Print

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

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Remember that it got released almost 25 years ago, the same day dwarf fortress got our of Beta?

Actually, Half-Life 3 was released 20 years ago.  Remember, that's how Valve announced its entrance into the EA wars.  I believe you are thinking of Team Fortress 3

[Mel_Vixen]

Couldn't you just periodically boot up a second instance of the program and then do a smooth transition? It's a shitty workaround, but I'm guessing you guys are working under deadline...

Would love to but we use, as the coders are telling me, some non state-preservative stream-processing framework thus only the current and part of next state of the graphics overlay exists in the system to limit the Ram-usage somewhat. A certain State would be recreateable if the entire thing would be deterministic but it isnt. Certain effects and operations require high whiteness noise (you may have heard the term "Squid-ink") for say the transition from Rayleigh to Mie scattering in opalish materials. We get that noise on the output from "dynamical casimir-effect random sources" which are in essence a few hundred-thousand roomtemp squids coupled to Dynamic-casimir microwave-sources.
Copying now all the data would be possible but the overhead would mean a harsh performance hit (up to 30-40 ticks for an operation that could be done in 2 or 3 ticks if we pushed the data just trough) since we need to preserve much of the noise. It also means quite some code-bloat. Finding the bug is certainly the faster way.

One thing we think could be the cause is a problem with the garbage-collection code. Some of it is Jury-rigged so it can keep up with the rendering code while still needing only minimal computing time so people here are looking into it. Going out on a limp here but it could even be something as stupid as an "Off by one Error" in it. 

Luckely i can talk about this since all that was released on E3 last week.

[MDFification]

Luckely i can talk about this since all that was released on E3 last week.

>E3
>2050

Man, I remember when there were only 3 console giants before the console market crashed in 2021. Now I feel old. Thanks gramps.

On that note;

>Not playing on a Direct Neural Interface to a memristor computing mesh.
>Biocons can't game

[Helgoland]

Well, legacy code is rife with shortcuts that used to work back when we still used silicium, but simply don't play nice with modern carbon-based machines. Of course they were adapted (a lot of jury-rigging there too, believe me) and usually work rather well, but I've heard of errors that were 20-30 years old before they became apparent. Back in the war we had quite a few problems like that with legacy code: Our drones still used the UNIX kernel from 2020, because the damn Israelis had security concerns about the newer versions. Turns out that it used a few rough-and-dirty shortcuts that had worked fine over the years, but gave disastrous results when used with our next-gen magnetic field detectors. Imagine having a raid in progress - fifty or a hundred of our men storming an EA base, their lives depending on the drone's readings. And the damn thing just bluescreens fifty kilometers above ground, and at least two hundred from the nearest person capable of fixing it! After three or four of these incidents we booted out our previous supplier and substituted a homebrew vehicle. The whole episode cost us some five hundred casualties and around four billion bucks all in all.

Luckily there's this project - Daidalos I believe it is called - to redo all the programming foundations from scratch. Maybe they already have completed the modules you guys need.

[poketwo]

Luckily, the SJWs that infested gaming were basically near powerless when the 2nd Crash happened. At least due to all the competition, people have been making actually good consul and PC games far more often now a days than during the 2010's.

Thank goodness the US had a surge of 3rd parties and basically made it that the Democrats and Republicans had more moderate alternatives than the radical insane types the republicans and democrats were (and now are) becoming. Sadly, Europe didn't do so well with those.

We all know how the ideology wars had devastated Europe. Modern scale civil war!!! BROTHER AGAINST BROTHER!!!!! Still, at least it didn't spiral into WW3.

LETS GET BACK ON TOPIC NAUW

I've been having some trouble creating a race of scythers that would glorify war and then expand into great empires or become vikings or something else. Most of the time they are being peaceful tribals that quickly get stomped and become slaves that farm. Or they become a race of mercenaries divided up into "swarm companies" that fight for profit and sometimes glory in war, usually settling down sometime when states can hire them as professional soldiers. Even then, most of the time where it seems to be working they glorify fighting in battles instead of the big picture of war itself.  A few civilizations do succeed at first, but quickly shatter and either die or become the "swarm companies" . Any help on how to do this?

[MDFification]

I've been having some trouble creating a race of scythers that would glorify war and then expand into great empires or become vikings or something else. Most of the time they are being peaceful tribals that quickly get stomped and become slaves that farm. Or they become a race of mercenaries divided up into "swarm companies" that fight for profit and sometimes glory in war, usually settling down sometime when states can hire them as professional soldiers. Even then, most of the time where it seems to be working they glorify fighting in battles instead of the big picture of war itself.  A few civilizations do succeed at first, but quickly shatter and either die or become the "swarm companies" . Any help on how to do this?

Ok, let's talk memetics. I did a lot of this in the past. Due to PETA/legal interference mentioned early in the thread, I'm now considered a 'war criminal', so depending on the state of AI rights in your locality you might want to ignore this.

Firstly; Modding a DF race to become predominantly aggressive is easy. Making one that is aggressive and supports large-scale hierarchal civilization is hard. I take it that's your problem - you're having trouble balancing the self-interest of your society vs. their aggression (i.e. too much self interest = tribals, too much aggression = no coherent social structure and devolving into mercenary bands). Going for straight biologically-aggressive species (rather than species motivated to be aggressive by social structure) doesn't typically end well when they come up against, well, any of the big 4 vanilla races.

The best strategy for producing a species that is overwhelmingly hostile towards other societies is actually rather counter-intuitive.

Firstly; set those values for minimal individualism and maximum community dependence! Individual self interest tends to lead to individuals defecting from their society when it goes against their interests or membership is limiting opportunities (i.e. your mercenary problem).

Secondly, while it seems like putting competition to high is a good idea, it actually isn't. Hyper-competitive individuals tend towards protecting their own assets, while minimally competitive individuals will sacrifice themselves and their resources towards their society easily. Competition =/= violence! It often leads to mutually beneficial relationships between societies, while you seem to want ruthless expansionism at all costs.

Third; you're going to want to set up society to maximize individual resource consumption. The need for resources will drive expansion, and with minimal competition your civ will avoid becoming more efficient with using the resources it has in favour of taking someone else's. I typically do this by tweaking mating requirements; make successful mating require large amounts of social status and hierarchies flaunting wealth and power will be the norm.

Finally; minimize the tendency towards doubt. This will make them more likely to attack other foes, plus make their society less prone to change - meaning that any you get with particularly aggressive memes won't eventually become moderate as they otherwise tend to do as they mature.

Following this approach generally leads to aggressive, monolithic empires spawning. However, be warned; they're not necessarily going to survive worldgen. Societies more prone to things like trade tend to advance in technology faster and are more capable of adapting in the face of adversity, so if a few of these spawn close together they'll basically never get conquered by an empire like you want your race to make.

[94dima94]

If you don't mind "cheating" a bit, you could give them a small tech advantage with a special reaction only they know. If they don't cooperate with other races they won't exchange it soon with anyone, so they will have an edge in the first years. Somebody will sooner or later pillage their libraries and research it, but at that point at least you know that they survived enough to expand a little. It could change the balance, so don't give them a WMD immediately; I'm thinking something on the same level as iron forges, but immediately available, and maybe some exclusive farming that allows that...
You still need a lot of testing, though.

[drilltooth]

I.. have kind of weird relationship with my local PeTAi chapter... they don't quite like the fact that I'm monkeying with the dorfs for my entertainment. I don;t like their "white man's burden" attitude toward emergent systems. And, legally, the simspace isn't posing any threat.

[SimRobert2001]

Ive already created a computer in df that recousivly runs the current edition, but i want THAT game to recousivly  tun a SECOND version of the game. Which edituon should the second one go for?

[Wimopy]

So... I was running DF in with tech disabled, just to reminesce a bit. Mind you, spoilers ahead!

Urist McAdventurer, the first dwarf to strike out solo in history (worldgen rolled a single civ with extreme community spirit, dwarves do everything in minimum groups of 3) decided that it would be nice to take over a fortress after ten years* of wandering the world. He had accrued a wealth of knowledge that would give a slight advantage in all fields. He had become a legendary teacher, soldier and official from his various experiences. It was time to use all that for the community again (damn dwarven mind was on the verge of breaking, he demanded to be returned to a fortress by the gods!).

Then, this fortress was there. It was once a glorious capital. Even 1000 years after its fall to a united siege from 2 goblin and an elven siege (the goblins had no access to any forests, so they could ally with the elves) it was still considered the symbol of all dwarves. Restoring it would be the ultimate moment in Urist's life. The dwarf knew what the intention was when I arrived there, his thoughts suddenly changed to ecstatic. Just ecstatic. Nothing else. All the other various emotional axii were suddenly nullified. It felt like I'm checking the thoughts page of a dwarf in a player fort something like... 4 decades ago.

Of course, there were traps, but without tech, all it took was some quick reactions and Urist evaded them (I didn't train any trap making skill, weapon traps, pitfalls and cage traps are easily avoided by a well-trained adventurer, since there're no trap speed tech upgrades). Of course, there were carp. There was a waterfall going through the fort and the carp jump out of it while falling to attack Urist, but he just swatted them aside. It got a bit more dangerous with the skeletal carp though. It seems the river probably runs through an evil region somewhere, as every tenth carp is undead. Not that it makes too much of a difference to one such as Urist. No idea how the original inhabitants dealt with it though. Maybe it was corrupted after the fall by some necromancer or lich?
Ehm... back to topic. Sorry, I'm still bad at writing these.

As customary, there was a mine shaft that was dug just too deep. Of course, it was on purpose as a last-ditch effort to weaken the sieging forces, but it backfired. The ancient dwarves tried to seal it back, but failed to cover a single tile. Urist set to work and dropped a few stories worth of stone on the shaft for good measure. The demons already knew his name, so only few dared venture out, but it would've caused serious problems to any migrants later on.

Finally, it was time to go to the throne room, take the crown and declare the revival of Boatfall. This was to be the easiest part. Causing a cave-in and fighting on wet ground (rails still can't be constructed around waterfalls, it seems. I thought that was fixed already?). A single slip can really be fatal, as we know, especially next to a waterfall that goes straight into the abyss.
Then, on the throne sat a single dwarf, wearing the crown Knifemurder, among a countless number of other jewellery.
"I am Udim Vastborn the Harp of Stone. I have lived more than two millennia. I have killed..."

I stood there, pressing keys for hours. I later checked legends and found that the king was one of the first vampires, having offended some goddess of the night by drinking in the light of the full moon. During the siege, he personally created the mineshaft. It's likely he would've also exterminated the entire sieging force, but as a king he was royally forbidden from it. (Turns out he once read a book called 'The Monarch' and really liked it. It says something about how a single injury of the monarch may cause the downfall of the entire kingdom. Dwarves are still as influencable as ever...)
The thing is, while he was excavating, he breathed in some adamantine powder and fell into hell itself, where he was possessed by a demonic spirit, which let him fly back to the surface. He then proceeded to murder all survivors of the siege, both dwarven and not. Since then, he has murdered ever single non-fish being to set foot in Boatfall. He's also the reason why the place wasn't demon-infested yet, he was that much feared.

Here comes the strange part:
"I beg you, help me."
Udim's eyes glow red.

In a single moment of clarity, he wished to be freed. Despite being a vampire, he felt remorse for murdering all his brethren (I guess it's because it wasn't to feed himself).
Urist clashed with Udim fiercely. Still, Urist was no match for a demonically-powered vampire dwarf who had been killing for two thousand years. With all his might and acquired knowledge, he managed to flee, suffering heavy wounds.

I guess I'll have to get Urist to train a bit, probably turn him into a werecreature or something. Though he is getting old (I didn't notice, but he was quite old to start with already) so I might have to turn him into an undead, which might prevent him from ruling the capital, if he ever manages to reclaim it. Any ideas? I could try enabling tech mid-game, getting Urist to do as much research on weaponry and longevity as possible then disable it. I don't want my enemies suddenly appearing with guns and killing me. I'd prefer skills to have a greater effect than that.

Also, is it a bug that the king wasn't mentioned as an inhabitant of the ruined Boatfall? The legends say "no defenders survived". He only has former memberships in civs and legends only list his kills, but not as a part of the siege. Actually, everyone who went to Boatfall previously is only mentioned to have "died while exploring the ruins of Boatfall."

[Deus Asmoth]

It's possibly because of your legends settings. If you're not set to omniscient and no one got out to report that the king was still alive, there'd be no way for him to be known to have killed al those people live there. Let Urist talk to a few people and see if your legends update.

My story isn't as impressive as that, but it really drove home to me how far procedurally generated stories have evolved even in the past couple of years.

I was searching through the legends of a thousand year old world (I like to keep them short) and came across a dwarven kingdom that had died out in a war against the nearby humans. That got me curious, since normally humans and dwarves get along fairly well as long as there's nothing supernatural at play. It turns out that the humans had declared war over a book made by Urist Herokiller, called 'Trust; my Only Mistake' because of its glorification of fire and dragons (the humans worshipped two gods, one of water and one of ice). The dwarves apparently thought the book was fairly good and refused to allow the humans to execute Urist for his blasphemy. Tensions escalated into a war that lasted nearly a century, decimating both kingdoms and ending only when the humans got hold of TMOM and, ironically enough, burned it.

Urist had not been idle, though. Since his kingdom had somehow failed to develop any printing press parallels, he spent twenty years copying the book out by hand, eventually making three transcripts before his death in 462. I wasn't sure if he was lazy or if the book really was that long at first, but apparently the strange mood that resulted in the book lasted over a decade, so I decided it was just a really long book. History, unfortunately, didn't tell what happened to the copies after his death.

The story would have ended there, but I wanted to read what he had written, so I went into adventure mode. I eventually found one of the copies of TMOT in a tower close to where Urist died, as well as Urist's own walking corpse. It really was as long as I thought it'd be, easily ten thousand pages. Hoping that I wasn't about to overload my computer, I looked at the book and then read it.

It's A Song of Ice and Fire. I mean, the names are all different. We have Bomrek Honourbound instead of Ned Stark. But I'm about a third of the way through and the plot seems to match pretty much exactly. It's not Shakespeare or anything, but it seems to be a good demonstration of the monkeys with typewriters saying without having to deal with infinite monkeys. And I know that A Dream of Spring is meant to be coming out next year, but if anyone wants a look at DF's take on it before then I can put up the save.

[Dirst]

So I've been messing around with the legacy configuration utility (the one before the global standards on Personal Preferences Format allowed games to adjust to the player).  This thing hasn't been updated in years but it still works with the current version, and obviously wasn't made with wetware in mind.  My grandpa said it'd be good to "get my hands dirty" in the game's innards, but also refused to give me any pointers on what was interesting to change.

So there are some settings in there for "DETAIL_LEVEL", and setting the DETAIL_LEVEL for PHYSICS below 114 seems to disable all quantum effects, though there is some hardcoded behavior that allows chlorophyll to continue to function.

I also found something about RESOURCE_USE that (on my rig) default to:

[RESOURCE_USE:LOCAL:MIN:50:MAX:188]
[RESOURCE_USE:REMOTE:MIN:NONE:MAX:6144]

No idea what the units are, but I was curious if I could put NONE in for the MAX value.  Not wanting to run up my utility bills, I changed it to

[RESOURCE_USE:LOCAL:MIN:50:MAX:NONE]
[RESOURCE_USE:REMOTE:MIN:NONE:MAX:6144]

Remember when I said this thing wasn't made with wetware in mind?  It apparently isn't properly registered as an entertainment tool, so it consumed all local computing resources right up to the safety thresholds.  Protected mode stuff like breathing weren't affected, but there weren't enough cycles left over for any conscious action to change the settings back.  Next thing I know, there's a pair of EMTs in my home lecturing me about safety protocols.  It was really embarrassing.  Good ol' grandpa won't stop laughing about it.

So no matter how much you like this game, do NOT set the local resource use to max!

But I do have one awesome-looking world genned with three completely different pantheons vying for power, at least eight planes of existence, and some kind of metaphysic that allows for dreams to be recorded directly in crystals.  This is going to be interesting!

[Robsoie]

Finally Toady released the fix to DF new brain interface, i had enough to be forced to dig the ground outside everytime i ordered the dwarves to conduct a mining operation in the game, that damn bug sending back your orders from the game back into your own brain was really bad.

Now to refill all those holes in my garden ... my poor back ... i guess Toady does not have a patch for that ?

[Wimopy]

Now to refill all those holes in my garden ... my poor back ... i guess Toady does not have a patch for that ?

Try playing an adventurer and admire a huge waterfall. It might not fix your back, but I think it'll counterbalance the pain pretty well, if your neural feedback configs are correct, anyway.

[Egan_BW]

Hehe, look at these plebs still in organic bodies. unlike you, I don't have to waste brain power on breathing. Sure it's only a 2% efficiency increase, but so worth it.