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[Mr S]

I suppose that's debatable. Clinically, depression expresses in varying degrees. It's measured and quantified, albeit in a rather subjective way.

While melancholy can be described differently by various folks, being in a state of melancholy would seem to imply having passed some threshold of depression.

[smjjames]

I'm going to plug away for the next few days on the attackers/goblins-always-win issue for world advancement.

Awesomeness.

Anybody remember if the 'armies sleeping forever' bug/unfinished feature is related to the 'attackers always winning' bug or a completely separate problem?

[Witty]

Attackers always winning isn't a bug, it was just a placeholder feature. Armies sleeping forever is an actual bug, and not at all related to it.

[smjjames]

Actually, isn't the 'army sleeping forever' also a placeholder in a sense that it's an incomplete feature?

I was just wondering if they were related in some way.

[Toady One]

Not so far as I know -- there's also them physically sleeping forever vs. the bug that causes them to camp forever, which are very related but require different fixes.  I don't have the slightest idea what is breaking down that causes the camp forever error log to be written.

[smjjames]

I was referring to the sleeping refugee camps, armies on the march, and some other instances, the ones that generate the 'empty announcement 130' errors.

Also, slapping [NO_SLEEP] onto the four main races will make them stop falling asleep in those camps, but while they will do local patrols, they don't do anything (even the armies on the march still camped at their departure point, which btw, are all civillians for some reason) and you can't do anything with the camped armies.

[mndfreeze]

I have a question that may have been asked in the past but I didn't see anything about future plans, and being new I'm sure there is tons and tons of discussion I'll never hear since I wasn't around when it took place...

On performance, are there any plans to streamline or further increase the performance of the game in general?  For example, offloading processing cycles to a high end GPU if you have one (or any GPU for that matter) so the CPU can do other tasks?  And does the game support multithreading or is there plans for better multithreading support if it does have it?  I know the complexities of this game are massive, but I have a pretty new high end gaming machine and for sure my system still starts to bog down pretty dang hard when I get up near 200 dwarves, forget it if a dragon is lighting my entire map on fire at the same time...etc.

[Max™]

Yeah, pops up now and then, one of the kind souls here (what the heck was their name, can't remember it now) finagled their fix for the graphics handling into toady's hands a while back as I recall, and there are lots of ways which he can theoretically go about multithreading and such but it's one of those things that is a lot easier when you're working from a fresh codebase planned out around such optimizations, rather than trying to port existing stuff to do it. Similar to the 32 bit vs 64 bit stuff, there are methods for these sorts of changes which can be implemented readily in different types of code bases, there are things which might seem obvious to someone who is more of a specialist at programming, and so forth.

As I recall Toady saying, he doesn't see himself as a programmer so much as a game designer (an awesome one, at that) who ended up hacking his way through a jungle of code with a machete he made himself. At this point he's many years along the trail, and some of the suggestions amount to "just rip up the jungle and replant it" though they may seem like "grab a new machete!" at first. I'm no programmer myself, but I have been running exclusively linux, and arch most recently, for years... so there are things I can do, and things I'm comfortable with regarding poking around at bits of code. I myself have gotten a really good grasp of PLAYING df, and am even comfortable with various minor modifications/and such... but just from what I know of how the game operates currently? That's one of those things that we could say, forgo any other features for an arbitrary period of time and hope Toady stumbles on a doable fix before too long... or we can keep playing with the new stuff and hope he stumbles onto said fix along the way, or perhaps someone here finds a way to do it and gets him to implement it.

He added in a lot of stuff with this update, the foundations for lots of cool things, but he's still dealing with a lot of the direct, less directly obvious, and chain-reaction kabooms from this as he goes.

tl;dr, he has plans, I think someone can find one of the listed version goals somewhere that relates to it, but it's a big interlinked problem with no quick fix that we know of yet.

[Mopsy]

« Reply #666 on: Today at 08:44:34 »

I have a question that may have been asked in the past...
...offloading processing cycles to a high end GPU...
...is there plans for better multithreading support...

Are you the Devil?

[PigtailLlama]

With the addition of fruits, nuts, legumes, and vegetables, what's the current planned roadmap of processed foodstuffs and meals?

[mndfreeze]

« Reply #666 on: Today at 08:44:34 »

I have a question that may have been asked in the past...
...offloading processing cycles to a high end GPU...
...is there plans for better multithreading support...

Are you the Devil?

Ye.....I mean. No. Of course not.  >

[Urist McVoyager]

Is the current development plan to prolong this small-update development cycle as long as possible and see how far we can get with the minor patches and single-feature upgrades, rather than diving back deep into coding and coming back up for air in another year?

I seem to recall that being mentioned in one of the FotF replies.

[Putnam]

It was the most recent FOTF reply.

When do you decide it's time to work on the next major update? In a general way, I mean. At what point do you stop bugfixing and adding minor features and think "Yep, I think it's time to start working on DF20XX"?

I don't know that there's been a uniform way that works, except maybe the part where I say that I hope it doesn't happen that way each time before it happens.  Ideally, there wouldn't be large releases, but it has also been the case often enough that we might find ourselves on a long road again before too many months have passed, all effort to the contrary.

[MrWiggles]

If I recall, what happen last time, is that the Brothers Adams, felt that their last addition of content, wasn't fun and underwhelming. So that road to make that content worthwhile, took a very long time. And over that time, other, seemingly low hanging fruits were snagged too.

[SuicideJunkie]

The numeric portion of the emotion is invisible...  it seemed clutterful to add intensifiers all over the paragraph.  The eustress/distress levels of the emotions are pretty arbitary, but align more or less with the seriousness of the word.

What about using alternative words rather than separate intensifiers?
EG:
Urist was interested in a fine chair.
Vabok was fascinated by a masterwork statue.
Tosid was annoyed by being caught in the rain.
Sigun was vexed by being caught in the blood rain.

Sufficiently weak emotions could also lose their color to de-emphasize them.