Ah yes, *that*. I had imagined a re-writing of the current fluid dynamics. ...
Why would water without any pressure move fast?
But ya, if there was some way to get it to teleport at maybe 3 instead of 7 but stop once it was level-ish the slowly widening slopes of water wouldn't stick out as much.
Your hopes are a bit screwy though as hydraulics dudes probably don't have an especially good way of representing water in tiles like these.
That and Toady, being a mathematic professor, probably understand hydraulic sufficiently. The only difficulty facing him is HOW to implement hydraulic into Dwarf Fortress without the FPS being shot to hell.
Remember, one of the most difficult problem for computer to simulate is fluid dynamics (if you try to do it realistically).
Though I think the current issue with Dwarf Fortress' fluid dynamic is that water seems to have a really high viscosity (which will result in water flowing really slow down a channel). Of course, this may be an artifact of the fluid being represented in 1/7 chunks (low viscosity fluid will spread to a thin film rapidly, while tracking it in 1/7 chunk inherently slows it's rate of spread).
If you've watched the numbers dance very much it's clear that the units glide around on top of the next layer below them as a group but in a random sort of direction unless they hit a spot two digits lower at which case they fall down to that level and possibly continue the process. The teleport behavior requires actual pathing so it's slower but this non-wander behavior gives the kind of constant directional progress we want.
...
Exactly.
Anyway, I was operating under the assumption that if Toady were able to do it himself and it were easy, he would have already. I hadn't thought of the performance issue, but there are still some odd properties with water that come about because of innaccurate simulation (again, my presumption).
For example:
1) if you channel into the floor and it has access to a larger body of water above it, nothing happens. So a toilet-like U-bend (S-bend?) isn't possible.
The u bend was one of the first things checked to see if water pressure worked. I guess maybe if you've got water that isn't moving and channel into it it might not notice right away but-
One of the performance safety mechanisms in place is that water will only teleport to lower levels. Otherwise you might get a single 1/7 pathing back and forth over the whole map endlessly. One tile is obviously not that scary but you know it's obviously not going to be just one tile often and a whole ocean of these would be awful.
2) if you channel a one tile access to a river, split access into 4 sub-channels, let those channels dump into a tube which has a one tile exit for the water at the bottom, and your tube overflows. I guess because the 4-splits serves to suck more water from the river? Pretty sure that's not right.
There aren't really flow rates for pressure water. It just zips about looking for the closest available spot to go.
3) again, you can have a 7-tile of water back-logged up a 1-tile channel accross the map and have it dump into a huge reservoir. Water will actually seep into the ground and dry up before the reservoir fills, if it ever fills. The water should flow faster in the channel and slow down once it gets into to the reservoir. Pretty sure this is also not the case.
It is the case if you've got pressure, meaning that the source water is above the channel.
Perhaps you guys are right and its not a matter of expertise. Either way, it doesn't seem to be working properly. If I am wrong and water actually does work that way in large quantities, by all means disabuse me of my misconceptions. But I am pretty sure (from an interview I read) that Shoku's got it right.
The problem is mostly only with water on the same layer. You can use things like pumps to force it to be more like the unleashed currents and with smart design it won't flood your fort.
One thing though is that for pressure water won't path through diagonals so if you absolutely must have the river divert underground and you want to give your dwarves wells or whatever from it just make the water move diagonally into them and it will do so at the relatively slow speed.
However, as it stands most users consider water to be too big a system drain and hate having sites with certain features, such as the end of underground rivers.I suppose one way to make water move faster would be if 1/7 water flowed around like higher levels did. But then you might get a little puddle of water randomly skittering about like a living thing and muddying an entire level. But i think it would end up flowing faster.
Only slightly. The problem is how you have to wait for a 7/7 to find a tile that is 5/7 in order for it to drop down. This is easy and likely very close to a large group of 7/7 tiles but once you've stretched out a long way a 7/7 will have to wander a really long way to get there and the probability of that happening goes way down.
7/7 water would turn into 7x1/7 water faster if the 1/7 water was free to flow away because 2/7 water would not have to randomly walk all the way to the edge of the 1/7 water before it fell off.
Look closely at where you've got your 2/7s and 3/7s. Even with the 2's moving around you still don't get many 1/7s right up against your 3/7s.
But even so you'd only improve things by one seventh like that and that wouldn't be much.
Actually, from the way I understand it, things at/near the speed of light have time slow down relative to everything else around them. So it would be more like you'd be able to throw a rock, and then kill a dragon 1000 years in the future...
Well no, relativity means that time varies based on how fast you're traveling, or rather that light always looks like it's going the same speed.
So if you threw a dwarf at light speed he might think he had traveled for one second but to anyone else they'd see him having been shooting along for centuries. The thing is if he shot off a beam of light ahead of himself he'd see it go off just light light regularly does but if he shot a beam of light behind himself... he'd see it go off just like it regularly does. You'd think it would have to go slower ehind him or faster in front but the actual distance he's seeing gets strange as things behind him stretch out and thing ahead compact.
So what I'm getting at is that if you threw a dwarf and a dragon at light speed they could throw rocks that would kill each other 1000 years in our future.
Btw, the above sentence made me realize why a ship on conventional propulsion will never accelerate beyond lightspeed. Acceleration being velocity increase with time, say meters/second^2, there will be no way to accelerate when time stops for you. If you accelerate at meter/eternity^2, you don't accelerate.
Well there's an issue before that in that when you get things close to the speed of light pushing on them stops making them go faster and starts making them heavier. Eventually right up near the speed of light you'd need all the energy in the universe just to get half of the remaining difference between your speed and the speed of light.
The rock would perceive itself to be traveling through the universe at a speed greater than that of light
You're missing important information or talking about behavior you can't possibly have examples of. At the exact speed of light the light headed away from it would never get away so there'd only be some inbound light but is that really worth describing as observing yourself to be traveling beyond the speed of light?
My fault everyone, sorry.
You're a bad person and you should feel bad.
You should be sorry for giving them this kind of ammunition. Remember folks, within Dwarf Fortress, there is no lightspeed or relativity. Things can fly as fast as they want.
That said, I do hope it will still be possible to somehow throw mundane objects with such speed as to cause grievous bodily harm, just old time's sake.
Well I'm sure you could just mod the attribute ranges for dwarves to allow it.
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