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[AdamK]

As 64 bit binaries are out in the world, we could do a lot longer woerld genertion then before. Unfortunately, making time takes time So, I would be nice if we could pause worldge, save it, to resume later.

[Bumber]

I'm not sure that's feasible. You could put your computer in hibernation mode, which dumps your entire system state to disk to resume later. Trying to save the state of a complex world gen, and then pick up where you left off, is not worth the development time for whatever other (non-hibernating) reason you'd want to do that.

[AdamK]

My best guess is that saving the worldgen is not much diffrent from saving ordinary game - restoring it might be more problematic.

1000000 old world history anyone?

[vjmdhzgr]

Toady has said previously that for technical reasons, he's probably never going to be able to implement starting world generation again after it's already over. However, that's not really what's being asked for here. I mean, you can pause it already. Just press escape I think? It's at the bottom, there's a stop worldgen now button and you press that and it'll ask you if you want to generate a new world the same way, generate a new world a different way, use it as it is, or just continue world generation again. So I'm not really sure why you'd need much more than that. Still it does mean that it's probably possible at least, since it already is done in a different form.

[Dirst]

Toady has said previously that for technical reasons, he's probably never going to be able to implement starting world generation again after it's already over. However, that's not really what's being asked for here. I mean, you can pause it already. Just press escape I think? It's at the bottom, there's a stop worldgen now button and you press that and it'll ask you if you want to generate a new world the same way, generate a new world a different way, use it as it is, or just continue world generation again. So I'm not really sure why you'd need much more than that. Still it does mean that it's probably possible at least, since it already is done in a different form.

Toady could try to serialize the whole worldgen state to disk in that menu, but I think it'd be in the gigabytes range.

[Bumber]

Saving isn't really an issue. It's the loading. The loops and functions have to resume exactly how they left off, and probably weren't designed to do that. AFAIK, they're just temporarily halted when you pause world gen.

The ordinary game, on the other hand, was designed for that. Everything is complete each tick, because that's how game loops are designed.
To nobody in particular: I don't think we can just reload the execution state of a program, because the stack and memory addresses change. (As opposed to an entire hibernating OS.)

[Dirst]

I suspect that pauses happen at the beginning of a new year, which can be thought of as a worldgen "tick."  That would make it easier (but not trivial) to serialize the game's state into something that can be written to disk and read back.

Now try to resume your worldgen in a new version and watch your computer explode! 

[Bumber]

I suspect that pauses happen at the beginning of a new year, which can be thought of as a worldgen "tick."

I suspect it's more like an iteration. To the best of my knowledge, game loops keep lists and variables that are read at the beginning of each tick to determine what to do. The world generator may or may not be a mess of spaghetti code that is relying on a chain of function calls to keep track of everything. Really only Toady would know.

[Migrant]

Guys the solition is obvious. We simply have to

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

BOOT TO DF!