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[Footkerchief]

Isn't there a performance loss of a Multicore game forced to use a single core processor?

Yes, as he said, a truly insignificant one (unless the program was specifically written to do certain tasks unusually badly).

[MrWiggles]

Meh screw multicores.

You don't see the advantages?  Temperature, pressure, AI, and path finding could really use separate threads.

No, I just can't afford a multi-core processor.

Also for a problem I have with df:

Immigrants.

I understand the need for having them, but the game really does them poorly, You just get settled in to a new fort, preparing to line up stuff and BOOM 20-30 dwarves come crashing your party, you now have to abandon what you were doing to screw with them, you have to build quarters, make sure you have enough food, and mostly they are just a pain with the only solution being Nazi style death rooms, or messing with the init every time you want to allow more dwarves to join your fort.

There really just needs to be a way to control them, like having migrant group leaders coming to you to request joining your fort, and leaving when you say no. I know eventually migrants will be the migrant groups you see on the world map so that should help a bit, especially if that 20-30 dwarf group that wants to join you gets attacked by goblins and ends up around 5 when they get to your fort.

How weird, that there out cry for challenge, but when a challenge presented in the game (the immigrants), is asked to be removed, or downgraded.

It make sense, that the player can only indirectly affect immigrants. And there more to be done with this, sure. Like promoting for certain profession of possibly certain skill level, with privileges, like a nice room.

Though I don't think its outlandish to turn down dwarfs, as it doesn't feel out of turn, but in certain light it seems inappropriate for it to happen. The dorfs, don't seem to be a 'only for me' type, (cept for the nobles, oddly), it would seem odd that a dwarven leader would admit that his fortress, isn't able to handle another 20 dorfs.

Its the thrown monkey wrenches that provide contrast for the game, the conflict. That test your mgm. skills and multitasking skills.

Do I need more apartments for the dorf, or getting that fortification up more important? A partially unexpected immigrant wave is neat. I wish there were similar challenges. Like bad crop seasons, or serve inclement weather. Imagine, the dorfs getting heat stroke from heat waves in the desert, and having to order them inside until it passes.  Or a tornado. Tornado that happens during a siege. I got side tracked.

[Rilder]

How weird, that there out cry for challenge, but when a challenge presented in the game (the immigrants), is asked to be removed, or downgraded.

Well I prefer to turtle, and when I'm moseying around with a few dwarves and suddenly I'm having to deal with 30 some dwarves when I've not even adapted to 7 it just ruins that fort for me, makes me want to just abandon that fort, no matter how much I liked it.

[Hydra]

The dev issue is really that Toady likes to code on what interests him.  That's all well and good to some extent, but if he wants to keep the money flowing, he's going to have to focus on the needs of the user base at some point.

Yup, and I think that's kind of where the frustrations I see with some posters come from. DF is a truly brilliant game, I can't remember having seen this depth in a game anywhere. But there are also HUGE gaps in usability which really should not take long solve. A few examples:

- Farming: at the moment you either have no plump helmets, or you have too many of them. I personally would like to be able set orders to my dwarves that they can store a max number of 900 plant items. That they can auto-brew up to 900 drinks. And auto-cook up to 900 lavish meals. The job manager could be easily extended to do this. Manually managing the amount of plump helmets so they don't fill up all available barrels is annoying. Sure, you can limit stockpiles (I've done this myself) but then you end up with millions of rotting plump helmets untill you turn the farms off. It's the type of micromanagement I don't like.

- Training soldiers. At the moment there's basically a 'cheat' with wrestlers training super fast, but sparring should not be 'dangerous'. In sparring you don't hurt each other. Maybe some bruises, but no chopped off limbs.

- Immigrants: I like immigrants, but I would really prefer them all to be peasants really. give me the option to have all labors turned off by default for them. And/or give me a dwarven brainwash machine that lets me reset his "Soapmaking" skill to -1.

- Partying/sleeping: I want to be able to turn it off. The moment I define a statue garder or whatever, dwarves with no current task start to party. I am happy to allow them some fun, but they should stop partying the moment I have a task for them. ESPECIALLY if there is a siege or ambush and the dwarf in question is in the military. Same goes for sleep and sieges. I don't care if a dwarf wants to nap, we're under siege. Most annoying thing is that if the squad leader is sleeping, the whole squad is useless.

- More influence in world/embark generation. To be honest, I don't care that much about an entire world being generated when it's impossible for me to find a site with HFS, water, trees, magma, sand, flux and an abyss. I'd rather have the option to just generate the 'perfect' 6x6 embark.

- Saving. It's all fine and dandy that Toady doesn't like save-scrumming, but different people play the game for different reasons. If I want to be able to auto-save every 10 minutes and go back to a previous save when I screwed up for some reason, why not let me? I've spend days playing my current fortress. If I screw up and unleash a torrent of lava at the fortress, I don't go "Okay, losing is fun, let's start over". No, I go "Screw this retarded game" and go play something else. Losing is fun? No, disasters are fun, as long as you can go back to a previous save.

These are just a few annoyances, but I think the focus should now be with improving some of these big gaps there are instead of more bodyparts and stuff. I'm a programmer myself, and I totally understand why he prefers to do fun stuff, and interface work isn't 'fun', but currently there are still some issues with the game that prevent it from becoming a huge hit.

[codezero]

@Hydra

You'll like the next release then, 'cause Toady just so happens to be working on most of the stuff you just mentioned.

-Training soldiers. I think that cheat is being handled, with the new attribute system going in.

-Sleeping. It will no longer matter if the leader is sleeping or not with a more individual based squad.

-More influence on world, embark - The underground layers are getting a big ramp up in diversity, so they'll be feature rich. This I believe was strongly influenced by the eternal suggestions voting.

It's all mentioned in the dev notes and the 'list of remaining items' thread in this subforum.

[CynicalRyan]

Isn't there a performance loss of a Multicore game forced to use a single core processor?

First, a clarification: There is no such thing as a "multicore game". There can be, however, such a thing as a multi-*threaded game*. To explain: A program can, in theory, be broken down into multiple parts, that can do stuff independently. In the example of Dwarf Fortress: You could have a thread drawing the UI, another thread doing the AI, another thread doing world stuff (like the migrations, or armies in the background).

My apologies for my anal-retentiveness in this regard, but it is an important difference.

Now to answer your question:
Short answer: No.

Optional, long answer: It depends.

Multi-threaded applications, and in particular games, require a lot of concurrency (meaning that the threads do stuff on their own, while using data from other threads). If you do that wrong, you get all sorts of interesting effects, mostly manifesting in crashes. Concurrency is *hard*. It is even harder in languages like C/++, which, IIRC, is used to write Dwarf Fortress.

Then, there is the problem of scheduling. Let's say each CPU (let's count each core as its own CPU, for simplicity's sake), can do n+1 threads, where "n" is the number of cores, without performance loss. If you start to execute n+m threads, where "m" is the number of threads a program has, you get more cache misses (meaning that data has to be gotten from a slower memory, which takes longer), more page faults (data isn't in memory, but paged to disk, taking very long to load, even multiple seconds, which is *ages* for even a Pentium II CPU), and of course scheduling conflicts (i.e. the OS can't assign all threads the time they actually need, and they get thrown out of the CPU, and another thread gets the CPU for a time, needing access to the cache, and so on).

Of course, *any* and *all* modern operating systems are able to do multi-tasking, and can thus handle many threads at once. So, as long as the programs are half-way decently written, there should be no noticable effect in performance, while a computer with a multi-core CPU enjoys the benefits of more performance.

Now, here is the really strange issue: Even if you have a single-core CPU, the lack of threads can actually seem like the application is actually slower. You can notice that with Dwarf Fortress: During saving and loading, sometimes the screen stops updating: That makes it *seem* like the application is slower, when in effect it just means that an application is very busy.

Whence the advice to application developers to use two threads when they write their spreadsheet application: An UI thread, and a so-called worker thread. The UI thread keeps the screen updated and semi-responsive, while the worker=thread is, well, working.

Clear as mud, innit?

Edit: Clarity and an apology for possible perceived rudeness/condescending attitude.

[Volfram]

How weird, that there out cry for challenge, but when a challenge presented in the game (the immigrants), is asked to be removed, or downgraded.

Well I prefer to turtle, and when I'm moseying around with a few dwarves and suddenly I'm having to deal with 30 some dwarves when I've not even adapted to 7 it just ruins that fort for me, makes me want to just abandon that fort, no matter how much I liked it.

Then don't let 'em in.  Nobody knows them yet, so you won't get any tantruming when they starve to death.

[Shurikane]

A DF player out to choose his own challenge, and some will want more in one area and less than another.

Telling people to deal with what they are given goes against the semi-sandbox principle that Dwarf Fortress embodies in the first place.

[Kazindir]

A DF player out to choose his own challenge, and some will want more in one area and less than another.

Telling people to deal with what they are given goes against the semi-sandbox principle that Dwarf Fortress embodies in the first place.

I disagree and take an almost diametrically opposed view. Dealing with what you are given is an essential part of DF and any sandbox style game. What is left up to you is exactly how you deal with what your given.

To use the sandbox analogy, what you are given is the sand in the box. What you do with the sand with the tools you have available is up to you, as the last few posts have ably demonstrated, coming up with all sorts of approproaches to dealing with the immigrant "sand".

[Neonivek]

Sand-box is starting to become a scewed word.

It more or less refers to the freedom to chose the orders of your actions within an unconstrained system (uhh I think my definition is off) usually without a explicit goals.

Sandboxes can have goals, difficulty, and challenges outside the player's control.

[Shurikane]

I disagree and take an almost diametrically opposed view. Dealing with what you are given is an essential part of DF and any sandbox style game. What is left up to you is exactly how you deal with what your given.

To use the sandbox analogy, what you are given is the sand in the box. What you do with the sand with the tools you have available is up to you, as the last few posts have ably demonstrated, coming up with all sorts of approproaches to dealing with the immigrant "sand".

But isn't it more useful to let the user have the option rather than not?

In other words: I can let the player choose to have sieges or not.  If I make the choice available, it doesn't mean that I disable sieges outright, but that I allow the player to turn them off if he wishes so.  It does not affect siege-lovers in any way whatsoever.

That sort of thing happens in several civ/strategy games.  You can choose whether resources are abundant or scarce, if the economy is simplified or complex, etc.  You choose your own game parameters to suit your playstyle and your goals.  If you don't want to get bogged down by food management, you set it to its simplest form so you don't have to worry about it.  If you want a gritty challenge, you kick every difficulty variables to the maximum levels.  Take it a step further: world building already does that job to a certain extent, allowing the player to make the environment full of water, or magma or what have you.

Otherwise, if you set absolutely everything in stone, then you're filling a niche of only those people who like that playstyle - and if there's a single turnoff in the parameters that the devs have set, then that player is lost, lacking the option to change that parameter to suit his playstyle.

[CynicalRyan]

But isn't it more useful to let the user have the option rather than not?

No.

In other words: I can let the player choose to have sieges or not.  If I make the choice available, it doesn't mean that I disable sieges outright, but that I allow the player to turn them off if he wishes so.  It does not affect siege-lovers in any way whatsoever.

I sure like to play Warcraft II. But I'd like to remove the Orcs, because their attacks wreck my nice bases all the time.

That sort of thing happens in several civ/strategy games.  You can choose whether resources are abundant or scarce, if the economy is simplified or complex, etc.  You choose your own game parameters to suit your playstyle and your goals.  If you don't want to get bogged down by food management, you set it to its simplest form so you don't have to worry about it.

I dimly remember one or two that did that. Compared to other God/Civ games which I *do* remember, and have set rules, they are in the minority. Like Populous, Warmonger, Black & White, the Civ series, Colonization, Pocket God.

If you want a gritty challenge, you kick every difficulty variables to the maximum levels.

Easier enemies != no enemies.

Otherwise, if you set absolutely everything in stone, then you're filling a niche of only those people who like that playstyle - and if there's a single turnoff in the parameters that the devs have set, then that player is lost, lacking the option to change that parameter to suit his playstyle.

Didn't seem to hurt Valve, Blizzard or Westwood in the least. However, I have no trouble with easy moddability of a game. If you don't like how the game works, change the rules to your liking. But for that to work, you actually need the rule- and framework of the game in the first place.

[SuperWalrus]

Df needs to be able to support multi core processors because DF kills my computer and i have a duo core prosessor with 4 gigs of ram

[Aqizzar]

But isn't it more useful to let the user have the option rather than not?

No.

You obviously won't be convinced by anybody then.  But I'll point out that there's already options to disable sieges, moods, the economy, and bedroom rent.  A lot of players turn the economy off so they don't have to deal with all their haulers suddenly turning homeless and little unmovable piles of coins dropping everywhere.  Why not have a similar option for immigrants, or at least some measure of control over them beyond just locking the door?

[CynicalRyan]

You obviously won't be convinced by anybody then.  But I'll point out that there's already options to disable sieges, moods, the economy, and bedroom rent.  A lot of players turn the economy off so they don't have to deal with all their haulers suddenly turning homeless and little unmovable piles of coins dropping everywhere.  Why not have a similar option for immigrants, or at least some measure of control over them beyond just locking the door?

Nope, I won't be. The designer of the software gets to do the hard decisions, not me.

However, there is no inherent problem with the option being there. Nobody's forced to use it, after all, and given that DF will be more than a game once it has grown up, the option has its place.

However, I'm distinctly of the opinion that there are more pressing needs (and if you can't handle immigrants after a few days of play, I question your ability of rational thought), than the whining of a handful.

Otherwise I want DF to have the option to make my coffee for me.