Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[therahedwig]

This is sorta inspired by the questions in the FotF about more geological features. I looked through several threads and found mostly stuff about hot springs and eruptions. So let's look at the other stuff.

Volcanos in the game are right now mountains with a magmapipe.

It would be interesting to see more volcanic activity in the game:

* different volcano shapes(these are influenced by how the volcano came to be).
 * Cryptodomes, Shield, Cinder cones, Stratocones.
 * Volcanos with multiple magma tubes.
 * Volcanos with broad tubes, or really thin ones.
 * Really big caledras in which there's the tubes or lakes.
 * underwater and glacial volcanos
 * lava lakes
 * Dead volcanos.
* Vents filled with volcanic gasses.
* Geysers, mudpots and hotsprings.

Volcanic activity could be influenced by magic, such as, of course, eruptions, but also in a fisher king like manner, where killing the dragon might actually kill the volcano they're in as well.

Now how does colored fire come into this? Well, colored fire on Earth is largely caused by gasses(white fire is the highest that is possible on earth, we know of stars that burn blue due what is suspected to be temperature, but such high temperatures aren't possible on earth as far as I can tell). And volcanos do indeed sometimes burn such gasses, such as the case of the Indonesian Ijen volcano(s), which has blue lava and flames due to sulphuric content.

Looking at the wikipedia page for pyrotechnic colorants, it seems the easiest way to deal with colored fire is to just add a tag for fire color to the materials, with it defaulting to red. Doing it this way will also ease up on any future attempts at implementing decorative fireworks.

Colored fire in turn can also be colored due magic, think Malificent and her green fire in Sleeping Beauty, and depending on how consistent the magic system is able to make symbolism it can provide valuable information to the player.

[Starver]

Aside from the fact that stars don't "burn" (more like fluorescent light tubes, though still not quite right), coloured fire based on elements could arise just from better chemistry-tags¹, overlaid upon the typical black-body², if the interface can handle such potentially-extended complexity of display.

But I think there's room to tweak the geoprocedural aspects of worldgen (or embark/adventure-tile loading) to provoke the volcano variation. Add analogues to ridge-push/slab-pull, subduction zones, transform faults, maybe? But not sure how compatible any of this is with the Spoiler-Space at the bottom of the world.

Also it'd need a huge rewrite of backwards-incompatibility. Not sure how far Toady would want to go for that.


¹ Ions noted as present in MATs being linked to raw-defined shortcuts to the relevant hue(s) for their atomic/group-emission spectra?

² A more temperature-related shift of dominant spectral hue.

[PatrikLundell]

Given that the map rewrite is going to break save compatibility anyway (and replace the Circus with something else and more varied thingie as well [assuming the world isn't completely mundane]), it's something that might be considered to provide support for, even if it's not actually implemented in more than a rudimentary fashion initially.
I probably wouldn't go the whole distance to plate tectonics (or the absence thereof, as e.g. Olympus Mons), because the worlds are going to be varied in a number of ways, and investing too deeply in the real world version might not be the right thing here.

Varying the magma channel layout would be nice, but would probably require that the feature logic is changed to be capable of placing features covering multiple Mid Level Tiles (assuming those are retained).

[thompson]

I'd like to see explosive eruptions that kill everyone and bury the surrounding area in ash. You could then reclaim the site later and excavate the remains.

Shouldn't be common, but adds to excitement of embarking near a volcano.

[therahedwig]

¹ Ions noted as present in MATs being linked to raw-defined shortcuts to the relevant hue(s) for their atomic/group-emission spectra?

² A more temperature-related shift of dominant spectral hue.

So, I obviously don't know much about chemistry and physics, but I do know way too much about computer color, and doing spectral calculations aren't trivial. Because typically 36 bands are used instead of just 3(so this eats ram), and converting those 36 bands to the required sRGB is, well, not impossible, but there's no algorithmic method to do so. People usually do precise measurements with a spectrometer and then make a normal photograph, and put both values into a look up table. It might become a really deep rabbit hole to get into for just wanting spiffy looking fires. (I have been contemplating this for a while, but couldn't come up with a place in dwarf fortress where regular rgb mixing wouldn't be a good compromise, beyond having towers made of diamond or zirconium, and seeing the light refract into its spectral components. This would be a super rare occurance, and well, would require directional light in df to begin with )

FWIW, Toady has mentioned that he wanted to try doing some tectonic plates stuff, but I don't know if this was just intended as a worldgen thing or how detailed it'd be.

Thompson: Yes, erruptions are something that a lot of people have suggested, and Toady has remarked it'd be a pity to have volcanos but no eruptions.

[Starver]

I was just thinking that if the raws were tagged that a given MAT was likely heavy in Copper(II) ions, and was now enflamed or caught in something else's flames then the raw-entry relating to Copper(II) would be used to make the result green (maybe more cyan if we are we sticking with basic principle of 4-bit RGBI?), either as the colour of the tile's graphic for smoke/flame or combined (temporally dithered?) with any of the other components there, like the orange (maybe) of Calcium(II), or whatever hue the temperature of that cell is raw-linked to be. But it'd be a rough'n'ready look-up cheat-sheety thing, not intricately calculated by modelling electron-shell levels and quanta.

Spoiler-ore might be especially interesting (by design, having nothing in reality to use as RL inspiration) in flame-colour influence. Spoiler-rock might even "burn black". Divine-MAT stuffs might inherit their properties from the sphere they associate with. And may be a little more adventurous, even. Imagine "singing metal" (music) in such a situation, for example. Or "blistered metal" (disease).

But, even without that, blue(-flamed, at least) magma could be a thing. Whether by temperature (necessarily redefining 'magmasafe') and/or material composition.

Maybe just a (magma)pipe-dream, but I put it out there as a suggestion. It could be pre-Rawed, even if it takes a while to get used properly in the UI. By way of sympathetic 3rd-party visualisers, maybe.

[Batgirl1]

I'd like to see explosive eruptions that kill everyone and bury the surrounding area in ash. You could then reclaim the site later and excavate the remains.

Shouldn't be common, but adds to excitement of embarking near a volcano.

Hmmm....When you say "kill everyone", do you mean unavoidably, like in the old "You dug too deep; Fort Over" kind of way?  Or just a whole bunch of collapsed tunnels, smoke, fire, etc. that an especially lucky player might miraculously survive?  Because the latter might be kind of fun!

[Starver]

Hmm...  "Rocks rise, everybody dies!"