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[IT 000]

Init option for weather? You should be able to turn it off.

Hail storms shouldn't have a great affect on FPS. After all it would just be like white colored rain. That kills people.

[Quarterblue]

the game wouldn't actually model all the wind forces in the tornado!

Wait...

Crap..

Oh no, my FPS

Actually a tornado would destroy a great amount of items, it would clean your map and actually raise the FPS when it's gone.

[NW_Kohaku]

Actually a tornado would destroy a great amount of items, it would clean your map and actually raise the FPS when it's gone.

... If tornados would clean up dump sites and battlefields strewn with goblin corpses weighted down with useless rings and socks and crap for me by completely annihalating the objects without my having to do anything but get my dwarves underground, I would never embark on a site that wasn't in tornado alley ever again.

[noob]

but dude, the game would freeze. its like a 10 z level high funnel that has cave in dust flying everywhere.

[IT 000]

That's why you should be able to turn it off for the processor inept computers. Personally I am hesitant to dub it sir FPS killer. Without actually seeing or hearing some ideas on what a tornado would look like. However it will probably drop your frames by a noticeable amount. Perhaps if the tornado had a maximum size, say 10x10 and the dust that it threw off would be invisible. This would conserve FPS as the tornado does not have to flash and calculate where the dust clouds have to be and how much they will be filled in, rather it would only need to check to see if any items are within its 'cloud' and throw them a few tiles. Perhaps the dust that whirls around it could use mist effects instead of cave-in effects. I'm pretty sure that mist doesn't lag as much as a cave-in.

A strange idea just popped into my head, perhaps once caravans start roaming the world after the caravan arc is completed, they could give us a heads up on said storms. Either for payment or friendly reminder.

[Lungfish]

While volcanos, or rather volcanic activity, would probably be a very real concern for anyone literally digging into a magma pipe or into the magma sea to funnel off limited quantities of that magma, I don't think that things like earthquakes or especially meteor strikes are exactly common enough to really be seen by most fortresses.

I would like to see an occasional violent change in lava pressure, maybe more common in some places than others. Perhaps, being natural geological experts, the embark screen could warn of the potential for seismic activity.
Earthquakes don't seem all the uncommon, depending on your locality. Earthquake strength and frequency could vary depending on proximity to fault lines generated during worldgen. Earthquake proofing would be a fun concern. A plume of lava pushing its way to the surface, though possibly a once in a world event, would be outrageously cool. Even if it doesn't happen to your fortress, engravings depicting a fabled eruption or "mysterious explosion from the sky" would be fun to find.

On storms: Perhaps towers of a certain height to width ratio could be toppled. Other than that, you would just see a bunch of toppled trees (maybe lumber gathered after a storm would be OK for elves to accept in trade, maybe adding an element of stockpile management challenge), though getting caught in a storm might result in getting hit by such toppling trees. Far more of a concern if trees were more than a single Z level tall. Can trees get branches that could get torn off and thrown around in a storm?

Mudslides would be cool. Nice to have an ecological disaster that results from clear-cutting.

[NW_Kohaku]

On storms: Perhaps towers of a certain height to width ratio could be toppled.

Uh oh, there's a problem there.  How does the game tell what a "tower" is?  All it sees is a collection of walls that have support.

This is another "the game can't handle cave-ins" problem - it can check for whether there is any sort of support at all, but telling what is sufficient support coming through a narrow chokepoint is a very complex calculation that requires simulating forces through every tile "pathfinding" some support from the tiles it is connected to, and keeping some sort of running tab of how much stress each tile is under from the amount of support it has to give to nearby tiles.  That's a hugely complex set of calculations to make.

[Jake]

Uh oh, there's a problem there.  How does the game tell what a "tower" is?  All it sees is a collection of walls that have support.

This is another "the game can't handle cave-ins" problem - it can check for whether there is any sort of support at all, but telling what is sufficient support coming through a narrow chokepoint is a very complex calculation that requires simulating forces through every tile "pathfinding" some support from the tiles it is connected to, and keeping some sort of running tab of how much stress each tile is under from the amount of support it has to give to nearby tiles.  That's a hugely complex set of calculations to make.

There might be ways of streamlining that (no pun intended). Perhaps wind could use the building-destroyer rules and have a random chance of taking out a wall or support every n ticks while it was blowing?

[Lungfish]

On storms: Perhaps towers of a certain height to width ratio could be toppled.

Uh oh, there's a problem there.  How does the game tell what a "tower" is?  All it sees is a collection of walls that have support.

This is another "the game can't handle cave-ins" problem - it can check for whether there is any sort of support at all, but telling what is sufficient support coming through a narrow chokepoint is a very complex calculation that requires simulating forces through every tile "pathfinding" some support from the tiles it is connected to, and keeping some sort of running tab of how much stress each tile is under from the amount of support it has to give to nearby tiles.  That's a hugely complex set of calculations to make.

Hmm, yes.

A radius can be determined based on the storm strength. If there is (or are) construction(s) that fit within that radius for a certain number of concurrent z levels, it could be called a tower and a number of its top levels (again depending on storm strength) can be toppled. So a mega-project of a map-wide castle would be immune to toppling, and probably so would a pyramidal structure or something barely off the ground, but my 3x3x20 spire would fall easily. As I'm imagining it, it would be vulnerable to exploit by simply building a long and tall wall and attaching it to the tower so that the construction would never fit neatly inside the storm-strength radius, but that'd be a lot of work for an exploit.

I've been playing DF so long tonight that it's morning, so I'm not sure if that makes sense.

I have the impression that tall and narrow towers are a common construction style, so if storms had this ability, that would be very fun.

[NW_Kohaku]

Who said anything about constructing walls?  What if I carve a cliff into a tower, and it's all natural rock, but it's a spindly little thing with only a wall on all sides around an up/down stair leading up to a bulbous and unweildy top of the tower, but it's all natural stone.  Does that mean it's not a "tower" anymore?

[Lungfish]

No, you're right. This hypothetical storm algorithm should also knock over dug up "towers."