It's my (admittedly limited) understanding that just the fact that it's a quad, should help with any performance issues, since you can devote a core entirely to the game. Anything else that's going on on your computer can be handled by the other three.
It's not optimal, ofcourse, because DF isn't multithreaded/multicore, but at the same speed, 4 cores should still outperform a single core, circumstantially, I would think. This should basically also be consistent with 2 cores, though, dependant ofcourse on what else you've got running.
With a dual core you've usually got enough crap filling up the other one that DF can get a lot of power- there's maybe another 30% of the processor in my computer not it use when DF is maxing out the one core. With a quad core DF can at best take up 25% of your power, which in this case looks to be a whole lot smaller than my 50%. He probably doesn't have so much crap going that the other three are really being utilized significantly.
Cats always land on their feet, right? So the impact should break their legs.
Having less body mass they can fall a really long way safely. The towers we drop goblins off of would still be too much but just a few z levels? No problem.
Funfact: cats really hate having their face just an inch off the ground when they're not standing on it.
Ok, sorta not so fun. More a side observation of trying to drop one low enough that it couldn't flip.
Note to self: To get Toady to answer your question immediatley, make it about questions.
It depends on the hight. To low and they cant turn around and to highthey break there bones. This said i want to see a cat fall from 2Z-levels unharmed.
...
Math time!
According to Wikipedia, the typical housecat has a mass between 4 and 5 kilograms, so let's assume 4.5 kilograms is the typical mass of our Dorf's cat. We know they don't seem to eat, so we don't need to take full/empty stomachs into the equation.
Let's assume that one Z level is around about 1.5 meters. Yes, I know that Toady hasn't given us any concrete figures on dimensions, and I think he said at one point that he dosen't really want to as that will cause all kinds of complications from the community, but we're going to have to make some assumptions. Sadly, real physics doesn't work on Z levels.
So we're talking about a three meter drop.
If we assume that the gravity works the same as normal, and that the planet has as much mass as our Earth, g should be about 9.8, and as v^2=u^2 + 2ax, where v is the final velocity, u is the initial velocity (here, zero), a is acceleration (here, 9.8 m/s^2 down), and x is the displacement (here, 3 meters down), the final velocity of this daring cat should be... the square root of 58.8 meters a second.
In other words, roughly 7.67 m/s, ignoring air resistance. So the cat's momentum is 34.51 kg m/s at impact.
Does anyone know the compressive strength of a cat's leg bone?
I'd imagine it's less than that but landing doesn't work like that as you use your leg as a spring to make that less of an impact force.
I've got no idea where to find spring measures for animal legs though. Probably better to just look for a site on the net that talks about how far cats can fall.
Air resistance?
No, the forces are still applied to your face. Actually, they aren't in new air bags, so let's go back to the cat, shall we?
The forces from the impact are still applied to the cat. The total force is still 58.8 newtons, but the cat is able to lengthen the time of the collision, lowering the peak force, so instead of breaking the cat's legs, the paws are deformed to the point where they might hurt a bit for the next couple of minutes. I don't know, I'm not a cat, but the forces are still all applied to the cat. Physics would break if they did not.
1 pound of force over 10000 seconds is very different from 10000 pounds of force over 1 second. Same total but "the force" dissipates in one but snaps a bone into splinters in the other.
Also, that cat bug got fixed suspiciously fast. I bet he just removed cats.
After what we've been posting about doing with them I can't blame him.