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[tyrannus007]

People have talked about this in the last few pages, but I don't think it's been put in green yet, so...
In games like SimCity, you can set the simulation speed to slow, medium, fast, very fast, and so on. How feasible would a similar system for Fortress Mode be? Maybe the slowest speed could the same as adventure mode, while the fastest speed would be the same time scale we currently have (72x).

Well, the main slowdown is pathing and unit movement. Unfortunately, those can't be sped up to 72x real speed, so dwarves just eat only once a month (or however often it is) and they only sleep a couple times a year for a few weeks each.

Basically, DF runs as fast as it can already. It can't go any faster. If we slow everything down, then nothing will get done because it'll take two days real-time for a dwarf to get from one end of the dining room table to the other.

Not that I don't like the idea. In fact, in ten years when computers are 100 times faster (that is, 6 or so cycles of moore's law), then it will be totally possible to do just that and we can have an in-game controller.

72x speed means the same speed we have now. 1x speed means the same time scale as adventure mode. Dwarves would be going at the same speed in 1x mode as they are right now.
This might clear a few things up: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Time
There was a discussion a couple pages back about the problems the current time scale causes. It makes interaction between Fortress Mode and Adventure Mode a lot more problematic, for one. Also, it means it takes a dwarf several weeks to walk over to the other side of the map.

[mastahcheese]

With the new jump mechanics, will we start to see jumping elephants? Or jumping carp?

[Rose]

Silly, elephants can't jump.

[mastahcheese]

Silly, elephants can't jump.

Not in real life, they can't

[tahujdt]

Buagh... that must taste bad, specially if is executive meat. That is rotten even before the butcher.

You think that's bad, try Apple copyright lawyer.

[PTTG??]

People have talked about this in the last few pages, but I don't think it's been put in green yet, so...
In games like SimCity, you can set the simulation speed to slow, medium, fast, very fast, and so on. How feasible would a similar system for Fortress Mode be? Maybe the slowest speed could the same as adventure mode, while the fastest speed would be the same time scale we currently have (72x).

Well, the main slowdown is pathing and unit movement. Unfortunately, those can't be sped up to 72x real speed, so dwarves just eat only once a month (or however often it is) and they only sleep a couple times a year for a few weeks each.

Basically, DF runs as fast as it can already. It can't go any faster. If we slow everything down, then nothing will get done because it'll take two days real-time for a dwarf to get from one end of the dining room table to the other.

Not that I don't like the idea. In fact, in ten years when computers are 100 times faster (that is, 6 or so cycles of moore's law), then it will be totally possible to do just that and we can have an in-game controller.

72x speed means the same speed we have now. 1x speed means the same time scale as adventure mode. Dwarves would be going at the same speed in 1x mode as they are right now.
This might clear a few things up: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Time
There was a discussion a couple pages back about the problems the current time scale causes. It makes interaction between Fortress Mode and Adventure Mode a lot more problematic, for one. Also, it means it takes a dwarf several weeks to walk over to the other side of the map.

I understand that. But if the dwarves' actions were made to take as long as the do in Adventure mode, then everything needs to be changed to the adventure mode speed- including, for instance, water flows and other processor-intensive things. If all of these things are made to occurr 72x more frequently than they do now, where is the extra processing power going to come from?

[Rose]

Haven't you heard of the new 200GHz single core processor out on the market?

[Whatsifsowhatsit]

72x speed means the same speed we have now. 1x speed means the same time scale as adventure mode. Dwarves would be going at the same speed in 1x mode as they are right now.
This might clear a few things up: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Time
There was a discussion a couple pages back about the problems the current time scale causes. It makes interaction between Fortress Mode and Adventure Mode a lot more problematic, for one. Also, it means it takes a dwarf several weeks to walk over to the other side of the map.

I understand that. But if the dwarves' actions were made to take as long as the do in Adventure mode, then everything needs to be changed to the adventure mode speed- including, for instance, water flows and other processor-intensive things. If all of these things are made to occurr 72x more frequently than they do now, where is the extra processing power going to come from?

Well, but I think the idea that people were talking about a couple pages back was that the game time would just be 72x slower, so you would still get ticks at the same rate, which would mean things don't need to occur 72 times more frequently in real time, so you wouldn't need a much faster processor. It would require recalculating a bunch of things, such as the liquid flow speed that you mentioned -- although it might be that that's another thing that currently makes more sense at the adventure mode speed than at the dwarf fortress mode speed -- but those are just things Toady would program the numbers in for ahead of time.

Actually running the game such that a tick occurs 72 times as often is another question, and that is actually quite interesting. You would avoid many of the problems with the game getting boring, or various events such as trade caravans and invasions happening way too infrequently in real time to be interesting (whether you agree with such assessments or not). You wouldn't need to abstract things either, such as the pathing. You would still have the issue that things would be hard to follow, but that might not be too bad, it's hard to say ahead of time. Of course, the problem there is, as you mentioned, limitations in the available hardware (especially if you did still want to show every tick on the screen). But by the time something like this would be implemented, we'd probably be many years further down the line, so I think it's a very real possibility to take into account.

[eux0r]

also, the water flow mechanisms right now are severely flawed and obviously need a rework at some point. any argument based on their current state is invalid.

[LordBaal]

Processing time and requirements would be the same. What we are contemplating is a change in the phase of gameplay. So the adventure and fortress mode time is "seamlessly" integrated (as in the year in fortress mode not going by so fast).

The main issue there is that if for example, right now build X thing takes a week, (I don't know how much is that in real life time, I think is about a minute?), by changing the thing to adventure time (no pun intended) the same building would take like an hour in real life time or something along those lines. Then we could have dwarfs that take breaks while building, or things built by several dwarves and things like that, it would be, like pointed out a few pages ago, a slower game in all senses.

[zwei]

Processing time and requirements would be the same. What we are contemplating is a change in the phase of gameplay. So the adventure and fortress mode time is "seamlessly" integrated (as in the year in fortress mode not going by so fast).

The main issue there is that if for example, right now build X thing takes a week, (I don't know how much is that in real life time, I think is about a minute?), by changing the thing to adventure time (no pun intended) the same building would take like an hour in real life time or something along those lines. Then we could have dwarfs that take breaks while building, or things built by several dwarves and things like that, it would be, like pointed out a few pages ago, a slower game in all senses.

There is one very stupid assumption in this: That build/action times would not be rebalanced.

It is conciveable, that "big actions" like workshop setup could have half a day - 5 minutes realtime from untrained dwarf and much faster for trained.

There is nothing that says that, i.e., caravans/migrants/ambushes can not happen more often than quaterly.

What if in one month has equivalent event density as one year.

As far as breaks or other things go, they could be much more reasonable - i.e. every 10 days is special day when dwarves take breaks and handle personal stuff. Dwarves would take breaks during evenings, sleep at night and eat during noon. Basically, understandable schedulle instead of semi-random stuff right now.

[FearfulJesuit]

I'd definitely support breaks that were twice as often and half as long. The burnt system brands they don't come often, but can be truly dangerous when you have something that one dwarf urgently needs to do.

[LordBaal]

Hey, hey, I was just saying what it meant towards processor use.

Of course rebalance on the game mechanics would be needed, I didn't bother mention it because its pretty darn obvious.

As yourself said it would allow them to have some kind of normal cycle (basically what I tried to say). And in this hypothetical dwarf fortress I could foresee a building taking more than a few minutes in real time, specially a important/big one.

[PTTG??]

Well, that's certainly an interesting discussion, but think about that- what now happens in a 2-hour session of dwarf fortress would then take 144 hours of solid playing. That sounds remarkably unrewarding.

[LordBaal]

Yeah, that's a down side, unless you trim the year so is shorter or something. Also, if the game is re-balanced then those 2 hours session could see almost all you see in a current 2 hours session. Of course all this is highly hypothetical.