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[Granite26]

Hours run into days, days run into months, months run into years.

There are a few problems with the way time is handled in fortress mode, specifically the way it interacts with the natural cycles.  I wanted to list a few in one place, to kind of put brackets on the problem.

1:  Hauling 101:  As it stands, it takes many times longer to haul the rock out of a shaft than it does to cut it into a useable tunnel.  Something like days or months to a few minutes.  That's like dynamite...

2:  Walking 101:  even in a well constructed mine it takes several days to walk to the bottom.  when mining out your map, it's more a factor of how far away from the fort than how hard the rock is.  I've had it so that a poorly constructed mine has dwarves mining 3 squares before they're done for the day because they had to walk that deep.

3:  Trading 101:  Traders take something like a week to cross the map to your depot, and it often takes a few weeks to carry everything to the depot from the storehouse right next to it.

4:  Combat 101:  Skirmishes takes weeks from when the creatures are first discovered to when dwarves first arrive on the scene.

5:  Food 101: A dwarf likely only has to eat once or twice a growing season, if that.  With travel times such as they are, walking back to the dining room from their work area can take longer than actually growing the food.

6:  Combat vs Trade:  As it stands, it's hard to manage time between sieges and ambushes and traders.  Ambushes arrive at the same time as caravans, and even if they didn't, the time an ambush takes and a caravan takes means overlap is almost inevitable.  Is these reasonable?

Hmm, I sound like I'm bitching more than I really am.  What I'm trying to do is establish that the time taken traveling, eating, and sleeping is on a completely different scale from the time taken mining, crafting, farming, and generally doing things in the world.  For sleeping and eating, this is countered by lowered need for food and long times between eating.   For walking, this isn't countered by anything, leading to the difficulties mentioned above (poor seperation between 'at war' and 'at peace' being the primary difficulty at the moment.)  With time the way it works now, we have only a single slot (winter) to insert a caravan before we have to start stacking them up.  It's impossible for farmers to train at arms during the winter and summer, because they're too short.  Etc etc.

The advantage to the compressed time structure is that everything happens at a human pace.  You can watch your mine being dug, while at the same time, the dwarves move at an observable pace.

It just feels like we're bumping up against the limitations of the simulation without some ability to dilate the timeframes some.  (no ability to war in the summer and return home for the harvest, for example.)

[Pilsu]

I agree, DF currently makes The Sims days seem long

On the other hand, while slow years sate the desire for realism, they probably also make the game exceedingly tedious to actually play. For instance, goblins will eventually actually come from a pool of adults. Yeah, 12 years between sieges. That will be annoying as is, let alone if the years took a period of time that actually feels significant

I do think years should be longer as they just fly by as is and absolutely destroy races that don't live for 200 but you do need action for it to work

[Silverionmox]

The advantage to the compressed time structure is that everything happens at a human pace.  You can watch your mine being dug, while at the same time, the dwarves move at an observable pace.

That's important for a game. To have our cake and eat it too, we should have a fast forward button. Important events would still pause it.

[Sowelu]

Fast forward button is a bad, bad idea.  You want your simulation to run at close to the maximum speed whenever possible.  Otherwise, you COULD be spending more CPU cycles to make the game more awesome, but you aren't, because you're running too slow.

Alternately you could simulate with less detail at higher speeds but that's a clear non-starter, you wind up with quantum effects (things work different at different speeds).

See, I think players expect to do a certain amount of managing per minute of gameplay.  If you slow down the timescale too much, dwarves start taking a lot longer to mine out each wall, and that's okay...but it stops being a game.  Let's say an adept miner takes one workday to mine out ten wall sections, or an adept mason takes one workday to build ten wall sections.  Maybe one full day takes one minute.  In the early game, would you be happy seeing your adept miner take a full ten minutes just to dig out your starting bedrooms?  Still, 10 tiles a day would mean he could mine out 3650 tiles a year.  That's more than a third of a 2x2 embark zone!  You could mine out ALL the space under a 2x2 embark range in just under 40 dwarf labor years...Considering we're not even talking legendaries, that's pretty fast.

At the same time, if one full day is one minute...That's 2.5 seconds per game hour.  One second is 24 game-minutes!  Your dwarves will be BOOKING it around the fortress.  NYOW.  Superdwarf!

So for this hypothetical time scale of '1 minute = 1 game day' and '10 mined tiles = 1 game day', I think I just established that dwarves will run too fast (for the user), that gameplay will proceed too slow (for the user), and that the dwarves might actually be working too fast (for logic's sake).  If you tweak the numbers in ANY direction, it gets even worse.

[Silverionmox]

Fast forward button is a bad, bad idea.  You want your simulation to run at close to the maximum speed whenever possible.  Otherwise, you COULD be spending more CPU cycles to make the game more awesome, but you aren't, because you're running too slow.

I don't. I'd rather have excess CPU power during the 90% of the game in which not much happens (which can then be fast forwarded, if desired) in exchange for a smooth transition when something.. invasive manifests itself. Then, CPU should run at a maximum; but even that maximum will be different for different players and times, so it's not worth coding with a certain CPU limit in mind.

See, I think players expect to do a certain amount of managing per minute of gameplay.

People who are playing at 12 FPS don't And people do play at 12 FPS. DF can run in the background, slowly, or ASAP in fast forward until something happens. It makes no sense to arbitrarily make things happen at short intervals to suit a particular playing style.

[Felblood]

The time scale is totally out of whack, and it's not an easy task to make a system that is both realistic and fun.

Increasing the movement speeds of all dwarves, even just completely escape the fact that a battle involving twelve soldiers can last for a week, even if all the do is rush each other and start stabbing.

As the game gets more complex and there is more to do in the course of a typical week, I can see making months longer without slowing down the dwarves' movements, so the dwarves can get more of that done in a typical week.

I can see players with high performance machines wanting to be able to toggle the FPS cap, say between 120 for dull winters and 60 for more interesting times, without exiting, but I doubt it's a much demanded feature, with the rarity of CPUs that have both the power and the structure to run DF well.

[Warlord255]

Abstraction and gameplay mechanics, mate.

Keep the same work rate we have now and make days 10% longer.

[PTTG??]

So for this hypothetical time scale of '1 minute = 1 game day' and '10 mined tiles = 1 game day', I think I just established that dwarves will run too fast (for the user), that gameplay will proceed too slow (for the user), and that the dwarves might actually be working too fast (for logic's sake).  If you tweak the numbers in ANY direction, it gets even worse.

Well, that's you're opinion. I for one would find that rather interesting... you'd need to depart with several miners to really expect great construction. Just picture the Five Man Band entering the Dwarven hall through the great, 60-foot tall archways and saying "how did they do this?", with the Dwarf saying "Urist dug the doorway out in ten minutes."

I would say that 10 tiles a day and 1 minute a day works really well, possibly with an even longer day. You'd just have to adjust to dwarves not tunneling through rock like butter.

Such a system gives you some openings for a lot of new behavior, such as mealtimes (so that if you have a 100-table great hall, more tables will be used other than the first two on the row) night watches (if most of the dwarves are asleep at the moment, a few guards keeping eye out for goblins would be a good idea), cleaning and moving possessions (dwarves will have time to put clothing away and clean their rooms), and social behaviors in general (a dwarf taking an evening to woo a she-dwarf, talk to friends, go for a walk, read books, shop for crafts, stalk grudges...).

Fast forward button is a bad, bad idea.  You want your simulation to run at close to the maximum speed whenever possible.  Otherwise, you COULD be spending more CPU cycles to make the game more awesome, but you aren't, because you're running too slow.

You are absolutely right. Which is why I propose the opposite: A Real Time Button. Normally, dwarves flit about going about their days at a time, slowly chipping away at tasked digging areas, crafting fine armor over months of labor that to you take only minutes. Then, a goblin siege appears! You slow time and see the progression of time at a reasonable pace, and you can put crossbowdwarves up in the fortifications and order the woodcutters inside and see this happen at a realistic pace. This has the advantage that you can't, for instance, forge 3 suits of armor and weapons and send out reinforcements in the time it takes for one battle, but said battle doesn't take place in the blink of an eye.

Potentially, this could use a more sophisticated AI for combat that could take advantage of the more open cycles.

EDIT: Ah, Felblood, very much what I was thinking.

[Granite26]

The advantage to the compressed time structure is that everything happens at a human pace.  You can watch your mine being dug, while at the same time, the dwarves move at an observable pace.

See, I think players expect to do a certain amount of managing per minute of gameplay.  If you slow down the timescale too much, dwarves start taking a lot longer to mine out each wall, and that's okay...but it stops being a game. 

Tomayto, Tomahto...

Although I don't think it means there's no better way.

[Sowelu]

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?

[Warlord255]

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?

Is the one-minute day the timescale we have now?

[Sowelu]

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.

[LegoLord]

The thing is . . . a realistic time scale would make the game take to0 long to play, and the dwarves too difficult to keep track of.  It's okay to have an unrealistic time scale; it is a game, after all, and they are meant to be fun and playable, not something you need to pause every second and spend a whole month on just to get a little bit of progress.

[Pilsu]

Well it is a fantasy world, I can picture a month having less than 30 night/day cycles. Now, I don't pretend to know how long weeks are right now on "average" CPU speed or how long dwarves need to snooze but you could have short of 2 weeks of daytime with a night to top it off. Alternatively, 4 "days" per month

At any rate, I'd like to see years to be twice as long as they are now and the ability to be sieged by and trade with all the civs at once. Preferably space the caravans out a bit so they don't all show up in autumn. While having multiple civs at once is unstable to generate at best, it would certainly provide you with activity should all the civs survive. They'd need quite the breeding stock to maintain yearly sieges though, even if they concentrate their efforts on you. The realism thing really gets in the way of gameplay when enemies are no longer randomly generated. Being able to place (name?) the civs' sites would probably help spread it out a bit so alliances don't clash at the same forest retreat every damn time

[Yourself]

Five minute days could actually work

With a year that's 4 weeks long (one for each season), it'd take 28 hours of gameplay for a baby to grow into a peasant (12 is the age of adulthood, isn't it?  I can't remember).