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[Cruxador]

Ok question time!

Toady how are you going to marry creatures who have incredibly fast and sudden strikes but cannot do it often (Like snakes) and ones who can attack often?

For example a snake

Presumably the preacher need also be a ninja just to survive the ceremony.

He used the word correctly, sir.

[Aerval]

*nods* I think the last possible moment ToadyOne can stall on putting in those sites, is when we're able to send armies across the map, then view the battles that'll take place on those sights. At that time, it'll be very crucial to have those actual sites. So yea, anywhere between the release after, and before that.

This raises a question...

Toady, when you can send your armies out and watch them, can you also manage the fort at the same time or can you only do one thing (either watch the battle or manage the fort) at a time?

I know there has been much rumor about this ever since df exists but maybe this is the point where he implements some kind of multicore support. Since your army and your fort would be independent games (to some point) each of them could run on a different core. They just would have to be kept synchronized slightly and the the fusion process might get difficult. Everything else is just two different instance of df running on the same world

[MrWiggles]

I'm pretty sure Muti threaded support is an all or nothing sorta of deal.

[Bulwersator]

I'm pretty sure Muti threaded support is an all or nothing sorta of deal.

Eee, no. Even current version of DF is sligtly multithreaded (graphics/everything else).

[MrWiggles]

I'm pretty sure Muti threaded support is an all or nothing sorta of deal.

Eee, no. Even current version of DF is sligtly multithreaded (graphics/everything else).

Ah, that's true.

[Dae]

Yep just have two lists (one of orders being sent to the troups, the other of news from the battlegrounds), a mutex around each one and once every X days make the troups check for orders and let the fort check for news...u

Admittedly, apart from things that come from your caravan and depart from your fortress, what happens outside of your fort is virtually independant of what happens inside of it. Could totally be multithreaded.
Only exceptions would be caravans or sieges. You could have a queue of entities coming to your fort that the map would check once a day, so an army moves on the map until it reaches your fort, is put in the waiting queue (mutex'ed) and at the following "midnight" the map would check that list (preventing the world from writing while the map reads it) and pop the siege.
There would be a slight delay but at the speed of the game it would be almost un-noticeable and very practical to do.

It would work differently in adventure mode, but if Toady has put the framework so that a method simulates a portion of the world at a certain scale for a certain in-game time, it would be trivial. Adventure mode would simulate local area for a tick every step the player has, greater area for 12 in-game hours every 12 in-game hours, etc while in fort mode you'd simulate continuously in another thread.

Anyway, since it can be deferred, I don't think simulating the world is going to be THAT much of a performance killer. Maybe once an in-game day you'd have half a second of freeze.

[O11O1]

Toady, when do you intend to have another Animal Drive, or something like it? Would it be shortly after this next release, or several releases down the line?

[Neonivek]

Toady, when do you intend to have another Animal Drive, or something like it? Would it be shortly after this next release, or several releases down the line?

I highly highly doubt it given that he hasn't even finished the current batch of animals. Sure he added them all to the game but he didn't finish them all in depth.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

i sincerely hope it wont happen anytime soon, and not without it being seriously rethought

in my opinion, it was a massive investment of development time on a pile of superficial content. dwarf fortress dev goals list is already bloated enough without toady having to cater to everybody who donates 5 bucks for a pet feature. if it happens i hope toady takes pledges instead, and only works on the item that got the most pledges, returning the rest of the donations

as i said, df already has plenty of awesome goals, and although i'd welcome any opportunity to throw loads of money to the man's face, i don't want him buried on piles of superficial content hindering proper development

[Neonivek]

What he can do is next time he should just lower the amount of creatures involved.

For example if he does a Megabeast drive... limit it to 10 megabeasts.

[Torchy]

i sincerely hope it wont happen anytime soon, and not without it being seriously rethought

in my opinion, it was a massive investment of development time on a pile of superficial content. dwarf fortress dev goals list is already bloated enough without toady having to cater to everybody who donates 5 bucks for a pet feature. if it happens i hope toady takes pledges instead, and only works on the item that got the most pledges, returning the rest of the donations

as i said, df already has plenty of awesome goals, and although i'd welcome any opportunity to throw loads of money to the man's face, i don't want him buried on piles of superficial content hindering proper development

I think you're forgetting what the Animal Drive did for the game. The addition of X breeds of animals W, Y, and Z may not have done much for the gameplay in themselves, but the secondary benefits were huge: the Animal Drive resulted directly in us getting Beekeeping, Eggs - and the notion of hatching animals in general as a consequence of that - as well as catalyzing the material-breath rewrite (which in turn, spurred along the general interaction rewrite) because of things like Octopus Ink.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

yeah, i find most of those superficial. and it isn't like toady would idle around doing nothing if he didn't had to do the animals. the secondary benefits of implementing superficial content might have been huge, but i hold that the primary benefits of implementing core features would have been bigger

[Putnam]

yeah, i find most of those superficial

Then you aren't a modder.

[Neonivek]

yeah, i find most of those superficial. and it isn't like toady would idle around doing nothing if he didn't had to do the animals. the secondary benefits of implementing superficial content might have been huge, but i hold that the primary benefits of implementing core features would have been bigger

I agree and many of those features as they are currently implimented are more of a headache then a benefit... With Eggs laying being frustratingly broken and requiring more features and Beekeeping somewhat pointless and contextually flawed. Material Breaths as well havn't really been fully fleshed out and other then a few rare superbeasts they havn't really been put to great use.

They feel more like the first step towards a genuin feature then as grand features on their own... but then again that is the way Dwarf Fortress just seems to be, a lot of features but never complete features.

It is actually getting to the point where it is disheartening because it takes away from the excitement of any new feature. "Ohh Toady is adding proper fairies? Well... I'd be excited but I know they will be broken and barely functional indefinately".

Then you aren't a modder

You would have to be a modder to get the bang out of many of those features.

[Rose]

Toady, with all this talk about bandits eventually destroying towns while you watch, will invaders be able to destroy our fortress walls eventually?