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37 (56.9%)

< 25%

6 (9.2%)

25% (5/4ths of current)

8 (12.3%)

50% (3/2 of current)

5 (7.7%)

100% (Double current)

9 (13.8%)

Total Members Voted: 65

[smjjames]

Don't legendary engravers pretty much do this already?

Really though, there's just too many factors here, the biggest bieng FPS since it varies so much that any extended length of the days will be magnified, making the days go much slower.

[ein]

I think the days are long enough.
What I want to see is an actual transition between night and day.

[Timst]

Well, the day problem is a complex matter. If you have longer, more "realistic days", assuming nothing else change in the remaining features...

... Long jobs are done overnight.
... Merchants take ages to arrive.
... The fortress will be mature before the end of the first year.
... You'll have to wait a long time to see all the "seasonal features" freeing, evaporating, colored trees etc.

But if you have short days, like the one we're having....

... The eat / drink / sleep cycle is totally broken. Dwarves sleep half a month or take a week to eat their lunch (exaggerating a bit).
... Wounded dwarves can take years to recover from a broken arm.
... Or days to travel from a part of the map to another.



We can't fix that easily.

[shadow_archmagi]

... Wounded dwarves can take years to recover from a broken arm.

Actually, wounds are healed a per-season basis. Length of day has no effect.

[Vattic]

I think the days are long enough.
What I want to see is an actual transition between night and day.

Agreed. What I would like to see is have days and nights work like your at the poles so you have a month of light and month of darkness. Stationing night watchmen on rotors and having goblin babysnatchers come in the night would be  cool. It makes sense for other races at least to sleep at the same times, makes sense for dwarves for social reasons mostly but it might be dull as a player to have most of your dwarves go to bed but maybe not.

[LegoLord]

The thing is, though, dwarves live underground.  The day/night cycle doesn't seem like it'd affect dwarves (other cool things, yes, but not dwarves), as they live underground.  It seems to me like the day/night shift system would develop naturally in medieval dwarven civilization.

... Long jobs are done overnight.
... Merchants take ages to arrive.
... The fortress will be mature before the end of the first year.
... You'll have to wait a long time to see all the "seasonal features" freeing, evaporating, colored trees etc.

But if you have short days, like the one we're having....

... The eat / drink / sleep cycle is totally broken. Dwarves sleep half a month or take a week to eat their lunch (exaggerating a bit).
... Wounded dwarves can take years to recover from a broken arm.
... Or days to travel from a part of the map to another.

I wouldn't call this a problem.  The current system matches the latter, in which there are only breaks from realism that neither enhance nor detriment gameplay.  The prior, more realistic, is much less fun as it makes the pace of the game too slow.

[Vattic]

The thing is, though, dwarves live underground.  The day/night cycle doesn't seem like it'd affect dwarves (other cool things, yes, but not dwarves), as they live underground.  It seems to me like the day/night shift system would develop naturally in medieval dwarven civilization.

Indeed but I'd imagine social reasons would keep the dwarves on similar timetables, missing parties and feasts because you sleep on the graveyard shift would be annoying for them given that they have little reason to work in their night. The same amount of dwarves will get the same amount of work done in the same amount of time regardless of when they sleep.

It might be annoying for the player though, snatchers and thieves would help a little and hopefully there might be other things to keep you busy while they sleep but it might not be worth the hassle.

[LegoLord]

Well, things don't sleep for half the day, so there'd probably be some overlap period with a day/night shift system (actually, this is kind of how the game works now, only day/night cycles don't affect anything, rather than just not affecting dwarves).  And while the dwarves do get the same amount of work done in the same amount of time regardless of sleep, it's nice to have working dwarves on hand if something goes wrong at night.  I personally find it annoying when all the starting seven go to sleep at the same time in a new fort.

[Warlord255]

Well, the day problem is a complex matter. If you have longer, more "realistic days", assuming nothing else change in the remaining features...

... Long jobs are done overnight.
... Merchants take ages to arrive.
... The fortress will be mature before the end of the first year.
... You'll have to wait a long time to see all the "seasonal features" freeing, evaporating, colored trees etc.

But if you have short days, like the one we're having....

... The eat / drink / sleep cycle is totally broken. Dwarves sleep half a month or take a week to eat their lunch (exaggerating a bit).
... Wounded dwarves can take years to recover from a broken arm.
... Or days to travel from a part of the map to another.



We can't fix that easily.

To be frank, realism is already right out. I can accept that a game-day can't take much longer than it does now at risk of invoking boredom, hence my (biased) suggestion of a very light increase - less than twenty-five percent, perhaps ten or fifteen. At 100 FPS, that's a few seconds at best, and perhaps a minute for every two or three months.

Still, though, it's an artifact of the game's fourth wall, and won't be broken anytime soon.

[orbcontrolled]

Since the calender days don't really have an impact on the game, why do you want them longer? I don't think we will be able to have a coherent discussion unless you give some reasons for us to chew on.

EDIT: To clarify, what do you mean about player comprehension? As far as I can tell, the "calendar" days only affect when the caravan comes, other than that, everything happens in the "apparent" time frame where dwarves live, in which a "day" lasts several minutes judging by their sleep cycles.
Do you just want the caravan to come less often? or is there some other effect that calender days have that I'm forgetting?

[Footkerchief]

Since the calender days don't really have an impact on the game,

Not so.  Many events occur according to the calendar, such as season changes and caravan arrivals.

[orbcontrolled]

Not so.  Many events occur according to the calendar, such as season changes and caravan arrivals.

Oh, and migrants, and water freezing, you're absolutely right.
I never really thought about it before because I played for a long time with low FPS.

Now that I think about it, I do keep my FPS capped at 50 for this very reason, and there are some years when I completely ignore caravans because I just have too much else on my mind.

I'm going to go with the idea for an Init option, I suddenly want to play around with day length a bit.

[Captain Mayday]

Well, the day problem is a complex matter. If you have longer, more "realistic days", assuming nothing else change in the remaining features...

... Long jobs are done overnight.
... Merchants take ages to arrive.
... The fortress will be mature before the end of the first year.
... You'll have to wait a long time to see all the "seasonal features" freeing, evaporating, colored trees etc.

But if you have short days, like the one we're having....

... The eat / drink / sleep cycle is totally broken. Dwarves sleep half a month or take a week to eat their lunch (exaggerating a bit).
... Wounded dwarves can take years to recover from a broken arm.
... Or days to travel from a part of the map to another.



We can't fix that easily.

Sure you can. Time is already measures in ticks (see crop time), so may as well use that to make the most of it.
Areas where you'd need customisable times (in ticks) to make this moddable:
Crop growth duration
Day length (solves issue of how little a dwarf is able to do in a day, especially movement-wise)
Base Task length (solves issue of long jobs getting completed overnight)

Naturally, this all drastically impacts the gameplay in the following ways:
Fortress building takes a lot longer
Fortress has a lot less clutter.
If you make dwarves eat more often, then you'll need bigger crops and bigger food storage areas.
Merchants will seem rarer, and will have a greater impact on the resources available to the fortress.

The biggest problem: More time where a player has nothing to do. Of course, this will change as there becomes more things to do in fortress mode, and the dwarfs starting having more to do in a day.

[Kilo24]

Did I miss something?  I could have sworn the OP said "What about making days longer without changing anything?" when everybody responded to "my n00b brain can't take speed slow the game down plz."

That being said, I think it'd be very nice to have slower days when they start meaning more.  As it stands right now, it really only affects the speed of the calender year which IMO is decent already.  The timescale is already 3 miles away from Madnessville such that not much will be made more realistic by the slight change he's proposing.

And, actually, the times of the day do change stuff.  There was an erroneous bug report filed about a strangely pumping unpowered pump tied to a windmill that seemed to not have enough wind; the problem turned out to be that morning breezes occasionally powered the windmill...

[Armok]

Hey, I just got an idea: One solution that would solve both the days being to short, and the seasons being to long if you lengthen them, is to simply say that the year is much shorter. either because the planet revolves slower around kit's own axis, or because it revolves faster around he sun!
Pherhaps simply say each month is a single digit number of days, that way the dwarves can sleep and eat etc. once per day/night cycle, while still having just as few sleepings and e3atings between each caravan and such.