Print

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

[Veylon]

Seems neat, but I suspect it would take up tons of memory and get VERY repetitive.

Not necessarily; after all, art (for example) is only generated when you look at it. This goes for artifacts, too. The same could probably go for these journals.

Still...two things.
Even if they only wrote in their journals once a week, that's 48 entries--likely including 3-4 events per entry at times--per year per dwarf. That's a lot, once you start getting big, long-lived forts.
Also, how would the game do that? It would need to remember what events were worth recording at any given time.

Well, let's crunch the numbers on this. Dwarves already remember a bunch of stuff and have a number value for how "important" they are. The top five or so things that affect their mood can go in the journal. Let's say a ballpark figure of two hundred characters (assuming we're storing it in text) per seasonal journal entry. Let's say we've got 200 dwarves and we've got 50 years of time in this thing. That's 200 * 200 * 50 * 4 = 8,000,000. Around eight megs for a worst-case scenario.

More reasonable, you could just pare it down to maybe five bytes that point to the feelings. With new-found space, you could have each dwarf also keep pointers to, say, the top three events that happen between journal entries, if any. You only need the pointers as events are already saved in their entirety elsewhere. Then stamp a date on it (four bytes), and we're good to go. Very optimistically, you could have each entry only take 5+12+4=21 bytes. So that same fort only costs us 840,000 bytes.

I personally don't think enough happens in a week (or even a month) to bother with shorter time periods.

[GreatWyrmGold]

Seems neat, but I suspect it would take up tons of memory and get VERY repetitive.

Not necessarily; after all, art (for example) is only generated when you look at it. This goes for artifacts, too. The same could probably go for these journals.

Still...two things.
Even if they only wrote in their journals once a week, that's 48 entries--likely including 3-4 events per entry at times--per year per dwarf. That's a lot, once you start getting big, long-lived forts.
Also, how would the game do that? It would need to remember what events were worth recording at any given time.

Well, let's crunch the numbers on this. Dwarves already remember a bunch of stuff and have a number value for how "important" they are.

A bunch, yes, but unless you want dwarves to only remember some kind of evil weather, some kind of yummy food, being attacked by some kind of creature, etc, you'll need more. And I don't think the game pays much attention to when, exactly, the thoughts were gained.

The top five or so things that affect their mood can go in the journal. Let's say a ballpark figure of two hundred characters (assuming we're storing it in text) per seasonal journal entry.

What.
Why? Name one three-month time in your life that only 200 things that seemed important on the given day happened. Even if we're assuming that dwarves only record their journals once a month or something, we would still need a lot more than 200 characters per season. Your estimates are:

Very optimistically

made.

I personally don't think enough happens in a week (or even a month) to bother with shorter time periods.

It does to dwarves. If you have a journal, you're going to write in it, probably every week at least. Dwarves aren't gods for whom a year passes in an hour--dwarves are dwarves for whom a year passes in a year.

And this still doesn't cover the problem that reading a computer-generated journal would get very dull, very fast--even more so if dwarves only wrote down things important for the whole season or whatever, even more so if we limited what dwarves record to thoughts and whatnot.