Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Eric Blank]

To be done with it, I imagine it like this

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Sorry if it's really crude, I literally made it in less than a minute with crayons and paint.

This is how I'd try to map DF worlds. A cylinder with circular caps on the ends with multiple regions using the surface area of the cylinder. Simple enough, the height and diameter of the cylinder would depend on the region size generated.

[King Mir]

One problem I see with curvature expressing maps, is that currently even a large map is only about the size of New Zealand. It's not actually near the size of the earth or even the moon. The map would need to be much larger, and probably use 64 bit addressing before it would be realistic to make it curve into itself.

[LordBaal]

Nah, I mean, yeah, but are we really in need of such huge map? Or perhaps can be made in pieces and only completely load one region, like if you are in Europe it only loads that continent. Like currently loads sites. I don't really know...

[Spinning Welshman]

Nah, I mean, yeah, but are we really in need of such huge map? Or perhaps can be made in pieces and only completely load one region, like if you are in Europe it only loads that continent. Like currently loads sites. I don't really know...

The issue with that is that while it only "loads" the local area (in the case of fortresses) or the local region (in the case of your idea) the rest is still loaded abstractly for the purposes of history progression. Toady wants the world to progress as you progress, and having regions offloaded would prevent that (I think, someone correct me if I'm wrong)

[Bortness]

Nah, I mean, yeah, but are we really in need of such huge map? Or perhaps can be made in pieces and only completely load one region, like if you are in Europe it only loads that continent. Like currently loads sites. I don't really know...

The issue with that is that while it only "loads" the local area (in the case of fortresses) or the local region (in the case of your idea) the rest is still loaded abstractly for the purposes of history progression. Toady wants the world to progress as you progress, and having regions offloaded would prevent that (I think, someone correct me if I'm wrong)

It would only prevent that from happening in real-time, which frankly is probably not desirable anyways due to frame rate concerns.  You got frame rate problems already with one (large) single-site fort?  Imagine the lag if you're processing the ENTIRE WORLD every single frame.

The obvious solution is to do live updates only in the local area (as it is now), and every 20 minutes or so, intentionally hang on a frame for 30 seconds or a minute while the rest of the world updates and "catches up" to your current timebase.

It's kinda complicated, but it's a solution that works in all situations - allows the world to stay current with your actual player maneuvers, and also avoids annihilating the gameplay frame rate.

[Putnam]

A whole year of worldgen takes 20 minutes worst case. I don't think updating the world once every 1200 ticks will be too problematic.

[neblime]

what do you do to make it take 20 minutes 0_o
even on a large world with 1k years of history I would say I barely get up to 1 minute per year

[King Mir]

The progress of off loaded sites is already implemented for the next release. Toady has said it is not a heavy FPS load in either play mode. It does use some of the same machinery as world gen itself, but in some way it is necessarily more detailed.

A larger map would indeed mean a higher FPS load, in part due to having more sites and events in the world, and in part because of less efficient caching. But maybe that increase would not be that high.

[Putnam]

what do you do to make it take 20 minutes 0_o

Have the kind of toaster computer I haven't had for years, I imagine.

[flabort]

On the biggest world with max civs, with nothing but livable land (teensy tiny oceans and smaller mountain ranges) and a ridiculous number of secrets, megabeasts, demons, etc, with cull history turned OFF, and 300 Z levels per layer or some such nonsense, with Masterwork Mod so there's like 300x the number of creatures and stuff, on an old old computer.

That's probably how you make it take 20 minutes a year. Just keep on piling up extra complexities until your computer overheats.

[Mesa]

I for one wonder...
How huge is the changelog gonna be?

Because I can't imagine it being something for a quick at-school read...

[Mel_Vixen]

Well i heard it will rival the bible in length and content.

[Witty]

Well, there used to be a very well organized googledoc with most of the coming features, but it has since been deleted.

[Putnam]

Well, there used to be a very well organized googledoc with most of the coming features, but it has since been deleted.

Wherever did you get that idea?

[Witty]

That document is completely blank, on my end at least.