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[Stromko]

Is there any chance there'll be a day/night cycle in dwarf fortress mode? It might add a lot of variety to the proceedings, and will be great once some kind of fire / light arc is complete.

It feels like in adventure mode I'm stumbling around in the dark more often than not, so perhaps it should be much shorter than adventure mode nights, maybe about 1/6th or 1/8th or less of the time, or infrequent so it isn't too much of a bother. Dwarves would probably have a preference to sleeping during night, making it more of a concern to truly have enough beds for everyone. There could perhaps be options for different Squads to sleep at different times.

Having this almost-universal sleep period might make it hard to get things done during the night, but you could still Draft dwarves to force them to react to invasions or what-have-you, with suitable consequences. Your fort's sleep being more synchronized would actually be very helpful in some ways as it would make it more predictable, instead of essentially random dwarves going off to sleep at any time.

I don't know how the pallete change (everything turning blue) works and how well that would translate to dwarf mode, and if it would be possible to have only Outside areas have this color change. That would be part of what helps make it an interesting and worthwhile change. Dwarves and kobolds and goblins might have nightvision, I don't know, but when there's less light you might expect slightly worse senses of observation anyway.

Having a sphere of light around each dwarf would also probably be intensely laggy, so perhaps it could just change sneak or LoS parameters to make skulking creatures more of a concern during the night. Creatures being worse at picking out targets at night would be good in both fortress and adventure modes, it would be a reasonable way to make melee fighters worthwhile.

I guess all the inherent complexity to make it 'work' might be why we aren't seeing night in DF already, but I haven't seen a thread with the words 'night' in the title over the last 30 days (yay search function) so hopefully this thread has a point.

[Capntastic]

Well, considering a month flies by in DF in about 10 minutes, it'd be annoying for the screen to be flickering colors every few seconds.

Edit:  If it were sort of like the abstracted sleep system, it would still be annoying since the player can sort of see everything as it is.   Night wouldn't effect them so much from their semi-hemi-demi-omniscient vantage point.

[ February 22, 2008: Message edited by: Capntastic ]

[Stromko]

Yes it needs to be abstract of course. Something like one night a season as a way to simulate something happening during a night sometime in the season. Err, in another word, abstract yes. (edit) Probably ten minutes or so, or equivelant to one or two periods of dwarf-sleep.

There's actually a lot of things you don't see in Dwarf Fortress as it is now. Kobold thieves, goblin kidnappers, ambushes, as I understand it those don't just spawn from nowhere. They actually enter the map and become visible when they encounter something.

Having night in the game might mean these things would be more visible during the day. It's taken for granted in roleplaying games, but moving in plain sight in broad daylight is quite difficult. Perhaps skulkers, especially the less combative ones, will arrive and move under cover of darkness, becoming less active or inactive during the day as a means to avoid walking into sight.

I have to say again, I know dwarves are traditionally thought to have excellent night vision, but technically they usually have more limited range of sight in dark conditions (for instance, I think D&D gives them a set range for infravision, but assumedly in daylight they can see farther). Realistically one would expect as radiation bleeds off into the atmosphere, whether it's infared or thermal or whatever, the resolution becomes worse over distance. Thus, sneaking is easier at night than it is during the day, even if the observer has nightvision.

That's just my opinion and I don't mean to make the whole thread about whether dwarves and such have great nightvision or not. It's just one feature of an overall idea (night-cycle in fortress mode).

(edit) I think the most crucial effect that night would have, and my whole point where I'm going on about civ creatures that happen to have nightvision still having better sight during the day, is that during the night ranged attacks wouldn't trigger from as far off, or would be much less accurate. An elite marksdwarf may seem like the only worthwhile unit right now, but he wouldn't be such hot stuff if he could only get a good shot at five paces! Alternatively, during a siege you could raise the drawbridges until nightfall, and then send a squad of sword-dwarves to kill the enemy while they sleep.

Of course, some things are nocturnal and others aren't. Humans might attack at dawn so they have a full period of light. Goblins may choose to attack at night hoping to slaughter your dwarves whilst they sleep.

[ February 22, 2008: Message edited by: Stromko ]

[ February 22, 2008: Message edited by: Stromko ]

[Draco18s]

Dwarves in D&D are losing their darkvission.  They will be lighting their mountain halls with torches so that even the huamn PCs can see them.

Infact, almost every single creature is losing special sight modes, as in 3.5 very very few critters don't have some way to see in semi to full darkness.

And I hope they fix the darkness spell.  It doesn't prevent you from seeing creatures, it just gives a 20% concealment miss-chance.  Ghey.

[Patarak]

quote:Originally posted by Draco18s:
<STRONG>Dwarves in D&D are losing their darkvission.  They will be lighting their mountain halls with torches so that even the huamn PCs can see them.

Infact, almost every single creature is losing special sight modes, as in 3.5 very very few critters don't have some way to see in semi to full darkness.

And I hope they fix the darkness spell.  It doesn't prevent you from seeing creatures, it just gives a 20% concealment miss-chance.  Ghey.</STRONG>

Who gives a flying fuck about D&D?

[Miminini]

I agree with Patarak, why should dwarf fortress races sync with other fictional sources.

[Zemat]

I agree with the OP. Sleep patterns should be more synchronized. Adding a day/night cycle, even if only where three nights per season (early, middle, late season) would add a lot by allowing the addition of night-only creatures or activity cycles.

Also, the duration of day and nights could be tied to the season. Making winter nights longer than summer nights. Even the closeness to the poles (or single pole) could make day/nights even longer, to the point of lasting for entire seasons. Making survival in glacier outposts more difficult/fun.

[ February 23, 2008: Message edited by: Zemat ]

[Draco18s]

quote:Originally posted by Patarak:
<STRONG>Who gives a flying fuck about D&D?</STRONG>

Someone mentioned it, I replied.  Now go "flying fuck" yourself.

[umiman]

How would night and day work? Even right now, a day in fortress mode passes faster than I can blink.

There would need to be some serious time slowing, considering how long dwarves sleep, eat, or do anything.

[Stromko]

Like I said in my second post, though details can easily be lost in my over-long sentences and needlessly bloated paragraphs, it'd have to be abstracted.

So one cycle of day and night would actually take a significant chunk of an entire season. Time is already kind of abstract DF mode because the outside never goes dark and dwarves take entire weeks to eat or drink or sleep.

I feel at some point the Fortress mode and Adventure mode are going to converge so much they become nearly indistinguishable, just a matter of depth in a single continuum, so it seems like sooner or later one or the other is going to have to change its method of time keeping so they match up. For all I know it might already match up in many ways, except it gets dark in adventure mode and a whole town full of NPCs will go to sleep, whilst in fortresses I exist in an always-bright world where everybody takes sporadic catnaps.

It seems like it's almost inevitable it will have night eventually, but so far I haven't found it in the dev goals.

[Toady One]

Although you've mentioned it, I just wanted to emphasize that I hear nothing but negative comments about a uniform sleep time for all the dwarves (specifically of the starting 7).  Even if special things happened at night that built potential tension, it's still very important to keep in mind how dull it can be, especially if FPS have dropped a bit.

We've kicked the idea around a bit of course, partially because it makes things more homogenous with adventure mode, which eliminates some annoyances, but there's the sleep problem (which isn't that much of a problem if dwarves aren't made uniformly diurnal) and some other potential difficulties to overcome as well, or at least hurdles, with how it zooms to army battles or relates to adventure mode time.  Even with abstract day/night the accelerated abstract time for dwarf mode is always going to be a problem though, so those potential problems aren't a big deal in the grand scheme of things.  It would be nice to scrap dwarf time altogether, and it's very aggravating on many levels, since two systems have to be kept in place for the same mechanics, but it's not as if I can get rid of it...  unless people want years to pass reaaaaaally slowly.  There are various ways to try to change it, but the flow of dwarf mode is pretty nice now, so anything very radical would need careful consideration.

Of course, I'm actually here to ask for some calm in the thread.  There's no need for the discussion to go sour.  Patarak, there's a different way to raise your point.  Draco18s, there's a different way to reply.

[ February 23, 2008: Message edited by: Toady One ]

[Stromko]

Perhaps adventure mode seasons should be changed so they pass as quickly, per-step, as they do in dwarf fortress mode, rather than the other around? If the time rate was completely merged (day/nights in Adv and DF taking the same # of steps) there would probably need to be a lot longer between day/night transitions as running in real-time it'd probably (just a guess) take mere minutes for a day to night change.

It might just be better not to merge the rules of time passage or only partially merge, but then inconsistencies remain. They're not very important inconsistencies, but potentially cause numerous oddities between the two modes, oddities that become important the closer the two modes otherwise become.

I'm also not sure how crazy merged time-rules would make the passing of seasons in adventure mode, if a simple jaunt down to a cave would take years or merely a season (which might, travel time included, be sort of sensible if we're talking about traversing an entire world).

As for synchronized sleeping schedules, yes I can see it being a big issue if most of your dwarves are sleeping at the same time. I was thinking (perhaps incorrectly) that the reduced pathing would keep the FPS high during these times thus allowing it to pass quickly. Also, that a brief intermission and kind of a 'breather' while your dwarves slept would be made up for by the intense efficiency of just about the whole fort being awake at once.

(edit for clarification)I suppose the main point is to create a transition, a different feel. You might be dealing with different activities and different dwarves during the 'nightwatch'.(/end edit)

If we can put up with that being synchronized, perhaps we could also put up with "daily" events like group meal times, maybe storytelling or regularly scheduled ceremonies (religious and other). This should be optional somehow, kind of like how now you can opt not to have statue gardens and thus have no parties if you don't like the uncertainty it adds.

It might be nice if a lot of this varies based on the situation. There could be highly regimented "monastic" fortresses where everything is done communally, but also free-wheeling work-site type fortresses (much like we have now) where sleeping, eating and all that are done strictly on an individual as-needed basis. Personality preference would have a big impact on whether either method is a boon or a drain on happiness for an individual.

Letting us choose whether we want the patience-testing simplicity of synchronized necessity-quenching or the slightly chaotic but very convenient individual system might alleviate a lot of the issues. People are more patient and understanding when it's a choice they've made.

There's also the consideration that night might lose its meaning for cave dwellers, perhaps opening up passive or automatic, sometimes not even deliberate, means of making your dwarves omni-sleepers that nap whenever they feel tired, day or night, like it is now. This would also be a good excuse to completely opt out of the synchronized sleep-pattern effects of a day/night cycle in fortress mode, but toy with the benefits of night-time raids and dawn chills.

None of this is what I'd call completely necessary, and some say that a masterpiece is done when nothing more can be taken away, but I think DF is kind of proof that that saying is not a universal truth of design. In other words, elegant design may not be the best course if it means less variety. Also, this fortress-mode day/night cycle might be critical if we're ever to be able to visit living fortresses. Granted, that really changes the perspective on it, as an adventurer it's no problem if everybody's sleeping because you might be there to rob them blind (thus, it's desired), and you can always sleep or travel to advance time.

Which brings me to recall that some God games choose the simple approach of letting you actually move the sun in the sky and change where you're at in the day/night cycle at will. In other words you'd just go to some screen and tell your dwarves to act like it's twelve noon, and their behavior would follow suit. Of course it lends itself to the consequence of your followers being a bit unhappy from being overworked if you skip too many nights.

Hopefully I'm not jabbering like a madman and this all actually makes sense. Kind of just an insomnia-fueled infodump.

[ February 23, 2008: Message edited by: Stromko ]

[Captain Mayday]

Okay, the problem is that you would have to effectively base everything on Adventure mode speed. But that's not all. What about eating? What about growing enough food? What about how incredibly fast it would be to get an enormous fortress going and the aggravation of incredibly long wait times between caravans and immigrations.

Long periods of nothing to do.

I don't think that this sounds like fun, to be honest.

Understand that I'm not ripping on your idea. If things were more abstracted, then it would be excellent to implement. But in a game with lots of micromanagement, running out of stuff to do and letting the game run (often with low FPS) will be boring.

[Stromko]

I suggested adventure mode would progress on "dwarf time", not the other way around. It's kind of frustrating having to reiterate the same thing again and again, but I understand that my post was way too long and it's easy to miss details.

I am suggesting that things in dwarf-fortress mode would progress just as fast as ever, seasons-wise, and as far as day/night goes the sleep cycle should probably be abstracted to take up way, way less than 1/3rd of the playing time. In other words, your dwarves wouldn't be sleeping 8 parts of a 24-part cycle, they'd be sleeping 1 or 2. It would be crunched down so that you spend way more time on your dwarves being awake.

For what this might adds, consider the basic gameplay of The Sims for example, where a day/night cycle gave an ebb and flow to the gameplay. Waiting for your sims to sleep or come back from work was handled in a way that wouldn't be possible for Dwarf Fortress, time was automatically sped up and everything zipped by super fast until your sims were ready for more input.

What If in the Sims example if they had, instead, made it so sleeping or going to work took a few minutes in real-time, during which the occasional event would occur that you would react to. In the sims those events were things like ghosts walking around or weird phonecalls or neighborhood pets knocking over trashcans, but in DF, night-time events would be things like kobold thieves, kidnappers, 'night of the living dead', etc. By reducing the relative length of the sleep cycle, it becomes unnecessary to add a time compression mode (which just wouldn't be possible when DF is already running as fast as it can).

The main reason I'm making this suggestion is to give variety and a changing flow to dwarf fortress mode, something like what adventure mode towns already have, and the challenge is to stop it from being boring. Like I said it's no problem to an adventurer if everybody's sleeping when they visit a town. If you need the shops open you can simply go to the worldmap and travel until it's daytime. Dwarf Fortress mode would allow no such luxury, but it depends on the particulars. It might work out okay, without too much downtime, allowing time to become more univeral.

As for the change to adventure mode if the passage of seasons was the same as it was in DF mode, well, I'm not sure what the ramifications would be. Would it take ten years just to explore a particularly large cave complex, or just half a season? Would it be so drastically fast that players felt pressured to do everything they wanted before they died of old age, or, would it be just enough that you could note the passing of the seasons, such that starting in the summer you could look forward to frozen rivers and chucking snowballs at mayors in a few RL hours?

Thing is I don't know how many 'steps' go into a season in DF mode, and I don't know how many 'steps' are consumed every time you travel through a region on the worldmap, so I'm not sure what the effect would be exactly. There's really no point in merging the two time-modes if they're completely insuitable for it.

(edit) It might someday be possible to switch easily between the two modes, to have a fort still active while you're running around as an adventure. It could remain like it is and only run the day/night cycle while you're in adventure mode, it wouldn't be missed really. The only consequence off the top of my head is that if your dwarves acted like regular adventure-mode townies, that means they'd all be sleeping at night. What happens if during the night you switch out of adventure mode and go back to DF mode, since they were all sleeping wouldn't this mean they'd be synchronized, and you'd have the disadvantage of a night-day cycle in fortress mode without the benefits?

Obviously none of this really matters at this stage in development, I'm not suggesting a day/night cycle in DF mode anytime soon. Down the road it just seems to me that it's going to be more of an issue.

[ February 23, 2008: Message edited by: Stromko ]

[penguinofhonor]

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