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Infinitely large planet with every terrain combination

11 (21.2%)

Flat planet

16 (30.8%)

Cylindrical planet

7 (13.5%)

Some other shape (Post to specify)

18 (34.6%)

Total Members Voted: 52

[Fniff]

And that's why no-one can relate even on a basic level, the world is completely different for every single person, and we're all trapped in our own nightmarish delusions without being able to understand others as they are all screaming whales inside a horseshoe made out of spiders, at least to our perspectives.

If someone can look at a glass of water, and another person can look at said glass of water, if they can both agree it's a glass of water then that's the objective reality.

[My Name is Immaterial]

Let's just wait until Toady does the next FOTF:

Toady, what is the shape of the world?
Inspired by this thread: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=122411.0

[NW_Kohaku]

This also heavily implies that Armok is the in-world personification of the player entity.

This is also not true:

Our eventual goal is to have the player's role be the embodiment of positions of power within the fortress, performing actions in their official capacity, to the point that in an ideal world each command you give would be linked to some noble, official or commander.

The player is the collective positions of authority in the fortress.  Basically, you are a council of the nobles doing their respective jobs. 

At the start of the game, you are the expedition leader, alone.  When you assign a bookkeeper, you gain access to what the bookkeeper knows when they have accounted for objects in the fort enough to know it - when you want to know how much of something you have or where it is, you ask the bookkeeper, and they tell you.  Otherwise, you only know of what you manually look at in a stockpile and count for yourself.

Likewise, you aren't given immediate access to knowledge of who killed a creature.  A god would know.  Dwarves who just happened to find a dwarf murdered in the night wouldn't.

[Owlbread]

Perhaps though the player's role is actually synonymous with Armok's role. He controls the positions of power within the fortress.

[NW_Kohaku]

Perhaps though the player's role is actually synonymous with Armok's role. He controls the positions of power within the fortress.

Isn't that just redefining something into meaninglessness?

You're basically saying that Armok is the player because Armok is the player, no matter what the player might be proved to be.  Armok, therefore, would have no definition or identity of his(?) own, other than the player.

[Owlbread]

Isn't that just redefining something into meaninglessness?

You're basically saying that Armok is the player because Armok is the player, no matter what the player might be proved to be.  Armok, therefore, would have no definition or identity of his(?) own, other than the player.

Basically yeah. Except he's a god. Kind of.

[Buttery_Mess]

Perhaps though the player's role is actually synonymous with Armok's role. He controls the positions of power within the fortress.

Isn't that just redefining something into meaninglessness?

You're basically saying that Armok is the player because Armok is the player, no matter what the player might be proved to be.  Armok, therefore, would have no definition or identity of his(?) own, other than the player.

You speak as though you're unaware of how religious thinking works. Once you bring a god into the discussion, rationality flies out of the window.

It's nice that Toady's been thinking about about the player's role in Fort Mode, but right now, you are just playing as the dwarven communist hive-mind. You're certainly not playing as 'Armok'; Armok only exists in the (purely whimsical) game title.

[the woods]

And that's why no-one can relate even on a basic level, the world is completely different for every single person, and we're all trapped in our own nightmarish delusions without being able to understand others as they are all screaming whales inside a horseshoe made out of spiders, at least to our perspectives.

If someone can look at a glass of water, and another person can look at said glass of water, if they can both agree it's a glass of water then that's the objective reality.

Fucked up if the water was a hologram the whole time.

Also I'm pretty sure people are trapped inside isolated nightmare delusions. Have you ever read this thing about how shitty people are to each other in Dubai?

Of course I'm not stuck in a virtual hellish fuckscape, I'm just a western cyber-hedonist aping individualist traits when individualism is enforced as a universal norm, sitting at a computer made from dubious coltan at a shitty noxious taiwanese factory, doing taxes to pay for drones to blow up impoverished people on the other side of the world, checking the on line discussion of a violent video game that lets me build things I can't irl

[NW_Kohaku]

And that's why no-one can relate even on a basic level, the world is completely different for every single person, and we're all trapped in our own nightmarish delusions without being able to understand others as they are all screaming whales inside a horseshoe made out of spiders, at least to our perspectives.

If someone can look at a glass of water, and another person can look at said glass of water, if they can both agree it's a glass of water then that's the objective reality.

Fucked up if the water was a hologram the whole time.

Also I'm pretty sure people are trapped inside isolated nightmare delusions. Have you ever read this thing about how shitty people are to each other in Dubai?

Of course I'm not stuck in a virtual hellish fuckscape, I'm just a western cyber-hedonist aping individualist traits when individualism is enforced as a universal norm, sitting at a computer made from dubious coltan at a shitty noxious taiwanese factory, doing taxes to pay for drones to blow up impoverished people on the other side of the world, checking the on line discussion of a violent video game that lets me build things I can't irl

That's still not grasping the key difference between objective and subjective reality.

In objective reality, you can still have delusions, sure, but they're just delusions - they affect nobody but you.

In subjective reality, your delusions change reality.  They affect other people as your delusions become things they actually experience.

Although it was empowered by an artifact, Michael Crichton's Sphere, where one character's fear of a giant squid causes one to actually appear and start attacking the characters.  Their subjective experience alters reality.

For a real and true delve into what subjective reality really means, Paranoia Agent is perhaps the best example that comes to mind. 

[LordBaal]

Why bother so much with this? I mean, right now we have some kind of a quarter of the world (based on the fact that generally you get a map from one pole to the equator), not the whole planet.

In the end it could be something like a huge square, just like now, with the sides connected to represent some sphereness, and as for the poles? Screw them. It could be kind kind of a Civilization 3 map, I didn't see much people complaining about that. This could give us really huge worlds to play with, specially once ships go into play.

[Miuramir]

I'm generally with NW_Kohaku on this, but with some minor differences.  General thoughts:

* The largest DF map currently available is a "Region", and there are several different good reasons to believe that said Region is a part of a greater whole ("World", for simplicity). 

* The largest currently available Region corresponds to a large island or small sub-continent in terms of practical extent. 

* The lack of latitude variation, arguments about spherical vs. rectangular mapping, etc. are unfortunately in the scale range that it is not possible to unambiguously determine which effects are the result of design decisions, world shape, mapping conventions, simulation simplifications, and game mechanics.  The simplest summary is that "the Region is a small enough patch of the World that the inaccuracies caused by representing as a square grid are low in comparison to other simulation issues".

* Regions are usually generated with a range of North-South climactic variation that seems unusually high for the practical size of the region if it occupied a similar size on Earth.  This is somewhat in conflict with the previous point, as on our Earth these two assumptions don't go well together. 

* The DF vertical structure is clearly quite different from that of Earth, in particular the presence of super-dense structure at the base of the geological column. 

My default assumption used to be that the largest Region is a "trimmed octant", roughly 1/8 of a sphere with the pointy polar end trimmed off; but this doesn't work out as well as I'd like. 

An interesting case could be made that the DF World is smaller and/or differently shaped than our Earth, but due to the presence of a hyper-dense basement the net surface effect remains similar (cf Ringworld and Scrith, for one vaguely similar example). 

[LordBaal]

A smaller but denser planet? So gravity remains the "same" for example? That's interesting indeed.

However I really don't worry too much about it. I will be happy, as I said before, with a civ3 kind of map, a rectangle warped around and the up and down parts with a line representing the poles.

One can even justify people not walking in straight line to pass from one side of the pole to the other as I don't know, they preferring to stick to the coast in oder to avoid the worst cold, lose themselves or whatever.

The only thing I see about a map like that is the huge amount of data it would bare and the size it would have in your hard drive.

[SquatchHammer]

I don't see what's wrong with imagining a DF world to be a thin cuboid hovering above hell. It's fantasy, it can be weird.

Preposterous. The map is clearly a turtle's back.

So demons are really the Turtle's anti bodies then?