I have a question, how in the world will I be able to run dwarf fortress in the future if the whole world is gonna come alive?
Right now when I get a around to 160 dwarves that's usually when I dancing around fps death.
But now am I to be expected to be able to run that while simultaneously running 100's of thousands of creatures with no problem?
If there's something Im seriously overlooking here let me know.
All those critters the game is simulating have much less in the way of a memory/CPU footprint than your own dorfs and creatures. They don't do much in the way of fancy pathfinding, they don't play with fluids, they make decisions much less frequently than your dwarves, so on and so forth. Further, it won't be "hundreds of thousands," it'll just be anyone of historical significance- decisionmakers like kings, generals, and mayors, rampaging beasts, bandit leaders, blah blah blah. All their minions can be abstracted until they interact with your fortress in some way- say, because the bandits decided to raid you, or a king decided to declare war on your king, or a megabeast heard rumor of your fantastic artifacts. Until they actually get on the map, they really just have to remember what they're doing and how long until they can do it.