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[profit]

Maybe 5 minute week.. but not a 5 minute day... Course, I have a mega fortress where my frame rate falls sometimes to 2 FPS.  so it is going 50X slower than someone playing at 100fps, but... still I would prefer to have a week acting like a single day in dwarf fortress, and just have the time vanish for the sake of the story line.

In age of empires, your units never seem to go faster than average walking speed, yet it covers hundreds of years of history.

In Civ 4 your fastest sea units would take 30 years to circumnavigate the  larger more detailed globes

We accept time compression for the sake of playability.

I SERIOUSLY doubt we would accept things going much slower.

* already my children are set to grow up after 1 year, and still births are an extremely trivial part of fortress growth.

Master of Orion 3 they traded fun in for realism.    It was very realistic.  It was also no fun.  *The ruining of the franchise was probably missed by a lot of you as it was such a massive failure... I bet a significant portion of you have never actually played master of Orion 3, only the first 2.

[Faces of Mu]

The OP makes some good points. I'm not sure what's been suggested, tho.


My two cents is the timescale of the Broker. When you say "Broker requested at depot", that only safety, eating and sleeping be the only other things that broker does and he gets his sorry ass to the depot NEOW!!
As it is in my current fort -which strangely was not always what it was, I don't know what changed-, my broker never arrives at the depot because of other tasks he is doing. Even when I turn all his duties off -which I shouldn't have to do- he starts hauling items to the depot, which he should be excluded from having to do. If I want him to haul, then I wouldn't request that he come trade at the depot.

Perhaps my suggestion in more in line with dwarf priorities suggestions than this timelines one.

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.

/signed.

[Felblood]

Making the timescale perfectly realistic is, of course, unthinkable. You can't play a hundred years of history in real time.

However, the timescale could be improved in a lot of ways.

Uneventful years either fly by, or drag by, depending of your CPU limitations.

In eventful years, nothing get's done, because it takes three days to walk across the courtyard.

The broker should not need to spend an entire month organizing his sock drawer, every fall.

If dwarves walked just slightly faster, so hauling and commuting took a smaller percentage of their day, cities would run more smoothly, and weirdness, like brokers stopping to talk to a friend and losing a month, would be reduced. You don't want them zipping around too fast to track, you just want them to reach their destinations in reasonable amounts of time. As dwarves spend a smaller percentage of time traveling, hallway congestion based FPS loss, will be mitigated slightly.

A day/night cycle would be nice, but it would have to overlay the current seasonal scale, instead of trying to fit within it. The time of day isn't much use, if the day is thirty seconds long.

[Warlord255]

Master of Orion 3 they traded fun in for realism.    It was very realistic.  It was also no fun.  *The ruining of the franchise was probably missed by a lot of you as it was such a massive failure... I bet a significant portion of you have never actually played master of Orion 3, only the first 2.

I tried 3 and felt the heartbreak. It was, quite literally, Spreadsheets In Space.

TANGENT: Let's do some math!

Assume we have a ~360 day year. If months are 28 days (4 solid weeks) rather than 30, it's 336, but we use the former number for smoothness.

If a day is 30 seconds (on the average system), then a year takes 3 hours of gameplay, adding another hour at LEAST for paused planning/menu time. So, 4 hours.

If a day is made to be 1 minute (on an average system; or, at least, double the current day length), then a year takes 6 hours of gameplay, plus the same amount of menu time.

The question, of course, is how the productivity of forts might be affected; either the benchmark of an X-year fortress changes (a year's worth of work is more) or efforts are made more trivial (what once took ten years takes only five now).

[Granite26]

The OP makes some good points. I'm not sure what's been suggested, tho.

Nothing really,  I just wanted to open up a discussion about the effects that timescale were having on the game, specifically in the problem areas I mentioned.  Again.  Right now, dwarves walk around at a visually apealing rate, and tasks get accomplished at a visually appealing rate.  These are both good things, but they come at the cost of completely abstracting out the day/night cycle, and loading up virtually all tasks with significant 'walk time' costs.

It makes balancing tasks difficult, because every task has the same cost: Travel Time.  The time cost of doing the task itself becomes insignificant.  Mining a square takes the same time as crafting a masterwork sword takes the same time as making a sandwich takes as long as a swordfight between your champion and a goblin invader.

As the simulation gets more advanced, it's going to be harder and harder to align all these things.  That I know of, we've got two sliders to work with.  How fast dwarves walk, and how fast dwarves accomplish tasks.  Tweaking those will yield some sort of results, maybe better ones.

Anybody have any other ideas about reducing the appararent relation?

[PTTG??]

I'm open to week compression, where one week is compressed into one day of activity.

[Felblood]

The trouble is, if we get  day/night cycle, we're gong to need to be able to split up our dwarves into shifts, so as to cut down on rush hour traffic.

This gives us some nice advantages, in the area of keeping he social circles separate, since people who work different shifts won't take many breaks at the same time. However, I bet I'd be a pain to code.

Right now, dwarves sleep when they get tired and eat when they get hungry. We're told that dwarves will soon finish their current tasks, before going to sate their needs, which will cut down on some of this, particularly with the broker.

[Pilsu]

14th century societies didn't have work shifts, that's a strictly modern concept. We already have a 24/7 traffic going on and it works just fine

All that's really needed is a night guard system and an alarm system to get dwarves up if there's an emergency at night. Emergency labor could override evening break status but make dwarves seriously ornery


This could mesh well with dwarves getting tired from work. Labor would accumulate during the day, making the dwarves take the rest of the day off. Dwarves that do nothing would be available all day. Waking up in the morning would reset the counter. Powergamers could simply mod the amount of points accumulated per task, making dwarves work all day

[Granite26]

This could mesh well with dwarves getting tired from work. Labor would accumulate during the day, making the dwarves take the rest of the day off. Dwarves that do nothing would be available all day. Waking up in the morning would reset the counter. Powergamers could simply mod the amount of points accumulated per task, making dwarves work all day

Something like this sounds appropriate.

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

I'll add 'lack of sleep or eating cycles' as an official cost of the extant timescale

[bjlong]

One thing that might fix this is making everything move absurdly fast in Fortress mode, with the ability to run the simulation much slower, say a tick per second, to watch/manage battles. Tasks would take the same amount of time. Maybe except for eating.

[Granite26]

One thing that might fix this is making everything move absurdly fast in Fortress mode, with the ability to run the simulation much slower, say a tick per second, to watch/manage battles. Tasks would take the same amount of time. Maybe except for eating.

But then dwarves are effectively teleporting.

And the speed (FPS) is governed in large part by pathfinding and flows (things that happen on the fast time scale)

[bjlong]

Yes, I understand your first thought, but think about it. We have miners digging through things like they're just taking a stroll. Instead of rescaling all tasks, we could rescale just walking and make things a lot more intuitive.

The FPS stuff is a technical issue I have no clue about. Feel free to discount my suggestion because of it.

[Granite26]

I'm trying to avoid discussions of relative merits...  My druthers at this point lean towards doubling walking speed...

[Sowelu]

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.

[LegoLord]

Excuse me, but for double walking speed to make it a realistic time scale, one year would have to take an unholy amount of time to play. 

For an accurate time scale, playing through a year would take too long, and dwarves would move faster than you can manage, as I said before.  Don't ask me for the numbers, they've already been put forth in this thread.  4 hours for one year?!  We're trying to make years faster, not slower!  I have enough trouble tracking dwarves in a new fort as is!  We don't need this!  It is unimportant!  It slows things down!