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Messages - zagibu

Pages: [1] 2 3 ... 58
1
DF Suggestions / Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« on: December 10, 2012, 10:12:34 pm »
Quote from: alexandrite on December 10, 2012, 05:48:08 pm
Quote from: Mephansteras on October 29, 2012, 01:33:31 pm
Quote from: magmaholic on October 27, 2012, 06:27:14 am
seeing multithreading as 11th in the voting list made me wish more people knew what it is.
MULTICORE SUPPORT MAN. YAYUS.

I think the reason it doesn't get more votes is because it would require a massive overhaul of the game to put in, and during that time Toady couldn't really do anything else. So the overall development would stall for a very long time without anything new being added. Sure, performance would improve, but that's about it.

Personally, I'd rather have more features and less bugs than better performance, and I'm sure a lot of other people feel the same way.

Same. 

Also, some technical stuff: Concurrency is difficult and bug-prone, it would require different code for each supported OS, and even modern games still only run two or three threads: Device I/O (network, hard drive, whatever), Game Logic, and Graphics.  Offloading the entire game logic to a different thread would be negligibly helpful in this case, and even if the game logic were spread out into multiple threads (like one for pathing, one for fluid simulation, and one for everything else for instance) all the game logic threads would still have to wait on the slow one to finish before updating the state of the game.  tl;dr: Even if pathfinding and fluid simulation were offloaded, the rest of the game would still have to wait for it to before finish a "tick" of the game could happen.  It would be of minimal benefit for colossal effort.

I think the idea is more that a problem is split up in subproblems that are then calculated in different threads. Pathing is a good example. Each path could be forked into an own thread, which would greatly increase the speed of producing a pathing result for the next game tick. But you are right, it is not easy to do, and if pathing isn't the bottleneck, it will actually hurt more than help, because the thread-switching of course means an additional overhead.

The game should be profiled to identify the problematic code locations, then these should be improved. Toady is probably a very good programmer, but I'm quite sure that there is still potential for performance improvements. Maybe, for some of the code, multi-threading will be the solution. Maybe not.

2
DF Suggestions / Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« on: March 21, 2012, 01:57:22 pm »
Heh, the new generation of ajax-spoilt children will never figure it out. When I was young, you still had to properly submit a form, there was no newfangled I-Jags around in our time to wipe our butts when we were done.

3
DF Suggestions / Re: DF Eternal Suggestion Voting
« on: February 25, 2012, 12:54:26 pm »
Toady has the code, ask him. Unfortunately, I've got too many things going on to work on the script.

Also, I wasn't gone, I check this forum almost daily.

4
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Weapon research
« on: February 19, 2012, 05:10:22 pm »
I highly doubt it.

5
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: What's Below the HFS?
« on: May 19, 2011, 11:48:14 am »
It's the hidden multiplayer feature. All df worlds are connected to Toady's server by the bottommost z-level.

6
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Weapon research
« on: January 01, 2011, 07:48:54 am »
Ok, I've reupped the evaluator stuff. There was a problem with recognizing rounds. Another thing is, that calculate.pl has to be adapted, if you test other creatures than dwarves. Currently, it only counts attacks of "Dwarf 1". If you test other creatures, or want to test attacks of the second dwarf, you have to change the pattern called $pattern_start.

With the fixed evaluator, I got the proper statistics out of your test file.

7
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Weapon research
« on: December 31, 2010, 11:55:32 am »
How did you run the perl script? I'm gonna try exactly your way and see what I get on my system. Also, what kind of OS are you using? Can you post some lines of a testreport?

8
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Weapon research
« on: December 29, 2010, 08:54:38 am »
The script either processes all files given on the command line as parameters, or, if none given, it looks for files in the current directory with names beginning with "testreport". It creates an output file for every processed input file.

9
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Weapon research
« on: December 28, 2010, 10:53:21 pm »
It's a perl script. I know, this is not perfect, but for me, it was the easiest solution, because perl has a fast regexp implementation and was supported on one of my OS (Linux). I guess you can run it with cygwin on Windows. Or there might be another Perl interpreter. The perl script generates numerical data that you can paste into the provided spreadsheet.

The evaluator has not been updated since the beginning, but, IIRC, it never counted biting, etc. You can take a look at the perl script and find this information in the patterns that I use to extract the data.

10
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Weapon research
« on: December 25, 2010, 06:52:40 pm »
I've tried to run your tests on my machine, but there were some problems with the item strings (you have to be careful there, it hasn't got ANY error tolerance). The best thing would be to first manually set up the test and exactly write down the filters you employ letter by letter.
This corrected version worked.

Code: [Select]
Sword - High Master x Dabbling/10
1/0/0/79/0:13,3:13,17:13,18:13,19:13/steel short sword:1,steel mail:1,steel breast:1,steel helm:1,steel gaunt:2,steel high:2,steel greav:1,steel shield:1
2/0/0/79/0:0/steel short sword:1,steel mail:1,steel breast:1,steel helm:1,steel gaunt:2,steel high:2,steel greav:1,steel shield:1

It created a 5MB file, because the fights were pretty long. The reason is that the unskilled dwarf learns so fast, he is usually on legendary skills before having received any serious wounds, and from there on, the fight is pretty even. I think you won't see a significant advantage for the skilled dwarf. You could try modding the dwarf creature, so that it can no longer learn skills. It's what I have done for my tests, but I can't currently get to my long-term storage to retrieve the correct definitions.

I'm also going to upload a new version of the simulator that works with the newest DF in a minute. It also contains a readme.txt with some tips.

Note that if you have something else besides Windows XP 32bit, and find that even the corrected version still doesn't work, you're on your own. Unfortunately, I don't have Vista or 7, and I don't even know whether AutoIt works there.

[Edit] The new link is up in the original post.

11
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Weapon research
« on: December 25, 2010, 11:53:21 am »
Well, if the fighting doesn't stop, the file will obviously get bigger and bigger. Or is the problem that it doesn't recognize the end of the fighting?

12
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Weapon research
« on: December 16, 2010, 03:15:15 pm »
I wouldn't worry about these few %. The tests are not THAT accurate, so the 9% might actually be a bit higher than average, while the 2% might be a bit low. In general, I would think in 10% classes. At first, I actually only wanted to use three classes, low, medium and high, but then I was too lazy to do the grouping function in the spreadsheet and just went with the %.

13
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Weapon research
« on: December 15, 2010, 01:52:17 pm »
It depends on what you call "iron". Pure iron is very brittle, yes, but the question is whether pure iron was used in weapon making at all.

14
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Weapon research
« on: December 05, 2010, 10:34:53 am »
Yeah, I know, it's more a maul than a real-world warhammer. The head on a real-world warhammer doesn't really allow an additional steel mantle.

But DF warhammers don't have to be like real-world warhammers. Dwarves are certainly strong enough to wield onehanded mauls, and an important part of real-world warhammers (the beak or thorn) is missing anyway, if I am not mistaken.

Maybe it could look like this instead:
Code: [Select]
_
| \____________________
|  \____               \
| P ____|   Steel      |
|  /___________________/
|_/       |   |
          |   |
          |   |
          |   |
          |   |
          |   |
          |   |
          |   |
          |   |
          |   |
          |   |
          |   |
          |   |
          |   |
          |   |
          |   |
          |   |
          |   |
          |___|
          |___|
          |___|
          |___|
          |___|
          |___|
          |___|
          |___|
          |___|
          \___/

15
DF Dwarf Mode Discussion / Re: Weapon research
« on: December 05, 2010, 09:17:02 am »
What i meant was something like this:
Code: [Select]
_________
/         \
===========
\_________/
    | |
    | |
    | |
    | |
    | |
    | |
    |_|
    |_|
    |_|
    |_|
    |_|
    \_/
The ===== would be the platinum cylinder (not to scale, just to give the idea where it would be located). My idea was to keep the platinum part as small as possible. The steel around the platinum cylinder would only be for additional weight, if the platinum cylinder alone was not heavy enough.

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