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no, i like the current one best. it does not need to be changed.

i like it! (i read it, really!)

i like it, but i dissagree with your cpu assesment and think it will be too much strain

pretty good, but needs to change (insert stuff here)

i do not like it for (reason) but agree the current one needs work too.

i do not like the current one, or this one. thik of something else.

i like both the current one and this one, or i do not care.

[lucusLoC]

Magma

tl;dr: made by "hot spot," melts rocks, heat can be pumped around

i think magma is too simple as it is. we need magma that is interesting and dangerous (and not just the "oops i spilled" kind of dangerous. i want the melts-through-walls kind of dangerous). having extensive magma plumbing should be more difficult than just burrowing through some stone. you should be required to line pipes with magma safe materials or be wiling to endure melting walls to move it around. there should also be the danger of eruptions from vents that cause havoc topside. settling on a magma vent should be all kinds of Fun.
 
*please note, all numbers made up on the spot! not guaranteed to be balanced right!*

to that end we need the following:


propagation rules:

1. needs hotspot tile at high fixed temp

2. hotspot transfers 100% of temperature to directly adjacent rock, melting it to 7/7 magma.(to make a vent, you would actually have a tower of clustered hotspots. each cluster of hotspots would have to be slightly different shape than the one on the level above and below to keep the vent from being uniform top to bottom. the magma sea would have to be a string of hotspots, or perhaps a floor. unless cut off from the source hotspot tiles will slowly regen magma)

3. new non-hotspot rock transfers 99%  of temperature to next adjacent rocks, if this temperature is hot enough to melt them then they turn to 7/7 magma and retain their new 99% or origin temperature. with careful control of hotspot temperature this will allow control for varying size vents (say hello to the small offshoot vents).

4. repeat step three until the temperature is no longer able to melt a wall.

5. pumped magma retains its temp (so pumping from closer to the source is hotter and lasts longer, but can melt more tiles if not handled carefully).

6. magma cools at 2 temp points per day/month/season (except hotspots of course), but can never be less than 99% of hottest adjacent magma block. this means that all magma that is isolated from a hotspot (via pump for example) will eventually cool into rock unless it is kept circulating. magma will also increase by 1 pt per day/month/season up to 99% of its hottest adjacent tile. this will keep players from refreshing an entire pool by simply dropping in 1 hot tile of magma. it will refresh a little, but not faster than the rest of the pool is cooling.

7. hot spots are only hot if they have magma on them ( it is possible to destroy hotspots, but they will be recreated if: a. they are adjacent to a functioning hotspot, b. they are refiled with magma and c. the entire chain is connected to the "source" magma sea. this will prevent players from isolating hotspot tiles and using them in an artificially unlimited way)

Eruptions rules:

an eruption would simply be an event that generated constantly full hotspots x level above the current "vent" of hotspots

this would mean that an open vent would overflow with very hot magma, which would probably melt surrounding terrain (unless that terrain was made of magma safe rock), and would cool very slowly to rock (since it effectively started at the temp of a hotspot). you could even spawn some additional hotspot towers to widen the vent for the duration of the eruptions, but this would have to be discussed for balance (and fort destroying) issues. it would also take a considerable amount of time for the vent to cool back down to its original size.


another possibility with this method is the ability to spawn new vents dynamically from the magma sea, just start stacking up hotspots and let them melt a vent into the rock. this too would need to be discussed based on its shear fort destroying powers.

needed mechanics:

the foundation for this is already in the game, as natural ice walls already melt into 7/7 water based on temperature. this just needs to be extended to natural and constructed rock walls. the other aspect of this, temperature transfer and loss, is already partially implemented. it is for this reason that i think that it will not be a significant cpu drain above what we already have, though i am sure there would be some additional overhead (that is unless you play with temp off, in which case you are screwed).

without a map data rewrite cooling magma that is less then 7/7 poses some issues. for this reason i propose that 6-7/7 tiles of magma cool into a full wall, 4-5/7 magma cools into a ramp 2-3/7 magma cools into a boulder and 1/7 magma cools to a floor.


Benefits:

this suggestion makes magma dynamic, rather than static. magma would be able to cool into stone on its own, as well as melt through rock and light things on fire like it should (since it will be able to transfer temp to adjacent tiles). carelessly moving magma around could cause catastrophic problems if it suddenly starts melting through important retaining walls, but keeping an isolate magma foundry would also become more difficult because you could not just pump a tile of magma to the edge of the map and expect it to last long. it would also make eruptions simple and non permanent, as isolate magma lakes will eventually cool into stone, and yet they will still be very destructive events capable of causing over 9000 damage to a fort!.

drawbacks:

slight overhead cost, but probably not significant since most systems exist in game already. noobs (as well as some unlucky pros) will roast in magmay death if they embark on an active volcano (note: this may actually be a good thing).

suggestions and comments?

[FreakyCheeseMan]

Gotta say, I like the idea of making you make magma circulate for magma forges and the like, or actually build them over something... would be tough as hell, though.

[GRead]

Assuming no other temperature values are changed, this will create a 'magma sea' that extends a single tile away from all hotspots of 11880 degree magma, and then a 11761 degree obsidian wall. at the cooling rate, if a hotspot magically lost its status, it would cool solid in roughly 1.8 seconds at 100 fps. Hell, if the bottom layers are gabbro, the sea would not extend past the hot spots; Gabbro does not melt in magma. In fact, if you are relying on the hotspot to melt the rock, the gabbro layer would not have magma, just tiles that mysteriously cause dwarfs to burst into flame.

You could jack up the hotspot temperature, but how much? You could make it hot as the sun, and you will still ultimately wind up with magma that is forever uniform to the hotspot shape, and will cool solid almost instantaneously the second it is channeled further.

[lucusLoC]

no one said that magma had to be the same temperature as it is now, or that my example numbers were perfectly balanced.

for simplicitys sake let us assume magma always cools to obsidian (probably a good idea to keep consistency), and we also have gabbro and granite in the mix. obsidian melts at 9000, granite at 10000 and gabbro at 11000,

if we want the largest pipe we can without melting gabbro (since it is magma safe) the max temp the hotspot can be is 10999. that will give us a 10 tile radius for a vent in granite and a 20 tile radius in obsidian. if the hotspot suddenly lost its status it would take 1000 ticks to cool to obsidian. now depending on how often a tic occurs that may be a bit fast, so we may wish to adjust the number a bit (i pulled them out of my @$$, so this is no surprise to me. the important part was the concept). maybe well only drop it 2 pts every 100 ticks, or a 1000, depending on how long you want unheated magma to stick around. please also note that these rules only apply to heat transfer between magma to magma and magma to rock. Toady already has some other mechanism in place for heat transfer through air and object to object that will have a separate set of rules for gameplay reasons.

this suggestion also opens up the possibility for superheated magma vents that can melt right through "magma safe" materials with no problem, should we so desire. supersize magma vents may have a center too hot for anything but adamantine to block up. or perhaps eruptions increase the temperature of the hotspot tiles to make them a bit more dangerous. that is up to us to decide how we would like it done, and what the balance should be. i just think it is silly to have a tiny pool of magma that never cools, and i cannot really think of any other way to do it that makes sense.

[lucusLoC]

judging from the very few votes it looks like people just want magma to be a super hot liquid that never cools. this does not make sense to me, can someone pleas explain why?

i personally would love to see dynamic magma, materials that are only "usually" magma safe, and an end to the 1 tile magma that perpetually fuels forges thing.

[GRead]

judging from the very few votes it looks like people just want magma to be a super hot liquid that never cools. this does not make sense to me, can someone pleas explain why?

i personally would love to see dynamic magma, materials that are only "usually" magma safe, and an end to the 1 tile magma that perpetually fuels forges thing.

It doesn't help that you loaded the questions in the poll. If I don't like the idea, I need to either say the current sim is the best, or say its terrible. It's neither, but since it's not bad, people are voting for the first option. I wouldn't mind seeing better magma, especially if it meant I could heat things more than a single tile away, but the current sim works, lets me do cool things with magma, and only does moderate damage to my FPS when I turn it on.

[lucusLoC]

i tried to make the question cover most of the possibilities and be pretty unbiased. i would think that "it works" would not preclude people thinking it needs to be improved (to my mind "it sux") but i will modify and start the poll over (no big loss since there are only like 8 votes). should i include any other possibilities?


edit: i also updated to original post to reflect the issue you brought up about magma cooling to quickly. no instead of "per tic" it is "per day/month/season" and will depend on how fast you want magma to cool (should the coolest magma harden in less than a year or 10s of years? perhaps some other unit of measure should be used?)