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[Cruxador]

Yeah, honestly I hope that acceleration at least becomes optional some time.

[Whatsifsowhatsit]

Yea, but thats been a long standing issue with Fort Mode time acceleration forevers.

I know, I just mean that given that, it can go either way in terms of deciding how fast to make siegers do certain things (and in different cases as well), i.e. as fast as makes sense with the speed of time passing by, or as fast as makes sense with how long it takes them to do other things (such as crossing the map). Personally, I think the latter option would be better, otherwise I think it would just seem weird if they do some things very fast and some things very slowly.

Yeah, honestly I hope that acceleration at least becomes optional some time.

Oh, me too, that would be brilliant. Although I think that would mean that everything would need to be slowed down immensely in terms of real time, so that, for example, building a workshop takes a long time. (Either that or forts will just be allowed to develop much more quickly in game time.) And a long time (real time) would pass between events, on average. It might get boring, at least to most people, but I would definitely still like the option.

[MrWiggles]

Well, everything would be about 72 times slower.

So, a game year would take about 72 hours of play time. You'd be doing nothing for most of the hours you'd playing.

It'd be close to 36 play hours before the first caravan arrived.

[Whatsifsowhatsit]

Exactly. Like I said, it might be boring. But I'd give it at least one serious try, because the inconsistency with the time bothers me a bit as well.

[DG]

If you slowed down time (or rather lengthened a year as I prefer to describe it) you could put in proper day/night cycles, you could give dwarves social lives and communal rituals, you could do lots of things to fill in the hypothetical 72 hours that aren't really feasible for DF as it is now. From memory, this has been thrashed out in a few different threads and I don't recall many people changing their minds from their preconceived preference, whether it be the ones agitating for a slowdown or the ones championing the status quo.

[Eric Blank]

Kinda what DG said, yeah.

Just because time flows 72x more slowly doesn't mean we won't then have the chance to abandon the seasonally-based arrival of the caravans. 72x more stuff can occur in a given year, so you'd be safer leaving the game unpaused so your dwarves can do their thing, and can make more designations while unpaused, and trouble may occur less often. Especially now that Toady intends to have the frequency of invasions switched over to some algorithm depending on the local political climate and distance to hostile entities; if you live right next door you'll get besieged early and often, but if you live some distance away, with many friendly settlements in-between, the goblins may be very rare. Caravan arrivals may work the opposite. It would mean succession games would need to change the way they choose how long to play, though, because few people can put in the 5-10 hours it takes to charge through a year right now in many succession games. At that point, instead of playing for a year, they just say "you have a week to get done as much as possible."

I think that if fortress mode were slowed down, there would be more time for other interesting things to occur in a given year, such as wandering traders and adventurers to show up, largely unannounced, and interact with your dwarves at the inn or markets you've developed. That also goes for hill dwarf and cavern sites around your fortress; there could constantly be some small population of merchants and citizens doing business, dwarves can have personal possessions (clothing and furniture in their houses) and private lives (producing goods to trade) in-between government (player) mandates, and a semi-capitalist economy, while you can still pop in at any time to tell your broker to go trade with them for this or that to add to your official horde. As it stands, dwarves don't live on a day-to-day basis, but rather take immense swathes of time to get your jobs done and thus there's little room to implement personal interactions in-between. Their "breaks" could be replaced by unpaid vacation where they go back to their personal lives, and they'd spend smaller and smaller fractions of the year eating, drinking, sleeping and partying. It could end up being far more efficient. Especially when you need to get the damn broker to go trade; the diplomatic caravans can still hang around for a month even if local merchants spend on average a day or two, but your broker won't spend that entire damn month goofing off; he only needs a couple hours to eat and drink at max every day, so even if sleep takes ~1/3 of the time there's still a large period in which they have nothing but their government-mandated labors to do.

[finka]

Well, the other way to resolve the anomaly, and my preference, would be not to slow fortress mode down but to speed up within fortress mode the things which cause the discrepancy: e.g. let the dwarves walk 72 times in each tick, not just once.  Really not too implementationally different -- we'd still need the above changes to time spent eating and all that -- but far less glacial. 

If you worry it loses empathisability too much, as you can't watch your dorfs walking around... well, if the result was really a reintegration of the two different timescales, it needn't be so hard to code it so that you could switch to adventure-mode clock speed and follow someone if you want to. 

If you object that the current pathing algorithm couldn't handle that... well, that's probably enough of an objection to defeat this in practice.  But given the amount of time DF burns on pathing, I say an abstraction of it wouldn't be unwelcome.

[Cruxador]

You'd be doing nothing for most of the hours you'd playing.

I already play mostly like that, with DF running on an auxiliary monitor. Only thing is that I have to do a lot of work at once to get things running early on, and then I often lose forts because I haven't gotten around to setting something or other up in time.

It'd be close to 36 play hours before the first caravan arrived.

In the current system, but Toady's going to change the system so you have semi-permanent farmer's markets. If he fixes the time, there could also be more than one merchant caravan per season, but instead an organic number depending on your location relative to trade routes.

If you slowed down time (or rather lengthened a year as I prefer to describe it) you could put in proper day/night cycles, you could give dwarves social lives and communal rituals, you could do lots of things to fill in the hypothetical 72 hours that aren't really feasible for DF as it is now. From memory, this has been thrashed out in a few different threads and I don't recall many people changing their minds from their preconceived preference, whether it be the ones agitating for a slowdown or the ones championing the status quo.

When was the last time you saw many people changing their minds from their preconceived preferences in an internet argument?

[Whatsifsowhatsit]

All this talk has made me even more convinced (so I guess I didn't change my mind either, at least not qualitatively) that I would indeed like to see such a system. I still see problems with it, but there's problems with the current system as well, and it would certainly be interesting to at least try out. Unfortunately, it seems like it would probably be a lot of work to do, and probably isn't very high priority, even though Toady did mention in the Roguelike Radio interview that the time discrepancy was the one thing that bothered him most about the game in its current state (if I recall correctly, and I'm paraphrasing). Finka's solution, I suppose, would be easier to implement, but not what would have my personal preference.

[zwei]

If year took 72 realtime hours, we would have 10 minute days ingame. Which would mean that day/night cycle would be feasible and that stuff like vampires or were creatures would be much better.

Addition of day/night cycle would be awesome and propably gamechanger.

[LordBaal]

Also, in real life, according to a BBC documentary I saw last night, 98.3% of the dwarf fortress fall before reaching their first year.

[CaptainArchmage]

If year took 72 realtime hours, we would have 10 minute days ingame. Which would mean that day/night cycle would be feasible and that stuff like vampires or were creatures would be much better.

Addition of day/night cycle would be awesome and propably gamechanger.

The trouble I am seeing with this is 72 realtime hours is a long time. You do a lot of pausing in 72 hours of simulation time....

To get the days and nights in properly, you could make the year slightly longer (say 4 hours instead of about 1 hour at 100 FPS), and make the days last longer too (so there are fewer days in a year). Reducing the passage of time of the year should also be tied to improvements in FPS, so the rate does not drop much.

[DG]

When was the last time you saw many people changing their minds from their preconceived preferences in an internet argument?

Maybe after a NW_Kohaku wall o' text. It helps if one side is clearly wrong, but this time-scale discussion is based on a persons opinion of how they imagine an unimplemented change would play so I guess it's even less likely that people will change their minds.

[Eric Blank]

NW_Kohaku just takes pleasure in utterly annihilating our hopes and dreams.

I also doubt the argument will ever be settled. Having a way to test it objectively would be nice.

[Zavvnao]

Also, in real life, according to a BBC documentary I saw last night, 98.3% of the dwarf fortress fall before reaching their first year.

there is a documentary on this?