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[flameaway]

{eyes Toady with suspicion}

God...?

[Asin]

Yee.

[Bloax]

There are no Feelings in DF, only Wants.

Insufficient Wants being fulfilled results in MAD.

There is no Thought in DF, only Wants.

Insufficient Wants does not result in Thought, only MAD.

There is no Waste in DF, only garbage which eats into Wants. No sickness, no death.
The only common factor is that it makes MAD.


Bring back the other gods, Slaanesh, you dirty swine.

[Bumber]

Magma-Assured Destruction?

[Gwolfski]

Yes.

[Urist McVoyager]

I wonder how far the simulation will go. It'd be pretty cool to have DF running entirely self sustaining coherent worlds that could go on around the player like an actual world. Currently the mechanics peter out a bit after worldgen ends. You don't see farmers tending the fields or people running workshops yet. There's not really any supply chain you can interact with. It all just stops at the moment. Parts go on, there are definitely parties moving on the map. Just the stuff that really makes a people live goes down when you start playing.

He'll get there. We just have to give him time.

[Thisfox]

I wonder how far the simulation will go. It'd be pretty cool to have DF running entirely self sustaining coherent worlds that could go on around the player like an actual world. Currently the mechanics peter out a bit after worldgen ends. You don't see farmers tending the fields or people running workshops yet. There's not really any supply chain you can interact with. It all just stops at the moment.

Well, even if they were self aware, they wouldn't be aware of it all just coming to an end, unexpec

press e to embark

[Urist McVoyager]

It's more like "I suddenly lost my appetite. And I'm no longer thirsty. When's the last time I needed to sleep? I'm not tired anymore." It's not over, just the things that drive life suddenly end for everyone except some random schlub in some backwater hamlet, fortress, pit, or tree camp. There's some things that go on, like bandits and location stuff, but the real driving forces for civilization suddenly stop mattering. It's all about family, fun, and telling random people all the rumors you've heard.

[FakerFangirl]

press e to embark

[Sbcc]

From what im reading. The world will start to become much more alive as soon as the economy is tweaked more towards supply and demand. This will create the need for stuff, and allow for cool stuff to happen. Over time, a strong enough AI in the game could create the scenario you are wanting.

[Urist McVoyager]

Exactly. The best way I can see to manage that is to extend the Adventurer's survival needs to everyone. It'd be the basis for everything once Toady gets the ball sufficiently rolling. Once everyone needs to eat, there'll be an impetus to get farmers and hunters out there doing their jobs. Once there's a sustainable supply of food, there'll need to be other jobs so people can pay for the food. And there'll be needs for other things besides survival so that those other jobs actually have a purpose.

[IndigoFenix]

The problem is that as the simulation gets deeper, the game will be forced to run slower.  Toady has to find balance beween a good simulation and a playable game.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

How about a compromise? Food appears out of nowhere, proportional to the size of the village, the wealth of the village, and the current scarcity level of food for that civ/location. If an adventurer is nearby, food-eating is simulated. If an adventurer suddenly appears nearby, being-halfway-through-food is simulated. If not, then people-dying-from-starvation-and-reducing-population-levels is simulated.

[Urist McVoyager]

The problem is that as the simulation gets deeper, the game will be forced to run slower.  Toady has to find balance beween a good simulation and a playable game.

It depends on the big advances they make in future tech. Anything I'm talking about is probably a good decade ahead of us. We already saw gains made from Toady switching to 64 bit. Not a full game changer, but gains. The game's big bottleneck is its single thread nature. If a big breakthrough is made that improves the power of a single core, within the next decade, we might see a core capable of crunching heavy duty numbers like what DF would need.

Toady has already said he wants interchangeability. He wants to be able to meld the two modes in different ways. So all this stuff I'm talking about is pretty much a necessity for Toady's future goals. A world without needs and logistics just has no place in it for adventure fortresses beyond the camps we get now, and the half step simulation wouldn't work for what I want, because I'd rather meld into a plain-clothes character, open a skill-based shop like a smithy, and see how a regular person with a player's special perspective can affect the world without necessarily going to war and doing everything for the rest of the world.

[FakerFangirl]

The problem is that as the simulation gets deeper, the game will be forced to run slower.

Yes but if you had infinite processing power then you could just speed up the timescale so that the simulation runs faster than the host universe! (Possible to escape heat death by transferring your consciousness to the simulation?) Say, a black hole programmed as a turing machine programmed to create a black hole programmed as a turing machine programmed to create a simulation of the universe containing a simulation of your consciousness. The computational power problem becomes an energy problem rather than a time problem, so as long as you have a big enough black hole to start with, you can process an unimaginable amount of information.