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[ILikePie]

Can you give the specs on the two machines? Are you using the same output mode on both? (2D SDL? Or?)

I use 2D or standard output on Windows, and text on Linux. I'm guessing it's the text the reduces the load on the machine, as it's just spitting letters and numbers out onto the console. I have to check this.


Edit: Nope, 2D output runs just as fast, maybe even faster.

[carebear]

I made it to 2000 years on a maximum size world. It took hours. 

[Retro]

Usually around 10-100. I like all the megabeasts to be alive and to write history myself. The megabeast note doesn't matter much now that they've been amped up I guess, but it's still a habit.

[A-chana]

In my case, if I actually bothered to remember to stop world gen before 1050, I'd probably stop it at 600. For some reason, goblins like to make themselves nearly extinct when given enough time (the number one cause of death is being murdered by another gobbo), so they become the minority in their own civilizations compared to humans and dwarves running the show. I'm not sure how that could be fixed, aside from going into the raws and making murder wrong for them, and even then that might not stop them.

At the same time, though, with enough time passing by, I see more stuff like demons leading humans, and wars between dwarves and elves (a plus in my mind since I don't have to bother killing their traders). I've even seen wars between elves and "goblins" (really just a bunch of humans and some dwarves and elves), with the goblins upset over elves eating people. It was glorious.

It took me a couple minutes to make a default world (create world now, year 1050), but my computer isn't the greatest anyway, and I was running a few other programs. Saving and loading takes some time as well. It plays well enough, at least.

[ledgekindred]

My most recent fort, I went to the extreme and generated a 8,087 year-old world...of course, this was a random number I generated between 8,000 and 10,000 years.  I wanted the age of civilization approximately equal to what it would be IRL, plus to give the world more backstory. This also resulted in the defeat of the elves by dwarves, so my fortress' walls are covered with inspiring engravings of dwarves striking down elves.

I was actually going to ask this, if anyone had let it run for an insanely long amount of time doing worldgen.  Was there anything significantly different about the world other than civs?

[Vercingetorix]

I was actually going to ask this, if anyone had let it run for an insanely long amount of time doing worldgen.  Was there anything significantly different about the world other than civs?

I'm going to look at it in World Viewer to look for specifics, but on a cursory examination of the map before embarking, there were (of course) significantly more ruins and the civilizations were heavily concentrated; most of them tended to be clustered in a few core areas with the result that there were usually no more than one or two in any area.  Some of this was probably a byproduct of the island world style.

[ledgekindred]

I was actually going to ask this, if anyone had let it run for an insanely long amount of time doing worldgen.  Was there anything significantly different about the world other than civs?

I'm going to look at it in World Viewer to look for specifics, but on a cursory examination of the map before embarking, there were (of course) significantly more ruins and the civilizations were heavily concentrated; most of them tended to be clustered in a few core areas with the result that there were usually no more than one or two in any area.  Some of this was probably a byproduct of the island world style.

I'm very tempted to let one run for like 20k years just to see what it would turn out like. 

The feature DF needs is genetic drift over time with occasional "mutations" to creatures' raw definitions.  For example developing a natural weapon type (poisonous groundhogs), changes in sizes (giant, poisonous groundhogs), habitats (giant, poisonous, arctic groundhogs), etc.  Let the world run for 500,000 years and see what pops up.

[NW_Kohaku]

Ah, DF evolution again...

The problem with "evolution" in DF is that this game is not complex enough to model realistic costs of adaptations - if any creature without blood is far more likely to survive a fight, as it means only decapitations or dissections will kill them, why wouldn't everything evolve to lose their heads, lower torsos, and blood, and become essentially like the materials-based HFS?

In real life, many aspects of a creature's biologies are actually trade-offs.  Spiders (as species, not the entire class of creatures), for example, are believed to have evolved constantly back and forth between being nearly-blind, slow-moving web-spinners, where much of their biological energy is taken OUT of eyesight and mobility in favor of being more energy-efficient, and relying upon their webs to catch flying insects, and changing into "wolf spiders", which have good eyesight, move quickly to outrun prey, and devolve their web spinning abilities because they rely upon out-running land insects. 

Evolution isn't a matter of becoming "better" at everything, it's a matter of optimizing yourself to the one particular survival strategy that works for the niche you have carved out right this moment.  Spiders can't BOTH have good eyesight and running speed and have web-spinning, it costs too much, and spiders often starve from lack of nutrition to upkeep such body parts.  The spider that specializes is the spider that lives to breed, which is where evolution pushes them.

This, again, is something way beyond DF's current modeling capabilities.

[ledgekindred]

Yes, I understand all that about evolution, but there could still be a subset of data that would be capable of random "mutations."  Simple things such as size, number of limbs, claws, etc.  More superficial features as opposed to fundamental body design.   It doesn't even have to make a lot of sense scientifically versus being a fun gameplay aspect.  Put in a toggle to turn it off/on.  Let you edit raws to define which aspects of a creature you'd want to modify.  Etc.  Over 1000 years, nothing much would happen, but over 50,000 years, you'd see some new variations.

I'm sure the idea is a recurring one on the forums, and has a standard response, but I haven't seen it before or I probably wouldn't have brought it up. 

Eventually it'll just become emergent once the game becomes self-aware anyway.

[NW_Kohaku]

Simple things such as size, number of limbs, claws, etc.  More superficial features as opposed to fundamental body design.   

I would counter that the number of limbs a creature has is a rather fundemental aspect of body design.

[Shrugging Khan]

You could vary things in the same way in that they're handled by simplified laws of evolution or biophysics; i.e. that penguins grow larger and fatter the colder the region they live in (to conserve heat), or that desert foxes have far larger ears than their arctic relatives because ears that big would freeze off (or require a lot of energy to keep warm) in the colder climate.