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Author Topic: If I generate a world with a history longer than 100 years I can't stop it.  (Read 4047 times)

Urist McColeTheo

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If I generate a world with a history longer than 100 years I can't stop it.
« on: July 10, 2016, 08:03:14 pm »
If it goes longer than 100 years it will periodically say (not responding) and my window playing Dwarf Fortress will fog up, and no matter what I do it won't stop. I can continue mashing ESC and Enter, but the generation won't stop and it will continue going to (not responding).
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Daris

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Re: If I generate a world with a history longer than 100 years I can't stop it.
« Reply #1 on: July 10, 2016, 08:23:26 pm »
It's common for DF to stop responding when it's thinking hard.  If it's a crash (presuming you're running Windows) you will get a crash notice.

If you legit can't generate worlds older than 100 years, if I were you I would re-download the game because maybe your install has been corrupted.
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Shonai_Dweller

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Re: If I generate a world with a history longer than 100 years I can't stop it.
« Reply #2 on: July 10, 2016, 08:26:31 pm »
It takes 3 years to stop worldgen (roughly). If your worldgen is down to 3 minutes/year (and worldgen often drops to much slower), it will stop 6 minutes after you push Esc. "Mashing" won't help.
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ORCACommander

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Re: If I generate a world with a history longer than 100 years I can't stop it.
« Reply #3 on: July 10, 2016, 08:47:32 pm »
And the System Admin Called Forth From the Task Manager And Said "End Task"
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vjek

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Re: If I generate a world with a history longer than 100 years I can't stop it.
« Reply #4 on: July 11, 2016, 12:40:23 am »
It's trivial to generate worlds with 10k histories in seconds, with the right parameters.  If it's breaking your system this badly, something is wrong with those parameter sets, if the primary goal is simply a 10k history.
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Shonai_Dweller

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Re: If I generate a world with a history longer than 100 years I can't stop it.
« Reply #5 on: July 11, 2016, 06:59:13 am »
Quote from: vjek on July 11, 2016, 12:40:23 am
It's trivial to generate worlds with 10k histories in seconds, with the right parameters.  If it's breaking your system this badly, something is wrong with those parameter sets, if the primary goal is simply a 10k history.
Link to how that works please. I imagine most new players use basic worldgen which takes quite a while for a 1000 year world, let alone 10k. If you could save them all hours of worldgen time it'd be much appreciated.
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vjek

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Re: If I generate a world with a history longer than 100 years I can't stop it.
« Reply #6 on: July 11, 2016, 09:37:16 am »
The worldgen cookbook threads have plenty of examples, but I'll summarize it with the following:

Parameters that are likely affecting history generation:
World size.
If the intent of the world is simply to use a 3x3 embark, there's no need for a 257x257 world.  None at all.  Pocket worlds (17x17) work in almost all cases.

Number of civs.
Again, if the intent of the fortress mode embark is to get sieged, you need a civ count of 2.  In 42.06 or 43.03, goblins will come immediately after the population count is reached.  By default, once you hit 80 dwarves, you will get sieged.  If you change the _SIEGE parameter from 3 to 1, you can get sieges after you hit a population of 20 dwarves.

Embark neighbors.
If you make a larger world (this gets worse as the world gets larger) then there's a smaller chance of having the embark neighbors you want.  In a pocket world, everyone can reach everyone.

Site Cap after civ creation.
I've never seen the value in having this over, say.. somewhere between 0 and 40.  Typically, if you need sites at all, which normally you don't, leaving this somewhere between 3 and 10 will work.  I have it at zero most of the time.

Population Cap after civ creation.
I typically leave this at zero, but 1000-2000 seems to be a reasonable maximum.  It doesn't work the way most people think it should work (obviously, given worlds generate just fine with it at zero).

Cull unimportant historical figures.
Should always be Yes, no reason i can find for it to ever be No.  Who cares if "some guy" did "some thing" in "some region"?  You want to know who killed 100 goblins, right?

Reveal all historical events.
I typically leave this to yes, but afaik, it only affects what dwarves will engrave or possibly tell stories about, in fortress mode.

Here's a sample world that generates 10,000 years of history in about 10 seconds with very few rejections, and will typically be completely playable in fortress mode, with as many dwarves as you need, caravans, liaisons, kings, all those typical features.  And of course, 10,000 iron/steel wearing goblins waiting to attack. ;)
Spoiler: 10k history in 10 seconds (click to show/hide)
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PatrikLundell

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Re: If I generate a world with a history longer than 100 years I can't stop it.
« Reply #7 on: July 11, 2016, 12:55:08 pm »
@vjek: A comment on world size: To my dismay, it seems extremely rare to get visitors in pocket worlds. So far I've had a total sum of 1 visitor over lots of worlds. Until now I've written it off to the fact that elves and humans tend to just barely hang on (100-300 normally). The latest one however has healthy human and elven civs numbering in the thousands, and I've still got no visitors after 9 years, despite regular human and elven caravans. The only quirk in my current world is that there isn't actually any physical land connection to the human and elven civs: I've embarked at a "water" tile with access to all civs, but if caravans can reach me visitors ought to as well?
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Shonai_Dweller

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Re: If I generate a world with a history longer than 100 years I can't stop it.
« Reply #8 on: July 11, 2016, 05:11:59 pm »
Quote from: vjek on July 11, 2016, 09:37:16 am
The worldgen cookbook threads have plenty of examples, but I'll summarize it with the following:

Parameters that are likely affecting history generation:
World size.
If the intent of the world is simply to use a 3x3 embark, there's no need for a 257x257 world.  None at all.  Pocket worlds (17x17) work in almost all cases.

Number of civs.
Again, if the intent of the fortress mode embark is to get sieged, you need a civ count of 2.  In 42.06 or 43.03, goblins will come immediately after the population count is reached.  By default, once you hit 80 dwarves, you will get sieged.  If you change the _SIEGE parameter from 3 to 1, you can get sieges after you hit a population of 20 dwarves.

Embark neighbors.
If you make a larger world (this gets worse as the world gets larger) then there's a smaller chance of having the embark neighbors you want.  In a pocket world, everyone can reach everyone.

Site Cap after civ creation.
I've never seen the value in having this over, say.. somewhere between 0 and 40.  Typically, if you need sites at all, which normally you don't, leaving this somewhere between 3 and 10 will work.  I have it at zero most of the time.

Population Cap after civ creation.
I typically leave this at zero, but 1000-2000 seems to be a reasonable maximum.  It doesn't work the way most people think it should work (obviously, given worlds generate just fine with it at zero).

Cull unimportant historical figures.
Should always be Yes, no reason i can find for it to ever be No.  Who cares if "some guy" did "some thing" in "some region"?  You want to know who killed 100 goblins, right?

Reveal all historical events.
I typically leave this to yes, but afaik, it only affects what dwarves will engrave or possibly tell stories about, in fortress mode.

Here's a sample world that generates 10,000 years of history in about 10 seconds with very few rejections, and will typically be completely playable in fortress mode, with as many dwarves as you need, caravans, liaisons, kings, all those typical features.  And of course, 10,000 iron/steel wearing goblins waiting to attack. ;)
Spoiler: 10k history in 10 seconds (click to show/hide)
Ah. I see. Single use, fortress specific pocket world. Looks no fun at all to me, but useful for some I guess. Useful for the OP?
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vjek

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Re: If I generate a world with a history longer than 100 years I can't stop it.
« Reply #9 on: July 11, 2016, 05:27:00 pm »
Quote from: PatrikLundell on July 11, 2016, 12:55:08 pm
@vjek: A comment on world size: To my dismay, it seems extremely rare to get visitors in pocket worlds. So far I've had a total sum of 1 visitor over lots of worlds. Until now I've written it off to the fact that elves and humans tend to just barely hang on (100-300 normally). The latest one however has healthy human and elven civs numbering in the thousands, and I've still got no visitors after 9 years, despite regular human and elven caravans. The only quirk in my current world is that there isn't actually any physical land connection to the human and elven civs: I've embarked at a "water" tile with access to all civs, but if caravans can reach me visitors ought to as well?
I've had up to 18 concurrent visitors in a pocket world.  I don't think this behavior (visitors or lack thereof) is related strictly to world size.
And... I've also had visitors immediately after defining a tavern area.  As in, I draw the tavern area as my first action after embark, and I instantly have visitors.

It's been my experience that the more surviving civs you have, the more visitors you have.  An easy way to test that is to make a world without enemies (except in the caverns) and specifically without goblins.  If humans, elves, and dwarves thrive, then if my memory serves, the last time I tested that I had more visitors than I could ever want.
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Bumber

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Re: If I generate a world with a history longer than 100 years I can't stop it.
« Reply #10 on: July 11, 2016, 10:05:10 pm »
Quote from: vjek on July 11, 2016, 09:37:16 am
Cull unimportant historical figures.
Should always be Yes, no reason i can find for it to ever be No.  Who cares if "some guy" did "some thing" in "some region"?  You want to know who killed 100 goblins, right?
The culling process slows down world gen. Any performance boost would probably only affect loading saves.

I'm pretty sure this is what causes "In a time before time, somebody attacked somebody."
« Last Edit: July 11, 2016, 10:10:53 pm by Bumber »
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PatrikLundell

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Re: If I generate a world with a history longer than 100 years I can't stop it.
« Reply #11 on: July 12, 2016, 02:08:23 am »
Hm, in most of my pocket attempts I've set dwarves to a single civ (that's required to die) and everyone else to default, while in the last one I had one civ of each to get them to generate in their intended locations. And yes, if a tavern draws visitors it seems to do so more or less immediately.
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ORCACommander

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Re: If I generate a world with a history longer than 100 years I can't stop it.
« Reply #12 on: July 12, 2016, 11:37:51 am »
culling uses more cpu in world gen but it ultimately reduces ram usage and file size.

In my experience populations, civs counts and overall world size are the biggest killers to world gen performance. It is very difficult and multi day task to generate a 10k year world history on a large world

When it comes to how large you world you want it to be depends on your use cases. Some poeple like toi have done multiple forts in a single world and get cross migration of survivors plus the old fort's events get added into legends for engraving. Some people want to do one off worlds, Larger worlds increase the odds of a usable site, Pocket worlds are easier to navigate for adventure mode
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