why it is possible to have sites you have already visited having different architecture depending upon which direction you come from due to a bug.

This is why you can die in a city or hamlet then find your body in the exact place in the exact building you died in.  ( it most definetly isn't off of a seed, if it was the slightest variance in a towns variables eg the population being off by one would change the layout completely the hamlet would look COMPLETELY different I'm talking half a map away) This is also why when you go back to a city and have high memory most of the city will be revealed you explored it already this is also why meadhalls castles and sewers look the exact same if you leave a city and come back, taverns are a bit more interesting (the kind of liquor  changes every day) but the tavern will look the exact same the next time you go it it.

This is also why you get a big lag burst the first time you approach a city but afterwords the lag is less because it is simply loading it from a file.as toady has stated in past df talks. Toady really really cares about consistency.

Now it may be that when the actual city "level" changes that the architecture is regenerated, since I'm going off of what toady said before the world activation release, though I believe he also talked about it in one of the talks he did while working on the world activation release.

However you were talking about trade depots I thought you were talking about cities.

Of course you find your body in same place, because as I said certain items (such as all bodies) are tracked!  Your body will be in the same place even if the site were regenerated so that where your body is happens to be right in the middle of a wall now.  As already mentioned however, this should not happen because the same seeds are used everyime so that if everything goes according to plan the architecture will regenerate exactly the same; changes to sites like cities growing/shrinking carefully set up so no architectural problems will occur (hence all the ruined/abandoned houses).  This is not really up for dispute, it is how the game creates sites in general, even if cities are for some reason the sole exception; the interesting thing is that some items do not work that way, the exact square that every item is on is stored as a central list for the whole world and placed at that location regardless of anything.

The thing is that the game tracks the location of said items it does not track the ownership of the items.  Ownership is something that is assigned to items after the sites have been loaded, which means that special items cannot be owned permenantly as only the items that were generated along with the site can be owned.  This means that if you sell an item to a trade depot the items appear to be owned and are available to be bought back for as long as the site remains loaded.  If you reload the site however whether by leaving or by going to sleep/waiting then you will find the items you sold to the shop lying about atop the trade depot unowned so you have to pick them up and give them to a depot dwarf first if you want to then buy them.  This is a solid fact, I have tested a new game not suffering from the site inconsistancy bug like my first game and found this be the case; another solid fact is that if you drop an item on the ground in a site that is your private property, offload the site and then return the item will become unowned, I did both things. 

You claim that you have bought items created by a previous adventurer which were presumably owned by the shop.  This implies one of two things, one that shops are operating on a different basis than the trade depots or two that the item tracking is per adventurer.  The first option is unlikely because as shops are older than trade depots it is pretty unlikely that Toady One would not simply have reused the shop code for the depots.  The second option is more likely, the game erases the information as to the location of all items that were tracked during a given game but in the case of items in sites the items are saved into an abstract site list.  This would explain why you were able to buy items from your previous adventurer, when he died all the items were untracked and then uploaded into the item list of the site. 

In this model the site is not creating a new batch of items every time like with the architecture but instead keeps a list of items just as keeps a list of historical characters effectively.  When the site is onloaded the items are placed in the appropriate place for the given type of item and assigned ownership or not.  It might be that the items are only uploaded into the sites item list at the termination of every adventure (with the death of retiring of the adventure) or equally it could be that it is something that happens periodically so what is going on in my case is that not enough time has passed for the sites to digest the items into their site lists.

[Untrustedlife]

I have never had a city suddenly "regen" based on where I approached it from they look the exact same , I have heard that goblin sites do that(and I never spend slot of time in those so it's possible) but I spend the majority of my games going back to cities I've been to previouslY and it definetly  isn't the case with cities, or even hamlets , that site map was exported directly from legends,  toady has stated that cities generate the first time you approach them, but afterwords it just loads the pregenerated site map from legends , the next time you come. And adds houses if it needs to that is exactly how it works. I'll take toadies word for it.

I'm sorry but you are wrong.

Wrong about what in particular?  The essential point of the thread is completely accurate, that by simply moving items and offloading the site the player can annihilate property ownership from the game. 

They are supposed to always look the same, because they are using the exact same random seed every time along with generally similar base data.  What I am talking about is a bug, but it is a bug that is revealing of how the game is actually working, the game does not store the architecture of the city or any other site, instead the architecture is recreated identically every time you visit it; or rather it SHOULD be recreated identically.  So instead of actually storing what the city or other site looks like the game stores the recipe book that will make a site that looks like that; this is why it is possible to have sites you have already visited having different architecture depending upon which direction you come from due to a bug.

This is why you can die in a city or hamlet then find your body in the exact place in the exact building you died in.  ( it most definetly isn't off of a seed, if it was the slightest variance in a towns variables eg the population being off by one would change the layout completely the hamlet would look COMPLETELY different I'm talking half a map away) This is also why when you go back to a city and have high memory most of the city will be revealed you explored it already this is also why meadhalls castles and sewers look the exact same if you leave a city and come back, taverns are a bit more interesting (the kind of liquor  changes every day) but the tavern will look the exact same the next time you go it it.

This is also why you get a big lag burst the first time you approach a city but afterwords the lag is less because it is simply loading it from a file.as toady has stated in past df talks. Toady really really cares about consistency.

Now it may be that when the actual city "level" changes that the architecture is regenerated, since I'm going off of what toady said before the world activation release, though I believe he also talked about it in one of the talks he did while working on the world activation release.

However you were talking about trade depots I thought you were talking about cities.

Of course you find your body in same place, because as I said certain items (such as all bodies) are tracked!  Your body will be in the same place even if the site were regenerated so that where your body is happens to be right in the middle of a wall now.  As already mentioned however, this should not happen because the same seeds are used everyime so that if everything goes according to plan the architecture will regenerate exactly the same; changes to sites like cities growing/shrinking carefully set up so no architectural problems will occur (hence all the ruined/abandoned houses).  This is not really up for dispute, it is how the game creates sites in general, even if cities are for some reason the sole exception; the interesting thing is that some items do not work that way, the exact square that every item is on is stored as a central list for the whole world and placed at that location regardless of anything.

The thing is that the game tracks the location of said items it does not track the ownership of the items.  Ownership is something that is assigned to items after the sites have been loaded, which means that special items cannot be owned permenantly as only the items that were generated along with the site can be owned.  This means that if you sell an item to a trade depot the items appear to be owned and are available to be bought back for as long as the site remains loaded.  If you reload the site however whether by leaving or by going to sleep/waiting then you will find the items you sold to the shop lying about atop the trade depot unowned so you have to pick them up and give them to a depot dwarf first if you want to then buy them.  This is a solid fact, I have tested a new game not suffering from the site inconsistancy bug like my first game and found this be the case; another solid fact is that if you drop an item on the ground in a site that is your private property, offload the site and then return the item will become unowned, I did both things. 

You claim that you have bought items created by a previous adventurer which were presumably owned by the shop.  This implies one of two things, one that shops are operating on a different basis than the trade depots or two that the item tracking is per adventurer.  The first option is unlikely because as shops are older than trade depots it is pretty unlikely that Toady One would not simply have reused the shop code for the depots.  The second option is more likely, the game erases the information as to the location of all items that were tracked during a given game but in the case of items in sites the items are saved into an abstract site list.  This would explain why you were able to buy items from your previous adventurer, when he died all the items were untracked and then uploaded into the item list of the site. 

In this model the site is not creating a new batch of items every time like with the architecture but instead keeps a list of items just as keeps a list of historical characters effectively.  When the site is onloaded the items are placed in the appropriate place for the given type of item and assigned ownership or not.  It might be that the items are only uploaded into the sites item list at the termination of every adventure (with the death of retiring of the adventure) or equally it could be that it is something that happens periodically so what is going on in my case is that not enough time has passed for the sites to digest the items into their site lists.

You are still wrong about how sites are stored (it does store actual maps after you go to them ingame) , but I give up, you can ignore what toady says about how his game works, all you want. Whatever.

Rainseeker:   So what we're looking at here - and if you guys have seen on the website we have some pictures of what these cities are going to look like, and that's on the dev page, correct?
Toady:   Yeah that's right, bay12games.com/dwarves, the main Dwarf Fortress page has the latest pictures and by the time this recording comes out there should be even more pictures.
Rainseeker:   So you can check them out as we're talking about it. So now what we're looking at is an overview of the city. If you're looking at you'll see there are a number of pre-made buildings and usually there's a river, possibly going through it and what is happening here Tarn, how is this thing being generated?
Toady:   Well, right now it places the centre of the town, it just picks out a spot and spreads out buildings from there respecting whatever wall or keep it's decided to put down, and it spreads ... It sometimes goes over the water... It fills out the entire area, the idea is that the vast majority of these cities were formerly agricultural and would have had those old manor-style maps that we had before, but they've got a market now and are now the central hub for at least the surrounding villages that get linked to them. So you've got these maps ... The oldest maps, the ones that are currently posted as of the recording don't have market squares or anything, so you don't actually get to see the market at this point but presumably those will be ready before long. Because of how it has to integrate the city grid with the cities it doesn't really have the same former-manor structure that it once did, although for the parts that are still agricultural that could return or not, depending on the timetable. But basically you have denser city buildings growing out from some central point and taking over some portion of the formerly agricultural area. So the cities are always the same basic size in terms of the overall area that's considered part of that city, it's just the percentage that's town and the percentage that's agricultural is varied based on the population, pretty much. That's why they always have the same overall shape, it's because all the villages have the same overall shape too, nothing's really changed about that.


Capntastic:   What can you tell us about the people that currently live in these places? Do cities have populations yet?
Toady:   Right now during world generation ... We kind of stopped the caravan arc part way through and then did the first release and then did some bugfixing, but as of then world generation had assigned a bunch of professions and all of the villages would just have people that were doing farming, mining, and various agricultural related work, they'd butcher the animals on occasion and so on but nothing like ... you wouldn't just get a bunch of silversmiths placed in the random villages that were there. But when a market springs up it looks at the resources that are available from the villages, whether that's ore or leather or ... Ow! (to Scamps) what is this cat ... He just snuck up behind and did the claws like usual, and now he's getting his belly rubbings ... So once you have a market - and there's a market from the very beginning, from your one or two or three or whatever there'll be a market location selected for the beginning villages, and that's where it centers all of the secondary craftwork. So you have all of the ore and things being brought to that town and you have the professions springing up, the ones that can spring up around there, and every village and town has a list of needs based on the population and the items that are currently stored - it stores all of the items numerically now - and so if people have a desire for beds or weapons or crafts of various kinds they'll start to use the resources they have and they'll also look at the neighboring markets that they link up with and see what needs they have, and basically build the things that they're best at building using the resources they have. That starts to create profession counts in the towns and specialty counts in the towns so it keeps track of how long they've been doing a given thing and how many people are doing it. So you get some specialization and the remainder of the town doing the other jobs that need doing. In the end you have a numerical breakdown of the population of the town by profession, so we have for a given town up there that might have a thousand or two thousand people or whatever, you'll have a specific breakdown of all of the professions and those are used - or going to be used depending on where we're at when this is released - to populate the buildings with workshops and so on, to reflect who lives in the city during world generation.


Rainseeker:   So do you have plans to allow the cities to grow organically over the course of world generation, and is that going to continue on into adventure mode?
Toady:   So city growth right now during world generation ... It does not have the specific city map set aside during world generation because it takes a certain amount of time to generate one of these maps and it would slow down world generation a bit to have the specific locations of every building tracked and it would also be pretty memory intensive. So right now what it does is it numerically tracks the buildings and things, so it knows how much is there, but it doesn't know specifically where it's location or how many streets there are and the exact shape of the road network and everything. It just knows what's there and those numbers increase or decrease depending on what's going on. Once world generation ends then it has that information ready to create a map of a city, so that when you go to the city for the first time it will then generate a map based on that information. So there's still an opportunity for the appearance of organic growth there because it has historical information and it has population variation over time and it can keep track of how many ... It doesn't currently keep track of when every building was built but doing that to some extent would be feasible, in which case you could do a bit of organic growth for the time during world generation.

After world generation it's basically the same story. You have nothing happening right now changing in the towns, and the timeline for that is not really well known, we'll see when we get to it ... I think it was release 5, I'm going to go and check now ... there was a release there that really gets at the dynamic of the situation; right now we're just trying to get things to show up at all, so you have to be a bit patient with what we've got. Release 5: changing populations, food use and other world generation stuff moved to actual play; that entire release is basically dedicated toward making the situation more dynamic in the cities. So if people moved to a town then that needs to be reflected in the growth of the town, even if you've visited the town before; if you've visited a town and it had a population of one thousand and you play the game for twenty in-game years ... that would be a lengthy series of adventure mode games but it's not just adventure mode games being played, it's fortress mode games which pass the years quite quickly ... and so you can end up with a town, you know if its population changes from one thousand to two thousand and you've already visited the town in adventure mode then you would have a map for that town and that map would need to be updated, so basically it would need to take a summary of changes - it can't keep track of anything - but a summary of changes, and continue to create the city, basically, and more or less tear up farm land and extend the map outward. So the extent to which that's possible with, say, five hundred years of world generation history ... It's not something I'm doing right now as various people have noted, about these maps, and I don't have all the information stored that I need but it's certainly a feasible thing that shouldn't be too difficult overall.
Ollieh:   (interlude music)

What he is saying here is that during world gen it just tracks numbers, but after you go to it in adventure mode it creates a map, and the next time you go there it just directly loads the map from your world file(IT DOESNT REGENERATE).And updates the map with new buildings when it needs to, so yes, it does store the actual city maps it doesn't use a fricken seed to regenerate it.

How many times do I have to say this?

It doesnt even overwrite parts of the map that have been already generated so your body would not be in the middle of a wall either.

The important quotes are bolded, so you can read.


The rest of what your saying is fine but this is important for understanding how things actually work.



edit:
No Idea why I am so irritated by this...

[Bumber]

You are still wrong about how sites are stored (it does store actual maps after you go to them ingame) , but I give up, you can ignore what toady says about how his game works, all you want. Whatever.

That DF Talk is from May 31, 2011. IIRC, sites were re-written between 2012 and DF2014.

Note this bug fix: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=9432

(*) Fixed inconsistent underground vegetation generation (which caused underground site maps to generate inconsistently)

[Untrustedlife]

You are still wrong about how sites are stored (it does store actual maps after you go to them ingame) , but I give up, you can ignore what toady says about how his game works, all you want. Whatever.

That DF Talk is from May 31, 2011. IIRC, sites were re-written between 2012 and DF2014.

Note this bug fix: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=9432

(*) Fixed inconsistent underground vegetation generation (which caused underground site maps to generate inconsistently)

The game does underground areas far differently, I doubt toady changed much how cities are loaded relying on a seed is s downgrade not an upgrade.he probably ( well he would have to) make them more dynamic, but it probably still adds to sites rather then making them based on a seed. There is no functional reason for him to do it that way there is a resin he spent a very long time on site maps while he was working on version 40.

[Bumber]

The game does underground areas far differently, I doubt toady changed much how cities are loaded relying on a seed is s downgrade not an upgrade.

Of course we can also ask on the fotf reply but he likely upgraded his code, likely making it smarter relying on a seed is not an upgrade.

It's a save-size optimization.

[Untrustedlife]

The game does underground areas far differently, I doubt toady changed much how cities are loaded relying on a seed is s downgrade not an upgrade.

Of course we can also ask on the fotf reply but he likely upgraded his code, likely making it smarter relying on a seed is not an upgrade.

It's a save-size optimization.

Did toady say he did that? I rely on my experiance and toadies word. No need for him to optimize save size: it only loads the site when you come close to the city anyway it doesn't keep it in ram memory.it keeps it in the world file.

Like I said we should ask toady himself for confirmation we can't just assume things.



Remember that trees create holes in the ground bug from s few patches ago? ( one of the version 40 patches) What happened was a new town was built (or expanded onto a previously explored forest (likely part of a younger city map) the map wiped the trees and built a city on top it resulted in holes all over the ground this happened because a forest map already existed and a the city expanded and was built on top of the same map a map that was generated already. Resulting in holes in the ground where trees used to be.


Btw I'm not trying to be a jerk or anything , we just need to make sure what we say is actually accurate, I get that this was a theory not a statement but you know what I mean right?

[Bumber]

The game does underground areas far differently, I doubt toady changed much how cities are loaded relying on a seed is s downgrade not an upgrade.

Of course we can also ask on the fotf reply but he likely upgraded his code, likely making it smarter relying on a seed is not an upgrade.

It's a save-size optimization.

Did toady say he did that? I rely on my experiance and toadies word. No need for him to optimize save size: it only loads the site when you come close to the city anyway it doesn't keep it in ram memory.it keeps it in the world file.

No, it was just a factual statement. Disk read times are very slow, so a seed can also be a speed-up depending on the complexity of the algorithm. The actual reason, if not save-size, would likely be making it easier to change layout. Abandoned buildings are structurally different from occupied ones.

The only thing from Toady I remember for certain was that rewriting the site code was one of the major delays in releasing DF2014.

[Untrustedlife]

The game does underground areas far differently, I doubt toady changed much how cities are loaded relying on a seed is s downgrade not an upgrade.

Of course we can also ask on the fotf reply but he likely upgraded his code, likely making it smarter relying on a seed is not an upgrade.

It's a save-size optimization.

Did toady say he did that? I rely on my experiance and toadies word. No need for him to optimize save size: it only loads the site when you come close to the city anyway it doesn't keep it in ram memory.it keeps it in the world file.

No, it was just a factual statement. Disk read times are very slow, so a seed can also be a speed-up depending on the complexity of the algorithm. The actual reason, if not save-size, would likely be making it easier to change layout. Abandoned buildings are structurally different from occupied ones.

The only thing from Toady I remember for certain was that rewriting the site code was one of the major delays in releasing DF2014.

fair enough.

[GoblinCookie]

Did toady say he did that? I rely on my experiance and toadies word. No need for him to optimize save size: it only loads the site when you come close to the city anyway it doesn't keep it in ram memory.it keeps it in the world file.

Like I said we should ask toady himself for confirmation we can't just assume things.

Remember that trees create holes in the ground bug from s few patches ago? ( one of the version 40 patches) What happened was a new town was built (or expanded onto a previously explored forest (likely part of a younger city map) the map wiped the trees and built a city on top it resulted in holes all over the ground this happened because a forest map already existed and a the city expanded and was built on top of the same map a map that was generated already. Resulting in holes in the ground where trees used to be.


Btw I'm not trying to be a jerk or anything , we just need to make sure what we say is actually accurate, I get that this was a theory not a statement but you know what I mean right?

Toady One is busy making the game and is not on call to answer endless questions except for once a month; the answers to these questions are frequently evasive and can become obsolete as the game changes.  Yes it is pretty much the case that every site is recreated identically based upon a set of data plus a random seed that is the same every time and is saved; we are however not supposed to notice that this is how things work.  A computer game is ultimately an illusion and it does not make sense for the illusionist to give away or make obvious the way that the illusion is actually working.  This means that appearances are very much decieving and your experience does not reveal a great deal about the workings of the game since you are not supposed to notice the actual workings but only the illusion the working creates.  It is neccessery to go out of your way to break the game in order to actually find out how the game mechanics work through experiance, the everyday player does not learn much about the inner game mechanics by passively playing since they are not supposed to be noticed. 

Your answer to Bumber is truly naive.  The game has to load up the save file into memory in order to then draw the resulting architecture also into memory, the size of the save file matters because the bigger the save file the longer the loading is going to take.  In order to have sites work the way they do in most games with predefined maps it would be neccessery to have loading screens like most game have during which the data is loaded up into memory and then drawn on a map also in memory.  By generating everything from seeds you divide the load between the memory and the processing power, since generating the world from seed uses processing power rather than memory.  Doing things in the traditional way takes far more memory because the complex data that tells the computer how to draw the map and the map itself both take up memory but processing power is mostly idle.  However some things it would seem, such as certain items are actually being loaded according to the traditional manner, with the items explicit location being stored in a file and loaded at that location regardless. 

This is what this thread is supposed to be about, not the fact that sites are loaded from seeds.  It gets quite interesting when sites fail to regenerate properly and we see items loading up in the middle of buildings because those items are specially tracked as opposed to being generated along with all the other items.  It is also interesting that the ownership of objects is not tracked but instead is assigned upon site generation to the items that are created.  If items are picked up they join the list of items that are in the special list of items whose precise location is actually tracked, which means that if you pick up an owned item, drop it on the ground, reload the site and come back the item ceases to be owned by anyone.  The other issue is that items that are sold remain tracked items, they only temporarily aquire owned status until the site is unloaded; the other items cease to exist with the unloading of the site and are reloaded based upon an abstract item list.

In summary: ownership is actually something that is recreated everytime the site is reloaded. 

No, it was just a factual statement. Disk read times are very slow, so a seed can also be a speed-up depending on the complexity of the algorithm. The actual reason, if not save-size, would likely be making it easier to change layout. Abandoned buildings are structurally different from occupied ones.

The only thing from Toady I remember for certain was that rewriting the site code was one of the major delays in releasing DF2014.

Abandoned/ruined buildings are architectural placeholders, they are not structually different from occupied ones in any non-superficial sense and this allows consistancy in the regeneration of the town from seed to (hopefully) be mantained while allowing for towns to change size.  The towns architecture is generated in sections from the center based upon the seed+town size and if the town shrinks the sections that would not be occupied if the town had never grown that big in the first place are abandoned/ruined.  In this manner consistancy is mantained since when if the population increases then the next generation of the town have occupied buildings in the exact same place and all tracked details like items will be in the same place.

[Untrustedlife]

Did toady say he did that? I rely on my experiance and toadies word. No need for him to optimize save size: it only loads the site when you come close to the city anyway it doesn't keep it in ram memory.it keeps it in the world file.

Like I said we should ask toady himself for confirmation we can't just assume things.

Remember that trees create holes in the ground bug from s few patches ago? ( one of the version 40 patches) What happened was a new town was built (or expanded onto a previously explored forest (likely part of a younger city map) the map wiped the trees and built a city on top it resulted in holes all over the ground this happened because a forest map already existed and a the city expanded and was built on top of the same map a map that was generated already. Resulting in holes in the ground where trees used to be.


Btw I'm not trying to be a jerk or anything , we just need to make sure what we say is actually accurate, I get that this was a theory not a statement but you know what I mean right?

Toady One is busy making the game and is not on call to answer endless questions except for once a month; the answers to these questions are frequently evasive and can become obsolete as the game changes.  Yes it is pretty much the case that every site is recreated identically based upon a set of data plus a random seed that is the same every time and is saved; we are however not supposed to notice that this is how things work.  A computer game is ultimately an illusion and it does not make sense for the illusionist to give away or make obvious the way that the illusion is actually working.  This means that appearances are very much decieving and your experience does not reveal a great deal about the workings of the game since you are not supposed to notice the actual workings but only the illusion the working creates.  It is neccessery to go out of your way to break the game in order to actually find out how the game mechanics work through experiance, the everyday player does not learn much about the inner game mechanics by passively playing since they are not supposed to be noticed. 

Your answer to Bumber is truly naive.  The game has to load up the save file into memory in order to then draw the resulting architecture also into memory, the size of the save file matters because the bigger the save file the longer the loading is going to take.  In order to have sites work the way they do in most games with predefined maps it would be neccessery to have loading screens like most game have during which the data is loaded up into memory and then drawn on a map also in memory.  By generating everything from seeds you divide the load between the memory and the processing power, since generating the world from seed uses processing power rather than memory.  Doing things in the traditional way takes far more memory because the complex data that tells the computer how to draw the map and the map itself both take up memory but processing power is mostly idle.  However some things it would seem, such as certain items are actually being loaded according to the traditional manner, with the items explicit location being stored in a file and loaded at that location regardless. 

This is what this thread is supposed to be about, not the fact that sites are loaded from seeds.  It gets quite interesting when sites fail to regenerate properly and we see items loading up in the middle of buildings because those items are specially tracked as opposed to being generated along with all the other items.  It is also interesting that the ownership of objects is not tracked but instead is assigned upon site generation to the items that are created.  If items are picked up they join the list of items that are in the special list of items whose precise location is actually tracked, which means that if you pick up an owned item, drop it on the ground, reload the site and come back the item ceases to be owned by anyone.  The other issue is that items that are sold remain tracked items, they only temporarily aquire owned status until the site is unloaded; the other items cease to exist with the unloading of the site and are reloaded based upon an abstract item list.

In summary: ownership is actually something that is recreated everytime the site is reloaded. 

No, it was just a factual statement. Disk read times are very slow, so a seed can also be a speed-up depending on the complexity of the algorithm. The actual reason, if not save-size, would likely be making it easier to change layout. Abandoned buildings are structurally different from occupied ones.

The only thing from Toady I remember for certain was that rewriting the site code was one of the major delays in releasing DF2014.

Abandoned/ruined buildings are architectural placeholders, they are not structually different from occupied ones in any non-superficial sense and this allows consistancy in the regeneration of the town from seed to (hopefully) be mantained while allowing for towns to change size.  The towns architecture is generated in sections from the center based upon the seed+town size and if the town shrinks the sections that would not be occupied if the town had never grown that big in the first place are abandoned/ruined.  In this manner consistancy is mantained since when if the population increases then the next generation of the town have occupied buildings in the exact same place and all tracked details like items will be in the same place.

( I'm talking about cities not forts so perhaps they work differently)

Im a computer science major goblin. I know the difference . However DF loads sites and some terrain from chunks in the world file so it is constantly streaming (and offloading) the site to you similair to how minecraft does terrain  ( except it doesn't need to have as much loaded since what the player can see is much less) Which is why you have no "loading screen" when you visit your fortress , the problem with player forts is that toady can't split it into chunks so it loads the entire thing. Cities can be 16*16  and he can pull that off by generating the city and seperateing it out into chunks ( this was s big part of the site rewrite, before the first site rewrite human sites were loaded like forts (Toady lamented this many times)  so they  had to be tiny)
That is why you sometimes get those huge lag bursts when you first visit a city because it generates the whole city then offloads most of it.

Camps and lairs for example are loaded like player forts.



You can't argue that it is regenerating your own fortress.

However it does seem like NPC forts work differently as do goblin forts , hillocks probably work like hamlets.

Goblin I'll go ahead and ask toady. I have trouble accepting that he loads town the way you say he does when he has only ever said it doesn't work that way. Sure it might not be s good way of doing it and I am aware, but toady never claimed to be an expert Programmer. Toady is very open to questions he cares about the community I'm sure it will be fine.

-----------------------------------------------------
The item ownership is interesting I believe item ownership is planned to be tracked more once toady works on law/culture changes and right now it is very simple "oh you are in this building, now you belong to it" that sort of thing. And it will be great when he goes to track that more . I believe he plans. to actually track item amounts by name per (important) person.


Now items (as toady has said) are tracked numerically by site ( then they put all the spare items in warehouse buildings he does that so he can simulate trade.

Items you drop in a site are tracked by position. We can test the possible part of your theory by dropping an item in a shop in a city and see if the shop "claims" it.


Time for more science perhaps? Did you delete the world entirely already?

Also remember to report it!

[Bumber]

Abandoned/ruined buildings are architectural placeholders, they are not structually different from occupied ones in any non-superficial sense and this allows consistancy in the regeneration of the town from seed to (hopefully) be mantained while allowing for towns to change size.

Abandoned buildings lack some walls, etc. My point is that it's easier to generate the building anew from seed than to load the existing structure and try to figure out what needs to change.