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[Footkerchief]

New question.

Will the somewhat absurd tactic of making furniture out of ores be nerfed somehow, or will it still be a way to make high-value furniture?

It won't be nerfed at all.  You'll be able to nerf it the same way you can in the current version (by modding the material values).

I think he meant how making furniture from ore isn't worth less than making it from bars so you can get lots more native aluminum statues by making the raw economic stone available for the task.

Yes, I know that.  Part of the problem is that the ores have the same material value as the metal.  If you mod the ore to have a lower material value, making furniture from ore is then worth less than making it from bars.  Clear now?

[Shoku]

New question.

Will the somewhat absurd tactic of making furniture out of ores be nerfed somehow, or will it still be a way to make high-value furniture?

It won't be nerfed at all.  You'll be able to nerf it the same way you can in the current version (by modding the material values).

I think he meant how making furniture from ore isn't worth less than making it from bars so you can get lots more native aluminum statues by making the raw economic stone available for the task.

Yes, I know that.  Part of the problem is that the ores have the same material value as the metal.  If you mod the ore to have a lower material value, making furniture from ore is then worth less than making it from bars.  Clear now?

Ya, I'd been thinking the value of the bars was automatic for some reason.

[DreamThorn]

I missed the relativity discussion! 

Since I actually am a theoretical physicist, I live for this stuff.

Just so that nobody argues about it again, I explain it here:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The key to understanding special relativity is to use constant-velocity frames of reference (observers), and to realize that light in a vacuum travels at the same speed (c) in all of these reference frames.

If you move slower than light relative to an observer, they will see you flatten, increase in mass, travel slower than light and your clock slow down.  You will see the distance between yourself and your destination decrease (the universe flattens parallel to your velocity), everything else's mass increase and all other clocks slow down.  If you going fast enough, it will seem to you that you traveled faster than light.

If you go at the speed of light, an observers sees you as flat, unchanging, infinite mass and traveling at the speed of light.  (Photons don't seem to have infinite mass, because they have no rest mass.  Zero times infinity gives you the mass of the photon, which is why photons can have differing masses.)  You will seem to reach your destination instantly.  (No time to brake, though.)

If you go faster than light, stuff gets really weird overall.  It will seem to you as if you arrive before you depart, if you watch the clock, but your memories might not agree, because you might have turned into anti-matter and perceived time backwards.  It has been quite a while since I did the calculation, so I cannot quite remember the details.

If you have accelerating frames of reference, you can handle any acceleration as a type of gravity, or vice versa.  This is Einstein's principle of equivalence.

Hopefully we won't have any more relativity discussions in this thread.

[Baughn]

Doesn't your mass turn into an imaginary number at above light-speed? *whistle*

Also, I realize this requires general relativity, but what exactly does it mean that your mass increases relative to objects moving relative to you? How can you tell? If you collide with one, then it looks to you like the other object is heavier, and to the other like you're heavier, so.. um, huh?

[DreamThorn]

Ok, I answer two last questions.  Anybody else wants to know something, they should start a thread (and tell me about it), or go get a degree or something. 

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

A1:

If you go faster than the speed of light relative to an observer, you cannot be perceived by or affect that observer, but, if you could, you would seem to have negative mass, thus you would be antimatter.  (Antimatter seems to have opposite charges, but that is actually an illusion caused by having negative mass.)

Imaginary mass is required to go faster than light with less than infinite energy, but then going slower than light becomes a problem again.

A2:

The nature of the collision depends on relative momentum, so you have to multiply the increased mass by the relative velocity.  The relative speed is the same for both, so the amount of mass increase is the same for both, so the increase in relative momentum has the same factor, so for any observer the collision's intensity will increase with the same amount.

[Osmosis Jones]

Anyword from Toady? Since the last dev_now update it's been eerily quiet here. Where's our favourite toad? 

Spoiler: Offtopic science discussion (click to show/hide)

(Antimatter seems to have opposite charges, but that is actually an illusion caused by having negative mass.)

Wait, what? That goes against every text I've ever encountered on the subject. Literature reference please. Also, wouldn't that yield a negative gravitational response, which is notably not a feature of the existing theories of antimatter?

[jpwrunyan]

@shoku re: water

Basically, the game needs to be aware of the difference between a static body of water and a dynamic one.  As it is, it makes no distinction.  Once this sort of thing happens, then FPS would only get hurt when water starts to flow.  Furthermore, I don't see any other way around modelling beyond the tiles immediately adjacent to a tile of water.  Somehow the game needs to realize:  "Hey, I'm a 7/7 deep thingy of water next to a completely vacant thingy of space.  I better change that fast!  So let's see, where should I move to..." and kill the FPS if need be, at least it will only be killed for moment if the flow isn't into a chasm or some other endless extreme. 

It does that just fine. You can expect a large body of water to very quickly fill up a room you've accidentally carved into it and piercing an aquifer floods your fort at a suitable rate.

The slow water issue only shows up when you've got 7/7 next to a long stretch of 6/7 next to a long stretch of 5/7 and so on.

No, no it doesn't do it just fine.  Something that only works under certain circumstances and not under others is not working fine, in my opinion.  We're not disagreeing on the issues, of course.  Just apparently on whether we should be satisfied with the way it works (ie whether it is a problem or not).  A 7/7 tile should be able to "look ahead" a bit (beyond its immediately adjacent tiles) and more aggressively dump its content.  It would be interesting to experiment by surrounding a space of 7/7 water with floodgates and then open them simulateously to see if the 7/7 immediately becomes 7 1/7 tiles in an appropriately large room.  I am willing to bet 50 dwarfbucks it doesn't.  Yeah, a small room will flood *pretty* quickly, but a long channel simply will not.  Anyway, another problem is the way time is very relative in dwarf fortress.  But even given that, I say it should not take a full year for water to flow from one end of a channel to the other given uninterrupted input.  That's the basis of that argument.  If we can't agree on that, then there's no point arguing about flow and this other esoteric stuff.

Last time I checked U-bends didn't work perfectly, they only fill to one level under the source level.
To ilustrate this situation:

Code: [Select]

Source
   |
   V      
OOOOOO  OOOOOOOO
77777O  O.......  <-Safe area
OOOO7O  O7OOOOOO
   O7O  O7O
   O7OOOO7O
   O777777O
   OOOOOOOO

I tested with an underground pool, there were probably some strange things going on there...

Code: [Select]

OO77777777777777777OO
OOO7777777777777OOOOO
OO7777777777777777OOO
OOO7777777777777OO __←mined out with open (channeled floor)
OO77777777777777777OO
Anyway, got no love from that.  Unfortunately, I don't have the save anymore to go back and check.  So I might be wrong.

edit: mispelled "tiles"

[Sean Mirrsen]

Spoiler: Thread-within-a-thread! The discussion continues! (click to show/hide)

I believe we've yet to encounter a glob of antimatter of sufficient size to measure its gravitational pull, so I suspect all theories about its properties such as mass are very much useless at this point.

[Totaku]

Anyword from Toady? Since the last dev_now update it's been eerily quiet here. Where's our favourite toad? 

Well if you looked around the forum you'd noticed he's posted something in the last few days.

Long story short, he's getting better, but is still feeling the lingering after effects of the flu (Mainly fatigue and the chills). He's still got a little ways to full recovery, so we should be patient. It'll likely be a week or two before he's back on his feet to good enough condition to work on last few reminaing bits of the underground and then testing everything and fixing the small extra features.

Though I will point out if you look at his profile he was on last night. So chance are he's trying, but like I said, it'll take time since he's still recovering. He did say after all it may be about a few days to a week before he can do anything. So let's take our time, he's is recovering after all.

[Nadaka]

Time for a new round of predictions then? I predict February 14, unless toady finds a special someone to spend that particular day with in the meantime.

[Osmosis Jones]

Cheers Totaku.

Spoiler: Science! (click to show/hide)

I believe we've yet to encounter a glob of antimatter of sufficient size to measure its gravitational pull, so I suspect all theories about its properties such as mass are very much useless at this point.

That's just it though. Negative mass hasn't been empirically disproven, but nor is it the standard model. I was challenging DreamThorn on his claim because he states it as fact.


Man, this is what always happens when two scientists run into each other on the net

[mendonca]

Time for a new round of predictions then? I predict February 14, unless toady finds a special someone to spend that particular day with in the meantime.

Which,

(if the chinese cookery pamphlet that came out of my monthly food magazine subscription is anything to go by)

Is (Chinese) New Year!

Which means the new year predictions were right all along ... (!?)

[Sean Mirrsen]

Spoiler: More science! (click to show/hide)

When mankind harnesses fusion power, space travel, and macro-nano-construction, I propose the first project to be a Large Pluron Collider. Basically, build an accelerator ring so large it can smash Pluto and Charon together to see if they make an anti-planetoid as a result.

Megaproject ftw!

[shadow_slicer]

Spoiler: Quantum physics issues (click to show/hide)

If you go faster than the speed of light relative to an observer, you cannot be perceived by or affect that observer, but, if you could, you would seem to have negative mass, thus you would be antimatter.  (Antimatter seems to have opposite charges, but that is actually an illusion caused by having negative mass.)

That's not true. If you go faster than the speed of light, your effective mass becomes imaginary, not negative (due to the negative inside the square root in the gamma function). You can still affect an outside observer by sending radio signals, etc. (but only to observers lying in certain angles such that the projection of your velocity onto the vector from you to them has a magnitude less than the speed of light).
Further, antimatter does not have negative mass. The mass of antimatter (positrons and anti-protons) has been measured, found to be positive, and in agreement with theory. Negative mass implies gravitic repulsion. There are no known materials that have this property (except for "dark energy" which is simply some unknown force pushing the universe to expand faster than current theories suggest). Further, negative mass would imply negative energy, which seems absurd to me (though I guess it may yet exist as part of the bookkeeping the universe needs to do for hawking radiation, etc.).

[quinnr]

May I suggest the antimatter/lightspeed discussion get's its own thread?

It's interesting, but it doesn't belong in this thread.