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[gimli]

Yes I guess we gonna have serious FPS related problems later on [more calculations in real time -> FPS kiler, and as we know we gonna have a "living world" and that means more real time calculations]. Since the game is not multi threaded, and prolly won't be ever, since it would take an enormous amount of time to change from single to multi.

[Neonivek]

I think what is REALLY going to slow him down is adjusting the speeds for ALL THE CREATURES IN THE GAME!

Especially for animals.

[Dae]

If he doesn't find some sort of default way to get new numbers from old ones that works 90% of the time and let us report the other 10%, that is going to be an issue, yes.

This sort of thing should be best handled crowdsourced. We have the arena to test, the will to get a good result and lots of modders with the knowledge to properly tweak the raws.
If I had any say in all this, I'd tell Toady to let us do the boring part and focus on making dragons attack villages and properly grill the petty goblin raiders who happened to be there too.

By the way, do you think it'd be reasonable for goblins to capture every child they find in the villages they raid ? I know they don't enslave adults (so far), but having survivors tell them in tears that their children were taken would be great.

[Telgin]

Maybe we could help the situation along by building an architecture with absurd amounts of cache, given that cache is usually the FPS bottleneck of DF (or so I've heard.)

It's memory bandwidth in general, if I had to guess.  Of course, memory bandwidth is the #1 killer of performance for almost everything.  So, theoretically you could build a ginormous processor that had a 4GB register file (or cache, if you prefer a tad more sanity), but each one would probably cost $10,000 and would be hot enough to cook food on after it ran for a few seconds.  Which of course is beyond the tolerance of any sane materials for an IC.    I also have doubts you could actually get the clock rate very high with such a large register file, so you might not get any benefit in the end...

Oh, but I'm rambling.  I would be interested to see a cache profiling of DF.  Some day I might actually try putting DF on a Linux computer and running Cachegrind on it (assuming it would run) and see for myself.  If I had to guess, it probably does a reasonably good job on the cache performance.

DF just does so, so many calculations on so, so much data, it's the nature of the beast.  Improvements in processor / memory architecture will help for sure, but parallelism is going to have to be exploited somewhere eventually to see the game truly scale.

This sort of thing should be best handled crowdsourced. We have the arena to test, the will to get a good result and lots of modders with the knowledge to properly tweak the raws.
If I had any say in all this, I'd tell Toady to let us do the boring part and focus on making dragons attack villages and properly grill the petty goblin raiders who happened to be there too.

Agreed.  Some community data has been used in the past for things like materials, right?  I'd like to see this more.  If anyone does anything silly with the numbers, it can be reported on a case-by-case basis with the assumption that most of the data from the community would be good enough.

[FearfulJesuit]

If I were a multi-millionaire, I'd probably hand Toady several hundred thousand dollars and say "I'll give you all this money, but in return you're going to buy yourself a team of crack programmers and get this motherfucker multithreaded in a couple of months. Deal?"

[MaximumZero]

He'd probably just hand it back and say, "No, thanks, I'll just continue on as is." This is his baby, after all.

[MrWiggles]

ToadyOne doesnt like working with other folks. He doesnt even like programming with his own brother. I dont think this is a  money thing but a personal choice thing.

[FearfulJesuit]

He'd probably just hand it back and say, "No, thanks, I'll just continue on as is." This is his baby, after all.

Well, sure, but this is just to multithread- it wouldn't affect any gameplay.

That being said, I assume it would be much easier if he knew the ins and outs of how it was multithreaded...

[MaximumZero]

He'd probably just hand it back and say, "No, thanks, I'll just continue on as is." This is his baby, after all.

Well, sure, but this is just to multithread- it wouldn't affect any gameplay.

That being said, I assume it would be much easier if he knew the ins and outs of how it was multithreaded...

That's really not the point, though. Given that I'm creating a game myself, I couldn't bring myself to hand it over to other people for any reason, even if it was "Look, I've got a dozen people here who are expert writers who really  want the game reorganized. Let's just get this done, 'kay?"

Quite frankly, the internal dilemma would be exponentially greater on Toady's end, given that what he's doing has a rabid fanbase and is his livelihood, not just a hobby like mine.

[Telgin]

Yeah, that's kind of the problem with having other programmers work on code.  He'd have to refamiliarize himself with all of the changes, and they would be extensive for this sort of operation.

Of course, I'm also skeptical that a team of talented programmers could parallelize DF in a couple of months.  Adding programmers to a project is a sure way to delay it.   

[Dae]

Especially if there is little documentation about it. I doubt Toady has a lot of notes describing everything he's done on paper. It's probably more of a mind map.

If I were a millionnaire, I'd say "look, I have a lot of money and if you ever need anything, just ask". I'm not sure he'd ever ask for anything, but that would seem to be the best option.

[misko27]

Yeah, that's kind of the problem with having other programmers work on code.  He'd have to refamiliarize himself with all of the changes, and they would be extensive for this sort of operation.

Of course, I'm also skeptical that a team of talented programmers could parallelize DF in a couple of months.  Adding programmers to a project is a sure way to delay it.   

what we need are toady clones.

[Eric Blank]

One Toady clone, to work night shift. Can only work one keyboard at a time. Still need to figure out some form of telepathic communication so they could instantly convey information about everything they did while the other was sleeping, or it'd go to hell in a handbasket pretty fast.

I'm also impressed by the current work on in-game invasions and deaths of important historical figures, and recovering from them. I have yet to see any game successfully pull off mid-game changes like that, but DF is nearly halfway there.

[MaximumZero]

The real Toady works the night shift, from what I gather.

[misko27]

I'm also impressed by the current work on in-game invasions and deaths of important historical figures, and recovering from them. I have yet to see any game successfully pull off mid-game changes like that, but DF is nearly halfway there.

Yeah, I can't tell you how upset I get that killing the head of goblin civilization has no effect beyond bragging rights, and no mounts. I'd like to see collapse of goblin civilization, or at least a fundamental weakening.