It's only active at the edge. There might be edge lag, but not much else.
To be at a representative scale it would have to be generating millions and millions of Z-levels and close to infinite tiles on the X and Y axis.
*bunch of pointless numbers not related to the comment*
My argument was about the simulation of the multitude of flat-world mythology.
According to most of them there is an infinite space of nothing beyond the border/edge of the world .. not to mention how mention how many millions of Z-levels of animal needs to be simulated carrying the world on its back some of those mythologies have, or infinite empty space others explain is below the flat world.
"According to the flat-earth mythology, space is really big." This is true for most cosmologies. It's not particularly relevant to the flat-earth cosmology.
We don't need to simulate the entire cosmology at once at a 1-meter level of detail to include it in the game. There is a precedent for this, as we already have the sun and the moon in the game at an abstract level. More general precedents include the loading of map tiles, which allows us to simulate only the relevant world at a high level of detail while the rest is stored and runs more abstractly in the background.
Even when "run abstractly in the background" it still requires simulation, calculations and computations.
But really, not that many. How often does the game update the position of the sun? Once an hour maybe, does it even bother in fortress mode? We don't seem to have day/night at all there.
Toady's mentioned simulating starfields for very little extra cost. Pretty sure a bottomless pit/entrance to another dimension at the edge of the world wouldn't need a supercomputer to handle.
Now, he also mentioned how fun it would be if the turtle that a world may be balanced on could interact with the world. That sounds quite a bit more intensive...
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Topic: Round Earth (Read 6734 times)