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[ZeroGravitas]

Nah, I kind of pulled that from nowhere (and my previous example).  Currently, dwarves sleep and eat on a seasonal scale, and each day is...god, I don't know how long, but I'd guess 10 seconds on average framerate.

At what frame-rate? It doesn't mean much to say that a day is 10 seconds if I'm playing at 12 fps and you're playing at 120.

[Pilsu]

We're trying to make years faster, not slower!

What makes you think that? No one has voiced such a desire thus far

[LegoLord]

We're trying to make years faster, not slower!

What makes you think that? No one has voiced such a desire thus far

So your saying you want to have to play for ages just to get through one year?  I know I don't.  Sowelu doesn't either.  Neither does profit, nor, it seems, anyway, Faces of Mu.  Go back and read their posts. 

[Pilsu]

You claimed we want faster years. What is actually being said is protests against making the years unbearably long

[LegoLord]

Faster to play, pilsu, not shorter in-game.  Talking about play time, not game time.

[Sowelu]

I think 30-60 minutes per season is a good target, but that's just me.  Of course it depends on how fast your machine runs.

[Granite26]

I also agree about the night shift being inappropriate.  It's an artifact of high capital costs and cheap lighting.

You're kidding, right?  Dwarves live underground.  Lighting costs the same at all times.  And space is (somewhat) at a premium underground.

erm... I mean the night shift in the real world is because capital (The big machines we use) is very expensive, and the best way to get your value is to have it running all the time, even if it means paying a high premium getting your workers to show up at 2am.  In a world with low capital costs (workshops are cheap), it doesn't make sense to pay your workers a premium to live off cycle with the rest of the world.

Lighting is the same way.  We went from lamp oil and candles being extremely expensive, to a sixty watt bulb costing pennies a day.  Free natural light is no longer a huge plus.

So far as dwarves go, you are correct, there is no reason for them to care about solar cycles other than making them easier for us to understand, and culturally fitting in with the world they associate with.  (plus, not all dwarves live underground)

Faster to play, pilsu, not shorter in-game.  Talking about play time, not game time.

Wait what?  You're not making a lot of sense.  Who cares how long a year takes to play?  A year is an arbitrary measurement of time for the dwarves.  Sowelu had it right in his desire for 'a certain rate of player decisions' being the core factor for the player's expectations.  The problem isn't years, it's how long a dwarf takes to walk somewhere versus anything else he does.  Making a dwarf walk twice as fast doesn't have to make it realistic, it just makes walking take up less of a dwarf's waking hours.  If I wanted to micromanage walking distances, I'd play Settlers.

I think 30-60 minutes per season is a good target, but that's just me.  Of course it depends on how fast your machine runs.

Yeah, real time to game time is kinda fuzzy at the best of times.  60 minutes would allow for both a caravan and a raid...

[Felblood]

The game gets debilitatingly slow on most machines.

Slowing the game down before that gets fixed is not acceptable.

[Granite26]

Nobody has suggested anything but an increase in the rate at which things happen in the game (for the player)...  It's just... the relative time they take, and how the time frame things happen in works

[Felblood]

We're trying to make years faster, not slower!

What makes you think that? No one has voiced such a desire thus far

Apparently, it needed to be said.

[tsen]

Sheesh, calm down.

Nobody is saying "make the game slower!" What's being suggested is a rebalance of walk-time vs task time so that players get more performance/decisions per unit of real time than before. Or at least a more pleasing rate of influx for said decisions.

Walking costs FPS. We all know it, we can all agree on it. So making walking faster lessens CPU load. Dwarves who are working in workshops take VASTLY less cycles than dwarves who are dodging kittens in small hallways. So if we bump up movement and increase work time, it's 1. more realistic and 2. better for us because our FPS will be higher. Right now task times are ridiculously short specifically *because* walk times are so long.

Even if a task generally ends up taking longer, subjectively, to the dwarves; we gain it back in lessened walking time which makes more sense. Besides, don't tell me you target moving dwarves anyway. We pause when we want to inspect specific dwarves.

Basically, the end result would be higher FPS, which means more things happening for us to respond to as players, which = more fun.

[LegoLord]

While that is true, tsen, according to this guy . . .

Hmm.

You know, I can actually kinda see this.

Five minute days could actually work, as long as there was a fast forward.  Mealtime would take about ten seconds.  Sleeping would be about two minutes.  There's still the problem where if each tile is a five-foot square (BIG assumption), my math puts dwarves at about 250 squares per real-life second.

Seriously...This is one big reason why space is all messed up in terms of scale, in these games...why characters in RTSes look about as tall as a house.  Even a dwarf can walk a couple-three miles in an hour.  The perimeter of a 6x6 fortress is about 1176 tiles, or (given that bad assumption) about one mile.  Do you really want your dwarves to be capable of making twenty laps around that map in a day, when each day is one or five minutes long?

Let's say scale is HORRIBLY fudged, and each square is fifty feet across.  Your dwarf can still wake up and walk the perimeter of a 6x6 map twice in one day.  In a five-minute-long day, that's going to seem very fast.  In a one-minute-long day, it's sheer madness.

And don't forget...if each day is one minute long, each year takes 5-6 hours of unpaused gameplay.  If each day is five minutes long, then playing a single game year will take longer than some console RPGs.  A five year fortress will take longer than the time I've wasted on Disgaea.

And yeah, it's kind of fun to see the detail...but I don't know if I want to sit down for an hour of Dwarf Fortress, and have less than a MONTH pass by.

Maybe we could compromise.  One sleeping+3 meals cycle, taking five minutes or so, could be one week?  One month?

. . . A realistic time scale, which is what the suggestion is, would make years take a long time to play, meaning fewer migrant waves, caravans, and sieges in the same amount of real time, and dwarves would be moving incredibly fast.  That is all I'm saying.  Yes I want my dwarves to be faster, but a realistic time scale would be more of a hindrance.  A timescale that had dwarves doing more in a day, that would be good, as long as it still took the same amount of real time to play through a year. 

If dwarves were raised to blur speed, where you could barely keep track of them, with the current year-to-real-time ratio, we still wouldn't have a realistic time scale.

[Jamuk]

Why do we need to see the dwarves working all of the time?
My idea is that dwarf movement is abstracted at some points so that CPU speeds aren't as much of an issue.

The 'high speed' button would create a list of indexed paths and determine how long each one would take based on things like traffic, and then abstract where the dwarves are at any specific moment until you decide to shut it off.
While it's on, you wouldn't see dwarves moving, maybe lines could be drawn to show the paths that are being used, color coded based on traffic level.

Of course, things like a dwarf getting crushed by a collapsing floor may have issues due to the fact that it doesn't have a position when it happens.  However, I doubt that a reasonable solution to that couldn't be found, such as keeping track of when and where a dwarf is standing while mining or hauling.

The whole reason we -can't- have higher speeds is due to pathing, so why not make it possible to remove it temporarily?  Think how much processor time you could save if not every dwarf had to move 1 tile at a time, and instead you kept track of how long until they reach the destination.

I bet that this will happen anyways when Toady starts implementing more abstraction as your fort grows larger into an empire, so it's not like it would be out of place.

[Felblood]

Wait...

Where in the world is there an indication that Toady is going to add more abstractions? The trend rather seems to go the other way.

--and rightfully so, in my opinion.

My fortresses grind to a halt at 100 dwarves, without excessive city planning and whatnot, but the solution is not to make them teleport to their destinations, particularly if you still want to cache and calculate all their pathing, which is what is the real problem anyway.

Half the fun is watching your little minions scurry around doing your bidding.

Plus, movement needs to run on a timescale similar to the one used by combat. Dwarves could stand to be considerably faster, but not too much faster.

[Silverionmox]

Half the fun is watching your little minions scurry around doing your bidding.

Plus, movement needs to run on a timescale similar to the one used by combat. Dwarves could stand to be considerably faster, but not too much faster.

I agree that that watching them is fun. But you're not watching all the time, and when you aren't, the game can use any remaining CPU power to speed up the hauling of stones etc. Variable speeds would allow us to slow down the real-time speed, because we can fast-forward the boring episodes. Slowing down the real-time speed is necessary if we want a realistic proportion of dwarf's time spent on working vs. walking. And when combat happens, speed can be set at a pace that makes everything easy to follow and control. If the dwarves are spending all summer long dying cloth and woodcutting, there's no need to control them as intensely as in combat.