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Author Topic: What would be the file size of dwarf fortress if it had skyrim graphics?  (Read 25748 times)

GreatWyrmGold

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Re: What would be the file size of dwarf fortress if it had skyrim graphics?
« Reply #45 on: October 11, 2012, 07:11:11 pm »

There is something more depressing about this too. with the creation of quantum computers, philosophers now think that there is a possibility that we might be living in a simulation. I know it sounds crazy but think about it carefully: If quantum computers have the potential to be this powerful, then it is possible they can create artificial intelligence in a simulation. And these computers also have the possibility to simulate entire universes.
As to the math stuff: Couldn't the universe be the three-dimensional surface of a four-dimensional black hole?
well... a black hole contains what is known as singularity in its center. Singularity is one dimensional (so a infinitely small dot) so if we did live in a black hole 1) time would go backwards and 2) we would be crushed to a point by hyper gravity.
I knew the singularity bit, but assumed it wasn't the literal black hole mentioned several posts back.

Code doesn't take up much space, resources do. Even if you have ten thousand goblins standing in a field, the save data just needs to know all their coordinates and conditions, and you only need to store one goblin texture/model to display them with, or a set of textures for separate body types and all that (along with smaller textures for scars, stumps and so on). Assuming the actual game mechanics stayed the same save size wouldn't really need to change, and then you just have to draw textures and make models for every tile type, item, creature, whatever else. I'm not saying it wouldn't be a fairly monumental undertaking given the sheer amount of detail in DF, but it's by no means undo-able.
The bigger concern would be writing a proper engine to handle all of our nonsense, but storage-wise machine code is pretty trivial.
Have you paid attention to how much is abstracted that couldn't be if we had Skyrim graphics? The location, shape, and orientation of scars; the position of scars; the way a dwarf holds a crossbow when missing three fingers; how one wrestles with one's left lower leg; and much, much more. Oh, sure, a crappy job could be done easily, but when has Toady been content with a crappy job?

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misko27

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Re: What would be the file size of dwarf fortress if it had skyrim graphics?
« Reply #46 on: October 11, 2012, 07:14:46 pm »

Code doesn't take up much space, resources do. Even if you have ten thousand goblins standing in a field, the save data just needs to know all their coordinates and conditions, and you only need to store one goblin texture/model to display them with, or a set of textures for separate body types and all that (along with smaller textures for scars, stumps and so on). Assuming the actual game mechanics stayed the same save size wouldn't really need to change, and then you just have to draw textures and make models for every tile type, item, creature, whatever else. I'm not saying it wouldn't be a fairly monumental undertaking given the sheer amount of detail in DF, but it's by no means undo-able.
The bigger concern would be writing a proper engine to handle all of our nonsense, but storage-wise machine code is pretty trivial.
Have you paid attention to how much is abstracted that couldn't be if we had Skyrim graphics? The location, shape, and orientation of scars; the position of scars; the way a dwarf holds a crossbow when missing three fingers; how one wrestles with one's left lower leg; and much, much more. Oh, sure, a crappy job could be done easily, but when has Toady been content with a crappy job?
Yeah dude, think about how slow DF gets on a REGULAR computer. explain why its so easy then. Because its not just the surface, its hundreds of tiles underground. Every mineral has to be represented. Every cave-in must look realistic. The artificial water falls and fluid dynamics, THINK ABOUT THE TERROR.
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Sutremaine

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Re: What would be the file size of dwarf fortress if it had skyrim graphics?
« Reply #47 on: October 12, 2012, 05:47:31 am »

meh. sjyrim looks like its trying too hard to be realistc and failing badly. I think the graphics such.
Uncanny Valley ahoy! I would say that the PS1 / PS2 had about the right level of graphics capability to show pretty stuff without the humans looking realistic enough for the flaws in their emotional and motion modelling to show up, but then again those were the first 3D consoles that I owned. Who knows where the Uncanny Valley will be for players being born today?
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Rex_Nex

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Re: What would be the file size of dwarf fortress if it had skyrim graphics?
« Reply #48 on: October 12, 2012, 06:11:19 am »

I'm probably younger then you, but I don't think skyrim is at the uncanny valley yet. Close, perhaps, but not there. I can still see the polygons, for gosh sakes :P
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hops

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Re: What would be the file size of dwarf fortress if it had skyrim graphics?
« Reply #49 on: October 12, 2012, 07:46:28 am »

Are we derailing this thread into Skyrim graphics discussion now?

I don't think the realism in Skyrim is that bad, save for some few ings that other games can't manage as well (Dude, where is my respect?) and how flat the dialogues are said.
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Talvieno

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Re: What would be the file size of dwarf fortress if it had skyrim graphics?
« Reply #50 on: October 12, 2012, 08:26:38 am »

I don't think that the "uncanny valley" can be reached with landscapes/terrain alone, and to be honest... Skyrim's humans suck. :P

Let's think in extremes.
Crysis looks awesome in everything but its human models, but it's still nowhere near uncanny valley.

Spoiler: very large image (click to show/hide)

It also requires a monster rig to run smoothly at highest graphics. I'm not talking "best thing you can find at a store", either. (or at least, that's how it was when it first came out in 2007.)

This would kill DF for me, and probably every other player out there. Permanently.
Even if my computer could handle it... Like other people have already said, there's just no way to get the detail Toady puts into DF into this kind of engine. I'd prefer DF as it is over Skyrim graphics.
« Last Edit: October 12, 2012, 12:48:21 pm by Talvieno »
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Miuramir

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Re: What would be the file size of dwarf fortress if it had skyrim graphics?
« Reply #51 on: October 12, 2012, 12:15:44 pm »

It also requires a monster rig to run smoothly at highest graphics. I'm not talking "best thing you can find at a store", either. (or at least, that's how it was when it first came out in 2007.)

This would kill DF for me, and probably every other player out there. Permanently.
Even if my computer could handle it... Like other people have already said, there's just no way to get the detail Toady puts into DF into this kind of engine. I'd prefer DF as it is over Skyrim graphics.

Skyrim appears to be a particularly poor example, as it sounds like its engine is an even worse combination of dubious hacks than average.  There's a couple of different points in here however. 

Few current games do a really good job of handling wide ranges of rendering power.  They may have the ability to crudely adjust distance cutoffs or texture sizes, but it's all the same engine with a few tunable parameters.  One of the more interesting is Stardock's "Elemental: Fallen Enchantress"; it has two fundamentally different rendering modes, the default 3D and what it calls "cloth map" mode.  The user can set at what zoom level the game switches between the two modes, and even set a config option to run in cloth map only mode, so the game can be played on a netbook (and perhaps eventually, a tablet or smartphone) without all the rendering overhead at all. 

Given the decade or so we expect DF to take, it's not unreasonable to posit a multi-staged modular interface system:
* 2D pseudo-ASCII
* 2D graphical tiles
* pseudo-3D isometric tiles & sprites (Falcon's Eye or Stonesense style)
* 2D / 3D optimized hybrids (upcoming Shadowrun Returns uses a version of this. In a DF interpretation for instance, the engine could create a fortress dwarf from a combination of procedurally chosen 3D models and textures, then pre-render / "bake" a set of (2D) sprite animations from it that could be cached and rendered far faster in play.  Original Wolfenstein 3D had a version of this, where room objects were really only 2D (basically like a cardboard cutout that always was rotated to face the player).) 
* Simplified 3D; late PS2 or early PS3 grade 3D or older MMO equivalent, with a comparatively low poly count and texture size, but adequate to see what is going on.  WoW-grade graphics would fall under here. 
* Early 2010s MMO grade 3D; Aion or SWTOR characters probably have enough configuration options that an analogous engine could handle the variance amongst dwarves, for instance.  Skyrim, Dragon Age, Crysis, etc. fall into the same very general category.  By the time DF reaches much closer to finished, this sort of rendering at reasonable resolutions should be practical on fairly inexpensive devices.  With procedural generation of the vast majority of the models, the storage space isn't all that large (although possibly still a separate download), and in any given fort only a small fraction would need to be loaded. 
* Late 2010s / early 2020s grade "photorealistic" 3D: I would guess that Bay 12 would stop short of this, but might have hooks for those wanting to do up their own high-res models, or render existing ones in a more complex fashion.  (For instance, at least one previous-gen MMORPG created their models and textures at a fairly high detail level, and then simplified them for device rendering; if you knew how, you could extract the actual models and textures, load them into an external 3D graphics program, and render them at a far higher quality and resolution than the game ever used interactively.)

One could posit having device-specific configuration files that specified the highest and lowest level you wanted to enable, and changing amongst the enabled levels with a hotkey, depending on your current desire for quality versus speed.  Perhaps on your tablet you play in isometric tile mode normally, but drop to 2D top-down tiles when you want to pass the next month quickly, or crank up to simple 3D when you're trying to arrange some difficult mine-cart tracks while paused.  On your gaming desktop, perhaps you play in 2010s 3D normally, dropping down to simplified 3D to speed megaproject construction, or up to 2020s 3D to admire a particularly cool scene and get a screenshot for the forums. 
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Damiac

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Re: What would be the file size of dwarf fortress if it had skyrim graphics?
« Reply #52 on: October 12, 2012, 12:54:11 pm »

Can I just point out a small flaw I saw?

Saying it'd be hard to render a dwarf wrestling with his lower leg does not point out a flaw in graphics rendering.  It points out an obvious flaw of DF, that the wrestling makes no sense!  The cow grabs the mule with the right leg indeed!

Also, if we were in a simulation, why would we notice? Why would we realize it? I could make a simulation that makes sense to its inhabitants easily.

If MakesSense = 0
   MakesSense = 1
End If
Call (ConsiderIfThingsMakeSense)

There you go.  Everything always makes sense, no matter what.  If it doesn't make sense, then it still makes sense.

Not to mention, in reality, there are things that do not seem to make any sense.  Light's speed is fixed, regardless of the speed of the observer?!?  Everything having to do with the double slit expiriment?
We're equipped to survive on earth.  Who says our notion of "sense" even... makes sense?  We're just machines programmed to not die too much.
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GreatWyrmGold

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Re: What would be the file size of dwarf fortress if it had skyrim graphics?
« Reply #53 on: October 12, 2012, 04:39:55 pm »

That is stupid. For starters, I can see someone wrestling with their legs, if not in the same way one would wrestle with their arms. Second, a game cannot figure out if something" makes sense." Third, a lot of what we would think makes no sense actually does. Fourth, DF runs on unrealism. Can you imagine a realistic magma forge, or dragon, or zombie? Fifth, if you just arbitrarily stripped out everything that doesn't" make sense," the game would have to figure out what to do, in a way that makes more sense. Sixth, that was the least of the arguments against Skyrim (or whatever) -esque graphics.
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hops

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Re: What would be the file size of dwarf fortress if it had skyrim graphics?
« Reply #54 on: October 12, 2012, 08:09:18 pm »

Also as what I think in the near future when DF is complete we will need a special type of computer for it.
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Re: What would be the file size of dwarf fortress if it had skyrim graphics?
« Reply #55 on: October 13, 2012, 11:14:01 pm »

You guys are too much Sword Art Online oriented.    O.o!!!
it would be great if DF could have even Final Fantasy V graphics, though. =)
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misko27

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Re: What would be the file size of dwarf fortress if it had skyrim graphics?
« Reply #56 on: October 13, 2012, 11:31:58 pm »

Also as what I think in the near future when DF is complete we will need a special type of computer for it.
I'm REALLY Hoping that eventually Moore's Law catches up with him. Cause, if he somehow is moving faster then it (Or alterantively keeps it one threaded and companies choose not to add more cores), FPS may one day make it unplayable lest we buy a single massive computer and keep it solely for DF. Which wuold hurt his small fanbase.
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Loud Whispers

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Re: What would be the file size of dwarf fortress if it had skyrim graphics?
« Reply #57 on: October 14, 2012, 04:28:33 am »

And just so you know, everything ending up in a single super massive black hole is one of the likely ends for the universe.
And if we were to end in a hyper expansion which causes the heat death of the universe, another more likely candidate?

Moonputer.

Im gonna have to sig that, just because its an amazing word.
Why ty good sir

§¢ǿŗÞﵧ

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Re: What would be the file size of dwarf fortress if it had skyrim graphics?
« Reply #58 on: October 14, 2012, 02:05:40 pm »

Quote

And just so you know, everything ending up in a single super massive black hole is one of the likely ends for the universe.

according to the inflationary theory, the universe expanded by a huge (and I really mean huge) factor, and it stopped expanding because the potential energy of the inflation field dropped. And according to the inflationary theory it will start again in the future. Therefore the universe ending in a black hole is an unlikely end, because for a black hole to form, you need matter to be crunched together not spread apart.
« Last Edit: October 14, 2012, 02:07:27 pm by §¢ǿŗÞﵧ »
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Putnam

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Re: What would be the file size of dwarf fortress if it had skyrim graphics?
« Reply #59 on: October 14, 2012, 02:11:54 pm »

And just so you know, everything ending up in a single super massive black hole is one of the likely ends for the universe.

The universe's expansion is, so far as we can tell, accelerating.

In other words, no, it's not likely at all. Much, much more likely is the big rip, which will basically mean that spacetime will be so far spread from itself that individual atoms, baryons and mesons will begin tearing themselves apart. The big freeze/heat death is probably not going to happen, because of the whole "accelerating" thing.
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