Print

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

[Mr Crabman]

A cool kind of magic for implementation at some point would be manipulation of time itself. Slowing it down, stopping it, and fast forwarding/skipping it (going backwards could be interesting, but comes with extreme challenges that probably deserve their own post).

Of course, these each have some technical and design challenges (but not as bad as travel to the past) to be considered, which I'll discuss and offer some ideas for solutions:

Stopping Time

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Stopping the world

Stopping time requires being able to effectively more or less pause everything in the game, for everything except the player character, or any other creatures or objects who are for some reason exempt from being affected by the spell (maybe some magical artifact/enchanted items for example, or just being a spirit innately being resistant to time stoppage).

There needs to be a way to allow the unaffected creatures to effectively move around, still be affected by gravity (taking the same number of "real life ticks"), have all their own internal clocks move separate to all the others that have been stopped (they'd still get hungry and tired right?).

Stopping some things

Stopping time of individual creatures or objects is a bit different because "global" clocks like the day/night cycle and the world in general don't need to be paused, only the clocks and AI of that specific creature or object, and the effects of gravity/physics applied on them. This feature also introduces a bit of a problem though, which I'll bring up now.

Stopping the player

One needs to think about what happens if an NPC stops time, and the player is among those affected; if a enemy vampire casts "stop time" for example, or just stops the time of the player, then logically, the player should probably not be able to see what is happening during the period. This could be done like so:

1. Freeze the clocks/physics/gravity on the player's character along with the rest of the world, and along with it, all controls that allow them to control their character/directly command their dwarves. The player should still be able to look around in their menus (no item usage or actions though!) and actually pause the game for real, and save and quit and all that stuff that doesn't affect the world.

2. Let only the unstopped creatures/objects continue with their AI/physics during stopped time. If the player adventurer is affected specifically rather than the NPC using their power on the world, then basically everything in the world will continue by the same clock except the player character. If in fort mode, only a few dwarves being affected should probably still let the player do everything as normal, just without those particular dwarves.

3. Freeze the graphics/rendering for the player, so they don't see what is happening (again, unless in fort mode and at least 1 fort member is unaffected).

This approach has the advantage of being relatively easy to implement, but the problem is that if all the player's fort members (or their adventurer) are stopped, then until time resumes, the player is stuck on a frozen screen waiting for the NPC to do their thing and for the time stop to end, and this is not only unfun, but also kind of immersion breaking. The main way around this seems to be to also speed up the things that can still move.

This could be done sort of by temporarily unlocking the FPS counter to go as high as the processor will allow, which probably could go a lot higher if everything in the world except the caster and maybe a few others are stopped (since the game will basically be nearly paused), but unfortunately even if the FPS were to reach 1000 when the whole world is stopped, then the player would be waiting 1 full second to move again for 8 minutes of stopped time "in-lore" (since 1 tick = 0.5 seconds in adventure mode), and if the player adventurer is the only thing frozen (or somehow, all the fort members and nothing else), then there can't really be any speedup there at all if the player's PC is already doing its best (if it has CPU to spare, you could still unlock the FPS and get some benefit).

The badness of this I guess depends on the maximum possible duration time can be stopped for, in any world, though the FPS unlock would most likely work for global timestops, so maybe the answer could be to only allow that to last for the longer durations.

In cases where the world as a whole is stopped, and therefore everything except specific "timestop-immune" entities like the caster are stopped, there could also be some heuristics/abstractions used to speed things up further without using multiple ticks, like letting them path across multiple tiles at once, and take multiple actions in a tick, and wherever something would take multiple ticks (like iterating hunger by 1 per tick), it will be made to happen in only 1 tick (or whatever amount necessary).

So say they can normally move 1 tile every 10 ticks, and they then stop time for "100 seconds" (or 200 ticks in adventure mode); they could be set to be able to move 2 tiles every tick (this is planned by Toady for non-timestop related reasons anyway), and take 20x as many actions as they would normally in that timespace (with any cooldowns they have reduced by 20x), and have their hunger incremented by 20 at a time instead of 1.

Programming these heuristics might be unnecessary effort and coding complexity compared to just unlocking the FPS and letting the extra ticks handle things (and it would produce more accurate results anyway most likely), and might not even really work, but if the FPS unlock doesn't do the trick for a smooth player experience of "oh snap they must have stopped time, because a whole bunch of stuff happened in an instant", at least this other idea is out there.

Interaction with frozen things

One also needs to define how interaction between stopped and unstopped objects works.

Things should move to some extent if direct force is exerted on them by the unfrozen (a simple reason for this is, so that clothes/carried items can be used), but if a stopped object is whacked, or someone throws a ball, how far should it go before it stops again? Maybe just stopping immediately is the best, and there can be a separate magical ability (distinct from stopping time to begin with) for allowing objects to be be pulled into your own "time frame" temporarily (so even if only you have power over time, you can allow your party members to move as well).

The momentum applied to stopped objects should also carry over when time resumes presumably, but how should the physics calculations work here when deciding how much to apply, since logically speaking, the unstopped object moving is way faster than normal? Maybe an easy solution here is to just treat it as if the objects are stationary rather than you moving any faster.

Another thing is fluids; what happens if an unstopped object enters stopped water that is stopped in a state of flow, do they get pushed along by it?

As for workshops, it would make sense that some dwarf can work on making wooden crafts (if that's what you want to be doing), but in some cases, like working in a forge/smelter, or a still, that the time being stopped would prevent the task from being done, since it's not just about the actions of the unstopped person, but the workshop itself having to burn fuel or whatnot.

About temperature; a creature should probably melt if it jumps in magma during stopped time, and if the air beside the magma is hot, presumably walking into that air should affect you (though I don't think convection is an actual thing ATM), and if you walk into a fire (or were already on fire), it seems that it should continue burning wherever it's in contact with you. Same story goes for the cold of course. Likewise, it makes sense that unstopped objects also impart heat to (or take heat away from) stopped things, so a fire imp could melt water while time is stopped for instance (if the imp is able to move).

Of course, some of these ideas could vary from world to world/magic system perhaps; imagine having to strip down to nothing (or have the clothes be enchanted specially or something) to actually move in stopped time, and not being able to move anything (or even walk around in the rain), but you can walk across water and magma and not have the temperature of it affect you in any way? Probably not good for every world/magic system to be like that, but playing around with the implications of time being stopped from world to world might be fun, if it doesn't take too much coding effort to add these variations of course.

Slowing Time

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Instead of just pausing everything like with timestop, there needs to be some calculated "pause everything for alternating ticks, where the player/unslowed creatures can still move"; so the world at large does 1 tick, but skips the next, and for things that don't happen every tick anyway (like once every 10 ticks), their schedule needs to be adjusted accordingly. Also, when multiple pieces of progress are made in 1 tick (like the future plans to let creatures move multiple tiles per tick), then that would need to be split up, rather than happening all on 1 tick and then not happening at all on the next.

If the player is slowed down with the world, there is still a need to preserve the "illusion" of being someone experiencing slowed time, which would look like the specific creatures who are not slowed moving very, very fast, which could be accomplished with the heuristics discussed above for time stopping, and also manipulation of the FPS/using extra ticks exclusively for the non-slowed entities. Unfortunately, preserving this illusion won't work at all if the player is slowed down while the rest of the world isn't.

This is similar to stopping time, but feels more difficult to implement in a satisfactory way because of 2 problems, if anyone has a solution to these problems I'd love to hear it:

Discreteness

When the player is not slowed down (just seeing other things/the world slowed down), it seems it would look like less time being slowed down, and more like it being stopped briefly then starting again, or being stopped for some time then briefly restarted.

Imagine 1 tick is processed, then 9 are skipped, then another 1 goes by normally again; at 100 FPS this might all  blend together and work fine, but when processing step by step in adventure mode it wouldn't quite work. A tick equals 0.5 ingame seconds, so that would be 0.5 seconds of time moving, and then 4.5 being stopped, and so on (or even slowing time by 50%, it would be all staggered), it's basically too discrete.

I'm not sure there is a solution to this, because of the highly discrete nature of the game; as noted above, it works fine for things that move more than 1 tile per tick, because now they could move half the distance per tick, but slowing time just seems awkward when 1 tick always completes one fully discrete action, and you can never do half in one, half in the next. It's just do something one tick, and nothing the next, which doesn't jive well with the idea of "slowing" time rather than repeatedly stopping it, and I expect in practice it would feel very wrong/unsatisfactory.

This problem spills over into slowing time for individual creatures as well, and makes interactions between slowed and non-slowed creatures more difficult than stopped and non-stopped.

Synchronization

The other tricky part with slowing time, is that unlike time stopping where either a creature/part of the world is either completely stopped for the whole duration, or is fully able to move smoothly by being the caster (or otherwise immune), multiple creatures can in principle be slowed down to different speeds, which makes interactions between them harder to figure out. This is a way easier problem to solve than the discreteness I believe.

Fast Forwarding/Skipping Time

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Fastforward Time

Fastforwarding is pretty much the same thing as slowing time, so if that issue can be solved, this can be solved too, here are the parallels:

1. Fastforward the player = Slow down the rest of the world.
2. Fastforward the world = Slow down the player.
3. Fastforward individual creatures, some more than others = Slow down the whole world, and some creatures are slowed down, but less than the world, and a select few (the fastest) are at normal speed.

The results are identical here pretty much. To speed yourself up is the same as to slow down everything else.

Skip Time

Skipping time, for the player, is basically time travel to the future, where you vanish from the world and come back later. For longer time periods being skipped, this could go back into worldgen/whatever that screen is that you get when starting a new fortress, whereas shorter periods may be like sleep. NPC's or objects skipping time would manifest as vanishing into thin air and reappearing at whatever time they were skipped to.

Time Manipulation outside the gameplay area

Obviously, like everything else that happens there, time stopping, slowing, or speeding up during worldgen and in the world outside the fort/loaded area around an adventurer can be totally abstracted out and implied to have happened, without actually altering the player experience at all.

[Azerty]

Good luck with performance issues.

Though, a character might be tasked with preventing a bad outcome from occuring, for exemple preventing a would-be dark lord from finding a book which gave him the power of destroying entire armies.

[Mr Crabman]

Good luck with performance issues.

Though, a character might be tasked with preventing a bad outcome from occuring, for exemple preventing a would-be dark lord from finding a book which gave him the power of destroying entire armies.

The performance issues are a bit tricky, but mostly only apply in cases where the player is slowed down or stopped, but the world in general isn't. It also only applies even then if we want the player experience to be as if they really were frozen in time, or had their time slowed down.

I think what you're describing in your second sentence (preventing a bad outcome from occurring) would fall under "past time travel", which is beyond the scope of this suggestion because it has its own whole bunch of implications/challenges, though I guess in all honesty, the "slowing down time" thing also has its own issues apart from stopping time.

[Starver]

It might be odd for normal RTS/FPS players coming to the game, and annoying even to those used to DF's frame-rates going down upon the underworld collapsing (or a cat trying to get through a cat-proof door!) but it is just a simple(!) matter of putting select things into 'stasis' (or skip a proportion of their interaction calculations) as you say, and for everything not slowed down (or the fastest thing 'sped up', normalising them to 'standard' and everything else, including time-of-day/date, relaxed to slow. Performance-wise, it should be better...

...Frexample, you accidentally (or 'accidentally') breach an aquifer/water-source and it's tumbling down your fort's deep staircases (or, worse, magma, slower but with temperature changes too). Activating super-speed for the repair-squad will suppress the processor-sapping flood (and cats, invasions, whatever else is excluded from the 'spell' and you're actually experiencing a less-lagged control of those lucky few as you coax them to do whatever you want them to do.


That probably does require some degree of rewriting. A flag/multibit-flag attached to everything (individually and/or group) or alternately an exhaustive set of 'what time-treatment to apply' (or non-exhaustive one with a fall-back for anything unrepresented) that the kernel of the simulation must be primed to check to know whether it can/must skip the "this thing updates" process it normally attempts. (This is, on the whole, single-threaded so should have just such a leverage-point.)

Depending upon implementation (it may depend on the style of time-warping, and also of the nature of the entities concerned) this would have opportunity to be briefly checked and honoured when "another thing updates" is happening, and part of that is "push the first (paused) thing to be updated by it". e.g. An antagonist could shout all he wants at a frozen target, there'd be no 'has been shouted at by...' applied to them as it wouldn't sink in - unless as high-pitched buzzing. Though if the antagonist stabs them, assuming the magycks don't do anything too protective, they'd experience wounds during their time of not being as up-to-speed as the stabber. If it's an area-effect application, heat from adjacent magma might just not be calculated to transfer inside the uncalculatable area, flows might stop against the barrier (or barely trickle through, on 'allowed' ticks) but if the instigator/master of the stasis-field has an exemption (special medallion? ...just part of their casting?) they could walk in and move round, pick things up (think the typical 'speedster in their own time-frame' set pieces from X-Men/The Flash/Heroes/whatever) and put things down, maybe do a limited amount of interaction with individuals (s)he finds there (no talky, definite stabby, possibly manhandle them over/away from a ten-storey drop if they could have so manhandled an unresisting individual normally).

Momentum/kinetics isn't really something we need to worry about, if we'd rather not bother Newton or Einstein about such things they never really considered part of their Real World formulae. Let's assume that throwing things that then merge into the slowpoked background effect/out of the personal speed-force bubble have throwing-velocity in the suppressed zone equivalent to that imparted in the unsuppressed one, to be evident only as the slow time takes its next active ticks or the frozen time becomes dispelled. To be fair, it could also be vice-versa, but as part of the 'superpower' invoked you could assume that the individual with the personal time advantage could indeed pluck crossbow bolts from the air, just by being clever with the 'field', they control around themselves, either to just deplete the trajectory entirely and place them on the floor or move/rotate them and somehow impart/restore an equivalent motion upon them as you leave them flying towards their new target/their origin. (Consider it a Necessary Secondary Superpower, though if I could at all theoretically apply finger-pressure to a 'time-locked' bullet, already, I should indeed apply over a reasonable amount of my own time a force that 'feels' like a sufficiently large instantaneous impulse, and the skill may only lie in 'feeding' it just the right amount of push to be going back in the right direction - and tweaks to impart the correct non-tumbling spin to it.)



For the "putting right what once went wrong" scenarios, the only real way is to effectively have a savepoint (if it's a planned opportunity/forced-mission, easy to establish a likely moment, or tie into the existing Seasonal Saves mechanic) and then when fate/your decision decrees you have to enter the wibbly-wobbly time-tunnel (having seen how the world has been converted into a crapsack one, and gained 'sufficient' knowledge of why, so maybe how to stop it) your character then plays through from the old save-point to make (you hope) a diverging forward history that doesn't have Hitler winning/whatever. Then you either have a wibbly-wobbly path back to the date-of-departure/DoD-plus-mission-time (worldgen simulation is used to establish what new history you'll find when you get there, perhaps with the opportunity to return/redo the old-save-visit/add a further more experienced you to your prior back-traveller's version of the save) or you just have to take 'the long way back', if you can.

Assume (because it essentially is) that you're starting off again (each time?) in a new universe, so getting your old self killed along the way isn't paradoxical, because you aren't trying to maintain the time-line[1], though if it's long enough ago (a savepoint made during worldgen) you might not even exist (yet, or ever). Or you mind-merge with your younger self and diverge with (increasingly unsure) future-knowledge sending you on another path. Or anyone/thing that goes back makes their contempetaneous selves/items that existed at that point in the past just absolutely puff out of existence because the Universe don't wanna have duplicates running around for Plot reasons. One way or another (or another, or another) Arrangements Are Made. And, yes, failure is an option. The world could be Crapsackier. (Hey, maybe you could toady up to the antagonist, get in on the action. Or get a head start on them and do their thing instead of them, only better! Like ban Wibbly-Wobbly Portal invocations/monopolise them solely for your own ends.)


Just some thoughts. I occasionally have them, as you can tell.


[1] You're actively trying to change it! The exception might be if your mission is to go back and get a 'lost' artefact that is the only known Kryptonite for The Big Bad, to use it against them in the Present. As far as the Quest is concerned, the Kryptonite was lost for unknown reasons, or destroyed by TBB, whereas obviously you're going to resolve this by being the one who 'rescued' it from the past (in circumstances mistaken for being lost/destroyed) and always had actually been the one to courier it into the then-Future/now-Present to send delayed Karma down upon your foe. Well, that's how a film-script would do it, tying up all the loose ends (doing a John Keel along the way, to your younger self, maybe), but the restrictions needed to apply such a Self-Consistent, Self-Reinforcing, Meta-Paradoxical Non-Paradox to gameplay would be... challenging and/or unattrarctive. Perhaps an enforced locality - ...at the time of your original history, you were not exploring near the Dark Lord's seat of power, as a black cloud of evil settled across his expanding realm, nothing but rumours escaping the benighted realm, and then before you are yourself overtaken by the fiendish fof you find the portal that leads back into that obscured and mist-tainted territory with no way (or opportunity) to go beyond the expanding frontier, nor attack any of the few figures whose history you had already learnt of as inhabitting the infernal interior... You must complete your necessary trials (and set in motion the downfall, including activating your first-time-rounder's  temporal transit opportunity) before the point at which your external self starts this mission, or else it cannot be achieved at all until that point, though all this time you've been gathering the components/knowledge necessary to try to resolve this, the final piece to the puzzle being the magic Ring Of Rewinding you first used to enter the past, but which had fallen off your finger as you did so, and now awaits you returning physically to the now overcome point of departure to rediscover it where it fell and combine its powers with the Sword Of Truth, the Shield Of Protection, the Helm Of Knowledge and the Mug Of Greatest Grandma In The World.

Or something like that. If you like that kind of thing.
(Resisted the feetnete long enough, then made one big doozy of one. Hope you like it!)

[Mr Crabman]

It might be odd for normal RTS/FPS players coming to the game, and annoying even to those used to DF's frame-rates going down upon the underworld collapsing (or a cat trying to get through a cat-proof door!) but it is just a simple(!) matter of putting select things into 'stasis' (or skip a proportion of their interaction calculations) as you say, and for everything not slowed down (or the fastest thing 'sped up', normalising them to 'standard' and everything else, including time-of-day/date, relaxed to slow. Performance-wise, it should be better...

Well, the performance would be better if the world is being stopped or slowed down, but the tricky bit is handling it when the player is affected, and not much else is.

flows might stop against the barrier (or barely trickle through, on 'allowed' ticks)

I'm not sure what you mean about flows stopping against "the barrier"? Which barrier?

but if the instigator/master of the stasis-field has an exemption (special medallion? ...just part of their casting?) they could walk in and move round, pick things up (think the typical 'speedster in their own time-frame' set pieces from X-Men/The Flash/Heroes/whatever) and put things down, maybe do a limited amount of interaction with individuals (s)he finds there (no talky, definite stabby, possibly manhandle them over/away from a ten-storey drop if they could have so manhandled an unresisting individual normally).

I'd definitely lean towards "speedster in their own time frame" with regards to being able to pick up and carry bolts around, as well as other interations, as part of how the magic works; of course, if it makes sense, this could vary between worlds magic systems.

To be fair, it could also be vice-versa, but as part of the 'superpower' invoked you could assume that the individual with the personal time advantage could indeed pluck crossbow bolts from the air, just by being clever with the 'field', they control around themselves, either to just deplete the trajectory entirely and place them on the floor or move/rotate them and somehow impart/restore an equivalent motion upon them as you leave them flying towards their new target/their origin. (Consider it a Necessary Secondary Superpower, though if I could at all theoretically apply finger-pressure to a 'time-locked' bullet, already, I should indeed apply over a reasonable amount of my own time a force that 'feels' like a sufficiently large instantaneous impulse, and the skill may only lie in 'feeding' it just the right amount of push to be going back in the right direction - and tweaks to impart the correct non-tumbling spin to it.)

Perhaps objects that had velocity before time being stopped could be proportionately "slower" (so in stopped time, they would have no force at all when touched), so you could pick up a bolt, and when time resumed, it would have both the old momentum (though turned in another direction if you rotated it), and whatever you "added" to it by say, throwing it.

For the "putting right what once went wrong" scenarios, the only real way is to effectively have a savepoint (if it's a planned opportunity/forced-mission, easy to establish a likely moment, or tie into the existing Seasonal Saves mechanic) and then when fate/your decision decrees you have to enter the wibbly-wobbly time-tunnel (having seen how the world has been converted into a crapsack one, and gained 'sufficient' knowledge of why, so maybe how to stop it) your character then plays through from the old save-point to make (you hope) a diverging forward history that doesn't have Hitler winning/whatever. Then you either have a wibbly-wobbly path back to the date-of-departure/DoD-plus-mission-time (worldgen simulation is used to establish what new history you'll find when you get there, perhaps with the opportunity to return/redo the old-save-visit/add a further more experienced you to your prior back-traveller's version of the save) or you just have to take 'the long way back', if you can.

In all honesty I'd not really wanted particularly to discuss this in this thread because it seemed like a whole big thing of its own, out of scope with the rest of the suggestion (and thus deserving its own thread), but I guess I may as well.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing; you need to save any time that you want the player to be able to return to, so ancient history would require worldgen to create savepoints/time portals of its own accord, and maybe the player could either create their own "save points" as in-lore magic, or it could happen on some other fixed basis.

Then you either have a wibbly-wobbly path back to the date-of-departure/DoD-plus-mission-time (worldgen simulation is used to establish what new history you'll find when you get there, perhaps with the opportunity to return/redo the old-save-visit/add a further more experienced you to your prior back-traveller's version of the save) or you just have to take 'the long way back', if you can.

I'm not so sure about this; well, I mean if you can skip time as I already suggested above that's pretty similar to this "use the wibbly wobbly path back", but the issue is that even if you don't do anything at all (maybe you immediately fall off a cliff after coming back), it's quite likely that worldgen simulation just will not be able to plausibly make things go the same way as they did the first time (in other words, you can't really "fail to change the future").

Whether you have to return with a time portal or can return with your own magic, or have to go the "long way back", could likely depend on the mythgen magic capabilities and other restrictions on how you can get back. It would be ironic to have a world where you can't travel to the future again, and after your attempt to change the past, you tragically die of old age and never get to see if you succeeded (I mean, as the player you can make another fort/adventurer, but still).

Assume (because it essentially is) that you're starting off again (each time?) in a new universe, so getting your old self killed along the way isn't paradoxical, because you aren't trying to maintain the time-line[1], though if it's long enough ago (a savepoint made during worldgen) you might not even exist (yet, or ever). Or you mind-merge with your younger self and diverge with (increasingly unsure) future-knowledge sending you on another path. Or anyone/thing that goes back makes their contempetaneous selves/items that existed at that point in the past just absolutely puff out of existence because the Universe don't wanna have duplicates running around for Plot reasons. One way or another (or another, or another) Arrangements Are Made. And, yes, failure is an option. The world could be Crapsackier. (Hey, maybe you could toady up to the antagonist, get in on the action. Or get a head start on them and do their thing instead of them, only better! Like ban Wibbly-Wobbly Portal invocations/monopolise them solely for your own ends.)

The thing about "getting your old self killed along the way", is that:

1. There needs to be some kind of satisfying answer in the lore for why this isn't a problem, or as you say, perhaps the game could MAKE it a problem; maybe you become some form of timeless ghoulish existence with no past, and your memories all vanish because "your past no longer exists", though we still need a wibbly wobbly answer about these problems existing.

2. It's not really a matter of "getting your old self killed", but that you're basically 100% guaranteed, if you go back before your birth, that you will never be born, and if you are still alive, you don't even need to get them killed to experience the problem; either the game will need to record every action the player ever takes, or just by going back in the past, instantly "the past you" will become an NPC and not do any of the things you did, even if you never encounter them.

3. Forts; adventure mode past characters being changed is one thing, but even old forts in the same world will end up not happening the way they did, or even remotely similarly.

So the issue is in a way, that going back in time at all creates a new world, regardless of if you even do anything or go anywhere, which lore-wise (and in terms of "player sentimentality for what they did in the world") is a bit funky and unsatisfying, like the most extreme butterfly affect ever, which somehow only changes things the player did; any NPC nations halfway across the world will still behave the way they did originally probably, just not the player's forts and adventurers.

The exception might be if your mission is to go back and get a 'lost' artefact that is the only known Kryptonite for The Big Bad, to use it against them in the Present. As far as the Quest is concerned, the Kryptonite was lost for unknown reasons, or destroyed by TBB, whereas obviously you're going to resolve this by being the one who 'rescued' it from the past (in circumstances mistaken for being lost/destroyed) and always had actually been the one to courier it into the then-Future/now-Present to send delayed Karma down upon your foe. Well, that's how a film-script would do it, tying up all the loose ends (doing a John Keel along the way, to your younger self, maybe), but the restrictions needed to apply such a Self-Consistent, Self-Reinforcing, Meta-Paradoxical Non-Paradox to gameplay would be... challenging and/or unattrarctive.

I'm sort of of the opinion that enforcing such a "self-consistent loop/beethoven paradox" form of time travel is.... Basically impossible for if the player goes back in time; notably though, worldgen/history gen could actually pull off stable time loops easily enough by just making up "oh look, someone from the future has just appeared with some memories of their own past and of history" and then conspiring/scheduling to make that stuff all happen. The only problem with the time travel is when the player gets involved and wipes out their own past actions (even if logically, 1 adventurer going back in time on the other side of the planet shouldn't cause the 1 fort the player made to vanish/change drastically).

Perhaps an enforced locality - ...at the time of your original history, you were not exploring near the Dark Lord's seat of power, as a black cloud of evil settled across his expanding realm, nothing but rumours escaping the benighted realm, and then before you are yourself overtaken by the fiendish fof you find the portal that leads back into that obscured and mist-tainted territory with no way (or opportunity) to go beyond the expanding frontier, nor attack any of the few figures whose history you had already learnt of as inhabitting the infernal interior... You must complete your necessary trials (and set in motion the downfall, including activating your first-time-rounder's  temporal transit opportunity) before the point at which your external self starts this mission, or else it cannot be achieved at all until that point, though all this time you've been gathering the components/knowledge necessary to try to resolve this, the final piece to the puzzle being the magic Ring Of Rewinding you first used to enter the past, but which had fallen off your finger as you did so, and now awaits you returning physically to the now overcome point of departure to rediscover it where it fell and combine its powers with the Sword Of Truth, the Shield Of Protection, the Helm Of Knowledge and the Mug Of Greatest Grandma In The World.

I'm not sure what you're describing here? Is this it?:

1. Certain areas would be marked as "time travelable" by worldgen and the world in general during play, which don't have any information available come out of them that is definitive.

2. When you travel back the game saves things.

3. Once you go back, you're not allowed to leave the "time travelable" area you just went to.

4. When you jump back to the future after the job is done, you go back to where the game saved, but it brings with you the changes you personally underwent, and also the changes you made in the past (in that region), and so all your past forts and adventurers (including your own past) are preserved because the game didn't have to actually "rerun history", it just noted down some changes you made, puts you back where you started (with things you gathered from the past), and retroactively rewrites parts of recorded history accordingly?

That's pretty imaginative, but I'm not really sure how it could actually be made to work; there's a lot going on here that's pretty tricky to work out (in terms of making your act of time travel meaningful and interesting, as well as consistent).

[Starver]

Well, the performance would be better if the world is being stopped or slowed down, but the tricky bit is handling it when the player is affected, and not much else is.

I'd see it as a variation on being knocked unconscious. Things happen (usually a lot of hitting or biting, then it tells you that you died, in that case). For player-trapped-in-stasis (a simpler case than "all your fort dwarves are frozen") it runs as fast as it can, whether or not it gives you updates, until the effect is removed and it stols being a zero-player game again (or you find out you died).

flows might stop against the barrier (or barely trickle through, on 'allowed' ticks)

I'm not sure what you mean about flows stopping against "the barrier"? Which barrier?

The notional temporal barrier. If it's area-effect (tile A is in stasis/slowdown, tile B is not) then you need to imagine what happens to anything trying to move into that area (tile B, as it fills to 7/7ths, cannot really pour into tile A as whatever starts to nudge into it would immediately be time-slowed/stopped before it gets properly into it, so it 'feels' a bit like a wall). For the same reason, I suggest that temperature effects don't propogate (there's no real 'happening' so tile A can't warm up until it experiences time (full, or its proportionate fraction) and the heat can bleed in. Ditto it couldn't bleed out (lava in A+B, prior to the same field being set up, could be drained from B, which then cools, even as A stays full and self-referentially hot - if B had been a magmatube wall, it could be a safe(ish) magmatapping aid, I suppose, as it lets you set up floodgates/whatever without the usual risk... but that might be a mundane waste of limited mystic temporal magic-points/etc).

[...me and my paradox thinking...]
In all honesty I'd not really wanted particularly to discuss this in this thread because it seemed like a whole big thing of its own, out of scope with the rest of the suggestion (and thus deserving its own thread), but I guess I may as well.

...and I hadn't meant to go into the detail, either, sorry it just flowed a bit!

To summarise most of my thinking about your thinking about my thinking about this: Blame it on the Butterfly effect!
(Which it basically is, though more deterministically (computer RNGs are worse than the what the rest of the universe can serve up) and more discrete (32 or 64 bits of any given state differential compared with a much more continuous 'almost but not quite the same' neighbouring possibls measurements, possibly at Planck-scale/periodicity). So there are bigger butterflies, and stable time-loops from a multipass 'evolution' are either easier to find or possibly impossible to achieve.)

1. There needs to be some kind of satisfying answer in the lore for why this isn't a problem, or as you say, perhaps the game could MAKE it a problem; maybe you become some form of timeless ghoulish existence with no past, and your memories all vanish because "your past no longer exists", though we still need a wibbly wobbly answer about these problems existing.

I don't like 'Marty McFly' solutions. Though that's Marty who is made to vanish as the circumstances go against his ever having existed, the temperoretroactive removal of memories (loss of certain knowledge that did exist, especially when the physical form isn't vanishing) is a fudge too far. IMO, and obviously the game can handle it how it likes (or how it must, to be sane, programmatically, however bad a trope or reflection of 'reality' I think it is) but it'd be as annoying as Marty's phasing-out was, to me.

Personally, I'd prefer an A Sound Of Thunder solution (the 'NoButterfly Effect' makes the traveller return to a future subtly different to that which their intact memories thought it should be), which is an interference-branching timeline as already suggested.

Or an All You Zombies one (neatest, in some ways, but has the bootstrapping problem in spades - theoretically its probably a MacGuffin-bootstrap, in-story, necessary to keep every other temporal interference this side of a Universe-breaking Paradox event that only the catalyst of the 'zombie' can successfully tie down into an acceptable cosmic meta-stability), which is the opposite of the Ghoulish Existence (unless that's the self-bootstrap's initial bootstrapping origin, in meta-time?). But already we know that's problematic to reliably code into existence.

So the issue is in a way, that going back in time at all creates a new world, regardless of if you even do anything or go anywhere, which lore-wise (and in terms of "player sentimentality for what they did in the world") is a bit funky and unsatisfying, like the most extreme butterfly affect ever,

...but seems to me the only practical solution. IRL, this is my second (maybe third) most prefered conceptual theory about what RL time-travel would entail to 'work' (and relies a bit upon mass+energy+darkmass+darkenergy=0, or 'Big Bang was a blip in the metaverse version of quantum foam', to make any obvious sense). But in a fictional game-based scenario, I'd have to accept it as a better idea.

I'm sort of of the opinion that enforcing such a "self-consistent loop/beethoven paradox" form of time travel is.... Basically impossible [...]

Well, I did attempt to describe a way it wouldn't (basically an 'event horizon' partioning of cause-effect to cut off the problems of the re-run through the same world-time), but "Basically Impossible" is the simpler answer.

I'm not sure what you're describing here? Is this it?:

3. Once you go back, you're not allowed to leave the "time travelable" area you just went to.

Mostly that. In a 'Mission' context (rather than a spontaneous attempt to change history) the thing you are going to possibly fight against is increasingly surrounded with a (flavoured by a fantasy trope or two) bubble of enforced non-interactivity so that the game has to worry far less about what the player will do on the re-visit when still pandering to their first pass. Or maybe like The Nothing from Never-Ending Story. Or an actual Schwarzschild radius/event-horizon. Fate/whatever 'knows' you are also going to be inside the 'future zone' (assuming you don't fall off a cliff and end the game early) and obscures it so that only in your own personal future do you know anything about your own personal future (exactly as it unfolds).

Though if the game wants to be sophisticated enough to remember what you had done 'outside'/first-pass, and allow you to be revisited by such information or actions as they propogate into the second-pass version of you..? Nothing like Bill And Ted's "Let's remember to give us the keys to get out" (and thereupon the keys to get out have been made available), but if you're genre-savvy enough to throw a spare set of armour into the Zone from outside on your first-pass, and then on your second-pass and having by then damaged/lost your current armour enough to think you need that spare, you just have to walk up to the inside of the Zone Barrier at the right time to be gifted that spare set that your past-self is just about now speculatively throwing in. Or you don't (or you can't), and the spare armour that you 'threw away', previously ends up just being... well... thrown away.


But that is just me going on at length again about the complex things I again wasn't going to go on at length about (again). And probably the basis of a completely different game that needs to be written entirely around such a conceptual mechanic. (I'm solely tempted! I could see more of an Android screen-swiping game of it... I'd call it No Paradox, or suchlike. If that doesn't already exist - name and/or concept.)

[Mr Crabman]

I'd see it as a variation on being knocked unconscious. Things happen (usually a lot of hitting or biting, then it tells you that you died, in that case). For player-trapped-in-stasis (a simpler case than "all your fort dwarves are frozen") it runs as fast as it can, whether or not it gives you updates, until the effect is removed and it stols being a zero-player game again (or you find out you died).

Hm, how does that work? I admit I haven't really played adventure mode (the graphics and UI are too buggy for me and I never got it to work properly, I just did it once and got in a fight with some goblins), so all my knowledge about it comes from the wiki and other people's discussions of it.

I guess that could work like that, while leaving the "actual full resolution simulation" for when the world as a whole is frozen/slowed, since that will free up plenty of resources for those that are unaffected (I wonder how high can the FPS go when the game is paused and the FPS is unlocked?).

The notional temporal barrier. If it's area-effect (tile A is in stasis/slowdown, tile B is not) then you need to imagine what happens to anything trying to move into that area (tile B, as it fills to 7/7ths, cannot really pour into tile A as whatever starts to nudge into it would immediately be time-slowed/stopped before it gets properly into it, so it 'feels' a bit like a wall).

I wouldn't have thought it's an area affect on the whole tile, but just affecting literally only the creature that can move (so not even the tile it's standing in can pass time in a normal since, though heat can transfer between the creature and the tile), though once again this could be a "world-to-world" thing, and I guess it could also make sense to be able to target tiles with the time magic rather than just "the world" or "creatures" or "items".

Apart from that, I'm afraid I don't understand your description clearly. If B exerts force on A, then just like how a timestopped creature can push open doors, surely B should be able to (to a limited extent) push A, until it can't overcome the other water surrounding A. Once again though, world-to-world time stoppage rules.

For the same reason, I suggest that temperature effects don't propogate (there's no real 'happening' so tile A can't warm up until it experiences time (full, or its proportionate fraction) and the heat can bleed in. Ditto it couldn't bleed out (lava in A+B, prior to the same field being set up, could be drained from B, which then cools, even as A stays full and self-referentially hot - if B had been a magmatube wall, it could be a safe(ish) magmatapping aid, I suppose, as it lets you set up floodgates/whatever without the usual risk... but that might be a mundane waste of limited mystic temporal magic-points/etc).

But on the other hand, surely it makes sense that a creature would radiate out heat even if it stops immediately into the air (so they would warm up stuff they are touching directly)? Because otherwise they would just build up body heat inside themselves and die because they can't lose any heat produced. Same goes for touching magma, since if your clothes can move with you, surely then things you touch are "sort of" moving in time.

The point is that while A is not able to exude heat by itself (say, to another C tile that's also in stasis), B should be able to transfer heat to and receive heat from A, if they are in direct contact.

Basically, I see temperature transfer as an extension of transferring momentum/being able to open doors that are in stasis, or walk around while wearing clothes.

[Starver]

A common death in Adventure Mode (for me, though it's not my primary game, nor do I think I've played it in far too long so excuse me if my recollection of the endgame isn't quite right) is to over-exert to unconsciousness, so you can't respond. Normally the game throttles to the 'player's moves/ticks' so that equally responsive enemies will (try to) hit you once for each attack you (try to) launch on them, as quick or as slow as you enact the attacks. Once you have no reasonable input (not even 'do nothing', but delivery) by being unconscious, you get a slew of attacks on you reported with a "press any key to continue" when there are enough to require paging to the next few. Unless you recover quickly, and get to react again, this generally ends with "You have been struck down." It needs a particularly weak enemy (that nonetheless gave you the problem of unconsciousness) to survive.

Without the combat element, a 'player in stasis' enchantment (or 'non-player with superspeed abilities') could be the same. Adv/Fort mode variations invoked accordingly.

The qjestion is whether the time-locked (or less time-free) entities should experience messages. A whole fort frozen for a hundred years shouldn't see seasons flash by, traders pass by (or through, mystified, if they can do that), or at least it should be summarised (as per H.G. Wells's "everything eventually a blur" mode when sat looking at the years wind quickly into the future).  IMO.


The 'area effect' idea was just one aspect I was theorising. You could potentially tie an effect (fast, slow, or stopped) to a creature, or an artefact, or - in that example -ba zone-of-influence. If you had (say) a 10x10x10 block of stasis (excepting anything particularly/automatically exempt from it) then anything (else!) attempting to enter that zone would inevitably be frozen at the boundary. You could have it/them cross the boundary to then be frozen, but then the next <whatever> to try to follow it would have to pile into the same space (yes, in DF you can have a thousand giants wander in, but only one (the first?) can do so without crawling... liquids must be  capped at 7 individual units (without considering mixing dissimilar ones)... whatever passes into stasis wouldn't even have 'time' to pass back out the way it came, it'd beike fly-paper).  Unless you implement a graded edge-effect (N-tiles in, an asymptotic amount of stasis like the apparent slowing down of objects falling towards a black hole), which gives them a chance to shuffle.

For practical purposes, I'd treat it as a not-so-soft barrier (to anything that isn't immune to the effect) that does not let things pile up just within such a boundary.  Liquids stay just outside, sloshing around at full speed, because any that tries to pour into the timeless zone finds there's nowherewhen to arrive, similarly with anything else that is not purposefully allowed in to get stuck. From the POV of any creature trapped inside, there are no ticks of time in which all the attempts to enter, across the whole of whatever arbitrary length of outside time had occured, must seem to happen all at once in.

For heat, I'm assuming  a similar 'physicality' of barrier, because effects (where not immune, which you are of course free to suggest heat is) can pile up like objects. Get a lump of glacial ice, make it stasisified, then engineer to surround it with magma. Does it melt? Drain the magma. Does it refreeze? Or just do your time-freezing on a river in a higher-latitud3 area with freezing winters and thawing springs, across at least one freeze-thaw cycle in the unaltered time-frame.

Alternatively, freeze (as in 'stasis') a tile of magma. Drain the magma around it (the static magma can't drain). Is it a source of heat? It certainly can't flow out. It might be a bit Hollywood Lava, in that (unless the plot needs it) you have to be practically touching it before you get anything like the temperature-based dangers it should cause. Flood water round it... does any obsidianising/steaming go on? Can that water freeze, in the right weather/seasonal conditions? (Though once you relax the stasis, or it fails, things must Start Happening, to various degrees of !!Fun!!...)

But that's just my interpretation, just to explain what I'm thinking. Not telling you how you should be thinking of it.

And, technically, light itself must find itself barred from crossing (either way) for relative reasons, or at least highly red/blue-shift, but (unlike my description of a true Event Horizon for preventing paradoxes) I think there's no benefit enforcing this. We could just adopt the Discworld convention (where light goes [j]very[/i]bslow in its magical environment, and can be seen rolling across the Disc as every dawn breaks, etc) of 'light by which we see the light by'. This light obviously having no thermal-radiation aspect to it, if I want to preserve my heat-barrier concept, but of course statically-hot things still glow red hot, not in faint microwaves...


And all that is what dumb (or at least non-intelligent, and not in control) processes make happen. A stasis-caster should still have that control we mentioned before of willfully 'interfering' (through the Necessary Secondary Superpowers, if required), and perhaps even an uninvolved and unimmune intelligent being could deliberately force their way through the nominal 'barrier' to put themselves into Stasis (as a desparate move, or perhaps a cold-calculating one). But that's just a further detail to consider (I'd say no, though a Stasis-immune person could push them in..?).



And I thought I'd make this less TL;DR; if I didn't reply to you quoted point by quoted point. Failed!