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[cameron]

what could work is that everything is stored as a unit of the material as per suggestion but every action has a say 1 in 10 chance of producing a certain amount of scrap material. metal scrap could just be melted down again but rock and wood would be suitable for very little perhaps only paving and burning respectively. The chance could be raised with larger constructions. Ideally this would give similar results as tracking logs/large rocks and calling them scrap when they reach a certain size.

to be clear though this would not mean your dwarves would fail to make something just that they would waste additional materials. perhaps the chance could correlate with quality and skill.

[Sunken]

Hey, you have to decide here - if you criticize me for simply using a different sized unit, then you can't also complain that I'm adding more object types!

No I don't.  Not when you are arguing for something that is functionally just a different arbitrary unit size than we have right now as if it were a game-changer and arguing for multiple types of objects that serve the same purpose, or else are generally useless. 

I have been arguing two parallel suggestions from the start. One is just using larger minimal size increments, one proposes functional differences. It's the latter that's a game-changer. The former just improves on the current system. Yours does too, we just don't agree which does the most.

In fact, let's illustrate this point by going back to this little gem:

You might say "it's all just 0.5 liters of wood" and I say sure, but
1: doesn't "2 blocks / five planks / three logs" give a clearer and nicer picture?

OK, so what you are honestly attempting to convince me of is that "57 kg of Maple Wood" is more confusing than "2 blocks of Maple Wood, 5 planks of Maple Wood, 3 Logs of Maple Wood, 3 kg of Maple Sawdust, 6 kg of Maple Firewood" in a stack?  Now then, kids, get out your calculators, because blocks are worth 3.5 times as much as planks, and logs are worth 20 times planks.  Firewood is only useful for charcoal, but you have to convert it at a 10 kg to 3 plank ratio for determining how much charcoal you can make.  Plus, blocks aren't useful in making certain items, so you have to subtract that number out when you are figuring out how many tables you can make, but you DO still have to add in the logs.

You misunderstand me. I didn't mean all those three at the same time. Any stack only presents one unit - either because it's your system underneath, and just rounded off for presentation purposes, or because it is actually represented as a stack of planks, nothing else. Your blocks and planks would end up on different piles. When you're making furniture, you're only interested in planks so you want them separate, and so on. Sorry if I was unclear.

[Sunken]

You see, maybe you don't realize it, but you're arguing that "your system" is better than the current system... because its units are some arbitrary, undefined smaller unit! 

THEN, you argue "your system" is better than mine... because the units are some arbitrary, undefined LARGER unit!

The whole argument you are making is that I'm somehow asking for the game to measure down to the picometer, and then offer your idea up as a Golden Mean between these two "negative extremes". 

OK, so I'm officially confused. Aren't you proposing representing everything by the smallest possible unit of volume? If you're not, then what do you propose? If you've written it already I must have missed it, in that case we've been wasting a lot of time here...

I am indeed proposing something smaller than the current units (which are quite arbitrary - a log is "the amount you get from 'a' tree", a stone is... well, just arbitrary).
The units I'm proposing are arbitrary only in the sense that they could be picked within a range - a "plank" could be anything from a big fat near-beam to a relatively short and thin piece of wood - but it couldn't be any size. Toady would pick some average size that corresponds well with most people's idea of a "plank", and also allows all furniture/construction to be done reasonably with whole numbers of them. And so on for other types.
A prototypical plank, in other words. Doesn't exist in reality, but approximates well what does exists in reality - better than the current wood logs do, certainly - and provides sufficient detail for that which they're used for.

Now then, let's look at the way that the game actually works.  Dwarves will prefer (potentially very heavily) to stack items of the same sort if they can at all help it.  With fungible piles of wood, this means that they will continue putting every single scrap of wood they can find into one pile until the pile hits whatever it's arbitrary "full" size is, at which point, they start up the next pile, probably directly next to the first.  When some wood needs to be added to the pile, they place it in the partially-full tiles first.  When wood is taken from the pile, they go to whichever is closest first, which is probably the same tile they took from last time, which cleans up those fractions leftover if there were any rather nicely before they move on to the next pile.

In the above I was assuming that a dwarf will prefer to grab everything he needs in one pick, over starting with the nearest pile if that's insufficient. How does it work now? Is there any facility for "grabbing enough" material for, say, melting metal - or is it just "get 1 metal thing, bring it back, see if it's sufficient, get 1 more metal thing..."? I confess I don't know. Both our systems needs to deal with this in a proper way, at least.

Anyway, if the stockpile is constantly being replenished as you postulate, the problem would indeed be mitigated. On the whole, the performance argument is not my main reason for preferring units of some tangible finite size rather than (as I've understood you) the smallest available unit. It's most of all about aesthetics. And there, I doubt either of us will be able to win the other over. It's not up to us to decide, anyway

[Sunken]

what could work is that everything is stored as a unit of the material as per suggestion but every action has a say 1 in 10 chance of producing a certain amount of scrap material. metal scrap could just be melted down again but rock and wood would be suitable for very little perhaps only paving and burning respectively. The chance could be raised with larger constructions. Ideally this would give similar results as tracking logs/large rocks and calling them scrap when they reach a certain size.

to be clear though this would not mean your dwarves would fail to make something just that they would waste additional materials. perhaps the chance could correlate with quality and skill.

This was proposed in another thread on crafting efficiency some time ago. Arguments got pretty heated back then. I think many (myself included) are averse to letting randomness decide whether waste is produced or not. It seems a little untidy. Both Kohaku's and my takes would probably work by producing a little waste every time instead - though the amount of waste sould be influenced by skill, and could vary with randomness too I suppose.

Edit: I'll grant that this would be vastly easier to implement than what we've been discussing though.

[cameron]

the idea was more that it would be easier to have it be a 1/10 chance then to have a countdown so when ever it reaches 0 from 10, waste is made but either would fit with what i was thinking of

[NW_Kohaku]

In fact, let's illustrate this point by going back to this little gem:

You might say "it's all just 0.5 liters of wood" and I say sure, but
1: doesn't "2 blocks / five planks / three logs" give a clearer and nicer picture?

OK, so what you are honestly attempting to convince me of is that "57 kg of Maple Wood" is more confusing than "2 blocks of Maple Wood, 5 planks of Maple Wood, 3 Logs of Maple Wood, 3 kg of Maple Sawdust, 6 kg of Maple Firewood" in a stack?  Now then, kids, get out your calculators, because blocks are worth 3.5 times as much as planks, and logs are worth 20 times planks.  Firewood is only useful for charcoal, but you have to convert it at a 10 kg to 3 plank ratio for determining how much charcoal you can make.  Plus, blocks aren't useful in making certain items, so you have to subtract that number out when you are figuring out how many tables you can make, but you DO still have to add in the logs.

You misunderstand me. I didn't mean all those three at the same time. Any stack only presents one unit - either because it's your system underneath, and just rounded off for presentation purposes, or because it is actually represented as a stack of planks, nothing else. Your blocks and planks would end up on different piles. When you're making furniture, you're only interested in planks so you want them separate, and so on. Sorry if I was unclear.

Wait, wait, you're now saying that you want to make all units the same, and using blocks and planks as some kind of decimal point, the way that coppers and silvers and gold coins are used? 

Doesn't that mean, then, that ten planks (or whatever subdivision system you use) would meld into a block or a log?

Isn't this EXACTLY what I've been proposing, but with a slightly different "face" on it?

Hey, you have to decide here - if you criticize me for simply using a different sized unit, then you can't also complain that I'm adding more object types!

No I don't.  Not when you are arguing for something that is functionally just a different arbitrary unit size than we have right now as if it were a game-changer and arguing for multiple types of objects that serve the same purpose, or else are generally useless. 

I have been arguing two parallel suggestions from the start. One is just using larger minimal size increments, one proposes functional differences. It's the latter that's a game-changer. The former just improves on the current system. Yours does too, we just don't agree which does the most.

OK, this is getting pretty silly.

So... when you have two seperate arguments, and I make two seperate counter-arguments, your counter-counter argument is that I made two seperate counter-arguments.  In my counter-counter-counter argument, I point this out, and you essentially wind up agreeing with me, both that arbitrary changes to "granular size" in the abstract are fucntionally identical until you can set something down with hard data and compare actual results, but also in your making it necessary for me to make two seperate responses.

So, in other words, your argument is that you're agreeing with me.

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

[NW_Kohaku]

the idea was more that it would be easier to have it be a 1/10 chance then to have a countdown so when ever it reaches 0 from 10, waste is made but either would fit with what i was thinking of

Kind of, that's the way that the reaction system works, as opposed to the way that melting objects (which is the same workshop) works.

Law of averages would state that, provided it was calibrated the same way, it really doesn't matter either way.  This is a game with an unusual focus on the small scale, but it is still a game where you have to think in macro terms, and operations like "build wooden barrel" are performed thousands of times.  The difference is only really important when each and every unit really does matter... and with waste, that's certainly not the case.

However, the thing about having a random chance to produce a "waste unit" is fit more for the small integer style of game design than the higher precision style I've been talking about here.  As such, I'd say I would be against it largely just because it goes against the general theme of what I am proposing.

Keep in mind, however, that producing waste means that someone will have to clean that waste up.  Producing waste is a deliberate programming choice to slow down production, and force a new task to clean that waste up.

I talked about producing waste with mining, because I do think that mining needs to be slowed down, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you want to add in cleaning up waste to every single task in the game.

Honestly, with something like a carpentry workshop, it would be fine if the waste (as in, the excess chunks of wood that aren't actually used in the process, not a randomly generated-from-thin-air additional waste product) just dissapeared, although it could go the other way, as well.

[Len B]

I think this is a great idea.  Unifiy the underlying mechanics with the raws and slap a nice happy unit-discreet interface to assuage players who want planks, logs, chunks, blocks, bits, dust, slabs, hunks, spools, rods, plates, foils, whathaveyou - all selectable in the init.  Set up probability curves for raw material sizes.  A table has a (material amount)/(probability) stat and is checked when drawing against the stockpile for the job.  Once it's above unity, you can always draw a "table sized" chunk of wood.

I suppose real discrete unit purists would insist that one could add less wood than a "table sized" amount and then voila, draw a plank from the pile.  I'd never notice that level of detail or even care that much, although some might.

*shrug* whatever is better for FPS, in my book...

[NW_Kohaku]

Well, I should also say that I was playing with modded dwarves of vastly larger size recently.  In it, I discovered some of the fun properties of how items scale.  Aside from the bizzare quirk that it doesn't matter how large or strong you are, the same amount of mass applies the same SPEED penalty if you are a termite or a titan.

More importantly, though, "Breastplates" take the same number of metal bars to make a piece of armor no matter what civilization uses that kind of armor.  A 60 liter dwarf will require the same number of metal bars to build armor for his race's size as a 60,000 liter dwarf will, even though the resulting armor is 1,000 times more voluminous and massive.

[Sunken]

Wait, wait, you're now saying that you want to make all units the same, and using blocks and planks as some kind of decimal point, the way that coppers and silvers and gold coins are used? 

Doesn't that mean, then, that ten planks (or whatever subdivision system you use) would meld into a block or a log?

Isn't this EXACTLY what I've been proposing, but with a slightly different "face" on it?

Pretty similar, but you seemed to be insisting that the minimum unit should be as small as possible, whereas I was insisting it should be of a size adapted to the amounts used by crafts/construction etc.
In my version, I wouldn't have blocks turn into planks when stacked though - because it seemed unrealistic. So I'd have to store them as different types, at least, even if one didn't wish to differentiate their actual function. They'd be just like bank notes and coins, in a way, except you weren't allowed to change a smaller denomination to a larger one. And all prices would be in whole dollars or cents (or whatever's the applicable currency...).

The functionally-differentiated version is more radical: it's more like taking your 20-dollar bill (tree) and buying one of several types of tokens, of different sizes. The tokens can be used in different machines, which accept integral numbers of tokens for different wares, but you can't use the small tokens for the big machines or vice versa.
(In some cases, you'd get some tokens back from the machines - tiny tokens, all the same, that can only be used in the low-end run-down machine in the corner. Those tokens are your firewood, mullock or what have you.)

The difference between your system and the first of the above (let's call it A, and the one with the tokens B) is even smaller for, say, stone. If the only stackable size is "brick", then there's only one "coin denomination", just as in your case, except the denomination is larger (again, tailored to fit the requirements for construction/crafting). And then there's the mullock, which would work the same in your system and mine AFAICS.

My, but the Internet is a huge impediment to understanding sometimes. I tried to separate my advocation of A and B a few posts ago, but it seems I didn't do such a good job of it. Anyway, hope it's clearer what I mean with the above. You didn't say whether I'd misunderstood your position regarding the minimum unit size in your system, though.

[Sunken]

However, the thing about having a random chance to produce a "waste unit" is fit more for the small integer style of game design than the higher precision style I've been talking about here.  As such, I'd say I would be against it largely just because it goes against the general theme of what I am proposing.

I just want to be pedantic and point out here (lest there be any misunderstanding! perish the thought!) that even with either my A or B system, waste doesn't have to be dealt with by randomness either. The resolution of the wastefulness is less, though. A bungling carpenter may use 5 planks to make a chair of a certain size, where a master gets by with 3, the additional material ending up as firewood fit only for the charcoal pile. You can't waste less than 1 plank with this system, though, obviously.

Keep in mind, however, that producing waste means that someone will have to clean that waste up.  Producing waste is a deliberate programming choice to slow down production, and force a new task to clean that waste up.

I talked about producing waste with mining, because I do think that mining needs to be slowed down, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you want to add in cleaning up waste to every single task in the game.

Honestly, with something like a carpentry workshop, it would be fine if the waste (as in, the excess chunks of wood that aren't actually used in the process, not a randomly generated-from-thin-air additional waste product) just dissapeared, although it could go the other way, as well.

As I've said, I think that waste that retains some secondary usefulness (like firewood, gravel, etc.) may enrich gameplay. We already have useful waste products in the form of bones and shells; if you had to choose whether to use a turtle for food or for the shell, we'd have fewer shell items and the game would be (very slightly) poorer for it. Currently we have to make that choice with our wood - burn it or build with it? If we couldn't help but get some waste wood that could only be used for burning, maybe magma wouldn't be quite the sine qua non that it is now (though, I doubt it).

[Daetrin]

Not to intrude on the running argument :p but I really like this idea. Specifically, what appeals to me is to represent the use of precious metals vs. functional metals. Mining ten tiles of gold vein wouldn't (necessarily) give the same   amount of material, but you no longer use the same amount of material to make as you do to decorate.

Insofar as the abstraction vs granularity argument goes, I'm in favor of abstraction. I don't want to feel the "need" to make 100 wood crafts to clean up the scraps from bedmaking.

[Soralin]

Yeah, this would definitely be useful for that, especially if rarity and value gets worked out with it too.  I mean, compare a solid gold ring to a solid gold table.  The table should be worth a large amount, much more than the ring, but it's also using what should be an absurd amount of gold in the process.  Right now, precious metals aren't really that much more valuable than normal ones, and you can mine them out by the ton without any trouble (Although I suppose those two facts combined make sense).  But it would be nice for certain materials to be much rarer, and actually have the quantities that things are made out of make sense, so that there's a reason why you usually have golden rings, and that golden tables are a bit more uncommon, simply because of the amounts required.

[NW_Kohaku]

Yeah, this would definitely be useful for that, especially if rarity and value gets worked out with it too.  I mean, compare a solid gold ring to a solid gold table.  The table should be worth a large amount, much more than the ring, but it's also using what should be an absurd amount of gold in the process.  Right now, precious metals aren't really that much more valuable than normal ones, and you can mine them out by the ton without any trouble (Although I suppose those two facts combined make sense).  But it would be nice for certain materials to be much rarer, and actually have the quantities that things are made out of make sense, so that there's a reason why you usually have golden rings, and that golden tables are a bit more uncommon, simply because of the amounts required.

This is actually something I've discovered a little bit about through modding, though...

Apparently, the value of a weapon is based upon the size of the weapon.  A giant axe 100 times larger than normal axes are worth rediculous amounts of money.  (This is probably why serrated discs are such hot commodtities now - they're very large weapons.)  The number of metal bars it takes to produce these weapons, however, is completely unrelated to the size of the product, and is determined arbitrarily in the raws.

[NW_Kohaku]

From a different thread, talking about this one:

Don't think that's what he's suggesting.


I like this idea, but how would the game display the parts of the boulder/bar/log that aren't used up? The cloth rework handled this by permanently locking the cloth in a hospital chest. Perhaps one could give workshops the same sort of storage.

As I said to Sunken's similar concerns, this can be solved by using the mechanics the game already uses regarding bins (and, presumably, the mechanics for wheelbarrows and stacking when they become implimented) - If dwarves prefer to place all items in stockpiles with like items that have yet to fully occupy their maximum stack size, then "leftover fractions" of materials simply get clumped together. 

The excess .5 liters of steel from one reaction gets lumped into the next two 2 liter bars of steel that get sent to the same stockpile tile, making 4.5 liters of steel, which then has 2.7 liters removed for the making of a helmet, and you have 1.8 liters of steel in the tile when another 2 liter bar gets smelted, and added into the pile, giving you 3.8 liters of steel.