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[Spitfire]

Vacation absolutely inspired me to a DF mega project: Angkor Wat.

I was amazed by the beauty of it. And thus my goal is that recreating helps understanding.

Now I'm breaking my head over feasability. It would be a complete above ground fortress, invasions ON, in the standard scale of 1 block = (2m)³. That would equal to an embark site of 16x14. To retain FPS, the world'd be genned without underground features and a minimum of z-levels.

Here's a satellite pic of the complex, embark squares are indicated.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The moat would be at least channeling out 300k blocks.

What do you think? I want to keep DF mostely vanilla. Is it acceptable to mod out some stone, flora and fauna, so embarks similar to Angkor's biome will be more abundant?

[Lielac]

o.o Don't forget to pick up LargeAccessAware from somebody who has it (I think it comes with the Lazy Newb Pack?), because you're gonna need it. And be hella patient with your dwarves, and apologize to your computer regularly.

Good luck!

[Bihlbo]

I assume "minimum of z-levels" means limited access to ores and stone. I'd probably make the whole construct out of clay bricks. Planning out the layout of the place will be a blast. For all that water you're going to need either a river, a cavern with water, or you'll need to use dfhack to create an artificial spring (speaking of water, how deep does it need to be?). If you limit the z-levels to less than 10 you might not regret the endeavor due to terrible frame rate, but my guess is you will. If you scale it down to 1:2 the idea seems far more possible.

This is the kind of thing that begs for a good visualizer.

[Urist McRas]

Spitfire, I think you are a dwarf. I'm talking about the moat.

You going to embark on a site so huge that running DF there will be a torture to your computer. And then you going to channel more then a half of it. And then you going to fill it with water somehow. And all that just to have a moat around the central building that fits easily to a 2x3 embark site. And you are not going to simplify the challenge by turning off invasions.

And the result can hardly be appreciated by somebody else because picture of your embark will have resolution 7680x6720 and most viewers can't process it.

In short you are starting a project that will take ages, will require huge amount of effort, will probably fail half-way and will lead for little benefit. Isn't it dwarfy?

Although, I do like the idea of creating central building.

[FrankMcFuzz]

Ironically, the scale of this megaproject makes me go "WAT"

[Aslandus]

In short you are starting a project that will take ages, will require huge amount of effort, will probably fail half-way and will lead for little benefit. Isn't it dwarfy?

If only I could have a bigger signature...

[misko27]

I hope your computer is up to it is all I can say. You may actually hit a point where you can't possibly be treating your dwarves worse then you are treating your computer.

[Merendel]

In the name of trying to keep your framerate withen reasonable tolerences might I sugest you scale down a bit of the relitively empty land?  From the looks of your immage you could easily shave an embark square or two off each side of the island without loosing much beside the scale between the fortress and the main island being slightly missmatched.  Shave 2 squares worth off the east side, 1 or 2 off the west and 1 to 1 and a half off the north and south.  Additionaly shrink the moat so its only a single embark wide instead of almost 2.  Doing that you could get down to a 10X9 or so, probably have to compress the scale of the north and south vilages a bit but should decrease the strain a bit.  Even at that size its still over 4x the size of my standard embark.  hope your computer is a beast with good cooling.   You might want to just do a test run at an embark of that size and see what your computer does befor comiting to the project.

[Spitfire]

Thanks for the great feedback!

If you scale it down to 1:2 the idea seems far more possible.

Yesterday I've been working on the block layout of the buildings, and it really was a blast of fun. Unfortunately it became clear that reducing the scale would decrease the information content beyond recognizability. As the central tower rises to 65m, 33 z-levels is barely enough to contain the main features of the temple.

I'd probably make the whole construct out of clay bricks.

That's very close to reality! 3 main durable materials were used: sandstone, mudstone and clay bricks. In the original the sandstone was mined in a quarry some 20km away. And the mudstone (probably) came out of the moat. So my hopes are an embark with sandstone and mudstone beneath 1 level of clay, so a two z-level deep moat would be my source of building material. (That embark sounds pretty hard to find in vanilla, thus I wanna mod out most other types of stone.)

o.o Don't forget to pick up LargeAccessAware from somebody who has it

Will do!

You might want to just do a test run at an embark of that size and see what your computer does befor comiting to the project.

That's a great idea! I will do that when I get home today. If my PC can't handle I'll have to fall back to shaving off some embark squares.

I hope your computer is up to it is all I can say. You may actually hit a point where you can't possibly be treating your dwarves worse then you are treating your computer.

So I'm fortunate that idea came to me in winter. During summer we constantly have 30°C throughout the night up in this bitch.

[smjjames]

Hm, in the next version which is coming within maybe two months, you can non-destructively abandon the forts, so maybe you can do the moat piece by piece with smaller forts solely dedicated to just digging out the moat (though I guess you could destructively abandon those) and then for the main part of Angkor Wat, make an embark that JUST borders or maybe overlaps the moat. May have to do some trickery with embark anywhere.

You could also try to shortcut it by finding a river with an u-bend.

If you don't want to do some terraforming by flattening the land, you'll have to do some world gen magic to make land that is totally flat.

[Xantalos]

...
Watching this.

[Larix]

I'd really recommend checking if your computer and your patience can actually handle the map size you're going for. It'd be a shame to have the layout all planned out only to realise the map won't start or only runs at 5 fps (at that rate, an in-game year would take almost a day real time, without interruptions).

If you wanted to reduce map size, you could be cheaty and use different scales for different purposes: make a tile two metres high but three or four wide, or represent the central buildings at a larger scale and shrink the other parts like the moat a bit.

Nice project. Very very mega.

[TalonisWolf]

...

It's...so dwarfy...

Please periodically update on progress-if you succeed, you may just have achieved
                    the record of  biggest, most time consuming fortress ever!

I can't say useless, as it proves the viability of using DF to simulate reality, especially
  when Toady reaches 1.0. I wouldn't be surprised to see this being used by
Architects and engineers in the far-off future...

[GiglameshDespair]

Make it in chunks of embarks, abandoning each section in turn, and when it's all or mostly done, reclaim all of them.

Or else it'll take centuries due to negative integer framerates.

[smjjames]

Make it in chunks of embarks, abandoning each section in turn, and when it's all or mostly done, reclaim all of them.

Or else it'll take centuries due to negative integer framerates.

That's basically what I said.

Still would have to use embark anywhere functionality in order to embark on the whole thing in the end.