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[irmo]

If fixing up gear ends up taking fuel then a lot of forts just could not happen. You'd need 10 armourers just to keep up with a fair sized fort, and each of them would require fuel (for each bit of armour?) etc etc. The fuel consumption will be stupid, or EVERY fortress will be forced towards magma.

Repairing shouldn't take fuel. You hammer out the dents, replace straps and bolts, sharpen blades, file off rust, etc. I'd expect that to be the real bread-and-butter work for apprentice armorsmiths, because they can't screw it up too badly. (In game terms, repairing a piece of armor doesn't have a quality modifier, so the smith's skill only affects the time it takes. Then it makes sense to embark with/trade for high-quality armor in the early game and use your newbie armorsmith to maintain it, which trains him to start making more armor when you need it.)

[Granite26]

If fixing up gear ends up taking fuel then a lot of forts just could not happen. You'd need 10 armourers just to keep up with a fair sized fort, and each of them would require fuel (for each bit of armour?) etc etc. The fuel consumption will be stupid, or EVERY fortress will be forced towards magma.

At a certain point, I stop cutting down trees and just buy everything I need for the year off of caravans.  Don't forget underground tree farms... 

Armor doesn't break that often, does it?

depends on what you mean by break... I'd want an armorsmith to do a once over on my plate after every battle...

More to the point: I'd think diminishing returns would create a maximum quality you could shoot for in a given fort, and that wouldn't be the best possible.3

Then it makes sense to embark with/trade for high-quality armor in the early game and use your newbie armorsmith to maintain it, which trains him to start making more armor when you need it.)

Awesome

[lucusLoC]

Irmo, love the idea. Armor should take damage in battle, and an armorsmith should be able to fix 99% of that. The rest shoud go twords the wear of the item. Items can also be refurbished to brand new, with a chance that the quality would be moved one point in either direction (depending on the skill of the smith), but that would take fule, an possibly a small amount of material.

Bone and leather armors can only be refurbished with a small amount of new mats.

[Felblood]

Oh, wow. I hadn't noticed point #5 before.

I'm going to have to oppose that bit. The years should, if anything, be slightly longer, to prevent minor events from eating huge chunks of the calendar, but with the way the game bogs down, even that would be unacceptable.

[Warlord255]

I think the time-scale problem most notably affects battles and hauling/walking

For these reasons, I'd be in favor of doubling the day length and increasing craft times by 1/4th, with no other changes except to sleeping/eating.

[antymattar]

SUPPORT!!!

Though I would rather have less months in a year than days in a month. :/

[peskyninja]

I don't support, but the only thing that makes em sad is the time that were-whatever stays transformed.

[antymattar]

Ahem.... Do you ever actually look at how fast time flies in dwarf fortress? It would make WAY more sense if the days were longer.  My woodcutter spends one day just hauling a log from here to there. How is that normal? Making the days longer would also fix the way that caravans seem to telleport around the place and dwarf mode and adventure mode wouldnt have to be so different.

[astaldaran]

I think the best option involves realizing two things and then changing the game in three ways..and these can even be done in steps.

First in-game time is not the same thing as how long we as the player have to experience something--we need to keep that in mind. We never want to experience realism in our experience (I have to wait how many Earth years to build that temple?).

Two, we do want the in-game time to make sense so it feels somewhat realistic..and this is the main problem (why does mining take less time then cutting down a tree?)

The four things should be considered are (the first one could be skipped..it adds to the fantastic form of the game but that is about it)

1) Why should years, months and days, hours etc even be a fixed period of time? With each new world these times could be completely different based on a combination of how long it takes the world to go around the sun and how long it takes to spin on its axis--there could be a default range for the randomly generated worlds but you could modify it (play on a world where it is always night on one side and always day on the other! aka the rotational speed is 0.)  This would help add the the other worldliness. In some games your dwarves sleep three times a day (the days are really long) and in other worlds they sleep every three days (the days are really short). 

The result of this is time itself is meaningless other than for things like crops, or sight, etc (maybe sleep cycles..)it is a cultural thing and not something that really affects you as the player (just as it does now). A dwarves actions are defined by ticks not time--thus in all games cutting down that tree takes the same number of ticks but a different amount of "measured time"  (a day in one world could be two in another)..this has no affect on the player.

2) Toady should put all activities into the raws so you can edit how much many "steps" it takes and thus we as a community can test lots of different permutations and perhaps offer the best ones for Toady to include in the vanilla.

3) the player should be able to adjust how quickly he experience the game...kind of like in the squad command now where you can choose to do one step at a time. Maybe it is a slider on part of the screen that tells you have fast time is going by--maybe t+ and t- adjust the flow of time.  So when you are just waiting around..you crank time up really fast..when battle comes you slow it down. This could also help with solving 2...you could make things take a much longer period of time but be able to fastforward through it..but if you are going slow because you are fighting a battle and want to manage it...your mega project will seem to crawl by as the battle rages.  To see what this would be like, consider that in most RTS you can choose a game speed...or in say Tropico you can also do that.






Under this scenerio in the raws I might define the action "sleeping" as

[Sleeping]
      [Duration=10]

and then in the game that 10 is only important as to how it relates to other actions sense  I as the player can change how quickly I experience the game. One way to look at it is if I double the rate at which I want to expierence the game, the game simply chops all duration in half so sleeping goes to 5.

[nighzmarquls]

I completely agree with the sentiment of making the game have variable duration, although there are going to be some upper limits on this because some simulations do not 'compress' readily like this.

For example the biota style simulation for water and lava is not one that you can 'skip to the end' with. It has to accumulate changes over the course of its process, if you made everything else take 'no time' and did not have a proper aproximation of the water flow you would either end up with the ability to freeze water in place for years or have sudden catastrophic flood the whole world (even your air tight submarine bunker) scenarios.

That said I expect that this particular feature request might fit VERY nicely as an early debugging tool for toady when he finally takes the plunge and starts simulating the world as a 'living' thing and for dealing with 'activity away from the fortress'.

In that regards it would be nice to essentially just say "I wanna skip ahead a year, perform the "I'm not at fort low impact simulation" on my fort for that year and lets see what happens... with perhaps emergency 'stop sim and do 'real time' when seiges or megabeast incursions happen.

[dwarfhoplite]

I support some of this. Currently dorfs produce stuff way too quick

[astaldaran]

For example the biota style simulation for water and lava is not one that you can 'skip to the end' with. It has to accumulate changes over the course of its process, if you made everything else take 'no time' and did not have a proper aproximation of the water flow you would either end up with the ability to freeze water in place for years or have sudden catastrophic flood the whole world (even your air tight submarine bunker) scenarios.

I like what you said but did not fully understand this..do you simply mean that with things like liquid the game has to simulate each step in order to achieve an accurate final result? All I was suggesting was that you could make it so everything gets simulated faster, not that anything was skipped or extrapolated. But because of some of our system limits and things..you might be right extrapolating time away (like a year) very well might be needed in order to skip large periods of time..I wasn't thinking about skipping time at all or even going that fast compared to your suggestion. But your suggestion could make sense--especially since something like it needs developed to operate your fort while you are "away" anyway (at other forts).

[nighzmarquls]

DF runs 90% of the time at maximum possible frame rate in most situations because people are often running at LESS then 60 FPS. So there is not going to be any way to make the game simply 'run faster' beyond efficiency gains.

To be completely accurate, yes the game has to simulate each step of the process although I suspect toady could implement some tricks using a path finding algorithm to find the 'bottom most point/drainage' and then start snatching water from the top of a water mass to fill the bottom (or just throw it out of the map) until all water has been calculated.

This might actually be a good idea to process water a little bit faster when such granular simulations as is currently present are not necessary (giant walls of water/magma I'm looking at you).


Also pulling an idea that surfaced briefly in the thread that has been linked above in this one, I think it would also be worth while to be able to shift to more adventure mode style pacing rather then fortress mode style pacing IN GAME.

So we could have some more interesting fights or caravan arrivals/market fairs played out in a logically consistent time frame when that is called for.

That is pretty much my thoughts on time in general for DF, looking foreward to the new release.

[Di]

By the way, you can already alter game speed on the fly: there are hotkeys for increasing and decreasing max fps. Though like nighzmarquls said it becomes irrelevant quite fast, and you cannot just skip frames to compensate that.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I like the calendar how it is now. Sure, it's horribly flawed, but unless Toady is going to remove butchering kittens so they don't adopt dwarves, throwing elves off cliffs to use their bones, and the like, I want dwarves that sleep for days and take a week to go assemble the materials needed for making a sword at the magma forges and another day to forge it, without any side effects!
It's just a part of the ludicrosity of DF that lets you ignore that, between goblins, monsters, other dwarves, and the cruel whims of the player, the average DF fortress is a terrible, filthy hellhole by any rational mind, what with common flooding (sometimes with magma), construction accidents resulting in multiple deaths barely worth notice, and deaths by the migrant-wavefull due to elaborate deathtraps and cruel leaders as well as outside evils, and migrants still come by the dozens, sometimes even including the king, so other mountainhomes must be even worse!

See why I want to keep some ludicrous elements in?